October 24, 2012

Derrais Carter and Nicholas Yanes Talk About “Iconic Obama”

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The U.S. Presidential Election is now less than two weeks away and counting. All of the major media events that pundits pay attention to — from the conventions through the debates — have already taken place. Ad buys have reached record numbers, thanks to the contributions of a few wealthy Americans. The producers of memes are working overtime to try to keep up with “Mansplaining Ryan,” “Binders of Women,” “Bayonets and Horses,” and “Romneysia” related Tumblr sites. And the race is still so close that few feel safe predicting the outcomes, with the oh so precise polling data spreading “all over the map.”
So what’s left to say? I recently was sent a new book, The Iconic Obama, 2007-2009, which invites us to consider our first impressions of this remarkable candidate, as he made his way from First Time Senator through to becoming the first black president of the United States. From the start, he was closely linked to developments in popular culture and someone whose campaign was aggressively testing the waters in terms of the innovative use of new and emerging technologies. It’s sometimes hard to recall how exciting that Obama campaign has been compared to the largely negative, largely joyless, and largely top-down model which the Obama campaign has adopted this time around. The book explores both how Obama drew on popular culture and new media to frame his campaign and the ways that popular media responded to the energy which surrounded Obama in 2008, especially as it relates to constructions of race in contemporary America.

So, I contacted the two editors of Iconic Obama — Derrais Carter and Nicholas Yanes — to reflect a bit on how the Obama legend was created and how it is being deployed/managed/shelved throughout the current campaign. Along the way, I am sharing some emblematic examples of Obama-related media, which may help inform our discussion. For example, we might compare the “snarky” tone of this 2012 campaign ad attacking Romney with the even more sarcastic advertisement which the McCain campaign released in 2008 attacking Obama:

Or perhaps we might discuss what’s being said about Obama and his constituencies through these two GOP spots, the first released in 2010, the second part of the current campaign:

 

Your book is called “The Iconic Obama.” How are you defining Iconic? Aren’t all presidents iconic? It’s hard to be more iconic than having your face carved on the side of a mountain or printed on a postage stamp. What makes Obama a particularly or distinctively iconic figure in our culture?

 

Derrais Carter: Yes. Presidents are iconic in that they represent the United States of America. This is evidence in monuments, postage stamps, libraries, etc. What captured us the most about Obama was the proliferation of representations stretching across mediums and communities throughout the globe.

For me, race was a contributing factor in defining Obama’s iconic status. Foregoing a rehearsal of debates about dominant representations of black people in American media, I will say that we should take seriously what it means to attach and/or detach race from our readings of the American presidency. In the context of the U.S. popular culture, we have seen this in the New Yorker cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama adorned in “terrorist” garb. Similarly, the infamous “beer summit” following the arrest of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates challenges the way that we think about race and the American presidency by situating us between discourses of race and political leadership.

 

Nicholas Yanes: While many presidents may have been popular enough to be voted into office, I wouldn’t state that every US president galvanized the public’s imagination in a manner that Obama has.  After all, not every president appears on Mount Rushmore or on US currency.  Yes, Obama and recent presidents did have electronic mass media to broadcast their faces and campaign logos across the country, something that presidents like Taylor, Fillmore, and Pierce didn’t have access to, but there seems to be timelessness quality already forming around Obama’s legacy.  While several of his policies build upon many of Bush’s policies, there is a desire by both his opponents and supporters to frame President Obama as though he has set the United States on a course completely counter to what has been done before.

In addition to being the nation’s first African American President, he also inspired a base in a manner few presidents have done before hand.  While many of his supporters may not be as enthusiastic in the 2012 election as they were in 2008, there is still a large swath of the population that not only supports his policies, but support a presidency that they passionately project on to him.

In many ways, one of the key things that defines Obama as uniquely “Iconic” is not just that he is fairly popular, but that he has created a brand about himself that allows people to see what they want in his work.  It’s a stroke of genius that allowed him to build the campaign juggernaut in 2008 that got him into the White House.

 

As some of your contributors note, there has been a long history of portrayals in both comedy and drama of what the first black president might look like. How have these popular representations helped to frame our understanding of Obama? To what degree has he had to struggle with popular representations of blackness?

 

Yanes:  I think the primary representation of blackness that Obama has had to struggle with is not that of portrayals of black presidents, but that of “The Angry Black Man.”  Still present in much of popular media, I’ve always felt that one reason why Obama’s opposition was so dedicated to ridiculing him, even going so far as for one person to call him a liar while he was giving a State of the Union Address, was because many knew that Obama showing anger in public would come back to haunt him.  With movies, television shows and other media frequently depicting black men as unreasonably and physically threatening, and this stereotype clearly cemented into popular imagination, I feel that Obama has been kept from passionately defending his record for fear that he would be seen as “too aggressive.”

In regards to the specific nature of your question, I’d like to turn to Dr. Justin S. Vaughn’s contribution to this collection, “Character-in Chief: Barack Obama and His Pop Culture Predecessors.”  In this essay, Vaughn writes, “Upon consideration of the actual substance of the few portrayals of black presidents in American film and television history, it becomes quite evident that the journalistic trope about how the David Palmers and Tom Becks of Hollywood paved the way for America’s first African American president are not only poorly supported; they are flawed and false.”  Vaughn goes on to conclude by writing “Indeed, a far more plausible statement to make is that Barack Obama became the nation’s forty-fourth president not because of Dennis Haysbert’s portrayal of his fictional predecessor, not to mention those by Chris Rock and Deebo (Tommy Lister), but rather in spite of it. Stated otherwise, the 2008 election was less an example of life imitating art than of it defying the expectations of popular entertainment.” (The Iconic Obama, pg. 60)

Overall, while it is understandably desirable to find evidence of popular culture setting the groundwork for President Obama’s election, there is just little evidence to support that fictional black presidents did much to accomplish this goal.

 

I would argue that the campaign spot which Samuel R. Jackson recently released in support of Obama might represent one of the most compelling spot to emerge so far from the 2012 campaign. How does this spot play with the “post-racial” framing of Obama in the 2008 election? What aspects of popular culture and blackness does Jackson bring to Obama’s Iconic status?

 

Yanes:  One thing that I have felt is missing from most discussions of the “Wake the F&*K Up” ad is that was created by the Jewish Council for Education and Research.  This is the same organization that produced the pro-Obama video, “The Great Schlep” featuring Sarah Silverman for the 2008 election; yet the “Wake the F&*K Up” ad is devoid of any specific references to issues specific to the Jewish-American community, and has no explicit references to any religious issues or imagery.  I bring this up because I believe that any discussion of a popular campaign ad should acknowledge those behind its creation.

 

As to Samuel L. Jackson and the issue of blackness, it’s important to note that since his role in Pulp Fiction, Jackson has crafted a persona of being a tough, direct, no nonsense man that always has an aura of authority.  While these characteristics are clearly in line with the black male protagonists of blaxploitation films, Jackson has not only made these elements his own, he has made them acceptable to mainstream American audiences.

With that said, “How does this spot play with the ‘post-racial’ framing of Obama in the 2008 election?”  I don’t know.  I feel that the notion of the United States being ‘post-racial’ overlooks clear disparities between peoples of different ethnic backgrounds and is often deployed as a means to argue that issues of race and racial prejudices are no longer relevant.  Though I’m light skinned, I am an Hispanic American and I don’t see evidence that the nation has truly moved past issues surrounding race.

As for the ads relationship to popular culture, it does seem more reminiscent of the popular entertainment materials produced in 2008.  Overall, I feel that one of this ad’s main goals is to inspire not just the support President Obama had in 2008, but the fandom his campaign created.

 

Carter: The ad sadly reinforces the idea that a post-racial America literally resides in a white suburban household and a quick examination of cultural texts referenced in the ads suggest as much. I find Jackson’s role particularly intriguing.

 

When Adam Mansbach’s book Go the F**k to Sleep came out last year, it became an instant hit. The book’s reputation picked up when Jackson recorded an humorous audio version of it. Nick is right to link Jackson’s success to the “no nonsense” demeanor, but I find it remarkably odd that during the presidential election, there’s an ad that features a black man “magically” appearing in a suburban white home and scaring three generations to get out and vote. The widespread post-racial lore leftover from the 2008 campaign is certainly the driving force.

 

Also, I get that the message to “Wake the F*ck Up!” is provocative and funny especially coming from Samuel L. Jackson and a child actor, but this isn’t the first time Jackson has told us to “wake up.” Does anybody remember Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing (1989)? In it, Jackson plays a radio dj who tells us to “wake up” . Though  This gesture is a recurring practice in Lee’s films.We also see in School Daze (1988).

 

Lee wants his audience to awaken from the racial slumber that has so greatly affected the nation and communities of color in particular. The ad is intended to wake voters up and propel them to the polls. This can’t be done if there’s too much “race talk.” Even after 4 years of critical commentary on race during the Obama administration, there’s still a need to reach back to 2008 galvanize the same supporters with the same strategies. It’s definitely a step back.

 

Bios

 

Derrais Carter is an American Studies doctoral candidate at the University of Iowa. His dissertation examines representations of the New Negro in Washington, D.C. His research interests include gender studies, performance studies, and black popular culture.

 

Nicholas Yanes is currently an American Studies PhD candidate (ABD) and Dean’s Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Iowa.  His professional and academic interests are Early US History, Contemporary Popular Culture, and the Industries of Popular Entertainment – specifically, comic books, movies & video games.  He freelance writes for Scifipulse.net, and the Casual Gaming Association’s gaming magazine, Casual Connect, and its industry resource, GameSauce.  He is the co-editor of and contributed to his first book project, The Iconic Obama.  His dissertation will analyze the corporate evolution of EC Comics & MAD Magazine, and he is set to defend it in March 2013.

 

Filed Under: book shelf, civic media, interviews
September 28, 2012

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part Three)

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Today’s civil rights movements, such as the struggles over the DREAM act, are more likely to play out in digital media than through broadcast media, and once again, the debates seem to want to focus on digital media as technology, rather than as a set of social, cultural, and political practices. What lessons might we take from your work on 1960s television to help us understand the role of new media in contemporary political resistance movements?

 

Let’s remember that television news in the early 1960s was the era’s “new media,” as digital media like Twitter and Facebook are today.  Any successful social change movement is going to want to exploit and make use of the newest communication tools of its era.  Today it’s social media.

These forms of media obviously do somewhat different things than “old media” like television – the form of communication and contact is different, appeal to audiences is different.  I hear the term “Twitter Revolution” and it puts my teeth on edge.  Twitter no more caused the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement than television caused the civil rights movement or the anti-Vietnam war movement.  In both cases, social change movements used the communication tools of the day and certainly the tools have an impact on how one can communicate, who one can reach, how quickly we can organize, and all the rest.

What concerns me is the centering on the technology as technology and the utopian discourses that surround it all.  As far as digital media, I think Morozov’s The Net Delusion is a useful corrective to the notion that new social media are inherently liberatory.  Social change movements create the impetus for social change – and that requires the hard work of organizing.  Television coverage and social media tools help, but they don’t substitute for organizing and getting lots of people together in real time and space pressing a change agenda and dialoguing with others and confronting others about it.  Some of this can occur in virtual spaces (I think Facebook and Twitter can be great organizing tools – mostly because they are fast and efficient), but I still would argue that social change activists do have to get into the streets and into public spaces as Occupy did – and as the civil rights movement did. 

One of the most important contributions of your book is your focus on reception, specifically the ways that different groups (not simply black vs. white or north vs. south, but different groups of white southerners, say) used television content to stage debates about what forms of social change were or were not acceptable. Too often, we end up with pretty univocal accounts of how southerners responded to the civil rights movement. What were some of the core points of difference that surface when you look at audience response to these broadcasts?

It’s pretty easy to stereotype white Southerners in the civil rights era: either benighted, evil or buffoonish racists or latter-day Atticus Finches taking on the good fight for victimized blacks.  I was interested in really trying to understand how white Southerners responded to the fundamental challenge to their segregationist world view when national media, network television in particular, throws a nationwide spotlight onto race relations in their locales, in particular Birmingham and Selma.

Working with the very large number of letters to the editor I found in Alabama newspapers, along with editorials and commentary that directly addressed media coverage I wanted to analyze and provide interpretive readings of these responses.  One thing I found was a significant degree of media awareness and savvy among white Southerners – they were far more aware of the workings of the media than were non-Southerners or African American commentary in the black press.

In fact, during the key civil rights years (early-mid 1960s) I was struck by how little discussion of the media I found in the black press.  It was like, since the media wasn’t a “problem” for the black empowerment movement, the medium as medium tended to disappear.  The media was telling the truth, “reflecting” what was really happening in the South, so there wasn’t the felt need to interrogate how the media was operating.  At least, that’s my attempt to hypothesize about the dearth of discourse about media in the black press during this period.

The situation is very different in the Alabama press.  Lots of attention to the role played by national media and particularly the “new media”: television.   And since most of these Southerners didn’t want to believe that what they were seeing on their TVs was true, they had to explain what was going on.  There were a lot of accusations that King and the movement merely wanted “publicity.”  Publicity for what?  Well, King was power mad or wanted to curry influence in Washington.  The movement’s stated reasons for the publicity campaigns couldn’t be grappled with.

These Southerners were, of course, correct that King and the movement staged marches and demonstrations to get media attention: they needed publicity on a national scale.  The movement, on the other hand, could never admit that they were staging “media events.”  White Southerners could see this, but for the most part had to stop right there.  To engage the next question: why do these marchers want this national attention, what are they marching for and against, would lead to scary answers.

If the Southern white worldview is founded, as it was, on the premise that segregation works for everyone and that blacks are just as content with the situation as whites, then to really engage the fundamental question profoundly threatens that worldview.  So many white Southerners had to evade and look for other things to focus on: the “Northern-ness” of network television, for instance.  Or media bias: why the focus on bad race relations in Selma when blacks and whites are killing each other in New York subways?  Why doesn’t the media focus on racism in the North?  Valid questions, but they do help to evade the big issue about Jim Crow and voter disenfranchisement.

Occasionally with some letter writers and editorialists, the media images broke through: especially during the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, particularly when white volunteers got murdered.  In a number of cases, there were anguished concerns about the “image” of Alabama that the rest of the country is getting: what does this say about Alabama?  Who are we?  How are we going to have to change?  I see these as cracks in the hegemonic segregationist armour and clues to how a previously naturalized worldview starts slowly to disintegrate.

As a historian of reception practices, the one thing I wanted to try to do was avoid taking a condescending attitude to these segregationist discourses and the people who were producing this discourse.  It’s easy to feel superior and know that these folks were on the wrong side of history.  They didn’t know that.  I

n some ways I found Northerners, particularly those who responded to the East Side/West Side episodes that explored race relations topics in Northern locales, as equally blinkered.  Even though these episodes were clearly marked as occurring in New York City and its environs, numerous letter writers would discursively locate the problem back to the South.  The real race problem was there; Southerners were the ones who should be watching these shows to learn about the plight of black people.   “Dumb” white Southerners were the problem, no matter where blacks faced oppression and discrimination.

One of the surprising discoveries you made was that while the networks did cover aspects of the March on Washington “live,” they cut away from what we now see as the key moments in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. What do you think motivated that decision?

All three networks carried significant amounts of live coverage of the March on Washington which occurred, by the way, on a Wednesday.  Nowadays it’s no spectacular feat to get masses of people to Washington for a march, but they always happen on the weekend.  Try to get a quarter of a million people to the national Mall on a weekday!

Along with the live coverage during the day, CBS that evening provided a prime time news programme that both recapped the events of the day and provided background about the March.  For people interested in the March, CBS’s prime time coverage is probably where they first got their sense of what happened.  Now this is the pre-sound bite era.  The news special provided long excerpts for quite a number of the speeches that preceded King’s.

Finally we get to King who provided the final speech of the day.  King’s speech can be divided into two halves: the first part provides some rationale for why people are massed at the Mall and why blacks are not satisfied with the racial status quo or the pace of change.  The second part of the speech is the one we all know: the soaring oratory of “I have a dream” and King’s vision of an America redeemed.  So, when CBS news personnel make their decision of what to excerpt from the speech, what do they go with?

Believe it or not, they cut away just as King launches into “I have a dream.”  When I first saw this news programme at the CBS News Archive, my jaw just about hit the floor when I realized that the most important words of the most important speech of the 20th century ended up on the cutting room floor.  It’s a pretty major journalistic gaffe.  But why?

I suggest that in 1963, reporters and news personnel didn’t know what to do with “I have a dream.”  King isn’t speaking politically any more; he isn’t given a list of grievances.  He is preaching.  Drew Hansen in his book about the speech really helped me to understand what the journalistic decision-making must have been.  King was no longer a political leader, he was now a visionary prophet, akin to Isaiah in the Bible.  This wasn’t a King that journalists were familiar with – outside of black churches, no one had really heard King speaking like this.

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Television and New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

Filed Under: book shelf, civic media, Civic Paths, interviews
September 26, 2012

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part Two)

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You suggest that the news media made “common cause” with the civil rights movement in bringing some of their concerns to the American public. What motivated the national news media to embrace this story? What were the limits of their commitment to the cause?

 

It was a limited common cause. Around issues such as integration of schools and public spaces, along with voting rights, the media was largely supportive.  But Presidents Kennedy and Johnson also embraced those goals.  The news media, television in particular, tended to be very positively inclined to JFK and was as well to LBJ in the early period of his administration when he appeared to be trying to carry out the Kennedy agenda, particularly the Civil Rights Act that passes in 1964.  The legislative goals of the movement were “legitimated” by the fact that there was significant support among both Democratic and Republican officials outside the South. These were somewhat less partisan times, certainly in media coverage.  Television news deferred quite a bit to the president.

But one thing surprised me as I examined TV news coverage.  Reporters tended to become far more critical of civil rights activists and civil rights campaigns when things turned violent.  In reading transcripts of NBC coverage of the sit-in movement, I was surprised to discover that the reporter refused to identify who was being violent.  The reporter kept using the passive voice so it wasn’t clear that white segregationists were the ones pummeling sit-in demonstrators.

At other times, however, when the violence was so clearly marked between victim and aggressor, there was less criticism of the civil rights activists.  When voting rights marchers in Selma were brutally gassed and beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in full view of a battery of cameras, there was no attempt to suggest that the marchers were participating in creating the mayhem.  However, in another news story from Selma that I viewed, the CBS reporter was somewhat critical of very youthful demonstrators who, unlike their elders, did not present docile bodies, but ranged around the streets and back alleys during their march.  In general, there appeared to be more anxiety about the activities and potential threat of black youths (who were, of course, fundamentally important to the success of civil rights campaigns, particularly those of direct action and civil disobedience).

It’s a weird paradox: TV news was drawn to the civil rights story to some extent because it provided dramatic visuals of violence and a powerful good versus evil narrative, but reporters tended to criticize the violence that drew them to the story in the first place.

You write in the book about “a moment [in the 1960s] of non-stereotypical, respectable middle-class blacks” on fictional television. What factors gave rise to this moment and which led to its decline? How do these fictional black characters relate to the idealized civil rights subject that you suggest was constructed through the evening news?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcOlcDUQ29M

It seems that every era of media representation of African Americans is attempting to respond differently to the era that precedes it.  I open the book with a consideration of The Beulah Show and Amos ‘n’ Andy, the early 1950s shows featuring blacks in starring roles.  We tend to consider them to be stereotyped and degrading images of blacks.  At the time, however, the thinking about these representations was somewhat more complicated.  Beulah, the black housekeeper to a white family, was seen by some (including some in the black press) as equal to her employers, middle-class in deportment, not using dialect, and in general a good role model.  In developing Amos ‘n’ Andy for television, CBS very deliberately elevated them and the Kingfish to middle class status presumably to make them appear less disrespectable and buffoonish.  Nevertheless, both shows, and especially Amos ‘n’ Andy, were subject to high profile protest by the NAACP, and were off the air by 1953.

Prime time becomes a very “white-washed” world from then on till the early-mid 1960s.  Network programming philosophy was: appeal to the most, offend the least.  Black performers tended to cause controversy – witness the case of Nat King Cole and his 1957 variety show which couldn’t secure a sponsor.  The “integrating” of prime time entertainment programming is, of course, a direct result of the civil rights movement.  It was becoming more of a problem to not show at least occasional black performers or black characters.

Herman Gray came up with the concept “civil rights subject” when he was writing about how television tended to remember civil rights.  The civil rights subject in his original formulation is the latter-day beneficiary of the movement: an exemplary figure signified by hard work, individualism, middle-class status.  The Huxtable family of The Cosby Show is the quintessential example of this concept.  What I argue in my book is that this “civil rights subject” is also evident in television representations (both in news coverage and in prime time entertainment) during the civil rights era.  The most notable early example in prime time drama is Bill Cosby again!  In 1965 he’s paired with a white partner in the Cold War espionage series, I Spy.  Cosby’s character can’t just be a spy, though: he’s a Rhodes scholar who speaks eleven languages and is clearly superior to everyone around him (except that his white buddy gets all the girls).  I Spy gives us a colour-blind, post-integrationist world where our two heroes can range around the world to Cold War hot spots (typically in Asian countries that look “exotic”) and represent a black-and-white America that doesn’t have anything to do with racism.

 

Bill Cosby’s character is the opposite of a victim, but another form of early 1960s programming did focus on blacks-as-victims – the “social problem” dramas that appeared in direct response to both the idealism of the Kennedy New Frontier and also industry anxiety about tougher regulation by the new FCC chairman, Newton Minow who castigated television as “a vast wasteland.”  One show I look at, East Side/West Side, focuses on the crusades of an idealistic white social worker in New York City.  One very high profile episode examines the plight of a young Harlem couple dealing with the lack of jobs for black men and horrendous ghetto housing conditions (their baby dies after begin bitten by a rat).  Even though the couple is obviously poor and living in degraded conditions, they are presented to us as middle-class seeming, dignified, hard-working, eminently respectable – although James Earl Jones, as the husband, portrays a barely contained rage against his oppression.  The characters, nevertheless, are presented to white viewers as ones deserving of help – the only thing standing in the way of their achieving middle-class status and integration into the white world is employment discrimination and slum housing.  So there’s that similar appeal that we see in news and photojournalism coverage: helpless but worthy blacks, enlightened, caring whites as potential rescuers.

 

But shows like East Side/West Side were a bit grim for prime time Nielsen families.  The quintessential civil rights subject after Bill Cosby in I Spy was Diahann Carroll in Julia, which came on air in 1968 and was the first TV series to star an African American since the days of Amos ‘n’ Andy and Beulah.  Julia was colour-blind integration fully achieved.  She’s a nurse with white co-workers and she lives in a LA apartment building with white neighbours.  Except for mostly humourous instances of “prejudice,” Julia and her adorable young son personify a world of interracial harmony.  The show was controversial because as network television’s first high profile attempt to center a show around African Americans, it ran up against the rapid shifts in the black empowerment movement and what was going on with race in the US at that point.  By 1968 with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts having passed, the attention shifted North and there’s more of a focus on economic oppression and “de facto” segregation and the situation with black inner city “ghettos.”  The movement also shifts into more confrontational directions that are more discomforting to liberal and moderate whites.  Julia was a popular show but arguments swirled around it suggesting that the show was out of touch with what was really going on: the show wasn’t “telling it like it is.”

 

You see the book as seeking to correct some common misunderstandings about the role of television during the civil rights era. What do you see as the most widespread misinterpretations of this period?

 

I think it’s similar to the misunderstanding about television and the Vietnam War.  Television did not embrace the cause of the anti-war movement and thereby lead the US population to demand the war’s end.  (See Daniel Hallin’s The “Uncensored War.”)  Similarly television didn’t cause the success of the civil rights movement.  Television was not a mouthpiece for the movement; news coverage did not transmit or reflect the positions, perspectives, and arguments of the movement in some simple, one-directional sort of way.  I see this over and over again in histories of the civil rights era: the nation saw it on television and the nation acted.  This reifies the medium, gives us television as a neutral mirror reflecting what’s in front of the camera.   No attention to television as an institution and industry, or to textual construction, or to reception practices – all the issues that we as media scholars explore.  This is preaching to the choir when I say this to fellow media studies folks, but I’m hoping my book gets read by non-media scholars, too!

Was network television in general sympathetic to the legislative goals of the movement?  Yes.  But as I’ve already noted, so were powerful political players.  Was the movement sympathetic to many of the movement’s strategies, including demonstrations, direct action, civil disobedience?  In general, no.  For instance, in the run-up to the March on Washington, the media (and not just television) was very critical of the prospect of a hundred thousand and more black people converging on the nation’s capital.  The recurring news peg was “violence is inevitable” and “mass marches won’t sway congressional votes anyway.”  When violence didn’t occur on the day of the march, the live coverage became largely celebratory with images mostly focused on dignified, middle-class-looking marchers – ideal “civil rights subjects” – who presented docile, smiling, and unthreatening images.  But newsmen covering the event continued to insist that the quarter of a million marchers wouldn’t sway votes, so what was the point of the march.

So I really want to undercut and question a certain amount of technological utopianism and determinism that I see in civil rights historiography and also in popular memory.  Television coverage was crucial to the movement, of course; the movement did not, however, fundamentally control either the medium or its messages.  The medium and the movement were not one and the same; that fact tends to get lost.

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Televisionand New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

 

 

Filed Under: book shelf, civic media, Civic Paths, interviews, television
September 24, 2012

Television and the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Aniko Bodroghkozy (Part One)

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Many of us may think we know the history of the role which American broadcast television played in fostering public awareness and rallying support behind Martin Luther King and his 1960s era Civil Rights struggle. We can all picture in our heads the black and white fuzzy images of King’s powerful remarks in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, for example, and we know that people across the country must have watched those amazing words in their living rooms.

Not so fast, argues Aniko Bodroghkozy, the author of a new book, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement.  Bodroghkozy certainly argues that television played important roles in sparking the consciences of viewers around the country as the networks and the activists made reluctant, tentative, highly compromised “common cause” with each other to transform the civil rights struggles into a prime time spectacle. But, some of what you believe happened — starting with how the networks covered the March on Washington — turns out to be a bit more complex than popular memory and imagination might suggest.

I have had the joy of watching Bodroghkozy develop from a young graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying under John Fiske and Lynn Spigel, to the author of an important first book about the ways the student protests of the 1960s engaged with television, through to the publication of this masterful new book, which represents the culmination of more than a decade’s work in the archives. Bodroghkozy has already written the definitive accounts of the controversy surrounding The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the reception of Julia by black and white viewers, both essays often assigned in television history classes around the country. Her work moves back and forth between news and entertainment programming, showing the ways that they were sometimes aligned, sometimes contradictory, in their depictions of the current state of race relations in the 1960s. Her work is surprisingly nuanced in dealing with the diversity of perspectives within the network journalists, within the civil rights movement, and with white southerners, as the country sought to resolve deep rooted conflicts around segregation. She offers rich readings of key programs and broadcasts which are contextualized by contemporary responses from newspapers and letters housed in archives, combining insights from social and political history alongside those she brings to the table as a gifted broadcast historian.

The book’s consideration of media and political change is well timed, offering a rich historical counter to current debates about the role of new media in informing recent struggles, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement. For me, it especially resonates with the work that my Civic Paths team at USC has been doing on the DREAMers, undocumented youth whose current civil rights struggles are informed by their saavy use of YouTube and various social media platforms. But, as the country’s first black president seeks re-election,  Equal Time offers us some great resources for placing into perspective various attempts to mobilize popular memories of the Civil Rights era.

The following interview demonstrates Bodroghkozy’s careful, nuanced, yet engaged mind at work, describing some of the ways that Equal Rights helps to revise our understanding of this important era both in the history of American politics and in the evolution of television as a medium.

You can also follow this link for an interview with the author on public radio.

You begin the book with a powerful quote from Martin Luther King: “We are here to say to the white men that we are not going to let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.” To what degree were the tactics King brought to the civil rights movement designed to encourage and shape television attention? What did King and the other civil rights leaders hope to accomplish by getting access to broadcast media?

 

King’s quote is really noteworthy because he and civil rights leaders of the era so very rarely talked openly about their strategies to elicit television coverage.  To be open about their “media campaign” would have appeared manipulative, anathema for a movement that was attempting to appeal to the moral conscience of the nation.  King and the SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, his organization) understood the power of strong visual images and the need to communicate a stark message of moral clarity – and to communicate that message and those images to a national audience that could put pressure on congressmen, senators, and the president to pass federal legislation around civil rights and voting rights.  Accessing a national audience was key.

You have to remember that in the early 1960s, there were few truly national media outlets.  There were the picture magazines, Life and Look, which reached a huge readership, and to a lesser extent the newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek.  None, of course, had the reach of network television, which by the early 1960s had over ninety percent penetration in U.S. households.  This time period is also when the networks finally begin to invest significantly in their news divisions (CBS and NBC inaugurate their half hour nightly news shows in the fall of 1963 and throughout the early/mid 1960s large numbers of prime time news documentaries, special reports, bulletins and the like).  So you’ve got network news becoming a serious journalistic venue reaching unprecedented numbers of citizens.

King and the SCLC in particular appeared to intuitively understand the nature of television news and the need for dramatic pictures.  They knew to schedule marches no later than about 2:00 in the afternoon in order to work with the demands of the TV news room: film had to be flown to New York, printed, edited, and readied for broadcast for the nightly news.  And they knew that the news cameras would stick around only if the marches and demonstrations led to confrontation and even violence.  The movement did need to create situations in which white racists would beat and brutalize civil rights activists.

On the one hand, one could say that the movement was manipulating the media as well as Southern white police officials like Birmingham’s Bull Connor or Selma’s Jim Clark by creating a setting for confrontation (and certainly segregationists argued that these were all publicity stunts).  On the other hand, blacks had been beaten, lynched, and brutalized “in the dark corners” for decades and decades.  Staging this brutality out in public and inviting new forms of national media to witness it was a novel and clearly powerful tactic that both assisted the movement in making its larger arguments about Jim Crow and black disempowerment, but also played to the strengths of television as “new media.”

 

Was the goal to reach white viewers, black viewers, or some kind of community which included people of multiple races?

 

The goal clearly was primarily to reach white viewers, particularly outside the South.  Frequently network news stories about civil rights would be “blacked out” on Deep South TV stations.  Steven Classen has written superbly in his book, Watching Jim Crow, about the case of Jackson, Mississippi’s WLBT-TV which systematically censored network news stories about civil rights or race relations and eventually, after long legal struggles by civil rights activists, finally had its broadcast license revoked by the Justice Department in 1969.  King would frequently appeal to “the conscience of the nation.”  He was obviously referring to the mass audiences produced by media like network television and to nationally distributed magazines.

The movement really didn’t need television to appeal to African Americans (either in the South or the North).  There was a very robust black press that was very effectively distributed to black communities.  News weeklies like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier had national reach with black train porters often working as an informal distribution system to get these newspapers to black communities around the country, and especially into the Deep South.  The movement needed to reach and impact whites outside the South in order to make the case that segregation in Birmingham, Alabama or Albany, Georgia or voter disenfranchisement in Selma, Alabama weren’t regional issues to be solved at the state level, but rather national problems of concern to all Americans to be dealt with in Washington.  And Washington politicians would only care if they were hearing from constituents en masse.

It’s also important to remember this was the Cold War era and to some extent the movement was aware of the global audience. We aren’t really in the satellite era yet (although the Telstar communications satellite goes up in 1962 and live satellite transmission is possible).  The 1963 March on Washington coverage is transmitted live to most European countries.  Nevertheless images are traveling more quickly in this era and there’s lots of concern about how global audiences are making sense of the “leader of the Free World” oppressing its black citizens.

 

Does television mean something different in the context of this movement than newspapers and print based media?

 

I think the distinction is more “visual media” versus “print media.”  My book was going to press just as Martin Berger Seeing Through Race came out.  He examines the photojournalism around the civil rights movement and comes to some similar conclusions to mine about network news coverage.  In both cases, the emphasis is on dramatic images of moral clarity: good versus evil, clearly marked.  It calls to mind Peter Brooks’ arguments about “the melodramatic imagination” and the moral occult: in a secular era, we need narratives to give us that clarity that used to be presumably provided by the church in the pre-modern era.

Both television news and photojournalism assumed a white viewer.  The preferred images are of helpless, supplicating or brutalized black bodies that need assistance.  The white viewer is hailed into the position as saviour or rescuer.  The white viewer, whose conscience is being appealed to, is called on to do something, respond in some way to come to the aid of the helpless black victim.  Berger very usefully traces this trope back to abolitionist iconography with the widely circulated image of the kneeling, supplicant slave holding up his chained arms.  In television news coverage, black civil rights activists are almost always mute; only King is authorized to speak.  Preferred images include docile marchers, praying bodies, and, of course, tear-gassed, whipped, beaten bodies.  Print media had a significant role to play as well and Richard Lentz in his (terribly titled!) book Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King does a great comparative analysis of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report in their coverage of King and the movement.

But ultimately I think the power of the civil right movement comes from its visuality and the movement’s intuitive grasp of how to communicate via imagery.  Print media, I think, functioned in an ancillary role providing background, context, and information to the images.

 

 

Aniko Bodroghkozy  is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
Prof. Bodroghkozy’s first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Television and New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her current book project, Black Weekend: Television News and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy is a narrative history exploring the four days of network coverage surrounding the death of JFK.  She is also editing the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the History of American Broadcasting.

Filed Under: book shelf, civic media, interviews, Uncategorized
August 29, 2012

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Germany (Round Two) and the Czech Republic

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Delmonhorst and Breman, Germany

Our travels next took us back through Germany — to the town of Delmonhorst in Lower Saxony. Here, I participated in a conference, organized by Martin Butler and centering around the “precarious alliances” which shape the relations between authors, readers, editors, publishers, translators, critics, archivists, and booksellers, among others, each of whom helps to shape the nature of literary production. This was an intimate event — roughly 20 academics, mostly European, a few American — sat around in a seminar room for three days and talked about each other’s work. For me, this kind of prolonged engagement was a rare treat, especially when coupled with the fact that the topic — which centered mostly around print culture — was a little askew to what I normally look at  and most of the papers, by and large, focused on pre-20th century forms of publication. I gave the opening keynote, using J.K. Rowling’s complex relations with Harry Potter fans and readers, as the central focus of my analysis, but giving the group a taste of what publication means in the era of “spreadable media.”

The other keynote talks came from James L. West Jr. (Penn State), who has helped to manage the republication of the works of F. Scott Fitzergerald, and shared some of the behind the scenes negotiations which shape  posthumous publications (and along the way, told some great stories about consulting with Baz Luhrman on the forthcoming, now delayed, Great Gatsby movie), Wil Verhoeven (Gronigen) who spoke about “print capitalism” and the establishment of “political modernity” in England, and Claire Squires (Stirling), author of Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain, who described the ways new modes of digital publishing and online book selling were disrupting older printing practices.  Other memorable presentations include a critique of the rhetoric of participation as deployed by some contemporary marketing projects by Martin Butler (Olderberg), a talk on the packaging of best selling genre fiction in Post-socialist Russia by Ulrich Schmid (St. Gallen),  a discussion of the political and cultural debates surrounding the Booker Prize by Anna Augustcik (Oldenburg), and a talk about the construct of the impoverished author in early Modern France by Geoffrey Turnovsky (Seattle). These exchanges, which dealt with print as a medium and as a set of cultural practices, rather than as a fixed canon of great works, were refreshing for me and seemed to open a path forward for future multidisciplinary conversations around similar topics.

Cynthia and I especially enjoyed getting to know Verhoeven and his partner, Amanda Gilroy, who drove down  precisely to meet me. Gilroy recently published a fascinating essay dealing with how she used fan fiction writing activities to get her students to engage more closely with the works of Jane Austin, an essay I know would be of particular interest to many of our readers.

The conference organizers allowed a fair amount of downtown for us to explore the city and its surrounding area. A few blocks from our hotel, there was a beautiful park, where we ran into this brace of ducks.

 

 

And in the town proper, we had yet another Spider-man sighting. It would seem that for a U.S.-based superhero, he gets around!

 

 

One night, a party of the speakers went into Breman, nearby, for dinner and a stroll around the historic districts of this German city, which was referenced by Ptolemy as early as 150 AD.  Like many German cities, Breman was heavily bombed during the Second World War, but it has made concerted efforts to restore some of the beautiful old buildings.

 

 

Praha (Prague), Czech Republic

 

When I arrived in Praha, I was greeted with posters depicting me as a somewhat paunchy superhero, flying high above the  Žižkov Television Tower,  a local landmark. These posters had been made by Luis Blackaller, a former MIT Media Lab student, who now lives in Los Angeles and occasionally sits in on my classes.


The poster had been commissioned by Jaroslav Švelch, who had spent several years as a visiting scholar through the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, and now teaches on the Charles University Faculty of Social Sciences. Svelch had helped to organize a day-long symposium, Transmedia Generation: On Empowered and Impassioned Audiences in the Age of Media Convergences, in honor of my visit. We were grateful to receive funding from the U.S. Embassy in Pradha to help support this exchange between American and Czech based scholars.

Here is my talk (a variant on the one I had given at the Telefonica conference in Madrid).

Sangita Shresthova, a former CMS Masters Student, who now heads up our Civic Paths research team at USC, flew in for the event. Shresthova is part Nepalese, part Czech, and grew up in Praha, as she notes in the opening segment of her talk  about Bollywood dance and its fan following around the world. I featured Shresthova’s book, Is It All in the Hips?: Around the World With Bollywood Dance, earlier this year, on my blog. 

Here’s  Švelch”s own talk which shared some of his research about fan subbing practices, especially concerning Game of Thrones, in the Czech Republic.  Švelch’ has a background in translation studies, even though much of his recent work has dealt with computer games and other aspects of digital culture, so this project allowed him to combine several of his interests.

I was especially intrigued by this presentation by Nico Carpentier (Free University of Brussells), who has been exploring what we can learn about new forms of participatory culture by digging more deeply into the literature around participatory democracy. I was a bit nervous when I saw the title of his talk, “The Dark Side of Online Participation,” but I left enormously excited by the work he is doing. Carpentier argues that legitimate claims for advances in opportunities for meaningful participation are drowned out by a rhetoric of participation which as often as not is little more than marketing. He wants to create some conceptual models which allow us to appraise what kinds of participation are on offer, seeing meaningful participation as involving the redistribution of power and the flattening of traditional hierarchies and inequalities. This is precisely the kind of work which should be done right now at the intersection between critical and cultural studies.

I made no secret of my excitement over discovering Carpentier and his work when Sangita, Nico, and I shared a panel together for the symposium’s final session, which dealt with the political and educational implications of the research we had presented.

Since I have been back in Los Angeles, Carpentier and I have been working on a dialogic piece which explores more fully the similarities and differences in the ways we are thinking in our current projects about the nature of political participation.

To be honest, the conference was, in some ways, an excuse to have  Švelch and Shresthova show Cynthia and I around Praha. After speaking to so many different groups and meeting so many new people, it was a luxury to be able to hang out and have fun with two old friends.

 

 

I would say that we painted the town “red,” but somehow that might have a different connotation when talking about a post-socialist country. But, we had a wonderful time wandering the streets and taking tram trips together as they tried to introduce us to as much Czech culture as I could possibly absorb in a few days time.

 

As I sit here some weeks later and try to put into words my scattered impressions of Praha, I feel like it comes out as something like “Pretty, Shiny, Golly Whiz!”, where-as something of the beauty and splendor comes through in Cynthia’s photographs.

 

As Jaroslav, Cynthia, and I were walking along the banks of the Vltava River, we ran straight into two other Comparative Media Studies affiliates —  Zuzana Husárová and Amaranth Borsuk  — both visiting Eastern Europe to attend a conference about digital poetry and storytelling. Here, you see the Praha Castle towering over the river, while on this sunny afternoon, you can see all kinds of boats out cruising along the river.

 

 

This is Jaroslav’s photograph of Cynthia and I in front of some of the old buildings which survive from the 1891 Jubilee Exhibition. We were here visiting another late 19th century panorama, in this case depicting the Battle of Lipany (fought in 1434). Our exploration of late 19th popular amusements also took us to visit a Hall of Mirrors, also from 1891, and also very much still alive as an attraction for contemporary tourists.

 

 

 

We were fascinated by the old world charm of Praha, especially the decorated facades of buildings which date back to the Art Nouveau period.

 

 

One of our discoveries on this trip was the work of the Czech Art Nouveau graphic artist, Alphonse Mucha, whose paintings, illustrations, advertisements, postcards, and designs captured the spirit of Prague as it entered into the 20th century. I found this video on YouTube which shares some of Mucha’s story and work.

 

But we were also very much taken by the aesthetic of contemporary Praha street art.

 

We were very much amused to stumble upon this fine establishment, dedicated to preserving the memory of this classic 1970s vintage American cult series and the lifestyle which it embodies. Starksy and Hutch was very much an active fandom when I wrote Textual Poachers, though I don’t run across many references to it today. I wanted to share this image in honor of all of you old school fans out there!

 

Visiting this former Soviet block country brought back a rush of memories for me as a child of Cold War America. Perhaps the most powerful concerned the CBS Children’s Film Festival, a staple of my childhood.  (You can learn more about the program on this Kukla.TV fan website. )This program ran every Saturday afternoon, just as the morning cartoon shows started to give up the ghost, and spill over into programming intended for adults. The program was hosted by Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and dedicated to sharing films focusing on the lives of children from around the world. When I looked the program up on the web, I was struck by how many of the stories I remembered most vividly had come from Czechoslovakia, which was known during this period for its production of children’s films. Here, for example, are segments from two of the films shown during the Children’s Film Festival:

Adventure in Golden Bay   Dobrodružství na Zlaté zátoce (1956)

Captain Korda  Kapitán Korda  (1970)

Many of the other films shown on the series came from the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Poland, Eastern Germany, and a range of other Warsaw Pact countries. These memories have left me very curious how it was possible for so many of these films to air on network television during a period of time when political tensions between the United States and Eastern Europe were at such a level of intensity, and also to ponder what impact this early exposure to global diversity might have had on my generation’s relationship to the rest of the world. Certainly, there are children’s film festivals hosted by museums and cultural institutions around the United States today, but there is no such commitment from commercial broadcasters to insure a more cosmopolitan diet for contemporary youth.

A window display of wooden marionettes suggested the continued process of cross-cultural exchange, as Charlie Chaplin, Harry Potter, and Jack Sparrow hang alongside Old World witches and trolls.

 

 

The Czech people have long been among the most accomplished puppet makers and performers in the world, and this fascination with puppetry has often influenced their filmmaking, resulting in a strong tradition of puppet animation. Looking for more information about the puppet shops and theaters we saw in Praha, I stumbled onto this website, which also shared a delightful cartoon produced by students in their summer program.

While I was in Praha, I was interviewed by Pavel Kořínek, who wanted to get my thoughts about the current state of Comics Studies, as an emerging field of research. He was nice enough to give me Český Komiks 2000-2010, a wonderful collection of contemporary Czech comics.  Here’s a useful Wikipedia entry that overviews the history of Czech comics. Jaroslav helped to fuel my growing interest in this graphic tradition by taking me to a small museum dedicated to the works of Kaja Saudek, perhaps the most important Czek underground comics artist of the 1960s and 1970s. Saudek was inspired both by the traditions of mainstream American comics, especially superheros but also Walt Disney and Carl Barks. He was also transformed by his encounters with the work of R. Crumb and Richard Corben. Here’s what came out when these worlds collided. Saudek’s work conveyed something of the spirit of the youth culture which contributed to the Prague Spring movement in 1968.

Jaroslav and Sangita also took me to Terryho ponožky (Terry’s Socks), located by the box office at the Světozor art house cinema just off Wenceslas Square. Terry’s Socks was named after Terry Gilliam who famously left a sweaty pair of socks on a Prada movie theater’s stage after a public appearance. Terry’s Socks is by reputation the best place to shop in Prague for DVDS. I went there in search of what I could find of the Czech New Wave film movement, and brought back some real treasures. As it happens, Americans who want to know more about the explosion of cinematic creativity which hit Praha in the 1960s can now buy a number of classic works in Criterion’s Pearls of the Czech New Wave box set, released earlier this summer. See below an especially memorable sequence from Věra Chytilová’s 1966 film Daisies, which is included in the anthology.

 

While I was in Praha, I was contacted about appearing on one of the Czech Republic’s late night news program. They featured me for a full half hour, sharing my thoughts about new media literacies, digital activism, and participatory culture. What surprised me was that the interview ran in real time with the reporter Peter Fischer interviewing me in Czech, which was translated off camera into English, which I could hear on my ear phone, and then I spoke in English, which was then translated into Czech for the television viewers.

 

Here, you see Jaroslav and I sharing a last cool drink together in the Prague train station before Cynthia and I departed on an 8 hour rail journey to Budapest.

 

Coming Soon: Budapest and Bologna

Filed Under: branded entertainment, civic media, Civic Paths, globalization watch, University of Southern California
August 9, 2012

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Part Two): Portugal

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This is the second in a series of digital “scrapbooks” through which I capture and share my impressions of my extensive lecture tour across Europe. Last time, I dealt with Germany. Today, Portugal.

 
Of all of the stops of my tour, Portugal was perhaps the biggest surprise. Given how little the average American (myself among them) knows about Portugal, it could not help but be a surprise.  I had not expected to be so taken with the culture, the people, and the beauty of Lisbon and its surrounding area. Going into this leg of the trip, I could have told you four basic things about Portugal:

The first would have been what I had learned about Lisbon in the opening narration from Casablanca, which has long been a film favorite.

The movie’s plot centers around the struggle to access papers which would allow refuges from Nazi Germany and Vichy France to get entry into Portugal. So, while the film is set in Morocco, it spends a surprising amount of time telling us about what Lisbon means in the context of the Second World War. When I learned I would be speaking in Lisbon, I had an impulse to see if I could retrace the character’s route, and thus dip far enough south to visit Casablanca, but when I spent some time looking at my time table and the basic geography, this did not look like a good idea.  I had to tell my wife that we would always have Paris, but we would not yet have Casablanca.

The second thing I knew about Portugal I learned in my high school history classes — the role this country had played during the age of discovery as one of the key powers which have opened up the world to European exploration and trade. Specifically, I had been a big fan of Henry the Navigator, the Prince of Portugal most associated with this period of exploration and colonization, largely because of the name association, but also because I liked the cultural myth of the king who was also a geek.


We were able to visit a monument in Lisbon to Henry and the age of exploration. Trust me, when cities start erecting monuments to Henrys, they get my attention. But this was a particularly stunning piece of sculpture — which manages to evoke the plow of a ship pointing out towards the “new world” and at the same time, personify the rugged seamen who went on those first voyages. On the trip, though, I learned from a book called The First Frontier that Basque fishermen had been traveling to the coasts of Canada and the United States for centuries before their government officially “discovered” this part of the world, which complicates this story considerably. What I also learned was the huge impact that this period had on the architectural style of the city — where the local architecture incorporated iconography associated with ships (such as ropes) into their design

Or, natural images (both animals and plants associated with the New World.) Cynthia captured this architectural detail of a frog from one of their cathedrals

This image resonated with us because Cynthia had spent a lot of time at a park a few blocks from our hotel which had a pond which was overflowing with frogs. This is one of many great bits of nature photography she brought back from the trip.

We also got a sense of Portugal as a once powerful empire through our visit to a museum which housed the gilded carriages which had been used by the Royal family through the centuries.

If I had dug deeper into my historical memory, I might have recalled that this region’s culture was also very strongly influenced by its history of interactions with the Moors, with the result that there is a strong Islamic flavor to much of the local architecture, especially in the use of brightly colored tiles with strong geometric patterns, such as the ones you see in this photograph.

The third thing I could have told you was that Portugal was closely associated with Brazil, sharing a common language with its former colony in South America. Almost every person in Lisbon I asked suggested that these links were more historical than contemporary, but my own observations suggested otherwise. A high percentage of the tourists I met in Lisbon came from Brazil. The grocery store I visited had a whole section devoted to Foods from Brazil. This would not be true of American grocery stores, for example, but then, we would almost be unlikely to have sections devoted to salted fish and meat, or for that matter, smoked pork products. We saw multiple posters for concerts of Brazilian music. And one of the first stops on our guided tour of the city was a monument to the first person to fly solo from Lisbon to Brazil. So, my sense was that there remain very strong cultural links between the two countries, even if these links were not always conscious or acknowledged.

Fourth, as a fan of world music, I knew about Fado. which historians believe emerged in Lisbon in the early 19th century. Wikipedia provides this useful definition:

In popular belief, fado is a form of music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor, and infused with a characteristic sentiment of resignation, fatefulness and melancholia (loosely captured by the word “saudade”, or longing). However, although the origins are difficult to trace, today fado is by many regarded as a simply a form of song which can be about anything, but must follow a certain structure. The music is usually linked to the Portuguese word saudade which symbolizes the feeling of loss (a permanent, irreparable loss and its consequent life lasting damage).

You can get a sense of what Fado sounds like (and almost as importantly, looks like) from these two clips which I found on Youtube.

As the clips suggest, the style of music is associated with certain gestures and postures, with a style of performance, with a structure of feeling (suadade), with a set of traditional themes (including, once again, the sea) and with a specific set of musical structures, all of which are distinct to this region. As the clips may also illustrate, each of these is heavily gendered so there are very different modes for men and women in performing these songs. Cynthia and I were lucky enough to have been taken to Clube De Fado, one of the nightclubs in Lisbon which, as the name suggests, is strongly associated with Fado. We were able to see for ourselves the intensity of this musical tradition and the command it still exerts on the heart and soul of the city.

As much as I enjoyed the music and the company on this particular evening, I also will savor for a long time to come the food, which was one of the best meals I had on my entire trip. I ordered something which roughly translates “the treasures of the Black Pork.” This was my introduction to the pleasures of eating Pork-based products in Europe. I was nervous from the name that the “treasures” might be various entrails, which might not match my Americanized aesthetic. In fact, they were simply really savory cuts of fried pork. Consistently in Europe, we were struck by how meat-centric the cuisines were and especially how much more central pork, particularly  hams of many varieties, are to their everyday diets. This image which Cynthia captured at a street fair shows the pride they take in their meats.

For dessert, I had, for the first but scarcely the only time on the trip, the pasteis de nata, small custard pies, which quickly became a personal favorite, and which I sampled at several different bakeries as we were walking around Lisbon.

 

One day, as we were wandering through the Center City of Lisbon, we stumbled onto a street festival which was clearly celebrating the diverse folk traditions of various regions around the country. As a result, we encountered one visually striking set of folk costume after another. Here are just a few examples.

 


 

 

I wish I could place more cultural context around these costumes (and the dances or public performances associated with them), since they really captured my imagination, but we were not working with a guide at that point and any explanation provided would have come in a language I do not understand. If there’s any reader out there who can provide us with a fuller explanation, I would really appreciate you sharing it with me and my readers.

Another highlight of our time in Portugal was a day trip we took to Sintra, located in the mountains outside Lisbon. Apart from the natural beauties of this region, it represented such a striking playground of the imagination.

 

For example, we visited the Palacio da Pena, built for Portugal’s royal family in the 19th century with an eclectic mix of styles, including Neo-Gothic, Neo-Manueline, Neo-Islamic, Neo-Renaissance, and the key word in each case is Neo. The architects took what they found most exotic and eye-catching from a range of styles to construct a castle that might otherwise have existed only in our feverish imaginations. Everything is brightly colored, epic in proportion, and full of fantastical details, which left one feeling like you were visiting Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars or some equally fanciful location from the space opera of your choice.

By contrast, we also visited the nearby the Quinta da Regaleria, a gothic mansion created for Antonio Augusto Carvalho Monteiro (1848-1920) in conjunction with the talent of the scenographer-architect Luigi Manini (1848-1936). Monteiro was among other things rumored to be an alchemist and a Freemason. There is a haunting, morbid atmosphere about the place, which reminds me very much of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland or the setting of one of the great Roger Corman films with Vincent Price.

Some of the floors were designed to produce vertigo. The library, for example, was lined with mirrors on the floor, so it looked like it was floating in space and as there were book shelves running below as well as above. As someone who suffers from mild forms of fear of heights, I actually found myself panicking when I had to walk across the floor. But, there’s also something playful about the ways the house uses pseudo-Medieval elements throughout, such as the stone boar and other wild game hanging on the wall in this shot.

 

All told, the place is consistently unsettling and “spooky, complete with garden mazes and underground grottos — what’s not to love!

Of course, so far, I’ve made it sound as if Lisbon was all sight-seeing. I gave three talks in Lisbon. First, I did a presentation on Spreadable Media as one of the two keynotes (along with Andras Balint Kovacs from Budapest) at the conference of the Associacao Investigadores Da Imagen em Movimento (The Association for Investigators of the Moving Image), which is the key professional organization for film and media scholars in Portugal. The day before, my host, Tiago Baptiste, a film historian and archivist who has done work on silent and early sound films in Portugal, took us to see the Cinemateca Portuguesa, the national film archive, which is housed in a beautiful old mansion, and which currently had a great display of the origins of home movie projectors.

The event was being held the same day as filmmakers and stars were marching in protest in Lisbon over the ways that state support for the national cinema was being gutted as part of the austerity moves Portugal was being forced to make in response to the European economic crisis. While my talk ended with some hope for the ways that crowd-funding and surfing models were offering new resources for independent media makers to work outside traditional gatekeepers, I was forced to acknowledge that the filmmakers most at risk today may be those who had thrived under the state-funding models which produced films as national prestige projects for exhibition in international film festivals. Such films are perhaps too idiosyncratic in their vision to be adequately previewed on Kickstarter or to have the solid base of fan support that has surrounded projects like The Cosmonaut or Iron Skies. As we argue in the book, these crowd funding models do hold open opportunities for producers who have courted solid and committed followers — not simply fans but also racial, ethnic, or sexual minorities or political movements who have reason to want to see certain kinds of films made which are unlikely to emerge from the Hollywood system. However, they may not support the most personalized forms of expression that drove the various New Wave film movements around the world in the 1960s.

 

Following the talk, I had a lively interview with an independent filmmaker, Edgar Pera, who sought my comments about the similarities and differences between cinephilia and fandom for his latest production. As you can see from this trailer for The Baron, his films draw strong inspiration from horror films and other B-movies, and so we had a very enjoyable conversation about monster movies fans

.

My second talk in Lisbon, dealing with the Harry Potter Alliance as a model for fan activism (and based on my essay in Transformative Works and Cultures), was presented to faculty and students at t ISCTE – Lisbon University Institute. My host, Gustavo Cardoso, is a sometimes collaborator with my USC colleague Manuel Castells.  As Cardoso was walking us across the campus, we heard cries of surprise and someone raced up to me, urgently asking if I was, indeed, Henry Jenkins. It turned out that this was Kris Hammer, a reader of this blog currently studying in Estonia, who was visiting the campus for totally unrelated reasons. He was surprised to discover that I was about to deliver a lecture. He tagged along with us and engaged actively in the question and answer period.

My third talk was a half day “master class” on news and politics in the digital age, supported by the U.S. Embassy, and given to Cenjor, a school which trains future journalists. I was able to share with the group some of the research being done by Civic Paths and the Youth and Participatory Politics Network, not to mention the thinking which is shaping the Journalism program at USC’s Annenberg School. The reporters jumped into the talk quickly and basically, drained me dry, sucking up any insights I could give them about the interplay between professional and citizen journalists, new business models for the future of news, digital and news literacy, and the ways that Spreadable Media might speak to how news circulates through the culture. Something of the tone of these exchanges is captured in this short news report produced by some of the school’s students around my visit.

 

Meanwhile back at the ranch: My son sent us frame grabs from this Carl Jr’s commercial which was then playing in the Los Angeles market. The commercial features Spider-Man interacting with people waiting outside the Orphan Theater (which is across the street from where I live) before swinging past the Eastern Columbia (which is my building.) So, after years of fantasizing that he really was my “friendly neighborhood Spider-man,” the guy drops by my street, no doubt looking to hook up for some late night adventure, and I am half way across the world! Life is not fair! So, Spidey, if you are reading this, please drop back by the Eastern building. I’d really love to hang out with you.

 

Of course, it makes total sense that this version of Spider-Man would have a thing for Downtown Los Angeles, since the new film was directed by Mark Webb, who directed (100)Days of Summer, a film which captures the culture of Downtown Los Angeles about as well as anything I’ve seen.

Coming Soon: My adventures in England and Ireland.

Filed Under: branded entertainment, civic media, fan culture, globalization watch, transmedia entertainment
August 7, 2012

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Part One): Germany

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This is the first of a series of blog posts which will share images, videos, and impressions from my extensive lecture tour this summer across Europe. I think of these posts as the equivalent of a scrapbook. For me, they are a way of consolidating my impressions on what were truly transformative experiences and encounters. I am hoping for the reader they will function as one part travel guide and one part overview of some key figures and developments in Europe around the topics which I regularly cover here.

 

The Journey Begins

Over the course of ten weeks, I ended up giving more than 30 talks and visited 12 European countries at a moment of tension and transition within the European Union. As someone commented on my Facebook page near the end of the trip, “Now everyone in Europe has had the chance to hear Henry Jenkins speak at least twice.”

In almost every case, it was the first time my wife and I had visited those places and so we engaged with each with curiosity and excitement. I had never really been able to spend significant amounts of time in Europe before, having not had the resources to be a foreign exchange student in high school, to do the Junior semester abroad programs as an undergraduate, or to hitchhike across Europe after graduation, all the stereotypical ways Americans get to know Europe.

As Convergence Culture began to be translated into many European languages, I felt a very strong desire to visit Europe in a more substantial and systematic way, to engage in conversation with the people who were reading the book, and to learn more about how its themes were playing out in a European context. But, the trip kept getting put off as I struggled with my decision to leave MIT and then dealt with the transition to USC, and so this summer was the first time I could make this dream into a reality.

The timing could not have been better, since I could also now use the trip to talk about a range of forthcoming projects, each of which build on the foundations of ideas introduced in Convergence Culture, including a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on fan activism (which I co-edited with Sangita Shreshtova and the members of my Civic Paths team), Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture (Co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, and due out in January), the 20th anniversary edition of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (coming out from Routledge this fall), and Reading in a Participatory Culture (co-edited and co-written with a group of former students and researchers associated with the New Media Literacies Project, due out from Teacher’s College Press by the end of 2012.) For me, these projects represent the finalization of many ideas and projects started at MIT and now reaching completion.

Finally, this summer represented a moment of transition as I start really working on book projects which represent the conceptual breakthroughs I have made since starting work at USC, and thus, the summer was a way of clearing my head, refocusing my thinking, as I prepare for some new ventures.

This trip would not have been imaginable without the hard work of Amanda Ford, my ever-resourceful assistant, who coordinated with my hosts at each of these cities to resolve the many, many details involved in pulling off a trip on this scale, certainly the most extensive, exhaustive, and exhausting trip I’ve ever tackled. I also could not have done it without the partnership of my wife, Cynthia, who acted as the “official photographer” on the trip (almost all of the images I will be running in this series are hers) and also helped to puncture my ego whenever needed to prevent too much swelling of the head.

Marburg

Our trip began in Germany and I recall those first few days through a deep haze — one part end of term exhaustion, one part jet lag. But one of the more surreal aspects of our first leg was waking up from my sleep in the middle of the afternoon on the first day to the sounds of hail hitting the balcony outside my room and looking down into the streets below, more or less covered with ice. Keep in mind that this was the first week of May and that no one in Marburg could recall having seen a hail storm this late in the year before.


 This is not the best of pictures, but it gives you some sense of what we saw  from the hotel window. I think back on the hail storm as ironic in several senses. First, as any American will tell you, Europe suffers from a severe shortage of ice otherwise. Even when you beg waiters for ice, they return with one or two small slivers, not convinced that it is really healthy to have ice in your drinks. So, the travel gods delivered most of the ice we’d see the whole trip in one dump. And second, by the time the trip was ending, the weather in Europe was sweltering and we were on the verge of melting into the asphalt, so the move from a hail storm in Marburg to 100 degree days in Athens or Rome, says something about just how long we were on the road.

Marburg is a classic medieval German city — narrow, winding streets, buildings with lots of “gingerbread” decorations — and it feels as if it were a location in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. This is no accident since the Brothers Grimm spent a portion of their lives here and that many of their visits into the country side to collect local folk tales which form the basis of their narratives were in the region around this town.


As a consequence, my second really surreal encounter in Marburg was seeing this statute of our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man hanging outside a very old world looking comic shop.

 My host for this leg of the journey was Malte Hagener, who has recently published (with Thomas Elssasser) Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses , which offers an approach to classic problems in cinema studies through a framework that is highly appropriate to those of us working in Comparative Media Studies. I plan to use some of its chapters in my course on Medium Specificity this fall.

First, there was a lively informal conversation with a room full of bright undergraduates (many of whom were doing projects dealing with transmedia entertainment or fan studies or game studies). They had been asked to read my recently published essay on the Harry Potter Alliance and fan activism, which gave me a chance to talk more generally about our work on new media, youth, and political participation, and exchange perspectives on everything from the Arab Spring movement to the ways Occupy Wall Street had impacted current debates around the European economic crisis. Later that night, at the University of Marburg, I delivered the first of the trip’s formal lecture dealing with the ideas from Spreadable Media.

After,  Hagener and his colleagues took my wife and I on a walk through the old sector of the city and to dinner. We had arrived at the height of Germany’s “cult of the white asparagus,” which meant that for a few weeks each year a good chunk of the menu was dedicated to this distinctive vegetable, which was served in various soups or stews, cooked into various pastas, served as the main dish with many different kinds of sauce, or served with ham and other local meats. I had never had white asparagus before but by the time this leg was done, we would have enjoyed it for a number of meals. It is larger than the green asparagus we mostly have in the States, but it was surprisingly not at all tough or fibrous, more or less melting in your mouth, and also very sweat tasting.

Gottingen

From Marburg, we traveled by train to Gottingen, where I was greeted by Jason Mittell, who has been spending his sabbatical year in residence at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, where he has joined a group of researchers working on contemporary and historical forms of serial entertainment. I have known Jason since he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and we’ve worked together many times, especially through the Futures of Entertainment Consortium, and he runs one of the very best academic blogs in media studies, Just TV. Below you can see a photograph of the two of us walking through the streets of his temporary home town.

 Jason, for example, took us for our first of many visits to cathedrals in Europe — in this case, the St. Jacobikirche (St. Jacoby), which is unexpectedly decorated with candy cane red and white stripes inside. St. Jacoby is called the “dancing cathedral” because the architects used a variety of optical effects in its design which created a strange “buzz” or warping effect on the eye.

 

Here, you see the window of Cron und Lanz, a truly phenomenal bakery and candy shop. There had been a German Bakery in Atlanta near where I grew up, which carries enormous sentimental importance in my childhood memories. I especially associate it with these great gingerbread man cookies which we would get every year at Christmas. I still seek them out if I have reason to be in Atlanta this time of year, and my friend Laurie Baird, until recently with Turner Broadcasting, will bring me a box if we have a chance to meet. I was having fantasies of tasting authentic German gingerbread, but even though it is available year round in Atlanta, it seems to be a seasonal treat here, so no such luck.

 But, Jason introduced us to another seasonal delicacy — chocolate Maikäfer or May Bugs, which are associated with the celebration of May Day in this part of Germany. It’s hard to see them in the window of the bakery, but there was another whole window displaying various sized chocolate bugs. This is a close up of one such creature who I bought at the shop and later consumed in my hotel room (with the apples used just to give you a sense of scale).


 Here we see the two of us, alongside many of Jason’s students and colleagues, who were all part of the the Research Unit for “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice”, shortly after an intense afternoon bull session.




 The discussion was organized around a chapter we shared from Spreadable Media , which dealt primarily with the ways the television industry understands the concept of “engagement”, its struggles to adequately measure and capitalize on the value of audience participation in its franchises, and the ways these trends have shaped the push towards transmedia storytelling. But, our discussion was far reaching, covering many different points of intersection between our research projects. This was the first time I had encountered a very German academic practice. Rather than clapping after the end of a presentation, here and elsewhere in Germany, the audience rapped their knuckles on the table top.

Below you see some members of the very engaged audience at my evening public lecture, based on my new book project, Comics…And Stuff, which deals with the ways contemporary graphic novels are helping us think about our relations to material culture and the practices of collecting in an era of eBay and other forms of networked consumption.


 This project combines formal and thematic considerations of the works of nine contemporary comics artists from the Anglo-American world. This was the first time I had done a public presentation of these ideas, which are still very much taking shape in my head, so the talk had an exploratory and improvizational tone (i.e. I was partially making it up as I went along). Gottingen turned out to be the ideal audience for such an early presentation of these ideas, since there were people in the audience from my diverse fields, many of whom were doing work on popular representation, art history, popular memory, material culture, networked consumption, and above all, a surprising number doing work on comics and graphic storytelling.  Among them were Daniel Stein and Alexandre Starre.) The audience was generous and generative in sharing their reactions to my ideas and helping me think out loud about this project which will dominate much of my writing time for the coming year.

Frankfurt

From there, we traveled to Frankfurt by train. Below is the Frankfurt train station, the site of an especially memorable moment of transcultural misunderstanding. As I was walking through the train station, I spotted a sign advertising Berliners. I have always been bemused by the story of John F. Kennedy’s trip to Berlin where he sought to express solidarity with the German people by claiming he was also a Berliner, but ended up, via a mistranslation, announcing to the world that he was a jelly doughnut. So, I had to have a Berliner, and my wife wanted them too, so I went to the counter, only to find that the sales woman did not speak any English and I spoke no German. So, I pointed at the doughnuts and held up two fingers. She spoke very fast in German and held up three fingers. But, I only wanted two doughnuts, so insisted on two, and this went back and forth for some time, before some other customer took mercy on me, suggesting that the woman was trying to tell me that the doughnuts were three for the price of two, and so, in the end, I walked away with three.


 I mean this as no insult to the people of Frankfurt, but this city was intended primarily as a bolt hole where I could lock myself away for a few days and finish off grading for my semester at USC. I had left on the last day of classes and by this point in the trip, the papers for my graduate seminar on Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 were coming in electronically, and I needed to take some time out to grade them in a city where I had no local contacts, no scheduled talks, and thus would not be disturbed. You can see me here grading in the hotel room.


 But, ultimately, I could not visit Frankfurt without doing some exploring. Cynthia and I took a break from grading to do a walk through rain soaked city streets and to visit the Deutsche Filminstitut, which has a museum focused on the history and art of motion pictures and is highly recommended. We especially enjoyed spending time on a floor focused around 19th century forms of media. In the past, these materials would be framed as “the prehistory of cinema,” but increasingly, there are the source of fascination in their own right. I am a very modest collector of such artifacts of this earlier moment of media in transition. I especially admired the juxtaposition created here between magic lantern shows (which deployed a broad array of special effects and optical manipulations) and the work of Georges Melies, which turns out to have a remarkably similar aesthetic, though these connections have rarely been explored by film scholars. The museum also has a large collection of materials associated with Charlie Chaplin, including toys, advertisements, and other collectibles, showing the transnational fan culture which grew up around his work.

Giessen

Grading completed, we then took a train to Giessen, a small, somewhat sleepy little German village, where I ran a master class for graduate students doing work on various topics in media and popular culture through International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC). The talk had been organized by Joern Ahrens, who I knew from his time as a visiting scholar at Comparative Media Studies, but he was unfortunately called out of town before I arrived. Nevertheless, I found my time with the students cordial and engaging, as might be suggested by these two photographs from the session.




 While I was interacting with the students, Cynthia got to explore a quaint old country cemetery which was just on the edge of the campus. This is one of the many beautiful images she captured there.


Stuttgart

From there, we traveled to Stuttgart, where I participated in FMX, a trade-show/festival focused around animation, games, special effects, and other forms of digital entertainment. I was featured on a special track of programming focused on transmedia which was co-hosted by the fine folks at 5-D, which runs transmedia and world building themed events here in Los Angeles.

Today’s program included Scott Walker, one of the key organizers of the Los Angeles area Transmedia Meetup, who has done some innovative thinking about audience engagement strategies through his company, Brain Candy; Femke Wolting, who is part of the acclaimed team at Submarine Channel, which has done many transmedia projects in both fictional and documentary storytelling; and Nuno Bernardo from beActive, a transmedia from Portugal producer who recently published The Producer’s Guide to Transmedia .

I delivered a talk on the Future of the Content Industries, which would be a core talk I delivered multiple times across Europe. But, for me, the high point was getting to participate in an open-ended conversation about world building and story telling with Alex McDowell, the noted British-born production designer who most recently has been shaping the look and feel of the upcoming Superman movie, and Shekhar Kapur, the Indian born producer associated with The Bandit Queen and the Elizabeth movies, among other projects. We brought very different perspectives to the topic in terms of our professional stakes and our cultural backgrounds. This conversation, and subsequent talks with Kapur at the conference dinner, ranked as one of the  intellectual high points of my time in Europe. The exchange was marked by constant shifts in tone from the philosophical or even “spiritual” to the intellectual to the personal to the professional, each of us circling around some of the most challenging issues surrounding the nature of entertainment in a transmedia and transnational era. I am sharing the video with you here thanks to special efforts by the 5D and FMX staffs, so thanks guys.

5D: The future of Storytelling in Transmedia at FMX 2012 from Dave Blass on Vimeo.

For more about transmedia at FMX, check out Scott Walker’s very perceptive blog post, which shares his impressions not only of the day of programming I participated in but also other highlights from the week long festival. See also here an interview I did about transmedia for a German blog as part of the publicity build up for my appearances in his country.

While I was at the convention, I also shot an interview with Klaus Uhrig, a producer for Bayerischer Rundfunk. Uhrig is preparing a documentary for national television dealing with issues of collecting, ownership, and publishing, as phenomenon undergoing profound transition as we move into the era of cloud computing. More and more, we are not going to own the media we consume — whether television programs, movies, or books — but rather we will access them (in effect, rent them) from their publishers. As someone deeply invested in collector culture and very excited to own so many of my favorite media texts in DVD, I am a bit concerned about the uncertainities of access such an era is apt to produce. After all, Borders has never gone into my home and removed books I’ve bought from my bookshelf, but Amazon has been called out several times now for removing or disabling digital books from people’s iPads and Kindles. And, where media availability is concerned, what iTunes and Hulu giveth, they can also withdrawal on their whim, something which is going to have serious consequences for media educators who want to predictably show certain core works semester after semester to their students. So, I am not normally cranky about the future, as anyone reading this blog knows, but to me, there are disturbing implications for our current moment of corporate “curation” and cloud based publishing, which we urgently need to be discussing. You see here a photograph of the producers interviewing me for the program.

Next Time: Portugal

Filed Under: book shelf, civic media, Comics Culture, fan culture, globalization watch, transmedia entertainment, University of Southern California
August 5, 2012

Mobile Games: Activism, Art and Learning

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A new report, The Civic Tripod for Mobile and Games: Activism, Art and Learning, was published a few weeks ago through the International Journal of Media and Learning. It was written by three PhD candidates, Susana Ruiz, Benjamin Stokes, and Jeff Watson, whom I’ve worked with closely since I came to USC three years ago.  Susana and Jeff are both game designers who are completing their work through the USC Cinema School’s iMAP program, while Ben is doing his PhD in Communications through USC’s Annenberg School. Watson completed his PhD this past summer.

Here is the way they describe what their report tries to accomplish:

The “big picture” for mobile and locative games has been hard to see, and hard to articulate. One cause is that the examples are rarely woven together across disciplines. Second, theory has too often been absent or heavy-handed. Something in-between is needed. This is especially true for more deeply social designs, which are too often reduced to case studies especially in fields like education, the arts, and civic innovation. We argue that this fragmentation of isolated examples is undermining our ability to think big, design holistically, and evaluate broadly.

For this report, we ambitiously seek to curate a set of conceptually important mobile projects, and to connect them with a light weave of theory from three distinct traditions of practice. Specifically, this report outlines the emerging field of mobile and pervasive games along the dimensions of (1) civic learning, (2) performance/art, and (3) social change. Focusing on real projects from the field, we aim to reveal key opportunities and constraints on the mobile frontier for civic games.

We argue that this three-legged “tripod” is increasingly necessary to articulate how mobile game projects are succeeding (and failing). In the past, designs have been analyzed separately by the siloed domains of art, learning, and social action. Each silo remains a useful lens, but combining the lenses is increasingly necessary for mobile media.

Mobile media is different because it ties into the physical space of our neighborhoods, with longstanding relationships and neighborhood dramas. On the streets in front of our homes, most of us already know if there are potholes, and whether socio-economic segregation is getting worse or better. But we may need the vision of art to imagine alternate futures. Art on our streets resists abstraction, and raises immediate questions of civics, prompting us to ask, “what can we do about this?” And taking action points back to learning, since the neighborhood solution is so often to empower ourselves, which necessitates learning who we are, determining what assets and power we have, and learning the skills of collective action to push for change.

Clearly the tripod legs are not just connected — they overlap. In fact, we argue that games are pushing for further blur between art, activism and learning. Games are a form of media that do less to structure facts, and more to structure and shape the player’s experience and identity. Learning is inherent in games, since their engagement depends on providing challenges that are just barely possible. (To use the language of Vygotsky, we might say that games are only fun when they scaffold the experience to keep the player within their zone of proximal development.) When games are tied to physical space, their action ties to learning about our own neighborhoods — how to move through them, and to change them. The art of such games is often the physical world itself, with better sounds and graphics than any screen! And the digital side of games draws in the civic, if only because it is so easy to link to more information on how to take action, or how to learn more. In other words, the experiential nature of games pulls mobile experiences on civics into being a mix of art and learning.

The report is a wonderful example of multidisciplinary scholarship with each student embodying one of the legs of their “tripod” and developing their ideas in conversation with the others. They have used a nonlinear format to allow readers to trace multiple paths through the diverse case study examples and interviews with media producers (including Mary Flanagan, Katie London, Colleen Macklin, and many others) they have assembled.

Yet, they also are creating multiple points of synthesis where their insights come together and produce  understandings that none of them individually would be able to reach. Outside this innovative framework and presentation, some of these games might be understood through a lens of avant garde art practice, others through the lens of education or activism, but we would be unlikely to see the connections between them. I strongly recommend this report to anyone who wants to better understand the potentials of mobile games for facilitating new forms of civic learning and expressive practice.

Filed Under: civic media, Civic Paths, games culture, macarthur, media literacy, University of Southern California
July 20, 2012

Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action

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Over the past few blog posts, I have been sharing updates on some of the work being done by my Civic Paths research group at USC — first, the special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on fan activism, and second, Arely Zimmerman’s white paper exploring the ways undocumented youth and their supporters mobilized through and around new media in support of the DREAM act. But, as I have noted, this work fits within a larger initiative launched by the MacArthur Foundation — a research hub on Youth and Participatory Politics, headed by Political Science Professor Joe Kahne from Mills College, and involving a multidisciplinary mix of researchers who are combining a range of different approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, to better understand how young people are using new media as a resource for political participation.

A few weeks ago, Kahn and another Political Scientist, University of Chicago’s Cathy Cohen, released an important report representing the first phases of this research — Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action. Here’s a rich and provocative interview with its primary authors, thanks to MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning team.

The white paper does two things which are really important for people seeking to better understand the interplay of new media and citizen participation — first, it offers a new conceptual framing for thinking about what our research network is calling “participatory politics” and second, it shares the findings of the team’s first large scale survey which seeks to capture the current state of youth, new media, and civic participation, recorded just after the Midterm Elections and prior to the current presidential campaign season.

Here’s a key passage of the report which seeks to explain our core concept and what we think it will add to the existing understandings of the political lives of American youth:

The Youth and Participatory Politics study defines participatory politics as interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern. Importantly, these acts are not guided by deference to elites or formal institutions. Examples of participatory political acts include starting a new political group online, writing and disseminating a blog post about a political issue, forwarding a funny political video to one’s social network, or participating in a poetry slam.

Participatory political acts can:

␣ reach large audiences and mobilize net- works, often online, on behalf of a cause;

␣ help shape agendas through dialogue with, and provide feedback to, political leaders (on- and offline); and

␣ enable participants to exert greater agency through the circulation or forwarding of political information (e.g., links) as well as through the production of original content, such as a blog or letter to the editor.

Four factors make participatory politics especially important to those thinking about the future of American politics.

1. Participatory politics allow individuals to operate with greater independence in the political realm, circumventing traditional gatekeepers of information and influence, such as newspaper editors, political parties, and interest groups.

2. Participatory politics often facilitate a renegotiation of political power and control with the traditional political entities that are now searching for ways to engage participants. Witness how newspapers and cable television stations now try to facilitate a controlled engagement with their audience through the use of social media.

3. Participatory politics as practiced online provide for greater creativity and voice, as participants produce original content using video, images, and text.

4. Participatory politics afford individuals the capability to reach a sizable audience and mobilize others through their social networks in an easy and inexpensive

manner.

This definition emerges from three years of intense discussions amongst the participating researchers, as well as consultations with leading scholars and activists, all of whom are thinking deeply about media change and its political consequences. It think it is safe to say that this reconceptualization would not have emerged anywhere except in the radically multidisciplinary space which Kahne and the MacArthur Foundation have helped to establish. We bring ideas from our own disciplines into conversation with those from profoundly different frames of reference, and in the process, we have begun to map a space which is inadequately covered by any given field.

In the case of media and cultural studies, the report comes as we are seeing sharper distinctions being drawn between different forms of cultural and political participation, where-as on the Political Science side, it emerges from ongoing discussions about the shifting nature of politics as a human activity, especially the shift of focus towards nongovernmental forms of political action.

The report shifts the focus from “Twitter Revolutions,” which place the emphasis on new forms of networked technologies, and onto specific sets of political and cultural practices, which deploy those tools in relation to older media technologies, to help redefine the dynamics of political debate and mobilization.

A second key point to make has to do with the relationship between participatory politics and more established and institutionalized forms of politics, a question to which Kahne and Cohen addressed in the interview that accompanies the report’s release:

Participatory politics can allow for greater creativity and voice, but voice may not necessarily lead to influence. What sort of shift must occur in order for these practices to become influential?

Kahne: We have thought about this a lot, and it’s something we as a field need to learn more about. There is no doubt that practices that amplify the voice of young people are a significant thing, especially given the marginal status that so many young people have in relation to mainstream institutions. Those institutions are places where young people generally don’t have significant voice. Participatory politics can give them that voice. At the same time, it’s key to realize that if youth are circulating ideas among their networks without understanding how to move from voice to influence, they may well not achieve the goals they value. In our work with youth organizations, digital platforms, and youth themselves, we have to find ways to help youth connect to institutions act strategically to have influence and to put pressure on the places – whether corporate or governmental – to prompt the change youth want to see occur.

Cohen: Participatory politics is never meant to displace a focus on institutional politics. We might think of it as a supplemental domain where young people can take part in a dialogue about the issues that matter, think about strategies of mobilization, and do some of that mobilizing collectively online. That said, we have to always recognize that there is important power that exists largely offline. The Occupy movement is a classic example of both participatory politics and offline institutional politics coming together to not only amplify voice but also provide influence and power — even temporarily — for a group of primarily young people around class and equality issues.

This new framework for thinking about “Participatory Politics” helps us to make sense of some of the significant findings of the national survey. I can hit on only a few key insights here (read the report for more):

Large proportions of young people across racial and ethnic groups have access to the Internet and use online social media regularly to stay connected to their family and friends and pursue interests and hobbies.

Contrary to the traditional notion of a technological digital divide, the YPP study finds young people across racial and ethnic groups are connected online. Overwhelmingly, white (96 percent), black (94 percent), Latino (96 percent) and Asian-American (98 percent) youth report having access to a computer that connects to the Internet. A majority or near majority of white (51 percent), black (57 percent), Latino (49 percent), and Asian American (52 percent) youth report sending messages, sharing status updates and links, or chatting online daily.

Youth are very involved in friendship-driven and interest-driven activities online.

78 percent send messages, share status updates, or chat online on a weekly basis.

58 percent share links or forward information through social networks at least once a week….

I was delighted to see this last question, dealing with the practices around what I call Spreadable Media, included in the survey, since events like Kony 2012 have established that acts of circulation can be an important part of how young people are participating in political debates.

Over-all, 64 percent engage in at least one interest-driven activity in a given week, and 32 percent engage in three or more interest driven activities a week.

Participatory Politics are an important dimension of politics.

41 percent of young people have engaged in at least one act of participatory politics, while 44 percent participate in other acts of politics.

Specifically, 43 percent of white, 41 percent of black, 38 percent of Latino and 36 percent of Asian-American youth participated in at least one act of participatory politics during the prior 12 months.

Participatory politics are an addition to an individual’s engagement rather than an alternative to other political activities:

Youth who engaged in at least one act of participatory politics were almost twice as likely

to report voting in 2010 as those who did not.

A large proportion–37 percent of all young people–engages in both participatory

and institutional politics.

Among young people who engage in participatory policies, 90 percent of them either vote or engage in institutional politics.

Participatory politics are equitably distributed across different racial and ethnic groups:

The difference in voting in 2008 between the group with the highest rate of turnout according to the U.S. Census Bureau–black youth (52%)– and the group with the lowest rate of turnout– Latino youth (27%)–is 25 percentage points.

These findings challenge many key stereotypes which shape dominant discourses around youth, new media, and political participation, suggesting that:

  • participatory politics and culture are not simply activities involving white suburban middle class youth but they are widespread across all ethnic groups, and indeed, the group most likely to engage with the broadest range of such practices are African-Americans
  • new media politics does not come at the expense of more traditional forms of political participation but rather is more likely to amplify patterns of voter-participation
  • participatory culture and politics seems to be an important equalizer of opportunities for engagement in the political process.

One other conclusion seems important for readers who are invested in media literacy: According to the survey, 84 percent of youth indicate that, given their reliance on online sources for news and information, “would benefit from learning more about how to tell if news and information you find online is trustworthy.” So, contrary to the stereotype that young people are indifferent to the credibility of the information they access online, many of them are seeking support from adult educators to help them acquire skills at more meaningfully parsing what should be trusted.

Educators and policy makers alike will benefit from looking more deeply at the rich data and insights found in this report. I am sure to be drawing more on this report through upcoming blog posts around these topics.

For those who want to learn more about the report, I’ve embedded here the video of a recent chat session featuring Kahne, Cohen, and others, talking about the report with Howard Rheingold through the MacArthur Foundation’s Connected Learning Seminar series.

Joe Kahne is the John and Martha Davidson Professor of Education at Mills College. His research focuses on ways school practices and new media influence youth civic and political development.

Cathy Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is the founder of the Black Youth Project and author of The Boundaries of Blackness and Democracy Remixed. Her research focuses on political engagement by marginal communities.

Filed Under: civic media, Civic Paths, macarthur, media literacy, Media Policy, participation
July 19, 2012

Documenting DREAMS: New Media, Undocumented Youth and the Immigrant Rights Movement

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Civic Paths is a team of graduate students, faculty, post-docs, and staff researchers within the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, who are seeking to better understand the role of new media tools and practices in shaping the political socialization and mobilization of American youth. The faculty leads on the research team are myself and my Journalism colleague, Kierstin Thorson while Sangita Shreshtova is the Research Director.

The team is linked to a larger research hub on Youth and Participatory Politics, headed by Mills College Political Science Professor Joe Kahne and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Our team’s contribution consists of developing a series of ethnographic case studies of innovative networks which have proven effective at encouraging youth to become political activists. Next time, I will be sharing some quantitative research recently released by Kahne, Cathy Cohen, and other members of the YPP network.

Civic Paths recently released the first of the white papers which over the next two years will start to emerge from our research: this one written by our Post-Doc Arely M. Zimmerman and dealing with the groups of undocumented youth who have been trying to rally behind the DREAM Act. The report was released the same week that President Barack Obama announced a major shift in the country’s immigration policy that reflected in many ways the success of these DREAM activists in reframing the public’s perception of the experience of being undocumented and in calling out the fact that the Obama administration had deported more people in its first three years in office than George W. Bush had in his two terms as president.

Zimmerman’s white paper takes us behind the scenes, identifying the tactics which had led to this political victory and sharing the stories shared with her by the participants in her study.

Zimmerman’s research was the focus of an earlier blog post, describing a program we hosted at USC where young immigrant rights activists talked about their use of new media to mobilize supporters.

You can find the full report on the DREAM Activists online at the Youth and Participatory Politics homepage. But, to give you a taste of the report, I wanted to share two excerpts here today. The first comes from the introduction to Zimmerman’s report:

On October 12, 2011, five undocumented youth wearing graduation caps staged a sit-in at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices in downtown Los Angeles to urge the Obama administration to stop deporting undocumented youths. The sit-in launched the national E.N.D. (Education Not Deportation) Our Pain campaign, comprised of a network of immigrant youth organizations and allies demanding an immediate moratorium on deporting youth eligible for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. This proposed legislation would grant conditional legal status to those brought to the United States under age 16 if they attend college or join the military.

The action took place on a busy Wednesday morning when most Angelenos were at work and most students were in school. Fearing a low turnout, Dream Team Los Angeles, a local youth-led community group, and their allies used social media to send links of a live broadcast of the action from a free video-streaming site. While 300 people attended, over 4,000 users watched online as the youth entered ICE headquarters and demanded a hearing with officials. The attendees and online audience looked on as handcuffs were placed on the youth. Immediately after the arrests, users were able to make donations and petition for the arrestees’ release through another website.

The E.N.D. campaign’s direct action is an example of a strategy to amplify youth voices in the immigrant rights movement by combining traditional community organizing

with new media strategies. One of the arrestees and leader of one of the DREAM advocacy groups in Los Angeles acknowledges that a mixed media strategy is key for reaching diverse participants:

You have to be able to use Facebook and Twitter, but you have to be intentional about it, and strategic. At the same time, you have to also utilize traditional media outlets because our ‘tios’ and ‘tias’ are not using social networking. They are still watching Univision and the nightly news. So you have to engage in both.

DREAM Activism is an exemplar case of youth capitalizing on new media affordances to recruit, mobilize, and sustain broad-based youth political participation. While initial organizing in 2001 focused on states with high immigrant populations such as California, Illinois, and New York, undocumented youth and student organizations are now active at the national level with chapters in 25 states. The California Dream Network, a network of undocumented youth organizations, boasts chapters on over 30 college campuses. Student and youth organizers credit both their rapid growth and public outreach to the power of new media. Prerna Lal, co-founder of DreamActivist.org, a media-centered youth organization, states in an online video, “New media has indeed taken a small group of undocumented students to new heights and fueled a movement that was stagnant.”

Immigrant youth’s participation in the DREAM movement provides an opportunity to examine the intersection of new media and grassroots youth-led social movements in the context of a politically disenfranchised and legally vulnerable community. Drawing from field research, event observations, media content analysis, and 25 semi-structured interviews with DREAM activists residing in California, Illinois, Georgia, and Texas, this report examines the role of new media in mobilizing undocumented youth’s participation in the movement.

Only three of the youth I interviewed were U.S. citizens. While Mexico was the primary country of origin, some of the youth came from Colombia, Nigeria, El Salvador, Poland, and Chile. All but three of the youth were enrolled in an institution of higher learning or had completed their bachelor’s degree at the time of the interviewee. The semi-structured interviews allowed me to reconstruct the history of Dream Activism and account for existing organizational networks through youth’s narration of events, stories of participation, and the re-telling of their experiences as members of Dream activist organizations. On an individual level, the interview protocol was directed at capturing youth’s stories of involvement, the contextual factors and supports that sustained their civic participation, and their use of new media platforms and practices. Additionally, I probed how their participation in the Dream movement had shaped their experiences of inequality and identity, feelings of membership and belonging, and conceptions of citizenship.

As the effects of new media on political participation continue to be sharply

debated, this case study suggests that youth’s online and political participation are

mutually reinforcing. Despite the barriers they face because of their legal and socio-

economic status, undocumented youth activists in this study are highly engaged online as bloggers, documentarians, artists, or social media activists. The positive correlation

between levels of civic engagement and online participation is due to several factors.

Online communities have served as spaces to develop associational bonds, forge social

networks, and amass forms of social capital that are particularly useful given the legal

and political vulnerability of face to face activism. Online communities have also

increased youth’s sense of political efficacy by offering spaces for collective identification and shared memory. The sophisticated use of new media by undocumented youth has enabled youth to negotiate, resist, and respond to their political and socio- economic marginalization. Through new media, undocumented youth have uplifted the voices, experiences, and stories of an often-ignored segment of the immigrant population in the United States. Simultaneously, these activists have brought attention to the youth voice within the social justice community more broadly….

The second selection from the white paper comes from the conclusion and focuses more directly on the personal trajectories of the DREAM activists that Zimmerman interviewed for the project. She deals honestly with the challenges these undocumented youth confront, both in preserving personal dignity in their everyday interactions and in finding ways to access the digital media which is so vital to their efforts. This passage gives us a snap shot of how people are living with and working around the digital divide and the participation gap and the ways these inequalities of access are tied to larger social, political, and economic inequalities. Their stories help us to understand how current immigration policies are squandering the potential of a generation of young Americans who seek to make a contribution with their lives but who are often blocked from doing so as a consequence of the political stalemate which surrounds efforts to change the process for acquiring citizenship:

During the research on this MAPP case study, I met many individuals who defied the presumption of civically and politically disengaged youth. Like Jose, who used Facebook to confront the social isolation he felt by posting photos of his drawings online, these youth have used new media tools to overcome rather than succumb to barriers to their political participation. Sammy, an aspiring filmmaker, did not have the means to buy a camera with HD capabilities, but produced a short documentary on the plights of undocumented students. El Random Hero was an avid blogger and yet did not have a computer at home. He accessed the internet through public libraries. The stories of these youth provide a glimpse into the positive impact that new media can have on the ability of youth to become civically and politically engaged.

Through this research, I also met disaffected undocumented youth who were less engaged both in their schools, communities, and empowering forms of digital social networks. Though these youth had access to new media, they had not used this access to empower themselves and engage politically. Anna, a high school student, felt that

Facebook was a detriment at times even, pulling her into a web of high school “drama” causing her to deactivate her account. Anna was graduating high school that summer and hadn’t any idea of what she would do next. Would she be destined to work in a low- skilled job for minimum wage?

These varied DREAMer youth experiences show the range of outcomes that are possible. For those individuals that experienced positive outcomes in their civic, political and digital lives, it seems to be a result of access to new media combined with a range of other contextual supports. One important contextual support is institutional, namely the college campus. Most of the youth in this study who were politically engaged are also college graduates or on the way to obtaining a degree. Of course, there are exceptions. El Random Hero, for instance, has not been able to afford to attend community college. But for the most part, DREAMers seem to become more involved once they’re enrolled in an educational institution. Students like Agustin, who had been exposed early on to Chicano or Ethnic studies, had a framework to understand their struggles in relation to historical patterns, increasing their sense of belonging and group pride. Several youth in this study started their activism by joining a college campus group. Others found each other online. Some later become active in community-based organizations or national coalitions, but they generally began when a peer or a mentor introduced them to a student support group for undocumented students. This happened both online and face-to-face.

While much research needs to be done in this regard, this study suggests that new

media do provide extended opportunities for political advocacy and social engagement

for undocumented youth. DREAMers find each other online. They strengthen their sense

of community through collective storytelling. They mobilize for action using social media. They use their online media savvy in combination with more traditional social movement tactics. The youth use new media to make the DREAM movement personal, networked and visible. What remains a question is whether the degree of empowerment and the sustainability of youth’s political participation in this movement relates directly to institutional supports and contextual capital. If so, how can we strengthen these to create powerful avenues for broader youth participation in politics and the public sphere?

While community groups like Dream Team Coalition of Los Angeles or the United We Dream national network are youth-driven, these groups have also successfully drawn on resources and support from more traditional allies in the advocacy and nonprofit sectors. These contextual supports may enhance DREAMer youth’s new media affordances towards more sustained political action. For example, in the Los Angeles area, community-based organizations such as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) and UCLA’s Labor Center have been at the forefront of undocumented youth organizing. These centers provide both formal and informal supports such as mentorship, scholarship, organizing and leadership development, along with access to the broader social justice community. In 2011, the Labor Center sponsored an event called “Dream Summer”, which provided 60 undocumented youth with paid internships and a trip to Washington DC. Such programs help sustain youth’s political activism and involvement by providing a means of both emotional and financial support and motivation.

In California, especially in cities like Los Angeles, the immigrant rights community has well-established organizations with a long trajectory of facing an uphill battle to organize and sustain their political involvement. While new media and online social networks are a way to counter social and political isolation, DREAMer youth may benefit by seeking out the support of institutions that can help sustain their activism. Kendra and Jenny, for instance, found it hard to plug into the social justice community in their hometowns in Texas and Illinois, respectively. Because immigrant rights are often framed as a Latino issue, most organizations cater to Spanish speaking, newly arrived immigrants. Kendra and Jenny were not Latin American and were not Spanish speakers. The lack of ethnic ties made it more difficult for them to participate in local organizing activities, so they turned to the Internet. Kendra was more successful than Jenny at connecting to a social network of undocumented students, but she also was pulled further into the immigrant rights struggle when she visited Washington, D.C. for a collective action. Joining others in a solidarity march on Capitol Hill was a catalyst in her political activism.

Clearly, there is still more research that needs to be done in understanding why some undocumented youth become politically and socially empowered, while others, to put it in their words, remain “in the shadows.” Further analysis of this research will begin to answer these questions as well. Still, it is already clear that new media placed in the hands of DREAMer youth, inspired by a collective vision and supported by the community, has created a powerful movement for social change.

Civic Paths is very proud of the timely and ground-breaking work which Zimmerman has done on this case study, and we hope you will take the time to check out her full report.

Future Civic Paths white papers will deal with the network of fan activists around the Harry Potter Alliance, the Nerdfighters, and Imagine Better; the activities and institutions supporting the Students for Liberty movement; and the politicization of Moslem-American youth in the wake of 9/11.

Filed Under: civic media, Civic Paths, macarthur, participation
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