"It's 2012. Do You Know Where Your Avatar Is?": An Interview with Beth Coleman (Part Two)

You reference your own avatar many times across the book but you do not tell us much about why you chose this self-representation or how you relate to your avatar. So, what's the story?

Henry, it's a tale of two cities, one academic and one engaged. Practically speaking, I had to make an avatar to do research in Second Life, as I would with any social media platform. In the same way, I had to have actual experience with the augmented reality and alternate reality games I describe in the book. So, on the one hand, my avatar is a simply a device, a way into the different platforms and communities I investigate. In a sense, my avatar is like a microphone. I need to have it to conduct research.

With that said, I am glad to be upfront about how my avatar functions because it has everything to do with me--who I am in my different facets as academic, artist, etc. So I will describe Hapi, my Second Life avatar, as an example of this positional Jujutsu. Hapi is a cute, white robot diminutive in size and genderless in affect that designed with Jenny Mu, a graphic artist and game designer from Parsons School of Design. From my point of view, Hapi was happily free of race, gender, or even humanness and that's how we had intentionally designed that avatar.

In my experience, the highly identifiable avatar bodies of MMORPG and other graphical virtual worlds could carry a serious burden of identity. It felt heavy to me to have to represent so exactly a gender or race or even species. Additionally, I needed to find an avatar that other avatars would talk to in neither an overly aggressive nor sexualized way. So, I landed on a cute robot, which is a figure personally near and dear to me. In other moments, you and I have discussed the place of race and gender in the contemporary world, where we both find ourselves liberated from some forms of the historical trappings and, yet, also recreating them. And so, I saw my avatar persona not so much as an alternative or different me, but as a strategic extension of myself.

You include an interview where Cory Doctorow describes himself as "offloading" reading to his students and playing to his wife. I realize he is to some degree joking, but it does raise the question about whether one sentient being can function as an "avatar" for another under your definition. How much control must we be able to exert and how much identification must we feel in order to see something as an Avatar?

Cory, as we know, is scrupulous researcher and a person intensely committed to seeing through to completion the project of a networked open-source world. With that said, he is also an avatar of economy. He makes part of his work the work of outsourcing to the right sources. Alice Taylor, his partner, is an accomplished gamer; Cory will never be that. Thus, free riding over her shoulder is his best education. Boingboing.net, the massively popular blog site of which Cory is one of the founders is based on the premise that other people find the stories on which the blog posts are based. The bloggers of Boingboing do not do "original" research in the traditional sense; they aggregate information (one of the exceptions to this is Xeni Jardin and Cory's first hand reports from Occupy Wall Street last winter). Cory describes this process of managing what would be for most of us information overload. He has tagged something about the aggregated now--the avatar effect as it were--that we need to attend to in moving forward. As for his students, Cory is pretty clear that he gives away books and asks students to report anything interesting. The students become proxy readers, but in a way that seems mutually beneficial and relatively transparent. If you think about the medieval formulation of the university and how graduate students are apprenticed, this seems like a relatively ethical approach.

What roles do you think telepresence plays within participatory culture?

Telepresence, or what I am calling copresence (the sense of being present with someone via mediation), is huge for participatory culture. We are moving unerringly toward a more graphic and increasingly real-time mediation. One of the things I underscore in the book is the idea that people in their everyday engagement of networked media create all kinds of innovation and intervention. I cite your work and that of Stefana Broadbent and Mimi Ito to support this point. I see copresence as one of the critical factors in how we move forward.

If my ideas of X-Reality hold--that online and worldly engagement become increasingly meshed--then copresence is a critical aspect of that progression. We feel each other across the networks. We strategize for regime change or denial of service attack or group buying power across these networks. The more vividly we feel each other's presence the more effectively and passionately we can work together to achieve our ends.

What do you see as the distinction between "users" and "agents"?

Users, as I quote scholar Wendy Chun, get used. Agents are activists. I don't mean exclusively political activists but, rather, the profile of one who engages. You yourself have talked about the importance of avid fan networks in the transitional state of moving from active viewer to active maker. I see this formulation of agency as the critically important to the theories of network society and open-source models that we find in influential thinkers such as Manuel Castells, Yochai Benkler, and Lawrence Lessig. In One Way Forward, Lessig's most recent book, he takes as a given that We the People are agents, the authors of our destinies. He also says that that We the People is a sleeping giant that needs to awake to its power. I agree that we need to awaken to the power of networked agency. In my mind, X-Reality and copresence are tightly bound up in a notion of twenty-first century agency.

You use various metaphors - especially "supplement" and "augment"--to describe the ways we use digital communications in relation to face-to-face contact. Both of these imply a complimentary rather than oppositional relationship between the two. Elsewhere, you make the claim that human agents are "not entralled by technology." How would you respond to critics who think we spend too much time in "virtual worlds" or in front of "screens"?

We spend a lot of time in front of screens. For my two bits as a media designer, I want to see us take these screens outside as often as possible, and I would like to see as much heads-up engagement as we can muster. What I see is people making the technology work for them by any means necessary. I invoke the Malcolm X adage because it is crucial to our sense of freedom and agency that we control our network outlook--our avatar.

I say this because of the data battles on the horizon. We have a shockingly new and powerful economic model where our data flows fuel the engine of Google or Facebook or other social media sites. We are at a moment when we need to consider seriously how we use network media to augment our lives--create greater opportunity for real-time and copresent exchanges. We are also at a moment when we need to reclaim our avatar
imprint, our data trail, as our own.

In this sense, my concept of augmented reality and mediation as a supplement to face-to-face presence are not metaphors at all. We actually use these mechanisms as we would a pair of glasses or a cane--we use them to see ourselves and each other more clearly. Think about whether you would rather lose your computer or your cell phone.
Most millennials would say without hesitation junk the computer. The hardware is nothing. The pervasive connection is everything.

You attempt to update Sherry Turkle's discussion of people as "cycling through" virtual identities. What do you see as having changed since she wrote her book, Life on Screen?

I don't think people cycle through. I think people use their online personas to extend, augment, and help actualize who they are in the world. I see what has historically been called "the virtual" as a contemporary aspect of augmentation. We don't think of a telephone call as "virtual;" we think of it as extending connectivity beyond geographic limits. I am suggesting that online engagement should be thought of in the same way.

For business people whose only engagement with "cyberspace" in the 1990s was their Blackberry connectivity, this has always been the case. Today for teenagers using mobile and social media to make status updates in real-time, this is also the case. There is no
separation between the "virtual" and the "real."

You compare your "virtual cannibal" with "Bungle the Clown" in Julian Dibbel's classic essay, "A Rape in Cyberspace." What has changed about "transgression" in online communities since Dibbel wrote his essay?

When Julian wrote that essay in the early 1990s we were both working as copy editors at the Village Voice. I saw in that piece and in that moment Julian framing a generational experience: we were the first generation of networked users to play wildly and freely in this undefined space of online. Subsequently, post-deluge, there are multitudes of us online. Julian translated a boutique experience to many.

Now, as I describe with the virtual cannibal, anyone can embark on a quest to find the edge of comfort and culturally acceptable behavior. There are two main points for me in understanding the experience of the virtual cannibal. First, we can Google extremist cultures and fairly easily join in the rumpus; in effect, as all things are more findable,
the historical idea of marginal cultures changes. The global jihadist movement illustrates this vividly. So does the sustained glee of the burners (Burning Man participants).

Second, the things we experience in simulated or virtual space are actual events in our lives. Julian's story of Mr. Bungle has often been interpreted as a cautionary tail of the raging id of online life. I see it in a different way. I think "A Rape in Cyberspace" tells us, from very early one, that our actions online have clear, connected impact on our lives in the world. I think he tells one of the first proto-X-Reality stories, even if it has not been generally interpreted as such. The difference now is that transgression is normal, not exceptional, in an era of avatars and that everyone can be Mr. Bungle. 4chan certainly figured that out.

You end the book with a discussion of alternate and augmented reality games. What do these experiences teach us about living in relation to "x-reality"?

I think the most important technologies we see coming online today augment reality in some form or another. Whether it is a game played across a city (an alternate reality game) or a handheld-device with real-time feeds, we are experimenting and rapidly prototyping technologies of augmentation. We see a profound augmentation of reality in how movements such as Occupy Wall Street or the occupation of Tahrir Square or even the Tea Party all use network media for collective action. This is X-Reality in action. But I still hold near and dear to my heart (and my analysis), the everyday use of avatars as augmenting reality. X-Reality describes the way in which people right now make manifest a collective power and individual agency. I know, it's a tall order. Nonetheless, it seems that we have amazing, vivid examples of this kind of heroism all around us.

Professor Beth Coleman believes in the power of storytelling to transform the world. She works with new technology and art to create transmedia forms of engagement. She is the director of City as Platform, Amsterdam, a Faculty Fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, as well as a professor at the Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam. From 2005-2011, Coleman was an assistant professor of comparative media studies at MIT. As an artist, she has a history of international exhibition including venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Musée d'Art moderne Paris. She is the co-founder of SoundLab Cultural Alchemy, an internationally acclaimed multimedia performance platform. As the newly appointed co-director of the Critical Media Lab and a professor of English Literature and Languages at the University of Waterloo, Ontario Canada, she continues to work internationally with collaborators in through Africa, Europe, and Asia. Her book Hello Avatar is published by the MIT Press.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Watching the Internet: An Interview with Jose M. Alvarez-Monzoncillo (Part One)

This summer, I am embarking on an extraordinary adventure -- a 20 city lecture tour of Europe. I have been long overdue paying a visit to the Continent, not having visited there since Convergence Culture has been translated into a host of different languages, and this will be my chance to visit academics, public intellectuals, cultural leaders, and transmedia producers, and learn more about the ways these various nations have responded to the shifts in the media landscape which my works describe. I am excited at the prospect of meeting many new thinkers there. I am still struggling to decide how to deal with this blog while on this exhausting journey but in the long run, it should allow me to bring more perspectives to you.

Jose M. Alvarez-Monzoncillo, a professor of Audiovisual Communications at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, will be one of my many hosts on this trip, and he shared with me the English translation of one of his recent books, Watching the Internet: The Future of TV?, which takes up many of the issues we like to discuss through this blog. I asked him if he would be willing to do an interview and share some of his takes on the intersection between old and new media as seen from his perspective, as a veteran of the old media industries and as someone deeply immersed in a Spanish context.

Early on, you quote Gilles Lipovetsky's description of "the unstoppable process of individualization." What factors do you think are leading to the individualization and personalization of our media experiences? How does this personalization impact the existing models shaping the entertainment content industries?

I think there are two distinct, though closely related tendencies. On the one hand there is a tendency towards social individualism which is referred to by Lipovetsky, and on the other hand there is that which refers to the experience of the media. I think the first is indisputable, at least in Europe. "Close relationships" have diminished considerably in recent years (going to church or to the cinema on Sundays, chatting on public transport, talking every day to the person who sells you your newspaper or to the one who serves you coffee in the neighbourhood where you live etc.. There is a great demand to escape from "social control" or anonymity. With regard to television or the cinema I think there is also a trend towards individualism. The concept of the family sitting together in front of the television has disappeared and groups of friends who go to the cinema are doing so less frequently.

However, social networks allow a new social relationship that is replacing the previous ones. I do not agree with Lipovetsky when he argues that virtual communities will eventually destroy the real community, the direct encounter, collective bonds. This is a new form of social relationship that overlaps with the previous ones.

The factors which explain the new socialisation process are very diverse and profound: changes in the family, the design and planning of cities, new forms of social relationship with the arrival of the internet etc. Nobody is denying that the Internet is a powerful tool which allows a new form of socialisation, although it also has the opposite effect: for example, parents have fewer opportunities to have a relationship with their children as they are using social networks or mobiles. The content industries are already taking into account the personalisation and individualism of nomad entertainment. More and more variations of different products are being made to be used on different devices and in different locations: from the cinema to tablets. I think there is still much to be done in this area.

Yes, I agree in general terms as people are talking, expressing their opinions, debating and sharing much more than in the past. However, I also believe that television audiences have become much more fragmented in the last few years. The mass audiences of the past are more divided. Broadcasting vs narrowcasting. New digital divides are being created (in their use of the net), economic and social (between the rich and poor), generational (young people, the middle aged and elderly) and cultural (technophobes and technofiles). Inside every group, however, a larger socialisation has appeared. For example, television is more "collectivised" and the dreamed of interactivity of the past is starting to become reality

You write, "The social functions once fulfilled by TV are in crisis, while new ones have yet to be defined." Does this imply that television is in crisis? Should a medium survive if it has outlived its social functions?

In Europe, yes. The television of the masses which emerged during the previous century to inform, teach and entertain and was controlled by the State has died. All of the public television stations are in crisis and commercial television, though highly competitive, is losing audiences and advertising. Young people are now deciding how to do these three things. That form of television is changing at the hands of the internet. The logic of demand is changing to the logic of choice. It is the viewer who decides what he wants to see.

This new concept will be created by all of us. But for me, what defines television is the content. When we watch an HBO series, we are watching television. It doesn't matter what screen we are watching it on or the type of telecommunication (cable, satellite, ADSL etc) .The day the internet produces content, things will change. We will then have to invent new concepts. Hulu will always be a joint venture.......

As you note, the rate of change has been uneven across countries and later, you point out that Spain has one of the lowest level of creative participation in net culture in the world. How would you describe the current state of participatory culture in your country and what factors do you think contribute to its relatively slow rate of creative sharing?

This has more to do with what the statistics say than with my opinion. Spain is the leader in pirating and, traditionally, a culture of sharing has not existed, to the point of defrauding the tax office being well looked upon. The Spanish are individualists, in contrast to what is usually supposed. However, I believe that little by little the UGC is catching on among young people, but more slowly than in other countries.

To what degree do you think television will become a global rather than a local, national, or regional medium in an era of networked communications?

Global television for big events (sports, news programmes etc) will continue for a time and will coexist with regional and national television. The Net will complement and start to integrate with television. The internet offers a fascinating complementary opportunity.

Like many others, you speculate that the BRIC countries may become dominant players in the audiovisual culture of the future. Since I have many readers from those countries, I wondered if you might spell out a bit more what you think their impact is going to be and what factors might lead to their increased visibility in the global media market.

I don't believe so. The global mainstream will be North American. It will be difficult for them to break into China but they will manage it in the end. My position is very similar to that of Frédéric Martel. We are moving towards "standardised diversity". We are not faced with a value system that wants to impose itself on the world, rather a "hydra" of companies that feed off each other and know how to adapt themselves to circumstances. The power of the USA on the net and in the production of content makes me think this. Without doubt, styles and vanguards from other cultures will be incorporated, just as happened during the 20th Century. The size of the American national market will help to provide high production costs which will make it very difficult for other cultures to compete.

Jose M. Alvarez-Monzoncillo is Professor of Audiovisual Communications at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid. In addition, he currently holds positions as the Vice Rector for European Harmonisation and Convergence and Director of the International Doctorate School of URJC; Course Director for the Master's in Television Journalism; Coordinator of the Masters in Film, Television, and Interactive Media Studies; and Director of the INFOCENT research group. Professor Alvarez has written and co-written thirty0six books and more than twenty papers for scientific journals on the economy of communications, the cultural industries and new information technologies. Some of his works include The Future of Audiovisual Media in Spain (1992), The Film Industry in Spain (1993), Premium Images (1997), The Present and Future of Digital Television (1999), The Future of Home Entertainment (2004) and Cultural Policy Alternatives (2007).

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Let's Do the Time Warp Again: A 21st Century Study Guide for Rocky Horror Picture Show

Last fall, I was asked by a USC dorm which was planning a field trip to Los Angeles' NuArt Cinema to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show if I might share some reflections with them to stimulate thought and discussion about the experience. As someone who had been a Rocky Horror fan in the 1970s, I approached this task with some bemusement, but I also saw it as a chance to think a bit more deeply about the "cult film experience" as it has evolved over time. Here's what I shared with those students:

From Wikipedia:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the 1975 film adaptation of the British rock musical stageplay, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, written by Richard O'Brien. The film is a parody of B-movie, science fiction and horror films of the late 1940s through early 1970s. Director Jim Sharman collaborated on the screenplay with O'Brien, who wrote both the book and lyrics for the stage. The film introduces Tim Curry and features Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick along with cast members from the original Kings Road production presented at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1973.

Still in limited release 36 years after its premiere, it has the longest-running theatrical release in film history. It gained notoriety as a midnight movie in 1977 when audiences began participating with the film in theatres. Rocky Horror is the first film from a major Hollywood studio to be in the midnight movie market. The motion picture has a large international cult following and is one of the most well known and financially successful midnight movies of all time. In 2005, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you have the Rocky Horror Picture Show experience almost 40 years after it all began.

What Constitutes a Cult Movie?: Film scholar Timothy Corrigan writes, "Cult movies are always after a fashion foreign films: the images are especially exotic; the viewer uniquely touristic; and with that relationship viewers get to go places, see things, and manipulate customs in a way that no indigeneous member of that culture or mainstream filmgoer normally could." So, what is it about Rocky Horror Picture Show which has engendered this kind of response? If this is a touristic experience, then where does it invite us to travel, what world does it open for us?

Manufactured or Discovered: A key debate among people who have studied cult movies is whether cult movies can be designed and manufactured to inspire this kind of devoted response or whether they must be found and cultivated by their audience. People have made both arguments about Rocky Horror. The original stage production already passed out sheets instructing the audience on how to dance the Time Warp, and thus clearly invited our participation. But, it is the audience participation which has sustained interest in this property over time, even as other contemporary "Midnight Movies" have long ago faded into the background. So, what properties of the film and of the audience participation inspire such passion?

From Cult Movies to Cult Television -- Some have argued that Rocky Horror represents the last gasp of a public film culture -- that is, the values of movie-going as a shared culture experience. Which contemporary films become events in anywhere close to the same way that the Rocky Horror Picture Show is? Most contemporary cult movies have emerged as such because people watched them on television or DVD. Today, television shows are more apt to become cult objects than movies, and the experience is more likely to be an online experience.

Rocky Horror as Ritual -- When the "Midnight Movies" emerged, they were often discussed anthropologically in terms of the collective performance of rituals. So, there are certain gestures, lines, and actions which are performed and reperformed, taking on special meaning and significance to those who repeat them week after week. What role might popular rituals perform in an increasingly secular society? Are there other examples you know of popular rituals of this kind?

Rocky Horror as Spectacle: When it began, the argument was that Rocky Horror was like traditional carnival -- a space where there was no division between performers and audiences. Over time, though, has it become more like a spectacle, where certain people -- now semi-professional -- perform their parts every week for the amusement of others who come once or twice to watch. Do you feel fully a part of the Rocky Horror experience?

Transgression and Tradition: This movie/experience celebrates transgression. For the first generation who went to the film, it was all about the shock appeal -- the sense that our parents would not go to see a movie featuring a singing transvestite. But, now that this event has been going on for almost four decades, the odds are that many of you have parents who saw this film as an undergraduate. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, today, is almost a historical re-enactment, one deeply immersed in a sense of tradition. And what counted as transgressive in the 1970s may seem much more familiar in the 21st century. So, does the film still maintain its transgressiveness under these circumstances and if so, how?

Room for Improvization?: Many of the practices now associated with Rocky Horror emerged through practices of improvization, as different audience members added their own contributions to the mix. Yet, these practices are increasingly codified. What space remains for spontaneous audience response?

Local and Global: Rocky Horror is a global media phenomenon, yet it is also one which gets performed locally -- tied to specific theaters and specific communities in specific cities. What aspects of the NuArt performance of Rocky Horror seem specific to Los Angeles? What signs if any do you see of the global dimensions of this tradition?

Are You A Virgin?: A classic ritual at many Rocky Horror screenings is to identify those in the audience who are seeing the film for the first time. In the 1970s, it was possible to come to the movie knowing very little about what to expect. But, as RockyHorror references have spread across the culture (for example, Glee did a special Rocky Horror themed episode last year), does anyone really enter the theater without some preconceptions about what they are going to experience? And if not, then what are the consequence of this pre-knowledge?

Talk Among Yourselves.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Why youth are drawn to Invisible Children: Prefiguring Kony 2012

by Neta Kligler-Vilenchik

The rapid and expansive spread of Invisible Children's Kony 2012 film has garnered immense attention (both positive and negative) online. While much of the criticism is around the organization's rhetoric, its suggestion of military intervention, or its financial practices, I would like to touch on a different  aspect of Invisible Children -- its impact as an organization on youth participation in US civic and political life.

Why has Invisible Children's approach resonated so well with young people and what impact does this and other campaigns have on their sense of themselves as political agents? The Kony 2012 video has been most popular with 13-17 year old Americans (as well as 18-24 year old American males...), and part of the video's soaring viewership is attributed to these teenagers' sharing of the video through their various social networks.

So far,  it would be simple to dismiss their sharing of the video as a form of Slacktivism: these young people, allegedly, are practicing easy and thus meaningless forms of social action, actions that don't go beyond pressing 'share'. This critique, however, ignores the possibility that the movie may be meaningful in mobilizing young people as civic actors. Making such statements around Kony 2012 would be premature, as only time will tell what the long-term impacts of young people's experiences with this movie will be. But, we can gain some preliminary insights by looking at what Invisible Children has done before, over its years of mobilizing young Americans to action. At this time, we do not want to get into the controversies about the right action to take around the war in Central Africa. Rather, we want to highlight Invisible Children's ability to powerfully engage young people through what we call Participatory Culture Civics.

Let's first provide some background. Invisible Children (IC) is an organization that has been around for 8 years. IC's previous 10 movies, while not circulated as widely as Kony 2012, have sparked similarly intense reactions from many of its viewers. Some of these previous viewers joined what became the "Invisible Children movement", consisting of volunteer staff, interns, roadies, and local club members in high schools and colleges. These members participated in IC's large-scale, performative campaigns, including the Global Night Commute, Displace Me and 25, and dedicated time and energy to promoting IC's causes nationwide. While this was not Invisible Children's original goal, the organization became increasingly aware of its "inadvertent" role in encouraging American youth's social engagement. The organization has increasingly focused on this role as part of its action, as exemplified by the "Fourth Estate" event they held in the summer of 2011, an event dedicated to empowering 650 socially active youth to become activists for the causes they care passionately about. The key elements of this event are summarized in a video created by IC for the Do Something Award competition:

Do Something Award - The Fourth Estate from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

The Civic Paths Project Research Group, working with Professor Henry Jenkins at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, University of Southern California and supported by the Spencer Foundation, has been looking at Invisible Children as a case study of what we call Participatory Culture Civics: organizations which build on top and harness the strengths of participatory cultures to further their civic goals. Invisible Children sparked our interest due to its innovative and non-orthodox use of media, but even more so, due to the way it created a participatory community around its goal. But we'll get to that in a moment.

Among the tens of millions (we've given up on updating this number) of viewers of Kony 2012 are hundreds of thousands of young people who have joined Invisible Children's mission long before this film. In 2010-2011, we interviewed 30 such members, who told us about how they learnt about Invisible Children and got involved in the organization, and how becoming involved with the group helped shape their identity as civic actors. We talked to members who were relatively highly engaged: interns volunteering to work at IC offices for the summer, roadies, who volunteered 3 months of their lives to tour IC movies around the nation, and leaders of local IC clubs in high schools and colleges. In short, they were young people who dedicated significant time, energy and effort to IC's cause.

Yet in some ways, they are not unlike some of the new viewers of Kony 2012: many were in high school when they first encountered IC, and to many (though not all) viewing the film and becoming engaged with IC was a first experience of taking part in any civic action. We believe that listening to these members' accounts of their experiences can help us better understand why young people are attracted to Invisible Children and what role the organization has played in the past in helping young people begin to conceive of themselves as political agents.

This blog entry is based in our research with Invisible Children and builds on a forthcoming article "Experiencing Fan Activism: Understanding the Power of Fan Activist Organizations through Members' Narratives" which will be published in the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures in June 2012.

Creating content worlds - Invisible Children's storytelling through movie

Our analysis of Invisible Children's model of youth engagement began with the lens of "fan activism": forms of civic engagement and political participation growing out of experiences of fandom. We were examining Invisible Children as a parallel to another case study of Participatory Culture Civics: the Harry Potter Alliance, a non-profit organization that mobilizes the Harry Potter fan community toward civic action, using metaphors from the popular narratives. In comparing the two organizations, we found that while the Harry Potter Alliance built on an existing fan community and harnessed a pre-existing content world (a powerful narrative that strongly resonates with members) toward its civic goals, Invisible Children began with a goal--ending the use of child soldiers in the civil war in Uganda--and built a content world around it.

Invisible Children has been creating documentary films since 2004, when they released their first, and for many viewers most powerful, film, Invisible Children: The Rough Cut:

For an analysis of IC's transmedia storytelling practices see the Invisible Children Working Paper written by fellow Civic Paths member Lana Swartz.

The Rough Cut documents IC founders Jason, Bobby and Lauren's trip to Uganda,  where they first learned about the war with the LRA and the existence of child soldiers. In members' narratives, this movie is attributed with an almost magical effect in transforming their worldview:

"They showed me the film and I remember being so floored like, 'I cannot believe that this is going on' and 'why have I never heard about this.' I remember something in me shifted that night." (Ruth, IC intern)

"The movie is just very raw, and it's, even though they were older than me they were kids, and you see these kids just go, they see something, they run into a problem and they're like, OK, now we have to fix this problem." (Beth, IC intern)

"I had been trying to find ways that I could get into volunteering or working to become part of a more global community. I saw the screening and they were in the process of trying to get the bill passed and they were encouraging us to talk to senators to hold a meeting, a cool way that you guys can make a big change, and so I got really involved from there." (Tina, IC roadie)

"Even though I haven't met anyone from Uganda, I feel like they're kind of my extended friends now. I care about them not just a far off, 'Oh, I want everybody to be okay' but I really feel somewhat connected." (Dave, IC intern)

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

A Brief Outline of Kony 2012 and Initial Reactions to the Campaign

by Rhea Vichot and Zhan Li

The Kony 2012 video campaign by Invisible Children (IC) has been extraordinarily - even unprecedentedly successful - in spreading its message. It has also attracted criticism, both concerning the content and strategy of the video campaign and the general character of the organization itself.

This post offers a brief overview of the debate over the campaign as it evolved in the period between the release of Kony 2012 on YouTube on March 5, 2012 and the subsequent official response to critiques made by Invisible Children on March 7th. Of course, we recognize that the debate continued to develop in important ways after this time. This post simply offers an introduction to the early days of the campaign.

The Kony 2012 video was released by Invisible Children at 12PM PST on March 5th, 2012 on popular video sharing platform YouTube (the video had been hosted on Vimeo, another video sharing site, since February 20th, but may have been password protected until its public release).

KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

Narrated by Jason Russell, one of the founders of Invisible Children, the film aims to spread awareness about the crimes of Joseph Kony, head of the militant group the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) which is operating in several countries in Central Africa: Sudan, South Sudan, The Democratic Republic of Congo, The Central African Republic, and Uganda. Kony was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2005, and the campaign calls for increased action and pressure to bring him to justice.

The video quickly became an astonishing success in the scale and speed of its spread. For instance, Invisible Children tweeted that the video had already received 800,000 hits online in the first 24 hours. Indeed, the scale and speed was so staggering that many people in the NGO and aid world felt that they had to pay close attention to this campaign by a NGO that many may have never heard of before (and some may have dismissed as an eccentric aid campaign organization aimed at an audience of high school kids). The impact of the campaign also attracted much attention from fields beyond the NGO and aid world - including the celebrity press and social media and marketing consultants.

By March 7th, the videos had attracted 40 million views on YouTube and almost 11 million views on Vimeo. IC's campaign planners had originally called for a target of a mere 500,000 views of the video by the end of 2012 and had thought the video would mostly circulate within IC's core audiences of (mainly US) high school and college students.

Besides raising awareness of the issues surrounding Kony and the LRA through encouraging spread of the video online, the Kony 2012  campaign also recommended to its supporters that they send communications (primarily via Twitter) targeting 20 "culturemakers" and 12 "policymakers" as selected by IC and identified on the Kony 2012 website. 

These designated celebrities and political figures range in experience and ideology. The "culturemakers" ranged from entertainment celebrities (including some with reputations for involvement with NGO and humanitarian causes such as Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, and Bono - to major technology and financial entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, as well as other leading shapers of public opinion such as Rush Limbaugh and Rick Warren. The range of policymakers focused on U.S. politicians such as former U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Harry Reid (President Obama and his Cabinet are notably not included here), while also including non-U.S. politicians Stephen Harper (Prime Minister of Canada) and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Criticisms as well as praise began to emerge online soon after the video's launch on Monday. These responses came via social networks (perhaps most notably Twitter and Reddit) as well as independent opinion blogs (for instance, a grassroots blog post whose critique of Kony 2012 started spreading widely early on was an opinion piece entitled  "We Got Trouble"  that was written by a Canadian college student) and mainstream media channels in the US and beyond (the UK Guardian for instance liveblogged early reactions to the campaign and quickly published multiple reports online about Kony 2012).

Key critiques of the Kony 2012 campaign included arguments that it greatly oversimplified the complexities of politics, conflict, and aid; that it displayed neo-colonial or patronizing attitudes towards Africans; that it distracted attention away from more pressing issues; that it was arguing for humanitarian military intervention without recognizing the immense difficulties and many unintended consequences of such policy; that the organization has inefficiently misallocated funds towards media/marketing and overhead at the expense of tangible on-the-ground development and aid efforts; and that there is something distasteful and counterproductive in the way that IC presents its message through glossy, stylish, and youth-centered popular culture savvy content.

On March 7th, Invisible Children released an article on their site which provided official responses that argued against key critiques levelled at their campaign - for instance, regarding IC's NGO credibility and transparency and IC's position in relation to human rights based criticisms of the Ugandan government. IC also attempted to deflect attacks on what some critics have seen as IC's "white savior" rhetoric by highlighting "that over 95% of IC's leadership and staff on the ground are Ugandans on the forefront of program design and implementation." They also addressed the related controversy regarding the photo of the founders posing with guns from 2008, with co-founder Jason Russell stating "that photo was a bad idea. We were young and we got caught up in the moment."

Overall, IC appears to have been both caught off-guard as well as feeling exhilarated and energized by the spread of the campaign so far. In a video posted on March 8th, Jason Russell thanked IC's supporters for the incredible success of the campaign's spread.

Wow. Thank You. from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

Jason called the movement a revolution that will change the world and told his audience: "I need you to know something. I am here representing you - your voice. This is a collective. It's a We. And this story transcends borders. It is not about politics. It is not about the economy. This is about human beings - human beings waking up to the potential and the power that they have. That's what KONY 2012 is about and it's just the beginning - because we are starting something which cannot be stopped." IC has also announced that it is translating the Kony 2012 video into as many languages as possible.

Since IC published its response to critics, the attention towards Kony 2012 has only increased, with tallies at time of writing (end of day, March 11th) showing around 91 million views in total for the original YouTube and Vimeo versions (these figures do not count other versions that may be in circulation, including non-English language editions that may already have been released). Commentary critiquing and praising IC's Kony 2012 campaign continues to evolve and expand.

Zhan Li, a fellow member of the Civic Paths Project Research Group has created a Storify linklist , which presents a selection of these critiques and defenses.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Contextualizing #Kony2012: Invisible Children, Spreadable Media, and Transmedia Activism

By Henry Jenkins

A little under a week ago, the San Diego-based human rights group, Invisible Children, posted its Kony 2012 video through YouTube and encouraged its base of supporters to help spread the word. By midafternoon Sunday, the Youtube video had been watched more than 71 million times and the hashtag #Kony2012 has been a trending topic on Twitter throughout much of this time.

Invisible Children's goal was to make Joseph Kony a household name, not to celebrate his accomplishments, but rather to call him out so that pressure mounts world wide to hold this Ugandan guerilla leader, head of the Lord's Resistance Army, responsible for his acts of child abduction and genocide. According to estimates in a 2006 report produced for UNICEF Uganda by Jeannie Annan, Christopher Blattman and Roger Horton, the LRA since its beginnings has abducted and forced at least 66,000 youths (aged 14-30 years old; the traditional Acholi definition of youth) to fight and/or carry out other roles for them for various lengths of time (many never to return); with the UN estimating 22,000 to 25,000 children being abducted during this period. The LRA has also contributed to the internal displacement of nearly two million people, as well as untold thousands of deaths in its region since its rebellion began in 1986.

Invisible Children has been surprisingly successful in this social media-based campaign to call attention to issues in Africa which have long been neglected by mainstream media and which remained little known to most American citizens. The Kony 2012 campaign has drawn extensive coverage from traditional journalists and sparked heated debates across the blogosphere, with many experts on African politics weighing in to complicate or challenge the film's narrative of what is occurring on the ground in Uganda and its recommendations about what appropriate responses to Kony might look like. Alongside these discussions of African policy and politics, the video has also sparked heated debates about the nature and value of online activism.

For a basic narrative describing the release of the video and its immediate reception, see this blog post by Rhea Richot and Zhan Lee,

For a data base of materials, including both the original video and a range of different responses and critiques, see this archive which Zhan Li has assembled on Storify.

The Civic Paths Project

Much of this coverage has dealt with the video as a piece of content which suddenly went "viral" -- but in fact, the Civic Paths research group at the University of Southern California has had Invisible Children on its radar for almost three years. Our primary focus has been on the strategies behind the organization's success at recruiting, training, and mobilizing young activists in the United States. This research has been funded, in part, by the Spencer Foundation as part of their larger initiative to identify new forms of civic learning and is linked to our group's participation in the Youth and Participatory Politics research team, which has been recruited and funded by the MacArthur Foundation, though neither foundation is responsible for this series of blog posts.

As part of this research, we conducted in depth interviews with more than 30 young people who have become involved in IC's efforts, spent time at the organization's headquarters, audited their media output and strategies, and otherwise, sought to better understand why this group has been so successful at what it does.

The Kony 2012 video did not "go viral"; rather, its circulation depended on the hundreds of thousands of young people who already felt connected to the organization and to this cause through their participation in school based clubs and grassroots campaigns over almost a decade. These young people were among the first to receive the video, pass it along through their social networks to their friends and classmates, and thus, start a process which ultimately got the attention of millions around the world. Many of them have already given time, money, and other resources to this cause. Awareness of Kony 2012 remains highest among teens and young adults, suggesting how central these same groups were to circulating the video from the start.

Given the sudden visibility of the organization's most recent efforts, we felt as a research group that it was important to share some of the core insights from this research through this and the Civic Paths blog. We have little to contribute to the debates about what would be the best policy response to the problems which Invisible Children is calling to the public's attention, but we do feel, as communications scholars, that our work might shed some light into how the current effort fits within IC's larger history of using social media and participatory culture tactics to empower young people to see themselves as active political agents who can make a difference in the world.

Invisible Children: Storytelling-Based Activism

CIvic Paths was started as a project to better understand the links between participatory culture and civic engagement, specifically looking for examples of successful campaigns, organizations, or networks which had helped young people become more involved in campaigns for social justice and political change. During our initial phase, many team members shared groups that they were already researching. Melissa A. Brough brought Invisible Children to our team's attention; she had just completed a study of the visual culture and rhetoric shaping some of the group's earliest efforts, which has since become a chapter in the recently published book, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in NeoLiberal Times, which was edited by Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, for New York University Press. Here are some excerpts from her article:

Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, and Lauren Poole founded Invisible Children in 2004 as recent University of Southern California graduates, after completing their documentary film Invisible Children: Rough Cut. Only four years later, IC had ninety staff running development programs in Uganda and thirty US staff who, significantly, were almost exclusively under the age of thirty. In 2005 they raised more than $300,000; by 2008 the revenue growth reached over $10 million. At the time of this writing 2,098 U.S. school clubs were registered to support IC projects in eleven Ugandan schools. And as is increasingly popular in the commercial sector, IC utilizes user-generated content from its supporters to help collectively envision and market its mission, through Web 2.0 sites like Myspace, YouTube and Facebook....

Creative storytellling through visual media is at the core of the organization's dual mission to be 'both an innovative media-based organization' (i.e. a production company) and a humanitarian/development nongovernmental organization. Approximately 50 percent of its programming budget is therefore spent on media and event production, largely in the US with the stated goal of bringing 'awareness to the situation and promoting international support of the peace process taking place.' IC refers to these production activities as the 'Movement' component of the organization (as opposed to its direct aid and development work), which uses stories and images to connect to and mobilize US youth to support its project in Uganda. This in turn produces content for more stories, creating a circular process of humanitarian media production....

In IC's media, emphasis is placed on the American donor/activist as much as, if not more than, IC's beneficiaries. Invisible Children's videos unapologetically embrace the opportunity for personal growth offered by entrepreneurial participation in the humanitarian adventure. IC sends the winners of high school fundraising competitions, organized through an online social networking site, to Uganda to visit the schools and camps of internally displaced communities that their funds support....

Invisible Children's media are bold, beautiful, and captivating the minds of tens of thousands of American youth. They are creating a space for idealism that works within the context of postmodernism and neoliberalism, which is precisely its promise and its peril. Radically reconfiguring humanitarianism will likely require the innovative vision of youth, from both the global North and South.

Brough's work can help to address several aspects of the current controversy, starting with the concern raised by some about what a high percentage of the IC's revenues get spent in North America rather than on the ground in Africa. Such critiques neglect the central role which movement building and civic learning play in IC's model for social change. At times, this focus on increasing young America's social awareness and political voice has come to be as important to their efforts as their specific goals of bring about change in Africa. We can debate the merits of this choice, but it needs to be understood as part of the larger picture of what the group has been doing.

Youth As Political Agents

Brough's essay also suggests that the steps which the group takes to give youth a sense of their own voice and power as political agents, what she describes in terms of "discourses of personal growth," may be problematic when read in relation to the historical relationship between the Global North and South, furthering discourses of dependency which disempower people in developing African nations, even as they give greater agency to those who already possess a high degree of privlidge. This critique has resurfaced often in more recent responses to Kony 2012.

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, another member of the Civic Paths research team, has developed a blog post which shares what we learned through our interviews with Invisible Children's young activists, specifically focusing on the impact which their participation in these campaigns have had on their own developing civic and political consciousness. This blog post is based on an essay she wrote with Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, and Chris Tokuhama for the Special "Fan Activism" issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, which will appear in June 2012.

Kligler-Vilenchik argues that the focus of the campaign on youth participation is one of the themes which has largely been lost in critical responses by African experts to the video campaign, as has the idea that the video was intended as part of a larger transmedia strategy to create multiple points of contact with its core messages and themes. You can read her reflections here.

Transmedia Mobilization

Lana Swartz, another member of the Civic Paths research team, has conducted an extensive overview of the media strategies deployed by Invisible children, resulting in a working paper written last year which describes the group's efforts in relation to my frameworks for thinking about transmedia storytelling. She argues:

The "Movement," as Invisible Children calls its US-facing work, includes visually-arresting films, spectacular event-oriented campaigns, provocative graphic t-shirts and other apparel, music mixes, print media, blogs and more. To be a member of Invisible Children means to be a viewer, participant, wearer, reader, listener, commenter of and in the various activities, many mediated, that make up the Movement. It is a massive, open-ended, evolving documentary "story" unfurling across an expanding number of media forms.

Her working paper can be accessed here.

Swartz and other members of the Civic Paths team briefed key leaders of the Invisible Children staff on these findings last summer; they were receptive to these insights and have made some efforts to improve their practice as a consequence, though, in some ways, her findings predict some of the current controversies surrounding the Kony 2012 video. While many are encountering Invisible Children for the first time thanks to the widespread circulation of this new video, the video itself may best be understood as part of this much wider array of new media tactics and practices.

It is important to understand the transmedia nature of Invisible Children. Swartz writes:

Jenkins (2007) defines transmedia storytelling as a process in which "integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience," and, "ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story." It involves an emphasis on "world building" rather than plot or character-driven narratives, multiple points of entry for differently engaged audiences, co-creation and collaboration across various professional and fan sites of production, and collective intelligence, as audiences become "hunters and gatherers," collecting and sharing information across media. Transmedia storytelling is not just about new media, although it often makes thorough use of it. In fact, in order to best understand the concept, it helps to have an expansive notion of the word "media" as any channel through which new meaning or information is added to the larger story-- be it a piece of clothing, an action figure, or a live in-person performance.

Spreadability and Drillability

The rest of the paper uses elements of transmedia storytelling to understand the Invisible children in more detail. An important element is the section on Spreadability and Drillability:

Spreadability, the focus of Jenkins et al's (forthcoming, 2013) book, refers to the extent to which media can be engaged with and shared in a way that increases its economic value and social worth. They contrast spreadability to distribution, a model in which "movement of media content is heavily--or totally--controlled by the commercial interests that produce and sell it." Spreadability, instead, is "an emerging hybrid model of circulation, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways." Mittell (2009) offers "drillability" as a corrective but complementary characteristic. He writes, "Spreadable media encourages horizontal ripples, accumulating eyeballs without necessarily encouraging more long-term engagement. Drillable media typically engage far fewer people, but occupy more of their time and energies in a vertical descent into a text's complexities." By putting the two terms in conversation with each other, Jenkins (2009) suggests that transmedia storytelling will likely have both properties working dynamically to engage audiences.

In transmedia storytelling mobilization, both spreadability and drillability can refer to the way the movement structures access to information about the cause and the organization itself. The extent to which the group "raises awareness" is largely dependent on how spreadable their message is. Drillability, on the other hand, describes the learning opportunities that exist beyond initial contact with the message. Both features are necessary for newcomers to become advocates of the cause.

Invisible Children makes information about itself and its work in central Africa very easy to share while at the same time allowing groups and individuals to personalize its meaning, amplifying spreadability. One way it does this is through fairly open content distribution. Although screenings where roadies show Invisible Children films to school and church audiences play a big role in the Movement, DVDs of the 9 major films are available for purchase and have, at various times, also been available for free, streaming online or on YouTube. Each purchase of the Rough Cut comes with two DVDs, one to keep and one to share. Invisible Children does not explicitly use Creative Commons licensing, but it does practice and encourage the free exchange of its materials, stating on the FAQs section of its website:

We at IC make every effort to spread the word about the plight of those in northern Uganda, and we realize that having access to Invisible Children: Rough Cut is vital to helping this movement grow. As we pass the torch to you, we ask you use the documentary and Invisible Children logo responsibly--only to raise awareness and benefit Invisible Children, Inc.

and:

We want everyone to have FREE access to Invisible Children: Rough Cut. Be creative and make your screening unique. The only thing we insist is that you don't charge for admission.

Similarly, Invisible Children takes pains to enable its staff, volunteers, roadies, and other representatives to give accurate information about central Africa and its work there. One intern was careful to correct herself when she said, "war torn," replacing it with, "impacted by war." Roadies in particular cite being equipped with information that would allow to them to speak confidently in any crowd as a particularly valuable part of their training. This information is often dispersed in short, quotable chunks, making it easier to spread in a way that seems particularly effective for the college and high school aged audiences who may have little, if any, prior exposure to the history of central Africa.

Providing drillable wells of knowledge does not seem to be as much of a priority for Invisible Children. Its blog does feature, at least monthly, a "Peace and Conflict Update" on current events in central Africa, but the official description of the history of the war in northern Uganda, a main tab on its website, is less than 1,200 words long, and this information tends to be repeated rather than augmented across media.

In some circumstances, inadequate drillability can undermine Invisible Children's otherwise powerful transmedia story. This is true, for example, when a critic, claiming to be Ugandan, makes comments in multiple Invisible Children blog posts suggesting that Jolly Okot, now the director of Invisible Children's direct aid programs and featured heavily in many of the films, has compromising political ties to the Ugandan government and the LRA. A curious Invisible Children supporter, wanting to drill deeper into these claims, is thwarted from enacting questions across media because the link to the profiles of the Uganda-based staff is broken and has been "Coming Soon" for many months. Because Invisible Children is more focused on enabling spreadability than drillability, it relinquishes opportunities to more thoroughly and credibly describe the good work it is no doubt doing.

This lack of intentional drillability is further exacerbated by cultural and technological asymmetries between the way the Ugandan and American representatives of Invisible Children share data about themselves in unofficial ways across the Internet. For example, even for the most savvy transmedia navigators, finding any information online one way or the other about Jolly Okot's actual political history is very difficult. However, simply by clicking through a series of links or performing a quick search, any interested party can find a personal blog in which a high-ranking member of the American Invisible Children staff makes a joke that, especially in a low-context medium, might be seen as racially insensitive. The lack of drillable information about the leaders in Uganda and the excess of it about those in America equally undermine the credibility of the organization.

Provocation and Process

In a very thoughtful blog post, Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow member of the MacArthur Youth and Participatory Politics research hub, shares his own critiques of what Invisible Children has and has not achieved in its current campaign, opening up questions which should be addressed by those of us who see spreadability as a productive model for thinking about new forms of political activism:

The campaign Invisible Children is running is so compelling because it offers an extremely simple narrative: Kony is a uniquely bad actor, a horrific human being, whose capture will end suffering for the people of Northern Uganda. If each of us does our part, influences powerful people, the world's most powerful military force will take action and Kony will be captured....

The problem, of course, is that this narrative is too simple. The theory of change it advocates is unlikely to work, and it's unclear if the goal of eliminating Kony should still be a top priority in stabilizing and rebuilding northern Uganda. By offering support to Museveni, the campaign may end up strengthening a leader with a terrible track record.

A more complex narrative of northern Uganda would look at the odd, codependent relationship between Museveni and Kony, Uganda's systematic failure to protect the Acholi people of northern Uganda. It would look at the numerous community efforts, often led by women, to mediate conflicts and increase stability. It would focus on the efforts to rebuild the economy of northern Uganda, and would recognize the economic consequences of portraying northern Uganda as a war zone. It would feature projects like Women of Kireka, working to build economic independence for women displaced from their homes in Northern Uganda.

Such a narrative would be lots harder to share, much harder to get to "go viral".

I'm starting to wonder if this is a fundamental limit to attention-based advocacy. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?

Yet, in practice, the effect has been the same. People are talking about Kony, including many who had remained silent and unaware before. The blunt force of the video has created a space where more nuanced readings of the situation are being produced, circulated, read, and debated. Some of the other bloggers might see themselves as correcting the "damages" the group has caused through its simplification, but blog posts such as Zuckerman's can also be seen as continuing the discursive process which the release of the video set into motion.

Zuckerman offers a similar perspective in his blog post's conclusion:

As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good? Or is the wave of pushback against this campaign from Invisible Children evidence that we're learning to read and write complex narratives online, and that a college student with doubts about a campaign's value and validity can find an audience? Will Invisible Children's campaign continue unchanged, or will it engage with critics and design a more complex and nuanced response?

We might think about this process through a lens of "monitorial citizenship" -- groups like Invisible Children help to identify and focus public attention onto urgent problems, initiating a process where-by a range of grassroots groups and experts work together to create richer and more nuanced frames for understanding the problem and identifying solutions.

But this raises the question of whether despite our capacity for networked circulation, we have developed collectively the skills we would need for this kind of deliberative process. We do not know how much these other critiques are able to ride the coat tails of the rapidly circulating video, to what degree young people are inspired by the debate to think more critically about the frames they deploy in thinking about injustices in Africa or America's place in the world.

Ideally, part of Invisible Children's commitment to civic learning would include the fostering of critical media literacy, including the capacity to test and appraise the group's own claims and its own media practices. Ideally, Invisible Children itself would be ready to respond to the controversy with much more information which can support the efforts of their movement to promote human rights in Africa. In practice, they seem to have placed a much higher investment in spreading the basic message than in giving the young citizens they have mobilized a chance to drill deeper and learn more about these issues.

As Invisible Children's critics seek to correct what they see as the simplifications and misrepresentations of the video, we can also hope they will do so in ways which respect the commitment of Invisible Children's young activists, in ways which support their efforts to find their footing as political agents and make a difference in the world. There is a risk that a more complex and nuanced narrative may also be a disempowering one, one which, as so often happens, convince citizens -- young and old -- that they have nothing to contribute and that these matters are best left in the hands of experts.

Contributors:

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik is a Doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. She works with Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito on the Media, Activism, Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, as part of the Youth & Participatory Politics (YPP) Network, where she is investigating connections and continuities between youth's involvement in participatory cultures and new media and their civic engagement. The case studies she works on focus more specifically on organizations and groups that build on networks and communities of fandom, online and off-line, with the aim of encouraging and sustaining young people's involvement in civic life. Neta is currently working on her Doctoral thesis, which revolves around alternative citizenship models and their potential for youth civic engagement. She holds an M.A. in Communication from the University of Haifa, Israel.

Zhan Li holds a B.A. in Social & Political Sciences and a M.Phil. in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (Trinity) as well as a S.M. in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. For his Ph.D. in Organizational Communication, he is specializing in researching the future of scenario planning, a widely used strategic foresight method. Previous thesis topics have included the World Bank's promotion of Knowledge Management and Economics in the 1990s, and the U.S. Army video game America's Army during the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Most recently working as a global media investment banking analyst for HSBC in New York City (with a special focus on India and China), Zhan has also been employed as a researcher at Sony (Los Angeles), the Microsoft Games-To-Teach lab at MIT (Cambridge, MA), the London Business School's Future Media Program and UBS Warburg (London). At Annenberg, Zhan manages the Annenberg Scenario Lab, which focuses on online media innovation in scenario planning techniques for a variety of organizations. His dissertation will focus on the development of online techniques for participatory scenario planning and futures that are informed by organizational communication and new media theory.

Melissa Brough is a Doctoral Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, and a 2010-2011 Fulbright grantee to Colombia. She works in the fields of communication for social change, participatory media, visual and new media cultures, and social movements. She has collaborated with youth and community media projects including Mobile Voices , FilmAid International , Listen Up! and the Chiapas Media Project . She received her B.A. in Development Studies and Modern Culture & Media from Brown University.

Most of Lana Swartz's work is on money (and other regimes of value) as techno-social practice. At Annenberg, she has worked on the CivicPaths research collaborative and the new Media, Economics, and Entrepreneurship working group. In 2009, she completed a masters in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her thesis was on "fake" luxury fashion. There, she also worked on a teachers' strategy guide and an unconference on cultural geography and new media literacies. As part of TeachForAmerica, she taught high school English in Houston, TX.

Rhea Vichot graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Comparative Media Studies in 2004. She attended New York University and attained a Masters in Cinema Studies as well as a Graduate Certificate in Culture and Media in 2006. In 2009, Rhea received a Masters in Digital Media from Georgia Institute of Technology. At Annenberg, Rhea has conducted continuing research on Anonymous, along with other online countercultures and their relationships to learning, cultural practices, and political and civic engagement. Her current research interests include global popular culture, online and fan communities, and media criticism. In particular, she is interested in subaltern groups that have been historically linked with either 'hacker' culture or 'deviant' subcultures. In addition, she is interested in critical analysis of media, specifically games, both as a medium of commercial art as well as an object for cultural production by designers and players.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

How to Earn Your Skeptic "Badge"

Learning today happens everywhere But it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements gained outside of school. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy to issue, earn and display badges across the web. The result: recognizing 21st century skills, unlocking career and educational opportunities, and helping learners everywhere level up in their life and work.

Get recognition for new skills and achievements

The web and other new learning spaces provide exciting ways to gain skills and experience -- from online courses, learning networks and mentorship to peer learning, volunteering and after-school programs. Badges provide a way for learners to get recognition for these skills, and display them to potential employers, schools, colleagues and their community.

Through a simple framework that's open to all

Using Mozilla's Open Badges infrastructure, any organization or community can issue badges backed by their own seal of approval. Learners can then collect badges from different sources and display them across the web -- on their resume, web site, social networking profiles, job sites or just about anywhere. Unlocking new career and learning opportunities. 
By displaying skills and achievements that traditional degrees and transcripts often leave out, badges can lead to jobs, community recognition, and new learning opportunities. -- from Mozilla Open Badges Wiki

Let me make a few things clear from the start: First, I was an Eagle Scout. Technically, I am an Eagle Scout since what you learn in scouting is something you carry with you for the rest of your life. I not only made Eagle but I had multiple additional palms, which means that I earned a hell (pardon my un-Scout-like language) of a lot of merit badges through the years.

I certainly valued the learning which went into each of those badges, but I also took pride and joy in that full sash of merit badges, in and of themselves, and I was motivated to see how high a rank I could earn before I aged out of the organization.

Scouting does several things right where badges were concerned: there are some badges which every Scout is expected to earn if they want to move up rank but there are also a vast array of different badges which a scout chooses from as they map their own route through scouting. The badges I remember most vividly were those having to do with journalism, communications, drama, and photography, all aspects of the person whom I would become when I grew up. The skills which the badges represented were in most cases skills which we actively deployed in our life in Scouts, so they were not simply things which I learned to earn a badge. Well, there were a few of those -- in my troop, Basket Weaving was the joke badge we all earned at summer camp because the requirements were simple and pretty lame and it was funny to have the badge on your sash. We can say that Scouting thus combines intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to create a system within which the badges are meaningful to those who opt to participate.

That said, even as a lad, I knew that Scouting and its badges were not for everyone. Many of my friends, especially during the late Vietnam War era, did not like the idea of wearing a uniform of any kind, they did not really understand the appeal of badges, they did not want adults telling them what to do. (Today, I might add my own increased questioning of the values of the organization, which has today embraced overt homophobia in its dealing with queer scouts and scoutmasters.)

For the most part, the current drive for badges in education is being pushed by people like me -- people who were proud to wear merit badges, get good grades, or otherwise, display their achievements. The problem is that badges are being designed for people who may or may not share those values and assumptions.

Second, I believe fully and totally in the value of informal learning, seeing much that youth learn outside of school as more essential to who they are and who they become than the more narrowly restricted curriculum imposed by the national standards. I was always someone who learned more outside the classroom than inside, even if I played the game of school well enough to progress to a high place in the system. Scouting was part of that and so I was glad it had such a flexible framework. But, many of the things I did outside school -- like watch and develop a knowledge of 1930s monster movies, which, ultimately, led me to get graduate degrees in cinema studies -- were not something anyone every gave me a badge for. I see the importance of recognizing, respecting, supporting, and deploying the expertise developed through informal learning and fear that when schools seek to close it out of their formal practices, they also shut what is learned in school for what kids do with the rest of their waking hours.

I fully support the ideas about "connected learning" which were announced by the MacArthur Foundation at the recent Digital Media and Learning Conference. Something very important occurs when we develop a more integrated learning ecology and when kids know how to map what they learn outside of school into categories that they can meaningfully deploy inside the system. That's part of the power of Scouting -- to convert the activities into badges into ranks which can be read and appreciated as accomplishments by adult authorities, including those who decide whether we get jobs or can move through the system of higher education.

That said, I remain deeply skeptical of the massive push going on right now to promote the use of badges across a broad array of different informal learning contexts. I am writing this as I wait in the airport on my return from the DML conference, and what I heard there was a push for badges as if they were a one-size-fits-all-solution to a range of ills in the current educational system (at least from the podium) and then a lot of people on the fringes of the party asking each other whether we really believe that badges are uniformly the way to go. Many of us fear that MacArthur, Mozilla and other foundations have jumped too quickly on the badges bandwagon. I was happy to support badges as one interesting model for thinking about how to insure greater respect for the value of informal learning; I am less prepared to accept the premise that badges might someday be the universal currency by which young people get credit for (or in some models get motivated to participate in) a range of informal learning activities.

As someone who helped to build up the current field of Digital Media and Learning, I am concerned that, if badges start to feel too much like a "party line," many are going to feel excluded from the field. This has the potential to be the first major divide in a field which many of us see as our intellectual and spiritual home. We remain silent because we do not want to disrupt the party and because we respect the leadership of the DML initiative so much, but there is much that is at risk in that silence.

So, let me spell out some of the reasons why I want to see us go slower and think through the advantages and disadvantages of badges:

1. Many young people have deep ambivalences about the kinds of "credit" adults choose to give (or withhold) around their activities. There are plenty of smart kids who don't say things in class, may not do as well as they can on assignments, and certainly would not join an organization like scouting because these kinds of achievements are not "cool" within their peer cultures. Many of these kids are learning now outside of school through participating in activities that are intellectually demanding and socially rewarding without bearing the imprint of adult approval. Some of these activities even have an air about them of transgression or subversion which make them safe for their participation. So, what happens when the scoutmasters move into these spaces and start giving out merit badges, gold stars, cookies, whatever they do, to single out those kids they think are doing what the system wants them to do. Do we not run the risk of chasing away the kids who need these kinds of informal learning the most? Admittedly, there is a value in helping these youth find ways to value what they are doing as intellectual pursuits and there is a value in seeking to validate these experiences and help them learn how to mobilize that knowledge as they learn to work through the formal structures that exert power over their lives. Much of that value may come in helping them articulate for themselves what they are getting out of these kinds of experiences. But, making the badges too central to the process may alienate them before they have a chance to exert ownership over the knowledge they are acquiring. (This problem only grows when we seek to move the system of badges from its original American context into a global phenomenon, since badges will mean very different things across a range of different cultural contexts.)

2. Badges run the risk of becoming "gamification" by another name -- that is, a system which does not trust the power of intrinsic motivation and feels the need to add a layer of extrinsic motivation. Again, scouting, I would argue, succeeds in doing both. James Gee argues that games-based communities do also. But, some forms of gamification rely so heavily on points schemes that there is far less effort to make the activities meaningful in and of themselves, and it can be easy to replace learning with "playing the game." American education is already gamified: for too many students, even good students, it is already about collecting badges and they calculate carefully what they need to do to make the 'A'. I worry that badges can become just another points system and as a consequence, undercuts the motivational structures which have historically led young people to engage in these kind of practices. Otherwise, do we run the risk of turning game modding or fan subbing into the contemporary equivalent of my Basketweaving merit badge -- something kids do because it is an easy way to get recognition or because they think it is a joke. And, as they do so, what happens to those kids who value these activities on their own terms.

3. What's working about the kinds of informal learning which takes place in participatory culture is that it is emergent and ad hoc: activities spring up, last as long as they interest participants, disappear again; young people feel empowered to create their own activities and set their own goals within these organizations; young people can feel like the experts in a subject matter which has not yet been fully integrated into the systems of formal learning. Not every child participates in such activities, and our goal should be to expand the range of options available and to provide stronger motivations and scaffording for their participation. But, informal learning works because it is informal. Yet, any coherent system of badges requires systems and structure; there have to be requirements which help to standardize forms of participation and which rank some kinds of contributions as more valuable or at least more central to the group than others. In that sense, too quick a move towards badges runs the risk of destroying the complex but fragile ecosystem within which participatory learning thrives. Our philosophy should be above all do no harm. There is a high potential of harm in a badging system which is badly applied.

4. Another thing that's working about these informal learning communities is that they are relatively nonhierarchical. They are often spaces where youth and adults interact without fixed relations of power and authority -- the adults are not parents and not teachers, they are people who share interests with the younger participants, and the mentorship that emerges is organic to the activities in which they are engaged. In some cases, the adults even learn from youth who have developed greater expertise or have more experience. This fluidity of relations across generations is threatened by a system where some people (you can call them Den Mothers or Scout Masters, Teachers or Principals, you can even call them Fearless Leader and Grand Poohbah) are giving badges to others (who are now seen as their subordinates). These roles will not necessarily break down along conventional adult-child lines, but there's a high likelihood of those roles reasserting themselves into the process, especially if the granting of badges becomes more bureaucratic or requires communications with more formal institutions and organizations.

5. Badges may work well in some circumstances or for some participants. They should certainly be explored as one way of validating and supporting informal learning. But, the rush to badges means that we have not spent as much time in the past few years as we should be trying to understand what other mechanisms for promoting participatory learning might be. It means that we are overlooking or over-riding systems of support which already exist in many of these sites of informal learning. So, even if we think badges are a potentially good idea in some contexts (and, again, my first response to this badges talk was generally supportive), we may not think it is the best or only possible solution in every situation.

6, No system of badges is going to be adopted uniformly. Mozilla's description of where learning takes place encompasses mostly forms of learning which schools and employers are likely to already recognize as valuable -- "from online courses, learning networks and mentorship to peer learning, volunteering and after-school programs." Yet, much of the early work in DML focused on informal learning sites which many adults did not yet fully appreciate -- from gaming communities to fandom. If we move to see badges as a common currency of achievement in informal learning, then what happens to those activities which chose, on principle, not to give badges or which lack the formal infrastructure to even decide who should be issuing badges. Do these activities, in fact, become even more marginalized, because they are now neither part of the formal system of schooling or part of the informal system of badging. This is another way that badges potentially disrupts what's working about participatory culture.

I guess what I am saying is:

• Experiment with badges but really experiment -- that is, try to figure out if these mechanisms really do what you hope they will do and be particularly attentive to the ways that they have unintentional consequences and damage the very activities you are seeking to recognize.
• Also seed other kinds of research and experimentation which looks more closely at other mechanisms for promoting and appraising participation, including those which may already be in place within such communities of practice.
• Be aware that the process of badging is going to make things more comfortable to those who are comfortable with getting recognition from adults and may make things less comfortable for those who have not yet fully bought into the values of the current educational system.
• And above all, if you are embracing badges, make sure you are doing so because you agree with the core premises, because it's the right thing to do for your group, and not because someone is offering a bucket of money to those who are willing to "give it a try."

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

C Is For Convergence: How the Cookie Monster Reformed Canadian Health Care

A few weeks ago, Glenn Kubish, an Alberta-based reader of this blog, wrote to me to share a remarkable story about the power of grassroots media and participatory culture. Like a typical U.S. yokel, I had no idea what had happened up in Canada, but was blown away by the story he told and asked him to share it with the other readers of this blog. Kubish is currently working on a thesis which explores more fully the implications of these events, and would be happy to receive insights or suggestions from you fine folks. With this in mind, I've included his contact information in the bio which follows this piece. For now, sit back, grab some cookies and milk, and read what happened.

C Is For Convergence!
by Glenn Kurbish

It's fairly widely known that Canadians are passionate about health care and the state of hospitals, so what happened to the man who used to run Alberta Health Services (AHS) shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise.

What was surprising was the role played by the Cookie Monster.

Welcome to my astonishing introduction to convergence culture.

You may not have heard of CTV Edmonton (the local television station in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where I used to work as news director) or Stephen Duckett (who used to work as president and CEO of Alberta Health Services, the government agency that oversees all aspects of health delivery in this province), but you have heard of the Cookie Monster, and I guess that is part of the point. But first, the facts.

On the morning of November 19, 2010, we did what we in the broadcast news craft always did to start the day. We met around around a table and behind a door to discuss story ideas and decide the shape of the evening news. Emergency room wait times was again a big issue that day, as hospital leaders from around the province were themselves meeting around a table and behind a few sets of doors at a downtown hotel. Their goal was to establish new standards for care and admissions.

The center of attention was Stephen Duckett. As he left the meeting, he was met by our reporter, who asked if she could ask him a question.

Actually, my words won't do justice to the 2:14 encounter. Some 337,000+ others took a look at it on YouTube.

Summary: Duckett wouldn't answer conventional media questions because he was:

a) eating a cookie,
b) still eating a cookie,
c) interested in eating his cookie,
d) of the opinion that the media should not question him, but, rather, go to a news conference at which an underling would speak about the day's discussions,
e) crossing the street, and
f) eating his cookie.

Dubbed the Cookie Affair and Cookiegate, that piece of video made it to the highest office in the province. The Alberta premier told the legislature, "I think everyone in Alberta watched and saw the offensive comments. I'll just leave it at that." Of course, he didn't leave it at that; he fired Duckett later that day.

And, as it turned out, Albertans did more than just watch and see the video. They posted thousands of comments in that new public square, the YouTube rectangle. Some found fault with the media:

Damn! Let the man eat his cookie! #$#$ media! Would you even had to bother him if he was sitting in the toilet?!? (SpiderQED)

Others defended the reporters' tack:

what a F**ing jerk. He is just so rude, so inconsiderate...They were asking him questions about the state of Alberta's healthcare, something he is responsible for. (maymonk)

COOOOOOOKIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEMOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNSSSSSSSAAAAAARRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!? (hunuthevolkswagen)

(It is fascinating how one 61-lettered, upper-cased, misspelled word gets the message across, complete with a moving image, with audio, of The Cookie Monster!)

And while many responded from their various perspectives, some recreated the video, using the video of the Duckett-media encounter as their own raw material in remixes that drew tens of thousands of views. Take a look (and tell me if you don't smile at the editing touch at :50!)

Here's another creative, autotune remix effort

And here's one that combines contributions from mass media current and past (Sesame Street's Cookie Monster, NBC's The Apprentice, CBS's Hee Haw) to make a grassroots media case against Duckett.

All of this news and reaction dominated front pages, tops of newscasts, radio call-in shows, chat forums, political blogs, Twitter and Facebook pages. TV Tropes picked it up. I'm Eating My Cookie badges popped up.

For his part, Duckett, a day after the video was posted on YouTube, responded, conventionally, with a letter to the media, which ended:

Most regrettably, I did not convey what I deeply feel, which is the greatest respect for the difficult challenges our health care providers face every day, and their innumerable achievements, and what those challenges and achievements mean for our patients and their families. When I got back to my desk I finalized and uploaded a blog which conveys my feelings in my words.

The blog was seen by AHS staff, but what struck me at the time was what strikes me now as I hit the keyboard letters, and that's how weak written words can be -- especially up against the Cookie Monster! Admittedly, that's not a new insight. Here, Lawrence Lessig in Remix makes the same point: "My favorite among the remixes I've seen are all cases in which the mix delivers a message more powerfully [emphasis added] than any original alone could, and certainly more than words alone could."

But it was a new insight for me as a news director and for the newsroom I managed, even though the superior power of the image and the sound over the word was the price of admission into the TV news industry. This was different. It's not that our station's question-asking and video-recording sparked subsequent debate, because that was routine. It was that the media we produced in this case became the primary material for others, and not so much to produce their opinions as much as to express their opinions by producing their own media.

This, for me, was new territory where, in the words of Henry Jenkins, "old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways."

It is surely the case that Duckett, an erudite and by many accounts friendly and caring citizen, was caught unaware not some much by the pitch of his opponents' attacks -- he was, after all, no stranger to public and political criticism -- but by the strange key in which it was composed, allowing notes from , well, muppets. Of course, this is my speculation, but it seems reasonable on the evidence that Duckett simply did not see the convergence culture moment he became trapped in and, ultimately, a victim of.

The evidence is admittedly indirect, but his retreat into the written word, and his wife's subsequent written defence of her husband's actions suggest, at the very least, a discomfort with the mashup tools arrayed against them.

"Alberta," wrote Duckett's wife in a letter the following month published in the capital city's broadsheet newspaper, "will not find a more passionate defender of publicly funded health care.

"In retrospect...was it too flippant? Probably."

This is all very reasonable. And it would have been very reasonable for the most vociferous of Duckett's critics to debate the statistics around emergency room admissions and treatment versus the targets for the same. Just like it was very reasonable for Duckett, who was bestowed by the University of Bath with a Doctor of Business Administration degree in Higher Education Management, to remind reporters that a news briefing on those very questions would take place within the half hour. (I should note that our news station also covered that news conference).

But all this talk of reasonableness only makes Stephen Duncombe's voice louder and his argument more insistent. In his 2007 book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics In An Age Of Fantasy, Duncombe chastises progressive leaders for hitching their star to the rationalism wagon.

Appeals to truth and reality, and faith in rational thought and action, are based in a fantasy of hte past, or, rather, past fantasy. Today's world is linked by media systems and awash in advertising images...We live in a "society of the spectacle," as the French theorist-provocateuer Guy Debord declared back in 1967.

Keep in mind the mediasphere that grew around the Duckett Cookie episode as Duncombe briefly surveys the work of cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who found in the mysterious human capacity for metaphor a radical admission that hard information, rationality, reasonableness are not enough. These categories and metaphors, he argues, allow us to "translate hard information and direct experience into a conceptual form familiar and comfortable for us." He continues:

[P]rogressives need to think less about presenting facts and more about how to frame these facts in such a way that they make sense and hold meaning for everyday people.

Quite apart from whether you are in the progressive chorus, this is a solid stage on which to build a case for what really happened in the Duckett Cookie episode. Those who used the tools of spectacle, including raw material culled from pre-existing media and a laptop edit suite, have heard Duncombe's admonition. Says Duncombe in a chilling remark: "Those who put their trust in Enlightenment principles and empircism today are doomed to political insignificance."

As I continue to study this episode, and ask you for any thoughts or directions on finding and picking the theoretical fruit it contains, it is worth sharing a few provisional conclusions:

1. It was not the bloggers nor the twitizens nor any other member of the new media who played the pivotal role of being in place to ask Duckett the questions and record his answers. The conventional media may indeed face a threatening business model, but we are not yet in the new world where public figures are directly asked questions by those other than the conventional media who have the resources (time, money) to do so.



2. The Duckett Cookie episode is unthinkable without the contributions of mass media (Sesame Street) and the gamble, not much of one, that viewers of mashed up videos would immediately understand the Cookie Monster text.



3. Laughter and ridicule remain potent politcal weapons. I am not the first to point out that once a public figure is ridiculed, he or she cannot be taken seriously.



4. None of this would have happened if one unconventional decision was made in our conventional newsroom, and that was to post the raw video to YouTube in the first place. Why did we do this? For many reasons, including the feeling that the usual packaging of a television news story (heavily edited, 1:45 in length, reaction clips) did not serve our viewers in forming opinions about the issue.



5. In convergence culture, the Cookie Monster matters.

Glenn Kubish is working towards a Master of Arts in Communications and Technology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where his final research project will analyze what happened in the 2:14 of video and in its sharing across social media. He can be reached at glenn.kubish@gmail.com

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Inventing the Digital Medium: An Interview with Janet Murray (Part Three)

You suggest a broad range of design fields as important for addressing the core properties of digital media. I know you've thought a lot about the process of educating designers. Do you imagine expanding the curriculum so that all designers know at least something of these various fields or do you imagine building multidisciplinarity into the design process through collaboration across various expertise?

I do think that designers should know about all the contributory fields - such as visual design, human computer interaction, industrial design, computer science, media studies. These fields overlap one another and each one is already drawing on multiple other disciplines, so even those with a more narrow training have had some exposure to other disciplines. For me, the key thing is that we should understand design as a collective process of inventing a common medium - that all of these practices should be seen as contributing to a common design palette of conventions that are available for use by any application. For example, we can't think of information design as separate from game design, because game mechanics can be very useful in explaining complex systems, and information visualization can be very useful in offering an overview of a complex multiplayer world. The more we think of every artifact we make as occupying this larger potential design space, the more strategies we have at our disposal for making expressive, coherent digital artifacts.

But we need a way to unify these different approaches, which is why I suggest that we think of the digital medium as having four characteristic affordances (the procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial) so that we can understand the role of each of these contributory disciplines in helping us to maximize these affordances.

Of course curriculum decisions are always influenced by local configurations - by what departments are more open to change or to collaboration within any particular university. Digital Media is being taught in many departments, and degree programs are proliferating so rapidly that we seem to have a new faculty ad to post to our PhD students every day. My hope is that Inventing the Medium will make it possible for more people to teach digital media design from a wider range of disciplines. I'm hoping that humanities and arts faculty will be able to introduce the technical issues using the book, and that computer science and engineering departments will be able to use it to integrate media-oriented design questions into their teaching. And I've made an extensive Glossary in order to encourage professionals from varying disciplinary backgrounds to share a design vocabulary.

I think that Steven Johnson is right - more complex storytelling (as in the change in serial drama that he charts in that book) makes us smarter. And I see the digital medium as supporting more complex cognitive forms, not only story-telling forms, but also representations of the world as replayable simulated systems, so that we can look at how the same situation can be configured in multiple different ways, or how multiple causes can contribute to a single event. I thank that Nicholas Carr and other dystopian chroniclers of the digital era are correct in identifying the distracting effect of information overload, but they mistake the immediate situation for something that is intrinsic to digital culture. Right now, we have a growth in the quantity and variety of information that we can encode and deliver - a big growth spurt in inscription and transmission - but a lag in the conventions of representation that make information coherent. Google is making us much smarter in exactly the way that external media representation has always made us smarter: the new encyclopedic affordances of the digital medium lets us offload information that we no longer need to carry in memory, and to share information with one another that we no longer need specialists or personal contact to access. Google makes all this encyclopedic information retrieval on demand. Of course it is not as refined as we need it to be, but it has already made it orders of magnitude easier to find an address, identify an author, check on professional affiliations, etc. So it is absurd to say that internet resources reduce our ability to focus.

Now, it may be the case that people are less patient with self-indulgent prose, that people are less willing to submit to the long-winded authorial voice, to enter the trance of reading a longer work. But in some cases that may mean that we can convey the same information in more concise terms. For example, I needed to express the argument for Inventing the Medium in book form, but now that I have laid it out, I would love to make an ebook that segmented the same information in smaller chunks and allowed for multiple navigational paths.

Borrowing is a necessary feature of design. But designers should be aware of the provenance, the origins, of design features and think about the function they serve separately from the medium in which they live. For example the front page of a newspaper and the headlines on the page are very useful conventions for conveying a common understanding of what is news in a short time. But the sound bite and display behind the news anchor, the scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen, the magazine cover, are similar conventions, and they all relate to the core cultural task of taking in diverse summary information in an efficient manner. If we are making a news site for the web, or for a mobile device, or for some future platform that operates from a chip in the corner of special glasses, we would have to think about the purpose served by the aggregation of headlines on the front page, and consider what we want to merely borrow the legacy conventions (or the web conventions when they become digital legacy) and what we will need to reinvent.

I don't believe that the digital medium is wholly new and separate from cultural history--quite the contrary. But I do see the need for designers to borrow, invent, and refine the appropriate conventions of the new medium in a way that is mindful of how earlier customs reflect earlier limitations (such as column size and page size and the fixity of paper) that we need not reproduce.

That is a great question and of course one answer is that I rely on you, Henry, to tell me about that!

But I don't think designers can abdicate responsibility. It is our job to invent the conventions that scaffold popular invention. For example, the status line and hash tag are incredibly powerful organizing conventions, which then make possible the inventive uses (such as professional convention commentary, fan commentary, political organizing, even ironic pseudo-hashtags) that we value on a viral success like Twitter. People need a coherent structure in order to share focused attention and pool their creativity.

Janet H. Murray is an internationally recognized designer and media theorist, and Ivan Allen College Dean's Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech where she also directs the Experimental Television Laboratory. She holds a PhD in English from Harvard University and was a pioneer of digital humanities applications at MIT in the 1980s and 1990s, moving to Georgia Tech in 1999, and serving as Director of Graduate Studies in Digital Media from 2000-2010 during which time she led the redesign of the MS curriculum and the founding of one of the first PhDs in the field. She is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997; MIT Press 1998), which has been translated into 5 languages, and is widely used as a roadmap to emerging broadband art, information, and entertainment environments, and Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press, 2011). At Georgia Tech, her interactive design projects include a digital edition of the Warner Brothers classic, Casablanca, funded by NEH and in collaboration with the American Film Institute; the Interactive Toolkit for Engineering LearningProject, funded by NSF; and a series of prototypes for the convergence of television and computation, created in collaboration with PBS, ABC , MTV, Turner, Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, and other networks and media companies. Murray is an emerita Trustee of the AFI and a current board member of the George Foster Peabody Award. In December 2010 Murray was named one of the "Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future" by Prospect Magazine.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Is It All About the Hips?: Sangita Shresthova on Bollywood Dance (Part Two)

To me the themes of nostalgia and orientalism have emerged as a bit of a paradoxical relationship in the case of Bollywood dance. On one hand, Indian dance has functioned, among other things, as a lesson in Indianness for first, second and even third generation Indian dance. Though less rigid in its adherence to protocols and certainly more hybrid in content, Bollywood dance has also approximated this function for Indian-American youth. The West's growing interest in Indian dance both complicated and perpetuates these desires for Indianness as both are shaped by a particular imagined India. Both the nostalgic and orientalized gaze tend towards opulent and recognizably Indian movements, gestures and costumes. But unlike the nostalgic gaze, the foreign interest in India, particularly the one in continental Europe, sometime borders on a slightly condescending fascination with kitsch. To me, this labeling of Bollywood with kitsch and the slightly condescending (though perhaps well intentioned) interest that this generates is where the legacies of Orientalism are perpetuated through Bollywood dance. As I write in my book, I see Bollywood dance as unintentional kitsch.

Though very different in intention, Bollywood dance driven by nostalgia and Bollywood dance informed by orientalism can at times look very similar as they both tend to highlight a idealized kind of Indianness. That said, there are differences in the nuances of how these motivations for Bollywood dance manifest. These nuances, however, may only be intelligible to a very small percentage of audience-members.

The simple answer to this question would be to say that, given the large number of Hindi films produced every year and the global reach of the industry, we should not be surprised that there are conflicting definitions of what Bollywood dance means and does. There is certainly some truth in this especially when we consider that the various narrative contexts of the song-and-dance sequences. Conservative heroines need to move in ways that are appropriate to their convictions. Worldly heroes need to demonstrate this through their globally informed dance style. Narratives demand that Bollywood dance incorporate many cultures and styles. Live Bollywood dancers can then just pick and choose the movement content that best suits their needs and preferences.

There is, however, a more complex answer that builds on this inherent narrative diversity. I believe that it is really the hybrid mixing of dance styles and cultures, which defined Hindi film song-and-dances since early days of cinema, that lies at the heart of Bollywood dance. This mixing also supports the various at times conflicting definitions of Bollywood dance. The hybridity of movement contained within Bollywood dances in turn allows people to pick and choose the elements that most reflect their personal preference and aspirations. This is why Bollywood dance can mean different things to different people in different contexts. The specific meanings associated with the genre of Bollywood dance can thus become extremely localized while at the same time remaining connected to the Hindi cinema's international trends and flows.

Yes, Bollywood song-and-dance sequences live outside films as much as they live in them. Hindi film songs (and the accompanying videos) are often released months before the actual film to help promote the film. The recent case of the surprise hit "Kolaveri Di" is an exceptional example of how effective this strategy can be. Notably, Kolaveri Di, did not actually contain any choreographed dance. The song spread quickly through the internet, garnering more than 37 million views in advance of the release of the Tamil language film 3 that it was composed for:

A portion of the many people who saw the song on Youtube.com (or one of its many response "avatars") surely made plans to actually see the film when it is released in 2012.

Similarly, there are many instances when a song-and-dance sequence endures even as the popularity of the film that contained it fades away. The "Choli Ke Peeche" (What is behind the blouse?) song-and-dance sequence from the film Khalnayak (1993) is a perfect example of this.

That said, there are many layers of meaning within a song-and-dance sequence. Audiences who have seen the film that contained the sequence are more able to interpret the nuances in a song-and-dance that refer directly to the plot. If they are very familiar with Hindi films, they may even be able to pick up on some inter-textual references that connect that particular film and dance to other earlier cinematic works. Inter-textual references to other films, subplots and even real-life events outside the film's narrative are quite common in Hindi films. Audiences familiar with neither the film nor the references that it contains are left to their own devices in interpreting a song-and-dance sequence that circulates outside the film.

Both the narrative and extra-narrative circulation of song-and-dance sequences have implications for Bollywood dance. Dance instructors need to be aware of the possible meanings that may be associated with any given Hindi film song before they teach it to their students. This seems to be particularly true to Bollywood instructors outside India where the appropriateness is a key consideration in choosing songs.

In a stark departure from the scorn it used to receive, Bollywood has gained prominence in academic and other intellectual circles in India in recent years. There is even talk that it is now hip to study Bollywood! In that sense, I am happy to note that my book has been released at a good time and the overall positive response I have received so far confirms it. A few valid minor quibbles aside, the reviews of my book in both Nepal and India have been overwhelmingly positive. I have also been quite surprised with how much attention my book has garnered given the saturated book market in India. I have even been featured in Marie Claire! Flatteringly, the Sunday Indian said my is "a fine blend of in depth research, humour, and astute cultural sensitivity." So far, the reviewers have also generally voiced a general agreement with the points I put forward in Is It All About Hips? In Nepal, a positive review of my book in the Nepali Times (a prominent Nepali weekly) elicited an interesting exchange in the comments section with some commenters suggesting that I was "another Nepali turned Indian" and that "Bollywood makes for some cheap and easy popularity." Paradoxically, these comments actually confirmed my observations about Nepalis national identity and troubled relationship to India. As the Marie Claire (December 2011) feature on the book states: "Whether you love 'em or hate them, the world cannot resist Bollywood."

You can find out more about Sangita Shresthova's work on Bollywood and dance at: www.bollynatyam.com.

Sangita Shresthova: A Czech/Nepali scholar, filmmaker, dancer and
media scholar, Sangita's work has been presented in academic and
creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin),
AIGA Boston/ATE Massaging Media Conference (Boston), the Other
Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival
(Seoul), the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC), and Akademi's Frame
by Frame (London, UK). She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of
World Arts and Cultures and earned a MSc. degree from MIT's
Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on Hindi film
dance. Sangita is also founder of Bollynatyam (www.bollynatyam.com).
She currently works with Professor Henry Jenkins on questions related
to participatory culture, new media, and civic engagement.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Is It All About the Hips?: Sangita Shresthova on Bollywood Dance (Part One)

Sangita Shreshtova, a 2003 Alumni of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, recently published an informative and engaging new book, Is It All About the Hips?: Around the World With Bollywood Dance, which explores some important questions at the intersections of transnational media, participatory culture, and film performance. She writes with the experienced eye of someone who is herself a gifted dancer and choreographer and with the theoretical sophistication of someone who has gone through several top academic programs.

This engaging ethnography explores the ways Bollywood dance is moving off the screen and into the everyday lives of fans all over the planet, through attentive close studies of what performance means in a range of different local contexts (from London and Los Angeles to Kathmandu). Shreshthova knows from her own work as an organizer of the Prague Bollywood Film Festival that these films, their music, and their dance cultures, are traveling not only to places where there is a strong South Asian diasporic community but also into places which have had limited history of contact with India before. This is part of the fascination of our current moment where popular culture is being circulated across traditional borders in ways which produce unexpected consequences.

I have been lucky enough to have worked with Shreshtova, first as my graduate student at MIT and now as the research director on the CivicPaths project here at USC, so it is a source of great pride and pleasure to be able to share with you this interview. Here, she shares both her own journey to write this book and some core insights about the transnational contexts within which contemporary popular and participatory culture operates.

In your acknowledgements, you describe Bollywood dance as "a messy, yet appealing, reflection on my own scattered cultural identity." What aspects of your autobiography did you draw upon in shaping this book? Is there something about Bollywood entertainment which speaks especially to the diasporic experience?

While my book is based in ethnographic and academic research, there are certainly some autobiographical elements that informed its final shape. For one, my initial encounters with Hindi films are interwoven with my own cultural struggles to define my Czech-Nepali mixed race identity growing up in Kathmandu. It was during this time that I was first drawn to the hybrid content of Hindi film song-and-dance sequences. Much later, I was once again drawn to Hindi films as a homesick undergraduate student at Princeton University. At that time, I was so grateful to the Indian students who shared their Bollywood audio and video collections with me. The songs and images became an accessible way for me to feel connected to a familiar culture in ways that somehow eased the profound isolation that dominated my initial years in the United States. Watching the films also connected me with other students in similar situations.

Films like Pardes (1997) really catered to diasporic nostalgia. Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardes_(film)

When I returned to the study of Bollywood as a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, I, of course, drew on these early experiences with Bollywood. I then combined my research with my training in dance and media.

So yes, to me, Bollywood films, in general, are very well suited to the diasporic experience. For one, they provide accessible familiar content that can be shared in the community. To me, the hybrid nature of the films themselves is also particularly well suited to the fragmented identities that emerge out of particular diasporic experiences. And, Bollywood dance specifically is an eloquent commentary on the juxtaposition of the global flow of media enabled by media technologies and the physical experience of these images on a local level. This is why I am particularly cautious about the nostalgic urge to treat Bollywood film content as representative of Indian (and at times even explicitly Hindu) culture. To me the richness of Bollywood (dance) is its portable mixing of cultural content that enables multiple (related) meanings to emerge in multiple locations.

There are many practices associated with Hindi film (and more recently Bollywood) fandom, including keeping up with current trends within the industry, organizing screenings, creating art inspired by films and actors, and following references to other films and actors within a given narrative. To me, the shared memory of films is really central to Bollywood fandom. This pleasure may further be encouraged when audiences make watching Hindi films a group activity - to be shared with relatives and friends.

As one of the organizers of the Prague Bollywood Festival, I had the opportunity to witness and encounter many Bollywood fans. (image source: www.bollywood.cz)

In many ways, Bollywood dance grew out of these shared pleasures. Put simply audiences wanted to experience the films first-hand. The also wanted to share these pleasures with others through performance. In this context, thresh-hold to participation in Bollywood dance was very low and took place in the privacy of people's homes or at community gatherings. Anyone could participate. By emulating particular movements from films, dancers could summon up the shared memories of those films. They would also teach movements to each other and invite others to join in as best they could. In many ways, Bollywood dance movements became a shared language of Bollywood film fandom. To me, this is what makes Bollywood dance a participatory culture.

In some ways, current trends towards a more "professional" Bollywood dance as live performance are now changing these practices. There is, however, no indication that the Bollywood dance as fandom is about to fade any time soon.

The relationship between Bollywood dance and the Indian classical dance world is quite controversial and has been for some time. For the sake of clarity, I will situate my answer within the United States and limit my observations to this context. The growing popularity of Bollywood dance and its frequent positioning as representative of Indian dance has indeed caused much concern among Indian classical dancers in the United States. While I am not sure about the actual enrollment numbers, there is a general sense that Bollywood dance is gaining in popularity at the expense of Indian classical dance and many classical dance teachers have expressed their distress at this trend. Often this distress also is tinted with a slight disdain for Bollywood dance, which classical dance teachers tend to see as a less refined, dislocated and even crass from entertainment. There is also a sense that Bollywood dance is in some ways riding on the coat tails of the hard work that many Indian dancers have done to establish and raise awareness about Indian dance outside India. The popularity of Bollywood dance is also a source of concern for those advocating the preservation of specific (conservative) elements of Indian culture in the lives of Indian-American youth who may otherwise only feel a very tenuous connection to Indian culture. 

Students of Bollywood dance often feel that Bollywood dance is much more accessible, malleable, learnable, and fun than Indian classical dance. As source material, song-and-dance sequences from Hindi films are today quite readily accessed through sites like Youtube.com. Students can quickly adapt movements to suit their skill level. They may be in a position to show off their moves to their friends quite quickly as well. In contrast, music to classical Indian dances is often a closely guarded and will only be shared once a teacher deems the student is ready to make a public appearance. There are very few or no compromises made to accommodate student's skill level. They have to master set dances. It may take years before an Indian classical dance student actually has a dance to show and even longer before he/she is ready to perform in public.

Reflecting on these realities, several Bollywood and Indian classical dance teachers have been searching for new ways to address this situation. More and more often, Bollywood dance teachers and dancers make a very active effort to integrate Indian classical elements (and at times actual full classes) in their teaching. They often also actively encourage that their students study classical Indian dance. On the other hand, Indian classical dance teachers make efforts to add Bollywood (or as they prefer to call it Hindi Film dance) components into their repertoire. Drawing on the Indian classical dance Kathak, Anjani Ambegaotkar has choreographed an ode to Hindi film dance in "Made in Mumbai", and Made in Mumbai II.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

On Transmedia and Education: A Conversation With Robot Heart Stories' Jen Begeal and Inanimate Alice's Laura Fleming (Part One)

This week, I want to showcase two innovative projects which seek to explore the intersections between transmedia storytelling, participatory culture, and education -- Robot Heart Stories and Inanimate Alice. Here's some background on the two projects, taken from their respective home pages:

Robot Hearts Stories is an experiential learning project that uses collaboration and creative problem solving to put education directly in the hands of students. This fall, two classrooms, a continent apart, will work together to get a lost robot home, and they will need your help... The experience begins when a robot crash lands in Montreal and must make her way to LA in order to find her space craft and return home. Two class rooms in underprivileged neighborhoods, one in Montreal (French speaking) and the other in LA (English speaking), will use math, science, history, geography and creative writing to help the robot make her way across North America. At the same time, Robot Hearts Stories extends beyond the classroom, as the project welcomes involvement from a global audience. We need participants of all ages to share their own passions in the form of a creative act involving a robot they can print, customize and document. For each photo or piece of art featuring the robot that is submitted, the "signal strength" of the robot grows stronger and helps her to get back home. Robot Heart Stories is the first in a trilogy of experiential learning projects from award winning storytelling pioneer Lance Weiler and creative producer Janine Saunders.

Robot Heart Stories from WorkBook Project on Vimeo.

Set in the early years of the 21st century and told through text, sound, images, music and games, Inanimate Alice is the story of Alice and her imaginary digital friend Brad. nanimate Alice is Transmedia - designed from the outset as a story that unfolds over time and on multiple platforms, the episodes are available on all devices capable of running Adobe's Flash Player. Alice connects technologies, languages, cultures, generations and curricula within a sweeping narrative accessible by all. As Alice's journey progresses, new storylines appear elsewhere providing more details and insights, enriching the tale through surprising developments. Students are encouraged to co-create developing episodes of their own, either filling in the gaps or developing new strands. Designed originally as entertainment, 'Inanimate Alice' has been adopted by teachers eager to connect with students through media they inherently understand. Created around a high-quality robust text, the content is suitable for the deep-reading and re-reading necessary for academic investigation.

My desire to learn more about these imaginative and groundbreaking projects led me to two women (Robot Heart Stories' Jen Begeal and Inanimate Alice's Laura Fleming) who have been heavily involved in their development and deployment. What follows is an online conversation between the two of them which describes not only their work on these projects, but also dig deeper into their underlying philosophies concerning the value of transmedia and participatory learning. (For my own thoughts on these topics, see this blog post.) My hope is that this exchange will help spark similar discussions across projects, across entertainment companies, nonprofits, educators, and schools, about how we can tap in the power of new forms of storytelling experiences to enhance the opportunities students have to learn and grow.

You have both been involved in recent projects to create transmedia experiences for young people. Can you describe these projects and your participation in them?

Jen: I have recently been involved with Robot Heart Stories (RHS), an experiential education project that used collaboration and creative problem solving to put education directly in the hands of students. The experience begins when a robot crash landed in Montreal and must make her way to LA in order to find her space craft and return home. Two class rooms in underprivileged neighborhoods, one in Montreal (French speaking) and the other in LA (English speaking), will use math, science, history, geography and creative writing to help the robot make her way across North America.

At the same time, Robot Hearts Stories extends beyond the classroom, as the project welcomes involvement from a global audience. We need participants of all ages to share their own passions in the form of a creative act involving a robot they can print, customize and document. For each photo or piece of art featuring the robot that is submitted, the "signal strength" of the robot grows stronger and helps her to get back home.

Robot Heart Stories was created by award winning transmedia storytelling pioneer, Lance Weiler and creative producer Janine Saunders. My role with the project is as social media strategist, I helped build the social media strategy for the twitter feed and the blogger outreach campaign.

Laura: I have been working on Inanimate Alice , a series of interactive, multimedia, episodes that uses a combination of text, sound, images, and games to tell the story of Alice, a young girl growing up with technology as her best and sometimes only friend. During my time with the project, I have been able to work closely with the producer of the series advising on the educational media attributes of the story and helping devise intriguing new ways to navigate the transmedia experience that is just starting to unfold.

In addition, I was a collaborator for Robot Heart Stories, a project in which transmedia strategies were used to engage students from across the world. I also implemented pieces of the project within my own classroom.

What lessons have you taken from your experiments so far in deploying transmedia practices for education?

Jen: You need to understand your audience, and know that what works for each grade level will be different. Also, you must make the project easy to understand, curate and showcase for educators and students. Another lesson we learned from RHS is that you need an open line of communication between collaborators which may include needing an administrator to oversee discussions to you ensure that goals are made and met.

Laura: When thinking about transmedia and the affordances it provides for learning, the most important lesson I have taken away is that transmedia properties designed for education must be pedagogically sound, by shifting the locus of control firmly away from the teacher towards the learner. In the case of Inanimate Alice, I have seen learners become producers of content in the widest transliterate sense- teachers and learners learning together, shaping new narrative possibilities has enabled learners to participate, grow and be an integral part of the story. Transmedia practices for education must allow room for freedom, flexibility, and creativity while at the same time being practical and addressing standards, objectives and the needs of learners.

While transmedia has long been a property of commercial franchises aimed at young people, we are just now beginning to explore the implications of transmedia for education. What lessons do you think educators might take from commercial transmedia aimed at children? In what ways does educational use of transmedia require different underlying models and assumptions?

Jen: Some lessons that educators may take away from commercial transmedia aimed at children are the social communities built around the project, and how these communities encourage each participant to have a voice. Some examples of commercial properties which have accomplished this include: Inanimate Alice and the eagerly anticipated Pottermore, currently in Beta, but which allowed one million early testers to join in the summer of 2011.

Transmedia projects are about being actively engaged with a story and "playing." Educators must understand that there is no right or wrong way to tell a transmedia story because the landscape and communities are continuously changing and evolving. Digital technologies are in a constant state of flux therefor we can no longer rely on "standards" for teaching as educators will face a harder time connecting with students who are becoming more accustomed to shifting technologies.

Laura: Successful commercial franchises have proven that transmedia narrative techniques create intense loyalty, interaction, and engagement. Educators can use these same techniques to create anytime, anywhere learning that is fully integrated and embedded into learner's lives. Spanning educational content across varying platforms and incorporating varying forms of media meets the needs of all of our learners, while at the same time creates an emotional connection to content. Transmedia techniques create a totality of learning experiences that encompass learning both in school, in the community, and at home. Ultimately, I feel educators and indeed learners, increasingly, need to be an integral part of the creation process

.

Jen Begeal is a social media strategist and transmedia producer. Her recent projects include developing a social media strategy for the experiential education project, Robot Heart Stories, developed by The Workbook Project and producing the transmedia campaign for the film, Zenith. She currently works at Umami.TV and can be found tweeting at @jlbhart and @umamitv Jen has spoken at leading conferences including the Film & History Conference for the University of Wisconsin and Mobility Shifts Conference at The New School on the subjects of film theory and media literacy. As a writer her works have been featured on the Tribeca Film: Future of Film blog and on Huffington Post's blog. Jen received her BFA from The State University of New York at Purchase in film directing and her MA from The New School in media studies. She is a co-organizer of the Transmedia NYC meetup group and an active member in the New York Film community.

Laura Fleming has served the children of New Jersey as an educator for the past fifteen years as both a media specialist and a teacher. In recent years she has taken a professional interest in developments in new media and in vanguard techniques in interactive and transmedia (multi-platform) storytelling. In this context, she has been able to draw powerful connections between transmedia and education. She blogs on these issues at www.edtechinsight.blogspot.com and is a regular contributor to other outlets, including the Huffington Post. Laura is currently playing a lead consultative role with the BradField Company, the developers of the innovative and popular transmedia story, Inanimate Alice. She has played a major role in growing and sustaining a thriving and vibrant global community around Inanimate Alice. She has consulted on several transmedia properties, working with producers to help maximise the value of their creations and toolsets for teachers and students as well as for the corporations themselves. Laura is currently co-authoring a book on Transmedia LearningWorlds, due for publication in Autumn 2012, and has spoken at a number of prestigious education, publishing and media events on the significance of transmedia for teaching and learning.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

On Transmedia and Education: A Conversation With Robot Heart Stories' Jen Begeal and Inanimate Alice's Laura Fleming (Part Two)

Some transmedia properties are entirely top-down, deploying fairly conventional models of authorship, despite their deployment across multiple media platforms. Others include strong elements of participatory culture. How central is youth participation in the production and circulation of media to your visions for transmedia education?

Jen: Youth participation is very important In production and circulation as many Transmedia projects are aimed at young people, and the ones aimed at adults require that the adults have some prior knowledge of media which leads us back to teaching media literacy at a young age. Specific youth aimed projects, like Robot Heart Stories, require that the students create their own videos, write collaborative stories and construct and color their own paper robots (called "heart packs") which were pdf downloads from the website. The theory behind transmedia education is that user generated content (i.e. created by the students themselves) should be at the core of these projects.

Laura: Story-driven user-generated content is a powerful piece of the transmedia experience and in my opinion is an essential consideration for any educational property. Technology tools allow for new forms of participation and learners inevitably seek out those opportunities. Even just the notion of creating transmedia experiences for specific groups or demographics is something we need to consider carefully. Learners themselves should be immersed in the creative process to ensure that they are not mere consumers of the experience.

What are the implications of teaching a generation not only how to read but also how to write across media?

Jen: There are several implications to this, for one there will be a larger population of active consumers, prior to the "digital generation" most media consumers were passive with little choice in what they were sold or presented with. This new generation now has the choice to decide what to watch, who to interact with and decide which brands can target them. This likewise poses a challenge for brands to be smarter and more engaging with their target audience. I also foresee a higher literacy rate as well as lower drop-out rates as students will have to have certain levels of education to compete in the working world, which will be heavily media driven.

Laura: One of my personal goals has been to blend the theory of transmedia with the implications from entertainment and business and layer it in a discussion about reading, writing, and learning for even our youngest learners. Children will read and write across platforms, whether they are taught to or not. As an educator, I feel I have a personal responsibility to teach my students how to read and write across media by providing a learning environment that allows for freedoms to think about story in less conventional ways. Transmedia storytelling techniques enable us to expand the definition of literacy and allow for new opportunities to experience both reading, writing, and publishing in a transmedia environment and students should be taught to do so responsibly and effectively.

One potential implication of the use of transmedia for education is that it might help students to experience the same story or events through multiple points of view. How might such practices contribute to young people's capacity to explore different perspectives?

Jen: Exploring different perspectives allows for students to filter the facts of a story and sift through the evidence presented to determine the truth. As was the case with RHS, French speaking students in a Montreal classroom had to convey their stories through video, music, and images to their sister classroom of English speaking students in Los Angles. This presented a problem that the students themselves needed to solve, one which involved telling a narrative which could be understood across language. The global initiative of the project prompted our collaborators to translate the initial French/ English curriculum into other languages including Swedish and German.

Laura: Transmedia by nature promotes multiple points of view which fosters a dialogue within global reach that can connect technologies, languages, cultures, generations, and curricula. The dynamic experiences transmedia storytelling helps to provide allows for the proliferation of information and knowledge, as well as ensures that young people will learn together and from each other. Ultimately, transmedia practices have the power to shape and possibly even alter beliefs or interpretations offering mutually beneficial solutions for all. This power makes it all the more critical that learners themselves are instrumental components of transmedia learning worlds.

I have used the metaphor of "hunting and gathering" to describe the activities of consumers engaging with a transmedia narrative. What connections do you see between these modes of active consumption and the kinds of research processes which have long been central to education?

Jen: Research requires actively searching out information and can be as involved as your project requires. Likewise transmedia storytelling allows you to be as little or as much engaged with the project as you desire. The students who participated in Robot Heart Stories had a specific curriculum presented to them, however what they chose to do with the information provided was up to them. In the end they chose to tell the story of the robot across multiple platforms including videos, e-mails and through song.

Laura: There is no problem with the notion of 'consuming' transmedia, but its true educational value will come in our definition of 'active'-- its definition has to be about more than mere 'thinking about the content', it has to stray knowingly into the creative and the immersive aspects too. In the case of Inanimate Alice, students around the world have been motivated to create their own next episodes of the series. Learners have used critical literacy skills to deconstruct the digital text as readers, and have used the knowledge they gained to write and create. They have become producers of content, shaping new narrative possibilities. Students have developed episodes of their own, either filling in the gaps or developing new strands of the narrative. In addition, students have created interstitial episodes that fill in the gaps in Alice's story.

Inanimate Alice has created an active virtual circle of storytelling where transmedia meets co-creation inspiring many learners to write and create. Creators looking to build a market here will succeed best where they can find a path between 'delivering' transmedia experiences which can then be consumed, and building transmedia platforms/landscapes/immersive experiences that empower the learner to create (and live!) their own stories.

Jen: For some, transmedia may be seen as technology overload, however not all transmedia projects take place completely on screens. For instance with Robot Heart Stories part of the project involved students physically cutting out paper robot heart-packs and either drawing pictures or pasting photos on the robots stomachs as a way to "fuel" the robot. The students also had to create videos which meant they had to engage in face to face collaboration.

Another transmedia project that focuses on youth culture is Socks, inc. asks participants to create a physical sock-puppet then photograph or video the puppet interacting in the real world. This type of teaching, which requires a cross-pollination of digital and real world problem solving, should be the core theory behind all transmedia education. We are already a society of information overload but now we need to learn how to examine the world around us and learn how to engage with it through digital media and hands on activities.

Laura : When considering the amount of time young people spend engaging with "screens", it is important to differentiate effectively between the many uses to which screens are put- playing an immersive and complex computer game is not the same as watching television. In the case of transmedia each screen facilitates the manifestation of the whole storyworld.

Jen: The model of transmedia education should focus on the ability of the learner to synthesize information across multiple channels as students need this skill in the real world. Content is continually being dispersed across multiple channels and as more content becomes available it will be up to us to teach young people how to curate this content and synthesize the constant stream of information.

Laura: To me, neither of these models are mutually exclusive. Ultimately, only the learner is really in control (for a concise exposition of this position, see I am Learner) Teachers can influence, guide, and facilitate, but what is taught is rarely if ever what is actually learned- so while learners focus on synthesizing information across multiple channels, they will also, naturally, when they are allowed to, take multiple paths to knowledge. The most powerful transemdia education will therefore try to combine both models into one more persistent model.

Jen: Pottermore has the ability to connect children globally, to teach them how to learn from different cultures, to understand how to connect with one another and be more accepting of each other. I foresee projects like these with such a broad scope and community to reduce prejudices, stereotyping and encourage collaborative learning.

Laura: JK Rowling has done a fascinating thing with Pottermore. She has taken her linear novels and created a non-linear experience around them. Her fans have been wanting to get close to her for years and through Pottermore they will feel like they have gotten that chance and that they now have the opportunity to contribute to the story world. The loyalty this will foster should not be underestimated and should serve as a model for future transmedia properties. In the case of education, these strategies will empower learners to share, contribute, and create by making discoveries through their own interpretations, which encourages passion and responsibility for their own learning.

Both of you have placed strong emphasis on the value of stories as a means of capturing and communicating human wisdom and knowledge. How do we decide which stories or themes should form the basis for these kinds of grassroots storytelling activities?

Jen: Stories should have personal meaning, and they should have an overriding theme. We had learned that for primary and secondary education topics that deal with social good, passion and personal responsibility (anti-bullying) campaigns are the easiest for students to tackle. There are many themes which can be explored or addressed, however the theme itself should be easy to understand and engage with, and be meaningful to the students learning the curriculum.

Laura: Storytelling activities should have the power to offer multiple perspectives and different ways of communicating ideas. Authentic, meaningful, genuine narratives that engage learners through their intent will naturally capture them and enhance the depth of their knowledge.

Jen: By allowing students to tell their stories across multiple platforms we have given them the chance to be authors without making them self conscious. Some students tell stories visually, others through music and some even through short form dialogues, transmedia embraces the telling of stories across multiple channels, thereby giving everyone a chance to be a storyteller or author. In the case of Pottermore, these same young people are encouraged by a community to pick and choose how little or how much they want to involve themselves into the stories. It gives them the chance to become immersive creators and to actually play instead of write. This is especially helpful to those kids with learning disabilities as they can engage with others in their own way and at their own pace. By breaking down traditional barriers of storytelling we build a world of creators who can tell a story and synthesize information more effectively than ever before.

Laura: Transparency, connecting learners directly to the storytellers allows for powerful opportunities for co-creation. Learners themselves become multiplatform producers by mashing-up commercial content or by creating their own original content that extends the overarching narrative. Once embraced, contributing to the story world will provide satisfaction and a sense of achievement. In addition, celebrating the participation of the learner is validating and will lead to further engagement with the content and will make them feel empowered.

Jen Begeal is a social media strategist and transmedia producer. Her recent projects include developing a social media strategy for the experiential education project, Robot Heart Stories, developed by The Workbook Project and producing the transmedia campaign for the film, Zenith. She currently works at Umami.TV and can be found tweeting at @jlbhart and @umamitv Jen has spoken at leading conferences including the Film & History Conference for the University of Wisconsin and Mobility Shifts Conference at The New School on the subjects of film theory and media literacy. As a writer her works have been featured on the Tribeca Film: Future of Film blog and on Huffington Post's blog. Jen received her BFA from The State University of New York at Purchase in film directing and her MA from The New School in media studies. She is a co-organizer of the Transmedia NYC meetup group and an active member in the New York Film community.

Laura Fleming has served the children of New Jersey as an educator for the past fifteen years as both a media specialist and a teacher. In recent years she has taken a professional interest in developments in new media and in vanguard techniques in interactive and transmedia (multi-platform) storytelling. In this context, she has been able to draw powerful connections between transmedia and education. She blogs on these issues at www.edtechinsight.blogspot.com and is a regular contributor to other outlets, including the Huffington Post. Laura is currently playing a lead consultative role with the BradField Company, the developers of the innovative and popular transmedia story, Inanimate Alice. She has played a major role in growing and sustaining a thriving and vibrant global community around Inanimate Alice. She has consulted on several transmedia properties, working with producers to help maximise the value of their creations and toolsets for teachers and students as well as for the corporations themselves. Laura is currently co-authoring a book on Transmedia LearningWorlds, due for publication in Autumn 2012, and has spoken at a number of prestigious education, publishing and media events on the significance of transmedia for teaching and learning.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Internet Blackout: SOPA, Reddit, and Networked (Political) Publics

This wednesday, Wikipedia, Reddit, and a range of other high profile on-line sites will go black in protest of SOPA and PIPA, legislation currently being considered by the U.S. Congress, which will impose regulations on net practices in the name of exerting greater control over "piracy." For those of us who have been involved in the digital world for a long time, this protest recalls another key moment in the history of the web when key sites went black in 1996 in protest of the Communications Decency Act, which would have similarly regulated the content and practices of the online world, in this case in the name of "protecting children" from obscenity. We should be cautious about the deployment of morally fraught terms like "piracy" and "decency" in framing public policies, since the stakes in these regulatory struggles are always more complex than such black and white language might indicate. Both are often deployed in ways that place the participatory ethos and free expression of the web at risk.

One can argue that the broadcast media has already largely "gone black" over SOPA -- since they have shown a remarkable unwillingness to discuss this important media policy issue on the air, or at least had refused to do so prior to the statement the Obama administration issued this past week coming out in opposition to SOPA but defining alternative ways that they might confront the war on "piracy." (I recall having a CNN executive some years ago tell my class that they did not cover the Federal Communications Act because they did not think the public would be interested, a unique definition of the "public interest" if ever I heard one. Thankfully, my students were not buying this explanation, which is more than the public got in terms of the willingness of news media to cover issues where their own corporate interests are at stake.)

Under such circumstances, those us in the blogosphere have a special obligation to help educate the public about matters that commercial media thinks is "over our heads" (or more accurately, "behind our backs.") So, I was delighted when Alex Leavitt, a PHD candidate in Communications at USC, offered to share his reflections on SOPA and especially on the online communities efforts to rally in opposition to it. Leavitt worked with the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT and now is part of the Civic Paths Research Group I run here at USC.

Internet Blackout: SOPA, Reddit, and Networked (Political) Publics
by Alex Leavitt

If you don't have time to read this article in full, the easiest way to skim information about this topic is to visit http://americancensorship.org/.

In the past year, we've dealt with various novel political moments around the world that have been enabled or augmented with networked technology, from Anonymous' global "hacktivist" incidents to the numerous protests in the Middle East, topped off of course with the vibrant grassroots protests of the Occupy movement. Over the last few months, we've also seen another interesting case study taking place in American politics: rampant opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act, dubbed as "the most important bill in Congress you may have never heard of" by Chris Hayes of MSNBC.com.

Watch Chris Hayes' interview for a good introduction to the debate around SOPA.

SOPA, a bill currently making its way through the House of Representatives (along with its sibling PIPA, the Protect IP Act, currently in the Senate) has faced weeks of protest from Internet companies and users alike. Why? Well, on Google Plus, Sergey Brin -- cofounder of Google -- likened the potential effects of SOPA to the Internet censorship practiced in China, Iran, Libya, and Tunisia. Basically, to protect against international copyright infringement, SOPA allows the US to combat websites (such as file lockers or foreign link aggregators) that illegally distribute or even link to American-made media by blocking access to them. Theoretically, the bill has dangerous implications for websites that rely on user-generated content, from YouTube to 4chan. Many have already written about the worries that SOPA and PIPA cause, such as Alex Howard's excellent, in-depth piece over at O'Reilly Radar. For more information on the bills, visit OpenCongress's webpages, where you can see summaries of the legislation, which companies support and oppose them, and round-ups of by mainstream and blogged news: SOPA + PIPA. The bills are one more step in a long line of anti-piracy legislation, such as 2010's Combatting online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).

Within the first few weeks since SOPA was introduced, http://fightforthefuture.org/ introduced the hyperbolic http://freebieber.org/ to illustrate the fears ordinary Internet users should have in relation to the legislation. In essence, SOPA would radically undermine many of the fan practices that Henry and others have analyzed on this blog. Fight for the Future also released the following video (which was my first media exposure to SOPA):

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

However, for the most part, criticism -- or even basic coverage -- of SOPA remained an online phenomenon. While there have been a few online articles written on CNN and a couple other networks, the mainstream news coverage of the bills remain fairly nonexistent, reports MediaMatters, likely due to the fact that the television networks largely support the bill. The Colbert Report featured a pair of short segments on SOPA in early December.

The Internet, though, largely worked around that problem.

In his book, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, UCLA anthropologist Chris Kelty describes free software programmer-activists as a recursive public. Drawing from Michael Warner's concept of "publics and counterpublics" from Habermas's "public sphere," Kelty illustrates these programmers as a group that is addressed by copyright and code, and who work to make, maintain, and modify their technological networks and code as well as the discourse with which they engage as a public. This "circularity is essential to the phenomenon."

Especially over the past two months, we've seen an exceptional effort on the part of online companies to engage users with the political process to oppose SOPA. For instance, on 16 November 2011, Tumblr blacked out every image, video, and word on each user's dashboard, linking at the top of the page to http://www.tumblr.com/protect-the-net, where users could call their local representative.

The effort set of thousands of shared posts and hundreds of hours of calls.

While other companies attempted similar experiments (like Scribd on 21 December), Internet leaders joined together to spread word and inform Congress (such as with this letter from Facebook, Google, and Twitter on 15 November, and later this letter by many others on 14 December) and even political opponents of SOPA reached out on social media, like when Senator Ron Wyden asked people to sign their names at so he could read the list at a filibuster. Other experts eventually spoke up too.

But perhaps the most intriguing political effort occurred within one specific online community: Reddit.com.

Reddit, founded in 2005, is a social news and discussion website where users submit and vote on content. According to Alexa.com, Reddit is currently the 53rd most-visited site in the United States. Due to its increasing popularity, Reddit's slogan is "the front page of the internet" -- pertinent, because when a link hits the front page of Reddit, it can lend hundreds of thousands of page views. Though members at times highlight the site's immaturity and incivility, its vibrant community -- combined with the hypervisibility of the front page, has particularly thrived over the past couple of years, especially in terms of political participation and charity. Co-founded Alexis Ohanian gave a TEDtalk about Reddit's dedication to strange things online and when that translates into a sort of political participation:

Humorously, every activist-related post on the official Reddit blog is tagged with "do it for splashy.

In terms of more prominent political activism, Reddit's community -- particularly it's subreddit, /r/politics, and the emergent subreddit /r/SOPA -- has unified around opposing SOPA, in line with the free-speech, utopian personality that pervades the site. For instance, a couple posts on /r/politics and r/technology that reached the front page [1, 2] helped bring rapid visibility to Senator Wyden's filibuster initiative.

A more effective protest occurred in the form of a website boycott. GoDaddy, the domain register, was discovered to be a supporter of SOPA. After some discussion on Reddit, one r/politics thread reached the front page: GoDaddy supports SOPA, I'm transferring 51 domains & suggesting a move your domain day. Visibility of SOPA-related content was aided by a new subreddit, r/sopa, to which a global sidebar linked from the Reddit homepage. Less than 24 hours after the boycott started (even though, by numbers, it was deemed hardly successful), and with two more /r/politics threads that reached the front page [1, 2], GoDaddy reversed their stance and dropped support for SOPA.

SOPA debate continued to be fueled by various posts, including one by cofounder Alexis Ohanian: If SOPA existed, Steve & I never could've started reddit. Please help us win.. At the end of December, r/politics joined together to place pressure on SOPA-supporting Representative Paul Ryan; eventually, he reversed his position and denounced the bill.

Most notably, Alexis Ohanian recently announced on the Reddit blog that the entire site would voluntarily shut down on Wednesday 18 January 2012 for twelve hours, from 8am-8pm EST. Replacing the front page will be "a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action." This blacking out of Reddit coincides with a series of cybersecurity experts' testimonies in Congress, at which Ohanian will be representing and speaking.

In reaction to SOPA (and PIPA, to which the opposition is now growing, since the SOPA vote has now been shelved), a vigorous public emerged across the web and united around discourse about the bills, particularly on Reddit.com. But to return to Kelty: is this a recursive public? Do the political users of Reddit have enough power and agency to maintain and modify their public?

I believe this question gets at a deeper question of ontology: what does political participation mean in a 1) networked, and 2) editable age? For instance, some users are able to promote their skills for discourse -- eg., My friend and I wrote an application to boycott SOPA. Scan product barcodes and see if they're made by a SOPA supporter. Enjoy. -- but in certain cases, participation in technological systems becomes participation in a recursive public because that participation helps modify the system. In the case of Reddit, participation can become political when content reaches extreme visibility. And this is particularly important when we reconsider that the mass media has barely covered SOPA as a topic: due to this conflict, participation on a network platform like Reddit becomes an inherently political action.

And out of these seemingly-innocuous actions emerge more political moves. In reaction to the black out, other websites have agreed to join the effort, such as BoingBoing.net. Perhaps the decision with the most impact came on Monday, when Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia -- which receives up to 25 million visitors per day at the English-language portal -- would also shut down, but this time for a full 24 hours, after a lengthy discussion on Wales' personal Wikipedia page. Wales responded to the announcement on Twitter by saying, "I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday."

In a recent New York Times article, Reddit's political actions were noted. "'It's encouraging that we got this far against the odds, but it's far from over,' said Erik Martin, the general manager of Reddit.com, a social news site that has generated some of the loudest criticism of the bills. 'We're all still pretty scared that this might pass in one form or another. It's not a battle between Hollywood and tech, its people who get the Internet and those who don't." Of course, Reddit isn't the only platform that is part of this important recursive public, just as Twitter wasn't the saving grace of the Arab Spring or the Iranian Revolution. The efforts of hundreds of activists around the country have contributed immensely to the anti-SOPA effort. But keep in mind that Reddit has reached a pinnacle of political participation in the last few months, and I have a feeling that -- like YouTube in the 2008 presidential elections -- Reddit may be the site to watch in 2012.

Alex Leavitt is a PhD student at USC Annenberg, where he studies digital culture and networked technology. Recently, his work has focused on creative participation in immense online networks, examining global participatory phenomenon like Hatsune Miku and Minecraft. You can reach him on Twitter @alexleavitt or via email at aleavitt@usc.edu; to read more about his research, visit alexleavitt.com.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Dreaming Out Loud! Youth Activists Spoke About Their Fight for Education, Immigrant Rights and Justice Through Media and Art (Part Four)

This is the final installment in a four part series, written by Arely Zimmerman and Sangita Shreshtova from the USC Civic Paths Project, concerning the young activists who are supporting the Dream Act. This research was funded by the MacArthur Foundation and is part of the work of the Youth and Participatory Politics Network.

  New Media and Movements

 

Dreamer youth have also used new media to grow their movement on a national scale.  Between 2009-2010, youth organized many protest, including sit-ins at Congressional offices, hunger strikes, marches, and symbolic graduations. They used new media to exponentially amplify their voices through sophisticated and strategic use of live streams, blogs, user generated video portals and social media like Facebook and Twitter. For example, in June 2009, the founders of Dreamactivist.org, and United We Dream, organized 500 youth to participate in the National DREAM Act Graduation in Washington DC. This protest combined a symbolic ceremony with legislative lobbying (Behary 2009).

On the same day, solidarity graduations took place in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Texas (Dream Activist 2009).

source: http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_hispanicaffairs/tag/dream-act

 

In another widely publicized campaign, on January 1, 2010, four undocumented youth from Miami Dade College began a 4-month, 1500-mile-trek to Washington, DC to advocate for the DREAM Act. In what they aptly called the "Trail of DREAMs," the youth documented and mobilized support for their their walk through blogging, Facebook, YouTube, and twitter. Along their journey, they gathered 30,000 signatures to bring to President Obama.

 

Watch the trail of dreams video here: 

 

Despite all these efforts, the DREAM Act has yet to pass, and undocumented youth continue to be deported. In the face of this continuing crisis, the youth have used a combination of direct action and media activism to highlight (and render visible) detentions and deportations, which have generally received little public attention (Kohli 2011). They have staged rallies and sit-ins at detention centers, ICE offices, and have even targeted banks that invest in private prisons to directly confront the institutions invested in the immigrant detention and deportation system (Foley 2011). Grass roots new media messaging campaigns have been crucial to these action as youth use Facebook, Twitter, and microblogging to share the stories of, and garner support for, those detained and fighting deportation.

The story of Matias Ramos, , an undocumented youth and co-founder of United We Dream, is a powerful example of such mobilization. On the morning that an electronic monitoring device was placed on his ankle, Matias Ramos posted a photo of himself on Twitter and announced that he had been given two weeks to leave the country (Berenstein 2011).

 

source: http://americasvoiceonline.org/blog/entry/dream_activist_matias_ramos_scheduled_for_deportation/

 

Ramos and his supporters were able to gain high visibility for his case, to the point where it was even called a "high profile challenge to the White House's new deportation guidelines." Stories like these are transmitted through many overlapping social media networks connecting campus organizations, community groups, sympathetic media and allies, providing links to petitions and online donations.

 

Nancy Meza is a key media strategist for the END our Pain campaign. At DREAMing Out Loud!  she discussed the importance of combining both new media and traditional media strategies to shape the movement messaging.  To Nancy, social media is a space where "we can 'freely' express ourselves, push our messaging forward... in terms of Twitter and Facebook."  At the same time, Nancy stressed the need to complement new and more traditional media as she continued: "Our organization doesn't even own a camera...With whatever resources we have...I have a blackberry on a month to month plan...So I think for us, it's really been about how we use traditional media and how we mix it in".  New media has allowed for youth to shape their message in a more democratic and participatory fashion. They are, however, increasingly conscious of the need to be strategic about its use. For example, Nancy explained that a lot of effort goes into coming up with a Twitter hashtag for an event.  Is it accurate? Is it catchy? Will it travel? Often, Twitter is a good way to catch the attention of more traditional media, she explained. To her, the key is arriving at the happy medium between locally constructed messaging and coordinating a coherent frame that can translate to major media outlets. 

 

Concluding Thoughts:

At the heart of the event were the stories that the panelists shared and accounts of how stories inspired activism.  Pocho 1, a internationally recognized photographer, recalled how photography shaped his activism and his reformation from a gang member to a social activist: "I started telling stories...I wanted to tell their story...I started hanging out with artists...I picked up a camera...I went crazy with it...shoot it everyday... tell people's stories". Now Pocho 1 documents the Dream movement, using his camera and social media as a form of social commentary and social activism. 

 

source: http://www.pocho1.com/#!

 

DREAMing Out Loud! provided many insights into how young people use new media to participate and mobilize in their communities. In many ways, the event highlighted the great democratizing potential that new media has, especially when it can be used to provide a platform to amplify the voices of youth who are marginalized from the mainstream political process. 

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Dreaming Out Loud! Youth Activists Spoke About Their Fight for Education, Immigrant Rights and Justice Through Media and Art (Part Three)

The following is the third installment in a four part series on young activists who are using new media to rally behind the Dream Act. It was written by Arely Zimmerman and Sangita Shreshtova from the USC Civic Paths Project. This work was funded by the MacArthur Foundation. 

Coming Out/Pop Culture

The need to be active, to be connected to other undocumented youth, and to strive collectively to make positive changes are key motivators for all of the youth panelists. They are all extremely active online. They create original media content. They blog. They share their stories and art through Facebook and Twitter.  They participate in public online conferences and symposia.  Yet, online visibility comes with its own challenges and risks. As Nancy recounted, she was personally targeted in a public campaign after a local conservative radio program called for her deportation.  Because of her role as the communications director of Dream Team Los Angeles and IDEAS at UCLA, she was an easily identifiable target.  The campaign got so vicious that she eventually had to disconnect her phone.  But, the risks of visibility have to be counter balanced with the benefits, she concluded.  "Yes, it is dangerous, there are risks that we face in being so publicly active, but it is even more risky if they don't know we exist". 

Listen to Nancy Meza speak on this topic here:

Driven by their urgent need to draw attention to their plight, undocumented youth put themselves at risk of deportation and arrest not only by participating in public civil disobedience but by also publicly 'coming out' via social media platforms.  The coming out process, as Erick notes, is a deeply personal one, shaped by each individual's own journey towards self-awareness and identification.  But, this process also has significant consequences on the movement because it is a first step in embracing one's undocumented legal status and becoming politically involved.  One of the common themes in the 'coming out' stories of undocumented youth is asserting their belonging, their 'Americannes', despite their undocumented legal status. Most Dream activism youth were brought to the United States as young children, and the United States is the only country they've ever known. It is their home. Fluent in English, educated in the American school system, these youth defy the already clearly inaccurate stereotypes of the 'illegal immigrant'. Mohammad of Dreamactivist.org, an online undocumented youth advocacy network, shared one often cited "coming out" narrative.

Watch Mohammad's "I am Mohammad and I am undocumented" video here:

The 'coming out' narratives of Dreamer youth often draw on shared cultural references.  Erick, for instance, shared how he formulated his identity from "Anime, heavy metal, and comic books" which he says, " framed my outlook on life".  When he came out as undocumented for the first time, he says he was inspired by a story arc in the popular comic Spiderman.  "When I mentioned my first name for the first time- I compared it to a story arc of Spiderman- when Spiderman shares his identity, I am also sharing my identity". Erick, and others, have also drawn connections to Superman as being undocumented.

source: yfrog.com/h314mmz (@laloalcaraz)

Sangita Shresthova is currently the Research Director of the Media Activism and Participatory Politics  (MAPP)  Project at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, her work focused on the educational communication components of international development interventions. Her scholarly writing has been published in several journals, and her work on global participatory aspects of Bollywood dance was recently released as a book by SAGE Publications.

Arely Zimmerman, a Melon Post-Doctorate Fellow at the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity,  holds a doctorate in political science from UCLA. Her scholarship engages overlapping research areas of U.S. Latino/a studies, race and ethnicity, social movements, transnational, media, and feminist studies. Before joining PERE, she held a postdoctoral appointment at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she examined how new forms of social and digital media are reshaping modes of civic engagement amongst Latino, immigrant, and undocumented youth. As part of her ongoing concerns with issues of identity and citizenship in transnational contexts, Arely's manuscript in progress, "Contesting Citizenship across Borders: Central Americans in the United States" details Central American migrant communities' struggles for citizenship and inclusion across multiple nation-states through transnational social movement and community activism.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Dreaming Out Loud! Youth Activists Spoke About Their Fight for Education, Immigrant Rights and Justice Through Media and Art (Part Two)

Dreaming Out Loud! 

by Arely Zimmerman and Sangita Shreshtova

Civic Paths Project

Theme 1: Barriers and Supports

The DREAMing Out Loud! symposium provided the panelists an opportunity to reflect on how they have grown their movement through harnessing new media's technological and communication affordances. Clearly, immigrant, low-income, undocumented youth face many barriers to both online participation and civic engagement, none more important than the lack of financial resources.  

Yet, these barriers do not foreclose their ability to mobilize online communities around their cause. Studies conducted by William Perez and more recently by USC sociologist Veronica Terriquez show staggering rates of civic engagement amongst undocumented immigrant youth, challenging dominant presumptions about how youth become active and which youth are able to tap social networks behind their causes. Arely Zimmerman's research on Dream Activism similarly finds that youth - including those who are undocumented and low income -  are active in organizations supporting the Dream act also acquired high levels of new media skills. Not only were they active on social media; they also created new media content and shared it through platforms such as Flickr and YouTube.  Given this context, the Dreaming Out Loud! panelists spoke openly about how they overcame financial and other barriers to their political participation.

(source of image: http://blogs.laforward.org/2010/12/06/news/another-dreamer-tells-his-story/)

Erick, for example, is working towards his journalism degree but has had to take time off because of financial hardships.  Since 2007, Erick has been blogging about his experiences as undocumented youth.  Without full-time access to a personal computer, Erick uses various resources to develop an online presence.  With his mother making ends meet as a street vendor, and his father picking up odd jobs, Erick used a scholarship to buy an Iphone.  Although it doesn't have Internet access, Erick uses his Iphone to take pictures, take notes, write blog entries. He then uploads the content to Facebook and Twitter via SMS text messaging.  Erick notes that, "As technology progresses it's becoming easier and easier and easier to be 'out there'."

Listen to Erick speak about this here:

The lack of access to technology does not keep these youth from participating online.

Julio Salgado is a co-founder of Dreamers Adrift, a collective of digital media artists.  After graduating with a degree in journalism from Cal State Long Beach, he could not put his degree to use.  Working odd jobs primarily in the service industry, he was frustrated by the lack of opportunities.  He became more active in the Dream movement and used his artistic talents at the service of the cause. He has developed a personal style that is immediately recognizable, and his images have been used to represent national conferences, t-shirts, and other movement iconography.  He recalls how he has used whatever we could to 'make ends meet', going to college parties and gatherings and drawing caricatures of friends to raise money to pay for books and tuition.  Using his artistic talent, he began posting his drawings of 'dreamers' on Facebook using a scanner and photo-booth on his Apple laptop. Soon thereafter, his pictures garnered national attention.  

(image source: http://dreamersadrift.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/LIBERTY78.11.jpg)

Reflecting on the barriers he has faced, Julio says, "that never stops you, you're so passionate...I need to draw this stuff".  

See Julio's video "Wall of Dreams" here: 

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DREAMing Out Loud! Youth Activists Spoke About Their Fight for Education, Immigrant Rights and Justice Through Media and Art

by Arely Zimmerman and Sangita Shresthova

In a dimly lit room, a young man peers into the camera and adjusts the viewfinder to check his image. He then looks directly into the camera and states "My name is _____, and I am undocumented." His migration story resonates with hundreds of others who then upload their own stories to YouTube. Elsewhere, Livestream carries the feed of a youth-led civil disobedience to thousands across the country. Statements of support for the protest soon appear on blogs, Twitter, and other social media....

On November 2, 2011 the Media Activism and Participatory Politics (MAPP) project hosted a symposium, DREAMing Out Loud! at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. The extremely well attended event emerged out of a case study on DREAM activism carried out by Postdoctoral Fellow Arely Zimmerman and brought immigrant youth activists together to share their perspectives on the intersection of new media, art, and social activism.

These 'dreamers' (as they are commonly referred to) are members of a national youth-led movement centered around the Dream Act, federal legislation (proposed with bipartisan support) that would provide an opportunity for undocumented students with "good moral character," who have lived in the U.S. for a certain period, to obtain legal status.  Jacky A., Julio Salgado, Erick Huerta, Nancy Meza, and Pocho 1 represented different local, regional and national youth organizations as well as different experiences using new media.

(photo: Civic Paths)

The forum followed two significant events impacting current debates around the Dream movement.  In September 2011, representing at least a small victory, the state passed a bill known as the California Dream Act -- undocumented youth in the state could obtain some financial aid to attend college.  However, without any change on the federal level, undocumented youth still cannot work legally upon graduation. Thus, while the legislation extends state financial aid to undocumented students, immigrant youth continue to be deported at alarming rates. Nationally, more undocumented immigrants have been deported under the Obama administration than under any previous administrations. 

Less than a month after the California Dream Act was passed, 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 youth (Rojas 2011). The sit-in was launched by the national Education Not Deportation (END) Our Pain campaign, which is comprised of a network of immigrant youth organizations and allies demanding an immediate moratorium on deportations of youth eligible for the Dream Act.

Watch the Ustream of that protest here:  

Armed with camera phones, the Dream activists broadcast their action on Ustream, which was followed by 4,000 people.  Nancy Meza, one of the panelists, was one of the protestors arrested at the sit-in.  She notes that new media was crucial to the activists' ability to raise awareness around this event. Confirming the effectiveness of this new media strategy, the activists were soon invited to a conference call with key officials of the Obama administration.

The use of new media has played a key role in mobilizing undocumented youth across the country, connecting local and regional youth organizations, scaling local movements to the national level, and contesting elite-driven messaging on immigration policy.

Sangita Shresthova is currently the Research Director of the Media Activism and Participatory Politics  (MAPP)  Project at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, her work focused on the educational communication components of international development interventions. Her scholarly writing has been published in several journals, and her work on global participatory aspects of Bollywood dance was recently released as a book by SAGE Publications.

Arely Zimmerman, a Melon Post-Doctorate Fellow at the USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity,  holds a doctorate in political science from UCLA. Her scholarship engages overlapping research areas of U.S. Latino/a studies, race and ethnicity, social movements, transnational, media, and feminist studies. Before joining PERE, she held a postdoctoral appointment at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she examined how new forms of social and digital media are reshaping modes of civic engagement amongst Latino, immigrant, and undocumented youth. As part of her ongoing concerns with issues of identity and citizenship in transnational contexts, Arely's manuscript in progress, "Contesting Citizenship across Borders: Central Americans in the United States" details Central American migrant communities' struggles for citizenship and inclusion across multiple nation-states through transnational social movement and community activism.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Help Time Lord Rocker Beat Justin Bieber on British Pop Charts

I know I signed off the blog for the year, but my imagination has been captured by a fascinating struggle which is taking place this weekend around the UK Pop Singles Chart.

Specifically, I am excited by 22 year old Alex Day, who is gaining ground and British bookies give him a 1 in 16 chance of winning the competition, despite the fact that he has no record deals and has built his following entirely through his deft use of YouTube, Twitter, and other social media.

His catchy pop song, "Forever Yours," was released December 3 and his video, which playfully pairs a love song with images from superhero comics and zombie movies, has already been seen more than a million times. To win, he will need to best Justien Beber and Mariah Carey (not to mention the recent winner of the British X-Factor).

But, Day's certainly bringing on the grassroots support. Here's what he shared with me via a recent email: "'Forever Yours' is on sale as from today, became the second-highest trending topic on Twitter worldwide within eight minutes, and is so far sitting at number 96 on the UK iTunes Chart and rising about twenty places every time I refresh." This seems like a classic example of spreadability in action!

Apart from trying to turn the British pop world on its head, Day has been a key figure behind the growth of "Time Lord Rock," music inspired by Doctor Who, which has emerged as a grassroots movement in the spirit of the Wizard Rock associated with Harry Potter fandom. As a Time Lord Rocker, Day runs a website, Chameleon Circuit, which features such songs as "Blink" and "Exterminate Regenerate."

Check it out and if you feel so inclined, do what you can to help him beat Justin Bieber. Whatever happens, this is a fascinating example of how grassroots media and participatory culture is starting to impact the operations of the commercial mainstream.

This story came to me from Andrew Slack from the Harry Potter Alliance.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

A Few Final Reflections at Year's End...

Having made it, more or less, through the grading frenzy, I am now really and truly spent, and looking forward to some much needed rest and relaxation over the holidays. So, this is going to be the last blog post for 2011. We will be back by the Second Week of January with an exciting line-up of interviews, essays, and other resources, but for the time being, I am going to take a few weeks off to read, write, and other things that keep Henry healthy and wise, if not particularly wealthy.

Before I do, I wanted to share a few loose ends which have come across my desk in the past few weeks.

The first is the webcast created by the fine folks at the New School of Social Research depicting the public conversation I had with Liz Losh at the Mobility Shifts conference earlier this fall. Many of you will have seen photographs of Liz and I wearing the Team Critical Theory and Team Cultural Studies racing jackets which Liz's husband designed and produced for the event. They were our joking way of calling out some of the unproductive tensions which have existed between those two camps over the past few years and the desire to work beyond them in order to contribute to far more important public debates, such as those concerning the future of public education, and to contribute towards shared visions, such as those concerning the democratization of access to digital media.

Here's how the program was billed:

At Mobility Shifts: An International Future of Learning Summit Henry Jenkins (Team Cultural Studies) and Elizabeth Losh (Team Critical Theory) offer a progress report on whether and in what ways the public schools and universities are going to be able to absorb or meaningfully deploy what Jenkins calls "participatory culture." Rather than an abstract discussion of a theoretical construct drawn from their supposedly opposite positions studying fan culture and institutional rhetoric respectively, the two will discuss concrete experiences of young people acting appropriately or not, inside or outside the classroom. What might a participatory learning culture look like? What policies make it hard for even supportive teachers to achieve in their classrooms? What stakeholders would need to be engaged in order to change the current cultures of our school? How might participatory learning take place beyond the schoolhouse gates? What is everyone afraid of?

The Mobility Shifts conference did a great job of combining multiple groups of people, from around the world, who care passionately about the future of education, many of whom are doing local projects designed to have a material real world impact that exist alongside and in relationship with their theory and scholarship.

As you will see, the differences that might exist between Losh and I on paper start to break down when we deal pragmatically with the concerns that animate our work. We've sometimes disagreed through our blogs, but the more we worked on pulling together this event, the clearer it became that our shared values and commitments were far more significant than tactical disagreements. In the course of this conversation, we make strong arguments for why, tempting though it may be, we can not just blow up the public schools and walk away, we talk about some specific insights we've gained through our educational interventions, and we discuss the strengths and limits of the concept of participatory culture as a way of framing current struggles over access to the means of cultural production and circulation. If you want to learn more about Liz's work, see her blog here.

Nikki Usher, a recently minted PhD from the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, has been using excerpts from Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society (which I co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green and which will be released by NYU Press next fall) with her students at George Washington University. Nikki shared with us a video produced as part of a class project by her student, Sandi Moynihan, which applies our concepts of "spreadability" to describe the Occupy movement. The video is part of a larger set of resources around the movement you can find at her website, many of them dealing with Occupy's use of social media. I was so excited by her wonderful video that I asked if I could share it with you here.

Last week, I was down in Rio. In Copacabana, there are the most remarkable sand sculptures, including several which reconstruct the city's landmarks. Somehow, this sculpture depicting Santa and friends caused me great amusement. It speaks to the incongruous way that Euro-American Christmas iconography and traditions work in the context of South America, where, after all, December is one of the hottest summer months, but we are hearing "Frosty the Snow Man" and "White Christmas" playing everywhere we go. I decided this particular version of Father Christmas might better be called "Sandy Claws." (By the way, while it does not show up very well in this particular image, the woman in the picture is actually wearing one of those "itsy bitsy polka dot bikinis" that one sees on the beaches here, though admittedly, the sculpture left very little to the imagination in this rendering, itself a marker of cultural difference, given how unlikely it is to see anything so "family unfriendly" in public spaces in the United States.)

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Futures of Entertainment 5: The Videos (Day Two)

Introduction (8:30-9:00 a.m.)

Grant McCracken (author of Chief Culture Officer; Culturematic)

The Futures of Serialized Storytelling (9:00-11:00 a.m.)

New means of digital circulation, audience engagement and fan activism have brought with it a variety of experiments with serialized video storytelling. What can we learn from some of the most compelling emerging ways to tell ongoing stories through online video, cross-platform features and applications and real world engagement? What models for content creation are emerging, and what are the stakes for content creators and audiences alike?

Moderator: Laurie Baird (Georgia Tech)

Panelists: Matt Locke (Storythings, UK), Steve Coulson (Campfire), Lynn Liccardo (soap opera critic), and Denise Mann (University of California-Los Angeles)

The Futures of Children's Media (11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m.).

Children's media has long been an innovator in creating new ways of storytelling. In a digital era, what emerging practices are changing the ways in which stories are being told to children, and what are the challenges unique to children's properties in an online communication environment?

Moderator: Sarah Banet-Weiser (University of Southern California)

Panelists: Melissa Anelli (The Leaky Cauldron), Gary Goldberger (FableVision) and John Bartlett (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

The Futures of Nonfiction Storytelling (2:15-4:15 p.m.).

Digital communication has arguably impacted the lives of journalists more than any other media practitioner. But new platforms and ways of circulating content are providing vast new opportunities for journalists and documentarians. How have-and might-nonfiction storytellers incorporate many of the emerging strategies of transmedia storytelling and audience participation from marketing and entertainment, and what experiments are currently underway that are showing the potential paths forward?

Moderator: Johnathan Taplin (University of Southern California)

Panelists: Molly Bingham (photojournalist; founder of ORB); Chris O'Brien (San Jose Mercury News), Patricia Zimmermann (Ithaca College) and Lenny Altschuler (Televisa)

The Futures of Music. (4:45-6:45 p.m.)

The music industry is often cited as the horror story that all other entertainment genres might learn from: how the digital era has laid waste to a traditional business model. But what new models for musicians and for the music industry exist in the wake of this paradigm shift, and what can other media industries learn from emerging models of content creation and circulation?

Moderator: Nancy Baym (Kansas University)

Panelists: Mike King (Berklee College of Music), João Brasil (Brazilian artist), Chuck Fromm (Worship Leader Media), Erin McKeown (musical artist and fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University) and Brian Whitman (The Echo Nest)

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

What Samba Schools Can Teach Us About Participatory Culture

If you dropped in at a Samba School on a typical Saturday night you would take it for a dance hall. The dominant activity is dancing, with the expected accompaniment of drinking, talking and observing the scene. From time to time the dancing stops and someone sings a lyric or makes a short speech over a very loud P.A. system. You would soon begin to realize that there is more continuity, social cohesion and long term common purpose than amongst transient or even regular dancers in a typical American dance hall. The point is that the Samba School has another purpose then the fun of the particular evening. This purpose is related to the famous Carnival which will dominate Rio at Mardi Gras and at which each Samba School will take on a segment of the more than twenty-four hour long procession of street dancing. This segment will be an elaborately prepared, decorated and choreographed presentation of a story, typically a folk tale rewritten with lyrics, music and dance newly composed during the previous year. So we see the complex functions of the Samba School. While people have come to dance, they are simultaneously participating in the choice, and elaboration of the theme of the next carnival; the lyrics sung between the dances are proposals for inclusion; the dancing is also the audition, at once competitive and supportive, for the leading roles, the rehearsal and the training school for dancers at all levels of ability.

From this point of view a very remarkable aspect of the Samba School is the presence in one place of people engaged in a common activity - dancing - at all levels of competence from beginning children who seem scarcely yet able to talk, to superstars who would not be put to shame by the soloists of dance companies anywhere in the world. The fact of being together would in itself be "educational" for the beginners; but what is more deeply so is the degree of interaction between dancers of different levels of competence. From time to time a dancer will gather a group of others to work together on some technical aspect; the life of the group might be ten minutes or half an hour, its average age five or twenty five, its mode of operation might be highly didactic or more simply a chance to interact with a more advanced dancer. The details are not important: what counts is the weaving of education into the larger, richer cultural-social experience of the Samba School.

So we have as our problem: to transfer the positive features of the Samba School into the context of learning traditional "school material" -- let's say mathematics or grammar. Can we solve it? -- Seymour Papert, "Some Poetic and Social Critera for Education Design" (1975)

I was lucky enough to have spent some small bits of time with Seymour Papert when I first arrived at MIT in the late 1980s and to have spent even more time in the company of his students, such as Amy Bruckman, Idit Harel Caperton, Edith Ackerman, Ricki Goldman, Mitchell Resnick, David Cavallo, and others. His ideas about redesigning educational practices to reflect the value of the Samba Schools was very much in the air at the time and I recall this passage being discussed several times at the meetings of the Narrative Intelligence Reading Group, an incredible bunch of graduate students, faculty members, and folks from the Cambridge community, who met regularly to discuss the intersection between new media and theory. In retrospect, I've begun to wonder how much the concept of the Samba School informed my own ideas about "participatory culture," without me being fully conscious of it at the time. It is only in recent years that I have started to draw connections between the two, but we are always shaped by things in our immediate environment in ways we can not fully articulate at the time. So, choose your contexts wisely.

This past summer, during a trip to Rio, my wife and I were finally able to visit a Samba School, and I came away from the experience with a deeper appreciation of the many different mechanisms through which the community's participation is solicited and maintained over the course of one of those weekend afternoons Papert is describing. And I have found myself reflecting upon this experience many times since my return. Here, I mostly want to share some of the beautiful photographs my wife, Cynthia Jenkins, took, but also to share a few of these still relatively unprocessed impressions. Thanks to my good friend, Mauricio Mota, for organizing our outing at the Samba School. I am still learning about this culture, so please excuse anything I get wrong in this discussion. I would love to have some of my Brazillian readers add their own background and context to what I am sharing here.

The Samba Schools are embedded within particular communities -- most often in the Favelas, which is where the poorest of the poor live in Rio. Upon entering these communities, as an outsider, one is impressed both by the density of the population and by the vibrancy of community life. Everywhere you look, people are gathered together, engaged in conversations, and around the edges, you can see a range of expressive activities.

For me, the creativity fostered by the Samba Schools is also visible in the grafitti and street art which adorns walls all over the city. And the playfulness can be seen in the boys and girls who are trying to conduct kite battles just outside the city center.

The Samba Schools are part of a larger folk logic which survives in Brazil as a living aspect of the culture (even as so much of the folk practices have been crushed in the United States over the past hundred plus years of mass media). We don't need to romanticize these creative impulses, but we also should not deny their existence.

Entering the Samba School has historically been a risky proposition for the middle class and the outsider, as is suggested by the incredibly narrow windows through which transactions occur around the purchase of admission.

But once inside the hall, things are incredibly open and designed to insure sociability through every means possible. The space and practices are designed to encourage participation and to embrace many different kinds of participation. So, the first thing you do upon entering -- or at least the first thing we do upon entering -- is to grab a big heaping plate of food.

As someone born and raised in the south, not so many generations removed from dirt farmers, I recognize the core ingredients here -- there's not much on my plate which I would not have seen at a BBQ place in the deep south or at a family reunion or church picnic. The preparation differs, of course, but the core building blocks are the same. And eating the food gives us time to sit and watch, to get our bearings and to develop a mental map of the space.

The design of the space creates a great deal of fluidity between watching and dancing.

There are many different vantage points for observing what's taking place, but there are no fixed walls separating performance space for spaces where spectators are gathered.

And the longer you are there, the more you find yourself edging closer and closer to where the action is. There is no decisive moment when participants step from watching to dancing. The music pulls at you -- you start to sway your hips or nod along without even fully realizing it.

Mothers and fathers are taking their children with them and they bounce to the music, even before they really know what's taking place.

There are certainly stars to be seen here: my host points out some of the well known figures in the Samba world who are strutting their stuff and others are gathering around to watch them, but there is nothing stopping anyone from stepping into the same ring on the flat floor and dancing alongside them.

There is a raised area where the bands perform and there are local personalities who moderate the festivities, giving out periodic encouragements for people to join the dance. The announcers, though, are only one of a number of different practices designed to actively invite our participation.

These young men and women function like cupids: they bring love messages from one participant to another, often encouraging them to kiss and dance together, and thus breaking down some of the isolation that might remain in a large public space. You may note that they wear straw hats and have freckles, both intended to indicate they are playing the role of "country bumpkins," a shared figure of bemusement for these urban poor, many of whom only recently left the countryside themselves.

Periodically, a group dressed in police uniforms step march through the hall, blowing whistles, and rounding up captives. They are seeking out people who do not seem to be participating and they take them away for short lectures on the traditions of the community.

As someone who lives in fear of confrontations with people in uniforms, I ask my host what I can do to signal my participation, and it turns out that participation is a flexible category and that wearing the festive shirt which was handed me along with my ticket will be enough to signal that I have become part of the community, rather than a mere spectator.

The "participation police," as I have come to describe them, are one of the most provocative aspects of the experience for me. They speak to the challenges which any participatory culture faces around nonparticipation. I have come to appreciate the concept of legitimate peripheral participation -- the idea that witnessing and learning are themselves forms of participation, or at least, meaningful part of the process of preparing to participate. We should be concerned if some groups are structurally prohibited from participating; we should pay attention to the educational needs of those who are not yet ready to participate; we should build in active mechanisms which repeatedly encourage and solicit participation, as I observed in the Samba Schools, but we should not force participation before any given community member is ready to join the festivities.

So, it is striking that the Samba Schools have a range of different mechanisms for encouraging participation, some more forceful than others, but that it also recognizes and values that sometimes wearing a t-shirt or some other marker of affiliation may be as far as any one person is ready to go in their process of absorbing the norms and values of the community and crossing the invisible threshold into full participation. As we follow Papert's lead, and think about what it would mean to design educational institutions and practices which mirror those of participatory culture, we need to be attentive to the varied and multiple ways that spaces like the Samba School enable meaningful participation for all of their community members.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part Three)

This is part three of a five part series by transmedia designer and theorist Brian Clark.

A HANDFUL OF BOTTOM UP MODELS
by Brian Clark

In the prior two installments, we looked at what might drive the next wave of innovation in storytelling and dissected the patronage business model that dominates the transmedia space today. In this installment and the next, I want to dive deeper into ten different alternative business models that we know work from other media movements in the hopes that they provide some inspiration to other entrepreneurial storytellers. The first handful treats funding and sustainability as the primary challenges: if you don't have access to millions of dollars, just how much capital do you really need? Do you need any at all?

No Budget

Some artists and art movements solve the business model problem by assaulting the very need for capital funding. They might treat funding as unnecessary (such as Theater of the Oppressed in the 1950s, the Dogma 95 film movement of the late 1990s or the subsequent Mumblecore movement of the early 2000s that embrace no budget as a choice) or might literally treat capital as the enemy (such as the dÈtournement of the Situationist International movement of the 1950s or modern Anonymousí physical and digital hacktivism). In the context of business models, their solutions look something like:

1. FUNDING: Is a distraction from making art.
2. RETURN: With no funders, there is no distraction of returning investment.
3. SUSTAINABILITY: My project is not about having a sustainable career as a creator.
4. AUDIENCE: A community to awaken or empower.
5. PROMOTION: Through provocation, controversy and guerilla tactics.

No budget movements are a healthy part of any artistic form: things get made all the time without having business plan justifications. The Internet and digital creative trends amplifies these kinds of models disproportionately because of the constant increase in tools that decrease the costs of production towards free. Sadly, it isn't decreasing the cost of your food, rent and healthcare towards free and no budget artists typically have more traditional jobs that pay those bills -- which might be, in part, why Lars von Trier doesn't still make films under the Dogma 95 model.

Grassroots

Sometimes, not having funding isn't an active choice but is definitely a current reality. This is familiar territory to independent artists and publishers, from pulp fiction zines of the 1930s through the punk D.I.Y. ethic of the 1970s to the Internet tradition of "grassroots alternate reality games" of this century -- you embrace your limitation as a virtue and make the most of it. For this "D.I.Y. ethic" style of grassroots, the business model solve might look like:

1. FUNDING: Beg, borrow, and elbow grease.
2. RETURN: The expectation of paying them back isnít very high on either side.
3. SUSTAINABILITY: Iíll at least live to fight another day.
4. AUDIENCE: People who are looking for something different than the mainstream.
5. PROMOTION: Through provocation, controversy and guerilla tactics.

Rather than being entrepreneurial, the funding in grassroots efforts is ad hoc, doesn't really set revenue goals for sustainability and leaves little funding for promotion. Sometimes, for the artists, the connection and affirmation of an audience is still enough reward to make them want to do it again.

Research & Development

Hopefully, creating always involves learning new things, but sometimes the point of making it in the first place is to learn. The R&D arms of giant companies share this business model with entrepreneurial garage tinkers and both work in prototypes and proofs-of-concept. Some creators, most notably Lance Weiler, have started talking about "story R&D" as the explicit value to their experiments -- learning how to tell stories across all these new platforms and opportunities in relatively low capital risk environments. An R&D business model solve might look like:

1. FUNDING: Angel capital (including my own).
2. RETURN: Something new that will require a new business model solve.
3. SUSTAINABILITY: Iím increasing my capabilities and chances for future success.
4. AUDIENCE: I wonít necessarily need a large one.
5. PROMOTION: Through provocation, controversy, partnerships and guerilla tactics.

The most inherent challenge in R&D models is that you're entrepreneurially deciding to push the return on your investment and sustainability to some future date. It requires some confidence (at least on the artist's part) that those kinds of R&D results are a predictable yield and tends (by necessity) to push the work into more experimental territory (because there is very little R&D yield in doing things you already know how to do).

Fan Incubation

Most artists will tell you that a fan is more valuable than a customer -- a fan base is a renewable resource for a sustainable career. Fans buy the next album, they subscribe to the series, they evangelize their passion bring in new fans, and they camp out in lines overnight before the opening. In the past, fan development was slow (for example, the way fan correspondence saved H.P. Lovecraftís works from disappearing) or physical (like the "make record and tour college towns" model of independent musicians like John Vanderslice). The age of the Internet has revolutionized the ability for creators and fans to have rich, meaningful interactions that have led to successes like The Blair Witch Project and innovations like the distribution strategy for Four-Eyed Monsters. Whether a small indie or a big company, fan incubation business model solves look something like:

1. FUNDING: Angel capital and sweat equity.


2. RETURN: A motivated audience for a forthcoming work.


3. SUSTAINABILITY: I'm increasing my chances for success (and return) on some other product.


4. AUDIENCE: My growing fan base.


5. PROMOTION: The efforts of the fans themselves, supplemented by owned (maybe even paid) media

Speaking of the power of fan bases, if you already have even a residual fan base, there are ways to replace funding with those fans. In the classic models, you'd call this pre-sales -- collecting money for a product you haven't made yet to fund the creation itself (often incentivized by some exclusive value add), a model quite common now in the videogame industry but also the classic underpinning of why magazines and newspapers offer annual subscriptions. The Internet's capabilities for crowdsourcing have made this an even more attractive model for independents, whether you're harnessing fans as angel capitalizers with a system like Kickstarter or selling a product that was manufactured "just in time" via a platform like Lulu. The business model might look something like:

1. FUNDING: From your fan base as pre-sales or angel capitalizers.


2. RETURN: A special copy of the work, a credit in the finished piece, etc.


3. SUSTAINABILITY: My fans will support me because theyíd like to see more work.


4. AUDIENCE: My growing fan base.


5. PROMOTION: The efforts of the fans themselves, supplemented by owned (maybe even paid) media.


The scale of this model is directed tied to the size of the fan base: George Lucas will always pre-sell more than you do, but a smaller group of fans could dramatically change the way a grassroots project might operate. Many creative properties (large and small) leverage this business model in serial with fan incubation -- when you're not pre-selling something, grow the overall size of the fan base as an investment in your next cycle of fan funding.

In the next installment, we'll look at another handful of models that solve from the opposite direction: maximizing revenue instead of minimizing investment.

Brian Clark is the founder and CEO of GMD Studios, a 16-year-old experience design lab based in Winter Park, Florida. He lives in New York City and occasionally tweets as @gmdclark




Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

"The Revolution Will Be Hashtagged": The Visual Culture of the Occupy Movement

Since September 17, the Occupy Wall Street movement has produced an overwhelming array of visuals, offering a significant lens on the movement itself, its ties to history, its divergent voices, perspectives and styles, as well as its multiple distribution channels from mainstream outlets to social media. Despite the criticism from experts who do not necessarily see much potential in Occupy's "brand," the visual aspects of the protest clearly have impact and traction. Although it would be impossible to fully assess this rich visual output, this blog post attempts to understand its emergent themes as well as the potential uses and value attached to visual commentary and protest.

Throughout history, visual culture has played an important role in protest and social change. Although "high" art had long been used to venerate political figures as well as members of the upper classes, with the revolutionary tides of the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America, we see a shift and an increase in pictorial depictions of political resistance. These historical examples demonstrate the way visual culture has been fundamental to the politics of protest. They serve as witness and document. They can incite and instigate action.

Thus begins a rich, compelling, and timely post over at the blog maintained by the USC Civic Paths Research Group. Dr. Alison Trope, Clinical Associate Professor, and Lana Swartz, PhD Student, both in USC Annenberg, have assembled an amazing archive of images drawn primarily from the Occupy rallies from around the country and across the globe.

As this opening suggests, their primary emphasis is on visual media -- the signs, costumes, spectacles, which have been deployed to define the terms of the debate. Given the visual rich nature of their post, I can't cross-post it here, so I can only send you there to examine it more closely. But, believe me, it is worth hitting the link...

The Civic Paths team has been studying alternative forms of activism, especially those which involve the intersection between popular culture, participatory culture, and youth, for more than two years. We are affiliated with a research hub focused on Youth and Participatory Politics funded by the MacArthur Foundation and led by Mills College's Joe Kahne. Our own involvement stems from my long-standing interest in fan activism, the theme of a special issue our group is editing for Transformative Works and Culture, which will come out early next year. But, our interest has grown far beyond this.

Our current case studies include work on the young activists who are working to pass the Dream Act to give greater educational and citizenship rights to undocumented youth (Arely Zimmerman), research on youth involvement in Libertarian politics (Liana Thompson), research on Nerdfighters, the Harry Potter Alliance, and Imagine Better (Neta Kligler-Vilenchik), and research into Muslim-American politics post-911 (Sangita Shreshtova). Along the way, though, we have also been looking closely at a broader range of case studies -- from Racebenders to labor organizing in Madison, Wisconsin. This site looks at some of our preliminary examples, which helped pave the way for our current research. Altogether, we have nearly 20 PhD and Masters students contributing to this research, many of whom have posted some preliminary insights through the Civic Paths blog, so if you come to visit the Occupy archive, stay around and check out some of their other contributions.

I was lucky enough to have been able to pay a visit to Washington Square, the home of Occupy Wall Street, a few weeks ago, when I was in New York for the Mobility Shifts conference. An army of people in Zombie costumes, many of them from Zombiecon, a horror fan convention, had arrived at the Park just a few minutes before I did, and they were mingling with folks dressed up like characters from Game of Thrones and carrying signs warning that "the Winter is Coming." Elderly tourists were stopping them and seeking to better understand why they were dressed the ways they were and how they were connected with the Occupy moment, resulting in a series of exchanges which would further spread awareness of the protest. And that's part of the point.

Occupy is not so much a movement, at least not as we've traditionally defined political movements, as it is a provocation. If the mainstream media has difficulty identifying its goals, it may be because its central goal is to provoke discussion, to get people talking about things which our political leadership has refused to address for several decades now -- the profound shifts in economic wealth which have created conditions of gross inequality in opportunity, the role of what Sarah Palin has called "crony capitalism" (and which is really an indication of the role of capital in shaping our political process), and especially the degree to which economic policies under both Republican and Democratic presidents have been written with more regard for Wall Street than Main Street.

The values that Occupy represents are shared by the vast majority of Americans, if recent surveys are any indication, yet they are rarely expressed by mainstream political leaders or the mass media. So, part of the point of these protests is to provide what Stephen Duncombe might call an "ethical spectacle" as a means of focusing attention. And the old women who are asking Zombies questions are part of that process, no doubt sharing what they saw with their friends back home, and thus providing yet another chance to talk about what's been going on here.

The blurring between fan and activist that I observed demonstrates a different relationship between popular culture and politics than we saw in previous protest movements. The Popular Front in the 1930s sought to influence the development of popular culture, giving rise to Aaron Copeland, Norman Rockwell, Frank Capra, and many others, whose work shaped our current image bank of what democracy looks like. The protest movements of the 1960s sought to tap into the language of popular culture -- especially those of rock and comics -- to create an alternative culture, one which was implicitly and often explicitly critical of corporately-owned media and which sought to express the worldview of a younger generation. The protest movements of the early 1990s embraced a DIY aesthetic, giving rise to the Indie-Media movement, and helping to fuel talk of a digital revolution which might democratize access to the channels of communication.

The Occupy movement, by contrast, has laid claim to the iconography of existing popular culture as a set of cultural resources through which to express their collective identities and frame their critiques. Thus, we see a much more playful style of activism, one which owes much to the traditions of fan culture, one which assumes that images and stories from superhero comics or cult television series are shared by many of the participants (and will be understood by a larger public which has not yet joined the protests). So, they are dressing up, designing signs which re-ascribe meanings to familiar characters, creating their own videos, and sending them out into the world, where they will be seen by many who are not going to go to Washington Square, Los Angeles City Hall, or any other site of occupation.

This is protest media designed to spread through social networks -- one which has the homemade qualities of the DIY movements of the past (thus, as Trope and Swartz note, the cardboard signs), the high tech qualities of digital activism, and the playful engagement of fan activism, all rolled into one heady combination. These tactics are not without their contradictions -- Trope and Swartz note that the Guy Fawkes masks, inspired by Alan Moore's V for Vendetta and now symbols of the Anonymous movement, are based on IP owned by Warner Communications who profits for everyone sold in this country.

But, it does seem to reflect the way we are conducting politics in the early 21st century. We saw some of these same images "test marketed" as it were during the pro-labor protests in Madison, as Jonathan Gray noted a while back, and we are seeing these tactics play out on an even bigger stage with Occupy.

There are many other aspects of the Occupy movement we recognize from our ongoing research. More and more contemporary political movements are decentralized, claiming loose affiliations with each other, yet playing out on very local levels, often with significant differences between the various chapters. This approach has proven highly effective for the Dream Activists, for example, where the struggle shifted from Federal to State and Local levels when Congress failed to pass the national Dream Act. These activists have tapped into social networking tools in order to be able to quickly learn from each other, allowing images, messages, and tactics to evolve rapidly. If traditional immigrant rights groups tended to observe ethnic, racial, and national boundaries, these young people have formed coalitions across different immigrant populations, and something similar is going on with Occupy, where many different ideological interests are organizing around the shared frame which Occupy offers.

These groups are refusing to create a simple unified message of the kind that are familiar from "disciplined," hierarchical, and established political movements. Rather, they seek to multiply the messages and to expand the range of different media framings so that they may speak to a broader range of different participants. No one piece of media reaches everyone; rather, media is produced quickly and cheaply and spread widely so that each piece of media produced may speak to a different set of followers.

As Sasha Costanza-Chock, a recent transplant from USC to MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program, wrote in his thesis about the Los Angeles Immigrant Rights Movement:

Effective transmedia organizers are shifting from speaking for movements to speaking with them. Transmedia mobilization thus marks a transition in the role of movement communicators from content creation to aggregation, curation, remix and circulation of rich media texts through networked movement formations. Those movement formations that embrace the decentralization of the movement voice can reap great rewards, while those that attempt to maintain top down control of movement communication practices risk losing credibility.

Occupy, if anything, pushes tactics of transmedia mobilization even further. Refusing to anchor a singular meaning behind the movement keeps the conversations alive, allows for more people to join and help reshape the message, enables quick and tactical responses to outside challenges, and supports creative responses from all participants. As they chanted in the 1990s, this is what democracy looks like. Or as Trope and Swartz write, "The Revolution Will Be Hashtagged."

In the case of the Harry Potter Alliance and the Nerdfighters, there has been a move away from single issue activism to create structures that can be quickly deployed in response to a broad range of concerns and participatory structures that allow local chapters or even individual members to identify and take action around their own issues.

All of this can be confusing to media that keeps looking for the one cause, the one message, and the one spokesperson. Such efforts also compound some of the division within academic thought, since the message of Occupy seems to come from the realm of Critical Studies and Political Economy, where-as much of the tactics and imagery reflect the domains of Cultural Studies.

All of this suggests that we need to rethink the ways we've discussed the relations between politics and culture in the past. That's a central goal of the Civic Paths research group and we invite others to join us in researching not simply the Occupy movement but the ways it illustrates the nature of political engagement in a networked culture. We'd welcome hearing about what other research groups are doing to document and analyze the Occupy protests in their local areas.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Acafandom and Beyond: Concluding Thoughts

Louisa Stein: I feel the need to start off by saying I never wanted or felt we needed a referendum on the term "acafan"; when I initially proposed the "Future of Acafandom" workshop at SCMS, I had in mind that we'd talk about the practices of acafan methodology and pedagogy, and perhaps also the shifting terrain for acafan scholars in graduate school and on the job market. But it became clear in that conversation that the term mattered to people, that the term itself was fractious, and that we couldn't engage with the concepts inside the term, so to speak, without poking at the term itself. I found myself asking why the term was so fractious; indeed, we originally talked about wanting these conversations to be dialogues rather than the debate structure of the Fan Girl vs. Fan Boy debates, hence the three participants, and yet it seems like we've found ourselves back in debate territory. I still don't feel like I have a full answer to this question: why is the term acafan something people feel so strongly about, or that causes discomfort?

I've come away from these conversations, both the in person ones and the blog dialogues, with an increased sense of the power of terms, of the way in which internalized definitions can link ideas and the people thinking through those ideas, but can also prevent dialogue and create miscommunication. So if acafan means one thing to me--and I say so and say it visibly, that doesn't mean others will embrace my definition over theirs (and indeed, why should they?) and may indeed continue to read my work from within their definition of the term. To make this more concrete: for me acafan is all about emphasizing the necessary synthesis of academic and fan--it's never been an exclusive term (again, to me), nor a term meant to raise rational academic discourse on fandom above emotional, non-academic fandom (indeed, quite the opposite!) But if acafan signifies these things to others, then those meanings may frame my work if I use the term.

But does that mean that I should give up the term? To me the answer is clearly of course not (I know, I'm sure everyone's very surprised about this!) because it still has methodological and personal resonance, and still offers the power to connect networks of scholars and fans. But perhaps more centrally, for me it still comes down to the fact that like it or not, the term is here with us, in the present if not the far future.

We can't just declare language dead--despite my spurious blog post title about "not-hosting the workshop that killed Acafandom." No single workshop could ever have that power. Spurred by the conversation between Jason, Alex, and Abigail, I googled acafan (why had I never done this before?) and found that in colloquial online use, the term bridges silos and boundaries. Yes, most of the first page of hits are Henry's blog, with Ian Bogost's declamation of acafan positioning making an appearance as well. But there's also fan fiction--a Sherlock Fan Fiction, no less, entitled "The Affair of the Asphyxiated Acafan" (!) And there are blog posts, twitter accounts, a fan lore entry, livejournal posts, delicious bookmarks, podcasts, etc. with varying levels of academic and fannish affiliation. To me there's a value in all that boundary crossing, and moreover it demonstrates simply that the term has a cultural life, and it's up to each of us to perform and model it as we see fit, in multiplicity, rather than to proclaim a single definition.

I want to close by building on Alex Doty's concluding point about the value of acafandom for teaching. For me, this is absolutely key, and a way my individual acafan perspective manifests every day. Depending on the course context, I don't necessarily spell this out to my students (because again, the label isn't all or even most of what matters here) but I am most acafan when I model to my students engaged critique and critical engagement. And no, we don't need the term to define this synthesized position, but the terms serves as a thread connecting my work to my teaching, and reminds me of what I value in media culture as a whole, as a scholar and a teacher, and for that matter as a student of media and fan culture who still has much to learn.

Henry Jenkins: I am not sure what I expected when I opened this particular can of worms. In many ways, I found the resulting exchanges fascinating -- especially hearing the diverse ways that contributors positioned themselves in relation to both academia and fandom, the ways that those relationships did or did not inform their work, and the other ways they were taking up some of the issues which for me are central to the use of the aca-fan concept -- especially those having to do with our subjective experiences as consumers and participants always implicated in the popular culture we study, one way or another, whether or not we want to admit it.

Progress has been made on some of the issues which spawned the term, but not others. I still hear about students who are hurt and confused when teachers write "too fannish" on their papers, with the implication that they do not demonstrate the appropriate amount of distance and rationality, that they are too emotional invested, and therefore, the chain of assumptions goes, that they are not sufficiently critical. I still get questions which imply these things when I speak outside of circles where Fan Studies has become a long accepted paradigm, as happened to me during a recent talk at Indiana University, where someone in the audience wanted to know in what sense a fan could be a critic.

This is no doubt part of what we mean when we talk about the pedagogical value of the term, that it allows certain kinds of work to be done, that it allows students and teachers another way of addressing these issues, that it allows students, especially those who may not have mentors involved in fan studies, an identity to rally behind and a means of justifying the work they want to do. For that reason, if for no other, we should hold up a banner for the acafans. It's so easy to feel isolated, the odd one out in those circumstances, and if acafan may offer too easy an affiliation as some have suggested, that is still better than no affiliation at all.

The post that has had me struggling the most with my own assumptions was John Campbell's critique of the essentialism implicit in refering to oneself as a fan rather than as "a fan of." We come at this question from such a different place, yet with such shared values, that this one got under my skin and I am still scratching at it. Most early writings about fans sought to essentialize them by defining them in terms of their singular relations to particular texts. So, a "Trekkie" (rarely a Trekker for such writers) was someone who loved Star Trek. There was no sense that they might be interested in other texts, that their biography might connect across a range of fan communities, that fan culture might have a tradition that extends beyond the single text, and so forth. In Textual Poachers, I stressed that fans were nomadic, that they "traveled across" texts much as De Certeau describes readers as "traveling across" lands they have not cultivated. The nomadic dimensions of fandom keep getting dropped from accounts of the book in favor of the concept of poaching -- titles do shape readings, after all -- but it is key to imagining the reader as structuring their relationships with texts and each other through choices made about which materials to borrow.

To me, going back to the "fan of" formulation means ascribing too much authority to the text, not enough authority to communities. I get John's points that there is no essential fan, that we are never just fans, that fans are not alike, etc., and these are useful correctives to our current use of the term. But, for me, when I speak of fan, I am thinking of being a fan as a subcultural identity, one defined through loose affiliations and shared traditions, as well as by shared debates and tensions, which run through the history of fan practices. There is not just one fan community, but most fan communities, in some ways, tap into the shared traditions of fan culture as they are defining themselves in relation to particular texts in particular social and technological contexts. I am not sure I have fully resolved the issues John raises (and I would welcome his response), but in many ways, this was one of the posts that most pushed the conversation forward.

In terms of my disappointments, I think the biggest one was that we did not make more progress in exploring in productive rather than dismissive ways the relationship between the identity of the acafan and that of the gamer-as-scholar. Most of the gamers here seemed to come into the conversation with very strong defense mechanisms against really entertaining that parallel and often with certain stereotypes about what it meant to be a fan. Some of those defense mechanisms emerged from the experience of stigmatization which surrounds the concept of being a gamer, stigmatizations which in some ways parallel those surrounding the fan, except that the gamer stereotype is often hypermasculine while the fan stereotype is so often feminized.

I had been struck by the essays in Drew Davidson's Well Played series, where gamers describe very specific play experiences which they had with specific titles: the argument is that there is no game text, only game experiences, and thus, criticism of games needs to preserve the process of playing them. As you do so, the player's own experiences are brought forward and with them, the player's own subjectivity, their identity, their history as players. I see strong parallels here with the trajectory of fan studies and the identity of the aca-fan. And I think the two movements have much that they can learn from each other. So, why do fans and gamers end up talking past each other, as I think has generally occurred here?

Drew, I would really love to get your reflections on this dynamic which occurred not only here but also in the discussion in Ian Bogost's blog which helped to inspire this one. Having tried and failed to bring the two groups together through this series of exchanges, I want to use my parting shots here as, well, a parting shot to push one more time to see if we can explore the similarities and differences between these two forms of cultural criticism and academic identity.

Drew Davidson: This has been an interesting experience, particularly since I wasn't deeply familiar with the term "acafan." And during the round of discussions in which I participated, I think all three of us were concerned about a lack in this regard, which we worried we had kept our conversation scratching at the surface of the ideas involved. And to be honest, due to lack of time, I followed the other rounds obliquely at best. That said, even at a high level I believe we all felt a resonance between the idea of being a fan and being a gamer, maybe the sense of defensiveness came from struggling to articulate the connections, but I don't think any of us felt overtly defensive (looking back I can see how it reads that way though).

Thinking of Henry's question, I think it comes from this lack. As with any academic field, acafan has developed a deep and rich set of issues and terminology that in some ways can become a barrier to newbies. Similarly, gamers-as-scholars are developing as a field (and it's an area where newbies would feel barriers in the terminology as well as playing ability). And so, I agree with Henry in that there is an opportunity to learn a lot from each other (and regret that it seems like we were part of the sense of talking past each other).

That said, it brings me back to the sense of a lack of time (the most finite of things). When this whole idea kicked off, there were bigger plans and more people involved, but as the reality of life set in, people dropped out here, got busy there, and a different thing evolved than initially was planned. For our round, we ended up having to squeeze in our discussion as we had wildly divergent schedules, and we weren't sure what to say really. Regardless, it seems to have inspired all involved to think anew about ideas and assumptions, so I think it's been an overall success. But it is easy to see how we will now scatter back to our daily schedules and pursuits, and having the time to better make and articulate connections across fields is a real challenge. But one worth striving for.

Just in the way Henry articulated why he was interested in inviting some gamers to join this discussion got me to think in a new light about what we've been doing with the Well Played series, and how the act of playing a game, and trying to discuss that act, is full of interesting agency on several levels. And it got me thinking about how I'm an acafan of Henry (and by extension his work), and that's why I joined in on this conversation (and often is how connections can be made).

Also, Henry's comments on how John discussed the distinction between being a "fan" and being a "fan of," got me thinking of how it can be both, particularly in terms of acafan. I think I am an acafan in general (in terms of approach), and I'm an acafan of videogames (in terms of expertise). Like Louisa notes in her closing comments, I think I'm most acafan when I'm engaged and modeling the agency in interactions with students and colleagues. And being an acafan resonates for me as an honest stance through which to consider the media and games that I both study and enjoy.

Kristina Busse: In psychology, there exists the concept of confirmation bias, which describes the informal fallacy whereby more information confirms our entrenched belief rather than expand our minds. This is a quite depressing concept for academics, because mostly our modus operandi dictates that more facts, more opinions, more positions are better and open our minds.

Sadly, I feel a bit like this reading over the acafandom conversations this summer. Personally, I came into this discussion wanting to narrow the term rather than expand it: to me acafans describe actively in the community involved fans who, at the same time, also do academic work on these very communities. Unlike Louisa, for example, I wasn't deeply invested in the larger concerns of and for the discipline but instead was quite happy to narrow the term and employ different concepts for other aspects of fan studies. The difficulties of the acafan to me were the negotiation of following competing rules of dissimilar community norms; it was the decisions of whether it was worth the CV line to expose one's friends' embarrassing debates; it was the constant explanation of fandom to academics and of academia to fans.

And yet we never really seemed to get to these difficult decisions and negotiations: Should we consciously create a canon of academically-approved fanworks that, in turn, will affect the value of these texts within fannish spaces? Do we (ab)use our role as fans when we exploit our fannish connections for academic work? Or do we, in turn, do a service to fandom by telling the better story? And do we compromise our role as academics when we focus on certain things but not others, pick the more accessible story, the more traditionally aesthetic vid, the classically trained artist's piece? Do we compromise our role by focusing on the good over the bad and ugly? And do we do harm by talking about one show and its fandoms rather than about others? What unconscious fannish and academic biases do we bring to our work, and where do the two cancel one another out and where do they amplify each other?

Those were the questions and moral dilemmas I had hoped we'd address and yet I felt we mostly were stuck in Acafandom 101: Hadn't we all agreed sometime in the nineties that academics exhibited clear fannish behaviors--that those folks at Faulkner and Hemingway and Woolf conferences clearly were quite affectively invested in their chosen writers? At the same time, hadn't Hills a decade ago convincingly argued that we can't facilely project our academic values onto fans, foregrounding the behaviors we recognized and valorized and overlooking those that were less like our own? Finally, did we really need to dismiss fannish behavior and communities in a conversation on acafandom?

The two things that most struck me was the resistance of several of the game scholars to embrace the questions and ideas that they might, in fact, be acafans and the willingness of various queer scholars to interrogate these positions and questions I raised above--even as they clearly weren't acafans in the more traditional sense.

Which brings me back to the original SCMS conversation and some of the more convincing arguments I heard there: to some, one of the strongest objections to the focus on acafans seemed to be the erasure of other central questions and the danger of studying a limited group of texts at the expense of equally culturally important ones. Then, my personal solution to that was to narrow the term down to the point where not every watercooler convo analysis, not even every user-generated YouTube response would automatically be about fans and, by extension, acafandom would define a subset of fan studies only (which, in turn, would be a subset of media studies only).

Reading Doty and Halberstam in particular, however, I wonder whether an alternative answer might not be to open up acafannishness to the point where indeed every academic is a fan (of sorts) and every fan (on some level) an academic. Borrowing from the amorphously defined and ineluctably changing concept of queerness, I wonder whether acafandom might not be better thought of as a set of parameters that circumscribe descriptors and questions and behaviors and identities while nevertheless avoiding certainties and resolutions. Because these initial questions I raised deserve not one answer but demand repeated revisiting. they are important questions, whether we are deeply embedded in a tightly self-defined and self-described community or analyze YouTube vids we stumble upon.

And maybe that made this conversation both difficult and frustrating. We tried to discuss these issues in the abstract but possibly they can only ever be presented in media res. If I take anything away from these conversations, it is my renewed investment in addressing this self-reflexive meta level of acknowledging and investigating the methodological and ethical concerns of studying fans and fan texts in everything I write. Not only can I not take anything for granted, I shouldn't assume that yesterday's procedures and theoretical framework still hold today. Just as fandoms and fans are changing, my own approach as a scholar must continue to interrogate my position and role within the academic and the fannish communities I inhabit.

Karen Tongson: Although I've taught introductory courses on fan cultures and fan studies in a general education context since graduate school--making some of the rudimentary, but necessary links between "fans" and "critics" that Kristina rightly insists we move beyond--I've never really considered myself a true fan studies scholar. Nor have I really identified as an acafan; at least not until this series of conversations transpired. In part, I think my reticence has to do with my own sense of the tremendous expertise and commitment that attends to "true" acafandom and vigorous involvements in participatory cultures. In other words, I had a sense (as both Louisa and Kristina gestured to) that the terms were narrower, or had reached the point of naming a more specific set of procedures, practices, and archives.

I also think my "primary academic orientation"--if there can be such a thing--as a queer studies scholar, kept me immersed in different conversations about affect and participatory engagements, even though I always felt and understood the tremendous overlap between acafan practices and queer cultures. All this to say that my familiarity with fan studies from the 80s onwards offered a particular lens for me to view queer studies, and vice versa. Yet my own disciplined docility to the concept of "expertise" and commitment to other identificatory practices kept me from assuming the subject position of the acafan in ways that I ultimately understand, through this summer's conversations, were rather unnecessary. In fact, it wasn't until I read this same reticence in some of the responses from my own colleagues in queer, ethnic and American studies (I'm thinking in particular of Christine Bacareza Balance's, Jack Halberstam's, Jayna Brown's and Sarah Banet-Weiser's pieces), that I realized how cordoned off many of us have been from the expansive possibilities of acafandom wherein, as Kristina phrased it, "every academic is a fan (of sorts) and every fan (on some level) [is] an academic."

More than anything, I valued this summer's conversation, and the invitation to consider in greater depth some of the practices we either rightly or falsely assumed belonged to the rubric of acafandom from an "outsider's" perspective. It brought to the surface how even certain, more established interdisciplinary fields (like the ones I listed above), are still very bounded, insular and unconsciously averse to the multiplicity of identifications. Acafandom, as I've come to understand it through this series generously hosted by Henry on his blog, is not simply a subset of Fan Studies, or Media Studies, but an orientation of sorts--at once methodological and affective--that can inform practices otherwise situated firmly within other disciplinary formations and their imperatives. I'm heartened by the extent to which emerging young scholars like Alexis Lothian and Suzanne Scott understand their work as part and parcel of the formations of both their "home" disciplines and acafandom in ways that shed the residual hang-ups (for lack of a better word) that continue to hold some of us back.

Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of gender and generation. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal and the Flow TV anthology (Routledge, 2011). Louisa is co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. Louisa is also Book Review editor of Transformative Works and Cultures.

Henry Jenkins blogs...here. He is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Art, and Education at the University of Southern California. He has recently completed Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, due out in 2012. His current fannish interests include comics, Disney, silent movies, The Walking Dead, Castle, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who...

Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories across texts, comics, games and other media. He is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center - Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University and the Editor of ETC Press.

Kristina Busse Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures.

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press), is forthcoming in August 2011. She is co-series editor for Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins (NYU Press), and is also co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) with Gustavus Stadler.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Acafandom and Beyond: Will Brooker, Melissa A. Click, Suzanne Scott, and Sangita Shreshtova (Part Two)

Will Brooker:

Here's the problem, for me. I like reading about Sangita's sari pleats and Suzanne's Nerf battleaxe, and recognising similar fan experiences from different fan communities, but those enjoyable moments, those connections and those stories don't make me feel more able to answer the broader questions posed by Melissa. I don't feel entitled to, and I don't feel inclined to.

Somehow, in the last ten years, I've gone from being a kid who couldn't believe he was actually writing a book about Star Wars to some middle-aged man of fandom who gets reverently approached by PhD students, telling me they were inspired by that book I couldn't believe I was getting away with. I'm happy to give advice, but I don't feel comfortable telling anyone what to do, except: do what you want to do, do what you love.

I have my own answers to Melissa's questions -- I feel entirely open-minded about different types of media fandom, I feel anti-fandom is a love-hate variation on traditional fandom, and I have few hang-ups about 'quality' versus 'camp' -- I studied 1960s Batman in the 1990s, and got over those snobberies a long time ago. But these are just personal opinions, as far as I'm concerned. I don't like the words 'geek' or ''nerd' because I feel they describe what would be simply called scholarship, expertise or ability in most other areas of life; I don't like the word ''fen' (why are we adopting this twee, sub-Elven term when we have the word 'fans'?), and 'squee' makes me squick. 'Squick' makes me squick, too. I don't feel we're helping our cause, such as it is, by using baby-talk and sleepover squealing. But then, for all my love of Legally Blonde, I'm a straight white guy, and as enough of our official vocabulary is decided by straight white guys, I don't want to make any rules for fandom's vocabulary based on my own preferences.

I don't feel it's for me to make rules or recommendations about anything in fandom or aca-fandom. To be frank, I don't know if any of us should be deciding what 'we' should do. Are we even a coherent community? For all our pleasurable connections -- the recognition of love for a text, a story and character, and the recognition of having that love mocked or derided -- I think the differences between us are more obvious, and perhaps more interesting, than the similarities. Deciding on labels, rules and titles risks making something that was always inherently a lot of fun, born out of passion and enthusiasm, into just another departmental committee meeting.

So, drawing up an agenda and writing the minutes of aca-fandom isn't for me. But if that was what everyone else wanted to do, I'd book a room, bring the coffee and offer my advice.

Melissa Click:

I think I know where Will is coming from. We were both on the 2011 SCMS panel organized by Louisa Stein on "Acafandom and the future of fan studies." Some on the panel (and some in the audience) were taken aback by the idea that some "fan scholars" don't particularly identify with and/or use the term "acafan" when describing their own work. That panel spawned this blog series and though I have found the discussions invigorating, I feel most of the entries in this series have raised more questions than they've answered--and given the minimal comments on each entry, it doesn't seem like many feel as though they wish to engage with this topic (which I think itself is interesting). While these questions can be productive, they can also leave one wondering what use or relevance "acafan" has in fan studies, especially when its boundaries aren't particularly clear.

That said, we did agree to discuss the term and its relevance in this forum--and I think the variety in our responses suggests the difficulty (or perhaps futility?) in pinning "acafan" down. However, it seems that despite wanting to make proclamations about acafans and what "we" should be doing, Will's made quite a few, particularly gendered, proclamations here, for example, calling some scholars' use of fan slang in academic discourse "baby talk and fan squealing." It strikes me that it's this dismissal of the melding of the fannish and the academic (also in conjunction with gender) that gave rise to acafan identity--so while Will suggests the term is unnecessary for him, he also demonstrates why it might be useful for others.

The questions I raised in my provocation were not intended to have us decide what others should do, they were intended to provoke discussion about the application and relevance of a term. I am under no illusion that we've been asked to tell everyone else to do--instead we've been asked to join a conversation about work that we all do. Though the questions raised in this entry of a bigger conversation about acafandom may feel like a departmental meeting to Will, I do believe that some feel it is an important conversation to have. I still think there's a lot for us to learn about the work we do and what we bring to that work--and I'd like to focus on that discussion, if possible!

Will Brooker:

I don't really see a contradiction in what I say above, Melissa. It's because I know I have personal preferences and prejudices that I don't want to make any broader proclamations. You're right that the behaviour I mentioned tends to be gendered, but I feel equally, if not more alienated, by the codes and conventions of male sports fans: I could have railed against those, but the truth is, they're further from my experience and feel alien to me, whereas my resistance to squeeing, shipping and geeking out is more complex, and more bound up with trying to deny that aspect of my own fandom.

This wasn't meant to be a dismissal of certain types of expression; more a demonstration of why I'm in no position to suggest rules for other people, because fan studies is so bound up in the personal, and I (like all of us, I expect) have irrational likes and dislikes. A lot of mine, I'm sure, are a complex love-hate dynamic that, despite my attempts at honesty, I haven't fully admitted to myself: I was in happy, secret, silent tears during the first act of Legally Blonde, which no doubt counts as a kind of squeeing.

I'm under no illusions that what works for me will work for anyone else, which is why I hope I made it plain that I welcome and support the continuation of these discussions, for what my support is worth. And you're right to suggest that I was unfair to compare it to a committee meeting. I was just getting bored of my own voice in monologue. Your response and your challenges make it into a conversation, and remind me that it can still be fun, as it should be.

I should also admit to myself that I'm very bad at shutting up.

Sangita Shresthova:

As I have not tended to think of my work as based in fan studies, I come to this debate with less knowledge about the acafandom discourse. I do, however, find it extremely useful as I consider current work being done on Bollywood audiences and fans. I am, in particular, struck by the unintentional hierarchies of fandom that Melissa brought up. When does a dance choreographed by a Bollywood fan become "worthy" of study (as opposed to many, many others) and what expectation does this place on other fans who may encounter the scholarly analysis of this fan production? As my work connects Bollywood dancers in disparate parts of the world, who may or may not have encountered each other otherwise, I am especially conscious of the power dynamics that are associated with my role as a researcher of cultural practices. In fact, I would dare say that being an acafan becomes akin to a research method - one that allows a researcher to establish a subjectivity based on rapport without compromising academic integrity.

I don't think that any of us are interested in codifying acafandom to the extent that it sucks the fun out of the term, or to the point that it alienates some modes of fan scholarship and canonizes others. I'm certainly not interested in policing language, or methodology, or taste. Still, my gut response to some of the gendered language in your response, Will, echoed Melissa's, particularly the bits on "baby talk and sleepover squealing." We all have our personal "squicks" and "squees" when it comes to fan discourse and scholarship, but from where I'm standing what will really hurt our cause is a failure to embrace the inherent diversity and subjectivity of the term, or consider its applications beyond classifying a body of literature. The expansions that Melissa initially proposed are just one possibility.

To attempt to tie some of these threads together, and to root this in a quick anecdote, one of the chapters of my dissertation focuses on the 2009 "Twilight ruined comic-con" protests. Full fannish disclosure, I absolutely loathe Twilight. Attending comic-con as a fan that year, I was alternately annoyed by the frequent conflation of "fangirl" and "Twi-hard," horrified by the thinly veiled sexism that underpinned the protests, and disappointed that I, too, felt compelled to distance myself from those genres and texts that comprise our cultural "pink ghetto."

As a scholar, my autoethnographic reflection on these anxieties openly informed my analysis of comic-con as a microcosmic reflection of the fanboy's place of privilege in this industrialized space, and the re-marginalization of the fangirl within media convergence. My initial resistance towards writing about Twilight was equally indebted to both sides of my acafan identity. I was terrified of having one of those closed-throat moments Sangita describes. I didn't want to be mistaken for one of the "squealers," and I didn't want my work (especially as a scholar fresh on the market) to be dismissed or trivialized. Just as Sangita rightly notes the need to be aware of the power that accompanies our roles as cultural researchers, I became acutely aware as I wrote that chapter of the residual power that my fan identity affords me (as someone with more stereotypically "masculine" taste in media texts, modes of engagement, and so on).

All of that said, it was important for me to write that chapter, both as a fan and a scholar, and I bring it up because it (hopefully) speaks to these intersecting issues of taste, shame, professionalism, and power that accompany the "unintentional hierarchies" that exist within our field and beyond it. I'm an avid reader of aca-fannish work on Twilight precisely because work like Melissa's forces me to confront my own anti-fan biases and interrogate them. I may hate the franchise, but I will defend its fans to the bitter end. I recognize their affect, even if I don't always understand what motivates it. Collectively, I can acknowledge their importance, even if their individual expressions of fandom don't resonate with my own.

I think a similar logic motivates my staunch defense of the term "acafan." I have always viewed acafandom as an extension of the mentorship and communal support that we've always celebrated in fans. And, just as in fandom, tensions and fissures, debates about the canon or about codifying a scholarly identity, will always be a part of that. We might find that we're no longer interested in a media property, or a piece of terminology, and move on to a new one. But I, for one, am still shipping aca/fan, and will always be happy to debate its significance, its boundaries, and its limitations.

Will Brooker:

I feel like I've been duly schooled, which is good and how it should be -- thanks Suzanne. I may have taken 'provocation' a bit too literally above, and I could have tempered my language, although again, it was meant as an example of why I don't think I'm in a position to make any broader recommendations. This is a good example, like your Twilight story, of why it's more helpful to try to engage with the tensions in our fannish identities (that is, I'm probably embarrassed by shipping because I recognise it in my own approach to narrative and character, and snobbish about squeeing because I'm jealous of it as a shared emotional response that I find it hard to admit to) than to go with initial and more superficial, perhaps defensive reactions, as I did above.

Suzanne Scott:

To briefly contextualize my own moments of defensiveness here, I think how we approached the provocations says a great deal about the stages we're at in our respective careers. I feel like I'm still cementing what sort of acafan I want to be, or coming to terms with the fluidity of that identity and its applications outside of fan studies. Part of my excitement about how we might realize the participatory and transformative ethos of fandom in our own work, or apply those ideas to an interdisciplinary discussion about pedagogy and scholarly communication, is because I'm just starting out. And, I know that in a year I'll be back on the market, where my acafan identity will intrigue some institutions and alienate others, and I'm personally and professionally invested in proving its worth. Reading Sangita's provocation, it's clear that there are spaces where that work still needs to be done, and without question part of the reason I refuse to shut up is because I'm not in a position to do so yet.

Melissa Click:

Perhaps without meaning to, we've just performed one form of utility "acafan" holds for fan scholars as our field of study grows and shifts. One important component/use of the term is to understand how our fan identities/preferences inform our scholarship. Will, Sangita, and Suzanne have all demonstrated how our affiliations and preferences can inform our work and the positions we take in relation to others' work. I think it's really important to try to find linkages/overlaps in our work as well as noting where our differences lie. Will's initial response suggested a feeling that our work and positions were too disparate to warrant further discussion, but I think that the ensuing discussion has pointed out that in fact it is our differences that fed our discussion and (hopefully) helped us come to a more complex sense of how our own positions affect what we study and how we evaluate others' work.

Will Brooker:

I thought I knew where I stood, and what I felt, but this discussion has challenged me in a very interesting and valuable way -- as a scholar and as a fan. So, thanks very much to the three of you.

Melissa A. Click is an assistant professor of Communication at the University of Missouri. She is co-editor of Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media and the Vampire Franchise. Her work on media audiences and messages can be found in Popular Communication, Women's Studies in Communication, Transformative Works & Cultures, and in NYU's anthology Fandom.

Will Brooker is Director of Research at Kingston University, London. His work on popular culture and audience includes Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, The Audience Studies Reader and The Blade Runner Experience. His next book is Hunting the Dark Knight.

Sangita Shresthova is the Research Director of Henry Jenkins' Civic Paths Project at USC. A Czech/Nepali dancer/choreographer and media scholar, she holds a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. Sangita's book on Bollywood dance (Is It All About the Hips? Bollywood Dance Around the World) has just been released.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning and Research at Occidental College. She currently serves as a symposium editor for the journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and her work has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica and The Routledge Handbook of Participatory Cultures (forthcoming). She blogs on fandom, the politics of participatory culture, and teaching fan studies at suzannescott.wordpress.com.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

A Virtual Bullpen?: How the USC Cinema School Has Embraced ARGS To Shape The Experience of Entering Students (Part Two)

A key concern of the Cinema School recently has been to encourage greater integration across the different tracks (production, screenwriting, animation, critical studies, interactive). How has this game helped to support this goal?

Tracy Fullerton: This was part of the mandate given to the committee that initiated the project. The school is making an integrated effort, of which this game is only one part, to bridge divisional barriers and encourage thinking, working and team-building across the school. One way the game does this is simply by eliminating divisional identifiers on the site. We give students an area to talk about their skills so they can find each other to work with, but we don't identify them as coming from any particular part of the school. Also, more directly, we have cards in the deck that reward them for working interdivisionally, and even across other universities.

In the first few weeks of play, we had a writing student who had never done any programming pick up GameMaker on the advice of other students, teach himself some simple coding, and make a simple video game. We have a group that has created a transmedia ARG, and interactive students who have tried their hand at creating an animation flip book. The game rewards groups equally for either trying something new or adding a person with know how to the team, so it is up to players how to approach and solve a problem.

Tracy Fullerton: Yes, this is a voluntary experience. We were very clear about this from the outset of the design. In fact, when we first showed the game concept to some of the staff, the reaction was "great, we can use this to make students do things we want them to do, like fill out these forms or go to this office, etc." But we very nicely pushed back on those ideas because we wanted the game to have an energy that could only come out of students' passion for making media together. It was important that it not feel in any way like an assignment or an extension of the orientation process. We felt that the tone and the sensibility had to recognize personal expression as being intrinsically motivated. Incoming SCA students have already self-selected as creative individuals, so for that kind of student, the idea of taking away that intrinsic motivation could actually be potentially harmful to their development as creative professionals.

Jeff Watson: We actually went to some pretty extreme lengths to keep the game a secret around the time that we were launching it. This was a bit nerve-wracking at first, because only a handful of students even noticed that the game existed at all. But in the end, this strategy paid off. It made the game a "pull" experience, drawing students in of their own accord. Players gradually began to appear at the Game Office, and they did so because they were curious and they wanted to be involved. As more and more students came in, the game acquired more and more evangelists, since each new player was personally invested. This approach is well-trod territory for marketers and ARG designers, but is something new in education, and we're excited to be breaking that ground.

How do you deal with students who aren't willing or able to get involved in creative production? Are there ways to engage that don't require large investments of time or social capital?

Simon Wiscombe: We figured that the level of engagement would vary from person to person, so this came up during our design sessions constantly, and we created four tiers of engagement. The top tier is for those who engage in all the ARG elements along with making creative projects--these are our "hardcore" players who seem to be able to solve all of our puzzles in a fifth the time we estimated they would. The second tier is for those who engage in the projects and enjoy creating, but aren't necessarily interested in scouring SCA or the website for the hidden ARG clues. To tackle the last two tiers, i.e. those who wouldn't engage as much as the others but still wanted to feel a part of the community, we drew from some inspiration we took from old photographs of the SCA in the 1960s and 70s. Jeff was particularly interested in one photograph of a space known as "the Bullpen."

Jeff Watson: The Bullpen was the central workspace of the Stables, the building which used to house the cinema school back in the day. It was a wild, unruly place, covered in graffiti, littered with junk, and full of creative energy. We felt like that kind of space was missing from the SCA of today, and so we decided to re-create it -- virtually, as a kind of social networking system on the game's website.

Simon Wiscombe: In the Bullpen, players are can comment on both deals and cards, participate in impromptu discussions, and upload pictures. Some of this is publicly visible through the site's "Photoblog" feature, but much of this discussion is kept in a walled garden, both to create a safe space for venting, and to extend the "exclusive" and "mysterious" narrative that envelops the game. Finally, there's a whole slew of other forms of engagement, much of which we can't track (but we know is going on), such as collecting sets of cards, lurking on the website, participating in deals without registering for the game, and so on.

Essentially we wanted to foster an awesome interconnected community of already amazingly talented people, and it seems to be working for players at a variety of engagement levels.

What roles do faculty and staff play in this process? How might the kinds of playful interaction the game is encouraging shift the relations between students and faculty? How have faculty integrated aspects of the game into their own curriculum?

Tracy Fullerton: When we designed the cards for the game, we purposefully included some prominent faculty, past and present, in the deck -- as you know, since you've given your own card out to students as part of our "Hey, Henry convergence" meet-up. It's a nice opportunity for us to involve faculty from all over the school in the game. We've found that the faculty have a tremendous curiosity and interest in what's going on in the game. Some are participating on the site, commenting on deals or cards, joining in the general discussion. Some are coming to the class to hear speakers, and some have helped with deals. It's an interesting opportunity because in this situation there are no predefined power structures. The game is presented by the mysterious "Reality Committee" which may or may not be comprised of faculty, it is very unclear. So the faculty are free to participate at any level they feel comfortable.

What aspects of this game could be ported to other educational contexts, and how does a game like this scale?

Simon Wiscombe: This type of game can be modified, with very simple tweaks, for any creative endeavor. We've had discussions about how we could specify it to any of the film school's departments (interactive media, film, animation), or how we could port it to art, music, dance, or theater schools. At its core, it's a game that relies on fostering and promoting the creativity of its participants through prompts that eventually lead to projects. What form those projects take could be anything. And in regards to scale, while this game was designed specifically with 130 or so players in mind, it could easy be for smaller or larger groups, although one would likely have to rethink its purpose. For smaller groups, I've found it's great as a brainstorming or creative sprint tool, and larger groups might embrace the idea of maximizing collaborators. This game is fairly simple in its construct, so I'm sure there are methods of applicability we haven't even dreamed of yet.

Jeff Watson: Well, so far, your card has been used in 5 different Deals (see the card's archive page here. Each of these Deals spins the notion of "Shared Universe" In a different way. For example, in the Justification for the stunningly-photographed music video, "Space Bound," , the players explain that the characters and story elements in their music video cross over with characters and story elements from a "Character Artifacts" project they previously created in the game. Other projects, such as the 10-part transmedia extravaganza, "Chronoteck", use the "Shared Universe" card to link together multiple projects across many platforms, connecting artifacts such as the fake Facebook group, "Stop Chronoteck!" to other story-rich artifacts such as the fake promotional video for the "Chronoteck Tach C," a new brand of cell phone that "receives messages from the future." It's a daily thrill for us to see amazing transmedia projects like these emerge out of our game.

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is an experimental game designer, professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment. The Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night Journey -- a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola. Tracy is also the author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide.

Jeff Watson is a PhD candidate in Media Arts and Practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His research focuses on investigating how mobile and social media can enable new forms of storytelling and participation. Reality Ends Here (A.K.A. "The Game") is Jeff's dissertation project. He can be found online at http://remotedevice.net or via @remotedevice on Twitter.

Simon Wiscombe is an experimental game designer, Annenberg Fellow, and MFA candidate in the Interactive Media Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His research focuses on exploring the idea of meaningful interactions and experiences through the blending of games and reality. You can find him at http://www.simonwiscombe.com or on twitter via @simonium.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part Two)

Conversation

Jason:
In reading over Alex and Gail's excellent provocations, I find myself reading fairly fannishly - not because I'm an admirer of their work (although I certainly am), but because even though they each present arguments that might seem to contradict my own stated position, I highlight and (to evoke our host) poach the moments and examples that confirm my own ideas. In Alex's post, I see evidence of the usefulness of writing what you believe and feel without a label - he might be framed as an acafan fore-parent, but the work that inspired so many of us didn't need that label to forge a model.

And his post points to another example of a slippery term that has had much more semiotic utility than either acafan or postmodern: queer. As we all know, this was not a term coined for academic convenience or trendiness, but rather a reclamation of an already powerful signifier that has come to define a field in seemingly (for a sideline observer like myself) coherent, pragmatic and politically efficacious ways. The semantic history of queer proves that terms can matter, but suggests that we should also engage with terms that already matter and fight the important fights, rather than coining and squabbling over new ones.

Both Gail and Alex's posts highlight the role of affect in writing about culture, and the importance of owning up to our personal engagements. But while Alex chose to "inject the I" into his work through both political and emotional investments, Gail chooses to speak Vulcan over Klingon, tempering affect while foregrounding her taste and identity. I'm sure that adherents of the term acafan would allow for both styles of fannishness under its rubric, but that points to challenges of the concept: either you must delineate the category in a way that excludes some significant modes of engagement, or you create a large umbrella that loses its explanatory power. I'm left unsure why labelling either of their approaches, or those of the many others who have participated in this series, as "acafan" helps us understand or justify the resulting work.

So I'm left with a question for both of my esteemed co-provocateurs: what would be different for the type of work you do without the term acafan to categorize it?

Gail:
Oh, quite simply, I think of myself as an "acafan" because Henry employed that term. He could have called it "lorax" and I would have said, "Yes, that's what I'm trying to do with my work, with my career. I'm trying to be a lorax!" As Alex is the fore-parent of so much great cultural studies and queer studies work, so Henry is the fore-parent of so much great work in fan studies. (Thus it is so great to have these two strands of genealogy touch points through this conversation, though of course their work has always been relevant to each other's.) I came into fan studies through the Henry route, and so Henry's terminology is mine.

But actually I would like to take up the question of using "queer" as a possible descriptor for "acafan." I know that's not literally what you suggested, Jason, but I have often wondered about drawing a connection between the two terms. On the one hand, "acafan" "queers" both academic and fan, Henry has explicitly referenced the origins of his early fan studies work in the emergent queer studies movement, fans generally use terms like "outed," there is something real at stake for those of us who are academics who "come out" as fans, and one of Henry's landmark contributions was showing that it could be done with respect to popular media, that one could and maybe MUST "out" oneself in academic work as a fan.

On the other hand, earlier in this discussion, John Edward Campbell asked "those who identify as 'acafans' to be a bit more reflexive about comparisons of fans to sexual minorities," emphasizing rightly that the dangers for people who "out" themselves as sexual minorities are far more acute and severe than for people who "out" themselves as fans.

If either of you has any thoughts on the intersections of "queer" and "acafan," as two terms that could be brought to bear on one another or may support or serve one another, or as two terms that are and must remain very distinct and separate, I would be really interested in them.

Alex:
I'll begin with Gail's provocation about how she tries to have her academic work speak critically about fandom and things she is a fan of rather than have her speaking as a fan, and how this particular positioning as an acafan (one I think most acafans take on) runs the risk of reinforcing "the old equivalences" of fan with "irrationality" and "overemotionalism" and academic with "rationality" and critical "distance." I agree with you, Gail, that this positioning may be a matter of "tone," and I will add "degree," rather than a wholesale denial or repression of emotion, but I have always been frustrated by how deploying this position always seems to demand we "control" our expressions of enthusiasm because they are, somehow, antithetical to the intellectual work we do. Is it really be impossible to conceive of a piece of work that veers between Photoplay and "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," and that is taken seriously in the academy?

Jason, you really are being a provocateur when you ask if we would really lose anything in terms of how we go about our business without the term "acafan" (or "postmodern"). I suppose I would say "no" and "yes." No, in the sense that those of us who were/are intent on combining "the personal is the political" type investments in our work would have proceeded (and did proceed) without a concept to work within or under.

But, yes, in the sense that it is handy to have a term like "acafan," or the earlier "scholar-fan," to indicate a "performance" option (as you put it, Gail) for scholarship. Once a term like this is established, it can provide some added weight to the struggle to legitimate certain types of scholarly performance. (I know, even while writing out "legitimate" I was cringing, but a girl's got to eat, so. . .) While, as Jason points out, this term (whether applied to a person or to a product) can mean many things to many people, it does gesture toward a group of people (self-identifying and not) and body of work that has attempted to expand and complicate just what constitutes a "scholar" or a piece of "scholarly" or "academic" work. And I do feel a kinship with these folks and with this project--though I guess don't really need a term to describe all this, I suppose. How's that for equivocating?

As to understanding acafandom, the acafan, and acafan production as "queer" somehow, I don't see why not, for the reasons Gail outlines, primary among them the impulse to critique categories with an eye to deconstructing them. Following this line of thinking, then, the queer goal of acafandom should finally be to trouble the categories of "fan" and "academic" (and academic and fan discourse) so much that we are left with exactly what Jason is calling for--a space that allows "our arguments and ideas to speak for themselves" no matter what their approach, methodology, for form. So, Jason, maybe you can just wait a while for acafandom to do its queer work!

Jason: I appreciate that both of you equivocate about my question, and even though I'm skeptical of the term, I'm similarly on the fence. Such labels certainly have their uses for community-building, group identification, and signalling a set of sympathies so that others can find like-minded fellow travellers - I imagine that on some social network like Academia.edu, tagging yourself as an acafan could be useful (as would tagging ourselves as Loraxes for that matter!). But as academics in the critical humanities, we need to be careful in how we use our labels, as today's marker of convenience is tomorrow's site of political factioning or terminological warfare: when will we see articles positing that we are now in the era of post-acafandom, to be followed by neo-acafandom?

To pull out another term that emerged from the theoretical stew of postmodernism (but I'd argue need not be labeled as such to be useful), what I think is going on around these acafan conversations is a form of strategic essentialism. There is a tactical utility for scholars, especially in vulnerable untenured positions, to be able to grasp onto a term like acafan and highlight how prominent figures in our field like Henry & Alex embrace it - it helps situate ones work & identity within an area of study that has validity and legitimation. But what happens when a hiring or review committee asks "so what does that mean?" I think it's most useful and honest to be able to embrace labels not just for their pragmatic utility, but because they actually help explain what it is you do and how you do it.

As for the queer question, I get the parallel in terms of issues of visibility and categorical instability, but echoing John Edward Campbell's point that Gail cited, I fear that it might unintentionally belittle the huge power differentials between being a fan and being a sexual minority. The odds that someone would suffer tangible discrimination or violence for being a fan are so much less than for being queer, and the fandoms that would probably carry the greatest stigma are themselves already queered. In other words, nobody's going to care that I "outed" myself as a sysop for a Lost fan wiki, but a scholar who writes BDSM slash fanfic has legitimate reasons to keep that aspect of her fandom closeted - but I'd argue that's less because it's a fan activity than because it's a queer type of fandom. Might a strategic use of the term acafandom would help her by validating such activity within an established community? Perhaps, and if so, that's as good of a justification for the term as I could imagine - although my skepticism about the incoherence of the category remains.

"Acafan" works well for me as a kind of search term (though I've never typed that into Google) - if someone is called an "acafan" or refers to themselves using that term, even in passing, it's helpful for me to recognize them as someone whose work may have some relevance and importance to my own work.

But just going back to the lorax example quickly, I am also fine with other tags like "fan studies scholar," "scholar-fan," "fan theorist," "fan cultures scholar," etc. And that circle of terms can widen outward quickly to "cultural studies scholar," "media studies scholar," "digital culture theorist," "Amy Pond who studies online communities," etc. I just find terminology useful for a quick assessment of whether someone's essays or books or blog entries or LiveJournal posts or conference papers are worth time and attention - Are they working on projects that are of interest to me, or not? Are they using approaches and frameworks that I might want to learn about, or not?

But I do think that as the acafan approach gets to be more and more common, with new generations of scholars emerging for whom the question of whether or not they should declare their fandoms is not even a question, that the term may become specific to a time frame. "Some scholars and fans in the late 1990s and early 2000s, sensing commonalities and overlaps in their theoretical and critical work, used the term 'acafan' to define themselves. Today, it is well-known that everyone who studies media of any kind is a fan, a non-fan, or an anti-fan, and that anyone who thinks that passion and emotion are not integral to media criticism and analysis is an idiot." (from the Future Encyclopedia of Media Studies, copyright 2042).

I do hope, though, that if and when "acafan" goes away, that we who were acafen remember that academics and fans can and should talk to one another, that they/we are not that different from one another, that the "meta" done in fandoms and the "studies" done in academia are similar kinds of work. I am especially concerned here about fans' possible marginalization from future academic discussions, since academics have access to (some) institutional legitimacy and research funds that many fans do not.

Thank you both, Alex and Jason, for weighing in on whether "queer" can or mustn't be thought of as pertinent to "acafan." Both of you suggest that much acafan work can do, and is already doing, queer work - and so inspires discomfort and encounters disapprobation because of its queerness, not because of its acafanishness. To me, that means that it is useful to think about "acafan" and "queer" together, and to articulate their relationships, but that in any discussion of the two concepts together, it is crucial not to mistake the social positioning of one for the social positioning of the other.

Alex: Well it looks as if I am bringing up the rear (to coin a phrase). It seems as if where we are leaving "acafan" is understanding it as a concept that might have certain uses for academic fans if not for "civilian" fans (sorry, I was an Army brat) when it is used carefully and strategically--but that it may have a shelf life, so we shouldn't get too attached to it. I think that between and among them, our provocations and responses have compellingly suggested some of the potential benefits of using "acafan" as well as some of its limitations or problematic aspects.

Reading both of your follow-up comments on "acafandom" and/as "queer," I realized that I probably sounded a bit flippant in my last response on this. As a queer and an acafan--yes, I will hold onto that label for a while longer though I don't really need it to do what I do, even though I still think it helps explain what I do to some extent, although Jason is correct in suggesting that sometime you need to define "acafan" for people before talking about your specific acafan work-- I agree that while as concepts they can be interestingly compared to each other, this should not suggest that "open" acafans leave themselves open to anything like what "open" queers do--except, possibly, as Jason suggests, when the acafan/acafan work is itself queer.

I like Gail's encyclopedia entry for "acafan(dom)," especially the final sentiment, which is an interesting reversal of what many undergraduate students think: that analysis and criticism have no place in expressions of (their) fan enthusiasms. That is, they will no longer enjoy (or enjoy less) popular culture texts or personalities once they have certain (academic) critical and analytic tools. Hey, this might be something else the concept and products of acafandom are useful for--showing students that you can simultaneously think critically and emote when you watch a film, listen to a song, contemplate a celebrity, etc. etc. etc. A carefully selected acafan article or two--along with a general discussion of "acafan(dom)"--have done wonders in my undergraduate classes along these lines.

Abigail (Gail) De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a joint appointment in the Berkeley Center for New Media (http://bcnm-dev.berkeley.edu/) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (http://tdps.berkeley.edu/). Her current LJ userpics are: The Beatles, Don & Peggy, Starbuck & Apollo (Kara & Lee), Rogue, Blair Waldorf, Torvill & Dean, Lisbon & Jane, Tony & Pepper, Daniel & Betty, and Mal & Zoe. At this time, she's looking for a good Arya Stark icon.

Alexander Doty is Chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University and a Professor in this department and in the Department of Gender Studies. He has written Making Things Perfectly Queer and Flaming Classics, co-edited Out in Culture, and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas. An old fogey, he is currently not active in any web-based fan communities, but in the past he has been known to put his 2-cents up on broadwayworld.com, and to indulge the consumer side of his fandom by buying risque postcards of 1920s stars George O'Brien and Ramon Novarro on Ebay--and, yes, he will end up writing something on at least one of them in order to justify these purchases to his "aca" side.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College, and a Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen, Germany, for the 2011-12 academic year. As an aca, he's written Genre & Television (2004), Television & American Culture (2009), Complex TV (in process) and the blog Just TV (ongoing). As a fan, he's been active in the Lostpedia community, transforms Wilco songs for the mandolin, and calls his fantasy football team The Heisenberg Helmets.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)

Alexander Doty:

Reading through the posts, I realized that some of my earlier work is considered part of the pre-history of acafan(dom). It is not really self-reflexively working at the intersection of scholarship and fandom, but it gestures towards this space by making a case for lesbian and gay and queer reception of mainstream film and popular culture as an intense and conflicted "fannish" site for articulating marginalized identities and communities, as well as a site within which to challenge notions of (fixed) identity and (unified) community.

This early work suggests that LGQ film and popular culture enthusiasms were also almost always what might now be called acafan-like as they simultaneously negotiated pleasures while generating critiques from positions that were at once inside and outside the dominant culture that produced these film and media products. As the sometimes "gay," sometimes "queer," sometimes "femme," sometimes "butch" scholar and fan considering all this, I was also articulating an approach to film and popular culture that I hoped to deploy in my own writing.

Inspired by Robin Wood's "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic," I wanted my academic work to more clearly and consistently reveal my "personal-is-the-political" gay/queer investments in film and popular culture. As I moved in this direction, I discovered that the addition of "gay" or "lesbian" or "queer" or "bisexual" to even legitimated academic approaches to film and popular culture--such as auteurism, genre studies, film history, etc.--resulted in this work often being considered unscholarly and unsubstantiated "wish fulfillment" or "fantasy. In effect, a gay reading of any film or TV show that didn't represent gay men in "obvious," denotative ways was a subcultural fan reading to many in the academy. Things are somewhat different now, though I find that the academy still frequently asks LGBTQ film and media acafans to go the extra mile in order to overcome resistance to what might be perceived of as doubly fannish positions.

I suppose I got so tired of attempting to inject aspects of the autobiographical (-as- political) into my scholarly writing only to have it rejected or patronized, that I returned to my English Department roots and hid behind close textual readings that were theoretically, culturally, and historically informed, but largely devoid of any obvious sense of personal investment or enthusiasm--unless you sensed it in the sometimes breathless and colorful prose stylings, or, read my first book's introduction. A (re)turning point for me involved Henry Jenkins and one of the other co-editors of Hop on Pop, Jane Shattuc, who said my lesbian reading of The Wizard of Oz was all well and good, but where was I in all this? That is, what brought this particular gay fan and queer academic to this particular lesbian understanding of the film?

Forced to fess up, I examined my personal and professional "archives" and discovered that a longtime sense of fluid gender and sexuality, combined with annual (or bi-annual) viewings of The Wizard of Oz since childhood, combined with teaching the film in various contexts, combined with lesbian feminism, combined with queer theory, combined with a particular drag performance I attended involving "Judy Garland" and lesbian fans, led me to see the film as a lesbian coming of age (if not coming out) story.

In short, my whole life had led me to that piece on The Wizard of Oz. Only by drawing together aspects of autobiography, fandom, pedagogy, and academic training could I express (and, for some, justify) my "queer reception" love for the film, while also recognizing its ideological lapses--largely centered on the butch Elmira Gulch/the Wicked Witch of the West, I might add.

So, while I have previously used the term "scholar-fan" to describe the kind work I do--or that I prefer to do--I am now ready to drop the hyphen that separates these two terms, take up "acafan," and deal with the tensions and negotiations that might arise from this hybrid term (though I did notice that Henry's blog does use the hyphenated "aca-fan" in its title--what gives Henry?). Yes, being and acafan and doing acafan work can be somewhat "elitist" as some have pointed out, but it can also be a site for meaningfully mingling the academy and "the streets." I know I never felt that my life was more consistently integrated than when the queer film/media scholarship and teaching I was doing as a post-doc at Cornell were being fed by actions I participated in as a member of ACT-UP and Queer Nation--and vice-versa. When is the next time that my Nancy Sinatra fandom will express itself as part of a City Hall protest done to the tune of "These Boots are Made For Walking," or when most of my students will be integrating their activist art and video-making into term projects that deploy "high theory" and cultural studies approaches to contextualize and analyze their work?

P.S. I apologize for this Me-centered opening statement. My plan was to go over all the posts before our groups' entries and cherry pick ideas with which to engage. But after landing on comments that positioned some folks in my academic cohort as the foremothers and forefathers of the acafan, I got nostalgic--and you got this aca-autobiographical opening statement. I hope you can forgive it as a form of Grandpa Simpson-like ramblings about the (not-always-so-good) old days. I will resist further Memory Lane wanderings in our subsequent conversation.

Abigail De Kosnik:

Firstly, I would like to say that I am an "acafan" of many of the participants in this wonderful debate (is that correct usage of the term?), and my enthusiasm for the work of Alexander Doty is one of the longest-lasting fandoms of my life. Alex's scholarship - the kinds of interventions that he describes in his "provocation" above - were key inspirations for me to seek out training in cultural studies, queer studies, and media studies, none of which were taught in any deep or concerted way when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1990s. Therefore, you can imagine my excitement at being assigned to his group! Along with Jason Mittell, whom I consider a friend and colleague, and whose work I also think of as foundational to my media studies training. What luck!

This is one of my favorite rewards of academia: sometimes the structures and operations and networks that academics create and operate (I am thinking of public performances of academic-ness such as conferences, symposia, and Henry's blog - Henry's blog being more consistently entertaining than the former two formats) put you (me) in direct contact with the objects of your (my) fandom. I mean, I remember the first time that Henry Jenkins saw me and remembered my name. I had introduced myself to Henry a couple of times at conferences to say that I was a graduate student who was a huge fan of his, but the first time Henry greeted me by name, I thought, My God, Henry Jenkins KNOWS WHO I AM.

Today, as an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, I actually *arrange* for fannish encounters with senior scholars on campus under the auspices of academic events. In other words, I totally "acafan" (I'm using that as a verb now) Linda Williams, Judith Butler, and others. I put myself into academic situations where these luminaries are basically forced to read my work and give me feedback. And after I have met another star in my constellation, I have this wonderful moment of "Wow. Judith Butler just gave me notes on my paper."

But you know, I contain my fannishness. I don't gush. Or I limit my gush to two sentences, when speaking to my academic idols, and when speaking to my colleagues about my academic idols. And in my scholarly writing, I also attempt to contain "the squee." In my scholarship, I try not to be too sycophantic to any one theorist, too beholden. My fandoms come across anyway. Everyone knows, after attending one of my seminars or just speaking to me about any of my fields, who "my people" are, whose work I draw upon the most. But I try (not always sure if I succeed, but I do try) to not write with a "fannish" voice, to not let my emotional investments and deeply felt affinities be the starting point of my analyses of cultural phenomena.

I am an acafan with a set of rules, applicable (as far as I am concerned) only to myself. My personal brand of acafandom is one that says, that even announces/proclaims, "I am a fan," but dispassionately. If a student or colleague or audience member at an academic conference wants to know about my fandoms, I will gladly list them, an entire litany. I have many, many fandoms, of every media format and nearly every historical period and many geographical regions. I will talk films if you want to talk films, I will talk astrolabes if you want to talk astrolabes, I will talk Atari or medieval bestiaries or printings of The Communist Manifesto. My fandoms are innumerable, and I am happy to discuss them. But - at an academic event, or in an academic context - I will speak of my fandoms not from the perspective of a fan, but from the perspective of an academic.

That doesn't mean that the "academic I" aims to appear devoid of passion, but she (the "academic I") does aim to appear to be somewhat Spock-like: the rational is what meets you right away, up front; the emotional is there, but buried deep. Spock's emotions inform his decisions but he tries not to get lost in them, and keeps them out of others' sight as much as he is able. The feeling, the affective power, of my fandom, fuels all of my academic work - I could not bear to delve deeply enough into any given topic or text without a kind of fannish devotion to, obsession with, it - but I try to keep the knowledge, the information, the analysis, up front, and leave the feeling out, for the most part.

In other words, I conceive of "acafan" as a term that designates a certain professionalism, a certain demeanor (a "seeming") of critical distance, a certain coolness and calmness in discussing all the many facets and valences of fandom. This does not mean denying, covering, or burying my personal fannish affinities - for those affinities are fact, they exist, and I will gladly state them at every turn - rather, I am speaking here of performance, of attitude, of tone. I think of myself as an "acafan" insofar as I say, everywhere I go, "I am a fan," but in Vulcan rather than Klingon.

Why my emphasis on tone, attitude, performance? Not only because I am housed in Berkeley's (Theater, Dance and) Performance Studies Department, but also because frankly, an even tone is what makes it possible for academics to communicate with one another. Keeping open channels of communication - keeping one's listeners and readers receptive - is so crucial when one is speaking or writing about topics that might be balked at as ridiculous, marginal, or unworthy of academic study. I have taken on this concept of "acafan" for myself completely because of my straddling a number of disciplinary fields, and almost never being a total "insider" to any one academic field. As a media studies person, I am an outsider to performance studies; as a Marxist cultural studies person, I am an outsider to new media studies; and so on. My experience in academia, traveling across many disciplinary borders and constantly visiting academic territories that are more or less foreign territories, has taught me that, if I want to talk about fandom, if I want to talk about texts and topics that are (still) somewhat unsettling to my audiences, that I must at least sound like "one of them" - like "one of us" - which is to say, I must sound/seem/perform like "an academic."

Once again, this does not mean that I am advocating a shift away from the personalization of theoretical, scholarly writing, in which Alex was a pioneer. In fact, Alex's work is a fantastic example of how fannish writing can be deeply serious academic work, and be taken seriously, received as significant and meaningful. I also have an essay coming out soon in an anthology (edited by Bill Aspray and Megan Winget of UT-Austin's School of Information) advocating that, in the digital age, we need more humanities writing that is theoretical and highly personal at the same time - the essay is called "Personal Theory" - because most of our students are learning most of what they know in media (social media/online communication) that emphasizes first-person perspective, that applies the "I" as a lens to almost every subject matter.

I am only sharing my personal incorporation of the subject position of "acafan" in my life, which is to be openly a fan, writing plentifully about fandom, and presenting myself and my work with the most professional affect I can muster. If this reinstates or simply reinforces the old equivalences between fan and irrationality and overemotionalism, and the opposition of fan and academic, and the equivalences between academic and rationality and distance, well then, I suppose I still live in this world, and must do my best to navigate and negotiate it. But if I try not to "seem" a fan when I speak or write in an academic forum, I do aim to argue for fans and fandom - not for their inherent goodness or creativity, but for their interestingness, for their value, for their importance.

Funny, these arguments are of the same bent as the arguments I am currently making for academics in the humanities: they are interesting, they have value, they are important. Fans are not nothing; they are so many things, they are significant. Same with humanities scholars. And as Karen Hellekson said so well earlier in this conversation, academics are nothing if not fans. So ironically, though I really believe that academics and fans are the same, they do not seem the same. Performing "fan" is (still, still) so so different than performing "academic."

But you should see me when I get home. Or when I am on LiveJournal. Or when I am in a mostly- or all-fan space (online or f2f). In those sites, I squee and squee.

Jason Mittell:

I should begin my "provocation" about the concept of acafandom with a caveat that I don't feel particularly provoked or provocative about this topic. I do have a take on the debate, but don't feel like I have much of a stake in it. While I certainly align myself with both of the categories fused in acafan, I don't feel like the term speaks to or about me.

Instead, I find myself looking on this debate as an outsider, asking pragmatic questions about the terminology and semantic politics: Who uses this term beyond the people participating in this discussion? Does this term do something useful that other more established labels do not? And what would be lost without it? And I'm left with the answers "not sure", "not really", and "not much".

The parallel that comes to mind is the term "postmodern," a label with much broader academic currency than acafan but that similarly leaves me feeling ambivalent. While most humanists for the past twenty years have probably spent time immersed in various theories of postmodernity, postmodernism, and postmodern conditions, I'm not sure to what end. That's not to say that great work has not been done under the rubric of postmodernism - it certainly has - but now that it is less liberally applied to every example of contemporary theory or culture, I'm left thinking that the term has probably done more harm than good (except perhaps to the major academic presses in cultural studies, who certainly boosted sales through the strategically applied use of "postmodern" in book titles).

Because there was no academic consensus on what "postmodern" meant (by design, I believe), the label obscured rather than illuminated, marking academic work as "cutting edge" without hinting on what was being cut or doing the cutting. Looking back on seminal scholarship focused on various flavors of postmodernism, I think we could eliminate the fuzzy label and strengthen our understanding of the core arguments and analyses without losing much of intellectual value.

I'd argue the same is true about acafandom. While that term will certainly never have the transdisciplinary currency of postmodernism, I do feel like the time spent debating what it means, what it does, who it includes (and excludes), and why it matters could be better spent doing the scholarly work that each of think matters most. And while that work may very well explore the intersecting identities and practices of academia and fandom, I do not think labeling it acafan research helps situate it in a larger conversation or subfield in a productive way. Instead, I'd contend that avoiding using a term that means such different things to so many of us would allow our arguments and ideas to speak for themselves, rather than being labeled in a way that can be easily dismissed or marginalized (or kneejerk embraced since the author is "part of the club").

So my ultimate provocation, to which I welcome debate: we should not hide our investments in the structures and identities of either academia or fandom, but we shouldn't hang our identities on a such a slippery signifier as "acafan."

Abigail (Gail) De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a joint appointment in the Berkeley Center for New Media (http://bcnm-dev.berkeley.edu/) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (http://tdps.berkeley.edu/). Her current LJ userpics are: The Beatles, Don & Peggy, Starbuck & Apollo (Kara & Lee), Rogue, Blair Waldorf, Torvill & Dean, Lisbon & Jane, Tony & Pepper, Daniel & Betty, and Mal & Zoe. At this time, she's looking for a good Arya Stark icon.

Alexander Doty is Chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University and a Professor in this department and in the Department of Gender Studies. He has written Making Things Perfectly Queer and Flaming Classics, co-edited Out in Culture, and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas. An old fogey, he is currently not active in any web-based fan communities, but in the past he has been known to put his 2-cents up on broadwayworld.com, and to indulge the consumer side of his fandom by buying risque postcards of 1920s stars George O'Brien and Ramon Novarro on Ebay--and, yes, he will end up writing something on at least one of them in order to justify these purchases to his "aca" side.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College, and a Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen, Germany, for the 2011-12 academic year. As an aca, he's written Genre & Television (2004), Television & American Culture (2009), Complex TV (in process) and the blog Just TV (ongoing). As a fan, he's been active in the Lostpedia community, transforms Wilco songs for the mandolin, and calls his fantasy football team The Heisenberg Helmets.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Rhianon Bury and Matt Yockey (Part Two)

Matt Yockey:
Rhiannon, I very much enjoyed reading your thoughtful post, especially since you come to this topic from a very different background than I do. You say that earlier in your academic career you identified as a feminist but also say that you don't consider yourself an acafan because you resist labels. Assuming that you still identify as a feminist, this suggests that in academia we remain very much invested in labels that carry a certain cache, diminishing the potential value of other labels.

Yes, any label will to some degree homogenize but they remain a necessary mode of understanding ourselves and engaging with the world (and certainly "feminism" as a label has had a long history of homogenizing and excluding). And this is not pick on feminism, as I identify as a feminist. I don't see this identification as allowing me a certain privileged position with women, any more than being queer-friendly allows me to fully affectively understand the experience of being queer. But both labels define who I am, both inside and outside of academia. So the label is important to me as a means of overcoming the schisms produced by the public/private divide

Love the Shatner SNL reference. I remember laughing hysterically with my Trekkie friend Mike in college when that first aired. It allowed some easy disavowal but also identification. For me, since then, I've grown increasingly invested in making meaning out of and between the things that move me, which have always been good ideas, whether they come in the form of a smart science fiction film or a really good cultural theory book.

All the various labels indicate the composite nature of my larger understanding of self, which is always in conversation with a larger public sphere. That hybridity of self is very important to acknowledge, I think, because it helps us engage with the complexities and contradictions of other individuals and the public sphere.

Rhiannon Bury: Good on you Matt for calling me out on my own contradictory use of labels, specifically my troubling of 'acafan' just after my seemingly straightforward embrace of 'feminist'. Of course the latter has been questioned, challenged and critiqued since the early 1990s by anti-racist and postmodern and postcolonial scholars for privileging the issues and experiences of white, western, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied women. And yet while I recognize the importance of an intersectional analysis and the incommensurable differences among women, the identification of feminist' is still meaningful and necessary to me at a time when women's rights are being continuously eroded by neoliberal and globalization agendas.

I found compelling your honest discussion of academic work and affect. (I am a Buffy fan but fear not; I do not hold your dislike of the series against you!) Affect is a dirty word in the academy, with pressure continuing to be exerted on those who study popular texts and fans regardless of whether they label themselves acafans or not. I recall one (former) colleague's facial expression change from puzzlement to relief when I answered his inquiry about whether I wrote fan fiction in the negative. Yet to be a writer in an English Department is a creative pursuit that is highly valued.

If I am totally honest, I distance myself, in part, with the acafan identification because of my desire to be taken seriously not only by my direct colleagues but by the feminist scholarly community where the study of female fan communities seems rather trivial when measured up against the more "pressing" issues of violence against women or other oppressions and resistances.

Matt Yockey:
I agree that in many circles within academia, the kinds of study scholars such as you and I engage is placed at the margins, making for a oftentimes uncomfortable sense of our own value as academics. I too have sometimes felt the need to somehow gloss over what exactly it is that I study. I have taken this up as a challenge to more explicitly engage with the political capacity of fandom in my work (for example,
considering the progressive interventions made by fans via their fan object - a recent piece I did looks at fans' use of Wonder Woman as a vehicle for supporting womens' shelters and for promoting gay rights). Perhaps the old saw, 'the personal is the political' is ultimately what I'm on about here but I think the notion has real value in considering why I am affectively and professionally invested in fandom.

Rhiannon Bury: It is interesting how we adjust our rationales depending on the discipline. With colleagues in English, it is a matter of demonstrating that we have not lost our "objectivity" and our ability to distinguish "quality" texts from "popular" texts. In feminist, Marxist and/or or queer scholarly communities we justify our work, consciously or not, by emphasizing its political relevance-- in your case the progressiveness of Wonder Woman fans and in one of mine, the heterosexism and homophobia of Six Feet Under fans.

Rhiannon Bury: You draw an interesting connection between your fandom and utopian ideals. I have never thought of fan spaces in this way as a fan and/ or as a scholar. In Cyberspaces of Their Own, I conceptualized female fan spaces as potentially heterotopic. Foucault specifically states that the heterotopia is not a utopia but a space of inversion or reversal of normative spaces.

Rhiannon Bury: Interesting. When I think about it, I did feel "at home" with members of the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades who joined the listserv I set up for my first ethnographic case study. As one of the participants noted, it was like "hanging around someone's kitchen shooting the breeze." So this home was a very much a domestic, gendered space.

I would like to go back to the earlier comment you made about the parallels between academic communities and fan communities. I'd go a step further and say that scholarly communities are the ultimate fan communities, with deep emotional investments in their particular objects of study that are hidden under the veneer of objectivity. While I do not study the fan practices that surround every text that I am a fan of, it is unlikely that I would study those surrounding texts in which I have no interest or actively dislike. For instance, I think the study of reality tv is important on an intellectual level in terms of the representations and performances of race, class and gender as well as the pleasures it produces. When I was in a Communications Department, I would never dream of not including a discussion of it in a television or media class. But like you said Matt, my heart is really not in it enough to pursue anything further.

Rhiannon Bury is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently analyzing survey and interview data collected for her current research project, Television 2.0: Shifting Patterns of Audience Reception and Participatory Culture. Updates coming soon via www.twitter.com/television2pt0.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Toledo. He has published articles in Transformative Works and Cultures, The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, CineAction, and The Velvet Light Trap. His book on the Batman TV series is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Rhianon Bury and Matt Yockey (Part One)

Rhiannon Bury:
It has been a bit of a challenge putting together this "provocation" in the final weeks of the Acafan and Beyond debate. I hope I have succeeded in responding to the original set of questions without covering too much of the same ground as earlier posts. Let me start by saying that I really am an accidental fan studies scholar. As late as 1995, when I was doing my PhD in Education with a focus on Cultural Studies, I was still heavily invested in the high/low culture binary. I whole heartedly agreed with William Shatner's "get a life" cri de coeur to fans. I identified strongly as a feminist so my "discovery" of the three David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades (DDEBs) while surfing the web for X-Files information and subsequent engagement with some of the members forced me to interrogate and reevaluate my elitist attitudes. Sixteen years later and an academic career made possible by the kindness and generosity of participatory fans, I do not consider myself an acafan or even a fan-scholar (overlapping but not interchangeable terms).

My reservation is in part a discontent with labels and their effects. As others have already remarked, they serve to homogenize the heterogenous, to constrain and erase difference and to draw boundaries that mark out who is an insider and who is an outsider. To be fair, "acafan" gestures openly to its hybridity and instability as a category but as the discussion over the weeks has made clear, it has historical linkages to a particular set of fan practices that involves the production of secondary texts such as fanfic or vids. Despite fannish interests in a number of primary texts and a number of professional and personal relationships with fanfic writers and vidders, my highest level of non-academic participatory engagement has been reading and posting a few comments on Television Without Pity for Battlestar Galactica (reimagined) and Dexter. As much as I like the idea of making a vid, I just don't have the creative commitment to follow through.

Drawing on queer studies and activist discourses while recognizing the dangers in doing so, I am mulling over another term that might be a better fit for me and perhaps others: fan-ally and, by extension, an acafan-ally. As previous contributions to the debate have indicated, being an acafan may be a fraught, complicated, even contradictory identification but its legibility and legitimacy must ultimately be determined by those who articulate it. I suspect a good number of those who identify as acafans are also on the margins of academia-- as women, as students, and/or as contingent, independent or untenured scholars. "Objective" criticisms and dismissals from those who do not identify as acafans but hold positions of authority can have a silencing effect, even if unintentional.

The other issue I wish to touch on is the issue of self-defined acafans "sitting too close" (Jenkins, 1993). I agree to a point with Nancy Baym's statement that the inability of acafans to distance themselves critically "is a failure of their academic training, not of their being fans." Part of this "failure" may be attributable to graduate degrees in the humanites not the social sciences. I had an MA in CompLit and was fortunate to have had a linguistic anthropologist on my thesis committee in addition to taking a qualitative methods course as part of my doctoral coursework.

Working out of a critical paradigm, I strongly believe that the location of the researcher, not just training, affects knowledge production. Being an insider both enables and disables certain forms of knowledge production. The same is true for the outsider. Researchers who put themselves in the frame of the research are not being subjective; they are being responsible knowledge producers.

Matt Yockey:

Responding to these provocations has proven much more challenging than I originally anticipated, perhaps in large part because it requires the kind of candor and reflexivity I've tried to dodge in my own work on texts of which I am a fan. The problem for me is my own struggle with identifying as a fan, as if this some sort of monolithic construct. For similar reasons I've often resisted the label of academic. The acafan label limits my identity as an academic (I do more than study texts of which I would consider myself a fan) and as a fan (I don't perform academic analyses of many objects of my fandom, such as the Red Sox, Robyn Hitchcock, or The Rockford Files). Curiously, however, the designation acafan has both emphasized my ambivalence regarding such labels and reconciled some of the problems I've had with them.

I don't explicitly identify as an acafan but the term is important to my sense of self; I keep it as a reminder of my own (perceived) liminality. Yet it also allows me access to certain communities when I choose to, or need to, use it for such a purpose. This was brought home to me by a recent trip to Australia. My trip was purely academic in purpose: I researched a comic book archive at the National Library and presented a paper on Wonder Woman fandom at a conference on the female superhero at a university in Melbourne. In the first instance I found a perfect commingling of my academic and fan selves, as I not only found valuable research information but quickly bonded as a fan with some of the staff members who enthusiastically brought out box after box of comic books and volunteered their own fannish interests to me.

I found a similar rapport at times with my fellow attendees of the conference, where the term "acafan" was never spoken but was certainly realized on every panel about Xena, Buffy, the Powerpuff Girls, etc. As with any conference, I found that my level of engagement with the presentations waxed and waned according to whether the paper was intellectually engaging and/or the topic was of general interest to me. For example, when panelists presented papers on Buffy, I listened attentively (and even took notes and asked questions), but my heart wasn't really in it because I actively dislike that show (and by admitting this, I know I've now alienated 75% of the academics reading this).

The trip confirmed for me why I am both an academic and a fan: because in academia and fandom I can engage with a community that confirms my own sense of self and legitimates my own utopian desires. I suppose the academic side of equation simply intellectualizes the affective fan side of it, for I'm compelled to turn to theorists to explain myself. Cornel Sandvoss, in particular, comes to mind when he writes in Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: "Fandom best compares to the emotional significance of the places we have grown to call 'home', to the form of physical, emotional and ideological space that is best described as Heimat" (64).

Sandvoss argues that the fan sense of Heimat as fluid is different from the traditional understanding of home as a stable signifier. I would argue that what attracts me to academia is its potential (much less often realized than in fandom) to confirm a sense of Heimat through an individual, affective response to a text (in the case of the academic, an object of study and/or the theory applied to an analysis of such an object).

I say less often realized because in the "acafan" equation, the academic side is the one that I most frequently find wanting. Academia is as suffused with its own coded jargon, internal hierarchies, and privileged texts as the most pathologized fan community. In fact, I use my fandom to more comfortably take on the role of academic. And I am an acafan because I believe that, at its best, my affiliation with an academic community offers as much potential for utopian transcendence as the fan communities with which I identify.

The (ideally) perpetual intellectual pursuits of academia mirror the ongoing, transformative engagements fans make with texts. Both are motivated (at least for me) by the utopian pursuit of Heimat, an affirmation of my identity through a group affiliation. And Heimat is mobile because I am always searching for the utopian ideal away from home and only by separating myself from home can I then re-imagine home as potentially utopian. It's my own fort/da game with self located within the fluid structures of academia and fandom. The term acafan has allowed me to bridge the gaps produced within this dynamic and be more comfortable in my own skin(s).

Rhiannon Bury is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently analyzing survey and interview data collected for her current research project, Television 2.0: Shifting Patterns of Audience Reception and Participatory Culture. Updates coming soon via www.twitter.com/television2pt0.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Toledo. He has published articles in Transformative Works and Cultures, The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, CineAction, and The Velvet Light Trap. His book on the Batman TV series is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

On Skepticism, News Literacy, and Transparency: An Interview with Dan Gillmor (Part Two)

Some have argued that the criteria for evaluating news has shifted from
impartiality to transparency. How would you rank mainstream news and citizen
media in terms of their embrace of transparency as a civic virtue?

An effort to be impartial - or "objective," to use the word most journalists revere - is not a bad thing. The problem is that it's impossible to achieve in the real world. We all come to our jobs with life histories, world views, and sometimes outright biases.

That said, transparency is a definite virtue. It's one of several principles - though not enough by itself - that information providers of all kinds should embrace. Add transparency to thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and independent thinking, and we're getting somewhere.

I would rank traditional media organizations low on the transparency scale. They're still among the most opaque institutions around. But there are glimmers of openness, here and there, that give me some hope that journalists are beginning to understand why they need to do this. Bloggers and others we might put in the "citizen journalism" sphere vary in their openness, too, though I'd say bloggers tend to be somewhat more transparent than professional journalists.

It's about trust in the end. For people who are honorable in the way they work, transparency inspires greater trust.

What role should the news media itself play in fostering basic civic skills,
including those of critical reading and thinking? For example, how should
the news media be responding to persistent rumors about Obama, such as those
promoted by so-called Birthers? Is this a "teachable moment," as one would
say in the Education Schools, and if so, how should teaching taking place
via the news media?

I wish the news media had made this a core mission a long time ago. They didn't, and still haven't. That's a real shame; it would have helped not just their audiences but themselves - because audiences would have gotten a better idea what it takes to do quality journalism and had more respect for it.

If I ran a news organization and learned that a sizeable percentage of people in my community believed something that was false - birtherism, for example - I would make it part of my mission to help them learn the truth. That sounds easier than it would be, because people who believe lies are invested in those beliefs, but teachable moments abound in today's world.

You also advocate in the book that in an era where many of us are playing
more active roles as citizen journalists, that the status of journalism
classes in colleges and universities shifts from training professionals to
training all citizens. Should journalism now be a required subject as part
of a newly configured liberal arts education?

The principles and skills of journalism map extremely well to every other endeavor, when you think about it. They're part of being an engaged citizen in a variety of ways.

So, yes, I would make some kind of 21st Century media literacy - call it journalism or whatever - a part of the core curriculum. At several schools, "news literacy" is becoming a required course, though in the ones I've seen the emphasis (for practical reasons) is on consumption of news. The emphasis should be on critical thinking as consumers , but we are not literate unless we are also creators.

Many argue that the key difference between citizen and professional
journalism is the role of fact checking. Yet, your book describes many
different mechanisms on the grassroots level which are designed to check
facts and otherwise insure the integrity of information, while, for many
reasons, the place of fact checking in professional journalism is declining.
So, how long can we frame this as a meaningful distinction? And if this is
not the best way to think of the differences between amateur and
professional journalism, what would be productive ways of understanding
their relationship?

I don't agree that the key difference between citizen and pro journalism is fact-checking. It can be a difference, but as you note, sloppiness is growing in traditional media and lots of bloggers are doing work that I trust a great deal.

The real issue is that we all have to take more responsibility for what we know, and what we say. Certainly we have to trust some sources more than others, but we have to be skeptical in varying degrees of everything, and the more important something is to us the more we need to look deeper. I don't buy a car based on an advertisement, and if I see a story about some alleged medical breakthrough - especially if I am personally a candidate for that treatment - I'll check further.

I'm trying to blur the distinctions between "pro" and "amateur" in the information world rather than highlight them, by improving the practices of both and encouraging audiences to take more responsibility.

There's no question that traditional journalism is in trouble as a business, and that some parts - vital parts - of what these organizations have done will go missing for a time. Consolidation of the traditional media into an ever-smaller number of corporate hands is also a reality.

At the same time, there's never been more quality information about all kinds of things in some profitable niches, such as politics, technology, fashion, sports and a host of other things. Meanwhile, in a host of unprofitable (as media companies) niches, domain experts are telling us what matters. And new techniques for providing information, using APIs and databases among other tools, are leading to an explosion of social news gathering and dissemination.

We're also starting to see some genuine innovation in business models, That's key to what needs to happen.

Are we where we need to be? Not even close. But I have to stress that we're very early in this transition. If it's a baseball game we're in the bottom of the second inning or top of the third.

What practices might emerge around citizen journalism which would increase
its accuracy and reliability?

The main one would be a recognition on the part of the information provider that it's better to be trusted than distrusted - and that following some basic principles (the ones outlines above) are the road map to be trusted.

I stress principles because they don't change much, if at all. The rest is simply tactics, which do change, but if tactics have principles as a foundation, we'll be fine.

Dan Gillmor is founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The project aims to help students understand the startup culture, and ultimately to help them invent their own jobs.

More about Dan at http://dangillmor.com/about

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

On Skepticism, News Literacy, and Transparency: An Interview with Dan Gillmor (Part One)

"We're in an age of information overload, and too much of what we watch, hear and read is mistaken, deceitful and dangerous. Yet you and I can take control and make media serve us -- all of us -- by being active consumers and participants."

This language appears at the top of the website Dan Gillmor, long time advocate for citizen journalism, has constructed around his most recent project, Mediactive, and beautifully captures his particular contribution to the media literacy movement. Gillmor's approach acknowledges the challenges and opportunities the new media landscape presents us in a way which is at once pragmatic and empowering. He certainly knows the risks to democracy posed by waves of misinformation and disinformation being spread across an array of media channels and the challenges of a context where we do not always know who created the media we are consuming. He also recognizes the value of expanding who has access to the channels of communication and thus the democratization which occurs when a broader range of citizens are producing and sharing media with each other. What he demands is that we each take ownership over the information we consume and share with each other, and taking ownership for him starts with skepticism.

Gillmor's book provides a solid foundation for anyone wanting to work with young people or adults about news literacy, one which is as invested in new forms of civic media and citizen journalism as it is concerned about the future of professional news. In this interview, we get a glimpse into Gillmor's current thinking about what it means to be a discerning citizen in the digital age and what the obligations of journalists are to help foster core civic skills and competencies.

Your new book, Mediactive, seeks to encourage "skepticism" about news and information. What do you see as the core virtues of skepticism and how does it differ from cynicism, which some would argue is wide spread in the
current context?

Skepticism is an essential part of being well-informed. It starts us off in the right place: assuming nothing but learning to trust some sources of information more than others.

Skepticism differs from cynicism in one key way: A cynic has essentially given up any hope that an information provider can do a good enough job to ever earn trust. A skeptic recognizes that there will be flaws, but also believes that trust can be earned.

Let's look at agriculture as an analogy for a second. American factory farming is an ecosystem, but highly non-diverse - nearly a "monoculture" in many crops where a single variety overwhelmingly dominates the market.

The news ecosystem has been something of a monoculture in recent years, at least in the newspaper business in most U.S. communities that support daily papers, where typically there's a single surviving one. Broadcast is close to that - just a few entities with government-granted airwaves that no one else can use.

We've come to understand the danger of monocultures. They're inherently unstable, because when they fail they do so with catastrophic results. (Remember Wall Street in 2008.)

A diverse ecosystem, by contrast, isn't as threatened by individual failures, because the parts of the ecosystem are less dominant. If the dominant food variety fails, we can end up with a serious food shortage, or worse. If a few big banks can kill the global economy when they fail, similar forces are at work.

In a diverse and vibrant agricultural system or capitalist economy, the failure of a specific crop varietal or business is tragic mostly for the farmers who planted it or that business. It doesn't cause a wider catastrophe.

That's the kind of news/information ecosystem we need, and which is coming. It's why I'm optimistic.

It's much more a shift of emphasis. I was cautious about quality in my last book, which some folks misconstrued as an uncritical celebration of citizen media. I continue to celebrate the fact that so many more people are creating media, but while the quantity is surging, it would be crazy to declare victory when it comes to quality.

In the book, you advocate what you call "slow news." Can you explain this
concept and why you think the speed of current journalism is partially to
blame for the circulation and perpetuation of myths, rumors, and other
inadequacies?

I've been a fan of the "slow food" movement for some time (even if I don't adhere as well as I should to its ideas). Slow news, a term that was coined in this context by Ethan Zuckerman, is the notion that we should not hurry to assume we know what's actually happening, certainly not when we're getting news at the rapid pace we hear and see it today.

When you combine the amount of information pouring over us with its high velocity, the need to take things a little more slowly - as information providers but especially as info consumers - becomes obvious. And it's not just random blog posts and tweets that can lead us astray.

We need only look to last January's horrific shootings in Tuscon, Arizona, for evidence. NPR and a number of other news outlets (most relying on NPR as a source) reported that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had died in the supermarket parking lot. She had not died, as we learned fairly quickly.

My own approach is to force myself to consider how sensational a report is along with how soon it comes after the alleged event. And the closer it is to the event, the more I put it in a category of "interesting if true" - with emphasis on "if".

I recognize that this goes against human nature to some degree. But if we can persuade ourselves to keep in the back of our minds that sliver of skepticism, we'll be fooled less, at a time when the consequences of being fooled are growing.

Dan Gillmor is founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The project aims to help students understand the startup culture, and ultimately to help them invent their own jobs.

Dan's latest book, Mediactive, aims to encourage a better media supply in part by creating better demand -- to spur people to become active media users, as consumers and participants. His last book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People was the first to explain the rise of citizen media and why it matters. Dan also writes an online column for the Guardian and blogs regularly at Mediactive.com.

Dan has been a co-founder, investor and advisor in a number of media ventures in the for-profit and non-profit worlds. From 1994 until early 2005 he was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont.

More about Dan at http://dangillmor.com/about

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

"Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part Three)

As you describe the many kinds of anxieties, uncertainties, disappointments, and frustrations which surround technology in everyday life, it sounds like many people are unhappy with current configurations and most have harsh judgments of the uses of new media by others in their friends and family, yet few people are breaking out of the patterns you describe. Why not?

I think that we are at a point of inflection. Our lives are enmeshed with our new technologies of connection and ever more so. We now have more experience of what this means for us as individuals, for our relationships with our families, with our parents, with our children, with our friends, with our neighbors. We are coming to a greater understanding of what this means for us as politically, both in our own country and globally.

It has taken time for people to understand where life with this new kind of technology has brought them. Things came to them one gadget at a time. A phone, a navigation system, a way to listen to music, a new way to read books, books "on tape" became something else . . . . and now we catch up to the idea that positioning and navigation translate into surveillance and that using social media as though it were a neutral "utility" ignores important issues about privacy and ownership of personal data.

I don't think that we grownups who "gave" this new communications regime to our children thought it through on several of its critical dimensions. What is intimacy without privacy? What is democracy without privacy? These are not easy questions. But they are starting to be questions that people are thinking about. They begin to have concrete meaning as people come to a new kind of life and have enough experience to take its measure.

On the simplest level, when I talk to parents who realize that it makes them anxious to walk to the corner candystore with their child without taking their cell phone, who cannot go to the playground with their child without bringing their e-mail enabled device, who text in the car while driving with their children in the back seat, it seems clear to me that we are not at a point of stable equilibrium. These people are not happy.

So my qualified optimism about change comes from my sense that the people to whom I have been talking are not happy and are genuinely searching for new ways of living with new technology. I hear more and more about "Internet Sabbaths" during which families disconnect for a day or a weekend. Some families modify the Sabbath and declare two hours a day as off-the-grid family time.

There is no option in which we give up on our new devices. They are our partners in the human adventure. What we have to do is find a way to live with them that is healthier. A digital diet that is better for our health and the health of our families. It took a long time for Americans to learn that a diet high in sugar and processed foods was not healthy. It is going to take a long time for people to develop strategies, individually and collectively, to live with our new technologies in the most healthy way. But the stakes are high and we can get this right.

In the domain of communications technology, one of the things that excites me the most is when technologies of the virtual enhance our experiences of and in the physical real. So, ironically, one of the earliest uses of the Internet as a social media, how MeetUps were used in the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, remains an inspiration to me. People "met" online for a political purpose and then "met up" in the physical world. They did not fool themselves into thinking that political action consisted of just giving money online or visiting a website and leaving a "thumbs up" sign on it. MeetUp continues in this tradition as do many other online groups that organize in the virtual and connect in the physical. We have seen this play out on the most dramatic scale in political life where despots may be challenged by groups brought together by social networking in all of its many forms.

I am often asked this question: "You are so critical of social networking. But what about Egypt" My criticism of social networking boils down to the necessity for us not to redefine the social as what the social network can do. The social encompasses a great deal more. This is not to put the social network down, it is simply to put it in its place. So there is no conflict between the magnificence of what the social network can do for the overthrow of tyrants and how it can get in the way of the development of teenagers who need to engage with each other face to face.

On a personal note, I recently attended a reunion of my fifth grade class. This was the fifth grade class from PS 216 Brooklyn. This fifth grade class would have never had a chance of meeting had it not been for Facebook. One person from the class had been connected with several others and then searched Facebook for a few more names she remembered. Those people remembered a few more names. Within six months, our fifth grade class was on the roof terrace of the Peninsula Hotel in New York. It was a small miracle. It was a gift, a profound gift. Yet in the annals of the social network, my story is banal.

I think it is easy to make distinctions in this domain. A parent who uses social media to keep up with a child living away from home or a child who uses social media to keep up with a parent in a different city - one recognizes and respects these cases when one sees them. My concern is with very different kinds of cases. Parents who cannot tolerate their eight year old child not having a cell phone. Children who have developed a style of relating that I characterize as "I text therefore I am" or "I share therefore I am."

To put it too simply, things have moved from a style of relating where one thinks: "I have a feeling, I want to make a call" to "I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text." In other words, the act of sharing a nascent feeling becomes part of the constitution of the feeling.

The problem is that when we use other people in this way, as needed elements on the path toward our having our feelings, we can move toward a misuse of others. We are not relating to them as others but as what psychologists call "part objects." We are using them as spare parts to support our fragile selves.

This takes the notion of an "other directed" self to a higher power. Our technology supports a culture of narcissism digital-style. It is a kind of self that does not tolerate being alone. And yet, psychology teaches us that if you do not teach your children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. We are forgetting this lesson in our culture of hyper-connection. These kinds of anxieties of connection are different from the "rational responses" to staying in touch to far-flung family and friends.

What both nexting and stalking have in common is the objectification of people who we meet on screens. We do not consider them in their humanity. They have a profound similarity. And this, too, is one of the major themes of Alone Together: we are at a moment of temptation. It is to treat machines as if they were people and to treat people as if they were machines.

In what ways has the persistence of information online forced you to revise earlier arguments about the potential to protean plays with identity? It seems these days, on the internet, everyone knows you are dog and many know what dog food you eat.

Henry, this is beautifully put. My earlier enthusiasm for identity play on the Internet, for what Amy Bruckman called the Internet experience as "identity workshop" relied heavily on the work of psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Erikson wrote about the developmental need for a moratorium or "time out" during adolescence, a kind of play space in which one had a chance to experiment with identity. In the mid-1990s, I wrote about the Internet as a space where anonymity was possible and where one could experiment with aspects of self in a safe environment.

Today, adolescents grow up with a sense of wearing their online selves on their backs "like a turtle" for the rest of their lives. The internet is forever. And anonymity on the Internet seems a dream of another century, another technology. People still use game and virtual world avatars and social network personae for identity play. But the expectation of a parallel, distinct, and anonymous virtual life is no longer a clear starting expectation.

It cannot be. Many of these experiences begin by registering with a credit card.

No matter how much the metaphor of addiction may seem to fit our circumstance, we can ill afford the luxury of using it. It does not serve us well. To end addiction, you have to discard the substance. And we know that we are not going to "get rid" of the Internet. We are not going to "get rid" of social networking. We will not go "cold turkey" or forbid cell phones to our children. Addiction--with its one solution that we know we won't use--makes us feel hopeless, passive.

We will find new paths, but a first step will surely be to not consider ourselves passive victims of a bad substance, but to acknowledge that in our use of networked technology, we have incurred some costs that we don't want to pay. We are not in trouble because of invention but because we think it will solve everything. As we consider all this, we will not find a "solution" or a simple answer. But we cannot assume that the life technology makes easy is how we want to live. There is time to make the corrections.

I wrote Alone Together to mark a time of opportunity. So for example, the essence of my critique of the metaphor of Internet "addiction" is that it closes down conversation, because it suggests a solution that no one is going to take. Addictive substances need to be discarded. We are not going to discard connectivity technology.

We need to form a more empowering partnership with it, one that shows (for example) greater respect for our needs for privacy, solitude, times of non-interruption. In some areas the need for empowerment has reached a state of great urgency, for example, in the area of privacy. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, has declared privacy to be "no longer a social norm."

In Alone Together, I question such assumptions. Privacy may not be convenient for social networking technology, but it seems to me essential to intimacy and democracy. This is one of the conversations I wanted to contribute to. Others include conversations about child development, connectivity, autonomy, and narcissism. I think one of the most important sentences of my book is "If we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely." I want people to talk about this when they give their eight year olds smart phones.

And yet much of the reaction to Alone Together criticizes me as though I have told the world to "unplug." As though I have accused technology of causing a new epidemic of mental illness. And as though I have said that technology is making us less human. I have been portrayed as an anti-technology crusader. Reviewers analyze why someone like me, someone who was once on the cover of Wired magazine, could now, not "like" technology. Commentators talk as though technology and I were dating and I, capriciously, have decided to cheat on him.

This rhetoric points to a serious problem. Technology is not there for us to like or not like. Our job is to shape it to our human purposes. When you say a technology has problems that need to be addressed, people are quick to interpret you as saying that it offers nothing. In Alone Together I write of "necessary conversations" that lie ahead. I wrote the book in the hope of sparking some of them. I'm glad that people are talking. But sometimes it can be hard to know if you are in a conversation if people are shouting.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). Professor Turkle's most recent book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books in January 2011.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

"Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part Two)

In many ways, both of us have been profoundly shaped by our time amongst MIT Students. And you wrote very explicitly about MIT hacker culture in The Second Self. What do you see as the strengths and limitations of MIT as a testing ground for your ideas?

I don't see MIT as a testing ground for my ideas. I would say rather that MIT is the place where my ideas are most challenged because there is a tendency at MIT to want to see human purposes and technological affordances as being one. Technology has purposes; technology is made by people. Technology and people are at one in their purpose.

From my point of view, every technology offers an opportunity for people do ask: "Does this technology serve human purposes?" and this is a wonderful thing because it enables us to ask again what these purposes are. We are well positioned to create technology whose purposes are not in our best interests. And then, it is time to make the corrections.

So, from this point of view, I find that my favorite sentence in my books is "Just because we grew up with the Internet, we think that the Internet is all grown up." From my point of view, this is a distortion of perspective, one that is very common at MIT. From my point of view, we are in early days and it is time to make the corrections.

Perhaps the greatest ongoing difference of opinion I have had with close colleagues at MIT has been about the meaning and prospect of sociable robots. I take a very strong position in Alone Together that nanny-bots and elder-care bots who pretend affection are seductive. And that my research shows that we are vulnerable to them. We are alone with them, yet we feel a faux-intimacy with them.

Indeed, the arc of the book is that with robots, we are alone and feel a new intimacy. In our new mobile connectivity, we are together with each other, and yet experience new solitudes.

I worked on my studies of sociable robots with colleagues at MIT who are some of the most brilliant and creative developers of sociable robotics. We had deeply-felt, serious conversations about the purposes and possibilities of these machines. Some think that their ultimate significance will be profoundly humanistic. I'm listening, but I am not convinced. Conversations with robots about love, sex, children, the arc of a life - in other words, about human meaning - to me, this has no meaning. These are things that the robot has not experienced. These are not appropriate topics for conversations with robots. So, being at MIT has kept me more aware than I would ever have been about the broad differences of opinion in what the purposes of machines can be.

I took you to task, ever so mildly, in my blog a while back about some of your comments about MIT students and multitasking in the Digital Nations documentary. You can see what I said here. I wanted to offer you a chance to respond to my arguments.

I most often run into our disagreement about multi-tasking in the context of parents who say, "Well, is it so bad if I text while my kid is in the kitchen with me; my mom used to do the dishes while I hung around?" Or, "My dad used the read the newspaper when we watched sports on TV; what's the difference between that and my doing my email while I watch sports with my son on Sunday?"

Having interviewed the children who feel abandoned by their parents, who feel almost desperate for parental attention, has led me to do a lot of thinking about the kinds of attention that digital devices require. We don't give them the kind of attention we gave to doodling or to a newspaper or for that matter, to cooking or watching TV. We are drawn in in quite a different way. This is made apparent when I interview teenagers who say things like "When I was little I used to watch Sunday football with my dad and we would talk. Now, he is on his BlackBerry and he is in the 'Zone.' I can't interrupt him." Or, stories, many stories of daughters who come into the kitchen to hang out with their mothers and find them texting and cannot make eye contact with them and who are shushed away. I observe parents and children in the playground with children desperately trying to get their parents attention; parents are absorbed in their devices and cannot "multi-task" attention for their kids.

So, I think that the narratives we use to think about our students multi-tasking in class needs to be informed by the nature of what it is to absorb oneself in digital media. Beyond this, I am persuaded by the research that suggests that when we multi-task, our performance degrades for each task we multi-task, even as we receive a neurochemical reward for our multi-tasking. So, through no fault of our own, our biology has us feeling better and better even as we do worse and worse.

I do think that smitten by what computers enable us to do, we have allowed multi-tasking to seem like a twenty-first century alchemy. I think that classrooms, will soon be in the position of being the places where uni-tasking is taught, places where students learn to concentrate and where, additionally, they learn to cultivate the capacity for solitude.

I think that the two learning skills that are in the most jeopardy in our hyper-connected world are the ability to concentrate on one thing and the capacity for the kind of solitude that replenishes and restores.

I am going to be running a summer-long conversation on this blog about the value of the autobiographical voice in cultural criticism. You have now edited a series of books where people share autobiographical reflections on what you call evocative objects. Can you explain what you mean by evocative objects and what you think is the contributions of these kinds of reflections?

Evocative objects are objects that cause us to reflect on ourselves or on other things. Put otherwise, they give us materials that help us to do this in new and richer ways. Objects can be evocative for many different reasons. Some of these reasons have been widely studied. So, for example, objects that are "betwixt and between" standard categories are classically evocative because they cause us to reflect on the categories themselves. This is why computational objects, standing between mind and not-mind, between the world of the animate and not animate, have been so evocative as objects-to-think-with.

Other evocative objects partake of elements of what Winnicott called "transitional objects." These are objects that blur the boundaries between self and not-self, object that we experience as being in a special, blurred, sometimes fused relation to self. Here, too computational objects have had a special role to play. From the very beginning, people experienced a kind of "mind meld" when using software, saying things such as "When I use Microsoft Word I see my ideas form someplace between my mind and the screen." Now, in talking about always-on-them digital devices, there is an ever greater sense of the device being part of the body.

Evocative objects provide a special window onto life experience, one that is grounded and cannot avoid issues of depth psychology. Science studies, sociology, anthropology have each in their own way welcomed the study of objects but have been hostile to depth psychology. When one pays careful attention to evocative objects, one "hears" psychodynamic issues, one "hears" family history, one "hears" a close attention to personal narrative and the texture of a life in all of its peculiarity and deeply woven interconnections with others. In science studies, studying objects and life narrative has the additional virtue of making the point, which seems to need making for every new generation of students, that technologies are not "just" tools, that our relationships with objects are profoundly interconnected to how we make meaning out of lives and think through who we are as people.

There are of course important differences in how people who grew up with a given technology appropriate it in contrast to those who adopted it in adulthood. But what most fascinates me these days are common vulnerabilities of grownups and younger people, both in the area of communications technology and in the area of sociable robotics. I did many interviews with people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who are willing to entertain the idea of a robot that might love them, care for them. But certainly, the sensibility of the "robotic moment," the idea that we are ready for robots that might care for us is most apparent among the young.

Their science fiction and imaginative toy and game worlds suggest to them that robots may soon be in a position to teach people how to love; they have a way of thinking about the nature of aliveness that considers objects with a new pragmatism. That is, previous generations talked about computational objects as "sort of alive" or "kind of alive." This new generation talks of computational objects as "alive enough" to do certain jobs. Robots are thus considered "alive enough" for the job of care and companionship, at the limit, alive for affection.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). Professor Turkle's most recent book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books in January 2011.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Karen Tongson, Jayna Brown, and Geraldine Bloustien (Part One)

Earworms, Touchstones, Inversions
Karen Tongson

I've got a reason, girl, and it's Immanuel Kant's--and I like it -Scritti Politti, "Boom! There She Was"

I'm convinced the only reason I ever cracked open a copy of Kant's Critique of Judgment--the "Great Books" edition--is that Green Gartside, the helium-voiced frontman of the 80s British pop band, Scritti Politti, suggestively whispered this remark through my Walkman when I was 13 years old. I hadn't even realized then that several years prior, Scritti Politti also recorded a single called "Jacques Derrida," in which the andro-voiced Green declares: "I'm in love with Zhack Derr-eee-dah/Read a page and I know what I need to/Take apart my baby's heart..."

I open with Scritti Politti not simply to provide some texture to the pop music fandom that manifests in my work, but also because, in many respects, Scritti Politti's irreverent and cheeky approach to intellectual life offered a nascent template for what evolved into my own improvisational practice of acafandom from middle school onwards. Rather than learning to take apart "my baby's heart," I was offered the tools to understand my own through books, music and media-in-the-making.

Though I'd like to think my intellectual curiosity was ignited by more than the dreamy, synth-laden British pop that scooted across the pond all the way into Riverside, California's chain record stores (vast and enticing to a kid recently immigrated from the Philippines), so much of what I've devoted my life to reading, analyzing, writing about, and indeed loving, has been informed by snippets of New Romantic, post-punk songs that name-check everyone from Voltaire to Keats and Yeats. It seems no accident, then, that I began graduate school as a Romanticist, before transitioning into Victorian studies, and finally (though I'd like to hope intellectual incarnations are never "final") into contemporary queer cultural studies. The latter became a means to make sense of the circuits of affect and encounter that made my intellectual and textual promiscuity possible. The concept of textual promiscuity (which I wrote about in my dissertation on Victorian non-fiction prose), would seem to run counter to certain notions of fandom that, some may argue, overlap with institutional desires for specialization: the sense of "loyalty and devotion" to an object or set of objects and subjects that constitute expertise in a particular genre, era or area.

And yet, I'd like my contribution to our broader conversation about acafandom to rethink the value of errant desires: wayward passions eliciting accusations on a lifetime of schoolyards, from junior high to the university, that one is a "wannabe." An even baser version of a dilettante. (Case in point: though I was known for being a "Duranie" in the seventh grade, a musically tribalized "metal boy" called me a "wannabe," because I expressed a fondness for Ozzie Osborne's "Bark at the Moon" video).

The figure who ultimately inspired me to consider "textual promiscuity" more seriously was, strangely enough, the eminent Victorian (and arguably, Britain's first "cultural studies" scholar), Matthew Arnold. In "The Study of Poetry," Arnold suggests we store lines of poetry in our memory and use them as "touchstones" to assess the potential "greatness" of other works. The type of critical evaluation encouraged by the touchstone is one of comparative efficiency. Arnold's touchstones are what we might now call earworms: catchy expressions and memorable snippets of text that "lodge" themselves in the mind (to use Arnold's phrasing). These unforgettable lines not only have a good hook, but they've been preordained for excellence depending on who has produced them.

According to Arnold, touchstones come from the "great masters" (casually assembled by Arnold himself) and are thus, worthy of comparative application. Strikingly, a resemblance between the touchstone and the object under scrutiny is not a prerequisite for excellence. In fact, dissimilarity and incongruity are among the benefits of juxtaposition afforded by this handy evaluative tool that the critic carries with her in her intellectual kit. Arnold's touchstones are actually quite random and subjective--his own special set of "fanboy faves." A passing survey of Arnold's touchstones in "The Study of Poetry" takes us through sources as predictable as Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, but he also extols lesser-known figures like Brunetto Latini and Christian of Troyes.

The genealogy ascribed to Arnold's method for measuring poetic works by comparing them to "expressions of the great masters" is often construed as an elitist one for obvious reasons. Arnold himself sought to dignify English poetry by employing touchstones from classical and continental poetry as standards. And yet the very notion of "lines stuck in the head" has always, for me, carried the potential of something more reparative (to invoke Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on a practice of reading that contains within it a spirit of intellectual and affective compromise).

Quite obviously, my tendency to use random song lyrics and other earworms from a migrant musical past as the foundation for my own critical labors, especially in my first book, Relocations, bears some resemblance to the touchstone in "The Study of Poetry," albeit in the crassest sense. Or maybe we should just accept the fact that touchstones have always been conceptually crass; have always had to do with the vicissitudes of affective attachment, and the cultural contexts that make these attachments congeal in ways both problematic and un. It's a simple point, I realize, that has been repeated (perhaps some may say ad nauseum) within the frameworks of cultural studies, queer studies, feminist studies, critical ethnic studies and other intellectual orientations that have openly parried with the personal. Nevertheless, I think it bears repeating, so that we may reconsider the materials that might comprise the "fannish" archive: one more expansive and historically rangy than we allow ourselves to imagine.

When I taught my first course on fan studies as an English graduate student, I focused not only on the contemporary materials more readily associated with "fan cultures," but also asked my students to reconsider Ruskin's writings on Turner, Nietzsche's writings on Wagner, and Thomas Carlyle's "Heroes" lectures as fannish texts. Though some may argue such comparisons produce anachronisms (despite the fact that the etymology for "fan" affords such reconsiderations), I believed it was crucial then, and remains crucial now, that we take a longer view on critical enthusiasms.

Though trained within a discipline that Arnoldian concepts like the touchstone and "critical disinterestedness" made possible, I'd like to imagine my own work, and the work performed by others who identify with the practices of aca-fandom, as a mutation of this and other disciplinary lineages. The traffic needn't always be scaled vertically between high and low, but rather imagined sideways (to invoke Katherine Bond Stockton's work), askew, and even inverted: the kinds of inversion that lead to Kant via Scritti Politti, or to The Smiths via a precocious passion for Keats, Yeats and Wilde.

Monster Paws Up! Loving the Stuff You Love
Jayna Brown

I've never thought of myself as a fan. In fact, I always thought of fandom as the inability to think creatively for the self, as being centrally about consumption. Despite my focus on popular culture in my work, when I thought of fans my thinking became strangely Frankfurt School. Surely, that kind of blind fervor was about the commodification of affective response, the symptom of a modernity that created dependency on the cultural industry for permission to have any emotion or passions. Making pleasure dependent on purchase was canalizing creativity.

Yet the worlds that interest me and make me passionate in my own work are those very worlds at the nexus of commodification and 'organic' collective creativity, and what is fascinating to me is how impossible and unnecessary it is to draw the line between the two in the ephemeral, tricky world of popular music and dance. My training in cultural studies taught me to ask certain questions of expressive forms. What is politically at stake? How is it reflective of the specific historical conjuncture in which it was produced? These questions, for me, are a way of 'loving' the stuff I love--1930's musicals, chorus girls, Detroit Techno, Chicago House, Missy Elliott and beyond.

But the center of all this activity for me has been the disco, the club, where the concept of audience and producer blur, where participation is what makes the moment happen and anonymity is charismatic. It is about the space that the collective creates together and fills with an ecstatic state of possibility. Where the body is claimed outside of the wage relation, outside of the demands of work, for another kind of labor. "You better work!" was a phrase from the floor in my time.

Participating in this forum is a fantastic way for me to examine my own investments, and the shifting ground of what shakes me up. It may sound cliché, but I am now inspired by the movements of the next generation now rising up to claim the dance floor. Now, I am heavily invested in watching my fourteen-year-old nephew grow up. From infancy he has been a true performer, with an acute sense of fashion and pose. Over the years I have seen him create some of the wildest costumes: complete with heels, headgear and wigs, choreographing entire shows. He is one of a new generation giving meaning to the term 'gender non conformity' which makes the term drag queen, or cross dresser, entirely insufficient. He quite consciously blurs the lines, is fluid in his presentation, aware of the performativity of all gender assignment. Ahead of his years, he also insists on a fluidity of sexual preference.

What I also admire in him is his precocious use of influences, as he consciously draws on movements and artists. At three it was Hello Kitty and Powerpuff Girls; at eight it was Japanese anime and Tim Burton; now, at almost fifteen, drawing on David Bowie, the Runaways and Andy Warhol, he is destined for great things. And he can do cartwheels in seven-inch heels!

I am a fan.

And he, in turn, has turned into a great, even professional fan of Lady Gaga. "There is a difference between monsters and little monsters," he tells me. "Monsters are like me, we've been fans for a long time." I was at first dismayed to hear this, thinking it surely meant he was sublimating his own creative impulse into worship and mimicry. When I asked him, "isn't being a fan just about copying your idols?" "No!" he replied, and then patiently explained it to me. "It is a culture, a movement," he said.

I think she is the first artist to come up with a name for her fans. I think that gave them an identity. But they are not copying her. They are expressing themselves. Her message is that we always have the power to rebirth ourselves. She feeds off our ideas and we feed off hers. We call her mother monster. I admire her because she writes all her own music, co-produces and sings live. I do dance to her songs, and use her choreography, but one of the reasons I copy her is that I am just starting out and most people start out copying others in cover bands and stuff. She is just a stepping-stone in my development. I know there will be others. But no other artist has made me cry, or feel so good about myself.

So now I can see my nephew, monster paws up in eight-inch heeled orange boots, harnessing his own cultural moment and letting it feed him as he develops. If Gaga sets the precedent for an openness to avant garde as well as hyper pop art and the places they intersect, I actually can't think of a better influence on a young gender non conforming performance artist like my nephew.

As cultural critics we often spend time raising awareness and alarm over the ways in which art and popular culture have participated in producing regimes of oppression. So what I take acafan studies to mean for me is the chance to develop a language to talk about the kinds of cultural formations where we catch a glimpse of a life of pleasure and ease, where we find and feel, as the utopian critic Ernst Bloch would have it, traces of anticipatory illumination. These traces he argues, can be found in the most commercial, "vestigial and contaminated" of sources--lipstick, fashion, advertisements all can harness dreamscapes, even, to quote Tom Moylan, "recoverable traces of radical longing." I still balk a bit at this idea, when faced with talentless fetish symbols produced in Hollywood, until I remember it is what people do with such products that matters. Here, there are worlds of possibility.

Geraldine (Gerry) Bloustien:
I don't feel the term acafan really resonated with me as something particularly different from what I have always done and considered as a researcher. My sense of an intersectional identity which incorporates both my European / Jewish migrant cultural background (arriving as a female adult in Australia) together with my education and training as an educator and then as an Anthropologist has made me always very aware and sensitive to occupying / embodying several worlds and cultures all at the same time.

Being aware of this complex layering of identities - as lived, performed, constructed, and embodied - does indeed shape what I see and what I study. I always thought that one's cultural background and experiences are the key to what people felt inclined, or even urged to investigate.

This was certainly true in my case. Moving from a culture (in the UK) where I felt physically, psychologically and emotionally 'at home' to a world where suddenly I was identified and addressed as coming from somewhere else, brought about a severe case of culture shock. I quickly learnt to perform and be both simultaneously within and without two cultures and became fascinated by the ways in which all cultures express and respond to this sense of belonging and longing and I found this resonated with my experience as a fan - in particular genres of music and particularly TV programs that I became obsessed with (yes I can be an obsessive fan!).

For example, I have always loved the very physical way people engage with music. That was my first experience of acafandom, some 20 or more years ago, I think, seeing my own response to music in others and wanting to explore this further. I also wanted to tease out the ways in which the lines between consumer, user and creator were blurred in so much of what I saw, recognised, identified with in my engagement with popular culture - including the way I also enjoyed, immersed myself and wanted to share and discuss my enjoyment in, and knowledge of, my particular 'scenes' of popular culture.

I think I have always been more interested in the idea of fandom, though - people rather than the various texts and that is because I am (again as an Anthropologist) motivated primarily by the phenomenon and multiplicity of lived experiences.

As an academic (an acafan?) it also led me to look for a type of methodology that encouraged and facilitated participation and reciprocity; I wasn't looking for critical distance! I wanted to find a way of discussing my findings through a multi-vocal, dialogic, emotive narrative and was very impressed and influenced by Michael Taussig (1993) and Marcus and Fischer (1996) in approach and style. This also meant that I wanted to ensure that the non-academics of my study were collaborators, co-researchers and not just respondents.

Of course, increasingly this means we (non academics and academics) are sharing a language, a way of talking about our common interests and shared passions. I think that researching and writing about an area in which one is passionately engaged means one cannot stand outside and look in. You are already inside the culture, the experiential community, a participant observer, and an embedded member of the culture or the scene that one is studying. Everyday life, leisure, work friendship groups blur all the time (Wow! Especially with social networking sites like Facebook, now that I come to think about it. Then issues of privacy and boundaries do become an issue).

Does such an approach and such a field of scholarship get in the way of the critical distance expected of serious scholarship? Hmm! I don't believe so because firstly, I don't believe it is possible to be completely critically distant. Secondly, I believe that what one is actually studying is the meeting of cultures. The area of research is never static and it is not immune from our involvement as both fans and researchers within it.

I am, however, constantly struggling to explain and justify my approach, methodologies and even my particular interests in a field of study to colleagues from other disciplines (sometimes while in the middle of collaborative research! Assumptions sometimes become unravelled in the field). I faced this in my recent project and book (Youth, Music and Creative cultures: Playing for Life 2011) and spent sometime discussing this and writing about it there.

So being an acafan for me goes beyond how I see myself now as engaged in areas of scholarship and leisure communities. I suspect the provocations outlined in this task actually underpin most areas of scholarship for most people but they are issues that are often not acknowledged or made overt. This leads me to start thinking again about the second provocation - the question of Acafan as a concept. I think the acafan concept owes much to earlier debates about the nature of "subjective criticism" and also subjective writing; it has been influenced by 'the poetic turn' in Anthropology too. It has given the scholar 'permission' and legitimacy to be engaged with areas that she loves, especially in areas of popular culture, many of which still seem to be deemed 'low brow', trivial and inconsequential.

That leads me to one other aspect before I stop for breath. The particular fields in which I am engaged as a fan do not seem to be considered equal. I have no difficulty being recognised within my own or other institutions, or obtain funding etc. for my research into popular music or film. But my work on (and love of) Buffy or other popular TV programs or my work in 3D virtual worlds, is a totally another matter. So for example, despite there being over 50 different disciplines world wide that have used ideas in the Buffyverse, my research and writing in this field is trivialised and I find in this work I often am expected to defend my own fascination with, involvement in, and the rigour of, the scholarship in this field through established (maybe even inappropriate?) hierarchies of literature.

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press), is forthcoming in August 2011. She is co-series editor for Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins (NYU Press), and is also co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) with Gustavus Stadler.

Jayna Brown is Associate Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Riverside. Her book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern was published by Duke University Press in 2008 and has won awards. Her current projects focus on utopias and race in speculative fiction and global pop music and black women and postpunk music in Britain.

Geraldine Bloustien is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Hawke Research Centre, Division of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of South Australia (UniSA). She has published extensively and internationally in the areas of cultural identities, youth cultures and on the complexity of effectively using participatory visual ethnography. Her book publications include Girl Making: A Cross Cultural Ethnography of Growing Up Female (Berghahn 2003), Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity (Ashgate 2008) and Youth, Music and Creative Cultures: Playing for life (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2011).. Her recent research explores the intersections of community media, music, health and Web 2.0 technologies.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Studying Creativity in the Age of Web 2.0: An interview with David Gauntlett (Part Three)

In talking about Star Wars Uncut, you touch on an issue very important to my own work - can we build creativity onto borrowed materials? Does it matter if those raw materials are physical objects (recycling of trash or driftwood, say, as the basis of new artworks or fabric scraps as the basis for quilting) or media content (as in many forms of fan productivity)? How would you situate fan culture within the larger logic of DIY Media?

Ah, this is interesting - this is where I think my priorities might be a bit different to yours, Henry, perhaps. Of course there's lots of lovely, amazing stuff out there made by fans. I talk about Star Wars Uncut in the book as one of the things that led me to reflect that the kind of tangible joyfulness involved in the process of creativity, which you can get a sense of in its outputs, is more important than the empirical originality of the outputs. Star Wars Uncut is a project by fans to remake Star Wars in 15-second chunks. There's a huge amount of inventiveness on display in the many different kinds of animation and recreation which fans have used to produce this amazing patchwork, and it's the funny little homemade details that make it especially touching.

Star Wars Uncut "The Escape" from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

But the thing that I don't like about the emphasis on 'fans' as the new generation of creators is that they are inevitably positioned as, to some extent, subservient to the producers of the big, mainstream (or at least industrial or professional) media thing or things that they are fans of.

So on the one hand, the fans do very clever, very creative things within their fan practice. But at the same time, they are not the 'ultimate' creators, but instead take their inspiration from the successful professional media producers who are, in this sense, the 'ultimate' creators. So it seems a bit of an odd emphasis to me. There's so much wholly original stuff out there in the DIY/online creative world, and I think the focus on 'fans' may tend to feed the egos of professional media producers who feel they are the rightful creators of original content - the kind of authentic creative work that ordinary mortals could not make and which such mortals could, at best, only be 'fans' of. Do you know what I mean? As advocates of a new, alternative participatory culture, I don't think we should always pick examples that are derivatives of, or in some way dependent upon, the offerings of the traditional established media.

Henry Jenkins: We may have to agree to disagree on some of this. Yes, fans are not the only form of participatory culture out there and part of what I love about this book is that you really engage with a broader array of DIY practices. For me, participatory culture would refer to any form of cultural practice which is open to a broad range of participants who have access to the means of cultural production and circulation. My own work has focused primarily on fans because this is a form of cultural production I have been tracing -- and engaging with -- for more than thirty years, but in my forthcoming book, Spreadable Media, we deal with a much wider array of participatory culture communities. Sites like YouTube and Flickr and Etsey have certainly increased the visibility of these other sites of grassroots production. Fans interest me because they inhabit the intersection between the old media culture and the new and thus they illustrate the contradictions of a moment of media in transition. But I am not saying that they are more creative than any of a range of other communities who are similarly transitioning from the pre-digital to the digital.

As critics, we may be interested in these objects from many different vantage points. A media scholar might be interested in what the fan work says about the program to which it responds, but I might also be interested in the relations between the fans and leave the commercial producer out of the equation altogether. I might, for example, studying how different DIY communities pass along craft and knowledge from more experienced to newbie participants, and in that study, the sources of the raw materials are going to be less important to my analysis than the sources of the knowledge being exchanged between participants. But in terms of whether the participants are being "creative" or not, these differences in source materials are not that important to me.

David Gauntlett: Yes, you're right of course - everything builds on some things that have come before, whether it is ways of using materials, or styles and genres of creative work, or the elements and practices of storytelling. I certainly did not mean to suggest that fans who make stuff within an already-existing narrative are 'less creative' than other makers. It was just that it means that the grand narratives, or the powers to create original story universes, remain in the hands of traditional media. But no matter. As you say, creative fans are just as interesting as creative anybody, and working at the 'intersection' between old and new media can be especially revealing.

I was struck by the passage you quote from Ivan Illich: "A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenges known." It struck me that you could swap out "educational system" with "communication system" and come up with a pretty good definition of what I and others call participatory culture. By these criteria, how would we evaluate the current state of web culture?

I agree, it's a good aspirational definition of participatory culture, or for the Web in general. We are not there yet, but the potential is still there. Some commentators write as though the Web has already been entirely taken over by the big commercial companies, such as Google, or that Web 2.0 has been entirely absorbed by them as a profit machine. I would really hate for that to happen. But to act like it has already happened is, in a way, giving up, I think; and reveals a lack of awareness of what's really going on.

Well basically I argue that those people who are only interested in saying that Web 2.0 is about the exploitation of free labour are making a category error, and using an exclusively economic lens where that actually isn't the best way of understanding what's happening. Someone who makes an original music video, say, to share with their friends, and with anyone else who wants to take a look, and who chooses to do so by putting it on YouTube, a convenient and free platform, is hardly being 'exploited' in the way we would normally use the term in a Marxist analysis of labour. Obviously those services do seek to make profit from the advertising revenue, and from the value of the user data that they capture, on the back of stuff provided for free by users. But users themselves see it as a decent bargain - the site hosts your material for free, and enables you to engage with a community around it, and in return it gets to keep that associated revenue. In most cases, the value associated with any particular video or other piece of content will be very small, and it is only when it is multiplied by millions of other bits of content that it becomes a viable business.

These arguments create confusion about what Web 2.0 is about. A really great, archetypal example of Web 2.0 in action would be if there were an encyclopedia which was entirely written by users around the world, writing about the things that interest and engage them, and collaboratively editing it to make it get better and better. And it would be owned and run by a non-profit foundation. What an outrageous and unlikely idea! But that already happens, of course, and it's called Wikipedia.

Another archetypal example of Web 2.0 in action would be if an international consortium of organisations - such as, say, a collaboration between the Library of Congress, and the British Library, and perhaps the BBC, and some of the great European museums or cultural institutions - would set up and support, but not interfere with, a non-commercial platform for creativity, along the lines of YouTube, where people could share their creative works, comment and rate the work of others, and form supportive groups and communities of practice. That one hasn't happened yet, but there's no reason why it couldn't.

Web 2.0, or participatory culture, is not inherently commercial, and it might be healthier and more reliable in a non-commercial environment. One of the best things about non-commercial Web 2.0 services is that they make those comments about 'exploitation of labour' immediately redundant. The critics of the commercial services are not entirely wrong, but they are missing the most important thing that's going on.

Well, unsurprisingly, I favour educational processes which are about students exploring for themselves, asking questions, being curious, tinkering, and learning through making things. One inevitably thinks of that point made by Ken Robinson, in his very popular TED talk online, that we are meant to be preparing young people for the future but not one of us knows what that future will look like. What we do know is that people need to have powerful 'learning muscles', as Guy Claxton has put it, which means that they need to be creative, and questioning, and they need to be resilient - which means that when things go wrong then they are not crushed by this event, but instead know that things going wrong is a normal part of life and something which you can learn from. As educators we should model learning - in other words, show that we ourselves are learning all the time and are engaged in any number of 'learning projects' at once.

One thing I have been learning recently myself is how to make a Kindle book. Amazon enables authors to self-publish Kindle books, but the process is not quite as easy as you might expect, if you want to do it properly. For instance, to make a logical table of contents file I had to learn some XML for the first time. I became proficient in HTML fifteen years ago when you had to make Web sites by hand using Notepad, the standard function-free text editor in Windows. But I've shied away from trying to master XML - until this new challenge came along. I like new platforms for self-expression in general, and this is one I wanted to crack. Kindle books aren't restricted to people who own Kindle devices these days - there are free Kindle readers for iPhone and Android phones, iPad, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and probably soon for your toaster.

This looks like a complete aside, but actually is relevant because I have pieces on both the content of what I think media and communications studies should be about, and also on how we should try to orchestrate learning about it (you see I avoided saying 'teaching' there), in my new Kindle book which I am publishing in August 2011. It's called Media Studies 2.0, and Other Battles around the Future of Media Research, and pulls together some previously published but uncollected writings, and some new stuff.
Thank you very much indeed, Henry, for inviting me onto your blog to be interviewed. It's an honour to be here and I have really enjoyed it.

Links:
• Making is Connecting: The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, site for the new book (May 2011) with extracts and videos
• Media Studies 2.0, and Other Battles around the Future of Media Research, new short Kindle book (August 2011):
Amazon USA: I ($7.90)
Amazon UK: (£4.80)

David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK. His teaching and research concerns people's use of media in their everyday lives, with a particular focus on creative uses of digital media. He is the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007) and Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011). He has made several popular YouTube videos, and produces the website about media and identities, Theory.org.uk. He has conducted collaborative research with a number of the world's leading creative organisations, including the BBC, Lego, and Tate.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Studying Creativity in the Age of Web 2.0: An interview with David Gauntlett (Part Two)

One of the real revelations in the book for many readers will be in how directly the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris speak to contemporary issues in the Web 2.0 era. What do you see as the key value of re-examining their work now? What do you see as the most important continuities and discontinuities between their conception of craft and contemporary DIY culture?

I'm glad you liked that part. Thank you. I just thought it was very striking that these English Victorian critics, whose philosophy inspired the Arts and Crafts movement, who were writing 120-160 years ago, seemed to really chime with the spirit of Web 2.0, or at least the best part of it. By which I mean: fostering and encouraging everyday creativity, and giving people tools which enable them to share, communicate, and connect. And seeing the importance of things being made by everyday, non-professional people - and the power of making, in itself - rather than us all being mere consumers of stuff made by other people. That's what Ruskin and Morris's most exciting writings are all about.

And, of course, I like making these connections between things that at first look very different. What, for instance, could medieval cathedrals have to teach us about the ecology of YouTube? Well: John Ruskin was passionate about the gargoyles that you find on medieval cathedrals. They are often quite quirky and ugly, and rather roughly-done - not at all like 'fine art' - but that's precisely why Ruskin cherishes them: because you can see in them the lively spirit of a creative human being. And you can sense the presence of the person who spent time making it.

Then if you carry that way of seeing over to YouTube: there again you have quite a lot of quirky things, often roughly-done, and not like the kind of professional stuff you would see on TV; but that is what makes them so special, and exciting, because what you see there is people making things, and sharing them with others, just because they want to. They've got something they want to communicate. You can often sense that personal presence, and enthusiasm. So Ruskin's passion for one kind of craft really helped me to build an argument about the importance of another.

Then if you look at what William Morris did with Ruskin's ideas - Morris was more concerned with societies and communities than Ruskin, and he added a vision of communities connected through the things that they make: people filling their lives with the fruits of their own creative labour. It was especially important to him that people should be creators, not (only) consumers.

Morris felt you had to make things to understand them fully, which is part of the Make magazine positive-hacker ethos that is enjoying a revival today. Morris was a maker himself, and mastered a dazzling number of craft and construction techniques. So he was both a writer and a maker, but these were not two separate tracks in his life; rather, his writings and the things he made can be seen as two sides of the same project: 'visionary accounts of an ideal world'.

In ways that seem very relevant today, Morris argued that the route to pleasure and fulfilment was through the collection and dissemination of knowledge; communication between people; and creating and sharing expressive material. That's like a manifesto for Web 2.0 right there. So I think the continuities between these old arguments and our present situation are strong; and the discontinuities are the things that put us in a stronger position today, because today we have much wider access to tools to make and share things, which were denied to non-elite people in the past. Not everyone, of course, has access or the necessary skills, and the tools are often owned by big powerful companies, as we will discuss below; it's not perfect.

But I hope these ideas from Ruskin and Morris are therefore shown not to be just some kind of nostalgia, which just shines a little light upon our present situation; rather, they offer very relevant manifestos for what we should be doing today.

You write at several places about the "messiness" of everyday creativity as in part a virtue and not a flaw - the point which begins with Ruskin's gargoyles. Yet, our classic notions of crafts include the "value of a job well done." How might we reconcile these two claims about craft?

Well I'm less concerned about the approach to craft which is about doing the same thing repeatedly until you can achieve a very high level of 'polish'. But I think a lot of makers are very concerned to make something to the best of their ability. And I think the 'value of a job well done' can refer to how well something connects with others, or how effectively it communicates a message or an idea. The 'value of a job well done' can be about the self-esteem that comes from having made something which has touched someone else. So you could have something quite 'messy' which is still very successful in this other sense.

Some of your examples come from very traditional kinds of craft production, such as weaving, stitching, etc. How has the introduction of new media changed the practices of such communities? What has remained the same?

Craft people have taken to the Web with great enthusiasm. The essence of what they do often remains unchanged, but today they talk more, share more, and find it much easier to find other people who share their passions. So they get more feedback, encouragement, and inspiration. Often in the past, individuals had to be quite resilient to stick with their craft or maker interests, because their families and friends tended not to understand or be very sympathetic to their strange 'hobby'. Being able to find others who share their interests, online, has been an extraordinary source of support and encouragement for many of these people.

David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK. His teaching and research concerns people's use of media in their everyday lives, with a particular focus on creative uses of digital media. He is the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007) and Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011). He has made several popular YouTube videos, and produces the website about media and identities, Theory.org.uk. He has conducted collaborative research with a number of the world's leading creative organisations, including the BBC, Lego, and Tate.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Studying Creativity in the Age of Web 2.0: An Interview with David Gauntlett

The expansion of participatory culture and its relationship to the emergence of Web 2.0 is a theme which has run through my recent work, but it is also a key concern for researchers thinking about everyday creativity in all of its historical and contemporary forms. Over his past several books, British scholars David Gauntlett has been asking researchers to think more deeply about the nature of "creativity" and its place in our everyday lives. Gauntlett's exploration is central to his most recent book, Making is Connecting:The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and Knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, which I read recently with a sense of encountering a kindred spirit with whom one can have productive disagreements (as surface later in this exchange) and from whom one can draw core insights.

Part of the richness of this book is its expansion well beyond the sphere of things digital to place grassroots creativity and DIY tinkering in a larger historical and philosophical context, one which will be valuable in helping to further clarify the core point that Web 2.0 is simply one model for thinking about what happens when more people have the capacity to produce and circulate media and other cultural materials.

Gauntlett's accessible and engaging writing is a gift, all the more so given the urgency of his message. All of the above come through loud and clear in this interview, which I will run over the next few installments of my blog.

Let's start with something very basic - the title of your book, Making Is Connecting. What do you mean by making? By connecting? What do you see as the relationship between the two in an era of networked computing?

Well, I'm using these words in their recognised senses - I don't believe in making up new words, or jargon, for things that can be expressed simply. So, by 'making' I simply mean people making things. This can be with new technologies, or ancient ones, and can be on the internet, or offline. So it refers to James knitting a scarf, Amira writing a poem, Kelly producing a blog, Marvin taking photographs, Michelle making a YouTube video, Jermaine doing a drawing, Natasha coding a videogame, or hundreds of other examples like that.

And 'connecting' means social connections - people starting conversations, sharing reviews, providing information, or making friends. But also it refers, for me, to a connectedness with the world which we live in. So I say 'making is connecting' because you put together ideas and materials to make something new; because creativity often includes a social dimension, connecting you with other people; and because I think that through making things, you feel more of a participant in the world, and you feel more a part of it, more embedded - because you are contributing, not just consuming, so you're more actively engaged with the world, and so, more connected.

I think this is almost always the case, regardless of what technology is being used, and was the case for centuries before we had a global wired network. But in an era of networked computing, which you mentioned, I think that these benefits are amplified, and many new opportunities and connections are enabled. Creativity didn't begin with the internet - far from it. But in an obvious and well-known way, the internet enables people to connect with others who share their interests, regardless of where they live in the world - whereas previously, geography, and the practical difficulties of finding people, made it far more difficult to have conversations with others who shared niche interests.

Having easy access to people who share their passions means that individuals can be inspired by each other's work and ideas - which can lead to a positive spiral of people doing better and better things and inspiring more and more activity by others. This could happen before the internet, in clubs and societies, but it would tend to be slower, and the inspiring inputs would most likely be fewer, and less diverse.

Well I never wanted to get bogged down in arguments over a 'definition' of creativity. But in Making is Connecting I do put forward a new definition, basically to provoke a conversation around how we think about creativity, and to shake up the consensus which seemed to have formed which casually accepts and cites the definition put forward by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about 15 years ago. That definition emphasises that creativity is some kind of novel contribution or innovation which makes a visible difference within a domain of expertise, or in the wider culture. So it's a definition of creativity which requires us to focus on the outputs of a creative process; and then it actually goes further, and says that those outputs don't really count for anything unless they are recognised and embraced by a significant or influential audience.

Now, Csikszentmihalyi developed this definition for a particular purpose, for use in his sociological study of the circumstances which enable creative acts to be recognised and to flourish. So it's fine for his own purposes, and he clearly didn't mean any harm. But now, because Csikszentmihalyi is a well-respected expert in more than one area, widely cited in academic papers and featuring strongly in Google searches in this area, his definition pops up in all kinds of other contexts where someone wants a definition of creativity to put into their talk, article, or presentation.

So the unintended consequence is that creativity is increasingly likely to be understood, these days, as the generation of innovative products which become popular, or at least widely recognised. Now, that is one kind of creativity, but as a definition it seems much too narrow.

One problem is that it runs counter to our common-sense understanding of 'creativity', because it is far too demanding. I'm sure you can think of quite a few friends or colleagues whom you would say were 'very creative' - and you would really mean it - and yet they have not invented a new process which has revolutionised the field of architecture, and have not written a novel which sold over a million copies, nor done anything else which goes over the very high bar set by Csikszentmihalyi. But you still really believe that these are creative individuals. So that's one difficulty.

Another problem is that this now-standard definition is focused on outputs. Indeed, you can only assess creativity in this way by looking at the outputs of a creative process. I wanted to shift the conversation about creativity so it was more about the process, not the outcomes. But I also thought it was weird that this Csikszentmihalyi perspective on creativity meant that you literally could not say if something was creative or not without consulting an external system of experts or publications. Someone might show you an amazing work of art, or an invention, or a new way to do something, and you might exclaim 'oh that's very creative!', but in strict Csikszentmihalyi terms that would be inaccurate, unless this thing had already become influential or successful.

I talk about all these issues at some length in the book. But I arrive at a definition which emphasises the process of creativity, rather than outcomes, and prioritises feelings rather than levels of external success. It's a bit long. It says:

Everyday creativity refers to a process which brings together at least one active human mind, and the material or digital world, in the activity of making something. The activity has not been done in this way by this person (or these people) before. The process may arouse various emotions, such as excitement and frustration, but most especially a feeling of joy. When witnessing and appreciating the output, people may sense the presence of the maker, and recognise those feelings.

I also did a shorter one, trying to make it a single sentence:

Everyday creativity refers to a process which brings together at least one active human mind, and the material or digital world, in the activity of making something which is novel in that context, and is a process which evokes a feeling of joy.

This shorter definition is OK, although for the sake of brevity it misses out some bits that I thought were quite important. But in both cases you can see I have emphasised emotion - even the word 'joy', which comes through strongly in interviews with makers. They are not filled with joy all the time of course - creative work is often experienced as hard and challenging - but you get moments of pride and accomplishment which make it all worthwhile.

Understanding creativity is perhaps no more or less important today than at any other time. But we do see, I think, an explosion of visible, accessible, shareable creativity online, which it is interesting and important to study and understand, and which is so diverse, and done by people just because they want to, that I wanted us to have a working definition of creativity which embraced the key dimensions of this work - rather than sniffily dismissing it because it had not yet won awards, gone global, or made an auditable impact.

Well as you can tell, I'm not so bothered about an understanding of creativity which can be counted or quantified. So it's a bit like 'happiness'. On the one hand, as economists and social scientists have found quite recently, happiness is perfectly measurable - you can do large-scale surveys which ask people to say how happy they are with their lives, on a scale of one to five, for instance, and then you can compare with other data and variables, and build up a picture of the self-reported levels of happiness in different groups or areas, and the factors which are correlated with them. Those statistics are really interesting - and indeed I use some of them in Making is Connecting to show the importance of personal relationships and creative projects. But of course, this data doesn't tell you anything about what happiness feels like.

I think creativity is in the same boat. The most important thing about it is what it does for the person doing the creating - the sense of self-esteem, the sense of doing something in the world, being an active participant, feeling alive in the world - these are all feelings which are reported by people who make things in the physical world and, with striking similarity, by people who make things online. But the things they make are also important - those are the things which, at first, connect us with others, which say something about ourselves, and which perhaps contain ideas or inspiration which will make a significant difference to our own or other people's future experiences of the world. So the internal and external dimensions of creativity are both important, but I would say that the most important thing is just doing it.

I think there is a tendency to think of everyday people's acts of creativity as 'nice', on an individual level, but insignificant, in social or political terms. So it may be personally pleasing, or emotionally rewarding, for someone to make a toy for their child, or to maintain a blog about their everyday experiences, or to make some amusing YouTube videos, or to record and share a song - these all sound like 'nice' things, and nobody would really want to stop them from happening - but they are not considered to be much more than that.

And as you know yourself, Henry, there are people who work on the more obvious, formal 'political' issues in media and communications studies - government broadcasting policies, or the business practices of multinational corporations, or the impact of political advertising on public opinion - and they would not recognise an interest in everyday creativity as part of serious or proper critical study.

But I think these acts of everyday creativity are extremely important. You can cast them as just 'a nice thing' for individuals, and normally they are a nice thing for individuals, but they are much more than that. Every time someone decides to make something themselves, rather than buying or consuming something already made by someone else, they are making a distinct choice, to be an active participant in the world rather than an observer or a shopper in the world. And through the process of making, they get to enjoy, as I've said, that sense of purpose and connection, and satisfaction.

Taken one by one these are all small things, seemingly insignificant moments; but when more and more people make more and more choices like this, and then also when they go online to amplify and inspire further activities, it builds up to something really big, and powerful.

David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK. His teaching and research concerns people's use of media in their everyday lives, with a particular focus on creative uses of digital media. He is the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007) and Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011). He has made several popular YouTube videos, and produces the website about media and identities, Theory.org.uk. He has conducted collaborative research with a number of the world's leading creative organisations, including the BBC, Lego, and Tate.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Aca-fandom and Beyond: John Edward Campbell, Lee Harrington, and Catherine Tossenberger (Part Two)

John: I can't help thinking my provocation is an odd fit in this larger discussion. Although I once belonged to a gay Sci-Fi fan group (the Gaylaxians), have attended Sci-Fi conventions, and love speculative literature, films, and television shows, I've never been comfortable with identifying myself simply as a "fan." I have always used the term in relation to a particular cultural text or practice. I also find I don't identify with many people who do declare themselves "fans" in the general sense.

Furthermore, I'm not comfortable with the fixed sense of identity the term "fan" suggests to me. On a personal level, claiming to be a "fan" feels like committing to a particular model of identity that denies both my individuality and the diverse and changing nature of my tastes and pleasures. Today I enjoy watching True Blood, but I may not in ten years. When I was in my 20s I belonged to a Sci-Fi fan group and attended Sci-Fi conventions, but I don't anymore. Those activities fulfilled a particular need at a particular moment in my life, but they hardly define who I am now. Thus for me, "fandom" is something fluid that one may move in and out of over the course of one's life.

In some respects, my experiences of "fandom" converge with those of Lee Harrington. My expressions of fan behavior have also largely occurred in private. I would include in this private experience of fandom, intimate gatherings of friends to share the enjoyment of a particular media text, such as weekly get-togethers over a friend's house to watch True Blood or Project Runway or Heroes. (What can I say; we all had a crush on the telepathic cop played by Greg Grunberg. Greg, if you're reading this, call me.)

As with Harrington, I have not had to grapple with my own fan practices when studying various media fan communities. This is not to suggest that I fail to acknowledge how key axes of my identity shape both how I approach a particular subject and even what subjects I find worthy of study. However, that struggle has been in terms of gender, race, class background, and sexuality, and all those other social categories I was essentially assigned to at birth and I did not simply choose for myself. I have only ever known the world through the eyes of a white man who has felt different as far back as I can recall. Thus, in being reflexivity, I qualify my observations as coming from this very particular vantage point and that things may look very different indeed from another vantage point.

Unlike my gender, race, and sexuality, my tastes and those cultural artifacts from which I derive pleasure have changed over the course of my life. I was not (nor was anyone else) born into a particular vantage point on fandom. In fact, I currently occupy a very different vantage point on media fandom then I did in my 20s. Given fluid nature of tastes, it would be useful to explore how race, gender, sexuality, and class background all shape one's desire to identify as a fan or "acafan." Unfortunately, some of the fan scholarship I've read does not extend self-reflexivity beyond a claim to fan status. It is important to keep in mind that a claim to a shared fan identity, does not erase power inequalities between the researcher and the subject, nor does it negate the influence of race, gender, sexuality, and class not only on our analyses, but also on what cultural activities we deem worthy of analysis in the first place.

To clarify, by lack of fluidity surrounding social constructs such as sexuality, I am not suggesting our erotic desires and sexual impulses are fixed or that our sexual identity doesn't change over the course of our lives. Rather, I'm referring to the way society seeks to lock our sexual identities into rigid and often binary categories: gay/straight, homosexual/heterosexual, deviant/normal. Basically, once you step over a certain line in our society, you're no longer straight you're "Other" and it's wroth noting how invested our society is in policing that line. Obviously, sexual appetites and erotic desires do not fit comfortably within the gay/straight or any other binary model of sexuality. Even opening a space for such other categories of sexual identity as bisexual, pansexual, queer, or questioning, still does not adequately reflect the vastness and variability of the erotic universe.

Even though I do not identify myself as an "acafan," it is not to say that I have not drawn from my passions in my work. For instance, while in graduate school I wrote an article on The X-Files. I was an avid fan of the series (well, OK, the first four seasons of the series) and discussed it extensively with those friends who also followed the show. I drew upon this cultural capital in writing my analysis of the text and what I saw as its complex ideological function. Indeed, researching and writing the article was a pleasurable practice in itself. In this sense, my understanding of a fan is much in line with Nancy Baym's and Sam Ford's - a fan is someone with an extensive amount of knowledge about and deep appreciation for a particular type of text (whether that be soap operas, Sci-Fi shows, sporting events, modern art, Broadway musicals, etc.). Here we can understand a fan as type of connoisseur; an individual with refined taste and specialized knowledge in some particular area. Arguably, it is this refined taste and specialized knowledge that underlies much of the enjoyment a fan experiences in consuming a particular text, what Barthes would identify as plaisir as opposed to jouissance.

I do have to agree with Catherine Tosenberger regarding the importance of "thinking through" our positionality in relation to the communities we study and representations we construct. This is certainly an issue that has been wrestled with extensively in LGBT studies and queer theory. Gay scholars have a professional responsibility not to present a sanitized or idealized image of the communities or individuals they study. For this reason, I am careful to note in my work on gay male communities how hierarchies of race, gender, and even beauty are (re)constructed in online environments. My goal as a critical scholar is to neither celebrate nor condemn the communities I study, but rather to understand them. My primary concern is constructing a representation that shows my subjects in all their complexities as individuals - individuals who are as flawed and noble as the rest of humanity.

It goes without saying that I have the added responsibility of considering the very real social, political, and economic ramifications of the representations I provide in my scholarship. Here the stakes are high indeed. Many of the individuals I interact with in the course of my research must conceal their sexual identity for fear of losing their employment, their families, and perhaps even their lives. Some of the individuals I have interviewed over the years have been victims of violent hate crimes and still carry the psychological scars from those attacks. And the majority of the individuals I've encountered in my research live in locations where there are no legal defenses against blatant forms of discrimination.

I would also ask that those who do identify as "acafans" be a bit more reflexive about comparisons of fans to sexual minorities. Would a LGBT individual be as ready use the language of "coming out" to describe identifying oneself as a fan? There is a way that sexual minorities growing up in this society must constantly police their behavior, their tastes, their gestures, even their subtlest glances to conceal their difference from mainstream society. If they fail to sufficiently conceal their difference, the consequences can be severe. As I write this, a trial is underway in the Los Angeles district of Chatsworth. The trail involves a 14-year-old boy, Brandon McInerney, who has already confessed to shooting one of his peers, Larry Fobes King, twice in the back of the head execution style in front of his teacher and a classroom full of students. The motivation for the shooting was the victim's openness about his (homo)sexuality and his non-normative gender expression, which included wearing dresses and make-up to school. This story as well as those of Matthew Shepard and far too many others, remind me of how terrified I was in high school that someone would even suspect I was different. I didn't yet have a name for this difference, but I knew nonetheless that it was something horrible which had to be hidden away from everyone. While I was very open about my love for all things Star Wars since seeing the first film, I was utterly silent about my love for men even to myself. Being a fan of Star Wars was cool. Being different was dangerous.

Catherine: Throughout this whole discussion, I've found it interesting how comfort levels with the term "acafan" seem to be correlated to different experiences of fannishness: the impression I have, listening to John and Lee and reading the previous postings, is that those fans who have the easiest time with the term are those whose fannish experience has been primarily transformational, rather than affirmational. If you're a humanities/cultural studies scholar, especially, then the basic premise of transformational fandom -- the source text is a springboard for your own creative and analytical work to share with others -- dovetails with academia in many ways, as Joli Jensen pointed out ages ago; moreover, many transformational fan practices (like fanfiction) have obvious analogues with "respectable" mainstream practices (like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, etc.), as John mentioned. If those types of fannishness, and those types of texts, are the ones that you as a fan and academic are working with, then the category of the "acafan" goes down easier.

But those fans whose experiences have primarily tended to follow affirmational patterns , or what Lee called "as-is" fans, I think understandably have been having more trouble with the idea. This is why I think we need to have these discussions, because the unmarked term "fan" covers so much ground.

I love those terms, affirmational/transformational, because they're not setting up a hierarchy of "true fans" or whatever, but just describing general patterns of participation, ways of "doing" fandom; granted, they're still talking about fans who are interacting in some kind of social way with other fans, as opposed to a wholly private experience, but I think it's a good way of conceptualizing participatory fannishness.

And building on that, I think that it's also important to talk about how these different forms of fannishness (and therefore conceptions of acafannishness) interact with existing systems of privilege and power. The original discussion of affirmational vs. transformational arose in fandom because of these observed culture clashes. Affirmational fannishness (and I'd include mainstream sports fandom here) generally fits more comfortably within existing cultural hierarchies, since it tends to reiterate the primacy of the official creator/institution; affirmational fannish spaces are also often (not always, but often) majority male. Transformational fannish spaces, as Kristina and others have pointed out, are more likely to be majority-female, and overtly queer or queer-friendly. Transformational fans were also likely to be treated as an even more pathological form of the pathologized fan: those fan boys fighting about the engines on the Enterprise might be hopeless geeks, but at least they're not perverts writing gay porn about Kirk and Spock!, etc. The initial constructions of the acafan were responding to those larger issues just as much as to the construction of fans specifically, which is why there was so much focus upon female fans doing the most arguably "subversive" stuff (like writing erotic and homoerotic stories). I think for the term aca-fandom to continue to be useful, we need to really think through that history, and our own positions within that history.

John, some of my thinking overlaps with yours (and not just on the hotness of Greg Grunberg!), but I think it's really important to point out that particularly in transformational fandom, sexuality, and fan production as a means of exploring and articulating sexuality, is a big deal -- this is especially true for younger fans, whose expressions of sexuality are so heavily policed in institutional settings. While not every fan, transformational or otherwise, is focused upon sexuality or eroticism by any means, sexuality and sexual enjoyment is a major part of the discourse in all the fandoms I've been involved in, and a lot of discussion centers around the topic -- especially in slash fandom, where, according to recent research by Anne Kustritz and others, the majority of slashers identify as somewhere on the queer spectrum, myself included.

Kristina, Robin Anne Reid, and Alexis Lothian wrote a fabulous article called "Yearning Void and Infinite Potential: Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space," on just these issues of sexuality and fannishness, and the potential for fluidity of sexual desire and categorization of that desire. These are conversations that are important to have, and are being had both within fandom and within academia. A lot of this is centered around slash fandom though, so if you're not plugged into that corner, or transformational fandom in general, it might fly under your radar. There are a lot of things that can be said about fandom and queerness in spaces beyond specific consideration of slash, of course, and I'd love to see that conversation spread.

It's funny; I know I'm coming across as a bit "Rah Rah Acafandom!," but I'm actually having something of a crisis -- not so much about the concept itself, but all those issues of identification and "overinvestment" and such that go hand-in-hand with it. I'm working on an article on the tv show Glee right now; I've always joked that I overidentified (I was in show choir! In Ohio! It was just like the show, really!), but then Santana, who has been struggling with identifying her sexuality and coming out, happened. I basically was Santana in high school (though instead of a Brittany, I had a Quinn, which is a recipe for horror), complete with attitude problem and her methods of (not) dealing with her desires and their implications; I sometimes feel like, watching the show, that the writers somehow got hold of my teenage diary.

In a lot of figurations of fannishness and acafannishness, this should be my way into producing reams of material on Santana, but it hasn't been the case. I have a hard time reading Santana fanfic, much less writing it, because I find myself going "That's not right, that's not how it was!", projecting my own experiences on to her. And of course, Santana isn't entirely me, not then and not now -- I'm bisexual and white, among other important differences. But I struggle a lot with thinking and writing about her, because it's too close, and too exposing; even talking about it here, I'm squirming a little (I've confessed to being a mean girl, omg). Fandom is so often treated as if it's about uncritical adoration, but I find that I can only be a productive fan if I can maintain some distance, enough to be able to consider aesthetic issues and the like -- if I can't adopt a stance of critical engagement with a character, I have nowhere to move, no conflicting feelings to mine.

That, for me, gets at the heart of "what it means to be an "acafan" -- it's not some kind of binary between rational disengagement on one hand and slobbering emotion on the other, but about the ways we make different parts of the spectrum work productively in a variety of spaces.

Lee: Very interesting observation, Catherine, I hadn't noticed a correlation between comfort level with the term "acafan" and types of fannishness (transformational vs. affirmational)....and I'm still mulling through how this might intersect with the "doing" vs. "being" distinction that John explores. When Denise Bielby and I wrote Soap Fans we were explicitly arguing FOR fandom-as-identity ("being"), as it seemed to be absent or downplayed in the emergent fan studies of the early 1990s.

I appreciate John's discomfort with the generalized term "fan" (rather than fan of something) and what it potentially implies, though I guess I think of most identities, fan included, as fluid rather than fixed. I'm not overlooking the power of ascription (a nice old-fashioned sociological term) but rather highlighting the extent to which our multiple identities are visibilized and invisibilized in different interactional and social contexts...though not always a result of our own agentic choices, of course. In my undergraduate sociology courses I spend a lot of time exploring implications of the distinction John emphasizes - a person who engages in certain activities vs. a certain type of person - though admittedly I've never questioned fandom in quite the same way.

For me personally, fandom is both an identity (that we can claim or not, or have imposed on us or not, or express or not) and an activity (manifested in any number of ways including some not visible to others). I have no problem sharing my fan identity - the naming of it - with students and colleagues and even strangers, etc., but they're sure as hell not going to "see" it very often. Or, rather, they might see (some of) the activity but the emotional basis of fandom for me, the sheer pleasure of fandom, is mine and mine alone.

I laughed when I read Catherine's description of her squirminess and admire her both for having a teenage diary and for apparently keeping the damn thing (I prefer my 16-year old self to be as repressed as possible). And perhaps this is ultimately why I don't consider myself an acafan - as I mentioned earlier I've never written from within my own fandom (see Catherine, above) and the claiming/naming of it has been minimally useful to me both personally or professionally.

I've been thinking of what Jack Halberstam wrote in an earlier post, that it's hard to be a fan. For me it's not hard, it's just nobody's business but my own - the emotional content of it, I mean. The "fan" Lee Harrington that exists publicly is about as real as the "teacher" Lee Harrington. There's some authenticity to it but it's also mighty partial and mighty varnished.

C. Lee Harrington is Professor of Sociology and Affiliate of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Miami University. She has published on fans and fandom since the early 1990s and is currently exploring aging audiences/fans. Her fan interests as of today include Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, General Hospital, all things cheese-related (since gifted a cheese-of-the-month-club, it's fantastic!), Las Vegas, and - inexplicably to those who know her - Kate and William.

John Edward Campbell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications, and Mass Media in the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University. He teaches media theory, cultural studies, and popular culture. His current book project - Selling Belonging: When Online Communities Become Big Business - examines the cultural and political implications of the commercialization of online communities. His first book - Getting It On Online: Cyberspace and Gay Male Sexuality - represents an ethnographic exploration of the cultural practices of online gay communities.

Catherine Tosenberger is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, where she is attached to the Centre for Young People's Texts and Cultures. She teaches children's and YA literature, folklore, and cultural studies, and has been involved in the Harry Potter, Supernatural, and Glee fandoms. Her publications include articles on the Grimms' tales, Harry Potter slash, and Supernatural fanfiction.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Three, Part Two (Kristina Busse, Flourish Klink, and Nancy Baym)

Kristina: I think it's interesting to look at three of us and how our different background quite strongly affects not just the way we do research but also the things we worry about. Coming from a straight up literature department (in the middle of High Theory no less) and teaching in a philosophy department, I worry a lot about what represents, both in research and in teaching. Meanwhile, my fan life feeds directly into my academic research, so that I feel a strong responsibility toward my fan friends to neither exploit nor to misrepresent them.

Unlike Nancy, I was trained to analyze texts, and it actually took me a long time to negotiate my solely text-based background with, for example, ethical concerns for my research subjects/fan friends. In other words, it was my fannish background that made me create a research ethics that to most social scientists is probably totally obvious. At the same time, though, moving back and forth between studying texts and studying people, looking at blog posts as textual artifacts and looking at them as revealing material about a person, has forced me to address these issues in ways I feel many literary scholars don't (they often subscribe to the notion that everything that's accessible online is citable and in an almost New Critical way follow an author-less text model) and many social scientists don't (insofar as they erase the identity of individual fans when they don't name names).

As for Flourish, I can't really speak to her experiences except that for me fandom is something that isn't connected to production and industry. As a fan I don't want to engage directly with actors/writers/directors, and as an academic, I don't care about that side either. I know it's an important area, and I'm very happy that we have good and smart people explaining and representing fandom, but to me fandom is mostly about what we as fans do. I'm passionately and hopelessly in transformational fandom, and I am interested in tracking and analyzing what fans do on their own rather than how fans interact with the industry. [And I am well aware of the gendered aspects of that attitude and its drawbacks!]

The other thing that I notice a I'm looking at the three of us is generational. I don't know Nancyís age but I know she published already when I was just entering English grad school, so I think of the three of us possibly representing not only different disciplinary backgrounds but different fan studies generations. And maybe that means that Flourish's industry collaboration indeed is the future?

Flourish: At least within transformational fandom, I do think that you're right about the generational issue, Kristina. Right around the time that I was getting involved with fandom, my friends began getting cease and desist letters about their Harry Potter fanfiction - this would be around 1999 or 2000. Partially, I think, because Harry Potter was a more or less "feral fandom," people resisted rather than going underground - and it worked. So, on a personal level, I've never experienced fandom as something separate from industry; it was always very clear that industry knew about us, cared about what we did, and often misunderstood us. Even the most transgressively transformative works, for me, are inextricably tied up with issues of industry and production - recall the ëTwins Against Twincest sign, held up by the actors who play Fred and George Weasley! I think that that experience is probably more common among young fans, especially young fans who didn't grow up going to media fan conventions.

Nancy: Uh oh, I think I've just become a grandmother! Give me a few more years! I published my first piece about fandom in 1993. Like most of that work, until it took book form in Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage, 2000) it was being positioned primarily as work about online interaction, not as work about fandom (even in the book, it is at least half and half). Again this colors why the term "acafan" has never seemed relevant to me. I wasn't positioning myself as a fandom scholar, I was a qualitative internet researcher who studied what fans do.

I like Flourish's points about industry and I appreciate her bringing them in as a third party to the personae we balance as people who study and participate in fandom. I love that people like Flourish are working with industry. In the last several years I have begun to speak at industry events and talk more with people in industry, particularly the music business, and the more I see, the more convinced I am that we really need fans represented in those rooms where Flourish sits with her teal hair (and I sit with my asymetrical hair with streaks of color that don't belong there). As fans we are constantly being viewed as ATM machines - "let's connect so we can monetize you!" - and I believe that the sustainability and long term future of the entertainment industries relies on a new kind of engagement with fans that must be informed both by those within fandom and by academic research.

I keep going back again though to the notion that these concerns are not unique to fandom in any way. It's always incumbent on researchers to recognize the different audiences who have a stake in our work and to figure out the ethics of treating them all appropriately. These are rarely problems with obvious answers that fit everyone. They are ongoing processes we all work through on moment by moment and project by project bases.

I don't think we all have a responsibility to speak to industry, and I totally get where Kristina is coming from in saying she wants to keep fandom for the fans. I do think, though that we have some responsibility within fandom to listen to the voices of the industry. Actors, musicians and writers are also real people with real feelings. I interviewed a woman in a band who had stumbled across fan fiction about her having an explicit erotic encounter with another female musician whom she knew in real life. She read it and the fan responses (which were along the lines of "wow, what a cool pairing") and felt both violated and kind of mortified about ever having to see her friend again without thinking about that. I believe in transformative works, but to me, this is a problem. As I've interviewed musicians about their interactions with fans, it's become clearer to me that some of the things fans do to gain status within fandom hurt the musicians. I'm not saying they shouldnít do them, and I do advise musicians to toughen up and let things go, but I do think it's worth thinking about how we might raise fans' awareness of how they affect the people they are discussing as well as the industry's awareness of how they affect fan discussions and academics discussions about both.

Kristina: Oh, Nancy, I apologize, but then academic generations!=actual age :) I think I may indeed be older than you, but I didn't even start studying fans and fandom until almost a decade after you, so that's where my generational idea came from. In fact, what made the analogy so enticing is that we do indeed represent such different views in terms of where fans, academics, and industry relate to one another. And I must sidestep the academic aspect for just a second to focus on the fan-specific engagements with industry that both of you brought up. Like Nancy I see a problem in having a celebrity reading about fantasized sexual encounters. Unlike Nancy, however, I do not think that writing and even sharing the fan fiction is the problem. Instead, I think that fans behaving inappropriately is the issue and, just maybe, celebrities connecting to fans in likewise too intimate ways.

In other words, when you present a version of yourself that may make fans believe that you're open and accessible to reading about your hot steamy romance and then google yourself, it might be in part your responsibility. In turn, I'm a big fan of warning pages and robot/spider blocked pages so that you need to be looking and knowing how and where to look in order to find the material. So, in the end, I blame a celebrity culture and a fan/industry intersection that makes it seem OK to erode boundaries that I am perfectly happy and comfortable keeping up. I don't think it's appropriate to shove sex toys, references to underage incest, or manipulated sexualized images into actors' hands--just like I wouldn't give those things to strangers or random acquaintances unless in an environment where this is collectively acceptable.

In turn, I feel like I don't owe the industry all that much and so for myself I kind of disagree with Nancy that as a fan I need to (or that all fans need to) listen to the voices of the industry. My particular corner of fandom, for example, is mostly not that interested in industry and production or even the actors and celebrities in themselves, even if we're not naive about the intersections. I'm pretty indifferent to industry that has yet to prove itself to me in any way, shape, or form, so I feel like we're left as fans to create the characters, characterizations, and plots that move beyond the interests of white, straight, cis, male able-bodied 18-34 year olds. Given that this industry still doesn't speak to and for me and mine, I frankly have no interest in being "their" version of interpellated fan and play by their rules.

And that may indeed be my age showing: maybe, Flourish, you have better experiences, and maybe, Nancy, your situation is different when you engage with musicians one on one, but my creative heroes, the people I want to meet and talk to, want to engage with and write fan letter to are my fellow fans. And I'm perfectly happy not sharing our conversations with the musicians who form the blueprint for potential fictionalized adventures, or the actors whose characters we extrapolate and interpret, or even the writers who provide the characters and worlds we continue to play with. And I know that there are fans who love that interaction, but for myself, that's not where my fannishness is.

Shifting back into acafan mode, I think that there's a lot of different fan communities and fannish ways of interacting with industry (including not interacting at all) that we need to study. But I also think that the way we approach academic fan identities is deeply affected in the way we think about our fan identities by themselves, isn't it?

Flourish: Nancy, your story about the band member makes me think about fans' reactions to the academic articles they themselves are in. That's a productive comparison, I think - "fans are to acafen the way that band members are to RPF writers" - because I think it opens the door to discussing the competing ethical responsibilities we have. Part of defining oneself as an 'acafan,' I think, is about making an ethical commitment to the fan community, yes? So that when they read your academic work, they don't feel like that band member - misrepresented and kind of miserable. On the other hand, as a fan, Kristina is eager to reject any responsibility towards the creators of source texts for transformative works (or the actors and musicians whose lives provide source texts).

Obviously, there''s some important differences - an academic is making truth claims, whereas a fan is not; academics have cultural power, whereas fans rarely do; fans do not (usually) put themselves forward as public figures, whereas musicians and actors must by the nature of their work. But ultimately, academics and fan fiction writers both mine preexisting texts and come up with narratives that make arguments about our world, right? They aren't the same, but they are similar.

While I'm sensible to the argument Kristina is making about industry's interests not intersecting with hers (and the implicit argument I think she's making about industry's power and desire to control fannish behavior), I think it's interesting to think about the question of whether academics' interests actually match up with fans'. For many years, I pooh-poohed the idea that academics publishing about fandom would have any impact at all on what industry understood or thought - but now I see people in industry independently bringing up articles that have appeared in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures. (One result of having an open-access journal is that, yes, fans can read the articles published therein, but so can folks in industry.)* If there are fans who truly want to be left alone, they haven't been helped by academics, not one bit.

Besides, that horse has already bolted. Whether fans like it or not, there are more academics studying fandom than ever, and there are more people in industry sniffing around than ever. At this point, there's no reversing it. As Nancy suggests, the only thing that's left to do is to think about how to create some kind of balance - how to make sure that everybody can co-exist. Academics do play a role in that, whether we want to or not - which is one aspect of being an acafan that's not usually highlighted.

*Yes, I realize that this somewhat contradicts what I was saying above about industry having more of an impact on daily life than academia. I am large, I contain multitudes.

Nancy: I'm not sure how major a point it is for this discussion, but I am troubled by the idea that a performer who presents herself as willing to engage fans is thus obliged to be written about in public spaces in explicit sexual terms and, should she encounter that work, obliged to ignore it. I have no issues with people imagining and writing sexual encounters between fictional characters, but I do think that for fans to treat real people as fictions for their own and one anothers' imaginations can be selfish and even cruel, and that is not the fault of a musician for daring to be nice while looking good. I stand by my sense that one thing academics ought to be doing is giving fans frameworks for at least thinking critically about the ethics of what they do, just as we are well positioned to argue to the industries about the ethics of the choices they make towards fans.

Our conversation seems to have revolved largely around ethics and accountability. When I first started studying fandom and read much of the textual analytic work on soap opera fans I was mortified by the willingness to make claims about what fans got out of the genre without ever actually looking at what fans did or talking with them about it. Not surprisingly, these textual analyses often led to analyses of fans as deeply screwed up people living vicariously through texts. I was also struck by the fact that so much of that work was written in language that was borderline incomprehensible without a Ph.D. in the area. In response, from the start, my core obligation has been to write about fans in a way that honors their perspectives and in a way which they can read easily [as a sidebar, open access publishing is an increasingly important part of this]. But 'honoring' does not mean 'fawning.' When fandom misbehaves, when there are fan works that are problematic or poorly done, when there are fans within communities who pull weird power plays or whatnot, we mustn't paper over that in order to make sure fandom looks good. We are often eager to criticize previous research in order to situate the value of our own, we need to be willing to criticize the fandoms we study too. Similarly, there are temptations to paint fans as good guys and industry professionals as bad guys, which is just as intellectually sloppy.

What academics contribute isn't necessarily "truth" as Flourish said - I'd argue truths are multiple and contestable when youíre talking social behaviors and meanings - but insight. I see my role as an academic as doing systematic and rich analysis that provides a basis for understanding social phenomena. All of the relevant identities we experience as researchers can be mined for their contribution to understanding if we are reflexive throughout the research process.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

BIOS

Kristina Busse (http://kristinabusse.com) is an English Ph.D. who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. Kristina is co-editor of†Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), and of the forthcoming collection†Transmedia Sherlock.† She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures.

Nancy Baym (http://www.nancybaym.com) is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. Her recent work on independent Swedish musicians, labels and fans has been published in Popular Communication, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, and First Monday. She blogs (now and then) at http://onlinefandom.com and collects links about artist-audience relationships at blog.beautifulandstrange.com.

Flourish Klink leads the Fan Culture Division at The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. She writes transformative works of fiction - both interactive and non-interactive - and studies fandom and popular culture. She is also a lecturer in the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and earned a S.M. in that same program; before that, she earned a B.A. in religion from Reed College. By the time she was 14, she had helped co-found FictionAlley.org, a Harry Potter fan fiction website. Most recently, she has been secretary of the board for HPEF Inc., which puts on educational conferences centering around Harry Potter.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Three, Part One (Kristina Busse, Flourish Klink, and Nancy Baym)

Kristina Busse

Being an acafan to me means constantly negotiating two often quite competing codes of conduct and ethical expectations. In particular, I worry about the compromisesóboth fannishly and academically when I do acafannish research. I have a pretty strong fannish ethos in my research, i.e., I tend to not cite and reference material without the permission of its fannish creators and I am well aware of the limitations that may put on my research material (Fan Privacy and TWC's Editorial Philosophy). Not only am I restricted by texts I know but I self-restrain to texts where I can easily contact the creator and likely get a positive response. In addition to this limitation, there still remains a desire to present fandom in its best guise; after all, if another scholar gets to read one story, sees one vid, I want it to conform to traditional aesthetic notions. My selections are thus restrained not only by the textís possible representativeness and accessibility, but also by my desire to not embarrass my community. There are enough shoddy journalistic pieces who point and mock, and the fan in me desires to impress the academicís colleagues.

The result, however, is that we as acafen are faced with not only the general problem of any qualitative scholar of popular culture on which texts to pick, but also compound the issue by having a variety of vested interests that complicate that selection. In my presentation at the SCMS acafandom workshop, I addressed "The Ethics of Selection: The Role of Canonicity in Acafannish Pedagogy and Publication," and it is this conflict I continue to worry about. The problem is one of choice and selection and the responsibilities this entails. Doing qualitative research one has to pick and choose, and unlike my initial discipline of English literature, there isn't a ready-made canon of important texts that anyone is expected to recognize if not know.

And yet, fan studies tends to create its own version of a canon, and while I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing, I do worry about the fact that we do it seemingly unthinkingly. In fact, given the a wide variety and such idiosyncratic choices, it is surprising how small numbers of vids, for example, dominate academic vid shows, class showing, and academic papers. I'm just mentioning Lum and Sisabet's "Women's Work" and Lim's "Us" here, two vids that might indicate that there is indeed a vid canon, after all.

The reason for that has a lot to do with what fans like and what academics like. In fact, these two criteria beautifully intersect in these two vids, making them ideal representatives, so to speak. And yet I see some danger in creating our own academic canon, so to speak, of texts that fit our theoretical frameworks, texts that are sufficiently experimental, queer, political, or whatever else we may decide to focus on. the problem is not that there shouldn't be an essay on "Women's Work." There totally should! The problem is that by showing the vid every single time and namechecking it (as I'm doing right now :), we're effectively construing a canon, a canon that then gets reflected back on fandom who, of course reads and responds to academic canon formation. Moreover, in so doing, we are on some level ignoring the thousands of vids not as experimental, not as political, not as well edited.

And the question is then whether there really is a problem in that and what political implications that may have. When we choose fan works that fit into our arguments, that make fandom look more creative, more political, more subversive to outsiders because that's the image we want to give to the world at large, are we ultimately misrepresentating and betraying fandom? When we decide on picking exceptional texts, are we properly studying the fandom? How do we justify picking the three most excellent, most politically progressive genderswap stories while ignoring the dozens of stories that are misspelled and poorly plotted, that are reactionary or right out offensive?

Of course, it's more fun writing about stories we like, stories we consider aesthetically and ideologically pleasing. I can spend time with a text I like; I can present my fandom in the best light; and I can get easy permission, because I can show my analysis and not offend the author. I can please academics, fans, and myself in the process. But I'd like to ask what texts and what forms of cultural expression we may ignore in the process, and that we remain vigilant to our vested interests when we decide to choose one text over the many available others.

I am certain that any subcultural member and scholar faces similar ethical concerns to remain true to their two competing codes of conduct: not to betray/expose/embarrass one's community and not to do bad scholarship. But I also fear that the danger is always there that one part compromises the other. Constantly acknowledging and evaluating that balance is at the center being an acafan to me: I cannot let my academic side exploit my community yet I must be careful to remain aware of my biases without letting them control research.

Nancy Baym

I have to say I don't feel like I'm trying to reconcile competing sets of expectations and codes of conduct in being a fan studying fandom within academia.

One reason for this may be the primary fandoms with which I've aligned myself. I was never involved in fanfic or vidding communities. I've always been involved in and studied fan communities where we talk about and critique what we're into and it seems like the dynamics are different than in communities based on fans' creative works.

I think it also has to do with the fact that I study people, not texts, and I study the relationships between people, so I come at fandom research from a different set of background contexts and assumptions. For me, canonizing within fandom just isn't an issue since I'm not looking at fan texts per se. The parallel concern I encounter is how to sample examples of fan discourse or sites, but, I see my first obligation as both scholar and member of fan communities as trying to come up with a sampling that will leave fans saying "yes, that's a fair take on what we do" and academics saying "I trust that she's given me a representative view." We always have a responsibility to situate what we study and teach within a wider context that includes some analysis of how representative our choices are.

Throughout much of these discussions (including those already posted) I feel like so many of the issues raised are not unique to academics who are fans and who study fans. The term "acafan" has never resonated with me. I've never felt that a disconnect between the two that was problematic or that called for special language to label, nor have I ever understood the problems in what we do as different from the core problems everyone encounters in doing qualitative ethnographic styles of research. "Acafan" was a response to a tradition of media research that I didn't come from. I started in interpersonal communication and online interaction with methodological training in ethnography and qualitative methods. I've never thought of these issues as being any different from those that, say, people who enjoy using the internet and also study people who use it face - yes it colors our perspective and gives us access to some points of view and inside knowledge, and yes it makes some other perspectives harder to palate, but research is always guided by points of view. We always speak from perspectives. If fans who study fandom lack critical distance, that is a failure of their academic training, not of their being fans, and the same charge can be leveled against anyone who studies anything they are part of. This is what theory and methodology are for, to help us step beyond the everyday experience into an analytic mode that takes advantage of what we know and feel without being limited to it. In that regard, I do think methodological training is very important.

I will say, though, that I have often felt there is a risk to studying my pleasurable passion in that it can come to feel like work. That is the identity risk for me, not seeming not fannish enough, or not academicy enough, but not loving the music I write about as much because I am also interviewing some of the people who make it. I worry more about burning out on the pleasure than I do about not having the academy think it's scholarly enough or the other fans thinking it's too scholarly.

Flourish Klink

I come from an unusual place: by the time I was really involved in fandom, the term "acafan" had already come into general use. I knew the term "acafan" first from the fan's perspective and not from the academic's. What's more, the conflict I experience regarding fandom and professional life is much more general than concern about acafandom.

The reason for this is because while academics do influence others' thought about fans and fandom, the moment that they really begin to make immediate changes in fans' lives is when they begin to work with the industry. I realized this when I began to work with the Alchemists: holy shit, people really take my advice about what to do. I had better make sure it's good advice! Publishing an academic article, or a purely academic book, is one thing: it may change what people think about fans twenty or thirty years down the road. Actually getting into a room with entertainment execs is another thing entirely. The decisions that get made there will go into effect next quarter, and they may determine whether fan sites are harassed with C&Ds or whether they're ignored or whether they're solicited for advice.

It may seem silly and self-absorbed, but my concerns with regard to how to represent fans in these situations have even dictated whether or not I should dye my hair. If I am the only self-identified fan that a network exec meets in a year - should I have teal hair? Or not? Unlike the traditional scholar, my very embodiment of fandom is one of the things that helps me get my professional message across. To be honest, it's part of my personal brand. With each client, I have to ask myself: what aspects of my personal fandom should I emphasize to most effectively get my points across? And that's a worrying state of mind to get into: so calculating, it doesn't feel fannish to me...

In comparison to these ethical conflicts (or "personal angsty excrescences," if you'd like), concerns over the term "acafan" seem to me to be - not unimportant, but certainly not immediate, personally. My current contributions to scholarly work are not likely to go much further than a really good meta might. My contributions to the Alchemists, on the other hand, might influence the policies of next year's TV lineup - which I think most people would rightly be concerned about! But there's no pat term to speak about the conflict of professional and fannish responsibilities outside the academic realm.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

BIOS

Kristina Busse (http://kristinabusse.com) is an English Ph.D. who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. Kristina is co-editor ofFan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), and of the forthcoming collection†Transmedia Sherlock. She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures.

Nancy Baym (http://www.nancybaym.com) is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. Her recent work on independent Swedish musicians, labels and fans has been published in Popular Communication, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, and First Monday. She blogs (now and then) at http://onlinefandom.com and collects links about artist-audience relationships at blog.beautifulandstrange.com.

Flourish Klink leads the Fan Culture Division at The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. She writes transformative works of fiction - both interactive and non-interactive - and studies fandom and popular culture. She is also a lecturer in the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and earned a S.M. in that same program; before that, she earned a B.A. in religion from Reed College. By the time she was 14, she had helped co-found FictionAlley.org, a Harry Potter fan fiction website. Most recently, she has been secretary of the board for HPEF Inc., which puts on educational conferences centering around Harry Potter.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Three Reasons Why Pottermore Matters...

Yesterday, J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame announced a bold new online venture called Pottermore which has sent shock waves through multiple communities which I follow closely and I've had more than a few people already ask me to weigh in on my initial thoughts about what's taking place. Keep in mind that, as Will Rogers used to say, all I know is what I read in the newspaper. I have no knowledge of what's taking place here other than what's already in the press and what I can speculate about from my knowledge of the announcement's fit within a range of trends impacting social media, transmedia entertainment, Web 2.0, and fan culture.

Here's the video of Rowling's announcement, which you should watch, if you haven't already, so the rest of this makes sense.

Now, let's consider what this announcement means from several perspectives.

Pottermore as Transmedia Storytelling: This may be the most highly visible transmedia project to date -- after all, Harry Potter is as big a media franchise as we are likely to see anytime soon. I've blogged before about the paradoxical nature of Harry Potter fandom:

Harry Potter is a massive mass market success at a time when all of our conversations are focusing on the fragmentation of the media marketplace and the nichification of media production. There has been so much talk about the loss of common culture, about the ways that we are all moving towards specialized media, about the end of event based consumption, and so forth. Yet very little of it has reflected on the ways that Harry Potter has bucked all of these trends....But in many other ways, the success of Harry Potter demonstrates the power of niche media. Start from the fact that this is a children's book, after all, and a fantasy, two genres which historically have attracted only niche readerships. Scholastic surely wouldn't have predicted this level of popular interest when it chose to publish the original novel. By traditional industry talk, much of Harry Potter's success came from so-called "surplus consumers" -- that is, consumers who fall outside of its target demographic. Traditionally, much of fan culture involves these kinds of surplus consumers -- female fans of male-targeted action adventure series, adult consumers of children's media, western consumers of Japanese popular culture, and so forth. Indeed, it is this attraction to works that are in some ways mismatched to our needs that encourages fans to rework and rewrite them.

Relatively little of the official Harry Potter media produced to date has been transmedia in the sense that I use the term -- as an extension of the information we have available about the world rather than as a replication of the story from one medium to another. I've been suggesting lately that we might identify transmedia projects through the combination of two factors - radical intertextuality (that is, the complex interweaving of texts through the exchange of story-related information) and multimodality (that is, the mixing of different media and their affordances in the unfolding of the story). Pottermore works at both levels.

On the one hand, Rowling is making a commitment to provide fans with a large chunk of additional information about the world of Harry Potter, nuggets which, as she puts it, she's been "hoarding" during the writing process. We might think of this as a more interactive version of the kinds of "further stories" or notes on the mythology that J.R.R. Tolkien's estate has been slowly feeding Lord of the Rings fans in the decades since the author's death. Some estimates suggest that she's already got 100,000 words of new material which is going to be inserted into the interstices of the original novels -- that's more or less the length of a typical book (not as much as a Harry Potter book, but still) -- and she's hinted that there may be more where this comes from. During the Harry Potter lexicon case, it came out that she had been planning to publish her own encyclopedia which would expand our knowledge of her fictional universe. It is not clear whether this will supplement or replace that original conception.

By far, this is the aspect of the announcement which has caught fire with fans, especially those who have been worried that the intensity of the fandom will fade once the last film is released into the theaters. Trust me, there's been lots of mashing of teeth about this. No one thinks that Harry Potter fandom will go away completely -- we've seen many fandoms long outlast the production of new material -- but there is apt to be less intensity and visibility once the final film hits the theater. For these fans, Pottermore is a game changer. Here, for example, is some of how HPANA, one online Harry Potter fansite, responded to the news:

"Does this announcement and the looming launch of Pottermore hold enough weight to keep together a fandom that is showing signs of deterioration? To me, Pottermore will act as an integral part of the fandom for the next few years. Yes, years. If Jo were to have announced a print encyclopedia, the immediate impact would have been greater. But because of the interactive nature of Pottermore, and the fact that each novel's storyline will be released months apart (Sorcerer's Stone in October, Chamber of Secrets in early 2012), the Pottermore storyline may not conclude for at least two years - extending active fandom discovery until the end of 2013 at the earliest....What does this mean? The Harry Potter fandom is on the verge of embarking on a new, monumental journey, something which has never occurred and probably will never happen again, as Rowling has been famously private about her writings in the past. Pottermore will be truly a one-of-a-kind experience where fans will have the opportunity to dictate what they want to see come out of it, both from Jo and fellow fans....I believe the whole fandom discovering brand new canon together is the most important aspect of Pottermore. The ingenious sorting, play-along aspects and digital store with the first ever Harry Potter e-books? That's merely icing on an already delicious cake."

On the other, there is the promise of multimodality represented by what's been described as interactive "moments" introduced around the books -- including a sorting hat process and a wand shop -- which allow fans new ways of interacting with the story. For literary critic Lev Grossman, who has been a key enthusiast for the books, this aspect of transmedia causes him to pause:

When publishers mix reading with other media, the way Pottermore does (or the way that The 39 Clues, another Scholastic creation, does), I find it confusing. Every time I see more of the Potterverse realized in other media, as video or audio or even still images, it undoes the work I did by reading about it. It takes away from the marvelous, handmade Potterverse I've got going on in my head and replaces it with something prefabricated.

Those of us who are more enthusiastic about transmedia see it differently: we see these materials as expanding our knowledge and deepening our experience of the story (at least in so far as they are done well and everything about Potter has been done well) by allowing each medium to do what it can do best. There's been lots of talk about whether there has been a killer demonstration of the potential of transmedia -- this may well become that killer demo, for better or for worse, and I for one am going to be watching closely to see what happens next.

Pottermore as eBook: The Wall Street Journal has read the Pottermore story through the lens of ebook publishing and the future of authorship, and it's a pretty significant story from that perspective also. Here's part of what they speculate:

While her publishers and major online book retailers will continue to sell her physical books, Ms. Rowling has reserved for herself the digital editions, the fastest-growing segment in the book world. The move could inspire other authors, large and small, to pronounce themselves independent agents in hopes of tapping more lucrative paydays. Ms. Rowling refused for years to release her books in electronic format, retaining the digital rights for herself. While most other authors have already handed over their digital rights to their publishers--most recently, John Grisham--Ms. Rowling's deal could prompt them to self-publish when their deals come up for renewal or demand higher royalty rates than the 25% of net sales that most publishers offer today on digital editions. Some may even choose to forgo all traditional means of book publishing and set up their own bookstores, reaping 100% of everything they sell.

Rowling recognizes that it is not enough to offer a digital offset of the books via Kindle but that ebook publishing represents its own kind of event, which enables her to further expand the reader's experience through new content and new ways of interacting with the material. Her continued involvement with the social network of her fans moves the ebook from a product to a process - not a one time thing, but something which can draw back people who have already read the seven books and watched the eight films to have a new set of relationships with the story. So, again, the announcement is big news.

Pottermore as fan relations: This is where things start to get a little more complicated. I've been mapping this fandom for years and there are many different kinds of Harry Potter fans who have different expectations and different relationship to the material. So, as critics such as Suzanne Scott and Julie Levine Russo have noted, transmedia practices tend to priviledge some kinds of fans over others, constructing model fans and thus seeking to set the terms of how fans relate to the material.

This has become increasingly true for Rowling, who has shown many signs that she wants to continue to shape and control how fans respond to her work well after she finished writing it. We can see this in the epilogue to the last novel, which seems to pointlessly map out futures for all of her characters, including shaping the "ships" (relationships) between them, in what amounts to spraying her territory. Many fans would have preferred a text which was more open ended on that level and allows them more freedom to speculate beyond the ending. She decided to "out" Dumbledore not through the books but via her own discourse around the books. She tried to shut down the Harry Potter Lexicon. So, it is abundantly clear that she likes some of her fans more than others and that any effort to facilitate fan interactions also represents an attempt to bring fandom more under her control.

Two key phrases stood out for me in the announcement: "digital generation" and "safe," both of which require some glossing here. Harry Potter has attracted a very strong adult readership, many of whom would not conventionally fall into the digital generation. Even among those who come from the digital generation, many of those who grew up reading the books, are now young adults, even in some cases, parents on their own. And then, there are the children readers who were the targeted audience for the books. The most active fans, as noted above, are often a "surplus audience," and may well not be children. This doesn't matter when the book can be purchased at a range of different locations, read in a variety of contexts, but if you try to bring that readership together online, then the tensions are apt to become more of an issue.

That's where the term, "safe," is a red flag. In this case, it can mean two things -- first, a space where you can read the stories without encountering any of that dratted "pornography" that some (many actually) of the adult fans have been producing. I remember talking to Warner executives when I was working on Convergence Culture who kept saying they wanted to distinguish between the "fans" and the "pornographers," and I couldn't bear to tell them that most of the erotica is produced by the fans and is part of what it means to them to be a fan. So, "safe" in those terms means censored, regulated, or policed. So, the promise is that "You," "Us," will help shape the future of the franchise but only in terms specified by Rowling and by the companies involved in overseeing this site.

Here enters a second potential meaning of the word, "safe," which is that the site will comply with the Children Online Privacy Protection Act (or its British equivalent) which sets restrictions on the exchange of personal information, especially by minors. (For a useful discussion of how the desire to protect children may also restrict their ability to meaingfully participate, check out this recent post by Anne Collier.) So, does this mean that Pottermore will become the literary equivalent of Club Penguin, social media without the potential for off-line social interactions, and how does this fit within the larger framework of social relations upon which Harry Potter fandom, like all other fandoms, depends.

Moving beyond the word, "safe," there's the potential that this follows the logic of Web 2.0 more generally which seeks to capture and commodify participatory culture. There are multiple concerns here, which I need to know more to be able to address. While the language of the video hints at a more open-ended structure of participation, wherein fans share their thoughts, speculations, and creative works with each other, the only features specifically described constitute preprogramed interactivity -- such as the Sorting Hat -- which sets the terms of our engagement with the storyworld. I might note that Harry Potter fandom has been among the most innovative in helping fans make the transition to the era of social networks -- having developed their own platforms and practices since the book was first published -- including several very sophisticated versions of the Sorting Hat. Which house you identify is deeply personal to Harry Potter fans. I strongly identify with my affiliation with Ravenclaw, so why should I cede to Rowling and Sony the right to decide which house is mine! So, in this case, Rowling is offering fans what they already have on their own terms and using the release of information as a bribe to pull them into her walled garden. (Keep in mind that the information is going to get spoiled and leaked the moment it is posted.)

If, on the other hand, she does allow for more creative and participatory engagement of the material on the site, that opens other questions already hotly debated along the borders between Web 2.0 and Participatory Culture. Abigail DeKosnik, for example, has described the bargain fans often are forced to make -- ceding all rights to their own intellectual property in return for the promise, easily revoked, of corporations not suing them for their efforts. Others have described this in terms of issues of fan or free labor -- people are doing creative work for free which benefits corporations without getting any revenue in return. Lawrence Lessig has gone so far as to describe this as a modern form of "sharecropping." This is a complicated issue and we have a lot to say about it in my forthcoming Spreadable Media book.

I am not prejudging the terms that Rowling and Sony are offering here. I am just saying that the platform as described raises these questions and we need more information before we can really weigh whether Rowling is treating her fans fairly here. She's been surprisingly supportive of fan culture in the past, but on a selective basis, which does not give us much guarantee on how this one is going to shape out. The devil is going to be in the details here and those are going to be rolled out over the next few months.

Could Rowling's "gift" to her fans turn out to be a Trojan Horse? Hell yes, but it may also open the door for some other creative opportunities along the lines discussed in the earlier sections of this post.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Two, Part Two (Henry Jenkins, Erica Rand, and Karen Hellekson)

Erica Rand:

Karen, I'm really struck by your passage: "My writing of slash fan fiction must be subsumed under the rubric of interpretation; how else to explain the overwhelming pleasure of the (writing of the derivative) text, without resorting to "it was confusing and I hated it! So I fixed it!" I hate to sound so simplistic but is it partly liking to do a different kind of writing? I've recently gotten the chance to reprise a previous sideline of queer sex advice columnist. I just love the different style of it. But I see what you're saying about how for you, fan fiction has a bit of the same function as critique.

Also, is there also something about people's relationship to being "an academic"? Little anecdote: I was just at a workshop on teaching first year seminars and the person leading it did the icebreaker of having us discuss in small groups an incident in college where we first identified as scholars. (Not my idea of an icebreaker, which I think of as more like, "Name a cheesy song you would stay in the car to listen to if it came on the radio.") Anyway, it made me realize that I don't think of myself as a scholar. I think of myself as a nerd because I think superb punctuation is hot and like to watch number patterns emerge on my odometer--although not so much since the numbers don't turn mechanically. But scholars, they work down the hall from me; a crazy disconnect like describing the family weirdness of one's siblings as if one didn't come from the same family.

Karen Hellekson:

I do think that that creating fan texts is an interpretive response: fan fiction, fan vids, and other fan artifacts are really just analysis--exegesis with a point, and a point of view. The kneejerk emotional response (which I articulate here, obviously simplistically, as "it was confusing and I hated it!") can be pretext, but it's just the jumping-off point for exploring the why. It usually isn't particularly valuable by itself. Like or dislike--it doesn't matter which, because either can provoke a response. It is hard to engage intensely with something that leaves you neutral. I usually write academic texts about things that I like or that I find intellectually interesting. I usually write fan fiction about things that bother me or to explain things. My essay here was a chance for me to bind together the affective and scholarly voices.

My relationship to being an academic: it's fraught. I tend to feel insecure about it because I am unaffiliated, and people's reactions (when they see "independent scholar" on my name tag; when it comes up when I'm chatting with a professor-colleague of my husband's at a university party) are often weird, like they're not sure how to deal with me, and then I get flustered and say stupid things and overshare. My job as a freelancer is isolating. This academic thing is a way to get out of the house, to talk about things that really interest me, to engage with fabulous like-minded people, and to have substantive, thought-provoking conversations. If "what I am" is what comes out of my mouth when people ask me about myself, then I'm a consumer of media and a copyeditor in the sciences. My scholarship, including writing articles and books and editing an academic journal, is basically unpaid service that I can't explain in a sentence at parties.

(A cheesy song that I would stay in the car to listen to is Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz." I first thought of myself as a scholar when I delivered a paper as a MA student at KU at the Campbell Conference and was delighted that everyone seemed genuinely interested. It is because of that honest interest, now maintained especially through the Science Fiction Research Association, that I have kept a foot in that academy.)

Karen raises some important questions about the discipline specificity of the acafan position, which is one of the real value of having such a diverse set of contributors in this exchange. In Literary Studies, fan-scholars have had to overcome the affective fallacy, which has historically rendered our emotional responses to literary texts mute and irrelevant.

By contrast, in film and media studies, almost all writing starts from some kind of theory of spectatorship, whether media is understood as propaganda, art or popular culture. There are times that I think films would not exist if they were not projected to a viewer just as a tree falling in the forest would not make any sound if there was no one around to hear it. Even our formalist theories, or at least the version I was trained in, starts with the issue of defamiliarization, which assumes a viewer who is shocked or startled out of their habitual norms of viewing by some element in the text.

The question is whether your theory of spectatorship starts from the attempt to accurately capture your own emotional response to the work or whether you are, in my book, speculating about someone else's emotional responses. And the danger is that when you start speculating about someone else's feelings, you end up imagining that someone else as more vulnerable, gullible, and susceptible to influence than you see yourself, and that's why media studies was so pathologizing in its construction of fans in the absence of the acafan move. So much of the dread of popular culture from the academic perspective is precisely that it demands our emotional engagement as compared to the more distanced viewership imagined to be the domain of high culture (whether distanciation is imagined as a political position a la Brecht or a class-based posture a la Bourdieu).

You cannot write about soap operas or melodramas without a theory of tears, about horror without a theory of fear and dread, about Hitchcock without a theory of suspense, or comedy without a theory of laughter. And again, work which writes about someone else's feelings is apt to distort the nature of what it is describing in relation to popular culture, to be dismissive and simplistic.

Of course, one hopes that such a theory goes beyond your ""It was confusing and I hated it!" and the real test of the acafan perspective is not where it starts, but where it ends up.

Even on the level of its affective grounding, I would argue that the goal is to be more complex and sophisticated in describing our emotional responses and what sparks them within the work (or its context). And that points us towards some of the issues Erica raises, which I want to address more fully next time. For the moment, let me note that for me, a theory of fandom minimally tries to capture both fascination and frustration, both of which seem to be present in the best fan writing, whether fanfic which writes beyond the ending or Meta which challenges the ideological construction of a beloved text. Look at some of the responses I've run in my blog to the ending of Smallville -- the best of which have been critiques of gender politics or simply genre expectations which start from an impassioned and by no means uncritical perspective but which build out a fuller description of what provokes it.

For me, perhaps the most nuanced and challenging acafan posture to achieve is one of ambivalence, which is not at all "wishy-washy" but rather tries to deal with deep and conflicting responses to the work. A hallmark of ambivalence in cultural critique would be Laura Kipnis's extraordinary essay about Hustler -- which offends her and fascinates her and she's trying to work through this conflicted response. I can imagine this being part of what Erica is trying to capture in her work on figure skating (or at least seems to be part of what I am reading from her provocation here).

Karen Hellekson:

I'm struck by Henry's and Erica's remarks about pathologizing and addiction--terms with negative connotations that hint at fan studies' tendency to be perceived as extreme and therefore suspect, both by outsiders and by ourselves as we get our fix. Joli Jenson, in "Fandom as Pathology," sees this insider-outsider debate as central: fandom must be pathologized because "once fans are characterized as deviant, they can be treated as disreputable, even dangerous 'others.'" This othering permits separation in the field of play: "Fans, when insistently characterized as 'them,' can be distinguished from 'people like us' (students, professors and social critics) as well as from (the more reputable) patrons or aficianados or collectors. But these respectable social types could also be defined as 'fans.'" Here Jenson gestures to status and taste. The mode of othering and taste making inherent in the default view Jenson is working against still remain. Those of us who work in media studies must traverse these discontinuities: high and low culture, fan and academic, insider and outsider. Henry's coining of the term acafan is one way to mediate these oppositions.

I'm struck by my own tendency to be drawn to these so-called maligned fields: my literary specialty is science fiction, and no sooner does SF get all mainstreamed and I no longer have to defend myself, when I decide fan studies is tons of fun and I have to start all over again. Luckily there are many wonderful academic organizations where SF and fan studies are welcome, where acafans can go and have substantial conversations under the reassuringly default view that of course these modes of inquiry are valuable and useful. We can't spend all our time justifying ourselves or explaining that we are not pathological; we have to have time to interpret our world too.

Henry's term acafan filled a void: its very creation and then its subsequent deployment suggest that such a word was needed (and as a dealer in words, I very much enjoyed Henry's description of the context of its creation). I like linguist-novelist Suzette Haden Elgin's explanation of neologisms that fill a needed gap: she calls it Encoding, "the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before ... and that has not just suddenly been made or found or dumped upon [our] culture. We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to deserve its own name" (Native Tongue, chap. 2).

The term acafan is thus wonderful, a naming of something that had been whose cultural context was suddenly right to explore the issues--and is still right, and thus this conversation. Although I find the word ultimately self-referential, I appreciate its generative aspects, which deploy from its overt linking of scholarship (aca) and affect (fan).

Erica found her work "an acafan-type call to find theorizing that matters in sources around us." I love this articulation of making meaning from things that we decide are interesting: Wordsworth found meaning in a cloud, whereas we might find it in, well, the cloud. Yet the same modes of interpretation resonate. English still owes perhaps too much to New Criticism in its approaches (valorizing the text), just as media studies still bases critical approaches on the spectator (valorizing the viewer), yet all fields concerned with making meaning rely on the complex interplay between the elements of the rhetorical situation: text, creator, consumer, context. Ultimately that is what the acafan conversation is about: what can we learn about these things when viewed through this particular lens?

Karen, I love the point you took from my comment about finding theorizing that matters all around us. But actually, I meant something related to what Henry wrote about how important it is to promote avoiding presumptions that professional critics and academics have more rich and complicated interpretations of culture than the people in pronouncements about what something means: means to whom? how do you know? Most obvious when reading student essays about how "society feels" or how raunchy music videos threaten to corrupt one's younger sister (always the sisters, somehow), but, as Henry notes, underlying a lot of work and whole fields, certainly the one I was trained in, art history.

And yes, to respond to Henry's comment just above Karen's, that ambivalence is part of what I'm trying to get to. Except with skating, it's different than I'm used to. Not so much like loving pop songs with sexist lyrics, but in addition to that, a layer of deeply felt contradiction in the practice. For example, in figure skating I've found my own femininity, as I understand it, alternately fed, trashed, and unrecognizable as femininity under figure skating's dominant codes of femininity, partly because queer femme dyke codes don't work with them. (Thus I might stand out as unfeminine for being the only female in our annual recital who chose to wear pants for her solo--gasp--and the pants is what people notice not the sparkly tight low-cut top that reads out differently, I think, if your underlying opposition is femme/butch (where showing/hiding protrusions might be a big gender marker) as opposed to a model locating an ideal in that ballerina(or ballerina/slut) look.

So I keep being slammed, hurt, judged--in a hugely educational, productive way--by being smacked up against standards I don't meet despite finding my pleasures in what I perceive to be living inside their essence. Somehow despite going on and on, in course after course ("legislative, judicial, executive, legislative, judicial, executive, legislative, judicial, executive . . . ." as the sometimes tedium of repeating basics is represented in the movie Election), about gender being complicated, vexed, painful, a story even if not centrally with trans content, being in the middle of it made a big difference. The sports studies version of acafan maybe.

Separate: I want to go back to something I brought up earlier about whether there is an acafan pleasure in adopting modes and voices for different contexts. I bring it up because I'm a bit hooked on this bit of weirdness: This season's Bachelorette is from Maine, and the Portland Press Herald, every Tuesday, has a FRONT PAGE article, at least below the crease, recapping the previous night's show as if it were a sports or news event. Tuesday the 14th, from Ray Routhier's article: 'The Bachelorette': Trip to Thailand helps mend a broken heart: A restaurant owner named Constantine helps Ashley Hebert put Bentley behind her":

The second date in Thailand was a "group date," in which Hebert and 10 men helped renovate an orphanage. On the night of that outing, Hebert was seen with J.P., kissing again. "Kissing J.P. is magical, the best kisses I've had here by far," Hebert said into the camera. "J.P. is one sexy man. That shaved head? Mmmm."

I'm very taken with what we might call this news-o-fan production (maybe without the hyphens when the term catches on). It's not quite the same as the now taken for granted celebrity news as news, because the author seems to be a guy trying on gendered writing and interests in ways that interest me.

Henry Jenkins:

The circumstances which Erica describes above hint at some of the difficulty with binary descriptions of participant-observation or insider ethnography. They sound like they cover more than they do. There are different forms of belonging and participating, different degrees of inside and outside. So, Erica belongs to the group she is studying but for many reasons, does not fit comfortably within their aesthetic and gender norms (or at least as she describes it). Similarly, as we are pulling this acafan discussion together, we relied on multiple kinds of connections with people, in relation to different communities and different scholarly traditions, and then purposefully mixed and matched them, so that we are all part of this conversation, but my bet is that each participant has reasons to feel somewhat inside and somewhat outside the "core" of the community being represented.

So, the goal is not simply to check a box and say "I am inside the community I study," but rather to use the provocation that "acafan" terminology represents, to dig deeper into where your knowledge comes from and how the work you are doing intersects your professional and personal identity in various ways. I think as we've become more familiar with writing in the first person, which high school and college writing teachers try so hard to discourage, then we have started to toss ourselves into more complex situations, which require more fancy footwork (to choose a metaphor appropriate to the situation that Erica is discussing),

And if there's a risk to the acafan label, it may be that it starts to feel too comfortable as a way of explaining or justifying what is always a much more complicated relationship to our object of study. At the same time, we want to avoid writing which amounts to nothing more than navel gazing. I struggled with this in writing Textual Poachers. It seemed vital to me to "come out" as a fan and yet at the same time, as a male writing about a predominantly female community, I did not want my voice to drown out the community I was studying and claiming that I was a member of the community did not seem adequate to explain my much more complex relationship to this group. I can never belong to that community in a simple way, given the gender composition, but I also do not want to be simply a "fan husband" given my wife's very active participation in this space. It's something I've continued to struggle with through the years and am not convinced I got anywhere near the right balance in my published writing on fan studies.

It seems uncomfortable not to acknowledge our participations and affective investments, these relationships are complex, and the minute we start to talk about them at all, it can start to feel like we are saying too much, either because we are directing attention away from our objects of study and onto us or because we are "oversharing" things which academic culture tells us should be private matters. What was so powerful about the first generation of queer studies folks is that they refused to be invisible, refused to keep quiet, when their silence could be read as complicit within a structure based around patriarchal and heteronormative power. In that circumstances, personal revelation was a vital part of the critique, and that was what I had hoped the acafan concept might help achieve.

Karen Hellekson:

Erica notes that she wants to avoid promoting "presumptions that professional critics and academics have more rich and complicated interpretations of culture than the people in pronouncements about what something means: means to whom? how do you know?" I agree that it doesn't take a professional critic to create valid interpretation. Professional critics have nothing on fans and their meta. Fans talking among themselves have some of the densest and richest text-based and self-referential analyses I've ever seen. I still remember the fabulous conversation about the TV show Leverage at the first Muskrat Jamboree fan con ("Hardison!"), and sitting on a panel about Margaret Atwood at Toronto Trek that had a great Q&A. Both experiences were like attending a really awesome English class, with excited students and detailed text-based analyses. Fan jargon may be different, but the analysis is fundamentally the same. In both worlds, my pronouncements are just as valid as anybody else's.

Science fiction critic Damon Knight, in In Search of Wonder, famously defined SF thus: "Science fiction . . . means what we point to when we say it." Part of this definition refers to the impossibility of adequately defining SF. But an important part of this is the self, pointing and making a declaration. So it is with the fan, and with the scholar: we self-define. Erica's good questions of means to whom? and how do you know? are answerable within the context of the conversation. It means to me and it means the object of study as defined in my text, and it also means to the audience of the text. I know because I studied it and thought about it. It has less to do with credentials and more to do with common agreement of appropriate modes of analysis: supporting ideas with text; placing the text within its context; juxtaposing modes to effect; perhaps constructing a critique within an established mode of theory. Fans and academics have different versions of these strategies, with fan fiction, fan videos, altered artwork, meta, and critical analysis all requiring community-valid construction and support.

I realize that Erica's real point here is that we must question what is at stake when such pronouncements are made. Fans analyze for the love of the source text; they may also analyze for some personal self-valorizing notions of thinkiness, networking, and credibility. (This isn't meant negatively. Many fans perform meta as their primary fannish activity.) Academics analyze basically for cultural capital, to be exchanged for jobs, publications, promotions, tenure. Both fans and academics may have authority, but it has a much-needed tangibility for academics in a way not necessarily relevant for fans. But analysis is not more pure because done for love and not profit; it is not more authoritative when done by a scholar and not a fan.

Henry points out in his Response 2 how the term acafan might be used as a pretext for navigating this binary that can result in an uncomfortable (because excessive) sharing. Yet it is polite to acknowledge your debts (to fans; to spouses). Likewise, it is common, even required in scientific writing, to acknowledge limitations that may affect understanding (as a person of a certain gender; as a person of a certain sexuality). Part of the problem is the difficulty in studying something that you're a part of. It's a Schroedinger's cat kind of thing, where the viewer always affects the thing being viewed, except it works vice versa too. Analysis leads to self-analysis, knowledge of imbrication in taste, class, authority, power, gender, and affect. That is as it should be.

It may be too much for the term acafan to carry such a heavy load, to meld together disparate practices and communities. All we can do is stand where we stand; point to what we point to; and call it like we see it. I think that's enough.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

BIOS

Karen Hellekson (http://karenhellekson.com) is a freelance copyeditor who lives in Maine. For her posts, she looked up the words name tag, kneejerk, exegesis, and imbrication. She studied with James Gunn and at the Institute for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Involved in face-to-face fandom from 1982 to 1996 and then online fandom since 2001, she writes slash and runs a fan fiction archive.

Henry Jenkins blogs...here. He is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Art, and Education at the University of Southern California. He has recently completed Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, due out in 2012. His current fannish interests include comics, Disney, silent movies, The Walking Dead, Castle, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who...

Erica Rand teaches in Women and Gender Studies and in Art and Visual Culture at Bates College. Her most recent big project, which brings the aca, the fan, and a lot of ice time to sports studies, currently titled Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice (Duke U. Press), is forthcoming in 2012. She also serves on the editorial boards of Criticism, Radical Teacher and Salacious: A Queer Feminist Sex Magazine (submit, submit, submit) , and shares the Salacious Advisor job, in print and on the blog.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Two, Part One (Henry Jenkins, Erica Rand, and Karen Hellekson)

The Origins of "Acafan" -- Henry Jenkins

I have been "credited" (or "blamed," depending on your perspective) with coining the term, "Acafan." Unfortunately, I don't remember when or how this occurred. Like many rich concepts, the term took shape over time, refined through conversations with students, colleagues, and fans. By the time Textual Poachers was published in 1992, I was moderating a short-lived discussion list called Acafan-L, involving mostly fans working on graduate degrees exchanging what we would today call "metafan" comments. "Acafan," however, does not appear in Textual Poachers which starts with my personal declaration as someone who is both a fan and an academic. I had been a fan for well over a decade, I was newly minted as an academic.

While built on the foundations of the Birmingham School, fan studies emerged in 1992, with the publication of Poachers and Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women, of Constance Penley's key essays on slash, and Lisa Lewis's The Adoring Audience (which included Jolie Jensen, John Fiske, Larry Grossberg, and others). Bacon-Smith may have been the most immersed of all of us into the fan community, yet for methodological and temperamental reasons, she presented herself as "The Ethnographer" who observes but participants only through formal experiments to see how the community practices work. The fan community itself embraced those more willing to signal affiliation, the relationship the term, aca-fan, was intended to capture, and many found Bacon-Smith's self presentation off-putting.

I've always thought some bright graduate student should systematically compare Enterprising Women and Textual Poachers: two ethnographies of more or less the same community, published only a few months apart, but so fundamentally different in approach and attitude, accessing different voices, reaching different conclusions, both capturing (but not adequately predicting) a moment of transition when digital media was reshaping what had long been a print and postal focused subculture. Some of the differences reflect the move from second to third wave feminism and some, shifts in our understanding of the relationship between personal and scholarly experiences.

I do not remember when or under what circumstances we first used the term, "acafan", but I do recall why we felt such a word was necessary.

A small but significant body of pre-existing scholarship about fandom pathologized the enthusiasms and participations so central to our work. Often, fans were depicted as inarticulate, incapable of explaining their motives or actions. This claim of inarticulateness was typically coupled by the scholar's refusal to engage with the community (and thus a rejection of the value of ethnographic methods). Instead, there was a focus on textual or ideological analysis of cult television, often framed around episodes not significant and often despised within the fan canons formed around these same series. Part of what allowed this pathologization of fandom was that the researchers were not implicated in their own analysis and were not accountable to a fan community. Many researchers treated fans less as collaborators than as bugs under a microscope. At the time, many fans and fan practices were behind closed doors, especially in a pre-digital era. For example, one of the first online communities focused on slash specifically prohibited academics and men (so I was doubly out of the picture).

The new "acafen" (fen has been the plural of fan within the science fiction fan culture) sought to distinguish themselves from the previous generation by signaling their own affiliations with and accountability to the communities they were studying. At the same time, many of us were also being accused of being "inauthentic" when speaking as fans, accused of "slumming it" or "going native" when we claimed to be part of the world we were studying, reflecting assumptions about intellectual and cultural capital that separated high culture academics and pop culture fans. We wanted to signal a dual allegiance -- to treat our subcultural knowledge as part of what informed the work we were doing as scholars. We were not simply fans and we were not simply academics - we were acafen.

A later generation would claim our sense of fandom was too rationalized (Matt Hills), not sufficiently focused on issues of passion, desire, pleasure, and affect, and Derek Johnson would question whether we papered over the "fantagonisms" which occured within fandom. Perhaps, but at the time, the fight was to get rid of this taint of irrationality, seeing being a fan as a meaningful rather than trivial pursuit.

As writers like Jolie Jensen noted, this mixture of passion and knowledge was what qualified one to speak about classical music, serious literature, or high art, but because of the legacy of critical studies, being passionate about popular culture was seen as being duped by the culture Industries. Many of us felt that there were things we could not understand about popular culture from the outside looking in.

Tapping our lived experiences, we argued, returned cultural studies to its roots. Take a look, for example, at how Raymond Williams mobilizes his personal experiences as a scholarship student and his working class childhood in "Culture is Ordinary." Think about what he has to say about his youthful embrace of libraries and museums as opposed to the way he got treated when he went to tea shops. Think about how his anger shaped his theories.

Or think about the ways Angela McRobbie shook up the Birmingham boys club working on subcultures, calling out Dick Hebdidge and others for not owning up to their own relationships to the groups they study, and asserting the importance of her own knowledge as a woman about what took place in adolescent girl's bedrooms rather than in the streets.

And of course, the Birmingham tradition was only one place we could have turned for examples of the subjective turn in cultural analysis. "Writing from a standpoint" was a feminist issue, and Jane Tompkins was asserting the right to tap the language of affect and fantasy, to write in first person, arguing that what she knew about literary texts was being excluded from male-dominated critical practices and institutions. Within anthropology, Renato Rosaldo's book, Culture and Truth, was asserting a potential link between academic distance and the colonialist project of earlier anthropologists. The only way forward, he argued, was for ethnographers to describe their own subjective experiences and to be more accountable to the communities they studied.

For me, perhaps the most important influence, though, was the emergence of queer studies as a theoretical paradigm closely linked to the experience of scholars making decisions about whether or not to come out of the closet in their professional lives. My office at MIT was across the hall from David Halperin, who referenced my discussion of slash in his work in queer historiography; I was deeply informed by his stance as a scholar who openly acknowledged his own desires and sexuality as a source of insight and knowledge. In media studies, I was also inspired by the work of Alex Doty, Erica Rand, and others, who were insisting on the value of "making things perfectly queer" (as Doty's book title suggests). At the same time, Rand's work on Barbie was suggesting the ways we selectively mobilize and retrospectively construct aspects of our own lived experience in order to reconcile them with our current self-perceptions.

Queer politics was being felt within fan culture itself during the early 1990s, with the rise of a global AIDS pandemic and debates about Robert Mapplethorpe's federal funding representing turning points in terms of how slash fans in particular saw themselves and their culture. Many were talking about "coming out" or being "outed" as fans. Reading as a fan was often a queer practice, and many fans joined pride parades and spoke out for gay rights. Queer scholars often signaled their identities through their introductions, feeling that there was an ethical obligation to be honest about how you knew what you knew and what motivated your work. And for me, this commitment spilled over into how I wrote about fandom. I do not mean to see the stakes of queer studies in the age of AIDS as comparable to fans trying to defend the value of their cultural identities but one informed the other. In some cases, they were linked, as when young fans were thrown out of their houses when their parents found their slash zines hidden under their beds or when adult women had to hide their involvement in fandom from husbands who saw their reading and writing of male-male erotica as sexual betrayal.

So, I can't tell you when Acafan was born, but these are the ideas and feelings from which it was born.

Is the term still useful today? I don't know, and that's why I am eager to host such a conversation. I know that the term has become so much a part of my identity through twenty years of use that I am going to be one of the very last to abandon it. "Acafan" should not be abandoned unless we can hold onto what has been gained by its deployment through the years.

Pleasure/Politics; Twirling/Defence -- Erica Rand

For the past five years, I've been trying to work my way out of the problem represented by the prompt: "Have we found a way to talk about pleasure [that] no longer requires self-reflexivity about our politics?" I know how long it's been partly by the date of a 15 December 2007 Dear Abby column that I grabbed from The Portland Press Herald, my local paper, early into my participant-observation project grounded in adult (grown-up vs. xxx) figure skating. "Abby" told the "Woman Search[ing] for Reason to End her Guiltless Affair," that "when something feels good, it is easy to become addicted . . . and then you'll be in for a world of pain." I used the comment in my first essay derived from this research, writing that pleasure had a bit of a bad rep among theorists of pleasure from Barthes (Pleasure of the Text) to Abby. In that context, I think, Abby functioned as a funny anti-model and the pairing with Barthes functioned, implicitly and a bit to the contrary, or so I hoped, as an acafan-type call to find theorizing that matters in sources around us.

I hadn't quite intended the first exactly, however, or lived up to the second. Revision changed things. The first draft I'd submitted began with a personal anecdote positioning myself as a surprised, somewhat rueful compatriot of Abby and Barthes. It concerned discovering that my adamant pro-pleasure stance was not as solid as I had imagined it to be before I took up a project where the brief summary didn't have "I fight oppression" as an obvious subtext. "Migration policing," even "Barbie," serve the purpose in a way that "figure skating" simply does not. In response to feedback from the editor/gatekeeper, which I interpreted to require me to make my theorizing more visible (to him, I thought crankily but not necessarily fairly), I frontloaded words like "neoliberalism" and some theoretical engagements that I'd originally positioned later.

It worked on him and, consequently, for me, especially after a series of conference paper and article rejections suggesting that either the work was terrible or that pleasure was indeed still a discredited topic as I'd heard. (I couldn't even interest the p.r. people at my own institution, formerly so interested in my work.) But the capitulation had some negative effects. Most important to me at the time was that even though the primary theory-engagement-demonstrator I used was pretty juicy--Kiss and Tell's Her Tongue on My Theory (Press Gang, 1994), one of my favorite texts--the beginning became far less reader-friendly. Even my academic skater friends commented "your article was so interesting--after I got through the first few pages." I wished I had fought more for the pleasure of my own text. The article lives in my own head as not quite the one I would have written and I shrank from inviting people to read it, fearing that it would turn them away from reading more.

By the time I finished the to-copyediting book manuscript on the topic (shameless ad in the bio below), I saw Abby's advice differently. I'm no fan of applying the label "addiction" to anything pleasurable that one does a lot. Why is a lot of pleasure a problem? What and whom does medicalizing stigmatization benefit? But I came to see the interconnections between love, money, and time that give so many adult figure skaters--including me--the ingredients for a classic addiction narrative. As I put it in the manuscript,

It can come upon you the way that bumming a cigarette at a party can turn into a pack-a-day habit: bit by bit before your very eyes, yet before you know it and while you half-deliberately missed what was happening. It begins, perhaps, with a group lesson every week, that you attend if nothing else is up. A few years later, skating has shunted other activities to the side, involving cash, prioritizing, and sacrifices that would have seemed unimaginable at first. Maybe they seem lunatic still. But the bar for sanity, or justifiable lunacy, has surely risen. So has the bar for satisfaction. You need more to have enough. You scheme to get it. Maybe you cut your expenses by getting in on the delivery. Perceived wants become perceived needs. You can't quit, or moderate, even when you know you're hurting yourself (or others). Shame and guilt--about having, spending, wanting--dampen, or fuel, the thrills.

There's something to learn from how well the analogy works that isn't "(say) you need to go to rehab if you sext outside of marriage." I'm still thinking through about what.

I'm also still trying to think through attaching "politics of" to "pleasure." I want to study political matters about pleasure, but came to think that describing my topic as the "politics of pleasure" was especially a way to butch it up, aligning with bad histories of gendered dichotomizing. Pleasure/politics; art/science; sex/war; twirling/defense (as in offense-defense); the first term in each has been denigrated in numerous contexts for allegedly feminine attributes. Plus, there's the creepy aura of alibi a la cause-related marketing (Product (RED)): notice all the white people around you and buy permission to skate your life away.

From that angle, the "politics of pleasure" seems like an excuse for no self-reflexivity about one's politics. Plus, here is one of many ways that immersing myself in figure skating brought me to rethink my relation to a political position I really believe(d): put simply, people should not have to rely on the Oprah-style largesse, parodied in Bring it On, for fun or survival. Yes but who am I to toss out someone else's pleasure with a disdainful "ugh, neoliberal" because a 501 (c) 3 is buying them figure skating lessons in Harlem?

Five years into it, I'm still rolling around with it, now mixed with a bit of self-absorbed sadness and panic: fieldwork is done, now what?

Affect and Interpretation-- Karen Hellekson

As a scholar trained in the field of English, which is all about interpretation and not so much about affect, I tend to be unconcerned about how people feel about ideas or texts. Back in the distant mists of time, when I taught, I was annoyed by student writing that dealt with emotion alone as though it were a valid response to a text. A response like, "It was confusing and I hated it!" to a complex novel is not in any way useful, despite what students clearly seem to think. Get to the formal aspects that made you feel that way! I exhorted them. What about the text made you hate it? What characters, what situations, what textual choices, what aspects of the authorial voice? If you must valorize your emotional response, use it as a doorway into interpretation!

I actually stand by that assertion, even as I left students behind when I happily left the academy more than ten years ago. In terms of critical engagement and analysis, feeling may certainly exist--in fact, it must, or where is the love, joy, and interest that compel active engagement? Academics are nothing if not fans, although for people who work in science fiction (like me) or media or fan studies (like all of us posting today), the term fan may have a slightly different articulation than the average Jo, thanks to the formal structures that have sprung up to permit fannish expression, including things like fan fiction and fan conventions and fan online message boards. Suffice it to say that for me, the pleasure of the text seems occult and forbidding, even forbidden. My writing of slash fan fiction must be subsumed under the rubric of interpretation; how else to explain the overwhelming pleasure of the (writing of the derivative) text, without resorting to "it was confusing and I hated it! So I fixed it!"

As someone who thinks that everything ought to have either use or beauty, and preferably both, the term acafan falls short. Positioning oneself in relationship to the text seems delightfully old-fashioned. Why use up an essay's precious words explaining an obvious relationship? Isn't the disinterested scholar a thing of the past? Has postmodernism taught us nothing?

Aca has a snooty connotation: I have been trained to interpret, and I know better than you. Fans are immediately suspicious. Fan has the connotation of unthinking, uncritical adoration. Academics are immediately suspicious.

The portmanteau word so constructed must bear a heavy load, mediating the disinterest of the scholar with the passion of the fan. Further, the term's use does not necessarily benefit. To fans, acafans may be treated with suspicion. To some fans, to become an object of study by someone you thought of as a friend or community member is fun, even flattering; to others, it is threatening, something to be shut down. To academics, it signals a level of immersion that may confer credibility even as it may cause a fear of bias, along, perhaps, with a raised eyebrow.

What unites the academic and the fan is the unbearable pleasure of the text--unbearable yet faced and negotiated, a (pre)text responded to with text. As a practitioner, I prefer to focus on the aca side, but that is the result of my discipline's biases and my training. By such a focus, I think I become a better practitioner because I try not to be partisan. While researching, it helps me negotiate the terrain. I am horrified by certain aspects of the fan world, like incivility and name-calling (in my defense, some of my recent work has been on fan kerfuffles and wank, where incivility can be the order of the day), even as I am struck by fans' thoughtful, decisive analyses (known as meta), performed in a different register than acafannish work--personal, biased, honest in a way that acafannish work tends to dance around because of its use of a dispassionate tone and its choice of publication venue.

I suspect--I know--that aca work and fan work are the same work, performed for different audiences. I perform them both: I write fan fiction to critique the source text in my fan work, but my academic work performs the same function. For me, "It was confusing and I hated it!" is the same thing as "It made me think and I loved it!" The text I generate is the why.

Acafan is a created structure that serves to gesture mostly to itself, a term whose use speaks to a relatively small subset of researchers who recognize the bifurcation inherent in the term and exploit that bifurcation. Its power lies in the academic's power; the fan gains little or nothing from its deployment. Within the realm of fan studies, the term has become a shorthand that indicates a particular approach and stance--one that involves affect, thanks to the fan, and power, thanks to the academic, yet it is deployed at an academic moment (at least in English) where such self-positioning is not considered useful. Its use announces the interweaving of affect and scholarship and signals the topic as fan studies.

The instability between fan and scholar provides endless modalities to play with, gaps to fill, and openings to exploit. To close them is to shut down a conversation that is still generative as it explores notions of authority and affect. For this instability alone, acafan is a useful term; and for me, as I consider the word, flung at my feet, for me to dance with or not, it can be beautiful.

BIOS

Karen Hellekson (http://karenhellekson.com) is a freelance copyeditor who lives in Maine. For her posts, she looked up the words name tag, kneejerk, exegesis, and imbrication. She studied with James Gunn and at the Institute for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. She is founding coeditor of the fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Involved in face-to-face fandom from 1982 to 1996 and then online fandom since 2001, she writes slash and runs a fan fiction archive.

Henry Jenkins blogs...here. He is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Art, and Education at the University of Southern California. He has recently completed Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, due out in 2012. His current fannish interests include comics, Disney, silent movies, The Walking Dead, Castle, Game of Thrones, Doctor Who...

Erica Rand teaches in Women and Gender Studies and in Art and Visual Culture at Bates College. Her most recent big project, which brings the aca, the fan, and a lot of ice time to sports studies, currently titled Red Nails, Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice (Duke U. Press), is forthcoming in 2012. She also serves on the editorial boards of Criticism, Radical Teacher and Salacious: A Queer Feminist Sex Magazine (submit, submit, submit) , and shares the Salacious Advisor job, in print and on the blog.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Going Beyond the Ending: A Wrap Up

This week, this blog has been using the debate about Smallville's ending to raise some larger questions about how cult series ends and how producers might deal with fans who are disappointed or frustrated or enraged or betrayed or... with the outcomes. Seeking to place this debate in a larger context, I reached out to Flourish Klink,who graduated with a Masters from the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (where I was her proud mentor) and now, alongside teaching at MIT, works as the Chief Participation Officer for the Alchemists, advising this transmedia company about fan relations and participatory culture. She always has interesting things to say about the interplay between producers and fans, so I wanted to give her a chance to weigh in on this discussion.

Cult series always seem more satisfying to fans in the middle than at the end. How do you think producers should deal with the expectations which have built up over the run of the series? Are there classic mistakes which producers make in trying to respond to fan frustration with the ending of a program?

One of the most important aspects of dealing with expectations is to be honest about the situation, the possibilities, and the fact that not everybody is happy. One of the most classic mistakes that producers make is to become very defensive about their own work, suggesting that the way the show (or book, or...) ended is the only way it could have ended. Obviously, producers and writers and actors get just as wrapped up in their own long-running projects as fans do, so sometimes they become very certain that they're doing the right thing!

But fans also have a perspective on the series, and if the producers are too staunch that the series ended the right and correct and only way possible, it can be very insulting to fans. It is much better to frame discussion about the end of a series in a more open way. "We decided to make character X and character Y together, because that's what everybody in the writer's room was feeling... Character Y and character Z might have a romance in an alternate universe, for sure, but we could only tell one of a million possible stories about these people."

An example of a writer who dealt with this very badly is J.K. Rowling (OK, she's a writer, not a producer - but it's a similar idea). Many fans viewed the epilogue to the final book as a slap in the face, intended to shut down any speculation about what might happen to the characters in their adult life. It would have been very easy for Rowling to mitigate some of those frustrations with a few well-placed words!

What roles can/should transmedia play in shaping the future of a cult series?

Transmedia can provide a wonderful way to explore the future of a series that ended too soon - but it can also play a wonderful role in exploring alternate universes, alternate ideas of how characters could be. That's an old idea in fanfic, but it's a new idea for Hollywood. (Here, we ignore the Star Wars extended universe - it's been doing this for years, but very quietly.) On its simplest level, changing media can allow fans who liked the ending of a TV show to enjoy that ending and consider the new medium "noncanonical" - but it can allow fans who didn't like the ending, especially an ending that centers around a romantic pairing, to continue the story until it reaches a place they find more satisfying.

What roles can/should fan fiction play in allowing fans to "repair the damage" done by the "Powers That Be" when they end a series on what some fans feel is the wrong note?

It seems silly to me to ask questions about "should" when it comes to fan works. Fan works are not really the kind of thing that "should" or "should not" exist - they do exist, and there we are. That said, I think that fan fiction is vital for this purpose. Fans are extremely invested in their shows, and fan fiction can be a way to put your money where your mouth is: instead of just saying "damn, why didn't they do X, Y and Z," you can write it yourself instead. By that stage of a show, fandom is often as much about frustration as it is about fascination; fan fiction gives one a way to work out both those emotions.

Even though lots of fans disliked the final season, I think that Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a very good job - and it did a good job of using multiple shows and multiple media to let fans choose what view of the universe they wanted to take. Fans can choose to only watch Buffy - or also watch Angel - or also read the Season 8 comic books. Depending on what they chose to do, what they choose to consider their own personal "head canon," they can enjoy their own ideas about the series. What's more, whether you liked or disliked the final episode of BTVS, nobody was able to say that it wasn't climactic. BTVS somehow managed to have an apocalypse every season and still raise the stakes every season. If that's possible, no other show has an excuse for not having a climactic final episode!

For those who want to have a better understanding of how one can be a fan, even a very loyal fan, and actively seek to write around or think around disappointing elements in the original series, I'd recommend checking out my chapter on Beauty and the Beast in Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Here was a series that many, though not all, fans thought took a wrong turn which violated the genre contract the producers had made with their viewers and many chose to disavow an entire series and proceed with the fandom as though it had never existed as part of the canon.

Now, I want to share two letters I received from other fans who wanted to share their thoughts on the ending of cult series. I would be happy to see more such letters at hjenkins@usc.edu and will publish more if they come. Do let me know if you intend your letter for publication.

Dr. Jenkins,

The ending of series can certainly be a challenge for everyone involved, especially the fans. I remember well when the original Star Trek television series moved to less-favored time slots and eventually went off the air. It is probably fortunate that they did not have the inclination at the time to do a major "wrap up" episode, which left fans and professional writers alike the opportunity to continue the storyline and expand it into many other series set in the universe that Gene Roddenberry built.

I was, by the way, one of those fans who continued the series in dreadful, typed fan-fic stories that circulated in small eddies, a practice that also got me through the long dry-spells between Star Wars movies. I'd never be rival to Timothy Zahn, but my own imaginings and characters satisfied my desire to know what happened in a way that did not detract from what became the official story line. My friends and I enjoyed our now-online "alternate universe" versions, and the challenge of creating believable plots and character development arcs gave me new sympathy for professional writers.

This is not to say that I do not understand the sense of disappointment and loss when a series - or character - is terminated before I am ready. I still consider Firefly the best series that should never have ended. The movie Serenity explained many of gems Josh Wheaton had hidden in store for us, but I will always grieve that we did not see the interplay between those 9 superb characters (and actors!!) beyond the first season. But I also wonder if, in the need to turn out an episode on schedule, the cast and crew would have started moving in directions that disappointed me and the rest of its many fans. As it is, we have our memories, favorite lines, and our mental model of who these characters would have become.

Art, after all, is a cooperative enterprise - while the television presents us with episodes in our favorite characters' lives, the audience also fills in and extrapolates for itself meaning of whom these people "are" to us. For some of us, myself included, they can be more than entertainment. If we follow them for years and invest them with importance to us personally, then they do have deeper meaning. They may be role models or exhibit a part of our personalities that we do not or cannot express in the "real world" of our socio-cultural reality. Watching them gives us an opportunity to play with identity, perhaps in ways not open to us normally. We might not have a strong, professional woman in our "real" lives, but seeing that character on the screen can help us imagine being one ... and then becoming one in a case of a projected identity becoming actual.

In retrospect, considering all the series and characters I have followed, I wonder if cult series should avoid conclusive wrap up episodes. The last episode (heck, the last season) of Lost, for instance, felt like a cheat - not answering the questions that I did have while also not advancing the characters in a way that felt authentic, to me. While, at the time, a series' sudden end (as with the very uneven Odyssey 5) leaves me with questions, it also leaves me freedom to imagine for myself what would have been if only the series had continued. And in many ways, the audience's own imagination - as Hitchcock demonstrated - is more powerful than laying it all out on the screen in vivid, authoritative, bound-to-disappoint-someone conclusion.

Barbara Z. Johnson

From Eugenia:

WHY THE FINALE TO BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (2003) DIDN'T WORK FOR ME

POSSIBLE RESOLUTIONS TO THE SERIES

Sometime during Season 3, I had decided that there were three types of resolutions to this series. These were:

1. Everyone dies.


2. Most of the main characters survive.


3. The postmodern non-ending ending.

1. Everyone dies

According to the laws of narrativium and story logic [1], this was the most likely resolution. Hints, or what other writers call "foreshadowing", in this direction were themes such as humanity wasn't fit to survive and children didn't come into their own until their parents were eliminated. Minor plots centered on schisms in the population leading to violence, characters suffering fatigue both mentally and physically, and characters becoming addicted to mind-altering substances. Logically these actions would have led to depleting resources to the point the fleet would be unable to defend or sustain itself.

2. Most of the main characters survive

Given Moore and Eick's manifesto [2] which described their "re-imagining" as "Naturalistic Science Fiction" and which stated, "Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series", something resembling an optimistic ending was the least likely resolution. After several seasons of "gritty realism", bleakness, and despair, the reversion to something resembling a traditional ending where the "good" guys win would be tantamount to an admission of failure of their "re-imagined" series.

Rationalizations of following the original series are mere excuses. Moore and Eick never felt obligated to follow anything in the original series beyond the title, the character names (even then demoted to "call signs" or last names), and the general design of the eponymous spaceship. It's absurd to even bring up Galactica: 1980 to justify the ending; that series wasn't titled Galactica: 148,000 BC.

3. The postmodern non-ending ending

In light of the "critical acclaim" of the series in the first two seasons, this conclusion to the series was possible if Moore and Eick sought to reinstate their favoured position with the critical intelligentsia.

The typical ingredients of postmodern works are evident in the series: style over substance, juxtaposition of different elements, references to past works, combination of the "lowbrow" and "highbrow", ambiguity, nihilism, and self-awareness of the artificial contrivance involved in creating the "work". Frequently accompanying postmodern literature or art is the author's stated intention to make it "difficult" for the reader or viewer. Not only difficult in interpreting it, but also even reading or looking at it due to the revolting subject matter.

These traits were evident in the series with its use of documentary (cinema-verite) camera work, the "re-imaging" of a "cheesy, 1970's TV show" into something "complex" with "layers of meaning", the disjointed narrative which frequently shifted time frames leaving gaps in the storyline, the monotone colour scheme of the costumes and sets making it difficult to distinguish characters, and viewers constantly being referred to deleted scenes and podcasts to fill in the gaps. Adding to the difficulty in understanding the storyline was demanding the viewer to shift frames of reference in quick succession. At times it was space opera, at others it was contemporary drama, and at still other times abstract symbolism. A frequent trait in postmodern literature is the author making an appearance in the story itself, so Moore's cameo in the final scenes was not unexpected.

What is claimed as sophisticated and erudite is merely confusing as the postmodern approach repeatedly disrupts the "suspension of disbelief" which narrative fiction relies on. The conclusions of such works are often self-referential or circular in that they return to the beginning.

WHAT DID WE GET?

Basically the conclusion was a traditional "happy" ending in which most of the main characters survive and a quick addendum of the postmodern self-referential with a few final swipes at the original series.

Moore and Eick just couldn't resist making the "Guardians" (old-school Cylon centurions) all on the "evil" side and obliterated. They just couldn't resist pitching the whole fleet into the sun accompanied by the original 1978 series title music played at the tempo of a dirge [3]. They just couldn't resist one last potshot regarding the original Baltar's beheading/non-beheading [4].

WHY IT DIDN'T WORK FOR ME

It contradicted the underlying assumption of the science fiction genre. Underneath the spaceships, lasers, funny-looking makeup, etc. is the ideal that the scientific method enables progress through a greater understanding of the physical world. As such, it allows humanity to determine its own destiny by surviving threats of extermination from disease, natural disasters, and predators.

The finale succumbed to the romantic notion of the "noble savage" living in harmony with nature by giving up material possessions, advanced technology, and accumulated knowledge. In essence, these Colonials sentenced their direct descendants to ignorance and a minimal existence. This is the antithesis of the science fiction genre's foundation. The series conclusion reveals that the "optimism" that Moore and Eick criticized as unrealistic in Star Trek was actually a lack of understanding on their part of the values inherent in the scientific method and Western civilization.

The cyclical "what has happened before, will happen again" typifies Eastern traditions. Destiny is preordained meaning when it come right down to it, an individual or civilization having no "free will". References to the "Head" people as angels who are acting in accordance with God's instructions is actually in direct opposition to the original series "Beings of Light". The "Beings of Light" represented the possibility of humanity's evolution to a higher state yet they could not "interfere with freedom of choice [5]", unlike the "re-imagined" series "Head" people who directly interfered and acted in the capacity of fate or destiny.

Various comments regarding comparisons of the original series to the "re-imagined" series indicate that some viewers weren't paying attention or were not able to recognize recurring themes without a character pontificating at length. When the original series mentioned that Kobol's [6] civilization migrated and abandoned technology, it stated: "And when they settled the Colonies, they turned on the very technology that could have saved them had they used it properly [7]". This theme is later alluded to in dialogue referring to the Cylons as "a race of beings who allowed themselves to be overcome by their own technology [8]". Technology wasn't considered evil in and of itself, but that it could be misused either intentionally or through over-reliance.

The original series connected the themes of "free will" and the use of technology. These themes are intertwined in the episode "War of the Gods" and complement the surface mythic storyline. In being seduced by technology, there is the danger of losing one's humanity or soul. To retain "free will", and thus humanity, it was deemed necessary to maintain family, community, and knowledge through religious, educational, political, and military structures. To submit blindly to another power is to lose "free will" and the ability to determine one's future. This point was again visited in the episode "Experiment in Terra" with the words: "I came from a world where the people believed the opposite of war was peace. We found out the hard way that the opposite of war is more often slavery. And that strength -- strength alone -- can support freedom [9]".

[1] The force that holds the story together as defined by Terry Pratchett.
[2] Ron Moore, Battlestar Galactica: Naturalistic Science Fiction or Taking the Opera out of Space Opera 2002
[3] Has this series ever used the 1978 Stu Phillips title music theme at the original tempo in all of its orchestral glory? Especially the trumpet fanfare?
[4] That one was for me, wasn't it, Ron?
[5] Being of Light, "Lost Planet of the Gods, Part II"
[6] Incidentally, the Akkadian word for planet or star is kakkabu, which doesn't take much effort to transform into Kolob or Kobol.
[7] Adama, "Lost Planet of the Gods, Part II"
[8] Baltar, "War of the Gods, Part II"
[9] Apollo, "Experiment in Terra"

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Learning from Hollywood: Voices from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Conference

I spent the first part of the week participating in a conference, hosted by the USC Cinema School and organized by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "Learning from Hollywood: Can Entertainment Media Ignite an Education Revolution?" This was the kind of event that warms my radically undisciplined heart and mind -- a gathering of people from many different backgrounds (educators and academics, media industry people from both the commercial and public media worlds, activists and nonprofits, foundations, librarians and curators) to talk about the potential intersection between education and entertainment. In the course of the two days, we heard a lot about the value of stories and storytelling to incite the imagination, to provoke curiosity, to convey our collective memories and wisdom, and to inspire more acts of creativity.

This was perhaps best brought alive for me through a performance by The Story Pirates -- a group of actors, improv comedians, and otherwise kooky and creative people, who go into schools around the country, help young people construct their own stories, and then incorporate them into their performances. In this case, they brought a class of Latino/a elementary schools with them, both performing one young man's previously written stories, and soliciting elements from the kids for a story performed live on the spot.

My own remarks at the conference centered on what the practices and logics of participatory culture might bring to the paradigm of "entertainment education" which I have been learning a lot about since coming to USC. Under the classic version of this model, experts consult with script writers to get information about health or social concerns integrated into the fictional programs and sometimes to get tags or bumpers which help link viewers to the groups working on these issues. I really respect the commitment behind such work and know that it does make a difference for many people. But increasingly, I've wondered what would happen if these same projects got taken up by the fan communities around the show, if the messages were not simply embedded in the program but designed to be acted upon in more creative and public ways. I used the example of what's happened around Harry Potter to describe a movement from inspiring reading to inspiring writing to inspiring activism, remarks which build upon the work my Civicpaths research group has been doing for the MacArthur and Spencer Foundations.

Scott Traylor from 360KID, who I knew from back at MIT, was nice enough to capture my remarks and those of several other speakers via his cellphone camera and has given me permission to share some of these segments with you through this blog. Thanks, Scott. So, this first bit is my talk on Harry Potter and the potential of a more participatory model of entertainment education.

Scott also captured some of the highlights from a panel on Monday night on "Storytelling and the Art of Engagement," hosted by Betty Cohen, the former President of the Cartoon Network and the Lifetime Network, and including film producers Don Hahn (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) and Doug Wick (Gladiator, Memoirs of a Gesha) and television producer Marcy Carsey (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Third Rock from the Sun), sharing their insights on Hollywood's craft and speaking about their desire to see the work that they do more fully incorporated into both formal and informal education. Getting these kinds of glimpses into the behind the scenes production processes is one of the great joys of living so close to Hollywood.

Here are two highlights Scott captured -- showing Carsey talking about the need to "respect the audience"...

And Wick talking about how he draws inspiration from the work of Bruno Bettelheim:

The event was also a place for demonstrations by some top digital designers and developers, including this segment on Sifteos by a Media Lab alum Jeevan Kalanithi.

On Tuesday morning, we heard from Linda Burch from Common Sense Media and Frank Gilliam, Dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs, talking about the challenges of overcoming existing frames parents and teachers have for thinking about the relations between digital media and schooling. Scott captured Gilliam's remarks, which offer some real insights into how and why some of the messaging around digital media and learning may be falling on deaf ears.

Unfortunately, Scott had to fly back to Boston so we do not have some of the other highpoints of the conference, such as a presentation by Participant Media's John Schreiber on their Waiting for Superman documentary;

an interview with Kari Byron, the charming host of Mythbusters, about their new Headrush initiative, to help inspire girls to think about STEM; and closing remarks by media mogul Peter Gruber.

All told, my head is exploding from new insights and beyond that, new connections, many of which I hope to build upon through this blog in the weeks ahead.

Special thanks to Cooney Center Director Michael Levine who has helped pull together this phenomenal event.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Shall We Play? (Part Two)

Because of the importance we place on play, we call the professional development program Project New Media Liteacies is developing PLAY (which in this case stands for Participatory Learning and YOU!) (We usually accompany this definition by pointing our finger at the person we are talking to, itself a playful ritual which surrounds our collective discussion of this work.) You can read more about the core concepts underlying our PLAY approach through a series of blog posts being developed by Vanessa Vartabedian at the Project NML blog.

For the moment, I will simply offer this one paragraph explanation of our general approach:

Participatory learning is characterized by:

• Heightened motivation and new forms of engagement through meaningful play and experimentation;
• Learning that feels relevant to students' identities and interests;
• Opportunities for creating using a variety media, tools and practices;
• Co-configured expertise where educators and students pool their skills and knowledge and share in the tasks of teaching and learning;
• An integrated system of learning where connections between home, school, community and world are enabled and encouraged.

Blake Anderson, a student in my New Media Literacies class made this video to explain the concept, which I had to share. This graduate student was motivated by a series of YouTube videos to make a puppet for the first time, as he sought ways to translate my conceptual model for a new audience. As you will see, the protagonist of the video is The Professor who bears an uncanny resemblance to the actual instructor of his class but was also a tribute to a childhood spent in the company of Muppets. This deflation of academic authority was received with great pleasure by all involved, especially by me.

What does participatory learning look like in practice? Well, one example might be the workshops in interactive design which I ran for many years at MIT in collaboration with the late Sande Scoredos from Sony Imageworks. We formed teams of students with many different educational backgrounds and interests. Each team was to chose an existing media property and began to develop a plan for how to expand it into interactive media -- most often, how to translate it into the vocabulary of contemporary video games. Students in this intensive class broke their time between hearing lectures on aspects of interactive design by faculty and industry people and working in teams, brainstorming, refining their ideas, and working towards a presentation. By the end of the week, the students "pitch" their game ideas to a panel of people from different parts of the entertainment industry, pretending to be a start up company trying to get a contract, and they got feedback on both their ideas and their presentation styles.

The result was always memorable -- a rich array of imaginative ideas which showed a deep understanding of the core concepts and information running through the class. Students listened with the idea that they would be applying what they learned in this creative and playful process. I plan to adapt this approach for the Transmedia Entertainment and Storytelling class I am offering through the Cinema School in the fall.

Participatory learning might also look like what we have been doing through an after school program which we launched at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools this semester, a program focused around themes of digital citizenship. The RFK schools (six altogether, each with different focuses and philosophies) launched this fall and they are still trying to work through their identity and norms as a community. We sought ways to get students focused on the process of defining who they were as a community through play and creative activities. Vanessa Vartabedian ran the program, with strong support from Erin Reilly and Laurel Felt, and in the end, it involved all of the current Project NML students and staff, as well as students from my New Media Literacies graduate seminar.

One activity had the students taking photographs of "invisible borders or boundaries" which shaped their social interactions, whether borders based on gender, class, or the line between student and teacher or the line between the different schools using the shared facility. This focus on norms of inclusion or exclusion was enhanced by the challenge of using photography, normally a medium for capturing the visible, as a means of representing things which are understood but often not explicit, often not seen or observed.

Another activity, developed by the Rossier Schools' Stefani Relles sought to get students to construct an anthem for their school, using very open ended modes of visual orchestration, and then, using simple instruments, trying to produce meaningful noise together. The goal was not only to get students to articulate what their schools meant to them but also to experience music-making as a creative process, one which was structured to free them from anxieties about performance.

Another activity, developed by Meryl Alper, got them to focus on the history of the school, which had, among other things, been the site of the Coconut Grove nightclub, which has been partially preserved as a drama facility, and was also the site of the Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. In fact, the media lab where the after school program meets is the kitchen where RFK died, something which students had not fully understood until Alper explained it. Alper shared with them a photograph of the Latino bus boy who prayed with and comforted RFK in his final moments, and asked them to think about their own place in the history of the school. Using an app which pastiched a range of different film stocks, she asked them to go out and stage images which conveyed something of the history of the school, and again, they were invited to creatively explore and document their physical surroundings. These are simply a few of the forms of participatory learning activities we've incorporated into our work at the RFK schools. Most of these activities are playful and creative, but they are not in and of themselves games.

So, let me close with the invitation to all of the educators who read (or hear) this talk: Shall we play?

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Shall We Play? (Part One)

A few weeks ago, I delivered one of the two keynote addresses at the USC Teaching with Technologies conference. This year's theme was "The Connected Mind." I chose to spend my time talking about the value of play, a theme which has surfaced several times in my recent talks, so I wanted to share the core ideas from this presentation with you here.

SHALL WE PLAY?

In many ways, I am speaking to you today under false pretenses. This talk is not primarily about teaching with technology. After spending two decades of my life at MIT, I have almost reflexively become that guy who challenges claims about technological determinism and who stresses the importance of the culture which informs the design and deployment of tools.

These themes are explored more fully in the white paper which I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on Learning in a Participatory Culture. New media tools and platforms have affordances which support new kinds of learning, but those forms of learning are also very strongly informed by participatory practices, many of which have a history far older than the web. Today, in focusing on play, I am going to be drawing heavily on ideas that emerged prior to the introduction of digital games, but which continue to be relevant in rethinking our pedagogical practices. If we embrace the values of play, we may find ourselves toying with new technologies and insofar as these participatory practices are closely associated with some of the new platforms of the Web 2.0 era, we may also find that in working with these tools, we are drawn towards a reappraisal of the value of play in our teaching.

This is also not a talk about games-based learning. Through the work I did almost a decade ago at MIT with Kurt Squire, Philip Tan, Eric Klopfer, Alex Chisholm and others on the Games to Teach Project, I have been an early and frequent advocate of games-based learning. I both share James Paul Gee's belief that good game design is also good pedagogical design and have worked to model what games for education might look like. But in talking always about games, we may under-estimate the value of more open-ended forms of play and of play as a general disposition in the educational environment. These are the themes I want to explore more fully today.

This is also not a talk about gamification, a term which is being used far too often today, as if it could adequately sum up the larger movement towards games for change. To me, gamification as a concept grossly simplifies what research on games-based learning has shown us over the past decade or so. When the Games to Teach team worked with content experts, we sought ways to embed information from the curriculum, knowledge from the text book, into activities in the games. We asked each expert what knowing this allowed people to do and then we sought to capture those activities through the game design and mechanics so that they provided deep motivation for the learner to master these concepts.

At the heart of this model was intrinsic motivation. The power of games is in part that they provide such clarity in defining the roles and goals, that they helped us to know what to do and how to do it, and as such, they motivate deeper forms of learning. Gamification, at its worst, rejects a theory of intrinsic motivation in favor of one based on extrinsic motivation. That is to say, it attempts to motivate "proper" or "desired" behavoirs through attaching points to otherwise mundane and uninteresting activities. For example, Foursquare represents a gamification of consumer loyalty programs.

One might argue that this version of gamification does not in any significant way break with current educational practices which may be why it has been easier for schools to embrace than the more challenging kinds of learning games which were proposed in the past. Our students learn NOW in schools not because they value what they are learning but because they have been taught to value grades. And where their grades are not strong, they plead for extra credit points, which represents another way of adding points as rewards or incentives to behaviors valued by their teachers. I do believe we can learn much from games but I sure hope that what we take away from them goes deeper than most current models of gamification.

But, for the moment, I want to push games aside and talk about play. The distinction I am making here comes from an essay by the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. Here's what Bettelheim tells us:

'Generally speaking, play refers to the young child's activities characterized by freedom from all but personally imposed rules (which are changed at will), by free-wheeling fantasy involvement, and by the absence of any goals outside the activities itself...'

Bettelheim thus links play to freedom, experimentation, personal investment, and process, all values to which I will return later in this talk.

"Games, however, are usually competitive and are characterised by agreed-upon, often externally imposed, rules, by a requirement to use the implements of the activity in the manner for which they were intended and not as fancy suggests, and frequently by a goal or purpose outside the activity, such as winning the game."

We might think about the game, Candyland, as an ideal transitional device -- a game which teaches young players the basic mechanics of board games, one which often plays a key role in socializing us into the world of games. For Betteiheim, learning to play games represents an important step in the socialization process -- learning to accept outside and sometimes arbitrary constraints on one's behavior for the purposes of social reciprocity and delayed gratification.

"Children recognize early on that play is an opportunity for pure enjoyment, whereas games may involve considerable stress."

So, while learning to play games is a step forward, it also is accompanied by some kinds of losses -- in terms of personal expression and immediate pleasure. People cheat at games, for example, as a way of coping with the anxiety of competition in ways that they do not generally find it necessary to cheat at play. Indeed, it is not clear what cheating at play would look like given the lack of social constraint on individual expression it entails.

By that same token, institutions find it much easier to incorporate games, which preserves the notion of rule-driven activity, rather than play, which is often understood as a kind of anarchic freedom from any and all constraints. So, schools often treat most forms of play as minimally a distraction, more often a disruption, of school practices, hence the concept of "class clown" which runs through educational literature. In other cultures, the clown is an educator who invites us to re-examine existing hierarchies and structures, taking the world apart and putting it back together again, where-as the clown in our schooling is seen as an unwelcome rival for the classes attention, a challenge to discipline and a disturbance of learning.

In part, this is because our puritan culture maintains a world view in which play is the opposite of work. We have decided that schooling should be about work rather than play, and as such, we are driving down the creative impulses of our students. No wonder that many are seeing a crisis of creativity in contemporary America!

Interestingly, though, when we work with teachers in professional development programs focused on learning and teaching the new media literacies, they consistently gravitate to play out of the 12 social skills and cultural competencies we've identified through our work. Here's how our white paper defines play as a literacy: "the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem solving." Today, we are pushing beyond play as a skill to think about play as a disposition -- a way of seeing oneself and the world through new creative lens which depend on suspending real world consequences and encouraging a process of innovation and creativity.

Educators are sometimes drawn to play for the wrong reasons -- because they seek to entertain their students. I sometimes hear various lay theories of "stealth learning," the idea that we can smuggle in learning disguised as play into schools and students will have so much fun that they will overcome their resistance to the schooling process. In many ways, I see this as like that moment in Tom Sawyer where Twain's protagonist sells others in his cohort into helping him white wash the fence by convincing him that doing so is great fun. This is perhaps the same kind of trap that we fall into when we talk about gamification -- a confusion between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Play is not disguised learning; play IS learning.

Jean Piaget captures this sense of the value of play when he tells us that "play is the work of childhood." He rejects any simple opposition between play and work, suggesting that play is the most important work children perform, because it is through play they acquire basic knowledge and skills fundamental to their culture. A kitten plays at stalking. In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. And in an information society, people play with information and interfaces.

We can rehearse and acquire core skills and knowledge through play because play lowers the stakes of failure. One of the activities we've developed through Project NML for thinking about play is called "Fail and Fail Often," and it uses the casual game, Bloons, to get people to reflect on the strategies of experimentation and calibration they apply in solving problems in games. This is a totally addictive game in part because it is so simple and the way you move forward through the game is to try different strategies, most of which will not work. Through this process, we learn basic things about the physics of the game and how different materials respond to us. We can compare this with the role failure plays in schools: children are afraid to fail and teachers are afraid to tell their students that they are failing. As a result, students do not take risks which might push their performance forward and they do not get the feedback they might need to better calibrate their efforts.

Lately, as I've talked about the value of play for learning, I have started to identify a series of properties which help us to better understand the core principles of play. I call them the Six P's of Play (though this remains a work in progress and may end up with fewer or more Ps before all is said and done).

1. Permission. Before we can play, as adults, as students, we have to give ourselves permission to do so. This is of course different for many children who play often and only stop playing when they are prohibited from doing so. The concept of permission is closely linked to what game theorists call the "magic circle," that is, a mental bracket which we put around our activities which changes their affect, their meaning, and most of all, their consequences. Within that magic circle, we lower the consequences of risks; we agree to engage with each other with good humor; we try hard but do not take the outcome as seriously as we would if we performing the same activities outside of a play context. I love the example of the little girl who is sweeping the floor -- we would understand her activity differently if she were doing chores or playing house, even though the actions would be the same. In a school culture, where there is a long history of prohibiting play, we must work very hard to give signals when play is an acceptable mode of engaging with the activities and we have to build up trust with our students that we are not going to retrospectively count their play against them.

2. Process -- Play values process as much or more than product. Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens make the point that the most efficient and effective way to play golf is to walk right up to the hole and plop the ball into it. But we would not see that as a very fun way of playing golf. Instead, we create as many obstacles as possible -- we use strange implements, we move far away from the hole, we create sand and water obstacles, we slope the landscape to give us less effective control over the outcome. In an education system now focused so heavily on how students perform on standardized testing, performance based on product completely displaces performance assessed based on process, yet play's value is focusing our attention on the experience itself, in the moment, in the process. It asks us to be aware of how we do things as much as on what we do. This is why play can be helpful in supporting the acquisition of basic skills which can be rehearsed and valued on their own without regard to the finished product.

3. Passion --The Gates Foundation has found that an increasing number of young people are dropping out of school not because they are incapable of performing what's expected of them but because they are bored. Work in the Digital Media and Learning Field tells us that we need to recognize the rewards of passion-based learning, of students pursuing those topics which they care about most deeply and using these interests to motivate and sustain other kinds of learning. Mary Louise Pratt has a great story she tells about her son's baseball card collection and how talking with him about it pushed him to learn more about history (as a backdrop to the key games in baseball history), geography (as a context for where the teams come from), architecture (as a way of discussing different stadiums), and math (as a way of playing around with batting averages.) This brings us back to Bettelheim's notion of play as open-ended, free-flowing, self-determined, and thus as something which is experienced as a site of freedom and passion.

4. Productivity -- Play is highly generative, despite or perhaps even because of its focus on process rather than product. I am very fond of the photographs which Martha Cooper took in the 1960s and 1970s of children's street play in New York City. These images show the imaginative ways that children transform their geographic environments through their play, claiming space even in relatively inhospitable environments where they are free to explore and interact; these images also show them taking up everyday materials around them as raw materials for their own play, transforming them from their mundane functions through a clever recognition of their underlying properties and affordances. And of course, they do the same thing with their bodies and with their social relations, performing new roles, trying out new structures, redefining old situations. This is the sense in which play can be linked to creativity. While in the spirit of play, old rules and structures are suspended, allowing us to look at the world in new ways, and allowing us to transform and transcend our environments.

5. Participation -- Play occurs in a social context which invites us to enter into the fun. We do sometimes watch others play, to be sure, and this represents what educational theorists call "legitimate peripheral participation." We watch with the anticipation of future participation. We watch to observe how others perform, to learn new skills, to appraise our own performance, or simply because we do not yet feel in the right spirit to play. But watching in this case is also a form of learning and is of a very different kind than watching which occurs when we know we will never be able to participate, when we feel that our participation is not welcome, when we anticipate not being able to do what's expected of us. As we sit in classrooms where no one offers up answers and no one is engaging with the learning process, we could learn a lot by going back to the ways that young people are introduced to a new kind of play and the ways that ideally they are encouraged to participate. (Of course, I don't want to romanticize this. As someone who often was not picked for teams in school, I know that the promise of participation can become cutting if we experience exclusion rather than engagement.)

6. Pleasure -- Pleasure is the byproduct of play. The search for pleasure is often what motivates play. This takes us back to Bettelheim's point about the stress around winning a game versus the relative freedom of participating through play. The game remains an operationalization of play, it represents a stress on the outcome that undercuts play's focus on process. And thus, a game may offer pleasure to some but with no guarantees and often a strong threat of displeasure if we lose the game. Thus, while it is very valuable to bring games into school, it is also important to provide contexts for more free and open-ended forms of play, which can offer pleasure to all who participate, rather than offering rewards to those who win.

(MORE TO COME)

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

"Critical Pessimism" Revisted: An Open Letter to Adam Fish

A few weeks ago, Adam Fish called me out through his blog, Savage Minds, for what he saw as a harsh and unfair representation of the Media Reform movement in the final paragraphs of my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He did so for the most part by simply reprinting my own words to frame a story he wrote about the recent Media Reform conference.

I was a bit surprised to find myself singled out as an enemy of the Media Reform movement. If I am the biggest obstacle to your success, you are much closer to victory than I had previously imagined. :-)

The experience was uncomfortable for me, but in a very constructive way, in that it has forced me to revisit my own words and reflect on how much my thinking has changed since I wrote them. It also hit at the end of the term so I am only now able to share some of these reflections with you.

Much of this change has been provoked through conversations with Eric Klinenberg, who I have gotten to know through several summers together at the Aspen Policy Institute, and through my participation in the Verklin Media Policy and Ethics Conference at the University of Virginia shortly before I left MIT. I have since written in my blog about some of these shifts in my thinking, making the argument that there is such urgency in the need for media reform right now that there is no longer any room for the usual infighting between critical and cultural studies perspectives.

Through these experiences, I have had a chance to get to know some of the young leaders who are pushing the Media Reform movement in significant new directions, including a deeper embrace of the potentials of digital media and networked communication and a willingness to partner with fan activist groups in ways which moves them away from a history of dismissing popular culture and scolding those of us who are engaged by it. When I wrote the passages for Convergence Culture which critiqued some aspects of the media reform movement, I was speaking about a very different generation of leaders and a very different set of rhetorics and practices. Even so, my caricature was inadequate and inaccurate, but perhaps even more so now.

Given these shifts in my thinking, I had very much hoped to attend and participate at the media reform conference this year, but was unable to do so because of a personal commitment. When I read Fish's post, I felt a need to speak out less my absence be misinterpreted. It still remains to be seen to what degree someone who comes with my theoretical and political commitments will be welcomed into the ranks of the media reform movement, all the more so because I am clearly going to be forced to eat my words. But I remain eager to revise even more my picture of the reform movement.

There remain, as there have been, very real differences in emphasis and perspective. Many of those academics featured at the Media Reform conference come from critical studies and political economies backgrounds which have often dismissed the cultural studies traditions that inform my work. These traditions bring different things to the table, to be sure, and look at the world through very different lens, but what the world needs now is an approach to media reform which combines critical studies' focus on structural inequality and cultural studies' focus on agency and empowerment. We need to embrace the potentials of participatory culture even as we critique the exploitative practices of web 2.0. We need to understand the ways that digital media does and does not transform the terrain upon which debates about media policy are occurring.

At the heart of Fish's account of Free Press's gathering was a question which has haunted my own recent work as well: "Is the open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet - by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized - becoming closed, centralized and homogenous as it begins to look and feel more like the elite-controlled cable television system?" And there is in this piece a celebration for "ancient movement of ordinary people taking back power from entrenched elites," which for him is embodied through the work of Free Speech TV. For the record, this "open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet -- by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized" is what I mean by participatory culture and Free Speech TV is participatory culture.

We share common goals in providing the American public with the resources needed to sustain democratic citizenship, with a commitment to insuring diversity of perspectives, with a desire to expand the ranges of voices which can be heard, with a push to put the potential for media production in the hands of those who have historically been excluded and marginalized.

My own way forwards towards these goals has been to promote what I call participatory culture, to expand opportunities for people of all backgrounds to produce and share media with each other. I work to promote media reform through advancing the cause of media literacy and defending opportunities to participate through new media channels. My initial frustration with the media reform movement stemmed in part from my disappointment that some of its leadership have historically dismissed media literacy and new media practices as meaningful contributions to the media reform movement, which is why shifts in the movement rhetoric starting with the "Save Our Internet" campaign and the struggles over Net Neutrality represented a significant improvement from my point of view over earlier media reform formulations.

For many in the media reform movement, their strategy starts with a focus on concentration of media ownership. I certainly care about concentration issues, but see them as part of a much larger context of struggles over the nature of our communication and information capacities. The decline in journalism can only partially be understood as a byproduct of media concentration and has to also be understood as a product of other economic and technological shifts. I would, in any case, be as concerned if media was concentrated in the hands of governments, nonprofits, educational institutions, or the media reform movement itself as I am with the fact that it is corporately controlled. The goal should be to insure a world where media power is spread as widely across the culture as possible.

The defense of participatory culture and the critique of media ownership are two sides of the same coin -- two flanks in a battle to democratize and diversify media in this country. One starts with a focus on agency (participatory culture), the other with a focus on structure (media concentration); one starts with an emphasis on the new world we are trying to build, while the other focuses on the system we are trying to dismantle; one is focused on what we are fighting for and the other what we are fighting against.

These are the differences I was trying to get at in making a distinction between critical utopianism and critical pessimism. "Critical pessimism" is at least as accurate a description of what I see as the limits of the critical studies perspective as phrases like "cultural populism" and "techno-utopianism" have been at describing the limits of a cultural studies perspective. Neither set of terms is totally fair, yet they also have descriptive value in helping us to understand where our approaches, taken to their logical extremes, may lead us.

For me, the term, "critical pessimism," captures the distinction between cynicism and skepticism. My hope is that a viable media reform movement will embrace skepticism, asking hard questions of government policy, corporate actions, and, yes, its own assumptions and beliefs. We are not served, though, when skepticism becomes cynicism, when the rhetoric forecloses any meaningful change, when all corporate action, say, is treated as equally repressive and reprehensible. And we are not served, on the other side, by rhetoric which sees digital media as inevitably democratizing and thus does not feel the need to struggle for social justice and media reform, which sees grassroots media as somehow adequate in taking on the concentrated power of mass media. A naive celebration of contemporary digital culture denies the need for struggle and a cynical perspective on grassroots change denies the value of struggle. These are the blind spots which we need to work together to overcome in our work.

So, critical pessimism is not a bad term to describe certain forms of critical studies and political economy work at its worst, but I was wrong to imply that this is the only thing going on here, to conflate critical studies and the media reform movement, to simplify the media reform movement to a small number of highly visible figures, or to suggest we can dismiss the importance of the media reform efforts as a result of our disagreements in disposition and tactics. I have been struggling in some of my own recent work, much of it still not published, to try to work through a critique of Web 2.0 which combines the concerns for structural inequalities and the exploitation of free labor which comes from the critical studies camp with a defense of participatory culture (perhaps the best basis for such critiques) which reflects work from the cultural studies tradition.

I hope we can find ways to bring these two camps together through political activism as well, and my own current work is focused on understanding how the mechanisms of participatory culture can be deployed to foster greater political participation and civic engagement, work partially inspired by watching how the "Save Our Internet" movement was able to bridge between different sites of participatory culture and use grassroots media as the basis for critiquing corporately-controlled media.

Where my comments in Convergence Culture went too far was in my hyperbolic description of certain kinds of media reform advocates as seeking to "opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses". This was frankly sophomoric and beneath the standards I set for myself. Fish writes, "This is a false exaggeration of a movement that is providing a necessary check on corporate power and mindfully working for greater civic, community, and citizen involvement in media production." I agree.

So, let me now publicly apologize for stooping to this kind of stereotype. It was a really dumb thing to say. I am, I'm afraid, still a work in progress on these issues.

At the time I wrote this passage, I was frustrated by the recurring descriptions of popular culture as "weapons of mass distraction," as "bread and circuses," etc. I see popular culture as a much more complex terrain and respect those who would mobilize it for their own ends -- whether in the form of fan culture or Free Speech TV. I have been delighted to see many images now emerging from the Media Reform movement which are not anti-media or anti-popular culture, but rather raise legitimate concerns about the distribution of media power and in particular the decline in substantive journalism, issues very close to my own heart.

I am sometimes struck that many critical studies writers are far more idealistic than critical utopianists insofar as their embrace of the ideal often does not allow them to recognize partial victories or contradictory advances. My own work talks often of "negotiations" between different forms of cultural power, of gains and losses, of progress made even if bigger battles remain to be fought, and for me, the recognition of the good, even when we can still imagine something better, is a necessarily fuel for media reform. To describe oneself as a "utopianist" is often to be accused of imagining that this is the "best of all possible worlds", but in fact, as Stephen Duncombe has been reminding us in some of his recent writing, the construction of utopias has historically been a vital form of social critique, one which can both focus attention on the ways current conditions fall far short of ideal and allowing us to imagine alternative structures that might better meet human needs.

I have often heard critical studies writers accuse us of "not being at all critical," and I agree that this is a charge worth examining, but I want to challenge critical studies writers to be equally concerned with the charge that they are "not at all celebratory." There is something important at stake in our struggles to defend the Internet and if you can not recognize progress made, how can you realize what's at risk? Again, it comes back to the idea that any reform movement needs to be as concerned with what it is fighting for as what it is fighting against. But either way, we should not be fighting with each other, whether in the form of my original critique or Fish's more recent provocation.

So, let me end by celebrating the strong ongoing tradition of media reform in this country as represented by the recent conference and let me urge all of us to work across artificial divides which may get in the way of us working together towards shared goals.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

From the VCR to YouTube: An Interview with Lucas Hilderbrand (Part One)

What happened before YouTube?

It's a question we've addressed here many times before. Many different histories lead to our current moment of video sharing and DIY media-making -- some subcultural (the history of fandom and a range of other communities of practice which are generating new content), some economic, some technological. Lucas Hilderbrand, author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, holds some critical pieces of the puzzle, writing with historiographical sophistication about the emergence of video as a technology and as set of cultural practices, about the debates it sparked especially around shifts in control over production and distribution, about the communities which formed around the sharing of tapes, and about how all of this looks forward to contemporary digital practices. It is a book which raises vital questions and provides a rich historical context for our current debates.

As someone who lived through the era when the VCR was launched, the book brought back many memories of things I had almost forgotten about the dramatic adjustments which the culture made to this transformative and transgressive technology. Working through the book for an interview, I was struck by the fact that I, like many other instructors, have had very little to say about videotape in my current course on new media and culture, something I will work on the next time I teach it.

Given my enthusiasm for this book, I was delighted to be able to interview Hilderbrand and share with you his own reflections on the ways the history of video can help us to understand some contemporary media developments.

As you note, the debates about videotape form an important precursor to current debates about digital technologies -- especially those concerning the implications of expanding grassroots control over media production and circulation and debates around copying and intellectual property. From the start, video was understood as "out of control," as shifting the balance of power between established media producers and distributors, new entrepreneurs, and consumers. What can we learn from tracing the history of video, which might better inform current discussions around file-sharing, piracy, and YouTube?

For me, the stakes of the project were always largely historical and in response to a threat of cultural amnesia. On the one hand, I was interested in intervening in new media studies, which has historically focused on the newness and nowness of technologies. I was intrigued by work that rethought newness in a historical sense, by returning to the 19th century and examining old media in their own moments of newness. But even this more historical work seemed to erase recent and increasingly obsolete technologies from memory and from the histories of new media. It seemed to me that many of the functions and political struggles surrounding new digital technologies had already pre-existed with tape technologies. I thought that it was important not only to complicate the hype surround new media but also to look back at the lessons we could learn from these prior moments that shaped the present.

In terms of questions of policy and sharing, I was struck that so much of the anxiety about piracy and the litigation around copyright seemed like a replay of the controversies that surrounded audiocassettes and videotape when they were introduced. Both the recorded music and the film industries fought tape because they feared that if audiences could make their own copies, that there would be economic collapse for the content industry. For the film studios, at least, VHS proved to be a huge economic boom. The challenge then, as more recently, was to find a new business model that didn't alienate the audience but also provided reasonable and accessible ways to market content.

But the differences between digital distribution and analog tape sharing are also obviously significant in terms of efficiency and scale and in terms of their financial threat, so we need a technologically specific understanding of both the material practices and policy implications. But there's also a major difference between the ways file sharing and burning a DVD work, so even "the digital" needs to be complicated and differentiated.

The innovations are largely changes in convenience: as you have suggested in Convergence Culture, convergence often means the availability of the same content across multiple platforms. Even before streaming video, Netflix was functionally the best video store in the world, insofar as it has more selection than any single brick-and-mortar store could, yet even Netflix's inventory was limited to content that had been released on DVD. There remain treasures and obscurities that have never been made available on DVD. And, of course, every tangible technology wears out eventually, so if Netflix's discs of a film got scratched, broken, or lost and that title had gone out of print, it could not be rented. So there is always the limitation of what is made materially available.

For me, streaming video creates a different set of issues. On the one hand, people seem very enthusiastic about Netflix streaming and Hulu. These offer instant streaming access to an ever-increasing range of films and TV shows, and these have been two of the leaders in establishing a new business model that makes online distribution economically viable for the industry. But that model is based upon licensing and subscription rather than purchase. In other words, what is sold is time and access, but that access could be cut off at any time--if the user stops paying or the service's licensing agreement with the rights-owners lapses. Unless users figure out a way to hack, download, and store the material, we are moving toward a model where there is no longer fixity and the assurance of long-term access that a videotape or a DVD allows. We are also moving away from a collector model. This is potentially alarming for fans and especially for teachers and scholars. It will be very hard to teach film and TV when we no longer have stable access or recordings that can be cued. But in the meantime, most people seem to be embracing the streaming model for its convenience. It's been an economic boom for Netflix, and I frequently hear people complain if they have to wait for a DVD to be mailed rather than have streaming access.

First, I'd like to challenge the concept that digital technologies are perfect. Although in principle reproduction should not involve degeneration, most digital reproduction does involve compression, which is a different kind of loss. Perhaps I didn't think this through as clearly as I could have at the time when I was writing: analog reproduction operates through degeneration, digital reproduction through compression. In addition, so many of our interactions with new technologies involve frustration and troubleshooting, whether it's an unreadable DVD or a problem toggling a laptop to a projector or an email missing an attachment. Some of these problems are about mechanical failure, others about human error.

In terms of resolution, I was struck that, when the electronics and content industries began the push for audiences to adopt HD TVs and DVD formats, we saw more rapid adoption of low-resolution video technologies, from YouTube to cameraphones. These low-res options have become increasingly refined to allow for clearer resolution, but it seemed to me that it was convenience rather than pristine quality that generated a massive response. That said, there are numerous instances on YouTube and elsewhere that viewers will prefer a high-quality copy when it's equally available. But we also see a blurring of the two models of "prosumer": producer-consumers often have access to professional-consumer grade technologies that allow for slick fan productions.

Yet evolutions in video aesthetics, I think, make outmoded image resolutions not just dated but increasingly visible. When I started thinking through analog video aesthetics, there wasn't much analytical work to build from, but there are now many popular examples that suggest recognition of what old video technologies look like. The technology has become a style. A friend told me that his iPhone has a filter on its camera to make the image look like VHS. I've seen similar effects that make still images look like Polaroids. So now we have a fetishization of the retro.

Lucas Hilderbrand is faculty in film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to core courses on film and TV, he teaches classes on popular sound media, documentary, sex in cinema, Disney, and queer nightlife. He is a contributor to flowtv.org
and is currently researching the cultural history of gay bars in the U.S.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Four)

Despite your title, you spend less time here talking about "gender" than might be expected from other books which talk about women and gaming. What roles does gender play in your analysis? What claims are you making about the different kinds of experiences and identities female players construct around games?

For me, the book is not about gender. It is about women and girls who take gaming beyond gaming to become designers within well-designed passionate affinity spaces that change their lives and the lives of others. It about these women and girls because we believe that what they are doing, how they are doing it (e.g., combing technical modding with modding for emotional intelligence and social interactions), and what they are accomplishing is on the cutting edge of where all of us are going--male or female.

Women and girls are leading the way here as they are in many other areas of society. There has been lots about modding for games like Half-Life and its connections to technical skills--and indeed this is important. But much less has been written about modding the Sims to create challenges and game play that is simultaneously in the game world, in the real world, and in writing things like graphic novels.

Such modding is the force that sustains a passionate affinity space that builds artistic, technical, social, and emotional skills. We wrote the book because these woman and girls rock, not because they are women and girls.

Also I had a sin to expiate. I had left the Sims and women gamers pretty much out of my first book on games. Betty helped me see that The Sims is a real game and a very important one because it is a game that is meant to take people beyond gaming. She helped me see that how women play and design is not "mainstream" (see comments above) but cutting edge, the edge of the future. If it were leprechauns that were the cutting edge of the future I would have written about them.

In the case of The Sims, you have a designer -- Will Wright -- who has been outspoken in his desire to empower his users to construct community and build their own content around his games. How does this goal on the part of the designer impact the kinds of stories you can tell about these women's relations to this particular game?

See answer above. Will Wright is doing in an extreme way what lots of game designers want to do: empower people to think like designers, to organize themselves around the game to become learn new skills that extend beyond the game, and to express their own creativity. Many say the Sims is not a game--and I myself used to believe that. But as Derrida would remind us, what we find marginal is often actually central. Out book argues that games like the Sims--and gaming beyond gaming--will eventually be the new center of gaming or maybe something eventually all together different.

It is important to me because I do not want to compete with you for the participatory culture space. Further, I want to stress production, though I know well you care about production as well. There are some--not you--who in education celebrate participation in a mindless way. They argue that just because people are participating they are learning. But people can participate in ways that allow themselves to be "colonized" by a group or to gain much less than others in the group or even to be used as an example that makes others look good. I think a demand that everyone learns to produce and design--to be a "priest"--can mitigate these dangers, though I am sure that dangers remain.

What I have called "situated embodied problem-focused well-designed and well-mentored learning" will either come to exist primarily for elites who will get it 24/7 on demand across many institutions and their homes or it will be given to everyone.

In the first case, the regular ("mainstream") public school system will continue to teach the basics accountably and will exist to produce service workers. In the second case, we will have to reinvent a public sphere and transform our view of society, civic participation, markets, and what constitutes justice, fairness, and a good life. We are headed the first way right now, but there is always hope for the future. Both you and I are trying to push the train to the second future and not the first, though, in the end, in the future the real actors and activists in this "game" will be younger (and often browner) than we are.

The current accountability regime MUST be removed. It is immoral, stupid, and counterproductive. We define accountability around teachers failing to teach children. This is like doing accountability for surgeons by waiting to see how many people they kill and then getting rid of them if they kill too many.

Far better to have accountability back when teachers and surgeons were trained, which means radical changes in Schools of Education and universities. Surely we should not wait to see how many patients they kill or kids they screw. Teachers are punished if a kid's test scores go down, but scores could go down for many reasons, not just what the teacher did in one year. This is like punishing a surgeon when a patient dies in back surgery because his wife poisoned him--and lots of things are poisoning our children, not, by any means, mostly teachers.

What we need accountability for is curriculum and pedagogies, not teachers per se (who should have been well trained and then held to high standards that most of them can and do meet, as in the case of surgeons). Today curricula and pedagogies are often politicized, seen as right wing or left wing. If we could agree on a common measure (say a NAEP test or some other test we can come to agree on), a measure that is given to a sample of students (not given to all), so that it cannot be taught to, then we can simply say which curricula and pedagogies correlate with strong or weak results on the common measure. This is what we do with drugs and surgical procedures.

In the end, though, we MUST change our assessment system or we will never have new learning, since assessment systems, in an accountability regime, drive what is taught and how it is taught. Today's games and other digital media allow for learning to be so well designed that finishing the "game" means you have learned and mastered what it being "taught". No one needs a Halo test after finishing Halo on hard and no one should need an algebra test after finishing an equally well-designed algebra curriculum.

Furthermore, games and digital media can collect, mine, and artfully represent copious moment-by-moment data on a great many variables. So we can, with such data, assess learning across time in terms of growth; we can discover different trajectories towards mastery and use this information to help learners try new styles; and we can compare and contrast learners with thousands of others on hundreds of variables tracked across time (as we already do with Halo for instance).

When the day comes where we can contrast such assessments (based on growth, trajectories, multiple variables represented in ways that inform and develop learners, and comparison among thousands of people sorted into a zillion different types for different purposes) with our now standard "test score"--one number taken on one day--the game will be over. The choice will then be stark. Either we will develop only some or we develop everyone. The bell curve will be gone. No one needs always to be "in the middle" ("mainstream"). Everyone can, in some places and at some times, be at the very top of their game.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Three)

The part of your arguments for affinity spaces which get the most push-back from my students are your claims that "a common passion-fueled endeavor -- not race, class, gender, or disability -- is primary." To many, these seems like a very utopian claim for these spaces, which you have been careful to describe as not "communities" in the way that term is most often used. Yet, surely, inequalities impact participants at all levels, from access to the technology to access to basic skills and experiences, to access to the social networks which support their learning. How can we address these very real inequalities while recognizing that there are indeed ways where class, race, and gender matter differently in the kinds of spaces you are describing?

The statement that passionate affinity spaces are focused on a shared passion (and shared endeavors and goals around that passion) and not race, class, and gender (while allowing people to use such differences strategically as their own choices) is not an empirical claim, it is a stipulation. Something is not a passionate affinity space if it does not meet this condition. So perhaps there are none. But, then, such spaces become a goal and an ideal and we can talk about how close or far away from that goal and ideal we are.

On the other hand, it does little good to follow the standard liberal line that race, class, and gender are always and everywhere one's determining identities. This, for example, locks an African-American child into always being "an African American". A white kid can be a "Pokémon fanatic" or an expert modder, but the African American kid is always "an African-American Pokémon fanatic" or an "African-American modder".

We are never, none of us, one thing all the time. Sure, the world continuously tries to impose rigid identities on all of us all the time. But it is our moral obligation--and one necessary for a healthy life--to resist this and to try to create spaces where identities based on shared passions or commitments can predominate.

In reality, the real identities that count in life most--that define us and make us who we are--are rarely named. They are identities like "a person who would never kill someone because they did not share his or her religion" or "a person who would rather love and be loved than be rich" and a great many more such as these. These sorts of identities constitute our most significant form of human sharing and bonding. And such identities are where the deepest divisions among people occur.

It may be here that I diverge from some others. I have repeatedly seen people who are pissed off because someone said they or their work were not "mainstream". If someone called my work "mainstream" or called me "mainstream" I would be insulted. If I discovered that my work or myself was "mainstream", I would retire or find something else to do. Note, by the way, that NO good academic wants to be mainstream. If something--say, what they teach in high school--is called "mainstream history", you can bet no good young historian wants to do it and you will find next to no one, old or young, in a good history department with such a sign on his or her door.

Chibi-Robo, Ico, Psychonauts, and Shadow of the Colossus are not mainstream games. They are however great games and their designers will be long remembered when many mainstream designers are long forgotten. Remember, too, that 19th century America had only two world-class poets (Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman) and at the time neither was remotely close to mainstream. One never published and the other published his own book himself and reviewed it under various names. The monk Mendel wanted to be a high school biology teacher, but he failed his state teacher's test and was relegated to the monastery's garden. He was unknown in his time, entirely non-mainstream, and yet also the only man in his time who actually knew biology (including Darwin, who knew less than nothing about genetics), though no one knew that until much later.

Throughout the book, you celebrate "grit" as a key virtue of these new forms of cultural participation. How are you defining "grit"? Is this a skill that is valued as much in contemporary schooling?

"Grit"--originally used by Angela Duckworth in a somewhat different way--is passion plus persistence. Human expertise is a practice effect, it requires hours of effort, practice, and persistence past failure. This is unlikely to happen without passion. School has a very hard time producing grit because different people have different passions (and school is about everybody learning the same thing) and passions are something people choose (and school is often not about choice). Furthermore, interest is kindled into passion inside things like passionate affinity spaces and related sorts of social formations and these are hard to come by in schools.

In modern developed countries, only grit will lead to work or lives that are rewarding, given that most jobs will be service jobs. The passion one develops may well be in an out of work space and off market. But there has to be some space where a person has a sense of agency, intelligence, control, and creativity.

Some people have a good deal of grit at school because they believe that putting up with even badly designed schooling will lead to a good college and a successful career. It will lead to a good college, but no longer necessarily to a good career.

The world is full to bursting with educated and talented people, many of whom can compete for the same jobs across the world. Being just good at what others are also good at, in standard ways developed in standard sorts of education, will just put one in competition with millions of well-trained Chinese and Indians and many many others across the globe. In my own view, one needs to have a passion for something and master it in a creative way--it almost does not matter what it is. It could be, for instance, carving art out of avocado pits.

Whatever it is, avocado pits included, you will find via the Internet a critical number of people across the world with whom you can join with for social learning and among whom one can rise to status, respect, and a sense of real contribution and, in some cases, profit (there is not a lot of competition, at least yet, for the top places among avocado artists and, thus, a whole area is waiting to become "hot").

A person who cannot find a passion is going to be in trouble in our modern world as far as I am concerned. Many people will gain status, respect, control, and creativity off market (since not everyone can gain these things on market for profit in a world where, in developed countries, only 1/5 of people will be well paid). But all people need to gain these things.

All our schools and institutions are set up very poorly to help kids find their passion. We want to teach "what every citizen should know" in things like science and math (and we succeed, all Americans pretty much know the same things about science, mathematics, and geography, which is nothing).

We think we can force people to learn things. We treat collaboration as cheating. We do not give kids the time--and places where the cost of failure is low--to try out a variety of interests and identities in an attempt to discover passion or passions. We do not let kids engage with professional-like tools and activities in areas like urban planning, game design, or journalism.

Rather, we define everything to be learned in terms of content names like "algebra" or "civics" even when this "content" might be best learned as a tool set for other activities like 3-D design. We let rich kids experience what passion and practice can bring one in the world and what the routes to success are, but we do not let poor kids have this knowledge. We treat certifications and degrees as more important that actual talent and achievements.

Now what about people who just "don't care"? Barring serious illness, there are none. Every baby is born as a passion-seeking being. That is why children acquire their native languages and master much of their cultures without formal schooling.

One day, when my son Sam was a mere toddler, I found some plastic figures at the grocery store. I had no idea what they were. I brought a couple home and gave them to Sam. They were Pokémon and they led to interest, passion, and practice that made him a passionate gamer. That passion for gaming led, in ways no one could have predicted, to his current passion for acting and theater, on the one hand, and for Africa, on the other (since Age of Mythology hooked him on mythology and then on cultures beyond his own).

School is defined around outcomes it knows in advance, but does not meet for many children. Real learning kindles passions that make new kinds of people--and people capable of making themselves over again when they need to--but does not know or predict the outcome and does not, by any means, insist on the same outcomes for everyone.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Two)

Your most recent book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, moves us from a focus on the kinds of learning which occurs inside the game as we play towards the kinds of learning which takes place around the game as people build upon it through the mechanisms of what you would call affinity spaces or what I call Participatory Culture. You describe this as "gaming beyond gaming." What has motivated this shift of emphasis?

Women and Gaming is no longer our most recent book. Language and Learning in the Digital Age has just appeared (another book I did with Betty). My focus of late on passionate affinity spaces was caused by the influences of my son Sam (who claims correctly to have taught me everything I know about games), Betty's wonderful work on her tech-savvy girls clubs, and, of course, you.

The first thing I ever wrote on passionate affinity spaces was motivated by a request that I write a paper about my take on "communities of practice", a notion that has become very popular in a great many areas. In my view, this powerful notion has become attached to so many different things that it is in danger of losing any real meaning. When talking about such notions I think it is necessary to name what you mean very specifically and name it in such a way that it clearly indicates what you value. This is what you have done with "participatory culture" and what I did with passionate affinity spaces.

So why did I choose that term? First I wanted to argue that "interest" gets someone in the door but not out the door to any deep place unless it leads to lots and lots of practice and persistence past failure. To get such practice and persistence past failure an interest has to be kindled into a passion and an affinity space needs to be organized to help people to do this.

I use "space" rather than "community" because the word "community" carries a rather romantic connotation which it should not have. I also use the word "space" because the notion of "membership" is very complex in modern Internet spaces. People are "in" the space even if they are just lurking, but what makes them "members" is a much harder and, in some cases (though not all), a more flexible and fungible notion.

Passionate affinity spaces tend to follow the Pareto Principle (20% of the people produce 80% of the outcomes, 80% produce 20% of the outcomes), while school classrooms tend to follow (enforced) bell curves. I want to stress not just multiple forms and routes to participation, leadership, and mentorship in passionate affinity spaces, but also the opportunity for all people in the space to become producers, designers, and creators, as well as mentors to others.

All passionate affinity spaces are organized first and foremost around a specific passion that is not necessarily shared by everyone (some only have an interest), but is the "attractor" in the space around which norms, values, and behaviors are set. The book Women and Gaming is about different forms passionate affinity spaces can take and some forms we applaud. The form we applaud most is not age-graded (young and old are together); allows newbies and experts to be together; and engages in supportive interactions because people in the space accept a theory of learning that says that expertise is not in a person but in the affinity space and that no matter how good you are there is always something more to learn and someone else from whom to get help and mentoring.

The following is from Elizabeth Hayes:
TSG grew out of my interest in differences among how girls and boys engage with gaming more broadly. Not only do girls and boys tend to play different sorts of games, they also do different things with games. In particular, boys are much more likely to mod games, to create content for games, and otherwise to engage with games and other gamers in ways that support their development of technical skills and identities as content creators. The Sims is one of few games in which girls and women actually predominate as content creators and modders.

I wanted to give girls who otherwise would not participate in such practices greater access, social support and encouragement to participate. We started TSG, though, with a pretty limited understanding of the learning that takes place through fan communities, or affinity spaces. We initially saw fan sites as sources of information (i.e., tutorials, examples of content) rather than as spaces where the girls could develop identities, interact with other players, and be mentored (as well as mentor others).

A crucial turning point in our perspective was conducting interviews with adult women content creators, described in Chapter 5 of the book. These women kept pointing back to the Sims player community as crucial to their interest in content creation and modding, as well as to their mastery of technical skills. Talking to these women made me realize that I had started TSG with a deficit perspective towards women's gaming practices. That is, I'd assumed that we needed to help girls engage in modding practices similar to what boys are doing, rather than starting with an appreciation for what women were already doing.

This change in perspective led us to further investigations of the fan practices already taking place around The Sims, and this research became a very important component of our work. One of my research assistants is just completing her dissertation on The Sims Writers' Hangout, a site where players post and discuss Sims stories, a form of multimodal storytelling that requires composing images in the game and combining them with often lengthy narrative texts. Another student is investigating the learning of specialist language that takes place in Mod The Sims, another fan site devoted to game modding.

This is why discussion of the social spaces around The Sims is so central to Women and Gaming. We wanted to help others see that what women are doing with games is already exciting and important, and also to shift the lens a bit, in order to encourage people to look at male-dominated game spaces in new ways.

A key theme running through the book is the importance of becoming a designer rather than simply being a player of games. What accounts for the growing emphasis on design literacies in the 21st century?

I think that the importance of design, design thinking, and design literacies today follows from the shape of the world. We live amidst complex systems of all sorts, systems which are risky and dangerous and which interact with each other to create yet more risk. Furthermore, such systems are rarely now just "natural" or just "human made".

I live in Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is a dessert. Like desserts from time immemorial, Sedona is cold at night even if it is hot in the day time. This is not so for Phoenix, which is also a dessert. It is hot at night when it is hot in the day time. This is so because of a heat-island effect. The massive amounts of concrete in Phoenix absorb the heat all day and radiate it out all night. So the temperature in Phoenix is a joint venture of "Mother Nature" and humans.

Solutions to problems involving complex systems demand multiple sorts of pooled expertise, including even the wisdom of crowds. Single minded, single focused experts are dangerous, since they undervalue what they do not know and their actions can and do create massive unintended consequences when they intervene in complex systems (as we found out in the 2008 worldwide recession and as Alan Greenspan pretty much admitted in front of Congress).

So people--citizens--need to learn to think of systems as designed or as things that act like they are designed. They need to know how themselves to produce designs as "models" to think with (and model-based thinking is the core of science).

The United States today is politically polarized and comes at all problems as if they are political or ideological, when in fact most of our problems are complex, the solutions to them are going to be compromises with tradeoffs, and we need to continuously question our expertise, values, and goals. We are so polarized today that a core goal of schooling, in my view, ought to be teaching kids to see arguments as designed and as inherently connected to evidence and perspectives and not just ideology, self-interest, and desire.

Of course, the focus on design has also come about because so many digital tools--and other tech tools--developed by and for professionals can be used today by "everyday people" to design, build, and create for themselves. There has always been the danger with any technology--most certainly including books--that people will get divided into two classes: "priests" who are experts and know the deep secrets inside the technology (or make them up) and the "laity" who consume the technology, but do not understand it enough to transform it. The potential of much digital learning today--as well as many passionate affinity spaces--is to allow more and more people to be priests. But this sort of potential has always in human history been opposed and resisted by elites, who ever seek to constrain and tame it.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

A Remediated, Premediated, and Transmediated Conversation with Richard Grusin (Part Two)

Aesthetics
RG:
Serendipitously, I, too, had been thinking of a video that might help delineate the distinction between transmedia and remediation--the Hype Williams video for "Gold Digger," the Kanye West song featuring Jamie Foxx.

For me, the video's remediation of the look and style of pin-up magazine covers as live videos is a clear example of an instance of remediation that I would see as distinct from transmedia. On the other hand the now longstanding practice of refashioning songs as music videos might be able to be seen as an example of both remediation and transmedia. Would you agree with this?

HJ:
I would agree that the "Gold Digger" video is an interesting example of how one could have remediation which does not necessarily become transmedia. It is also, as you note, a music video and thus as an amplification of the recorded song a form of transmedia. I would call it transmedia performance in this case rather than transmedia storytelling. My own early writing emphasized the storytelling functions of transmedia, but storytelling is only one function which is now conducted across media platforms. Performance seems the more pertinent category for thinking about music, though a series like Glee might send out some extensions which are primarily about performance and others that are about narrative.

We could, however, imagine a version of this music video that with very little changes would be pulled towards transmedia narrative (or transmedia play). Right now, the magazine covers function to comment on the situations being described in the song lyrics, but they also seem to construct a kind of world where the song takes place. Let's suppose we built more of a plot into that world -- not simply the story the song offers of failed relationships, violated trusts, and sexual tension. Can we imagine extending those core plot elements into a melodramatic plot and imagine the magazine covers perhaps referring us to other media where we learned more about these people and their relationship? Can we imagine the magazine covers as functioning as clues which led to a kind of alternative reality game, which then led us down a rabbithole where we started seeking out more information elsewhere on the web? This would pull us much more fully into a transmedia logic.

RG: Yes, I suppose we could and I suppose it would. Your inclination to actively remediate or transmediate existing media forms is much stronger than mine. I see myself more as a cultural critic or media theorist than as a creator of new forms. Still I would be interested in you defining even further how you see transmediation differing from or extending remediation.

RG: True enough. I like the way you describe your and Janet Murray's work as imagining or anticipating new media futures. It reminds me that, in the context of my most recent work, premediation was already quite active in the 1990s. And yes, it has been very gratifying to see how Remediation was taken up by designers, artists, and other creative people--not to mention by new media scholars like you, especially in relation to transmedia.

HJ:
One of the ways I often think about your work in relation to transmedia is the different modes by which transmedia elements are constructed. On the one hand, they often present themselves as documents or documentaries, seeking forms of immediacy. We look through them to see into the world being depicted and the world of, say, District 9 becomes more real to us insofar as such materials adopt forms we associate with nonfiction. The early ARGS often insisted on there being nothing that signaled to players that they were playing a game and thus sought to blur the fake documents being produced back into reality. They were fictions which denied their status as fictions.

On the other hand, more and more, transmedia extensions represent themselves as advertisements for imaginary products, such as True Blood. They show us what the mediascapes of these fictional societies might look like, and so we achieve a kind of access to the fictional world through an heightened awareness of processes of mediation.

We can see how the immediacy and hypermediacy come together by looking at something like MNU Spreads Lies , one of the websites created to help promote District 9. The website proports to be the home page for an Alien Rights organization. Much of the text is in an alien alphabet, though we can convert it to English. My favorite entry is one called "I'm Speechless" which is halfway down the page. Here, we have a mocked up government video on the aliens reproduction system, complete with imitation grain and scratches, clearly intended to achieve a certain degree of immediacy, though the focus on the buggyness of the footage uses properties of mediation to allow us to achieve that level of immediacy. The text around it shows a fake resistant reading of this fake documentary -- the alien rights organization has captured this footage from the government and is offering a shocked and outraged reaction to what they are seeing. Here, we are invited to be aware of the processes of mediation and contestation that have emerged around the video -- for me, this would seem to represent a kind of hypermediation. As you note in the book, at a certain point, as our everyday reality is shaped by our interactions through media, the lines between immediacy and hypermediacy blur. We achieve immediacy by way of hypermediacy.

Interactivity and Participation

RG:
The Tru Blood commercial is fantastic! It is an exemplary example of a kind of faithful or respectful remediation of a Budweiser commercial. But it is even more interesting, as you suggest, as an example of how the urge to transmediate deploys strategies of remediation in constructing new, participatory mediations of imaginary worlds.

But as the District 9 promotions make evident, transmedia isn't always fan-based or participatory, right? It is increasingly a technique of corporate infotainment media, whether in fictionally remediating participatory media like blogs or in distributing elements of specific media narratives or worlds across multiple media formats. What makes the MNU Tells Lies site different (and especially interesting) is that it continues the documentality of the District 9 film into the blogosphere. This is, I think, an advance on the transmediation of the Matrix franchise, which I have discussed in terms of the concept of a "cinema of interactions." The distribution of the narrative of The Matrix across the Enter the Matrix video game and some of The Animatrix contributions (particularly the archival pseudo-documentary about the back story of how the machines took over Earth), while interesting in terms of the continued decline of medium specificity, does not trouble the border between fictionality and reality in the same way that the MNU Tells Lies site does. But in both of these examples, I would agree that your robust concept of transmediality (or my more sketchily developed notion of a cinema of interactions) is more useful and informative than the concept of remediation. That being said, one could certainly (as you do above) approach either of these from the perspective of the double logic of remediation.

If they are participatory, it is on the level of reception and circulation rather than on the level of production, though we are seeing some kinds of transmedia production which apply crowd-sourcing or user-generated content models to build out the fictional world further. So, yes, these are part of a new commercial logic. My argument, though, is that they are not simply commercial products; they are also creating new opportunities which gifted storytellers and artists are exploring in ways that deepen our possible engagement with these fictional universes. You could read both the District 9 and True Blood examples as promotional: they are designed to spread word about their affiliated media properties. But they are both expansive (adding to what we learn in their respective works) and expositional (helping to inform our experience once we see their affiliated works) in ways which go beyond what we would expect from a movie trailer. We go into District 9 with different expectations (even a different moral orientation or emotional identification) and have a different experience if we've visited the MNU Spreads Lies site than if we have not. Given this, I don't think we can simply dismiss them as promotional materials.

RG:
Thanks for clarifying. I agree that promotional materials should not be dismissed out of hand. Kracauer wrote that we can learn much about any historical moment by making sense of what he called its "surface phenomena." But where Kracauer explains how these ornamental surface phenomena are of a piece with the structure of monopoly capitalism in the 1920s, you treat transmedia surface phenomena as creative opportunities for artists and designers which deepen the 21st-century consumer experience. Kracauer is making a claim about history, while you are making a claim about how transmedia enhances the creation of fictional universes.

Richard Grusin is Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and four books, including (with Jay David Bolter) Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999) and most recently Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010).

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Political Lives of Black Youth: An Interview with Cathy Cohen (Part Two)

You write near the end of the book, "While the Obama Administration and other black officials are attempting to avoid discussions of race, members of the Republican Party and the Far Right have escalated their racial and racist talks and attacks. These contrasting trends have meant that racial discouse is increasingly being shaped by, or at least framed by, the right wing." Clearly, you have in mind something like the Tea Party movement. How would you explain the expanding support that the Tea Party has received? What impact do you think such a movement has on the political lives of the black youth you've studied?

I don't think it is a coincidence that recent polls show that only about 17 percent of black youth support the Tea Party, compared to 34 percent of white youth and 15 percent of Latino youth. Black youth understand that the policies advanced by Tea Party candidates and members will mean a more limited role for the government in the lives of everyday Americans. And while many believe that the reach of the government has extended too far, black youth realize that many of the opportunities secured by the mobilization of Blacks and others from the Civil Rights Movement through the election of President Obama have only been implemented and protected by an activist and expanded federal government.

Thus, a significant part of the Tea Party agenda, that which would repeal recently won health reform or pursue deficit reduction by slashing needed safety net programs or reduce funding for public education, or generally reduce and constrain the work of the government, would detrimentally impact the lives of black youth, especially those who are most vulnerable.

Beyond the specific policies of the Tea Party, I believe that their exaggerated discourse, especially as it targets President Obama and attacks him not on the terms of just his policies but also engages in a racial baiting, will reinforce the idea held among black youth that racism remains a major issue in this country and that black people are treated as second-class citizens in the political community. These young people have watched as the Tea Party held rallies in which President Obama has been demeaned and depicted as other, an unspeakable evil on par with Adolph Hitler. They believe that while some of the objections to President Obama are based on the political agenda he has pursued, other motivations for their challenge to President Obama has everything to do with the fact that he is black.

In response to such actions on the part of some members of the Tea Party, it seems that President Obama and his team has made a decision to try and stay above the fray of racial politics, adopting or letting stand a color-blind approach to race in the United States. My concern as you quote in the question is that the absence of leadership by President Obama on the topic of race and racism has allowed the right wing and some more extreme Tea Party types to step into the gap and promote their decidedly pre-civil rights movement view of the ideal racial order.

In contrast to the continued activity of the right on questions of race and racism, those public officials that might traditionally be mobilized to fight for and articulate a political agenda meant to improve the opportunities and lives of black youth, specifically black and progressive politicians like Barack Obama, are exceedingly reticent to make and defend an explicitly racialized agenda. And so black youth are left to fend for themselves on issues of race and racism, again learning the lesson that politicians are not to be trusted and that even in an environment where expansion of our political community is promised, some will fight the equal rights and inclusion of black youth seemingly forever!

I think it is hard to understand and think effectively about the issues that confront us without thinking about the perspective and lived experience of black youth. As I discussed in a different question, black youth are at the center of many of the most troubling issues confronting the country. Issues ranging from the decline in public education to the rise in incarceration and the dominance of the prison industrial complex all disproportionately impact black youth. So it will be hard to develop effective and inclusive policies, programs and approaches to these issues without seriously considering the perspectives and including the insights of black youth.

However, it is more than just a simple gesture of inclusion when thinking about how black youth help us to understand and imagine differently the political scene. We have to acknowledge that young black people often have a different take on issues than others groups of young people that necessitate different policy choices and political collaborations. For example, if we take the issue of whether we are currently or even approaching a post-racial state, black and white youth think very differently about this issue.

Since the election of Barack Obama, much has been made of the generational divide in the populace. Some have suggested that once the so-called millennials come to dominate the political domain, many of the thorny social issues that have caused great debate and consternation among the American public will be resolved. This line of reasoning implies that young people who embrace and personify a more inclusive society will eventually take over policy-making and thought leadership, moving both areas in a more liberal direction. Commentators point to the significant differences in opinion registered among various generations on topics such as same-sex marriage and abortion as evidence of the more inclusive worldview held by the majority of young people.

The promised harmony around social issues that is presumably evident among younger Americans extends beyond the confines of sexually infused social policy to the prominent and always simmering issue of race. An article published in The New York Times suggests that much of the problem of race and racism found in the Tea Party and the NAACP has to do with the fact that they both are largely comprised of older members who grew up as the targets or beneficiaries of Jim Crow. Columnist Matt Bai writes, "The Tea Party and the N.A.A.C.P. represent disproportionately older memberships. And herein lies a problem with so much of our discussion about race and politics in the Obama era: we tend not to recognize the generational divide that underlies it."

As evidence of this substantial generational divide, Bai cites pre-midterm data from the Pew Research Center indicating that "there is nearly a 20 point spread between Mr. Obama's approval ratings among voters younger than 30 and those older than 65." Perhaps Bai's most important observation is one that he seems to add almost as a throwaway: his comment that "These numbers probably do reflect some profound racial differences among the generations." I show in the book that significant and profound differences in how young whites, blacks, and Latinos think about such topics as racism, citizenship, and gay and lesbian issues still exist today and that these differences are a defining feature of American politics as practiced by the young today, even in the age of Obama.

Far from the generation of millennials signaling the end of race or even the beginning of a post-racial society, I present data in the book that suggest that deep divides still exist among young people, with black youth particularly skeptical about the idea of a post-racial anything. I note in the book that on a survey we administered seven months after the 2008 election, we asked 18-35 year-old respondents if they believed racism was still a major problem. The divide between black and white young people was stark: 68 percent of black youth stated that racism remains a major problem, compared to 33 percent of white respondents and 58 percent of Latino respondents

A similar split was evident when we asked if blacks had achieved racial equality. A near majority of whites (48 percent) thought blacks had achieved equality, compared to 15 percent of blacks and 39 percent of Latinos. As we know the racial landscape is far more expansive than one that accounts for just blacks and whites. When asked if Latinos had achieved racial equality, support for this assertion dropped among whites. In fact, only 29 percent of whites, 16 percent of blacks, and 20 percent of Latinos believed that Latinos had achieved racial equality.

In the many articles written about the generational shift in attitudes on social issues, such as gay marriage or even race, few, if any, take the time to disaggregate the data by race and ethnicity to determine whether there might be divergent trends among the many groups comprising "youth." When researchers disaggregate their data (that is, if they have sampled enough people of color to pursue statistical analysis of different racial and ethnic groups) they often find that there are significant differences in how young people from the various racial and ethnic groups that make up the American populace think about not only same-sex marriage and abortion, but also race. If leaders continue to make policy and academic insist on writing articles with data assuming that the ideas of white youth represent the attitudes of all young people, they are all in for a rude awakening.

As the demographics of the country continue to move from one dominated-in population and power-by whites to one increasingly populated by individuals of color, our analyses must start paying attention to the ideas, attitudes, and actions of young people of color. Making the experiences of black and Latino youth central to our understanding and "work" around race provides a very different perspective in terms of what we must do. In the realm of race, the experience of black youth and, at times, Latino youth is that race still figures prominently in their lives, shaping where they can live, if and where they work, and how state authorities, such as the police, treat them. For these young people, racism still blocks their access to full citizenship, in particular the psychological aspects of believing that one belongs to and is valued in the larger political community. In the book I use the experiences of black youth to underscores the necessity of not just including but highlighting the voices and experiences of black youth if we are to bolster democratic practice in the 21st century.

Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science. . She is also the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education and the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Cohen is principal investigator of two major projects: The Black Youth Project and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Video Blogging (Part Three)

This is the sixth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is my interview with Ryanne Hodson, author of The Secrets of Videoblogging.

Let me ask the painfully obvious one first just to get it out of the way. Many of those who dismiss YouTube and other video sharing platforms as exhibitionistic are probably visualizing something like the classic video blog. How have these charges been confronted within the videoblogging community?

In the beginning, a majority of the videos being shared were people talking into the camera, or showing a day in their life, so there were a few critics who called videoblogging narcisistic, self centered and boring. Basically 'Who wants to see that?'. The reaction the community had was two fold. First of all, we wanted to see that, so that's what we were making for each other. And we challenged anyone who didn't want to see that, to make something else. If you have a camera and an idea, make it happen. There were no limits to what you could make. The best defense to criticism of any online media is the choice not to watch or participate. If you don't like it, you don't have to watch it. It's really that simple. To take that a step further, maybe it will even inspire you to make something that you think is better. In fact, that's why a lot of us started- because several had been television producers and editors and wanted to make something different.

What has been the response within the videoblog community to projects such as Lonelygirl15 which have sought to imitate the visual rhetoric of the videoblog in order to create "fake" or fictional materials?

The initial reaction to Lonelygirl15 within the community was fear that a wider audience would now question the authenticity of our videos as well. It was the first project that really called into question wether what we were saying was real or not. Several of us were trying very deliberately not to be produced or written like a television show, but to simply share genuine, personal and creative moments. Eventually the buzz about the Lonleygirl project died down and they moved onto to more obviously fictional interactive project but the fear of having your genuine voice questioned was a real one that has stuck with a lot of creators.

The context of the videos could never be fully controlled on the web, that's true now more than ever with videos being shared on facebook, twitter, etc.

A lot of the original videos from 2004 were part of a series of conversations, but could be viewed as their own individual moments as well. I feel like the videos we made back then weren't meant to be as portable as they are now, but we didn't have video on phones or wifi on planes then either. A lot of us have moved from strictly editing video for a blog and distributed through RSS to shooting moments on our iPhones, emailing to flickr and automatically posting to Twitter.

You also suggest that these videoblogs constitute a system of communication between multiple people who have gotten to know each other as friends. Does this suggest something significant is lost when we view the work of one videoblogger without looking at others with whom they are communicating?

This was more true in 2004-2005. There is so much video online right now, it really depends on what you're watching. I find that some communities online are very exclusive and are often making videos for very specific people, maybe mentioning them by name and referring to previous conversations. But there are so many micro-communities happening at this point, that it's truly like the wild west. Watching a section of a conversation could mean just as much to you as the people it was intended for. That's why I love video on the web. Everyone has their own interpretation of the importance or coolness of one single video. If you want to trace the conversation back to it's beginnings, most likely, you can. If you just want to enjoy one piece or one part of a meme, you can do that too.

As I've mentioned before, for me personally, Twitter changed the way I videoblogged dramatically. I felt i could share ideas and have conversations more quickly and fluidly, whereas on my videoblog, it would take a lot more time and effort. With the introduction of video on the iPhone and video hosting on places like Flickr and Facebook, several videobloggers have all but abandoned their blogs for the instant gratification of shooting to sharing in the same 5 minutes. This is not to say that creators have forgotten about making more complex content. Using these tools to sketch and have conversations and collaborations has opened up the flood gates of creativity, in my opinion. Making ideas flow faster and further breaking down the barriers to media access is nothing but good for everyone- creators and participants alike.

A lot of us were media producers before we were videobloggers. And every one of us has been influenced by television and films since birth. As the tools get smaller, cheaper and the quality gets higher, people expand what they feel they are capable of. I have a small, DSLR HD camera with a relatively inexpensive lens and mic. I have seen, in the last 6 months, several independent films and a couple TV shows shot with almost the same equipment. If you have the idea and the gumption, the distribution exists, there should be nothing stopping you from making something just as compelling and creative as what comes out of Hollywood.

Ryanne Hodson (RyanEdit.com, RyanIsHungry.com) co-author of the first published vlogging book, The Secrets of Videoblogging, started her career as a video editor at WGBH PBS Boston and in Boston public access television. From Bangkok to Delhi, Amsterdam to San Francisco, Ryanne has taught diverse audiences the hows and whys of videoblogging. With partner Jay Dedman, she produces RyanIsHungry.com featuring stories of individuals hacking everyday life and exchanging notes on survival.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Video Blogging (Part Two)

This is the sixth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following selection of video blogs was produced by Ryanne Hodson, author of The Secrets of Videoblogging.

As several videobloggers, myself included, have celebrated their 5th and 6th anniversaries of publishing video work online, we find ourselves wanting to show more than just our talking heads. With the creation of Twitter and Facebook, many of us have been able to stay personally connected on a daily basis, sharing what we used to share through our videoblogs. The need to create deeper and more artistic narratives has begun to shine through. Here are some of my favorites.

Wreck and Salvage- Shirts Get Dirty

talkbot.tv- Ep. 04 Lady Time

Mary Matthews- REM 30

Jennifer Proctor- Grand Rapids in Miniature

Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman- Beijing, China: August 2008

Kerry Brogen- Seeing

Jay Dedman- Sure

Robert Croma- Night Impromptu

Ryanne Hodson (RyanEdit.com, RyanIsHungry.com) co-author of the first published vlogging book, The Secrets of Videoblogging, started her career as a video editor at WGBH PBS Boston and in Boston public access television. From Bangkok to Delhi, Amsterdam to San Francisco, Ryanne has taught diverse audiences the hows and whys of videoblogging. With partner Jay Dedman, she produces RyanIsHungry.com featuring stories of individuals hacking everyday life and exchanging notes on survival.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Video Blogging (Part One)

This is the sixth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is a curatorial statement by Ryanne Hodson, author of The Secrets of Videoblogging.

Videoblogging emerged as the bandwidth hogging stepchild of podcasting or 'audio blogging' in early 2004, a little over a year before YouTube. We can put media files in a blog and have it delivered right to people's computers as we update? This is it! This is what we as artists, filmmakers, cable access producers, frustrated television editors and moms and dads with camcorders have been looking for for so long. The big D, Distribution. We have all these ideas floating in our heads, now we can get them out and share them with no gatekeepers or higher ups telling us it's not 'broadcast quality' or 'green light worthy'. We're "making stuff up and...putting it on the internet, and you can't do shit about that " (Michael Verdi, Vlog Anarchy).

Technical note: In the beginning, videos were uploaded in the Quicktime format and not easily embeddable/sharable on other blogs like Flash (and soon the HTML5 video tag) is now, so I'm linking to the original blog posts for viewing. My second round of videos will be embedded for your viewing ease.

First Mantra- Kicked To The Head- Daniel Liss- 11/25/2005

there are so many kinds of videos to choose from made by videobloggers since 2004. For the first 24/7 DIY Video Summit in 2008 I chose a selection based on personal connections.

Excited- RyanEdit- Ryanne Hodson- 12/01/2004

Many of these people have become my close friends and collaborators over the past 5 years.

Vlog Anarchy- Michael Verdi- 2/20/2005

I've slept on their couches, I've played with their kids, I'm about to get married to one of them.

Became A Nurse- Miss B Havens- 3/10/2006

Videoblogging can be anything the creator wants it to be. Some say it's just simply video on a blog, or even broader, just video online.

This Cheese Sandwich- The Faux Press- Jan McLaughlin-7/17/2006

Most of us were video makers before we were bloggers.

Private Screening- Scratch Video- Charlene Rule- 2005

Blogging was just a way to distribute our creations free and wide- whether it was a conversation, a documentary, a political statement, a home movie or just a tiny moment that was recorded.

Mad As Hell- Twittervlog- Rupert Howe- 7/13/2007

These are people whose work from 2004-2007 inspired and changed me. All of them are still active videobloggers. Some, including myself, have morphed their methods to include more instant videoblogging through iPhones, flickr, Facebook and Twitter- our ideas scattered throughout the web.

Hand Carved Tusk- Hopper Video- Rob Parrish- 6/10/2006

For the most recent 24/7 DIY Video event, I explored these creators' evolution into more experimental endeavors. I will be sharing these in my next installment. Enjoy!

The End- Twittervlog- Rupert Howe- 6/11/2007

Ryanne Hodson (RyanEdit.com, RyanIsHungry.com) co-author of the first published vlogging book, The Secrets of Videoblogging, started her career as a video editor at WGBH PBS Boston and in Boston public access television. From Bangkok to Delhi, Amsterdam to San Francisco, Ryanne has taught diverse audiences the hows and whys of videoblogging. With partner Jay Dedman, she produces RyanIsHungry.com featuring stories of individuals hacking everyday life and exchanging notes on survival.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Manifestos for the Future of Media Education

A few months ago, I was asked if I might contribute a short essay to a United Kingdom based project to frame a series of arguments around the value of media education in the 21st Century. The project is intended to spark debate within the Media Studies field and beyond about the value of our contribution to secondary and post-secondary education.

This week, Pete Fraser, Chief Examiner of OCR Media Studies & Jon Wardle, Director, The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University, launched a website which includes ten such manifestos, including mine, and which they hope will host ongoing discussions around these issues. Here's part of the rationale they provide for the project:

There are those who would dismiss the very idea of studying the media. The Daily Mail might argue that it is only on the national curriculum and available at degree level to ensure that the participation numbers for young people engaged in formal learning and gaining good qualifications remains high- the 'dumbing down' agenda. They might argue that studying Soap isn't a serious pursuit and will be frowned upon by University admission tutors and employers. Implicitly this argument is promoting a high brow / lowbrow divide; we can't remember the last time we read an 'angry from Tunbridge Wells' letter complaining that the tax payers money was being used to fund the teaching of metaphysical poetry instead of physics....

Twenty five years of scholarship have bought about broad consensus on the theoretical framework for Media Education - 1) that media is representation not reality, 2) that the media is produced by organizations and individuals and therefore can and should be read critically 3) that the media is now not only read and received, but reinterpreted by audiences. We would nonetheless argue that we are still some way from identifying a broader teaching and learning framework for media education and most critically - and the focus of this work - we are yet to articulate a clear purpose for the work we do. What is the point of media education? - whether it be media studies, media practice, media production, media literacy - what is the point?. You may argue the clue is in the title of each of these subsets of media education - as on the surface the differences between media production and media literacy seem pretty straightforward. However, the purpose of each still feels rather opaque.

Are we seeking to develop the media producers of tomorrow, or to nurture individuals capable of holding power to account, are we seeking to hold a looking glass up to society in order for society itself to better understand itself, or perhaps we are hoping to develop a more media literate society capable of protecting itself from evil media conglomerates?...

I used my own response to their provocation to reflect a bit on what we learned through the decade plus that I ran the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT and especially how we might extend the thinking behind Project New Media Literacies to include more advanced studies in media. Here's part of what I had to say:

We should no longer be debating the value of media education. The real question is whether media education should be a stand-alone discipline or whether expertise in media should be integrated across all disciplines, just as the ability to communicate is increasingly recognized as valuable across the curriculum....

Beyond these core skills which need to be integrated into K-12 education [those in the MacArthur white paper], though, I might also argue for kinds of contextual knowledge which are vital in making sense of the changes taking place around us. All learners need to acquire a basic understanding of the processes of media change, an understanding which in turn requires a fuller grasp of the history of previous moments of media in transition. All learners need to acquire a core understanding of the institutions and practices shaping the production and ciculation of media -- from the Broadcast networks to the social networks, from Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley....

Media education offers skills, knowledge, and conceptual frameworks we need in our everyday lives as consumers and citizens, members of families and communities, but they should also be part of the professional education of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, people entering a range of professions and occupations. At the present moment, there is a tremendous need across all sectors for what the industry calls "thought leadership" -- the ability to translate big picture change into language that can be widely understood and engaged -- as well as the capacity to deploy such media expertise to shape pragmatic and practical decisions.

Grant McCracken (2009) has argued that this hunger for insights into how media and cultural change impacts economic decision-making may lead many business to hire "Chief Cultural Officers," ideally people who can bring humanistic expertise on culture and society into the C-Suite. If this vision came to pass, we might imagine media educated students entering not only the academy or the creative industries, but business of all kinds, policy think tanks, arts curatorships, journalism, advertising and branding, and a range of other jobs, many of which do not yet have names. Current media education tends to focus on reproducing the professoriate, despite declining numbers of jobs, and treating the vast number of our alums who get jobs elsewhere as if this was a failure of the system, an unfortunate byproduct of the decline of higher education. What if we reversed these priorities and saw the expertise media education offers as valuable in a range of different kinds of jobs and presented these options to our students at every step in the process.

The kinds of media education required for such a context differs profoundly from what we have offered in the past. For starters, it requires a much more conscious engagement with the relationship between theory and practice -- not simply production practices (itself a big change given how often theory and production faculty sit at opposite ends of the conference table at faculty meetings) but the practices of everyday life. We need to compliment the current theoretical domains of media study with a more applied discipline, which encourages students to test their understanding through making things, solving problems, and sharing their insights with the general public.

The site's participants include some of England's top thinkers about media and learning, including David Buckingham, David Gauntlet, Cary Bazalgate, Natalie Fenton, and Julian McDougall. Having just spoken at a British media literacy conference in November, I came away with a deeper understanding of the caliber of scholarship and pedagogy emerging there and of the particular nature of the political struggles they are facing over education at the moment. I welcome the chance to learn more about their thinking through the ten remarkable essays the site assembles.

To whet your appetite for more, let me close by sharing a chunk of David Buckingham's manifesto. Buckingham notes that he often finds the rhetoric by which we justify our profession overblown and deterministic, so he labels himself a poor choice to write a manifesto. In fact, it is precisely because Buckingham is so cautious in the claims he makes, so skeptical in the way that he reads the world, that his work carries such weight and impact:

I have always felt that media education suffers from an excess of grandiose rhetoric. We have all heard far too many assertions about how media education can change the world, save democracy or empower the powerless. As a classroom teacher, I was always painfully aware of the gap between this sort of rhetoric and the messy realities of my own practice (and I don't think that was just about being a useless teacher). While it can be morale-boosting in the short term, this overblown rhetoric does not serve teachers very well: we need to cast a more dispassionate eye on what really happens in the classroom, however awkward or even painful that might feel.

In my view, we can make the case much more effectively by showing in concrete ways what and how children can learn about media. Most of the critics of media education do not have even the faintest idea of what it actually looks like in practice. Media education can be intellectually challenging; it can involve intense and rigorous forms of creativity; and it can engage learners in ways that many other school subjects do not. Even experienced teachers can be positively surprised by the quality and sophistication of students' thinking as they engage in media education activities - and by the forms of oral and written work that result from it. Like any other school subject, media education can also be undemanding and boring, and it can result in pointless 'busywork'. I am not calling here for rose-tinted accounts of 'good practice', of the kind that most teachers tend to find somewhat implausible. Rather, we need to come up with evidence that media education actually works - that it can engage, challenge and motivate young people, as well as enabling them to understand and to participate more fully in the media culture that surrounds them.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Video and Gaming Culture (Part Three)

This is the fifth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is an interview with Matteo Bittanti, a Social Science Research Associate at Stanford Humanities Lab.

Your curator's statement sets up the opposition between the way game videos might be seen in the traditional art world and the ways they are perceived in the fan world. Yet, one could argue that the Machinima community in particular has been developing its own art world -- including festivals, exhibitions, critical authorities, and canons. What can you tell us about how this alternative art world functions and what role it plays in shaping the aesthetic evaluation of the videos you are sharing with us?

As artworlds, Machinima and Game Art have had different gestation periods. The former is actually younger - the first examples can be found in the mid-Nineties, but artists have been experimenting with games - at various levels - since the Eighties. Nevertheless, machinima - as an artworld - has reached a fascinating level of complexity. Although the vast majority of machinima productions are still self-referential - therefore primarily intended for the gaming community, i.e. the connoisseurs who possess the necessary gaming capital to recognize and appreciate the intertextual connections between the game and its visual commentary - there's also a significant production of machinima intended for different crowds and contexts - art galleries, new media arts festivals and even film festivals (mainly because for long time, film people thought of games as "interactive cinema" - an oxymoron, obviously, a contradiction in terms, a classic example of the "rearview mirror" syndrome, that is, they could only understand/relate to those elements of games that resembled film, which became the trademarks of the medium itself - a major strengths but also its Achille's heel (I'm just trivializing what Espen Aarseth said, much more convincingly, here).

Machinima thus represented a good trade-off since what we are dealing with here is basically (non-interactive) digital animation. If machinima is "an animated cartoon" then it can be featured - read: tolerated - alongside film festivals, media art events, retrospectives etc. That second order of machinima, the machinima that flirts with the Contemporary Art World rather than the Videogame world, includes artists like Frenchmen Benjamin Nuel and Yann Bauquesne.

Performance in Counter Strike from Foke on Vimeo.

The latter is the author of a series of performances in Counter-Strike that I find absolutely brilliant but most fans of the game would dismiss with an irreverent "Huh?/WTF?". Incidentally, Bauquesne is the same artist who created Violent Waste (2010), a sculpture of Super Mario entirely made of cartridges - pun intended.

Not too long ago, Salman Rushdie said that the best way to free Iran is to drop gameboys and bigmacs", basically comparing videogames and junk food to weapons of mass distraction/destruction. In this sense, Bauquesne's scultpures acquires another layer of meaning, both literal and allegorical. Anyway...

Again, the context is everything: it's interesting to see how the 'same" artwork is received, for example, by the readers of Kotaku and by the readers of Flash Art/Artforum etc...

To answer your question, Henry: I am afraid that if we over-emphasize the text over the con-text and the pre-text) we risk of losing sight of the real importance of machinima. That is, although the essence of a medium cannot be considered independently of its technical aspects, the question concerning technology is not exclusively technological. I'm more interested in understanding the ways people use, think and talk about a medium.

Example. When John Hillcoat, the director of The Road (2009) created Red Dead Redemption. The Man from Blackwater, a machinima based on Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games, 2009) he was basically legitimizing the medium (machinima) in a broader context while simultaneaously promoting the game.

There was a time when several machinima practitioners believed that machinima was going to revolutionize digital filmmaking. It was around the time Tom Pallotta directed a video for Zero 7 in machinima-form, "In The Waiting Line". That scenario has not materialized (yet) and perhaps it does not really matter.

What matters is that right now there are many ideas of what machinima is and what machinima does - machinima as an artform per se, machinima as an inexpensive yet versatile alternative to digital filmaking, machinima as video commentary about gaming culture for gamers etc. All these ideas are competing with each other right now, but in the future one or possibly two may become dominant and redefine the perceived meaning of machinima. A Kuhnian paradigm shift, if you will.

In just a few months, MIT Press will release The Machinima Reader, edited by two scholars who have written extensively on this topic: Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche. I believe this collection of essays will simultaneously answers many questions about the nature of the medium and raise new ones.

Given these two parallel art worlds, is it possible to define an "avant garde" and "popular aesthetic" for thinking about the videos which have been produced through and about games?

I love to repeat myself, so I would simply say that the context matters more than the text. That is, the same artifact could be perceived as "avant-garde" or "popular aesthetics" depending on factors like "where", "how", "who", "why" etc. Think of Cory Arcangel's entire ouevre...

Moreover, a video distributed via YouTube prompts a certain response and attracts a certain crowd (also, for an artist to choose vimeo over YouTube as a channel of distribution has political rather than simply technical/design implications). But if I take the same exact video and show it in a physical art gallery, it will attract a vastly different feedback. Plus, cultural and social biases play a significant role as well in defining the nature of what we consume.

I'll give you an example. A friend of mine, let's call her D., recently told me about her experience at Leonard Cohen's concert in Oakland. D. was born in Poland but lived in the US most of her life. Nevertheless, she still has strong ties with her home country. Once Polish always Polish, so to speak. Anyway, the Canadian singer was playing at the Oracle Arena. His first concert in NorCal after a long hiatus. He's 77 - in great shape - but still, 77. Now, D., who practically worships Cohen, at one point took out her cellphone to take a picture of the living legend performing on stage. The man seated next to hear - yes, the audience was seated - yes, at a rock concert - tapped on her shoulder to tell her that she was "Being obnoxious and should be "Ashamed of herself". She also got the stink eye from many other attendees around her (average age: 50-60+) and felt mortified.

When she went home, the first thing she did was opening the browser to check out the videos from previous gigs - Cohen played in Poland as well. The European Eastern crowd (which ranged from twenty-somethings to fifty-somethings) was dancing like crazy, and everybody was taking pictures and recording videos that eventually found their way on YouTube. Thus one act that was considered "disrespectful" and "blasphemous" in one context, was perceived as a heartfelt manifestation of appreciation in another: the more videos and pictures the crowd captures of a performer, the higher the level of appreciation.

The point that I am trying to make is that although Cohen performed the same songs, the reaction from the crowds, the locale, the written/unwritten rules of conduct changed the very nature of the performance. In Oakland, the concert was a religious experience, in Poland a Dionysian party.

Another example. Last Saturday I attended the screening of Mahler on the Couch (Felix Adlon, Percy Adlon, 2010), a film about the life of the famous composer. The most interesting aspect of an otherwise forgettable/predictable story of love and betrayal is a somehow minor episode, that takes place at the very end [MINOR SPOILER AHEAD], when Mahler is fired after a ten-year tenure as the director of the Vienna Opera House. The crowd is outraged by the fact that the new director immediately changed the rules of attendance, forbidding the audience to clap and chat. "Opera used to be fun," one of the enraged spectator says, "Now it's only art".

One of the reasons why the new rules of conduct were imposed so abruptly has more to do with the changing media landscape of the early 20th century than with personal politics. Opera - which used to be a popular form of entertainment - was being challenged by film - a medium still in infancy, still perceived as a technical novelty, a childish, somehow juvenile pastime (Gunning's "Cinema of attractions"), deemed "artistically" inferior to theater by the intelligentsia of the day (Pastrone's Cabiria and Griffith's Birth of the Nation were still a few years away).

So in order to distinguish itself from the increasingly popular new medium, opera "changed" with the introduction of new rules of engagement, new behaviors, new codes of conduct. It became "only art". The ways we interact - or are expected to interact - with a text change the nature of the text.

Let me give you one last example: Second Life. Second Life looked like a videogame, behaved like a videogame, and yet it was not a videogame. You know why? Because gamers hated it. They found it pointless, cumbersome, boring. They checked out for about ten minutes and then left. This is exactly why the art community found it intriguing and exciting. Finally they had a playspace they could tinker with. Heck, even Chris Marker became a believer. And they did a lot of interesting things. Yet, in many cases, the kind of artists' performances/practices in Second Life were not essentially different from gamers' performances/practices in game-spaces. Example. Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101's "Synthetic Performances" (2007-) is a series of re-enactments of famous art performances (e.g. Marina Abramovic's Imponderabilia, Vito Acconci's Seedbed, Chris Burden's Shoot) in Second Life. How do they differ - conceptually - from gamers' remakes in LittleBigPlanet? I'm talking about Duckhunt, Pitfall and a million of others? Yes, it's a rhetorical question.

You seem drawn towards the expressive or performative dimensions of games-related videos rather than the narrative. There has been a long debate in game studies between approaches focused on narratives and approaches focused on game play. Can we see the aesthetic distinction you are making here as reflecting this larger debate about the nature of games as a medium?

I followed that debate from its inception which means that I am very old. It was a clever strategy to put game studies on the academic radar, a perfect example of agenda-setting. It worked well: the Ivory Tower discovered digital gaming, which means we could talk about games without feeling ashamed as long as we - the game scholars, another oxymoron, a lovely one - made the "right" connections with Deleuze, Guattari, Eco, Baudrillard and company. And we could also explore, and map, and colonize the new "virgin" territory, which is always fun.

And we laughed and cried and sat on the edge of our seats for years while the Scandinavian school of Ludologists fought its battles against the US Army of Digital Narratologists. I loved those conversations. (For some reason, I'm thinking of Bryan Ferry's "More than This: "It was fun for a while/There was no way of knowing/Like a dream in the night/Who can say where we're going?"). And we all cheered when the armistice was declared.

Although we now pretend to be looking at other issues, that seminal diatribe never really disappeared, like all major diatribes (e.g. "iconoclasts vs. iconolaters"). Mutatis mutantis.

Having said that, what I find exciting is that what we are seeing right now is the emergence of new game aesthetics, brought on by a new generation of designers and artists that use games as a form of expression, as raw material. Young, talented individuals that attended art/design schools and universities that have strong programs in digital media (both theory and practice). "Hands-on" students who read Roland Barthes alongside Judith Butler, Bill Moggridge & Andre Bazin, Michel de Certeau & Erwin Panofsky, Slavoj Zizek and Janet Murray.

Nobody is really surprised by the fact that several influential game critics awarded a tiny, independent production called Limbo, created by a Danish studio called PlayDead, as their favorite game of the year. On the surface, Limbo is a simple side-scroller action/platform game. Deep down, it is a reflection on the human condition, delivered with a black & white, sepia tone aesthetics, minimal soundtrack, etc. etc.

Equally interesting, but on the game criticism side, is the impressive work done by an art student from Washington State, Cory Schmitz, who was able to turn his school projects in some of the most exciting paper-based game/art criticism I've seen in a long while - EXP and The Controller. While everybody is hyping the iPad - tablets and e-reader - here we are, celebrating a cellulose-based lascivious fanzine about gaming! Ha! So, to make a long story short, the gaming as a medium is changing dramatically and it's not really about rules vs. stories anymore. Or maybe it is. Who knows. We are just beginning a new journey into gaming. "A journey which along the way will bring to you new colour, new dimension, new value."

Grassroots video making around games has, as your selection illustrates, been profoundly shaped by specific gaming platforms -- from Quake to Spore and LittleBigPlanet. What can you tell us about how the videomakers represented here work within or against the constraints of those platforms?

Today more than ever, the constraints are more political than technical. That is, while the PC is (still) a (relatively) open platform, consoles (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii) are (still, relatively) closed systems, tightly controlled by the respective manufacturers, which can considerably influence/limit the creative efforts of the game community. The history of the PlayStation 3, for instance, is marked by the continuous struggle between the hackers - that jail-braking the console on a weekly basis - and the Japanese company, which is doing all it can to suppress such "illicit" operations (when the users get tough, the users get sued).

This perfectly exemplifies the dynamics between tactics and strategies described by de Certeau. And the struggles between the producers and the users, the way a company reacts to such creative/disruptive efforts, defines the very nature of that technology - the way you talk, or not talk, about a technology, a feature, etc. So, a hacker who tinkers with the Microsoft Kinect is a creative genius because Microsoft tolerates or even encourages such tinkering (within limits). A hacker who unlocks the PlayStation 3 is "a pirate" and a criminal. "Terrorists" vs. "Freedom fighters": reality is always defined by who gets to call the shots.

It's obvious that if I want to create something using LittleBigPlanet as my plaftorm/canvas I need to be aware that my creation could be erased overnight without any warning, that I might be censored by Sony for "copyright infringement", "offensive content" etc etc. whereas if I mod/hack a PC game, I can have multiple outlets for displaying my creations. I can do interesting and potentially controversial things like a first-person shooter starring Jesus Christ or simulate the battle in Waco, Texas and play a deathmatch game at the MoMa and elsewhere. Nevertheless, there are several levels of LittleBigPlanet that really pushed the boundaries - from the Little Big Cremaster cycle to the re-enactment of 9/11 - that are just waiting to be "discovered" by the Artworld.

Much of the early Machiniema content was focused specifically on the concerns of the gaming community. Yet, many of your examples here connect games-based videoing to larger internet "memes". What does this suggest about the relative porousness of the cultural communities represented here? What points of contact exists between these games-based video-makers and other kinds of grassroots cultural production in the era of YouTube?

There is a high degree of porousness between mainstream pop culture and the gaming community because today (almost) everything is one click away, instantly accessible 24/7, and content migrates easily from one platform to another, from one screen to the next. In the age of television flow, channel hopping, "500-channels and nothing to watch" etc., writers and artists invented cut-ups and similar techniques. Today such production is not limited to niches anymore.

In the era of convergence, media literacy has expanded considerably. Finally, thanks to Windows and Facebook geeks became powerful and respected within our society - their fashion, language, and idiosyncrasies/inferiority complexes migrated to the mainstream. Steve Jobs is a rockstar. Julian Assange is the man of the year...

To quote Jen from the I.T. Crowd (S01, e01), "Ideas are coming, things are happening here". To answer your question, we could certainly come up with a taxonomy of memes - scholars fetishize taxonomies - or a series of case studies - economists love case studies - to get a sense on how digital gaming is influencing other grassroots cultural productions.

Example:

Case one. All Your Base Are Belong to Us (1998). A game-based video that becomes an internet meme. By game-based I mean that its "materiality", i.e. the phrase "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" and game footage used came from a videogame, namely the the 1989 side-scrolling arcade shooter Zero Wing, itself rather niche within the game community dare I say.

Case two. The Downfall/Hitler Meme (2006). In this case, a Spanish game player appropriates a sequence of a film, namely Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004), to express his disappointment about a videogame, Flight Simulator X by Microsoft. The video spreads first within the game community - spawning other game-related spoofs/parodies/responses (my favorite, "Hitler Gets Banned from Xbox Live"), then goes "global", and, bingo!, next thing you know is that The New York Times is writing about it.

Case three. The Fail meme (2003?). Like "All Your Base Are Belong to Us", here's an example of a game-based term, "fail" (from the Engrish line "YOU FAIL IT" from the 1998 Neo Geo video game Blazing Star -also very niche) which was used - right from the inception - to illustrate, visually, examples of failures - failures tout court, not necessarily game-based.

...But we should also remember that there are memes in the Game Art world as well, but they are not necessarily called memes, but "homages". One recurrent theme among Game Artists to is to recreate a gallery or a museum in a game space with the explicit goal of destroying a) the space itself, b) the artworks it contains, c) eventually, the artists/curators/spectators. The origin of this meme, pardon, theme, can be traced back to ArsDoom (1995), Created in 1995 by Orhan Kipcak and Reini Urban, ArsDoom was shown at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz the same year. Using the Doom II engine and Autodesk' AutoCAD software, Kipcak and Urban created a virtual copy of the Brucknerhaus' exhibition hall and invited artists to create or submit virtual artworks that could be displayed in the new map. Armed with a shooting cross, a chainsaw or a brush the player could kill the artists and destroy all the artworks on display.

Others point to Palle Torsson and Tobias Bernstrup's Museum Meltdown (1996) as the main culprit. These two enfants terribles - at that time art students in Scandinavia - created a mod of Duke Nuke'm 3D that allowed the "player" to destroy everything that moved - and did not move, like paintings - on the screen. This idea spread like fire in the Game Art community, and became an almost required practice. A playful subversion the rules of the Artworld by using videogames became a rite of passage among art students... Among the others: Chris Reilly's Everything I Do is Art, But Nothing I Do Makes Any Difference, Part II Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gallery(2006), Michiel Van Der Zanden's Museum Killer (2008) and Christopher Wyant's Team Fortress 2 Ceramics (2011).

In short, endless fun.

Matteo Bittanti is an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Studies Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. He writes about technology, film, games, and popular culture for various publications (WIRED, Rolling Stone, LINK, Duellanti). His online projects include GameScenes, a blog about game-based art.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Video and Gaming Culture (Part Two)

This is the fifth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following selection of videos was curated by Matteo Bittanti, a Social Science Research Associate at Stanford Humanities Lab.

LittleBigRevenge
Seakitten Collective (Belgium)
2009

genre: the video uses a blend of real footage and in-game footage
keywords: LittleBigPlanet, fandom, comedy

LittleBigRevenge uses a blend of real footage and in-game footage of Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet in a creative and engaging way The video, starring the game avatars Sackboy and Sackgirl, asks the viewers "what would happen if a diplomatic mistake causes [sackboys] to take revenge on humanity? A Belgian couple finds out right in their living room..."

"MTBig Planet"
DanteNeverDies (Spain)
2009
genre: machinima music video
keywords: Music video, Montage, parody

An irresistible spoof of famous dance music videos created with Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet. PlayList: Flatbeat - Mr Oizo; Sing it Back - Moloko; Satisfaction - Benny Bennasi; Destination Calabria - Alex Gaudino; Right Here Right Now - FatboySlim; Who's Your Daddy - Benny Bennassi; Starlight - Supermen Lovers; DANCE - Justice; My Boobs are Ok - Lene Alexandre; Hey Boy; Hey Girl - The Chemical Brothers; Call on me - Eric Prydz; Invaders Must Die - The Prodigy; One More Time - Daft Punk.

"LittleDaftPunk"
DanteNeverDies (Spain)
2009
genre: machinima music video
keywords: Music video, Montage, parody

A visual medley of Draft Punk's most celebrated songs recreated with Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet by DanteNeverDies.

"I'm On a Boat"
Matthew Gallant (Canada)
2009
genre: machinima music video
keywords: Machinima Music Video, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo), Saturday Night Live

Matthew Gallant mixes Saturday Night Live with Zelda and creates the (explicit) Wind Waker version of I'm On a Boat. In his own words: "Like all stupid ideas, it began on the Internet"

"Half-Life2: All sounds replaced with my voice"
-Trase- aKa Patcher aKa Tr45e (Ukraine)
2009
genre: Gameplay footage
keywords: BHuman beat Box, Mod,

The author replaced 1327 sound files with his voice ("I did not edit any of them, its fresh from the microphone"). The result is incredibly funny and started a new meme on the internt. (He left untouched: "Ambient noises like wind; some zombie voices; character voices (it would sound dumb); maybe i missed some minor physics like a trap door hidden somewhere in ravenholm and no one ever opens it").

"Infinite Mario AI -Long Level"
Robin Baumgarten (United Kingdom)
2009
genre: Gameplay footage, speedrun
keywords: speedrun, skill, AI, music

This incredible video won the Super Mario Competition in September 2009 which invited players to submit their game performances. Robin Baumgarten, a PhD student at Imperial College, London, produced an enhanced run which pulls off a major coup halfway through when it walljumps out of a pit. In his own words: In this version of Mario, when you're jumping while sliding on a wall, you jump backwards and upwards away from it").

"Project Blackjack: Trials HD - Stunt Video"
BLKJ Son (United States)
2009
genre: Gameplay footage with Music (Bonnie Tayler's "I Need a Hero")
keywords: Skill, Trials HD, montage

Videos stunts performed in Trials HD, a motorbike game available on Xbox Live arcade. The author - BLKJ Son - presumably filmed his television screen and edited the video adding a rock soundtrack (the screams and wows from the player can be heard as well). BLKJ Son's description: " Trials HD is the sickest game ever. You know how we get down ... BLKJ Son". I law the "raw footage" nature of this video.

"What A Wonderful L4D"
James McVinnie (originally from the UK, living in Canada)
2009
genre Edited gameplay Footage with soundtrack
keywords: Gameplay, montage, music

This video creates a powerful cognitive dissonance by juxtaposing scenes from the ultra-violent horror game Left 4 Dead (Valve) and Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World". The effect is similar to Microsoft's famous TV ad for "Gears of Wars" featuring Gary Jule's "Mad World".

In his own words: "I play Left 4 Dead waaaay too much. It deserves a vid. Please ignore the lag spikes and such, i rushed this out over 2 days and didn't really have time to fix up all the bugs. The reason Louis doesnt make much of an appearance is the fact that i'm always Louis, so he was doing all the camera work."

What a Wonderful Left 4 Dead (Machinima) from James McVinnie on Vimeo.

"The Adventures of Ledo and iX"
Emil Carmichael (US)
2009
genre Game-Inspired Animation
keywords: Homage, 16-bit aesthetics, lo-fi

The Adventures of Ledo & Ix online is a low-fi (but conceptually rich) five minute faux-16-bit short by Emily 'Kid Can Drive' Carmichael.

In His Own Words: "In many ways, Ledo and Ix are just like us. Sleeping under the stars makes them philosophical. Sometimes they wonder if they should have chosen different careers. They avoid dens of monsters when possible. But in one crucial way, they're different--they're fantasy adventurers in an extremely small-scale video game epic. What exactly do video game characters do when we're not around? What if they chat and bicker like we do, wonder and dream like we do, feel boredom and dread like we do, despite being 48 pixels tall? A sort of eight-bit tribute to Waiting for Godot, The Adventures of Ledo and Ix uses the visual vocabulary of retro video games to explore the human fear of both the unknown and the known."

"Creepy Mario 64"
LightningWolf3 (US)
2009
genre Manipulated Game Footage of Super Mario 64 (Nintendo)
keywords: Gameplay Footage

A manipulated version of Super Mario 64 that evokes David Lynch's cinematic nightmares.

Matteo Bittanti is an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Studies Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. He writes about technology, film, games, and popular culture for various publications (WIRED, Rolling Stone, LINK, Duellanti). His online projects include GameScenes, a blog about game-based art.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Video and Gaming Culture (Part One)

This is the fifth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is the curator's statement from Matteo Bittanti, a Social Science Research Associate at Stanford Humanities Lab.

I have always been fascinated by the tension between different forms of cultural productions, by the ongoing diatribe between the artistic nature of gaming, which to me has much more to do with the notion of gaming as a set of practices rather than gaming as a specific set of artifacts. That is: I am more interested in understanding the broad range of gaming performances by different social players than defining/defending a canon. A key assumption is that there is nothing intrinsically artistic about the medium of the videogame - or any medium/artform for that matter, although one could argue that "interactivity" is the special ingredient that does the magic for digital games. Whatever. It all comes down to rhetoric. As for art, well, it is simply a label, a socially constructed definition that serves a political, ideological, and economic agenda.

My selection for the DIY festival juxtaposed two forms of game-related productions that are simultaneously close - in terms of aesthetics - and distant - in relation to their cultural positioning. There are several fan-made productions -e.g. the LittleBigPlanet music videos - that have limited "artistic" appeal, that is, are extremely popular and well received among gamers but ignored/dismissed in the "official" artworld - that is, the marketplace that values sharks in formaldehyde and museum sit-ins performances. And there are a few "artistic" productions that are highly regarded among art practitioners, but unknown/dismissed or even derided by "gamers". There are two set of mutually exclusive forms of capital at play in two different factions/subculture: the "gaming capital" of gamers celebrating skill-based performances (e.g. speedruns, stunts, replays, machinima that expand/reflect upon/joke about the narrative world of the games they are based on, and so on) and the "cultural capital" of the artworld - that rewards marketable ideas and intents (e.g. illustrating, via a specific installation to be installed in a specific context - an art gallery - the 'essence of the gaming medium', 'its effects on human psyche', 'the commodification of leisure', 'the game of identity', 'the blurring between the so-called real and the so-called 'virtual'', 'hacking/modding as a political subversion' etc. etc.).

While they both use digital games a platform/canvas//raw material for creative expression, their nature as fan-art objects or artistic artifacts is not specifically defined by technical craft, but by a dispositif/apparatus that is both cultural (thus social =>human-based) and technical (machine-based). A network that comprises both human beings in various contexts (intellectual production/criticism/consumption) and automated delivery systems (e.g. Youtube, vimeo, flickr etc). Just to clarify: I am not suggesting that a speedrun is not artistic. The matter to me is almost irrelevant. I am just saying that until an influential art critic demonstrates that a speedrun is "artistic" by placing it in a socially recognized artistic context (e.g. a museum, an art gallery, a prestigious film festival), a speedrun will remain confined to a fan-only context. The context is everything. If I can have my speedrun on display at the Gagosian, Saatchi, or at the MoMa, I can sell it in the market place for $$$ - if that's my goal. Clearly, in order to sell my speedrun for $$$, I need the aforementioned influential art critic(s) that will justify the market value of my piece with a convincing critical assessment that will explain/justify/make up its cultural relevance to a broader public, a public unfamiliar with - and likely uninterested in - the conventions/language/aesthetics of the medium.

This also applies to those videogame-based artworks that have acquired weight (= market value) in the "official" artworld - I'm thinking about works by artists such as Cory Arcangel, Miltos Manetas, Joseph Delappe, Feng Mengbo and more (but not many more). For instance, I consider Miltos Manetas the first machinima-maker not because he was the first one to make machinima - today being "first" only matters if you're writing comments online, and especially if you are a troll - but because he was the first one to have his game-based videos recognized as a significant, groundbreaking artistic achievements by a critic who matters (Nicolas Bourriaud), in a NY gallery that matters, in the mid-Nineties, while the Ill Clan was creating the first Quake movies. Obviously, if one's goal is to gain reputation, admiration and status within the gaming community by being the greatest player in the world, the most skilled performer, the greatest e-athlete, the funniest commentator, then she/he will not give a toss about "Art". Or pretend not to: dismissing the artworld as "irrelevant" in today's society is instrumental in acquiring/increasing/solidifying street cred in other contexts.

This eclectic selection features a variety of video-game videos ranging from gameplay footage to game music videos. The main criterion behind this extravagant assortment is the urgent need to redefine the very notion of machinima in order to include the most enthralling audiovisual experiments produced, shared, and discussed by and within the game community. It also represents an explicit criticism toward the narrative-based machinima: the vast majority of the videos included steer clear of a traditional, conventional, linear form of narration. The success of DIY/Sandbox games like Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet and the proliferation of movie editing tools have spawned a new generation of creators that transcend the confines of game culture. This is a small sample is by no means an adequate reflection of the ginormous (sic) production of game videos currently floating in the seven seas of the electronets. Nonetheless, I hope you'll find them interesting. Expect the unexpected.

Street Fighter Deconstructed
Dylan Hayes (US)
2009
genre: gameplay videos
keywords: abstract, deconstructionism; glitch art

Dylan Hayes is literally tearing down Capcom's Street Fighter to its constituent parts in order to bring in the foreground the true essence of this seminal beat'em up game. The result is a series of mesmerizing experiments in ludic abstractionism and glitch art that nostalgically evoke an 8-bit past that never was. We begin with "Palette Change Test" (described by the author as "palette change tests on SFII. almost 8-bit, i kinda dig it"), we continue with "Shapes" only to end with "Block Test 01", where the original game is so deconstructed that it becomes almost unrecognizable.

Palette Change Test from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.

Shapes 02 from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.

Block Tests 01 from Dylan Hayes on Vimeo.

genre: gameplay video and teaser of a computer mod
keywords: teaser, gameplay video, music, abstract

DM-Spectrum is a custom UT3 deathmatch level developed by Matthew Bradley. The video selection includes a teaser and a gameplay video.

DM-Spectrum from Matthew Bradley on Vimeo.

DM_Spectrum Gameplay from Matthew Bradley on Vimeo.

Matteo Bittanti is an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Studies Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. He writes about technology, film, games, and popular culture for various publications (WIRED, Rolling Stone, LINK, Duellanti). His online projects include GameScenes, a blog about game-based art.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Anime Music Videos (Part Three)

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is an interview with Tim Park from AnimeMusicVideos.org in which he responds to my questions about the anime fan scene.

Many get confused by the superficial resemblances between Fan Vids and Anime Music Vids. Though both are expressions of fan appreciation, they come from very different traditions. How would you describe the similarities and differences between the two?

For this question, I asked AbsoluteDestiny, who started making AMVs in 2001, and switched to making vids in 2005. He's much more familiar with the vidding community than I am, but also has familiarity with the AMV community in order to compare. He wrote:

Henry's question is a really huge one and one I've actually given a lot of thought. There was a time, in the 2vcr days of both vidding and amvs, where there were a lot of similarities between the videos made in the two communities. Hair by Media Cannibals is largely the same vid as Hair by You Know Who, albeit with different gender gazes. As the communities, skills and aesthetics developed, the respective videos started to diverge. The reasons for this are a mixture of three important factors:

1) How the source is read and enjoyed

2) How the source lends itself to video editing techniques

3) What kinds of videos the communities give praise (and reward) to

In very very broad terms, the vidding community grew out of media fandom's more narrative side, fan-fiction and so on, with a strong emphasis on character over genre. Anime fandom, on the other hand, is largely interested in genre, spectacle, Japanese culture and self-referentiality. These differing priorities tend to different subjects for videos - Wonder of Birds (Laura Shapiro) versus AMV Hell (Zarxrax) to take two extremes.

Then we have the very nature of the source. Scenes in anime are not emotionally subtle - visually, especially in TV anime. Much of the emotional nuance is carried by the voice acting and only the more emphasised visual emotions (joy, anger, embarrassment) remain when the footage is removed from its audio. So where vidding can rely on the superbly nuanced body language of the actors, anime can really only pull on whatever aesthetic flourish the source gave them (flowers, blushing, thought bubbles with super-deformed characters beating each other up etc). To do subtle emotion with anime is hard and it's not unknown to rely on external manipulation (such as Playground Love by Nathan Bezner). Thankfully, animation lends itself to external manipulation very well and roto-scoping the footage and puppeteering it to do your bidding is not out of the realm of possibility, which allows for original narratives that are still very much in the spirit of anime (with its genre, spectacle, culture and meta fixations).

Lastly we have the community and how their reception of the works develop and refine aesthetics. The AMV community learned to walk at conventions and even in the early days of Anime Expo and Otakon a formal structure for AMV exposition was created in the form of the contest. Categorisation and the need to find ways to compare highly subjective works led to the formation of AMV genres and a fond regard for technical proficiency (being something that is much more objective when judging a video's quality). While the explosive growth of the community towards the mid 2000s did introduce all kinds of new aesthetics, the major genre categorisation and the search for technical wonders moved amv work further to the side of original spectacle, sometimes very disconnected from the narratives of the sources being used. Ultimately, however, it is a combination of all three elements here that have created the communities we have and the output they produce.

There are wonderful oddities and outliers on both sides but the kinds of work you are likely to find largely fit into the following spectrum:

Vidding tends toward deep analysis of character and show and utilisation of interior movement where amvs tend toward meta, spectacle and genre works with a strong utilisation of external motion, footage, effects and original art.

I've also vaguely plotted some well-known videos (though the amvs totally show my age) onto the graph. It's very rough but this should give an idea as to how I see the whole amv vs vidding spectrum.

[Titles in black are vids, titles in blue are AMVs]

Your account of AMV focuses on their American origins. Are such vids part of the Otaku tradition in Japan or is this a distinctly western response to Anime? If the former, what kinds of contact exists between the artists in the two countries? If the later, is the AMV being picked up by Japanese fans as well?

Learning about hobbyist video editing by fans in Japan and sharing ideas is difficult due to the language barrier. Remix videos in Japan that we're familiar with are called MADs, since one of the early tapes was labelled "Kichigai Tape", or "Tape of Madness". There are many different types of MADs, but early on the AMV community was exposed to a number of Seishiga MADs (and to many, "MAD" came to be a term with only this narrow definition), where still images, often from dating games or visual novels, have motion and other effects applied to them. This creates a distinct aesthetic that was emulated by some North American AMV creators such as VicBond007 in his Believe AMV.

In 2005, one MAD editor named pianos (interview from 2004) came to Anime Weekend Atlanta with a translator, and showed the audience MADs made by him and other editors at his panel. Some of them can be difficult to understand, again due to the language barrier, but there was one short MAD I came across years ago that I liked so much, I remade it for an English-speaking audience.

It used to be fairly difficult to find MADs. I stumbled across some videos where the files were split up between hosts to avoid bandwidth and space limitations. Later on, I came across a collection of them on Usenet. Now you can find Japanese fan videos on Nico Nico Douga, but of course it's a Japanese site so it can be difficult to navigate. Some of them get uploaded to YouTube so you can see them there. They can be hard to find since MAD is a common English word, but you can try searching for "Nico Nico MAD" to find some examples. Several MADs consist of anime-inspired custom artwork, which is relatively rare in AMVs. (Some exceptions: Greed vs. Envy, Utena Daioh, Woolongs For Nothing)

What functions do AMV play within the fan community? Are they primarily consumed by existing fans of the program or are they part of the process of educating American fans about Japanese media content?

A little of both. As I wrote in the first segment, fans at AMV panels at conventions have often indicated that they've bought anime after seeing it in an AMV. For those that are already fans of a particular show, today's search engines make it easy to find an AMV that uses that show.

Now, however, the internet also makes it much easier to find both licensed and unlicensed copies of anime, so I have a feeling that the promotional impact of the hobby is now less than it used to be. Though in some cases, editors seek out shows that haven't been licensed here yet, possibly in order to be the first to use a high-quality new title.

What kinds of relationship exists between the AMV creators and the commercial and semi-commercial groups who are marketing anime in this country?

Views on the hobby depend on which company representative you talk to. I heard of one anime convention panel with ADV Films where one of their employees told Brad DeMoss that they loved his Evangelion/Star Wars Episode I parody. The company, while it existed, was also AMV-friendly in other ways, with employees helping to judge at Iron Editor events. Also, for the final DVD of their release of the Noir series, they contacted four AMV editors, including myself, to create videos to include as Easter eggs on the disc. This took some wrangling on their part with the rights holders in Japan, and due to rights issues we were only allowed to use the opening and ending songs from the show, but it was a pretty cool thing of them to do.

On the other hand, reportedly at the closing ceremonies of Anime Expo one year, a Japanese guest of honour was upset when they played an AMV that incorporated one of his works. I'm not sure who the guest was, but AX stopped playing AMVs at their closing ceremonies after that.

For one final example, Anime Tourist reported on a 2002 interview done with Hiroyuki Yamaga, Co-Founder of Gainax and his friend Takami Akai.

Audience question: What is your opinion on anime music videos from a company standpoint and from a personal standpoint? Have you seen any anime music videos?

Mr. Yamaga: What exactly do you mean?

AQ: Like the anime music videos that we are going to be showing tonight?

Mr. Yamaga: I like them a lot. I think that they are very well done.

Mr. Akai: I didn't know that they existed. I actually like them personally.

Mr. Yamaga: I feel that copyrighting is only for professionals. For people who are doing it for their own enjoyment as a hobby, I feel that the line is very blurry. The reason that copyright laws are so strict is because it is very difficult to make the distinction whether or not someone is professional or amateur. But as Gainax, they got their start doing similar stuff so it's very hard for them to say, "No, We won't allow that'. They also feel that they don't really want to say that. As Gainax, the corporation, they have to say, 'No, we haven't seen it', 'Nope, haven't heard about it'. That is how they deal with it.

I've also heard this "willful ignorance" position from some in the North American industry. (again, from a professional standpoint) Though I've heard of at least one employee calling them a "headache", AMVs and the North American anime industry seem to coexist reasonably peacefully.

Tim Park programs videogames by day, and helps to administrate AnimeMusicVideos.org at night. The site has been online for over ten years and catalogs over 100,000 AMVs. He's edited a few dozen AMVs (and one vid) under the name Doki Doki Productions.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Anime Music Videos (Part Two)

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following selection of Anime Music Vids was curated and commented upon by Tim Park from AnimeMusicVideos.org.

Only Bob - by Infinity Squared

Although plenty of interesting results can be made by simply mashing up anime and music, some editors like to push themselves and try to incorporate elements of other mediums into their work. In this example, original CGI is combined with anime to portray a robot pondering what it means to be human.

The following videos were also considered for the event:

A Little Retrospect - by Kitsuner

Using footage from other AMVs is often frowned upon in the community. This is partly because the North American anime industry is still quite small (ie: compared to Hollywood) and if you're going to use some footage, you should support them by buying the DVD. In the case of this video, however, Kitsuner deliberately picked scenes from over 60 AMVs that span a decade to show "how far we've come". (The Strongbad parody clip saying you can use all the AMVs you already have came from Road to Iron Chef)

AMV Minis Episode 3 - compiled by Zarxrax

(Embedding of this video has been disabled. You can view it on YouTube)

Ever since the first one, the AMV Hell series has been hugely popular, with showings of some of the hour-long projects routinely filling screening rooms at conventions. The general idea is, an editor may think a certain part of a song would be a funny pairing with a certain part of an anime, but the joke wouldn't be funny for the entire length of the song. Collect enough of these ideas and put them together Short-Attention-Span-Theatre-style, and you have AMV Hell. It's spawned countless imitators and homages, even in machinima in the form of HMV Hell, based on the Halo game franchise. Zarxrax kept saying he'd retire the AMV Hell series, but its spirit lives on in this shorter-form of the popular rapid-fire comedy shorts. Things are often hit-or-miss based on your sense of humour and knowledge of cultural references, but this was one of my favourite compilations of AMV Minis Season One.

Continuous Play - by Ileia

Although repeated scenes may be a symptom of a lack of effort in a video, it works strikingly well here with the song "Stuck On Repeat". Also, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has scenes that are similar in composition but with different elements or palettes, which makes the video less repetitive and more visually appealing.

Lawl & Order: Legal Tender - by Fall_Child42

Some videos are closer to short stories or parodies than actual music videos. This one tells the story of the criminal justice system. This video was originally done for an Iron Editor event, but Fall_Child42 went on to improve and complete the video after the event.

Time - by qwaqa

qwaqa alters footage from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time to tell his own story of a girl who fixes the past. A "making of" video is directly below, so you can see the work that went into altering footage from the movie.

Kawaii Girls: Ultimate Dating Simulator - by Fizziks

This is a fake parody ad making fun of the Japanese dating simulator game phenomenon.
(Short glossary: kawaii / mecha /moe /otaku)

Attack of the Otaku - by Chiikaboom

After Odorikuruu practically defined the upbeat dance video, there have been constant attempts to one-up videos in the genre with more effects and fun footage. One editor even claimed that he wanted to create an "Odorikuruu killer". This more recent entry to the field makes references to Koopiskeva's prior work, Skittles. One effect on display is masking, or isolating an anime character and removing the background in order to put a character in another scene, or in front of some other effects. Chiikaboom wrote in the video description: "It takes a good 20-30 minutes to mask out one frame. There were 482 frames. Do the math." (And that was just for one scene. A total of 904 frames were masked)

Auriga - by Nostromo

Nostromo specializes in dance videos with electronic music, but instead of cute or fun scenes like in Attack of the Otaku, he typically uses scenes with a higher quality of animation and art than most budget anime TV shows for a different aesthetic. Interestingly, he also used software to interpolate frames, creating more in-between frames for an even smoother look. A description of the process, and higher quality versions of the video are available on the video's profile page.

Twilight - by Koopiskeva

In a similar vein to Only Bob, above, Koopiskeva combines Kanon with original live action footage. The video was inspired by one of the characters asking another, "Have you ever wondered that perhaps we were living in someone else's dream?"

A Feel-Good AMV - by haunter103

What can I say? It's a feel-good AMV! :)

The following videos were made in 2010, too late to be considered for the event:

The Friend Request - by Moonlight Soldier

Here Moonlight Soldier explores anime relationships via Facebook. There are a number of anime and editor in-jokes here, but you should be able to get something out of it. In this video, the female singer is actually speaking for the boy, since Shinji Ikari, the male lead in Evangelion, is portrayed as a bit of a wimp. Other AMVs have also used female voices for him, such as Kevin Caldwell's Engel.

Every Anime Opening Ever Made - by Derek Lieu

This supercut compilation video illustrates how anime opening sequences share
a lot of elements between them, from composition to effects.

RAH HEY! - by Ileia

Cleverly based on the similarity between the pronunciations of "anime" and "enemy" (at least when sung by Green Day), this is a fun "can you name them all" compilation video which includes composites of anime with editing and social networking software.

Tim Park programs videogames by day, and helps to administrate AnimeMusicVideos.org at night. The site has been online for over ten years and catalogs over 100,000 AMVs. He's edited a few dozen AMVs (and one vid) under the name Doki Doki Productions.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Anime Music Videos (Part One)

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following curator's statement was written by Tim Park from AnimeMusicVideos.org.

As far as the AMV community is aware, the first Anime Music Videos were created by Jim Kaposztas in 1982. He was inspired by MTV, back when they played music videos. Anime had a slow growth in North America, with few options before the '90s for shows licensed and released in English. Fans would trade tapes recorded by friends in Japan, and often translated into English and subtitled by other fans. Many times there would be some extra room at the end of the tape and so as not to waste any, occasionally people would record AMVs after the show.

To some extent, AMVs have helped advertise the shows that they contain. At AMV panels at anime conventions, when audiences are asked if they've ever bought an anime based on an AMV that they've seen, most hands go up. Apparently when Hold Me Now was shown at Anime Boston, the dealers room sold out of Princess Tutu shortly thereafter.

Before the rise of digital distribution, another common way to see AMVs was at anime conventions. Rather than simply screen them, tradition was that the videos would compete in a contest, perhaps because one of the other most popular events at conventions, cosplay, is also most commonly in the form of a contest. Every year, AMVs shown at Anime Expo and Otakon are seen by thousands of fans, and they can vote for their favourites. (Though in some cases, contests are evaluated by a judging panel) Anime Weekend Atlanta was the first convention to have a 24-hour room dedicated to AMVs for the entire con, and a couple of others have followed suit.

And so, unlike most of the other genres presented at the DIY festival, much of the AMV community is steeped in competition, with multiple rating systems available to grade and evaluate videos at AnimeMusicVideos.org.

One of the reasons for these systems was to help the site's creator (and others) to find good AMVs. There are even "Iron Editor" competitions where two editors have to make the best video they can in two hours with a few predetermined shows... and a secret ingredient of course.

It's not all competition, however. Ever since the first Dance Dance Revolution Project in 2001, where almost 20 editors came together to create a dance mix AMV over an hour long, there have been many cases of people coming together to create something more than just one person could manage. They're called Multi-Editor Projects, or MEPs, and there's also a sub-forum on AnimeMusicVideos.org to help people organize them. Themes for MEPs can include bands, emotions, holidays, or even numbers stations.

When selecting videos for consideration to be shown at the recent DIY festival,
most were released in 2008-2009.

Videos shown at the DIY 24/7 2010 program:

(With the exception of the YouTube embeds, if you click on the small "link" chain icon in the videos, you'll be taken to the video's profile page at AnimeMusicVideos.org. There you'll find more information on the anime and music used, and any other details about the video that the editor wanted to convey)

I'm On A Blimp (ft. Teddy) - by LittleKuriboh

LittleKuriboh is known for his Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series videos, which consist of abbreviated episodes of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime re-dubbed with humourous dialog. This video parodies The Lonely Island's "I'm On A Boat" with Yu-Gi-Oh footage, but unlike most AMVs, the original song's lyrics have been revised and performed by the creators, in the manner of filk songs. (Another notable example of AMV creators doing their own singing is the Iron Chef Idol series of videos)

Ian Fleming's Property of a Lady - by qwaqa

There are several instances of AMV editors making faux openings or trailers for existing movies or TV shows. In this case, using Noir, Cowboy Bebop, a few other shows, and a lot of editing, qwaqa creates a fake James Bond-style opening for Ian Fleming's story, "Property of a Lady".

AMV Technique Beat - by Douggie

Also called an "AMV For Dummies" (ie: a how-to book video) in the title card, Douggie illustrates a number of techniques and considerations that go into making an AMV. The title is a reference to the "Technique Beat" trilogy of videos by Decoy.

Tim Park programs videogames by day, and helps to administrate AnimeMusicVideos.org at night. The site has been online for over ten years and catalogs over 100,000 AMVs. He's edited a few dozen AMVs (and one vid) under the name Doki Doki Productions.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part Four)

An interview with Counteragent.
Counteragent is a vidder who is not only a fan of media sources, but of fandom and its discourses; she describes herself as a "fan of meta and fandom in general." Consequently, Counteragent's vids and artworks tend to be not only about television shows and movies, but about fandom's responses to them. Her vids "Still Alive" and "Destiny Calling" are featured in the 2010 DIY show.

FC: What was your first vid and why did you make it/?

Counteragent: "Copacabana." Because there weren't enough Alias vids, and because I knew Yahtzee would like it.

Counteragent: "Still Alive": the agony! The structure was very difficult to craft. I wanted to criticize both the fandom and the show but ultimately wanted to make a vid about empowerment and squee. Finding that balance was really hard for me with the way the song worked. I really owe my betas on this one, especially Giandujakiss.

"Destiny Calling": the desperate feeling of falling in love. I'd just met vidding and I was giddy with the flush of infatuation with the craft, the vids, and the vidders. I was shouting my love from the mountaintops.

FC: Have you seen any of the other vids in DIY program?

Counteragent: Yes, all. I'm a big fan. "I'm On A Boat": Fucking fearless song choice. "Handlebars" is a perfect vid to showcase the power of a vid as critical commentary on the source, especially to nonvidders. Simple but really, really effective. "Women's Work" is an institution. "Origin Stories" was gutsy storytelling both for the source and for the larger cultural commentary. Also a really great use of a tough song. "In Exchange for Your Tomorrows": great abstraction. Is "Piece of me" more RPFiction or cultural commentary? Anyway, it's all good. "How Much is that Geisha in the Window" is scaaaaathing. And I was too dumb to get "Art Bitch" the first time I saw it. Great use of outside graphics.

Counteragent: Worst: the amount of time it takes. That it's perceived as worthless by both people close to me and many cultural commentators. Best: the feeling of squee and empowerment. The community.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part Three)

Vidders: In Their Own Words
Vidding curator Francesca Coppa interviews vidders Giandujakiss, Flummery (Part Three), Counteragent, and kiki_miserychik (Coming next time). Coppa and Stanford's Julie Levin Russo will also be co-editing Transformative Works and Cultures' special issue on remix video: anyone interested in submitting should check out the call for papers.

An interview with Giandujakiss.
Giandujakiss is a prolific vidder who has worked in many fandoms. . Notable vids include "Origin Stories" (2008; submitted for the 2010 DIY festival), "It Depends On What You Pay," (2009; a vid critiquing rape in Dollhouse), and Hourglass (2008; a vid which looks at the Groundhog's Day trope in multiple media.) Her vid "Origin Stories" was included in the 2010 DIY show.

FC: What was your first vid and why did you make it?

GK: My first vid was a Highlander slash vid pairing the characters of Duncan and Methos. I made it because I couldn't not make it. A friend had introduced me to the concept of vidding maybe several months or a year earlier, and suddenly I had all of these ideas and I couldn't get them out of my head - they were driving me crazy. So I finally broke down and figured out just enough of the technical aspects to be able to make my own, very low-tech vid.

FC: What do you remember about the experience of making "Origin Stories"?

GK: "Origin Stories" was unusual for me because it's the most collaborative vid I've made. The idea wasn't mine - it was Thuvia Ptarth's - and she came up with the song and the theme and part of the basic structure. The biggest challenge from my "perspective was to figure out ways to make Thuvia's ideas work visually and be clear to the viewer. And that was particularly difficult because the whole point was that we were focusing on characters who were underrepresented, and so the amount of available footage was limited. I also tried to stretch myself technically; that vid made a bit more use of effects and certain stylized cutting than I'd done before.

FC: What kind of reception did "Origin Stories" get when it was released?

GK: The reception was really positive and really overwhelming. There were so many downloads when I first posted it that it blew my site bandwidth after just a few hours. And lots of people started posting long analyses and thoughts about the vid, which was just amazing. I hadn't anticipated any of that - I'm a Buffy fan, obviously, but I hadn't been all that active in the Buffy fandom community, so I hadn't realized how much of a hunger there was for this kind of critique.

There was another thing that really struck me, though. A little while after the vid was posted, Thuvia posted a short essay about Spike and Robin Wood and why she'd wanted the vid made. The purpose of the essay was to explain where the idea for the vid had come from and what she'd hoped it would convey. That essay got linked by a couple of blogs that were outside our internet fandom circle - I think they were race blogs, or feminist blogs. Anyway, what was striking to me was how those blogs overlooked the vid itself, like, they barely even seemed to understand that Thuvia wasn't just writing an essay about Buffy, but was writing an essay about a vid. It really brought home how difficult the concept of "vids" or "vidding" is to grasp if you're unfamiliar with the form. It wasn't just that they didn't understand the vid - it was that they didn't understand that the vid was the primary document in which the argument about Buffy was being made; the essay was just a supplement.

And I'm not mentioning this because of my vanity :-). I'm mentioning it because it was a really visceral demonstration of how hard it is for people to understand even the idea of "vids" when they haven't seen them before.

GK: I've seen all of them! Within my particular corner of the internet vidding world, most of these vids are quite justly "famous." I think they're all brilliant in different ways - some are more of an internal analysis or celebration of the source material ("I'm on a Boat", "Handlebars"), others are more political critique of the source ("Women's Work", "How Much is that Geisha"), and Counteragent's, of course, are explicitly celebrations of fandom that are almost divorced from the source itself. I think "Still Alive" in many ways captures my experience of fandom - the television show is just a jumping off point; what I'm really here for is the artwork by other fans.

FC: What are the best and worst things about vidding?

GK: The best is probably the experience of "vid farr" - which most vidders have felt at one time or another. The term is a play on the Star Trek phrase "pon farr," and in vidding, it means you're essentially "in the zone." The clips are coming together the way you want them to, you can see your vid developing as you'd hoped or better than you'd hoped, and it's like a compulsion - you can't stop for anything, not sleep, food, or work.

The worst thing for me are the technical challenges. Figuring out how to get the software to work with the source, and formatting and you're tearing your hair because there's some bug in the program ... it's incredibly frustrating. For some reason, for example, my video editing program has decided to declare war on the .wmv format. I don't know why. It always worked fine before!

An interview with Seah and Margie, aka Flummery.
Seah and Margie have been vidding together as Flummery for ten years. . Among their best-known work is the multimedia vid "Walking On The Ground," which tracks the history of vidding through various times and technologies. "Walking On The Ground" was featured in the 2007 24/7 DIY Show at USC. Their Doctor Who vid "Handlebars" was featured in the 2010 DIY show.

FC: Tell us about your first vid.

Flummery: Our first vid was "Kryptonite", for the tv show Invisible Man. We came up with the idea in 2000, listening to the song and thinking that hey, this would make a great I-Man vid! We did a whole outline on it, complete with complicated POV shifts, and sent it off hopefully to one of our favorite vidders asking if she'd be willing to make it, since neither of us could vid. She said no very kindly and gently, leaving us with no option but to eventually figure out how to do it ourselves. That same vidder flew across the country the next year to help us with some basics, and we plugged away at it for months, finally premiering it at Escapade in February 2002.

FC: What was it like making "Handlebars"?

Flummery: We were vidding this [Doctor Who] live - episodes were still airing right up till our deadline. It made things a little tense, as we had to hope that we could find enough footage to fill in the holes we were leaving along the way. It meant that we redid entire sections a lot more than we were used to, ripping things out to rebuild them from scratch as better footage appeared.

We also weren't at all sure what the reception would be. We'd never done a vid where we so blatantly pointed out the negative aspects of our main character before, and we thought there was a really good chance people would hate it. We spent a lot of time being nervous about how it would play at Vividcon.

FC: How was it received?

Flummery: We were gobsmacked at the reception, which has been almost uniformly positive. This vid has gotten more attention than anything we've ever done. The most interesting part about it is that we get the same reaction from fans who love Ten and fans who hate Ten -- they all think we did a good job of capturing him the way they see him. Which is incredibly cool.

Flummery: The worst thing about vidding is discovering that the perfect clip that you KNOW was somewhere in the source is really only in your head. And clipping in general is just a pain.

The best thing about vidding is having made a vid. And really, the way vidding changes the way you think and see -- it's a real shift, at least if you start out as more verbally oriented, the way both of us did. Learning to think visually, and to tell stories visually, is amazing.

Francesca Coppa is Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College. She is also a founding member of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit organization established by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and culture. Coppa and OTW recently worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get a DMCA exemption for noncommercial remixers like vidders. Coppa also writes about vidding both as a feminist art form and as fair use.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part Two)

This is the third in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following selection was curated and written by Francesca Coppa, a long time fan and media professor researching the feminist tradition of fan vids.

Women's Work, by Luminosity and Sisabet (Supernatural, 3:14)

A controversial and massively popular video that deliberately cut Supernatural's beloved male protagonists out of the picture to offer a critique of the eroticization of violence against women in media. As Luminosity noted in
an online profile by New York Magazine, "Women are sexually assaulted, murdered, and then laid out in artistic tableaux, chopped into pretty, bloody pieces. They usually further the plot, but they're hardly ever a part of the plot. We wanted to point out that in order for us to love a TV show--and we do--we have to set this horrible part of it aside." If it is women's work to be menaced and killed on tv, it is also clearly women's work to make a vid like this. (Note also that despite being cited in several academic articles and featured in New York Magazine, the vid is not available on YouTube; the audio has been disabled.)

Still Alive, by Counteragent (Supernatural, 3:07)

This vid is part of a conversation in fandom started by "Women's Work", above; or as one fan put it, "Women's Work/Still Alive = problem/solution, yes?" This vid speaks in the voice of both Supernatural's female characters and its fans; the vid's thesis, broadly simplified, is that, yes, female fans are angry at the show's sexism, but we'll keep making our female-oriented fanworks ("doing science") for those of us (women) who are "still alive." The vid ends by moving away from the show's violence to a celebration of female fanworks and fan communities.

Origin Stories, by Gianduja Kiss (Buffy/Angel, 3:47)

"Origin Stories" was released with the tag line, "It's Nikki Wood's fucking coat." This vid is about race and appropriation in the Buffyverse, hung on the fact that fan-favorite Spike's trademark leather coat turns out to be a trophy taken from the body of a black Slayer named Nikki Wood, whose son Robin shows up in season seven to avenge her. The vid not only critiques the text but also the fan response to it, both of which tended to privilege Spike's redemption arc over the stories of Buffy's minority characters. This vid circulated widely through fandom in 2008 as part of a larger conversation about race in both source and fannish texts.

In Exchange For Your Tomorrows, by lim (Harry Potter, 4:01)

A beautifully made character vid about Severis Snape that tells his story through the end of the books using footage from what were then only five films. Lim compensates not only through skillful editing but through making her own footage and special effects, which blend seamlessly with the movie's own magical effects. As Obsessive24 wrote, in her analysis of the vid, "Given that the vid uses existing and limited footage to tell a bigger story, the narrative is nonlinear and driven largely by emotional connectivity and symbolism. Lim uses object symbolism to astonishing effect: in terms of character representation (e.g. repetition of umbrella blowing in the wind) but also in general setting of atmosphere."

* Piece of me, by Obsessive24 (Britney Spears, 3:21)

RPF--or real person fandom--has been increasingly popular within traditional media/science fiction fandom in recent years. This vid uses one of Britney Spears' own songs to analyze not only the tabloid version of Spears' story (divorce, custody battles, substance abuse, bad behavior, etc.) but also Spears' counter-narrative of control. The vid also uses visuals from unconventional sources: including YouTube, tabloid photos, etc.

How Much Is That Geisha In The Window? by Lierduoma (Firefly, 2:55)

A critique of race, this time in Firefly, a show which imagines an Asian-influenced world without any Asian protagonists. Lierduoma brings the show's "Oriental" background to the foreground, focusing on the use of Chinese people and artifacts as set dressing and cutting multiple times to a sign that reads, meaningfully, "Good Dogs." This vid was influential at the DMCA hearings on noncommercial remix as an illustration of the ways in which vidders shift visual emphasis to people and objects on the margins. It became a crucial example of why vidders need to work with high-quality DVD footage - where these background items are visible - rather than lower quality digital video, where details of anything not central might be muddied or lost.

* Art Bitch, by Hollywoodgrrl (Battlestar Galactica, 2:19)

This character study of Starbuck reframes her bad girl behavior as Romantic, self-destructive artistic temperament. The vidder - herself an artist, of course - paints extravagantly over BSG's footage and collaborates with fanartist Deej to put Starbuck on the covers of the art magazine's I-D and Visionaire - which of course also both work as puns, considering Starbuck's identity quest and prophetic powers.

Destiny Calling: A Tribute To Vidding, by Counteragent (multi, 4:22)

A jubilant metavid made for "More Joy Day" (a fannish holiday dedicated to spreading joy) which demonstrates the vidding community's ability to articulate its own aesthetics, build its own canon, and celebrate its own talent. (Many of these vids and vidders will be easily recognizable to DIY 24/7 participants!)

Francesca Coppa is Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College. She is also a founding member of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit organization established by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and culture. Coppa and OTW recently worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get a DMCA exemption for noncommercial remixers like vidders. Coppa also writes about vidding both as a feminist art form and as fair use.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part One)

This is the third in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following curator's statement was written by Francesca Coppa, a long time fan and media professor researching the feminist tradition of fan vids.

Vidding is one of the oldest forms of DIY remix. Invented and still largely practiced by women, vidding is an art form in which mass media texts, primarily television and movies, are remixed into fan music video. In the mid-1970s, women created vids with slides; in the 1980s, they used VHS footage, editing with home equipment and tape-to-tape machines. Today, vids are made with digital footage using computers and sophisticated digital tools, and vidders - who have always been interested in aesthetics as well as argument - have more and more opportunities to bend the both style and content of pop culture to their will and taste.

Many people still don't "get" fan vids, seeing them either as incomprehensible mashups or mere celebratory slideshows. In fact, vidding, like most forms of remix, is about critical selection and the editing eye: deciding what to put in and what to leave out. Vids can make very sophisticated arguments about the source text's plot and characters, and even its ideology. While some vids are edited to broadly emphasize certain themes, images, or characters, and are thus easily understandable to the uninvested spectator, other vids are made specifically for fellow fans who are assumed to be familiar not only with the source text but also with the conventions and established aesthetics of vidding.

At the most basic level, turning film and television into music video represents a fundamental change of genre. While most mass media stories have a forward-moving, plot-driven structure, music video is more like poetry: expressive rather than descriptive, concerned with feelings and rhythm rather than the distanced narration of events. Like poetry, music video is also a highly concentrated form, distilling hours, days, or even weeks of footage into three or so minutes! Consequently, looking away from the screen during a vid is considered to be as offensive as arbitrarily deciding to skip words in a poem, since every moment, every conjunction of image and music, carries meaning.

While not all vidders are part of the organized communities, there is a longstanding tradition of vidding within shared groups, partly because in the pre-digital age, vidding was complicated and expensive, and so the mostly all-female vidding collectives shared equipment and skills. (See Henry's 1991 chapter on fanvidding in Textual Poachers.) While today most vids are released straight to the web, fans making vids in the 1980s and 1990s had to take their vids to conventions if they wanted anyone to see them, so even today many vidders debut their vids at conventions like MediaWest, Escapade, Bascon, and Vividcon, which is entirely devoted to vidding.

Moreover, the fans who attend these conventions have developed their own critical vocabulary for talking about vidding, and an institutionalized "vid review" based on art show reviews. Escapade features a 2 hour vid review; Vividcon not only has that, but also an additional "in-depth vid review" focused on only one or two vids. Even more recently, vidder bradcpu has been making a series of vidder profiles: short documentary films historicizing and analyzing the work of particular vidders. Like any advanced art form, vidding has developed its own conferences, critical literature, and theoretical apparatus.

Vidding Programme.
* vids marked with an asterisk appeared in the main programme.

The following represent a selection of notable vids made from 2007 - 2010.

* I'm On A Boat, by kiki miserychik (Star Trek, 2:36)

This vid expresses the widespread fannish joy over the 2009 Star Trek movie; it also captures the reboot's younger, more frat-boyish tone compared to the original series. It's worth noting that this vid, along with a wave of others, was made from a camcorder copy in May 2009. (See also: Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor by Sloane in the political remix section.)

Handlebars, by Flummery (Doctor Who, 3:27)

Probably the most successful vid of 2008, this meticulously-crafted character study of the Tenth Doctor spread beyond its community and intended audience almost immediately, eventually reaching--and being praised by--the show's creative team. As one fan noted, "Flummery completely called Ten's character development, and well over a year ago at that. The Doc has, indeed, gone completely handlebars on us."


Francesca Coppa is Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College. She is also a founding member of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit organization established by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and culture. Coppa and OTW recently worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get a DMCA exemption for noncommercial remixers like vidders. Coppa also writes about vidding both as a feminist art form and as fair use.

Posted by Henry Jenkins at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

DIY Video 2010: Political Remix (Part Three)

This is the second in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is my interview with Jonathan McIntosh, who describes himself as "a pop culture hacker, video remix artist and fair use advocate." McIntosh was the curator for the Political Remix track of this series.

Your selections here suggest a strong over-lap between fan vidding and political remix. Can you tell us something of the relationship which has emerged between the two DIY video communities?

The overlap in my curated examples is definitely intentional on my part, though I'm not sure how much of a self-conscious relationship there is between the two genres. I can say little about the impact of political remix on vidding but I can detail the impact of vidding on political remix work.

Many of my favorite political remix videos are created by people from a wide range of DIY communities who felt inspired or compelled to make one (or several) remixes addressing a political/social issue. I think many of these people creating remixes with a critical edge would not necessarily describe themselves or their remixes as being part of the political genre.

There are of course, a relatively small group of remixers who primarily do political work, and I am one of them. Unfortunately, within this self-identified group I still find some resistance to include vidding as a legitimate part of the political/critical remix tradition.

From my point of view it seems clear that vidding is not only an integral part of remix history but vidding practice can also can teach political remixers an enormous amount on a wide range of practices and techniques. Through my engagement with vids and vidders I have gained invaluable insights about the fannish use of narratives and pop culture characters in remix videos. When I look at vidding I see as a core element the idea that it is possible to simultaneously enjoy and love a television show while also being critical of aspects of the show's writing, characters, story arc, embedded messages etc.

Most people engage with mass media stories in a subtle and complex way - we both love it and are critical of it. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit this now but I didn't really understand this tension very well before I learned about vidding. I think that part of the resistance to vidding I encounter from other political remixers might be related to this point. They may be uncomfortable with the fannish and or sympathetic relationship that vidders have to their source because self-conscious political remixers often have a relationship of ridicule or animosity to their source.

Political remix video can be a blunt tool that uses ridicule as a way to expose hypocrisy, illuminate tropes, and talk back to power - but it is a little harder to use the form in more subtle ways (especially if you still want to get the lolz).

Learning about vidding really gave me permission to embrace my fannish-side as a political remixer instead of hiding or being ashamed of it. It would have been impossible for me to conceive of making either "Buffy vs Edward" or "Right Wing Radio Duck" without the positive influence of vidding on me and on my work. In both I rely on my fannish (and therefore sympathetic) view of one pop culture icon (The Slayer and Donald Duck) which I use to critique another popular culture character or story (Glenn Beck and Twilight/Edward Cullen).

I would also say that political remix video does not really have a self-conscious or intentional community, at least not in the same way that communities have coalesced around vidding, AMVs or machinima. The love of source material(s) seems to be part of the glue that holds vidding, AMV and machinima communities together. Political remix video as a genre on the other hand does not have a fandom at its core - but rather rallies around a deep shared suspicion of powerful institutions, structures and the media itself. This base of criticism is what, I think, poses challenges to building a larger sustained online community organized specifically around political remix video.