Follow the Yellow Arrows: An Interview with Michael Counts

From the launch of the Comparative Media Studies Program, we have had a steady stream of students who have been interested in the role which media plays in urban spaces. In part, this is because there is a strong crossover between our program and the MIT tradition of work in architecture and urban studies. We've had students do thesis projects which center around how we conceptualize and map urban environments; we've had interesting projects in the space of augmented reality -- projects which use handheld and gps enabled technologies to create an interesting overlay of digital and physical space, allowing people to annotate the world around them. I've mentioned here before the project Rekha Murthy did examining the flow of official and unofficial communications media in the Central Square area just off the MIT campus. In the course of this research, she started stumbling onto yellow arrow stickers that were posted on lampposts and walls through her study area, which led her to learn more about the Yellow Arrow project. Based on her contacts, we developed an MIT Communications Forum event on Branding the Urban Landscape, which featured Jesse Shapins of the Yellow Arrow Project, as well as Thomas V. Ryan, senior vice president of mobile and digital development for EMI Music North America, and Jon Cropper, then creative content channel strategist at Young & Rubicam Brands. Today and tomorrow, I am featuring an interview with Michael Counts, the head of Counts Media, which organized and deployed the Yellow Arrows as an innovative effort to try to get people in cities around the world to look at their environments in a different way. Yellow Arrow, which Counts describes below, is a fascinating example of participatory culture and viral marketing. If you don't know about Yellow Arrow, you may be interested to check out their home page.

I asked Counts to share with me some basic biographical information. Here's what he sent:

Michael Counts is an artist and entrepreneur who has been a pioneer in experimental theatre, art and entertainment for over a decade. As co-founder and artistic director of Gale Gates et. al. he was instrumental in the development of DUMBO, Brooklyn and

served as primary architect of the creative identity of this now vibrant cultural

district.

In 2002, Michael started The Ride New York LLC. which later grew to become Counts Media Inc. Backed by some of Broadway's major producers, this new company has allowed Michael to further expand into international entertainment and continue the pursuit of large-scale environmental productions and installations. Some of the initial Counts Media investors include the founders of Blue Man Group; Vivek Tiwary of Starpolish and Tiwary Entertainment Group; Robyn Goodman, producer of Avenue Q and founder of Second Stage Theatre; and Charlie Flateman, former President/CEO of Gray Line New York. Counts Media's projects over the past years have drawn the attention of major media globally, including The New York Times, CNN, NBC, Wired Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, The London Times, Liberation, Politiken, the Sydney Morning Heraldand the Discovery Channel among countless others. As Chief Creative Officer and Chairman, Michael drives the creative vision and organizational culture of the company, defining his team's unique entertainment products and properties that bridge all media.

Michael grew up in New York City and studied at Skidmore college under Gautam Dasgupta, author, critic and founding editor of Performing Arts Journal. He continues to reside in DUMBO, Brooklyn

.

Counts is a fascinating mixture of theorist, entrepreneur, and artist, someone who is helping to change the ways residents think about the cities around them. I am pleased to share with you some of his thinking.

How would you describe Yellow Arrow?

Since Yellow Arrow began, we have defined it several different ways. Initially we called it a M.A.A.P (Massively Authored Artistic Project), that then became M.A.A.P (Massively Authored Artistic Publication), which finally became M.A.P (Massively Authored Publication) as we determined that its use could extend beyond the creative or artistic aspects of the project. For example, we learned a great deal as we began to work with Lonely Planet and their community as they were primarily interested in the "travel" aspects of Yellow Arrow. We ultimately found that what we were really creating was a new and subjective map of the world. I became particularly interested in the idea that there should really be as many maps of the world as there are individuals or perspectives - for instance, your map of New York, based upon your interests would likely be very different than my map, based upon my interests in New York. The patent application actually calls it a "deep map." We have also been very interested in the idea that each object or location has a really compelling history if only it can be unlocked or revealed - for instance, the corner of 38th and 8th in New York, consider how many events have occurred there and how those events and histories might relate to each other and how interesting it would be to access that invisible reality. I think that Yellow Arrow and the growing number of projects and ideas like it, both on-line and in the "real" world, can help us navigate increasing complexity and reveal the patterns in apparent chaos.

What are its goals and how successful do you think you have been in achieving these goals?

Based on the varied definitions and intentions outlined above, I think that Yellow Arrow has had a successful beginning. In a short time, we've had arrows placed in hundreds of cities in over 30 countries around the world. The book we did with Lonely Planet, Experimental Travel, distributed hundreds of thousands of arrows to potential users and on yellowarrow.net there is a growing library of content. We also experimented with different uses and ended up with two projects or applications that I think hold the most promise. The first, the "Capitol of Punk", was created with the founders of Discord Records in Washington, D.C., which was an epicenter for the early Punk scene in America. The project linked Yellow Arrows and created a tour of several areas of the city that anyone could navigate. On-line there were video interviews and a ton of content that really delivered on the idea of Yellow Arrow as a new type of publication. The second project, which is very similar to the Capitol of Punk, is a series of "text-tours" of New York, called "cityTXT", that one would begin at any of 18 subway stops along the NR subway line. Once initiated, a user would be lead on a 45 min tour of the area. Jesse Shapins who is a tremendously bright and insightful urban explorer and one of the founding creative team, developed the tours in a way that really reveals hidden and deeply compelling aspects of the city

How do you see YellowArrow as changing people's relations to urban space? What parallels or differences do you see between similar efforts to expand the information environment around our cities -- such as geocaching, alternative and augmented reality games, and the Big Urban Games movement?

The ultimate vision for Yellow Arrow, I suppose, would be an infinitely large publication about public spaces -- cities -- that would allow one to access all of the information and mostly subjective information in a way that helped a user find "their city" within the greater city that they were looking for. Yellow Arrow is an attempt to make the invisible city visible. The publication aspect of YA makes it different than these other projects or movements and the depth of the YA site makes it more practical. That said, I love the projects you've mentioned and have been deeply fascinated with them all. As I said above, we are interested in all aspects of how media and technology are changing, the consequent opportunities that are emerging and most importantly how the interests and values of the "game generation," that John C. Beck discusses in his book Got Game, are different from past generations or demographic segments.

Are You Hep to That Jive?: The Fan Culture Surrounding Swing Music

When Sue Turnbull (a scholar who has written very interesting work on murder mysteries, their female readers and writers) asked me to be the outside reader on a PhD dissertation being written by one of her students at LaTrobe University (in Melbourne, Australia), on contemporary swing dance, I was resistant at first, insisting that I knew little or nothing about the scholarly literature around dance. Sue pushed me harder, suggesting that this project had much more to do with my own work than I might imagine, and being a trusting sort, I agreed to read the work, satisfied in having made my own lack of credentials clear, intrigued by why she was pushing so hard, and a bit pleased to be reading something on swing since I am a closset enthusiast of the new Swing revival (though I certainly can't do the Lindy Hop to save my life.) Thus, Sam(antha) Carroll entered my life. Carroll's dissertation did indeed fascinate me -- it is frankly some of the best work by a graduate student in cultural studies I have read in some time. She draws not just on the literature in performance studies on popular dance traditions in America but it also shows a deep familiarity with cultural studies work on fan appropriations and transformations on media content as well as work in digital studies on virtual and online communities. She captures the world of swing dance culture -- from the inside out -- and traces it across multiple media channels, showing how their lives online are connecting to their physical encounters in geographic space, and especially exploring how they trade video clips of obscure dance performances which become core resources in the development of their own performance repertoires. And, hey, the dissertation came with its own dvd of amazing clips -- and you could dance to it!

I felt that some of her work would be of great interest to readers of this blog given our ongoing discussions of various fan cultures, of the ways digital media is transforming traditional cultural practices, and of the poetics and politics of remixing media content. (And to add to my pleasure, she writes about Hellzapoppin', a much beloved film in my household, and one which I regularly assign to graduate students in our program.) Even if, like me, you think this may be outside your field of interest, think again and give it a closer look.

The following entry was written specifically for this blog by Sam Carroll. I asked her to give us some more biographical data and here's what she wrote:

Sam Carroll has just completed her Phd at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. In that doctoral thesis she discussed contemporary swing dancers and their use of digital media in embodied practice - or, in other words, what dancers do with computers. In addition to writing about dancing (and computers), Sam also likes dancing very much. And watching footage of dancing on her computer. She began learning lindy hop in 1999 in Brisbane, but found the swing dancing community an excellent complement to academic life when she moved to Melbourne in 2001 to pursue a postgraduate degree - less writing, more dancing. Sam is now trying to learn as many authentic jazz routines from the 1930s and 40s as possible. Her progress is more a performance of fandom than an embodiment of elite fan knowledge.

THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN BY SAM CARROLL

This is a clip of the Whitey's Lindy Hoppers dancing a Big Apple routine (choreographed by Frankie Manning) in the 1939 film Keep Punchin'. In the last section of this clip they dance lindy hop on a 'social dance floor'.

And here's footage of dancers in the US dancing the same routine in 2006.

If you follow this link you can listen to the Solomon Douglas Swinged playing the same song on their recent album.

Both dancers and musicians have painstakingly transcribed what they see and hear in that original 1939 clip.

Lindy hop - the partner dance most popular today in swing dance communities - developed in Harlem in the late 1920s and early 30s by African American dancers. Over the following years it moved to mainstream American youth culture, carried by dance teachers and performers in films like Keep Punchin' and in stage shows, and then moved out into the international community, again in film and stage plays, but also with American soldiers stationed overseas. Though it was massively popular in its day, by the 1950s changes in popular music, where jazz was replaced by rock n roll or became increasingly difficult to dance to with the rise of bebop, saw lindy slipping from the public eye.

In the 1980s, dancers in Europe and the US began researching lindy, using archival footage like Keep Punchin' but also including films like Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races - popular musical films of the 1930s and 40s. The aim of these dancers was to revive lindy hop, to recreate the steps they saw on screen. Learning to dance by watching films, particularly films that were only available at cinemas or in archival collections, was unsurprisingly, quite difficult, and these revivalists began seeking out surviving dancers from the period. Among these original lindy hoppers were Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, Al Minns, Sugar Sullivan and Dean Collins.

Twenty years after these revivalists began learning lindy, there are thriving swing dance communities throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and Korea. They come together in their local communities for classes and social dancing, and also travel extensively for camps and lindy exchanges. My research has focussed on the ways these contemporary swing dancers utilise a range of digital media in their embodied practices. This has involved discussing the way DJs in the swing community use digital music technology; the way swing dancers use discussion boards (Swing Talk, SwingDJs), websites (Dance History), instant messaging and email to keep in contact with dancers in their own community and overseas and to plan their own trips to other local scenes; and the ways in which swing dancers have use a range of audio visual technology. These uses of audio visual technology include the sorts of revivalist activities first practiced in the 1980s, but continuing now in lounge rooms and church halls in every local scene, but also to record their own dancing and local communities and also performances (on the social or competitive floor) by 'celebrity' lindy hoppers.

The Big Apple contest from Keep Punchin' is a useful example of the ways swing dancers make use of digital media in their embodied practices. But it's also the focus of my own dancing obsessions at the moment. I've been dancing lindy for at least eight years, and dance a few times a week in my local, Melbourne scene. I've travelled extensively within Australia to attend dance events, I've run events in my own city and I've travelled overseas for large dance events (such as the Herräng dance camp). This year, having just finished my Phd, I've decided I finally have time to work on my own dancing, in the sweaty, embodied sense, rather than the academic or abstract.

Writers in fan studies like Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills and Camille Bacon-Smith have discussed being a scholar-fan (to use Matt Hill's term), where you're a member of the community of fans you're researching. This approach is fairly standard in much of the dance studies literature - it is notoriously difficult to write about dance and dancing with any degree of convincingness if you don't dance - it's a little like dancing about architecture. I've also found that combining my academic work with my everyday, making my everyday experiences my work, has been a satisfying way to extend my fanatical obsession with dance into every corner of my life (a little like Henry's writing about Supernatural, a program I also love, here on this blog).

So when I decided I needed to get back to some level of dance fitness, to end the thesis-imposed hiatus from hardcore dance training, I chose this Big Apple and a number of other 'vintage' or 'authentic' jazz dance routines as my focus. I've learnt the Big Apple and Tranky Doo (another venerable jazz dance routine choreographed by Frankie Manning) before, but this was to be my first solo mission, using clips garnered almost entirely from the internet, though also making use of sections of an instructional DVD produced by a famous teaching couple.

Dancing alone is an essential part of lindy hop. The dance itself revolutionised the European partner dancing structure with its use of the 'break away', (which you can see danced by the last couple in the film After Seben), where partners literally broke away from each other to dance in 'open' position. In open, partners are free to improvise, and the most common improvisation in that historical moment and today, is to include jazz steps from the vast repertoire of steps developed by African American vernacular dance culture over centuries in America. Learning to dance alone not only offers dancers the opportunity to work on body awareness, fitness, coordination, individual styling and expanding their own repertoire (a point upon which I was relying), but also encourages a creative, improvised approach to music which they can then bring to their lindy hop for those 5 or 6 beats of the 8 count swing out - the foundational step of lindy hop.

I've written a great deal about the gender dynamics at work in lindy hop, a dance which prioritise the heterocentric pairing of a man and a woman, beginning with my own discomfort with a dance where the man leads, the woman follows, and traditional gender roles prevail. But I've also written a great deal about the liberatory potential of lindy. The open position and the emphasis on improvisation are an important part of this - in those moments both partners are expected to 'bring it' - to contribute to the creative exchange within the partnership. Lindy, as it was danced by African American dancers in that original creative moment, also embodies a history of resistance and transgression, as a dance with its roots in slavery and created during a period of institutionalised racism and oppression. One of my own research interests has been the extent to which the resistant themes of lindy hop, of African American vernacular dance, have been realised by contemporary swing dancers. The fact that most of these contemporary dancers are white, middle class urban heterosexual youth goes some way to discouraging my reading of contemporary swing dance culture as a hot bed of radical politics and revisions of dominant ideology and culture. Yet I have also found that lindy hop and African American vernacular jazz dances like the Big Apple structure and the Tranky Doo offer opportunities for the expression of self and resistance of dominant gender roles.

As a woman, and as a feminist, I've found that archival footage such as that Keep Punchin' clip offer opportunities for reworking the way I dance and participate in the public dance discourse. When we watch that Big Apple clip, while we can clearly see that each dancer is performing synchronised, choreographed steps, they are also clearly styling each step to suit their own aesthetic, athletic and social needs and interests. We see the personality of each dancer as they execute a set piece of choreography. The very concept of a Big Apple contest involves dancers performing specific steps as they are called, and being judged not only for their ability to dance the correct step in time and with alacrity, but more importantly (in a setting where dance competency, as Katrina Hazzard-Gordon has written, is demanded by the social setting - everyone can dance), for their individual interpretation of the step. This is a performance of improvisation within a socially, collaboratively created structure. The representation of individual identity within a consensual public discourse. This is the sort of thing that jazz musicians do - improvise within a given structure.

And man, is that some serious fun.

For contemporary swing dancers, the idea of taking particular formal structures and then reworking them to suit their own discursive needs extends from the dance floor to the mediated world. Online, swing dancers upload digital footage of themselves dancing, edited to best display their abilities. Or they edit whole narrative films like Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races and edit out the sequences they're most interested in - the dancing. And dancers like myself are still watching these edited clips, recreating entire routines, and then, even more interestingly, editing out particular steps and integrating them into their lindy on the social dance floor, or into their own choreographed routines.

The notion of step stealing is not new in African American vernacular dance - it reaches back to Africa. And Frankie Manning himself is often quoted as saying 'dance it once and it's yours, dance it twice and it's mine'. For me, as a dancer, this is exciting stuff. If I put in the time and effort, I can learn these steps (well, some of them - watch that Hellzapoppin' clip and you'll see what I mean). And if I practice, time it properly and really bring it, I can pull that out on the social dance floor. Perhaps. Contemporary dancers enact that philosophy on the dance floor every day -stealing steps that catch their attention on the social dance floor, or 'ripping off' moves they see performed in footage of dancers in competitions or performances or in social dance settings all over the world. Or from seventy years ago.

For me, swing dancers' tactical use of digital media in their embodied use of archival footage is not only a source of academic fascination, but also a very practical skill to develop. I have had to learn how to watch footage of dancing in a way that lets me apply my knowledge of dance to separate out distinct steps, then figure out how they work, practically. Learning to poach dance steps from archival footage is a useful skill for lindy hoppers. But the testing of my skills is not online or in my ability to write and talk about these things. The real challenge to my creative and critical faculties comes on the dance floor, when I have to bring it - to bring the right step at the right time, but with my own unique, creative twist.

Bacon-Smith, Camille. (1992). Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

---. (2000). Science Fiction Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Clein, John, dir. (1939). Keep Punchin'. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Frank Manning and Hot Chocolates. USA.

Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. (1990). Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hills, Matt. (2002). Fan Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York and London: Routledge.

Kaufman, S. J. (1929). After Seben. Short film. Perf. "Shorty" George Snowden. USA.

Potter, H. C., dir. (1941). Hellzapoppin'. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Whitey's Lindy Hoppers and Frank Manning. USA.

Solomon Douglas Swingtet. (2006). Swingmatism. USA.

Wood, Sam. (1939). A Day at the Races. Perf. Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. USA.

A Second Look at Second Life

A few weeks ago, I posted here about the debate surrounding Second Life which was triggered by a high-profile critique of the popular multiverse by longtime cyber-pundit Clay Shirky. After corresponding with Shirky and with my colleague Beth Coleman, it was decided that we would offer some new statements about this controversy across our three blogs today and respond to each other's posts in about a week's time. We also agreed that we would post links to the other posts through our sites which would help readers navigate between the various positions. So, if you want to read the latest by Clay Shirky, you can find it here and if you want to read the latest by Beth Coleman, you can find it here. (These links will only go live once I know the other material is up on line.) None of us have had a chance so far to review what the others will say so I anticipate that the first round will mostly be a restating of or clarification of our previous positions. Clay's arguments rest on the following claims:

1.Claims about Second Life's user base have been dramatically overstated because the focus has been on the number of people who try out the multiverse rather than on those who return regularly. As he explains, "Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn't really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer."

A lot of effort has been put into debunking Clay's analysis of the numbers by writers such as Joel Greenberg

and Prokofy Neva. Frankly, my interest in Second Life has little to nothing to do with the statistical dimensions of this argument. I've never been one who felt that arguments about cultural change could be reduced to counting things.

I certainly agree that we should be concerned if the press's interest in Second Life is fueled by inflated numbers but I also recognize that these numbers give only a partial indication of the level and kinds of investments people make in these worlds, that Second Life may have cultural importance even for people who have never been there because it embodies a particular model of civic participation and cultural production.

The numbers matter if we are asking whether Second Life represents "the future of the web" but personally, I have never believed that SL is going to be a mass movement in any meaningful sense of the term. As I stated last time, I do not buy the whole nonsense that immersive worlds represent web 3.0 and will in any way displace the existing information structures that exist in the web, any more than I think audio-visual communications is going to replace written communications anytime soon. If nothing else, the ability to scan through text quickly gives it an efficiency that will not be replaced by more "technically advanced" solutions which are more time consuming to produce and to consume. I am pretty sure that the value of the web/net lies in asynchronous communications and that real time interactions -- whether we are talking 3d or skype -- will always represent a special class of uses which competes not with the web but with other teleconferencing technologies. Most of us will find uses for virtual worlds one of these days; most of us will not "live" there nor will we conduct most of our business there.

I do not even think that Second Life represents the future of multiplayer games -- it represents one end of a spectrum of player experiences which maximizes player generated content and minimizes the prestructured experiences we associate with most computer games. World of Warcraft represents the other end of that spectrum and so far, that model draws more customers. My own ideal lays perhaps some place in the middle. As such, this becomes a debate not about affordances but about the desirability of professional entertainment versus the pleasures of participatory culture. It also becomes an exercise in mapping what some have described as the pyramid of participation in which the harder it is to create content, the higher the percentage of participants who will chose to consume content someone else has produced. What's striking to me is not that so many people still prefer to consume professionally generated content (it has always been thus) but what a growing percent of people are willing to consume amateur content and what a smaller but still significant percentage of people are willing to generate and share content they produced themselves. Second Life interests me as a particular model of participatory culture.

2. He argues that the hype around Second Life simply repeats earlier waves of enthusiasm about virtual worlds, none of which have turned out to be the "next new thing" claimed for them by their most ardent supporters. He concludes, "If, in 1993, you'd studied mailing lists, or Usenet, or IRC, you'd have a better grasp of online community today than if you'd spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City."

I get the historical analogies Shirky is making here and he's at least partially right about the over-promotion that surrounded some of those earlier MUDs and Moos. My own sense is that Second Life has struck a deeper chord in our culture than those previous MUDS and MOOS did -- in part because of the engagement by other powerful institutions in our culture. To some degree, all of the corporate, academic, nonprofit, and foundation interest in SL is part of the hype which Shirky is dismissing here. There has certainly been a snow ball effect where this group has to be in SL because that group is in second life and so forth. But there is also a way in which SL embodies a new mixed media ecology in which institutions with very different levels of power, wealth, and influence co-exist in a shared virtual space creating more equivalence in terms of their relationship to the media landscape. This is the heart of what Benkler writes about in The Wealth of Networks and there is perhaps no more powerful illustration of this new hybrid media ecology than SL.

Some have dismissed SL as a costume party -- I see it more as carnival in the medieval sense of the term -- as a time and place within which normal rules of interactions are suspended, roles can be swapped or transformed, hierarchies can be reordered, and we can step out of normal reality into a "magic circle" or "green world" which can be highly generative for the imagination. The difference is that in the old days, carnival was something that existed for a very short period of time and people planned for it all year. Now, in the era of SL, carnival exists all the day and people have to decide how much time they want to spend there. In the old days, the power structures that led to carnival were religious and the church had to decide whether or not to embrace the popular rites. Today, the power structures that lead to SL are corporate and companies have to decide whether or not to embrace the popular rites. That corporate America seems to be experimenting with the alternative reality that constitutes SL is news -- even if many of these experiments fail and even if many of these companies have no clue what to do with their islands and even if most of them go back into their cloisters in another year or two.

3. The hype about Second Life is emerging because tech reporters are young and have no sense of history, because virtual reality is easy to grasp compared to the complexities of social networks, because writing about SL still keeps the focus on content, and because so many powerful groups have a vested interest in sending out press releases about the cool project they are doing in Second Life.

All of these seem valid criticisms of the media coverage of SL which is historically ill-informed, is simplistic, is subject to press releases proclaiming that "this is the first time that x has ever happened in a virtual environment before." That said, I am personally grateful that most of the coverage of SL has generally been supportive of participatory culture compared to the relentlessly negative coverage associated with sexual predation in MySpace or violence in video games. I take my good news where I can find it and for the moment, the coverage of SL, bad though it often is, is helping Americans in general adjust to the idea that there may be something positive to be gained by having an active fantasy life on line. I have always said that the myth of a digital revolution is more empowering, perhaps, than the reality may be because it keeps alive the idea that real world institutions may be subject to change from below and thus encourages us to imagine and push for the possibility of change. It only becomes disempowering when it gets draped in an aura of inevitability which convinces us that things are going to change by themselves and all we have to do is sit back and watch.

I care only a little bit about the future of virtual worlds. I care a great deal about the future of participatory culture. And for the moment, the debate about and the hype surrounding SL is keeping alive the idea that we might design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture. That's something worth defending.

Shirky concludes, "Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand....There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error."

By those criteria, the Renaissance and the Age of Reason were less than rounding errors since the key innovations occurred among a much smaller number of artists and thinkers. This is to subscribe to a quantitative model of history which simply doesn't reflect the reality of how cultural innovation occurs. A small community of people can generate an enormously rich culture and can have a transforming impact on society as a whole. I am not saying SL has achieved this yet -- and indeed, it may never live up to that potential -- but I don't want to lose sight of the fact that the importance of SL has squat to do with such statistical measures -- though what those measures have to say about its market value may be another value.

I respect what Shirky is doing here in questioning the numbers. I just want to push us to ask deeper questions about the criteria we use to measure the value of Second Life.

As I wrote last time, "Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there."

Front Line Perspective on the Boston Games Jam

Earlier this month, The Education Arcade played host to the first Boston Game Jam. Dan Roy, a CMS master's student, who has been working on the Labrynth project through the Education Arcade and is currently doing his thesis on the models of learning and reward underlying multiplayer game design, offered to share with us some of his perspectives of the event. What follows is his account of what happened when you put a bunch of creative game designers -- both professionals and students -- in a room for a weekend with the goal of testing the limits of their medium. (Personally, I am waiting to see Game Jam turned into a reality series not unlike Project Runway!) Boston Game Jam

by: Dan Roy

It's 9 a.m. on Saturday and about 15 professional video game developers from the Boston area are taking their seats in The Education Arcade lab at MIT. They've come alone or in teams of two for the first annual Boston Game Jam, armed with ideas for games involving the Jam's theme of "shifting." They are programmers, designers, artists, and musicians, and they've committed the next 36 hours of their lives to making experimental games. Though developing games is work and they do it every day, there's something special in the air this Saturday. It's an opportunity to leave behind the pressures of the game industry, with its years-long development cycles, escalating budgets, increasing team sizes and specialization, sequelitis, and publisher-developer tensions.

Once upon a time, a single crackerjack programmer or a team of three could bestow their unique vision of gaming on the world with only a few months of work. Development cycles were short. Genres were undefined. Risk was low and creativity was high. The trend in the ensuing decades has moved away from all of this. We've reached the point as an industry where failure on a project costing tens of millions of dollars means lots of lost jobs and maybe a shuttered business or two. In that environment, publishers rely on proven intellectual property and remaking established genres to meet their quarterly targets. When publishers hold the money and the IP, contracted developers have little choice but to live hand to mouth. One missed milestone or delayed contract could be the end for such a developer with no savings.

In addition to the rising budgets and reduced financial risk-taking, individual employees find themselves working on more and more specialized tasks. This assembly line model stifles a lot of creativity. The benefits of feeling like you are part of something bigger than yourself are offset by lack of control over the direction of the project.

And so, these game developers gather at MIT to seize back their creative control. They've come with plans for games they would like to make entirely by themselves. The programmers are no longer just graphics coders or physics coders or tools coders or artificial intelligence coders. They now hold the grand vision of the game, as well is the responsibility for wearing hats normally left to others.

By noon, everyone had settled in with his project and was making steady progress. Max McGuire in particular seemed ahead of the game, as he already had something playful-looking up on his screen. At a game jam, one can always step away from his computer, wander around the room, and become inspired by the ideas and energy of all the other auteurs. A casual observer would notice that screens full of code intermittently give way to intriguing visual representations of progress.

Later in the day, Jam organizer Darius Kazemi warned us that if we didn't have something playable by this evening, we were in bad shape. A couple of teams took this opportunity to step back from their original visions and refocus on something more practical. However, a surprising number of projects were right on track. It seemed we had scoped our projects well to not fall into the common trap of taking on too much.

After dinner, some participants started to call it quits for the day and head home. As the coordinator of the Jam facilities at MIT, I resolved to stay in the lab until everyone was finished. I was quite tired when I walked home at 5 a.m. As most people who have ever been excited about a project can tell you, there are good and bad kinds of sleepy. The energy that I took from the group and from my own creative process had not yet dissipated, and even as I lay in bed exhausted I found my mind eagerly bounding between the possible features I could implement the following day.

That following day began three hours later. In my exhaustion, I must have set my alarm incorrectly, because I was awakened by the ringing of my cell phone. When I arrived at the lab to punch in the door's security code there was already a line of antsy developers. I felt guilty for standing in the way of their work, even early on a Sunday morning.

As the clock drew closer to the 6 p.m. deadline, the entire room tightened its focus. As time ticked features a way, developers became even more earnest to preserve what they could of their initial visions. You could hear the whir of productivity, punctuated by semi-sarcastic exclamations from Al Reed like, "I just realized I don't know how to program." Kent Quirk and his son/teammate Lincoln also had their moments, like when they both leaned in close to the

screen and simultaneously grunted. "Huh?" and "Hmm."

Darius stopped us all precisely at six, and we gathered around the projector to present the creative gold we had mined all weekend with our pickax keyboards (handy tools, those). Max McGuire had managed to conjure up a respectable competitor to Will Wright's forthcoming game Spore, in which you take creatures from their basest existence through the height of civilization and into outer space. The core mechanic is shifting terrain up and down. Impressive, and as fun to watch as to play.

Eric Rosenbaum and Jonah Elgart created a game around shifting rhythms, redirecting streams of beats to create a symphony or cacophony of precautions and notes. It seems like a great game if I could just figure out how to play it.

Philip Tan, who has been flying back and forth between MIT and Singapore for half a year as he sets up an international game lab called GAMBIT, made a game about jetlag. In it, players must manage passengers' moods so that they're in peak state when they hit the ground (hopefully softly). The whole room had listened earlier in the day as Philip recorded the voiceovers for the flight attendants. It was definitely the fifth take of "Coffee, tea, or soda?" where the humor of the flight attendant's annoyance finally came through.

Kent and Lincoln Quirk made the only 3D game of the Jam, in which players shift an avatar between conveyor belts to reach the center of a maze. The tricky part was that if you stayed on the conveyor belt long enough, you would flip over with it... to the dark side.

Al Reed and Alex Rice somehow overcame Al's inability to program, creating a Mario Brothers type game called Squish in which players hop from platform to platform shoving boxes around in an attempt to crush each other. The only explicitly multiplayer game of the Jam, it clearly showed off the potential of humor in social interactions. The hilarity of watching Al's stick figure accidentally squish itself cannot be denied.

Darius, who had originally planned to not make a game and only assist others, had found himself twiddling his thumbs and cranked out a Game Boy Advance game of shifting mazes.

Darren Torpey and David Ludwig created a game about shifting seasons. They made the executive decision that four seasons was far too many, and unilaterally cut it down to two. Personally, I'll miss fall and spring tremendously and can't condone their actions.

Geoffrey Long and I (Dan Roy) created a game about shifting perceptions around the diamond industry. Conflict diamonds, or blood diamonds, have been used to fuel terrible violence for years, and I wanted to educate some consumers who might be unaware what their purchase might be funding.

Jim Ingraham and Duncan Watt contributed art and sounds respectively to all of the projects, and they did so valiantly in the face of our common and impending deadline. Duncan in particular knows how to triage.

Most of these game concepts would never have been made if not for an environment like the Boston Game Jam. At least, they never would have been made within the industry model that only makes space for AAA titles. However, there are promising signs that at least some segments of the industry are shifting back to smaller teams, smaller budgets, shorter development cycles, and wackier concepts. Digital distribution helps here tremendously, as do content delivery models like episodic. Chris Anderson's Long Tail is just regaining prominence in the game industry, and the "hits" of the future may be niche subscription titles. Henry did a number of posts on the rising independent games movement not too long ago that readers may find interesting.

The mood in the Education Arcade lab after giving our presentations was inspired exhaustion. Everyone agreed that they'd like to do the Jam again, with some calling for it every six months instead of annually. Most participants didn't seem to mind that they had just worked halfway through the Patriots-Colts game, even with New England's team represented. We had just had our own game of realizing our visions, in which we proved ourselves as much as played in the sand. I think I speak for everyone at the Jam when I say we are fortunate to do what we do.

How Computer Games Help Children to Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shaffer (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced blog readers to my former student, David Williamson Shaffer, and his new book, How Computer Games Help Children to Learn. This book is a must read for anyone who is invested in the concept of Serious Games or anyone who wants to have a better understanding of what games might contribute to the reform of the educational process. In yesterday's post, he walked us through his roots in Seymore Papert's notion of hard fun and his concept of epistemic games. Here's a bit more background on David taken from his blog:

Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Shaffer taught grades 4-12 in the United States and abroad, including two years working with the Asian Development Bank and US Peace Corps in Nepal. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he taught in the Technology and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a founding member of the GAPPS research group for games, learning, and society. The group recently received a $1.8 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study games and media literacy in the digital age. Dr. Shaffer has a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his work on Alternate Routes to Technology and Science and was the recipient of a Spencer Foundation National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Shaffer studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn. His particular area of interest is in the development of epistemic games: computer and video games in which players become professionals to develop innovative and creative ways of thinking.

Today, I asked Shaffer some of the hard questions which all of us who are promoting games and education are facing. He offers some candid and compelling responses.

You describe powerful activities which certainly require students to deploy a rich array of school content. But by classical definitions, not all of the activities you describe are games. And many teachers remain resistant to the concept of games in school. So what value do you see in referring to these experiences as games?

This is a great question, and I'm glad you asked it. Part of the problem with the word "game" is that there isn't a single agreed-upon definition. The definition I use in the book is closer to some than others--and as you know, I talk about this very issue and how my use of the term compares to others in the book.

A major point of the book is that digital technologies force us to reexamine and rethink a number of concepts whose original definitions come from an age of print literacy: things like games, learning, thinking, innovation, professionalism, school, and so on. It is an argument that I know you are quite familiar with, since you similarly argue that new media force us to reconceptualize the nature of concepts like production and consumption, genre and medium, and so on.

The argument I make in the book is that in the digital age there is a new set of relations between games and school--and school and learning, professional practices and academic disciplines, innovation and education--and this reorganization of how we think about thinking and learning, play and education, creativity and rigor is an essential step in thinking about the future of learning.

Some skeptics have argued that the serious games movement is imposing a utilitarian logic on play (making it into something serious) when in fact, the value of play as a form of mental recreation may come from the fact that it invites us to suspend real world consequences and constraints. How would you respond to this argument?

I've heard that argument, of course, but honestly I think it is a bit of a straw man. First of all, no one (that I know) is arguing that *all* play should be "serious" in the sense you describe here--that is, devoted to some larger purpose. Second, for all the reasons that Seymour and others (and I) have talked about, there is such a thing as "hard fun"--that is, the fun of doing something difficult but worthwhile. It is an important and legitimate part of fun, and of learning, and of being a well-adjusted and happy person. Finally, and perhaps most important, serious games do suspend some real world consequences and constraints. Any game imposes some constraints and relaxes some, abates some consequences and introduces others. Different games have a different balance, and serve different functions. But I don't think there is some form of pure or idealized play (except as a theoretician's fancy) which games that serve some larger purpose somehow "pollute." Any game is played in some social context, and therefore serves some larger purpose.

Other critics of the serious games movement have argued that we are moving too quickly from ethnographic evidence that some kids learn well through games to larger claims that all youth can/should learn through game play. How would you respond to this argument?

Well, not all the evidence is ethnographic. My work is based on experimental studies: we design a game based on a specific set of hypotheses about what players will learn and how they will learn it; then we study the experiences of players to see whether that's what happens. Others in the field have done similar studies, some at quite large scales.

No one would deny that there has been a lot of enthusiasm in recent months and years about the potential of games, and some claims have no doubt been inflated, or premature, or speculative. But that doesn't mean that all claims are suspect: it depends on the claim and the evidence.

I will say that this form of argument (games for learning are all hype) is a little ironic, in the sense that the other major criticism of games is that they will teach kids the wrong thing: that playing violent games will make them violent, and so forth. We seem to think it is easier to learn bad things than good--which is, at the very least, a very Hobbsian view of the human condition.

I do think that an important part of any game is the context in which it is played. So you can take a good simulation and make it part of a game that leads to the development of useful skills, knowledge, values, and identity in service of a useful way of thinking about the world. You can also set up the conditions of play in such a way that the outcomes are quite different.

So I am skeptical of any claims about what "games" in general do or don't do for kids. That's why my book is titled "HOW computer games help children learn" and not "DO computer games help children learn?" We know that children learn from all of their experiences. The question is whether and how we can design experiences that will help them learn things we think will help them become better citizens, happier individuals, and more productive members of society.

You end your book with some speculations on the future of education. How would schools change -- for the better or for the worse -- if various kinds of game-like activities were to displace some of the activities that currently constitute the "game" of schooling?

I don't know what the ultimate shape of schools will be in the digital age. It took decades to design the modern industrial schools we have now, and they look very different from their predecessors. Schools right now focus on standardized tests of basic facts and skills for a paper and pencil world. They need to become more about learning to use sophisticated technologies to find creative and innovative solutions to real problems. I think well-designed computer games can, should, and ultimately will play a large role in that process. But to get there will mean redesigning almost everything about schools in the long run: the architecture of the buildings, the content of the curriculum, the schedule, and perhaps most important, the means of assessment.

This is going to be a big change, and a big task. But as I argue in the book, wise, well-educated, and affluent parents are already using new technologies to help their kids prepare for life in a complex world. If schools don't keep up, they risk becoming at best a footnote in the real process of education in the digital age, and in the worst case, a road to failure and an impediment to educational opportunity for those who can't afford access to the tools and pedagogies for success in a world of global competition.

Some have argued that we necessarily distort the real world phenomenon we are representing when we reduce them to the structures of a game. Do you agree with this concern? If so, how might educational game designers address it?

As Don Norman points out in his wonderful book Things That Make Us Smart any representation of reality is a simplification, leaving out details that are not relevant to solving a particular problem or accomplishing a particular task. Moreover, all of our thinking takes place through representations--whether external representations like diagrams, pictures, or spreadsheets, or internal ones, such as memories, words, or images.

So all thinking is a deliberate distortion of reality in this sense.

The power of epistemic games is that they are based on a specific theory of how you determine what it is safe to leave out in designing a game that models professional training as a way of teaching innovative thinking. The book describes that process in more detail, but the specifics aside, the point is that epistemic games are based on a specific pedagogical theory--a theory about what is worth learning and how people learn it.

There are other theories one might use, of course. But in the end, I think that any good educational game has to be based on a corresponding theory of how learning takes place. The theory might work or not--which is why we test the games we build. But it is that theory that tells you which simplifications you have to make (and which ones you can not make) in re-presenting real world phenomena in game form.

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shafffer (Part One)

I've known David Williamson Shaffer for more than a decade. I was lucky enough to have him as a student in my media theory and methods proseminar back when he was finishing up his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. where he was doing work with Seymor Papert. I've reconnected in recent years with Shaffer through his work on games and education. Shaffer has come out this month with a very important book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn. A colleague of James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Shaffer has long contributed to our conversations about the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games.

He has especially promoted the idea of epistemic games, which he discusses at some length, in the interview that follows. He is interested in the ways that we can use computer-based games (including games that involve interacting with real people in real spaces) to introduce children to the basic conceptual frameworks that govern various professional practices. For him, this is the most powerful aspect of games-based learning.

His new book makes a powerful case for this mode of teaching, including detailed case studies of games he has developed to cover a range of different professional contexts and academic disciplines and drawing parallels to commercial games already on the market. The writing is accessible and engaging, driven by his own experiences as a classroom teacher and his own passion for helping to reinvent American education.

Over the next two days, I am going to be running this interview with Shaffer. In the first part, he lays out the book's core premises and in the second, he addresses the debates around serious games more generally.

Your biography in the back of the book lists one of your titles as "game scientist." So, I suspect the readers might be interested to know what a game scientist does and how you train for such a position. The cynic in me wants to know what the implications are of using scientific language to describe what is essentially a position in the humanities.

There are a few different ways of explaining where the title "Game Scientist" comes from. The most superficial answer is that as we were founding the GAPPS (Games and Professional Practice Simulations) Group here at the University of Wisconsin Advanced Academic Distributed Learning CoLaboratory, we needed to decide what members of the group would be called. The title "Research Scientist" is often used for appointments in research labs that do not grant tenure, so given that we were all studying games someone (I think it might have been me) suggested that Game Scientist would be an appropriate title.

So originally the term was something of an historical artifact.

But I do think that there is some value in referring to the work I do as game science. Games are, as you point out, a forum of human expression, like books, movies, and other things that are studied as "humanities." But it is also possible to ask scientific questions about books: to study, for example, how people read, or to study the social, economic or psychological impact of a particular kind of book. So we can ask scientific questions about games and peoples' experiences with them.

In using the term "scientific" here, of course, I am making a statement about research methods, not values. By "scientific" I only mean asking questions that can be answered with empirical data, which can be quantitative data (surveys, brain scans, and the like) or qualitative data (like interviews and observations).

In truth, though, I am not sure that drawing explicit distinctions between the sciences and the humanities is actually all that productive. Nelson Goodman made a strong case decades ago that the similarities between the two are more striking than the differences on a philosophical level: both try to warrant claims about phenomena in the world. This is a point I have made in some of my own writings as well.

All of that having been said, I am a game scientist because the work that I do uses methods of the field of psychology, which is a form of social science.

As a graduate student, you worked with Seymor Papert, among others, at the Media Lab. Papert has written about "hard fun." In what ways is your new work a theory or application of this concept of "hard fun?"

There are a lot of connections between Seymour's work and my own. The concept of "hard fun" is one that I talk about in the book, but there are others as well.

Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that it hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than "fun," but the net effect is pleasurable overall.

The concept is certainly one that applies to almost any good game--not just the games I work with, or games for learning in general. I make this point in my book, and Steven Johnson talks about it in Everything Bad is Good for You as well. Jim Gee talks about the games that work have to be pleasantly frustrating. Good games require a lot of work.

What makes hard fun valuable from an educational point of view is when the challenge you face is worthwhile in some context beyond the game itself. In Seymour's work, kids who used Logo had to solve problems in differential geometry and computer science to build things they thought were interesting and exciting.

In my work, the challenges are the kinds of problems that professionals face in the real world: engineering design, graphic design, mediation, urban planning, and so on. The games are hard because the problems are hard. But they are fun because it is fun to solve difficult problems that matter, that have no right answer, and that give you a chance to see what it would be like to run the world--or at least some part of it.

So, let's get to the heart of the matter. What are epistemic games and what value do you think they bring to education?

Simply put: Epistemic games recreate in game form the things that people do in the real world to learn to think in innovative and creative ways about problems that matter.

They are, in other words, role-playing games where players take on the role of being a professional in training--where "professional" in this sense refers not to so-called white collar professions, but to any kind of work in a complex domain that requires the exercise of autonomy and judgment.

Professional training is based, for the most part, on professional practica: times and places where professionals-in-training do supervised work, and then talk with their peers and mentors about what they did and why. Think about internship and residency for doctors, moot court for lawyers, the design studio for architects, capstone courses for engineers and journalists, and so on.

These repeated cycles of action and reflection create a particular kind of professional thinking that Donald Schon (also at MIT, as you know, before he passed away some years ago) characterized as "reflection-in-action": literally the ability to think and to work at the same time, and thus to do work that requires constant evaluation of the situation and adjustment of the work plan in order to solve non-routine problems.

So epistemic games give players a chance to work on simulations of real problems, and to think about what they are doing--to debrief, if you will--the way professionals do when learning to solve those problems.

The games are "epistemic" because any professional practice has a particular epistemology: a way of justifying actions and warranting claims. To be a professional of some kind means you solve problems in a particular way, and you accept some kinds of solutions as legitimate and not others. The way a doctor argues that removing a patient's spleen is the "right" thing to do is different than the way a lawyer argues about it. If you're in the hospital, you probably want to go with the doctor's way of thinking. If you're in the courtroom, stick with the lawyer--assuming, of course, that you have both a good doctor and a good lawyer.

Put another way, practica are where new professionals learn the epistemology of their chosen profession--along with the skills, knowledge, and values they need to put that epistemology into practice. Epistemic games recreate those practica in game form so players can learn to think like professionals who solve non-routine problems.

The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit.

You discuss a number of these epistemic games in the book. Can you pick one of them and describe how it might contrast to existing school practices in this area?

As you know, the book has two chapters that look at this very question. One chapter looking at history and what it means to think about history--in school, as a real historian, and in a game called The Debating Game. Another chapter looks at mathematics as it is learned in school and in a game called Escher's World.

I think the history example is an interesting one because the differences are so clear. Sam Wineberg at Stanford University did a lovely study comparing how graduate students in history and high school history students evaluated a collection of historical documents.

What Wineberg found (and here I'm summarizing from my book, which summarizes Wineberg's study) is that what distinguished the high school students from the historians was not the number of facts that they knew about the American Revolution. Instead, the difference was in their understanding of what it means to think historically. For the students, history is what is written in the textbook, where "facts" are presented free of bias. For the historians, historical inquiry is a system for determining the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth--it is a way of knowing based on using specific evidence to support claims rather than trying to establish a set of facts that exist without bias.

In the same chapter, I describe a game--The Debating Game--that asks players to think about historical evidence the way historians do... or at least more like the way historians do. The game is described in more detail in the book, but basically in the game players compete in a debate over whether the actions taken by some historical actor or actors were good or bad, selfish or public-spirited, constructive or destructive.

To win the debate, they have to convince the judges of the debate that their interpretation is better than their opponents' interpretation. To do that, they have to find specific pieces of the historical record to support their position: they have to argue, as Wineberg suggests professional historians do, for the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth.

The kinds of things that players of the game do are very different than what happens in most high school history classes. (The game has been played by middle school students as well, and there the contrast is even more striking.) Players in the game (debaters and judges) have to write essays where they defend a point of view, rather than take tests where they remember facts or recite received interpretations of events. They work with primary and secondary sources with conflicting viewpoints, rather than a text with one point of view. They make their own interpretations and judgments about arguments and evidence, rather than trying to decode and remember some canonical interpretation. And so on.

So the differences are quite striking: the game is about learning to use the "toolkit" of historical analysis to think for yourself; the class is about learning to give the right answers for a test. Thus the game is more realistic, in a sense, than class is.

A recurring emphasis in your discussion is on the movement from abstract school subjects towards school subjects framed around specific real world professions -- the difference between studying math, say, and studying accounting. What's the case for the use of these professional categories for secondary school education?

As I point out in the book, school is organized around a set of things that are supposedly fundamental ways of knowing--the building blocks of all thinking if you will--which in the case of school are the traditional academic disciplines.

This is a very old view of thinking, going back to ancient Greece. The disciplines were organized a little differently then, but the basic idea was the same: education is about learning some basic ways of thinking out of which all more advanced thinking is formed.

The problem is that a century of study in the psychology of learning suggests that this just isn't how it works. Complex thinking of the kind that characterizes expertise isn't simply lots of basic pieces put together. You can't teach a bunch of facts and skills and then expect that people will reassemble them as needed.

Expertise--indeed anything beyond rudimentary skill--is based on experience working with real problems, and usually quite a lot of experience. So if we want people to learn to think about problems in the real world, they need experience learning how experts solve those problems.

I should add that there isn't anything wrong, in principle, with having school focus on learning to think like historians or mathematicians, if we decide that these are the kinds of problems kids will really face later in life. But if that's what we want to do, then we should build games (and by extension design curricula) where players meet simulations of real historical and mathematical problems the way historians and mathematicians do--which is a far cry from what they are doing now.

I'd also want to see the argument made that teaching everyone to be 5 or 6 different flavors of academic is really more useful than learning to think as professionals. What, for example, would our health care system look like if everyone who went to a doctor's office understood the kinds of questions that the doctor should ask, and the kinds of answers that she or he would use to make decisions? What would our body politic look like if everyone who read a newspaper or listened to talk radio understood how a journalist thinks about stories--and thus what makes it into the news and what doesn't, and why stories get reported the way they do? How would that kind of education compare to what we have today--or to doing a better job of teaching students to think like biologists or historians?

No Matter How Small: Revisiting Seuss's 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

Every January, for the past fifteen years, I have conducted a salute to the great children's book author, Doctor Seuss. It started the year that Doctor Seuss passed away. I was struck by how central this author had been to American culture from the late 1930s until near the end of the 20th century. His children's books are all classics but they get read outside of any historical context and few people have connected them to the much broader range of work that he did -- as a humorist for adult publications such as Judge and Life, as an important copywriter in advertising, as an editorial cartoonist for the progressive PM in the years leading up to America's entry into the war, as the animator for the Private Snafu training films and script writer for Frank Capra's Why We Fight films during World War II, as script writer and designer for 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, as the author of the radio script which led to the classic animated short, Gerald McBoing Boing, as a promoter of modern art through a series of educational specials for American television, and so forth. The Seuss story spans across media and bridges high and low culture in fascinating ways. Every January, I share his story with students, faculty, and staff at MIT, reading from his works, and sharing some historical perspectives. This year, I am going to be joined by Nancy Newman, who traches music history at SUNY-Albany and who has written a fascinating essay on the score for the Seuss-inspired feature film, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. The highlight of the event every year is the screening of this rarely shown film from the 1950s which features Hans Conreid as a demonic (but campy) piano teacher bent on global domination. We will be concluding the evening with a screening of this rarely shown classic from the 1950s, which is one of my all time personal favorite movies.

You may not know that there's a real cult that has grown up around 5000 Fingers, including this excellent website, which is full of details about its production and includes audio files of a number of songs recorded for but cut from the film.

I wrote about 5000 Fingers in an essay I published about Seuss's relationship to the Popular Front and permissive childrearing in my anthology, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. I am hoping the following excerpt may intrigue you into either coming to our event (if you are in and around Boston) or renting the film.

The event will be held next Monday, January 29, 7-10 PM, in room 4-237 at MIT.

Here's some more information about Nancy Newman's talk:

"We'll Make a Paderewski of You Yet!:

Acoustic Reflections in The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T."

Abstract:

One of the striking aspects of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953) is its staging of a young boy's search for musical identity as an Oedipal drama. The story pits two men as competitors for the boy's widowed mother. One potential father represents the tradition of classical piano, the other, American popular song. This paper shows how the film's musical numbers resolve this crisis of identity and affection. Frederick Hollander's memorable tunes and innovative score affirm the individual's capacity to develop a distinctive "voice," a message with political overtones at the time of the film's release.

Biography:

Nancy Newman is an assistant professor at the University at Albany-SUNY, where she teaches courses on music history, both ancient and modern. Her article, "Acoustic Reflections in The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T" is forthcoming in Lowering the Boom: New Essays on the History, Theory and Practice of Film Sound (University of Illinois Press). She is currently writing on Björk's role as composer and performer in the film musical, Dancer in the Dark. Dr. Newman is also working on a book about the Germania Musical Society, Good Music for a Free People. An article on this 19th-century orchestra appeared in the Yearbook of German-American Studies (1999). Her years as a piano teacher will be put to use in SUNY-Albany's Extensible Toy Piano Festival this spring.

Seuss's live action feature film The 5000 Fingers of Doctor T represents the fullest elaboration of Seuss's conception of children as "thwarted people," struggling to find their own voice in a world dominated by dictatorial adult authorities. When we read through Seuss's notes and original drafts for the script, we see strong evidence that he was consciously mapping permissive child rearing doctrines over images associated with the Second World War.

5000 Fingers deals with the plight of an average American boy, Bartholomew Collins (Tommy Rettig), who finds learning to play the piano a threat worse than death.His instructor, Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried), is an old school authoritarian, who insists that "practice makes perfect" and who demands constant drill and repetition. The bulk of the film consists of Bartholomew's dream, in which he and the other boys rise up and overthrow the dictatorial Terwilliker and his plans to dominate the world through his music. As Seuss explained in a memo to the film's producer, Stanley Kramer: "The kid, psychologically, is in a box. The dream mechanism takes these elements that are thwarting him and blows them up to gigantic proportions."

If this description foregrounds issues of child psychology, concerns central to the finished film, the early drafts of the script make frequent references to the struggle against fascism. In Bart's waking reality, Dr. T is "not especially frightening," a "tight lipped and methodical looking old gentleman ... no more vicious and harmful than Victor Moore." Once we enter Bart's dream, however, Seuss increasingly characterizes Dr. T as the reincarnation of Der Fuhrer. Seuss describes his kingdom as "plastered with posters, showing Dr. Terwilliger in a Hitler-like dictator's pose." His soldiers wear medals that "resemble an iron cross, only it is engraved with a likeness of Dr. Terwilliger in the center." The mother has a "devotion to the man...bordering on the fanatical," a "gauleiter-like allegiance" which blinds her to her son's agonies. When he is challenged, Dr. T "flies into a Hitlerian rage." He sees the "piano racket" as a scheme for global domination, and his study is decorated with an enormous world map captioned "The Terwilliger Empire of Tomorrow." He has built a massive piano, designed for the enslaved fingers of 500 little boys, upon which he will perform his musical compositions.

Many traces of this Hitler analogy find their way into the final film. The sets are hyperbolic versions of monumental Bauhaus architecture, and the grand procession borrows freely from Leni Rieftenstahl's Triumph of the Will, with his blue helmeted henchmen goose stepping and holding aloft giant versions of his "Happy Fingers" logo. Terwilliger's elaborate conductor's uniform, one reviewer noted, was "a combination of a circus band drum major, Carmen Miranda, and Herman Goering." Most of the Henchmen bear Germanic names. Hans Conried's long thin body and his floppy black hair closely resemble Seuss's PM caricatures of Hitler (minus the mustache). The fact that Conreid had provided some of the narration for Design for Death, performing the voices of the fascist leaders, could only have strengthened the association for contemporary viewers. Even the film's musical score bore strong Germanic associations; its composer, Eugene Hollander, had studied under Richard Strauss, done music for Max Reinhardt in Berlin before the war, and was the musical director for The Blue Angel.

Some of the film's more disturbing images drew on popular memories of the Nazi concentration camps. Arriving by yellow school buses, rather than railway cars, the unfortunate boys are herded through gates, where their comic books, balls, slingshots, and pet frogs are confiscated. Then, they are marched off to their "lock-me-tights" in the dungeon. There, Dr. T dreams up fiendish (and Dante_esque) tortures for all those who refuse to play his beloved keyboard. The captive musicians have sullen eyes and sunken cheeks, lean and gaunt in their prison uniforms.

In constructing the more sympathetic plumber, Zlabadowski, Seuss drew upon other associations with the war. In the first draft of the script, Zlabadowski is described in terms that strongly link him to Eastern Europe. "Shaking his head sadly in deep Slavic gloom," Zlabadowski is "a big shaggy edition of Molotov, a kindly Molotov with the cosmic unhappiness of Albert Einstein." As the script progresses, Zlabadowski abandons all of his Slavic associations, except for his rather distinctive name, becoming a more all-American type, a reluctant patriot who must first shed his isolationist impulses before he can be enlisted as Bart's ally in the struggle to stop Terwilliger. In one of his notes about the script, Seuss summarizes the character: "Z's conflict: Desire to help people. Desire to keep out of trouble. An old soldier trying to be a pacifist. He's tired of war. It's futile." In the early drafts, Zlabadowski knows Terwilliger's evil plans, but he doesn't want to get involved if it means losing his overtime pay for installing the sinks.

In the finished film, many of these adult concerns have vanished. Zlabadowski represents the ideal permissive parent Initially, he is a bit distracted by his work and eager to make a buck, a bit eager to dismiss Bart's warnings as wild eyed fantasies. Ultimately, he becomes a warm-hearted playmate (engaging the boy in a pretend fishing trip) and a wise counselor (helping him concoct from the contents of the boy's pockets a sound-stopping device). Angered by his initial indifference, Bart challenges his adult privileges and sings a song that might have been the anthem for permissive child rearing:

Just because we're kids, because we're sorta small, because we're closer to the ground, and you are bigger pound by pound, you have no right, you have no right to push and shove us little kids around.

Proclaiming children's rights, Bart denounces adult assumptions that deeper voices, facial hair, or wallets justify unreasonable exercises of power over children. Zlabadowski regains his idealism: "I don't like anybody who pushes anybody around." The two cut their fingers with Bart's pocketknife and take a blood oath that binds them together,father and son,in the struggle against Terwillikerism.

In the film's opening scene, Bart off-handedly remarks upon the death of his father, presumably during the war, and Zlabadowski and Terwilliker are cast as good and bad surrogate fathers, respectively. In his nightmare, his piano crazed mother is hypnotized into accepting Terwilliker's hand in marriage, a deal to be consummated immediately following the great concert. Not unlike Lord Droon in The King's Stilts, Terwilliker represents the pre-war Patriarch who demands obedience and silence from his children. In his fantasy, Bart hopes that the more permissive Zlabadowski will fall in love with his mother and become his father, an arrangement consummated by their blood oath. Zlabadowski understands the needs of boys; he represents the manly virtues of fishing and baseball against Dr. Terwilliker's effeminate high culture, defending America against Terwilliker's Germany.

In the end, the task of finding the right father and overcoming the bad patriarch falls squarely on Bart's shoulders. He alone will face down Terwilliker, using his "very atomic" sound-catching device to disrupt the concert and liberate the children. The closing moments, where rebellious children hurl their music sheets in the air, shouting in defiance, stomping on and punching the piano keys, represents one of the most vivid images of resistance in all of American cinema. By this point, Bart's struggle against Terwilliker has absorbed tremendous ideological weight, a struggle of the freedom fighting all American boy (with his red and white striped shirt and his blue pants) against an old world tyrant, the struggle of those who are "closer to the ground" against those who "shout" and "beat little kids about," the struggle of permissive parenting against more authoritarian alternatives.

Broadway meets Reality Television

As an American Idol fan, I have been very pleased to see Jennifer Hudson get such wide-spread acclaim for her performance in Dreamgirls. Hudson got bumped prematurely from the Idol competition during the season which I document in Convergence Culture and it is delightful to see her get a second chance at success and really knock the ball out of the park. Beyonce's performance in the film seems surprisingly subdued while Hudson gets all of the showstopping moments (or at least all of the ones not commanded by Eddie Murphy!) And of course, now both Hudson and Murphy have walked away with Golden Globes and seem destined to be "players" in the Oscar race. I was curious, however, to see how her performance was being perceived by perhaps the most exacting fan audience for this particular film -- the community of enthusiasts of Broadway shows, many of whom have firm memories of the way this same role was handled by another Jennifer, Ms. Holliday, who won a Tony for playing Effie in the original stage production. So, I asked my friend and longtime collaborator, Alex Chisholm, himself a seasoned First Nighter, to suggest some places where I might get a taste of Ms. Hudson's reception. He directed me to the discussion over at Broadway World, a leading forum for fans of the American musical theater. The verdict is definitely split -- perhaps along generational lines -- with many of the younger fans knowing Holliday's performance only through the soundtrack album or glympses captured on the Tony Award show rather than from first hand experience. Here are just a few of the more thoughtful posts on this issue:

Holliday's voice barrels rapidly up and down the notes in AIATY in such a way that that I get a sense that she's truly feeling something powerful and emotional course through her body while she's singing. I find her singing on all of the other songs to be quite stirring also.

While Hudson's voice is astounding to me, she comes off more like she's decided how she wants to sing the song from the start and that's also how her singing on most of the soundtrack feels to me. However, I'm not exactly sure whose vocals I prefer. I love the way Hudson sings "that would be just fine" in I Am Changing.

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I do not think that Jennifer Holliday was a very good actress and soley won the tony for her amazing singing in the part. Hudson, on the other hand, blew me away as a first time actress and her rendition of the songs, I felt, were more emotionally charged and controled.

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How can you say that Hudson's a good actor. Don't get me wrong I loved the movie and her performance of the song but her acting was nothing special. Now, I've only seen Holiday's Tony performance and I think her acting is a little crazy to but her overacting works on stage Hudsons lack of acting isn't good for film.

Now as for the song itselfs, I have to say Hudson was amazing and killed it, but Holliday destroyed it. Holiday's version is clearly better in my opinion and I will always consider it her song.

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I saw Dreamgirls on broadwy with Holliday and just loved the whole thing. It was a dream for me. I was 10 and it was like this is what my life is all about. She will always be my dreamgirl.

BUT... Jennifer held her own. In many ways, it is different. Maybe not vocally as they both belt out a storm and take full control of it but with Holliday, there is a desperation in her voice, perhaps a I have ALWAYS been in control and she ain't going to take it lying down. Hudson's is more of a mental breakdown.. the hysterical kind..

I loved them both.

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Holliday was a force of nature on stage. I would venture to say her sheer power and vocal energy can never be topped. She can't even get to that level herself anymore. She was 21 back then, and heavier, and both helped her to explode with the unmatchable excitement of "And I'm Tellin' You." It was as if she was self-destructing in front of you. Tearing out her voice like that, every time. It worked in a HUGE way, but it also took its toll on her.

Hudson is fantastic on that song too, but she doesn't reach Holliday's power. Close! But no cigar. She doesn't push off the deep end into self-destruction.

However, Hudson gets my vote OVERALL, because her acting is much better than Holliday's ever was. Later in Holliday's run you even got the sense that she was almost "marking" the show to save herself for "And I'm Telling You" and "I Am Changing." She kinda walked through the rest of it, a bit. And it's understandable. She was like an athlete pacing herself for the triple somersault.

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Hudson's work is on film, and I don't think she could do any better sustaining Effie on stage than Holliday did, plus she already can't deliver the song with THAT much power (nobody can). She had multiple takes, and didn't have to worry about pacing herself for the rest of the show. So I'm already "discounting" my choice...

But since I'm basing my ultimate decision on the impact of the entire performance, I'm picking Hudson (qualifiers and all).

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I saw Holliday in Dreamgirls back in 1982 for me (and most others who saw her) there's really no comparison between the two performances -- Holliday owns that role. She embodies Effie like no other and the passion, pain and sheer power she brought to her performance is unparalleled. She was a force of nature and her raw intensity was so emotionally overwhelming, I can recall literally shaking afterwards (several people around me were actually in tears). No performance by anyone I've ever seen (and I've seen over 1000 shows) has had the same impact.

Hudson was fine -- quite solid in fact -- and gave the sort of very committed, but scaled down kind of performance that the screen demands. It's an appropriately strong Effie, but not an overwhelming one, which works well for the film. But, out of the dozen or so Effies that I've seen (including about 5 during the original Broadway run, another two for the '87 revival, and the others during the various national tours and regional productions), I'm not sure she'd even be in my top 5 -- and again, I say that realizing that making comparisons between stage and film can be rather unfair.

Nevertheless, Hudson deserves all the accolades she has received and I, for one, would be happy for her if she ends up nabbing an Oscar for her performance. But, at the same time, I would never begin to compare her performance to Holliday's which was the stuff of legend and in a different category altogether.

What surprised me is that there seems to be no real backlash here based on the fact that Hudson is known primarily as an American Idol contestant and is not a Broadway veteran. Chisholm notes that there has been so much crossover from American Idol to Broadway in recent years, including cast members on Rent (Frenchie Davis ), The Wedding Singer (Constantine Maroulis), Bombay Dreams ( Tamyra Gray), and Hairspray (Diana DeGarmo). Some have even gone so far as to cite A.I's influence on the new production of A Chorus Line which is more a showcase for singers than dancers.

A more heated controversy about the relationship between reality television and the Broadway musical is brewing around NBC's new series showing the casting process for a revival of Grease. Some Broadway fans have embraced the strategy, supporting anything which will get people into the theaters at a time when large scale musicals remain a highly risky proposition:

If anything, BROADWAY and the theater arts and those aspiring to be a part of that world will have weekly exposure to the United States. And, if it does well in the ratings, can be nothing but a positive thing. Hopefully it will inspire a new generation to embrace theater and the arts even more, and possibly stem the tide of diminishing Arts programs in schools and communities.

Others see a range of reasons for skepticism, each reflecting some of the tensions points which surround efforts to broaden the commercial appeal of the stage musical:

The reason for doing a revival is "usually" because someone has a new vision or something fresh to bring to an old show. But this revival is only being done to promote another reality TV show.

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The only problem with it I have is the fact that there are many Broadway actors/actresses who are "established" and been in the biz for years, worked hard, auditioned, Equity card holders ect. and this gives Joe and Jane Everyday a chance to slip in and take two primo, well know roles in a beloved classic as they bring it back to Broadway. Which in itself is all good: bring in new blood, find new Broadway talent, yes... But not American Idol style. It's over done.

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They could have also picked something that would allow non-white people to actually participate in.

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Could they have picked a better show?

Something that's NOT done every year around the country by high school?

Of course, one could argue that it is precisely because Grease is so familiar and because there is a generation of high school cast members fantasizing about repeating their roles on Broadway that it makes sense to use it as the platform for a reality television series. Grease represents the kind of show that many middle Americans want to see when they go to the Big Apple for the first time -- they know the songs, they like the movie version, and they know they will be entertained.

Something that's becoming clear is that when there are more opportunities for new talent

to emerge through both mass media properties on network television or online through

social spaces such as YouTube and MySpace (the new hit Spring Awakening turned to MySpace to find young performers who could sing and act) there is a greater chance that someone extremely talented and completely unknown one minute can get a lucky break and become something of an overnight sensation, whether on a large scale or within smaller communities that become devotees of a particular contestant. One doesn't have to be the "understudy" who takes over for the star in 42nd Street or the wannabe actress who has to lie to get what she wants in Applause, which was inspired by the classic All About Eve. Rather, in this age of participatory culture, audiences exercise a louder voice in choosing whose name goes up in lights on the Great White Way or at the cineplex. In the end, we all get to play casting director and critic for a day.

Engagement Marketing: An Interview With Alan Moore (Part Two)

Last Friday, I introduced my readers to Alan Moore -- not the comic book creator but the brand guru -- a cutting edge thinker about the ways that grassroots communities are reshaping the branding process. Moore, with Tomi T Ahonen, wrote a book called Communities Dominate Brands. The book spells out their vision for where media is headed -- towards what Moore described last time as a "connected society"-- and what it means for the branding process. Here, Moore gets deeper into some of the issues which will be of particular interest to regular readers of this blog -- the economic value of fans to advertisers and media producers, the issue of compensating for user-generated content, the case of Pop Idol as a global media franchise, and the concept of transmedia planning. Moore will be speaking at the CMS colloquium later this term and we hope to make a podcast of his remarks available down the line.

There seems to be an implicit tension running through this book between the focus on the individual consumer (which has been a cornerstone of branding theory and which gets new attention in an age of personalized and customized media) and the focus on communities (which take on greater importance in the age of networked communications.) I wonder if you could talk a bit more about this tension -- should companies be targeting individuals or communities? What do you see as the relationship between individual consumers and these

new kinds of brand communities you are describing?

My view is that one can create greater opportunities, by appealing to communities of interest.

Doc Searls said that markets are conversations. I think communities form around 3 principle tenets.

1. Information

2. Entertainment

3. Commerce

Lets take the equine community, or the climbing community, the motivations for belonging are at a deep human level.

By creating platforms that can better serve these communities around these 3 tenets, one can build I believe sustainable businesses, that are not geographic specific.

Communities form around values, not demographics.

Also, I believe that by combining, user generated content, peer production, inter-community trade and knowledge exchange, in conjunction with services and entertainment specific to that community, the community will grow and expand. This is where the advertising becomes the content and the content becomes the advertising. The advertising becomes the conversation and the conversation becomes the advertising.

Also, there is an opportunity to listen carefully to the community so that one is in a constant process of refinement of how best to serve that community.

The money flows in a different way.

Of course such a view is heresy, within the world of mass media, which are tied to location and old distribution/business models.

In the book, you describe the emergence of "brand promiscuity." As Sex and the City might put it, we are just not that into you any more. What do you mean by brand promiscuity? What factors are giving rise to it? and what steps might companies take to make sure they still have some place in the hearts of their most loyal consumers?

There is no doubt brands wax and wane. But the brand manager wants their customers to always consider their brand before others, and where hopefully price is not part of that consideration process.

However, through the process of search, customers have been able to do much more research about the products and services they want to buy. There is mounting evidence that people go online - and research before they buy.

Customers have become far more aware, that their interests are not always put before the company interests.

That's not to say certain brands don't have die-hard fans, many do, and Apple is a great example of the extraordinary loyalty shown by Apple users.

But none the less, we know that by researching, we can find a better deal on our terms.

The steps companies have to take are to put the customer at the start of the value chain and not at the end. There can never be an excuse for disappointment. Brands have to learn that customer service is not lip service.

Recently I flew to the US via the business airline EOS. It was quite clear to me that they had designed their service from start to finish around the customer experience. I would advocate flying with that airline to anyone.

Such an experience means I will always consider EOS before anyone else and they are cheaper than BA.

Equally, when a community reacts angrily to what they consider as malpractice by a brand, the brand has to engage with that community.

If we look at the near collapse of Kryponite, the resigning of Trent Lott from the Senate, of Jeff Jarvis's personal crusade against Dell computers, Brands have to understand that at the very least they could suffer severe bad publicity at the very worst they could loose their business.

The most extreme example of brand promiscuity comes from China. Chinese stores are being hit by mobs of customers who are engaging in a spot of Tungou, or team buying. Shoppers are coordinating times to hit stores using the web. The shoppers turn up en-masse and demand discounts - and often store owners concede! Sites such as www.51Tuangou.com and www.teambuy.com.cn provide forums for shoppers to meet and plan their next target.

You have interesting things to say in the book about fans: "Such fans are more precious than gold. You should find them, recruit them to work with you, never try to 'brainwash' them, but let them be themselves and use their own creativity and passion to promote your product or service. Find gentle but supportive means to promote them and their work. Pay them for their

intellectual property, at least as well as you would reward a star-performing advertising agency. Celebrate this kind of passion -- you will ignite other such sleeping giants from amidst your fan base." You touch on a key issue here we have been discussing on the blog -- should companies be compensating fans for user-generated content? Why or why not?

Like all things its about context.

The BBC for example, feel they should not be paying for user generated content. Whereas, Current TV pays those that get their 15min pod onto cable $1000.

Spreadshirt.com - which enables me to create my online shop and to trade and transact, with spreadshirt handling all the printing, distribution and financials, are in a way benefiting from user generated content. In a more sophisticated manner.

What about fans writing for the Soprano's or TV formats? Should we be paying them. Well yes. Wikipedia? No, because the motivation is completely different.

Again, we are the mid-wives of a new socio-economic model. It is interesting that we have never ever before really considered seriously that engaging such a fan base could be of huge benefit to various companies.

But, there is enough evidence to show that redirecting some capital in different ways can ignite creativity and therefore drive commerce.

Andy Warhol it was that said in the future everybody will be famous for 15mins. I don't think he could have ever possibly imagined how this would manifest itself. But we are living with that prophecy today.

Could we fire our advertising agencies, that cost us millions if not billions of dollars and just get our most passionate fans to create our advertising for us?

So I guess the formula, is to think about what is the incentive? What is the benefit? Is it short term or long term, is it about reputation and just a sense of belonging or do we want something else? Do we corrupt what we are by paying a revenue share, or are we really igniting the blue touch paper of our passionate community by offering a financial reward?

More generally, what advice would you provide to media companies about forming strong ties to their fan base? Can you cite some examples where companies got this right and where they've gotten it wrong?

So the old rules of command and control don't apply. It is about listening and building trust, it is about real dialogue and actions being taken on that dialogue.

It is about persistent conversation, and creating platforms that will attract, and reward in a variety of ways. It is about a better customer experience, and always, always delivering on the promise.

Who got it right?

Well I think Spreadshirt has got it right, Jamie Oliver and his School Dinner campaign got it right (through a TV programme he invited his audience to form as a community and embarrass the British Government in changing its policy as to how we feed our kids in UK schools), the Boeing Design Team, Soloman sports .

Trent Lott got it wrong, as did Kryptonite, as did Dell, Sony and Verizon all vie for the "how we really fucked it up" award.

But let me also say that, this is work in progress, and your fan base could be the many thousands of employees that work for your company, they are quite often a small army.

Jonathan Schwartz the COO of Sun Microsystems famously said:

The perception of Sun as a faithful and authentic tech company is now very strong. What blogs have done has authenticated the Sun brand more than a billion dollar ad campaign could have done. I care more about the ink you get from developer community than any other coverage. Sun has experienced a sea change in their perception of us and that has come from blogs. Everyone blogging at Sun is verifying that we possess a culture of tenacity and authenticity

And he talks about how Sun's bloggers have created a more transparent company that appears more human as a result. This is the natural consequence of two-way flows of communication. Something that many brand and advertising managers struggle with. Command and control should no longer be part of any marketing communications strategy.

We are at the very beginning now of a revolution in marketing communications. How businesses will engage with their audiences, how marketing budgets will be spent, and how marketing departments will be organized.

You've done some writing about the Pop Idol phenomenon worldwide. What factors have led to the consistent level of engagement which this property generates? What do you see as the most significant commonalities and differences in the ways consumers respond to this franchise in different parts of the world? What lessons might other media producers draw from the success of Pop Idol?

Today's world is a world of experience of content, of culture and of content-rich brands, a world where knowledge is profit and interconnectivity is power, where enabling and personal empowerment are keys to future success. The implications for business are clear. People will want more 'experiences' and to be able to define themselves by those experiences.

In no TV show worldwide has this been more obvious, than in . Generating over 3.2 Billion viewers over the past six years, the various national editions of Pop Idol are regularly the most watched TV show in their respective countries when they air, and the final episode to Pop Idol has broken viewing records from Norway to Singapore.

In Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy, Professor Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan, and, Professor Christian Welzel Professor at the University of Bremen, have been studying how developing economies affect and change individuals and society. Living in a world where survival is now taken for granted, and migrating from an industrial economy to a knowledge society places increasing emphasis on individual autonomy, self-expression, and free choice. Emerging self-expression values transform modernization into a process of human development, giving rise to a new type of humanistic society that is increasingly people-centered.

This new society they argue, seek true voice; direct participation, unmediated influence and identity-based community. Taking control of one's life, having total control over one's identity. These issues therefore, are central to the underpinning of Pop Idol.

Most viewers fully understand that Pop Idol is a manufactured format. What is crucial is not that these wannabe stars are just great performers, but that they come across as genuine and authentic.

Authenticity is one of today's zeitgeists. The cumulative net result of blogs, the explosion of user generated content and self-publishing, is about the exploration of identity on the one hand and on the other it is about communication that is unmediated, unfiltered, and perceived as genuine/authentic. Distrust of Governments and global brands explain why authenticity plays such a critical role in post-modern society.

In one Pop Idol show a contestant is told by the judges that her singing style lacks emotion. Her response to this observation is that she is not interested in the judges view, because she is performing for the audience. It is the audience with their voting power that she appeals to. Su Holmes explains in her paper Reality Goes Pop! Reality TV Popular Music, and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol: Sage publications 2004:

Contestants situate the audience not only as the primary point of address and recipient of the performance but the primary arbiter of its meaning. This structure validates audience choice, discrimination and agency at the moment of transmission in which the audience is actively encouraged to adopt a viewpoint at odds with an official or expert opinion.

In early Hollywood the stars were exceptional stage performers who transferred their skills to the silver screen. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin fell over for real, Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers truly did dance, though Rogers did dance backwards and in high heels! Elvis and Frank Sinatra did sing. The movie was special, and stars were closely guarded maintaining their sense of aura, and a heroic image. Today's Hollywood star relies on stunt doubles, plastic surgery and special effects. Doing the publicity tours for each movie, the stars are over-exposed, and discuss the tricks of the trade ad nauseum, destroying any lingering admiration for skills beyond purely that of acting. Actors are now known to be that and nothing else: actors. Audiences sense that this is more fake, than authentic. While a movie or TV show may be great entertainment, it is still fake, whilst there is an increasing demand for authenticity.

Reality TV is built on co-creation, participation, and persistent peer-to-peer flows of conversations on the television via voting in the chat rooms and forums. This signals that commercial success for broadcasters can be defined by better improving the dialogue via rich flows of communi-cation. Modern viewers think like this: "When I can see, that my vote counts, that my voice counts, then I will willingly engage. When I can be identified as myself within a group context, and listened to, that is important to me."

Sure, some of us may not want to participate in the Pop Idol's of this world, but we may be passionate about other issues, and Pop Idol is more about participatory democracy, true enough in a crude from, than some people may care to accept. If this is the case, then it is worth pausing as a broadcaster, to mull over; how am I engaging my audiences? How as a commercial broadcaster could I better retain our customer base thus reducing our acquisition costs? Or keep the size of our audiences, and therefore keep our advertisers?

Here are 8 key points to consider as a commercial broadcaster

1). Attraction = Pull to engage. We are deeply social

2). Co-creation / participation / peer production / collaboration / persistent conversations

3). Transparency and authenticity are key components of any engagement initiative.

4). Flowability of content across all media platforms

5). Valuable and contextual content

6). Idea driven

7). Deliver a memorable experience

8). Editorial can link to commercial revenue streams

As an American reading your book, I was consistently fascinated with your accounts of mobile media and SMS in other parts of the world. We lag so far behind Asia and the Nordics in terms of our adoption of these technologies. You've spent a lot of time helping clients to understand how they change the information flow and alter their branding efforts. So, what do you see as the future of mobile media and SMS in the North American context? What do you see

as some of the innovative uses of these technologies in other parts of the world and what changes would need to take place if American companies wanted to deploy these approaches in our context?

This is such a vast topic I feel defeated before I even start.

Well - operators have to really consider how they stimulate peer to peer flows of communication.

Mobile is not a mass market. it's a market of mass niche audiences.

In Norway you can buy plane tickets, pay for your parking space. In Finland you can be notified by your library that the book you wanted is now in stock or you can renew your borrowing by SMS, pay for your train tickets via SMS or buy your lottery ticket.

Bands have their own MVNO including the rock group Kiss and P.Diddy.

There is the obvious Citizen Journalism package, for example the Norwegian newspaper Aller, has equipped its journalists with video mobile phones where a print is translated into a 5 min sound-byte via the web.

In Hong Kong one can play the community horse racing game super stable, and in Japan play the community treasure hunt game Mogwai. As teams hunt a prize in an urban jungle.

Mobile is not Heinz baked beanz. One has to put the tools in the hands of creators.

There was one passage in the book which provoked sharp disagreement from me. You write, "Undebiably the storylines of content in popular culture have shrunk, which has shortened the attention spans of especially the younger audiences." Yet, writers like Steven Johnson have made a convincing argument that popular culture texts have greater complexity now than ever

before. We can certainly point to the short lengths of music videos, YouTube segments, or content for the mobile platform, yet we can also point towards people camping out all weekend to watch long marathons of complex serialized dramas on DVD. How would you respond to the claim that popular culture is demanding more, not less, from its consumers in response to the fragmentation and interweaving of storylines you discuss?

I agree, and it is something we have been researching from the last book. Culture is more layered. And is an area we have given more thought to.

I think what we were trying to say was that conventional storylines had been exhausted. Pulp Fiction was perhaps the last film to exploit the old movie genres to great success, where narrative is pulled, pushed and squeezed in innovative ways.

I think kids watch less television, my kids do, but seek greater immersion, in myspace or Grand Theft Auto, or any other gaming experience, or fan fiction site one cares to think of.

But the important criteria is, that they CAN be part of the co-creation experience. That changes everything.

Think about it, you're a kid, you're 9 standing in the schoolyard. Your lonely, you see the cool kids playing soccer, or baseball. The coolest kid in the school comes over to you and says, "do you want to join in?" what are you going to say?

All of a sudden you belong. Your identity recognised.

We've been talking here about transmedia planning as an approach which recognizes the growing complexity of popular culture and rewards the competency and mastery of fans. This approach would seem to be consistent with your own emphasis on fan engagement and brand communities. How do you respond to this concept and how might we reconcile it with your discussion of fragmented attention and declining brand loyalty?

Create context, attraction and reasons to engage. These are myriad.

Deliver a valuable experience, and rewards for engaging. Again, depending on what the reasons are for creating engagement will depend on how one structures the engagement initiative.

I like the concept of transmedia planning, it acknowledges the complexity of story-telling, and co-creation in a super-connected world.

It requires the combination of different skill sets, to develop and deliver such an experience.

All writers about media change face the problem of print being too slow a medium to respond to unfolding events. What recent developments do you wish you had been able to discuss in the book?

Well, we are blessed, with the sequel or son of. So I have no regrets. At times I wondered if we had gone too far. Also we built the book off of the SMLXL blog, and had 172 pages of draft text in the 1st weekend. When we went to print we were right on the bleeding edge.

It has however, taken until the middle of 2006, for the rest of the world to catch up.

The conversations that I am having with many companies and organisations demonstrate that we have pushed the envelope. They are just starting to grapple with the difficult issues of Darwin. Adapt or die. Or as we say, engage or die.

I think organisational structures, is perhaps the one issue Tomi and I grossly underestimated. Companies are struggling to grasp what they should be doing, how and why.

But everything pretty much that we wrote about has evolved into reality.

I am proud of the book as a body of work, as we tried very hard to mix theory with practical examples. Proving that our assumptions were and are already true, which they are.

As a creative person, I deal with putting things into reality, its no good, offering advice others can't see as practical.

Of course web/mobile 2.0 was still a twinkle in the sky, and the Apple iPhone a mere dream.

Its amazing what has happened in 15 months.

Engagement Marketing: An Interview with Alan Moore (Part One)

Alan Moore created quite a stir when he called my apartment a little over a month ago. The guy on the phone had a delightful British accent of the kind one might imagine coming from the British comic book artist who is responsible for such works as Lost Girls, From Hell, Watchman, League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Promethea, Top Ten.... Well, it wasn't that Alan Moore. This Alan Moore is a distinguished figure in the marketing world -- the CEO of SMLXL, the Cambridge based "engagement marketing" firm, and the co-author of Communities Dominate Brands: Business and Marketing Challenges for the 21st Century. In Convergence Culture, I write about what I call "affective economics" -- the reappraisal of the value of fan and brand communities within the marketing sphere. I'd recommend Communities Dominate Brands to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the realm of "affective economics." Moore and his co-author, Tomi T Ahonen, have thought deeply about the changes that are rocking the current media landscape and their implications for the ways that brands will court consumers. The book is informed by contemporary media theory and rich in examples for recent marketing efforts that put the theory into practice.

In this interview, Moore shares with us some of his insights into what is going to happen to the branding process given the rise of participatory culture and the breakdown of the traditional broadcast paradigm.

HJ: Your Bio in the book describes you as a specialist in Engagement Marketing, which begs the question -- what is Engagement Marketing and for that matter, what constitutes engagement from your point of view?

AM: Engagement marketing is a very broad term, and purposefully so. At its heart, is the insight that human beings are highly social animals, and have an innate need to communicate and interact. Therefore, any engagement marketing initiative must allow for two-way flows of information and communication. We believe, people embrace what they create.

And why is this important? Because in advanced economies the values of society and the individual change. AT the heart of this is the key issue around identity and belonging. We have always had community. Pre- industrialization, we were tied to our communities by geography, tradition, the state and birthright. External forces shaped our identity. However, in a post-modern world we can have many selves, as we undertake a quest for self identity.

This is described as Psychological Self-Determination the ability to exert control over the most important aspects of ones life, especially personal identity, which has become the source of meaning and purpose in a life no longer dictated by geography or tradition.

The Community Generation, shun traditional organizations in favor of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The Community Generation, seek and expect direct participation and influence. They possess the skills to lead, confer and discuss. These people are not watching television and have grown up in a world of search and two-way flows of communication.

Going further Engagement Marketing is premised upon: transparency - interactivity - immediacy - facilitation - engagement - co-creation - collaboration - experience and trust these words define the migration form mass media to social media.

The explosion of: Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and other MMORPG's, Citizen Journalism, Wicki's and Swicki's, TV formats like Pop Idol, or Jamies School Dinners, Blogs, Social search, The Guinness visitor centre in Dublin or the Eden project in Cornwall UK, mobile games like Superstable or Twins, or, new business platforms like Spreadshirt.com all demonstrate a new socio-economic model, where engagement sits at the epicentre.

For example Al Gore believes Current TV's hybrid of digital platforms and broadcasting can help re-engage young people with politics and the media. A third of its schedule is created by its mainly 18 to 34-year-old audience with digital video cameras and desktop editing software. Al Gore says It's not political, it's not ideological. You get a cornucopia of points of view and fresh perspectives that force people in rigid frameworks to reassess everything.

You can load up your 15 min film. The community gets to vote if it should be broadcast on cable and the creator gets $1000

Interestingly it's a different set of incentives both personal and commercial.

So reputation begins to play an important role here. And will increasingly do so.

I see this process as having value, not only in a commercial context, but also in education, civil society, science and politics.

Engagement Marketing could help sell a product, an industry, a region, combat a social issue. It can attract and deploy the collective intelligence of the many people.

Engagement Marketing is built upon the power of the meritocracy of ideas, and the strategic combinations of different media to propel that idea into the world, stimulating and facilitating the involvement of its audience to a commonly shared goal.

Engagement Marketing is about connecting large or small communities with engaging content to a commercial or social agenda. Rather than boiling everything down to a unique selling proposition, Engagement Marketing creates bigger ideas that emotionally engage its audience, who have a desire to participate.

Rather than focus on the one single proposition which would be a manufactured communication strategy, Engagement Marketing is built upon the fundamental notion of shared experience, something which 'interruptive' communications cannot do.

Mass media, presumes, only one thing of its audience that they are passive and they will consume as much as marketers can persuade them to.

Mass media is cold media, its push, its myopic, its about as relevant to the 21st Century as First World War military strategy. The age of set piece competition is over.

If the 20th Century was about managing efficiencies, then the 21st Century will be about managing experiences.

In the book you write, "Conventional marketing and advertising is the silent movies of the 21st century. The proletarian nature of the internet, blogging, moblogging, the mobile phone, interactive TV, media choice and the PVR, the rich flows of information and the reach of that information, have all contributed to bringing an era to an end." A bold claim, indeed! I'd love to

see you unpack this for us a bit more. Why is this era ending? What evidence can you offer that this era has ended?

"TV advertising is broken, putting $67b up for grabs, which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup." Stated Bob Garfield in a Wired article just before Christmas. He cites "evolution of dance," which has got nearly 35 million views in six months on YouTube, as evidence that conventional media is in meltdown. These numbers are impossible in a conventional media world.

P&G bankrolled commercial television, so when Jim Stengel CMO for P&G said:

In 1965, 80 per cent of adults in the US could be reached with three 60 second TV spots. In 2002, it required 117 prime time commercials to produce the same result. In the early 1960s, typical day-after recall scores for 60 second prime time TV commercials were about 40 per cent and nearly half of this was elicited without any memory aid. Currently a typical day-after recall score for a 30 second spot is about 18- 20 per cent and virtually no one is able to provide any form of playback without some form of recall stimulate.

The number of brands and messages competing for consumer attention has exploded, and consumers have changed dramatically. They show an increasing lack of tolerance for marketing that is irrelevant to their lives, or that is completely unsolicited. Traditional marketing methods are diluted by a hurried lifestyle, overwhelmed by technology, and often deliberately ignored.

One has to start to question the value of traditional marketing communications, which is further supported by Glen L.Urban. Professor at the Sloan School of Management. MIT, who argues that:

Marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the last 50 years of mass media to trust-based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment.

On top of that we are witnessing the emergence of a new socio-economic model as Yochai Benkler explains in his book the Wealth of Networks:

We need not declare the end of economics as we know it. We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production. That is, behaviours and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere their own patterns. what has changed is that now these patterns of behaviour have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship amd mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and organising productive behaviour at the very core of the information economy.

And lets not forget TRUST. According to the World Economic Forum, Trust is at its lowest level for Governments, Global Brands and even the UN since tracking began in 2001. Trust plays a key role in any interaction, and the media and business have done a great job in destroying that trust.

For example Sony being sued for the pernicious use of spyware on 24million music CD's it sold, without the buyers consent. Or Verizon promoting Bluetooth capability in its ads and then turning the Bluetooth functionality off. Which resulted in a class action against the company. the lawsuit against Verizon Wireless - and the way it came about - highlights the challenges that weblogs pose to corporations.

Verzion advertised the Motorola V710 with Bluetooth this made it possible for file sharing between the mobile device and a computer. Verizon However turned the bluetooth functionality off.

This case has been identified as being possible purely through the power of the blogosphere and the millions that provide such overwhelming force via "word of mouth"

And how about Fake TV news?

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms' use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)--a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population.

The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients' messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety.

So, once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't really want to go back to your boring day job. In this instance, the day job is the consumer as an; uninformed, unconnected, passive, ignorant, non-participative, controlled individual that will happily consume and not question what is put in front of them.

The point is that neither the media, nor brands are in control, and we are not waiting for them. We see image advertising as junk mail and by default irrelevant, we don't believe the hype, and we have learnt to question the motive. We the people formerly known as the audience are no longer content to be good foot soldiers.

So the upshot of all of this is the people taking control and creating their own media platforms like OhMyNews . Founder and Editor Oh Yeon-ho said in an interview with Wired Magazine "With OhmyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media. Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves."

The article goes on further to say that the Guardian has described it as the world's most domestically powerful news site and a South Korean diplomat was quoted as saying that the no policy maker can now ignore OhMyNews.

What does this mean? It means we are redefining what journalism is, what media is and who controls it. If this is the case we are redefining what advertising is, what business is and who benefits. It means we are redefining how we communicate and to whom.

We are witnesses at the birth of a new socio-economic model.

The Silent Cinema analogy suggests less a fundamental break than the reconfiguration of the system to reflect a new technological environment. Your book talks a lot about what needs to change. What lessons will these new marketers carry over from the era of conventional marketing and advertising?

What can they carry over?

Well - not a lot as I can see.

It's a new set of rules and a new language.

I think there is a great deal that can be left behind. The worse thing that can happen to you is irrelevance which is always the precursor to obsolescence. And that is a one-way street.

With TV audiences in decline, globally what is the model for the future?

Your book describes a shift from a Networked Culture to a Connected Culture. Explain what you see as the difference between the two. How does this distinction map onto the distinction people are starting to make between Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0?

Web 1.0 is representative of a networked culture. We're all plugged in, and can be defined as Metcalfe's Law.

But a connected culture is a world of hot media, of Current TV, peer production, collective intelligence, Second Life, the world of Warcraft, Pop Idol, Citizen Journalism, Myspace, Bebo, YouTube, mobile social networking, new business platforms which is about utilising digital technologies to radically challenge the status quo of our industrialised world. It is all about persistent conversation and extended narrative.

A connected culture is one that can be better described as Reeds Law and Group Forming Networks

(GFNs) are an important additional kind of network capability. They allow small or large groups of network users to connect and to organize their communications around a common interest, issue, or goal.

GFN's have an exponential effect and significantly out perform either Sarkov's Lawthe law of the mass media and Metcalfe's Law which is the Law of the internet.

Connected culture is about Commons based peer production as a third model of production that relies on decentralized information gathering and exchange and more efficient allocation of human creativity.

For example Yahoo talk about better search through people. Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo talks about User generated content that is Tagged, Described, Organized and, Discovered not by editors but by the users.

Yahoo talks about: User Distributed Content, and, User Developed Functionality

And they talk about F.U.S.E. = Find - Use - Share - Expand

Another illustration of a connected culture is >em>The Elephant's Dream, the world's first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use

The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world .

All mobile/web technologies are designed around social interaction of one form or another. It's a world of Social Media not Mass Media. Niche mass audiences - forming around passion based interests that are not geographic specific.

The Merits of Nitpicking: A Doctor Diagnoses House

My son and I are both big fans of the television series, >em>House. I watch the show for the characters and their interactions -- especially for Hugh Laurie's performance but also for his interplay with the other doctors. My son has shown a bit more curiosity about the medical dimensions of the series and in search of information, he stumbled onto a fascinating blog, Polite Dissent, which offers medical insight into House, superhero comics, and a range of other popular culture texts. The blog promises us "Comics, Medicine, Politics, and Fun." Its author, Scott, describes himself as being part of a large family practice in Southwestern Illinois. Scott's blog is a good illustration of a mode of fan criticism which sometimes goes by the name of nitpicking. Nitpickers examine their favorite programs through a particular lens -- in this case, medicine -- in which they have developed expertise. I became very interested in nitpicking when I did research for Science Fiction Audiences about the reception of Star Trek at MIT. What I found at that time -- the late 1980s -- was that MIT students were often drawn to our school because of an early interest in science fiction and used science fiction -- especially debates about the lines between known science, reasonable speculation, and implaussible technobabel -- to work through their own mastery of core scientific concepts. The pleasure was in being able to prove to each other what was "wrong" with the science in a particular Star Trek episode and to explain a more plausible or realistic way of dealing with the same themes. Indeed, they classified the ST:NG episodes by discipline, often using the numerical codes ("Course 6") which are most often used to refer to majors within the MIT Context, suggesting just how much the shows functioned in parallel with what they were learning in their classes.

These scientists and engineers in training were not being obnoxious in trying to show their superiority to the program: part of the pleasure for them came in sorting out the differences between real and bogus science. In some senses, this was to look at the series through a realist lens but that's too simple a way to understand what is going on since all science fiction fans recognize that science fiction involves speculation and about social commentary, not simply about reproducing the world of known science but pushing beyond it to explore alternative possibilities. There were just "rules" that governed how far outside known science science fiction "should" stray and in what directions.

The classic nitpicker has a love/hate relationship with their favorite program: the show has to be good enough to stretch the outer limits of their knowledge at a regular basis and yet at the same time, it has to be flawed enough that they can catch it when the authors "fake it" in a particular domain of knowledge.

So, Scott takes House apart in terms of hospital procedure, medical tests and equiptment, and the specifics of the various ailments they appear in the speculations surrounding a particular case. Taken as a whole, Scott seems to enjoy the speculative aspects of the series but to be displeased by the various shortcuts the writers take to get us through a complex medical process in under an hour of screentime. Scott recognizes the tension between story telling and communicating actual medical knowledge but remains frustrated, as he puts it, "when House does a "character show," the medicine suffers."

Here, for example, are some of the key concerns he raised about "TB or Not TB", a second season episode about a grandstanding doctor who works on the medical problems in the third world and who provokes special ire from the series protagonist:

I

f the patient is suspected of having TB, why is no one treating him wearing a mask? Why he wandering around the hospital and not in isolation? Why is he not in a negative-pressure room?

PPDs are not read by sight, but by feel. It doesn't matter how red it looks, but instead how indurated it is.

TB is slow growing. How did the team know almost immediately that it was resistant TB? How did the antibiotics kick in so fast?

A nesidioblastoma would explain most of Dr. Charles's symptoms, but *wow* that's a convenient tumor. Small enough that it can't be seen on x-rays or MRIs. Intermittent, so it only releases insulin periodically. And yet strong enough to lower the sugar level in his CSF. It's more of a deus ex machina than a diagnosis.

When Dr. Charles coded, why did no one in a room full of doctors start CPR while waiting for the paddles to charge?

I'm certainly no surgeon, interventional radiologist or endocrinologist, but the scene where the team is trying to induce the tumor to release insulin seemed wrong. Injecting calcium directly into the pancreatic blood supply may be a legitimate procedure, but I doubt those four are qualified to perform it. Also, since they expected the blood sugar to drop to dangerous levels, they should have had the D50 ready to inject and not scramble for an IV setup

Frankly, most of these questions never crossed my mind: for me, the medical language on >em>House is as much technobabel as anything heard on Star Trek, but I found I had to stop watching Jack and Bobby a few years ago because I got so frustrated in how they dealt with academic life and I am starting to get more frustrated with Veronica Mars along similar lines. It all depends on where your expertise and interest lies but that's part of the value of creating a space where shared texts get examined through multiple lens.

It has been widely observed that procedural shows like House or CSI can play an important role in exciting the American public about the professions being represented. They are often accompanied both by an increase in sales of nonfiction works on the same topics and by increased applications to colleges which offer programs in those areas of specialization. The obvious parallel here is to the MIT students who got turned onto science through Star Trek. In such a context, sites like this one play an important role in providing a corrective to some of the more hairbrained ideas that find their ways into dramatic television or simply to provide further background on the medical conditions and practices discussed on the program.

I wonder how we can incorporate something like the nitpicking process into the educational system. What is the value of getting students to apply their knowledge to deconstruct a popular representation? What is gained by the process of walking through such critiques and then trying to verify competing truth claims through reference to concrete evidence and information? What gets added when we move from a single knowledgible critic like Scott to the incorporation of a larger community of interested people who might bring slightly different expertises to the table or who might have competing interpretations and evaluations of what is represented in the program (as occurs in the comments section of this site)? The key point is that the procedural shows themselves do not have to be 100 percent accurate as long as they offer problems for students to work through and solve and as long as a spirit of playful debunking is built into how they get discussed in the classroom. Indeed, the shows may be a better basis for such an experiment if they are good enough to capture the imagination but ultimately flawed or compromised in their representation of real world practices. Such an excercise would seem to be a great way to introduce media literacy concepts into the biology classroom.

Five Things You Don't Know About Me...

Normally I avoid chain letters like the plague. Don't send them to me if you don't want me to break the chain and bring down the curse upon all of mankind or cost that little cancer-ridden girl her miracle cure or win a million dollars from Microsoft or whatever else good, bad, or indifferent you imagine will happen if you don't imediately pester your friends with some stupid task. But this past week, I got "tagged" by David Edery (Game Tycoon) in a vast game which is making its way across the blogosphere. Bloggers are being dared to tell their readers five things about themselves that they probably don't already know and then to pass the tag along to someone else.

I figured it was probably worth one blog post to share with you guys some behind the scenes information about yours truly, though given my tendency for openness about things like being a slash writer or an Eagle Scout, I found this more challenging than it might have seemed at first. Besides, if I have to tell you stuff that David Edery doesn't know about me, that narrows the field even more since David and I have spent many hours in each other's company as we traveled together trying to raise money for the Comparative Media Studies Program. So here goes my best stab.

The first book I ever wrote was a guidebook to the Atlanta Zoo. My CV lists me as the editor and/or author of 12 books. I lie. There's a book I wrote which doesn't appear on any of my resumes. I wrote it shortly after I graduated from Georgia State University. At the time, I was working as the public relations director for the Atlanta Zoological Society. Most of the job consisted of drafting press releases, editing a newsletter, and going out and giving talks to school groups. But the task which most captured my imagination was rewriting the guidebook, which I did with probably a bit too much personality, since the project got abandoned after I left the organization to go off to graduate school. What I wrote was never actually published.

My favorite portrait of my mother depicts her as a clown. It is a portrait painted by a longtime family friend, Glen LaRue. My mother used to love to make people laugh. It went all the way back to her high school days in the Gilbert and Sullivan club. She would periodically dress up as a clown and go to entertain people at local orphanages or old folks homes. When I was a boy, I would sometimes dress up in clown clothes and go with her. I suspect it is my mother's love of laughter that was her greatest gift to me - and as someone who grew up as a mother's boy, that's saying a lot. I am sure this love of comedy led to my dissertation topic - on the influence of vaudeville on American film comedy during the early sound period. Years later, when I got ambushed on Donahue, my mother's only comment was that I forget to make them laugh. It is a mistake I've tried hard not to make again. My students know that my mind runs on bad jokes. I seem to compulsively take words and concepts, twist them around looking for puns or comic structures. Sometimes, the results can be painful. Sometimes, they can break up a bad meeting. Often, they can result in a creative insight which pushes me to the next level in my thinking

My nickname is Mountain Man. The phrase came from an early newspaper article which described me as "looking like a mountain man who happens to be a genius." My wife immediately picked up on the first part of the statement, seeing it as an indictment of how shabby my beard and hair get when I try to push too long between trips to the barbers. I always have to remind her about the second, much more significant part of the statement. The name stuck when I ended up spending my sabbatical a few years ago living by myself in a cabin in the North Georgia mountains. In fact, the cabin was located not far from where they found Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic bomber, during that same time period. News reports suggested that he had stayed alive by eating acorns and lizards. So I started to make jokes in my e-mail correspondence back to the office suggesting that I was staying alive on acorns and lizards. I also joked that it was like living on Walden pond if Thoreau had a crappy dialup connection. Ironically, the year I spent at the cabin, using a really slow land line, was the year that I wrote Convergence Culture. This probably isn't up there with the revelation that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter. :-)

I played Elwood P. Dowd in my high school's production of Harvey. My mother's clowning probably gave me the acting bug. I loved to perform in church plays and scout skits. I performed a comedy routine in our seventh grade talent show as an eccentric professor who was obsessed with the problem of violence in children's literature (a reversal of the role I ended up playing before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee some decades later). When I was in high school, I acted in two plays and in both cases, I got cast as the leads - as Dorian Gray in a heavily sanitized version of the Portrait of Dorian Gray and as the eccentric but lovable Elwood (he who sees the invisible 7 foot tall rabbit) in Harvey. I also won an acting award for my appearance in a super 8 movie spoofing James Bond which had me roller skating in a trenchcoat down Peachtree Street but that was another story altogether. Some years later, I did some amateur standup comedy and used to do comic guest slots on a local Atlanta radio program, King of Schlock. All of this seems like an appropriate preparation for my current public speaking responsibilities.

When I was in late elementary school, I found a dolphin's skull washed up ashore on a beach. When I was a boy, I had a small museum in my basement of oddities of natural history. It started I think when a country cousin gave me the stuff carcus of a Red Fox and when my grandmother bought me a stuffed baby caiman at a roadside stand during a trip to Florida. Along the way, we purchased cobra skins which were advertised in the back pages of Boy's Life magazine and I had a black bat preserved in a jar of formaldahide. But the prize possession was the skull of a dolphin which I found while walking on Tybee Beach when I was in 6th or 7th grade. It was encrusted with barnacles and had been lodged underneath the peer. I recognized it because we had seen one in a museum earlier in the day. We bleached it and left it out in the sun to dry.

I am not sure how much any of this taught you about media change or participatory culture or education or any of the other main themes of the blogs. At best this is a digression from my usual content but I hope I at least managed to be entertaining.

Now, it is my turn. I will tag five other bloggers who are regular readers here - Jason Mittell, Derek Kompare, Mark Deuze, Ilya Vedrashko, and Nancy Baym. Tell us something we don't know about you. (Sorry, friends.)

The Shape of the Page: More Thoughts on Haw Par Villa

I am writing this as I am hiding out in my hotel in San Francisco -- jet lagged and under the weather from some evil germ that was working its way through the airplane's ventilation system -- and I can't get the Haw Par Villa out of my mind. In my previous posts, I wrote about it in terms of its thematic content -- the antimodernist impulses, the representation of classically Chinese conceptions of transgression and punishment, and the place of violent representations in moral instruction. But what interests me today has to do with the formal organization of the exhibits themselves. Remember that these exhibits were built in 1937. I'm going to go all art history on you for a moment so read at your own risk. Consider this image (taken by William Uricchio) which allows us to see one of the tableaus in its largest possible context. The first thing which may strike you is that the space breaks down into a series of different frames which can be read sequentially but which may be taken in as a whole.

In that sense, I am reminded of comic book creator and theorist Will Eisner's arguments about the ways comics might be read -- both in terms of the organization of information into a series of framed boxes and in terms of "the shape of the page" which we take in through peripheral vision and which shapes our interpretation of each framed image. It is this notion of the "shape of the page" which got dropped when Scott McCloud reworked Eisner for Understanding Comics and for my money, it may be Eisner's most significant contribution to the theory of the medium.

Eisner's own work was very good at exploiting the relationship here between information communicated sequentially -- panel by panel -- and simultaneously -- through the shape of the page. Consider this example taken from one of Eisner's very last published pieces -- note how he weaves the Spirit and the Escapist, his two protagonists, across the page in multiple ways. We can take in an overall impression of what's happening here at a glance but as we examine the page more closely, we see that it does contain a series of implicitly and explicitly framed actions which can be read sequentially to form a narrative.

In the case of the Haw Par Villa vignette depicted here, some of the frame lines are defined very emphatically -- there are two separate scenes staged side by side here -- while others are more ambiguous -- see the way features of the space function as implicit frames encouraging us to focus on one part of the action at a time. And there is even some activity taking place in the space between frames -- in what we might describe as the gutter if we were talking about comics. We are to see the people drowning below as at once a separate scene and part of the larger scene being depicted. Even within a single space, we are invited to scan the image, break it down into clusters of figures (such as some of the specific examples of combat depicted here), create a narrative context for the interplay of the figures, and then draw them back into the larger scene. The demands which this places on the viewer are quite complex. We can take in the scene as a whole on first impression but we really only understand it when we work it over with our eyes over a more prolonged period.

Other vignettes depend upon relatively straight forward juxtapositions within the same space -- as in the contrast here between the chaste peasant couple in the background and the more sexually transgressive modern couple in the foreground. We can read each scene individually but we only really understand the moral message when we understand the significance of this juxtaposition.

I find it productive to compare my first example here to a surprisingly similar aesthetic effect in a work better known to western readers -- Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

Bosch's painting is a triptych, allowing for the use of framing to create a similar play between simultaneity and sequentiality.Here's how one art-history-focused website tells us to read the image:

The triptych depicts the history of the world and the progression of sin. Beginning on the outside shutters with the creation of the world, the story progresses from Adam and Eve and original sin on the left panel to the torments of hell, a dark, icy, yet fiery nightmarish vision, on the right. The Garden of Delights in the center illustrates a world deeply engaged in sinful pleasures.

One's first impression upon looking at any of the framed segments is one of total visual chaos. The image is not organized for us in the ways we anticipate -- there is no central focus, no coherent whole. We are staring into a space that defies human comprehension -- and we can only begin to experience the painting by breaking it down into smaller narrative chunks, clusters of figures or bits of terrain which take on local significance as we scan across the image.

Bosch is one of those artists that I have always had trouble situating inside any coherent mental map of the trajectory of western painting. I love his work but what makes them interesting are all of the ways they break from the representational structures one associates with other classical paintings of the period. He seems to look towards the work of surrealists like Salvador Dali rather than having much to do with the realist impulses that would shape so many of his contemporaries.

Increasingly, though, I am wondering if there might not be some value in looking at a range of these "eccentric" forms of expression side by side as I am trying to gesture towards here and see if we might identify an alternative aesthetic system -- one which is more often than not associated with popular forms of representation and one which has to do with simultaneity of impressions or to go back to Eisner, "the shape of the page".

There has been a tendency to see the introduction of framing in comics, for example, as a step forward in organizing the chaos of the page -- with the resulting fascination with all of the wild experiments in framing and segmentation done by an early comics pioneer like Windsor McCay. But I have always been fascinated with the work done by R. F. Outcault on the early Yellow Kid strips. Here, the entire page of the newspaper may be given over to a single image (and some loosely affiliated text) which is so dense in details that one can not take it all in at once but rather must scan across it, slowly forming logical links between different actions which at first seemed unrelated, and thus working through the sequence of what must have occurred.

Most writers on comics have seen Outcault's work as more primitive than McCay's but what if we saw them as operating according to a different aesthetic principle -- one which is interested in capturing the sensation of living in a city where many different things may be occurring at the same time at the same space and may only have a loose connection to each other, even if they intersect or interrupt each other at various points. Read in these terms, the goal of the artist is only superficially to tell a story or to lay out information for the viewer; rather, the artist seeks to create a rich, immersive world. Each of these works I am discussing here represent consummate examples of spatial stories of the kind that I have discussed regularly in my writing on games -- most notably in my essay, "Game Design as Narrative Architecture."

I made a similar point about the relationship of games to other forms of world building activities in popular art in a column I wrote with Kurt Squire for Computer Games magazine after a trip to Japan, where I encountered yet another example of this world-making practice:

To get to the new Ghibli Museum, I (Henry) had to travel by train to Mitaka, a sleepy little suburb of Tokyo. The world outside is green and lush, full of Japanese school girls giggling on their way to class. The world inside is unlike any place I'd ever been: A physical embodiment of the great Japanese filmmaker Hiyao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away). Miyazaki personally designed or supervised almost everything in this enchanted, maze-like building. It's not just the big things -- a giant stuffed version of the flying cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro, an even bigger giant robot soldier from Castle in the Sky -- but also the little things, like the snack foods in the recreation of Miyazaki's cluttered studio.

Panorama boxes -- small windows into imaginary microworlds with titles like "The Great Underwater Adventure," "Monman the Water Spider," and "The Ogre's Snack Box" sit close to the ground forcing adults to get down on their hands and knees to look inside. On a plaque, Miyazaki explains, "Just as people wished to make pictures move, they also wished they could look inside a different world. They yearn to enter the story or travel to a faraway land. They longed to see the future and landscapes of the past. The panorama box with no moving parts was made much earlier than the zoetrope." Cinema, for Miyazaki, originates from a desire to step inside these microworlds and become a part of the story.

The next day, I had the rare privilege of talking with Toshio Suzuki, Miyazaki's long time producer. Suzuki is a thoughtful man, passionate about cinema and knowledgeable about its history. I shared my observation that every scene in Spirited Away centered around an interesting space and a compelling task and that the scene continued until the characters had fully explored that space and completed their assigned goals. His eyes sparkled as he completed my thought, "Like a video game."

But Suzuki wanted to talk about space. First, he sketched a Western Cathedral, reminding us that from above, the configuration resembled a cross and that every object was organized in relation to that overarching shape.

He sprang up to use the chalk board, and drew a tiny little room, and then a hallway, and then another room, until he had drawn a complex maze. This, he said, was how the Japanese designed a space -- one interesting detail at a time. The whole was an unpredictable but aesthetically satisfying conglomeration of details. This space makes no sense from above. One can only map it by walking down the hallways and being surprised -- and delighted -- as you turn each corner. Then, he pointed to a poster from Howl's Flying Castle, and said that this was how Miyazaki approached designing its mechanical world -- one detail at a time. It is a world so rich that the human mind can't take it all in at once but can only explore

it, one space at a time.

Finally, returning to my question, he revealed that Miyazaki is a close friend of Shigeru Miyamoto, the master video game designer. And suddenly it was clear to me that Miyazaki-sen and Miyamoto-sen share something in common: both design complex and compelling microworlds that we want to explore. Miyazaki's heart contains only cinema; his films have never been adopted into games. They don't need to be -- in a real sense, they already

are games.

Many unusual things about Tokyo suddenly made sense: the 8-9 stories high manga shops in Akihabara with one whole floor devoted to scale models anime robots, spaceships, and characters; the rows of Gachapon machines which yield a plastic ball with a toy anime figurines; the kids who gather on the outskirts of YoYogi Park on Sunday afternoons playing cos; the toy kits depicting levels from early Nintendo games. All across Tokyo, Otaku are

obsessing over the details.

Such richly detailed worlds allow multiple points of entry, routes for exploration, and things to carry back into everyday life. Media scholars talk about Japan's "media mix" culture, starting from the idea that story details get scattered across multiple media products.

Miyamoto's games (think Mario Brothers or Zelda) follow the same principles: they are micro-worlds built from detail to delightful detail. In his Master's Thesis for Georgia Institute of Technology, Chaim Gringold describes Miyamoto's works as "miniature gardens": "Gardens, like games, are compact, self-sustained worlds we can immerse ourselves in... A miniature

garden, like a snow globe, model train set, or fish tank, is complete; nothing is missing, and nothing can be taken away... Miniatureness makes a garden intelligible in the mind of a player, and emotionally safe in his heart. Miniature scale, clear boundaries, and inner life help players to wrap their heads, hands, and hearts around a world."

Miyamoto's games are a later-day variation on Miyazaki's panorama boxes -- microworlds that delight us in their details and invite us to get down our hands and knees to see inside. Seen in that way, the computer game predates the cinema -- at least in Japan.

This is all heady stuff -- and it may just be the cold medicine talking here -- but I hope it provokes my readers to look at some of these works from a somewhat different point of view.

Supernatural: First Impressions

Late last fall, I asked for readers of this blog to pimp their favorite shows. Overwhelmingly, the most popular choice was a CW series called Supernatural -- of course, there was a concerted campaign within the show's fan community to write in and share the love for the series in hopes that it might generate greater awareness of the program. Here's just a few of the things readers had to say about Supernatural:

Every week is like a new little horror movie that, most times, is really quite frightening. But that's not what really drives it. The true strength of Supernatural lies in the absolutely touching family ties and brotherly love exhibited every episode by Sam and Dean.

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The tight brotherly bond, driven by the love of their father is what keeps the fans coming back. The lore [hellhounds, demons, vamps, wendigos] keeps the fans sticking around for more and a crossover from the [Joss]Whedonverse thrills us! Each week a new puzzle piece is put down in the mystery of their family's trials and tribulations and we LOVE Eric Kripke for such a great show.

*****

John, Sam and Dean are a dysfunctional family, and so intriguing with it that all the exchanges they have about their family issues have us fan(girls, mostly, I think) squee in delight. They all have a definite character, differences and similarities quite cleverly written and filmed (the way Dean and John move, the way in which John and Sam say the same words, etc). The feelings implied in looking out for each other not only as fellow hunters but as a family make the tension in the fighting/dangerous scenes raise up a notch. We want to see Sam telling it all to his father, we want to see what Dean would do, who would he side with, we want to see John worried about his boys. In short, we want to see MEN EMOTE for each other, and the family ties allow for a narrative that can play with this instead of justifying it.

******

Usually when there's a friendship that fan glom onto, there will be hints of it onscreen--banter, and maybe once or twice per season they save each other's lives. It's the fans who had the really deep, strong emotional undercurrent in fanfic. But in Supernatural, the intense bond between the brothers is part of the text.

*********

It's got a lovely mix of an overall mytharc as well as standalone bits and episodes.

********

The arch narrative is threaded all throughout the first season, picked up in some episodes and just mentioned in others, but it's what gives the series a fundamental unity and reason d'eitre.

*******

The continuity is fabulous, and works in all sorts of extra information, both on the characters and whatever myth they're investigating. I find myself re-watching episodes, figuring out what's going on, and the researching the history of the legends.

Each of the paragraphs above comes from a different reader but they represent steps in an argument that certainly got my attention. All I can say is that your campaign worked -- at least in my case. I had only a vague awareness of Supernatural before I started getting flooded by these earnest pleas and recommendations. Frankly, I had lumped it together with Medium and The Ghost Whisperer, seeing the whole lot as basically TV knockoffs of The Sixth Sense. But, once I read those recommendations, I know I had to see it for myself and so I put the Season One DVD boxed set on my Christmas list. I've been watching Supernatural while coping with jet lag during my trip to Singapore -- maybe not the best choice under the circumstances because instead of putting me to sleep, I keep wanting to watch just one more and end up staying up later than I should be. I more or less ended up inhaling Season One -- watching the last eight episodes more or less back to back on the flight back from Singapore, and I am now craving season two.

I kept planning to write a midterm report on my viewing but given the choice between watching another episode and writing about the series, I kept choosing to watch another episode. Every statement I quoted above is absolutely true -- this is a show which delivers real haunted house style horror every week and does so while giving us an extensive look into the emotional life and personal growth of its core protagonist. Each episode is self contained enough that you can watch it out of sequence and get something rewarding out of the experience, yet there's a powerful cumulative effect of watching the episodes in sequence and thus seeing the character's inner lives come bubbling up again and again. The writing is crisp; the characters have a distinctive voice.

You can try to compare it to X-Files or Buffy or Night Stalker, all of which it superficially resembles, but this series does things its own way (as I hope to illustrate in a moment).

It's hard to imagine how or why a series this good is suffering from such total neglect from the network, from the critics, though clearly not from its most hardcore fans.

Let me tell you I was nervous going in. Having decided I wanted to write something in response to the community's push, I was terrified I wasn't going to like the show and would then have to write something negative. I never want to pee on someone else's fandom but I was starting to see some folks out in LJland grumbling because I hadn't said anything about Supernatural while I had posted about Heroes, the runner up show in my contest (You know who you are). I was already writing Heroes; Supernatural took homework and the end of a term is not the best time to be adding on extra assignments.

As it happens, the first few episodes didn't quite grab me -- they were good enough, they worked well within the terms of the genre, the characters and plot had potential, but I wasn't hooked. For me, the episode that pushed me over the edge was "Skin." And from there, it just got more and more intense. Retrospectively, it was all there from the beginning.

For those who, like me, got it confused with some of the other supernatural shows that hit television around the same time, this one deals with two brothers who are traveling across America doing battle with demonic forces and searching for their missing father. The creatures they encounter in any given episode are the stuff of campfire stories -- they are inspired by roadside Americana and by urban legends. It is supernatural horror of a kind which movies rarely give us any more -- spin tingling without being overly gory (other than an odd preoccupation with dripping blood). Indeed, its dependence on shadowy figures owes something to the vintage horror films of producer Val Lewton (The Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man) than anything in contemporary horror cinema. On the making of tape, Eric Kripke cites a range of filmic exemplars, including Poltergeist, An American Werewolf in London, and The Evil Dead movies.

The film scholar Robin Wood has identified the core formula for the horror film -- "normality is threatened by the monstrous" -- and suggested that the formula breaks down into three elements - normality, the monstrous, and the relationship between the two. And it is on that level that we can understand what separates Supernatural from many of the other horror series on television.

Joss Whedon has described the vampires and demons represented on Buffy as "metaphors" for teenage experience in America: they embody the horrors to be found in the hellmouth that is American public education.

The monsters in The X-Files ultimately became clues within the vast governmental conspiracy that Scully and Muldar wanted to uncover: the truth was out there and each monster we unmask brought us closer to the truth. Earlier in the series, everything hinged on the debate between faith and science, with the two partners contesting the validity of each other's world views.

Something similar can be said of Lost where the supernatural elements are few and far between but seem to be just one more tantalizing clue to the puzzle that constitutes the series.

In Supernatural, the monsters are, in effect, emotional scars and psychic wounds. They represent unresolved emotional issues, often within the context of family life, and they are also external correlatives for the emotional drama taking place in the lives of the series' protagonists. Sam and Dean go out there looking for things that are strange and unfamiliar and they end up seeing themselves and their relationship more clearly.

This is the stuff of classic melodrama: Peter Brooks tells us that melodrama externalizes emotions. It takes what the characters are feeling and projects it onto the universe. So that the character's emotional lives gets mapped onto physical objects and artifacts, gets mirror backed to them through other characters, gets articulated through gestures and physical movements, and on a metalevel, speaks to us through the music which is what gives melodrama its name. Supernatural is melodrama in the best sense of the term.

On one level, it is made up of classic masculine elements -- horror, the hero's quest, sibling rivalry, unresolved oedipal dramas -- but on another level, it seems ideally suited to the themes and concerns which have long interested the female fan community. Heck, this series is one long hurt/comfort story. Every episode seems structured as much around the character moments as around the monster of the week plotlines. Everything here seems designed to draw out the emotions of the characters and force them to communicate with each other across all of the various walls which traditional masculinity erects to prevent men from sharing their feelings with each other. Dean in particular seems to hate "chick flick moments" and has a running commentary on how much he would like to avoid getting in touch with his feelings but this doesn't prevent us from having some real emotional revelations in almost every episode and the last few episodes of the season force each character to decide what matters most to them and to weigh their goals against their ties to their family in the most immediate ways possible.

I am someone who is definitely closer to Sam than to Dean in my outlook on life and indeed, there are moments in the series that I absolutely hate Dean, yet the series is well enough constructed that each time you reach that point, they peal back another layer and show some other aspect of his character. There are several episodes near the end of Season one which show us why he acts the way he does and suggests that his emotions run a lot deeper than his machismo will allow him to admit.

What gives the series its epic structure is the quest for the demon that took the life of the boy's mother. The goal is what holds the dysfunctional and centrifugal family together; it is also what pulls them apart (since each of them holds within them some secrets about what happened that night that they have never shared with each other and the trauma has hit each of them on a different level.) Not every episode contributes directly to this core quest narrative -- though many of them are connected to it in ways that are not immediately clear and the quest gains momentum as you move into the last third of the first season (and perhaps beyond). This is not an ensemble drama of the kind which most often wins recognition from critics these days: the focus is strongly on the two protagonists but around them, we accumulate, episode by episode, a richly drawn set of supporting characters, some of whom are recurring, some of whom appear in only a single storyline. It is not always clear which is which when we watch an episode and a real strength of the series is that what may at first seem to be throw away or one shot characters may resurface later. The series spends enough time setting up many of these characters that it produces considerable negative capability: we want to know what happens to these characters after the episode ends and in the case of the various family friends we encounter, we'd like to find out more about their history with the father before the series itself starts. There's more than enough suggestions of back story here to sustain an army of fan writers for a long time to come.

A real strength of the series is the construction of female secondary characters, all the more unusual in a series which is so centrally about its core male leads. But each week, we seem to introduce one or two women who are struggling not only against supernatural forces but against the circumstances life has thrown their way. As Carol Clover suggests in Men, Women, and Chain Saw, horror films have traditionally offered a range of strong roles for women in part because men can accept the experience of risk and vulnerability at the heart of horror by mapping it onto the female victim. Clover describes the role of the Final Girl in the slasher film genre, for example, showing how the women overcome and ultimately face down their fear in the course of the action. These women sometimes surface as romantic interests for Sam and Dean but more often, they are extensions of their emotional drama: that is to say, each of them is dealing with some aspect of family drama which strongly parallels the issues which Sam and Dean are grappling with in their own lives. The men do not so much desire them as romantic or sex objects as they use them as mirrors to see into their own and each other's souls. Each woman teaches them something they need to learn before they can become emotionally whole again and in the process, each teaches the viewer something about the men that we would not know otherwise. The show never patronizes the women, never denies them their core humanity, and indeed, often, it is clear that the men admire the women's courage, intelligence, integrity, and passion. The result are some of the most compelling male/female relationships I've seen on prime time network television.

I am trying to write this without giving away too many spoilers. Part of my pleasure here was going into this series without knowing what to expect. Yet, I am hoping that I can lend my voice to the other fans of the series who wrote in this fall to pimp this show. You can certainly discover some of the virtues I've identified here in a single episode seen out of context but there really is a value in going back and watching this series from the beginning. There is a growth in the emotional life of the characters which is best experienced watching several episodes in a gulp. This is the kind of series that dvd box sets are made for.

I hope to write some more about Supernatural down the line. One of the things I am still working on are the parallels between Supernatural and Heroes, the other show which did very well with readers of this blog. There are several plot elements here -- the theme of dopplegangers in "Skin" for example parallels the Niki/Jessica storyline in Heroes and the slow discovery of the extend of Sam's powers has a lot in common with what happens to the various protagonists on the NBC superhero drama. I also think there's a fair amount to be said here about what I see as the surprisingly negative portrayal of fans in "Hell House," especially given the discussions we've had here about the "Love & Monsters" episode of Doctor Who.

I still have read none of the fan commentary beyond what's been posted here or the fan fiction so I don't know for sure what elements fans are picking up on in this series. That will be the next step once I get caught up with season two. But for the moment, I think you can add me to the list of Supernatural fans.

The Sony Game Design Workshop

For those of you following my travels, I am now back in the United States (San Francisco to be precise) where I will be through tuesday. Further legs on this trip take me to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Durham, and New York City, before returning in Boston for the start of the term. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scordose from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

Here's the basic details:

Storytelling and Games in the Digital Age

Prof. Henry Jenkins, Sande Scoredos and Thomas Hershey, Sony Pictures Imageworks

Mon Jan 29 thru Thu Feb 1, 10am-05:00pm, 14E-310

Fri Feb 2, 10am-05:00pm, 2-105

Enrollment limited: advance sign up required (see contact below)

Signup by: 10-Jan-2007

Limited to 40 participants.

Participants requested to attend all sessions (non-series)

Prereq: None

Student teams develop story concepts for various media, including motion picture visual effects and computer games. Sponsored by MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) and Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), this non-technical activity focuses on the theoretical, historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic elements of interactive narrative and game structures. Morning lectures explore linear and non-linear storytelling across media, audio-visual elements, game theory, and techniques to increase the depth of interactive console games and enhance storytelling. Afternoons run as workshops where participants collaborate in teams to design interactive story scenarios to be presented during a final session on Friday afternoon.

Held in 14E-310. Friday February 2nd will be held in 2-105.

Contact: Generoso Fierro, 14N-207, x3-5038, generoso@mit.edu

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants though there are limits to how many people we can absorb.

The following text is taken from a teacher's guide for the workshop which currently resides on the Education Arcade website. Parts of it have previously appeared in Telemedium. We have also produced a series of reality television style short documentaries showing the process at work and displaying highlights from the final presentations. And we have notes from some of the key lectures during one year's run of the workshop. These are all designed to encourage teachers at other institutions to try their own hands at conducting this kind of workshop process.

The workshop has two basic components - a design competition where teams conceptualize and present their approaches to adopting an existing media property into a game and a series of lectures designed to provide them with the background knowledge they need to complete this task. The contest provides greater motivation for students to pay attention to the information presented through the lectures and to apply it to the specific challenges of conceptualizing their games.

Some aspects of the workshop take advantage of the unique resources of MIT, yet we believe that the basic structure of the workshop could be adopted by local teachers at the high school level. We have had several high school aged students in the past and they have done as well or better than their older counterparts. In any case, the content of the workshop has adjusted slightly each year to reflect the available faculty and their interests.

Educational Goals

This workshop emerged from a series of conversations that Henry Jenkins and Alex Chisholm had with more than 50 different companies, large and small, which might be interested in hiring Humanities-trained media studies students upon their graduation. We were consistently told that while Liberal Arts students are highly desired by employers because of their mental flexibility and breadth of background knowledge, they often lacked some core skills that would make them ideal employees. Among those things most often identified were leadership experience, teamwork, communication skills, brainstorming and problem solving skills, competitiveness, and the experience of carrying a project through to completion. So, one important thrust of the workshop was to give our own graduate and undergraduate students training and experience in these areas.

Team leaders are selected from our own graduate students or undergraduate majors. In the case of a high school, they could be selected from upperclassman and (after the first year) students who had performed well in the previous competition. These students are given some additional training in leadership, brainstorming, and communication skills so that they can insure the success of the workshop as a whole.

At the same time, the workshop was designed to expose students to the basic building blocks of computer and video games - introducing them to current industry trends, technological opportunities of the current game systems, the tools the industry uses to select and develop potential properties - storytelling, genre, character, emotion, space, game play, community building, violence and ethics, gender and generational factors, visual elements, and sound track. Students are introduced to these ideas through the lectures and then apply them to their team projects. The judging criteria for the competition are designed to insure that all of the key concepts get applied.

A third educational goal here involves encouraging students to analyze the key components of an existing media text. Students need to think deeply about what aspects of those texts are essential to defining the 'world' of the story and to insure the audience's recognition and pleasure. Any adaptation involves maintaining certain core features while changing other nonessential features to reflect the specific nature of the medium in which the work is being presented and increasingly, to offer consumers an expanded experience of the 'world' of the story. One reason why we ask students to work with existing properties is that this workshop is designed to foster the analytic skills that we introduce to students through our existing courses on film, literature, or television.

Preparing Team Leaders

The success of this process depends on having good team leaders who can be trusted to keep their groups on track and help them to cross the finish line. Over the years we have been running this process, we have had only one team totally self-destruct. Given the several dozen teams we put through this process, the intensity of the demands placed on participants, and the fact that most of the participants are working without pay or academic credit, we consider this success rate to be a major victory. In order to get teams out of the gate first, we choose a team leader prior to the start of the week. We typically select graduate students in the Comparative Media Studies program, since these are students we already work with closely and who already come into the week with some solid knowledge of media theory and production practices. In some cases, we select undergraduate students from our program who have been working on some of our games related projects or we select people who have gone through the team process once before and have been successful. In the case of a school or after school program, you should consider recruiting some older students with whom you have worked in the past to be team leaders for your first run through this process and then create a system where, if possible, participants of winning teams get asked if they will come back next year to help with the contest. In the worse case, you should select students you think have real maturity and leadership potential to head the teams. Part of what our students get out of this process is experience in managing teams and a chance to test their theoretical insights into media against the challenges of an actual production process. We have been able to recommend a significant number of our students for internships with media related companies on the basis of the leadership skills they demonstrated through their participation in this process.

One of the key things we tell our student leaders is to think of themselves as facilitators. We strongly discourage them from coming into the weeklong course with strong ideas about what kind of project they want to lead. The ideas should come from the entire team and not simply from its leaders. This is key if all participants are going to feel a sense of ownership over the finished product and if they are going to be expected to work actively to realize the group's goals. Of course, in any given group, some students will feel closer to a particular idea than others and some disagreements about goals and choices is bound to occur. But, if the leader thinks of themselves as insuring the integrity of the process and making sure that each participant has a valuable experience, then the groups are less likely to face a serious rupture on their way to the finish line. In many cases, other leaders emerge organically from the group process and may supplement or assist the selected leaders. What you want to avoid, however, is a situation where struggles over leadership blocks progress on the project. It's that reason why we want to select leaders from the start.

The group leader needs to know how to brainstorm. Brainstorming involves all participants throwing out their ideas in an non-evaluative process. The leader wants to frame open-ended questions and not dismiss any idea out of hand. Brainstorming should be seen as an iterative process in which one will not necessarily know what the final value of an idea is until it has been worked over and reconsidered several times.

At the beginning of the week, the first phase of brainstorming should involve identifying what content will serve as the basis of the game. The leader may want to get participants to throw out media properties that they think have potential and write them down on a chalkboard or on poster board so everyone can see. A good leader may start to cluster ideas that seem related as they emerge so that the participants start to see relationships between materials. Often in this first phase, it will be hard to separate out the ideas about subject matter from ideas about game play or presentation. The ultimate choice will need to be a game concept that captures people's imaginations, which allows for innovative use of the medium, and which can be presented in a lively and compelling fashion. Once you have a list of possible properties, then you want to circle back through the list again and again, thinking through the value of each nomination and winnowing out those which pose insurmountable problems or which are unknown to a larger number of people in your group. By the end of the first day, you want to have a manageable list of potentially valuable options and you want participants to spend some time researching on their own their favorite options. The second day the group leaders work to further narrow the list and to reach a consensus about what the group is doing.

The second night, group members may plan on getting together and consume the media property that has been selected, making notes, or sharing ideas about what they want to do. The third day is focused on developing the ideas which had emerged around the property throughout the first two days of brainstorming, to begin to focus on aspects of game play, audio-visual design, and marketing, which will shape the final presentation. The group leader needs to keep good notes of the lectures and to be able to insert ideas from the talks into the brainstorming process in a timely way so that participants see their application to their current design problems.

By the third day, the group leader will also have thought about a division of labor based on the skills and passions of participants. In some cases, they may put one person in charge of each aspect of their presentation and send them off to work on their own; in other cases, the group may work through each level collectively and collaborate in the completion of tasks. We have seen both approaches produce successful results in the competition. What is important is that the leader know how they are approaching the tasks and know who is responsible for completing each one. On the third day, we have a review session where group participants meet with the faculty in charge of the competition and walk through the choices which have been made so far. We recommend that the group leaders check in with the supervising faculty at the end of each day to make sure that things are on track.

On the fourth day, the group will start to shift its focus from generating new ideas towards executing those it has developed. The focus shifts more decisively onto the challenges of developing a presentation that will effectively communicate to the judges what is exciting and innovative about this particular project. Here is where the diverse skills of the team come handy with programmers helping to develop the digital embodiment of the idea, graphic artists helping to develop materials that visualize the concepts, and business students helping to develop the business plan which shows why this approach might prove commercially viable. The group leader should be prepared to work late into the night checking in with individual team members or keeping the group working together until they know they have what they need for their presentations.

The final day involves the presentations. In some cases, the group leaders may be the most effective people to communicate their ideas, though we encourage many if not all members of the team to play a role in expressing their concepts to the judges and especially in addressing questions. In other cases, the group leader may play director and stage manager, pulling out of the immediacy of the presentation in order to watch each participant and give them feedback on their performance. You want to make sure you know more or less how long each part of the presentation will take because the judges will cut students off at the end of their time whether or not they have finished their presentation. The leader needs to anticipate problematic team members and have plans about how to deal with them should they "act up" during a presentation. We have seen people try to dominate the presentation, overstepping their assigned roles, interrupting fellow panelists, or even trying to reorder PowerPoint slides mid-presentation. These are the kinds of crisis that try leader's souls, but the leader must have established enough of a relationship with each member to be able to intervene quickly and effectively to put things back on course. Other times, students develop stage fright and the leader may have to step in and fill their roles at the last moment.

The judges will have a chance to ask participants questions about their project. The leader should try to anticipate the most likely questions, develop a division of labor so that the most qualified member addresses each point and so that the group sticks by what is said even if the point is one for which no consensus has been reached. In many cases, the leader may have to be the person who addresses unanticipated questions since the leader is the one who can be expected to have the fullest sense of the project as a whole.

Throughout the process, the leader needs to maintain team spirit and morale, since the more "up" the team members feel about what they are doing, the more effectively they will communicate that enthusiasm to the judges. Morale also is what keeps someone working later in the evening or pulling out the extra stops creatively.

The Presentations

The teams have 30 minutes to present their material, 10 minutes to dress the stage, and 10 minutes to respond to the judges' questions. We keep a tight time clock to insure fairness to all involved. The teams have to be well organized in order to get themselves into position by the start of the time and to stay on schedule so that all aspects of their presentation can be heard within the allotted time. We have certainly had teams who fell behind and the team leader had to make decisions on the fly about what should/could be cut in order to get the key ideas into the time. Ideas that don't get presented aren't considered by the judges even if the judges have heard them at earlier points in the process, since the judges have no way of knowing what changes might have been made in the last minute preparations for the presentations. No matter how many times you review the projects, there are always surprising elements in the final presentations as the projects only take their final shape the night before.

The order of the presentations is chosen by drawing slips of paper the day before. Everyone comes into the day knowing when their team will present and what the ground rules are for the presentation.

All participants in the competition have to be in place at the start of the first presentation and no further work can be done once the first presentation begins. All participants hear all presentations. The other teams are pushed out of the room momentarily when the judges ask their questions. Clearly, even with this precaution, later groups have some advantage since they can absorb information into their oral presentation, even if they don't adopt it into their visual materials. But, there have really never been any complaints about unfairness here.

As the competition has continued, the quality and elaborateness of presentations has grown each year. We find consistently that showmanship counts for a great deal in terms of the relative merits of presentations. Groups have become more theatrical. For example, it is very common for participants to create and wear costumes that help to establish the characters contained within their game. These costumes range from glitter rock garb for a Making the Band project to Purple Hats and capes for Willy Wonka. Very often, they will dress the stage with elements that evoke the atmosphere of the story world. For Spirited Away, they created the look of a Japanese bathhouse. Several times, we have had teams use puppets to communicate their ideas. One memorable presentation on Princess Smartypants included both a puppet imitating the regal voice of a princess and a man dressed up like a fairy. Given the technical skills of MIT students, it will not be surprising to learn that they build power point presentations, which can contain very elaborate mock-ups done in Photoshop or flash of what the actual game might look like.

Sometimes, there are very elaborate computer animations that help communicate the core premise. A group focused on Survivor had animations of cracking fires on laptops arranged around the room. The 1984 team, which won last year, turned a video camera on the audience and projected live feed on the wall so the judges and audience had the uncomfortable experience of watching themselves watching the presentation.

More and more students provide give-aways to the judges: one year, for example, a Matrix team provided a gold box with a red and blue sugar pill, asking us to decide which one we would take. Another group, working on Homer's The Odyssey, offered us bottles of root beer with a label designed to imitate the culture of ancient Greece. Some groups mimic the advertising materials or box designs for their products, even going so far as to give us blank CDs in jewel cases mocked up to look like the finished product. For a Fugitive project, each judge was given a 'wanted' poster with his or her own image on it. The groups frequently use music to communicate the audio design of their projects - in most cases, songs sampled from existing CDs, but in a few cases, original compositions the students created for the occasion.

The judges strive to separate out flash which is simply flash from elements carefully chosen to communicate the core elements of the concept and make it come alive for the audience. If there is no serious thinking behind the performance, it can upstage rather than compliment the other elements of the presentation. Throughout the contest, the students are ask to distill down the core features which most be present in order to allow their new product to fit coherently within the existing media franchise. Here is their chance to show you how fully they have achieved that goal. Yet, students need to be aware of the importance of underlying what aspects of the performance are in the game and why. Often, students will play interesting music throughout the presentation but not talk explicitly about sound design elements in their pitch.

We now ask the groups to identify a specific audience to which they are pitching the game. This element requires the groups to do their homework on the different companies which produce games, their connections with other media companies, their existing product lines and preferences, the core market to which they are addressing the bulk of their products, and any notable successes or failures which might impact how they think about your particular product. The group working on Spirited Away, for example, chose to address the Japanese branch of Sony, opening with an extended greeting in Japanese, and drawing on what they knew about protocol and business practices in that culture. Most of the information students need to know about the business can be found on the web.

Students search for games that may be similar to what they are proposing and need to know how well they did and what markets they reached. They can find this by reviewing the large number of games-related websites produced by fans, industry insiders, or journalists. They may look up the property that they are drawing upon to conceive the game to see who produced it, how well it did at the box office, and what other connections may exist between the production company and a games-related company. They may look at other games linked to that studio's properties to see which games companies developed and released them. Those with more business interests can look for trends through industry-oriented publications, which might make the company more or less receptive to the kind of game proposed.

When we first started the competition, these business aspects took a back seat to the more aesthetic dimensions of the presentations, but in recent years, we have attracted more and more management students interested in getting into creative industries. The teacher may need to assess her or his own students to know where their strengths and weaknesses lie and decide how much emphasis to place on this aspect of the presentations. Some focus on the industry, however, seems desirable as a way to help students understand the economic contexts in which creative decisions get made (including the impact of concentration of ownership on the current media environment); this focus on factual information also gives incentive for students to work on their research skills and especially their web searching skills, since this up to the minute information is not going to be found in books.

The goal of the pitch is to put together the key elements of the game in a way that is compelling for the audience. Everything students know about presentation skills comes into play during this part of the process. Students need to think about the ordering of elements - so that the information makes sense to the audience as they are hearing it, so that the most compelling elements get the proper degree of attention, and so that the closing drives home the core elements with an extra persuasiveness. The groups need to make sure that they address each of the elements they will be judged upon while not getting bogged down in local details to such a degree that the judges do not get a clear sense of the game as a whole.

Frequently, students divide up the roles in their presentation based on their expertise and enthusiasm for different aspects of the product. Often, they also identify someone who is their best "finisher," that is, some one who has strong sales skills who can drive home the final pitch at the end of the presentation. We do not require every participant to speak, since we see the value of students who are uncomfortable in front of groups making contributions on other levels. This is, however, a philosophical question, which teachers need to consider in the context of their own programs. If the goal is to get students to really hone their presentation skills and get experience speaking in front of groups, the desire to have every student participate in the presentation is greater than if your goal is to focus on brainstorming and conceptual skills.

The presentations are a time for all team members to drop disagreements and work towards the common good. Often, team leaders instruct participants not to contradict each other during the presentation. If a team member gets hit with a question for which they are unprepared, he or she should make up an answer consistent with the overall approach they are taking and then subsequent team members will need to factor that answer into what they say about the game. One year, we had a group which totally failed to reach a consensus to the point that one group member disagreed about the order in which the PowerPoint slides should be presented and kept flicking back and forth throughout the presentation in a distracting fashion, upstaging and confusing his team mates. Needless to say, this group did badly in the competition and much anger was directed against him after they got off stage.

Judging The Presentations

We recommend having 5 or 6 judges, since each judge will see the presentations in slightly different ways and will focus on somewhat different elements. Having a broad based group of judges helps to take the pressure off any one participant and helps to even out any potential biases the judge may feel towards one group or participant. The judges are given a score sheet. We have established ten criteria of evaluation, which are known by the participants in advance. For each category, the judge gives a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest score. Each judge keeps a running tally throughout the day and reserves the right to adjust scores upwards or downwards as they hear subsequent presentations. Judges often have to rethink their responses to the first few presentations, in particular, since they do not have a very clear baseline of expectations at the start of the day. Each group must be judged by every criterion, which means that they may lower their score significantly if they do not directly address one or another aspect. For some reason, students typically offer much more on game play, narrative, and visual design than they do on sound design.

The judges should set their own standards for each category. As long as they are consistent in applying those standards to each group, then their numbers will be correctly weighted in the final score. It doesn't matter if one judge is strict and another lenient since in the end, it is the total score across all of the judges which we use to weigh the teams. But those judges who are too generous in their grading need to realize that they are flattening out the distinctions between the teams.

In our process, we tally the scores to get a straw poll vote of where the judges have aligned themselves. The judges are often surprised by their own overall scores on the different projects. Subjectively, we will weigh some elements more than others in forming our overall impressions of the team. But if we weigh each element equally, we may find a team did better overall without being the best in any particular category. Once we have a set of scores, we then discuss the presentations to make sure we are fully comfortable with where the collective tally breaks. In some cases, we end up with two teams, which are only a few points apart in scoring, well within the margin of error, and we have occasionally had absolute ties on the first stage of the scoring. Talking through the presentations may help us appreciate things we missed the first time through or think more deeply about potential problems in the team's approach. We often will then recalibrate our scores and retally the results.

Another reason why you always discuss the projects among the judges is because ultimately, we see winning and losing the competition as less important than the critique we are able to provide to each team on its work. Talking it through helps us to identify high and low points on each presentation, which will be discussed as we critique their work. Often, we will give secondary awards which foreground what we see as the biggest strength of each presentation, so that each team has some kind of moral victory in the final presentation. So, for example, we may take each of the criteria and decide which team performed best on each, giving out recognition for best visual design, most faithful to the original content, or most innovative approach to narrative.

When the students come back into the room, we go through each group in order offering our critiques of their strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, one tries to be tactful in describing flaws in the presentations but we also feel it is important for all participants to have a sense of how the judges responded to each presentation. Doing the critiques first keeps students focused on what we are saying since they are looking for clues into which group may have pleased the judges the most. Usually, we have one judge designated to lead the critique of each group with the others jumping in as needed to elaborate on key points. It is important for the students to hear how a range of different judges with different types of expertise and backgrounds responded to their projects.

Typically, we spend 5-10 minutes on each group; trying to be even in the amount of time we spend on each. At the end of the process, we then announce the superlatives assigned to each group and finally, the ultimate winner of the competition. In the MIT context, because of our association with Sony, each member of the winning team receives some moderately priced electronic gadget. All participants in the process receive a certificate and many years, Sony brings a book or video tied to one of their current releases for each participant. Teachers will need to think about what kind of prize is appropriate for their students - perhaps a gift certificate from a local merchant.

Asian Cinema and the Slash Subtext

When I opened up the arts section of the Straits Times last Saturday I was surprised to read a story there about Hong Kong Actor Ti Lung and his latest film --which has a strong slashy subtext. Here's what the paper reported:

In all of his showbiz career of over 30 years, Hong Kong actor Ti Lung is known for his alpha-male, authoritative roles. Fans will remember fondly his swordsman characters in 1970s martial arts movies like Duel of Fists and The New One-Armed Swordsman or his Golden Horse-winning role as a gangster leader in A Better Tomorrow.

But Ti, 60, as a gay cop?

In his first Singapore movie One Last Dance, directed by Brazilian director Max Makowski, the actor plays a roguish police captain who has a special relationship with an assassin named T., played by Francis Ng.

While there are no intimate scenes in the unconventional mafia tale to indicate homosexuality, Ti felt his character had to be irrationally in love with NG's philosophical killer or he would have arrested T for his crimes....

"Mind you, when we filmed this, Brokeback Mountain was not even out yet. I asked the director, but he didnt give a definite yes. If he had, I would have added more hints in my acting."

What slash does is make explicit the feelings that such films leave implicit? It is, as I suggest in Textual Poachers, about crossing the divide between the homosocial and the homoerotic.

As I read this story about Ti Lung, I was reminded of another story about the rise of Bhaisexuals in Hindi cinema from the Indian Express, which my former student, Parmesh Shahani, sent to me a while back. Here's part of what the story said:

Hindi cinema celebrated the metrosexuals (the smoothies of Dil Chahta Hai). It has paid homage to the retrosexuals (Abhishek Bachchan, with his rugged, awkward macho-ness in everything from Bunty aur Babli to Sarkar). Now, it is seeing the rise and rise of a new breed. Call them the Bhai- sexuals. Unlike the Gucci-sporting, new-age DCH boys, the Bhai-sexuals are macho, retro and raw. And though, like the retrosexuals, they'd rather be sporting the newest gun rather than the latest designerwear, there's one crucial difference that sets them apart.

The Bhai-sexual shares a chemistry with his best pal that often even overshadows his chemistry with his lady love.

Again, these sounds like the kinds of tough but sensitive males who have often been the center piece of slash fan fiction in the west. And indeed, as the story continues, it starts to spell out the kinds of hurt/comfort contexts that lead to some of the most angsty of fan fiction.

If you recall, arguably the highpoint of Lage Raho Munnabhai was not the gently budding Vidya Balan-Sanjay Dutt romance, but the emotional scene where a contrite Munna approaches Circuit to apologise to him for losing his temper. Heart-wrenching drama follows when Munna reveals that the loyal Circuit, who has resorted to kidnapping chefs in the middle of the night to source hakka noodles, had also nursed Munna back to health, cradling him on his lap so that he does not miss his mother.

Then there's Rang De Basanti, which can claim to a more than a few of its own bhai-sexual moments -- not only do Aamir Khan and his friends hang out shirtless in rough fields that set off their own rough and tough physiques, they also pick up the gun for each other and sacrifice their lives. Not since Jai and Veeru, who -- riding their scooter, singing Yeh dosti... -- immortalised male friendship in Hindi cinema forever has Bollywood taken up male bonding with as much fervour.

These celluloid pals do not shy away from being emotionally intimate. It's a trend that's described as "bromance", that is, friendship between brothers, or two heterosexual males or as a "male-ationship". The metrosexuals typically bonded over hair gels and conduct their relationships with both their men pals and their women pals with equal new-age ease. On the

other hand, there's nothing easy about the retrosexual... angst, fury and raging testosterone defines not just all his actions, but also his relationships.

Like the

Straits Times

writer, this report raises but then denies the possibility that this structure of male friendship may have emerged from a western source -- i.e. Brokeback Mountain . These writers use Brokeback to stand in for a more explicitly homoerotic relationship in films and instead pull towards the homosocial. Of course, it may be no accident that Brokeback Mountain had an Asian director, Ang Lee.

Our heroes are straight heterosexual males and Brokeback Mountain is not an inspiration for anybody yet. "Male bonding in our movies has to be taken at face value. There cannot be any homoerotic tinge to it. No Bollywood hero will ever risk his reputation by acting as a homosexual. Actors are very concerned about their reputation. The life span of an actor is too short for such risks," points out Gadhvi.

Instead, the reporter shows the continuities between the Bhai-sexual friendship and more classic representations of male-bonding in Indian cinema.

In many ways, the Bhai-sexual has always existed in Hindi films. While Sholay is a show-piece for the early Bhai-sexual, Yarana, Dostana and Amar Akbar Anthony are examples of films where full-bloodied heterosexuals who wouldn't know a metrosexual from a train station, matching steps with one another, and thinking nothing of falling into hard embraces in moments of high drama.

However, social observers do point to one difference. Whether is it Sangam, Yaarana, Dostana, Qurbani and, of course, Sholay, sacrifice has been the ultimate test and enduring hallmark of the male friendship in Bollywood. According to anthropologist Shiv Vishwanathan: "In the films of the '70s and '80s, the friends were condemned to sacrifice. It was almost a duty relationship. You either had to die for each other or give up your love for your best friend."

Not so, the new age friendship. The 21st century celluloid buddies know how to have a good time. They simply hang out and talk to each other, like the Dil Chahta Hai gang. "You can live for the new age friendship, you don't have to die for it. The punitive aspect of friendship is gone from Hindi cinema. It is now celebratory and light-hearted without being over intense or sacrificial in nature," adds Vishwanathan.

"A lot of the films that we've loved and watched have had male friendship as the eternal theme. There's something universally appealing about male bonding, one can connect with it very strongly," says director Rohan Sippy, son of Ramesh Sippy who created Bollywood's most famous friends, Jai and Veeru. "Everybody wants buddies like Jai and Veeru. Their relationship is playful, emotional, loyal and they're ready to give up everything for each other," adds Rohan. Both his movies Bluffmaster and Taxi 9-2-11 explore the friendships between Abhishek Bachchan and Riteish Deshmukh and Nana Patekar and John Abraham, respectively. For Rohan, the archetype of the friendship is classic, but the setting is modern. "The friendship is as unconditional as it was in the movies of the '70s, but it is packaged for a modern audience," he says.

So, slash may represent an important half-way point as countries around the world edge up to the sexual explicitness they associate with Brokeback Mountain. Implicitly or explicitly, they may be drawn towards the rough and tumble style of male friendship which inspires slash but leave it up to their viewers to connect the dots for themselves.

There's a whole world out there waiting for you to slash, my friends, and thanks to the (legal and illegal) global circulation of content, sooner or later these movies will be accessible to you. We've already seen the influence of anime and manga on American slash fan. What will happen when Bollywood and Singaporean films enter the mix?

Given the international readership this blog attracts, I'd be curious if readers have spotted other slashy films in your countries.

Get a (Second) Life!

Clay Shirky has been a longtime pundit about digital culture: sometimes he gets it right (or at least, more accurately, sometimes I agree with what he writes) and sometimes he doesn't. For example, he was one of the first journalists to really think hard about the emergence of participatory culture as something different from the same old consumer culture; he also took what I see as the wrong side of the debate with Scott McCloud about micropayments (though the jury is still out on that one.) I always respect what the guy has to say -- even if he tends towards the cynical side and I tend to the more optimistic. He is someone who asks the right questions -- even if he doesn't always come up with the right answers -- and that's all you can ask of anyone who writes regularly and sticks his neck out about emerging trends in a still developing medium. Lots of folks are dismissing Shirky right now without knowing the range of insightful and provocative essays he has posted in the past. Check out his homepage Agree with him, disagree with him -- as I said, I've done both through the years -- Clay Shirky's no idiot.

Right before Christmas, Shirky posted a critique of the media hype around Second Life, which has been stirring up a lot of fuss among my various friends and neighbors. The piece is worth reading as a corrective to some of the more breathless prose which claims that Second Life is "Web 3.0" and will totally change the world as we know it.

Basically, Shirky's arguments boil down to the following:

1.Claims about Second Life's user base have been dramatically overstated because the focus has been on the number of people who try out the multiverse rather than on those who return regularly. As he explains, "Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn't really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer."

2. He argues that the hype around Second Life simply repeats earlier waves of enthusiasm about virtual worlds, none of which have turned out to be the "next new thing" claimed for them by their most ardent supporters. He concludes, "If, in 1993, you'd studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you'd have a better grasp of online community today than if you'd spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City."

3. The hype about Second Life is emerging because tech reporters are young and have no sense of history, because virtual reality is easy to grasp compared to the complexities of social networks, because writing about SL still keeps the focus on content, and because so many powerful groups have a vested interest in sending out press releases about the cool project they are doing in Second Life.

Shirky concludes, "Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand....There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived."

This story has already generated some smart responses from people I know and trust. Here, for example, is my MIT colleague Beth Coleman:

Second Life may turn out to be the Friendster of the "metaverse"--the first to disseminate the signal strongly but also fast to disappear once the My Space of this format appears. Last winter there were 200,000 who visited SL. Today there are somewhere around 2 million who have at least stepped in to use the interface, to see for themselves what this is all about. WoW has already demonstrated a mass scale of technical application and popular interest for MMORPG. SL, Multiverse, and the growing numbers of virtual world platforms beg the question of future network use. It's not like real life. Not by a long shot. One is animating a proxy through multilayered terrains of information. Some of them might take the shape of cliché singles bars, but the procession toward ever more complex simulation in computing is there. Not every user can code, but certainly more users will learn to script (or edit video or stream media) as Flilckr and Youtube have made clear. It also seems incorrect not to recognize exponential user growth in regard to 3d virtual worlds. Let's not look at the U.S. for a moment but Asia, specifically the Korean Cyworld that is a 3D world massively used for social-networking in the way that My Space functions for American youth. The all-encompassing metaverse that Philip Rosedale promises Second Life will become may be a fiction of the CEO's own virtual world fantasy. The potential of 3D search engines do not trump text-based and 2D formulations. But it seems short-sited to says that 3D imaging and spatial representation do not open doors for emergent use of communications networks. At the very least, the qualities of 2D social networks are mutated, amplified, and animated by these real-time moving image worlds. VW platforms, including SL, can claim the following qualities:

1. Community building of social networks that reach on and offline

2. Communal projects that span systems designs to educational, business, and activist organization

3. Avatar proxies are not minor. Yahoo avatar, Wii's Miis, Facebook....every place where users are able to created multi-media profiles they do. The puppet show of virtual worlds speaks very strongly to a collective desire to play in this way.

We are still in the beta stage on this, a continuing beta from the 1990s I suppose, but the tipping point from niche to popular use seems to have arrived.

Here's danah boyd:

Lately, i've become very irritated by the immersive virtual questions i've been getting. In particular, "will Web3.0 be all about immersive virtual worlds?" Clay's post on Second Life reminded me of how irritated i am by this. I have to admit that i get really annoyed when techno-futurists fetishize Stephenson-esque visions of virtuality. Why is it that every 5 years or so we re-instate this fantasy as the utopian end-all be-all of technology? (Remember VRML? That was fun.)

Maybe i'm wrong, maybe i'll look back twenty years ago and be embarrassed by my lack of foresight. But honestly, i don't think we're going virtual.

There is no doubt that immersive games are on the rise and i don't think that trend is going to stop. I think that WoW is a strong indicator of one kind of play that will become part of the cultural landscape. But there's a huge difference between enjoying WoW and wanting to live virtually. There ARE people who want to go virtual and i wouldn't be surprised if there are many opportunities for sustainable virtual environments....

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it's not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don't. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don't call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

GSD&M thought leader Joel Greenberg spells out what matters to him about Second Life and does some pretty interesting analysis of the same numbers Shirky has been working from:

SL has two interesting charactistics: 1) SL is a community; until you start participating with other people, you haven't really experienced it to its fullest, and 2) Linden Lab does not spend money on traditional advertising, so much of the growth can be attributed to community marketing and PR.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Shirky's column has sparked a long overdue discussion about what Second Life is and why it matters which moves us beyond the first flirtations with virtual life and gets to the heart of the matter. I've written a lot here about Second Life, including describing in some detail my own first steps into this new terrain. There's a lot about Second Life that really fascinates me -- starting with Linden Lab's enlightened views about user-generated content as well as the range of different groups that are using Second Life as a site for running what I have described here in the past as thought experiments.

For me, Second Life is a powerful embodiment of what Yochai Benkler has been talking about in The Wealth of Networks: a place where commercial, educational, nonprofit, governmental, and amateur groups co-exist and interact. It is a playground where we can try on new identities, test new products and practices, explore new ways that core institutions might operate.

Second Life is NOT web 3.0.

Second Life is NOT the future of the web.

We will NOT abandon physical reality for virtual life.

Immersive realities are NOT the primary way we will interact with information environments in the future.

But it IS important as a social experiment -- even if the user numbers were in the tens or hundreds of thousands as opposed to the millions. This isn't about statistics; it's about cultural innovation and social experimentation. If Second Life didn't exist, we -- those of us who care about grassroots creativity -- would have to invent it because it is a vivid illustration of the trends towards participatory culture which are springing up all over the place.

Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there.

I got asked the other day to predict which of the current hot new websites will survive a decade from now. The answer is probably none of them will survive in anything remotely like their present form. But, if I had to make a guess, I'd guess that Second Life will outlast YouTube and MySpace even though -- or maybe precisely because -- its user base is smaller.

We have seen rapid churn with social network sites; teens don't want to hang out where their older siblings hung out and they certainly don't want to hang out where their parents hung out. So, as long as MySpace gets defined around its teen user base, it will quickly be, as Clueless put it, "so-so twenty minutes ago." Social networking as a practice will continue and grow but MySpace is toast.

YouTube is going to face an uphill battle to make money for Google on the scale anticipated and almost every choice they make to generate revenue -- from charging subscriptions to incorporating advertising or selling content -- is going to alienate large chunks of its users. Some other site will offer the same services for less money and the amateur media makers whose culture is larger than YouTube will go to whichever media sharing site offers them the best deal.

Most multiplayer games will have a life-span of four or five years: sooner or later, the producers who are generating the content will run out of creative energy, will set the wrong policy, or will simply fail to keep up with their competitors, and they will lose their marketshare to the new game in town.

But Second Life may outlive them all for several reasons: people feel a deeper investment in Second Life as a community because they have built it in their own images, because they have invested time in constructing the physical artifacts and social processes which constitute this multiverse. The core users of Second Life will be there as long as Linden Lab is there and the folks at Linden Lab seem to have a pretty realistic understanding of what it takes to support the diverse kinds of communities who are embracing this technology.

I suspect Second Life's numbers will always be lower than those of World of Warcraft or its descendents: more people want to have master entertainers construct their fantasy lives for them than want to build them from scratch. I have been surprised by how many are trying Second Life -- suggesting that there may be some hunger out there for at least testing the waters with virtual reality -- but I am also surprised how intimidated even my MIT students are of trying to build something in virtual space. So, I don't know that this will represent the tipping point in terms of multiverses -- simply that it will be an important community that has the potential to sustain itself for an extended period of time.

Shirky's column has sparked an important conversation, has caused us all to catch our breath and examine our assumptions. For that, I am personally grateful, even if this is one of those times when I think he's probably more wrong than right.

I can't say the same about some of the company he is keeping. Shirky's article appeared on a site called Valleywag, which bills itself as a "tech gossip rag." Another Valleywag reporter, no doubt inspired by Clay's critique, decided to crash a press conference being held in Second Life and act, frankly, like a wild boar. Here's the reporter's own description of what happened:

The sex is less satisfying, the money meaningless, but in one regard, at least, Second Life has matched the real world. Political events in Linden Lab's overblown virtual environment are carefully controlled, lacking in authenticity, and mind-numbingly tedious. Valleywag sent along a video reporter to the opening session of Congress, or rather an online discussion of the day's momentous events in the virtual world. The event, sponsored by marketing consultancy, Clear Ink, and has-been computer maker, Sun Microsystems, was as sparsely attended as a New Hampshire at-home with a no-hope candidate. Those attendees not from the press were Second Life publicists making sure the participants stayed in their seats. So much like the meatworld. It's uncanny. Valleywag's reporter ran into trouble with the virtual world's flacks after he floated up and spoiled the photo-op by getting into the frame. "They were really freaking out. Dude, I was laughing so hard I was crying when they finally kicked me out." Well, at least someone enjoyed themselves.

Whatever the value of your criticism of Second Life may be, acting like a jerk in a virtual world is no different than acting like a jerk in the real world. This suggests the actions of someone who imagines virtual worlds as simply a playground where individuals can do anything they want and not expect any social consequences. It suggests the actions of someone who has contempt for anyone who takes what's going on in such a space seriously and wants to show his contempt by bearing his rump to the world. Here's hoping that we can debate the issues surround virtual worlds with a bit more civility and maturity in the future.

Singaporean Girls Gone Wild...

Singapore is so known for its work ethic and sense of decorum that I have joked off and on about marketing a series of videos of Singaporean Girls Gone Wild which consisted of school girls in uniforms throwing peanut shells on the floor of the Raffles Hotel bar with wild abandon before returning to studying for their exams. After all, one of the first things that I ever learned about this country was that the law specified that one could be thrashed with a bamboo cane for chewing gum in public. My first impression then was something like that planet in Star Trek: The Next Generation where one could be put to death for stepping on the grass. That said, spending time here has given me a much more nuanced picture of what lies behind those stereotypes and of the ways that such a society is confronting the potential anarchy being brought about by the new kinds of participatory culture being fostered on the web. When I was speaking at the Singaporean National Library, Dr. Tony Tan, my host, the former Deputy Prime Minister and current head of the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation, drew a comparison between the invention of movable type in the 15th century (and the print revolution that followed) and the invention of Movable Type (the bloging software) a few years ago and the profound impact it was having world wide. Dr. Tan argued that it would be impossible to hold onto old constraints on expression or to close off possible access to these new technologies, even if governments wanted to do so. Instead, they needed to find ways to help new bloggers develop a deeper understanding of their civic responsibilities.

Frankly, the government officials I have met in Singapore are better educated than anyone I can imagine in the Bush administration. Well, that's damning with faint praise, isn't it? Many of them have advanced degrees from elite institutions -- many of them have doctoriates -- and then approach problems with a calm and humane rationalism. They are both knowledgible and thoughtful about the issues they confront as they transition from an era where there is tight control over the press to one where there is broad democratic participation in the blogosphere.

What's Wrong with Singaporean Teen Bloggers?

What is clear from my many conversations here is that parents in Singapore as in other parts of the world worry about what young people are doing online. Their children are going places and doing things that were not part of their own childhood experiences and they are concerned about ways that these decisions may come back and hurt them later. As I have spoken to people here, three very distinct stories of youth "misbehavior" online have cropped up again and again as reference points for this conversation. I thought I would share them with you here because of the insights they offer into Singaporean culture and the ways that these technological changes are being understood in this country. Since two of them involve young female bloggers, these may be a truer picture of Singaporean Girls Gone Wild.

The first story involves Wee Shu Min, the teenaged daughter of a member of the Singaporean Parliament, who become the center of a national controversy about economic privilege and almost ended her father's political career because of something she had posted on her blog. Here's how the story began according to a news report on the CNN website:

When Wee Shu Min, the teenage daughter of a Singapore member of parliament stumbled across the blog of a Singaporean who wrote that he was worried about losing his job, she thought she'd give him a piece of her mind.

She called him "one of many wretched, undermotivated, overassuming leeches in our country" on her own blog and signed off with "please, get out of my elite uncaring face".

Wee was flamed by hundreds of fellow bloggers, but when her father Wee Siew Kim -- an MP in Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's constituency -- told a Singapore newspaper that "her basic point is reasonable", the row moved well beyond the blogosphere.

The episode highlighted a deep rift in Singapore society and was an embarrassment for the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) and prime minister Lee, who has made the reduction of the income gap one of the priorities of his new government.

The CNN story goes on to contextualize this controversy in terms of a growing public concern about income disparities in a country which generates the second largest per capita income in the world (after Japan). There is great suspicion here that moves towards a welfare state might undermine the country's work ethic so there are no government pensions or minimum wage laws though there are widespread educational benefits. The flame war that erupted around this teenage girl's blogs brought to the surface deeply buried class antagonisms with the youth, who was attending one of the country's elite schools, being compared with Marie Antoinette for what many saw as insensitive comments about the nation's underclass.

Part of what gave this story its sensationalistic qualities though was the idea that what this teenage girl wrote might be reflective of the views expressed in private by one of the nation's political leaders, an impression re-enforced by the father's attempts to defend his daughter's actions. A story on AsiaMedia quoted the father as saying: "As a parent, I may not have inculcated the appropriate level of sensitivity, but she has learnt a lesson."

The second story centers around a 19 year old female blogger who posts under the name Sarong Party Girl. Her posting of nude photographs of herself placed her at the center of a national controversy about exhibitionistic uses of digital technology and about sexual propriety among young women. Her user-name already seemed calculated to spark controversy.

According to the Wikipedia, Sarong Party Girl (or SPG) is a derogatory slang term used in Singapore and parts of Malaysia to refer to a young woman who "dresses and behaves in a provocative manner; and exclusively dates and prefers Caucasian men." The entry continues, "The stereotypical Sarong party girl has extremely tanned skin, a false foreign accent, and is provocatively dressed. Originally, the outfit of choice was thought to be a bikini/tank-top paired with a sarong, though that now exists only in the name. Many of them frequent clubs or nightspots that are popular with expatriate Caucasians in order to meet and form relationships with these men. Sarong party girls are known to prowl specific nightspots in Singapore along Boat Quay, Clarke Quay, Emerald Hill and City Hall, the classic place being the now defunct Carnegies at Far East Square."

So in choosing to call her blog, Sarong Party Girl, the youth was trying to reclaim a negative term which embodies an explosive mixture of sexual and racial transgression, while no doubt thumbing her nose at traditional sexual morality in her country. Interestingly, though, as much controversy centered around the decision of the Singapore Straits Times to report on the incident (and thus drive potentially much more traffic to her site) as on her decision to post the nude images and frank commentary. This suggests uncertainty about the public/private status of blogs and about the interface between centralized and participatory media.

The third incident involves blogger Gan Huai Shi, a 17-year old student, who was charged with seven counts of "promoting ill will" under Singapore's Sedition Act, for posting negative remarks about the country's largely Islamic Malay population. Each offense carries a potential punishment of up to three years in prison. Here's part of an editorial in the Straits Times referring to this and two other cases of young bloggers sparking race antagonism:

The Internet is not a personal space.

Yet those who air their diatribe do so in the belief that they are not only anonymous, but also that there are no rules and constraints. This perception is reinforced if site hosts and moderators fail in their duty to act, and if fellow netizens don't come down hard and fast on them.

There are thought to be more than one million active Internet users in Singapore, and the maths would suggest there are more people with the ability to do good and police the system than there are those who preach intolerance, ridicule and call others' beliefs into question.

So rather than question why it is that the authorities had to act, or the merits of which is the more appropriate law to use, or whether this is a prelude to a political clampdown, the Internet's cause will be better served if active users weigh in and do their own clamping down...

What these guys have done, as some have already suggested, is to give bloggers and chatrooms a bad name.

And if the community does not want to have Big Brother watching, then it's best that it does the watching itself.

In a society composed primarily of three major racial groups (The Chinese, the Indians, and the Malay) who have had some history of antagonisms, the Singaporean government officially promotes multiracial harmony. And thus the image of Singaporean young people freely posting anti-Islamic comments on their blogs provoked a very stern response from both the mainstream media and the national government.

As each of these examples suggest, the concern with transgression by youth bloggers (male and female) points to potential fault lines within the culture. The forms these fears take are culturally specific (as no doubt are the concerns that American parents have about what constitutes misconduct by youth on line -- whether read through the lens of the Post-Columbine controversies about violent video games or the more recent hysteria about sexual risks faced by young women on MySpace). Yet, in each case, these concerns translate into a more generalized anxiety about the risks young people face as they enter into the digital world. The young blogger becomes a figure of freedom and license, an embodiment of the breakdown of the old order as average citizens gain the ability to express their thoughts and fantasies through these powerful new communication platforms. We can't begin to address those generalized fears about youth and digital media until we understand the ways they get linked to deeper and often implicit cultural and political anxieties.

For a sense of what a good Singapore blogger looks like, one need look no further than the Jan. 8 edition of The Straits Times, which is running a series called "Piecing Together the Digital Native." (Marc Prensky, are your ears burning?) There's a full color graphic of the digital native, depicted as a tribal chieftan, complete with body and face paints and a quiver of arrows, but also depicted with a mouse hanging as a talisman on his shark tooth necklace, and with an ear and mouthpiece from a cellphone wrapped around his face. The headline on the story tells it all: "Business-Saavy Kids Turn Blogs Into E-Shopping Outlets. They Find Ready Customers Among Fellow Youngsters."

To Hell and Back...

If the notions of what constitute being "bad" are culturally specific, then so are the fantasies about what happens to people who are bad. All of this was brought home to me Sunday when I paid a visit to Haw Par Villa, a distinctly Singapore attraction owned by the Tiger Balm Company. For a small fee, you can enter the 10 Courts of Hell: a series of garishly colored plaster statues from the 1930s, represent the harsh punishments awaiting men and women alike for their transgressions (as understood within classical Chinese mythology). So, by way of illustration, here are some offenses and the punishments they bear:

Disrespect for Elders -- heart cut out.

Tomb Robbers - tied to red hot copper piller

Stealing -- frozen into blocks of ice

Misuse of books, possession of pornographic materials, wasting food -- body sawed into two

rumors -- tongue pulled out.

driving someone to their death -- thrown into wok of boiling oil

cheating during examinations -- intestines and organs pulled out

And so on. All of these punishments are depicted with blood-gushing everywhere and piles of dismembered limbs and decapitated heads. Trust me, I haven't encountered much in American popular culture which is as vivid in its depictions of mutilation and impailment.

Here are some images taken by my colleague William Uricchio when he was there last year.

This image depicts prostitutes drowning in a pool of "unclean" blood.

This man refused to pay his taxes and is being pounded by a stone mallet.

It is hard to imagine a more grisly form of public amusement, yet many Singaporeans tell me that they went to this park regularly as young people and that it played a central role in their moral instruction. American discourse about media violence assumes that young people identify with those who commit violence; this attraction, on the other hand, assumes that young people identify with those who are being punished for their transgresions and may change their ways if they see enough blood and guts, decapitated limbs, and impailed bodies. Well, it's a theory...

Elsewhere, there are a series of scenes which represent various virtues and vices: the images here are fascinating because of their surreal fusion of the human and animal, folk tradition and images of the modern world as a debauched utopia.

This debased and lustful pig represents a character from the Chinese classic, Journey to the West.

And this is one of the many images which depict the sinful nature of western dress and modern life -- jazz clubs in particular take a drubbing in these exhibits.

And consider this image of the lustful Spider demons who have taken human female form in order to deceive the unsuspecting man. What William's picture doesn't show is a cloak drapped over in the corner which is red and white checked. All I could see was Spider-Man's costume! You get some feel for at least the coloring of the cloak from the halter tops these Singaporean Girls Gone Wild are wearing.

Again, one gets a sense that one could transgress a lot of social taboos by cloaking these sensationalistic depictions of modern life with an aura of moral instruction and spiritual uplift. In the name of redemption, we can look at men and women groping each other or naked breasts. The same of course was true in the western world during the Silent era where nudity was not uncommon in the films of D.W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMile as long as the goal of the film was to bring the viewer closer to that old time religion.

The Price of Transgression

Of course, these same anxieties about transgression and punishment crop up elsewhere in popular culture. For example, I picked up a DVD of what has been billed as the first Singapore produced horror film, The Maid. I have not yet had a chance to watch but I found the description of the film illuminating:

Filipino Maid, Rosa, arrives to work in Singapore during the Lunar Seventh Month, or the Hungry Ghost Festival -- believed to be a time when the Hell gates open. Life turns into a nightmare where Rosa unwittingly breaks the rules of the Month, tumbling into the world of the dead and glimpsing strange apparitions at night. To keep her job, she has to stifle her screams and fears.

I can't begin to unpack the mixture of anxieties which are bound up in this story, even understood in its broad outlines on the DVD box description: concerns about immigration, the breaking of traditional taboos, the relations of servants to their employers, and so forth. I am told that there have been a series of disturbing news reports in the Singapore press about servent girls being sexually and physically abused by their masters, which could account for the themes of this work.

Let me close with another symptom of the ways Singapore is adjusting to the consequences of media change. The elevators at my hotel in the Raffles complex advertises that one can go to the in-house spa for special treatments designed to help those who have overused Blackberries, cell phones, and other mobile technologies. The image of people wracking in pain because they have spent too much time text messaging and being nursed back to health at the spa represents a particularly adult anxiety about the dangers of embracing new media technologies.

Oh, by the way, when I wandered by an ice cream parlor at the local mall, I couldn't help but notice that they were selling Seaweed Washabi flavored soft serve ice cream, a dish which to my western taste buds sounds as close to a combination of the freezing and burning hells depicted at Har Paw Villa.. :-)

An Aside:

It seems appropriate in a post about horror and the internet to end with some good news. Those of you who have been following this blog regularly know of my strong opposition to the Deleting Online Predators Act. The new year has brought good news: the Act seems to have lost steam as some of its key supporters were defeated in the midterm elections. In any case, the bill will have to be reintroduced in the House since it failed to pass the Senate. There's a better report than I can offer right now of what happened over at PBS Teacher Source. The reporter is a bit more optomistic than I am that the bill is really and truly dead. I don't think Republicans have a monopoly on moral panic and censorship. Indeed, many Democrats in the House supported this bill the first time through and might rally around it again if it looked like it would give Hillary Clinton cover with the Security Moms and Cultural Conservatives. But let's celebrate our minor victories where we can!

Jenkins-Isms?

As I mention the other day, I am currently posting this blog from Singapore. I was invited here as a guest of the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation which hosted a public lecture at the National Library's Drama Center on Friday night which was attended by some of the country's political, economic, and intellectual leaders and was designed to focus public debate around the issue of Media in Transition. The talk has received enormous interest here -- I think I have been interviewed at this point by pretty much all of the English language media in Singapore. (I am starting to feel like Noam Chomsky!) The first interview came on my first morning of the country and went up on line almost immediately. It was with AsiaOne and resulted in this story. They asked for my photograph, having no time to get a photographer over to my hotel, and wondered if they could take some images from my blog. I was amused to see that they went with a picture of my Mii, created by Alice Robison, and the photograph of me reading a Polish comic book outside the Warsaw train station. In this context, the Mii looks a little bit like the kind of artist renderings a police might circulate about a crime suspect but I suppose it does drill home my attitude towards game and digital technology.

The article ran with the provocative headline, "The Youtube of Tomorrow Will Come from Asia," and discusses in some depth my interest in the flow of Asian produced goods into the west and my belief that Singapore as a nation may be posed to become a key broker in that relationship.

On Saturday, I opened up the Straits Times over breakfast and found a full page article about my talk, including a side bar on "Jenkins-isms" which included the following tidbit about my recent visit to Teen Second Life:

"Prof Jenkins himself went into Second Life and met a young girl from Mexico City. Despite their age gap, they could talk freely about many things."

So, Mariel, it looks like our encounter the other day is making international news!

It's pretty scary when people start naming "isms" after you!

I have also found this rather interesting blog post from a Singaporean who attended the public lecture and who describes some of the kinds of questions and concerns that got raised from the audience:

I was amused to hear about the story of how one lady was not too happy with her daughter studying before the exams with her iPod plugged in. Her daughter was actually listening to her own lecture notes, but hey, when I was studying, the radio or Walkman was always on full blast. This is what we define as The Generation Gap.

But I was not amused was when this PR practitioner stood up and said most of the online stuff that people are crazy over is "rubbish" to her.

Actually her point was that it was difficult for her to find useful stuff on the Internet apart from traditional media content (like a PDF of a print magazine interview), and she couldn't get the hang of being a constant web community. It's this sort of dismissal that will cause the older folks to be blindsided when the carpet is suddenly pulled from under their feet and they realize the old media ground no longer exists.

On Sunday, there was a second, longer profile of Prof Jenkins in the Straits Times. written by Cheong Suk-Wai, a high profile Singaporean journalist. I was really impressed with the quality of the reporting here: she manages to convey some of the core concerns animating my work and also to capture something of my personality as well. There are a few glitches -- most notably, she took my estimate that this blog gets 4000 visitors per week (more or less) and wrote that it had gotten 4000 hits since June.

I am also struggling with her side comment that I speak in a "chirpy rapid-fire throttle." I will certainly buy rapid fire throttle -- I do talk way too fast, just trying to fit in everything I want to say, but I never thought of myself as "chirpy" before.

The portrait captures both my optimism and the concern that we need to work together to confront some of the challenges and risks represented by this moment of media transition. A heavy focus here was on the work we are doing with MacArthur on new media literacies and with my own experiences raising a son during the digital age. My southern background -- described her as "homespun" -- seems to strike a note in this piece which is at once exotic (a world not often encountered here) and familiar (with its stress on family and religion.) This is perhaps the first article about me that talks about being raised a Southern Baptist by a mother who ran our church's vacation Bible school.

In addition to the public lecture, "From YouTube to YouNiversity: Learning and Playing in An Age of Social Networks," I did a workshop with employees of the various newspapers represented by my host, the Singapore Press Holdings, which centered around the relationship of old and new media as it impacts news and journalism. Since this talk was off the record, I can't really share with you what they asked or what I said. But much of what I conveyed drew upon some speculations I put together along time ago for Technology Review and for the MIT Communications Forum. Anyone who wants to read my thoughts on the future of news would do well to start with these two articles, now somewhat out of date, though many of the same issues remain.

One journalist said that Singapore was a great country which suffered because it was in a "shabby neighborhood." A central theme of my remarks had to do with the ways that geographic location might be playing a less central role in the production and circulation of news in the future. So, in 2001, I wrote that the American tradition of local newspapers might give way -- was indeed already starting to give way -- to a culture centered around national papers. More and more Americans get their news from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor or USA Today, all of which are essentially national rather than local or regional newspapers. Many techies still read the San Jose Mercury online, both because it was one of the first online newspapers and because it has unique access to developments in Silicon Valley and on Sandhill Road. I personally get my national news from the Washington Post and my international news from the New York Times. I know many Americans who prefer to read about Iraq and the War on Terror through the British media because they don't trust how the American trust has handled this story.

Can we imagine, then, other newspapers developing specializations which play on their core competencies and which thus attract readers nationwide? Could the Boston Globe, say, build on its access to leading colleges and universities by becoming in effect a center of excellence (or something like the journalistic equivalent of a magnet school) focused on covering Education? Could the LA Times beef up its coverage of entertainment news and start to attract nationwide readers online? What happens next -- I am seeing students in my dorm who continue to read the online editions or listen to the digital radio broadcasts from journalists in their home country. And the same thing is happening to readers of small town newspapers in this country when they go away to college.

In such a world, is it far fetched to imagine that a publication like the Straits Times, which does a first class job covering developments in Asia (both political and cultural), might become the newspaper of choice within the Chinese Diaspora or might even attract the interest of pop cosmopolitans in the west who want to read more about anime, manga, Jpop, Bollywood, and other forms of Asian popular culture or the Asian business scene?

In such a scenario, newspapers as a medium will survive but there's no guarantee that any particular paper will survive. Some newspapers will wither and die in such a world, just as we've seen over the past several decades, the consolidation of rival newspapers in major cities. How many American cities still have competing dailies? Surprisingly few. So, the next step may be the consolidation of publications within the Northeastern Megalopolis, say, so that papers in Boston and Providence start to fold into each other. Those newspapers which survive will be those which know how to identify and serve specific interests not just for their local readership but for interested consumers nationally or even globally.

All of this is of course totally speculative. I am channeling my inner McLuhan here! You can just chalk it up as another example of Jenkins-ism run amok!

An aside: While I am in Singapore, my name seems to be cropping up in relation to a controversy in the American gaming community. Penny Arcade's Tycho ran a piece last week discussing a new documentary, Moral Kombat, which centers around video game violence. I gather that the film's trailer is pretty sensationalistic (though I have had trouble accessing it here in Singapore). As Tycho notes, "I sincerely doubt the tone of the piece matches this trailer, given some of the participants - for example, I don't think that Henry Jenkins would be party to a hysterical dialogue, even in an attempt to tame it."

Thanks, Tycho for the vote of confidence. I haven't seen the film yet myself so I can't guarantee what its contents actually look like. I have been snookered before by producers who seemed earnest and then ambushed me. See the article in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers about my experience on Donahue. And there was the guy who signed me up for an interview and then ended up confessing mid-interview that he had lost his son to the evils of gaming: actually, his son was a national CounterStrike champion but the father couldn't accept the place of computer games in his son's life. Needless to say, that was not a fun interview from that point forward and the final film -- which will remain nameless here (primarily because I've blocked it out) -- ended up having a major ax to grind.

But my sense is that Spencer Halprin, the producer of this film, really wanted to get out both sides of the argument. He spent time following around Jack Thompson and hopefully gave the old buzzard enough rope to hang himself with. And he asked me some pointed but thoughtful questions, giving me a chance to spell out my arguments for why the links between video games and real world violence have been over-stated. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the finished product has the same reasonable tone and rational perspective as the interview I did with the producer several years ago. If I get an advanced peek at the work, I will certainly share my impressions here.

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part Two)

Over the past six months, I have been closely following the debates regarding the Deleting Online Predators Act. danah boyd and I issued a collective statement at the beginning of the summer based on our research on social networks and participatory culture. I also ran a post here describing some of the ways that banning youth from accessing MySpace and other social network sites in schools and public library might slow the potential use of blogging and other network software for pedagogical purposes. Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part series focused on NetFamilyNews and its editor, Anne Collier. Collier's site has helped parents address their fears about MySpace and has kept all of us on top of the latest developments regarding governmental policies that might restrict young people's access to online space. These policies, and the fears that motivate them, play an important role in today's installment.

Many parents express an anxiety that they can not realistically control the flow of media into their homes, let alone know what their young people are doing when they are outside of their supervision. How would you respond to that concern?

I understand that concern and the frustration many parents have about diminishing control over what their children are exposed to. It isn't just parents who are experiencing diminishing control. Schools, corporations, and governments at all levels of society worldwide are too. This is an unnerving, fascinating shift we're experiencing, and I think it's calling upon all of us to think it through together out loud, bringing a whole lot of skill sets into the discussion. Because the situation seems to be requiring us to figure it out together as we go along. Problems in a participatory medium like Web 2.0 are calling for participatory solution development.

At the family level, as I suggested above, the life and tech skills of parents and kids are both needed to find solutions to Net-related problems. In schools, challenges involving defamation or cyberbullying in blogs or social sites need the best thinking of a bunch of people - students, administrators, counselors, network administrators, school-safety experts, teachers, and sometimes First Amendment legal advisers and law enforcement people. In a way, that's really exciting. It used to be that school-safety people, techies, and counselors, for example, had their spheres and hardly ever talked, much less hammered out solutions together. Now the pooling of those areas of expertise is being demanded, and I can't imagine that there won't be some creative and very positive outcomes because of it. Think, for example, about what we're all going to be learning about free-speech rights. Maybe not since the Constitutional Convention has the First Amendment been such a prominent topic in American schools!

Then I look at what's happening in other parts of the world where people are using the participatory Web. I just blogged about a report in The Guardian that, even though the Iranian government "remains a staunch opponent of Internet freedoms ... Farsi has made it into the top 10 languages on the Net." There are 70,000-100,000 active blogs in Iran, The Guardian article said. Then there's the social site ChinaKids with 800,000 registered preteen users and sponsored by the youth wing of the Chinese Communist Party. The Wall Street Journal reported that the site encourages kids to speak

out, "sometimes against authority"! The question of how to control the flow of media into homes, schools, cybercafes, and kids' mobile phones is being eclipsed by what to do about the media that flows out from those places and devices!

You have readers from around the world. What similarities and differences do you see in the concerns raised by parents in different parts of the world?

I do have readers in more than 50 countries, but I don't get email from many readers outside North America, interestingly - only some in the UK. So I mostly rely on English-language news-media coverage of technology in other countries to know what the general concerns are. It does appear that parents' concerns are fairly universal, but there are degrees of differences. For example, European parents seem to be less concerned than American parents about blocking nudity and more concerned about hate speech on the Web. But cyberbullying is a big issue everywhere. In the UK, Europe and Asia, so far it has been happening more on mobile phones than in IM and social Web sites, as we're seeing here. People are being impersonated and defamed in social sites everywhere. I did hear from a colleague in Portugal about harassment in a US-based social site popular there, one case involving a co-worker and another a teenager whose dad contacted him for help. Someone who said he was a teenager in India emailed me recently about his concern that he was accessing porn too much online, that it would hurt his future prospects. I've seen and linked to news reports of "videogame addiction" in South Korea and counseling centers established to help addicted players. Just a few examples.

One thing's for sure: Social networking sites and all the good and bad happening in them are certainly international. India has nearly a dozen social-networking sites and 1.2 million bloggers (compared to China's 19.9m, Japan's 10m, and the US's 50m), India's Economic Times reports; Japan's Mixi recently had a $1.8 billion IPO; Cyworld has saturated the teen and 20-something market in South Korea and its diaspora, so it launched a US version this past summer; LunarStorm reached the saturation point in Sweden (reportedly 90% of Swedish h.s. students) and launched a UK version - and on and on. So all the stuff that's causing worries here in the US, from bullying to piracy to PC security, is causing similar ones in other countries.

You've written a book specifically addressing adult concerns about MySpace. Why do you think social network sites like MySpace have sparked such anxiety? How real are the dangers that are being claimed?

For grownups, MySpace kind of came out of nowhere. It wasn't just for teenagers, of course (only around 20% of its users were teens), but to any parent who knew about it, it was a teenage thing, and my guess is teenagers weren't inclined to tell their parents about this new hangout if they didn't have to. So I don't think it was really on the radar for parents until it was all over the news media as a dangerous place where "predators" could contact their kids. An AP story out of Connecticut last February reported that "at least seven" girls 12-16 had been "sexually assaulted by men they met through the popular Web site MySpace." As far as I could tell following the news coverage closely, parents were hearing nothing about MySpace or social networking that wasn't at least negative, and some of it was really scary. It was that combination of a totally new thing adults knew virtually nothing about and very negative news coverage that sparked such anxiety, I

think. Then, too, there was the '06 election; politicians stood to benefit from saying they would act on those fears. It was, you might say, a "perfect storm" of parental-concern creation. By May, when our publisher, Peachpit Press, asked us to write the book ( My Space Unraveled ), there simply was no balance to the public discussion. We wanted to offer some balance - share the views of teens, researchers, children's advocates, and law enforcement people who understood social networking; encourage parents to check MySpace out themselves with simple step-by-step instructions; and explain the actual risks and the research.

How real are the dangers? There are dangers in social sites for out- there, risk-seeking people just as there are for them in "real life." As Janis Wolak, one of the authors of both of UNH's studies about child online victimization, told me last spring, "Basically, what puts kids at risk is when they talk about sex with people they meet online, and the vast majority of them don't get involved in that kind of situation." The first study was the widely misrepresented one about "one in five children" being sexually solicited online that, when actually read, said that "none of the solicitations led to an actual sexual contact or assault" and many of those solicitations came from other teens. The second study found the number of solicitations had gone down, to one in seven, but - though published this past summer - the survey was conducted before social networking took off. So even the second study from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at UNH wasn't about social networking. What these researchers have found in other studies, though - as Janis indicated - is that it's the young people responding to and seeking out sexual contacts with strangers who are at risk.

Most of the research we have so far - or the most publicized research - is about exploitation of online kids by adults. That's important research to have, but it's only part of the picture. We know almost nothing yet about child and teen behavior on social sites, good and bad, or about the impact of online socializing, media-sharing, social-producing, or creative networking. In our book I call it "collective self-expression," this social aspect of all the mashing-up and remixing that's going on with digital media, and I think it's fascinating. I think it's kind of in its infancy, and we have so much to learn about and from it. In any case, a much more complete picture is needed before any conclusions can possibly be drawn, I feel.

But I digress. ;-) There are other "dangers," depending on a person's definition. Certainly some parents would define exposure to nudity or sexually suggestive content as a danger, and there is definitely greater risk of that than sexual predation in social sites. MySpace says it's deleting x-rated content as it finds it, and it has both scanning technology and staff dedicated to finding and deleting it, but users are posting and finding it. The general Web itself, though, is known to have much more hard-core content than anything I've seen on MySpace, if kids are seeking it out.

The risks that I suspect will affect most young social networkers, though, fall under the very large category of bullying, or social cruelty, which parents and kids have probably always dealt with and always will. Since school social life has moved online, so have bullying, gossip, harassment, etc., and they can be particularly insidious online because the behavior can go on 24x7 and be anonymous. Kids and teens often don't think about the implications of their actions because that part of the adolescent brain, the prefrontal cortex, is still in development, so they can impulsively post text and other media about themselves and others and not be able to control the outcome (see my comment above about the teenage girl emailing sexually explicit photos of herself to a boyfriend). Digital media, parents too need to know, can be cut and pasted into Web pages, attached to IMs and emails, and shared on file-sharing networks - they usually can't be taken back. This, to me, is a real risk that I've been telling parents about in NetFamilyNews for years.

Your site monitors legislation designed to "protect" youth from various perceived dangers of the new media landscape. What do you see as the most pressing trends in this area as we enter 2007?

Better-written laws that reflect understanding of the Internet and its users! Most disturbing to me was the now-defunct Delete Online Predators Act, written before hardly any research had been done on the impact of the social Web on the people it was purportedly written to protect.

The metaphor that occurred to me as I was writing a chapter of our book was Penn Station in New York. A tourist walks into that giant, confusing, fast-paced, populated space at rush hour and feels a sudden urge to look for the nearest exit. That's most adults' first experience of MySpace. But like a MySpace user going straight to his or her page, a commuter just heads to his usual platform, gets on the train and goes home. He doesn't remotely see what the tourist finds so daunting. This is changing now, I think, but when we were working on the book last summer, the tourists were in charge of the entire public discussion; legislation was being written by the tourists! For a balanced picture and sound solution development, we've got to have the commuters' perspective too, I think.

Some parents argue that when in doubt, they should simply prohibit social networking sites. What's wrong with this approach? What do you see as positive about social networking sites?

I don't think prohibition is possible, at least it'd be even harder now and with the Internet than when it was given a serious try in the 1920s and '30s. I talk about this above - it's too easy for kids to "go underground" online, with all the free accounts available to them in sites parents have never heard of, proliferating wired and wireless access points, and new Net-enabled products constantly arriving on store shelves.

We're only just beginning to see the positives, with research like that funded by the MacArthur Foundation. But I think we'll discover many positive developments involving digital media and socializing online. I think of how the Rock for Darfur profile got started on MySpace (see this on "Powerful Change Agents ); of a woman I just met in an airport whose teenage granddaughter first started publishing her poetry on MySpace and has since won a prize for her work; of the ski videos my son shoots, edits, and posts at Newschoolers.com and YouTube.com; of the html and other software code kids are learning while embellishing their pages in social sites; of the youth social activism being fostered at YouthNoise.com; of all the future professional writers who got their start vying for and trying to hold their peers' attention in their daily blogging; of the garage bands that wouldn't otherwise be finding fans and signing record deals.

I often receive letters expressing concern about addiction to digital media. Is this a realistic concern and if so, what steps should parents take if they fear that their teen may be addicted to games, social networks, or other digital media?

I'm not really qualified to answer that, but the question of whether there is such a thing as Internet addiction is getting more and more attention in the medical field (and coverage in the news media). In November the Washington Post took an in-depth look at the subject , reporting that an international neuropsychiatric medicine journal published a study that "claimed to be the first large-scale look at excessive Internet use," and "the American Psychiatric Association may consider listing Internet addiction in the next edition of its diagnostic manual." I just talked with a 16-year-old in New York State who loves playing World of Warcraft (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and says he spends 3 hours a night on school nights and 5 a day on weekends playing it, but - from communicating with both him and his librarian mom (who sounds like a great mom) - it doesn't sound like he's addicted. His mother says she's not thrilled by the amount of time he spends in WoW and his grades have gone down a bit, so there will probably be some repercussions, but there are things about his experience with the game that she likes too.

"Game addiction" is coming up more and more. South Korea opened its first game-addiction treatment center in 2002, and the Washington Post reported last June that the country had just launched a game addiction hotline. Europe's first game addiction clinic reportedly opened last summer in Amsterdam (here's an item I ran on it last June last June ).

How much should parents know about the online lives of their youth? Is there a point where adult supervision becomes intrusive?

I do think parents need to know enough about the online part of their children's lives to feel assured that it's safe and reasonably constructive. The best gauge is probably how much parents feel they need to know about their kids' offline social lives. The online part is just as individual. And it changes as young people mature, right? The responsibility for staying safe and assessing risk increasingly shifts from parent to child as the latter grows; that's no different in their online lives, I'd say.

I think there can be a point where adult supervision becomes intrusive, but it's different for every child. Some parents seem to want to remove all risk from their teenagers' lives. So - having heard from a couple of researchers that risk assessment is one of the primary tasks of adolescence and having quoted them in our book - I later asked a prominent pediatrician what he thought about this risk- removal tendency, and he very definitely said we're doing our children a disservice if we don't let them do that assessment work that helps develop their brains.

Much of the legislation that seeks to "protect" youth gets argued on the basis of protecting childhood innocence and yet gets applied to regulating the conduct of adolescents. What role should an understanding of child development play in developing meaningful response to the online lives of our offspring?

My co-author Larry Magid recently quipped that the Delete Online Predators Act was more like the Delete Online Kids Act - in the sense that it would've done nothing to "delete" predators but rather focused on banning kids from social sites in schools and libraries. The legislation that Sens. McCain and Schumer just announced they would be introducing this year is clearly aimed at keeping out predators, because it would require sex offenders to register email addresses and other online contact information in addition to offline data such as phone numbers. This makes sense if it succeeds in extending existing child-protection law into cyberspace. It seems based on what is already known and understood, but I still think more child-development expertise needs to be folded into the public discussion and lawmaking. These have been dominated so far by law enforcement and research on criminal behavior online. There are some wonderful cops out there doing fine child-protection and online-crime-prevention work, but we do badly need to broaden and balance the discussion. For example, state attorneys general have called for age verification of minors in social-networking sites, but they haven't seemed inclined to entertain a full discussion about the implications for children's privacy, and the subject of social networking became so negative and associated with predators late last year that social-networking companies were reluctant to take any position on best practices that might counter-balance politically based regulatory efforts.