Triumph of a Time Lord (Part Two): An Interview with Matt Hills

Last time, I ran the first of a two part series featuring an interview with Matt Hills, a leading British thinker about fan culture and genre entertainment, discussing the revamped Doctor Who series. Hills is currently hard at work writing a book, Triumph of a Time Lord, which discusses the retooling of this classic British series for new audiences and new times. In the first installment, I focused on questions concerning the series's relations to its most hardcore fans, discussing the argument that the new Doctor Who represents what happens when fans take over control of a media franchise. But that's really too simple an explanation for all of the changes which have happened here. This time, I asked Hills to drill down on how the changes in the series format reflect trends in British and global television production as strategies to broaden the viewership of the programme. As with last time, Hills assumes readers are relatively familiar with the contents of both seasons of the new Doctor Who -- and makes frequent and telling references to individual episodes. He's pretty careful not to kill the drama for poor Americans who haven't had official access to all of the episodes this season (and haven't figured out how to order them from UK Amazon or download them from some extra-legal source.) But if you've really remained in the dark about what happens this season, you may not want to read this since there are some major plot developments that get discussed here.

Of course, there are going to be spoilers afloat in the Doctor Who community at this point: it is really absurd to have such long delays in the distribution of the series between the United Kingdom and the United States, two countries seperated by a common language, at a time when information flows so fluidly across national borders along various digital networks. Television fan culture is now global and producers run a high risk when they muck about with the temporality of information flows!

To what degree do you think the new Doctor Who has been conceived for a global rather than a national audience? I gather there were complaints early on about

the "Americanization" of Doctor Who because of shifts in the format. Have those concerns settled down?

If anything, I'd say that UK fandom has shown a certain pride in the show's volume of overseas sales - back in the day, this always used to be cited as a barometer of the old series's popularity. There are still some residual and highly proprietary attitudes among a few UK fans, though, who very much perceive the show as 'theirs', which isn't always helpful. The history of Who has frequently been one where certain groups of fans have contrasted its supposed "Britishness" to the allegedly "American" values of, say, the likes of Star Trek. And that hasn't totally gone away, even in an era where fans can internationally access the same production information, and spoilers etc, at pretty much the same time via web-based communities like Outpost Gallifrey.

I think one sign that the show has absolutely been conceived of as a global vehicle is its comparative reliance on London as a setting. Filming in Cardiff has frequently doubled for London - even causing some consternation to drunken passers-by on those late-night occasions when the Welsh capital city has been 'dressed' as London: I overheard one Welshman shout "how rude!" as he lurched past a London underground sign which the production team had erected in the city centre for the filming of 'Rose'.

Contemporary London helps to sell the show's Brit identity abroad: it makes sense as a setting for international audiences much more readily than other UK cities would. The 'showreel' used to promote series one to buyers and advertise it on-air to audiences, included that scene of Big Ben being demolished by an alien spacecraft: 'marvel as an international icon of tourism is trashed' was evidently just as strong a subtext as 'we've actually got decent special effects'.

And Cardiff's first appearance was, of course, in 'The Unquiet Dead', which compensated for this by capitalising on the BBC's reputation for costume drama (again, something likely to help sell the show overseas). This combination of 'cool London' - set up in the very opening montage of the series - and 'heritage'/period drama settings makes the show a likely candidate to travel well. And the emphasis on clear storytelling (by Who's standards) and iconic monsters are also both tokens of a global ambition, as are the occasional inserts of media coverage within invasion stories, which the show has been increasingly careful to internationalise, so that fictional US newsflashes, for instance, are seen on-screen alongside UK ones.

The 1996 US-UK co-production of Doctor Who was far more self-evidently "Americanized" than the current series. There, the TARDIS had a "cloaking device", and the Doctor kissed his 'companion' in a more straightforwardly romantic manner compared with the various contrivances Russell T. Davies has used to justify this event. And though some fans may feel the latest show has been "Americanized" in the sense that it's followed in the wake of US TV successes like Buffy, or adopted a story arc approach characteristic of shows like The X-Files, in fact elements of the new series' format can be traced back through previous Russell T Davies' screenplays and even his own Who novel - the emotionally complex, hard-hitting, and beautifully condensed Damaged Goods - as well as being indebted to developments in other Who novels: for example, the matter of groups of people (conspiracy theorists) trying to track the Doctor was raised in the Virgin novel Who Killed Kennedy, and is not simply or directly a reaction to developments in genre 'realism' in US cult TV (even if some of these 1990s Who novels may, themselves, have been written in the shadow of The X-Files). And the self-reflexive depiction of fandom (done far more directly than 'Love & Monsters') is carried out in Kate Orman's Virgin novels Return of the Living Dad and Room With No Doors, in which a fan actually discusses negative fan stereotypes and asserts that he wanted to "get a life" by emulating the Doctor. Given that these adventures were written for, and sold to, a fan niche market, it's not at all surprising that they moved ahead of the new series in terms of explicitly addressing fandom as a subject. But there is a very strong argument that far from simply reacting to American cult & quality TV, the new series is partly reacting to developments there (and production values) and partly reacting to developments within an international community of professionalised fan writers.

If the series were conceived of more centrally for a national rather than global audience, then I'd argue that it would display far more of a sense of UK regionality than it does. Even Christopher Eccleston's "all planets have a North" Doctor has been rapidly replaced by David Tennant adopting an estuary English (or London-ish) accent in line with his Casanova performance, and the international sales that presumably garnered. And Peter Kay's Bolton accent surfaces in 'Love & Monsters' only when he is under heavy monster make-up, seeming to suggest that the producers wanted to reinforce the point - yes, this is still Peter Kay the famous comedian, even under all the prosthetics. Otherwise, the dominant norm in the new series of Who is that its characters and settings are London-default and largely speak in 'received pronounciation' or Queen's English: plus ca change. UK regionality is suppressed because of its irrelevance to a global audience: the fact that the series is made by BBC Wales has made relatively difference to its material form, though it has undoubtedly been a great boost to the Welsh TV industry, which - much like UK fan audiences - has again shown considerable pride in its success. And I think that takes me back to where I came in on this answer!

Doctor Who has been perceived as a children's program in the U.K. but largely watched by adults in North America. Do you think the current series retains this focus on children viewers? How have the producers sought to balance between these two likely audiences?

In the UK, the new series has been credited with 'reinventing' or 'rediscovering' the family audience for prime-time TV drama. Press reports have made much of this, and the general sense appears to be that the success of the show has challenged industry wisdom, which had previously stressed the break-up of trans-generational audiences into different age-based 'niches' who would hardly ever watch the same programme together. The show has also been successful in terms of the relative gender balance of its audience: it really does seem to represent all things to all people right now!

So, though the old series may sometimes have been deemed a kid's show - or 'children's telly that it was almost OK for adults to enjoy' - this depiction seems to have fallen by the wayside rather. To be honest, I think the old show was always something of an oddity in terms of its unusually broad appeal: when it was pretty much at its height in terms of popularity in the 1970s, it always bridged a massively wide range of ages - audience data given in The Unfolding Text (1983) proves that. And the reinvented series is no different, typically balancing its 'adult' and 'child' appeals very carefully so as to work as a cross-over show.

One of the key shifts is the massive influx of family-based storylines, many featuring child actors and characters in major roles. Not only does the show work hard to represent the Doctor and Rose as desirable travelling companions - the brief being that audiences should like them and want to befriend them - it also uses families in a variety of ways. Yes, there's the Tyler family and Mickey, but even beyond this, the family really is omnipresent. The Slitheen aren't just an alien race, they're a family group. And the human family in 'Fear Her' confront an alien which is alone, cut off from its kind and its own vastly extended family. 'The Empty Child'/'Doctor Dances' revolves around the question 'Are you my mummy?' of course, and 'Idiot's Lantern' also centrally features a family dynamic. The majority of new series' stories involve family crises - even the parallel world of 'Age of Steel' is viewed through very much through the lens of family. And in 'Fear Her', the Doctor alludes to his own family, something which the series may well build on.

There's also more than a hint of family-type relations in the warmth and affection between the Doctor and Sarah Jane in 'School Reunion', and Rose talks of getting a mortgage with the Doctor in 'The Impossible Planet'/'The Satan Pit', which though it may carry some romantic implications, is also about the idea of elective rather than biological 'family'.

There are limits to the series' portrayals of family though, and the way these can work to bridge different generational audiences. While childhood is well represented - frequently giving younger audiences an identification figure in addition to the Doctor and Rose - the show has neglected older audiences and characters. The first Doctor, back in 1963, was a 'grandfather' type: the casting of Eccleston and Tennant seems to view the nominally lead character as necessarily youthful and energetic, if not unconventionally 'sexy'. Age and ageing don't seem to play well in this new series: the inclusion of some slightly older characters in the Graeme Harper-directed 'Rise of the Cybermen'/'Age of Steel' (in the forms of Mrs Moore and Lumic's henchman) appear to be indebted to Harper's own role as the 'elder statesmen' of directors, and his use of a repertory of actors whom he's worked with across his career. 'Fear Her' and 'Idiot's Lantern' do also feature grandmother characters, though in relatively minor roles. On the whole, the cross-generational world of new Who is one where youthfulness remains at a premium.

The show has also sought to balance appeals to younger and older audiences through its patchwork of different tones. One minute slapstick or broad humour, the next political satire, and the next pop-culture referencing: Davies's show-runner role has lent the programme a deftness of touch, making it much more of a combinatorial matrix of darker and lighter moments than ever before. This may again be something learnt from the best of contemporary and recent US TV.

But again there are limits, always limits. Despite this leaping to and fro between different tones, nothing too 'adult' should intrude: sex exists only as a euphemism or an implication, and death is curiously bloodless. Much of the new series still has to happen off-screen, or through unfolding subtexts.

Writers do sometimes seem to view these limits as boundaries to be toyed with, however. Steven Moffat's award-winning series one script may use the euphemism of 'dancing' for the Doctor's apparent sex-life, but it does so with such insistency, if not nakedness, that the idea that this is a "subtext" really seems to melt away. At the very least, there is only a wafer-thin line between 'coming right out and saying it', and the strategy which Moffat pursues. And he introduces Captain Jack Harkness, a bisexual character - OK, he's science-fictionally coded as 'omnisexual' - into a prime-time "family" show... without any tabloid newspaper outcry.

Forget 'reinventing' the family audience against industry wisdom: this was the greatest achievement of series one, in my opinion. What might have looked, in some ways, like cosy viewing - oooh, the BBC does war-time period drama, and Rose is wearing a Union Jack flag - was really cutting-edge television with a sharp twinkle in its eye, and a mischievous banana in its pocket (bananas are good). I couldn't believe the production team had got away with it - but they not only did so, they did it with style to spare.

Perhaps this tightrope-walking hasn't just been about 'balancing' different audiences. It's also been about challenging where, exactly, the lines should be drawn between audience 'niches', and between 'child' and 'adult' viewers. And although some older fans have decried the Slitheen fart gags, the inclusion of farting in TV drama has, on some occasions outside the world of Doctor Who, acted as a marker of 'quality television'. For example, the Jimmy McGovern-created BBC series, The Lakes, featured at least one scene of repeated farting by way of marking out its 'realist' and inclusive intent - it was as if the star writer was saying, 'hey, you don't hear much of this in TV drama, do you, but I bet you do plenty of it in real life, right?' And arguably, Russell T Davies wasn't just playing to the child audience with a whiff of toilet humour, as older fans have complained: he was also daring to include such material, making this sort of moment and tone an example of 'sophisticated' risk-taking with dramatic seriousness, and simultaneously an instance of 'childish' glee or rebellion against good taste. The old series didn't boast alien races farting while the Doctor sought to save the world.

Another point in its favour: 'Aliens of London' also features what may well be the fastest (intentional!) tone-shift in Doctor Who history: from farcical comedy to pure, pure tragedy in the time it takes for poor, poor space piggy to be gunned down.

Honestly, give international Who fandom about ten years, and these episodes ('AoL'/WWIII') will be acclaimed as classics...

Much of the interest of the new series has centered around Rose, who has to be

one of the most popular companions of all time, as well as being key to bridging between Doctors Nine and Ten and thus knitting together the two new seasons. Rose's emotional life and secondary relations have been much more central to the series than previous companions. Is there a concern that her departure may adversely impact the series in a way that is very different from the departure of the other companions or for that matter, the shifts in casting of the various Doctors?

The production team seem to be putting a specific gloss on this departure, namely that it simply indicates one of the strengths and core values of the Doctor Who format: that the Doctor's adventures will always go on. The show is bigger than any one star. Eccleston's departure, and Tennant's successful first season, would certainly seem to lend grist to this mill, even if it suggests that in the context of the fast-moving contemporary media industry, Doctor Who may never again see an actor in the lead role for more than three or four years.

Though Rose and her family have been crucial to the new show's success, it looks as though the programme will return to its roots in 'similarity and difference'. In other words, giving the 'companion' a family has worked well: solution - bring in a new family with a tweaked and slightly different dynamic, but still recognisably following the by now established template. Rose's departure was also, of course, seemingly the narrative end-of-the-line for the rest of the Tylers, with Jackie and Pete reunited in that alt-universe at the end of 'Doomsday'.

I think the challenge presented here is the same sort of challenge which Who has always responded to across its run, whether new or old series; how much novelty do you inject with a change of cast, and how much sameness do you play safe with? It sounds as though the new companion, Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), will again be London-based, continuing the metropolitan bias of the new series which has already worked so well to sell it globally. The latest character's family apparently includes a brother - so at the very least, there are already new narrative possibilities opened up by the likes of sibling rivalry! But these possibilities are clearly very much constrained by a need for continuity and sameness - just as the change from Eccleston to Tennant couldn't afford to make radical changes to the format. Film and TV critic Kim Newman commented on this in his recent 'BFI TV Classic' book dealing with the series, observing that given the success of the new series, it is highly unlikely that its producers will want to make radical changes, at least in the foreseeable future, to what's now a proven hit formula and a flagship BBC product.

Arguably, Doctor Who's biggest format shifts have come in the past when there have been major upheavals in the TV industry - whether this was the shift to colour TV in the UK in the seventies, or the industry perception that fragmented target audiences were more important than a 'mass' audience which took hold across the eighties, and caused Who to be self-consciously positioned in the UK as a 'cult' show with its own dedicated but dwindling fan-base who would watch it no matter when it was scheduled. By contrast, with the new series sparking an interest in the UK in the 'family audience', and doing remarkably well in multi-channel, digital TV households - its high production value special effects and multi-tonal approach seem to have made it collective required viewing on the main 'cinema'-style TV in many households - it is in the rare position of being a trend-setter at this point, rather than having to react to industry changes.

Given all this, I was still sad to see the Tylers vanish out of series two's story-arc as a job lot. I think it would've been interesting to confront the Doctor with his responsibilities to Jackie, had they both been trapped together on 'our' side of the universal fault-lines. What would she have made of him finding a new travelling companion, someone who was effectively replacing her daughter? Would she have hated the Doctor for cutting her off from Rose forever? Though the end of 'Doomsday' certainly felt like a full and satisfying resolution - a proper ending, which if I hadn't already known better, would've had me speculating it was the end of the 'Russell T Davies era' - I think there was potential for many more loose threads.

That's the price you pay for a big ending, I guess. It does mean that the show's newfound emotional realism now won't be able to develop its post-companion theme in such full-blooded ways. Instead, Rose's absence will no doubt be referred to, but in a more anodyne and less dramatically-compelling, threatening manner. And given the Doctor's repeated promises to Jackie that he would keep Rose safe, a headline failure for him would've really been something to focus on and pick away at. However, it would also have been too dark, probably, for the current format - too much family angst and not enough uplifting optimism!

Some have commented on the different emotional dynamic of the new series - more romantic, melodramatic, operatic, pick your term, compared to the emotional reserve one associates with some of the earlier Doctors. What factors led to this shift in tone?

Three words: the female audience.

There, thought I'd finish with a succinct answer!

Oh, OK, it isn't quite that simple, but almost. A key aim for the new series, from what I've heard, was to make it a TV drama 'brand' achieving very close to gender parity in its audience. What the show absolutely could not afford to be was 'science fiction for the boys'. It had to appeal to women via its re-branding. So it was that early promotional images played up action-adventure and pretty much removed science-fiction from the advertised genre mix, making the show about the Doctor and Rose and their thrilling, transcendent escape into space and time.

Part of that ambition was to integrate modes of storytelling which would appeal to male audiences with those appealing to women - it being taken as read that you can't definitively characterise sci-fi as 'boys' stuff' and melodrama as 'for girls' (though there are gendered patterns in media consumption, which is why broadcasters think in such terms). Making Rose's role basically equal to that of the Doctor was only part of this process. Techno-babble was banned, as was 'outer space' sci-fi - the fear being that audiences wouldn't 'relate' to visions of the far future. There's some anecdotal evidence to support this sort of assumption - I interviewed female fans for one research project recently, and a number of them spoke about finding Buffy 'realistic', but said that they hated certain Star Treks for their 'lack of realism'. Some generic hybrids, and themes, obviously play better than others, whereas some genre imagery, such as science-fiction construed as spacecraft, seems to turn off specific audiences - such are their prejudices and opinions.

Where new Who has done 'outer space' it has generally sought to anchor this in relation to immediately recognisable present-day concerns and themes - whether looking satirically at abuses of journalism and TV news in 'The Long Game', or Big Brother reality TV in 'Bad Wolf'. And though 'End of The World' and 'The Impossible Planet'/ 'The Satan Pit' buck this noticeable trend somewhat, they each have their present-day points of identification: in the former, Rose phones home, and the show ends with a walk through a present-day city (Cardiff, again doubling for London). And the latter two-part story was, surely by design rather than accident, originally broadcast in the UK either side of media fuss about it being the 6th of the 6th of 2006 - hence accumulating free media publicity and tying into the absolutely contemporary, even as it depicted a far-future space opera dealing with demonic forces. This sort of planned tie-in also indicates, for me, the almost unprecedented extent to which the new series is planned and rationalised as a continual media event.

As well as desperately seeking the female audience, and not wanting to alienate anti-sci-fi viewers, the new series' emotional dynamic is also evidently part of its critique of the original, and part of its attempt to fit into norms of contemporary 'quality' TV which tends to offer genre and tonal hybridity unified around core emotional content and a detailed 'series memory' rewarding audience loyalty. I've heard it said that the new romanticism of the programme is simply about fitting into a more openly emotional context in the UK - post-Princess Di - but this strikes me as incredibly lazy copy-writing, to be frank. Britain hasn't suddenly changed that much; I don't find myself knee-deep in extravagant emoting on a day-to-day basis. No, the series has changed in response to US and UK TV industry patterns in 'quality' content, as well as fans' criticisms of plot-holes and emotional absences in the old series: it certainly isn't a mirror of some supposedly vast social upheaval in the UK! What it is, is a very cleverly constructed and managed brand, which is far more intently controlled and policed for consistency than ever before.

In essence, it's the 'MacDonaldization' of what used to be a rather rickety old cult Brit show.

I mean this in a non-pejorative and analytical sense (American sociologist George Ritzer has written about MacDonaldization, at some length): the new series delivers a consistent series of pleasures, just as one would properly expect from a brand. Already in an episode like 'Fear Her', there's a sense of the writer - Matthew Graham - looking to tick the boxes of what should go into a "new series" pitch: strong family story and child-actor presence; monsters-of-the-week in the guises of an animated scribble and the possessed Chloe; emotionally uplifting, with the Doctor rescuing the Olympic flame; a little quirky moment encapsulating one of fandom's critiques of the original series (why does the TARDIS always land facing the most convenient or easily accessible way out?). It's not that any of this is ersatz, or even self-parody, just that it seems a touch too much like self-imitation pursued in the interests of serving up the same, established and regulated format. Old-school Doctor Who's defining quality was probably, above all else, its sheer patchiness; new Who would never dream of stooping to such radical inconsistency. It's a far more disciplined and rationalised beast, down to every last emotional beat. But no doubt it's just a phase the show's going through - after all, regeneration has always been its greatest strength.

-- Matt Hills, Cardiff University

HillsM2@cardiff.ac.uk

Thanks again to Cynthia Jenkins and Henry Jenkins IV for their help in formulating these questions.

Triumph of a Time Lord (Part One): An Interview With Matt Hills

For the past decade or so, I have had people come up to me and treat me as though I were an expert on Doctor Who. This is because I co-authored a book with Doctor Who expert John Tulloch (Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text) called Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. I provided the sections on American Star Trek fans and Tulloch wrote the sections on British and Australian fans of Doctor Who. I hate to say it but I really didn't like the classic Doctor Who very much, though my wife and son were hardcore fans. My son dressed up as Jon Pertwee when he was a wee lad, much to the confusion of our midwestern neighbors who had never heard of the actor before. But when Doctor Who returned, I fell hard -- again, perhaps not as hard as my wife and son -- but hard enough. So, I reached out to my friend and colleague Matt Hills of the University of Cardiff to share with us a British fan's insights into what has happened to the new series. Wisely, I let my wife and son frame the questions. Hills wrote Fan Cultures which is perhaps the most important new book on fandom since... hmm, what was the name of that book again. There's a conversation between the two of us about generations of fan studies in my new book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, and as you will learn below, he is now hard at work on a new book about the Doctor. So what follows taps Hills's special expertise as a fan and academic obsessed with this particular series.

I am going to run this interview, which is quite long (no doubt a shocking development for readers of this blog) but also quite rich, in two installments. This part focuses heavily on the relationship of the new series to its long-time fans, reading the new Doctor Who as a prime example of what happens when the fans take over the franchise. Along the way, there are lots of minor spoilers so for those of you who have not seen the second season, read this at your own risk. I don't think there are any fatal spoilers here but it's death by papercuts. And in any case, the more you know the individual episodes, the more you are going to get from his more specific comments.

Tell me a little about your relationship to the series and how you came to be

writing a book about the new production.

I've been a fan of the series since I was at least three years old - according to family stories, I used to be quietly absorbed in watching long before I learnt to talk! So, I suppose I've been a fan longer than I can actually consciously remember. My earliest proper memories of the show are of watching 'Genesis of the Daleks' on its original transmission, and 'The Deadly Assassin', both of which must have made a big impression. Davros really did terrify the younger me, even in 'Destiny of the Daleks'. And Tom Baker's eventual departure in 'Logopolis' formed a major part of my childhood emotional life...

As for how I came to be writing this book about the 'new' (2005--) series - Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the 21st Century - well, it was really just something I felt I had to do, given my previous work on fandom and science fiction TV, and my love for the show.

I was fortunate enough to get the chance to discuss the idea, however briefly, with Russell T Davies. He was absolutely supportive, and welcomed the notion that scholars might want to study the programme's latest version.

One interesting snag, though, is that because I'm not doing the book as an official BBC publication, BBC contracts apparently mean that production personnel are not able to grant me interviews. This is what I've been led to believe, anyway. It seems to be a very different situation, and a very different moment, to when John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado were writing Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text back in 1983 - they interviewed a wide range of then-current and former production personnel. It strikes me that right now, something like Doctor Who, especially with the success it's had, is much more intensely about information control and 'brand management' than it ever was before. It's almost as if there is a kind of info-war taking place - sometimes between the lines, and sometimes bursting into full view - between producers, fans and academics.

So, this book will probably have to be written without behind-the-scenes access, which is a shame in a way - but it's not as if working from 'the text' has ever stopped academics before: there's still masses of interesting things to be said about the new show and its audiences from different kinds of media studies perspectives.

I've ended up working with I.B. Tauris because of their excellent track record in publishing books on US and UK cult/quality TV: I've contributed to their books about Angel and a forthcoming one on CSI, and they've also done things like Reading the Vampire Slayer and Reading Desperate Housewives - spot the trend in titles! I wanted to avoid 'Reading' in my own title, though: it sounds a little limiting. And as I argued in Fan Cultures (2002), my very dense first book, being a fan is about so much more than 'reading' a beloved TV series. By now, I think 'reading' is a rather old-school academic concept or metaphor for what we all do in relation with television shows.

I.B Tauris have also recently published James Chapman's excellent study Inside The Tardis, which focuses on the 'classic' series of Doctor Who. My own book will be a little more theoretical than James's: he begins, only semi-humorously, by likening cultural theorists to Daleks and Cybermen, which I find truly astonishing. For me, 'theory' isn't ever going to be the monster of the piece. I begin my manuscript by suggesting that the ideals and politics of media theory - which often involve championing the underdog and challenging systems of power - are actually really much closer to the ideals of the Doctor himself. And in any case, Who fan writers and luminaries such as Paul Cornell, Lawrence Miles, and Tat Wood have been making very interesting use of so-called 'theory' in their work for years. Like the best of their writings, I'm aiming to provoke fandom, and sometimes challenge received wisdoms, but not disappear up my own fundament at the same time (hmmmm, famous last words, there!).

From the perspective of American fans of Doctor Who, the past decade has been something of a black hole with relatively limited new content. Yet, in the United Kingdom, Doctor Who was kept alive in various ways - from radio broadcasts and books directly based within the franchise to a variety of media projects which were thinly veiled references to the Doctor. Can you describe something of this process?

This seems to have been dubbed 'the wilderness years' by some fans: basically, the period between the original show's cancellation in 1989, its all-too-brief return in 1996, and then on through to 2005. From my perspective as a UK fan, the TV show may have been off-air, but the franchise (if we're going to call it that) was always active. Some of the best stories ever produced have, arguably, actually happened in original Who novels and audios - things like Paul Cornell's Human Nature or Rob Shearman's Chimes of Midnight. It's not at all surprising that the new television series, in episodes such as 'Dalek' and 'Rise of the Cybermen'/'Age of Steel' has occasionally taken inspiration from these other imaginings of the Doctor.

I'd hazard the observation that the series of Virgin novels really helped, if not forced, Doctor Who to develop beyond its original TV series format and limitations (and yes, despite the fan belief that Who is the ultimate flexible TV format, it clearly does have, and has had, its limits...). And in a sense, that growth was one of the most important things ever to happen to the programme. The fact that it has more emotional depth and resonance in its latest production may be partly down to contemporary changes in TV drama, and partly down to Russell T Davies's less stridently gendered vision for the show, but I'd say it also has a lot to do with what happened to Doctor Who when it was off-air, and when a generation of writers who (mostly) loved the programme sought to address the limits and blind-spots of the original TV series, as well as just having fun with the characters.

Along with the Virgin novels, and the later BBC range - which, for me, really took off with the arrival of Lawrence Miles's stunningly revisionist Alien Bodies - there's also been the ongoing Big Finish series. These were all licensed Who products, created by fan-professionals for fan-consumers. And there were also the more tangential Who-based dramas that you refer to - often taking place without the character of the Doctor, and featuring various more-or-less surrogate characters such as 'The Stranger' (not much of a leap there) or Lockwood, both in assorted BBV productions. Fan producers are continuing to make some great Who-based dramas: for example, Magic Bullet have done a few audios featuring Sutekh (Gabriel Woolf). And this has produced a rather odd paradox whereby it's the less clearly Who-branded fan product which explicitly refers to old Doctor Who monsters, while the official series has used the same voice artiste (Gabriel Woolf) but has only very vaguely implied any possible continuity going back to Sutekh. It's a reversal of what you might expect - namely, that the 'official' show would exploit and explicitly name its continuity references, whilst the slightly more tangential fan products would be forced to make veiled references. Instead, the official series has started to favour these sorts of thinly veiled mentions, whether to Davros or Sutekh, really as a way of winking at long-time fans without alienating the newer audience.

It can be very instructive to watch some of the fan-produced videos from around the time of the 'wilderness' years alongside the new series. Auton and Auton 2 are currently available as reissued DVDs: while each is a highly worthwhile watch, they absolutely depend on the detailed continuity surrounding their monster. By contrast, the use of the same foe in 'Rose' is played out as pure iconography rather than continuity. The Autons are brought back for their immediate visual impact - and to hark back to older audiences' nostalgic memories of the programme's 'golden age' - not for any continuity-fest. They aren't even named in the episode. Again, though you might expect the new series to capitalise on its continuity, this has been handled very, very carefully right from the outset.

'Continuity' has almost become a dirty word, as if any strong continuity back to the original series is a step too far, or instant continuity-porn. The series isn't afraid to exploit its icons - its strong visual images such as monsters' appearances or the look of K-9 - but this imagery has consistently taken precedence over continuity. I'm almost tempted to suggest that Elisabeth Sladen's wonderful reappearance as Sarah Jane Smith would never have happened if the actress had, today, been virtually unrecognisable as her former self. Fortunately for the story 'School Reunion', Lis Sladen today looks uncannily like Lis Sladen from 1970's Doctor Who. Just like the Daleks, Cybermen and K-9, there was no call for a radical change of look: iconography, and the pull of nostalgia, again won out over excessive continuity. Of course, once the production team start bringing back the likes of Peter Davison and Tom Baker - both of whom now appear quite different to their time on the show - then my argument won't hold, but I can't imagine either happening any time soon! The moment Tom appears will be the moment the show tips over into pleasing its long-term fans rather than looking for a mainstream, mass audience...

Some have suggested that the new series represents fans taking over the franchise. Russell T. Davies comes out of fan culture. Where does his fannish side come through most loudly in the current series?

I think the argument that the show has undergone a fan take-over is an absolutely compelling one: it's a case of what you've called 'textual poachers' - fans outside the official production process doing their unlicensed and supposedly less 'legit' things with a show - becoming a whole new generation of 'textual gamekeepers'. I would guess that that process has some precedents (even in relation to the 'classic' series of Who), but I'm not sure it's ever quite happened as thoroughly as with this latest version. All sorts of people working on the programme have professed their fandom, including producer Phil Collinson, whose fan credentials have come to the fore through such things as the podcast/web-based episode commentaries he's participated in. The majority of new series writers have also been fans of various stripes, so it's not at all something restricted to Russell T. Davies - though, of course, he has always been incredible vocal about his Who fandom, even down to using clips from 'Pyramids of Mars', and the K-9 prop in Queer as Folk (not to mention the series' less-than-realist and Who-indebted ending).

You might expect fans, who are also major industry players, taking over a show to lead to obvious differences. I'm not sure that it has. Certainly, as I've already started to indicate, it hasn't lead to a massive surge in constant continuity references. I think the fannishness that now underpins the programme has emerged, if at all, in two ways: in the manner in which the old show's shortcomings have been critiqued, and in the tendency to settle, at the same time, for a new formula.

Updating a TV series - changing it, reinventing it - can involve responding to perceived failings or problems with "the original". In that sense, I'd say that new Who is very much its own 'critical reading' of the classic series. Though 'reading' may be limited as a academic metaphor, it does accurately capture some of what media producers do when they give 'notes' on a script, or when they think about how to build on a show's previous successes and failures. Russell T Davies doesn't need media studies or TV studies to tell him that there were things that didn't work in old Who: he already knows that instinctively as a dramatist, and communally as a fan.

How has the new series criticised the format of the old?

Firstly, by suggesting that the Doctor's companions don't just walk out of their existing lives to travel with him, but bring some baggage and prior human connections with them. This is a challenge to many basic assumptions made in the old show, where 'companions' were usually just that: an allocated role in the script of the day, typically devoid of any human back-story which played an active role in the Doctor's ongoing adventures (after their introductory tale or first few stories, anyway).

Secondly, by recalling that the Doctor travels in time. Watching the old series, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was merely a device for getting the character into different adventures: time-travel was featured as an integral part of the story only relatively rarely, and in the 1996 TV Movie it was reduced to little more than a narrative cop-out.

A certain Douglas Adams remembered that Doctor Who was ostensibly about a time-traveller when he contributed 'The City of Death', but in later years this was hardly the norm. And though the UK fan response to series one's 'Aliens of London' has been less than ecstatic in some quarters, the pre-credits sequence for this episode has been, for me, the sharpest and most thrilling of the new series. Like Douglas Adams at his creative best, it remembered that time-travel could be a downright tricky - if not absurdist - business. In fact, this opener, and the Eccleston Doctor's uncomfortable apology to Rose for his bungling, seem just as much of a tribute to Adams as did the entirety of 'The End of The World'. The most likely inheritor of Adams's crown as Who-genius and sci-fi humorist, Steven Moffat, also puts time-travel narratively and emotionally at the heart of his series two contribution, 'The Girl in the Fireplace', and Paul Cornell's tear-jerking 'Father's Day' does likewise in series one. Some fans may feel that Doctor Who is 'less sci-fi' than it used to be - i.e. there are fewer alien worlds and societies - but in terms of its use of time-travel as a story driver, rather than a handy device, it has possibly never been more convincingly science-fictional than it is now!

And thirdly, there's the fact the Doctor's accretion and accumulation of "victories" has also been challenged, most obviously in the episode 'Boom Town'. Surely there was a major blind-spot in a series whose hero apparently put things to rights on a planet, or at any one time, and then promptly disappeared into the ether? What of the defeated 'monsters'? What happens after the Doctor has departed for another (weekly) adventure in time and space? And doesn't anyone notice that the Doctor has been popping up throughout Earth's history and sorting out alien threats?

This lumbering plot-hole, or general story problem, has been addressed from the word go by Russell T. Davies, both through the introduction of a fan-like character Clive (Mark Benton) in 'Rose' who had been tracking the Doctor's earthly appearances, and in series two's 'Love & Monsters', as well as in a developing story arc whereby the general population of the Earth have become aware of the existence of aliens (from 'The Christmas Invasion' onwards - this being referred back to in 'School Reunion' and 'Love & Monsters').

The influence of fan culture, then, appears most readily in the form of criticisms of the original show, and production or storyline 'fixes' which aim to make the show critic-proof, or at least more internally coherent and hence not immediately dismissable on a point of logic. If iconography has been preferred over continuity, then so too has internal consistency generally been favoured over in-jokes.

Some fans have alleged that Russell T Davies's scripts have sometimes shown a tendency to collapse into deus ex machina endings - with the 'God in the machine', or rather the obvious hand of the scriptwriter, coming to the aid of the hero all-too-conveniently. This has provoked fierce online fan debate over whether the new series' stories are as riddled with plot-holes as those of the original show: demonstrating that fans, at least, are still worried about the possibility that general audiences might spot some inherent silliness in 'their' show.

Perhaps the most obvious candidate for this sort of fan criticism is 'New Earth', where intermingled brightly-coloured liquids magically avert an outbreak of zombification. However, what fans miss here is that this supposedly 'magical' resolution is really a version of a children's game like 'it' or 'tag', where the "lurgy" is transmitted or taken away by touch. It's a kind of narrative short-hand, literally: an embracing of primitive thought which probably works best for the child audience, just as the coda where Cassandra dies in her own arms (another beautiful remembrance of time-travel) probably works best for an adult audience. Attacking this sort of thing for 'plot-holes' misses the point that Davies is scripting for a range of different audiences. If anything, the peril or the pitfall of 'New Earth' is that it doesn't adequately integrate its child-like and more adult moments and motifs, unlike, say, Steven Moffat's Hugo-winning 'Empty Child'/'Doctor Dances'. It's not the plot-holes that are the problem: it's the clear segregation of 'stuff for the kids' and 'grown-up' emotional resonance - though this is not a problem that all of Davies's scripts suffer from, as his series one and two finales more-than-amply demonstrate.

I suggested a little earlier that Davies's fandom shows though both in his critique of old Who and also in his own establishment of a new format. So, what is this new set of limitations, and how does it relate to Davies's fandom?

In a word: monsters. Davies seems to be especially in love with a certain phase of the series - around the eras of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, when the show was respectively focused on clearly-drawn tales of alien invaders rampaging across the Earth, and gothic monsters emerging from various shady ids. Earlier in its run, the programme had attempted 'straight' historicals (i.e. there were no monsters, just characters drawn from history), and later on it seemed to dispense with clear narrative altogether in favour of strangely condensed multiple threats and layers of storytelling (e.g. 'Resurrection of the Daleks'; 'Ghostlight'; 'Curse of Fenric'). Here, bits of different generic plots were stapled together, either as an example of post-modern self-reference, or post-script-editing laissez faire - 'let's chuck in a bit about android doubles'; 'there aren't any traditional monsters in this'; 'what about adding a bit about the end of all life on a future earth?'

Davies's 'golden age' is apparently one of relatively uncomplicated monsters. And though he offers a 'critical reading' of much of the old series, he also proffers a very devoted re-creation of the feel of its type of cod-space-invasion and reheated-gothic. Every story has its monsters; neither series one or two have had the courage to depart from this template and risk a 'straight' historical. And, as of yet, the new series hasn't widened or deepened its palette and range of genre borrowings - there's been no time-travelling spy story; no outright psychological thriller; no crime tale or noir filtered through the series format; no intimate epic following a group of friends or budding politicians across their lives, with the Doctor intervening to save humanity from political corruption, or just from one bad decision. There's no reason why the series couldn't tell these types of stories and still be recognisably new Doctor Who. Or rather, there is a reason: the show's reinvention is seemingly in thrall to its previous fan-perceived 'golden ages', settling into a certain set of formulas, whether this is the 'celebrity historical' (a 'name' from British history, e.g. Dickens or Queen Victoria, is combined with an alien menace) or the space opera. Even at its most experimental, as in perhaps 'Love & Monsters' and 'Boom Town', the show still uses monsters as a sign of 'proper' Doctor Who-ness.

If anything, the new series has massively intensified its dependence on monsters by using them as mid-series publicity "relaunches" (Daleks in series one; Cybermen in series two) and as series finale audience-grabbers. Paradoxically, this almost domesticates the show's monsters, making them a matter of audience familiarity, safety and branding at the same moment that they are supposedly terrifyingly monstrous. A truly human monster - a psychopath, a serial killer, a despot or tyrant - seems to be simply too dark and too threatening for the new show's format to contemplate, even if it can tolerate moments of "humanity" in its Slitheen combatants, as well as pantomiming monstrosity in the guise of mad scientist John Lumic. Van Statten is probably one of the new series' darkest turns, and even he doesn't really take centre-stage, instead serving to magnify the threat of just one Dalek in comparison with his greed and ruthlessness.

Davies has also engaged in 'setpiece' or fan-pleasing showdowns such as the Doctor regenerating after a battle with the Daleks, and the Daleks and Cybermen going head-to-head. Yet again, pure continuity is a dirty word - here, it is the unusual (in fact, pretty much unprecedented) loading or addition of established, singular elements which speaks to and from fandom: regeneration and Daleks!; Daleks and Cybermen!; and, through the implied back-story of the Time War, the Daddy of all neo-continuity recombinations - Daleks versus Time Lords. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the highly fannish Time War (along with 'Bad Wolf') was not especially foregrounded in Russell T. Davies's original pitch document for series one (published as part of the Series One Companion), but it has certainly appealed very strongly to fans. And the Dalek-Cyber confrontation was rationalised by Davies in his Doctor Who Confidential commentary on these episodes as being what his "eight year-old self" would've loved, i.e. that this battle was designed to especially appeal to the child audience. What this missed out - I would suggest purposefully - was the extent to which Davies was also deliberately upping the ante in terms of giving fandom what it had dreamt of for years - as well as doing something which received wisdom held could only ever be 'fanwank'.

Here's a mission-statement you'll probably never hear Russell T. Davies admit to in any promotional and publicity material: what he really, really wants is to prove that 'fanwank' is the new black.

One of the second series episodes, "Love & Monsters," directly represents what many perceive as a fan community. What kinds of images of fans emerge there and what has been the response to this episode from British fans?

Oh dear; I've got my 'Best Of...' ELO CD playing as I type this! Really. 'Love & Monsters' has probably been the single most divisive episode of the new series - some fans seem to love it, and others feel that it isn't "really" Doctor Who, though quite how that argument can be sustained, I don't personally know.

What is most interesting to me about the episode is the fact that it has not only given rise to opposed fan opinions, but also to entirely opposed interpretations of how it represents fans. Those who focus on the Victor Kennedy (Peter Kay) character argue that the ep attacks fans as obsessive, possessive types who destroy what they love by seeking to regiment and control other fans' activities. In this account, Victor Kennedy stands in for a kind of hierarchy-obsessed 'superfan', and so challenges socially-organised fandom to reform its ways. And it is clearly possible to interpret the majority of LINDA - certainly, those who are absorbed - as rather lacking in social ability: these are evidently misfits and outcasts. A relatively early scene which depicts each of the group in turn also appears to poke considerable fun at their artistic, creative and scholarly achievements, almost as if Davies the professional scriptwriter is pouring cold water on many fans' creative but amateurish, unprofessional efforts.

Against all of this, there's the character of Elton Pope (Marc Warren), which the script and production are consummately careful to depict as 'normal'. It's as if his normality can only be purchased at the cost of projecting negative fan stereotypes more or less heavily across other members of the LINDA group. It needs to be remembered, as well, that this allegorical interpretation of the episode is never directly licensed - the term 'fan' is not used to described these "followers" of the Doctor, and in their world he is a real rather than a fictional construct.

But, through the figure of Elton, fandom is affectionately reclaimed as a positive thing; as a source of solidarity, as a defence against traumatic memories and feelings, and above all, as a space for cultural creativity. Elton is a textbook 'good' fan. These representations of fandom may sound rather gendered, concerning pathologically "powerful" versus "normal" male characters whom women either support (Ursula's love for Elton) or are subordinated to (we witness Victor absorb a number of female 'fans'). However, Davies's notes for the episode indicate that Elton's character was originally to have been a woman, and perhaps the loss of a more conventionally 'feminised' fan in favour of a 'normal' fanboy shouldn't be entirely lamented.

In the end, though, perceiving the episode as a fan allegory slightly closes down its richness and its possibilities - especially as one of its strengths is to challenge the usual dramatic device whereby characters in genre TV seemingly endlessly flag up and discuss their past traumas. Here, it is Elton's silences, elisions and gaps - moments where he literally does nothing other than stare listlessly off-camera into space or where he motions to switch off the camera - which carry and convey his emotional hurt. And, as a result, when his childhood trauma is revealed, it seems to come almost out of nowhere rather than having been prefigured; a whole system of silences suddenly breaks down. There's a kind of emotional truth, power and realism to Elton's silence and his busy-doing-nothing which much TV drama frequently fails to achieve, let alone 'genre' TV. And the episode is also among the most self-reflexive of the run so far, with Elton virtually speaking in scriptwriter Davies's voice, and asserting that he's put the most exciting events at the start of his story. In Triumph of a Time Lord I compare this episode to Davies's much-heralded instalment of The Grand which focused on just one character (the barman Clive) speaking to his father. Both adopt a kind of kind of intimate, oral storytelling mode, making much use of voice-over and subjective POV. It is something which also crops up in the to-camera opening in Queer as Folk, and in Bob & Rose, not to mention Rose's unusual voice-over at the beginning of 'Army of Ghosts' and 'Doomsday'.

While emphasising the emotional bond of oral storytelling, 'Love & Monsters' definitely appears to chastise those fans who oppose the show's newfound emotionality - Victor Kennedy asserts that he doesn't like to be touched "either literally or metaphorically". And this is his great failing; he can't be emotionally moved or touched - i.e. impinged on from without - he can only greedily devour and incorporate external objects (which is all people are to him). 'Love & Monsters' must surely be the favourite Doctor Who episode of psychoanalysts everywhere! Yet its representations of fandom are, I would say, relational: it depicts fandom positively, but only in relation to other negative portrayals, leaving audiences to negotiate and navigate between the good and the bad in order to reach their own (often conflicting) conclusions. Not quite a Rorschach test for fandom, it is nevertheless an apt space for audiences to project in their own prejudices or positions on what it means to be a fan.

With the relaunch of Star Trek, there was a splintering of the fan community with some remaining "loyal" to the classic series and others embracing the new entries in the franchise. To what degree has that occurred around the relaunch of Doctor Who?

It's hard to say, because the fans who are very 'anti' the new series may have drifted away from organised fandom, or may not have bothered to voice their dislike online. There has been much debate, though, about the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the new series, some of which has shaded into what have been caricatured as 'pro' and 'anti' Russell T Davies camps. Such splintering is, I suspect, much more about creating an easy shorthand for different groups of fans to bash each other with, then it is about real debate. The dominant sense would seem to be that most fans love old and new Doctor Who, and value each for their very different identities. In this respect, a lot of fans are good media historians, acutely aware of the different production and industry contexts which have fed into the making of different eras.

Who may have been helped in this by the fact that its 'classic' series was always marked by the recasting of lead and supporting cast. Whereas Star Trek: TOS was really defined through its iconic lead actors (with far less variation than Who), Doctor Who has always been a little more changeable and much less identified with one central cast - Tom Baker's pre-eminence in the US notwithstanding. Fans have therefore got very used to championing certain Doctor Who stories or actors while attacking others: as a result, the fandom is much more decentred than simply revolving around 'classic' versus 'new' factions, I'd say, because of the show's long initial run and its many reinventions from the 1960s onward.

Having noted all that, I am personally aware of some fans - a very small number - who have simply stopped watching the show, saying it's just not for them any more, and that it isn't the Doctor Who they've loved all their lives. It may be that for these people, the pleasures of the show were so powerfully linked to a certain phase in their own lives, or to a sense of appreciating something outside the media 'mainstream', that the show's reinvention, rebranding, and newfound commercial omnipresence have put it beyond the pale. Sometimes being a fan is about a lot more than simply appreciating any one TV show: it can also mean making a statement about the obscurity (or not), and the individuality (or not) of what are felt to be one's defining tastes.

-- Matt Hills, Cardiff University

HillsM2@cardiff.ac.uk

Fan Fiction as Critical Commentary

This has been my week for dealing with law professors -- having engaged in a conversation with Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler last week at the MIT Communications Forum, I was pleased to find a review of Convergence Culture over at the blog of the University of Chicago Law School written by Randy Picker. The first and second parts of the review mostly provide a detailed, accurate, and positive summary of the key points from the book, targeting those passages which may be particularly relevant to people interested in the legal implications of participatory culture. The last segment, not surprisingly, gets into the book's discussion of fandom and intellectual property law. I thought I would use my post today to respond to a few of Picker's key points there. Now let's be clear that I am no expert on the law. My wife happens to have a law degree from the University of Wisconsin and we both take some interest in developments in the area of intellectual property law and regulation of free speech. I suspect I know more than most laymen about these matters as they impact fan culture and the other sites of grassroots participation I have written about. But I would be a fool to try to debate the fine points of the law with a scholar of Picker's stature.

Fan FIction and Fair Use

Picker writes:

Jenkins pushes (p.190) for a reformulation of fair use "to legitimate grassroots, not-for-profit circulation of critical essays, and stories that comment on the content of mass media." But he clearly wants more, as he recognizes that most fans aren't that interested in producing work that the law is most likely to protect (parody or critical commentary of the sort seen in The Wind Done Gone), but who want instead to write about Ron and Hermione kissing.

Let me spell out a little more precisely what I argue on page 190 in the book:

Nobody is sure whether fan fiction falls under current fair-use protections. Current copyright law simply doesn't have a category for dealing with amateur creative expression. Where there has been a public interest factored into the legal definition of fair use -- such as the desire to protect the rights of libraries to circulate books or journalists to quote or academics to cite other researchers -- it has been advanced in terms of legitimated classes of users and not a generalized public right to cultural participation. Our current notion of fair use is an artifact of an era when few people had access to the market place of ideas and those who did fell into certain professional classes. It sure demands close reconsideration as we develop technologies that broaden who may produce and circulate cultural materials. Judges know what to do with people who have professional interests in the production and distribution of culture; they don't know what to do with amateurs or people they deem to be amateurs.

For me, the phrase, the public right to cultural participation is a key concept underlying the book's discussion. If I had my way, the right to participate would become as important a legal doctrine for the 21st century as the right to privacy as been in the late 20th century. I argue elsewhere in the book that a right to participate might be abstracted from the combined rights listed in the First Amendment and the right to participate would include the right to respond meaningfully to core materials of your culture. In that sense, I might go beyond our current understanding of fair use.

But a key point here is that I regard all or at least most fan fiction to involve some form of criticism of the original texts upon which it is based -- criticism as in interpretation and commentary if not necessary criticism as in negative statements made about them. Not being a legal scholar, I have had trouble producing a more precise definition of what constitutes critical commentary for the purposes of Fair Use. I'd be curious if any reader could provide a workable one for the purposes of this discussion.

For the moment, I am relying on my understanding as someone who is in the criticism business. I reviewed a number of guides for critical essays written at writing centers at major universities. What they seem to have in common is the following: a critical essay puts forth an interpretation of the work in question, one which includes debatable propositions which are in turn supported by the mobilization of some kind of evidence -- either internal (from the work itself) or external (from secondary texts which circulate around the work). All of them make clear that critical commentary may, in fact, embrace the ideas included in the original work as well as take issue with them.

Hand Holding, Snogging, and Critical Commentary

My discussion of critical commentary in the book continues:

One paradoxical result [of current copyright law] is that works that are hostile to the original creators and thus can be read more explicitly as making critiques of the source material may have greater freedom from copyright enforcement than works that embrace the ideas behind the original work and simply seek to extend them in new directions. A story where Harry and the other students rise up to overthrow Dumbledore because of his paternalistic policies is apt to be recognized by a judge as political speech and parody, whereas a work that imagines Ron and Hermione going on a date may be so close to the original that its status as criticism is less clear and is apt to be read as an infringement.

So, yes, I am concerned about stories where the characters hold hands or snog and not simply those where same sex couples end up in bed together or when the story is told from the perspective of He Who Must Not Be Named. This goes to the very nature of fan culture: fans write stories because they want to share insights they have into the characters, their relationships, and their worlds; they write stories because they want to entertain alternative interpretations or examine new possibilities which would otherwise not get expressed through the canonical material. These interpretations are debatable -- indeed, fans spend a great deal of time debating the alternative interpretations of the characters which appear in their stories.

Fan stories are in no simple sense just "extensions" or "continuations" or "extra episodes" of the original series. Unlike the model critical essays discussed by the various university writing centers, the insights about the work get expressed not through nonfictional argumentation but rather through the construction of new stories. Just as a literary essay uses text to respond to text, fan fiction uses fiction to respond to fiction. That said, it is not hard to find all kinds of argumentation about interpretation woven through most fan produced stories. A good fan story references key events or bits of dialogue to support its particular interpretation of the character's motives and actions. There are certainly bad stories that don't dig particular deeply into the characters or which fall back on fairly banal interpretations, but the last time I looked, fair use gets defined in functional terms (what is the writer trying to do) and not aesthetic terms (what they produce is good or bad artistically). Fan fiction extrapolates more broadly beyond what is explicitly stated in the text than do most conventional critical essays and may include the active appropriation and transformation of the characters as presented but even here, I would argue that the point of situating the characters in a different historical context, say, or in another genre is to show what makes these characters tick and how they might well remain the same (or be radically different) if they operated in another time and place. Fan fiction is speculative but that does not mean that it is not at its core interpretative.

Elsewhere, I have argued that fan fiction emerges from a balance between fascination and frustration. If the original work did not fascinate fans, they would not continue to engage with it. If it did not frustrate them in some level, they would feel no need to write new stories -- even if the frustration comes from an inadequate amount of material. In most cases, the frustration takes the form of something they would change in the original -- a secondary character who needs more development, a plot element that is underexplored, an ideological contradiction that needs to be debated. And in that sense, fan fiction is often critical of the original in the looser sense that it expresses some concern about the story it tell.

Commercial Competition

As Picker notes, I do acknowledge the rights of creative industries to protect themselves against commercial competitors even as I would argue for a broader definition of fair use for amateur media makers who circulate their works for free. As I note in the book,

Under the current system, because other companies know how far they can push and are reluctant to sue each other, they often have greater latitude to appropriate and transform media content than amateurs, who do not know their rights and have little legal means to defend them even if they did.

In so far as they impact fan fiction, the studio's intellectual property "rights" are the product of intimidation and chilling effects and not based in any real legal doctrine; so far there is no case law which speaks directly to the fair use or parody status of fan fiction. Unfortunately, so far, the various public interest law organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have been more willing to protect the rights of Napster to facilitate illegal downloads than the rights of fans to publish stories which comment critically on the characters of Harry Potter. And a teenager confronted with a threat from a major studio that could bankrupt their family tends to fold rather than seek legal counsel.

My distinction between commercial competitors and amateur cultural production leads Picker to make the following observations:

Jenkins asserts that IP holders attempt to use IP rights to control authoritativeness. I think that is probably right, but authoritativeness is much more organically tied to the author herself. So I don't think that Jenkins provides any examples of fans hijacking the canon from the author. This is almost a question of market share. In a world without fan fiction, Rowling had a 100% share in the Harry Potter creation market. With fan fiction, her share is smaller, but I suspect that it is still in the high 90s. This isn't about sheer number of words written--fans could quickly surpass an original author--but more about reading share and mindshare. Every fan will read HP VII, but what fraction of those has read whatever is the leading non-official Potter text?

Actually, I wouldn't read this simply in terms of market share. It is almost certainly true that the commercial text will outdraw any texts fans are going to be able to produce. Moreover, anyone reading the fan text is in almost every case going to end up reading the commercial inspiration for that work -- after the fact if not before. The fan work depends on a reader with at least some superficial familiarity with the original and one could argue that fan texts may extend the shelf life of the original by generating new generations of readers.

Canon and Fanon

But again, it doesn't stop there: I would suggest that most fans take the "canon," that is, the official texts (in almost every instance) provide the base line for the conversation. The author makes a statement about the characters; the fan writer proposes alternative interpretations of the characters. That's why fans draw a distinction between canon (the original text) and fanon (the works produced by other fans which may or may not be constraining on subsequent interpretations).

There are instances where fans reject canon but it is most often in cases where subsequent developments in the series go against what fans took to be something foundational to their experience of the program. Fans reject canon when canonical authors contradict themselves or violate the spirit of their contract with the readers. I discuss one such instance in my earlier book, Textual Poachers, around the series, Beauty and the Beast, where plot developments tarnished aspects of the series which fans had been taught were sacred in earlier episodes and were rejected by a sizable section of fandom. The value which fans place on canon has to do with the moral economy that emerges around the series and only holds when the producer plays fair with her readers.

My concern is not just that the original texts exert a certain authority over fans. It is that the producers use that authority to police fan interpretations, normalizing some and marginalizing others. In the book, for example, I discuss the ways that Lucas's official Star Wars film contest adopts seemingly neutral rules which a) only grant to fans those rights it would be most difficult for the company to restrict -- the right to make parodies or documentaries and b) have the effect of making the works of male fans highly visible while pushing the work of female fans underground.

Picker continues:

IP matters here in the sense that if commercial competitors could write Harry Potter stories, a non-Rowlings text might do well. A commercial house would engage a professional writer and could put its marketing muscle behind the story. That would look a lot like Lucasfilm with its sixty best sellers, except that we would have more competitors. But I don't think that copyright is driving control over the canon against fans. The fan texts would have to achieve greater mindshare to become canonical.

It is possible to imagine a commercial competitor producing a text which generates a good share of the market -- especially given, as Picker notes, the likelihood of aggressive marketing but also given the possibility that the competitor really did their homework and were more willing to provide fans with what they wanted. But the new text might still not be read as canon, would be judged against the original, and would likely be perceived as a rip-off which tarnished rather than enhanced the experience of the series. One should not under-estimate the degree of loyalty fans will feel towards original creators or their desire to see themselves as protecting the integrity of favored works. There would be very few works produced by commercial competitors which would carry the same cultural authority whatever their commercial fates may be.

Picker continues:

When we don't observe licensing to extend the story, it seems unlikely that fan fiction competes with the authoritative texts or with licensing opportunities in adjacent markets. So Rowling licenses for movies, but she isn't building--yet--the Harry Potter Extended Universe. Lucasfilm has done exactly that, and, in that context, fan fiction may compete with officially licensed versions and represents a missed licensing opportunity

Hmm. My hunch is that in practice, fan fiction rarely decreases the amount of commercial content any given consumer consumes regardless of whether there is commercial content available. When fans get really interested in something, they want to suck in as much information and insight as possible. But I would be hard pressed to know how to prove this. He's right that the more broadly extended the universe becomes, the lower the likelihood that any given fan will consume all of that material. Very few people have consumed every story associated with Star Wars or Star Trek. Yet, this would be true for people who did not read fan fiction as well and I'd wager that the people who read fan fiction are likely to consume more not less of the commercially produced material than fans of the series who do not read fan fiction, just because they have a deeper engagement of the material over all, and because the fan fiction is likely to send them back to the primary text in search of evidence with which they may adjudicate conflicting claims about the characters and their motivations.

Erotic Criticism

He continues:

As Jenkins describes it (p.150), Lucasfilm has been most aggressive in trying to block erotic stories involving the Star Wars characters. (I haven't gone looking but my guess is that if we permute and combine Han/Leia/Luke/Chewie, we can come up with a full-range of variations.) This is like parody in the sense that we think that it is outside of what the author would be willing to agree to, but probably unlike parody as it may not operate as a commentary on the original text. As the parody case makes clear, copyright has been willing to protect as fair use the use that wouldn't be licensed voluntarily.

Again, we come back to a core question I identified earlier: for me, all fan fiction constitutes a form of critical commentary on the original texts and indeed, erotic fiction seems most often interested in providing a critique of the constructions of gender and sexuality found in the original works. This is part of what distinguishes fan erotica from much of the pornography that circulates in our culture: it is not anonymous sex; it uses sex as a vehicle to investigate the psychology of the characters and as such, it may be the form of fan fiction which most clearly comments on the original text. Fan erotica does more than comment on the original text: it clearly has mixed motives but there is very little fan erotica that is not also involved in critical commentary in some form.

This is a fascinating legal discussion -- though as I suggest in the book, I am more apt to put my faith in the short term in companies liberalizing their policies towards fan fiction because it is in their economic interests to do so. We are already seeing this shift happen with very little fanfare. The Powers That Be are recognizing that fans create value by generating greater interest in their works, expanding rather than diminishing the market. I often argue that fans can be seen to appreciate a favorite show in two senses: they like it and they add to its value through their various creative and emotional investments. They do invisible work which is increasingly valued by media producers and as a result, we are seeing studios start to turn a blind eye to fan fiction and in a few cases, actively promote it. This will result in a liberalization of fan fiction in the short run which may or may not help to settle the legal issues in the long term. Can they give us free access to walk across their land for a period of time and then reverse course and start prohibiting access or charging us rent? The law would seem to give us some contradictory messages on this point

Ms. Doonesbury's Lament or Why She Can't Take Our Class

We've been getting some calls and messages here at the Comparative Media Studies Program regarding the situation with Mike Doonesbury's daughter getting lotteried out of our Introduction to Media Studies subject. See the most recent installments from the long running comic strip.

An installment a few weeks ago introduced the problem, saying that she was lotteried out of a HASS-D subject in Media Studies.

So let me clarify some of the background. In MIT lingo, a HASS-D is a Humanities Arts and Social Sciences Distribution subject. Essentially, this is our variant on the core curriculum. Each student selects from a broad array of possible options. Interestingly, there is only one HASS-D in Media Studies at MIT: the Introduction to Media Studies class which we teach each fall. I created this class in collaboration with Martin Roberts about a decade ago. It is currently being taught by my colleague, Beth Coleman, who doesn't look very much like the guy shown in the cartoon.

The class is a large lecture hall subject which draws 50-75 students and breaks out into a range of smaller discussion sessions.

By design, HASS-Ds are small subjects. We are not allowed to have more than 25 students in the discussion sections. A Lottery system is set up to deal with the overflow problem created by the most popular classes. One of the prides of MIT is that these HASS-D subjects are taught by MIT faculty -- we all spend time in the undergraduate classroom -- unlike a certain place up the road from us, where such subjects would likely be taught by graduate students.

Ironically, Introduction to Media Studies has never actually had a lottery. Gary Trudeau is correct that the subject draws strong interest -- many students share Ms. Doonesbury's passionate engagement in the topic -- but because of the mixture of lecture and breakout session, we have been able to accommodate every student who wants to take the class.

That said, I would have little sympathy for Ms. Doonesbury's protests for special treatment. MIT is very much a meritocracy and would not make exceptions to its policies based on parental pressure or other forms of personal influence. MIT is proud of the fact that it does not allow "legacies" -- students whose parents have MIT degrees do not receive preferential treatment in our process -- and has never given out an honorary degree. Those who wear the brass rat have earned that honor by hard work. We try to be flexible in accommodating special needs of students but at the end of the day, a lottery is probably the fairest way to decide who stays when a class is oversubscribed.

Anyway, I thought people would be interested in knowing the back-story on these particular strips. I can say that we in the Comparative Media Studies program are delighted that Ms. Doonesbury is so enthusiastic about wanting to get into our classes. We hope she makes it one of these days. We'd love to see her become a major. A growing number of frosh are arriving at MIT wanting to major in our program. We are now the largest Humanities major at MIT.

Several people have noted that the guy in the cartoon doesn't look very much like me -- and he looks even less like Beth (who as I said is the person teaching the class this term). So, here's the offer. I will send a free copy of Convergence Culture to the first person who sends me a doctored version of the cartoon which replaces the rather generic professor character with an authentic Henry Jenkins avatar. Send them to me at henry3@mit.edu.

Update!: We have a winner and in record time. Genie, a reader from Australia, was the first to send me a "corrected" (or some would say "doctored") version of the Doonesbury cartoon with my likeness embedded. Here it is:

After all, to "doctor" is to make someone better, isn't it?

Picking Over Pilots

Let's take a moment today to think about the shifting status of the pilot episode on American television -- a worthy topic in the midst of the rolling out of a battery of new television shows across the various networks. In the past, the pilot served very specific functions within the behind-the-scenes decision-making at the networks. We might think of the pilot as functioning in television the way that a character sheet functions in comics or animation: it seeks to define the core characters and central premise of the series but it also does so by pushing them into their most extreme versions. The characters in pilots are often over-defined to the point of being reduced to stereotypes as the producers try to show who these people are, how they relate to each other, and what functions they serve in terms of the plot.

Compounding this problem is the degree to which performers have not yet fully jelled with their characters -- in many cases, they may have just received news that they were assigned these roles and been rushed into production on short notice. They are trying desperately to prove they can act so they can hold onto these parts. In the past, it was not at all unusual to recast key roles after the pilot was shot and before the series reached the air. In any case, we know that character on television is generated as much by choices made by the performer on set as they take up the roles as written and make them their own and typically it takes a few episode for the rough edges to give way to more fully human characters. (Of course, the opposite can also happen and a compelling character in the pilot can be smoothed out or compromised through the production process.)

Radical shifts in the conception of the series may occur after the pilot has been shot (see, for example, the case of classic Star Trek where Spock was a highly emotional character in the pilot and Number One, a character cut after the pilot, represented the voice of cold rationality). The pilot was almost never a particularly strong episode from the point of view of the audience but producers and network executives knew how to read pilots, or thought they did, and used them as tools to make decisions about the show's fate. It would not be rare for the pilot to get shuffled into rotation later in the run of the series (again, Star Trek is the classic example here where the original pilot got reframed and turned into a two part episode -- a flashback -- later in the run of the series). There was a clear separation between the pilot and the first episode.

And all of this took place behind closed doors. Network executives saw lots of pilots; they knew more or less which ones turned into good shows down the line and they knew what were the symptomatic rough spots experienced by most pilots. They might be anxious about innovation and shut down shows which took them in new directions; many of those shows are more likely to be embraced by at least cult audiences than network executives, but for most series, they knew what they were looking at when they saw a pilot.

Now, let's consider the functions that pilots play in contemporary television, where much of what used to go on behind the scenes now takes place in public view, and where audience participation and anticipation of series is becoming more the norm. We can start with the sheer number of pilots in circulation and public access this summer compared to previous television series. Some shows -- Studio 60 on Sunset Strip and Kidnapped -- are circulating above-ground via a special arrangement with Netflix; others could be downloaded off of the network's own home pages. Still others -- Heroes for example -- circulated unofficially through bittorrent (though in such cases, it is not clear the networks are exactly heartbroken that they have escaped their control as long as they build up buzz for new series).

And increasingly pilots for shows that have not been picked up -- think Global Frequency and Nobody's Watching -- make it into digital distribution as well and can become rallying points for audience activism with varying degrees of success. Some are even predicting a world where pilots will be distributed to audiences first over the web and those which get strong support there will be sold to the networks -- more precisely, the audiences they attract will be sold to the networks in return for money to produce more episodes. One can certainly also imagine a world where niche media properties will go directly into digital or dvd distribution and be supported by their subscribers.

The pilot faces new demands in such scenarios. The pilot now becomes the public's first introduction to the characters and their situations. And the public has less experience looking at the stereotypes and broad performances found in most pilots and knowing how to anticipate what will happen when the writers and actors have brought these characters more fully under their control. Bury the pilot midseason and people will think it was an off episode. Lead with it and they will think the series sucks.

And this new context where we have so many shows thrown at us is pretty unforgiving. I know there are any number of shows this season which are lucky to get a first glance from me. I watched pilot episodes for Men in Trees, The Class, and Standoff and trust me, I don't plan to give these series a second look, even though I know full well that some of the elements which annoyed me there may get resolved when the writers and actors develop more comfort with their roles. There are some pilots which knock the ball out of the park in terms of grabbing the public attention and never letting them go. For me, the pilot of Lost will remain the high bar mark for a long time to come -- it hooked me within five minutes and never give me a moment to rethink that decision -- and Studio 60 on Sunset Strip may do the best job this season in terms of introducing the characters and premise in an engaging way -- a mixture of biting satire, nuanced characterization, kickass writing, and performers who are strong enough that they instantly fall into a grove with each other (and even here, fans are expressing concern about Amanda Peet's performance.)

A little bit further down the food chain are the pilots for Heroes and for Jericho -- both shows I definitely plan to watch but which had uneven pilots. Jericho suffered from the problem of having too broadly defined characters but there was one really compelling sequence involving a school bus full of endangered children which suggests to me that the series may know how to balance out its elements and get down to real drama.

Heroes suggests yet another risk which pilots face at the present time -- they no longer have to introduce three or four major characters in the first episode. In an era of ensemble dramas, they have to introduce dozens of characters, help us learn enough about them that we know who they are and how they are connected to each other. Heroes and Six Degrees both spend their entire first episodes introducing their large cast of characters and provide almost no information about plot developments: we know who these people are but we don't know where the series is going. In the case of Heroes, I cared enough that I will certainly watch again -- and indeed, as I wrote earlier this summer, I have high hopes for this series. In the case of Six Degrees, I don't think the pilot gave me enough that felt fresh or distinctive to get me to tune in next week, given the high volume of good alternatives that seem to be emerging this season. Some of this no doubt has to do with my high threshold for superhero stories and my low threshold for coincidence.

In this context, it is easy for a pilot to do something unforgivable and just turn you off from the series altogether. For me, Smith hit that low mark when it had a supposedly sympathetic character kill several people in cold blood because they made fun of him. To me, this fundamentally violated the deal I make when I watch heist stories -- that I will enjoy stepping outside the law as long as it is harmless fun. I like heist stories because they feature intelligent and charming mavericks who plan carefully, minimize risks to human life, and do daring stunts: I don't watch it to see thugs and psychopaths, though I may well tolerate such characters on The Sopranos, The Wire, or The Shield, which set me up for very different kinds of emotional experiences.

Part of what inspired me to put these ideas down was a quote from critic Robert Bianco in USA Today last week about the pilot for Kidnapped:

You can easily imagine yourself settling in with Kidnapped for six, eight, maybe even 13 episodes. But 22? Sorry, no. And that, in the end, is the strange bind this season's run of one-story serials have created for themselves: they force you to decide upfront whether you want to wait a year for the answer to the question posed by the pilot. Every TV show, obviously, hopes to hook you on a weekly basis, but these shows are asking, not just for a week-to-week choice, but for an immediate season-long commitment. To make that kind of demand on an audience, you had better be incredibly compelling from the get-go. 24 was. Kidnapped isn't.

I've reached somewhat different conclusions about Kidnapped, which I saw earlier this summer, and plan to give a few more episodes to find its footing. But I get Bianco's point: it was one thing to try an episode of an episodic series, then try another to see if the series was starting to jell, and indeed, to wait a few weeks and try again based on word of mouth. It's another to have to make a decision right away which complex ensemble-cast serial drama you want to watch, knowing that the full experience will come to those of us who sign up for discussion lists, check websites, work through the secrets and puzzles together, and so forth. (And of course, it is precisely this tendency towards serialization which puts added pressure on the pilot to also be a compelling first episode. You can no longer shuffle the pieces as easily and bury a bad pilot in the middle of the season.)

The only thing which makes this scenario viable at all is the prospect that we can download episodes and catch up later if one of these things turns out to be better than our first glance and word of mouth starts to build around it. That's why rerun on demand is going to become even more central to the way television works in the years to come.

Update: The Flow Television Poll

A while back, I posted here my choices for Flow's television poll: Flow is an online zine where media scholars share their insights about contemporary developments in the medium with what they hope will be a diverse and engaged general readership. Participants were asked to identify but not rank their top ten favorite television shows of last season. Well, the results are now in and can be read in their entirity over at Flow for anyone who might be interested in what a bunch of academics think is worth watching on television. The top ranks look like this: Lost won overall, identified by 12 of the 24 critics who participated; the second tier down was Arrested Development, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with 10 votes each (Keep in mind that 7 people also voted for Colbert's appearance at the Washington Press Club which may suggest that news/entertainment got more votes overall than Lost depending on how we count). 8 people (myself included) vote for Veronica Mars; Project Runway and Deadwood got 6 votes each; and altogether, 94 different series, specials, commercials, and YouTube videos got identified by at least one voter. Of the shows I identified on my original list, Spooks/MI-5 was the only one unique to my rankings. I don't know whether I should be depressed because my taste is so mainstream or kind of proud.

As Jason Mittell notes, many of the shows identified reflect the ways that new media is impacting our relationship with television -- shows that have not yet aired legally in the markets where the critics live, content which circulated only on Youtube or as in the case of Colbert's remarks, gained visibility through digital circulation, and series which really only found their audiences among academics once they became available on DVDs. In fact, he suggested that The Wire might have ranked very high indeed, based on feedback from academics who were discovering it on DVD had it not been off the air during the 2005-2006 season and thus been ineligible for inclusion. Mittell predicts it is an early front-runner for status in this coming year on the strength of its new season which is indeed getting rave reviews. (I still have to catch up with Season 3 on dvd before I can watch it but my Tivo is storing away episodes for the cold winter months ahead.)

Anyway, I thought you might be interested.

"Random Acts of Journalism": Defining Civic Media

I have found myself this week struggling to put together my thoughts on the concept of civic media in light of a series of conversations and encounters I had last week: for one thing, there was the public conversation which the MIT Communications Forum hosted last Thursday between myself and Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) about how participatory culture was impacting how we access and process news and information. For those who'd like to hear the podcast of that conversation, you can find it here. For another, I listened to the earlier exchange which the Forum hosted involving Dan Gilmore (We The Media), Ellen Foley (The Wisconsin State Journal) and Alex Beam (The Boston Globe) on the rise of citizen journalism and its impact on established newspapers which can be found here. And finally, I got into a series of interesting conversations about the impact of new media on civic engagement as part of the planning process for a new series of books being put together by the MacArthur Foundation on Digital Media and Learning. Across all of these conversations, I found myself returning not to journalism as it has been traditionally defined but to something broader I want to call civic media -- that is, media which contributes to our sense of civic engagement, which strengthens our social ties to our communities -- physical and virtual -- and which reinforces the social contracts which insures core values of a democratic society.

Imagining New Kinds of Imaginary Communities

Newspapers and news broadcasts can certainly play that role and some of the speakers from traditional newspapers at the Forum events made powerful points about the important role that newspapers play at all levels -- from the micropublics of individual neighborhoods up through cities, states, regions, nations, and global cultures -- in forging a sense of connection between and within what Benedict Anderson calls "imagined communities." Anderson's point is that we feel a sense of emotional bond with people who we will never meet in part because media, like newspapers, continually remind us of what we have in common as citizens. Democracy depends not simply on informing citizens but also on creating the feeling that we have a stake in what happens to other members of our community. Such an attitude emerges in part from what the newspaper reports and the rhetorical structures it adopts; it also emerges through the perception of the editor's responsiveness to her readers and the notion that the op-ed page of the paper functions as a shared forum where community members can speak with an expectation of being heard. Part of what may be leaving young readers feeling estranged from traditional journalism is that they feel that these publications do not represent the most important experiences of their lives, do not care about the issues that matter to them, and do not value the kinds of communities which they inhabit. One need only point to the ways that news coverage of issues from games violence to MySpace and DOPA emphasize the adult's concerns but do not report or reflect young people's perspectives.

Players often experience a similar sense of social connection in regard to their guilds, for example, in multiplayer games. There are plenty of players who go on forays on nights when they are too tired to see straight because they don't want to let their virtual neighbors and comrades down. Such games are powerful introductions to civic engagement because they taught young people what it was like to feel empowered, what it was like to feel capable of making a difference within a world, and what it was like to feel a strong set of bonds with others with whom you worked to accomplish common goals. This is something radically different from Robert Putnam's argument that people who go online lack the deep social ties that emerged through traditional community life. Those people who form guilds in multiplayer games can scarcely be described as "bowling alone," to use Putnam's potent metaphor. This is a totally different ballgame. What ever we want to say about what they are doing -- they are doing it together.

Now, many concerned with civic engagement want to know how we could transfer those feelings and experiences from the game world to the "real world." And I am certainly interested in ways we might use games to strengthen ties to local communities. But this approach may discount the social and emotional reality these game worlds have for their players. Journalists and local governments have long seen sports franchises as enhancing community life: Is it any accident that so many multiplayer games are now developing their own local newspapers which report on important event and key figures within these alternative realities? Many young people who do not read the daily paper in their own towns and cities may read such publications and feel a greater sense of civic engagement, What would happen if local newspapers -- that is, traditional print publications -- reported on events which occurred within these game worlds -- as news events -- rather than as trends in the business section or more often, as simple the same old story about video game violence?

Creating the Daily Us

Other forms of participatory culture may foster this kind of civic engagement simply because they welcome our participation and reward our sense of affiliation. Think about wikipedians protecting the integrity and quality of information in the entries they have helped to create. Think about bloggers linking to others with whom they are having ongoing conversations. Think about the various social networks that are emerging at MySpace or Facebook or the kinds of lively and neighborly exchanges that take place on Live Journal. Think about the text message communities that emerge in a world where most people are carrying around mobile phones and using them to maintain recurring if not constant contact with their closest friends throughout the day.

During his remarks at the MIT Communications Forum, Dan Gilmour suggested we move away from thinking of citizen journalists as publishing the "daily me" and think of them as instead publishing the "daily us." I like this phrase because it speaks to a movement within networked culture away from personalized media and towards communal media. This shift is what I mean by civic media.

Think about people recording things they see around them on their phones and transmitting them via Flickr. I would argue for example that it was the availability of photographs by everyday people which circulated outside of official channels which more than anything else highlighted the inefficiencies and inequalities of the Bush administration's response to hurricane Katrina. We read those images differently because they came from people like us than we would receive the more polished images produced by traditional photojournalists. They spoke truths that were much closer to the ground because these phone cameras went places that journalists never bothered to go. Indeed, a small tool of journalists could never be everywhere at once and suck in as many impressions as a large community armed with their own information appliances.

Here, I am struck by Gilmore's phrase, "random acts of journalism." Gilmour is talking about the ways that average citizens may suddenly take on a responsibility of reporting back to their communities something they saw because they happened to be at the right place at the right time and not because they had a professional responsibility to do so. The knowledge they bring back is situated, shaped by their personal stakes and interests in the topic, and thus makes no gesture towards objectivity or indifference, yet for that very reason, we will learn to read it critically -- as a partial and subjective truth, rather than as, ahem, fair and balanced.

Slashers for a More Democratic Society

I am also finding myself thinking about the ways that average people appropriate, transform and recirculate news content -- such as the Photoshop collages which function, like editorial cartoons of the past, to encapsulate complex political debates into evocative composite images, or the use of digital sampling in hip hop music to speak truths to power that might not otherwise circulate within the culture, or the use of video mashups that mix together elements of popular culture and news to express something about the politics of our age.

It is interesting that such mash-ups figured prominently at both of the Communication Forum events: Dan Gilmour shared this fan-made video which borrows some of the rhetoric of slash to signal the close and uncritical relationship between Bush and Blair; and William Uricchio shared this video which uses dialogue and images from V for Vendetta to speak about the politics of terror in the Post-9/11 world.

Neither of these works might be called journalism -- citizen or otherwise. They don't involve reporting and they don't involve the exercise of news judgment. Yet, they depend for their power on the viewer's pre-existing awareness of events in the real world and they offer some powerful new metaphors for comprehending the importance and impact of those events. These videos work because they avoid the rhetoric of traditional politics and appeal to us as fans even as they ask us to act as citizens.

Newspapers in Network Culture

Civic Media doesn't try to displace the work of traditional journalists per se -- though increasingly, the editors and journalists who do their job best remain aware of these other kinds of civic media and use them to draw insights into the communities that they cover. Blogs spring up at those points where there is a public which demands kinds of information that is more likely to be scattered across many different websites than to be found well represented in the local paper. A good editor might well look at what blogs are tapping their information to figure out how to produce more information which will better serve the needs of those various constituencies and communities. These communities may search the planet for the information they want and yet they will return, as several participants at the Forum events suggest, to those sources which reliably provide them with information sources they value.

My colleague, David Thorburn, tried across both forums to get people outraged over the prospect that young people might stop reading newspapers and that print publications might not survive much longer. Yet, in both conversations, participants seemed more concerned about threats to participatory culture than they were about threats to traditional journalism.

I love newspapers and would hate to see them disappear. But I honestly don't think that this is going to happen -- not if journalists learn to respect the new kinds of civic connections which are felt by young people and find ways to tap them through their publications. I don't think we live in a world where blogs and podcasts are going to totally displace newspapers -- print or digital --but rather one where we will have a more complex ecology of information than we have seen before.

Professional journalists have real advantages in such a world because they have different kinds of resources, training, and access to information, because they have more time to devote to data collecting, and because they have built up a reputation -- for better or worse -- over time which allows us to evaluate their performance, unlike the citizen journalist who pops up, delivers information, and disappears again. Yet, participatory culture also brings something to the table -- a more diverse set of expertise and experiences, the ability to disperse responsibility over processing large bits of data (as in the example Benkler likes to use of citizens responding to information about the reliability of electronic voting machines).

More and more, these different forces will be correcting each other: the grassroots will innovate and experiment in ways that commercial media or traditional journalism can not; traditional journalism will monitor those experiments, test their reliability and heighten their visibibility; and yet these grassroots media efforts will also challenge the blinders that the traditional journalists develop as they become too close to some sources and too removed from others.

Who Gets to Participate in Participatory Culture?

I am more concerned by the issue of who gets to participate in an era of participatory culture and who gets excluded. Bill Ivey and Steven J. Tepper raised these questions about participatory media in the May 19 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Increasingly, those who have the education, skills, financial resources, and time required to navigate the sea of cultural choice will gain access to new cultural opportunities....They will be the pro-ams who network with other serious amateurs and find audiences for their work. They will discover new forms of cultural expression that engage their passions and help them forge their own identities, and will be the curators of their own expressive lives and the mavens who enrich the lives of others....At the same time, those citizens who have fewer resources -- less time, less money, and less knowledge about how to navigate the cultural system -- will increasingly rely on the cultural fare offered to them by consolidated media and entertainment conglomerates...Finding it increasingly difficult to take advantage of the pro-am revolution, such citizens will be trapped on the wrong side of the cultural divide. So technology and economic change are conspiring to create a new cultural elite -- and a new cultural underclass. It is not yet clear what such a cultural divide portends: what its consequences will be for democracy, civility, community, and quality of life. But the emerging picture is deeply troubling. Can America prosper if its citizens experience such different and unequal cultural lives?

This is what I call the participation gap. It is a problem newspapers have faced from the very start -- and speaks to the contrast we see here in Boston between the Boston Globe (which has always been preferred by the educated elites) and the Boston Herald (which has always targeted the working class). The papers cover different content in different language and make different demands on their readers. Unfortunately, newspapers may be losing that battle to serve these different publics as we've seen the consolidation of urban dailies until there is only one paper left per major metropolis and most often, that paper per force aims somewhere in the middle -- no longer serving the expectations of the educated elites and no longer reaching out to the underclass at all. The new and more participatory forms of journalism do seem to reach some readers that newspapers have left behind, but are still niche products that don't touch the lives of most Americans.

Anyway, I hope these somewhat rambling remarks are enough to get you interested in listening to the podcasts of these two events. There's lots of thoughtful discussion around all of these issues and many more.

For Those Living In Or Around New York City...

My book tour promoting Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide takes me to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria next week. Here are the details:

Convergence Culture:

A Conversation with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson

Wednesday, September 27, 7:00 p.m.

Henry Jenkins, author of the new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, and Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good for You), two of the nation's most incisive cultural critics, will discuss the ground-shifting and often surprising ways in which audiences are participating in the creation, distribution, and consumption of media in the digital age, and the effects of these developments on entertainment and learning. The program will be followed by a reception and book signing. Tickets: $10 public/$7.50 for students with ID/Free for Museum members, call to RSVP. Buy Tickets Online

I hope to see some of my blog-readers from the Greater New York City area in the audience. I am told that they will put up a streaming audio and transcript of the talk sometime in October and I would announce it here when they do.

I am also scheduled to be interviewed on Tuesday night on the Joey Reynolds Show on WOR and the WOR network. For those not in NYC, the show seems to be available online here.

Comics and Micropayments: An Interview with Todd Allen

Yesterday, I ran an outtake from Convergence Culture which centered around the efforts of Scott McCloud to build public interet in micropayments as a means of supporting digitally distributed comics. Like McCloud, I believed that micropayments offered perhaps the best way to provide a commercial infrastructure which would preserve the diversification of content that currently characterizes the web while at the same time allowing artists to make a living off of their work. When McCloud spoke at MIT last week, he told me that Reinventing Comicswas designed to be a book about the future when it was published more than five years ago and it was still a book about the future now. We are just moving towards the future at a slower rate than any of us might have imagined. The success of iTunes suggests that people are willing to pay small amounts of money online to consume content they want (and thus suggests that some micropayments model might still make sense). At the same time, they are doing so through a central distribution channel which could easily become a gatekeeper locking lots of content producer out. I have not been paying as much attention as I should lately to developments in the debates around micropayments and other ways of paying for online content. A few years ago, I served as a member of a thesis committee for Todd Allen, a student at New York University's Gallatin School, who was doing a project focused on business models for digital comics producers. He has since self-published the thesis as a printed book and made it available online Allen is now a Chicago-based consultant and author on matters related to digital media and its business applications. He teaches E-Business for the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management Department at Columbia College Chicago. Allen's writing on technology has been seen in the Chicago Tribune and Iconocast. Allen has worked with a diverse group of companies including the American Medical Association, National Parent Teacher Association, Modem Media and the Marketing Store. Outside of technology, Allen spent two seasons covering the New York Knicks for New York Resident, a Manhattan weekly paper, where he also penned a humor column. He once appeared on MTV in a futile attempt to explain computer science to Pauly Shore.

Todd is someone who follows digital comics very closely and so I decided to check in with him this week to see if he could bring us up to date about developments in that area.

You investigated alternative ways of funding digital comics through your thesis research. What models offered the greatest promise and why?

If I had to point to one, I'd point to merchandising. T-shirts, posters, printed collected editions (graphic novels, if you prefer)... selling things seemed to be the highest revenue generator when viewing the area from a high level.

That said, the more popular web comics - your PVPs and Penny Arcades - do quite well with advertising. In these cases you have high page view counts and higher than average CPM rates for the advertising, owing to a desirable demographic, particularly to gaming companies.

Ultimately, different revenue streams will work for different web comics. There will be differences in audience demographics and merchandising options from property to property that cause variations in the productivity of a revenue model. There's no reason not to mix the models until one clearly overtakes the other. Initially, merchandising will be a better option for more web comics. Advertising becomes a more viable option as your strip's traffic grows.

I would also caution against the use of contextual advertising for web comics. Contextual advertising is based on the _text_ elements of a web page, not the graphic elements. While theoretically, you could structure the text of the page to sync with the individual strip, I haven't heard a lot of success stories about cartoonists striking it rich with AdWords. Feel free to correct me on that one if a few instances have popped up.

What did you learn about the effectiveness of micropayments? What has happened in this space since Scott McCloud launched his experiment with BitPass?

You really don't hear much about Bit Pass these days. There seem to have been two nails in the coffin:

1) The Goats.com boys tried a download experiment last year with BitPass. They weren't happy with the response they got, which didn't translate into a lot of money (owing to the nature of micropayments requires a lot of transactions to start adding up to significant money). They also found their normal merchandising sales took a significant hit. It wasn't immediately apparent whether this was due to a focusing of attention on download distracting attention away from the t-shirts or whether people bought the low-margin download, instead of the higher margin merchandise, but the experiment did not go well and Goats.com is a site that's serious about its income, so people paid attention.

2) PayPal now lets you do micropayments with a credit card. This speaks to what, in my mind, is the biggest problem with BitPass - namely you're dumping $3.00 into a glorified bus pass to spend on their system. What if, like me, the only thing you want to get off their merchant system is Scott McCloud's "The Right Number" web comic? Then you've spent fifty cents on the first two parts and you have $2.50 in an account just sitting there, gathering dust. Having to open a separate account is a deterrent to sales. Having to open that account and drop in 12x the amount you intend on actually spending is silly. The power of their network wasn't strong enough to overcome the barriers... and I'm still waiting for the final part of "The Right Number" to come out, for that matter.

But we should back up and talk about micropayments in a more braod sense. People define micropayments a few different ways. Could be a payment under $3. Under $2. Under $1. Under $0.50.

By and large, iTunes and their $0.99 downloads are considered proof that micropayments work. Downloading the pilot for Aquaman at a $1.99 price point may or may not be considered a micropayment, depending on who you talk to.

There has not been a great deal of micropayment experimentation done in comics, past BitPass and I would argue that having that bus pass/minimum deposit system does not make BitPass a valid test.

In a very recent development (as in, within the last two weeks) Slave Labor Graphics has started offering some of their titles as digital download for $0.69 cents a pop. That price not only qualifies as a micropayment, you can also use it as a punchline.

What have been some of the more interesting recent efforts to provide support for the production and distribution of comics?

A few things. Web comics, traditionally, have followed the comic strip model, more than the comic book model.

On the strip side, the syndicates are expending a bit more energy to talk you into buying a subscription to their content. You can get the strips in an e-mail. You can access a deep archive. You have access to a few strips that are web only, including reprints of classic, discontinued strips.

It was a long time coming, but the syndicates are experimenting with what they can do online... after all, if the newspapers are having problems, then the syndicates are having problems.

The most interesting thing on the comic book side of web comics would be the migration of independent comics away from print and onto the web.

I should probably preface this with a thumbnail recap of the foibles of the direct market for comic books.

Most comic books are bought in specialty stores these days, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of direct market sales is controlled by a single distributor - Diamond Comics. Diamond has a catalog which features a handful of the larger publisher (who they have special contractual relationships with) in individual sections in the from of said catalog. Everyone else is mixed in the back of the catalog, alphabetical by publisher name. It makes it very hard to stand out in the catalog, and since there's a lot of crap (and I'm being nice when I say crap... trust me, I've seen the catalog) in that amalgamated section, many retailers don't even bother to read through it, making it even harder for a book to stand out. Sound like a mess for a small publisher? It is.

So when you add the retailer apathy towards independent/small product lines that exists in any industry to the problems with catalog placement in such a centralized distribution market, you can see where your independent artists who publish there own material might get squeezed out.

Well, Diamond recently put some minimum sales requirements on their catalog. This scared some people and we're seeing a migration to web of a few critically acclaimed books that didn't sell well in single issues, but did just fine in trade paperback editions (collected editions, graphic novels, pick your term of preference).

Phil Foglio was the pioneer for this trend _prior_ to Diamond throwing down the sales minimum with http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ , a continuation of his Girl Genius comic.

This has been followed by Carla Speed McNeil's "Aboriginal SF" feature Finder at http://www.lightspeedpress.com/ and Batton Lash's self-explanatory Supernatural Law at http://www.webcomicsnation.com/supernaturallaw/. There will, doubtless, be more to come.

Foglio is more aggressive with embracing non-collected edition merchandising (t-shirts, pins, etc), but over-all, what we're seeing is a shift away from small-print-run monthly comics to web publications aiming for a graphic novel as the end product. Placing material online, one page at a time, and offering an archive offers an infinitely wider distribution network than depending on the owners of an already-small network of comic book shops to stock your product.

Anecdotal evidence is that it helps the sales of the collected editions and the artists haven't felt an additional pinch for not having the traditional comic book's income. (In fairness, the income off the "monthly" editions for a series selling under 3000 copies would likely be minimal and there's a great deal of production and solicitation work that goes away in the straight-to-web scenario).

Do you believe Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory applies to comics? Why or why not?

Absolutely.

At the most basic level, you have the very existence of the collected edition. That's someone buying a book that's really 4 - 12 issues of OLD MATERIAL.

Kick it up a level, and look at Sin City or V for Vendetta. They've been around for years, selling a decent amount of books each year. Then they have films come out, based on the originals, and suddenly you're selling a LOT of Sin City and V for Vendetta. In bookstores, too.

Old properties sitting around and suddenly find an audience? That's the Long Tail in full force.

Back issue sales in print comics could be construed to be the Long Tail, although the collectors market makes it a bit different.

As fiction, and usually serial fiction at that, comics fit into the Long Tail model much better than news periodicals. New readers will seek out the backstory. And with web comics, since the back issues are, essentially, an on-demand feature for most strips, the Long Tail is built in.

Have DC and Marvel backed off of web-based distribution of their content altogether? Does the web have more to offer smaller publishers or independent artists than major companies?

DC offers little more than a few pages of previews. One occasionally hears rumblings, but DC seems to be a little on the web-phobic side, to look at their actions.

Marvel continues to waffle. They stepped back from their web comics, then returned to them with a strategy geared more towards promotion of upcoming collected editions. Their initiative of late have been establishing a wiki and instituting some editorial blogs. On the other hand, Marvel also issued a survey about attitudes towards digital downloads, including questions on how much the consumer would be willing to pay for one. So with Marvel, they're definitely thinking about it, if not jumping to action.

As to what the web offers to whom, that would depend on the context. If you were just looking at the world of people who go to comic shops, the web has a lot more to offer the independents. After all, most of them have trouble getting good physical distribution. This is a no-brainer.

If you look at the whole world, the web opens up possibilities to all, but more to DC and Marvel. Why? Because DC and Marvel are recognizable brands. You will have a magnitude more people seeking out Batman and Spider-Man online, than you will something like Fear Agent or Queen & Country. Your smaller publishers will need to do more marketing to catch up, when using brands that are, effectively, unknown to the mass market. That's not to say that something like Fear Agent couldn't become popular with the mass market, similar to how the Sin City film turned people onto the comics, but its a longer and harder road.

On the flip side, independent comics have more non-super hero fare, and could potentially play to a wider audience. Or at least so goes one line of thinking.

The web does not appear to be a zero sum market for comics at this point.

You've been doing some experiments lately with comics as download. What were the results?

Promising. Again, this is a story that needs some framing, particularly since your blog will have some people far removed from the comics scene.

Rich Johnston is a London (UK)-based ad man who writes copy for radio advertisements by day and also does a gossip column about the comic book industry ( http://comicbookresources.com/columns/?column=13 ). Every year or two, Rich will produce a comic, usually as the writer. While the do alright for small press titles, these aren't books that set the sales charts on fire. After all, Rich is known as a journalist, not a comics scripter, in these circles.

This year, Rich wrote a comic called The Flying Friar. A mild satire of the Superman legend co-mingled with the history of an actual Catholic saint, the book received an unusual amount of publicity in Europe, prior to publication. And when I say unusual, I'm referring to the BBC and the London Times.

It was obvious this book would sell out quickly in a fair number of venues and the publicity would definitely reach areas it wasn't stocked, so it was decided we would offer a PDF download of the book for sale.

As there was a copy on the store shelves, we decided to offer the download for cover price, as not to be undercutting the shelf copies (which would be unethical to do without first announcing the cheaper online version during the solicitation period). We also gave the book a few days on the shelves before announcing the online offering (on Super Bowl Sunday, actually).

Net effect was we've sold a bit over 2% of the initial print orders. The raw number isn't all that amazing, but when taken in context of a small press book, 2% is definitely significant. This was also a month AFTER the media mentions in Europe.

More interestingly, links coming in from comic book websites converted to purchase at a 2% rate. Ask anyone in web retailing, 2% is a healthy conversion percentage. People who came to the site, came with their wallet open. For an eBook, essentially. 20-25% of the audience was from Europe.

As a proof-of-concept piece, this suggests that there is an audience for online comics, and one willing to pay full cover price for an item they can't find locally (or just prefer to have in a digital edition).

It goes without saying that there are no print costs or distributor fees with digital downloads, so the margin is superior to the print version.

This was all accomplished with a slightly known, if not unknown creative team. One wonders what the percentages would be like with a known brand or "name" creative team. The only marketing done was shotgunning some press releases. Again, one wonders what would be possible with a marketing budget. The concept played out soundly.

(Interested parties can view the book at www.richjohnston.com.)

If you were to predict the future of digital comics distribution five years from now, what changes do you expect to see and which present models will have disappeared?

The ball is definitely moving and more people are talking. No two ways about that.

The micropayment "networks" like BitPass will be gone.

PayPal will have forced other credit card processors to adopt micropayment-friendly policies.

At least 50% of monthly comics will have a digital download available. The question here being whether the publishers handle it themselves or farm it out to stores, ala iTunes.

Comic book stores will become more firmly entrenched as a collector-specific market, not a medium-specific market. (That is to say, right now, if you want to read comics, you have to go to a comic shop. In the future, if you want to _collect_ the print editions, the monthlies, you'll need to go to a shop, as will casual readers who have a strong preference to print. Casual readers without the strong preference for print will start migrating to online, where its easier to find the material.)

You will see more creator-owned properties starting out as web properties and migrating to print, much like PVP has, but starting out this way with the expressed intent of following that path.

You will see the web and print industries actually admit that they're both in a market aimed at collected editions/graphic novels as the enduring product.

The wild card here is what happens with the newspaper market and the traditional syndicates.

comics and convergence part four

This is the final in a series of outtakes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide dealing with the ways that the comics industry is responding to shifts in the media landscape. This segment deals with how we pay for digital content. Reading back through this, this section felt less au current than the other excerpts on comics I have posted here. When he spoke at MIT last week, Scott McCloud, himself, conceded that micropayments have not so far taken off in the ways that he had hoped and that other business models were emerging to support online content. To bring us up to speed on the latest developments in this area, I have arranged to run an interview tomorrow with industry observer Todd Allen, about recent trends in the digital distribution of comics.

Long touted as an alternative economic model for the web, micropayments (small incremental charges for accessing content) may be ideally designed to support webcomics. In 2003, Scott McCloud joined forces with BitPass, to test the viability of this economic model, posting "The Right Number," one of his most interesting webcomics and charging consumers a quarter to access each installment. Subscribers go to the BitPass homepage, enter their credit card information one time and buy the digital equivalent of a debit card, which can be used quickly and easily with any of the affiliated venders. McCloud argues that a micropayment system would allow media producers (recording artists, independent game designers, web comics artists, authors) to sell their content directly to the consumers, cutting out many layers of middle folk, adjusting prices for the lowered costs of production and distribution in the digital environment. Such a system helps both consumers, who can sample from a range of different media producers without being locked into a subscription, and artists, who can collect a reasonable return on their work.

So far, content providers are using micropayments to set their own prices at a level they think their market will bear. In some cases, where consumers want to build an ongoing relationship with a particular content provider, subscriptions will represent a better alternative, whereas in others, we may prefer to pay for only the content we want to access. Most readers subscribe to some magazines and purchase others off the news stand when they have content which seems interesting or when they have time to read.

Most will subscribe to a finite range of web content - just as most of us subscribe to only a few (if any) premium cable services. An economy based exclusively on subscriptions will evolve over time towards media concentration. Only rarely do alternative artists get their acts together to form subscription-based services. In the case of web comics, for example, a number of independent artists have teamed up to create Modern Tales, a subscription based service which for $2.95 a month provides unlimited access to the work of more than 30 alternative comics creators. Micropayments, however, would support the fragmentation and diversification of web content, allowing a broader range of producers to compete for our entertainment dollars.

People who like comics tend to read a broad selection and are often willing to try unknown artists if the content is cheap and accessible. One can imagine micropayments thriving within niche media communities: hardcore gamers can use micropayments the way they use tokens in an arcade; techno fans might think of themselves as plopping quarters in a well-stocked jukebox and for digital movie fans, this could represent a return to the nickelodeon era. Micropayments will be most attractive where a range of small scale producers are trying to service the needs of committed and motivated consumers, where the reputation of certain pioneers (such as McCloud) will generate an initial market and create coat-tails for other less well-known artists, and where the price point remains lower than can be accommodated by traditional credit cards.

By early 2005, Bitpass had attracted a range of different content providers - from experimental filmmakers to comics artists and rock groups, from online games to educational software. The little company had not taken over the web, to be sure, but it was showing that the micropayment model worked in a range of different contexts.

For some counterperspectives on Micropayments, see Todd Allen and Clay Shirkey.

The Education of Sky McCloud

Last Thursday, the Comparative Media Studies Program and the MIT Media Lab played host to Scott McCloud, the comics theorist, creator, entrepreneur, activist, and visionary, who traced for us the progression of his thinking about comics as a medium -- from his first book, Understanding Comics, which gave us a language for thinking about sequential art, through Reinventing Comics, which argued that digital media represented important new opportunities for comics creators and readers, through to Making Comics, which offers practical advice to would-be comics writers and artists and in the process, lays out some important new arguments about the role of choice and styles in graphic storytelling. As McCloud noted, he first spoke in that same room 12 years before in the wake of the first book's publication and I have helped to bring him back to MIT on several other occassions. Indeed, we were lucky enough to have him do a week long workshop for our students several years ago when the ideas for Making Comics were first taking shape. So, with Scott, I knew what we were getting -- an articulate, empassioned, and visionary thinker about comics as a medium, whose work has implications for anyone who thinks seriously about the popular arts. McCloud engaged thoughtfully with questions from the MIT community on everything from the economics of online publishing to the potentials for comics on mobile platforms, from the design of tools for making art to the evolving visual language of the medium. I certainly recommend checking out the audio recording of his presentation and question and answer period.

Yet, the big surprise of the evening was Scott's 13 year old daughter, Sky McCloud. When Scott first asked if his daughter could make her own presentation following his opening remarks, we were not sure what to expect but immediately agreed.

The last time I had seen Sky, she was a toddler interupting her father's talk at Harvard's Veracon. Today, she is a dynamic young woman - a delightful mix of goth and geek -- who felt self confident enough to share her own perspective in front of a packed Bartos auditorium crammed with several hundred MIT and Harvard types.

She told us about the family's plans to do a 50 state speaking tour over the next year as her father rolls out his new book and as the family (Scott, his wife, Ivy, and his daughters, Sky and Winter) conduct an experiment in home schooling. Each member of the family is blogging about the trip over on Live Journal. And they are working together to produce a series of podcasts which they are calling Winterviews (after youngest daughter, Winter, who will be the on-camera presence in these films). The daughters will research about some of the comics people they will meet along the way, read and discuss some of their work, prepare questions, do interviews, and edit them for transmission via the web. Sky is also preparing an evolving powerpoint presentation as they travel to explain to various audiences about the trip and what they have learned along the way.

Meanwhile, she remains in contact with a larger circle of home schooled kids who are also tapping into their interests in popular culture (in this case, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars) to inform critical essays and research projects. We all concluded that Sky could be a poster child for the new media literacies we have been exploring through our project with the MacArthur Foundation -- someone who is tapping the full range of new media technologies to learn and share what she is learning with a larger community. Sky is incredibly articulate, holding her own debating the fine points of comics aesthetics with her dad and fully comfortably plopping herself down and conversing with a room full of graduate students. We were delighted to hear her say she was potentially interested in being an MIT student some day. She won the hearts of many of us here.

Let's be clear: Sky is an exceptional child, the offspring of a remarkable man, and her parents have had the flexibility to incorporate her learning (and that of her sister) into their professional lives. Not just everyone can take off for a year and travel the country with their family and still take in an income from speaking gigs. Yet, the core of what they are accomplishing here should be part of the educational experience of every child -- what she is learning grows organically from her own interests; she is being encouraged to express herself across a range of different media; she is encouraged to translate what she is learning back into public communication and is empowered to believe that what she thinks may matter to others. As I have suggested in a blog post this summer, these experiences are so far more available outside of the formal educational system through afterschool programming and home schooling than they are in the public classroom. Like many other home schoolers we have encountered through our research, she is using the potentials of new media both for creative expression and social networking.

I know that I make some people nervous when I talk here about the values of home schooling. Many people assume that home schooling is mostly used today by the religious right to escape secular education. But in fact, today's home schoolers come from many different backgrounds and are stepping outside of formal education for many different reasons. More and more kids are moving in and out of schools depending on where they are at in their emotional, social, and intellectual development or what kind of situation they are confronting in their local community. My wife and I home schooled our son for a year when he was Sky's age and oddly enough, one of his primary textbooks was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, but at the end of that year, he returned to a private school for the rest of his high school experience. I am not suggesting everyone should home school their kids. Most people should not. But I am glad that it is an option and I think that educators should study what is working in these home school contexts and pull the best of it back into their pedagogical practices. As they do so, they could learn a lot by listening to Sky McCloud speak about her experiences on the webcast of the event.

The World of Reality Fiction

In Convergence Culture, I included a sidebar about the remarkable fan fiction produced by Mario Lanza. Lanza is a fan who gets to consult with and often receive fan letters from the characters who populate his stories. Lanza writes fan fiction involving the contestants featured on Survivor -- a series of engaging, richly detailed, psychologically nuanced original "seasons" cast with "all stars" known to readers from their previous appearances on the series. At the time he started writing reality fan fiction, the idea of combining elements of reality television with narrative fiction might have seemed more than a little odd. Today, though, there is a growing body not only of amateur but also professional fiction which borrows elements from reality television. I asked my son, Henry Jenkins IV, to share with my readers some of his impressions about this emerging genre. Henry recently graduated from the University of Arizona where he studied media and creative writing. He has already published several essays of his own media analysis, including one in Nick Sammond's anthology, Steel Chair to the Head, which traces his experiences growing up watching professional wrestling, and another -- a father/son dialogue on Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- which is included in my new book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers. He has been very active in the spoiling and fan writing communities around Survivor through the years and so brings an insider's perspective to this topic.

What follows are his thoughts about reality fiction:

To the impartial observer reality television fiction sounds about as reasonable as tofu turkey. Both are wince inducing contradictions of an irreverently modern consumer culture in which seemingly clueless marketers cater to niche audiences with a cheeky disregard for tradition. The same literati crowd who rolled their eyes and sighed when CBS producers borrowed George Orwell's phrase to create the low culture Big Brother would probably sniff indignantly at me if I told them about my efforts to write an original Survivor novel. "Reality cannot be fictional. Please, go away."

But on the Survivor Sucks message boards, by far the most active for reality television fandom, dozens of amateur writers have tried their hand at penning the next great American Survivor novel. Only a few have produced novel length works of any real literary value but much like science fiction fandoms, for which zine trading has at times been a viable cottage industry, the interest is there and a cannon of great fan authors, archived works and literary conventions has been compiled by consensus.

The earliest Survivor fan fiction, not surprisingly, was badly written pornography. But Mario Lanza, a family man, computer programmer and aspiring comedy writer from Southern California, was the first to really popularize fan fiction in reality television circles. His four novels, All Star Survivor: Hawaii, All Star Survivor: Alaska, All Star Survivor: Greece and Survivor: Okinawa, were all of a Stephen King-esque length (about six hundred pages) and are still considered the gold standard by which all other authors are judged.

The All Star novels speculated about what might happen if the best and most memorable characters from the early seasons of the show were put into competition with each other. They were sort of the equivalent of comic book fans speculating "Who would win in a real fight, Batman or Aquaman?" They could also very easily be perceived as having generated the fan buzz producers' cited in their decision to try the concept out during their eighth season.

Mario's fourth novel, Survivor: Okinawa, cast real fans (including myself) in the role of the castaways, chronicling a month long game that took place online. The contestants competed in real time with the conditions mirroring those of the real competitions as closely as possible considering that we were all stationed thousands of miles apart. Daily reports were required explaining how we had contributed to the work around camp, strategy meetings took place off and on all day, a certain number of points could be allocated or reserved from each competition and most importantly the tribe that lost the Immunity Challenge would have to vote one of their members out of the game.

The mood of the game was surprisingly, at times almost disturbingly intense with real egos at stake. The knowledge that every word one said had the potential to be judged by the entire fan community put a lot of pressure on people to avoid being played for a fool and the result was a constant atmosphere of paranoia. Almost all of the contestants participating ended up with very mixed feelings about having done so. The ones who were voted out early were embarrassed and the ones who lasted the longest endured such prolonged angst that they needed a vacation by the end of it. Mario unflinchingly turned thousands of pages of conversation transcripts and emails into his most ambitious novel yet and the competing fans developed fans (and detractors) of their own.

As a side note, Mario was not the first to hold such a competition. He himself had only recently been a competitor in Survivor: Tonga, a game run by a Brown student named Rafe Judkins who would shock everyone when he himself was chosen as a contestant on the real life Survivor: Guatemala. Many both in the online community and the cast of the show consider Judkins the best strategist of his season and his online game no doubt allowed him to run an insightful simulation of what might occur on the island

Afterwards many tried to follow in Mario's footsteps but very few succeeded because no template was established for what Survivor short fiction would look like (nor for any other reality series) and the commitment and endurance necessary to write a six hundred page novel was simply beyond most of the amateur writers. Countless projects were begun and then abandoned a few chapters in (to a chorus of boos). A climate of cynicism reigned among readers who had been suckered in once too often and the low readership further discouraged fan authors.

One of the few truly successful efforts to follow Mario's was a series started by a young fan known only as GuatemalaFanfic or GF. He used a different template than the All Star model that many had attempted to emulate and instead of writing the story as literature he attempted to recreate the style of the show as accurately as possible. He wrote his episodes in sixty minute script format, throwing in moments of inaudible dialogue, background conversation and song cues. He also took careful analysis that other fans had done of the way that the producers told stories - when they focused on the characters that would succeed and when they focused on those who would fail - and challenged his readers to observe what templates his was using and how the game would play out. He also differed from Mario's formula in that instead of bringing together characters from different seasons of the show he used all of the characters of the season that was currently being broadcast, writing a kind of alternate history with a different set of storylines and outcomes.

Much like GuatemalaFanfic I had been an avid fan of Mario's All Star novels, enjoying them at times more than the actual series, and like GuatemalaFanfic I was determined to beat the master at his own game. So I began writing Survivor: Belize, a novel adhering as closely as possible to what I imagined the standards and specifications of original television novels to be, with the hopes of selling it for publication to CBS' publishing company. Because it would most likely have been perceived as slander to put words in the mouths of real life individuals I created a completely original cast of characters.

My biggest challenge came in introducing sixteen characters at the same time without the audience throwing up their hands in frustration. This is, of course, a challenge any reality series faces but I didn't have the benefit of using audio/visual clues such as contestants' faces and voices as memory jogs. I eventually decided on a two pronged approach for tackling these issues. First, I wouldn't try to familiarize audiences with all sixteen characters at the same time. I would take a page from the series' book and focus only on a manageable number of characters in each episode, working everyone in eventually as the numbers began to dwindle later in the story. Secondly, I would use visual clues by inserting a section of my contestants' headshots and biographies, mirroring the CBS.com website in style and content. Since most of the characters were based on people I knew, anyway, finding appropriate models wouldn't be hard.

I was in the middle of working on my project just before Christmas last year, toggling between my word processor and my online shopping, when I ran into a product line that made my jaw drop -original Survivor novels. There they were on Amazon.com, recently released. Not sure whether to be encouraged or discouraged I ordered a set to put under the tree.

This set of novels differed significantly from my own idea in that they were aimed at preteen readers and they followed a Choose Your Own Adventure format. Since I'd been a huge fan of the Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was in grade school these provided a charming bit of nostalgia but my concern that making the castaways all ten or twelve years old would really water down the story proved valid. Not only did the writers' take the teeth out of the game - providing the contestants with lots of kid friendly food, having them compete in little mock challenges and leaving strategy simple if explained at all - but the character development was wafer thin.

The most interesting thing about the books was easily the format, which allowed the reader to flip to one page or another depending on who they wanted to be booted from the game or which challenge they wanted the castaways to compete in. But because the writers tried to cram so many different possible routes into a 120 page book they had to cut each version of the entire game down to a miniscule number of pages that could not sustain a solidly built story. While aiming the series at younger readers is a surprising but not inherently stupid idea I feel like the series' editors choice to low ball the series was ill advised. A notable percentage of Mario Lanza's All Star novel fans were of the age that these books seemed to be aimed at but they never complained that they were overwhelmed by the difficulty of the content or bored by the grown up nature of the contestants.

A few weeks ago I ran into a book review in Time Magazine for Carolyn Parkhurst's Lost and Found, a literary novel about "an Amazing Race style reality show" which, we were told, explored the human condition in a way "crappy" reality series never could. Despite being annoyed at the anti-popular culture bias of the review and mildly disappointed that someone else had once again preceded me I was dying to pick up the book on my next trip into town. I wanted it to succeed where the young reader novels had failed, to capture the sense of excitement of great reality television, the immediacy and unpredictability. I wanted to see how Parkhurst tackled all of the questions I'd been working through in the first hundred and fifty pages of my spec novel. Would she capture the impression of reality with adverbs and imagination?

The answer? Only somewhat, but Lost and Found is a pretty good book anyway. Where it succeeds is in vividly portraying a small number of core characters' psyches, a crucial aspect of almost any story. Where it fails is in capturing the appeal of reality television as distinct from other forms of storytelling. There's virtually no suspense about the outcome of the game in the entire novel. A lot of the supporting characters are never so much as given a chance to speak. That obviously isn't a goal the writer sought and failed at, it's something they never tried to do.

The book's ambivalence towards the subject matter was fairly interesting and from my vantage point seems frank without being unfair even if it came across as slightly apologetic. Parkhrurst's reality television producers are cold blooded and opportunistic but her other characters understand that and, in all but one case, don't seem offended by it. They all have motivations of their own for taking part. Just like in real life some, such as the so-called 'ex-gays', compete in order to present a sociopolitical agenda before an international audience; others, such as the former child stars, do it to gain visibility in the entertainment world; while still others, such as the mother and daughter team, do it for the adventure and the escape from their ever day lives. In order to gain a sense of perspective on the industry Parkurst collected stories from two former competitors, Shii Ann Huang (Survivor:Thailand and Survivor:All-Stars) and Zachary Behr (The Amazing Race); and consequently some of the details, such as the camera operator who no one wants to work with because of his offensive smell, ring true.

One creative choice Parkhurst makes that seems a central issue of such novels is to focus on the mechanics of the production directly (and constantly) rather than avoiding the subject. Crew members such as camera people and handlers are supporting characters. The host is frequently described while she prepares for her next monologue. A production meeting is transcribed at one point. The Survivor Choose Your Own Adventure novels, by comparison, act almost as though there was no television production, focusing exclusively on the action 'inside' the TV box.

I myself found it useful at points to reference stages of the production that didn't appear on screen such as the casting interviews and the airing of the episodes but considered that level of self-reflexivity fair game because the show's host, Jeff Probst, talks openly about such things in media teleconferences and at the live reunion shows. Parkhurst tends to use descriptions of the production primarily in the pejorative sense to talk about the artifice of reality television where as I am more interested in the dual experiences of the castaways who are both experiencing some very real challenges such as hunger, exhaustion and the social game and at the same time going through the emotional mill of being put on display in front of seventeen million people.

At one point one of my characters is really torn between voting out a woman who shares her mother's cultural values or one who's everything her mother is against. She knows that her family and their entire neighborhood is going to one day be watching this play out on television and they're going to judge her for the choices she makes; and that leaves her sleepless at night. To me putting the game in such a context doesn't detract from the reality of the emotion, it adds to it.

Reality television fiction is at a really interesting point right now because the rules haven't been established yet. Does one use the same number of contestants as you would on a reality series or is that too many to keep track of? Do some shows work better for prose than others or not at all? If a short format isn't going to try to cover an entire game then what should it look like? How does one write a novel covering an entire game without exceeding a standard 350 page book length? Can new series be created for fiction and, if so, could a work of reality fiction ever be optioned for television production? With Battle Royal and Series 7 we're already starting to see how movies could recreate reality TV. But what other types of movies could be written that playoff of that idea? The opportunity to shape the conventions of the micro-genre is there for whoever steps up to the plate.

How to Watch a Fan-Vid

I am always fascinated when some bit of bottom-up generated "content" starts to get momentum and gain greater public visibility. This past few weeks, I have been observing a ground-swell of interest in a Star Trek fan video set to Nine Inch Nails's "Closer." Many of you will have already seen this video. It has already been featured by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, by Susie Bright, and by Salon's VideoDog among others. As someone who has done work in the past on Star Trek fans, I have received multiple pointers to this video from friends all over the world. Many of the people who sent it to me and certainly many of the bloggers who have pointed to it seem to have little or no awareness that there is a much larger tradition of fan-made videos or that the video makers, T. Jonsey and Killa have produced a larger body of work that circulates within the fanvid community. As artists, they are known for their sophisticated techniques and intelligent use of appropriated materials as well as for their diversity of approaches to their subject matter.

It is the nature of YouTube that the work which appears there could come from almost anywhere and that it is often consumed outside of its originating content: YouTube is the place right now where work travels from one grassroots community or subculture to another. There are real advantages to such a site since it results in cross-influences and more innovation, experimentation, and diversity, yet there are also losses to this process of decoupling amateur media from its original contexts of production and consumption.

Technical Innovation and Grassroots Media

Given that I have been following the development of fan-made music videos for more than fifteen years now, I thought it might be helpful if I spelled out some of what I saw when I looked at this particular segment. Through the years, I have watched dozens of hours of these videos, produced within a broad range of fandoms. In fact, my book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, published in 1992, already contains a full chapter tracing the aesthetics and production practices surrounding fan music videos.

At the time I wrote that chapter, fan music videos were made using two vcrs and patch cords. The only real way for most participants to edit the material was through transferring from one machine to the other. The biggest challenges artists faced were rollback and rainbow lines. Making videos under these conditions took a great deal of preplanning and an even greater amount of patience. The best video artists were perfectionists who would redo their projects many times to insure the smoothest transitions. The typical video could take six to eight hours to produce and more elaborate ones might take a great deal longer. Despite these technical limitations, some of the top video makers produced many hours of these videos which they would show primarily at fan conventions. There was some limited distribution -- they would personally copy the videos one by one for people who asked really nicely. They actively discouraged recopying of their material to pass to others because it would further degrade the quality of their work but of course, a good deal of underground trading of this content took place. Digital production tools have allowed for greater formal complexity and visual sophistication, including layering of images through lap dissolves, superimposition, multiple frame shots, and other digital manipulations, subtle manipulations of speed, lip-syncing of words and images and other forms of "mickeymousing," and so forth.

Fifteen years ago, I was presenting the work of these video makers at places like Interval Computing and the MIT Media Lab arguing that we should be paying attention to what these amateur media makers were doing when it was hard, nearly impossible, to accomplish so that we might predict affordances that should be built into the next generation of media tools. Today, we are seeing amateur media makers everywhere. Sites like YouTube have emerged to support their work and there is a public interested in seeing amateur-made work almost without regard to its origins or genre.

The Aesthetics of Fan Music Videos

I wonder if this particular song video would have generated the buzz that it has if it was not set to the music of Nine Inch Nails. The urban cool and the rough-hewn images of this video contrast sharply with people's expectations about the aesthetics of Star Trek fan art. In popular mythology, Trekkers are geeks, not rockers. The earliest fan music videos might have reconfirmed those stereotypes: the most commonly used songs were slow-paced and sappy, pop not rock, though artists explained this was in part because of the difficulty of doing rapid edits using the tools that they have had at their disposal. As these fans have embraced new digital tools, the overall pace of fan made videos has quickened. This, and the emergence of a younger generation of fans with taste for alternative music, has broadened the choice of songs. We are seeing many more hard-edged songs find their way into fan culture.

For the book, I interviewed a pioneering video artist, identified in Textual Poachers as MVD. MVD described her videos as "half-and-half things," neither "a Reader's Digest of the shows we love" nor "fancy pictures to entertain the eye while we listen to our favorite music." She explained:

Images pull out the words, emphasize the words, just as the words emphasize the pictures. If I've done a good job with a video, I can portray an emotion and I can hold that emotion throughout the song. I can bring a new level of depth to that emotion through my images and I can make you think about the program in a different way.

MVD suggested that the best fan videos could produce "layers of meaning," being accessible at first glance to anyone with a casual familiarity with the program, offering a deeper experience to anyone who knew the program well, and a still deeper experience to someone who has been part of the fan community's discussions around the show or read through the fan fiction surrounding a particular set of character relationships. MVD drew a distinction between convention videos, designed to be watched publicly in a general audience, and living room videos, designed to be watched in an intimate space by a group of friends who are already deeply immersed in the lore of a particular fan culture:

They can't take the complex ones in a large group. They get hyper. They aren't concentrating that deeply. They want to all laugh together or they want to share their feelings. So it's got to be obvious enough that the people around them will share those emotions....The living room video is designed to be so complicated that you'd better know everything about the show or it isn't going to make much sense. These videos are for a very small in-group that already understands what you are trying to say. It's like fan writing. You don't have to build up this entire world. You can rely on certain information.

MVD, at the time, could not have imagined what it might mean to watch a fan-made music video totally outside of the cultural context which fandom provided -- to come across it on YouTube or Boing Boing and not have any access to the conversations which shaped these particular appropriations. For one thing, "Closer" is apt to be understood within fandom as a "constructed reality" video -- that is, it creates a new story by linking together shots from the original series as opposed to using those shots simply to interpret or provide an alternative emotional perspective on events already depicted in the aired episodes. Such "constructed reality" works are extremely rare because they are so difficult to do well.

Such works certainly interpret the original series but not in a sense that would be recognized by most Literature teachers. They are not simply trying to recover what the original producers meant. They are trying to entertain hypotheticals, address what if questions, and propose alternative realities. Part of the pleasure of fan made media is seeing the same situations through multiple points of view, reading the same characters in radically different ways. The same artist might offer multiple constructions of the characters and their relationships across different works -- simply to keep alive this play with different readings.

As one fan quoted in my new book, Convergence Culture, explains,

What I love about fandom is the freedom we have allowed ourselves to create and recreate our characters over and over again. Fanfic rarely sits still. It's like a living, evolving thing, taking on its own life, one story building on another, each writer's reality bouncing off another's and maybe even melding together to form a whole new creation. A lot of people would argue that we're not creative because we build on someone else's universe rather than coming up with our own. However, I find that fandom can be extremely creative because we have the ability to keep changing our characters and giving them new life over and over. We can kill and resurrect them as often as we like. We can change their personalities and how they react to situations. We can take a character and make him charming and sweet or cold-blooded and cruel. We can give them an infinite, always-changing life rather than the single life of their original creation. We have given ourselves license to do whatever we want and it's very liberating.

"Closer," like other fanvids, was constructed as part of a conversation which the fan artists were having with the original text, with its authors, with other fans, and with themselves, whereas the video as seen outside of this context seems singular and unique. Or conversely, the video is read symptomatically -- as speaking for all Star Trek fans when in fact, it borrows in some ways and breaks in others from the norms of this community.

Recurring Images

MVD was one of a number of pioneering video makers who took on the responsibility to pass their skills onto other women interested in working in the medium. She would host slumber parties at her house in Western Massachusetts where women would bring their vcrs and tapes and learn from each other. As I suggest in Convergence Culture, a lot of fan culture looks like folk culture processes applied to mass media content and these gathering have the feel of traditional quilting bees.

Through this process, the community started to distill the hundreds of hours of episodes around a series like Star Trek into recurring shots which carried a greater deal of emotional resonance and meaning to members of the community. These shots get used again and again, combined in new ways, mixed with different songs and lyrics, taking on different connotations and associations. The best of them remained highly potent. When I first watched the "Closer" video, I was struck by what a high percentage of the shots used there were part of the vocabulary of fan music video producers of fifteen years ago. Don't believe me -- check out the photographs from MVD's "I Needed You" which I reproduced on pages 240-243 of Textual Poachers. Almost all of them appear in "Closer."

Slash This

One reason that so many of these shots reappear is that they evoke a particular interpretation of the original material. Keep in mind that in many cases, these videos are watched by people who are also reading fan fiction and thus have come to understand the relationship between Kirk and Spock within the terms of the fan subgenre known as Slash. I was struck by how many bloggers referenced slash in relation to this video -- the term is now known, but not widely understood, by many outside of the fan community itself. In Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (which collects my previously published essays on participatory culture), I include "The Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking," a collection of brief theoretical and critical statements about slash as a genre made by slash fan readers and writers which help to explain the persistence and popularity of this cultural practice.

For the moment, let's say that slash is a form of fan-generated romance which centers on the relationship between two same sex (most often male) characters appropriated from the realm of popular fiction. Kirk and Spock were probably the original slash couple but slash did not become slash until the idea of same sex relations moved from Kirk and Spock to a whole range of other pairings. Before that, it was simply K/S with the slash standing in for a sexual relationship. K&S would have referred to a passionate but asexual friendship between the same characters. The people who write and read slash are mostly women -- women of varied sexual orientations and interests -- who see their work as bringing to the surface emotional dynamics that were masked in the original material.

Think about all of the times that Kirk would woo some blue-skinned woman and then abandon her again, insisting that his obligations to his ship and his crew would outweigh his personal romantic interests. Then consider what happens again and again across the series and the films whenever Spock is put at risk. Kirk will sacrifice his ship, his crew, his rank, everything he has, to get Spock back. There's no question that his emotional commitment to Spock is the most important relationship in his life, even if the two men rarely speak directly about what that friendship means to them.

One of the most powerful moments in all of Star Trek comes in The Wrath of Khan when Spock finally puts into words his friendship for Kirk and gives his life to save the Enterprise. This scene seems key to understanding the emotional dynamics of slash, as I suggested in the Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers essay mentioned earlier:

When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies. Both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. They both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series. Almost everyone who watches that scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed. And, I tell my nonfan listeners, slash is what happens when you take away the glass. The glass, for me, is often more social than physical; the glass represents those aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men, which block the possibility of true male friendship. Slash is what happens when you take away those barriers and imagine what a new kind of male friendship might look like. One of the most exciting things about slash is that it teaches us how to recognize the signs of emotional caring beneath all the masks by which traditional male culture seeks to repress or hide those feelings.

Slash is a form of erotic writing, which differs from traditional male-targeted pornography, because it is more interested in the emotional rather than the physical lives of its characters. Readers and writers get off imagining the characters having sex in part because they see sex as enabling a form of intimacy between these men which is denied them on the program and denied most men within our culture. The construction of slash depends on reading certain looks and gestures exchanged amongst the characters as showing some hidden emotional truths and so song videos are often presented as visual evidence in support of a slash hypothesis about the series. Fans can point to the screen and say that you can see it in their eyes, these men really care about each other.

How Far to Pon Farr?

The opening title to "Closer" asks "What if they hadn't made it to Vulcan on time." This title references a specific tradition of pon farr stories. Pon Farr is the Vulcan mating season which occurs every seven years and is deeply disabilitating (can drive people insane or kill them if they do not make it back to their home planet and mate.) This concept emerged in the Classic ST episode, "Amok Time," written by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. Many of the earliest K/S stories used pon farr as a device to push Kirk and Spock into bed with each other. Kirk surely would overcome his inhibitions about gay sex if doing so would allow him to save his friend's life. As slash became more widely accepted, there have been far fewer pon farr stories; the characters are no longer seen as requiring extreme situations to get them in bed together. So, in adopting this pon farr frame, "Closer" pays tribute to the foremothers of slash.

Pon Farr stories often contain suggestions of sexual violence -- as does "Closer" -- themes which remain highly controversial inside fan circles. I am certain that the images of sexual violence here (specifically drawn from the use of the Vulcan Mind Meld in the original series accompanied by lyrics about "violation," "desecration" and "penetration") account for why some viewers outside of fandom found this particular video disquieting. This video is disquieting to many fans because of its strong suggestion of rape.

Ose and More Ose

One striking feature of "Closer" is its angsty tone -- created in part by the choice of soundtrack, in part by the ragged and grainy reproduction of the images, and in part by the selection of images which stress the emotional distance rather than closeness of the protagonists. Fans have a term, "ose," that captures this emotional quality: it comes from the expression "ose and more ose" (i.e. morose).

A number of writers have suggested that they expected to laugh and were instead moved or disturbed by what they saw in this video. Fan music videos adopt a range of different tones -- some do indeed welcome the uncomfortable laughter when one first starts to reread these images outside of their original heterosexual inflections and start to appreciate the pleasure of appropriating these shots for alternative interpretations. Others affectionately poke fun at the protagonists, choosing their most foolish or clumsy moments or choosing images that look especially suggestive out of context. (T. Jonesy and Killa have produced a number of other Classic Trek vids which adopt these more comic and playful tones.) Others play it more seriously, teaching us to respect the emotional truths they find through their recontextualizing of these images. For me, "Closer" has a kind of emotional distance -- despite all of the angst -- that sets it apart from many other fan-made videos. Ironically, it is perhaps this emotional distance which has allowed many who are not Trek fans to embrace the aesthetics of this particular work. Many slash vids are hot -- this one is cool.

Porn Again?

Another striking feature of "Closer" is the insertion of porn shots amidst the footage taken from the original series. I have certainly seen this (relatively uncommon) practice among some fan music video makers but historically, such explicit videos did not circulate outside the fan community, so it was striking to see this practice out in public view. This is perhaps illustrative of what has happened as slash and fan vids have entered a networked culture. New people have been drawn to the form at a rate that strips the ability of the community to inculcate them into their norms. Old taboos are being shattered right and left often in highly public ways that would distress older fans who felt they had reasons for avoiding such public scrutiny.

Another striking aspect of "Closer" is that it is being circulated as publicly as it is. Several years ago, I sparked some controversy in the Star Wars fan cinema world when I argued that the rules of the official competition hosted by Atom films were gender-biased because they recognized forms of media production -- parody and documentary -- most closely associated with male fans and excluded outright those forms -- most notably music video -- most closely associated with female fans. Many of those angry by these statements asserted that they had never seen any films made by female Star Wars fans and that they were certain such works did not exist. I saw that as validation of my argument because I had seen a large number of music videos produced by female Star Wars fans which had not been able to get into public distribution. Those who had seen some of the music videos argued that they did not belong in the competition because they were "derivative," that is, because they used found footage. In fact, though, "Closer" shows pretty well that these fan media makers can generate original interpretations through their manipulation and recontextualization of these images. Whatever you want to say about it, "Closer" makes a statement about the original material.

When I did Poachers, the music video makers were the only fans who asked not to be named in the book: they were concerned because their raw materials drew clips directly from the films and television episodes but also drew songs from top recording artists. They felt most exposed to legal prosecution and felt they had the weakest case that their works would be protected under Fair Use.

Today, some of these women do share their videos via the web but without much fanfare, on sites that are only known within a relatively closed fan community. Fans have learned how to use the web to make their content accessible to those already in the know while decoupling their content from access via most search engine. It's quite likely that in the current case, the artists lost control over the circulation of "Closer" and that it went more public than they intended. That's also part of living in a world where amateur media often circulates virally and without any direct attribution. Few of the blogs which have mentioned "Closer" even acknowledge the artist's names even though they are featured prominently in the video itself and there may not have been an expectation that whoever posted it to YouTube needed to respect the artists' choices about where and how it should be distributed. We still accord much greater respect to commercial artists than grassroots artists. This is a video which has been circulating within fandom for some time without getting this level of public notice and so many fans have been started by its sudden visibility.

The circulation of "Closer" outside of the fan community is apt to be causing concern not only for the original creators of this material but also for many others within the fan community. I suspect their reactions are mixed.

On the one hand, it is exciting to see some work within this tradition get some public visibility and respect. On the other, its visibility increases the likelihood that the Powers that Be will come crashing down on the whole practice of fan music videos, there must be disappointment that it is being discussed outside of the larger context of many people producing work within this tradition, and there will be some concern that this work includes some controversial practices -- such as porn inserts or the themes of sexual violence -- that may further enflame the situation.

You may note that I am not offering links here to other fanvids. I have made it a policy not to send people to fan-produced material, even if it is on the web and therefore theoretically "public" without their permission. I am sending pointers to this video only because it is already the subject of such public circulation and discussion that not doing so would amount to closing the barn door after the cow have already gotten out.

Thanks to Cynthia Jenkins for her help in preparing this post.

Will Newspapers Survive?

For those of you who are living in or around the Boston area, I wanted to flag two events next week that will be hosted by the MIT Communications Forum and will be free and open to the public.

The Emergence of Citizens' Media

Tuesday, Sept 19

5-7 pm, Bartos Theater, MIT Media Lab

Speakers:

Alex Beam, Boston Globe

Ellen Foley, Wisconsin State Journal

Dan Gillmor, Center for Citizen Media

News, Information and the Wealth of Networks

Thursday, Sept 21

5-7 pm, MIT Building 3, Room 270 (3-270)

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture

William Uricchio, MIT

The second panel emerged in part because USC anthropologist Mimi Ito wrote an interesting post in her blog comparing Convergence Culture and the Wealth of Networks after Yochai and I had visited her center about a week apart. Here's what she wrote:

Henry's Convergence Culture and Yochai's The Wealth of Networks, are the state of the art in thinking about new media and the Internet. Both provide both rich detail in the form of concrete cases as well as frameworks for understanding the social, technical, and economic changes coming down the pipeline that are both highly original and syncretic. But my goal at the moment is not to do a book review. I just want to ruminate on one thread of conversation that emerged from spending a day each with these thinkers and their texts.

Henry and Yochai are in many ways complementary thinkers who share an appreciation for the bottom-up, emergent, and viral forms of social organization emerging from the maturing media ecology of the Internet. Mostly they are in agreement about the scope and nature of the sweeping changes on the horizon as content turns digitally networked, and they both are actively participating in shaping these conditions of the future to be safer for the creative and knowledge production of everyday folks. But they also have some interesting differences....

Yochai also believes in the power of distributed intelligence and wired prosumers, and he sees amateur cultures such as fan cultural production as examples of "the wealth of networks." But his focus is on what he calls "nonmarket" forms of culture and knowledge production. If Henry's central cases are media fandom and alternative news, Yochai's are open source and distributed models of software and knowledge production such as Linux, Wikipedia, alternative news, and some forms of science (eg. bioinformatics, seti@home). He argues that the dominance of commercially produced forms of knowledge and culture is a historical anomaly, and we are in the midst of a correction that will give more weight to amateur, non-commercial and folk forms. In many ways his argument is probably more radical than what Henry or I might say about the promise of amateur and folk cultures. He sees everyday amateur producers as increasingly the source of generative forms of knowledge and culture, that provide a genuine alternative to commercial media.... At the end of the week, I think what it came down to for me was that this balance depends crucially on the specificities of the cultural forms in question. Yochai pointed out that his argument about distributed nonmarket production really focuses on cultural forms that can be easily decomposed, like software and encyclopedia entries. In his book, he talks about how even in the case of science textbooks, where it seems like this should work, the units are large enough that it is difficult to sustain as a volunteer effort. If we look at music, for example, amateur performance has always persisted because it is a media form that is amenable to local performance. Contrast that with something like feature films or the sustained multi-year (or at least season-long) narratives you get in an anime series, and you start moving into domains that require both a certain amount of capitalization as well as a sustained authorial viewpoint.

This will be the first time Benkler and Jenkins have appeared on stage together -- indeed, the first time we've met face to face. Benkler and I come from very different backgrounds but our books arrive at remarkably similar conclusions about participatory culture in a networked society. This is scheduled to be an unstructured conversation about what our two books might suggest about the future of journalism and civic media. I know we will have a lot to talk about.

For those of you who live outside the Boston area, these events will be available after the fact on streaming audio. I will provide information once the webcasts go up on line.

Cory Doctorow as Exemplar

Throughout the fall term, I am going to be sharing with readers more of the work we have been doing for the MacArthur Foundation on new media literacies, building up to the release of a significant new white paper in late October which makes the case for a new set of social skills and cultural competencies which we need to be incorporating into American education. We are already hard at work putting these ideas into practice, developing curricular activities and supporting materials that will help teachers and after school programs respond in more meaningful ways to the challenges and opportunities of the new participatory culture. One of our core projects is the development of an exemplar library. When we spoke with teachers and after school programs, it was clear that they recognized that their students were interested in new forms of cultural production that are enabled by new media technologies and new forms of cultural distribution supported by the web. They knew that their students were fans, bloggers, and gamers. But they faced a number of issues: they had no standards by which to evaluate work produced in these new and emerging media; they didn't know enough themselves to give good advice to student media makers; the students lacked role models to help them understand future opportunities in this space; and the students were facing ethical issues that their teachers and parents didn't really understand.

We decided to respond to these challenges by producing a library of short digital films focused around media-makers and the craft and ethical choices they face in producing and distributing their work. For each media maker, we may produce 5-10 short (4-5 minute) video segments addressing different points in their creative process. A teacher or after school program might show one or more of those segments to kick off a discussion about media production processes. They may decide to work horizontally -- fleshing out one form of media making -- or vertically -- looking at storyboarding or interviewing techniques across a range of artists and media. These videos will be accompanied by supporting materials -- vocabulary sheets, charts showing the various tools the artists use, and potential production activities that can be brought into the classroom. We also imagine that as students get engaged with the videos they will seek out more content on their own via our website and thus dig deeper into the whole world of media production than can be accomplished within the constraints of the school day.

Long term, we expect to make this an open library where anyone can insert their own content and thus provide an incentive for teachers and students to engage with media production projects around artists in their own local community. In the short run, we are producing these videos in-house -- working with Comparative Media Studies graduate students and with our new production coordinator Anna Van Someren, who was until recently part of the Youth Voice Collaborative here in Boston.

We are just now putting the first crop of exemplars out on the web and I figured I would showcase them here as they go up. One of the first will have special interest to readers of this blog, many of whom found this site because of some early shout outs by Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing. When Doctorow was speaking at MIT last year, CMS graduate student Neal Grigsby grabbed some time with him to talk about blogging, science fiction writing, and online communications. The documentary was produced for middle and high school students but we think it will engage many adult viewers as well.

Here are some highlights:

Doctorow was until recently an advocate for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: he is someone deeply committed to the concept of the Creative Commons, so it is fitting that the opening film starts with him reading aloud the Creative Common license that grants us permission to share his words with the world. He explains elsewhere in the opening segment:

My first novel was the first novel to use a Creative Commons license. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was released in stores on January 9, 2003 and, on the same day, it was released as a Creative Commons download that came with a license that allowed you to noncommercial redistribute it and make reuse of it as much as you wanted. The novel has been distributed from my website at least 650,000 times and from other people's websites some unknown number of times, and it's in its 6th printing. And that's because for most people an electronic book is not a substitute for a print book it's an advertisement for a print book. And, for me, my biggest problem isn't piracy, its obscurity. And it really seems to me that the more you give away, the better it is. That seems to be the conclusion that I've come to.

Doctorow went on to talk about why he choose Disneyworld as the setting for his first novel and in the process shared something of his own fannish relationship to popular culture:

It's a great fictional setting, for starters. I mean, there's so much great detail. And it's got both a lot of familiarity and a lot of foreignness for people. A lot of people have been to Disney World, it gets more visitors every year than the United Kingdom. But it also has all this rich detail, that if you spend a lot of time playing around with it, you can find all these interesting little factoids and trivioids that you can drop in and really excite people.

I love putting pop culture into the work I do. It lets you be a fan with a giving up authorship. You can be a drooling fanboy without surrendering your position at the top of the geek hierarchy by working in these fanboy references

in your stuff as you go, you know? And it's also, I think, a nice way to pay homage to your literary ancestors and your peers. And it's a little naughty, too, to drop in the occasional visit from someone else's characters or the

occasional moment from someone else's world. I think that pop culture references and references to other works in my own works give them a kind of a richness, a depth. You can import an entire other narrative just by dropping a couple of references to it in your book or in your short story, and that, think, is pretty exciting.

The other great advantage, of course, of writing a novel set in theme park is that it makes your trips to Disney World tax-deductible. And so I had a couple of very fine years of tax-deductible trips to Disney World.

Doctorow offers some pragmatic advice about writing in general (which are sure to earn jabs in the elbow from composition teachers around the country):

The most important thing, I think, that any writer can do is: when you're learning your writing habits, eschew all ceremony. Don't be one of those writers who needs to light a candle, and clean the cat, and wash the dishes, and vacuum the house, and put away all the books, and do 20 minutes of yoga, and go for brisk walk, and contemplate your navel before you can set a word down on the page. When you go back and reread your work, you won't know which pages you wrote on days when you were feeling completely uninspired, and which

pages you wrote on days when you were having a great time. And by not letting yourself get trapped into ceremony, and the myth of the Muse that has to visit you before you can commit to writing, you will be a writer. Because a writer is someone who writes not someone who complains about writing. And if your job is to be a writer you have to be able to write. Garbagemen never talk about having garbagemen's block. Doctors never say, "I can't do surgery today, I'm just not in the mood." If it's your job you have to be able to write when it's

time to write.

The interview also serves our mandate to offer teachers some standards for thinking about what constitutes good writing in the digital media. Here's what Doctorow has to say about the art of blogging:

A blog succeeds, I think, on the basis of how good your headline and your lead is. There's a tendency among bloggers to want to repeat the privilege and sin of newspaper writers, which is to write the clever, silly headline that draws its strength from its place on the page and the context that surrounds it. So you write a headline like "Britain Weeps!" And it's 72 point bold, and beneath it is a big photo of someone crying. And that's intriguing. But if you do that in a blog, and your headline is syndicated to an RSS reader, and it turns up among 2000 other undifferentiated headlines, and all it says is "Britain weeps," or "OMG LOL," or "funniest thing I've seen this week, can't describe it, you gotta see it," all that stuff goes right into the round file; all that stuff just gets pitched out.

If you want to write stuff that carries, you have to really focus on these clean headlines that eschew all cleverness for memorability, the ability to be remembered. And then you have to follow it on with a lead, a nut graph, that grabs everything that's in the story and sums it up in three sentences. And it's really hard to do that. Everyone wants to give some background. They want to say, "for the last several weeks we've all noticed that something, something, something, and then, subsequently, dumpty, dumpty dum, which brings me to today's point." Again, when people are skimming headlines and just the first sentence, that stuff is just noise. You have to open, and then move back to it.

It's like writing copy for a wire service. Because that's, in effect, what you do when you blog. The primary method for consumption of any blog these days is through an RSS reader, at least as the initial path in. BoingBoing, for example, has about 1.1 million unique RSS readers per day, and about 350,000 unique web page readers per day. So it's wildly disproportionate, by far the majority of people read it in headlines. So, if you're a wire service customer at a newspaper, what you do all day is go in and read thousands and thousands of headlines, and figure out which one of these is relevant to you, and pick them up for your newspapers. So, if you're a wire service writer, you've got to write to that audience. And I think that what the Internet has done is turn all those of us who read through our headline readers into wire service editors, and all of us who write blogs, and who are conscious of wanting to spread the material in our blogs, into wire service writers.

And finally, Doctorow talks extensively about science fiction writing as a mode of social commentary and activism:

The job of the technology activist and the job of the science fiction writer are pretty comparable in that both are meant to try to investigate and try to articulate what the consequences of technology policy changes will be. To say, "if you do X the outcome might be Y." And certainly in civil liberties that's always been a tricky one. To say, "well, to regulate the speech of these neo-Nazis, you will end up regulating the speech of these other people in this

way that would cause harm. Popular speech never needs defending, so if we're only going to allow people who agree with us to speak then this is what the outcome can look like."

Science fiction tells you how the present should be, it tells you what's wrong with today, and what the future could be.... Science fiction is the most didactic literature, I think, going. It's kind of infamous for the soliloquy. You know, the author who breaks off to have a character... You know, Heinlein's characters sit there and give 25 minutes of watered-down Ayn Rand in the middle of their space adventure.

1984 is the sterling example. I went back and reread that just a month or two ago, this being a good time in the history of the western world to reread 1984, and it's remarkable not just as a piece of political fiction, as it's remembered, but as a piece of science fiction. He does all the skiffy stuff that science fiction readers love to find in their books. He's a great shallow extrapolator; he extrapolates just enough to give you that frisson of the future, and then uses that to hold a warped mirror up to the present. And it works really well....

One of the nice things about writing fiction that has some didactic elements, or that has a mission and is intended to educate as well as entertain, is that it's very hard to rebut a short story. If you write an essay, someone can come along and write another essay that says your essay is rubbish. The number of people who can write a short story to rebut your short story is much smaller.

Special thanks to Margaret Weigel, the research director on the New Media Literacies Project.

Multiplatform Entertainment: A View From China

Last week, I posted about the rapid speed with which television content has moved into new channels of distribution and the degree to which the American public seems to have embraced the ideal of rerun on demand, television for download, call it what you will. One of the key lessons of media studies is that the same technology may get adopted in different ways and at different speeds in different cultures around the world. This is one of the real value of taking a global perspective on media change. My post inspired one of the Comparative Media Studies graduate students, Rena Huang, to post some thoughts on her blog about how this same process is playing itself out in China and I asked her if I could repost these remarks here. Huang is a second year Masters student who is doing a thesis on the growth of the Chinese animation industry and is working with CMS faculty memberJing Wang, the Chair of the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures Section, to construct a digital archive of Chinese animation in collaboration with the Beijing Film Academy. She was also part of the team from our Convergence Culture Consortium who participated in Project Good Luck this summer helping to document mobile culture in China. For those who haven't checked that site in a bit, they are still uploading pictures and interviews from the trip, including an interesting exchange with the Back Dorm Boys, the Chinese students who became famous for their lip-sincing video at You-Tube.

The following was written by Rena Huang:

Henry's "television goes multiplatform" interests me a lot since when I was back in China for the summer, I heard a lot of talks about and saw some real happenings of TV on other platforms, but not quite the same kind of platform as described in Henry's article. There are less downloading (the legal kind) of TV programs in China for various reasons. The broadcasting system, which features an overabundance of similar TV channels and a relative shortage of original content, has made frequent program rerun on different channels a common practice. One who misses his or her favorite episodes can soon catch it up on other channels. I couldn't believe that during the summer, the Westward Journey series (which was premiered 20 years ago and I really love it), is being aired to audiences old and new, on at least ten different channels. It keeps you safe in the competition to show what others are showing if you don't have better things to show.

Much of the talks I heard about alternative forms of TV-watching came from the corporate and the government. The idea of watching TV on various mobile devices is being infused to the public with greater efforts.

Watching TV on your cell phone is one way to do it. Most people are aware of and are exciting about 3G technology, when they don't yet have to worry about their 3G phone bills. But the corporate goes the easier way. Video transmission technology that is being developed and deployed for mobile receiver in China is mainly the digital multimedia broadcasting mode, that is, to broadcast through terrestrial or satellite broadcasting system. This is what Japan and South Korea are employing in their mobile TV service. But it's not happening in the US, since unlike Europe and other parts of the world, the US has failed to allocate the two kinds of radio bands that are required for this kind of transmission. With this type of relatively low-cost technology, people can watch TV on mobiles devices such as cell phone, PDA, mobile TV, and so on, for FREE, which is one major reason why we're so optimistic about the future of mobile TV-watching in China.

If massive television watching on personal mobile devices such as a cell phone is still a talk, then watching TV on communal mobile devices is already an everyday experience for many urban Chinese. It's the mobile television on public transportation. Beijing All Media and Culture Group (BAMC), who owns Beijing Television and Beijing People Broadcasting Station, set up a mobile television company and started trial broadcasting in May 2004 on 1000 Beijing buses. As of this writing, they've laid 16,000 TV sets on 5000 buses, 5000 taxies, 1,000 government vehicles and 4 subway cars to air programs to 4.5 million audiences per day, and are planning more in more public spaces.

A direct incentive behind the Chinese government's support and advocate for this initiative is the 29th Olympics to be held in Beijing in 2008. "Watch the games while you are on the go" is the picture that has been unfolded in front of people for them to grab. It is planned that, by year 2008, mobile TV broadcasting will be available across the country for people to watch on their cell phones. But the government, of course, looks way beyond 2008. The infrastructure that remains after the game will put China well ahead of others in the development and application of such technology. I was so unused to the fact that I didn't need to worry about my cell phone signals any more when I was in Beijing, no matter how deep I was under the ground. Every corner of the city is covered with cell phone signals, and will be covered with TV signals soon.

But you may wonder now, what do people watch on these mobile media. As for BAMC, a major technology, as well as content, provider in Beijing area, they have 17 hours programs (including repeats) to show to bus passengers a day, some licensed, some home-made. These programs are mainly on entertainment, life style and travel, the fast food, grab 'n go type. One interesting portion of the show is the live broadcast of traffic situation in the city which taps into the traffic cameras set up by the police on major roads. Any accident happened on the road will be released to the audience within three minutes. And of course, there are commercials and other sort of weird things. Once I noticed there was an interactive game playing on the TV screen while I was sitting on the bus. People called in to play a quick game using their phones. It costs 1.5 yuan per minute for the call, and you can win gifts. I was amazed to see that every 1 out 3 or 4 players won a big award of 80 or 120 yuan. How could the host make money? "You believe that those are real people winning? The TV is just playing tricks and trying to hook callers innocent like you!" my husband laughed at me.

Yes, that was stupid of me believing that you can actually make a fortune by playing games with mobile TV. It's true that, unlike in the US where people download and watch what they demand, here we don't have much control over where we would like to watch, nor what we can watch. A Beijing bus commuter actually went so far as to sue the bus company for "imposing TV commercials" on him when he doesn't want to see them. And he lost the lawsuit of course, since "there is no law saying that buses are not allowed to carry advertisement". He can go on to complain with the Administration of Environment, the judge suggested, if he feels bothered by the noise made by the bus TV. I don't think he can win that complaint either, 'cause for me at least, the audio of the bus TV is hardly recognizable on noisy roads and crowded buses of Beijing.

Astroturf, Humbugs, and Lonely Girls

Last week, reader Todd asked me what I thought about LonelyGirl15. At the time, I had only a passing awareness of the Lonely Girl phenomenon. Just in time, though, my friend Zephoria posted a very interesting discussion of LonelyGirl15 over at her blog, Apophenia. Here's her explanation of the back-story:

For those who aren't familiar, videos by LonelyGirl15 started appearing on YouTube over the summer. She's supposedly a teenager who is home schooled by religious parents who don't know she's creating videos online. Her friend Daniel helps her with the videos and they often talk back and forth across their videos. It's rather endearing but too good to be true.

As more videos popped up, people started questioning whether this was real or not. Speculation mounted and fake lonelygurls started to appear. People created videos to comment on LonelyGirl15. People flocked to the LonelyGirl15 forum to discuss. Problem is the LonelyGirl15 domain was registered before the videos started appearing. People started tracking down more and more clues, trying to hone in on what it was, who was behind it. Suspicion mounted. In classic fan style, people dove right down and tore apart all of the data. Quite a few thought that this was an ARG, Jane McGonigal style, but she denied involvement on NPR. Others thought it was an advert or some marketing campaign.

The clues people dug up were fascinating. Personally, i was intrigued by "Bree's" MySpace profile. I knew it was fake but i didn't know if the YouTube LonelyGirl15 made the MySpace profile LonelyGurl15. Why did i know it was fake? Well, i read too many teenage MySpaces. Not sure i should give away clues as to how to create a real-looking fake MySpace profile. ::wink::

Then press started covering it. Hands down, The New York Times had the best coverage. I can't help but wonder if the NYTimes knew the truth because they are certainly using the same language: "Hey There, Lonelygirl - One cute teen's online diary is probably a hoax. It's also the birth of a new art form." If so, go Adam for good reporting!

And sure enough, the artists who had created the original Lonelygirl15 videos revealed their identities last week:

With your help we believe we are witnessing the birth of a new art form. Our intention from the outset has been to tell a story-- A story that could only be told using the medium of video blogs and the distribution power of the internet. A story that is interactive and constantly evolving with the audience.

Right now, the biggest mystery of Lonelygirl15 is "who is she?" We think this is an oversimplification. Lonelygirl15 is a reflection of everyone. She is no more real or fictitious than the portions of our personalities that we choose to show (or hide) when we interact with the people around us. Regardless, there are deeper mysteries buried within the plot, dialogue, and background of the Lonelygirl15 videos, and many of our tireless and dedicated fans have unearthed some of these. There are many more to come....We want you to know that we aren't a big corporation. We are just like you. A few people who love good stories. We hope that you will join us in the continuing story of Lonelygirl15, and help us usher in an era of interactive storytelling where the line between "fan" and "star" has been removed, and dedicated fans like yourselves are paid for their efforts. This is an incredible time for the creator inside all of us.

As my son succinctly put it, "that's pretty bad news for lonelyboy15."

But it may not be news to many of the people who have suspected all along that Lonelygirl15 was a fake, a fraud, a hoax, or some other form of fiction. She was perhaps "fake" the way professional wrestling is fake -- that is a fake we are supposed to see through and enjoy nevertheless

. Prehistory

When I first saw the Lonelygirl15 videos, I was simultaneously reminded of two previous works. On the one hand, I was reminding by the autobiographical pixelvision films produced by teenage filmmaker Sadie Benning which became a cause celebre in the art world in the 1990s: here was a teenage dyke sitting in her bedroom, speaking with extraordinary frankness to a camera that was either handheld or propped up on her desk and which produced grainy and very authentic feeling images. In this case, the "authentic" teen girl turned out to be the daughter of an established avant garde artist who used his connections to the art world to help launch here career.

The second was Rachel's Room, an ongoing series of fictional videos produced by Sony Interactive, a few years ago, which also consisted of a teenage girl sitting in her bedroom, talking to the camera, sprawling on her bed, fighting with her parents, and developing a form of serial fiction which unfolded day by day on the web. In this case, my associate Alex Chisholm and I stood on the set in Hollywood and saw the amount of technical support which went into producing the effect of a normal teen's home videos.

The first was clearly marked as nonfiction, the second represented what might be called an epistolary fiction for the web.

ARGs and Epistolary Fictions

Yet, with Lonelygirl15, there was uncertainty about what we were watching: was it fiction or nonfiction? Was it made by an amateur or a commercial entity? Was it really what it seemed or did it represent a gateway to something else -- the rabbit hole into an ARG?

After all, ARGS do not explicitly mark their fictional status, often mimic real world documents, and thus provide another narrative frame for thinking about the relationship between fiction and reality. A while back, in Technology Review, I made the argument that ARGs (which constitute a modern variant on an older literary practice):

Alternative [sic] reality gaming could be seen as a 21st century equivalent of a much older literary form -- epistolary fiction. Many early novels, including Pamela (1740) Les Liaisons Dangereuse ( 1782 ) or The Sorrows of Young Werther (1815), consisted of fictional letters, journals, diaries, and newspaper accounts, which were presented by their authors with little acknowledgement of their fictional status. The authors often claimed to have found the materials in an old trunk or to have received them anonymously in the mail....The content of earlier epistolary novels turned readers into armchair detectives and amateur psychologists, piecing together the events of the story from multiple, fragmentary, and sometimes contradictory, always subjective, accounts. These ARGs take on a more public dimension, exploring conspiracies or mysteries which exploit the expansive potential of the transmedia environment. Though read in private, these early novels became the focus of parlor room discussions as people compared notes about the characters and their situations. ARGS today offer a very similar experience of mutual debate and collaborative interpretation for a society just beginning to experiment with what cybertheorist Pierre Levy calls collective intelligence.

Provocations

But, ARGs don't just blur fact and fiction. ARGS invite us to do something with the information they give us: we don't just watch; we act. Similarly, as I suggest in Convergence Culture, viewers are increasingly responding to reality television with a problem-solving mentality -- trying to track down what they can from various channels to uncloak what they can before it is broadcast.

This is the nature of art (fictional or nonfictional) in the age of collective intelligence: the work provokes us, incites us into action. Indeed, as an art project, Lonelygirl15 seems designed to encourage our participation. Yet we don't know what we are supposed to do if we do not correctly identify the genre within which the text operates: do we dig deeper into the text in search of clues (as in the case of an ARG) or do we go beyond the text in search of reality (as in the case of reality spoiling)? In this case, the public's uncertainty about the status of these images made figuring out the source of these messages the central task. The mystery overwhelmed the content -- perhaps more than the art students anticipated and forced them to out themselves so that we might hopefully engage with their work on another level.

As Apophenia writes:

They are telling their story, truth or fiction. Of course, this makes many people very uncomfortable. They want blogs and YouTube and MySpace to be Real with a capital R. Or they want it to be complete play. Yet, what's happening is both and neither. People are certainly playing but even those who are creating "reality" are still engaged in an act of performance. They are writing themselves into being for others to interpret and the digital bodies that emerge often confound those who are doing the interpretation. In many ways, this reminds me of the Fakester drama during the height of Friendster. As one of the instigators behind the Fakester manifesto explained, "none of this is real."

Something of the uncertainty that the Lonelygirl15 phenomenon has provoked can be seen by looking behind the scenes at Wikipedia where a heated debate has broken out about whether there should be a post about the phenomenon and what would constitute verifiable information on the topic. The blurry boundaries between fact and fiction here seem to have thrown the categories and logics by which Wikipedia works into crisis.

We'll Always Have Paris

In this regard, I am struck by the parallels last week between the Lonelygirl15 story and what happened with Paris Hilton and her new album. Here's how MTV news described the story:

British graffiti artist Banksy has placed 500 doctored copies of the heiress' debut CD in 48 U.K. record stores, replacing Hilton's album with 40 minutes of remixes and altering the cover to advertise titles including "Why Am I Famous?" and "What Am I For?," according to BBC News. The guerrilla artist also changed pictures of Hilton on the CD sleeve to show her topless and with a dog's head, but kept the original barcode intact -- which means that some may buy the LP thinking it is the real thing. A representative for record chain HMV told BBC News that it has recovered seven altered copies from stores but no customers have returned a tampered version of the disc. The altered copies also include a Hilton remix CD credited to "DM," which Danger Mouse's management confirmed is him. "It's hard to improve on perfection, but we had to try," the Gnarls Barkley mastermind said in a statement. Danger Mouse and Banksy are believed to have met while shopping for costumes in SoHo, New York. ...

So, in order to comment on the fakeness of Hilton's celebrity, someone created fake versions of her album and smuggled them back in the store. Back in the day, this would have been the work of amateur culture jammers, like the notorious Barbie Liberation Army, but now this is -- guess what -- an art project involving, among others, Danger Mouse, himself a star with a cult following for his bold mash-ups of other people's music. And as we speak, the fake Paris Hilton albums are going for ever larger sums on Ebay. So, how do we understand the nature of this particular recording: is it culture jamming or commodificiation? Is it art or self-promotion? Is it a fake Paris Hilton cd or a Danger Mouse/Banksy "original"? And what are we supposed to do with this knowledge? What forms of participation does it require from us?

Humbugs and Network Culture

Before we dismiss this all as "postmodern", keep in mind that the epistolary novels discussed earlier also played with our uncertainty about the line between reality and fiction within a new medium (the printed book) whose conventions had not yet been firmly established. And keep in mind the elaborate play between reality and fiction set in motion in the 19th century, which writer Neil Harris has described as the golden age of the "humbug." Harris writes about the proliferation of fake "mermaids" and stone giants in the 19th century at a time when knowledge was in flux, science was at least partially amateur and participatory, new discoveries (both anthropological and technological) were being made every day, and people wanted to acquire new skills at discernment to keep up with the pace of cultural churn. In other words, there seems to be a fascination with blurry categories at moments of media in transition -- it is one of the ways we try to apply evolving skills in a context where the categories that organize our culture are in flux.

Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks describes network culture in terms of the intermingling between commercial, nonprofit, governmental, educational, and amateur modes of cultural production. We might extend his concept of a network culture to describe not only one where these forms co-exist through the same media platform but also one where the lines between them start to blur, where it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where one ends and the other starts. Indeed, we are once again in an era where the "humbug" takes on new significance -- as we learn to apply our skills, collectively and individually, to try to reassert order in the chaos which is created at a site like You-Tube where amateur produced and appropriated commercial product co-exist often in unmarked forms.

Astroturf

To be sure, artists are not the only ones who are exploiting our uncertainty about the source and status of content within this new networked culture. Commercial interests and political interests are also increasingly acting in unscrupulous ways -- inserting fake grassroots media content into YouTube and other such sites in hopes that it can be passed off as authentic bottom-up material. There's even a word for this fake grassroots culture -- Astroturf. Here's a classic example of Astroturf. Earlier this summer, The Wall Street Journal outted a YouTube video spoofing Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth not as the product of an amateur but rather as the work of a Washington lobby group eager to discredit the former vice president:

The maker of the Gore-baiting spoof is credited as Toutsmith, a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills, California. The video appears to have been produced on a home computer, with a budget of pennies. But an investigation by The Wall Street Journal has discovered that Toutsmith is actually operating from Washington, on a computer registered to a PR company called DCI Group. The company's clients happen to include the multinational oil company ExxonMobil. If the video was produced by DCI Group, it would not be the PR company's first attempt to produce its own content. The company operates a news and opinion website called Tech Central Station, which is sponsored by companies including Exxon, General Motors and McDonald's. The website takes a highly skeptical view of climate change, and is openly anti-Gore.

All of this brings me back to the debate which has been brewing here around my post about the efforts to save Stargate. One side has been asserting that the campaign I described as grassroots activism may be having closer ties to the production company, MGM, than has been acknowledged, a charge that the group leaders deny. And others are writing to suggest that it really doesn't matter since the goal is for fans and producers to work together to find a solution which allows them to keep a favorite television show in production. I have been trying not to take sides here. I don't know where the truth lies. But I am really fascinated by the controversy itself as an illustration of the increased blurring of distinctions between media producers and consumers.

As I suggest in Convergence Culture, sometimes these groups are making common cause facilitated by the shared communication context provided by the web. They are speaking to each other through multiple channels -- public and private, open and closed, commercial and grassroots -- and working together on an ad-hoc basis. Other times, the groups are steadfastly opposed to each other, pursuing their own interests in their own ways. And sometimes, nobody is certain what is going on. Are we working together or are we being exploited? Could both be going on at the same time? Or could our suspicion of hidden motives get in the way of pursuing common interests, leaving us always looking for conspiracies where none exists?

Chaos or Churn?

Earlier, I shifted between calling this chaos (a negative term no matter how you cut it) and churn (a more positive spin). Writers like Virginia Postrel (The Future and Its Discontents) and Grant McCracken (Plentitude) use the term, churn, to describe a culture of rapid turnover and constant change, describing this uncertainty and unpredictability as generative. Churn encourages the experimentation and innovation at the very heart of the creative process. Clearly, we should be hunting out Astroturf which is simply a new form of spam but we should also be enjoying the creative spark which drives something like Lonelygirl15 or Danger Mouse. We should, like the 19th century patrons of P.T. Barnum, take pleasure in trying to see through a good humbug. We should be going into all of this with our eyes wide open but we should also be prepared to accept impure motives and hybrid works that emerge at the nexus between different levels of cultural production.

Thanks to danah boyd, Zhan Li, and Anna Pauline Van Someren for information included in this post.

The Beauty of Brian Michael Bendis

For several posts now, I've been running an interview with Alan McKee, the editor of Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, a book designed to focus attention on the ways fans and consumers evaluate different forms of popular culture. McKee asked his contributors to do several things at once: first, to choose the "best of class" within a form of popular culture which we had deep investments and then to set about to justify that choice in terms of the criteria which consumers most often use to evaluate good and bad work in that space. I used the invitation as an excuse to write about superhero comics. From the start, it was clear that my preferences in comics have as much or more to do with their authors as with their artists. In many cases, I read pretty much everything published by certain writers: favorites include Robert Kirkman, Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Neil Gaiman, Ed Brubaker, and Brian Michael Bendis. Already to focus on superhero comics is to navigate between two fairly strong taste communities around comics:

Comic fans are sharply divided into two camps: on the one side, there are fans of comics as popular culture (with a focus on the creative reworking of genre elements and plays with continuity) and their voice is perhaps best represented by Wizard; on the other side, there are fans of comics as art (with a focus on aesthetic experimentation and unconventional content) and their voice is perhaps best represented by Comics Journal. At my local shop, the two types of books are divided off from each other by a partition designed to keep the kids from mangling the adult books, but also working to signal a certain cultural hierarchy at play. To praise Bendis as one of today's best writers is already to take sides since the Comics Journal crowd will look down their noses at you if you admit to reading superhero comics.

The most interesting contemporary comics fall somewhere between these two extremes - including work published by smaller companies like ABC, Oni, Image, Dark Horse, or Wildstorm which put their own spin on the superhero genre or works published by the boutique labels, such as Vertigo at DC or Max at Marvel, which are maintained by the mainstream publishers. Increasingly, the lines between mainstream and indie comics are breaking down. Much as indie filmmakers are getting a shot at directing Hollywood blockbusters, indie comics creators (such as Gilbert Hernandez, John Strum, or Peter Bagge) are venturing into the mainstream without risking their street cred.

I ended up choosing Bendis in part because he represented so many of the trends reshaping contemporary comics -- not the least of which was a the tendency discussed above to blur the lines between indie and mainstream comics. Bendis came from alternative comics and brought some of that sensativity to the mainstream.

My essay tries to determine what made Bendis a unique voice in the superhero genre (despite some profound differences in theme and audience across his various books) and also what made him exemplary of contemporary comics production. What follows are a few excerpts from the essay.

The Ultimate

In Ultimate Spiderman 28 (henceforth U.S.), M.J. comes racing into the Midtown High School library and asks her boyfriend, Peter Parker, whether he brought his costume. Rhino is smashing up downtown Manhattan and no one has been able to stop him. Asking M.J. to cover for his fourth period French class, he races to his locker and grabs his Spider-man costume (hidden in his knapsack), only to run into his Aunt May who is at school for a parent-teacher meeting. As Peter squirms in his chair, the teacher accuses him of being 'distracted' and 'unfocused' in class. Begging off, he races for the door, only to spot the school principal, and then spin off down another hallway. He cuts through the school cafeteria where he catches the lunch lady grumbling that the Rhino coverage is interrupting her soaps, then out the door, where he runs into his friend, Gwen, who is sobbing that nobody cares about her. Extracting himself from this emotional crisis, Peter races out of the school, stopping long enough to shout to M.J. to go see after Gwen. A few seconds later, Peter gets clocked by a football and chased by the school bullies, before scaling over the walls, scampering across rooftops, and riding on the tops of cars, arriving just in time to see Iron Man taking kudos for stopping the Rhino's rampage.

Whew! We've all had days like this.

I always wondered how even an ultra-nerd like Peter could manage to skip classes so often (all in the call of duty, of course) without ending up flunking out or spending the rest of his life in detention. From the start, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko conceived Spider-man as sharing the flaws and foibles of his teen readers . Forget Metropolis and Gotham City: Marvel set its stories in actual locations in Manhattan. They relied on the sudden introduction of real world problems, such as not having enough money to buy a new costume or not knowing how to explain why you just stood up your hot date, to increase audience identification. What counted as comic book realism in the 1960s doesn't necessarily work for contemporary kids. Through the Ultimate Spider-Man series, Brian Michael Bendis retools Ol' Spidey for a generation that has grown up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, creating a comic that is as hip and 'postmodern' as it gets.

Bendis has fleshed out the core characters, changing the way they dress and talk to reflect contemporary mallrat culture, but not altering their core. In this case, the supportive M.J., the concerned Aunt May, and the 'drama queen' Gwen are used as comic foils to amplify Peter's struggle to escape the gravitational pull of his high school. Bendis also reconceptualized some members of the Spider-man rogue's gallery to up their 'coolness' factor - turning the usually dorky Rhino into a powerful mecha-man who tosses city buses through Starbuck's windows. The well-crafted issue maintains a frantic pace that keeps you turning pages. It contrasts with previous issues, coming right after an angsty story arc that took us inside the head of the Green Goblin and almost cost M.J. her life. It builds on evolving character's relations, such as M.J.'s new involvement in Peter's superhero life; and it prepares for future plot developments, such as the growing rift in Gwen's family. Artist Mark Bagley distills the essence of the characters into telling gestures, such as M.J. waving frantically from an upper window for Peter to get moving, Peter staring off into space during the parent-teacher conference, or a frustrated Spider-Man watching as Iron Man throws his hands up in victory.

The Bendis Moment

Film critics used to write about 'the Lubitsch touch' . Ernest Lubitsch melded European sophistication with classic Hollywood storytelling, adding one more layer of suggestion to the basic building blocks of the romantic comedy. Today, comics fans might talk about the 'Bendis moment'. Bendis always adds his own distinctive twist to the familiar characters and situations of the superhero genre, creating 'memorable moments' which will be discussed, debated, and savored by the fan boys. Half the time Bendis infuriates us by doing the unthinkable; the other half, he rewards us by taking us places we never imagined we'd get to go; but no matter what, he produces comics we want to talk about. A Bendis moment can be as innocent as Peter Parker, sprawled on the floor cradling his crumpled Spider-Man costume and sobbing over his breakup with M.J. (U.S. 33) or as crude as the controversial sequence in Alias (1) (henceforth A), where it is implied that the protagonist, Jessica Jones is having anal sex with Luke Cage, one of the few African-American characters in the Marvel universe.

One of the most memorable Bendis moments came when Parker gets rescued by three of the hotest mutant 'babes' from the Ultimate X-men cast. As Spidey 'fans,' they are just tickled to death to meet him. The telepath Jean Grey gushes that he's the first guy she's met in months that hasn't tried to imagine her naked (U.S. 43). Across fourteen awkward panels, Bendis and Bagley cut between Peter and Jean, as he tries, without success, not to think of her naked and as she waits impatiently for him to get over it. Any guy who has wanted desperately to be 'better than the others' and has had their hormones get in the way must surely feel for Peter's predicament confronting a girl who can read his every conflicted thought. Such moments grow organically out of the interplay between characters we know and love and exploit the juxtaposition between the fantastical situations we associate with superhero comics and a much more mundane reality we live in most of the time.

Bendis, Who?

Bendis writes what industry insiders call 'buzz books,' managing to be a critical darling who racks up awards and a commercial success who tops the charts. Bendis has won both the Wizard award (from fans) and the Eisner award (from fellow pros) for best writer for the past two years. Most months, he writes four or five of the twenty five top-selling comics. Wizard has called Bendis the 'Michael Jordan of Marvel,' citing this most valuable player as one of the key factors behind the company's commercial and critical revival over the past few years . (Somewhere around here, I keep wanting to toss off a 'Bendis like Beckham' pun.) As Marvel president Bill Jemas explains, 'Brian delivers hundreds of thousands of fans every month. He makes all of those fans happy and brings them back'. Wonder Woman scribe Greg Rucka praises Bendis as the consummate professional, 'He has a complete command of the art. Every aspect of the writer's job, he can do it well, and understands it intuitively. He's got every trick in the toolbox and god knows, he knows how to use them.'

And to top it all, he is amazingly prolific, cranking out five to eight different titles every month over the past several years. Ultimate Spider-Man alone adds up to eighteen issues a year. When Marvel needed a pinch hitter for Ultimate X-Men, Bendis crossed over and added another biweekly title to his workload, even as he was helping to launch Ultimate Fantastic Four and knock off the Ultimate Six mini-series.

His commercial success and professionalism has earned Bendis the creative freedom to take risks and the power to reshape the Marvel universe. As Bendis notes, 'I get paid whether I kick ass or phone it in. Why not kick ass?'. And kick ass he does, month after month....

Bendis has said that his greatest excitement as a writer comes when he paints himself into a corner and then has to figure out how to get back out again. Bendis constantly takes risks that a lesser writer would avoid and then makes them pay off for the reader, inviting us to think about the superheroes, their rogues galleries, their supporting characters, and their worlds in fresh new ways. Sometimes that pisses off the old-timers. Bendis sparked controversy with some of his earliest work for Marvel from fans who felt that he was putzing around with Elektra, a character introduced by Frank Miller during his acclaimed run of Daredevil . ...

The recent history of the superhero genre has been marked by several movements between deconstructionist writers (such as Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, or Grant Morrison) who critiqued the genre's fascist fantasies, and reconstructionist writers (such as Mark Waid, Kurt Busiek, Mark Millar, Jeph Loeb, or Greg Rucka) who have sought to put the 'Wow!' back in the genre . Bendis's deft writing allows him to move back and forth between the two camps, chipping away at clichés, critiquing underlying assumptions, while at the same time offering the kind of slobberknocking fight scenes and high flying adventures that make comic fans grin. Each Bendis book offers a different angle on the superhero genre: depicting a young man learning the ropes and facing adult dismissals (Ultimate Spiderman), a more mature superhero whose world seems to be coming apart before his eyes (Daredevil), a former B-level superhero who sometimes has trouble getting the A-listers on the telephone (Alias), and a bunch of beat cops who have to unravel the scandals and conspiracies celebrity superheroes hope to hide from their tabloid-reading public (Powers). Bendis clearly loves the genre, but he's more than willing to take the piss out of it....

Dialogue

Wizard praises Bendis for 'dialogue that pops and snaps more than a fresh bowl of Rice Krispies.' ...

Superhero comics are notorious for their clunky or over-inflated dialogue, dating back to a time when the pictures were crude and the writers sometimes had to fill in plot information the artist never got around to drawing. So, you have the situation where characters describe things that would be obvious to anyone standing at the location or where villains spell out their entire plans. Sometimes the entire book is nothing but exposition as the writer tries to cram an ambitious story into far too few pages. Only belatedly did comic writers see dialogue as a means of defining the characters or setting the emotional tone. When Peter Parker first realizes that he has spider strength, Stan Lee has him exclaim, 'What's happening to me? I feel - different! As though my entire body is charged with some fantastic energy,' and then has him go into a long wonkish discussion of how his various powers parallel those of the common spider . (Come to think of it, maybe that is how the geekish protagonist would react!) Bendis deals with a similar discovery in Alias in a far more down to earth manner. An angry adolescent is trudging along through a city park, her mind million miles away, and then, suddenly, realizes that her feet are no longer touching the ground and that she has no idea how to land again. Her: 'Shit! Oh Shit!' economically expresses her shift between giddy excitement and gut-wrenching terror....

Bendis adopts more naturalistic patterns of communication, including a focus on the various ways people struggle, in real life, to adequately express their ideas. A recent anthology, Total Sellout, shares a series of his monologues, some autobiographical, others based on things he overheard on the street, which shows his early fascination with human speech patterns. Bendis loves to weave complex layers of word balloons across the page, allowing well-drawn character study to hold our interest in the absence of more visceral action sequences. This technique came into its own in Jinx, which includes rambling debates between various lowlife characters on such issues as the letterboxing of movies that recall the debate about Madonna videos that opens Reservoir Dogs or the famous Le Cheese Royale exchange in Pulp Fiction. ...

Critics accuse Bendis of being verbose and he certainly uses more words per page than anyone else. Yet, Bendis knows when to pull back and let his images speak for him, making effective use of wordless montages which convey the character's thought processes. Consider the moment in Ultimate Spider-Man 14 where the meat-headed Kong almost discovers Spiderman's secret identity but is unable to hold all of the pieces of information together in his mind; or the scene in Alias 21 where we see a teen-aged Jessica's thoughts as she masturbates to a pinup of Johnny Storm (ending with a close-up of her curling toes). Perhaps most spectacularly, an entire issue of Powers (31) includes only the grunts of subhuman apes as Bendis traces the origins of the superhero back to prehistoric times. Throughout Alias, Bendis contrasts the information-dump that Jessica receives from her clients with wordless shots showing the detective absorbing and reacting to the information....

A Bastard Art

Bendis himself sets the terms by which we evaluate his work. He told interviewers at Write Now!: 'I heard a quote from Sting, that rock-and-roll is a bastard art form. That there is no one thing that makes rock-and-roll, rock-and-roll, that it only really succeeds when somebody makes the conscious personal decision to pull something new into it from outside like jazz, country, or opera. Something vital happens then. I think comics are the same way. There is no one thing that makes a great comic. Each time someone's gone outside of comics and pulled something into it. For their own reasons, something really exciting happens. A lot of artists have done that, but not a lot of writers.'

Bendis has helped to revitalize the modern superhero comics by pulling into the genre a range of techniques which in other art forms insure naturalism: his reliance on fragmented and sometimes incomplete dialogue; his interest in documenting the perspectives of professional groups or youth subcultures; his attention to the mundane details of everyday life; his ability to allow characters to grow and develop over time. He talks about his comics alongside the work of writers like David Mamet or Richard Price, refusing to accept a second-class status for his own medium. Rather, his work does something theirs can not - build on a thirty or forty year history of our relationships with these characters, push these ideas into alternative realities and use them to comment on our own lived experiences, and, oh yeah, capture the hearts and imaginations of hundreds of thousands of teenagers.

For those of comics fans in the Boston area, you might be interested to know we are hosting a public lecture by Scott McCloud on his new book, Making Comics, this thursday, 5-7 pm, in the MIT Media Lab's Bartos Theater. It is a joint CMS-Media Lab event. For those outside the Boston area, we hope to provide a podcast of the event early next week.

Behind the Scenes: Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (Part Two)

This is the second part of a two part interview with Alan McKee, the editor and mastermind behind a fabulous new book, Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, which introduces what I see as a vital new approach for thinking about how we evaluate various forms of popular culture. The essays in the book combine anthropological and autobiographical insights -- both asking about their own evaluations and then reading them against larger taste communities. The result is an academic book which is fun to read and which will itself spark countless conversations as people debate what might constitute the "best of breed" in their favorite form of cultural production. The book is sure to also raise debates at academic conferences where evaluative judgements have long remained taboo (even though all of the decisions we make are shaped by often unexamined evaluations about which texts are worth studying, writing about, teaching, etc.) Early cultural studies sought to escape the shadow of high culture criteria as well as a history of insensitivity to work produced in alternative cultural traditions, yet it has in the process falsified its object of study. We ignore the degree to which evaluation and debating evaluations is central to the pleasure we take in popular culture. We ignore the kinds of popular aesthetics which shape these evaluations and allow to stand the myth of consumers as undiscriminating and popular culture as undifferentiated. And we essentially ignore the degree to which popular culture is, to borrow from my own writing, "the culture that sticks to your skin," (see my book, Hop on Pop: The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Culture) and thus can not be meaningfully understood from a traditional stance of academic discipline.

My hope is that aca/fen can, in fact, break down this inhibition about evaluation while at the same time, develop new conceptual frameworks for thinking about how evaluation works in fan communities. This is why I am so happy to see McKee and his contributors do such a spectacular job in realizing his goals for this project.

You are clearly critical of the "belief that consumers of mass culture lack the ability for discernment." What do you see as the negative consequences of this position in terms of writing about popular culture? What do we gain by looking more closely at the institutions and practices where popular evaluation occurs?

It's funny. Every Cultural Studies academic agrees theoretically now that consumers are not brainwashed, that they make active choices about what to consume, how to consume it, and that the interpretations they make of it can never be predicted by the producers. That's all common sense. But at the same time there's this Freudian disavowal going on - 'I know very well ... but all the same'. We all know very well that the masses are, like us, thinking human beings who choose what to consume ... but all the same ... Rupert Murdoch gets to decide what he puts in his papers ... and there would be a genuine demand for social debates on television, if the capitalist companies didn't control what was shown ... and there's no such thing as 'real' choice in capitalism, because the producers make sure that the range of what is available is limited, so that nothing that would genuinely challenge capitalism is ever shown .... Etc, etc etc - all the same old clichés and worries about the masses being brainwashed by the culture industry!

I had this conversation with a friend - a cultural theorist - where I was telling her about this book. I was talking about how so much cultural theory relies on the idea that audiences take whatever they're given. It's an attitude that underlies concerns about globalization, about media ownership, about dumbing down, about ideology and hegemony, and so on. And she said 'Are there really dinosaurs who still believe that kind of stuff?'. That was the word she used - dinosaurs - as though such an idea was so old fashioned that she couldn't imagine any living human being thinking in that way.

And the conversation then moved on to populist, trashy current affairs shows, and I was saying how interesting I find them as a way of understanding the culture and interests of middle aged, non-university-educated women - the demographic for those shows. Because by watching the successful, popular ones, you find out what that audience thinks is important and interesting. And she immediately disagreed - she was saying things like 'But there's no evidence they actually like the programs - they only watch them because there's no choice'. She knew very well that audiences won't take whatever they're given ... but all the same ...

I asked her which theorists she liked, and she was telling me about, I can't remember, Nancy or somebody, and I said, 'But you don't really like Nancy, you didn't make a rational decision to read him out of the theorists on offer - that's just what you've been given'. And she actually said, 'That's really rude'. And then she realized that that was exactly what she'd just said about the viewers of A Current Affair.

And so I think that this is the key thing for our cultural theorizing - this is the insight that we get from studying these systems of popular evaluation. Of course no consumer has infinite choice - just as intellectuals don't have an infinite choice about the theoretical books that they read. But that doesn't mean that there's no intellectual work involved in the choices of what to consume. At any given time in Australia, even in prime time, three quarters of the population aren't watching television. If there's 'nothing on', people will switch it off and do something else. I mean, that's so obvious it's not worth saying - and yet we forget that it's true. So we have to remember that although intellectuals may have the luxury of time and resources to communicate their thinking about culture, and that may separate us out as a class, the basic intellectual work of making decisions about culture is common. All human beings are thinking creatures. And if we can remember that, and not dismiss it with ' ... but all the same', I think our theories of culture would benefit.

The book's contributors deal with a broad range of different forms of popular culture. Do you see different criteria at work as people talk about serial killer novels, motorcycles, sports players, and running shoes, or is there such a thing as a "popular aesthetic" that shapes our response to these various

sites of cultural production?

Again, this is an interesting contrast with the tradition of aesthetic philosophy, which tends towards unitary aesthetic systems. There's a tendency for people to seek out 'the' single, correct set of criteria for evaluating culture. This ties back into the binary, of course - everything in culture can be placed within a single dualistic system - popular culture vs art - and only art has a proper aesthetic system, therefore there can (/should) only be a single aesthetic system.

But I think that's nonsense. I think that the whole popular culture/high culture binary is nonsense. The problem, as I see it, is that the way that this binary has emerged is that fans of high culture have a pretty good idea of what that is - it's the culture that's enjoyed by people with tertiary education. Having established that, the problem then is that the definition of popular culture becomes simply 'everything that's not high culture'. It's all defined in relation to high culture. Which is silly - why would you make high culture - or 'art' - the centre of your definitions and models of culture? In practice, that means that 'popular culture' then includes everything that isn't high culture - even minority cultural practices that most people would have a problem with (the casual gay sex of cruisingforsex.com); or radical cultural practices that reject and attack the mainstream (community media). It doesn't really make sense to lump together everything that isn't art as though it were all the same.

A better approach, I think, is to think lots of different 'subcultures'--including 'art' as just one more subculture - alongside mainstream entertainment as another particular subculture, alongside sexual subcultures, alternative experimental subcultures, radical subcultures and so on.

And so there are indeed multiple aesthetic systems for interpreting different kinds of culture. Even within a given community, there will be competing aesthetic systems. And I'm not sure that we can pull out any general rules about them. From reading the chapters in this book, a few things stood out for me. You can find some continuity with literary aesthetic systems, in a concern for characters which are psychologically believable. And there's an element that came through in several writers that many consumers like to find the less popular and less well known examples of their genre, the whole 'I like their early stuff' approach to evaluating culture - the connoisseurs of popular culture can be terrible snobs just as much as art fans. But I don't think there's such a thing as 'the' popular aesthetic system.

You refuse to draw sharp lines between popular and high art here. This is a conversation we've been having on the blog -- whether we can be "fans" of high culture or whether the aura and institutional practices surrounding it tends to restrict how we engage with its contents. What can we take from the study of "Beautiful Things in Popular Culture" that we might apply back to the study of traditional high culture?

I know that this is a bit controversial, but personally I don't believe there's any difference between the fans of popular culture and the fans of high culture. I've recently been doing some research into Theory fans - people who read cultural Theory for pleasure. And their practices and pleasures seem to be exactly the same as Star Trek fans, for example. Theory fans buy the books. They buy books of 'fan writing' - books written by other fans who really like Theory and want to tell people how good it is. They read all of this for pleasure. They go to conventions/conferences, to meet other fans, and argue about their favorite bits, and about the interpretation of them. It's all just fan behaviour. I found a great example recently, of a flyer advertising a Derrida conference, where the organizers said quite explicitly that the conference would 'celebrate the enduring and urgent political significance and relevance of his work'. It's celebration! You can't get more fannish than that. And you can see the same thing for Shakespeare fans, and classical music fans, and performance art fans, etc etc etc.

Of course, there are differences about how such fandoms are treated in culture. As a fan of high culture, one is encouraged to think of oneself as a 'connoisseur'. The myth is that there are real, 'rational' reasons to like high culture (because it is, 'really', 'good'), while fans of popular culture are somehow excessive or misguided in their loyalty. But I can't find any evidence to support this view - I'm pretty sure it's just prejudice.

Many of the essays in the collection are deeply personal: people dig deep into their own memories to talk about the place of these "beautiful things" in their own lives and to establish their own credentials for offering evaluations. Much academic work seeks to expel such autobiographical impulses; what do we gain by including them in the study of popular culture?

I think you're right that academic writing as a genre seeks to expel personal reactions to texts. I've worked like that for a long time myself. But I think that ultimately, it's not intellectually sustainable. For example, look at Deleuze fans. Why are they so excited about Deleuze's ideas, why do they want to write about them, and go to conferences about them? The answer can't be found just in Deleuze's writing, because there are plenty of intelligent, informed people who have read Deleuze and just shrug their shoulders and say 'Whatever'. The reason for their passion is in the relationship between them as readers and the writings of Deleuze. It's something about their own character, their intellectual and emotionalformation, their upbringing, that means that they are the kind of people who respond to that kind of writing. Again, the recent research I've done on Theory fans has been very interesting. Many of them talked about the thrill they get when they read something that's initially incomprehensible, and then finally understand it. They talk about that thrill, combined with the secret, illicit pleasure of knowing that other people don't understand it - that you're special, you've cracked the code.

And so we can't just talk about texts - any texts, Theory, popular culture, etc. We always have to talk about the relationship - between the texts, and the specific audience, or perhaps even viewer, who is interpreting them.

Behind the Scenes: Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (Part One)

A little while ago, I raised the question of whether one can be a "fan" of high culture and was pleased to see a high level of interest in this question. I am excited to report that there is a new book, Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, which pushes even deeper into the question of how we evaluate various forms of popular culture and how those evaluations do or do not connect with the ways we assess work in high culture. Alan McKee, who teaches in the Creative Industires program at Queensland University of Technology (which I increasingly think of as the sister program to Comparative Media Studies), has brought together a world class mix of academics, fans, and journalists, who share with us what they see as "best of breed" examples across a range of different sites of popular aesthetics. So we get Will Brooker on the Best Batman Story (The Dark Knight Returns), Sue Turnbull on the Best Serial Killer Novel (Red Dragon), Thomas McLaughlin on the Best Basketball Player (Michael Jordan), Simon Frith on the Best Disco Record ("Never Give Up"), Sara Gwenllian Jones on the Best Villain in Xena:Warrior Princess (Alti), and John Hartley on the Best Propaganda (Humphrey Jennings, The Silent Village).

As this sample of the categories and judgements suggest, all of these claims are open to debate and that's precisely the point. Contributors were asked to offer "defensible" but not "definitive" choices and then to deal precisely with the terms of debate that might shape the judgements we make in these particular sectors. If the categories here seem like a grab bag -- and trust me, there are some even more surprising categories here such as the Best Motorbike, the Best Australian Romance Novelist, and the Best Website for Men who have Sex with Other Men -- then it is because popular culture is not a unified field, not one thing that can be simply contrasted with high culture. (Of course, high culture is also not one thing but that's a debate for another day.)

We would never judge Lisistrada, Everyman, Mother Courage, Oklahoma, A Noh drama, and A Doll's House by the same criteria -- each gets read according to terms defined minimally by a specific tradition and historical period and in some cases, by specific artists. (I never stop laughing at the college journalist who reviewed a Brecht play and complained that he just couldn't identify with the characters.) So, why should we apply a single set of criteria to talk about popular culture and why in the world should that criteria get defined by the norms of high culture?

I will admit that I am biased since I have a piece in this particular collection -- The Best Contemporary Mainstream Superhero Comics Writer (Brian Michael Bendis) -- which I will excerpt here in a few days time. But I have rarely enjoyed reading any "academic" book as much as this one. McKee is an editor who values lively and personally engaged writing, someone who pushed all of the contributors to write to a general readership, and for once, they listened. I never knew academic prose could be this fun! And underlying it all are some powerful ideas about how we value the culture we consume.

I wanted to share some of McKee's own thinking on this topic with my readers, so I asked him to address some core questions about the book's premises and will run the interview here in two parts.

What constitutes a "beautiful thing" in the book's terms and how do we recognize

one when we see it?

A 'beautiful thing' is the best example of an area of culture - the best serial killer novel, pair of sneakers, disco record ... I decided to use 'beautiful' rather than 'best' because it ties us into the tradition of aesthetic judgments that has been jealously guarded by fans of high culture. And I love the idea that, in the case of the chapter on 'the best website for men who have sex with men', that webpages full of arse-fucking can be, in their own way, 'beautiful'.

And how do we judge what's 'the best' in a given area? How do we recognize a beautiful thing when we see it? The key here is that 'we' might not recognize it - 'we' - cultural theorists, researchers, academics - may in fact have to speak to the experts in the area, and ask them to explain to us what is beautiful and why it is so.

That's a challenging idea for some Cultural Studies academics. Because there's a still a strong remnant in Cultural Studies of the Literary Studies idea that what distinguishes us as academics - the reason that we're worth our salaries - is because we've learned how to 'read' texts better than other people. Traditionally in Literary Studies one learned to read more 'sensitively', to understand the art in books that common people simply couldn't see (my first degree was in Literary Studies - in fact I got a medal for the 'Most Distinguished Shakespearean Scholar' at the University of Glasgow! - so I'm familiar with this tradition). In Cultural Studies, it's a similar thing - except we're trained to think that our readings are better, not because they're more sensitive to the art, but because we can see the 'truth' of ideology, exploitation, hidden capitalist messages, that the masses don't see because they're blinded by hegemonic processes, or not fully educated ...

And so, to abandon that idea, and to think that we might actually be interested in - respectful of, and learn from - consumers talking about the interpretations that they make of texts ... well, it's a challenging idea for a lot of academics!

That of course, leads on to the question - if we're not intellectually superior to the masses, and they don't need us to lead them out of the darkness and show them the correct, 'true', anti-capitalistic interpretations of culture, then what is the purpose of academics? In brief I think that the answer lies in focusing on the 'anthropological' element of defining cultures. Nobody suggests that anthropologists should be telling the people they observe that their culture is wrong, and they're blind not to see that. Personally, I don't agree with some of the claims that anthropology makes to objectivity. But it's still acknowledged that anthropology - trying to understand how a culture operates - can produce valuable knowledge.

A central goal of this book is to revitalize the place of evaluation in the writing about popular culture. Why do you think Cultural Studies has moved so far away from a focus on evaluation and what have we lost as a consequence?

I completely understand why Cultural Studies has a problem with evaluation - I've avoided it myself for many years. It's because there has been so little awareness by academics in any area - including in Cultural Studies - of the aesthetic systems of popular culture. That meant that you could pretty much guarantee that whenever anybody said 'we have to reintroduce aesthetics/evaluation into Cultural Studies', what they meant was 'we have to reintroduce high-culture aesthetic systems into the study of popular culture - and start studying television programs in terms of literary values such as philosophical themes, and references to T S Eliot', and so on. Which is, of course, completely the wrong way to go about things.

Why have we thought that 'aesthetic systems' automatically means 'high culture's aesthetic systems?'. Well, it's been hard to get away from the idea that an aesthetic system must be unitary. The idea that we could have multiple, irreconcilable, overlapping aesthetic systems coexisting has taken a long time to get established. I suppose it's because, in order to do that, you pretty much have to throw out everything in the philosophy of aesthetics from Kant onwards and start again. Which I'm pretty happy to do, personally. But I know that not everyone is!

What has really surprised - and upset - me, working in Cultural Studies is the extent to which Cultural Studies has managed to smuggle traditional forms of aesthetic evaluation back in by the back door. We don't say that art is superior to popular culture because it reveals insight into universal truths about humanity. Oh no - we say that art is superior to popular culture because art is politically progressive, and genuinely challenges capitalism, whereas popular culture is inextricably tied up in the capitalist economy within which it is produced .... It's so depressing to hear this kind of nonsense. It really is just traditional snobbery dressed up in new arguments. And that has been the place that evaluation has played in Cultural Studies. We've kind of forgotten what we all know to be true, about the power relations and class relations involved in making judgments about what is good and bad culture - and fallen right back into lazy thinking about art being superior to mass culture. I blame Adorno. I mean, you read his work on 'The culture industry', and it's so obvious that he doesn't know anything about popular culture, he's never consumed any popular culture - in fact, it seems like he's never even spoken to anybody who's ever consumed any popular culture!

So we've thoughtlessly accepted old prejudices about cultural value, smuggled in via the back door, which is one problem. And a second problem is that by refusing to study evaluative judgments in an anthropological sense, we've actually accepted the myth, perpetuated by the snobs, that mass culture is all the same. We actually play into their hands. But you can make an anthropological, or perhaps a sociological, study of aesthetic systems - one that asks how the consumers of popular culture make these judgments. And that isn't the opposite of aesthetic thinking - it's directly linked to it. It means that you can ask people 'Why do you love this program, this book, this comic, so much?'. And then listen to their answers. It's a simple idea - and yet, it hasn't been done before.

The question you posed to your contributors -- what constitutes the "best" in class within a given form of popular culture -- is the stuff of many barroom conversations. I suppose that's part of the point: we can't talk about popular

culture without debating values and evaluation. But what do we as academics bring to that discussion which wasn't already a part of fan knowledge and expertise?

I gestured towards this question before - if we're not telling people that their interpretations are wrong, what is our function? How do we earn our hefty Professorial salaries, with associated benefits? As I said above, there is an anthropological function, trying to understand cultures better. And more than this, we can then act as translators, letting groups know about each other. The information that we gather is fan knowledge. We can bring that together, synthesise it, and put it into forms that different groups can access. Our skills here are in editing, building networks, understanding genres and communication and so on. And ultimately we can then help different parts of culture to be aware of each other. That's an extremely important - and a very political - thing to do. I'm an old fashioned utopian, and my vision of the ideal world is a soppy, hippie, love-drenched place where people actually find ways to live together. I reveal this at one point in the book where I get all misty-eyed and say "knowing that there are people who do love and think about and discuss things that don't engage me isn't a threat to my way of thinking. It's a source of delight. The more joy that's in the world, the better for all of us, I say". I know - I'm a sad old hippie. But it does seem to me that one of the most positive aspects of our mature capitalist democracies is that different groups in society are becoming more and more familiar to each other, and there's an increasing interchange of ideas between cultures - across races, genders, sexualities and nationalities. I think that pretty much everybody would agree that the average, non-university-educated white man, for example, currently knows more about Black culture, or women's culture, or queer culture, than they have at any point in the history of Western culture, simply because of the increasing visibility and recognition of those cultures in mass popular entertainment.

I'm afraid I also have to say that one of the main forces working against such cultural exchange is humanities academics and cultural theorists, who want to insist that there is only one good form of culture - rational, informed, artistic, high-quality public debate - and that other forms of culture - Black culture or women's culture or queer culture, rap, debates about body image, emotional forms of communication and so on - are worthless. It bothers me that 'my people' (academics) are struggling so hard against what seems to me to be one of the most positive aspects of our cultures.