Slamming Media Effects

Some of you thought Ian and I were playing a little rough with each other. Wait till you hear about the kind of rough treatment that media effects researchers have been getting lately. CMS graduate student Sam Ford recently told the story over at the Convergence Culture Consortium blog:

In 1999, a team of professors from Wake Forest University made headlines with a quantitative study that found a correlation between watching professional wrestling and participating in fighting while on dates among teenagers, in a study that also highlighted other potential negative behaviors associated with watching pro wrestling.

While the study was not published at the time, it did receive a substantial amount of attention and was covered by most of the major news outlets. Then, last week, when a written essay based on the study and releasing the full results of the study was published, major media outlets once again reported on it.

WWE Owner Vince McMahon was livid. On last week's episode of Monday Night RAW, WWE announcer Jim Ross lashed out and the study and promoted Mr. McMahon's response to be made available on the WWE Web site for fans, and also on the company's corporate site for investors.

That response claimed, among other things, that the study was "junk science" and that the findings were both dated and unsubstantiated. Of course, in true McMahon fashion, Vince went on to say that the study was produced by "some obscure professor who finally got someone to read his paper and is trying to get his name in the media." WWE certainly didn't hide from the issue, even linking to the study on its Web site to bring further attention to the results from fans and engage in a dialogue, although WWE was definitely issuing their response in "wrestling promo" mode.

McMahon brought on board a ringer -- his own academic -- Dr. Robert Thompson, the head of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. Thompson -- who works loosely in the cultural studies tradition -- offers his own critique of the Wake Forest research:

What always worries me about these kinds of studies is that they imply a cause; this study claims nothing more than a correlation...So many people immediately see these studies, and they suggest that wrestling is causing these things, and I don't think that is a done deal by any stretch of the imagination....Whether you can make the step that says people who watch wrestling become more violent...is a lot more difficult to prove, and I don't think these studies prove it. I think it would be very, very difficult to put together a study that could actually control enough variables that you could demonstrate that.

Then, a University of Cincinnati sociology graduate student (and self proclaimed wrestling fan) Michael M Wehrman wrote an editorial for the Pro-wrestling Torch, a key publication in the wrestling fan community, claiming that Thompson's credentials for commenting on the matter were "highly questionable" since he comes from a humanistic rather than social science background.

Wehrman concludes that the Wake Forest Study " is fairly shallow, lacks relevant control variables, and seems overreaching in its conclusion," but Wehrman is convinced that he has the background to make such a judgment because he is a social scientist and Thompson doesn't because he's a humanist. In other words, nobody can beat up my kid brother except me.

The War Between Effects and Meanings

So, let's stop right there and explore the issue of expertise for a moment. Where media violence is concerned, we face a fundamental problem. A high percentage of the work done in the media effects tradition -- a specific strand of social science research -- has arrived at the conclusion that consuming media violence has some vaguely defined relationship to real world aggression. There is wide disagreement about how much influence, what kind of influence, etc. A high percentage of the work done in the humanistic tradition has arrived at the exact opposite conclusion -- looking at media violence in terms of the meanings it generates within a cultural context as opposed to the direct effects or influence it exerts over the people who consume it. I discuss these two models of how media operates as "the war between effects and meanings" in an essay included in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. I wrote this essay is response to the Limbaugh decision, a ruling in a Federal court which found that computer games were not protected by the First Amendment because they did not convey meanings. (This ruling has since been overturned). Here's part of what I say:

Gamers have expressed bafflement over how Limbaugh can simultaneously claim that video games do not express ideas and that they represent a dangerous influence on American youth. Reformers, in turn, are perplexed that the defenders of games can argue that they have no direct consequences for the people who consume them and yet warrant Constitutional protection. To understand this paradox, we have to recognize a distinction between "effects" and "meanings." Limbaugh and company see games as having social and psychological "effects" (or in some formulations, as constituting "risk factors" that increase the likelihood of violent and antisocial conduct). Their critics argue that gamers produce meanings through game play and related activities. Effects are seen as emerging more or less spontaneously, with little conscious effort, and are not accessible to self examination. Meanings emerge through an active process of interpretation; they reflect our conscious engagement; they can be articulated into words; and they can be critically examined. New meanings take shape around what we already know and what we already think, and thus, each player will come away from a game with a different experience and interpretation. Often, reformers in the "effects" tradition argue that children are particularly susceptible to confusions between fantasy and reality. A focus on meaning, on the other hand, would emphasize the knowledge and competencies possessed by game players starting with their mastery over the aesthetic conventions which distinguish games from real world experience.

Social scientists often act as if their research existed outside of a political, economic, or social context -- as if their findings remained in a world of pure scientific examination. But in fact, the kind of work being discussed here is going to be picked up and deployed by a range of political groups to serve their own causes. In the process, the qualifications and nuances of scientific debate is going to get striped aside. In the end, it doesn't matter whether this is a good or bad study, draws valid or invalid conclusions, deals with causation or correlation. As far as moral reformers are concerned, it is a good study if it can be used as a weapon in the culture wars. The findings are being used as a blunt instrument -- a foreign object, to use a WWE term -- that is being deployed to inflict as much damage as possible on one's opponent. That's how they are going to be played in the news coverage; that's how they will be deployed by reform groups; and that's how they will be mobilized by politicians.

Where I fault at least some of the social scientists working in this space is their refusal to accept responsibility for what happens to their findings when they enter the political process. I believe that a true scientist has an obligation to the truth. In other social policy debates -- such as the debate about porn and violence -- other social scientists -- Edward Donnerstein for example -- did stand up and challenge the distorted use of his findings.

Creating Monsters

In my essay, "Wrestling with Theory, Grappling with Politics" for Nick Sammond's anthology, Steel Chair to the Head, I discuss some of the cultural politics which forms a backdrop for this debate, starting by exploring what it might mean to "demonize" wrestling and other forms of popular culture:

Literary critic Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has constructed a theory of the cultural work which the category of the monster performs. The monster, he suggests, "notoriously appears at times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes." Monsters are "disturbing hybrids ...[with] externally incoherent bodies;" they embody the contradictions and anxieties shaping a society undergoing profound change. Old modes of thinking are breaking down and the construction of monsters represents a last gasp effort to hold them in place.

This is why wrestling is so often figured as monstrous and perverse. The WWE is a horrifying hybrid -- not sports, sports entertainment; not real, not fake, but someplace in between; appealing to the 'white trash' working class and the college educated alike; courting kids and appealing to adolescents on the basis of its rejection of family values; existing outside the cultural mainstream and yet a commercial success; appealing to national pride even as it shoots a bird at most American institutions; masculine as hell and melodramatic as all get out.

Cohen tells us that the monster is born from a category crisis. Thus, the undead may be considered monsters because they are liminal figures existing betwixt and between life and death. We might call wrestling the "unreal" since it stands on the border between fact and fiction. Activist David Grossman uses the "fakeness" of wrestling to justify larger claims about audience susceptibility: ""People tell me, 'you can't tell me that a 6-year-old in Flint, Mich., couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.... And I say, 'Well, you know, how many adults do you know who think professional wrestling is real?" In their video, Wrestling with Manhood (2002), Sutt Jhally and Jackson Katz argue that television wrestling may be the most dangerous kind of media violence because it passes itself off as real yet acknowledges no real world consequences. Referring to a moment in Wrestling With Shadows (2000), when Mick Foley's children become horrified after watching their father in the ring, Jackson Katz asks, "If Mick Foley's Kids can't see behind the illusion, what chance do kids have who have never been taken behind the curtain?"

One can certainly understand why this category confusion would be of concern for many of these writers. Their own literal-mindedness knows no limits. For them, to represent something is to advocate it; to advocate it is to cause it. Wrestling With Manhood, for example, depicts wrestling spectators as moral monsters and at one point, compares them to the folks who watched and did nothing to stop Hitler's rise to power. (You know an argument is kaput when it resorts to the Nazi card!) The filmmakers never acknowledge that these fans, who come to ringside in costume, mimic the catchphrases, waving signs they hope will get on camera, might see themselves as part of the performance, enacting, spoofing, taking pleasure in the imaginary roles and fantasy values on offer. The narrator explains: "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this is not only what's going on in the ring but the reaction of the crowd, which is wildly cheering what can only be described as a psychic and physical violation. A stadium full of seemingly normal boys and men cheering and getting off on the control, the humiliation, the degradation." Consider the rhetorical work done here by the word, "seemingly," -- as if the deceptiveness of the WWF extended to its audience, who are "seemingly normal" but actually ghouls and monsters. And this same literal-mindedness surfaces in the phrase, "which can only be described." As far as Jhally and Katz are concerned, the wrestling spectacle can only be understood in one way, even though what has fascinated the writers in this collection is the sheer range of meanings such moments might carry.

We respond to the threat of the monster through moral panic; confronting something we don't understand and can't really classify, our normal human response is to run like hell. We can hear such panic in the words of David Walsh, the head of the Institute for Media and the Family:

In the world of pro wrestling, it is appropriate to swear, to make obscene

gestures, to engage in violent behavior, and to objectify women. This is a

violent, unpredictable place where it is okay, for anyone to give in to any

impulse. It is a place where people are rewarded for being loud, crude and

aggressive. Sexual violence, simulated sex acts, foul language, and over-the-

top crudeness are the norm. And the more often kids watch this world on their

TV screens, the more these attitudes and actions seem normal in the real world.

As Cohen suggests, the monster is a figure of transitions and boundaries. The monster calls "horrid attention to the borders that cannot -- must not -- be crossed." The monster is thinkable (though regretfully so), where-as what lies beyond the monster is truly unthinkable. Film critic David Denby refers to popular entertainment as "a shadow world in which our kids are breathing an awful lot of poison without knowing that there is clean air and sunshine elsewhere." Senator Joseph Lieberman refers to a "values vacuum in which our children learn that anything goes." In other words, to move into the realm of popular culture is to move into a twilight zone, a "shadow world," a "values vacuum," "a violent, unpredictable place" where rules and constraints break down. And the biggest fear of all is that the monster will cross over from that alternative reality into our own.

The monster can have no legitimate point of view. The monster has no culture, generates no meaning, and respects no values. The monster exists simply to negate the moral order. Evoking a metaphor straight out of a David Cronenberg film, Leiberman compares contemporary popular culture to "an antibody which has turned against its own immunity system." Former professional wrestler turned evangelist, Superstar Billy Graham, describes his visceral response to the WWE: "I didn't want this stuff coming into my house, my eyes, or my mind. It made me physically ill to my stomach." The WWE muddies the water, mucks up cultural hierarchies, disturbs moral oppositions, and churns up emotional reactions. No wonder critics call it cultural pollution. This is also why the WWE so often proclaims itself to be 'politically incorrect,' relishing its own "barbarian" status, taking pleasure in committing antisocial acts and pissing off those who would police our culture.

Say nothing else about it, moral panic provokes ideological consensus, carves up the world into simple black and white categories, which seem, on the surface, so commonsensical that they are nigh on impossible to dispute. Politics makes for strange tag teams. Orthodox Jew Joseph Lieberman climbs into the ring, hand in hand, with the Christian right, a move all the more remarkable when you consider how often both sides evoke religious language to justify their efforts to police morality. David Grossman, a military psychologist who claims to have taught marines how to kill, joins hands with the Lion and the Lamb Foundation, a organization of concerned moms who feel that violence should never be considered "child's play." For some, wrestling is dangerous because it is so ruthlessly patriarchal and reactionary; for others, because it embodies moral relativism. For some, it is a symptom of a world without gatekeepers and for others, the dangers of media concentratio"n. For most, it is frightening because it crosses class boundaries. They all agree that what we have got to do is protect our children against its seductions and temptations. After a while, the specific ideological claims get absorbed into a more generalized rhetoric of horror and disgust.

Cultural tastes and interests are a central building block of our identities; we use our consumption of popular culture to map who we are and who we are not. As Pierre Bourdieu has noted, perhaps the most powerful way to defend our tastes is through the negation of other tastes. But, the negation of a cultural form necessarily spills over into (and often intentionally taps) our hostility towards specific cultural, social, and ethnic groups who are closely associated with those forms. The concept of "law and order" surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s as a code word for racism, allowing Republicans to appeal to Southern Whites with a covert reassurance that they would keep disorderly blacks in line. Similarly, at a time when it would be offensive to directly attack racial or sexual minorities, the rhetoric of "cultural pollution" functions as a code word for racism, homophobia, class war, and generational conflict. Listen to former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's description of a culture 'slouching towards Gamorrah": "Even those of us who try to avoid the repellent aspects of popular culture know about it through a sort of peripheral vision. The rap blasts out of the car window waiting beside you at the red light; blatant sexuality, often of a perverse nature, assaults the reader in magazine advertisements." Consider how differently this would read if it were Frank Sinatra or country music blasting from the car stereo or if he were protesting the persistence of hetrosexism. If we can keep these forms of culture in line, perhaps we can also control the people who consume them. This connection was made explicit in GOP operative Mike Murphy's post-Columbine comments that "we need goth control, not gun control."

Proponents of the cultural pollution argument are quick to note that they have many minority supporters, and thus cannot be accused of racism. Yet, members of a minority community use culture war rhetoric to police their own borders and separate themselves from unsavory aspects of their own culture.. Eric Michael Dyson, for example, has mapped the tension between jazz and church music in the early twentieth century or jazz and hip hop in the later twentieth century. Expressions of disdain towards godless or trashy music helped to police class and generational boundaries within the African-American community; Jazz and later hip hop were depicted as a threat to the goals of assimilation and upward mobility. So, different groups for different reasons might share a common agenda in terms of policing cultural borders (even if they are pursuing that agenda from different cultural positions or interests).

Writers in the Cultural Studies tradition often characterize the culture war rhetoric as "right wing," "ultraconservative" or "reactionary." As we do so, we are constructing our own monsters, seeking to draw a sharp distinction between those "whackos" over there who want to censor our culture and "nice, thoughtful liberals" like ourselves who would never think of doing that kind of mischief to the Constitution. But, like most attempts to resolve the ambiguities and ambivalence surrounding the monstrous, such representations provide us with a false sense of security. To be sure, conservative Republicans were among the most visible proponents of the culture war rhetoric, as reflected in Daniel Quayle's attempt to displace concerns about the economic causes of poverty onto the breakdown of family values in Murphy Brown, Jerry Farwell's hysterical responses to the thought that one of the Teletubbies might be gay or suggestion that the ACLU might be to blame for September 11, or Pat Buchanon's commitment of the GOP to a "Jihad" against those forces corrupting the American heart and mind. The initial Democratic responses to these arguments were largely negative. Much of the 1992 presidental nominating convention devoted to ridiculing Quayle's rather narrow conception of family values and dismissing the GOP culture war rhetoric as extremist.

However, some "New Democrats" sought to take social and cultural issues "off the table," appealing to moderate Christians by claiming that Democrats would join forces with Republicans to protect American families from "sickening" forms of popular culture. In 1985, for example, Tipper Gore (Wife of then Democratic Senator Albert Gore), Susan Baker (wife of Republican Senator Howard Baker), and some 17 other Congressional spouses helped to form the Parents Music Resource Center; the group received financial support from Mike Love, from the Beach Boys, and Joseph Coors, the owner of Coors beer, and logistical support from Pat Robinson's 700 Club and the Religious Booksellers Convention. Joseph Lieberman rose to political fame largely on the basis of a series of tactical alliances with cultural conservatives. For example, Lieberman serves on the advisory board of L. Brent Bozell III's Parents Television Council; stood alongside Pat Buchanon, Orrin Hatch, and Colin Powell to support an anti-Hollywood petition written by the conservative think tank, Empower America; and has worked closely with David Walsh's Institute for Media and the Family in condemning the video game industry. Leiberman himself described William Bennett as " my brother in arms, because we are engaged together in fighting the culture wars." He explained, "For the better part of two years, we have formed an unofficial, bipartisan partnership to coax, cajole, shout and shame the people who run the electronic media." As former WWF superstar Mick Foley notes, "whenever anyone accuses the PTC of being ultraconservative, he [Bozell] throws Joe Lieberman in their face." Significantly more Democrats joined the culture war following the shootings at Columbine, where one by one liberal Senators stood up at various congressional hearings and denounced the entertainment industry for inspiring teen shooters. It is striking that both candidates on the 2000 Democratic national ticket were men who had been early Democratic backers of this cultural agenda. One lasting legacy of that election is that it will be significantly more difficult for future Democratic candidates to label that perspective as reactionary or extremist.

When media effects research enters into the public debate, it gets taken up as proof that popular culture is a monstrous force in our lives and gets mobilized in support of a moral and political agenda which has little or nothing to do with academic disagreements about methodology or validity. McMahon may have come in slugging but then he at least understood that this was going to be a knife fight or a pissing match, anything but a discussion of scientific findings.

comics and convergence part three

This is the third of a series of out-takes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide which centers on convergence within the comics industry. This segment explores the ways that online communities are altering the ways that comics readers and publishers interact. A small portion of this content found its way into the book's conclusion in a significantly altered form, but the rest of it is appearing here for the first time.

Shortly before Ang Lee's feature film version of The Incredible Hulk was released, USA Today ran a front page story about the expanded power of internet fans in shaping the production and promotion of cult movies. Avi Arad, the head of Marvel's film production unit, explained, "I used to hate the Internet. I thought it was just a place where people stole our products. But I see how influential these fans can be when they build a consensus, which is what we seek. I now consider them filmmaking partners." USA Today recounted the emergence of so-called "superfans" - opinion-makers within the fan community who are actively courted by movie producers. Production companies will pay to fly these "superfans" out to the set to talk with stars and directors about a forthcoming release and in some cases, consult with them to insure fidelity to the original source material. Avad acknowledged that he sought casting advice from these fan communities: "These are people who grew up with their heroes in mind. You won't ever get everyone to agree on one actor, but they can tell you if you're going in the right direction." The most influential sites receive more than 5 million visitors per month. In some earlier cases, the studios have gone head to head with these sites, sticking by unpopular decisions, only to sustain box office damage. Now, the article suggested, fans were having more influence than ever before.

Kurt Busiek, the writer of Marvels and Astro City, argues that these online discussion groups represent an extension of traditional forms of publicity and criticism within the comics fan community: "It used to be that the two areas of communications among comic fans were the fan press and word of mouth. Somewhere in the community around every comic book store would be the guys in the know. They'd talk about comics in the store and whatever they thought was cool would filter into the rest of the audience... The internet has taken the mechanisms of fandom, word of mouth, and commercial reactions, intensified it, increased the speed of it, and made it much, much more efficient.... Instead of having to wait for a couple of months to read something like the Comics Reader to cover some comic news, it hits the internet news sites as it happens. The Friday Mark Waid was fired from Fantastic Four, there was a news article on the web and being discussed by Sunday and by Monday morning, the people at Marvel Comics came to work and they had to react to it." When fan reaction emerges this quickly and spreads so far, it commands much greater attention within the industry. Increasingly, internet response is shaping publisher's decision making.

The Sequential Tart has emerged as a central site for women in comics fandom, serving as an advocacy group for female consumers frustrated by their historic neglect or patronizing treatment by the comics industry. Started in 1997, by a group of female fans of Garth Ennis ( Preacher), the group expanded its focus, seeking to provide a female-written alternative to what they saw as the locker-room humor and ogling images found in most of the publications aimed at predominantly male comics fans. Marcia Allas, the current editor of Sequential Tart, explained , "Essentially our goals were to provide a magazine that would have content to appeal across as broad a spectrum of new or established comics readers as possible, regardless of age, gender, sexuality, or individual taste...In the early days we also wanted to change the apparent perception of the female reader of comics. It seemed that there were a lot of misapprehensions about this audience, such as that female comics readers either didn't really exist, or that they only followed one or two titles. Where they were acknowledged to exist, there were some bewildering stereotypes of what they would read, what they would dislike, and so forth. We wanted to show what we already knew - that the female audience for comics, while probably smaller than the male audience, is both diverse and has a collectively large disposable income."

In her study of Sequential Tart, Kimberly M. De Vries argues that the group self-consciously rejects both the negative stereotypes about female comics readers constructed by men in and around the comics industry but also the well-meaning but equally constraining stereotypes constructed by the first generation of feminist critics of comics. The Sequential Tart is, in that sense, a Third Wave feminist cultural intervention, defending the pleasures women take in comics even as it critiques some of the negative representations of women through the medium. De Vries sees this as asserting a politics of consumption as much or more than a politics of production.

The webzine combines interviews with comics creators, retailers, and industry leaders, reviews of current publications, and critical essays about gender and comics. They sought to showcase industry practices which attracted or repelled women, to spotlight the work of smaller presses which often fell through the cracks, to skewer sexist writing or images, and to help readers find books which were better geared to their own tastes and interests. The Sequential Tart are increasingly courted by publishers or individual artists who feel they have content that would be of interest to female readers and have helped to make the mainstream publishers more attentive to this often underserved market. The Sequential Tart, in turn, have provided a model for a range of other comics fans webzines and discussion boards who have been inspired by what a small team of writers had been able to accomplish.

Allas contends that they would never have been able to have this same degree of impact if they had relied on print rather than digital media. She cites, for example, the geographic dispersion of the core group of editors and writers, not only across the United States, but globally. The web provided a platform for them to share what they knew and to form a community which was grassroots without being geographically local. She also notes that they were able to launch the webzine with almost no financial commitment, reflecting the lowered costs of production and distribution in the digital environment. These savings allowed them to operate independently of any corporate interests. It also allowed them to get their ideas out quickly and widely and to publish on a more regular basis. All of that made it possible for The Sequential Tart to become, almost upon launch, a force to be reckoned with in comics fandom and in the comics industry more generally.

Survivor: The Race Wars?

Last week, the producers of Survivor announced that this season, they would feature what is almost certainly the most racially diverse cast in the history of reality television. The contestants would initially be organized into four tribes defined around their race -- African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic, and White-American. The announcement has provoked controversy from the very outset with even CBS Early Show host Harry Smith challenging Survivor M.C. Jeff Probst about the story line on the air. Today's post is intended as a primer of sorts to the debates about race which this announcement have set into motion.

Casting for Diversity

We can understand the producer's decision in the context of several variables surrounding race and reality television. First, shows like Survivor and American Idol are among the few on American television that perform more or less equally well among white and black viewers. (I don't have access to data on other minority groups). For the most part, American television is already segregated with very few shows being shared cultural reference points amongst racially diverse audiences. Reality television also probably already provides greater representation of minority groups than the vast majority of American programs -- which tend to be all white and more rarely, all black casts. But this is a sad commentary on the number of minority performers on network television since the percentage of minorities on Survivor has consistently been much lower than their relative percentage in the American population.

The producers have directly acknowledged at least some of these factors in explaining this new "twist" in the series.

Probst argued that the decision emerged from the production's efforts to respond to long-standing criticisms that minority contestants were under-represented on the program:

"The idea for this actually came from the criticism that Survivor was not ethnically diverse enough, because for whatever reason, we always have a low number of minority applicants apply for the show... So we set out and said, 'Let's turn this criticism into creative for the show.' And I think it fits perfectly with what Survivor does, which is, it is a social experiment. And this is adding another layer to that experiment, which is taking the show to a completely different level."

Probst added that the casting directors for the series actively recruited from local community centers within minority neighborhoods, seeking contestants who represented the diversity within these different racial groupings and trying to significantly broaden the range of people represented on the series: "We really just took off all blinders and said we want to find 20 people to play this game and we're really gonna have to source them out." Fans of the show believe this will add some fresh energy to the series because these participants are so different from those on previous seasons and because they are less familiar with the well-worn strategies and tactics deployed by previous contestants.

Probst has also described the way that cultural differences matter in terms of behavior within the game: "Suddenly you have new slang, new rituals--people doing things like making fire in ways that haven't been done on Survivor. I think we have a season where people will say you can never go back to what you were before."

Producer Mark Burnett has argued that the series is much more apt to challenge rather than reinforce existing racial stereotypes:

"We're smart enough to have gotten rid of every racist person in casting...There's no one race or sexual preference or other group who have an exclusive on being an asshole or being nice...Maybe that taboo (of race) could disappear through this."

Segregation Island?

In some quarters, the news of racially-constituted teams has provoked horror and dread with critics describing the new series as "segregation island." New York City councilman John Liu has launched a campaign to pressure CBS to pull the series from the air: "The idea of having a battle of the races is preposterous. How could anybody be so desperate for ratings?"

Pop Culture scholar Robert Thompson has attacked the series for an "unseemly interest" in race: "It's like a return back to segregated leagues in sports."

Hispanics across America founder Fernando Mateo told Reuters, "Survivor is not reality TV--it's racist TV. The participants will be held to the daunting and unfair challenge of representing an entire race of people. What will it mean for a team--a race--to fail in a battle of wits and strength against another race?"

James Pritchett, professor of anthropology and director of the African Studies Center at Boston University, told The Boston Herald on Thursday. "This program is drumming up every old stereotype, and I don't think it is going to be useful at all. What next, a show pitting Jews and Muslims and Christians against each other?"

Fans are quick to note that Survivor has previously cast teams based on gender differences (twice) and age differences without provoking this same level of controversy -- and The Apprentice has used thinly veiled class differences (Street Smarts vs. Book Smarts).

"I can't decide if the producers are completely naive and clueless or completely soulless," said Lisa Navarrete, vice president of the National Council of La Raza.

Nationally syndicated columnist DeWayne Wickham accuses the producers of trying to "stage a race war" with a program "that will appeal to the unspoken racism that festers just below the surface for many people in today's more tolerant society."

Perhaps making Wickham's point that the program could invite a range of racist responses, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh has unleashed a series of racial stereotypes that have themselves provoked intense backlash. Among other things, Limbaugh argued that swimming competitions could be unfair to African-American contestants, that Hispanic contestants have "probably shown the most survival tactics," including " a remarkable ability to cross borders" and that they can "do it without water for a long time, they don't get apprehended, and they will do things other people won't do," that Asian-Americans will be the "brainiacs" in the group and can outsmart the other contestants, and that the white tribe would first dominate and then provide government support to the various minority groups. There's no question that what Limbaugh said publicly is no doubt being debated in living rooms around the country -- with some people mindlessly repeating stereotypes and others reflecting more deeply upon the place of cultural and racial difference in American culture today.

A Teachable Moment?

Defenders of the program don't necessarily think that the conversations the show is likely to produce will be a bad thing for the country, feeling that Americans tend to remain silent rather than openly discussing and working through their feelings about race. In an editorial in the St. Petersburg Times, Eric Deggans aargues, "Burnett is going to make race a front-and-center discussion, after years of shrugging off the implications of his portrayals."

There's no question that the production decision has already provided a context for some thoughtful discussions of the place of race in contemporary American society, with a number of activists and bloggers finding this a "teachable moment."

At her blog, Rachel, a sociology professor who works on race, discusses her own mixed feelings about the "twist" on this season's Survivor:

I don't want to get too deep into the problem of how they are going to assign people into racial categories, but I'm very curious who they are going to assign to the Asian and Latino categories. I supposed they don't even realize the dramatic ethnic variation within those categories. I also wonder how they will assign mixed race contestants (of course, maybe they just eliminated all mixed race people from the casting).

I do see a few upsides to having a cast that has more than a token representation of Blacks, Asians, and Latinos. I think when various racial and ethnic groups are represented in more than token numbers people can get a better sense of the diversity and variety of views within racial groups. The TV pundits were proposing the idea that this is exploiting racial tension. Assuming the tribes are separated in the beginning, this may have the opposite effect. The biggest tensions and rivalries will be within race, at least until the tribes merge.

As Rachel's comments suggest, the most sophisticated comments -- both the most nuanced defenses and the most complicated critiques -- have come from those who are most familiar with the genre conventions and history of reality television. One could expand Rachel's analysis to suggest that the program reflects two important debates about race: first, the idea that America should be seen as a multiracial rather than biracial culture -- the inclusion of Latino/a and Asian-American contestants complicates the usual black/white construction of race, even if, as some critics have noted, it doesn't reflect the full range of ethnic groups in American society. Even a superficial review of the cast suggests an effort to show the range of different ethnicities within these broadly constituted racial categories including a fairly nuanced range of different "white" ethnicities. At the same time, the casting -- where only five out of twenty participants are "white" -- suggests recognition of demographic trends that suggest that the majority of Americans in the not-so-distant future will be "non-white" or as some are putting it, we will become a "majority minority" nation.

As many defenders of the series suggest, the rules of the game will force alliances as the series continues amongst people of different racial groups. The winner of the game will necessarily have to appeal across racial categories and be capable of navigating through cultural differences. The most divisive figures of any racial group will alienate the other players whose votes they have to receive in order to win.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Tony Pierce argues that critics simply don't understand the rules of the game:

Each tribe doesn't literally beat up their competitors -- they square off in puzzle-solving games or obstacle courses or tests of endurance, like standing on a beam for the longest amount of time. Unless one desperate dude on a pole drops the N-bomb to distract his opponent, it's difficult to see how race would even come into the game until the second half of the season, when the tribes all merge into one. And even then, the way to win is not by hurling slurs but by getting along with your new tribe and otherwise laying low, as the troublemakers and superstars almost inevitably get voted off.

In Survivor, if there's going to be any hate going on for the first half of the season, it will be self-hate, as the tribes get to learn all the little irritating things about one another rather than focus on the contestants they don't see very often. It's not the person with the different skin color, it's the guy on your team who eats the last scoop of rice, or that other guy who doesn't seem to ever work around the camp, or the alpha leader who runs around shouting orders.

This stage of the show is where you might see the Japanese American dig at the Korean American (helping people understand that not all "Asians" are the same), or the Mexican American diss the Cuban, who'd probably be put out at being called "Latino" anyway....

What tribal Survivor has a real chance of showing us is how much race isn't an issue when it comes to the bare necessities of living on an island for 39 days; how much race is an issue when talk show hosts want to artificially spice up their debates; and that teamwork, communication and trust are the foundation of great teams, not skin color.

Crash?

But again, we don't want to simply celebrate the kinds of inter-racial politics that might emerge in such a context. As Deggans predicts, "race difference plays out as a parable on assimilation -- the people of color who understand white culture and can fit in survive, often by being as bland and undistinguished as possible. Those who don't, wind up fulfilling the worst stereotypes. Their exclusion makes them racially paranoid, their inability to bond with their teammates makes them look lazy and their defensiveness looks like an empty excuse." Of course, with whites in the minority on the series, it just as likely that the winner will form a "rainbow coalition" across different minority groups as it is that they will assimilate into white society.

Guy Aoki, founder of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, has said he was "withholding judgment" until he watched the show: "It could be interesting. A lot of people put down reality shows. But if they're done well, they can be very interesting sociological experiments. You see people's first impressions of each other based on race. I'm not alarmed by it." Yet, he expressed concern that Survivor "would turn into that Crash movie, in which everyone clashes with each other and hurls racial slurs."

Aoki's analogy to Crash is provocative: after all, while the characters in the film display many different forms of racial divisiveness, many regard the film itself as encouraging an anti-racist attitude. It is not simply a reproduction of racism; it is a reflection upon it. Could reality television operate in the same way, encouraging us to reflect upon the way race operates within American culture? Industry research suggests that the overwhelming majority of reality television viewers engage in conversations about the ethical dimensions of the series -- more, in fact, than discuss strategy or the personality of the contestants. Reality television generates a series of ethical dramas which encourage us to share our own values and perspectives about both decisions made by participants within the series and decisions made by the program producers. While reality television often depicts amoral aspects of human interactions, the discussions around the series are often highly moralistic.

The format of reality television may offer some unique vantage points into how race operates -- taking viewers into a series of racial enclaves that might otherwise be closed to view and at the same time, using confessionals to show the same conflict from multiple perspectives. Despite Burnett's claims to have weeded out the racists, we know racism takes many different forms and there's no question we will see it at work in many different ways in the course of the series. Yet, as with Crash, there is the possibility that we will learn more about how it operates both within and outside our own communities.

As one African-American blogger notes, race has always played a role in shaping her identifications within the series, but , because reality television deals with real people and not fictional characters, she has also identified across racial lines:

If anything, this season of Survivor has the potential to build racial pride. More often than not, I tend to root for Black people when they are contestants in these television reality shows. Even though I get nothing when they win, I want to see Black people compete and win sometimes. I was glad to see Randal Pinkett become the first African American winner of The Apprentice...I rooted for Rueben Studdard and Fantasia Barrino (site) to win American Idol. So, yeah I admit I like to see someone who looks like me compete against people who don't look like me and win. But, what Wickham seems to miss is that Americans don't necessarily root for people of their own race. I was glad to see Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth get booted off The Apprentice. And if the Blacks team on next season's Survivor rub me the wrong way, or seem to be weak, or do something to shame the Black community, I'll have no problem rooting for another team."

We have similarly seen contestants on the series rise above their own prejudices -- most famously in the alliance between the homophobic Rudy and the openly gay Richard on the original Survivor series -- and in the process, model ways that the groups they represent can get along. Critics often assume that reality television brings out the worst elements in human nature: they don't acknowledge that it can also bring out the best in people with surprising moments of personal growth and self sacrifice being emotional highlights of many seasons. Contestants often go on the show to explicitly challenge the audience's stereotyped assumptions about their group with varying degrees of success (especially given that the editors play an enormous role in shaping how we perceive any given character). Indeed, Probst has suggested that they were led to the decision to divide the tribes by race because racial pride had been such a consistent theme in their interviews with these contestants.

All of this is the say that the value of a program like Survivor is in part the fact that it forces us to talk about the ties and divisions within human society, forces us to think about the attitudes and practices by which different groups interact with each other. On one level, Survivor may be the worst possible program to get us to think about race in America. On another, it may be the perfect vehicle. I have profoundly mixed feelings about the decision -- which is one reason why I am trying to lay out all sides of the argument here in order to encourage a deeper level of discourse than the first round of responses. But, I think there is plenty of evidence that even the idea (let alone the reality) of a racially divided Survivor is forcing us to think and talk about race in ways we normally avoid -- and I have to think that's a good thing, even if or maybe precisely because there are going to be some cringe-worthy moments from all camps before this series (and the controversy around it) has run its course. If it rigidifies or simplifies our views on race, that's a bad thing, but the show forces us to dig a bit deeper than that (and reality television at its best certainly can do that much), then it will have a more positive influence. I don't think it is going to live up with Burnett's odd prediction that Survivor will make the taboo of race disappear (whatever that means) nor do I think it is apt to provoke race riots as some have predicted. It may make us think a lot and talk a little.

Let me give the last word to Reality News Online columnist David Bloomberg who argues that Survivor will read race through its own particular lens: "we'll see a diverse group of people trying to stab people in the back, lie to them, and metaphorically cut their throats no matter what race they belong to." And maybe this is a step past the rhetoric of "can't we all just get along" which in the end means can't we just pretend that race will go away if we don't talk about it very much. Cultural critics have talked about the "enlightened racism" that shapes our modern moment -- we pretend to be "past" racism and resent efforts to re-introduce race into our conversations, but the effects of racism are still felt in potent ways in our everyday lives.

Thanks to Henry Jenkins IV for help in developing this article.

Tracking the MySpace Generation...

The Los Angeles Times recently completed a first rate series describing the media consumption practices of the contemporary youth market. "Tracking the MySpace Generation" reflected the results of a large scale survey of 12-24 year olds that shatters many of the myths that have emerged around the so-called digital generation, while at the same time focusing attention on some very important shifts in the ways people relate to media content. Youth and Civic Media

Contrary to the myth (which I debunked here a few months ago), young people are not more apt to vote for the next American Idol than to participate in the next presidental election.

Only 21% of poll respondents ages 18 to 24 said they had voted for an American Idol contestant. But 53% said they had voted for a candidate for public office.

This is consistent with other research that has shown that young people are civically engaged, care about political issues, but often seek out information through different channels than older generations.

Youth and Traditional Media

The researchers also found that young people still consumed a great deal of traditional broadcast content and traditional media sources still exerted a strong influence on their lives:

For example, respondents say that traditional sources such as television advertising and radio airplay still tend to drive their decisions about movies and music more than online networking sites. Those interested in keeping up with current events report a surprising interest in conventional news sources, especially local TV news.

Parental Regulation

The survey also found that parents are increasingly aware of what young people are doing when they are online and that many young people are restricted in what kinds of cyberspaces they can visit:

Nearly 7 in 10 of 12- to 17-year-olds said their parents knew how they spent their time online. Nearly 3 out of 5 12- to 14-year-olds said their parents restricted what they could download. About a third of boys and girls ages 12 to 14 are not allowed to go on social networking sites such as MySpace.com. Only 19% of boys and 13% of girls reported having no parental restrictions on computer use

This finding parallels research in the United Kingdom that I wrote about back when I had a regular column at Technology Review.

Like many other such studies, the report has a tendency to acquate restrictions on media access with good parenting. My own views are that good parenting involves a healthy acknowledgement of legitimate roles that media can play within our lives and an open dialogue with young people about our own tastes and values. Just saying No to Nintendo is a cop-out which doesn't prepare young people for the decisions they will make as cultural participatipants when they get older.

Choices and More Choices

More than anything else, the survey found that young people wanted options -- they wanted the media they wanted when they wanted it and where they wanted it -- and that included via more traditional channels such as theatrical exhibition, print, and broadcast television. They weren't being pushed towards the latest technological devices simply because they were new and wouldn't accept them if they did not facilitate the entertainment experiences they were looking for:

Asked where they'd prefer to watch a new movie if it were simultaneously available at home and in theaters, about a third said they would choose to stay at home, and another third said it depended on the movie. Going to movies at theaters still has appeal, particularly for younger teens, but among respondents ages 21 to 24, 56% said they wanted to see the new movie at home, and only 9% said they would rather travel to a theater.

Nearly half (47%) of respondents ages 12 to 17 say they would watch a movie on a PC, well above the interest in doing the same on a cellphone (11%) or video iPod and similar devices (18%). A similar share of those 21 to 24 said they would watch movies on a computer, although they are much less willing to do the same on a cellphone (6%) or video iPod (7%)....

Interestingly, 12- to 14-year-old girls showed the greatest eagerness about small-screen viewing, with 20% of those surveyed open to watching television shows on cellphones and nearly a quarter interested in checking out programs on iPods.

The LA Times suggests that the entertainment industry was racing ahead of even its most digitally literate consumers in making some materials available for new formats such as video ipods or cell phones. A level headed young consumer explains, "Why would I want to look at a video clip on my cellphone? I'd rather make phone calls on it."

This doesn't suggest a generation that is embracing convergence for convergence's sake. It does suggest a generation that is aware of a range of different media platforms and their affordances and is making reasoned chocies about which provides the most satisfying varient of any given entertainment experience.

Multitasking

The LA Times also found that multitasking is absolutely normative in this generation -- many of them seem to flit between windows, tasks, and relationships with reckless abandon. Any future analysis of young people and media has to recognize that they are always consuming one medium in relation to another and rarely give any given content their undivided attention:

Among respondents who had homework, 53% of children ages 12 to 17 said they did at least one other thing while studying, compared with 25% of adults ages 18 to 24, the poll found.

The youngest poll respondents did the most juggling. Twenty-one percent of the 839 respondents ages 12 to 17 who were polled said they generally kept busy with at least three tasks in addition to their assignments.

Girls ages 15 to 17 were the busiest: 59% said they liked to do at least one thing in addition to homework, and 27% said they liked to do at least three other things.

"I'll focus on my schoolwork, then if an e-mail pops up I'll change focus for a second, answer it, then go back to what I was working on," said Brittany Graham, 16, who also likes to surf the Web and listen to Christian rock while she studies in her family's home in Altamonte Springs, Fla.

Among those in that same age group who did other things while studying, many reported relatively passive diversions. Eighty-four percent said they listened to music as a side activity, 47% watched TV and 22% watched a movie.

But teenage respondents also enjoyed multi-tasking with things that required active participation, the poll found, including talking on the phone (32%), going on the Internet (21%), instant messaging (15%), sending or reading e-mail (13%), text messaging (13%) and playing a video game (6%).

The Napster Generation?

Finally, the survey found that young people's attitudes towards intellectual property were evolving and reflected some understanding of the social contract between media producers and consumers:

Among teens ages 12 to 17 who were polled, 69% said they believed it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original. By comparison, only 21% said it was legal to copy a CD if a friend got the music free. Similarly, 58% thought it was legal to copy a friend's purchased DVD or videotape, but only 19% thought copying was legal if the movie wasn't purchased.

People in the recording industry often act as if kids felt no concern about "stealing" their property. Instead, the LA Times study suggests young people are struggling to make sense of a shifting set of technological options and about the intersection between the commercial economy of mass media and the gift economy of participatory culture. They seem to understand that artists should get paid for what they create but there are real questions about when we've paid enough and what rights we buy when we buy recordings of a performance.

Thanks to Zhan Li for calling this series to my attention.

Fan Activism in a Networked Culture: The Case of Stargate SG-1

Last week, on the eve of its 200th episode, the Sci-Fi Channel announced that it would not be renewing Stargate SG-1, ending a run that extended across 10 seasons. The series began on Showtime, where it was canceled after five seasons, and then, as the result of fan activism, got picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel, where it ran another five season and spawned a successful sequel, Stargate: Atlantis. One might imagine that the series was dying a natural death after a run which is far longer than the vast majority of series -- science fiction or otherwise -- in the history of American television or that the network and creative artists are performing a "mercy killing" of a series that might be well past its prime but as far as its most hardcore fans are concerned, the series is "not dead yet." They are seeking to rally the troops one more time and their efforts to do so demonstrate the potentials for audience activism within networked culture.

The Modern Minutemen, er, Minutepersons?

The first thing that strikes you when you look at the fan community's efforts to save SG-1 is the speed with which they were able to respond to the news of the series' potential cancellation. The contemporary fan is a modern day minuteman -- ready to respond at a moment's notice to information that threatens their community, whether it is a cancellation notice or a cease and desist letter. Reader Sara Goetz, a graduate student from California, wrote me the day after the Sci-Fi Network announced its verdict with the following news:

The SG-1 fandom is no stranger to fan campaigns, having lobbied to bring back a beloved actor four years ago (with some question as to whether his return was their responsibility or his and the studio's - I wasn't in the fandom at the time and can't do more than speculate). Additionally, with the recent cast additions of two actors from the late, lamented Farscape, a large number of fans have carried over and feel a strong sense of deja vu. As sci-fi fans are practically trained to do now, we moved into action as soon as the news broke yesterday afternoon. The experience of the past is informing the current action, and while I don't know how much success SG-1 fans will achieve, we'll certainly be heard.

This is a powerful illustration of a point I make in my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide:

As a fan community disbands, its members may move in many different directions, seeking out new spaces to apply their skills and new openings for their speculations and in the process, those skills spread to new communities and get applied to new tasks

In other words, each new campaign is not only important in its own right but also represents an educational opportunity that develops new skills and knowledge which will then inform all subsequent fan efforts. There's a tendency for both academics and journalists to compartmentalize fandoms rather than seeing fandom as an interconnected network. Fans move between series and as they do so, knowledge gets transmitted from one fan community to another.

At the core of the fan community were seasoned veterans who knew what needed to be done and quickly rolled up their sleeves and took control over the situation. News of the network decision spread across discussion lists, fan websites, blogs, and Live Journal pages and as it did, people began weighing different tactics, collecting relevant information, and assigning tasks. This is a beautiful example of how knowledge communities work to pool resources and tap networks in order to achieve their goals. The striking thing is that there is no one approach being advocated here. The goal is to get the word out to as many different people as possible through as many different means as necessary. In that sense, fan communities are adhocracies not bureaucracy: some people have taken charge of different aspects of the process on a largely volunteer basis but no one is trying to control or orchestrate the movement as a whole.

Learning to Speak the Industry's Language

One can see the consequences of this effort if one visits this site which has emerged as one of several central clearing house for people involved in the campaign. The first thing I notice here is a pretty savvy analysis of the factors which led to the show's cancellation, one that shows a deep understanding of how and why networks make the decisions they do. The analysis factors in issues of demographics, scheduling, and audience behavior. Here's some of what they say:

The complicated US Nielsen ratings system has baffled fan commentators on many genre shows. There may not be one single cause contributing to the ratings slide, but more likely a combination of factors, such as:

First, the SciFi Channel dismantled its three-hour SciFriday block of original programming - the showcase of the network. The airing of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica not only helped SciFi compete, but win tough Friday night ratings battles. This year, SciFi chose to hold back Battlestar Galactica, which won't air until October 2006, reducing their three-hour block to a two-hour block of programming.

Any fan with Tivo or a VCR could have told the SciFi execs it's common sense to watch the three-hour block and record the shorter two-hour block for convenient viewing later. Taking that third hour out of the equation removed an impetus to make SciFi the network to watch live on Friday nights.

An additional ratings factor is acknowledged by Mark Stern, SciFi Channel's Executive Vice President of Original Programming. Interviewed by Mary McNamara for the May 8 issue of Multichannel News, Stern "believes some of the show's tech-savvy, toy-loving, time-shifting audience gets missed in ratings compilations. 'Part of it is the DVR,' he explains, citing digital video recording devices. 'Nielsen's sampling is not representative of the larger universe yet. They're sampling 3% and the larger [DVR] universe is something like 10 to 13%."

Second, new timeslots for the shows have put Stargate SG-1 in direct competition with the cable ratings powerhouse Monk, and locked both SG-1 and Atlantis on SciFi in a head-to-head with Monk and strongly performing new show Psych on parent channel USA. Ironically, Bonnie Hammer is President of both the SciFi *and* USA networks!

The ratings of both Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis have dipped and there is no guarantee that without their strong lead-in, Battlestar Galactica will fare any better when it finally airs in October. With all the advantages of the original three-hour programming block behind it, its ratings were only on par with those of Stargate last season. No one can predict how it will perform solo. SciFi Channel's Farscape was equally beloved of the critics but was unable to sustain a financially viable audience.

Such fan analysis does important work as a form of informal media literacy education -- teaching consumers how network television reaches its decisions and what kinds of arguments will be effective at getting them to reverse course. The fans have monitored trade press discourse and reached out to sources into the production company and have some awareness of the conflicting interests between the network and the production company, offering their own views on the negotiations that impact the economic viability of the series.

At another site, one can see a range of potential tactics identified -- including addresses for key decision makers and suggestions that a strong sign of support for digital downloads may help them demonstrate their clout through the marketplace. A major argument has been that the series fans are so tech savvy that their numbers may not be adequately counted by the Nielsen Ratings which tend to only measure viewers who watch the broadcast as it is aired and not those who watch it via digital recorders or downloads.

Mobilizing the World

The second thing one notices is the international nature of the fan response with the site including templates in many different languages -- from Spanish to Croatian -- that fans in those countries can use as models for writing letters to key decision-makers. The Sci-Fi Network may have made its decisions in part in response to declines in viewership in the United States but because the series is internationally syndicated, the decision will impact fans world wide. Fans in many different countries are working together to respond to the program's cancellation, exerting pressure not only directly on the network and production company but also through the networks in their own country which air the series. The coordination of these efforts across different nations (not to mention languages) suggests the global composition of most online fandoms.

Grassroots creative artists -- who might otherwise turn their attention to the development of fan fiction and fan art -- are deploying their skills towards supporting the save the series campaign. The resource page lists an array of different materials designed to get the word out to the fan base.

Downloading for the Cause

More generally, you can see the fans are deploying such social networking sites and web 2.0 applications as MySpace and Flickr as tools for identifying potential supporters and pulling them into the cause. They also recommend using Bittorrent and other peer-to-peer technologies to identify fans that are downloading the series and solicit them for the cause. They write:

many fans are savvy when it comes to the P2P file sharing power of bittorrent. Whatever your personal stance on the legalities of downloading episodes via torrent, there's no denying their popularity.

This is particularly true for overseas fans who aren't hurting the ratings of first-run episodes of the show in the US, and who might not get to see the current season for a year or two.

We could turn the power of peer-to-peer file sharing to information sharing. Check out the busy torrent sites such as Mininova, IsoHunt [which links many other torrent sites from its database],TorrentSpy, TV Torrents, #eztv @ EFNET.

Wherever you see a Stargate-related download, jump in and make a comment about the cancellation of the show and the paramount importance of:

(1) watching episodes LIVE

(2) spreading word of the cancellation as widely as possible on and offline

(3) pointing people to this website savestargatesg1.com for more information.

(4) pointing to the $1.99 legal downloads for US fans from iTunes!

Often, there are thousands of downloaders for Stargate episodes and people will check comments in case there's anything nasty in the file they're saving.

This approach shows recognition of the potential of such sites for social networking as well as the ways that illegal downloads may render invisible the level of interest in the series.

All told, both the tactics and the analysis behind it shows an extremely sophisticated understanding of the current media landscape and the various points by which grassroots communities may leverage their power to exert pressure on corporate stakeholders in the series. Activists of all ilk can learn a lot by dissecting how these guys are approaching their effort to save their favorite series. As a long time fan, I can't help but contrast this with the now relatively primitive snail-mail efforts that kept Star Trek alive in the 1960s: new media has given fans a lot more resources to mobilize in a roughly similar situation.

I have limited personal stakes in this particular series. Ironically, the Sci-Fi channel is not available in the MIT dorm where I live so I have only seen a few episodes. Be that as it may, I am really going to be interested to see how this campaign takes shape and what, if any impact, it may have.

Getting Lost

I've been sitting out the conversation that Jason Mittell, Jane McGonigal, and Ian Bogost have been having about Lost, Twin Peaks, serial fiction, and puzzles until now. I have had limited time to write new content the past week or so. One of the thing that interests me about this conversation is that it suggests what ludologists and narrativists can learn from each other if they actually talked amongst themselves. I am finding myself pulled back and forth as I read this discussion in part because both groups have valid points and a lot rests on how one reads the series. I m learning so much by looking at television through the eyes of game designers like Jane and Ian.

Puzzles or Enigmas?

Lost is a series that works on multiple levels:

1) There are indeed puzzles (defective ones, perhaps, but ones that seem engaging to an awful lot of folks who watch the series): what's inside the hatch, what's the status of the Island (social experiment, purgatory, what have you), what can we learn from deciphering the map, what do those numbers mean, etc.

2) There is all of the well-constructed backstory -- with each character allowing us a point of entry into a slightly different genre and into a different world.

3) there is the unfolding life of the castaways and the world they are building for themselves on the island -- all of the interpersonal politics, the stories of redemption or corruption, the issue of how they are going to deal with the Others, etc.

Lost is very very good at pitting these differebt pleasures and interests against another, with some new information added at each level in any given episode and the satisfaction of one level of interest being used to defer resolution on another level. Lost is a very well constructed serial fiction in that regard. Some of these pleasures are game-like in their dependence on puzzles, mazes, and ciphers; others are narrative in their dependence on enigmas.

The combination of puzzles and enigmas seems especially effective at motivating fan engagement and participation. This accounts for how Lost can work, in my book's terms, both as a textual attractor (drawing together a community that shares a common interest) and a textual activator (feeding that community something to do, some information to process, some knowledge to gather).

Twin Peak Revisited

Twin Peaks keeps getting pulled into this discussion -- rightfully so -- and as it happens, I did ab ethnography of Twin Peaks fans more than a decade ago. That essay is reproduced in my new collection, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers.

Here's what I wrote at the time:

Theories about possible murderers emerged with astounding density and even more remarkable diversity within this reception context. In a world where almost everything can count as a clue, including both material explicitly presented within the aired episodes and information from one of the many ancillary texts surrounding the series (interviews, the European release print, the published Laura Palmer diary, the Cooper tapes and autobiography, the Julee Cruise album and music videos, etc), almost any character could become a prime suspect. There were strong constituencies behind Leland Palmer and Ben Horne, characters Twin Peaks seemed to foreground as likely candidates. Others were convinced that Madeline and Laura had switched places and that, as a result, Laura was actually still alive. Another was certain that Josie or the mysterious Asian Man (then believed to be her henchman) was the killer (if only because the series' otherwise unmotivated opening shot - focusing on Joe's enigmatic face - must have some significance.) More ambitious critics developed elaborate explanations for why the killer was Sheriff Truman, Deputy Andy, Donna, Ronette Pulaski, or Doc Hayward, going well beyond possibilities explicitly raised on the program. Consider, for example, the case that one fan built to support his theory....

The formulation of such theories is the logical response to a mystery, part of the typical reception of any whodunit, yet rarely has the consumption of a mystery been conducted in such a public fashion. The technology of the net allows what might previously have been private meditations to become the basis for social interaction. Each case made against a possible suspect represented a different formulation of Twin Peaks' moral economy, a different emplotment of its events, that necessarily changed the meaning of the whole and foregrounded some moments at the expense of others. A world where Laura Palmer is murdered by the kindly doctor who delivered her into the world is a very different place than one where she is murdered by the Horne brothers in their efforts to protect their drug trade or where Laura kills her cousin and assumes her identity. Different theories were grounded in different assumptions about the nature of evil and the trustworthiness of authority. No one was sure how black Lynch's narrative would become.

What these competing theories meant was the continued circulation and elaboration of multiple narratives, each of which could be sustained by the aired information, each of which posed a different way of making sense to the series. Each new revelation on the air produced new challenges for some theories while seeming to add ammunition to others. Each clue was reread multiple times to provide support for each of the metatextual narratives that assumed lives of their own apart from Lynch's text.

In other words, the myth that fans were somehow solving a puzzle proved surprisingly generative, enabling a prolonged process of interpretation -- but I would go beyond this and describe each of these theories as a form of fan fiction. Most of the people who posed these theories -- especially those involving more obscure suspects -- knew they were unlikely to be "right" (predicting Lynch's narrative trajectory). Rather, they were showing off their ability to reimagine the story on different terms and still make all of the pieces fit. They weren't so much interpreting Lynch's series as constructing an alternative version of it. I am certain this is also what goes on with many of the theories around Lost.

There's a problem here: the notion of a mystery or a puzzle puts the focus on the product (figuring out the solution) rather than on the process (enjoying the play with multiple possible versions of the story). So, ironically, the pleasure is greatest in the middle -- once there are enough pieces of information out there to enable multiple competing versions of the story to be placed into circulation and to be debated but before the series starts to close down possibilities. A collective intelligence can generate a richer, more nuanced version of the narrative than a small creative team working within the economic constraints of the American media industry can possibly facilitate. These series are almost certain to end in disappointment, almost certainly going to let their fans down in the end. We've seen this with Twin Peaks and with The Matrix and with Babylon 5 and perhaps now with Lost with varying degrees of disappointment and frustration.

The Trickster Author

That said, notions of authorship play crucial roles in motivating and justifying this activity. These fans needed to see themselves as exceptional readers (going beyond what "Joe Sixpack" was willing to do with the content of popular television) and to justify that, they needed to see David Lynch as an exceptional author (one who was going to flaunt television conventions, one who had thought this through at a deeper level, one who would at any given moment pull the rug out from under his fans):

The fans' pleasure lay simultaneously in their mastery over the text (their ability to successfully predict the next turn of its convoluted plot) and their vulnerability to Lynch's trickery (their inability to guess what is likely to happen next). Matching wits against Lynch became the ideal test of their own intellectual rigor and creative impulses, a chance to demonstrate their knowledge and mastery at a task that refused to yield easily to their probing. While most critics were pushing the producers the resolve the Palmer murder before they lost all of their viewers, the computer net fans only wanted to see the enigmas expand, wanted to forestall closure in order to prolong their pleasure in playing with textual puzzles. One fan posted a joke that perfectly captured their pleasurable agony over the deferral of narrative resolution: "A robber walks into a bank and says to the teller, 'Give me all your money or I'll tell you who killed Laura Palmer.'"

Many of them gained a special prestige from their ability to understand this program that proved incoherent and unapproachable to many of their friends and family members. The fans wanted its complexities to proliferate so they could spend more hours trying to work through the problems it posed.

And as the process continues, as the ending grows closer, there is a panic that sets in that the writer may not be quite as bright as one had imagined. Here's how one TP fan talked about Lynch (the terms are very similar to the way some Lost fans are now talking about Abrams):

Am I the only one experiencing a crisis of faith? I waken in the middle of the night in a cold sweat imagining a world in which no one knows who killed Laura Palmer. I imagine Lynch and Frost just making it up as they go along, snickering about attempts to identify the killer when none exists. I see them ultimately making an arbitrary choice of culprits, a totally unsatisfying conclusion to the mystery. Are we being treated to an excruciatingly slow fuck destined to end in a whimper of an orgasm? Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining, there are worse things in life.

And of course, Abrams faces the added burden, as Bogost notes, of having already screwed over fans of Alias and thus having to escape his reputation for slap-dash storytelling. (Under the circumstances, I've been surprised by how much Lost coheres and yet still manages to surprise).

Here's how I discussed this problem in terms of Twin Peaks:

Paradoxically, the more authority fans ascribed to the author, the more suspicious they become of that authority. So much was riding on their conception of Lynch's masterfulness that their anxiety intensified as the series unfolded. If Lynch as author justified their fannish activity, rationalized the time and attention devoted to his text, what would happen if the text was meaningless - or rather, if they all found meaningful originated within the reception community rather than the author?

We could of course take another perspective -- suggesting that a text should be judged by the generativeness of its content and not by the coherence of its final resolution. A good television show would be one that inspires the most activity within the community and inspires fans to put together the pieces in the most interesting ways. The aired resolution represents one possible way of understanding that material -- given no more or less status than any other interpretation of the fictional world and judged against the richness that the fan community itself produced. Yet, most of us aren't willing to go this far in terms of valuing fan creativity over professional entertainment.

A Corrupted Art?

Let me respond briefly to two other claims that Bogost made in his comments here, since they speak to either a misunderstanding of each other's positions or to a fundamental difference about the nature of popular culture (take your pick):

Bogost writes:

In my opinion (you knew this was coming), this technique is primarily used to hook viewers and insure their commitment to the show in order to increase the value of the broadcast's advertising dollars. Such value is the primary currency of consolidated media, but it also benefits creator JJ Abrams, who gets a cut of the show's value thanks to his role as creator and executive producer. So, there is a financial incentive toward false riddles or riddle simulations, which are arguably easier to craft than real one.

Yes, Ian, I knew that one was coming. I don't totally disagree.

But the same elements in the series can have both commercial and aesthetic motivations at the same time. Every media maker is in the business of making money for the people who finance their work. Every choice has to be justified to their backers as a commercial calculation. Yet, in practice, there are a wide array of different ways one can make money off your consumers and at some point, other kinds of values enter into the choices that get made around the production of a television show. In this case, Abrams seems honestly interested in the aesthetics of serial fiction and seems to particularly enjoy puzzles, ciphers, and mazes (not to mention backstory) as building blocks for television entertainment.

Lost was far from guaranteed success when it launched: there weren't other shows with strong audiences that followed these practices and you could argue that he was going deeper in the same direction that was associated with the critical and commercial collapse of his previous series. No matter how you cut it, Lost was a gamble. Many other television producers have tried to duplicate the formula of Lost and so far, none of them have enjoyed either its commercial or critical success. Something is going on here that audiences find compelling. And if it were as simple as making the right commercial calculations, then we would see many more successful duplications. To date, Prison Break is the only new series, post-Lost, to succeed on these terms and its success is modest compared to what Lost has accomplished. We will see if any of the new fall serials can break out of this pattern.

I often find myself draw to a quote from Roger Corman that speaks to this tension between commercial and aesthetic motivations:

I think films are a compromised and corrupted art form, a combination of business and art. And I think filmmakers who treat it completely as a business fail. A business-oriented film is too blatant. It must have something more. To me, films that succeed are those that are slightly corrupted, that attempt to be both business and art, knowing they can never be a full work of art and should never be a full work of business.

A Disruptive Audience?

Bogost also writes:

I know that Henry (and you too, from the sound of it) believe that these fan gestures are disruptive to commercial enterprise, but I think the argument for such disruption is much stronger in the case of Survivor than in the case of Lost.

Actually, this is a simplification of what I am arguing about fan's relations to television. It is perhaps a more accurate description of what I argued in Textual Poachers than of what I am arguing in Convergence Culture.

Textual Poachers was very much shaped by the language of cultural studies which at the time was locked into a debate with other theoretical traditions about whether people who consumed popular media were somehow ideological dupes of capitalist patriarchy. The counterargument then necessarily focused on resistance, suggesting that audiences had a largely oppositional relationship to television producers and content. In Poachers, I hint at some flaws in this argument, suggesting the ways that fan activity is motivated both by fascination and by frustration, suggesting that appropriation involves both proximity and distance to the text, and arguing that not all appropriations fit comfortably within the progressive ideologies being celebrated by writers in the Cultural Studies tradition. But, the most oft cited passages of the book celebrate the oppositional nature of fan culture.

The relations between contemporary media producers and fans are more complicated still because of this elaborate courtship dance that is taking place at the moment around relationship marketing, user-generated content, and audience participation. The result may be a broad array of different relationships between consumers and producers, some oppositional, some collaborative, and typically there are shifts in that relationship over time. As I suggest, Survivor fans are not operating outside of the design of the series when they show strong interests in who wins the million dollars; they may become part of the buzz around the series when producers want to talk about the extreme lengths they will go to find answers; the producers may play cat and mouse games to keep them engaged. At the same time, Survivor fans increasingly view the producers as antagonists and producers increasingly feel threatened by their ability to expose what they find to a larger public.

In the case of Lost, there's nothing particularly oppositional about audiences pooling knowledge and debating interpretations. (Indeed, Jason Mitell makes this very point in an essay he recently shared with me comparing spoiling Survivor with spoiling Lost.) This is, as Bogost notes, the mechanism that sustains interest in the series. It is also part of Lost's aesthetic design: there's no question that the producers are factoring internet based reception into their creative decisions on the series.

Snake Eyes

Squawk. Slurp. Squawk. Slurp.

This is the sound of me eating crow. I'll admit that I fell prey to some of the hype about the Snakes phenomenon when I predicted several months ago that it might result in one of the strongest opening weekends this summer.

Now that the dust has settled, it is pretty clear that this isn't what happened. In fact, Snakes did manage to be the top box office earner last week but it barely broke beyond $15M, there's some dispute as to whether it really came out on top of the Talladega Nights, and there were three other films (none of them huge box office champs) that were only a few million dollars under it. All told, it was a pretty lackluster weekend at the box office -- as might be predicted by a late summer release date.

At the moment, New Line is getting caught by the expectations game. The media has turned the Snakes box office into a referendum of sorts on the new kind of collaborative relationship between media producers and consumers. They are taking its "failure" to meet some inflated expectations as evidence that internet based marketing doesn't work. I suppose we should use the below expectations performance of any number of films this summer as signs that movie previews and television commercials just aren't enough to open a movie.

Let's be clear that the hype surrounding Snakes was partially built on line and partially built through traditional media channels. What portion of you first learned about Snakes on the internet and what portion read about internet interest in the film in Entertainment Weekly or USA Today? The new seems very good at innovating and experimenting; the broadcast channels though play a crucial role in amplifying those voices and getting them in front of mainstream consumers. In the case of Snakes, the double whammy of internet activism and media hype has succeeded in creating a very high level of awareness of this particular film but was not enough to overcome some core skepticism about the core premise. I found this out talking to my mother-in-law and sister-in-law this weekend: neither is much of a film buff; most films pass through town without registering on their radar; but both knew about s Snakes and knew that it was the film that was generating such interest on line. That's no small accomplishment for viral marketing.

Of course, one might well question the motives of traditional journalists who have jumped with such glee on the Snakes phenomenon and tried to flatten the idea that fans might play an active role in promoting a motion picture. Here's a sample of some of the scorn thrown at fans of the film following the box office returns:

The Internet buzz over "Snakes on a Plane" turned out to be nothing to hiss about. (Yahoo)

The horror-comedy starring Samuel L. Jackson took in $15.2 million last weekend, a tepid opening that dashed the hopes of Hollywood and especially of New Line Cinema, which released the movie, that vigorous marketing on the Internet would be a powerful new way to propel fans into theaters at a time when movies are working hard to hold their own against other forms of entertainment. ( *Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Despite a year of blog-fueled fanatacism that spilled over into the mainstream media in recent weeks, Snakes on a Plane didn't exactly sink its fangs into the box office. (E Online)

Of course, such writers may have a personal motive for proving that the public may not be ready to decide for itself which new releases are worth getting excited about. After all, these are the people who have historically played a gatekeeping function within our culture.

At the same time, fan groups are lining up to suggest that the low box office was actually the product of the studio's efforts to capitalize on the grassroots buzz rather than letting things play out on their own, as reader Stefanie Kechayas, a media student at the University of Melbourne doing thesis work on movie marketing and the online community, explains:

SoaP has not been released in Australia yet (is released Thursday), but I wanted to add what I thought was a really interesting trend on the websites I'm looking at. Yesterday, all the sites began to report on the "poor"

performance of SoaP at the U.S. Box Office at the weekend. In trying to analyse why the film performed as it did there seems to be a "blame game" happening. Devin Faraci at CHUD, in particular, (just as he was with Firefly) is preoccupied with the fan vs. studio angle. These websites seem to have a major issue with the way the film went from being a 'genuine' cybersubcultural fascination (because of subcultural manifestations of cool and knowledges about 'good' and 'bad' cinema turning the film into one big joke) to being capitalised by studios into a 'mainstream' marketing extravaganza (hence detracting from the film's - and subculture's - countercultural clout). Through this over-capitalisation and also a too long wait on the release, the film has lost its interest factor (its 'undergroundness') and hence underperformed, and this - according to these sites - is the studio's fault.

I find this fascinating because, I think, this convergence between producers and consumers has been happening for years now and this transition between what is seen as sub or counter-cultural capital and mainstream cultural capital is nothing new. I think the difference now is that these websites and subcultures are beginning to realise what's been going on, and are not sure how they feel about it. They are fan groups and they do display some of the hallmarks of textual poaching and ownership as well as strongly displaying their capital through professionalism common in most fan groups studied. Yet they are uncomfortable with the power shifts that are occurring. This is not he first time these sites have been poached for information by film producers (look at the "planted review" phenomenon, or the new film Fanboys), and yet there is still a great amount of animosity directed towards studios and their marketing techniques. When a film underperforms, wether critically or financially, these groups blame the

studios. When a film performs well at the box office, these sites either give the film text critical merit or credit the studios with good marketing. Interestingly though, the sites place themselves also in judgement of other more hardcore fan groups, like Star Wars Fanboys and Browncoats. Devin blamed the Browncoats' over-zealousness for grass roots advertising for effectively scaring away average movie goers, amongst other reasons. And yet he rejects the blame for SoaP, drawing a major distinction between Internet Movie Fans and 'hardcore' fans. The Hollywood Film Review Websites and Internet Movie Fans I'm looking at seem to want to situate themselves as a place of convergence of power between consumers and producers, and yet really seem to struggle with their place in it, when push comes to shove. Ironically, although the Internet Movie Fans are angry that the studios took what was originally going to be a 'cult hit' only known to a niche group and tried to make it mainstream, the film hasn't earned blockbuster levels and may well actually turn into a genuine 'cult hit.'

Both sides seem determined to prove that there can be no meaningful cooperation between media producers and consumers.

But let's not be in such a big hurray to dismiss what's happened here. I would have loved to see Snakes outgross Pirates (or at least Superman Returns). But that may have been the wrong criteria for evaluating the success of internet based marketing. The idea of large opening weekend grosses is itself a product of mass marketing. In a world where films are designed to appeal to the broadest possible public, broadcasting makes sense as a way of getting out your message and the success of this strategy is going to be measured by how many people you can get into the theatre the first week. But, if you read Chris Anderson's Long Tail argument, he suggests that niche properties require longer shelf time to find their audience: they start slower, they last longer.

In this case, the hype was enough to heightened awarenes about the film but not enough to overcome skepticism. Some thought the film wouldn't be any good. Others worried that the film wouldn't be bad enough.

The folks who came on the opening weekend might be seen as the early adapters. Most of what we've heard here suggests that many of them liked what they saw. They are going to go back and reassure their friends. We need to wait and see whether the film has legs -- whether it's pattern is closer to the classic sleeper that holds steady over a number of weeks. We need to see whether the high awareness of the film translates into strong dvd sales. We need to see how the film performs internationally. We need to see how the film does on college campuses and on the midnight film circuit. Only then will we really be able to judge how much and what kind of impact the online phenomenon had in terms of shaping the success of this film.

David Edery makes a similar point in his discussion of the film at Game Tycoon:

To be blunt: the naysayers are wrong. What they don't seem to realize is that this movie could very well have been a disaster. The premise was ridiculous. Critics, not primed to think of the movie as camp, might have panned the hell out of it. Online fan communities gave this movie's creators a remarkable opportunity to turn a zero into something more. And they did!

Industry observers like John Hamann of Box Office Prophets seem on the cusp of understanding this, even as they question the film's "disappointing numbers." A quote from Hamann: Snakes won't change anything, but it could start a decent-sized franchise for New Line, with huge revenue from DVD in the cards. With a reported cost of only $35 million, this will be an okay performer for a studio that has struggled since the last of the Lord of the Rings films.

Huge revenue from DVD in the cards? That isn't a consolation prize -- that's a real win (and perhaps a miracle for a film as poorly conceived as this one.)

Keep in mind that all of this rides as much on expectations as on realities. Suppose this had been a documentary, a foreign film, or an independent film: this level of performance would have been seen as spectacular. Suppose this was a few decades ago when something like Snakes would have been a B Movie playing at the local drive-end: the idea that this film could be the top money earner would have seemed astonishing. In another era, this film might have gone straight to dvd and certainly would have taken longer to reach the current level of success. We still haven't adjusted to a world where there will be hits and there will be niche successes (and of course there will be flop.) No matter how you cut it, Snakes isn't a flop: it simply isn't a blockbuster.

We are at a transitional moment: web communities are capable of generating strong support for niche products but they still can't compete with the mass market success generated from broadcast media. We need to learn to be more adept at thinkiing about the relations between the two. And we need to curb our enthusiasms enough to lower expectations.

Squawk. Slurp.

comics and convergence part two

This entry continues the series of outtakes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Again, the primary focus is on comics. Here, the focus is on the ways comics content is moving into film and television as well as the ways that television and film content increasingly is moving into comics.

Paul Levitz, President of DC Comics, characterizes comics as having a "permeable membrane" to the other sectors of the entertainment industry. It is easy for comics's highly visual content to be translated into film or television series. Because the pay is low, comics represent a recruiting ground for new talent which, in turn, get absorbed into other media industries. Increasingly, comics are a playground where writers successful in other media - such as Kevin Smith in film or J. Michael Straczynski and Joss Whedon in television - can do creative work that would be harder to be funded in those other media.

From the beginning, comics content has moved into other media sectors. In the 1910s and 1920s, the popularity of Buster Brown, one early comic strip character, spilled over from the daily newspaper into live action films, stage shows, popular songs, toys, and advertising. Today, if Buster Brown is known at all, it is through the shoe company which still bears his name and image.

Similarly, within five years after the initial introduction of Superman, the character could be found in movie serials, animated shorts, and radio dramas, and subsequently, on television, stage shows, and computer games. This flow of comics content into other media is in many ways a prototype for our contemporary franchise system of media production.

Over the past few years, comics content has been increasingly in demand. Many recent comic-themed movies, including Spider-Man and X-Men, have become box office successes, and comics content has also influenced production in independent cinema (Ghost World, Road to Perdition, American Splendor, Sin City).

DC Comics, the company which controls Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and The Flash, among others, is owned by Time Warner, one of the major transmedia companies. DC Comics President Paul Levitz has outlined what he sees as the advantages of that relationship: "You gain the ability to work for the long run, you gain the ability to exploit creative properties across many different platforms, and at the same time, to be able to take the economic position in them that allows a single entity to brand and manage the assets so they can be deployed sensibly. You get a company that understands the line of work you are in so that you can take the appropriate creative risk, look for opportunities....There is no character in American culture who has been in as many media as Superman...It is difficult to name an entertainment medium that Superman has had no presence in....Did we benefit from having most of those assets stay under one roof? Yeah. We are still able to control rights to the George Reeves Superman shows...We are able to keep the Christopher Reeves movies on or off the air, according to our view of how they support the current initiatives whether Smallville, the new movies, an animated series, the comics, what have you. Our competitors are usually not able to do this."

By contrast, Marvel, the publisher of Spider-Man, X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four, among others, subcontracts with studios to produce media versions of its franchises, while increasingly maintaining creative control over the process. As Avi Arad, the head of Marvel's film division explains, "we pick the studio that will best nurture the product because basically they all want the Marvel brand." Arad's division emerged as Marvel began to reconceptualize itself less as a comics publisher and more as an intellectual property company which would generate the bulk of its revenue from licensing its characters for movies, games, television series, and toys.

Other smaller comics companies or independent artists will sell the rights to their work on a case by case basis. Dark Horse Comics, Inc., for example, has been the launching pad for several recent media properties, including Men in Black, The Mask, and Tank Girl. In this context, even relatively obscure titles can attract industry interest. Steve Niles's and Ben Templesmith's Thirty Days of Night, a horror comic about vampires in Alaska, published by IDW Comics, was optioned for film production before the first issue hit the stands.

Throughout most of this history, the number of people who would encounter these characters in films or other media has remained significantly higher than the percentage who read comics; filmmakers assume that many viewers had little or no previous exposure to these characters; the films had to operate outside the complex continuity and back story which shapes contemporary comics productions; and in many cases, the characters had to be reintroduced or significantly reworked to reflect the tastes of a mass audience as opposed to those of a niche readership. In turn, it is often the look and feel of the character in the movies which shapes other media spin-offs, such as video games, because the movie reaches far more people than will see the comics. Comics publishers often coincide the debut of new plotlines in the comics to these releases so that readers, turned on by what they see on screen, can find a jumping on point to the series.

As content flows across media, it is often accompanied by creative talent who got their start in comics. For example, Brian Michael Bendis, the creator of Marvel's Ultimate Spider-Man series, was hired to be script editor for an animated series based on the character for airing on MTV and to help direct the production of games set in the Marvel universe. In some cases, creative talents move fluidly across media. A notable example there would be Neil Gaiman who has been successful not only as the creator of The Sandman comic book series, but also has written English language scripts for Japanese anime films (Princess Mononoke), published best-selling novels (American Gods) and children's books (Coraline), and written original series for British television (Neverwhere). His short stories have, in turn, been adopted into comic book form by other writers and artists and into radio dramas.

Extension works in the other direction as well, with comics becoming a low cost, low risk means of expanding existing media franchises. Kevin Smith, the filmmaker who created Clerks and Chasing Amy, has been a long time comics shop owner and fan. He has developed a series of comic books which extends the stories of the characters he introduced in his so-called New Jersey films, in many cases, using them to provide back story or motivation for actions we observed on screen. Similarly, Joss Whedon, the creative producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has used comics to fill in gaps between episodes and perhaps more interestingly, to expand the time line of the series. Tales of the Slayers, for example, depicts the adventures of previous vampire slayers ranging across the full span of human history, while Fray depicts a slayer several hundred years in our future, battling demons and vampires in a world reminiscent of Bladerunner. Michael Chabon won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which dealt with the early history of the American comic books industry and introduced a range of original superhero characters. Chabon subsequently worked with comic book writers and artists to develop a series focused on The Escapist, Luna Moth and his other original characters.

Spelling Bees and Scrabble

Earlier this summer, I posted notice of a podcast featuring Scot Osterweil, the research manager of our Education Arcade initiatives and the creator of the Great Zoobinis game series. There are now two new installments on the web featuring Scott and his work on Zoobinis. This is part of a series focused on the people who are working together at MIT and at Maryland Public Radio on a new initiative called Learning Games to Go. (I recently taped some segments talking about my interests in games and education which will appear at some point down the line). These materials will be of interest to anyone who has been following the discussions here about serious games. One of the most interesting segments in the new podcast with Scott Osterweill includes a comparison between the Spelling Bee and Scrabble as two models for how one might integrate games or contests into the learning process. It helps to distinguish between early edutainment products which had a drill and practice logic and more recent attempts to develop learning games which sees learning as a process of experimentation and exploration:

In a spelling bee, a kid is challenged to memorize a lot of word, there's a fair amount of pressure, and it's kind of grim. If they get a word wrong, the buzzer goes off, they're told they got it wrong, and they are out. There's never a discussion about why they got it wrong, how they could have reasoned about the word to get it right. There's never really much of a discussion about how that word could be used in speech. In fact, the goal for a spelling bee is to learn all sorts of words that you will never use in common speech. Compare that with a game of Scrabble where the kid sits with the letters in front of them and is moving them around, thinking endlessly about all of the different combinations of words and which ones are real. They try to play one and there's a discussion about whether that's a real word or whether that's a real form of the word. Through that process, kids are engaging deeply not just in spelling but in word usage and they're having fun while they are doing it. There's very little penalty for making a mistake. In fact, the game invites kids to take a risk. 'I'll try a word that I think I heard an adult say. I am not sure it is right but if I get it wrong, I am not out of the competition the way I am in a spelling bee.' So a child can play Scrabble and have a lot of fun at it and laugh at it and not even necessarily need to win to feel like they have accomplished something. That's the experience a game can provide a kid in terms of learning.

This comparison really resonated with me. Anyone who has read this blog has no doubt caught me make one or another really awful spelling mistake. I have struggled all of my life with being a bad speller. I still recall some of the humiliation I faced participating in spelling bees in school. I think I would have preferred having my teeth extracted in public rather than being asked to spell words in front of my classmates. The Spelling Bee may be a game but it isn't a fun or motivating game except for those kids who become very good at it. The Spelling Bee is a game where there are clear losers and it is no fun losing. On the other hand, I got to watch my nine year old nephew play Boggle this summer and I was amazed by the pleasure he took in identifying words from the random pile of letters in front of him. He could more than hold his own with players twice his age and I would hear him introduce words that he learned from game play into his conversation, sometimes weeks later. He would drag out the box and want anyone and everyone to play the game with him. I would have been a better speller today if my education looked more like Boggle or Scrabble and less like spelling bees.

The podcast does a great job capturing Scott Osterweill's unique perspective on the importance of developing learning games that are fun and motivating, that encourage kids to learn by taking risks and testing out new approaches, and that so engage the imagination that kids end up drawing pictures or writing stories about their avatars. The new set of podcasts also feature students and teachers who have been using his games in their classes as they share their thoughts about the value of a more playful approach to learning. The teachers offer a compelling case for the ways games can be integrated into curricular standards and why it matters that educational games feel like real video games.

Newbie

As I was being interviewed for my segments in the series, I found myself talking with the guy who was interviewing me -- Tom Miller. It turns out that Tom has been so turned on working on this project that he has started playing games himself as a 46 year old and has begun to write his own blog about the experience, designed to help bridge between young gamers and their parents. Here are just a few tidbits from his blog, Newbie:

The whole experience reminds me of last year when my family and I went ice skating at our local rink. I'd skated some as a kid, but it had been years and years. People always say that it just comes back, you know, like riding a bike. Well, it didn't just come back for me. I fell on my behind about a million times. My glasses flew off. It was embarrassing.

As adults, we're supposed to know how to do things. It's hard to mess up in public. My kids, of course, did just fine. I think they wondered what was wrong with me, and we haven't been skating together since then. When I think about this, I get more determined to learn how to play these games. I also think that I should go skating again with my family...

Tom does a good job describing all of the bumps and challenges he encounters learning to think like a gamer. Here he describes what happened when he returned from playing Crazy Machines to confront a real world problem involving similar principles:

The amazing part was later that night when I was working on the sink in our bathroom - typical minor plumbing fix. At first, though, I couldn't figure out the problem. Then all of the sudden it was like I saw the pipes in a new way (really and truly!), and I was able to see how to solve the problem. The amazing part was that I felt like my game-playing earlier in the day had actually helped me trouble-shoot my plumbing issues. It was just coincidental that both activities involved pipes (virtual and otherwise...). It was a neat thing to notice. Maybe these games can help us old folks think a little more clearly and maybe even better. Cool....

He discusses a range of different games -- from Darfur is Dying to The Sims 2, which has caused him more than his share of difficulty:

Playing "The Sims 2" feels a little like being in a foreign country. They all speak in this weird gibberish Esperanto language. My little guy is still starving and he's making very strange sounds - EEEARRRHHHKKKKLLL - or something like that. As you can see, he holds his stomach a lot and points to his mouth, somehow convinced that these gestures will help him in some way....

It's all become more than a little upsetting.

Up until now, I've been trying to just figure out this game without looking at the manual. As I understand it, that's how "the kids" do it. Manual, schmanual. And I'm trying to do it like them. I may have to give in, though. I don't know how much longer I can stand to watch my doppelganger cry in anguish - EEEARRRHHHKKKKLLL!!!

I realize that the whole manual thing has become an issue. I'm like the guy who will drive around for three hours because he won't stop and ask for directions.....

Some days later, Tom was back still trying to figure out what he was doing wrong, suggesting that the problems in the game were really starting to get under his skin:

My wife is concerned that my Sims guy is probably dying (you may remember that when last seen, he was crying in pain because I didn't know how to feed him). Thus far, I've avoided going back to "The Sims 2," though, basically because I stink at it. It's way too hard for me to grasp easily, and I'm not sure that I want to make the effort necessary to learn the game. I guess I don't have to go back to it, except for the fact that I've committed myself to this project - exploring and learning about these games. So I feel like I'd be a failure if I just let it go.

The Sims 2 has become the elephant in the room. And I'm sure enough trying to look the other way.

Yet, as the diary continues, he returns again and again to the game -- as if it were a splinter in his brain -- until he improves. This is a pretty good clue that games can be motivators. How many people go back weeks later to homework problems that baffled them?

Good News for Aca/Fen

Some of you have asked what the phrase, "Aca/Fan" means. Basically, it is a term I made up some years ago to refer to people like myself who have one foot in academia and one foot in fandom. It is a hybrid identity -- Aca for Academic, Fan for, well, fan. The fen in the title above is a longstanding bit of fan slang -- essentially the plural of fan. In my forthcoming book, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, I reproduce excerpts from a public dialogue I had some years ago with fellow aca/fan researcher Matt Hills for the now defunct online journal, Intensities. In that conversation, we talked a bit more about the relationship between fans and academics. Unfortunately, the interview itself is no longer online:

I think we need to consider different generations of scholars within fandom, and moments within which those scholars are working. I think there are at least three moments of fan studies that get conflated together as if they are a unified body of theory. There is a body of work that began to stress active audiences and the use of ethnographic methods, derived in part from sociological methods, and I would put early John Tulloch, John Fiske and Janice Radway in this body of work - they come from different places and so I don't want to lump them together as representing one totally unified body of work.

But it was important for these writers to be outside what they were writing about, to be free of any direct implication in their subject matter. They begin to acknowledge that audiences have an active role, but their prose is very depersonalized, there's often no acknowledgement of any affection they feel for the objects of study, or if there is, it's a token gesture. And there's sometimes an attempt to pull back from the fan community at the end of such writing and say, right, now we can arrive at the truth that the fans don't yet recognize about their own political activity. I've taken Radway to task for the closing chapter of Reading the Romance for that kind of gesture. That's the first generation.

I see myself and others writing at the same time, Camille [Bacon-Smith] to some degree , as a second generation that comes to a discourse already formulated around these axes of active/passive, resistance/co-opted. We're trying to find a way to alter that perception based on insider knowledge of what it is to be a fan, and struggling to find a language to articulate a different perspective that comes out of lived experience and situated knowledge. And it proves very difficult - there's a lot of resistance because the first generation are the readers responding to our manuscripts, the editors deciding whether they get published or not, the faculty deciding whether we get hired. So you end up struggling to negotiate between what you want to say, and what it's possible to say at a particular point in time, in order to get your work out at all. And there is a level of defensiveness there. When I was writing Textual Poachers I was so frustrated by how badly fans had been written about. As a fan I felt implicated in that writing and I wanted to challenge it; there are passages in the book that are just out-and-out defenses of fandom, and others that are trying to pull back and describe, analyze, critique....

Now, I think all of that work paved the way for a whole generation of aca-fen, as I like to call them; that is, people who are both academics and fans, for whom those identities are not problematic to mix and combine, and who are able then to write in a more open way about their experience of fandom without the 'obligation of defensiveness', without the need to defend the community. Therefore they can take up things like contradictions within it, disputes within it, re-raise awkward subjects that we papered over in our earlier accounts, and now there's a freedom to have real debate among ourselves about some of these core issues.

For those of you who have come to my blog in search of insights into participatory culture, you already know that I think fan culture is a particularly rich spot to understand ways that new media can be used to transform our relationship to mass media. I was asked about this by the fine folks at the British webzine, Big Shiny Thing, last week. Here's part of what I had to say:

Fans have been and are likely to continue to be the shock troops in this transformation of our culture -- highly motivated, passionately committed, and socially networked. They are early adopters of new technologies and willing to experiment with new relationships to culture. (We might also throw into this category other highly motivated groups such as bloggers and gamers.)

There are signs that fan culture practices and products are spreading throughout the culture. Recent statistics from the Pew Center of Internet and American Life found that more than half of teens online produce some form of media and many of them shared what they produced by others. They are part of the participatory culture I am describing. So are people who join discussion forms or sign up for RSS feeds to get more information about their favorite band or television program.

As writers like Will Wright and Raph Koster have suggested, there is a pyramid of participation. Not everyone will want to spend massive amounts of time generating new content -- some will simply want to engage with content others have produced. Not everyone will write fan stories -- some may share critical responses with the authors. Not everyone will want to spoil reality television programs -- some will simply enjoy the new relationships to the program the spoiler community helps to create for them. But the expansion of this participatory culture changes the context in which media content gets produced and distributed and thus it impacts all of us one way or another. Given this, I would imagine fans may still enjoy a privileged status in participatory culture but more and more people will benefit from the once invisible cultural work of fans.

New Blog on Online Fan Cultures

Given that, it should be good news to many of you that Nancy Baym, a prime example of that third generation of fan scholars I talk about above, has launched an interesting new blog focused around online fandom and designed to explore the intersection between fans and academics. Baym wrote one of the first and best studies of the ways that digital media was altering fan culture, Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community (1999). She is a classic example of a scholar studying their own fandom and coming away with intimate knowledge that would be closed to many outside that community. For a more recent book that deals well with the question of online fandom, let me also recommend Rhiannon Bury's Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online (a book that deals primarily with fans of Due South and The X Files).

Baym's new blog has so far been at its best focusing on music fans online -- a topic to which I confess I know just enough to be dangerous but which is clearly central to any discussion of online fans as niche markets. Among other topics, she's posted so far about the way such groups as ABBA, The Who, and the Dresden Dolls relate to their fan communities. Some of the most interesting material to date centers on Madrugada, a Norwegian rock band I had never heard of. Small wonder: As Baym explains, "none of their records has been released in the US, they never tour here, and the only people I know who listen to them learned about them from me." Yet the group's website has allowed her and other Americans to feel a connection to this group despite the total absence of any attempt to market their music in this country:

Last fall the band toured Europe. Fans on that forum recorded several shows themselves, spent a good deal of time not just creating torrents, but also in some cases remastering the recordings for best sound. Others posted photos they had taken. Living in the States, it was a lot closer to getting to see them live than I ever would have gotten without the board. There is an archive of back concerts that are periodically reseeded and traded again. I've amassed enough live Madrugada recordings through the board that I have a pretty good sense of what they were like on each tour of their career. This is done with the band's tacit approval, with the understanding that there is no money exchanged and nothing available for purchase is posted, points which the webmaster gently enforces when need be. Not only did it keep fans who weren't able to make this tour involved with the band long after their last release might have stopped getting playtime, but it also brought in fans who didn't like the recent release, fans who wanted to know what old songs were being played. So it kept fans they could easily have lost involved with them. Would it have worked if it were a board run by the band? Maybe, if they were able to resolve the copyright questions in ways they and those around them could live with. Would it have worked if it were a board run by their label or any other third party? It could, but it would take a good deal more than simply "creating a fan forum."

She also ran an interview with Reidar Eik, a Norwegian who lives in Berlin and who runs the semi-quasi-official fan website for the band. It sounds like Eik has been able to achieve a symbiotic relationship with the band and its management, with his fansite linked off the official website and providing services for fans that the artists themselves would not be able to meet. Eik sees such relationships as possible if one works with smaller, lesser known groups which are still struggling to find their market:

Focus on the small bands that really deserve your interest and the time you put into the project. If you go for a band like Radiohead, thousands have already made better pages than yours will ever be, but if you go for the local band who sound like they should be selling millions of copies, you will be the first. They might turn out to be 'the next big thing' and it will be great, or they might dissolve into nothing. But hopefully they have tried, and you went along for the ride.

I know I will be eagerly awaiting more insights into the world of online fandom from Nancy Baym in the coming weeks. It is good to have other aca/fen out there blogging.

New Book on Fan Fiction

On other fronts, I also wanted to toss off a recommendation for an impressive new book for those of you interested in reading more about fan fiction -- Karfen Hellekson and Kristina Busse's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. I had a chance to read this outstanding collection of new essays some months ago while it was still coming together as a book project and was proud to write a blurb. I have to say that I have been studying fans for more than twenty years at this point and I still managed to learn something fresh and new in pretty much every essay in this collection.

As Hellekson and Busse suggest in their introduction to the collection, their central focus is on fan writing as a collaborative, social process, one which involves not simply the interaction between fan and the inspiring text (which they see as the central focus of fan studies to date) but also the social relations between fan writers, editors, and readers, who work together to generate fresh perspectives and new experiences around pre-existing cultural materials. They emphasize fan writing as always a "work in progress" with a particular emphasis upon the writing and reading process as opposed to the cultural products produced within the fan community. While Baym and Bury write mostly about discussion lists as one manifestation of online fandom, these writers are much more focused on Live Journal as a new kind of space for the production and transmission of fan writing. There is a very interesting discussion of new forms of fan fiction as writers assume the role of fictional characters (including the personas of real life celebrities) and correspond with each other in character.

The book breaks a number of taboos which were respected by earlier writers, including an open acknowledgement of the once closeted practice of real person slash (that is, slash written about the real world personalities of media celebrities as opposed to the fictional characters they play in their movies) and a frank discussion of the erotics of women sharing erotic stories with each other. Both of these themes are apt to be highly controversial within the fan community itself -- so we can expect a certain amount of fireworks to surround the book's publication. I know a decade ago when I was writing Textual Poachers, I was specifically asked not to write about either topic and like a good anthropologist, I protected the secrets of my field community. The Internet has blown the cover on real person slash (even if it remains a hot topic among many fans) and the intimate nature of Live Journal -- where stories circulate alongside personal confessions -- has made the relations between fans (including periodic heated feuds) also a matter of public knowledge.

Many of the writers came together through their own Live Journal practices, which often merged the production of fan fiction with the theorizing of their own practices. The best writing here brings new academic tools to bear on fan writing practices (my favorites include some focus on earlier forms of literature which involved the active appropriation and rewriting of existing stories and some focus on fan fiction as a cultural performance which moves from the actor's performance of the character in the original material, the writer's evocation of that character through their fiction, and the reader's re-embodiment of that performance -- now transformed through the addition of new information -- within their imaginations.) As several of the contributors note, they are less interested in fan culture from an anthropological perspective and more interested in what fan fiction means as a form of literary production. Yet, the best essays also take advantage of what the contributors know as fans -- including a fair amount of autoethnography focused on their own reading and writing practices.

The final few essays move us from the web as a system for producing and distributing traditional texts to the use of games as a platform for the production of new kinds of fan culture -- including a very good discussion by Louisa Ellen Stein of the ways fans are making use of The Sims and by Robert Jones (the book's soul male contributor) on machinema. These chapters may be of interest to those in games studies who might not otherwise regard themselves as interested in fan culture and suggest the ways that the lines between different online communities are blurring as the practices of participatory culture have extended beyond their originating subcultures -- a theme with which I began this post.

Some of the writing may be heavy slogging for non-academic readers: These young writers are still trying to prove to their dissertation and promotion committees that work on fan fiction is a legitimate academic subject. Their need to credentialize -- a painful reality in academic life -- probably hampers just a little their stated desire to produce a resource which fans can use to better understand their own creative practices. But for those with the background or the inclination, there's a lot here to spark new thought about fan fiction.

Monitoring Snakes on a Plane

I know a good many people who are reading this blog will be going to see Snakes on a Plane this weekend and that you are scattered in cities and towns around the globe. I would like to ask that you send me your observations about the film's reception by 9 pm est weds. night and I will compile them and post them to the blog. Some of the things we will be interested in hearing: When and where you saw the movie; what the attendence was like (packed, sparse, some place in between); memorable examples of interactions between the audience and the film; some sense of the tone of the audience response to the film; some clue as to why the people there came (this may be hard to gleam without talking to people but you can certainly listen to conversations around you, etc.); your own response to the movie. I see this as an experiment in whether we can use blogs to get a nationwide, perhaps world wide snapshot of the public's response to a film. Your notes don't have to be lengthy or sophisticated but your impressions may help us all to better understand the film's reception. Post your responses in the comments section here. (I will do my best to keep rescuing them from the evil Spam Catcher.)

Comics and Convergence Part One

This is the first of a series of outtakes -- passages written for Convergence Culture, but ultimately cut for reasons of length. Each represents a snap shot of convergence culture at work. Most of these sections were intended as side bars. Those of you who have read the book will know that it is structured around a series of core case studies that are developed in depth and sidebars which suggest other dimensionhs of the topic. Sidebars seemed like the most effective way of juxtaposing these other examples to the core discussion and seemed appropriate given the book's focus on the way we pull together information from multiple sources. What I like about the sidebars is that readers will engage with them at different points in the reading process as their own whims dictate and thus each reader's experience of the argument will be slightly different. Some will read them as they go; some will wait to the end of the chapter and then go back to read them, and so forth. This section introduces comic books as a particularly rich site for understanding media change. As regular readers will note, I find comics a particularly interesting and relatively underexplored medium. Experiments in new approaches to popular storytelling often take place in comics -- the risks are relatively low both because of lowered cost of production and because of the fringe nature of their readership. At the same time, comics content is being drawn into the commercial mainstream. More and more recent films have been based on comics -- not simply predictible superhero fare such as X-Men, Batman Begins, or Spider-Man, but also off-beat independent films, such as American Splender, Ghost World, Road to Perdition, A History of Violence, and V for Vendetta, among others. I am a hardcore comics fan so you will be seeing lots of examples of trends from comics coming under my analytic gaze as this blog continues.

For those of you who own Convergence Culture, you can always print out these sections and tap them inside your book to assemble your own director's cut edition. :-) For the rest of you, these will give you a taste of the style and structure of the book.

Once mainstream, comics are increasingly a fringe (even an avant garde) form of entertainment, one that appeals predominantly to college students or college-educated professionals. While few read comics, their content flows fluidly across media platforms, finding wide audiences in film, television, and computer games. Something like twenty times the number of people went to see the Spider-Man movie its opening day than had read a Spider-Man comic the previous year. As Avi Arad, the head of Marvel's film division, explains, "You can't do $155 million with just Marvel geeks." Comics creators are torn between the desire to create content which will attract mainstream interest ( to sell it off to other media companies and to broaden their own readership) and producing content which appeals to and retains their hardcore readers.

Comics have entered a period of experimentation, testing new themes, adopting diverse styles, and expanding their genre vocabulary. Because the cost of production and thus the price of experimentation is much lower in comics than in any other medium, film and television monitor comics, searching for material which can be brought from the fringes into the mainstream. The turnaround between conception and distribution is much shorter in comics with the result that they will be among the first media to respond to new cultural developments. Comics now function, as longtime DC Comics editor Dennis O'Neil has commented, as "The R&D Division" for the rest of the entertainment industry. And for that reason, many dimensions of convergence are felt first in comics.

Comics are media hybrids, combining words and images (including both representations and symbols). Not all comics have words and some artists pride themselves on telling stories purely through images. The relative prominence of words and images shifts across the history of the medium with early comics being much more text-centered - though some argue that this reversed itself when the size of newspaper comics shrunk, making it harder for readers to process more detailed images. At different moments in the medium's history (and at different companies), scripts emerged first from writers and were subsequently illustrated or scripts emerged by artists drawing panels which were subsequently retrofitted with dialogue. And in some cases, the same artist writes and draws the comic, often creating a greater integration of words and images.

Pictorial storytelling has been ignored within common periodizations of media history which discuss a general evolution from orality to literacy, from literacy to print, and from print to mass media. Less gets said about the way that pictorial media supported oral storytelling (as is currently believed to be the case with cave paintings or in the sand paintings done by some Arab storytellers to illustrate their tales) or helped to mediate between oral and text-based cultures (as in the case of stainglass windows and tapestries during the middle ages). Most of us have a fairly narrow definition of what we mean by comics - the short strips focused on cute children and funny animals found in the daily newspaper and the longer stories focused on superheroes found at a comic book store. Scott McCloud, the comics theorist and practitioner, has argued for a more expansive definition: "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence."

McCloud argues that there is nothing preordained about the current selection of genres which dominate comics. Indeed, comics took on different kinds of content, built on different aesthetic traditions, reached different audiences, and achieved different cultural status in Japan or in France than in the United States. Moreover, comics are not inherently bound to print culture and McCloud identifies a range of different delivery mechanisms for sequential arts: "A close reading of various ancient works yielded far more than a passing resemblance to comics. Whether decorating the walls of a painted tomb, spiraling in bas-relief up a stone column, parading across a 230-foot tapestry, or zigzagging across an accordion-folded painted deerskin, such works were, despite their exotic styles, comics to the core, telling stories in deliberate sequences of pictures....Ink on paper is just one of the physical forms comics can take, but it's the one form many feel most comfortable calling 'comics'."

Comics, then might be characterized less as a medium than as a mode of expression, cutting across not only different delivery mechanisms (the newspaper supplement, the printed comic book, the carved column, the tapestry) but also across multiple media (print, digital). In that sense, comics share something in common with poetry, which has moved across oral culture, print culture, and digital culture while preserving its own distinctive traditions.

Many familiar aspects of comics - such as panel borders or the left to right and up to down reading protocols or the use of word balloons or the continuation of protagonists across multiple stories - emerged from the specific properties of print culture. These protocols have a certain inertia, in so far as we think about emerging media through the filters of older media practices but they are also subject to change, in so far as each medium creates different working conditions and different markets. On one level, comics have enjoyed enormous continuity with some recurring characters - Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, for example - appearing more or less continuously for sixty years or more. On another level, little else remains the same in comics across that period. Changes in how comics are published, where they are distributed, who reads them, and how they are regulated, have an enormous impact on how the stories of these characters are told.

In his book, Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud argues that digital media may be the best - and perhaps the last - hope for comics to find a larger reading public, having cut themselves off from mainstream visibility through their dependence upon specialty shops as their primary distribution venues. McCloud imagines a world where independent comic artists sell their products directly to the consumer without confronting any middle men or gatekeepers, where more diverse comics content can find audiences well beyond the hardcore comics readers, and where the formal vocabulary of comics can expand, freed from the limits of the printed page. McCloud's book embraces elements of supercession and liberation. As McCloud argues, "Not every creator can expect to strike it rich in the new market, but every individual vision of comics will at least get its day in the sun. Comics designed to reach out to non-fans will no longer have to hide where only fans will see them but instead will connect with their true market and in time, comics can begin to earn the diverse audiences it so desperately needs."

The web has emerged as an important publicity and distribution channel for comics - though ironically, so far, the companies making the most money have been local specialty shops, such as Denver's Mile High Comics, which have seen cyberspace as a means of expanding their market. 75 percent of its sales come from online visitors to a site that receives 12 million hits per month. Such sites put comics in the reach of many who do not live in close proximity to comic shops, though they are also forcing some local shops out of business. As they reach a national market, these online retailers are particularly good sources for back issues, buying them from one consumer and marketing them to another. The major comics companies - Marvel and (the now defunct) CrossGen in particular - have experimented with making some of their comics content available on the web. Marvel boasted 1.3 million downloaded "dot-comics" per month at the peak of the site's success. Most established comics creators use their home pages to communicate more directly with their fans and to get immediate reactions to their work. The discussion forums on such sites are so popular that many comic books have discontinued their longstanding practice of publishing readers' letters, feeling that these missives will go out of date by the time they are printed.

By some estimates, as many as 3000 independent comics artists have chosen to begin their careers in digital comics. In some cases, they target readers who would not typically enter a comic shop. Tak Toyoshima's Secret Asian Man, for example, is one of a number of comics which targets the Asian-American community. In some cases, these comics have proven their market value and been picked up by a comic book publisher. A notable recent success was Scott Kurtz's PvP,/ a web comic on role-playing and computer games, which is now being printed. Others become successful in web-based syndication. Astounding Space Thrills (currently off-line), for example, appears on more than 3000 web sites, each of which pays to support the production of new content. Most such comics are labors of love or designed to pave the way for commercial success, yet, so far, comics artists have had difficulty getting paid for the work they distribute online.

City Blogging in Beirut

Part of the pleasure of starting this blog has been building closer contact with my existing students as I develop posts around some of their research and hearing back from former students who tip me about media developments in their part of the world. A little while ago, I got e-mail from a former undergraduate student Rania Khalaf. She had been a student in my Introduction to Media Studies class years ago and was reminded of the class by recent developments involving digital media in her native country of Lebanon. In this case, I wanted to share with you the story in her own words and through the images being produced by artists in the Middle East but circulated around the world.

Here's what she wrote to me:

I have been thinking a lot about that class lately and was thinking you'd find the blogging about the Lebanese-Israeli war, especially by the art community, to be an interesting phenomenon... Now, the blogs are seeping onto the walls of cities.

Here's what happening:

First, the usual first Web blogging is happening by people on both sides of the conflict. Well - since I'm Lebanese and my family's all there ... I'm a pretty stressed out - so I've mainly been following the blogs from/about lebanon. And now, as Paul Keller puts it, they're moving into the 'urban fabric' and becoming 'city blogs' .

A couple of these blogs that I like best are chronicling the war, not the politics of it but the day-to-day of it, using sketches. Maybe a few song lyrics. Maybe a few paragraphs of text. A song here and there, and one song using the falling bombs for bass.

Here are the two blogs I've been mostly checking out

There's even one that uses annotated pics of Arabic Superman comics .

Having grown up in the middle east and through one civil war, well .. let's just say political analysis of that region turns into wacky conspiracy theories and goes back thousands of years into a blame game that wastes precious time (and in turn, precious lives) .. making it so very sick that sometimes it makes me laugh a little filling the room with a nasty cynicisim .. So I tend to veer to the blogs that are about the human condition , about common sense, about staying alive and moving forward. Me, I'm still holding out for eternal peace and love and all that cheese.

Lately, some of the sketches started appearing on the streets of Amsterdam. Then, in New York, I (heart) Beirut stickers started appearing as 'love from new york to beirut' . Both have started to slowly creep their way throughout the cities of the world. I wonder whether people will notice.

And here are Mazen's pictures - on the walls of Amsterdam (city blogging).

Here are I heart Beirut stickers in NYC:

I thought you'd find this interesting from the digital community point of view, forgetting for a moment the bombs and the whats and wheres and whodroppedthefirstones.

For those who would like to know more about the role that digital media is playing in this current conflict, I would recommend checking out Morph, the blog of the Media Center, which has been having an ongoing discussion about blogging in the middle east written from people living and working across the region. Here, for example, is a discussion of blogs from an Iranian perspective:

The very first thing that I do every morning is to check my emails. It is always a great pleasure to see that people have posted comments on my blog. Even forgetting those who try to show their extreme hatred toward the Iranian regime, I am not used to reading comments like "stop offending my dear president". Many times I think everybody agrees with me; that the Iranian administration is naive and that the political atmosphere in Iran is so corrupt and inefficient. Sometimes when I find an interesting point about Iran I wonder if I should post it in my blog. I think, everybody knows this and everybody agrees with me. The problem is who this everybody is....

t seems that the world is divided into two very distinct islands. In one island intellectual people read our blogs and post nice comments. Some even blame us for being too nice to the regime. On the other island there are people whom applause when Ahmadinejad talks about "defeating the nation's enemies". Obviously, this is nothing new. People have always been separated over many issues, one of them politics. But I am afraid there is no bridge between the two islands, even if we think there is one. Internet, blog, comment, to some of us these are the great sounds of change and democracy. Freelance reporters, transparency, question. I am sorry folks we are living in our closed circle....

What I am trying to show is that basically the power of blogs is limited because of obvious barriers. I should be very optimistic to assume that an Iranian teenager in a small town will quit the national television, the only source of entertainment, and look for my interpretation of the events. I am more and more convinced that the fancy world of blogging, and arranging hunger-strikes, has no meaningful connection to the real world. People are not willing to change their perspective because Lisa tries to show them a nice picture from a "cruel Zionist Israeli". Nor they care if Mansour Osanlo is in prison because he has spoken out for a non-political demand; to have better working conditions. I am not blaming anyone. If I had to wake up seven at the morning to go to work everyday and then pass the last week of each month with virtually no money left I do not think I could afford writing in my good-looking blog. This is how I see all this. We are a community of internet freaks sharing a common positive sense for attractive words such as democracy and freedom. We talk to each other and have fun. This is fine. We are hanging out, blaming this government and that religious identity. This is all fine. But, folks, please do not make it bigger that it actually is.

And here is how Gloria Pan responded to Arash Kamanger's post:

But Arash, there are people who blog and people who read blogs. Yes, the writers are a small circle, their core audiences a larger though still select circle. But beyond that, who can say? If you look at the readership of some of the really active (not necessarily big) blogs, it's very clear that many commenters are not regulars, who just happened to come across a discussion or interesting post. My point, I guess, is that while we can't determine how widespread Internet usage and involvement is, what we can definitely see is a change in the overall public discourse. Is it freer? Are more people getting used to speaking out? Are more people getting used to hearing alternative views -- maybe not directly from the Internet, but from the cousin of the guy down the street who happens to be studying computer science? All this is definitely happening and happening faster all the time. But the question still remains: Will it be for good or evil? The new ideas out there can be from either side. I'm an optimist, and I believe that ultimately, the good ideas will prevail.

I find myself wondering whether the street media practices that Rania Khalaf described in her e-mail to me might represent a response to Kamanger's concerns -- a kind of bridge between the digital world and the people in the streets who have little access to digital media. Khalaf was not the first person living in the west to share with me the remarkable cartoons being produced in Beirut. Indeed, these artists have been able to use the web to get their impressions of the war into global circulation and their images -- whether created from scratch or appropriated -- leave vivid impressions of what it feels like to live in a wartorn country. They speak to the heart. I am thankful that digital media allows us to hear directly from people in other parts of the world and often brings us part of the story we are not receiving through the news media.

Yet, reproducing them and getting them out beyond the digital sphere seems like an important act. I am reminded, for example, of the ways that immigrant workers in turn of the century New York used to pay one member of their community to read to them while they worked -- allowing a broader number to benefit from the literacy skills of a few and maintain a connection to print culture. I am also reminded of the early days of internet fandom when people would print out all of the posts on a discussion list and share them with people who weren't online.

Here's how the man who posted the cartoons on walls and lamp posts in Amsterdam explained his thinking:

What are drawings if not posters-in-waiting that can easily been printed out and stuck against the walls of the city? clearly one only has to print them out, copy them a couple of times, get wallpaper-glue and head out into the night (ok, first wait some 10 hours for night). so i spend some of sunday night sticking a4 sized mini-posters all over the walls of my neighborhood (the pijp) in amsterdam....

yesterday evening i did a second round (around Leidseplein in the center), and i am planning to continue for the next couple of nights. hopefully these relatively small posters will catch some eyeballs and make more people think and start expressing their outrage.

Apart from the obvious advantage of making me feel like i am doing something about the situation, i also like this little action on a symbolic level. it feels like translating a blog (something normally contained to the internets) into something that is part of the urban fabric. i like the idea of images leaking from my screen into the streets of amsterdam and would probably be even more beautiful if people in other cities started doing the same...

We might think of these practices as a low tech form of grassroots convergence -- people taking up the responsibility to transmit information, stories, and images from one medium to another and in the process, broaden their circulation. If, as was suggested above, our differing access to media technologies means that we inhabit different worlds even when we share the same physical spaces -- then the answer surely must start by using appropriate media to bridge between those media sectors.

What DOPA Means for Education

A little while ago, I got the following comments in an e-mail from one of the Comparative Media Studies graduate students Ravi Purushotma about the news that the Deleting Online Predators Act has now passed the U.S. House of Representatives:

Some of my friends commented on how bitter, angry and depressed I seemed when DOPA passed. It's really painful spending 5 years searching for a new paradigm by which this planet could communicate among itself, coming to an actual sense of what needs to happen, then the week before it culminates into a thesis it becomes illegal because some bonehead in Alaska has his neural tubes clogged.

For those of you who have not been following this story, there's some very good reporting by Wade Rough of Technology Review about the debate surrounding DOPA. The Senator from Alaska is question is Senator Ted Stevens who has been a major backer of this legislation and who seems to know very little about how digital media works.

This exchange came as I was signing off on Purushotma's outstanding thesis which centers on the ways that various forms of new media and popular culture could be used to enhance foreign language teaching and learning. His project got some attention a year or so back when the BBC picked up on a report he had done describing his efforts to modify The Sims to support the teaching of foreign languages. Essentially, the commercial games ship with all of the relevant language tracks on the disc and a simply code determines which language is displayed as they reach a particular national market. It is a pretty trivial matter to unlock the code for a different language and play the game in Spanish, German, or what have you. The game's content closely resembles the focus on domestic life found in most first or second year language textbooks -- with one exception. Most of us are apt to put in more time playing the game than we are to spending studying our textbooks or filling in our workbooks.

This is a very rich and interesting approach but it is only one of a number of ideas that Ravi proposes in his thesis. Ravi has done more research than anyone I know about into how teachers are using this technology now and what purposes it might serve in the future. He has prepared his thesis as a multimedia web document that mixes sound, video, and text in ways that really puts his ideas into practice.

There has been lots of discussion here and elsewhere about the potentially devastating effect of DOPA on the lives of young people -- especially those for whom schools and public libraries represent their only point of access onto the digital world. I have made the argument that if supporters of DOPA really wanted to protect young people from online predators, they would teach social networking in the classroom, modeling safe and responsible practices, rather than lock it outside the school and thus beyond the supervision of informed librarians and caring teachers. The advocates of the law have implied that MySpace is at best a distraction from legitimate research activities, at worst a threat to childhood innocence.

But Ravi's thesis suggests something more -- we are closing off powerful technologies that could be used effectively to engage young people with authentic materials and real world cultural processes. Here, social networking functions not as a media literacy skill but as a tool for engaging with traditional school subjects in a fresh new way.

Throughout his thesis, Purushotma is interested in linking the affordances of new media and online practices with the traditional goals of the foreign language classroom. As I suggested in a recent blog post, more and more teachers are discovering the value of getting kids to learn through remixing elements of their culture, a recurring theme throughout his project:

Remixing has, of course, always been a central theme in foreign language pedagogy. As media from a foreign country provides students a link to the culture that created it, foreign language educators have historically been at the forefront of devising activities in which students learn to navigate through and reconfigure foreign media. With the emergence of the internet, however, today's youth are finding numerous new techniques for navigating through and reconfiguring media, both domestic and foreign. As this trend continues, foreign language education designers will need to shift from designing their own activities from scratch to actively tracking what remix activities students from a particular age group are already engaged in, and then inventing ways in which those activities can be applied towards learning a foreign language.

His impressive knowledge of Web 2.0 practices allows him to lay out a broad array of different tools that teachers can use to help students engage with a foreign language and culture in a more immediate fashion:

Perhaps the most challenging task in designing an introductory foreign language curriculum is that of representing foreign culture. If we conceptualize culture as an independent-standing entity, what ultimately gets delivered to students in our attempts to "teach culture" is a series of snapshots or editorialized slices of the target culture.

For most students in an introductory language class, their goal is often not simply to describe a foreign culture, but rather to be capable of participating in that culture. Thus, our goal should be to provide students with all the assistance appropriate to help them participate in the popular activities they would be participants in had they grown up in the target country: reading the same websites, using the same social networking tools and playing the same video games with their L2 peers. In this way, we give them agency to synthesize their own snapshot of the target culture from their own experiences and interactions within it.

While there are a number of innovative projects with similar aims already available, what is important to consider here is what a curriculum with the goal of enabling students to participate in a foreign culture would look like if the target culture is a remix culture (as many of the youth cultures in countries for the languages commonly taught in U.S. schools are). As youth culture shifts further from independently constructing media from scratch, to instead constructing media by connecting together and reconfiguring existing media artifacts, we should also be able to construct our cultural representations directly from mixing together live target language media, without having to extract them into a secondary context.

Lets begin with the way we create images. Many teachers are already turning to the web and google images to provide students with more up-to-date or authentic images of a target country than are provided by textbooks. However, copyright provisions prevent any curriculum generated using this approach from being openly published beyond a single classroom for a limited time duration; additionally, it still leaves the teacher in the position of slicing out a snapshot of the target culture to deliver to the students. For those wishing to create publicly distributable curriculum, they often need to still rely on either self-taken photographs or expensive and often dated stock photography.

Alternatively, they could gather images from the FlickR creative commons photo set. Here, real people from all over the world using the popular FlickR photo service have designated over 13,000,000 authentic/live photos as freely usable (with attribution) in other media creations. Additionally, FlickR provides an API system, allowing programs to connect directly into the FlickR database. So, for example, a Google Earth game teaching Spanish could receive all the information necessary from the FlickR API to automatically change its game content depending on what the contents of the newest photograph someone in Puerto Rico had taken. Students could then interact with the photographer through their FlickR profile, leaving comments in the L2 about that photo and any peculiarities of its cultural representation.

Perhaps the media most desperately in need of live materials is that of music. Once again, music faces similar copyright issues as images: only individual classrooms may use copyrighted music and for only a limited duration. Additionally, musical tastes are so individual and varied that no teacher could possibly find a single song to develop curriculum around that would simultaneously inspire all students to take an interest in the music of that country.

Using a distinction in the copyright system that gives "radio" broadcasts a different copyright status from standalone music, various sites such as last.fm are emerging offering "personalized radio." Here any student can find people in the target country with similar music tastes as them, then generate a personalized radio station that plays free, full length/full quality songs from around the world based on their preferences. Combined with various sound spatialization techniques, as API's for personalized radio services develop we will be able to create live curriculum that aids students to understand whichever songs in the target culture they themselves choose.

Ultimately, the real advantage of using live materials is the possibility of then connecting with live audiences. Certainly, the motivational advantages to producing work to be shared with a broader audience than just the teacher can not be over-stressed. As Cindy Evans describes of her experiences using web 2.0 technologies in her French class in which students were simply told their work would be made publicly available:

"The prospect of creating material for an authentic audience appeared to be the main motivation for the students. Students involved in the wiki project interacted with authentic cultural material on the web and also envisioned themselves as potential teachers to future students using their site. In contrast to researching and reporting on a topic for the class as students had done in previous classes, these students assumed responsibility for interacting with information, assimilating, rewriting, and organizing it in a way they deemed worthy of future students' interest."

At the same time, although Web 2.0 technologies provide infinitely more stimulating contexts for students, self-installations of these systems can bring with them major technological headaches for any teacher who doesn't have hours of free time to kill updating their PHP and MySQL libraries. In Cindy's case, it took over half the semester just to get the system running, and even then it did not contain the freely available user interface modules that would have allowed students to achieve many of the tasks she had hoped for.

Rather than leaving teachers to perform self-installations, it is important that curricular designers work to highlight the different options available for hosted services. For example, wikia.com allows anyone to instantly create their own wiki spaces in a variety of languages with all server space and configuration provided free. Services like writely, writeboard and thinkfree offer considerably more features than a typical wiki, with a cleaner interface and zero server installation. Perhaps the most valuable hosted services for foreign language teachers are the emerging platform portals such as ning.com. Here, teachers can browse through thousands of different social web applications already created by users throughout the world. They then choose "clone this app" to create a copy of a particular application for themselves, then use a suite of user friendly tools that do not require any programming knowledge to customize the application towards their own pedagogical goals. All server management and other tasks are automatically taken care of for them.

With live materials and customized social applications becoming increasingly available to non-programmers, the primary challenge will be to find models for how to connect various web applications together into coherent learning experiences. In the last ten years "webquests," that is, activities designed by teachers "in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet", have exploded in popularity in schools. According to Google Adsense, search popularity for the term "webquest" is now even approaching that of the term "lesson plan" (85 click per day rate for "webquest" versus 120 for "lesson plan" [Based on a $100 maximum cost per click estimate]). In a typical webquest, students are given a scenario which requires them to extract information or images from a series of provided websites and then compile their findings into a final report. For example, students might be told they are part of a team of experts brought in to decide on the most appropriate method for disposing of a canister of nuclear waste. They are then provided a series of websites relevant to waste disposal and then asked to present a final proposal to the teacher.

While webquests provide a popular framework for extracting information from new-media sources, little innovation has followed for what to do with that extracted information. For some students, simply compiling information into a report is unfortunately viewed as "overly structured clicking and reading." As the original webquest creator Bernie Dodge describes "It's true that most WebQuests are boring, but I think that's because they aren't really well designed, not because they don't have flashy graphics and interactivity. I'd like to think that getting engaged in a problem that requires synthesis and problem-solving is motivating in a deep and useful way that goes beyond Prensky's arcade-game type learning."

Already in the entertainment world we are seeing cases of games entirely devoid of flashy graphics or traditional game elements, yet compelling enough in their synthesis and problem-solving depth to motivate hundreds of thousand of players purely for entertainment purposes. Dubbed "Alternate Reality" games, these games are able to construct massive scale game universes simply by harnessing and mixing together numerous real-world web applications. By studying the learning that takes place in alternate reality games we can gain valuable insights into how to create engaging experiences around web content from other languages and cultures.

What is interesting about I Love Bee's is that it was a game constructed entirely out of technologies more commonly used for other purposes. In fact, at no point during the game did I Love Bee's even admit that it was a game. For many of the players, the result was a confusingly immersive experience in which they began to see much of the real world in the context of the game world. As one of the players described in an online posting "here we are, every one of us excited at blurring the lines between story and reality. The game promises to become not just entertainment, but our lives." In numerous cases, sites and mysteries not connected to the game were solved by confused players thinking that they were still in the game.

Foreign language educators have long struggled with how to ensure the language proficiency students gain while studying for a language exam successfully transfer to proficiency outside of the classroom in real life situations. Across all educational disciplines we see examples of how poorly human beings transfer abstract knowledge from one real world case to another...

As new-media usage transforms the entertainment culture of youth, if we do not adapt our curricular materials they will unfortunately bare a diminishing resemblance to the outside of school contexts in which youth live. However, by learning how to remix foreign popular culture and intelligently insert pedagogical aids at the points of connection, we can instantly appropriate automatically up-to-date media contexts that youth would naturally be engaging with if they were they living in a country speaking the L2.

Additionally, by remixing interventions inside media used throughout the day for other purposes, we naturally blur the lines between time set aside for everyday tasks and time exposed to the pedagogical interventions. For example, when a Google Earth Wars player uses Google Earth to look up driving directions to the movie theater or exploring different cities for an upcoming vacation, there is always the chance that the user will stumble upon a hidden game jewel or a poorly defended city to attack. In this way, players never really leave the game, but continue playing it throughout their everyday life. Foreign language teachers have long advised students that they need to try and continue thinking in the L2 around the clock, yet homework assignments are designed to be completed during a single block of dedicated study time. By closer integrating entertainment culture with educational interventions we can better assist students in connecting these often distinct parts of their lives.

Imagine how vibrant our schoolhouse culture would become if teachers adopted even a small portion of the recommendations this thesis provides. And so far, we are focused only on the foreign language classroom.

As Purushotma notes, foreign languages are simply one of a range of school disciplines that benefit from being able to deploy social networking and other Web 2.0 resources in the classroom setting. Here, for example, is a middle school Literature teacher who has students prepare profile pages for the characters in Shakespeare's Richard III. This exercise offers students a rich opportunity to dig deeper into fictional characters and understand what makes them tick. You could of course do much the same thing in a written paper but let's face it -- the activity would not be nearly as engaging.

Or here's the testimonial of a writing instructor who incorporated blogging into his 8th grade class and saw immediate shifts in the ways that children thought about their assignments:

My community of grade eight student bloggers became so big and so engaging that I spent every spare moment reading and writing within this community. My class community suddenly blossomed and I started seeing myself as an important part of the classroom community and no longer as a teacher who peddles content. I became a participant in a series of dialogues...

My students started blogging two years ago. It did not take me long to realize that a class blogosphere helps students see themselves as writers, as people with ideas. It helps them learn to substantiate their ideas, it helps them acquire confidence as learners, it gives them a context in which to investigate and question knowledge. Finally, it shows them a completely different understanding of knowledge as something that one constructs, arrives at, or co-constructs with others....

But then, about two months ago, there was a sudden shift. The community took on a life of its own. Imagine a place where students start with a literary text and then, rather than spend most of their time responding to literature, they are given opportunities to explore the relevance of this text in the world around them. Imagine starting with The Diary of Anne Frank and moving on to World War II, the Holocaust, genocide, human rights issues, and the work of the United Nations. Granted, it did not happen automatically. I did quite a bit of facilitating and guiding. I wrote about some of these topics on my own teacher blog within the class blogosphere. I took time to talk to each individual writer. I commented extensively on their work. I used my own blog to link to many entries, to show my students the connections between many individual posts. I suggested electronic and print resources. I talked about their work in class. We discussed individual entries.

Then, for a while, they kept composing individual responses. While certainly aware of the community around them, they continued to write as solitary writers. Then, one day at the end of April, it all changed. They started linking to each other's work because they found other entries meaningful and relevant. No, I do not mean that they linked to entries that explored the same topics. No. They started linking to entries that helped them expand their own understanding of issues that they were struggling with.

We learned about this teacher's project through Weblogg-ed which provides an important community resource for educators deploying these kinds of technologies in their classes.

As he notes in his conclusion, adopting these existing digital practices for classroom use has major advantages over developing digital classroom resources from scratch -- in terms of the level of authenticity, youth engagement, development costs, usability, and teacher training demands.

With the rise of the internet, our world today is radically different from even a decade ago. It is my belief that we can leverage these advances to greatly facilitate the evolution of actual communicative approaches into digital spaces. At the core of this is a recognition that meaningful communication is already happening inside entertainment media not explicitly designed for educational purposes. Thus, computers provide us not just devices for aiding language learning, but are an intrinsic part of the cultures for the L2's commonly taught in U.S. High schools. As such, we need to focus more on devising systematically and scalable ways of extend Communicative and TBLT methodologies to use existing new-media content in manners similar to the ways we use any other authentic media materials.

Although basic materials for this approach are naturally cheaper than for specially created materials, the real cost is, of course, the requisite teacher training and technological infrastructure maintenance. Thus, it becomes critical that we adopt the remix practices now ubiquitous in digital culture to make the use of real-world web applications more teacher friendly, and take advantage of the numerous hosted services available to give teachers the agency to bypass any technological infrastructure roadblocks imposed by their school's IT services.

All of this helps to explain why so many professional organizations of teachers and librarians have come out in opposition to DOPA. As Purushotma remarks at the opening of this post suggest, many of these potential classroom practices will be shut down if DOPA becomes law. Keep in mind that DOPA adopts a very broad definition of social networking software and nobody is really sure where the limits will fall. It will have a chilling effect where people are apt to restrict their behavior even further than the law provides for fear of potentially costing their schools federal funds needed to meet No Child Left Behind criteria.

DOPA provides some modest provisions for schools to opt out of its restrictions for legitimate classroom purposes. But, DOPA will create a climate where the pathologization of social networking will have been codified in law. American public school teachers will face an uphill battle against school administrators and parents if they want to deploy such practices in their class. And frankly, American school teachers face enough battles everyday that most of them aren't going to be fighting this one.

Part of the advantages of tapping live materials for use in the classroom is that motivated students may continue to engage with them on their own beyond the class period. In my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, I discuss the importance of informal, out of school learning -- or what James Paul Gee calls affinity spaces -- for encouraging exploration, experimentation, and mastery of important cultural materials. Ravi's work suggests ways of connecting what takes place in schools with the kinds of informal learning that is part of young people's recreational lives. For him, it is abolut embedding language learning throughout the day rather than trying to cram it into 50 minute class periods and cut and dry homework assignments. But if many students are blocked from doing so under DOPA, then again the schools will hit another roadblock. At the very time when schools should be exploring the use of Web 2.0 technologies and practices, the Federal government is actively discouraging them from doing so.

What a profound loss!

Response to Bogost (Part Three)

When Ian Bogost wrote me earlier today to say that his response to the first installment hadn't appeared on my site, I was confused. I went back to my spam filter and discovered that more than 30 substantive comments to this site from a variety of sources had gone missing. I had been trying to be as inclusive as possible and make sure all of the reader's comments were posted, cutting out only obvious spam and purely personal invective. I feel really bad to discover so many of you fell prey to the spam catcher. Now that I know it is an issue, I will be checking regularly. I have now reposted everything that got blocked -- for archival purposes if nothing else. Sorry for the mixup. All I can say is that I am new at this. Over the past two installments, I have been responding to Ian Bogost's thoughtful yet challenging review of my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, over at Water Cooler Games. In part one, I addressed some issues surrounding the emotional dynamics of contemporary advertising. Last time, I addressed some questions around transmedia entertainment and fan culture. Today, I will wrap up with some thoughts on the commercialization of culture and the relationship between technology and culture, among other topics.

For those who might be interested in hearing me speak more about the ways convergence culture is impacting the games industry, check out my appearance on a podcast organized by the editors of The Escapist.

Noncommercial Media

Tthe omission of convergence communities that opt for more historically-entrenched creative practices in lieu of outright commercial commodities seems to reflect Jenkins's own preference for contemporary popular culture, and perhaps his own libertarian politics. The subversive undertones in Convergence Culture remain squarely on the side of mass market global capitalism. While Jenkins admits that many corporations are pushing convergence as a strategy of control, he frames consumer resistance as a struggle to get media companies to be more responsive to consumer tastes and interests.

Hmm. Where do I start? I see my book as describing a particular aspect of contemporary culture which has to do with the intersection between commercial and grassroots media. I am very clear from the start that no one can describe the full picture and that all I can offer are a limited number of snapshots of cultural change in practice. There is much about the culture which this book doesn't address, though I would hope that its insights help others to begin to explore these implications for their respected areas. I know that Mark Deuze, for example, has been applying some of these ideas to the study of news and journalism; I have myself done some writing lately about the implications of participatory culture for education and for participation in the arts; and so forth. I would have said that the book tries to show how trends in popular culture are relevent to the political process, to education, to religion, and to the military at various points along the way, which is more than what most books on popular entertainment have tried to do.

My own particular background as a scholar -- and my own particular interest as a fan -- lies in the area of popular culture. It doesn't mean I don't see value in other forms of cultural production. I do. But there are plenty of others in the academia who know those areas better, write about them more knowledgibly, and make better contributions to them. I find myself drawn to popular culture in part because it requires me to defend what some see as the indefensible and in the process, to try to complicate the easy hierarchies that too often operate within our culture.

Some of what my book doesn't discuss is addressed very well by Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks, a book that I really wish I could have read while I was writing my own book. He's making an argument that we need to discuss the present moment in terms of the shifting relationship between commercial, amateur, civic, and nonprofit sectors, each involved in the production and circulation of media, and each meeting each other on somewhat different terms because of the leveling influence of the web. Man, I wish I had said that. My book really focuses on the two extremes there -- the commercial on the one hand and the amateur on the other. I do think it could have said more about these other players in the middle -- various nonprofit groups, educational and cultural institutions, etc. and the role they play in reshaping the media landscape.

Participation

To become "full participants in our culture" seems to entail filming Star Wars action figures, decoding reality television puzzles, or authoring Harry Potter fanfic. Jenkins intends these examples to be paradigmatic, but the chasm between the book's examples and the set of possible niche-market or grassroots media properties is tremendous. Jenkins does believe in such properties, but it's a shame that they failed to make an appearance in Convergence Culture, even in the sporadic sidebar mini-essays that pepper the book. Among others, easy examples could have come from Second Life, where both creation tools are provided and intellectual property rights are conferred onto players.

Again, timing issues are involved here. Second Life really emerged too late to be a central focus in the book. I probably should have added more references to it during the last revision process but I felt like it would have taken more space than I could give it to really explain what's going on. Second Life is enormously important as a testing ground for all of the issues the book explores. Interestingly, my students have been most interested in exploring branding and product strategies within Second Life, suggesting again that it can not be understood purely on a grassroots level, but also represents the intersection between commercial and amateur content. (I hope to share some thoughts on the commercialization of Second Life in a future blog.)

Similarly, Chris Anderson's work on The Long Tail has heightened my awareness and interest on niche media production. More and more, niche media dominates my writing here on the blog and I am certain to have a lot more to say about it in the future.

I would be horrified if what people took from the book was the idea that I thought being a fan was the only meaningful way of participating within our culture. I simply want people to recognize that being a fan is one meaningful way of participating in our culture. We need to acknowledge that the stories generated by mass media still have enormous reach: they are the common culture that most other forms of cultural expression define themselves against. It is worth struggling for access to those stories; what stories get told and how those stories get retold is of enormous cultural, political, and economic importance. But there are clearly other kinds of participation that matter -- most importantly perhaps, participation in civic life, which is a central concern in my "Photoshop for Democracy" chapter.

Again, though, I want to challenge an easy seperation between popular culture and public culture. I see public culture/civic media as increasingly informed by both the content and practices of popular culture and I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing if the result is to get people more engagted with public debates (as I think occurs around the Daily Show) or allows them to feel more comfortable expressing their ideas (as I think happens around the blogosphere.)

The User Content Pyramid

Jenkins somewhat ignores the massive disparity in participation among collective intelligences. While he does cite Survivor producer Mark Burnett's claim that the show's 20 million viewers massively dwarfs the community of online spoilers, Jenkins seems to assume that this disparity is a temporary one. In the future, as convergence culture takes hold, participation will become universal. Unfortunately, participation seems to take place more naturally in levels. Raph Koster points to a User Content Pyramid Will Wright used to use when talking about The Sims. A small number of tool makers supplies a slightly larger number of content creators, who publish content on a slightly larger number of web sites, for a slightly larger number of content downloaders, compared to the even larger number of ordinary players.

I wouldn't disagree with any of this. I think there has been a shift over the past decade in terms of the percentage of people who are interested in actively participating in the production and distribution of media content. The Pew study last December found that 57 percent of teens online have produced some kind of media content and about half of those have circulated it via the web. That's the beginning of a pretty large scale shift in how our culture operates. And there are many factors encouraging more and more forms of cultural participation.

That said, we will not all participate to the same degree. Already in the Pew study we can see that 43 percent of teens online do not make media content -- at least as Pew has defined it. There will be varying degrees of participation and there will be some at one end of the continuium who simply want to consume. There are some signs, though, that the kinds of culture produced in an era where the public is free to and expects to have the right to participate will differ dramatically from those produced in an era where most people purely watch. As Steve Johnson and James Gee suggest, they make different demands on consumer attention and cognition; they require us to take different kinds of actions if we want to fully understand what we are consuming. Moreover, a world when a large percentage of people participate will result in a much more diverse mediascape than we currently enjoy.

There will be many different forms of diversity. One kind Bogost alludes to here -- the potential for niche media or for noncommercial media to find a larger public. But I am also interested in insuring diversity at the heart of consumer culture, in showing how the popular culture materials we share may still be open to different interpretations and appropriations.

That said, I am very concerned about what I am calling the Participation Gap, something I reference near the end of the book but which is driving my work on new media literacies. The participation gap is a gap in the access to opportunities to participate in our culture (and the skills required to take advantage of these opportunities). Most of the discussion about the Digital Divide focused exclusively on issues of technological access. We now have reached a point where most American kids, outside of a few nagging pockets, have access to the internet through the classroom or public libraries if not at home, but there are tremendous gaps in their ability to participate in core online experiences (as I suggested the other day in my comments about DOPA and MySpace). This is not a case of people choosing not to move further up the pyramid of user generated content. They don't have a choice given the conditions that shape their online access, given their exclusion from the cultural practices by which others are learning how to participate.

ARG? Argh!

The first is somewhat pedantic. There are a few factual/transcription errors that may quickly obsess popular culture mavens. For one, Jenkins misspells Galdalf (as Gandolf, which is a common mistake but not one a scholar of popular culture can afford to make). For another, he mistakenly calls Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) Alternative Reality Games. Worse, Jenkins attributes the incorrect term to pervasive game researcher and designer Jane McGonigal ("Jane McGonigal ... calls the genre alternative reality gaming"), misciting one of her presentations as "Alternative Reality Gaming." If it were just the name, this might not be such a big deal. But McGonigal actually makes an important theoretical distinction (PDF) between alternate and alternative realities. Alternate realities, she argues, are "real worlds that use games as a metaphor." She contrasts this notion with alternative realities, realities one chooses between. McGonigal further traces the concept of "alternate reality" to science fiction, where the term refers to depictions of a world of changed history, and consequently of changed dynamics. This name, then, is central to McGonigal's claims that ARGs allow players to actively change the nature of their real reality by participating in these alternate ones.

Mea Culpea. I could offer various explanations for how this happened or how hard I worked to fact check the book. But the reality is that I screwed up. These are things I will change in the second printing. In the case of alternate reality, I have already started using this prefered term in my current writing and speaking. Somehow I got confused and passed the confusion onto the readers. I wouldn't read any deep theoretical significance into the terminological confusion. I don't think the use of the wrong term impacts the heart of my argument about ARGs, though as Ian notes, it does blur some important distinctions that theorists like McGonigal have been making through their work. Sorry, Jane.

Culture and Technology

One of Jenkins's major innovations in Convergence Culture is identifying the "black box fallacy" and offering a more distributed view of media convergence. His insistence on the cultural tenor of convergence is welcome, but Jenkins takes this emphasis to an extreme, arguing that "if we focus on the technology, the battle will be lost before we even begin to fight. We need to confront the social, cultural, and political protocols that surround the technology and define how it will get used." This point is well taken. But in opposing the cultural against the technological, Jenkins risks missing the importance of the technology. Technologies--particular ones, like computer microprocessors, mobile devices, telegraphs, books, and smoke signals--have properties. They have affordances and constraints. Different technologies may expose or close down particular modes of expression. Part of convergence culture must entail technical media literacy, an ability to consume and create media content that takes advantage of the particular properties of particular technology systems. Most, if not all of Jenkins's examples of computer technology take the computer for a network appliance rather than a processing machine.

I was a bit thrown by this response. I would have said that the book makes a very similar point multiple times. Drawing on Lisa Gitelman, I describe a medium as both a communications technology and the cultural protocals that grow up around it. Both sides of this are important for the reasons that Bogost argues here. My own expertise is cultural. I don't think anyone would want to read what I have to say about technologies as technologies -- there are lots of better writers on this topic. It may be my particular vantage point at MIT but I do think there is a tendency to think of convergence first in technological terms and only secondarily in cultural terms. I was trying to enlarge the conversation not narrow it.

My own notion of media literacy, which is central to the current focus of my work, certainly includes an understanding of technology, including the ability to produce and interprete simulations. There's no real disagreement here as far as I can see.

At best, we may differ in terms of emphasis. Rereading the qoute above, the one revision I would make would look something like this: "if we focus on the technology, the battle will be lost before we even begin to fight. We [also] need to confront the social, cultural, and political protocols that surround the technology and define how it will get used." I didn't mean to say that fights around the design of technology were not worth fighting. I simply think many of those issues appear first through cultural practices that jerryrig or retrofit technologies for new purposes and only later surface in the technologies themselves. But the reverse is also true: the release of a new technology can spark profound cultural changes as people experiment with how it will be used and begin to develop new protocals.

Jenkins strongly downplays technology's role as a participant in convergence culture. The content must be delivered, and technologies are there to do it. Yet, the technologies we choose to create and consume media structure the type of convergence that is possible in the first place. The iPod emblazoned on the cover of Convergence Culture is essentially a hard drive with a few circuits run for streaming data off the disk. This device is well-suited to playing linear media, specifically audio and video content. The tremendous cultural uptake of iPods makes them desirable targets for creative output, even convergent, transmedial output that Jenkins advocates. But that output is necessarily constrained by the affordances of the device--for example, iPods can't easily run custom-built software.

Again, there's no real disagreement there. I do think that the kind of networked culture I describe would have been impossible without the extistence of a network in the first place. I do agree with Lawrence Lessig that we should be very concerned about the cultural and social policies that get translated into code rather than law. I do think we need a world where all technology can be modified by the user. I do describe digitization as a driver of convergence culture (alongside economic factors like the consolidation of the media industry). The affordances of technology can certainly limit how they can be used in ways that should concern all of us. At the same time, though, I would push back from a hardcore technologically deterministic stance. History shows us again and again that the same technology operates differently in different cultural contexts.

The Convergence Fallacy?

Technological mastery couples with cultural mastery to help producers and consumers decide how and why to develop and consume the artifacts of convergence culture. Without such an understanding, a counterpart of the black box fallacy rears its head. I might call this counterpart the convergence fallacy: the more a media property is delivered across more devices, the better it is.

This is certainly not the case. I spend a good chunk of the Matrix chapter trying to articulate some aesthetic standards by which we can measure the value of transmedia experiences. Some are more culturally meaningful than others. Media companies have the power inhouse to create a media franchise from scratch; they lack the power to force consumers to value that experience.

Right now, there's a lot of uncritical excitement about convergence and extensions and this often clouds judgements. Not every story should be told across all media. Not every experience is enhanced by moving it between platforms. I would hope that the book gave us a vocabulary to push beyond celebrating convergence for convergence sake and begin to explore how convergence enriches or impoverishes our culture.

Or, more convergence equals more expression. The notion that value builds exponentially as nodes in a network increases, sometimes called Metcalfe's Law, has been implicitly extended from infrastructure networks like telephones to social networks like MySpace to product networks like Spider-Man. But this kind of value is principally economic, not expressive. Even if we accept Jenkins's claim that the interpretive interests of fan communities undermine the intentions of mass media, they still support the financial interests of mass media. For consolidated media, convergence mitigates financial risk. And until we overcome the convergence fallacy, there is great risk that the promising grassroots convergence will subsume these mass market goals, even if they do not benefit individual creators.

Unless we know why to choose one medium over another, or one set of transmedia over another, how can convergence produce more meaningful expression? Or consume it meaningfully? Or critique it fairly, to address three of the problems Jenkins raises in the book. Without a grounding in technological literacy and critique as well as cultural savvy, convergence risks becoming bricolage, an oddjob pastiche of any old media, rather than a pioneering manipulation of particular media for particular and collective ends.

Again, I don't think we really disagree here. I do see the movement of stories across media as opening up new points for consumers to intervene, as opening up some greater space for cultural expression in response to commercially produced and circulated stories. In that sense, convergence can and often does expand expressive possibilities. Transmedia processes can also deepen cultural experiences as we add together pieces that may seem superficial in a single medium but fit to form a more complex world when read across media.

I also think that the emergence of a networked culture, a la Benkler, creates new opportunities for noncommercial groups to insert themselves. In the book's terms, we might think about pixelvision filmmaking or machinema as examples where alternative groups are taking advantage of commercially produced tools to generate their own niche or subcultural production. For this to happen, we certainly need to expand access to technical competency and we need to push for the development of tools that are open source and allow for inexperted users to manipulate them for their own purposes.

I see the Serious Games movement, which occupies a fair amount of attention from both Jenkins and Bogost, as a good illustration of this process in practice. Much of the work builds on models and tools generated by the commercial media. Most of the energy comes from the nonprofit sector and the desire to generate alternatives to commercial culture.

Yet, at the same time, all of us still have to confront bottom line issues because the price of producing and distributing games is high enough that we have to seek outside funding to pursue our work. At the end of the day, I don't think alternative culture has to originate outside commercial culture -- nor do I think that alternative culture ever operates fully independent of the economic contexts within which it is produced and circulated. There is no such thing as ideological or cultural purity. I hope my book helps people to think about the complexity by which commercial culture operates and also to identify strategies by which grassroots media makers can insert themselves into this process. I just am more ready to embrace grassroots media production that looks more like fan culture than Bogost seems to be from his remarks here.

Anyway, hope these responses help to clarify my position and perhaps pave the way for further dialogue. The issues Bogost raises are important. I doubt I have laid any of them to rest here. At least I hope not. These are conversations we should be having as a society. My hope is that my book's framing, flawed though it may be, will provide a foundation for further exploration and critique.

Response to Bogost (Part Two)

On Friday, I began the first of a three part response to Ian Bogost's thoughtful, engaging, and provocative review of my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Bogost's discussion of the book at Water Cooler Games allows me to respond to some anticipated challenges to the book's content and approach. It also seems that many of you are relishing a good debate in the dog days of the summer so far be it for me to deny you your entertainment. All of this will make more sense if you've read both the book and the review. Last time, I mostly addressed some questions Bogost raised about the affective economics chapter of the book. Today, I take up some issues about transmedia storytelling/entertainment and about fan culture more generally.

Keep in mind two things: Bogost's review was primarily positive and I have enormous respect for Bogost's contribution to the game studies world. This is an intellectual debate, not a blood feud.

Ludology vs. Narratology

As the sonic boom of the so-called ludology vs. narratology debate dissipates, I find it interesting that Jenkins continues to insist on the terms "narrative" and "storytelling" as the principle units of cultural expression. Even though Jenkins admits that "storytelling has become the art of world building," where artists create environments and situations for a multitude of consumer intersections, he still does not reimagine such a craft separate from the particularity of narrative. Following Roger Shanck and others, Jenkins argues that "stories are basic to all human cultures, the primary means by which we structure, share, and make sense of our common experiences." Yet, the examples he cites, from the rich worlds of The Matrix, and Star Wars to transmedial experiments like Dawson's Desktop, readily elude the narrative frame, offering representations of behaviors, fragments, and environments. Michael Mateas and Gonzalo Frasca have called the privileging of narrative expression narrativism, and I have argued that narrativist gestures like Jenkins's occlude representational gestures based on logics and behaviors. Convergence Culture continues Jenkins' narrativist practice.

Given the propensity for such non-narrative interpretations of media properties, it is curious that Jenkins did not choose the more general term transmedia authorship over transmedia storytelling

My first response upon reading this was to gasp, "not again." The last thing any of us wants is to reopen the trumped up feud between the self-proclaimed ludologists and the so-called narratologists. The argument is, in my opinion, based on a false set of distinctions that are getting imposed on a hybrid medium at a highly transitional moment. (Anytime someone accuses you of "occluding" something, you know you are in trouble.) More seriously, I think the ludology/narratology debate was based on misidentifications across cultural and language differences. When Espen Aarseth and I sat down together a few years ago at the HumLab, we found that there was relatively little to debate. We were involved in disagreements in emphasis but not in a substantive dispute about the future of game studies.

I want to refer here to something I wrote at the heat of the Ludology/Narratology debate in response to Marku Eskelinin. It more or less summarizes my perspective:

Ultimately, my interest is in mapping the aesthetic norms that constitute different forms of popular culture and in almost every case, narrative exists alongside, competes against, struggles with, and is often subordinate to alternative aesthetic logics that are fundamentally anti- or non-narrative in character. Eskelinen is correct to note that games have a long history, so does magic, dance, architecture, ars erotica, and so forth, which exist alongside storytelling as important cultural activities. These various alternative traditions are never completely autonomous from each other, but come together and move apart in different ways, at different times, in different cultures. My goal is not to reduce games to narrative but to explore the unstable relationship between a range of different transmedia logics - narrative, games, spectacle, performance, spatiality, affect, etc....

The market category of "games," in fact, covers an enormous ground, including activities that ludologists would classify as play, sports, simulations, and toys, as well as traditional games. Some, but certainly not all, of these products also make bids on telling stories; storytelling is part of what they are marketing and part of what consumers think they are buying when they invest in this software.

These computer games, then, are a strange, still unstable, and still undertheorized hybrid between games and narratives. They are a border case for any study of narrative, but they are also a border case for any study of games. Computer games are a bit like duck-billed platypuses, a species which, as Harriet Ritvo has documented, confounded early naturalists; some of them denied that such a creature could exist and denounced early reports as fraud, while others sought to erase all ambiguities about its status, trivializing any problems in classifying this species - which has a duck bill, web feet, and lays eggs - as mammals. Jon McKenzie accurately summarizes my position: "games are indeed not narratives, not films, not plays - but they're also not-not-narratives, not-not-films, not-not-plays." In the end, the zoological discipline has decided that platypuses are not birds; yet, we will not really get why platypuses are such strange mammals if we don't know what a bird is.

Near the end of his comments, Eskelinen proposes a range of examples that he takes to be a reductio ad absurdum of my essay's arguments. It might be helpful to take one of his cases and break it down. Are gardens spatial stories? We can agree that they are not. Most gardens are spaces - with little or no narrative interest at all. Some of those spaces may be designed in such a way as to enable certain life events to unfold - such as hidden nooks where lovers may meet - and thus gardens have been the settings for many stories. There is a tradition of using gardens to recreate spaces from fictional stories; I am thinking about the Bible gardens which dot the roadside of my native south or the fairy gardens that are popular throughout Europe. Here, we would say that those gardens operate in relation to a larger narrative economy. In most cases, however, these gardens are simply recreating spaces or vignettes from stories. They evoke stories, but they are not stories. In the case of some Bible gardens, these vignettes are arranged in a narrative sequence designed to unfold the story of Christ's martyrdom. As they do so, they start to move towards the borders of our current understanding of narrative.

So, on the one hand, I would welcome Bogost's efforts to broaden my term, "transmedia storytelling" towards something like "transmedia entertainment" or "transmedia authorship." It is certainly the case, as the passage above suggests, that narrative is simply one of a number of transmedia logics that are all expressive of the human condition. Perhaps I should have been clearer about this point in the book. I'll take my lumps for that.

That said, I do think there's an argument to be made for the centrality of narrative for understanding the specific examples used in the book -- Star Wars, Harry Potter, and The Matrix. Just as one can argue that narrative may take a back seat to play mechanics, say, in our effort to understand how games work, most critics have argued that the American film industry has been driven from day one by the push to tell stories and that narrative imperatives dominate over all other factors in shaping the aesthetics of Hollywood entertainment. I could point you to a large body of literature which has made this point over and over. These particular worlds, then, were created for the purpose of generating stories. They may, as I have suggested, support multiple stories, they may also follow other logics and practices, but they are still part of a storytelling system.

I make clear that I don't think the games or some of the other materials attached to these franchises are primarily in the business of telling stories: I suggest that they are much more invested in allowing a more immersive experience of the fictional worlds. But there's no question that many, if not all, players read their experience of the original works onto these worlds and take information learned from these games and apply it back to their understanding of the story of the film. We can understand conflicting responses to Enter the Matrix as suggesting the contrast between people who came there looking for an extension of the story (and thus don't mind the lengthy cut scenes) and those who came there wanting a game play experience (and thus are angry over the lengthy cut scenes.)

My point is not to suggest that everything that takes place within a transmedia system is a story -- and that's why I am perfectly happy if Bogost wants to expand my concept to talk about entertainment more generally. Music, for example, is profoundly transmedia and yet only occasionally narrative-driven (in the case of ballads, say).

It might be instructive to compare Survivor and American Idol in this regard. Survivor is a game that was constructed to form the basis of a narrative; American Idol is a series of performances that sometimes incorporate stories about the participants in order to shape our emotional response. They thus both mix and match several transmedia logics but it is still possible to identify the dominant aesthetic impulse in each case.

I accept gladly the ludologist point that there are experiences that can not be adequately be described as stories but that are deeply meaningful within our culture. Some of these take the form of games, some rituals, and so forth. I accept gladly the ludologist point that we need to develop a new vocabulary to talk about the play mechanics of games and that we are badly served if they are discussed primarily or exclusively as stories. But I sometimes think that the ludologists give over to a kind of phobia about stories that is also not helpful because it denies the meaningfulness of stories to culture or the relevance of narrative for understanding some aspects of what remain hybrid entertainment experience. Even if they are right that our culture is blinded by its preoccupation with stories, we surely need to understand where that preoccupation comes from, what it means, and what impact it has on how they process the information gathered through these transmedia experiences. I make no apologies for the fact that I like stories, that much of the pleasure I take from popular culture is a narrative pleasure, that I consider stories to be a rewarding aspect of human culture. If that makes me a narrativist in his eyes, so be it. (Frankly, I am thankful that the ludologists have finally figured out that narratology is a specific school of narrative theory that has nothing to do with me and my work or indeed that of most of the other American academics they tried to label with this term.)

More interesting to me though is an implicit question raised in Bogost's comments: As these transmedia systems take on more and more of what Janet Murray has described as an encyclopedic logic, as they become more about worlds that support multiple stories and less about individual plots, then the centrality of narrative necessarily shifts. Will we reach a point where the stories exist to fit into the concordance rather than the concordance existing to illuminate the story?

Fandom and Other Cultural Traditions

But Jenkins does not adequately answer another objection, namely that a fixation on existing media properties like Harry Potter may reduce a child's interaction with the cultural, literary, and historical traditions that made such works possible in the first place. The success of Harry Potter and similar books may have duped us into the belief that reading in itself is honorable, no matter the content.

This is a very interesting point and I have struggled to know how to respond to it. I would have said that the book cites a number of examples where popular culture evokes intertexts across larger cultural, literary, and historical traditions -- see, for example, my discussion of the role of myth in The Matrix films or the debates about ethics and religion that surround Harry Potter. Indeed, one of the remarkable things about the online fan cultures that emerge around such works is the degree to which fans read intertextually and suck more and more cultural materials into their conversations. Fans don't respect the borders we like to erect around differently modes of cultural experience: everything is connected to everything else. This is part of how collective intelligence works -- everyone contributes what they know and as they do so, the conversation expands outward to include much broader traditions. Such works provide a context for kids to become interested in these older materials that are authentic in the sense that these materials help them address questions that matter to them as opposed to the forced march through the western tradition that constitutes school curriculum.

Of course, there's no guarantee that any given reader will move beyond the franchise itself in their search of meaning: these franchises can become a dead end for some people. I would think we should be trying to explore strategies that bridge between these different cultural spheres rather than trying to build walls between them. That's part of what I hope to be doing in my work around media literacy and it is part of why I am so interested by groups like Wondering Minstrels and what they are doing around poetry.

Lost in Commerce?

Perhaps more concerning than becoming lost in fantasy is becoming lost in commerce. Doesn't fandom reorient children and adults alike toward the consumption of more and more commercial products from the franchise?

I would have phrased this the other way around -- as I suggest in the Star Wars chapter of the book. I see fandom as responding to the commercialization of our culture and pulling us back towards older models of cultural production. Commercial culture has tried very hard throughout the 20th century to totally displace folk culture and it has utterly failed to do so. The desire to participate in the production and circulation of cultural materials on the grassroots or amateur level has remained extremely strong. That said, what has come out of the confrontation between commercial culture and folk culture is anything but pure. Folk culture now builds upon the materials of commercial culture and commercial culture now appropriates freely from grassroots cultural practices. Fandom represents a way of asserting grassroots concerns in the face of the commercialization of our culture. It represents a way of introducing non-market criteria into the production and circulation of media. It transforms commodities into resources for collective elaboration.

There is no evidence that fans consume more media -- or more products -- than any other segment of the population. Indeed, much evidence suggests that fans spend less hours each day watching television than nonfans. Television simply plays a different role in their lives: it fosters other social and creative activities. So they may spend more time focused thinking about and talking about a particular franchise (though often in relation to a range of other cultural works, as I suggested above) but they may not consume more overall. And much of what fans do consume comes within the context of the gift economy that grows up alongside commercial culture. Reading fanzine stories may intensify their interest in the commercial media content but it may also displace the purchase of ancillary products tied to the series that may less perfectly jell with the fan community's particular view of the series.

That said, there's no question that many of the convergence practices the book describes are motivated top down by market logic. I never deny that and indeed, try many times to try to identify what that market logic is. One of my goals for the book was describe fan culture both from the point of view of the commercial sector and from the point of view of the grassroots culture. But I don't think these practices can be reduced to market motives. These franchises mean something more to the people who work on them (as I suggest in terms of The Matrix) and the people who consume them (as I suggest throughout).

Marketing proves most ineffective at getting people to consume cultural goods. There are so many examples of expensive failures in developing media franchises, of monumental miscalculations. My experience has been that where a media product finds an audience, there is something meaningful going on within the culture and the task of the cultural critic is to try to identify what it means. We may not like what it tells us about our culture, but it's no fair trying to treat it as if it was mindless or meaningless. That's sheer laziness on the part of the cultural critic.

In the final installment, I return to issues of commercialization, apologize for some legitimate errors Bogost caught, and take up the relationship between culture and technology. Stay tune, boys and girls. See you tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel.

A Response to Ian Bogost (Part One)

Ian Bogost wins the award for being first to market with a thorough, thoughtful critique of my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The review is worth reading in its entirity because it really does set a high bar for debate and discussion around this book. Bogost does all of us a great service in taking on this task: the review is helpful to me in identifying some of the battlegrounds that are apt to emerge around this book. As I wrote to him, there are some points of real disagreement here, some points where we place different emphasis, and some points where we agree more than his summary of the book suggests. Some of his criticisms made me wince; some left me scratching my head. I wish I had read some of them before the book went to press.

It seems the most constructive thing one can do at this point is to respond to some of his questions publically in the hopes of getting a larger conversation going around the issues he raises. Because I wanted to respond fully to a range of interesting questions Bogost raised, I am going to be running my response over my next three posts.

I Can't Belive It's Margarine!

Bogost's review begins promisingly enough from my perspective with the following lines:

The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest.

I cite this passage here -- other than my amusement over the buttery metaphor -- just to show that he really does seem to like the book. (Bless you, Ian, for calling the book "short." It has to be the first time in human history I haven't been accused of being long winded.) Hinceforth, I am going to generally ignore the many nice things he says about the book in order to address points of disagreement. I am not trying to pick a fight with Bogost, who I admire, simply trying to respond to the issues that seem most urgent here and I have told Bogost I am planning to do this. My hope is that I can coax him to respond to my response and keep the exchange going.

Reality and Fiction

The discussion of collective intelligence in the Survivor community offers a welcome counterpoint to prevailing ideas that "puzzling" over apparently complex mass-media offers cognitive and cultural value in and of itself, such as those recently advanced by Steven Johnson; the Survivor spoilers are solving a real problem, rather than becoming drawn in to the elusive, unplanned web of J.J. Abrams telescripts gone awry.

This is one of the passages that left me scratching my head. Yes, I think it matters on all kinds of levels that the Survivor fans are exploring something that occured in the real world rather than a work of fiction. They can pool money and send representatives to the Amazon or Pearl Island and interview real people. The fans of Lost really don't have a chance to crawl down into that hatch and see what they can get from looking around. There's something fascinating about the experiences of Mario Lanza, the fan fiction writer who corresponds with and gets advice from his characters because they are real people. But I bristle a little at the hierarchy between reality and fiction implicit in this argument.

Perhaps Bogost doesn't like Lost as much as I and many of my students do. But a key assumption running through my book is that we can use fiction as a vehicle to talk through core concerns and that the activity of making sense of fiction may teach us skills that can be put to a broader array of other purposes. It may be true to Abrams and company are making up what's happening on Lost as they go -- in part in response to the speculations of the fan community. This doesn't devalue it as art -- after all, we know Dickens did more or less the same with the serial publications of his novels. People are still talking about real issues when they talk about Lost, whether they are discussing the spiritual conflicts faced by the characters or the show's representation of the politics of Iraq, Korea, and Africa. They are also learning how to work within a knowledge community and working through the ethics of collaborative information production and knowledge sharing in ways that have larger applications.

Similarly, I think we can use Survivor to ask some fundamental questions about group dynamics, sexuality, gender, race, and so forth, and as I suggest in the book, I think reality television poses a series of ethical questions that are designed to become the stuff of gossip within the fan community. It's ability to do so may have less to do with its factual status (especially given how contrived the situation is in the first place) and more to do with its rhetorical and dare I say, narrative construction. But the most important thing in both cases is they provide shared reference points around which conversations cane emerge. In the book's terms, they act as cultural attractors bringing like minded individuals together to form a reception community and as cultural activators giving the community something to do which exploits the resources of a collective intelligence.

Affective Economics

In particular, economic changes like the decreasing value of the 30-second television spot are forcing mass media into cultural convergence. Survivor and American Idol represent instances of what Jenkins calls affective economics, a marketing technique that appeals to consumers' emotional vicissitudes. I found it curious that Jenkins chose to invent this somewhat awkward term for a concept that has many names in contemporary marketing theory, including associative advertising and lifestyle marketing. One might assume that Jenkins knows about these concepts, but chooses not to mention them in order that he can reconnect the same underlying concept to cultural studies and fan communities. Yet, he also argues that affective economics is "on the fringes" in the media industry, suggesting that he may have a greater distinction in mind.

The problem of terminology is a vexing one in a book like Convergence Culture. Because the space involves imput from many different sectors, because the phenomenon discussed is evolving, and because there are almost always competing paradigms present to account for any observed phenomenon, there are always multiple terms you could use to describe a particular set of practices. Bogost has identified several places here where I had to drive a stake in the ground and I went with what seemed to me to be the best term to describe what I was talking about.

Frankly, I am less invested in these terminological questions than Bogost is. I see the varied terms as different ways of describing the same phenomenon. Each term helps us see some aspects more clearly and makes others harder to see. For that reason, there's an argument to be made for keeping multiple terms in play rather than trying to figure out which one is best. If my words are useful, use them. If not, dump them.

He's right that part of what I was trying to do in this chapter was to show the match between what academics in cultural and media studies had said about fans and an emerging discourse about the role of emotional investments within the brand space. I intended the phrase, affective economics, to be a tad oxymoronic. We tend to think of economics as a cold rational field quite removed from emotion. I wanted to suggest the various ways that people are trying to attach value to emotion in the new media economy. I was interested in several things: the talk about "lovemarks" or "emotional capital" which was shaping the strategies of brand managers and advertising executives; the degree to which research inside the industry was demonstrating in economic terms the value of fan commitments to programs; the work by Robert Kozinets and others about brand communities and the ways they parallel fan communities; and the ways that product placements sought to connect the emotions associate with entertainment onto products embedded within that story.

Some aspects of what I am calling affective economics are deeply embedded in current advertising practice, referred to by the various terms Bogost identifies ("lifestyle marketing," "associative advertising," "relationship marketing," etc.) while others are still emerging -- such as the focus on "favorite viewers" as opposed to demographic or ratings to measure the success of a program.

I am convinced that this shift represents the best means we have of getting media producers to reassess their relationship to their consumers and that seems to be key to the long term viability of participatory culture. In the book, I cite Grant McCracken's observations that companies will have a legal right for the foreseeable future to tightly control their intellectual property and shut down most forms of fan participation but they will have an economic interest in opening themselves up to greater participation from their consumers. One of the reasons for this is that they are discovering, perhaps some would say rediscovering, the value of committed consumers.

When I talk to executives at advertising companies or media companies, I get two key messages right now: one, they are terrified about losing control of their brands or products; they fear what the consumer can do to them through online communications. Second, they want very much to build a strong brand community that will help support their brands and products. And for the short term, this makes it possible to rewrite our contracts with the media company.

Part of what I wanted to stress in the book was Robert Kozinet's argument that brand communities can both promote and police the behavoir of media companies -- can help them reach new consumers, can hold them accountable for bad decisions. This happens because we are no longer talking about isolated consumers; we are talking about groups that pool knowledge, deliberate together, and take collective action. At one point, I refer to these new brand communities as collective bargaining units.

I was intrigued by Jenkins's willing adoption of lifestyle marketing practices, mostly since I have been such a vocal critic of this type of advertising, both here (1, 2) and, in considerably more detail, in my forthcoming book Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. Essentially, my argument is that lifestyle marketing does not address consumers' actual lifestyles, but fashions lifestyles as constructs that marketers manipulate consumers to adopt.

This point of disagreement probably deserves a whole blog post in and of itself. To make short work of it, I think Bogost is right that lifestyle marketing can be an empty gesture, a desire to herd us into fixed demographic categories that may have little or nothing to do with how we actually live and think. I suspect, though, that this form of lifestyle marketing is apt to become less and less effective as we are able to get together with like-minded individuals and share insights on the web. Bloggers are pretty aggressive at unmasking and debunking lifestyle pitches that seem inauthentic or run counter to the established practices and beliefs of particular communities. Most of the brand communities I am describing emerge bottom up from the grassroots, though companies may step in to facilitate their activities more fully. These communities emerge because we have authentic investments in the goods that constitute our everyday life and because brands express meanings that we draw upon to express our identities.

The fact that brands serve a range of other functions for the companies that produce and market them doesn't take away from the fact that we also make use of those brands for our own expressive purposes. For example, having grown up in Atlanta as part of a certain generation, I feel a strong emotional bond to Coca Cola. Its international success as a company becomes an extension of my pride in my home town. This was especially powerful when I was a boy and Atlanta was first fighting to become a global city. It was astonishingly important to me that I knew that Coke was a product produced in Atlanta and consumed around the world. I still feel that aura around Coca Cola even though I have an allergic reaction to carbonation that means I don't actually drink Coke. In that sense, my emotional investment in the brand is totally divorced from the reality of the product and does not even translate directly into my role as a consumer. It is up to Coca Cola's advertising executives to figure out how to transform my warm feelings towards the company into purchasing decisions. And in my case, I am a hard sell because it makes me sick to drink the stuff. While I think advertising plays with powerful emotions, those emotions do not necessarily over-ride our rational judgements about how the actual product will operate in the context of our own lives.

Again, I am interested in what happens when the top-down efforts of companies to sell products meet bottom-up forces from consumers who are asserting their identity through their relationship to products. I avoid the classic cultural studies term, resistence, in describing this because it paints too simple a picture of what's going on. Sometimes, these interests are alligned, sometimes they are opposed. In most cases, some kind of negotiation has to occur to reconcile them. Most of them time they are "impure" in that they represent some complex blending of subcultural and commercial motives. The emergence of brand communities interest me because they are both an expansion of corporate reach and an expansion of consumer power.

I tried my best to honor Jenkins's request for readers to "bracket their anxieties about consumerism," but I never felt that he returned to the problem in earnest. Hopeful appeals to future potential are nice, but I expected more vision and leadership on this topic. It's possible that advertising just doesn't bother Jenkins very much; it is, after all, the primary fuel of popular culture.

I recognized that the American Idol chapter was going to be one of the most controversial in the book -- especially for academic readers. Let's face it: the academic world has sought to distance itself from the commercial sector for a long, long time. I think in doing so though we have lost the ability to frame meaningful critiques or engage in dialogue with some core forces within our society. We act as if there was something obscene about money or as if advertising was right next to child pornography on the ethical scale. As long as we start from this premise, we will not be able to meaningfully engage in the conversations that are shaping our culture. We will not be able to talk to people in the business world and have any chance of having them take our ideas seriously.

In other parts of the world (Canada, UK, Australia), media and cultural studies have been very actively involved in policy work, connecting on a regular basis with key government leaders, consulting in the formation of key policies that impact their society. In the United States, we have been largely locked out of those conversations. We don't have a seat at the table. Our government listens to social scientists about cultural matters but not those of us in the Humanities. In these other countries, though, it isn't as if the academics fully agree with the policymakers or totally support their agendas. But they have agreed to suspend disagreements on some levels in order to engage productively on others. In this country, our culture is shaped more by corporate decisions than government policies (though I would argue our desire to turn every conversation into a struggle against the entire economic system doesn't make us effective in either sector).

So, yes, it is probably true that I am less worried by the commercial aspects of our culture, including advertising, than Bogost is. I personally enjoy many products -- cultural and otherwise -- produced by American industry and do not think that commercialization per se corrupts the artistic process. It can but it doesn't have to. All art is produced in an economic context which shapes to some degree what gets produced. I would say the track record for popular entertainment under capitalism is pretty good.

Right now, I am choosing to engage in other kinds of conversations with industry, conversations designed to increase media company's responsiveness to their consumers. Perhaps it might be best to think of what I am calling for in the book is a consumer rights movement for consumers of popular culture -- a fan politics as it were.

In that regard, sweeping critiques of consumer capitalism seem less productive than more focused discussions of specific policies and practices. I think it can be productive to be critical of specific industry practices that may improve or diminish the quality of our lives. I think most consumers have made some kind of peace with the commercial impulses that surround them, have learned to read through them much of the time, have resigned themselves to accept them as a necessary evil if the result is getting access to entertainment or products they want. I see consumers increasingly savy about the economic interests that shape the culture they consume and more and more willing to make trade-offs which serve their interests.

I saw my book as addressed as much at the media industries as at consumers and was trying to provide a space where both sides could understand the other's perspectives a bit more clearly. Swatting your readers with a newspaper is hardly the best way to open up a dialogue. I fully expect the information provided in that chapter to be deployed in a range of different arguments about whether this new model of consumption is a good thing or a bad thing. I may even engage in some of those arguments from time to time. But what I was trying to do there was describe, as accurately as I could, how this new style of affective economics works by looking more closely at a specific advertiser, Coca Cola, and at a specific franchise, American Idol.

With luck, this book will push debates about consumerism to another level, allowing for more nuanced discussions of what is going on right now. Too often, critics of consumerism act as if nothing has changed in the ways brands operate since the 1950s. Bogost is a much more nuanced thinker on this subject: his critiques here of lifestyle marketing suggest a real engagement with contemporary industry discourse; he has also worked himself extensively in and around advertising so he has some front line perspective on this. I expect to learn a lot from his book. It's just apt to be a very different kind of book than the one I set out to write.

I do think I am offering both vision and leadership in trying to find the basis for reaproachment between academics and industry. I don't think the only way to show leadership is to go in with guns blazing. I As I suggest in the book's conclusion, the fight for the quality of our culture is one which needs to be fought on different levels.

In Part Two, I will take up Bogost's critique of my concept of transmedia storytelling and some of my arguments about fan culture. Since issues of commercialization run through his argument, they will resurface throughout this response.

E3: End of an Era?

Those of us who follow the games industry have reacted with various degrees of shock and surprise by the announcement a few weeks ago that E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the major trade show of the games industry, will no longer be held. As Next Generation has reported, several of the major companies whose support was key for funding an event on this scale had pulled their support from the event:

When I spoke to some people about E3's collapse, the general response was one of disbelief. How could something so big fall apart so quickly? Perhaps this is why so many news outlets simply refused to believe the news. The fact is that all it took were a very small number of company presidents to talk with each other, and figure out that if they all decided to pass, none of them would need to be there. Once Nintendo, Microsoft, SCEA and EA had stepped out, E3 was history. It was multilateral disarmament.

The Next Generation writer went on to identify a range of other factors that contributed to the collapse of this industry institution, including a sense that it had not achieved its goals in attracting media coverage to anything other than the violence issue or the release of new hardware as well as the degree to which other and better publicity mechanisms had emerged which made it possible for companies to maintain greater control over their messages and reach their intended audience at lower costs. The Next Generation coverage stressed the degree to which organizing for E3 had taken on a life of its own, often at the expense of other goals within the industry:

E3 isn't just measured in terms of the cost of the booth, the floor-space, the party, the hotel, the flights etc. There's also the incredible amount of effort that goes into preparing for the show. Marketing teams are focused on E3 for a good six months of the year. Developers are whipped along as they try to get games ready for what is, essentially, an artificial deadline. It could be argued that this adds focus to development as projects near their conclusion, or it could be argued that it's an unnecessary diversion and a big pain in the ass. Publishers that focus on company-specific events are not under so much pressure to compete with the rest of the market for column inches, months before the real battle of competing for consumer dollars.

In a public statement, Doug Lowenstein, the head of the Entertainment Software Association, explained:

E3Expo 2007 will not feature the large trade show environment of previous years. It is no longer necessary or efficient to have a single industry 'mega-show.' By refocusing on a highly-targeted event, we think we can do a better job serving our members and the industry as a whole, and our members are energized about creating this new E3.

They Cancelled What?

Something of the shock waves this announcement has sent through the games sector is suggested by this pithy comment from Tycho over at Penny Arcade:

There must have been a time before there was an E3, but that's not really a part of my experience. Hearing that it's cancelled, or at any rate will be altered in "format and scale" (read: cancelled) is like hearing that Australia has been cancelled, or that the weak gravitational force is being temporarily suspended.

Some have wondered how a thriving entertainment industry might survive without a high profile trade show. E3 is most often compared to ShowWest which is the place where film exhibitors learn about the new releases for the year or Comicon, which as we have been reporting, functions as the interface between the comics industry and its fans. But already to draw those comparisons in such terms suggests the difference between E3 and these other events. E3 was trying to be too many things for too many people -- a showcase for major publisher's releases, a marketplace for products hoping for distribution and for international games hoping to find a way into the American market, a press event to showcase the industry, a training ground and recruitment ground for future professionals. Other groups have started to use E3 as a base for their own work: we did two Education Arcade conferences in the LA Convention Center during E3 trying to build interest in games and education and UCLA piggybacked off E3 this year for its conference on gender and games. The one function E3 did not play was to provide an interface between the games industry and its fans.

There was always a tension, though, between the lavish spectacle and parties required to woo reps from the major retail outlets and the more sober face that the industry wanted to adopt for talking to the press (and through them, to the general public). In many ways, the collapse of E3 signals the growth of the games industry -- as something larger within our culture -- rather than its diminishment.

Why E3 Hurt Games

Some of you know that Kurt Squire and I co-author the "Applied Game Theory" column at Computer Games Magazine every month. Several years ago, we penned one describing why we thought that at least aspects of E3 culture might be bad for the games industry. I don't want to see reposting this text here now as piling onto Lowenstein and my other friends at the ESA. They do great work on behalf of the games industry and they don't get enough credit. I am sure that they are experiencing the end of E3 with profoundly mixed feelings. But I did think what we said then would help shed some light on the current issues and might help us think through together what the next incarnation of a games industry gathering might look like. (The specific titles referenced here will have dated but otherwise this would still have described the 2006 event.)

Perhaps you are at the convention now, reading this column over the thundering noise and flashing lights which turn that same showroom into something akin to the streets of Hong Kong at midnight. Scantly-clad floor babes beckon to you with promises of easy access and cheap loot. Dancers in leotards demonstrate the wonders of motion capture technology. Highly skilled game girls are challenging all comers. The noise you are hearing is the sound of a thousand computer games all being played at the same time. Most people stagger out after only a few minutes, so overwhelmed that they can no longer focus on any one screen. We've seen people passed out in the corner, their friends trying to coax them back to consciousness by upping their caffeine intake. Everyone should see E3 once to experience the adrenaline rush.

E3's economic function is well understood by anyone who has spent more than a few minutes thinking about the games industry. This is where buyers from Wal-Mart, Electronic Boutique, and the other chain stores first encounter the coming year's product. The major game companies are hyping their hottest new titles, smaller companies are trying to break into the market. Both are involved in a life and death struggle for the attention of the middlemen who

will determine how much shelf space a title will get and how long it remains there. In E3 2001 for example, the disappointing Xbox showing sent the Microsoft PR machine scrambling for months to convince retailers that

platform was ready to ship.

Yet, the consequences of E3 on the look and feel of contemporary games have been less often discussed. For starters, many game designers talk about the importance of designing memorable moments into their new releases -- features which leave vivid impressions after the bulk of what we saw on the floor has blurred together in our sleep-deprived, alcohol-addled, and sensorial-overloaded minds. Producers push designers to come up with a preview reel which grabs attention on the huge monitors which dot the display room and often, the result is an over-emphasis on cinematics over game play. The disparity between those massive screens, which would not seem out of place at your average multiplex, and the much smaller monitors on which most of us play games tells us why so many games look like bad action movies rather than exploring the interactive potentials of this medium or why game soundtracks so often emphasize noisy explosions rather than emotionally enhancing music. What would happen if every movie to be release next year got shown all at the same time in the same auditorium? Which films would stand out? Which films would get buried? For those of us who want to promote greater innovation and diversity in game design, the E3 floor may be the biggest obstacle in our path.

Smaller scale games get little or no floor space. The Sims, for example, got swallowed up by the chaos of the E3 showroom. Games like Rez or Majestic which really stretch the limits of our understanding of what the medium can do are more often displayed in private rooms off the main floor. Some of the most interesting games are literally relegated to the basement, the Kentia Hall, where foreign and independent game developers fight over the cheap space with discount distributors and peripheral manufacturers. You might find an interesting title squeezed between the new video game glove and an online Korean dating game, but these quirky titles have little chance at being heard above the marketing din upstairs.

After even a few minutes on the floor, all of the games start to look the same. Is it any wonder that distributors and retailers are drawn towards recognizable franchises in such an hyperbolic environment?

Is it any surprise that retailers make decisions based on eye candy and glitz?

There's nothing wrong with the industry throwing itself a party at an E3. Wouldn't it be great, though, if like film and music, we had other outlets as well: independent gatherings, grassroots festivals, a real awards show.

As the games industry matures, it may not be able to contain all of its economic and social functions within one or two gatherings. The Indie Games Jam at the Game Developer's Conference is one approach, we hope that other similar efforts will emerge in the upcoming years as well. Consider, by comparison, how important the Sundance Film Festival has been for creating visibility and providing economic opportunities for independent filmmakers.

Where Do We Go From Here?

One step is to separate out the various functions which E3 served and see whether they should be combined or remain separate. Clearly, the industry will need some ways to introduce its new products to retailers and there's some danger that the next step will be to fragment this process -- allowing the major companies to have their own shows (as Next Generation suggests) but leaving the smaller publishers out in the cold. I don't think that would be a very good thing for the games industry. A second key function would be to inform the public about the current state of the games industry. For example, the Penny Arcade Expo may function more like San Diego Comiccon in providing a space where industry figures communicate more directly with their fans, while there are moves underway to develop an independent games festival that functions more like Sundance does within the film industry, offering a place to showcase work by smaller publishers or games that fall further outside the commercial mainstream. We are seeing a growing number of gatherings with more specialized focuses, such as those centering on casual games, mobile games, serious games, even religious games, each of which serves a specific niche as compared to the general interest focus of E3. The Game Developers Conference may absorb more of the training and recruitment functions that were associated with E3. And so forth.

Here's the paradoxl: E3 was bad because the major developers dominated and they overwhelmed smaller producers, contributing to the loss of diversity within the games industry. But when E3 goes away, smaller publishers will have to struggle that much harder to get the attention of the marketplace and they may be the ones who have the most to lose during the transitions that are ahead.

ComicCon & The Power of the Devoted Niche

This is the third guest post written by Comparative Media Studies graduate student and media analyst Ivan Askwith about his observations at Comicon. Askwith is beginning work now on a thesis which centers around transmedia and participatory aspects of Lost and Veronica Mars. In my second dispatch from ComicCon, I tried to illustrate how the studios and networks are already beginning to understand the importance of fan support in the era of convergence culture. And while some executives have a better grasp on the core principles than others, it's fair to say that the entertainment industry are starting to think more seriously about how fans power new business models.

Savvy executives, however, will also realize that ComicCon still has a lot to teach them about the significance of fan support, particularly in economic terms.

While recent entries both here and in the C3 Weblog tempt me to describe what I saw at ComicCon as a living illustration of Chris Anderson's Long Tail. After all, the merchandise selections available at ComicCon range from the super-mainstream to the ultra-obscure, which suggests that there is a market for even the most esoteric and specialized collectibles. If the exhibitors at the Con have chosen to use some of their floor space to offer less mainstream product, should we assume that they've embraced the "we can sell less-of-more" ideology? Most of these sellers have been attending the Con for years, which gives me ample reason to believe that if they didn't think they could sell off their more obscure inventory, they wouldn't bother bringing it.

For all of its strengths, however, I don't think the Long Tail is designed to explain the lesson that I would encourage the entertainment industry to take away from their time at ComicCon: that a small audience of super-committed fans can be worth more, in economic terms, than a massive audience of casual viewers and readers.

This isn't an entirely new observation, of course. Recent literature suggests that viewer involvement has a direct correlation to awareness and retention of advertising messages, and more networks are starting to see the merit of offering niche product through on-demand services.

At ComicCon, however, there is ample evidence to suggest that the industry still hasn't realized just how valuable these niche audiences can be. This became particularly clear during a brief conversation that I had with Allan Caplan, the founder of InkWorks, a company specializing in the creation of trading cards and collectibles tied to popular cult television programs. Their current lineup includes Lost, Veronica Mars, The 4400, and Naruto, as well as such discontinued shows as Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Firefly, Alias and The X-Files. InkWorks might not be operating on Anderson's Long Tail, but they benefit from a similar principle: that small audiences still have big purchasing power if you cater to their interests.

Case in point: InkWorks is preparing to release their seventh line of collectible cards for Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a show that has ended three years ago. One visitor, walking past the stand, asked: "How could there possibly still be a market for new content about a cancelled series?"

(In retrospect, this is an especially odd question to ask in a room where fans are ready and willing to pay well in excess of $1000 for an original out-of-print comic featuring their favorite character.)

Caplan's answer? That every line of Buffy cards InkWorks makes has sold out rapidly, and fans continue to ask them for more. The same is true of other cancelled series, especially Joss Whedon's post-Buffy endeavor, Firefly. Caplan told me that even he had been hesitant to invest in the development of Firefly-affiliated merchandise, until he saw that fans were willing to pay -- and pay well -- for anything connected to the show.

While trading cards aren't an especially new niche business, Inkworks has demonstrated a particularly keen understanding of the fan/collector mentality: in addition to the basic set of cards in each line, there are a number of "bonus cards" distributed at random through the line. The specific content of these cards varies from show to show, but generally includes "Autograph Cards," with actual signatures from cast members and "Pieceworks Cards," which contain tiny pieces of actual costumes worn on-screen during the show. (Other interesting show-specific offerings include invisible ink messages on select cards tied into the spy-fi show Alias, which can only be seen when the card is placed under a black light.)

For reference, a single pack of 6 trading cards costs $2.50.

While I didn't have the presence of mind to record my conversation with Caplan, it was clear to me that he understood (a) the power of creating limited quantities, and (b) that a small, engaged audience can be far more lucrative, especially to niche marketers, than a massive casual audience. After all, as he pointed out to me, there's no market for CSI: Miami trading cards, even if it is the number one show in the world.

One question worth considering: can collectible product lines like this be used as a barometer for the relative popularity of various franchises?

(At some point in the future, I'll be interviewing Caplan, and will post any interesting results that come from that discussion either here or in the C3 Weblog.)

Building Popular Buzz: What To Do, What Not To Do

This is the second of a series of guest blogs written by Comparative Media Studies graduate student and media analyst Ivan Askwith about his observations at this year's Comicon. Based on the evidence from this year's ComicCon, the entertainment industry is slowly starting to understand just how important a vocal fandom can be in the success of a new brand or franchise. As I indicated at the end of my last post, this growing comprehension is most evident in the largest "panel events" -- on the ComicCon schedule, this generally means those events held in Ballroom 20, Hall 6CDEF, and Hall H, which can seat anywhere from 2000-6500 spectators. Or, as the industry is learning to think of them, potential advertisers and advocates. Some presentations were more overt than others, but almost all of the largest scheduled events were closer in tone to a high-powered sales pitch than an intimate discussion between fans and creators.

That said, some presenters seem to have a more nuanced understanding of fan behavior than others. As Henry has already discussed on this blog, no one is currently cultivating fan participation more effectively, or respectfully, than New Line Cinema, in promotion for Snakes on a Plane. The panel for SoaP came at the end of a longer presentation from New Line, which featured previews of the Final Destination 3 DVD -- interesting insofar as it leverages the rarely-used interactive capabilities of DVD systems to let viewers determine the course of events at pivotal moments -- and the forthcoming Jack Black film, Tenacious D in 'The Pick of Destiny'. But the audience and presenters both knew that these were diversions from the main attraction: as the discussion about Tenacious D wrapped up, the energy in the crowd became palpable, and when panel host Kenan Thompson finally spoke the words -- "Snakes On A Plane" -- the audience erupted with enthusiasm and applause.

The entire presentation that followed demonstrated the same respectful appreciation of the internet fandom that has characterized the film's marketing campaign over the last several months. The presentation began with a video which flashed the words "Thanks to you.... Snakes on a Plane.... is already the summer's most talked about movie.... and it's not even out yet." This was followed with a several-minute montage collecting some of the best fan-generated content (spoofs, advertisements, posters, images, viral memes, etc), and used the winning entry from a fan-generated-soundtrack contest as the musical track. The video ended with another sequence of titles, which declared "Thanks to you, Snakes on a Plane is one of the most anticipated movies.... ever."

Based on the audience reaction, this isn't too far from the mark: the 6,500 seat Hall H was packed, with plenty of people standing in the back and even more turned away at the door, and the crowd responded enthusiastically to pretty much everything that was shown, said, or asked. Most of the audience "questions" consisted of variations on a theme -- the theme, in this case, being what a bad-ass motherfucker Samuel L. Jackson is.

In fact, one audience member straight out asked:

"What's it like, always being such a bad-ass mother fucker?"

To which Jackson replied:

"It's great to be able to live that out on screen, but, you know, I don't walk around every day thinkin' I'm a bad ass mother fucker. I'm just trying to make it through the day, most days, but I thank you for feelin' that way about it... You're a bad mother fucker, man, thank you. Thank you, thank you."

This was more or less the tone for the entire panel. However, one audience member did ask an interesting, albeit predictable question:

"Do you think that this movie will have a lasting effect on the way that the industry looks at internet hype?"

To which Jackson replied:

I hope that people in studios are looking and paying attention and trying to figure out how and why this phenomenon took place. I hope that there's some young filmmaker somewhere that knows, that understands that now they could put a premise on the internet -- 'my premise for this film is... boom... who has a scene?' -- and people will start writing the first scene for that particular film, and then they'll choose that scene. Somebody'll write the next scene, and they'll choose that particular scene, until they end up with a whole film, and then somebody will say, 'Who do you think should be in this film?', and then they go through that, and they come up with a whole cast list of people, and if everybody sends a dollar in, we can hire these particular people and shoot this particular film, and we'll have a film that's all-inclusive, that's something that a lot of people came together on, and had a collaborative passion about. And I think that would be kind of a wonderful thing to see happen. And hopefully that will be somewhere down the line... [audience applauds]

And while Jackson's scenario might be a little utopian for the near future, it suggests that he (and I suspect this carries over to many of the individuals working on this film) is beginning to recognize and respect the changing role of the audience, and the relatively awe-inspiring possibilities that emerge from the collective intelligence and energy of online fan communities. A collaborative online movie might still be some way off, but as to the more immediate question that was posed, it seems clear that this movie has already had a significant effect on how the industry looks at internet hype. Will it have a lasting effect? My guess is "Yes", in that it represents a substantial advance on the learning curve, as studios start to realize that there are right and wrong ways to engage with fan cultures.

Speaking of "wrong ways," I feel obligated to report that some presentations demonstrated far less tact in their attempts to engage would-be fans. During the World Premiere of NBC's forthcoming serial drama Heroes, which Henry has also discussed on this blog, Executive Producer Jeph Loeb (a comics legend in his own right for his work on Batman and Superman) instructed the audience that their job was to go home after the screening, get on the internet, and talk to everyone they know, as much and as often as they could, about how much they loved the show. While there's some room to encourage fans to be vocal in responding to a new show, I think it's a dangerous -- and potentially offensive -- move to instruct them to talk about how great a show is, especially before they've even seen it. (Of course, Loeb repeated the instructions at least twice more during the post-screening discussion, and closed with them as well.) But the guy sitting next to me gave a low, dismissive whistle during Loeb's first round of encouragement, muttering "Bad move", and (personal opinions of Heroes aside) I think he was absolutely right.

The fact is that studios don't need, and perhaps can't, instruct fans to be fans, you just need to be responsive and encouraging once they express appreciation for your work. If fans like what they see, they're going to talk about it -- it's part of the pleasure of being a fan. And if they don't like what they see, odds are they're still going to talk about it, but you're better off if they don't.