Oreos, "Wal-Mart Time", and User-Generated Advertising

Driving around earlier this week, I happened to hear the distinctive voice of American Idol's Randy Jackson ("Yo, Dawgs") on my radio, telling listeners about a national contest for the best amateur rendition of the classic "Oreos and Milk" jingle. Jackson's participation in an advertising campaign is hardly surprising in and of itself-- after all, we got to watch Simon Cowell endorse Vanilla Coke and we've seen Ford run a series of spots featuring Idol contestants which become part of what fans evaluate as they judge who should win the talent competition. From the start, American Idol has been closely tied to a range of new marketing and branding strategies.

Upon further investigation, I found the Oreo site online. It turns out that Kraft Foods, the company which makes those delightful chocolate wafers with the vanilla cream inside, is hosting a national competition to identify musical groups who can put their own spin on the advertising ditty. The winning group receive $10,000, the opportunity to record an Oreo radio commercial and hang out with Randy Jackson in Los Angeles in August.

A panel of judges winnowed down the original submissions and now the public is being invited to go to the web and vote on the five finalists. There's Acappella Gold, a group of soccer mom types in zebra-skin pants suits, doing it up barbershop quartet style. There's the Chris Allen Band which gave the song a bit of Reggae backbeat and Odysy who perform it with a mix of hip hop and street harmony. The Oreo Cousins do it as a blues number and The Three belt it out to acoustic guitar and percussion.

Each of the videos has the ear-marks of amateur made media -- the kind of stuff the RIAA wants to take off of YouTube: most of them have fixed camera positions, poor lighting, and are shot in rec-rooms or other cluttered domestic spaces. The performances that made it this far are pretty good -- each has its own flavor and each set of performers seems to be really enjoying what they are doing. The website features a selection of the folks -- good and bad -- who got cut from the competition along the way.

Everyone Likes Oreos -- in Their Own Way

Kraft can be seen as the latest in a long series of advertisers which have embraced user-generated content as a means of generating buzz around popular brands. Such campaigns seek to tap the passion consumers feel towards cult brands and use it to draw other consumers into the fold.

I confess -- I enjoyed spending time with these entries. A great deal of the interest lies in the diversity of musical traditions represented. This makes me skeptical of the plans to select one winner and feature them on television. Each of these performers embodies different consumer niches and there's a message to be had in seeing the Oreos message translated in so many different musical languages. It seems silly to start with such multiculturalism and end up with a monovocal message -- no matter who ends up winning.

I am not sure whether Oreos represents a cult brand (perhaps it's simply a comfort food that reminds all of us of good times we had as kids) but I know that I am susceptible to peer pressure where Oreos are concerned. Some years ago, I was getting on a TransAtlantic flight to the U.K. and I saw someone sitting across the aisle from me loading a huge carry-on bag filled with Oreo Cookies which she was apparently taking back with her to England. I snorted smugly to the person sitting next to me about the degree to which some people become addicted to their favorite products. But once I got to London, I started craving Oreo cookies and couldn't find them anywhere -- at least at that time a decade or so ago -- and when I got back stateside, the first thing I wanted to do was stop at the local 7/11 and buy some Oreos and milk. I hadn't had one of those cookies for months prior to the trip but somehow traveling through a world without Oreos left me really desperate.

"It's Wal-Mart Time"

Of course, Youtube shows us that consumers will make videos about the most popular brands, even in the absence of formal contests and prizes. Just as fan communities will use the web to build visibility for their favorite media properties, brand communities celebrate their connections to their favorite brands.

Take the case of Wal-Mart -- scarcely a brand that might be expected to generate a high degree of passion or be regarded as hip. Yet, you can find countless examples of amateurs who have made media -- sometimes ironic, sometimes dead serious -- to celebrate the Wal-Mart shopping experience. Many of these videos are shot illicitly with cameras smuggled into various Wal-Mart outlets, often taking advantage of the products on display as unpurchased props. These can be snatch and grab affairs or much more elaborate. This parody of Eminem's song, "Just Lose It," involves elaborate production numbers, presumably filmed under the watchful noses of Wal-mart's ever attentive and friendly welcomers. I'm not sure that the brand managers would jump from joy to see Wal-mart associated with white trash lifestyles, cheap merchandise, shoplifting, and parking lot fisticuffs as occurs in "Wal-Mart Time", but it's hard to deny the vibrancy of this particular video. Even if we don't want to see these spots as actively promoting the brand's own agenda, they have a kind of affection for the store as a public space which contrasts sharply with the anti-corporate messages one associates with the ad-buster or culture jammers movement.

His First Oreo Cookie

And of course, look around a little deeper and one will find similar spots for other products, including a whole range of videos featuring people consuming or playing with Oreo cookies. This one is overly long but it does convey the idea that how one eats Oreos is part of standard cultural lore and that people can have a good time standing around twisting open cookies and dipping them into milk. The message here may be more mundane, more ambivalent, than what you are likely to see on a television commercial. But then, that's how we live with brands in the context of our everyday life. We snuggle down with them at the end of a hard day -- we are unlikely to speak in the hyperbolic language of television spots.

These unregulated consumer-generated segments suggest just how carefully filtered and fully scripted the official competition really is. Traditional notions of brand management stress the careful control over the brand's core messages -- every image, every bit of text gets scrutinized to make sure that it reinforces the core themes of a particular campaign. You can bet that anything that made it this far in the official Oreo jingle competition was put through that same process. The finalists were chosen as much for their reverence for the product as for their musical talent. The radio spot I heard features an unlikely Polka style version but it doesn't show people talking about being allergic to chocolate. We don't even see anything as awful as those William Hung style performances American Idol likes to play over and over on the air.

These other videos probably couldn't get assimilated into the official campaign, but then, they may be all the more powerful as brand statements because they are clearly unauthorized and outside the company's control. This could be another one of those spaces where official and unofficial culture co-exist within the crazy, mixed up world of convergence culture.

I am indebted to CMS graduate student Ilya Vedrashko for directing my attention to the amateur made Wal-mart spots. The Oreo material I found on my own.

Convergence and Divergence: Two Parts of the Same Process

ReaderMorgan Ramsay flaged a column by Al and Laura Ries which argues that we should be thinking less in terms of convergence and more in terms of divergence. Here's part of what they say:

Convergence captures the imagination, but divergence captures the market.... Why divergence and not convergence? Because convergence requires compromise and divergence satisfies the evolving needs of different market segments.... Irreconcilable differences will always doom such convergence concepts. Television is a "passive" medium; the Internet is an "active" medium. A couch potato will never put up with the complexities of interactive TV and an Internet junkie will never surf the Net with an awkward box designed for another purpose. Like automobiles, different market segments demand different products... Companies today are pouring billions of dollars into such convergence concepts as smart phones, smart gas pumps, smart homes, smart watches, smart clothing, smart refrigerators, smart toilets and smart appliances. This is a tragic waste of time and money. Companies would be more innovative, more profitable and more successful if they would focus on the opposite idea: divergence.

Here's my response. This may get a little more theoretical than some of my posts.

The Black Box Fallacy

Mr. and Mrs. Ries see convergence primarily in technological terms - that is, the combination of different media functions within the same device. This is what I call the black box fallacy. To some degree, this kind of convergence is already taking place - have you tried to buy a cellphone recently that only made phonecalls and did not perform a range of other media functions? Our cellphones represent this technological notion of convergence gone wild and the last time I looked consumers were gobbling them up even if they didn't use those other media appliances very much if at all. The camera/phone, for example, has taken off in a way that the flying boat never did. It is now the digital equivalent of the Swiss Army Knife. At least some convergence devices do capture the market. But if we are waiting for all of the media technologies to merge into a single media appliance, we will be waiting for a very very long time.

Convergence is a Cultural Process

My book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide isn't terribly interested in convergence on a technological level. Rather, my focus is on convergence as a cultural process which involves the flow of stories, images, sounds, brands, relationships across the entire media system.

Here's what I write in the book's introduction:

Keep this in mind: Convergence refers to a process, but not an endpoint. There will be no single black box that controls the flow of media into our homes. Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the portability of new computing and telecommunications technologies, we are entering an era where media will be everywhere....Our cell phones are not simply telecommunications devices; they also allow us to play games, download information from the Internet, and take and send photographs or text messages. Increasingly they allow us to watch previews of new films, download installments of serialized novels, or attend concerts from remote locations. All of this is already happening in Northern Europe or Asia. Any of these functions can also be performed using other media appliances. You can listen to the Dixie Chicks through your DVD player, your car radio, your walkman, your computer's mp3 files, a web radio station, or a music cable channel....

In turn, media convergence impacts the way we consume media. A teenager doing homework may juggle four or five windows, scan the web, listen to and download MP3 files, chat with friends, word-process a paper, and respond to e-mail, shifting rapidly among tasks. And fans of a popular television series may sample dialogue, summarize episodes, debate subtexts, create original fan fiction, record their own soundtracks, make their own movies--and distribute all of this worldwide via the internet.

Convergence is taking place within the same appliances... within the same franchise... within the same company... within the brain of the consumer... and within the same fandom. Convergence involves both a change in the way media is produced and a change in the way media is consumed.

In such a world, all of the media systems are increasingly interconnected; we use them all in relationship to each other, whether or not the technologies are actually hardwired together. I doubt we are going to see a stable relationship between the technologies any time soon. I doubt we will live any longer in a world where various media can be understood as discrete and self-contained.

Convergence is an Ad Hoc Process

The notion of convergence which Al and Laura Reiss are critiquing would indeed require top-down coordination and systemic management of the technological infrastructure and would seemingly priviledge some relationships between devices over others. I share their skepticism that this kind of convergence is coming anytime soon. But we are already living in a convergence culture. A cultural model of convergence allows us to examine incremental, ad hoc, decentralized, unofficial, unauthorized and uncoordinated change. This model of convergence focuses on conflicting goals and expectations amongst different groups (commercial, amateur) involved in the circulation (legal, illegal) of media content. Technological convergence requires control, where-as convergence culture is out of control.

Convergence culture is occurring precisely because the public does not want a one-size-fits-all relationship to media content. Consumers want the media they want where they want it when they want it and in the format they want. On the technological level, this does indeed involve divergence between technologies; on an economic level, this may involve fragmentation of the market. On the cultural level, though, this desire for a divergence of technology works to spread media content across every possible delivery system and insures that there will be multiple points of entry to many of the most successful media franchises. The "couch potato" and the "internet junkie", in the Riess's comments above, will establish very different relationships to this content as they consume it on different terms and in different media, yet increasingly, they are both engaged with aspects of the same media franchise. (Both of these are fictional constructs, by the way, since nobody consumes simply one medium nor does anyone enjoy a purely passive or purely active relationship with media content.)

Technologies of Freedom

My book is inspired in part by the work of MIT Political Scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool's Technologies of Freedom (1983) for whom convergence and divergence are interrelated processes. Here's what he wrote more than two decades ago:

A process called the 'convergence of modes' is blurring the lines between media, even between point-to-point communications, such as the post, telephone and telegraph, and mass communications, such as the press, radio, and television. A single physical means--be it wires, cables or airwaves--may carry services that in the past were provided in separate ways. Conversely, a service that was provided in the past by any one medium--be it broadcasting, the press, or telephony--can now be provided in several different physical ways. So the one-to-one relationship that used to exist between a medium and its use is eroding.

Pool predicted a period of prolonged transition, during which the various media systems competed and collaborated, searching for the stability that would always elude them:

Convergence does not mean ultimate stability or unity. It operates as a constant force for unification but always in dynamic tension with change.... There is no immutable law of growing convergence; the process of change is more complicated than that.

We are still learning just how complicated the process of change really is as we watch agents at various levels respond to the shifts in the ways our culture operates.

More on Firefly and the Long Tail

With apologies to Steven Colbart, let's take this out of the realm of faith-based reasoning and resort to facts. Reader Reinier Zwitserloot estimates:

There are about 50,000 or so fans, and I'm being generous. Let's be very amicable and say each ep sells 150,000 times. That's 300,000 income.

I was skeptical that this estimate was accurate or gave a full picture of what we know about the Firefly audience, so I e-mailed a friend in the television industry to see whether he had access to more reliable numbers. So here's what he had on the dvd sales:

The Hollywood Reporter reported last July ("Wheedon flock ready for 'Firefly'

resurrection" by Anne Thompson, 22 July) that the DVD set of all 13 episodes had sold more than 200,000 copies. There is an unconfirmed number posted at WHEDONesque.com ("Firefly listed in top 1 DVD sets on FOX.com," thread started by Chris Bridges, 31 March 2006) from someone named "The Hey" that put the sales at 2.5 million on 1 April 2006 -- but that seems really high. I'd guess it's somewhere in the middle, with an uptick last summer/early fall ignited by SERENTITY's release.

So let's assume that the 2.5 million number is over the top (unless someone can show otherwise) but we can see that there were at least 200,000 copies of the DVD set sold prior to the films release.

Let's Do the Math

If we assume 200,000 purchasers as the bare minimum, then the episodes would have to go for $5 to recoup Reiner's estimated budget per episode, which seems steep for impulse purchases, but perhaps not that far off what you ended up paying per episode if you bought the boxed set for roughly $60.

That said, this is probably the most conservative possible reading of the numbers. Keep a few things in mind: these are the number of the copies of the entire set sold at a bulk price. We do not know what percentage of people rented those dvds from Netflix or a similar service. We don't know how many would have paid a smaller price to sample just one episode. We don't know what the impact of the film's release was on the sales or rentals of the dvds (we can bet that it did draw a number of people to the dvds who had not seen the episodes when they were aired. I'd bet most of us know people who followed that route). All of this could boast the numbers over the 200,000 number cited above and start to make what I am proposing look more like a winning proposition.

Now as we turn to statistics about the television audience, the potential market looks even larger. Here's what Nielsen says:

On average, across 11 weeks that the show aired on FOX, there were 2.7 million people 18-49 and 3.1 million heads of households that tuned in.

Of course, these folks were watching for free and we don't know how many of them would pay to access the episodes. These numbers are low in terms of ratings for a broadcast show -- but if you could turn them into paying customers, they would be very strong numbers for direct to dvd or download sales. A big IF, I know.

Now, Compare the Feature Film

Here's what we know about the feature film:

Budget for Serenity was $40 million (not including marketing costs). Domestic box office totaled $25.5 million after a $10 million opening weekend (30 September 2005). Foreign take was an additional $13.3 million.

We learn two things from this:

1) if we are right at estimating a per episode cost of 1 million, then the producers could have made 40 episodes, in theory, for what was spent on the feature film.

2) while these numbers are considered poor return on a feature film, getting that many people to spend a good deal less money to download an episode would be considered a major success.

In the course of researching this, I stumbled onto another author, Adam Sternbergh, at New York magazine, who has made a similar case for why Firefly might be a good candidate for direct to consumer production:

Let's say that Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly, wanted to bring the series back to air. (Though "back to air" is a TV phrase now as anachronistically quaint as "switching the dial.") Let's say he found a million Firefly fans online--and, trust me, they're not hiding--who were willing to pay, say, $39.99 each for a sixteen-episode season of Firefly. (Not an unreasonable price, given how many people pay about that amount for full seasons on DVD.) Suddenly, Joss Whedon's got roughly $40 million to play with--and he doesn't need a network. Or a time slot. Or advertisers. He can beam the damn shows right to your computer if he wants to.

None of this makes the production of a direct to dvd season of Firefly a sure thing but at this rate, you could have made a number of television episodes for the budget of the feature film.

Predictible Returns: What Disney Teaches Us

I introduced the idea of an advanced subscription from fans because this would allow the production company to move forward with confidence that there was at least a minimal market for what they were making. Keep in mind most media production decisions don't have anywhere near that level of guarantee of market success. They bet on their best guesses of what the audience is going to be.

That's why the Disney analogy is interesting. Disney doesn't have to sell subscriptions for its direct to the consumer sequels to The Lion King or The Jungle Book. These videos have a reliable consumer base which regularly pushes them into the top dvd sales or rentals upon release and keeps them there, more or less, until the new titles hit the market. These are in effect presold. They may not make as much money per pop as a theatrical release - but then they also don't cost anywhere near as much money. They are, however, far less hit or miss than the theatrical films which depend on generating interest around new and untested properties (and Disney's track record there has been pretty grim).

Pay Check to Pay Check

Liza raises a question about whether a show with Firefly's ensemble cast might work under this model. She writes:

I think the pre-pay, direct-to-DVD/ipod idea has merit, but could not be applied to the task of assembling nearly a dozen actors (rebuilding all the sets!) and ask them to work, essentially, paycheck to paycheck.

My first response was to ask whether Liza has any sense how many television actors right now are living paycheck to paycheck. By this logic, television shows would never get produced at all. Many recurring character actors - anyone who is not a series regular - probably gets hired on a check by check basis and is grateful for the relative stability a gig on a television series represents. While it is true that a long-standing series offers a decent degree of security for a performer, the reality is that any television show can be canceled on the whim of a top network executive. It's not like tv actors get tenure. That said, she is probably right that it might be hard to hold together an ensemble as large as Firefly had.

I would argue that from the point of view of the production company, my direct to consumer television idea might make more sense (especially when you add my ideas about selling subscriptions in advance to the most hardcore fans): the production company can make a reasonable decision about how many episodes it wants to produce based on iestimates of its likely audience and return on investment. Under the current system, the production company is essentially producing on spec and really only returns its costs once it goes into syndication or DVD packaging. Under this model, the production company starts to get returns from the moment the first product ships.

Is it a risk to go this way? No doubt - all the more so because no other television show has ever done this before. I suspect this option was never considered when Whedon was thinking about the fate of the series. Clearly, the decision would have rested with the studios involved -- not with Whedon. (Sorry to have personalized this discussion around Whedon in my first post. I didn't mean for this to come across as an attack on the guy.) I am sure Whedon wasn't offered any options forward other than the movie and I am certain under those circumstances, he was better off going with the movie. What I am suggesting here is a way to rewrite the rules of American television. It hasn't happened yet. It may happen some day.

What The Video iPod Adds

Catana notes, speaking about video iPod, that:

We forget how quickly new technologies change things that didn't seem feasible a very short time before. It was just a bit too early for any choice but Serenity. Alas.

He's certainly right that using the iPod as the distribution channel wasn't even a hypothetical option at the point Serenity was made but direct to dvd would in theory have been a model. Video iPod adds two factors to the mix: a stable infrastructure which allows per episode sales to consumers (my assumption is that hardcore fans would buy dvds and that this system will appeal most to casual consumers who want to taste the series) and a global distribution channel which allows you to quickly enter a world-wide market without carrying some of the costs of physically shipping your product. Both are significant advantages but direct to dvd production was possible when the decision was made to go with the feature film.

The Bottom Line

In some ways, Firefly would have been the best test case for this model - because of Whedon's reputation and hardcore fan base. In other ways, it would have been a bad test case for reasons readers have identified - the costs of an ensemble cast and of the special effects budget required for this particular series.

Would it have worked? We will never know.

Web Comics and Network Culture

I am participating in a very interesting conversation about digital storytelling, visual culture, and web 2.0 over at Morph, the blog of the Media Center, which describes itself as "a provocative, future-oriented, nonprofit think tank. In the dawning Digital Age, as media, technology and society converge at an accelerating pace in overlapping cycles of disruption, transition and change, and in all areas of human endeavor, The Media Center facilitates the process by gathering information and insights and conceiving context and meaning. We identify opportunity, provide narrative, stimulate new thinking and innovation, and agitate for dialog and action towards the creation of a better-informed society." The Media Center has asked a fairly diverse group of media makers and thinkers to participate in a "slow conversation" to be conducted over the next month or so about creativity in the new media age. So far, the most interesting post has come from Daniel Meadows, currently a lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales, about work he has done with the British Broadcasting System to get digital stories by everyday people onto the air. He provides links to a great array of amateur media projects. I haven't spent as much time following these links as I would like but it's a great snapshot of the work being done in digital storytelling.

What follows are some excerpts from my own first post in the exchange which uses webcomics to explore some of the ideas in Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, a book I referenced here the other day.

I have been reading a new book by Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which offers a pretty compelling account of the ways that the technological and social shifts wrought by the so-called digital revolution are generating new models of cultural expression and civic engagement. In the book's introduction, he writes:

These changes have increased the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations. These newly emerging practices have seen remarkable success in areas as diverse as software development and investigative reporting, avant-garde video and multiplayer online games. Together, they hint at the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century.

Benkler is describing a mediascape which is profoundly hybrid -- that is, communication occurs on multiple levels (some motivated by economic gain, some by a gift economy, some by a notion of reputation building or education or public service or civic engagement or fan appreciation). People create culture for many different reasons with different expectations in terms of rewards on their investment.

I am also reading alongside Benkler another new book, T. Campbell's A History of Web Comics, which describes the gradual emergence of the Web as a platform for graphic expression. At first, webcomics seemed largely fringe to the commercial mainstream of newspaper comic strips and printed comic books, a place for gifted amateurs and art school dropouts with much of the content focused on digital culture itself.

Scott McCloud's groundbreaking manifesto, Reinventing Comics (2000) made the case for the Web as an "expanded canvas" that might allow new modes of graphic expression, as a more open space for newcomers to prove their worth as artists, and as a technology which might broaden the potential public for comics by allowing writers and artists to explore themes that would never make it into mainstream publications.

All of this has proven true - at least to some degree. Today, webcomics thrive across many different communities. People are creating webcomics for very different reasons - some are trying to hone their skills, demonstrate market potential, or build a reputation before going pro. Some are moving into print once they've found their niche and others are choosing to remain digital despite offers from print-based publishers. Some have developed political communities around their web comics which take on a life of their own and, in some cases, overwhelm the comics themselves. Some have created virtual artists colonies where amateurs and commercial artists share work and give each other feedback. And a small number are generating at least modest revenues online through subscriptions, micropayments, or the sale of merchandise.

Campbell describes a moment early in the history of webcomics when Fred Gallagher, the co-creator of MegaTokyo, a man who thought he was doing amateur work on the way to turning pro, finds himself swamped at conventions by his intense fan following and realized "he had no control - no one had control -- over whether online readers labeled them 'professional,' 'amateur', 'true artist' or 'rock star.'"

The book similarly qoutes publisher Joey Manley's comments about Modern Tales, an important example of the "artist colony" model I referenced earlier: "We've got manga-styled werewolf/cop dramas butting heads (or, um, maybe some other body part) with Fancy Froglin, medieval fantasy side-by-side with 'straight' autobiography, space-opera-charged science fiction right next door to Borgesian metafiction. And we like it all (as do our thousands of subscribers.)"

Both of these comments suggest the instability which occurs when you bring together diverse kinds of media stakers working with different goals and interests for different communities but all available through the same communications platform...

These shifts in the nature of our media landscape have the potential to transform how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. Benkler writes,

They enable anyone, anywhere, to go through his or her practical life, observing the social environment through new eyes -- the eyes of someone who could actually interject a thought, a criticism, or a concern into the public debate. Individuals become less passive and thus more engaged observers of social spaces....The various formats of the networked public sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, without need to access the resources of a major media organization.

Benkler argues that the threat of fragmentation and babel on the Web has best been dealt with by harnessing the collective intelligence of Web communities -- through efforts at tagging, filtering, and blogging, which help us weigh the value of different contributions and direct them towards the most appropriate audience. At the same time, we are developing new modes of expression which do use images to encapsulate more complex bodies of knowledge.

There's more on this topic at Morph -- but I figured I'd port over the part that was most relevent to our focus here.

Do Snakes or Fireflies Have Longer Tails?

Reader Avner Ronen compares the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon with what happened to Serenity. He notes:

I'm looking forward to this movie as much as the next net.geek, but I don't expect as much of a box-office surprise as many seem to be anticipating, because I've seen it before.

What am I referring to? Serenity. It would be hard to beat the online buzz Serenity was getting, and sometimes it seems like it's difficult to find a blogger who isn't a fan of the prematurely cancelled series Firefly, but all of that buzz and a good deal of critical acclaim still couldn't get people into the theaters.

He may well be right - it is very easy living at the hub of digital culture to imagine that all of the buzz we are hearing is generalizable across the population as a whole. But let's look for a moment at what happened with Firefly/Serenity and then, I will try to explain why I think Snakes on a Plane is in a somewhat different situation.

Praise Be the Whedon

Let's be clear that I am a big fan of Firefly and of Joss Whedon's other work in television and in comics. I think he's one of the smartest and most creative people operating within the media industry today. He has enormous respect for his fans and he has earned our respect in return. He had constructed a television series he really believed in.

He was watching a very dedicated, very resourceful fan community form around a television series which either got canceled because a)the ratings were low and it was not seen as having a broad general appeal or b)the ratings were low because the network had not successfully targeted its most likely audiences and given it a chance to develop the word of mouth needed to expand its core viewership. We may never know which of these explanations is the correct one - I suspect some combination of the two.

Whedon still wanted to produce the content; there was a group of people clammering for the content; but the networks didn't think there's a large enough audience to sustain a prime time broadcast series. This is a situation we've seen again and again in the history of broadcast media. I think it's about time we rewrote the rules.

Serenity and the Long Tail

We are now in the space which Chris Anderson has documented so well in his discussion of the Long Tail. In Anderson's account, media properties can succeed by appealing to niche rather than mass audiences if you can lower costs of production, publicity, and distribution, keep the content on the market long enough for consumer interest to grow, and count on the most passionate consumers to help spread the word about your brand. By those criteria, Firefly should be as close to a natural for the Long Tail as anything produced for television so far and the brisk sales and rentals of the dvds of the original episodes illustrated that point pretty well.

But Whedon got greedy - or someone got greedy on his behalf - and Firefly moved the wrong direction up Anderson's Long Tail - towards a blockbuster Hollywood movie which would have required even more viewers to be seen as successful than would have been required to keep the series on the air on a second tier network. Yes, it was way cool to watch those characters up there on the big screen but Whedon set the bar much too high for the existing market for his property and we all paid a price for his hubris.

To make something that felt like a movie, he had to produce something that didn't feel like a television episode, creating a story that turned the world of the series upside down. Along the way, he killed off some of the most beloved characters and lost some of the elements which many of us liked about Firefly in the first place. At the same time, he compressed a season's worth of plot developments into two hours or so of screentime with the result that he produced a work that was confusing to many first time viewers and that lacked the gradual character development that was the hallmark of Firefly. I still liked a lot about the movie but what I didn't like was the fact that it would seem to have pretty much closed the door to further development in the Firefly franchise -- at least in the foreseeable future.

The Road Not Taken

Imagine, instead, that he had moved in the other direction down the tail, towards the production of television style episodes directly for dvd. I've discussed such a system in relation to Global Frequency (a show that suffered an even more premature death than Firefly -- canceled before it even reached the air). CMS graduate student Ivan Askwith has advocated the use of the video ipod as a distribution platform for essentially long tail television. We have seen fan groups advocating such an approach for recently canceled series such as The West Wing and Arrested Development.

From the perspective of a producer like Whedon, who has a strong and existing fan base, this should be a very attractive proposition - make as many episodes as you want in whatever story structure you want with no risk that a network will stand between you and your audience, start making money as soon as the first product ships rather than waiting for syndication to turn a profit.

What would make it even more attractive would be to create a subscription based model so that readers paid in advance for episodes they wanted to see and they knew more or less what the core market was before production started. This would be hard to arrange for a totally new property: easier for a canceled series or for a show by a brand-name creator like Whedon. I'd pay now to guarantee access to original content by Whedon, sight unseen, a year from now. So would most of the other brown coats, I would bet. And if he had gone that route, we would have been able to enjoy many more hours of quality science fiction/western action on television, where it belongs, instead of burning up the whole franchise in two hours of big screen excitement.

Yes, there are risks involved -- if for no other reason than because no television show has ever made this transition into direct to dvd production. We can point to the example of a growing number of Disney animated features which have generated direct to DVD sequels with a fair amount of success with their core market. But the risks involved would have been lower -- financially at least -- than trying to turn a failed television series into a Hollywood blockbuster. Whedon could have done it if anyone could and if he had, a lot of other television producers would have followed his example.

What About Snakes?

Serenity had one of the most committed fan bases in media history and they would have followed Whedon anywhere but they weren't enough on their own to make a success on the tall end of the Long Tail. They needed to draw in lots of non-fans of the franchise. We might imagine that non-fans were resistant to the film now for many of the same reasons that they were resistant to the original series and we can add one more factor: they were reluctant to jump onto a film they knew was based on a series that they hadn't seen because they were afraid they were going to be lost. Whedon worked hard to make the film accessible and we were told he was going to do so, but guess what, lots of folks didn't believe him.

So, if we follow the logic of the Long Tail, success on one end of the tail depends on deep commitments from a relatively narrow fan base (that's what Firefly had) and on the other end, on superficial commitments from a broader range of viewers (and that's what Snakes on a Plane has.) I doubt anyone really has the same level of passion for Snakes as they have for Firefly. It's a fun lark -- a one night stand, a vacation movie romance. But it isn't a once in a lifetime passion.

But that's okay. What's bad/good about the concept is something anyone can quickly grasp. You hear the title and you chuckle. You see the preview and you are hooked -- or not. You don't need to have seen another media product to consume this one. There's a star - Jackson - with some box office reputation - remember, Serenity had no stars except those who were in the television series. It's got some draw as a straight out peddle to the metal action film with a good leading actor and some appeal as the best example of camp and kitsch to hit the screen in some time. Those are good reasons to think the film will have a broader appeal than Serenity - even if, especially if, it is nowhere near as good a movie.

Whedon bet that his fan followers could tell the public to turn out at the multiplex to see his movie. The producers of Snakes have used the audience to tell them how to market this movie and then have applied the capacity of a major publicity campaign to amplify that approach towards the general audience.

Further Reflections on YouTube vs. RIAA

University of Chicago law professor Randy Picker was nice enough to pass along a link to what he has written - from a legal perspective - about the potential threat which the RIAA may pose to those folks who want to post lip-sync or karaoke songvids on YouTube:

For the music industry, this is a not-so-golden oldie and the conflict illustrates the persistent gap between actual law and the public's knowledge of that law and, frequently, perceptions of fairness. On these facts, far from being crazy or somehow a misuse of copyright, I think that music copyright holders have a straight-forward action against YouTube.... this is how we pay for music in the real world: different uses, different prices, and until we change the law and come up with a better way to pay for music, you should assume that the music industry is going to show up one day and knock on YouTube's door.

I don't pretend to be a lawyer so my views on the law should be taken with a grain of salt. I am pretty sure though that Picker is correct that the RIAA is almost certainly well within its legal rights to take action to shut down this use of its music via YouTube.

That said, I feel that we should be paying closer attention to that "persistent gap between actual law and the public's knowledge of that law and frequently, perceptions of fairness." True, ignorance of the law is no excuse but a democratic state should always be concerned if the gap between the law and the public's perception of fairness grows too great. (And I would suggest that gap is growing hourly at the present moment).

The current law regarding media use was written at a time when the freedom of the press was exercised primarily by those who could afford to own presses and was updated at a time when the key stakeholders at the table were thought to be broadcasters and other large media interests. It was never intended to function in a world where an ever-expanding number of amateur media makers are producing and circulating their work to a public. I would argue that our current law recognizes the rights of professionals fairly well - though clearly even here, it is having trouble keeping up during a moment of media in transition. As an academic, I know how much of a written text I can quote within scholarly commentary and fall within a Fair Use defense; I also have a pretty good sense as a journalist what constitutes legitimate quotation. Yet, as we turn to fans and bloggers and others within this expanding participatory culture, the lines become much less clear.

It is pretty clear that whatever systems of clearance that got set up to deal with commercial musicians and radio stations or even, to use Picker's example, singing waiters is not going to be adequate to deal with those high school guys in China who appeared in one of the more famous example of lip syncing videos. For one thing, the pricing for public performances is almost certainly beyond their capacity to pay and so they are going to be permanently locked out of being able to respond to a central element of their cultural environment. For another, it's hard to imagine a system which could accommodate requests every time one of us wanted to pre-register to perform "Happy Birthday", say, for our 5 year old's birthday party - as I am sure that the law clearly states we should do. Again, we are producing media on a scale rather different from even what was imagined in the most recent revisions of the copyright act. And for a third, did I mention those guys were from China and operate under a totally different copyright regime?

That's where we get to the second stage of this problem: a system of distribution like YouTube pushes grassroots creative expression to a level of visibility well beyond that received by any previous form of folk culture. The media industries could tolerate us lip syncing their songs at the local Lions Club meeting or as part of the school talent show because it did not reach a large enough public to demand their attention and concern. Enforcement would have been difficult and the damages caused by those public performances would have been so minimal that nobody would have taken the time to go after them. True, school drama clubs used to pay some small amount in licensing fees to the rights holders of plays like Harvey and Guys and Dolls, but there were many many everyday performances, even public performances, which would have been off the radar of the commercial rights holders.

But the same performance posted to YouTube can be seen by millions of people and in some well publicized cases, has led to commercial performances on television, even contracts for use in television advertising. The reach of YouTube breaks down the line between professional and amateur performance in a way which is going to force the recording industry to respond.

And that's the paradox of the present moment: you have amateurs reaching mass audiences without the means (or the legal representation) held by the media companies which previously were the only ones who could reach this scale of public.

It's not sufficient to simply tell us "this is the law." We need to work together to try to change the law into something that makes sense in relation to this emerging and expanding participatory culture.

That said, my key point in the original post was not that the RIAA would be exceeding its legal rights in going after such videos. Picker is correct to suggest that this would be a logical and clear cut extension of long-standing legal practice. Rather, my point was that attacking these amateurs would be going against the recording industry's own public and economic interests. Here I am thinking about a statement which the anthropologist and industry consultant Grant McCracken makes in his book, Plentitude:

Corporations will allow the public to participate in the construction and representation of its creations or they will, eventually, compromise the commercial value of their properties. The new consumer will help create value or they will refuse it....Corporations have a right to keep copyright but they have an interest in releasing it. The economics of scarcity may dictate the first. The economics of plentitude dictate the second.

Right now, the recording industry, more than any other entertainment sector, wants to fall back on an assertion of its legal claims over intellectual property -- trying to throw every legal and technological obstacle it can toss into the path of change. In doing so, they simply further erode public support and respect for their industry. They probably have the legal rights to do it: I wish they had the economic and cultural sense not to do so.

Thanks, Randy, for a very interesting post. I don't mean to be picking on what you wrote. I essentially agree with you on the legal argument but I hate to leave the entire future of our culture in the hands of lawyers (no personal insult intended). We have to fight a two front battle here: help to rewrite copyright law to respect the new realities of the media landscape and help to convince media companies that it is in their best interest to build a more collaborative relationship with their consumers.

Fun vs. Engagement: The Case of the Great Zoombinis

Scott Osterweil came to work with the Comparative Media Studies program a little less than a year ago as the head designer for the work we are doing through the Education Arcade -- primarily focusing on a collaboration we are doing with Maryland Public Television called Learning Games to Go. The Learning Games to Go project will develop handheld and mobile games to help young children master basic math and literacy skills. We were very lucky to get Osterweil to work on this project, since he is an experienced games professional, best known for his work on Logical Journey of the Zoombinis and its sequels. The Zoombinis games came out some years back but still crops up regularly when we ask teachers to identify examples of great educational games.

Osterweil is interviewed for the first of a series of podcasts about the project, which just went up this week.

He addresses throughout the interview what has become one of the most vexing problems in terms of convincing teachers and parents that games can be learning activities -- the fact that games are often, on purpose, fun.

I often have teachers, generally of an "older generation," tell me that it is a bad idea to try to make learning fun because most of the rest of our lives is work and work isn't supposed to be fun. (Such comments make me wonder how these people feel about their jobs but that's another matter). I usually respond that they have little to worry about. If being able to deal with prolonged periods of boredom is a necessary job skill for the future, then our current educational system may be doing a better job preparing kids for their adult lives than most of us imagine.

Scott offers a somewhat more tactful answer here:

When children are deep at play they engage with the fierce, intense attention that we'd like to see them apply to their schoolwork. Interestingly enough, no matter how intent and focused a child is at that play, maybe even grimly determined they may be at that game play, if you asked them afterwards, they will say that they were having fun. So, the fun of game play is not non-stop mirth but rather the fun of engaging of attention that demands a lot of you and rewards that effort. I think most good teachers believe that in the best moments classroom learning can be the same kind of fun. But a game is a moment when the kid gets to have that in spades, when the kid gets to be focused and intent and hardworking and having fun at the same time.

You will note here a shift in emphasis from fun (which in our sometimes still puritanical culture gets defined as the opposite of seriousness) to engagement. We think this is an important distinction. When you play a game, a fair amount of what you end up doing isn't especially fun at the moment. It can be grindwork, not unlike homework, which allows you to master skills or collect materials or put things in their proper place in anticipation of a payoff down the line. The key is that this activity is deeply motivated. You are willing to go through the grindwork because it has a goal or purpose which matters to you. When that happens, you are engaged -- whether we are talking about the engagement many of us find in our professional lives or in the learning process or the engagement which some of us find through playing games. For the current generation, games may represent the best way of tapping that sense of engagement with learning.

As the podcast continues, Osterweil describes how this principle of engagement informed his own design work on the Zoobinis project:

What we did when we started designing Zoobinis was to try to think about our own experience with the mathematics of the game and try to access our own learning of it -- trying to remember what it was like to encounter the subject in school or thinking about how we'd use the subject in our daily lives and try to identify times when we had been playful with the concepts in the past. In fact, most of us when we are trying to master something we find ways to be playful to it and in accessing our own playful approach to the material what we were really doing was finding the game that was inherent in the mathamatics. Instead of putting math in the game, we tried to find the game in the math.

Note here that play re-emerges as part of the ways we noodle with new concepts -- a form of informal, experimental, experiential learning that can sometimes precede formal classroom instructions. I often imagine the teacher coming into class to review the previous night's game play: "Think about level 7. How did you beat it? What was hard about it? Why was it difficult? What tricks did you use to get over it? Here's what you were doing" and then scratching out the formulas on the blackboard. "Now go back and try that level again and see if it gets easier." We see educational games as closely integrated into a more elaborate instructional process. We certainly can learn things by playing games -- and we can learn things independently on our own. Many of us would say that the most important stuff we learned growing up took place outside the classroom. But, we think that learning through games is going to be most powerful when we encounter the content on multiple levels and where informal and formal learning intersect.

Osterweil has a great deal more to say about the thinking which went into making the Zoombinis game such a great success.

YouTube vs. The RIAA

This is another in a series of posts highlighting trends which threaten our rights to participate in our culture. According to a report published in the Boston Phoenix this week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) may soon take aim at the amateur lip syncing and Karaoke videos which circulate on YouTube. Spokespeople from the RIAA, which has never been slow to assert the broadest possible claims on intellectual property, have so far not confirmed the claims that they will be using their power to force YouTube to take down such videos.

Participatory Culture's Most Powerful Distribution System

YouTube represents perhaps the most powerful distribution channel so far for amateur media content. More than 6 million visitors watch a total of 40 million clips per day and upload another 50,000 more, according to the Phoenix. Some of that traffic is no doubt generated by content grabbed from commercial media -- including a fair number of commercials which are virally circulated, music videos and segments from late night comedy shows, strange clips from reality television, and the like. But a good deal of the content is user generated and this content is generating wide interest.

Many people will have seen the footage of the guy who went a little extreme with his Christmas tree lights last year or, in regards to this current issue, some of the videos of pasty-faced and overweight people singing off key versions of their favorite pop songs -- often with demonstrably limited comprehension of the lyrics. Many of us had argued that earlier file-sharing services such as Napster provided an infrastructure for garage bands and the like to get their music into broader circulation but there, the illegal content swamped the legal and made it hard to support this case. With YouTube, there is no question that some of the most interesting content comes from grassroots creators. Via YouTube, what were once home movies are finding a public -- some coming to appreciate real creativity, some there to gawk.

Mixed Signals from Media Industries

The various media industries are struggling to figure out how to manage this service, which clearly yields them benefits in terms of increased audience awareness and interest in their content. The early circulation of a particular Saturday Night Live sketch ("Lazy Sunday") has helped to put YouTube on the map and has helped to increase ratings for the series. There was something funny on Saturday Night Live -- who knew? Many of us saw Stephen Colbert's appearance at the Washington Press Club dinner via YouTube. I suspect it was the only C-Span content a lot of young people had watched in a long time. In both cases, the rights holders -- NBC and C-Span respectively -- had the content removed.

More recently, a friend sent me to the site to see previews for some of the forthcoming Fall television series but by the time I got there, in some cases, the networks had them yanked. It's hard to imagine anything more bone-headed than to shut down grassroots efforts to sell your own products -- whatever else you think about the intellectual property issues in circulating actual program segments.

A few companies -- most notably the MTV Networks (full disclosure -- a sponsor of C3) -- have taken a more enlightened policy towards YouTube -- no doubt because a sizable chunk of young males spend more time these days surfing the web than zapping across cable. Taking advantage of YouTube as a source of viral marketing means letting go some of the control that the networks believe they have over what happens to their content: for some of the broadcasters, this loss of control has been hard to accept (and is complicated in the case of cable networks by expectations of their affiliates that they will be the exclusive source for program content).

We're Singing Their Songs!

Now, the RIAA, the most hated name in the entertainment industry, may be entering this picture and if history is any indication, they are likely to play rough. But they need to pull back and think more carefully about whether this kind of scorched earth policy is really the best approach to the challenges they are confronting.

After all, if their performing artists can't compete with some of the off-key, language-impaired performances in these videos, then nothing else they do is going to get any of us to buy their records anyway. It seems far more likely that these videos will drive us towards the professional performances, reminding us of songs we may have otherwise forgotten.

The RIAA is acting on the assumption that these amateur performances may be depreciating the value of their intellectual property. But these fans appreciate the original music in a double sense -- first, they want to show the world how much they like it and second, they increase the potential value of the music by heightening public awareness. Their emotional investments in the songs yield potential dividends for the rights holders. Media industries usually benefit when their content becomes a living part of our culture -- if nothing else, it extends the shelf life.

But then, technically, we are supposed to pay the record industry money every time we sing Happy Birthday to someone so it is no surprise that they take a dim view on amateurs playing rough with their precious lyrics or mouthing off to their songs.

As journalism professor John Battelle posts in his blog about this issue, "Good f'ing lord, RIAA. Wake up. This is how we use music in the real world. Get over yourselves."

Amen, Brother Battelle, Amen.

Thanks to Margaret Weigel for alerting me about this issue.

Brain Dump: Games as Branded Entertainment

Here are some stray tidbits which came across my desk in the past week or so which warrant your attention: Games as Lifestyle Brands

David Edery, who is one of the smartest observers of the business side of the games industry (I should know -- he works in the CMS program with me as our key corporate relations person), published an article this week in Next Generation \which explores whether game companies can join the ranks of so-called "lifestyle brands," such as Harley-Davidson or Apple -- that is, brands which transcend individual products and seem to embody a particular taste or philosophy. His examples were EA Sports and RedOctane/Harmonix in the music game sector. We might add Maxis as a company which people associate with intelligent simulation style games. To put this in context, though, a recent industry study found that only 2 percent of gamers consciously consider the publisher or developer in deciding to purchase a particular title.

For another take on this issue, read CMS graduate student Sam Ford over at the Convergence Culture Consortium (c3) blog.

Avatar-Based Marketing

Paul Hemp has a fascinating new article in the Harvard Business Review which explores what it would mean to try to sell brands and products not to consumers but to their avatars. He explains, "Advertising has always targeted a powerful consumer alter ego: that hip, attractive, incredibly popular person just waiting to emerge (with the help of the advertised product) from an all-too-normal self. Now that, in virtual worlds, consumers are taking the initiative and adopting alter egos that are anything but under wraps, marketers can segment, reach, and influence them directly." What might it mean to read an avatar as embodying consumer fantasies and in game experience as a kind of aspirational consumption -- trying out brands, lifestyles, products which consumers might aspire to consume some day in the real world? Paul Hemp presented these ideas in an earlier form at a closed door event we hosted for the sponsors of the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3).

Lost's Alternate Reality Game

Jason Mittell, who participates as an academic advisor to the C3 consortium, has an interesting article this week in Flow about Lost and the alternate reality game which it is running this summer. Lost has sought to extend the experience of the series through an experiment this summer in transmedia storytelling -- creating an online game which reveals more about the evils of the Hanso Foundation. Mittell discusses the contradictory demands of fans (for more series specific information), advertisers (for compelling product placements), gamers (for challenging puzzles), and the networks (to insure that nothing here is so essential to the series that it confuses regular viewers when they return to the aired episodes in the fall).

For those of you who don't know Flow, you should. It's an interesting experiment in media criticism being run out of the University of Texas-Austin: every two weeks, they produce a webzine with a handful of smart, provocative essays by some of the world's leading media scholars addressing themes in contemporary television and new media. For those of you who don't know about alternative reality games, you might also want to check out this column I published in Technology Review a while back.

The Snakes on A Plane Phenomenon

I am watching with great interest the growing hubbub about the new suspense/disaster film, Snakes on a Plane, scheduled for release later this summer and expected by many to yield some of the strongest opening weekend grosses of the season. In many ways, we can see the ever expanding cult following of this predictably awful movie as an example of the new power audiences are exerting over entertainment content. Here's what I think is going on here:

Enter the Grassroots Intermediaries

First, the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon has been building momentum for well over a year now. In the old days, the public would never have known about a film this far out of the gate. They might have learned about it when the previews hit the theatre -- a phenomenon which itself is occurring earlier and earlier in the production cycle -- or even given the fairly low-brow aspirations of this particular title -- when the film actually hit the theatre. In the old days, this would have been an exploitation movie of the kind that Roger Corman used to crank out in the 1950s and 1960s and destined to play on the second bill at the local drive-in. The goal would be to use a easily exploitable concept, a vivid poster and advertising campaign to generate heat quickly: then get into town and out again before anyone knew what hit them.

But, these days, grassroots intermediaries such as Ain't It Cool News are feeding the public's interest for inside information, starting to generate buzz almost from the moment rights are purchased or stars cast for a forthcoming production. Much as day traders have used the online world to become much more aware of every tick and twitch of the Fortune 500, the movie fans are ever attentive to anything which might impact a film's performance at the box office.

Alerting the public to a film so far in advance is a high risk matter for the movie producers -- since people can form strong opinions based on leaked photos or footage on such sites and those first impressions can be hard to shake. (There was a reason why Corman wanted to get into and out of town quickly.) With Snakes on a Plane, the early fan response suggested that the whole concept was a really big hoot -- this was going to be one of these films which is so bad that it is good.

Trash Film Aesthetics: From Niche to Mainstream

Think about that for a moment. The celebration of trash cinema used to be itself a niche audience taste. But over the past decade or two, this niche consumption practice has become progressively more widespread. Cable programs like Mystery Science Theater 3000 helped to introduce the pleasure of razzing a really bad movie to the masses. And so, we can now anticipate that a high percentage of the youth market and beyond will turn up just to throw rotten tomatoes at the screen and laugh about the whole premise.

Fan-Made Media

More than that, the film's fans (if you can call them that) started producing their own movie trailers and music videos; they've created all kinds of bad art -- like this or this or this. Check out this site, Snakes on a Blog, which documents the wild world of fan appropriations surrounding this film. This also reflects the growing ability of media consumers to archive, appropriate, and recirculate media content. These fans are using a wide variety of tools and distribution channels -- including both Flickr and YouTube. What's striking about the present moment is how easily such materials can attach themselves to a major -- or in this case, minor -- media property and get widespread attention. In fact, the fan response keeps generating news coverage for the film -- Entertainment Weekly in particular seems to have a Snakes on a Plane story every few issue.

Hollywood Listens to Its Consumers

But that's not all. In this case, you had a production company which was monitoring the fan response and like a real leader, figured out where the crowd was going and ran out in front, shouting follow me. You could imagine a film getting this kind of public drubbing and having the producer decide that the safest option was to pull it from theatrical distribution and send it direct to video.

In fact, though, the producers listened closely enough to hear the affection underneath the raspberries and realized that the audience was actually looking forward to going out to the theatres and see this turkey. It's hard to tell now whether the film was going to be marketed as camp all along -- somehow I doubt it -- but everyone's busy mythologizing the choice. Samuel L. Jackson is reputed to have insisted that the film keep its over-the-top title: "What are you doing here? It's not Gone with the Wind. It's not On the Waterfront. It's Snakes on a Plane!". The producers reportedly went back and reshot some scenes to include really bad dialogue proposed by fans. The new previews really play up the absurdity and improbability of the core premise -- and when I saw the preview at a theatre in Boston the other week, the audiences cheered and clapped like there was no tomorrow. And I have never seen a official site which so aggressively played up fan response to a film which is still sight unseen by its potential audience.

So, if the film really strikes it big at the box office, we can see this as a powerful illustration of what happens when fans take charge of the promotion of a major Hollywood release.

MySpace and the Participation Gap

Everyone seems to agree that we live in a era of participatory culture. Few people agree on what should be the terms of participation. From time to time, I will direct attention towards challenges and obstacles to the public's right to participate. More often than not, these debates center on young people and their access to media. Young people are the shock troops in the digital revolution -- early adopters and adapters of technology in their constant search for a room of their own in a culture where adults get to define all of the rules.

DOPA

The latest battle in the ongoing struggle over young people's access to and participation within digital cultures is HR 5319, better known as the Deleting Predators On-Line Act (or Dopa). Essentially, this proposed legislation would require any school or library which receives federal funds to ban a range of social networking software, including most notably MySpace, but also potentially including Live Journal and blogging software. This legislation has emerged in response to media coverage of a range of social problems which critics associate with MySpace, including concerns about the threat posed to young people by adults on the prowl for underage victims.

My former student, danah boyd, has been researching MySpace and the other social network sites. She's become a go-to gal with the media on MySpace issues and a sharp critic of the proposed legislation. Recently, the two of us got together for a joint interview about DOPA and MySpace more generally.

My own concerns about DOPA center around two key factors:

The Participation Gap

First, if passed, the legislation would further exaggerate the gaps in social experiences between kids who have a high degree of access to new media technologies at home and those who do not. Throughout the 1990s, there was a great deal of discussion about the so-called Digital Divide which was understood as a gap in access to new media technologies. Concerted efforts were made by those who saw digital resources as valuable to wire every classroom in America and to get networked computers into public libraries. Yet, as the dust has settled, we are realizing that the problem is only partially technical. There's a huge gap between what you can do when you've got unlimited access to broadband in your home and what you can do when your only access is through the public library, where there are often time limits on how long you can work, when there are already federally mandated filters blocking access to certain sites, when there are limits on your ability to store and upload material, and so forth. We call this the participation gap and if passed, this new law will only leave lower income Americans further behind in their ability to participate in the defining experiences of their generation.

The Worth of Networks

All of this would matter less if it wasn't for the second issue -- the ability to operate within social networks is a core skill which we should be cultivating in all young Americans. Increasingly, our professional lives are shaped by large-scale collaborations within knowledge communities. Yet, schools tend to be invested in training autonomous learners. Students, by and large, are acquiring networking skills on their own, outside school hours, through their involvement with MySpace or fan discussion lists or game guilds. In a hunting-based society, kids played with bows and arrows. In a networked society, they play with information and online communities.

Around the country, some teachers are already incorporating social network sites and blogs into their teaching practices. They are using them to connect kids with others who live in very different circumstances or who have specific expertise relevant to a particular assignment. They are using them to generate data which can be used in math or social studies classes.

But if this law is passed, it will make it much harder for these teachers to do their job in preparing students for their future digital lives. True, the law allows exemptions for recognized educational purposes but it creates some strong barriers for teachers to overcome before they can pursue such projects. Having dignified the fear that MySpace is a "Big Bad Evil" through federal legislation, they will face increased public pressure not to take Little Mary or Johnny into their horrible place.

Are We Really Protecting Kids Here?

To be sure, there are some real risks involved in letting young people enter into social networks without some degree of adult guidance -- issues of privacy and cyberbullying for example. And yes, there are some predators there -- though right now, these sites are being heavily policed. We do encourage parents and teachers to discuss responsible and appropriate ways of interacting in virtual worlds and give periodic reminders that while the world may be virtual, the people they are interacting with are real people with real feelings. We do not advocate parents spying on their kids; we do advocate adults communicating with their children about their values, expectations, and norms as they relate to these emerging digital environments.

You would think that if MySpace were as dangerous as critics claim, there would be a stronger effort made to educate young people about the safe and responsible use of social network software, much as earlier generations of educators taught kids what to do if a stranger calls on the phone when their parents are not there. Instead, the law would leave kids to confront these challenges on their own, outside of adult supervision, and off of school grounds.

Our position is in favor of education and against regulation.

For a short interview segment with me talking about these issues, see Beet TV.

Networked Publics Group Tackles Participatory Culture

The Networked Public group at USC's Annenberg Center recently posted a fascinating new essay on participatory culture, written by Adrienne Russell, Mimi Ito, Todd Richmond, and Marc Tuters. The group has been conducting conversations with leading thinkers about contemporary media and is now putting its collective heads together to jointly author a new book for the MIT Press. I was lucky enough to be included in the process, having an animated two hour conversation with them after they had read an advanced copy of Convergence Culture.

I was pleased to see that they had taken some of my insights to heart, expanding and enlarging on some of my book's arguments about participatory culture and linking it in productive ways with ideas from Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Convergence and Media Change

Here's what they have to say in the essay's conclusion:

"Convergence culture is not only a matter of industry and technology but also more importantly a matter of norms, common culture, and the artistry of everyday life. Professional commercial media brought us a slick common culture that has become a fact of life, the language of current events, shared cultural reference, and visual recognitions that lubricate our everyday interactions with one another. Commercial media, for better and for worse provide much of the source material for our modern language of communication. The current moment is perhaps less about overthrow of this established modality of common culture, but more a plea for recognition of a new layer of communication and cultural sharing. At best, this is about folk, amateur, niche and non-market communities of cultural production mobilizing, critiquing, remixing commercial media and functioning as a test bed for radically new cultural forms. At worst, this is about the fragmenting of common culture or the decay of shared standards of quality, professionalism, and accountability. The history of networked public culture has opened with a narrative of convergence and participatory culture; we lie at the crossroads of multiple unfolding trajectories."

The group describes our present moment as one where both grassroots and commercial interests are adjusting to some profound shifts in the relationship between media production and consumption brought about by the rise of networked media. The new media landscape, they argue drawing on Benkler, is characterized by a proliferation of different groups (some grassroots and amateur, some civic or public funded or educational, some commercial) which are producing and distributing content and by new kinds of social communities which are emerging to produce, evaluate, and discuss new forms of culture and new forms of knowledge. The era when commercial media dominated the marketplace of ideas is ending -- even if the mass media continues to exert a disproportionate claim on our collective attention. The commercial industry is reacting with great anxiety and often limited foresight, trying to shut down many of the opportunities which are emerging as the public exerts a greater control over the circulation and production of media. Yet, they are being forced to give ground again and again as fan communities are beginning to operate as collective bargaining units. Those interests which can not adjust to the changes become increasingly imperiled.

Transforming the Music Industry

At the heart, the essay outlines a series of compelling case studies of the interface between commercial and public culture -- including discussions of how amateur music is being reshaped by new technologies of production and distribution, how anime fans are partnering with Asian media interests to get their desired content into the market, how Madison Avenue is learning -- mostly by making mistakes -- ways to tap viral marketing, and how the journalistic establishment is struggling to adjust to the competition and critique offered by the blogosphere.

For my money, the discussion of amateur music production was perhaps the most interesting, if only because it is the area that I know the least about going in. The authors argue that "music has always been a domain of robust amateur production, making it particularly amenable to more bottom-up forms of production and distribution in the digital ecology, and ripe for the disintermediation of labels and licensors....As late as 2001 the prevailing wisdom described local/amateur music being considered by fans, scholars, and musicians alike as 'something to get beyond.' In other words, the end game for the artist was still 'getting signed' and following the traditional industry model, with the time-honored decision-making chain. However as the lines further blur, remix becomes embedded into the culture (even beyond music), and technological changes continue to occur, it would appear that perhaps "getting beyond" might no longer be the goal."

The Saga of the Legendary K.O.

Reading this passage, I was reminded of recent news about how the hip hop community in Houston was using web distribution of music to respond to the aftermath of Katrina. The Legendary K.O., a little known Houston based group, used their music to express what they were hearing from the refuges that were pouring into their city. Randle lives near the Astrodome and Nickerson works at the Houston Convention center. Both found themselves listening to refuges tell their stories: "Not till you see these people face to face and talk to them can you appreciate the level of hopelessness. The one common feeling was that they felt abandoned, on their own little island." They found their refrain while watching Kanye West accuse Bush of being indifferent to black Americans during a Red Cross Telethon being broadcast live on NBC. The juxtaposition of West's anger and comedian Mike Myer's shock encapsulated the very different ways Americans understood what happened.

The Legendary K.O. sampled West's hit song, "Golddigger," to provide the soundtrack for their passionate account of what it was like to be a black man trying to make do in the deserted streets of New Orleans. They distributed the song, "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" as a free download and it spread like wildfire. The song has been perhaps the most powerful demonstration to date of Chuck D's prediction that free downloads could turn hip hop into "the black man's CNN," offering an alternative perspective to mainstream news coverage and thus enabling communication between geographically dispersed corners of the Black America. Within a few weeks time, the song had in effect gone platinum, achieving more than a million downloads, largely on the back of promotion by bloggers. And soon, people around the world were appropriating and recontextualizing news footage to create their own music videos. The song may have started in Houston, framed around both local knowledge and national media representations, but where it was going to end up was anybody's guess. They have since used their reputations to produce more songs which speak to topical concerns, especially those facing the black communities of Houston and New Orleans.

The Legend of Grizzly Bear

I was also reminded of the story of Grizzly Bear, one of the young artists which my student, Vanessa Bertozzi interviewed for a project we were doing together. Grizzly Bear created music in his own bedroom, making imaginative use of found objects, and deploying low-cost but highly effective digital tools to record and manipulate the sound. He tapped local networks to get his music out into the world via mp3 files and into the hands of a record company executive. He ended up getting a contract without ever having performed in public and then faced the challenge of putting together a band to go on the road and perform in public.

I suspect we will be hearing many more stories about groups like The Legendary K.O. and performers like Grizzly Bear in the years to come -- more groups coming from nowhere and exerting some influence on our culture. As these two examples suggest, sometimes these artists are going to be making and distributing music -- and building up a loyal fan base -- almost entirely outside the commercial sphere and beyond the control of record labels. In other cases, they are going to find labels to be effective allies in getting their sounds before a larger public. It is the hybrid nature of this new communications landscape which is central to Convergence Culture and to the Networked Public group's essay.

Ode to Robot Chicken

I recently had a chance to catch up with the first season DVD of The Cartoon Network's Robot Chicken series and found it an interesting illustration of some of the trends I discuss in Convergence Culture. For those of you not in the know, Robot Chicken is a fifteen minute long, fast-paced and tightly-edited, stop motion animation series, produced by Seth Green (formerly of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Austin Powers) and Matthew Senreich: think of it as a sketch comedy series where all of the parts of played by action figures. The show spoofs popular culture - vintage and contemporary - mixing and matching characters with the same reckless abandon as a kid playing on the floor with his favorite collectibles.

For example, the first episode I ever saw included a Real World: Metropolis segment where Superman, Aquaman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Cat Woman, the Hulk, and other superheroes share an apartment and deal with real life issues, such as struggles for access to the bathroom or conflicts about who is going to do household chores. The same episode also included an outrageous parody of Kill Bill, in which Jesus does battle with the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and George Burns (as God). And a spoof of American Idol where the contestants are zombies of dead rock stars and the judges are breakfast cereal icons - Frankenberry (as Randy), Booberry (as Paula) and Count Chocula (as Simon).

The humor is sometimes sophomoric (in the best and worst senses of the word) - lots of jokes about masturbation, farting, vomiting, and random violence - an entire "nutcracker suite" sequence consists of nothing but various characters getting hit or kicked in the groin. Yet, at its best, it manages to force us to look at the familiar icons of popular culture from a fresh perspective: one of my favorite segments features a series of breakfast cereal icons (Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam, Captain Crunch, The Trix Rabbit, and the Lucky Charms Leprechaun) as forming an international drug cartel smuggling "sugar" into the country. Many of the sketches depend on the juxtaposition of toys remembered fondly from childhood with adult realities (such as a segment which restages the violent murders of S7even within the Smurf kingdom): it has all of the transgressive appeal of cross-dressing a G.I. doll or staging a ritual hanging of Barney the Dinosaur, speaking to a generation which has only partially outgrown its childhood obsessions.

Action Figure Cinema as Fan Practice

In Convergence Culture, I described the ways that the ancillary products surrounding Star Wars were being redeployed by amateur filmmakers who wanted to pay tribute or spoof the original film franchise:

"The amateur filmmakers often make use of commercially available costumes and props, sample music from the soundtrack album and sounds of Star Wars videos or computer games, and draw advice on special effects techniques from television documentaries and mass market magazines... The availability of these various ancillary products has encouraged these filmmakers, since childhood, to construct their own fantasies within the Star Wars universe....The action figures provided this generation with some of their earliest avatars, encouraging them to assume the role of a Jedi Knight or an intergalactic bounty hunter, enabling them to physically manipulate the characters in order to construct their own stories. Not surprisingly, a significant number of filmmakers in their late teens and early twenties have turned toward those action figures as resources for their first production efforts." For many of us, these action figures introduce us to the idea of participatory culture, creating a space where we can rewrite the narratives of popular television and where we can immerse ourselves in vast fictional universe. For some kids, the goal is to lovingly recreate the worlds of their favorite fictions with as much accuracy and plausibility as possible. For others, the goal is to subvert -- do rude things with characters from television, turning Skeletor into a good guy, criss-crossing program boundaries at will.

I go on to discuss the works of amateur filmmaker Evan Mather: "Mather's films, such as Godzilla Versus Disco Lando, Kung Fu Kenobi's Big Adventure, and Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars, represent a no-holds-barred romp through contemporary popular culture. The rock-'em sock-'em action of Kung Fu Kenobi's Big Adventure takes place against the backdrop of settings sampled from the film, drawn by hand, or built from LEGO blocks, with the eclectic and evocative soundtrack borrowed from Neil Diamond, Mission Impossible, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and A Charlie Brown Christmas...Apart from their anarchic humor and rapid-fire pace, Mather's films stand out because of their visual sophistication. Mather's own frenetic style has become increasingly distinguished across the body of his works, constantly experimenting with different forms of animation, flashing or masked images, and dynamic camera movements."

Action figure cinema is an emblematic example of the capacity of grassroots media makers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content. Fan filmmakers essentially take toys that were sold to them as commodities and transforming them into resources for their own creative output. Action figure cinema makes a virtue of the technical limits of amateur filmmaking. The movies are intentionally crudely done -- everyone is supposed to recognize that the sets are built from Lego blocks and the roles are performed by molded plastic figurines.

Mass Media Absorbs and Amplifies Grassroots Creative Practices

Action figure cinema was quickly absorbed by commercial media-makers. We see a similar blend of low tech production and pop culture references in MTV's Celebrity Death Match and Nickelodeon's Action League Now!!! series, both of which used stop motion animation and in the case of Nickelodeon, actual action figures, to parody icons of contemporary popular culture. If amateur filmmakers parody and remix popular culture, commercial media engages in "cool hunting," monitoring their local innovations and pulls back into the mainstream those that they think may have a broader market appeal. And then the process begins all over again. Innovation is most likely to occur on the fan fringes where the stakes are low; the power of mass media comes through its capacity for amplification.

We can trace this process at play within the history of Robot Chicken. As the show's head writers Douglas Goldstein and Tom Root explain, the series originated as part of a regular feature in Toy Fare, a niche magazine which targets action figure collectors and model builders. Seth Green, a fan of the publication, asked Goldstein and Root to help him put together a special animated segment for Green's forthcoming appearance on Conan O'Brien's show, which, in turn, led to an invitation to produce a series of web toons for Sony's short-lived but highly influential Screenblast, which, in turn, led to an invitation to produce a television series as part of the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup. We can thus trace step by step how this concept moves from the fan subculture across a range of sites noted for cult media content.

As the aesthetics of action figure cinema moves more mainstream, the media producers never-the-less want to maintain some of the grassroots authenticity which gave the approach its initial edge. Many of the earliest web cartoons (see the shows at Mondo for example), specifically spoofed the content of television and cinema - trying to establish themselves as closer to the viewer than the mass media (even when, or especially when, the content was actually produced by companies like Sony which were themselves part of the so-called "mainstream media.") In fact, almost every journalistic account I've read of the series stresses Seth Green's own status as a fan boy and toy collector and often describes the challenges faced by the program's "toy wrangler" who often has to go onto eBay or move into retro shops in search of the specific toys needed to cast a particular segment, again blurring the line between amateur and commercial media making practices.

Fan-Friendly Television

When this approach is done well - and Robot Chicken really does this about as well as any show I've seen, the program enjoys enormous credibility within the fan community. For all of the crude comedy and broad parody, the show consistently respects the nuances and details of popular culture. As a parent, I would sometimes step on some artifact of my son's action figure collection trying to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Extracting a sharp chard of molded plastic from my barefoot, I would grumble about "god damn Teela" only to be told by my still three-quarters asleep son, "No, Daddy, that's from Evil-Lyn." My son would respect a show like Robot Chicken because it would know the difference between Teela and Evil-Lyn, even as it breaks down the borders between different fictional universes and brings the characters screaming and kicking into the world of adult realities.

Welcome to Convergence Culture

Welcome to my blog. I launched this site in June in anticipation of the release of my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The book is now out and can be purchased here.

What's it all about? Here are some key passages from the book's introduction:

Reduced to its most core elements, this book is about the relationship between three concepts - media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence....

By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes, depending on who's speaking and what they think they are talking about. In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms. Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want....

Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want....

This circulation of media content - across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders - depends heavily on the active participation of the consumer. I will argue here against the idea that convergence can be understood primarily as a technological process - the bringing together of multiple media functions within the same gadgets and devices. Instead, I want to argue that convergence represents a shift in cultural logic, whereby consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections between dispersed media content. The term, participatory culture, is intended to contrast with older notions of media spectatorship. In this emerging media system, what might traditionally be understood as media producers and consumers are transformed into participants who are expected to interact with each other according to a new set of rules which none of us fully understands. Convergence does not occur through media appliances - however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers. Yet, each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information we have extracted from the ongoing flow of media around us and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.

In a culture which some have described according to information overload, it is impossible for any one of us to hold all of the relevant pieces of information in our heads at the same time. Because there is more information out there on any given topic than we can store in our heads, there is an added incentive for us to talk amongst ourselves about the media we consume. This conversation creates buzz and accelerates the circulation of media content Consumption has become a collective process and that's what I mean in this book by collective intelligence. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.... Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day to day interactions within convergence culture. Right now, we are mostly using collective power through our recreational life, but it has implications at all levels of our culture. In this book, I will explore how the play of collective meaning-making within popular culture is starting to change the ways religion, education, law, politics, advertising, and even the military operate.

The book develops these ideas through case studies of a number of key media properties, including Survivor, American Idol, The Matrix, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Global Frequency and the presidential campaign of 2004.

Here's What the Blurbs Say (Skip This Part)

At the risk of being immodest, let me share with you some of the things that others have been saying about the book:

"I thought I knew twenty-first century pop media until I read Henry Jenkins. The fresh research and radical insights in Convergence Culture deserve a wide and thoughtful readership. Bring on the 'monolithic block of eyeballs!'" --Bruce Sterling, author, blogger, visionary

"Henry Jenkins offers crucial insight into an unexpected and unforeseen future. Unlike most predictions about how New Media will shape the world in which we live, the reality is turning out far stranger and more interesting than we might have imagined. The social implications of this change could be staggering."

--Will Wright, designer of SimCity and The Sims

"One of those rare works that is closer to an operating system than a traditional book: it's a platform that people will be building on for years to come. . . . It should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to make sense of today's popular culture--but thankfully, a book this fun to read doesn't need a mandate."

--Steven Johnson, author of the national bestseller, Everything Bad Is Good For You

Henry Jenkins is the 21st century McLuhan I've been waiting for. With all the fuzzy generalities, moral panics, and gloomy pronouncements from industry spokesmen and social critics, Jenkins's clearly communicated and nuanced analysis is sorely needed. The world McLuhan foretold back in the age of electric media has become immensely more complicated in today's many-to-many, converged, remixed and mashed-up, digital, mobile, always-on media environment. If you are a parent, a student, an educator, a creator or consumer of popular culture, an entrepreneur, or a media industry executive, you need to understand convergence culture­­. And you will only after reading Henry Jenkins. --Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

"I simply could not put this book down! Henry Jenkins provides a fascinating account of how new media intersects old media and engages the imagination of fans in more and more powerful ways. Educators, media specialists, policy makers and parents will find Convergence Culture both lively and enlightening." --John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp & director of Xerox PARC

And oh, one more endorsement, for a second book also coming out this summer, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture:

"Jenkins is a one of us: a geek, a fan, a popcult packrat. He's also an incisive and unflinching critic. His affection for the subject and sharp eye for 'what it all means' are an unbeatable combination. This is fascinating, engrossing and enlightening reading."

--Cory Doctorow, author of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and co-editor of Boing Boing

Check Out This Webcast

For those who would like to see me talk about convergence culture, check out webcast of a keynote presentation I did about some of the key themes from the book at the New Media Conference in 2004.

About This Blog

I am going to be using this blog to talk about some of the issues raised in the book -- including providing some of the sections I had to edit out of the book for length reasons, updating some of the case studies in the book, commenting on recent events which reflect some of the book's key themes, and responding to questions and criticisms from readers. Frankly, one of the challenges of writing about contemporary media change is that many of the specifics of popular culture will have shifted by the time a print book appears, so I am excited to have a space where I can play catch-up.

Have no fear, though, if you have not read the book yet, this space will also allow me to comment on many other contemporary developments in the new media landscape. This is after all my 12 book over the past 16 years and so I have a broader array of interests than can be gleamed from any given publication.

And along the way, I will be sharing more about the work we are doing through the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT to put the ideas found in these books into practice through work on consumer culture, media

Update: Some people have read this to suggest this site is purely a "publicity stunt" for the book or to imply that I plan to stop blogging once the book tour is over. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have been overwhelmed by the positive response to this site. I am going to do my best to keep blogging in the months ahead. Getting the book out has given me an incentive to start blogging. But it isn't the only reason for this blog. I've wanted to do this for a long time but like many of you, I have been procrastinating. In any case, I plan to continue to blog once classes start back up. This may result in some cut back in the number of entries per week but I am going to try to continue to get out something every weekday, even if it means more use of interviews and guest bloggers to fill in some gaps in my schedule.

Who the &%&# Is Henry Jenkins?

ABOUT HENRY JENKINS The simple answer is:

Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

Until recently, Jenkins wrote a monthly column and blogged about media and cultural change for Technology Review Online. A longtime advocate of games culture, he currently co-authors a column with Kurt Squire for Computer Games magazine which seeks to promote innovation and diversity in game design. Jenkins recently developed a white paper on the future of media literacy education for the MacArthur Foundation, which is leading to a three year project to develop curricular materials to help teachers and parents better prepare young people for full participation in contemporary culture. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. He was also one of the principal investigators on collaboration with Initiative Media to monitor audience response to American Idol with an eye towards developing new approaches to audience measurement. He is one of the leaders of the Convergence Culture Consortium, which consults with leading players in the branded entertainment sector in hopes of helping them adjust to shifts in the media environment. Jenkins also plays a significant role as a public advocate for fans, gamers, and bloggers: testifying before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee investigation into "Marketing Violence to Youth" following the Columbine shootings; advocating for media literacy education before the Federal Communications Commission; calling for a more consumer-oriented approach to intellectual property at a closed door meeting of the governing body of the World Economic Forum; signing amicus briefs in opposition to games censorship; and regularly speaking to the press and other media about aspects of media change and popular culture. Jenkins has a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from Georgia State University, a MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at MIT for more than 16 years, where he is also housemaster of Senior House dormitory.

Well, that didn't seem so simple after all. For a somewhat more personal account of whom I am, read below.

ABOUT ME

The first thing you are going to discover about me, oh reader of this blog, is that I am prolific as hell. The second is that I am also long-winded as all get out. As someone famous once said (Thomas Jefferson, I think), I would have written it shorter but I didn't have enough time.

My earliest work centered on television fans -- particularly science fiction fans. Part of what drew me into graduate school in media studies was a fascination with popular culture. I grew up reading Mad magazine and Famous Monsters of Filmland -- and much as my parents feared, it warped me for life. Early on, I discovered the joys of comic books and science fiction, spent time playing around with monster makeup, starting writing scripts for my own Super 8 movies (the big problem was that I didn't have access to a camera until much later), and collecting television-themed toys. By the time I went to college, I was regularly attending science fiction conventions. Through the woman who would become my wife, I discovered fan fiction. And we spent a great deal of time debating our very different ways of reading our favorite television series.

Textual Poachers

When I got to graduate school, I was struck by how impoverished the academic framework for thinking about media spectatorship was -- basically, though everyone framed it differently, consumers were assumed to be passive, brainless, inarticulate, and brainwashed. None of this jelled well with my own robust experience of being a fan of popular culture. I was lucky enough to get to study under John Fiske, first at Iowa and then at University of Wisconsin-Madison, who introduced me to the cultural studies perspective. Fiske was a key advocate of ethnographic audience research, arguing that media consumers had more tricks up their sleeves than most academic theory acknowledged.

Out of this tension between academic theory and fan experience emerged first an essay, "Star Trek Reread, Rerun, Rewritten" and then a book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Textual Poachers emerged at a moment when fans were still largely marginal to the way mass media was produced and consumed, still hidden from the view of most "average consumers" and as such, represented a radically different way of thinking about how one might live in relation to media texts. In the book, I describe them as "rogue readers." What most people took from that book was my concept of "poaching," the idea that fans construct their own culture -- fan fiction, artwork, costumes, music, and videos -- from content appropriated from mass media, reshaping it to serve their own needs and interests. There are two other key concepts in this early work which takes on greater significance in my work today -- the idea of participatory culture (which runs throughout the Convergence Culture book) and the idea of a moral economy (that is, the presumed ethical norms which govern the relations between media producers and consumers.)

Aca/Fan Defined

Textual Poachers and much of my subsequent work has been written from the perspective of an Aca/Fan -- that is, a hybrid creature which is part fan and part academic (hence the current, provisional title of this blog). The goal of my work has been to bridge the gap between these two worlds. I take it as a personal challenge to find a way to break cultural theory out of the academic bookstore ghetto and open up a larger space to talk about the media that matters to us from a consumer's point of view. This philosophy has governed my various stabs at journalism and public advocacy and they are what are motivating me to develop a personal blog.

Convergence Culture

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Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide returns to this question of media audiences and participatory cultures at a moment where fans and fan-like activities are absolutely central to the way the culture industries operate. At all levels, the assumption is that consumers will become active participants but there is widespread dispute about the terms of our participation. We are seeing enormous experimentation into the potential intersections between commercial and grassroots culture and about the power of living within a networked society. At the same time, the media industries are struggling to keep up with these changes, issuing contradictory responses out of different divisions within the same companies. Convergence Culture was designed as a public intervention into this situation, trying to help both consumers and producers understand the changes which are occurring in their relationship.

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, my second new book, maps the transition between the world described in Textual Poachers and the world depicted in Convergence Culture: it reprints many of my key essays about participatory culture through the years, including early writings about fans and later writings which sought to respond to some of the moral panic kicked up by Columbine and claims that games and other forms of popular culture were leading young people to the brink of damnation.

It's safe to say that neither of these books would have come about if I had not moved to MIT 16 years ago and found myself immersed in the vibrant digital culture of the past decade. I often claim that I am a walking, talking oxymoron -- a humanist from MIT. But I think that my unique perspective as someone studying culture within one of the world's leading technical institutions gives me some distinctive insights into the ways that culture and technology are reshaping before our very eyes.

Comparative Media Studies

One of my proudest accomplishments so far in life has been the creation of the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) graduate program at MIT. At its core, this program encourages students to think across media, across historical periods, across national borders, across academic disciplines, across the divide between theory and practice, and across the divides between the academy and the rest of society. Our goal is simply to train the next generation of leaders for industry, government, education, the arts, journalism, and academia to think in more imaginative ways about the process of media change. I like to joke that CMS is a program for people who could never decide what they wanted to major in. It is "undisciplined" in the best sense of the terms -- my own sense is that the academic disciplines which emerged around the problems of the industrial age have outlived their usefulness in a networked culture and that we need to reconfigure the ways we organize and communicate knowledge to our students.

Central to the vision of CMS is the idea of "applied humanism." MIT has applied math, applied physics, and applied chemistry so it made sense to me that there should be an applied branch of the humanities. Our goal is to take what we are teaching in our classrooms and give students a chance to apply it more pragmatically to think through some of the core challenges being faced out in the field as core institutions confront media change. With this in mind, we have launched a range of research initiatives which I will be writing more about as this blog continues.

Convergence Culture Consortium

The Convergence Culture Consortium is a direct outgrowth of the books coming out this summer. We wanted to bring together key thinkers from a number of different disciplines and universities who were interested in the kinds of social and cultural changes that were impacted the branded entertainment sector. We wanted to bring together leading entertainment companies, advertising firms, and key sponsors to create a dialogue about where media is going and how it impacts consumers. We are developing white papers on topics such as advergaming and product placement, transmedia storytelling and mobile entertainment, alternative reality games, and fan cultures, among other topics. And I get to go into places like Cartoon Network or the MTV Networks and lecture them about what they need to know about the fan communities I study.

Project NML

Project New Media Literacies also grows out of the ideas in my most recent books. Here, the focus is on the educational challenges of making sure that every kid in America has the social skills and cultural competencies needed to participate in a networked society. According to a recent study by the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, more than half of all American teens have produced media and a significant portion have distributed that media content on line. We need to be aware of the challenges faced by both halves of that statistic -- those faced by media makers who lack the traditional mentorship and apprenticeship into production practices and ethical norms which would have shaped previous generations of media makers (student journalists, for example) and those faced by those who are not yet making media -- what we are calling the participation gap between those who have anywhere, anytime access and those who may only be able to go online on a library computer with limited bandwidth, filtered content, short work spans, and no capacity to store or upload what they create. This project argues that media literacy skills, broadly defined, need to be integrated into school-based and after-school programs, into adult education for parents and teachers, and into popular culture itself if we are going to fully address the challenges of this moment of media in transition.

The Education Arcade

The Education Arcade represents a systematic attempt to explore and experiment with the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games. I was one of the first humanities scholars in the world to write seriously about video games -- not as a social problem but as an emerging medium of aesthetic expression and social experience. Through the years, my work on games has led me to consult with Purple Moon on the development of the girls game movement (and later to co-edit a book, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games), to run a creative leaders program for Electronic Arts, to become a key public critic of the media effects argument and the push to regulate games content, and to become actively involved in the design and implementation of "serious games."

We have more new initiatives coming soon -- including, we hope, some work on public policy and civic media. But these three initiatives illustrate the ways we are trying to fuse theory and practice through the program.

And Stuff

And of course, this just scratches the surface in terms of my academic interest. I began my career writing about vaudeville and early sound comedy (What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Anarchistic Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic). Through the years, I have written about WWF wrestling, Doctor Seuss, Lassie, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and a host of other popular culture works. This strand of my research is represented by yet another forthcoming book, The Wow Climax: Tracing The Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, coming out near the end of this year. And comic books are my current popular culture passion. I hope to write a book about genre theory and superheroes before much longer.

I never can keep my personal life separated from my professional life. This is what comes of being a fan/academic. Much of what I write about popular culture comes from an autobiographical impulse and also reflects the tastes and interests of my son, Henry, now in his mid-twenties, and my wife, Cynthia, who helped get me into fan culture in the first place. I also seek inspiration from not only the students I teach through the CMS program but also the students who live in Senior House, the dorm where I am housemaster. I expect all of these folks will be making appearances in my blog posts from time to time. My wife would no doubt tell you that it is symptomatic of my workaholic tendencies that I cram my personal life into the last paragraph of an overly long and overly detailed account of my life. The reality is that most of my work is deeply personal and my personal relationships shape everything else I do.

And Now a Blog...

This blog is frankly long overdue. I've wanted to have a blog for some time. I used to blog for Technology Review; we run blogs for many of the projects; and I've run blogs through several of my classes. But I have until now been reluctant to make the time commitment needed to make a personal blog work. Reread the account above and you will see the reason why I have been a little preoccupied. So I've blogged for other people; I've written about blog; and now I have my own blog.

Karolin Lohmus has translated this post for Estonian readers. You can find it at https://www.espertoautoricambi.it/science/2018/02/04/kes-on-henry-jenkins/