What MIT Students are Learning about Communicating Science to the Public

One of the truly remarkable things about teaching at MIT are how many of our best students are crossing over from the sciences or engineering programs to take classes in media studies. They hope to use what they learn in our courses to improve their capacity to communicate scientific ideas with the general public. Here are two examples:

For the past few years, the Comparative Media Studies Program has been partnering with Terrascope, a freshman year program run by faculty from Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Terrascope students spend the year focusing on one of the world's leading environmental problems, pooling together research, talking to experts, and taking a trip to the site to see for themselves the nature of the problem. Historically, they have learned to translate their findings not only into research papers but also into museum exhibits designed to communicate with the general public. A few years ago, Ari Epstein, a faculty member in the program, approached me to see if our students might be able to help them teach the Terrascope participants how to use radio as a medium to convey their ideas to an even larger public. This year, CMS Masters student Steve Schultze served as a teaching assistant in the class. This year's focus was on how New Orleans should deal with the consequences of Katrina. The result: "Nerds in New Orleans."

The other was a paper I received from one of the undergraduate students in my Media Systems and Texts class which manages to combine his passion for climate issues with some of the things we've been learning this term about YouTube and participatory culture. The issues are ones which I have addressed here before -- the controversy which emerged as Al Gore's Penguin Army was revealed to be astroturf, but the student connects this debate to the larger context of media coverage of global warming issues in a way only a MIT science geek could.

Analyzing the Role of Media in the Climate Change Debate Through the YouTube Video, "Al Gore's Penguin Army"

by Garrett Marino

Climate change, or long-term changes in average weather conditions, signifies an important issue impacting the contemporary media landscape. The two-minute YouTube video criticizing Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Penguin Army, now viewed over 500,000 times, offers a compelling example to analyze the role of media in the climate change debate. A framework of questions can be asked around this video, with the intent of progressively working outward to link media with broader cultural trends on climate change: What can be learned from this video? How does it critique An Inconvenient Truth? What were the motives and goals of the video's producer(s)? Why use YouTube to respond to the movie? How do the contents of the YouTube video fall within broader efforts to discredit climate change science? The information presented in An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore's Penguin Army that individuals digest and the opinions developed through related media will arguably impact policy during the coming decades.

Released on May 24, 2006, the same release date for An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Penguin Army serves largely to discredit Al Gore and his movie. In the video, Al Gore is dressed in an outfit reminiscent of Batman's enemy Penguin, who could be described as a gentleman of crime. The crime being committed by Al Gore, according to the video, is his promotion of climate change science and dictating what people should do to combat this problem. The video opens with penguins assembling into an ice cave to listen to Gore's global warming slide show. On the wall of the ice cave, a sign depicts a part human, bear, and pig figure with a slash through it titled "Manbearpig." The poster references a South Park episode where Gore speaks at South Park Elementary about the Manbearpig, a monster who roams the Earth. Gore begins his talk and quickly the penguins lose interest at the illegible charts and fall asleep. Gore continues his discussion, apparently oblivious to his audience's indifference, and shows outrageous material, such as blaming the skinniness of Lindsey Lohan on global warming. At the end of the video, Gore says that "you must take action to stop global warming!," and immediately a list of "things you can do to stop global warming" appears, including "stop exhaling," "become vegetarian," "walk everywhere (no matter the distance)," and "take cold showers."

In addition to barraging the viewer with material despicable for a critique of a serious climate change movie, Al Gore's Penguin Army has no roots in reality throughout. The opening quote in the video supposedly quoting Newsweek editor Eleanor Clift as saying, "If you liked March of the Penguins, you'll love An Inconvenient Truth," was fabricated, although she did interview Gore a month before the film's release on April 28, 2006, the same date given in the video's quote (Clift).

Another misrepresentation in the video was the penguins themselves. They were all created to resemble Tux, a Linux mascot that does not accurately portray any known species of penguin. Even seemingly credible weather facts in Al Gore's slide show were also grossly exaggerated or untrue, such as "Coldest Day in NYC (January 2005)" and "Record rain in New England (May 2006)." In no day during January 2005 did the temperature at New York City's Central Park (the official site for National Weather Service observations since the 1800's) fall below 5 degrees Fahrenheit, while the all-time record low for NYC was minus 20 degrees set in February 1934. In May 2006, some areas such as Newburyport, Massachusetts did receive all-time May monthly rainfall records, but this record is far-surpassed by rains that occurred in 1936, 1938, and 1955.

Now that the video has been discredited, there needs to be an analysis of the motives and goals of the producer(s) of Al Gore's Penguin Army. The video's YouTube page shows the poster as a member by the name of "Toutsmith," who identifies himself as a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills. An email exchange between Toutsmith and the Wall Street Journal enabled the paper to originate the email to a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm whose clientele include Exxon Mobile Corp. When contacted by the Journal, DCI Group refused to say whether or not they had a role in the release of the anti-Gore video: "DCI Group does not disclose the names of its clients, nor do we discuss the work that we do on our clients' behalf," said Matt Triaca, DCI head of media relations. Despite their denial, DCI has a history of raising doubts about the science of global warming, placing skeptical scientists on talk-radio shows and paying them to write editorials. DCI client Exxon Mobile announced that they did not participate in the creation of the video and did not help release it, according to the Journal article.

Despite the denial of both DCI and Exxon Mobile, the motives behind the producer(s) of the video are clear: cast suspicion on climate change science and confuse the public, prevent people from seeing the movie, and make those who dislike Gore hate him even more. Digging back to the original response to the video, most people who replied believed climate change is real and people are largely responsible for it. There were a few, however, that took the opposite stance, as YouTube member Bear182 writes: "People get real...global warming has been around for millions of years...do your own research . . . Real scientific research is out there for anyone to find. This is all part of a natural cycle. Al Bore is a dummy duh." To quote Bear182 exactly, all typos remain, notably Gore's last name spelled as Bore. Bear182's remark represents the fundamental leap not yet taken by most climate change skeptics: they believe that global warming is occurring, and has occurred in the past, but are not yet willing to accept that humans cause it.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gores presents a trend known as the Keeling curve, a fact that should dispel the lingering myth that the climate change occurring now is part of some natural cycle. The Keeling curve, named after Dr. Charles David Keeling, depicts the nearly constant rise in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past fifty years. Incorporating these direct atmospheric measurements with various proxy records available from ice cores, scientists can recreate carbon dioxide concentrations over the previous tens of millions of years. The record indicates that in no point during the foreseeable past have carbon dioxide concentrations risen at such a fast rate, and if current trends were to continue, by the year 2100 carbon dioxide will exist in the atmosphere at levels unseen over the past 30 million years.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore makes this point vividly, by projecting the Keeling curve along with about the past million years of carbon dioxide concentration data on a large screen. He proceeds to raise himself on an automated escalator to near the top of the screen. He then projects the future century of predicted rises in carbon dioxide, and the million-year trend is startling: it appears as a nearly constant flat line with an upward spike at the end twenty feet tall.

Despite this overwhelming trend with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, videos like "Al Gore's Penguin Army" still surface and represent a critic that will not go away easily. An interesting difference between Al Gore's Penguin Army and previous anti-climate change propaganda was its release through YouTube. According to the YouTube web site, its founding mission was to become the place to watch and share videos on the web, enabling its users to become the broadcasters of the future. YouTube is less than two years old, but the site has already become a place to promote songs and upcoming movies to its nearly twenty million unique daily visitors. The Gore penguin movie also shows that YouTube and online video in general have become a large political experiment designed to change and confuse public opinion and alter the public's perception of the world.

Politics has migrated onto YouTube for several reasons. YouTube does not fully contextualize the circulated material on its site; the creator indicates the content of his or her video(s) through keywords and generic categories such as 'entertainment' and 'sports'. Also, the open-ended aspect of YouTube enables anyone to post content and remain anonymous. With amateur-looking animation able to capture people's interest without producers resorting to professional methods, astroturfing becomes even more widespread, as apparently the case with Al Gore's Penguin Army. Astroturfing is a term used to describe a disguise of a client's agenda as independent public reaction by one or a group of individuals. In this case, a large company can mask its power and use a technology associated with less powerful groups.

With the wide selection of material now uploaded and available through YouTube, it would be hard to come across a video like Al Gore's Penguin Army.

To further support the notion that the anti-Gore video was a product of astroturfing, from May to early August of 2006, when Google searchers typed "Al Gore" or "Global Warming," the first sponsored link on the side directed users to the video. The ads were removed only a few days after the Wall Street Journal contacted DCI Group in August 2006. Diana Adair, a Google spokeswoman, said to the Journal that they do not allow advertising text that "advocates against any individual, group or organization", and will not release the identity of any advertisers (Regalado). However, the Google policy does not apply to sites associated with ad links, the loophole that enabled the link to exist.

On the other side of the climate change debate, Al Gore's team has also employed the Internet. Paramount Classics, the distributor of An Inconvenient Truth, along with Gore's consent, created its own YouTube video titled, Al Gore's Terrifying Message, which depicts Al Gore talking to the robot from the cartoon show Futurama about global warming. This video has been even more popular than Al Gore's Penguin Army, registering 1.6 million views as of April 24, 2007 compared with Penguin's half million, an indicator that the pro-climate change camp is winning the media "war" surrounding this issue.

How do the contents of Al Gore's Penguin Army fall within the broader efforts throughout media to discredit global warming? Climate change skeptics typically cite and exaggerate unanswered questions in the science, and produce long lists of scientists who dispute global warming, without stating that the list only contains a few percent of the scientific community. Given, scientific consensus has not always proved to be accurate, e.g. with the Biblical version of Earth's history taken as fact before Darwin, or continental drift theory laughed at before the 1960's. However, climate change science is based on harder evidence than the supposed evidence in the past for a six thousand-year-old Earth or stationary plates on Earth. Science has progressed immensely since those periods, although given it is not perfect. Agreed, there are open issues in climate science, but with the climate changing, ignoring the threat until every question is settled is like refusing to run from an incoming tsunami along the east coast of the United States simply because no tsunami has hit that region in the past.

Television is another medium that at times also appears to be siding with the anti-climate change camp, discrediting global warming. For example, in December 2004, delegates gathered in Argentina to discuss ongoing problems with the Kyoto Treaty. The media, and particularly television, during this period only briefly mentioned this meeting, but jumped on covering Michael Crichton's then-new novel that dismissed global warming as a scheme cooked up by scientists looking for funding. A Crichton interview by John Stossel on the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 began with, "He's concluded [that global warming] is just another media-hyped foolish scare. And many scientists agree with him" (Linden 228).

Stossel's irresponsible reporting was exacerbated by an article that appeared the same week in Science, which reported that not one scientific paper published on climate change since 1993 challenged the issue that people are changing the climate. So where are these scientists that agree with Crichton? They exist in small numbers, but keep their ideas out of publication.

Entire corporations can also employ various media outlets to discredit global warming science. They thrive on public fear of the government playing a larger role in their lives during a future era of climate consciousness. Al Gore makes a compelling statement in his interview with Eleanor Clift of Newsweek:

The behavior of Exxon Mobil is disgraceful. They finance in whole or in part forty organizations that put out disinformation on global warming designed to confuse the American people. There has emerged in the last couple of decades a lobbying strategy that is based on trying to control perceptions. In some sense it's not new, but it's new in the sophistication and the amount of resources they devote to it. It's not new in the sense it's the same thing the tobacco industry did after the surgeon general's report of 1964, and that is a major part of the reason why the Bush administration doesn't do anything. The president put their chief guy in charge of environmental policy in the White House.

During the first years of the Bush administration, innumerable investigations mostly analyzed if people were to blame for climate change. Now that scientific consensus has converged, even the President has admitted that we are changing the climate. The next phase of the debate needs to focus exclusively on policy and its social, economic, and political impacts. The mainstream media needs to take a reality pill and direct their efforts to covering and promoting policy changes and not an unfounded debate.

The YouTube video Al Gore's Penguin Army served as a case study that provided the focus of this paper: the role of media in the climate change debate. Despite the negative role that media has contributed to confuse the public on the climate change issue, the messages of Al Gore and climate change scientists appear to be gradually gaining public awareness and acceptance. The country is on a tipping point beyond which, with the help of modern media, the problem will be faced seriously and politicians from both parties will begin offering solutions to combat climate change.

Bibliography

Burt, Christopher C. Extreme Weather: A Guide & Record Book. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Fleming, James R. Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998.

Linden, Eugene. The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Meyer, William B. Americans and Their Weather. New York: Oxford, 2000.

Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits. London: Verso, 1991..

From an early age, Garrett had a fascination with the weather and in understanding the

science behind weather and climate issues. While in high school, Garrett performed

research in fluid dynamics that earned him recognition, including a semifinalist in the

prestigious Intel Science Talent Search. After graduating from High Technology High

School in New Jersey in 2004, he entered MIT and immediately joined the Weather

Forecasting Team. Garrett recently created the Weather and Climate Club at MIT which

provides an opportunity for MIT students with interests in day-to-day weather and in

long-term climate issues to deepen their interest and to enrich their MIT educational

experience. Garrett is expected to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Earth,

Atmospheric, and Planetary Science in June 2008. He then hopes to stay at MIT for

graduate work.

Why Media Studies Should Pay More Attention to Christian Media...

I have been pleasantly surprised by how much interest has been generated by last week's announcement in the blog that Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum was hosting a special event focused on Evangelicals and the media. So, I wanted to be sure to let you know that the webcast version of the event is now available. Some people have asked why our program would help to host such an event. There are a number of reasons why media scholars should care more about the use of media by this particular population:

1. This event brought together representatives of two of the largest and most influential media ministries operating today -- James Dobson's Focus on the Family and Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. While they often operate in a world apart from mainstream commercial media, their work has enormous reach. For example, Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, has sold more than 20 million copies, making it the bestselling nonfiction hardback book in history, though many of those copies sold through Wall-Mart or Christian bookstores

which do not necessarily register in the tabulations of the New York Times best-seller list. Similarly the Dobson organization has run a major media empire since the late 1970s.

2. As Diane Winston explained during her opening remarks at the Forum, Evangelical Christians have been key innovators in their use of emerging media technologies, tapping every available channel in their effort to spread the Gospel around the world. I often tell students that the history of new media has been shaped again and again by four key innovative groups -- evangelists, pornographers, advertisers, and politicians, each of whom is constantly looking for new ways to interface with their public.

3. Anyone who wants to understand how niche media works in this country needs to understand what's going on in Christian media. It's hard to call Christians a subculture when most studies suggest that the vast majority of Americans claim some religious faith and most claim to belong to some mainstream Christian denomination. Yet, because the most hardcore members of these groups feel alienated from much of commercial popular culture, they have created their own alternative cultural sphere -- producing their own television programs, films,

music, games, magazines, comics, you name it. We can learn a lot by studying the strategies by which this alternative popular culture is produced, distributed, and consumed, often depending heavily on viral marketing to get the word out without having to rely on mainstream media channels.

4. While we often talk about "conservative Christians" as if the evangelical movement spoke with one voice, the term evangelical actually describes a range of different religious, cultural, and political perspectives, as was clear as we begin to see the contrast of perspectives between the two media ministers who spoke on this panel. One important educational function an event like this can play is helping people to recognize and understand the diversity of the

evangelical movement and thus push past some of our stereotypes. Getting ready for this event, I shared with my students a broad range of Christian-produced media from the rather hardcore music videos of Carman to news reports on Rick Warren's conversations with Barack Obama. Some of what we watched -- including some materials from Dobson promoting abstinence education -- upset some of my students, while other materials fit more comfortably within the consensus of the class. (We often justify showing other controversial content on the grounds that we want to "challenge" our student's preconceptions. Well, maybe it is time we challenged our student's preconceptions about "crazy Christians.") My students learned something by simply observing the personal style, the language, the tone, even the delivery of the speakers, as well as listening to the ways they answered questions from the audience.

5. Academic institutions may have an important role to play in supporting and sustaining conversations between conservatives and liberals in the face of the growing divisiveness of American politics. I am eager to use some of the programming we do through CMS to bring together people who may come from fundamentally different ideological perspectives in a context where we can have a civil conversation designed to help us understand what others believe and why they believe it. I was personally very pleased with the tone of the conversation -- the questions from the floor were smart and respectful and the speakers saw this as an occasion to encourage reflection and dialog rather than as a chance to prostheltize to our community. Indeed, I think in this context, the speakers were more frank in addressing core concerns than they would have in a more confrontational context, allowing us to get a better glimpse into how they think about and deploy media.

I should acknowledge that Timothy Stoneman, currently a visiting scholar in the Science, Technology, and Society program was the person who first proposed this session and assisted in recruiting the speakers. He is doing interesting work about the use of radio by evangelical missionaries, a project which sheds light on a somewhat earlier chapter in the history of Christian media.

By the way, we've gotten questions about whether our sessions with Jim Ross and Mick Foley, recent guests to the CMS program from World Wrestling Entertainment, will be available via podcast. We have fallen a little behind putting up the podcasts on the web due to a range of other activities but these events were recorded and I will let readers know when they go up on our site.

Meanwhile, if Christian media is not interesting to you, might I suggest checking out the podcast of advertising guru Alan Moore's recent talk at the CMS program. Moore's work will be familiar to readers of this blog through an interview I did with him earlier this year.

[Note: This post originally misidentified Dr. Dobson as Charles rather than James. I don't know where my brain was at since I have been following James Dobson since the 1970s. I might have crossed him with Charles Stanley, who was the minister of a mega-church in Atlanta when I was growing up. Sorry for the confusion.]

Dissecting a Media Scare

Shortly before I went on break, someone e-mailed me a segment from WDAZ News (Grand Forks, North Dakota) focused on the "newest youth trend" -- "Emo" (or as the reporter helpfully explains, "emotional people.") It struck me as a textbook example of the ways that youth subcultures get misrepresented on television news and the ways that adult anxieties about kids who don't look, dress, and act "normal" get turned into hysteria by misreporting. I have long argued that we need media literacy for adults far more urgently than we need it for kids, so I figured we might use this space to collectively dissect this video and the various ways that it constructs Emos* as a threat to public safety. So, dear viewers, let me invite you to join me in a game of what's wrong with this picture?

1. Look closely -- there were no actual Emos consulted in the production of this segment. The reporter spoke with a local police officer who emerges here as the expert on this youth trend (despite the fact that he knew nothing of the subculture before his daughter told him about Emos) and then went to the local high school, talked to a few "average" students about what they think about those "other" kids who are all "emotional" and stuff. This means one of several possibilities: the reporter couldn't find any actual Emo in Grand Fork; the reporter has no idea what an Emo looks like; and the reporter couldn't care less if there are any actual Emos who might have a point of view in this story. (Of course, given how subculture members most often get treated on news segments like this one, this may be a blessing in disguise!)

2. Literal mindedness is the hallmark of most coverage of youth subcultures. Subcultures adopt often hyperbolic style to express their resistance to dominant culture but it is not a simple matter to understand what that style means and one should be highly reluctant to ascribe any single meaning to the style. In this case, though, the reporter isn't even responding to any actual subcultural practices: they are responding -- let's assume unknowingly-- to parodies of the subculture created by outsiders who themselves know little about what's going on. I took a look at some of the sites which flash quickly across the screen during the segment -- Insta Emo Kit -- for example and it is clear that they are as close to a checklist of what you have to do to become a good little Emo as George W. and his classmates red the Preppy Handbook to figure out how to get through Yale. We fill out check lists for a great many reasons. As a native Southerner, I am sucker for checklists that start with "15 reasons you may be a redneck" for example. But most of them are not exactly a guiding set of principles by which we organize our existence or rank ourselves. Subcultures don't typically come with membership cards and instructional manuals and if you think you found one, I'd be looking for the little emoticons that demonstrate that more than likely the author is smiling at you.

Consider, for example, this passage from the site:

The height of achievement for an emo boy is to live to forty while mooching off his parents and clutching their inheritance. This will allow the emo boy to go to emo concerts in the future and listen to the same old derivative music that got its start in the punk movement back in the 70's. Ah, we mean the 90's. If any emo music you listen to has its roots in anything before 1998, then you're old school and therefore not emo.

Does this sound like something that was written by a leader of the Emo movement? Or for that matter, by anyone even remotely sympathetic to the Emo subculture? Is it possible that the reporter didn't bother to read the website that the story suggests is the key to understanding Emos?

3. The next step is to remove the subculture from any larger historical or cultural context. Maybe there were no Emos in North Dakota until a few months ago. Maybe the reporter is looking for that extra-timely factor that gives a story like this one a sense of urgency and might even push us towards a crisis mentality. Nothing like this has ever happened in North Dakota before and by jiminy, we've got to put a stop to it right away.

4. The next step is to link the subculture to some risky behavior -- in this case, the reporter makes literal the old journalist story, "If it bleeds, it leads" by equating being an Emo with cutting. There is no actual evidence beyond a few sketchy websites to demonstrate any direct links between the two. There's no attempt to figure out how common such practices might be within this community. There's no recognition that cutting is a symptom of clinical depression which occurs across many different segments of the population. It is simply taken as given that if your son or daughter goes all Emo on you, there's a high likelihood they are going to be looking for a way to cut themselves up.

5. Recanting is always helpful. Pay attention to the rather gothy girl in this segment who starts out trying to offer some sympathetic account of why these kids act the way they do and then uses every trick in the book to disassociate herself from being seen as an emo. If even your friends won't stand by you, then there has to be something seriously wrong with you, or at least that's the logic the newscasters are using. Note also the opportunistic use of quotations: does this girl really think that cutting yourself is just another form of creative expression or was that a slip of the tongue that the journalists are using here to create a through-line for their piece?

*I should warn you that I have had very little exposure to Emo culture myself but you don't have to know much to see how badly they are being misrepresented here. A reader notes that they are usually called Emo or Emo Kids, not Emos. I have left the text as is so it doesn't render the comment senseless but know that you probably shouldn't trust me on the plural form. I haven't gone back to check the video but I am pretty sure they do use Emos throughout.

So Why Should We Care?

A little while back, reader David A. wrote a response to my blog post about the Politics of Fear, saying what a number of others have suggested -- that I take all of this too seriously.

Here's what he had to say:

I am always amused by our politician's efforts in regulating the internet, for our own good of course. I think you take them way too seriously, Henry. Efforts to rein in violent video games will have no more effect on their sales than the CAN-SPAM Act had on the amount of spam I get in my inbox. It's all a dog and pony show. The reason they can make propose such irresponsible, and quite possibly unconstitutional legislation, is that is that they know it will have no effect on anything -- for a wide variety of legal, technological and commercial reasons. Furthermore, they get the no-risk benefit of appearing to be "doing something" about the problem.

What the politicians fail to realize is just how foolish and ineffectual it makes them look from the prospective of up-and-coming generations of voters. How is anyone going to take them seriously in the future?

All of this sounds reasonable. We can fall prey to a moral panic about moral panics. But here's why I remain concerned:

1. Governments have no legitimate business holding hearings on matters to which they have neither the authority nor the resolve to pass actual legislation. In Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, I reprinted my account of testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee investigation into youth and violence after Columbine. The hearings were described by one of the Senators who participated as a "ritual humiliation" of the American entertainment industry and were intended to create a chilling effect around popular culture, intimidating the media industry into making decisions which they could not be legally compelled to make otherwise. Such hearings, in and of themselves, do damage to the range of ideas in circulation in our society, precisely because the hearings themselves can not face legal challenges, and because they invite us to take likely the protections of free speech in the Federal Constitution, undermining respect for what should remain solid walls against government constraints on expression.

2. Political leaders and newscasters, alike, can lead moral authority to thugs who operate outside of government constraints and at a much more local and immediate level. Even if no laws get passed, or the laws that get passed are overturned through the courts, they have given moral authority to parents who are over-reacting to their son or daughter's thrashing about trying to define their identities, to principles and teachers who pass policies at the most local level that can make it a utter hell to receive a public education in this country, and to bullies who want an excuse to beat up any kid who looks, acts, or thinks differently than the fine folks in Grand Forks, North Dakota. In the case of Columbine, there were any number of horrors committed at local levels by people who wanted to protect their teens from the horrors that the folks in Washington DC were warning them about and they went further than Sam Brownback or Joseph Lieberman would have ever imagined but I didn't exactly see either Republicans or Democrats standing up and suggesting that these people were abusing their authority in this matter.

Having staked out a position in opposition to DOPA, I now receive a steady stream of angry letters from yahoos of this ilk. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a letter we received from a concerned parent:

Teens need to live genuine lives, not virtual lives. And your position that by monitoring teen use of the Internet we risk the trust of our teenagers is completely indefensible. The overwhelming majority of teenagers are untrustworthy almost by definition. Anyone who accepts at face value what a teenager says is either an idiot or a teenager or both.

The unfortunate reality for those who, like you, abandon reality in preference to its digital approximation is that as parents of teenagers we are legally bound to the activities of our juvenile dependents. If one of our teenagers violates the law, we, the parents, will be served a summons along with our child. And make no mistake, a 16 year old is still a child. Hence, it is only prudent that as responsible parents we keep a close eye and a tight reign on our children as they enter the wonders and horrors of the Internet...

With all due respect, we really don't need another apologist for irresponsible

Teenaged behavior.

Hey, it's an improvement over what I usually get called! Sure, this guy was probably cranky about his teenage daughter before MySpace came along, but the last time we need is to give this guy more firepower.

3. Such laws do pass and do have some real impact on those youth who have the most to lose. While DOPA failed to pass the Senate, there are still very real risks that similar legislation (The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act) will sail through Congress this go around and even if it doesn't, at last count there were anti-social networking laws under consideration in more than 20 States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. Many of these laws will pass. Some will be overturned in court. Many of them will make it harder for schools and libraries to provide instruction to students about rationale use of social networks. Some will block teens whose only access is through schools and public libraries from access to the online experiences which are formative for their classmates. There's something at stake here, folks, and most likely, it is at stake in your own state or local community.

Do such laws block the long-term development towards a more participatory culture? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But they can certainly inflect misery on the lives of an awful lot of young people along the way. We don't want to over-react but we can't afford to be complacent. Let's not panic but let's take action

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with comics journalist Joe Sacco (Palestine) as conducted by CMS Masters student Huma Yosef (herself a former professional journalist from Pakistan). Today, I continue this interview. It occurred to me as I was putting this together that it represents a fascinating contrast to the interview I ran a week or so back with comics Creator Rob Walton (Ragmop). Both artists are very interested in using comics to explore political issues but they approach these issues from very different vantage points: Sacco creates realist comics that document the everyday lives of people from war-torn countries while Walton uses fantasy and comedy to encourage us to reflect on the American political process. Between them, they suggest some of the ways that comics may function as civic media. I now turn you over to Huma for the rest of her interview.

In what ways is your method of working akin to that of a journalist?

I conduct lots of rigorous, sit-down interviews, one after the other. Lots of things happen that aren't part of the interview process, and I'm often in situations where I can't take notes. In those instances, I duck behind a wall and frantically take as many notes as I can. In the evenings, I translate all my notes into a journal.

I also take photographs whenever I can. I'm currently doing a book about the Gaza Strip for which, after interviewing someone, I'd take his or her photograph. If someone refused to have a picture taken, then I'd try to quickly draw an image of the person in the margin of my notebook. Sometimes, there are things I realize I need to draw only after I start working. In that case, I visually research places later on. When I was working on Palestine, I wasn't aware of a lot of things and had to draw a lot from memory. With Safe Area Gorazde, my process has evolved. Now, if anything, I take too many pictures.

On the job in Palestine, I also started following stories as they unfolded. Like any reporter who has a little freedom, you follow your nose and try to cover the stories that you don't think anyone else will tell. For example, Gorazde opened up while I was there - I didn't know I would write about it until I arrived in Bosnia. Once I identified my subject, I conducted preliminary interviews about what happened, then broke it down into component parts. No doubt, the second time around was a more methodical process as I was a little more self-conscious about what I was doing.

What extra measures do you have to take given the visual nature of your work?

I have to ask a lot of visual questions about what a street or a camp looked like. Still, you're not always aware in the field of what visual stuff you'll need when you start drawing. Over time, my method has been honed, and I'm more aware of what I'll need later on.

I also need to do extra research sometimes. For example, the work I'm doing right now is sent in Gaza in 1956. I've made trips to United Nations archives to gather photographic evidence of Gaza city at that time. When I was interviewing people about what happened, I spent a significant amount of time talking about the visual details. I had people taking me around and showing me old houses, some of which had been built over, but still gave me a sense of how things looked.

Do you struggle with issues of journalistic integrity when drawing something that you haven't seen or been able to find photographs of?

I've never had a situation where I couldn't visualize something to some level of accuracy. I may not know exactly if there were trees or a hill there, but I'm not going to drop material because of details like that. I like to compare myself to a film director who's making a movie about the 1700s: you just have to recreate something to the best of your ability sometimes. Granted, not every twig is going to be in the right place, it won't literally be the same thing. But I'm clear about the fact that my work is an artistic rendition of something, a mixture of art and journalism. If I start obsessing about the details, I may as well be a photographer.

How do you respond to critics who argue that your work cannot be considered journalism because of its artistic dimension?

It's perfectly valid to argue against what I do and wonder whether it can be considered journalistic. I describe my work as comic journalism, other people call it documentary journalism, but these are all just labels to me. The fact is that no one can tell an entire story, everyone concentrates on what they want to, details are cropped out of photographs, stories go through an editing process. Every portrayal is to some extent a filter, and on that level something that someone might find problematic. Ultimately, I try to be as accurate when putting down quotations and describing things. I'm not making things up even though there is an interpretive element to my work.

You told The Guardian that you do "comics, not graphic novels". Could you elaborate on that distinction?

A novel to me is fiction. I think of myself as working in the non-fiction world and don't like my work being considered fiction. I think of the term 'graphic novel' as a marketing moniker geared towards adults who are scared of comics. But it doesn't bother me to talk about my work as comics. I consider myself a comic book artist. The notion of comics still has an underground feel to it, which is fun.

Have you had trouble explaining the medium that you work in to interviewees who may not be familiar with comics?

The main problem I've had is with myself. When I was working on Palestine, I would tell people I was working on a 'project' because I felt sheepish and unsure about what I was doing. By the time I was in Bosnia, things were different. Younger people were more open to me as they have a history of comics there. Moreover, by some weird coincidence, someone in Sarajevo reviewed my work just before I got there, so people were greased for it.

During my last few trips to Gaza, I would bring my book along and show it to people. Especially with older people, having my work with me worked to my advantage since they don't speak English but can recognize the streets or camps that I've drawn. Different cultures might be different, but in the Middle East they can get their head around the idea of drawing and depicting historical events. In Iraq, when I was with marines, there was no getting around what I was doing because they could easily google me and find out exactly what I was up to. So I did meet some lieutenant colonels who were skeptical about my method but were willing to give it a shot because I had press credentials.

Do you manipulate comic conventions such as framing to express meaning?

Yes. My drawing is a very conscious process. The choice of frames, the decision to put captions in little bursts, each angle is very thought out. In Palestine, I feel I overdid some things and have since learned how to discipline my drawing. While working on Palestine, I'd get tired of drawing the same angle so I'd change angles. But now I know to stick with something if I need to maintain a tone.

Does your process involve much revision?

I try not to revise much. I write the script of the comic first and spend a while on this stage. Most of the editing occurs when I realize that I don't need to write out something because I can draw it instead. Other than that, I try to keep the script as it is. In the drawing, on the other hand, I let myself be loose and problem solve as I'm working. I don't story board the whole comic, which makes the process a little more lively and spontaneous. If it were a matter of connecting the dots, I don't think I could carry on working without losing interest.

Where and how were you introduced to comic books?

I grew up in Australia where I read British war comics and some American western comics. I didn't read many super hero comics, other than perhaps strips about The Phantom. It became a hobby because I'd draw my own little figures, mimicking the ones I saw in the comics I was reading.

Do you think working in the medium of comics liberates your journalism from the constraints of the 24-hour news cycle?

I don't think the freedom from the conventional news cycle is peculiar to comics. Herr's Dispatches, for example, is liberated from the constraints of time. I think it's about the approach rather than the medium. With my work, it has to be about the approach. I look for stuff that people will respond to even if the material is dated. That said, I try to make my shorter pieces for magazine publication timelier.

What can traditional print journalism learn from your work?

I

've been trained in classic American objective journalism, but I feel like a reporter should not treat a reader like a repository for facts, rather as someone you're talking to across a table. When I'm reading about a place, I want to know what it's like, what it feels like to be there. I think American journalism lacks the human element that is a bit more prevalent in the British press.

When I'd be sitting with US correspondents in Jerusalem, they'd tell me a story about something that happened to them, but would never write about it. They're so focused on getting all the right quotes, telling this side of the story, that side of the story, interviewing the right spokesperson, and working by the numbers, that they end up doing a disservice to their readers by being objective. They're so focused on being balanced, they don't tell you what they know themselves. It's difficult to maintain objectivity when you start writing that way, but I think reporters should be human beings with an opinion. Why can't a reporter tell me exactly what he or she thinks? Why is all the talking left up to pundits who never leave their desks in DC?

How do you decide which events to cover?

The hardest thing about this kind of work is how much time you spend on the desk. There's that impulse to always see more, but I have to choose the things that matter to me personally for whatever reason. To some extent, it used to be a financial thing. But it's ultimately about what hits you in the gut. The Palestine issue really hit me in the gut. When you start thinking about it, you realize what a disservice has been done to the issue by its media coverage in the US, you realize how many tax dollars go into perpetuating the situation. Similarly, I felt compelled to go to Bosnia. And when I had the gut instinct to go to Iraq, I started calling up agents to see if anyone would be interested in my work about the war.

Of course, there are other things that I'm compelled to do, but if you spend three, four, or even five years on a book, the years start to go by and you can't get to everything, even if it is compelling and interesting.

You also need to prepare yourself before you go, and it can take years of reading to learn the ten per cent you need to know so that you can be open to what's happening there and not waste time asking the simple questions. That basic historical context is important, even though you learn the rest when you get there. That said, I now want to do some shorter pieces for magazines and get out more.

Do you consider returning to the territories you've covered in order to keep your work up to date?

I feel I've already gone pretty deep into the places I've covered. Ultimately, I don't think I can really go much further than I've gone without becoming an Arabist. I think I'd need an academic base to go much further. But then question arises: am I a cartoonist or an Arabist? Also, I feel the urge to cover new ground and be creative for my own sake.

Do you think you've created a market for comic journalism that didn't exist when you started working?

I just tried to do what I wanted to do and didn't think about whether it would work out commercially for me. I thought I was committing commercial suicide with Palestine. Then, half way through Safe Area Gorazde, I had no success at all and was about to give up. But it's always been about doing what I want to do and so I stuck with it. Other people have come to see value in it. It's been a long road and it has taken many years for it to happen, but now I can pick and choose a lot more than I ever imagined possible. It helps that there's been increased interest in comics too.

Does your methodological approach change as you cover topics as varied as rock bands and the Balkan war?

With most of my work, I try to draw relatively realistically, and that's been a struggle since I've largely self-taught myself. When doing the rock band book, then, I've got a looser style and I enjoy doing it more. When doing funny work, I'm less worried about accuracy, the stakes are lower, and I can have more fun with the material.

Has there been a political backlash to your work?

Not really. Once in a while a store won't put my work on the shelves, but I've never had to deal with anything I've been bothered about. When Palestine came out, it was under the radar. My next book may not be under the radar, but we'll just have to wait and see what happens with that.

Given that your work reflects a political stance that is uncommon in the mainstream media, are you concerned about broadening your audience?

I probably get a bigger audience now, in this medium, than I would otherwise. No other medium is going to publish or broadcast this stuff. I also feel that if you popularize the material, you have to dumb it down. Overall, I think if I was to try any other tactic, I wouldn't have gotten done what I have managed to do.

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part One)

Every year, I ask students in my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to apply what we are learning in the class and do an interview with a media maker. The goal is to pull to the surface their "theory" of the medium in which they operate -- the often unarticulated, sometimes well considered, assumptions they make about their audience, their creative context, their techniques, their technology, their cultural status, and so forth. I will be getting a chance this week to see what my students have produced. I knew going into the process this year that I would be interested to see what Huma Yusuf produced. Huma Yusuf graduated from Harvard in 2002 with a degree in English and American Literature, and returned to Pakistan to work as a journalist. She specializes in writing about social trends as represented in media and media and society issues, in addition to addressing subjects such as low-income housing, 'honor' killings, gang wars and the state's ineffective prosecution of rape cases. Her writing garnered the UNESCO/Pakistan Press Foundation 'Gender in Journalism 2005' Award and the European Commission's 2006 Natali Lorenzo Prize for Human Rights Journalism. Yusuf is interested in investigating the interface among media, local politics and global trends - an intersection that she will explore through sites such as community radio, trends in media consumption, and online environments. With the support of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, she is currently launching a first-of-its-kind webzine, the goal of which is to provide an alternate forum where journalists, academics, and media students can examine and critique the Pakistani media industry at large.

I knew because Huma is an interesting person with a journalist's impulses but also because she was connecting with Joe Sacco, the journalist who has used comics as a vehicle to capture the perspectives of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Occupied Territories and to tell the story of the Bosnian War. We had been lucky enough to have Sacco as a speaker at a CMS colloquium event several years ago (alas, before we started our podcasts!) and I thought interesting things might happen if the two of them got on the phone together. When I heard she was doing the interview, I asked if we could run it on the blog.

Everything from here comes from Huma's account of the interview:

Working as a reporter in Karachi, Pakistan, I was often frustrated by the limitations imposed on my work by the parameters of traditional journalism. When I filed an interview with the Police Surgeon of Karachi, the man who oversees all forensic evidence gathering and related medico-legal issues in the city, I hated that I couldn't describe the homophobic graffiti that had been scratched onto the surface of his desk and filing cabinet, the best indication of the kind of pressure under which his team operated. While reporting on a horrific rape case, I would have given anything to describe the self-satisfied way in which the police official I interviewed scratched his crotch using a fly swatter throughout our conversation. That one crude yet probably unconscious gesture said more about the sense of physical entitlement that Pakistani men enjoy than anything I ever wrote. Similarly, if I could have admitted in print that I found myself throwing up in a back alley after visiting the sewage-ridden tin shacks of hundreds of homeless Karachiites, perhaps more people would have been outraged by a government scam that denied access to low-income housing.

I wasted many evenings arguing with my editor about the value of first-person narrative journalism and the shortcomings of objectivity. Unfortunately, neither of us could conjure a reporting template that would be considered appropriate within the standards set by the mainstream media, yet simultaneously capture everything that was raw and repulsive about the reality I was documenting.

Enter Joe Sacco. At the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston last fall, soon after my arrival in the US, I happened upon Palestine, Sacco's comic journalism tour de force. Although conference participants had spent the weekend brainstorming ways in which to make journalism more textured, insightful, and human, no one had come close to suggesting a technique that could rival the satirical, brutally honest, and profoundly immersive experience that is Sacco's work.

Often compared to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Sacco's award-winning Palestine: In the Gaza Strip (1996) has been hailed for setting new standards in the genre of non-fiction graphic novels, or, as Sacco terms it, comic journalism. With his follow-up effort Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, Sacco established himself as a journalist to be reckoned with. He has since covered all manner of "compelling" events from Ingushetia to Iraq, from rock bands on the road to raids in Ramallah. Each comic is reportage at its best, daring to go behind-the-scenes of journalistic objectivity, using alternating visual chaos and clarity to render a reporter's all-encompassing experience of a situation. Even better, Sacco's frames are replete with the adrenaline and anxiety, humor and humanity that are never granted any column inches.

While it would be inappropriate for me to compare Pakistan to Palestine, I do believe that there are some realities so absurd that they demand new ways of telling. Sacco's work serves as a reminder to all journalists that they should strive to recount the reality that drives their investigations by whatever means necessary. Sacco is currently working on another comic on the Gaza Strip. Until that hits bookstores, we can content ourselves with some thoughts from the cartoonist:

You've been described as a pioneer in the field of comic journalism, yet one could argue that your work is part of a long tradition, an evolution of the political cartoon. How do you contextualize your work?

I primarily think of myself as a cartoonist, but also as someone who is interested in political matters and what's going on in the world. I know there's a long tradition of illustrators dating back to the London Illustrated and Harper's coverage of the Civil War as well as another tradition of artists who deal with political matters, political cartoons, and editorializing news through pictures. In the end, though, my interests have just come together. I wanted to be a journalist and then fell back on an intense hobby to make a living. I don't think too much about where I place myself and I never really had a theory about what I was doing. People keep asking me about my work, so I'm coming up with something to say post-fact. But the truth is, it's quite accidental. If you've done something for 15 years, you need to build some theory around it, but I wasn't aware of what I was doing when I started doing it

.

Who or what has influenced your work?

George Orwell, Robert Crumb, Hunter S. Thompson, and Michael Herr's Dispatches. I really care about journalism and it's very important to me to get the facts. But I also like getting the taste of something in my mouth, being a part of the same swirl that the writer is in. Herr's work, for example, is more atmospheric and so tells more about war from a universal standpoint that can be accessed in different ways.

Given your influences, do you consider your work to be in line with that of the New Journalists?

I hesitate to make the direct connection. I studied standard American journalism and wanted to write hard news. I only wrote feature material later on. I discovered Herr half way through college and Thompson long after graduating. Other people have assigned me a place among the New Journalists, whatever that means. In my work, I'm just trying to create the flavor of a place I've been.

Did the New Journalists influence your decision to insert yourself into the narrative?

My work process has always been organic so I never made the conscious decision to appear in the narrative. When I started doing comics, I was doing autobiographical material. When I went to the Middle East, however, I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do. But it wasn't such a stretch to think that I would reflect my own experiences in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, along the lines of a travelogue.

Looking back, I think having myself in it is a strong part of the work, not because I want to be a character, but because I want to point out that this material isn't objective, this is my point of view, these are the impressions I got. I'm interested in the facts, but that's not the same as being objective. My figure represents the personal pronoun 'I' and emphasizes that this isn't 'fly on the wall' journalism.

By inserting yourself in the narrative, you can also write the stuff that journalists don't, for example, about how people interact with you. I want to get away from the pretense of the reporter as artificial construct. Reporters have feelings about a situation and that impacts the way they write. My work is a way to demystify a process that may otherwise seem strange to people.

How Second Life Impacts Our First Life...

After having written so much about Second Life during my recent exchanges with Beth Coleman and Clay Shirky, I swore to myself that I would not write about this virtual world for a bit and let reality catch up with some of my theories. No such luck. I recently heard from digital theorist Trebor Scholtz suggesting that there had been some interesting responses to the Shirkey-Coleman-Jenkins exchanges over at the iDC (Institute for Distributed Creativity) mailing list. Scholtz asked politely if I might weigh in on some of their arguments (always a dangerous thing since I am not on the list and not fully following their conversations) and clarify my position. I asked if I could cross-post my response here on the blog.

The question which Scholtz posed to me was deceptively simple:

My main question to Jenkins and all of you concerns the relationship between this virtual world and "first life." Do these virtual worlds merely provide an inconvenient youth with a

valve to live their fantasies of social change (elsewhere), or do they, in some measurable way, fertilize politics in the world beyond the screen?

The last several decades of observation of the digital world teaches us that the digital world is never totally disconnected from the real world. Even when we go onto the digital world to "escape" reality, we end up engaging with symbolic representations which we read in relation to reality. We learn things about our first lives by stepping into a Second or parallel life which allows us to suspend certain rules, break out of certain roles, and see the world from a fresh perspective. More often, though, there are a complex set of social ties, economic practices, political debates, etc. which almost always connects what's taking place online to what's going on in our lives off line.

Here, for example, is a link to the webcast of a session of the 2005 Games, Learning, and Society conference at Madison, Wisconsin. (Check out the session called Brace for Impact: How User Creation Changes Everything). It was one of the first places that I heard extensively about the kinds of educational uses of Second Life. One of the stories there which caught my imagination dealt with the ways people were using this environment to help sufferers of autism and Asperger's syndrome to rehearse social skills and overcome anxieties that can be crippling in real world social interactions. (They call their island, Brigadoon). Those who are undergoing therapy in Brigadoon are able to interact through Second Life for several reasons, as I understand it: first, because it creates a buffer between the people lowering the stress of social interaction; second, because it reduces the range of social signals through the cartoonishness of the avatar, helping them to learn to watch for certain signs and filter out others. Ideally, participants then return with these new social skills and apply them to their interactions in their First Lives. But even if that is not possible for all of those involved, they have had a chance to interact meaningfully with other human beings -- even if through a mediating representation.

For me, Brigadoon offers both a demonstration of the value of having a Second Life that operates in parallel to your First Life and as a metaphor to think about the ways we can try things out, learn to think and act in new ways in virtual worlds of all kinds, and then carry those skills back with us to our everyday reality.

In some cases, the Second Life opens up experiences that would not be possible within the constraints of the real world. My former student and friend, John Campbell, wrote a book, Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Identity, and Embodied Identity . His research primarily centered on much earlier forms of chatroom technologies rather than Second Life per se, but much of what he found there is still very relevant to our present conversation. One of the things I took away from Campbell's book was the idea that these chartrooms played important functions for queers who lived in small towns or in conservative regions of the country where there were little or no chances to socialize with others who shared their sexual preferences. Entering into a virtual world (even one as simple as the early chat rooms) allowed them to begin to explore aspects of their sexual identity that they could not yet act upon in their First Lives. Through this process, they developed the self confidence necessary to come out to their friends and family, they felt some connection to the realm of queer activism, and they made a range of other life-changing choices. I wanted to bring this into the conversation because I see from time to time academic theorists who want to dismiss the kinds of sexual experimentation that occurs in Second Life as interactive porn. Such language shows a limited understanding of what such spaces can and often do mean to the people who participate in these sexual subcultures in virtual worlds.

Those who have read my blog know how much I respect the work that Barry Joseph is doing through his Global Kids organization in Teen Second Life. Joseph has a strong commitment to using the virtual world to educate and empower young people and redirect them towards dealing with problems in the real world. Consider, for example, their recent collaboration with the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum to make images of the genocide occurring in Darfur visible to young visitors to Teen Second Life. The Museum was already projecting these photographs onto its own facade in the real world. The Global Kids group worked to showcase these same images within the virtual world, in the process learning more about real world suffering, and using Second Life as a platform to educate their contemporaries about a world problem that might otherwise have escaped their attention. By all reports, this was a transformative experience for the teens involved, resulting in them putting greater energy into trying to change the real world. Perhaps, Barry, who is a regular reader of this blog, will share more about his experiences.

How far might we push this? Consider the case of Kristofer Jovkovski, one of the readers of this blog, who wrote me recently to describe his proposal to construct a Virtual Macedonia through Second Life. Jovkovski's argument appeared in a Macedonia Arts and Culture magazine, Art Republica:

Macedonia is country of spiritual and profound people, having its culture originating from a deep tradition and culture. However, by implanting extremely materialistic culture and values that even the most developed capitalistic countries are revising and varying, the country is gradually losing its spirit.

Radical virtualization of reality would turn us back to our own natural needs. That would be the final, strongest slap in our own face, as radical immersion into the cyberspace would produce the opposite effect, at the same time, along the immersion path, would make us integrate, instead of enforce, the democratic and open values of the medium, process which would finally lead to reconciliation between the spiritual (i.e. cyberspace) and material world

It is essential to make space for the young people to create their individual and collective reality....

Macedonian government would accredit Virtual Macedonia as a legal state extension in the cyberspace and would give rise to virtual institutions and legal rights to the citizens, thus recognizing the first virtual sovereign state act that would make precedence in the international politics and instant popularity. Promotion of the first virtual state would incite knowledge and information revolution, changing the face of Macedonia. Everybody willing to embody themselves with a virtual identity, or Avatar, would have rights and possibility to create, own and trade virtual objects, thus empowering himself. Virtual Macedonia would be introduced to the older Macedonians in a nostalgic manner that would evoke ideological enthusiasm from their youth. Young people would, of course, be riding enthusiastic energy wave of even greater intensity.

Virtualization of reality would help us relive traumatic politization and transformation of everyday life. Experiences from the virtual reality would affect our real reality. We could help ourselves, and maybe most important, by taking more proactive part in creation of their own reality, young people could break the karma of cynicism and pessimism of elders.

Virtual Macedonia could be practical model of virtual state with its own territorial sovereignty, functional economy and community rights and regulations, opened to the world....

He has not yet tried to build a Virtual Macedonia. I don't want to get into this specific politics of the Macedonia situation but I was moved by this vision of how a virtual nation might revitalize a real one (which is in any case in the process of trying to reinvent itself after a complex history of struggles over national identity).

Might we imagine, for example, the construction of virtual homelands within Second Life that brought together disaporic communities and helped to cement their cultural and political ties to their mother countries? Might this result in new kinds of political alliances and affiliations that straddle between the real and virtual world? Could we use a similar structure to create a common space for interaction between groups which have very little face to face contact in the real world, even groups who have a history of conflicts over geographic space?

All of these examples work because Second Life does not perfectly mirror the reality of our First Lives, yet we could point to countless other more mundane and everyday ways that Second Life and other multiverses can and are being used to facilitate meetings in real world organizations, including those which result in all kinds of real world political effects.

That said, as Steven Shaviro notes on the iDC discussion list, there are some limits to the kinds of politics that can be conducted through Second Life at the present time:

Overall, Second Life is connected enough to "first life," and mirrors it closely enough in all sorts of ways, that we can pretty much do "there" the same sorts of things -- especially collaborative, social things -- that we do "here."...

A protest against the Iraq war in Second Life is little more than an empty symbolic gesture; but one might cynically argue, especially given the tendency of the media to ignore them, that

real-world protests against the war , however many people they draw, are at this point little more than empty symbolic gestures either.

On the other hand, I don't think that one could find any equivalent in Second Life of political organizing that takes place in "first life": if only because the people in Second Life are a fairly narrow, self-selected and affluent, group.

This goes back to the debate we've been having here about whether Second Life participants constitute a niche or an elite. Either way, the inhabitants of Second Life certainly are not a representative cross section of the society as a whole and there are many people who are excluded through technological or economic barriers to being able to participate in this world. These factors limit the political uses that can be made of SL: they make it hard for us to insure that a diversity of opinions are represented through the kinds of political deliberations that occur here; they makes it easy for participants to ignore some real world constraints on political participation, starting with the challenges of overcoming the digital divide and the participation gap; they make it hard to insure the visibility of online political actions within mainstream media.

That said, I don't think we can discount the political and personal impact that these online experiences may have on the residents of SL. We simply need a broader range of models for what a virtual politics might look like and need to understand what claims are being made when we debate the political impact of these virtual worlds.

Another list participant, Charlie Geer, goes a lot further in dismissing the value of Second Life. He takes issue with my claim that the participatory culture represented on SL is worth defending. Here's part of what he wrote:

It would seem to me obvious that trying to make some sense of and find ways of mitigating the violence and injustice in the complex world and culture we already necessarily inhabit, not least bodily, is far more pressing and considerably more worth defending than any supposed capacity to 'design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture'. This seems to me to be at best a license for mass solipsism and at worse something like the kind of thinking that undergirds much totalitarianism, as well as an evasion of our responsibilities to the world as we find it. Such a fantasy seems to be at play in both the relentless construction and assertion of identity', a drive that militates against proper social solidarity, and thus plays into the hands of those sustaining the status quo, as well as the fantasy entertained by the Bush

government that the Middle East can just be redesigned as if in some video game

Apart from anything culture is not something that can simply be constructed. It is something we are thrown into and which we can only at best try to negotiate our relationship

with. Culture necessarily involves other people and prior existing structures. Has Jenkins considered what it would mean if everyone felt free to 'construct their own culture'. Even if

such a thing were possible, it is certainly not desirable, especially if we have any hope to produce a properly participatory culture.

Frankly as far as I am concerned SL is really just a kind of cultural pornography, and is to the real business of culture what masturbating is to sex with another person. I like

masturbation as much as the next man, or indeed woman, but I don't make the error of mistaking for something it isn't. Apart from anything else it lacks precisely the element

that sex has, that of involving a proper, embodied, responsibility to someone else and to the potential consequences of the act itself.

There are lots of misperceptions embedded in these comments. To start with, I was not suggesting that we should be concerned with SL to the exclusion of concern with the real world. But I do see the struggle to preserve participatory culture as a fundamental political struggle in the same way that the right to privacy or the efforts to defend free speech are foundational to any other kind of political change. We are at an important crossroads as a society: on the one hand, we have new tools and social structures emerging that allow a broader segment of the population than ever before to participate in the core debates of our time. These tools have enormous potential to be used for creative and civic purposes. On the other hand, we are seeing all kinds of struggles to suppress our rights to deploy these new tools and social structures. Even as we are seeing a real promise of expanding free speech, we are seeing real threats to free speech from both corporate and governmental sources. We should be working to broaden access to the technologies and to the skills and education needed to become a full participant rather than having to defend the new communication infrastructure against various threats from government and business.

Gere understands what's going on in Second Life primarily in individualistic rather than collaborative terms. It would indeed be meaningless to describe a world where everyone constructs their own culture. Culture by definition is shared. But it is not absurd to imagine a world where everyone contributes to the construction of their culture. It is not absurd to imagine different projects in SL as representing alternative models for how our culture might work. Indeed, the virtual world allows us not only to propose models but to test them by inviting others inside and letting them consider what it might feel like to live in this other kind of social institutions. I think of what goes on there as a kind of embodied theory. And I think what is interesting is that these are intersubjective models that are indeed being taking up and tested by communities large and small.

In each of the examples I cited above, participants are learning how to work together with others through the creation of a shared virtual reality. We certainly need to spend more time exploring how we can connect what happens in these worlds back to our everyday lives but that doesn't mean that what occurs in a symbolic space is devoid of a real world social and political context.

Often, real world institutions and practices constrain our ability to act upon the world by impoverishing our ability to imagine viable alternatives. This is at the heart of much of the writing in cultural studies on ideology and hegemony. SL offers us a way to construct alternative models of the world and then step inside them and experience what it might feel like to live in a different social order. I think there are some very real possibilities there for political transformation.

From Participatatory Culture to Participatory Democracy (Part One)

The following is my attempt to provide a written record of the remarks that I presented at the Beyond Broadcast conference that we hosted at MIT the other week. I would strongly recommend watching the webcast version of the talk to achieve the full effect since the talk depended very heavily on the visuals and I am not going to be able to reproduce very many of them here. You might also want to check out the interview I did for Thoughtcast in advance of the event. This post is intended, however, to provide links to all of the examples I presented during the talk. Getting Too Close to Reality

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, my recent book, opens with the curious story of Bert and Bin Laden:

Dino Ignacio, a Filipino-American high school student created a Photoshop collage of Sesame Street's Bert interacting with terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden as part of a series of "Bert is Evil" images he posted on his homepage. Others depicted Bert as a Klansman, cavorting with Adolph Hitler, dressed as the Unabomber or having sex with Pamela Anderson. It was all in good fun.

In the wake of September 11, a Bangladesh-based publisher scanned the web for Bin Laden images to print on anti-American signs, posters, and T-shirts. Sesame Street is available in Pakistan in a localized format; the Arab world, thus, had no exposure to Bert and Ernie, but were very aware of a blue chicken who serves as one of the series mascots in Arabic-speaking nations. The printer thus didn't recognize Bert, but he must have thought the image was a good likeness of the al-Qaeda leader. The image ended up in a collage of similar images that was printed on thousands of posters and distributed across the Middle East.

CNN reporters recorded the unlikely sight of a mob of angry protestors marching through the streets chanting anti-American slogans and waving signs depicting Bert and Bin Laden. Representatives from Children's Television Workshop spotted the CNN footage and threatened to take legal action: "We're outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner. The people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves. We're exploring every legal option to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future." It was not altogether clear who they planned to sic their intellectual property attorneys on - the young man who had initially appropriated their images or the terrorist supporters who deployed them. Coming full circle, amused fans produced a number of new sites, linking various Sesame Street characters with terrorists.

From his bedroom, Dino sparked an international controversy. His images crisscrossed the world, sometimes on the backs of commercial media, sometimes via grassroots media. And, in the end, he inspired his own cult following. Ignacio became more concerned and ultimately decided to dismantle his site: "I feel this has gotten too close to reality.... "Bert Is Evil" and its following has always been contained and distanced from big media. This issue throws it out in the open."

In the context of the book, I am interested in the ways that this story illustrates the ways that contemporary media culture is being reshaped by the intersection of top-down corporate media and bottom-up grassroots media. Here, though, I want to invite us to reconsider what it might mean for citizens in a participatory culture to get "too close to reality" and whether this is a new kind of political power that we could deploy to transform society.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

One place to starting addressing this question would be to consider the case of This is What Democracy Looks Like, a feature length documentary that emerged from the Indie Media Movement in the wake of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. 100 media activists were issued camcorders and dispersed across the protest, each recording their own perspective on the action. The finished documentary shows us the experience in the street by pooling together the best of their footage into a 72 minute film, which was in turn intended to be a rallying point for further community building and activism. We might see the project as an example of the kinds of politically committed grassroots media production that was showcased throughout the Beyond Broadcast event.

Yet, I also want us to pause for a minute and consider the question posed by its title. What does Democracy look like? As Americans, we have a rich image bank to draw upon -- dating back to the founding days of our nation, so often, when we depicted Democracy, we fall back upon images of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, various protest activities such as the Boston Tea Party, or various national icons such as the American Eagle or The Spirit of 76. More recently, the Popular Front movement of the 1930s revitalized many of these images, offering us new icons of American democracy from Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Yet, today, when we represent democracy, the images we construct have a vaguely and often an explicitly retro feel to them. It is as if democracy in this country has a past but not a future.

But, we might well ask what Democracy could look like for the 21st Century? It might, for example, look like the kinds of protest activities which are occurring within game spaces, such as Velvet Strike, a conceptual art project which involved "spray painting" any war graffiti inside Counter Strike, the recent gay pride march inside the World of Warcraft, or the massive protest rallies that took place in the Chinese multiplayer game world, Fantasy Westward Journey, or a broad array of activist uses of Second Life As someone who lives in Boston, it is worth recalling that the Boston Tea Party involved people adopting alternative identities (might we see the Native American garb as an early form of avatar?) and engaging in symbolic acts of political violence.

Democracy in the 21st century might look something like "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People." A Houston-area hip hop group, The Legendary K.O., used their music to express something they were hearing from the refuges that were pouring into their city. Randle lives near the Astrodome and Nickerson works at the Houston Convention center. Both found themselves listening to refuges tell their stories: "Not till you see these people face to face and talk to them can you appreciate the level of hopelessness. The one common feeling was that they felt abandoned, on their own little island." They found their refrain while watching Kanye West accuse Bush of being indifferent to black Americans during a Red Cross Telethon being broadcast live on NBC. The juxtaposition of West's anger and comedian Mike Myer's shock encapsulated the very different ways Americans understood what happened. The Legendary K.O. sampled West's hit song, "Golddigger," to provide the soundtrack for their passionate account of what it was like to be a black man trying to make do in the deserted streets of New Orleans. They distributed the song, "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" as a free download and it spread like wildfire. The song has been perhaps the most powerful demonstration to date of Chuck D's prediction that free downloads could turn hip hop into "the black man's CNN," offering an alternative perspective to mainstream news coverage and thus enabling communication between geographically dispersed corners of the Black America. Within a few weeks time, the song had in effect gone platinum,

achieving more than a million downloads, largely on the back of promotion by

bloggers. And soon, people around the world were appropriating and recontextualizing news footage to create their own music videos.

Democracy in the 21st century might look like some of the ways that citizen journalists have deployed photosharing sites like Flickr to circulate ground-level images of public events such as the London subway bombings.

Democracy in the 21st Century might even look like some of the activities surrounding the selection of the American Idol. As I noted here last summer, critics who claim more people voted for the last American Idol than voted in the last presidential election are confused. More votes were cast for American Idol to be sure but then, the system allows and even encourages people to vote as many times as they want. The Vote for the Worst movement around American Idol, on the other hand, does represent an interesting model for how people might pool knowledge and deploy shared tactics to shape the outcome of the selection process, trying to negate the expectations of mass media companies and use their power to select to keep bad contestants on the air.

Escaping the Culture War Rhetoric

These new forms of activism may not look very much like the classic images of democracy. Indeed, there has been a tendency for activists to look down upon these kinds of activities, seeing them often as distractions from rather than incitements towards civic engagement. The result has been a kind of culture war between old style activism and the emerging participatory culture. We know more or less the kinds of images which cultural conservatives -- and indeed, the mainstream mass media deploys to dismiss and often demonize the new participatory culture. On the one hand, there are images of tarnished innocence -- wide-eyed children staring slack jawed at the television or computer screen, being imprinted by its toxic content and on the other hand, there are images of savages, youth run wild, and the feral children of the boob tube. Indeed, as Justine Casell pointed out to me recently, these fears are heavily gendered with a tendency for us to fear for our daughter's innocence and to fear our son's savagery. What strikes me, though, is that the images promoted by the Media Reform movement and by the Culture Jamming/Ad Busting world of progressive activism falls back on almost entirely the same kinds of images to condemn young people for their interests in popular culture. Once again, there are images of young people being brainwashed by television or driven wild by the seductions of popular culture; the content they consume gets described as "bread and circuses" or "weapons of mass distraction"; brand messages are written more or less directly onto their hearts, minds, and bodies; the public is depicted with faceless conformity; consumers are described as "idiots" who lack any critical judgment and told to "get a life." Such images grossly overstate the power of mass media and underestimate the agency of media consumers. The result is a politics focused on victimization rather than empowerment.

I have never quite understood how we are supposed to found a democratic movement on the premise that the public as a whole is stupid and has poor taste. And I am reasonably convinced that such images and rhetoric has the effect of turning off many people who might otherwise support many of the policies being advocated by the Media Reform movement. What I want to do in this talk is suggest ways that we might reimagine the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy, embracing new political language and images that mobilizes us as fans as well as citizens.

To understand what such a politics might look like, I would suggest picking up a new book by NYU professor Stephen Duncombe -- Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. Duncombe's previous work has included Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and The Cultural Resistance Reader, work that has offered a range of models for how popular culture can be deployed for democratic activities. In his new book, he argues that the left has seemingly lost the ability to construct a utopian vision for the future or convey such a vision through popular fantasy. The left, he suggests, has developed a powerful critique of what Noam Chomsky calls "the manufacture of consent" but it has not developed any fresh models for the "manufacture of dissent." He urges us to reconsider our relations to popular culture before it is too late:

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.

I found Duncombe's description of what a progressive popular culture might look like to be inspirational, though I might be inclined to describe this as a democratic popular culture since many of these traits he is discussing might also be embraced by at least some conservative groups as well and we would have a better society if these virtues were shared by both the right and by the left. We might sum up his key claims through the following terms:

Participatory: Dumcombe's example of this new kind of playful activism is Billionaires for Bush, a group which showed up in costumes and staged street theatre during Bush's appearances in the last presidential campaign, trying to remind reporters and citizens of what they saw as links between the Republican Party and corporate greed. Another example might be the Sorry Everybody website where many individuals posted snap shots and messages to the planet after the results of the election as a way of acknowledging what they saw as the damage Bush was doing to America's image around the world.

Active -- We might consider the ways that Alan Moore's graphic novel, V for Vendetta emerged as a response to Thatcherism, was produced as a film in time to be read as expressing dissent against the Bush administration, and has been literalized within participatory culture through a series of YouTube videos that link the film's dystopian future with the rhetoric and tactics of the current War on Terror. V offers progressives both a dystopian fantasy of where today's policies might logically lead (thus providing the basis for a critique of the manufacture of consent) and a fantasy of resistance (thus offering some idea of how we might manufacture dissent.)

Open-Ended -- Consider the kinds of political dialogue being sparked by comedy news shows such as the Daily Show, Politically Incorrect, or Colbert Report, which often call attention to topics that have been under-covered by the national news and encourages viewers to reflect on the mechanisms by which the news constructs our understanding of the world. I wouldn't turn to such programs for answers but I would see them as posing questions that might lead to further reflection and inquiry. The politics of this style of news comedy is clear at that moment when Colbert spoke truth to power at the Washington Press Club Dinner, directly confronting the president of the United States with what many see as fundamental contradictions in his world view. This style of news comedy has proven so effective at manufacturing dissent that Fox News has decided to create its own right wing alternative, The Half Hour News Hour.

Transparent -- Here, we might cite, for example, the kinds of progressive fantasies of an alternative America constructed on The West Wing. I wrote for Flow a few years ago about the ways that the program's construction of an alternative presidential campaign between essentially a maverick Republican in the John McCain mold and a progressive minority candidate of the Barack Obama school gave the program a chance to model what an alternative framing of the two parties might look like.

Transformative -- My example here was the work of JibJab, a group of animators who use borrowed and manipulated images to spoof the political process.

If we put all of these pieces together, the resulting organization might look something like True Majority, the pro-Democratic Party group created by Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry's fame), which is perhaps best known for circulating a video during the last election during which The Donald fires George W. Bush as if this were an extra-special episode of The Apprentice. As I discuss in Convergence Culture, this group embraced the concept of "serious fun" as a form of progressive activism, designing videos that people wanted to pass along not simply because of what they said but how they said it.

Four Eyed Monsters and Collaborative Curation

Attend the tale of plucky young independent filmmakers Susan Buice and Arin Crumley who have tapped every device available to them in the era of participatory culture to get their feature film, Four Eyed Monsters in front of an audience. Rather than waiting for the film to come out on DVD to offer director's extras, Buice and Crumley shot a compelling series of videos about the film's production and released them via iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube, where as of August 2006 they had been downloaded more than 600,000 times. As audience interest in the property grew, the team used their own blog/website to solicit support from their fans, promising that they would insure that the film got shown in any city where there were more than 150 requests. Indeed, they were able to use the online interest expressed in the film to court local exhibitors and convince them that there was an audience for Four Eyed Monsters in their community.

As Crumley explained in an interview with Indiewire:

Most theaters would normally avoid a project like ours because we don't have a distributor who would be marketing the film and getting people to show up. But because the audience of our video podcast is so enthusiastic about the project and because we have numbers and emails and zip codes for all of these people, we've been able to instill enough confidence in theaters to get the film booked.

As of today, the site has received more than 8000 requests from screenings. Fans can use their website to monitor requests and to help them to identify other potential viewers in their neighborhood. As Crumley explained,

We've learned that it's almost impossible to distribute your film to theaters the way the current system works, but their are loop holes, and they are building your own audience and then proving to theater owners you have that audience and that they are willing to show up to pay money to see your film that's something distributors don't have to do, but theaters would really benefit if they did.

The film and the web campaign behind it has drawn interest from the Sundance Channel which plans to broadcast it down the line but who used it to launch a series of screenings of independent films in Second Life, where once again it played to packed houses.

Based on their experiences, the filmmakers have started talking about what they call "collective curation" of content: a scenario where independent producers court audiences via the web, creating interest through clips and previews, and identifying where they have a strong enough following to justify the expense of renting theater space and shipping prints. They believe that such an approach will help other directors get their work before enthusiastic paying customers.

Seeking to support other filmmakers who want to follow in their footsteps, the Four Eyed Monsters team has posted a list of more than 600 movie theaters around the country which they think might be receptive to independent films and encouraging others to fill in relevant details.

The filmmakers will be sharing some of their experiences and perspectives to those attending the Beyond Broadcast conference this Saturday. As reported here earlier, this conference is being co-hosted by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Law, and Yale's Information Society Project.

The Four Eyed Monsters team also play a prominent role in the newly released documentary on videoblogging which CMS graduate student (and Beyond Broadcasting organizer) Steve Schultz has helped to produce for the Project nml Exemplar Library. As I have mentioned here before, we are producing a series of web-based documentaries for use by schools and after school programs interested in getting young people involved in media production projects. I will be featuring more information about this documentary down the line but I wanted to call it to your attention in advance of the Beyond Broadcast conference since it provides such a useful overview of the implications of citizen-based media. This is the first of the documentaries produced under the supervision of our newly hired production coordinator, the talented Anna Van Someren.

The News From Second Life: An Interview with Peter Ludlow (Part One)

I first became aware of Peter Ludlow and his work for the Alphaville Herald when NPR called me up and asked me to be a pundit commenting on a nationally broadcast debate between the candidates for the leadership of the largest town in The Sims Online -- a debate between a 14 year old girl from Palm Beach and a 20-something airline employee from Virginia. I watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the mechanisms surrounding the election broke down, some voters were denied the right to cast their ballots, the election technology was manipulated, and charges of corruption and poor sportsmanship flew right and left. The Alphaville elections, in other words, were the game world counterpart to what happened in Florida in the 2000 elections. Ludlow, who was far more deeply emershed in this world than I was, became my expert guide through this whole process. I wrote about these events for Technology Review and later revisited them for a section of my book, Convergence Culture. I lost contact with Ludlow for a while but recently he wrote me to see if I might give him some advice about his own new book project -- his account of his time as the editor first of the Alphaville Herald and then of The Second Life Herald, co-authored with Mark Wallace. Their book recounts a fascinating saga of mobsters and griefers, of civic boosters and would be socialites, and of the challenge of governing virtual worlds. The book will be coming out some months from now from the MIT Press but in the meantime, what Ludlow had to say was so timely, especially given my recent exchanges with Clay Shirkey and Beth Coleman about the value of Second Life and given our forthcoming Beyond Broadcasting conference that I wanted to share some of his reflections with you much sooner than that. When he is not playing the part of a muckraking journalist in Second Life, Ludlow is a professor in the department of Philosophy and Linquistics at the University of Michigan.

In the conversation that follows, he explores more systematically what it means to construct civic media in Second Life and discusses his contributions to the life of this emerging online community. Tomorrow, he will share his reflections on the Second Life Debate as well as his thoughts about the challenges of governing online worlds. Together, these two installments represent a fascinating inside perspective on the nature of civic engagement in Second Life.

Axel Springer announced the other day that they would establish a full time newspaper in Second Life. What do you see as the significance of this announcement? What does it mean to the existing local newspapers which are indigenous to SL?

The Axel Springer virtual newspaper, called The Avastar, launched a few weeks ago, and they have had, suffice it to say, a rough start trying to find their way around Second Life. One problem is that Second Life is a very complex and hard to understand cluster of social spaces, and the Avastar managers don''t seem to understand the world very well. I also don''t think they have had great success in lining up knowledgeable and articulate writers, and if they think people are going to *pay* to read their paper (or, for that matter, advertise in it) they are badly mistaken.

The fundamental problem with their project, however, is their idea that there is some sort of value added by virtue having their newspaper in a PDF format, rather than a blog-like format. PDF doesn't integrate into the Second Life infosphere in the appropriate way (they can't link to other stories, we can't link to them, people can't comment, the stories are stale by the time they appear, etc).

If you think about it, their project is somewhat reactionary. They had an opportunity to come to this strange and fantastic new place where all the rules can be rewritten, and the only thing they could think of doing was coming up with a product that mimics meat space newspapers as much as possible. Far from offering us a new way to think about news and entertainment and how it should be presented, they are effectively trying to make a last stand for static push media by using PDF instead of a blog or some sort of social software.

From the outside, I''m sure they look all bleeding edgy ("oh look, a newspaper in a virtual world!") but from inside they look reactionary in concept, and clumsy in execution.

You've been involved with local newspapers in two virtual worlds now -- SL and Sims Online. What do you see as the importance of civic journalism in imaginary space? How important is it that the perspective be "local" -- coming from the player community itself?

Civic journalism in virtual worlds is very important, and it has grown up a lot over the three+ years I have been involved with The Alphaville Herald, and now the Second Life Herald. When we started in October of 2003 there were lots of fan sites for online games, but the concept of blogs/journals that covered in game events and player/owner conflicts with a critical eye was foreign. People reacted to the Herald like it had come from outer space. I can''t speak for other virtual worlds, but today in Second Life there is a very rich community of dozens of bloggers - many of which are self-labeled as newspapers. It makes for a very interesting media ecology for Second Life.

Some of the sites are merely fan sites, and some are personal journals of some form or other, but there are some that take a serious and critical look at the world and Linden Lab policies from time to time. All of them play an important role in recording and commenting on various aspects of this very rich and complex space.

This sort of journalism is important, and the way I think of it, there are three audiences: the internal audience, the external audience, and the audience that isn''t born yet.

The internal audience involves other players, and the flow of information can be crucial to maintaining a fair playing field. Just as an example, we ran a story about a memo the Lindens had sent to some key land owners, informing them that prices for private islands would be going up shortly and that if they acted now they could grab islands at the current price. That story embarrassed the Lindens into opening the offer to everyone and extending the buy-in period for land at then-current prices. There are lots of instances of this sort - policies and actions have serious economic consequences and virtual journalism can be a watchdog.

For the external audience, we provide a window onto the world that hopefully accurately reflects what is going on there, so that people will come join for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons. Also, if you have thousands of people in a given space interacting, it is important that people on the outside know what is going on. If this isn''t clear, consider the case of The Sims Online, which is a space that is supposedly suitable for children as young as 13. Well, I think it is important that parents and policy makers be informed about what is going on in that space. I''m not going to tell them what to do about it, but I do think there is a kind of civic responsibility to point out some of the adult activities that are taking place.

The future audience: a hundred years from now people will want to know what was happening in the rapidly evolving social web of our era, and these journals provide important records. Sometimes when I write for the Herald I even imagine that I am writing for an audience that won''t come along for a hundred years. (Usually though, I''m just banging something out as fast as possible.)

Some of your critics have argued that your coverage of the issues facing the communities in game world could be used to spur on reform and regulation efforts by outside government authorities. How do you balance your responsibility to the community within the game world (to expose problems so they can be addressed) with what they perceive as your responsibility beyond the community (to not stir up public controversy which could bring outside attention)?

It certainly can''t be my responsibility to cover up in-world problems. I understand that people view critical commentary and exposure of outrageous in-world behavior to be an attack on the community, but of course it is nothing of the kind. The problem is that sites which constantly spin the world in a positive light have no credibility when an outside critic comes along. For example, when Clay Shirky launched his recent attack on Second Life, it was easy for him to dismiss the defenders of SL as a bunch of breathless logrolling fanboiz. He can''t do that with the Herald however, and we are, I think, positioned to slap him down good and hard when we have the time to get around to it.

I should also add that over time people do come to understand that we are not attacking the community, and some of the Herald''s harshest critics have gone on to be good friends and contributors to the Herald. If you stick around, that shows people that you are committed to the community, and that is what really counts the most.

Some people have made fun of your efforts suggesting that these virtual worlds are "only games" and that you are taking them "too seriously." How do you respond to this criticism?

The ""only a game"" meme is of course not merely leveled at the Herald, but at anyone who participates in online worlds (and participatory culture more broadly - it is a species of the "get a life" meme that you have discussed in Textual Poachers and elsewhere). The first thing that has to be said is that as applied to Second Life it is badly mistaken, since Second Life is barely a game at all --- it is a completely open platform the content of which is provided by participants (that is they build, texture, and script whatever they want). The platform can be used for many purposes, but developing and playing what might be called games has never really been a big part of Second Life.

Beyond that, I tend to think that not much in life is *only* a game. Even spaces like World of Warcraft that are pretty clearly designed to be games are also spaces where people socialize, exchange real world information, work on projects together etc.

The more interesting question is why people keep repeating ""only a game"" so much. If you google ""only a game"" and "Second Life" together, you get nearly 12,000 hits. It is like a mantra that people keep repeating to keep some thought or idea at bay - and I think the dangerous idea that Second Life shoves in your face every day is this: our wealth is virtual, our property is transient, and our social lives are mediated by technology, nomadic, and often fleeting. I think that when people keep saying "it''s only a game" they are really saying "the rest of my world isn''t like this: my wealth is tangible and permanent, my friendships are unmediated and also permanent." Saying "it''s only a game" is like saying "this isn''t how things really are, this is just a bad dream." People need to pinch themselves, because this ain''t no dream. This is reality; deal with it.

At various times, you have seemed to struggle with whether you are playing a reporter in a game and taking seriously your responsibilities as a journalist covering real people in a real community. To what degree does the "magic circle" give players --- including yourself -- license to shed real world responsibilities in virtual world? Where should we draw the limits?

I don''t think we struggle with whether we are in or out of the magic circle so much as we intentionally play at the circumference. Sometimes, when I think we are getting too serious, I will post a silly story, and when we are starting to get too silly I will put together a serious interview or offer a polished essay or piece of serious journalism. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable; they want to know if we are serious journalists or just playing at being journalists. But the answer is we don''t respect the distinction and we are constantly trying to flout it.

Playing (sometimes even being) seedy tabloid journalists has helped us to learn the role that tabloid journalism plays in the media ecology of Second Life and the internet more broadly. I''m fascinated by this topic. If you think of media as a kind of eco-system them you see that tabloid journalism plays an important role - churning up stuff that publications with bigger budgets and more time can sift through and investigate.

What is frightening, however, is seeing the number of so-called serious media outlets that pick up our stories (and other blog flotsam) and just reprint them as though it was the word of Gopod. More frightening than that, however, has been the many instances we have seen where major news organizations research their own stories and end up with great big piles of steaming crap. So I am in this strange position of thinking both that (i) people should not be reprinting our stuff without doing their Serious Journalism thing with it and (ii) the content we generate is on the whole more reliable and informative than what they come up with when they do that Serious Journalism thing.

The net effect of this has been that it has made me very pessimistic about the state of journalism in the business and technology sector; it seems to be mostly about recycling press releases without reflection. And it's even worse than that. The *real* problem is that too many people now equate Serious Journalism with the recycling of press releases. Critical journalism is so foreign to people (except maybe on the sports page) that they recoil against it. Well, let me modify that statement. People in the US have this problem. Readers from other countries (Germany, Italy, etc.) find the critical stance of the Herald altogether natural and they are baffled by the Americans who complain about it. So maybe this is just a problem with the American media consumers - they have forgotten what a genuinely critical media looks like.

The Culture of Citizenship: A Conversation With Zephyr Teachout

On February 24th, MIT Comparative Media Studies will host a conference in collaboration with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The one-day event will be held at MIT, and is entitled "Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy." It will bring together industry experts, academic leaders, public media professionals, and political activists for panel discussions and focused working groups. Beyond Broadcast 2007 builds on the overwhelming success of last year's sold-out event, "Beyond Broadcast 2006: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture" held at Harvard Law School. Over 350 people took part in-person and online through the virtual world Second Life. Attendees used several unique online tools, including a web-based "question tool" to probe panelists, a collaborative wiki, live blogging, flickr photo sharing, del.icio.us tagging, and YouTube video production. These tools enabled the conference to practice what it preached, turning the event into a two-way participatory interaction in contrast with many conferences. The tools have been expanded upon this year, already spurring an active conversation on

the conference web site, weeks before the event.

I will give the Keynote Address, followed by panel discussions from media makers and policy commentators. Details of these panels are being updated on the conference web site

In the second-half of the day, the conference turns its focus to working groups that attendees will help organize. Building on themes coming from the plenary sessions, participants will target specific issues or questions and join efforts with the diverse crowd of others. In the past, these groups have been facilitated by thought leaders in technology, policy, and academia. Many attendees last year expressed their appreciation for this hybrid conference approach in

which they had a chance to "do something before heading home."

There will also be an evening reception, called "Demos and Drinks," showcasing groups that are doing exciting work related to conference themes.

Registration is only $50 (before February 9), and includes lunch and the evening reception. There is also a special 50% discount for students. The conference follows the 2007 Public Media Conference taking place in Boston February 20-23.

As we lead into the conference, I am running a series of features on the blog which foreground the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy. In today's post, I offer an interview with another of the conference's speakers, Zephyr Teachout. The Director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, Teachout has emerged as a leading thinker about the role of new media in fostering what she describes here as a "culture of citizenship." After the presidential campaign ended, she worked at America Coming Together and Current TV and was a fellow at the Berkman Center. In 2006, Teachout became the national director of the Sunlight Foundation as the group's national director. According to Wikipedia, "The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. At the core of all of the Foundation's work is a focus on the power of technology and the Internet to transform the relationship between citizen's and their government."

In the conversation that follows, Teachout shares her perspective on politics and popular culture, Second Life and Wikipedia, all focused on helping us to better understand what elements in the new media landscape might be deployed to intensify civic engagement and insure a more transparent government.

Let's start with the core conference theme. Many media reformers have attacked the "bread and circus" aspects of popular culture as distracting voters from serious aspects of politics. Yet, this conference's theme, "From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy" invites us to imagine a different relationship between popular culture and grassroots politics. What do you see as the relationship between the two?

Both of these seem right to me -- the possibility and the threat. In the last four years, I've met thousands of people whose political creativity, public thinking, and public activity has vastly increased directly because of the internet. I've met people who I think you can fairly say have switched from never thinking of being a citizen as one of their central roles, to thinking of citizenship as being an integral part of their identity, the way being a mother or employee or sister or cousin is part of an identity. The internet has enabled that switch -- for some, its been a gradual shift, from reading arguments on blogs to contributing to arguments on blogs to joining groups making political statements to holding community fora. For others, its been an instant jump -- a Meetup-enabled political meeting has led to a leadership role. For still others (and here I'm thinking mostly of geeks and internet artists), a habit of creativity and responsibility in one arena has led to taking the same attitude in a political arena.

There are millions who have participated in political life because of the internet, first by ventriloquism (an email along the lines of "hey, I thought this political article was interesting") then by speaking (an email along the lines of "hey, I thought this article is interesting because x, but they got it wrong because...") who then become more comfortable in their other communications, on and offline, in speaking about political issues.

And then there are those extraordinary people, like those we've seen at the Sunlight Foundation, who take citizenship to a whole new level. Simply by being asked, "help us investigate this question about earmarks," a handful of people not only responded to that question but have becomes intrepid, creative citizen watchdogs, digging up information about our politics and sharing it broadly, all on their own time.

There are still more who have participated in a one-dimensional way, the way one "participates" in the coca cola industry by drinking coke (and an increasing greed on the part of candidates to increase this kind of participation -- big lists, assigned tasks), where neither personal responsibility nor creativity are engaged. But even this flat kind of participation leads a handful to taking the role of citizen seriously.

The internet breaks down some barriers to creativity, to public expression, to information, to public conversation, and to collective action.

That said, our human hunger for humor, connection, games, entertainment, gossip, is nearly limitless, and when the supply is nearly limitless it is hard to avoid. When I go to the airport, I can't tear my eyes away from celebrity gossip magazines, even though there is no barrier to my reading the Economist -- when I'm online, the celebrity gossip, the games, and the political gossip constantly beckon. There is now no barrier to instant dopamine hits from playing games, from reading gossip, from emailing and instant messaging friends. I can't generalize from my experience, but I know I'm not completely alone when I say that the internet has diminished many of my other experiences -- I cook less, read fewer books, plan fewer parties, and wander the streets aimlessly less frequently because I can always trust in some small comfort online when I would have to risk much more by taking on the streets. As applied to politics, its an open question -- will we, as a culture, choose the limitless entertainment because its there, and will our civic culture continue to decline (with a small percentage the exception?). Or will the new possibilities lead to a new culture of citizenship?

I happen to think the culture of citizenship is possible, but it will take real vigilance, care, cultivation, and a collective choice to make it a priority. It may also take some serious thinking about whether we want something like the fairness doctrine for the internet -- whether, looking at ourselves in the mirror, we decide we want some structural supports for our civic selves -- it will take a choice. The internet -- no matter all the joyful possibilities of political engagement it enables -- will not make us citizens, we will have to do that ourselves.

You were The Director of Internet Organizing for the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Given those experiences, what advice would you offer the current crop of Democratic candidates about the potential use of new media in the forthcoming campaign? Do you have any predictions about which campaigns seem to best understand this current era of web 2.0?

I am far more interested in who will make the best President than in who uses the best tools, and a clumsy use of email, youtube, and blogs wouldn't dissuade me from supporting a candidate who I largely support. The only way they really relate is that part of any support for me is necessarily a commitment to citizenship and to transparent government.

If you were advising a candidate in this election cycle, would you recommend that they adopt an avatar and go into Second Life?

Yes, I would have a full time staffer, with three interns at least, who were

responsible for gaming outreach.

For the past 40 years or so, there have been basically three ways a citizen can reliably interact with a Presidential candidate:

1) She can join a group (like a labor union) and engage in that group's decision-making, which is then communicated to the candidate through an intermediary.

2) She can watch the candidate on TV in a debate, on a news story, or in an ad

3) She can live in New Hampshire or be lucky.

Other forms of interaction were possible, but there were not that many, and they were not scalable. Suddenly there is Second Life, listservs, email, games that a candidate can play with and against others, a dizzy mess of kinds of interactions that are possible. The only real limitations on these new kinds of interactions are scale, creativity, and political will.

I once saw an interesting talk by a Microsoft sociologist, in which he talked about the kinds of characters that show up in list-servs. Its easy to be inauthentic in one forum, one time or a few times, he said, but over time, its pretty clear who isn't acting like a human - there are certain personality types we all recognize (including the trolls) and those that don't quite seem right we shy away from, picking up subtle signals that suggest that "this person is sort of lying." This is finally a positive conclusion for internet communities - it sugests that guerrilla marketers may be able to strike once, but astroturf will reveal itself in the end. Language, used unrelentingly over weeks and months, will out the shill.

This thesis is also interesting when reflecting on the efforts candidates make to engage people in completely new forms of interaction - a chat room, say, or in Second Life. While candidates won't necessarily lie, inasmuch as they do not sound like humans sound and bring prefabricated phrases, or phrases of others, it can undermine their credibility - and certainly undermine their interest. (The cookie cutter emails that so many campaigns now send have growing lists but idle members, who do not believe that the emails carry any authentic connection to them.) Likewise, even if thousands of people show up to watch candidate y "chat" or "blog", the interest will only remain so long as there is some reason to think they are getting something more than a press release or scripted notes. And the fashionable time-delayed "chat" in which questions are submitted before hand is not a new form - is similar to having a guest on talk radio, except leaves the candidate more control.

But back to your question -- a real time chat, or a conversation in Second Life, is a new form. That, as it develops, will be fascinating for politicians, who have so much more on the line in every word than the reporters who regularly do this. Would I recommend it? Yes. Presidential

candidates should be outreaching in gaming forums, including game-of-life forums, actively. But it will take some innovation and looseness to work well.

We had some very fruitful real time chats during the Dean campaign, when they were used for policy experts from the staff to answer basic policy questions by chatters. It was a narrow enough context that policy experts were quite forthcoming, and the discussions were fruitful from both sides - the chats we had with Dean involved were more chaotic and less likely to be fruitful. In both cases, much of the interesting conversations that I had were the side-chats, carried on in groups of two and three who pinged me, seeing the name of a staffer. In Second Life, with new dimensions added (and the possibility for visual demonstrations), I can imagine these lecture-like moments being even more valuable - a candidate could have a forum on net neutrality, for example, in which he presents not only himself but his policy experts, creating a new kind of conversation, but one more likely to inform a citizen both about the issues and about the way in which a candidate makes decisions.

Second Life, chat rooms, and social networking tools makes it easier to both create groups and be creative -- so instead of having to speak to a candidate through a large community years in the making, 30,000 people with shared interests can get together and ask for a town-hall meeting from each of the candidates, and invite tough questioners to attend.

The forms and format of the meetings can go beyond the classic candidate forum, because of the low cost of bringing people together - and it may be that in these liminal forms we learn more than we thought possible, even if the candidate does not step on his tongue.

What lessons do you think political leaders should take from the Wikipedia movement?

I think there are two key lessons:

1) Small groups of people who feel responsible are highly competent to manage difficult and boring and very important tasks. I think this is one of the most under-told stories, especially in politics -- politicians are eager for mass numbers, big email lists, big readerships, big donations, and thousands of people door-knocking for them. This is all fine -- but to truly be a democrat (small d) they must also believe that citizens are competent at decision-making and governing, and express that belief through their campaign structures and their governing structures. Any politician you ask will gush about the possibility of the internet to enable citizens to give her good ideas, but most are wary of actually distributing roles, not tasks, to groups of people that are not on the payroll. Wikipedia should help change that story -- self-governance is possible.

2) Millions of people want to engage as creative, intelligent adults in political life. Wikipedia, for all its neutral point of view, is a profoundly political project, and evidences, along with hundreds of other examples, the hunger of people to be meaningful contributors to political society.

What connection do you see between the ideals of citizen journalism and the kinds of voter participation and government reform efforts being promoted by the Sunlight Foundation?

Sunlight Foundation is committed to using technology to strengthen the relationship between citizens and Congress. Our grants support people who are making amazing transparency tools, and other parts of our work is more explicitly political, lobbying (with facebook groups and an open, distributed attititude) for Congress to open up its processes and join the 21st century. We beleive that a transparent budgetary process, once impossible, is now possible because of the internet, and the more citizens engage in that process, the closer we are to achieving ideals of self-governance.

I don't personally have an ideal of citizen journalism, but an ideal of citizenship -- which is to say that people actually take responsibility for their government. They can discharge that responsibility in infinite ways -- much as one can discharge the responsibility of motherhood or owning a pet in infinite ways. But we all know the difference between someone who owns a pet and takes responsibility for it, and one who does not -- what I seek is a culture in which most of us take responsibility. One of those ways is to research and write and mashup and make videos and generally engage others in Congress, and we are working to enable those (a quickly growing community) that are interested in this. There are some amazing people who work with Congresspedia and our Senior Researcher, Bill Allison, doing the hard investigative work it takes to actually understand how Congress works, and they are doing all of us an extraordinary service.

Can you give us a preview of your remarks at the Beyond Broadcasting conference?

Nope! Because I don't know what they are yet...

Jenkins-Isms?

As I mention the other day, I am currently posting this blog from Singapore. I was invited here as a guest of the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation which hosted a public lecture at the National Library's Drama Center on Friday night which was attended by some of the country's political, economic, and intellectual leaders and was designed to focus public debate around the issue of Media in Transition. The talk has received enormous interest here -- I think I have been interviewed at this point by pretty much all of the English language media in Singapore. (I am starting to feel like Noam Chomsky!) The first interview came on my first morning of the country and went up on line almost immediately. It was with AsiaOne and resulted in this story. They asked for my photograph, having no time to get a photographer over to my hotel, and wondered if they could take some images from my blog. I was amused to see that they went with a picture of my Mii, created by Alice Robison, and the photograph of me reading a Polish comic book outside the Warsaw train station. In this context, the Mii looks a little bit like the kind of artist renderings a police might circulate about a crime suspect but I suppose it does drill home my attitude towards game and digital technology.

The article ran with the provocative headline, "The Youtube of Tomorrow Will Come from Asia," and discusses in some depth my interest in the flow of Asian produced goods into the west and my belief that Singapore as a nation may be posed to become a key broker in that relationship.

On Saturday, I opened up the Straits Times over breakfast and found a full page article about my talk, including a side bar on "Jenkins-isms" which included the following tidbit about my recent visit to Teen Second Life:

"Prof Jenkins himself went into Second Life and met a young girl from Mexico City. Despite their age gap, they could talk freely about many things."

So, Mariel, it looks like our encounter the other day is making international news!

It's pretty scary when people start naming "isms" after you!

I have also found this rather interesting blog post from a Singaporean who attended the public lecture and who describes some of the kinds of questions and concerns that got raised from the audience:

I was amused to hear about the story of how one lady was not too happy with her daughter studying before the exams with her iPod plugged in. Her daughter was actually listening to her own lecture notes, but hey, when I was studying, the radio or Walkman was always on full blast. This is what we define as The Generation Gap.

But I was not amused was when this PR practitioner stood up and said most of the online stuff that people are crazy over is "rubbish" to her.

Actually her point was that it was difficult for her to find useful stuff on the Internet apart from traditional media content (like a PDF of a print magazine interview), and she couldn't get the hang of being a constant web community. It's this sort of dismissal that will cause the older folks to be blindsided when the carpet is suddenly pulled from under their feet and they realize the old media ground no longer exists.

On Sunday, there was a second, longer profile of Prof Jenkins in the Straits Times. written by Cheong Suk-Wai, a high profile Singaporean journalist. I was really impressed with the quality of the reporting here: she manages to convey some of the core concerns animating my work and also to capture something of my personality as well. There are a few glitches -- most notably, she took my estimate that this blog gets 4000 visitors per week (more or less) and wrote that it had gotten 4000 hits since June.

I am also struggling with her side comment that I speak in a "chirpy rapid-fire throttle." I will certainly buy rapid fire throttle -- I do talk way too fast, just trying to fit in everything I want to say, but I never thought of myself as "chirpy" before.

The portrait captures both my optimism and the concern that we need to work together to confront some of the challenges and risks represented by this moment of media transition. A heavy focus here was on the work we are doing with MacArthur on new media literacies and with my own experiences raising a son during the digital age. My southern background -- described her as "homespun" -- seems to strike a note in this piece which is at once exotic (a world not often encountered here) and familiar (with its stress on family and religion.) This is perhaps the first article about me that talks about being raised a Southern Baptist by a mother who ran our church's vacation Bible school.

In addition to the public lecture, "From YouTube to YouNiversity: Learning and Playing in An Age of Social Networks," I did a workshop with employees of the various newspapers represented by my host, the Singapore Press Holdings, which centered around the relationship of old and new media as it impacts news and journalism. Since this talk was off the record, I can't really share with you what they asked or what I said. But much of what I conveyed drew upon some speculations I put together along time ago for Technology Review and for the MIT Communications Forum. Anyone who wants to read my thoughts on the future of news would do well to start with these two articles, now somewhat out of date, though many of the same issues remain.

One journalist said that Singapore was a great country which suffered because it was in a "shabby neighborhood." A central theme of my remarks had to do with the ways that geographic location might be playing a less central role in the production and circulation of news in the future. So, in 2001, I wrote that the American tradition of local newspapers might give way -- was indeed already starting to give way -- to a culture centered around national papers. More and more Americans get their news from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor or USA Today, all of which are essentially national rather than local or regional newspapers. Many techies still read the San Jose Mercury online, both because it was one of the first online newspapers and because it has unique access to developments in Silicon Valley and on Sandhill Road. I personally get my national news from the Washington Post and my international news from the New York Times. I know many Americans who prefer to read about Iraq and the War on Terror through the British media because they don't trust how the American trust has handled this story.

Can we imagine, then, other newspapers developing specializations which play on their core competencies and which thus attract readers nationwide? Could the Boston Globe, say, build on its access to leading colleges and universities by becoming in effect a center of excellence (or something like the journalistic equivalent of a magnet school) focused on covering Education? Could the LA Times beef up its coverage of entertainment news and start to attract nationwide readers online? What happens next -- I am seeing students in my dorm who continue to read the online editions or listen to the digital radio broadcasts from journalists in their home country. And the same thing is happening to readers of small town newspapers in this country when they go away to college.

In such a world, is it far fetched to imagine that a publication like the Straits Times, which does a first class job covering developments in Asia (both political and cultural), might become the newspaper of choice within the Chinese Diaspora or might even attract the interest of pop cosmopolitans in the west who want to read more about anime, manga, Jpop, Bollywood, and other forms of Asian popular culture or the Asian business scene?

In such a scenario, newspapers as a medium will survive but there's no guarantee that any particular paper will survive. Some newspapers will wither and die in such a world, just as we've seen over the past several decades, the consolidation of rival newspapers in major cities. How many American cities still have competing dailies? Surprisingly few. So, the next step may be the consolidation of publications within the Northeastern Megalopolis, say, so that papers in Boston and Providence start to fold into each other. Those newspapers which survive will be those which know how to identify and serve specific interests not just for their local readership but for interested consumers nationally or even globally.

All of this is of course totally speculative. I am channeling my inner McLuhan here! You can just chalk it up as another example of Jenkins-ism run amok!

An aside: While I am in Singapore, my name seems to be cropping up in relation to a controversy in the American gaming community. Penny Arcade's Tycho ran a piece last week discussing a new documentary, Moral Kombat, which centers around video game violence. I gather that the film's trailer is pretty sensationalistic (though I have had trouble accessing it here in Singapore). As Tycho notes, "I sincerely doubt the tone of the piece matches this trailer, given some of the participants - for example, I don't think that Henry Jenkins would be party to a hysterical dialogue, even in an attempt to tame it."

Thanks, Tycho for the vote of confidence. I haven't seen the film yet myself so I can't guarantee what its contents actually look like. I have been snookered before by producers who seemed earnest and then ambushed me. See the article in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers about my experience on Donahue. And there was the guy who signed me up for an interview and then ended up confessing mid-interview that he had lost his son to the evils of gaming: actually, his son was a national CounterStrike champion but the father couldn't accept the place of computer games in his son's life. Needless to say, that was not a fun interview from that point forward and the final film -- which will remain nameless here (primarily because I've blocked it out) -- ended up having a major ax to grind.

But my sense is that Spencer Halprin, the producer of this film, really wanted to get out both sides of the argument. He spent time following around Jack Thompson and hopefully gave the old buzzard enough rope to hang himself with. And he asked me some pointed but thoughtful questions, giving me a chance to spell out my arguments for why the links between video games and real world violence have been over-stated. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the finished product has the same reasonable tone and rational perspective as the interview I did with the producer several years ago. If I get an advanced peek at the work, I will certainly share my impressions here.

The Student Press Law Center and the Future of the First Amendment

Some of my most formative experiences involved working as a student journalist -- first in high school and then in college. As someone who took seriously my responsibilities to my community, I found myself on multiple occasions in battles over the censorship of the student press. Most memorably, when I was an undergraduate at Georgia State University, we tried to do a special issue of the paper focused on the adult entertainment sector in Atlanta. There were a large number of strip clubs, porn theaters, and other such operations not far from campus which students drove past on their way to school and we decided to provide some insight into what went on there. Inquiring minds wanted to know and all of that. When the issue hit the stands, the administration was all over our backs and the editor of the paper quickly capitulated, pulling the paper from distribution. A bunch of my friends went around collecting the papers before they could be destroyed and then we organized a group of students to distribute them in brown paper bags as a protest of the pressures put on the paper by the administration. We later ended up defending our choices as journalist before a hearing conducted by the Student Government, which had been stung by criticisms of its policies and campaign tactics and saw this issue as a chance for pay back.

Several years later, I got involved in advising a high school newspaper editor who decided to stand up to the principal and the school board who wanted to stop him from reporting news about controversies going on in his school: he took the school board into court and won what was then a fairly groundbreaking case in student press law.

All of these experiences have left me with enormous respect for the work of the Student Press Law Center, a watchdog group that monitors struggles over censorship of student produced media and provides resources for editors who want to assert their First Amendment rights. A recent visit to their site showed a range of information which seems relevant to readers of this blog.

The website reports on a recently released study on the Future of the First Amendment, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which looked into young people's attitudes towards free expression. Among the studies findings was evidence that there has been a significant increase in the percentage of students who have studied the First Amendment in their classes (up 14 percent since 2004), that 64 percent of students favored the right of student journalists to publish what they want without prior restraint (up from 58 percent two years earlier), and that 45 percent of students (compared to 35 percent just two years ago) believe that the First Amendment "goes too far" in protecting the rights of the media. We can see this last statistic perhaps as evidence of the climate that has shaped this culture since 9/11 -- where criticism of the government's position gets read by a significant percentage of Americans as unpatriotic or "going too far."

The site provides interesting coverage of the ways that the Deleting Online Predators Act might impact student expression, focusing on the uses of MySpace and other social networking sites for political activism:

David Smith, executive director and founder of Mobilizing America's Youth, the Washington, D.C., based group that operates Mobilize.org, said that many students ...are finding that social networking sites can be "a great tool for social activism."

He said this was demonstrated particularly with the rallies that took place in the spring against congressional anti-illegal immigration legislation. In March, thousands of high school students across the country, including an estimated 40,000 in Southern California, walked out of school in protests, many of which were organized in part on MySpace.

"There was so much conversation, at least within the Beltway, saying 'Where did this come from? This issue, we didn't realize it was so hot out there, so how could you mobilize tens of thousands of young people?'" Smith said. "It seemed like it came out of nowhere, when if these people were actually on these various sites and had been able to be privy to these different conversations, they would have realized that these conversations had been happening for a long time, and because of the way social networking sites are designed, it's easy to activate people and get them to do stuff offline as well."

And although Mobilizing America's Youth was not directly involved with the immigration protests, Smith said the organization uses MySpace and several other social networking sites to inform students about political issues and motivate them to get involved in the group's campaigns. One of these causes is the Save Our Social Networks campaign against DOPA.

"There are very few members of Congress that have a MySpace account, I don't think any of them have Facebook accounts," Smith said. "So they have no personal connection to these networks that millions upon millions use. They have no concept of how these sites are used positively."

Going back through their archives, one can find a really disturbing 2004 report on the growing efforts of schools to extend their authority over student expression to include things they have posted on the web which may have been produced off school grounds, outside of school hours, and not on school equipment, even if they did not explicitly target the school community. Principals have tried to argue that such posts can be subject to punishment because other students may access them on school computers, especially if they include commentary on school related issues. The report summarizes the current status of such cases:

While most courts recognize the constitutional limitations placed on public school authorities to punish students for their private, off-campus activities, a few have been very reluctant to tie the hands of school officials completely. Some courts have gone out of their way to justify schools' responses to off-campus speech, suggesting that students may not have the same rights as the general public when their off-campus school speech has a "disruptive" effect on campus. In other cases, school officials attempt to link off-campus speech to some on-campus event, such as the distribution at school of an underground newspaper written away from school.

Taken together, these three stories give some interesting data points about some of the struggles which are shaping participatory culture. Young people have new opportunites to become involved in the political process and to express their perspectives in ways which are relatively unfettered by prior restraint, but those opportunities are threatened both by laws which would block inschool access to social networking software and by school policies which might punish youth for what they do on their own equiptment on their own time. And young people are themselves, no less than others in our culture, struggling with anxieties about what constitutes an abuse of their rights to free expression and when media may go "too far."

I had a disturbing conversation the other day with one of my colleagues who seemed to believe that the First Amendment provided protections to professional journalists that extended beyond those protections allowed to citizen journalists. Many of the others around us seemed equally confused about this core principle. Nothing could be further from the case. At the time the First Amendment was drafted and amended to the United States Constitution, there was little that resembled modern professional journalism. Many of the founding fathers had written pamphlets debating the merits of Revolution against England which had been self-published. They wanted to insure the ability of all citizens to write and publish what they want. Of course, in a world where only a few had the means to print and distribute their ideas, this freedom of the press had limited application in the lives of most people. Freedom of the press did not mean that printing presses were free. We have become accustomed to hearing the professional press assert their First Amendment protections but we have had fewer occasions to think about what it means to us as individual citizens.

The emergence of new media has lowered barriers to participation in the marketplace of ideas. Now, more of us are expressing our ideas through blogs or posts on discussion forums and thus more of us are starting to feel a stake in what happens to the First Amendment.

Those of us who care about this push for a more participatory culture should pay close attention to the legal struggles surrounding student journalists and bloggers. Students are using these new media as they make their first steps towards civic engagement and political participation. How they get treated can have a lasting impact on their future understanding of their roles as citizens. In my case, struggling to defend my rights as a student journalist left me with a deep commitment to free expression. For many others, those hopes can be crushed, leaving them apathetic, cynical, and uninterested.

For Those Who Live in Boston...

MIT COMMUNICATIONS FORUM Why Newspapers Matter

Thursday, October 5, 5-7 pm, Bartos Theater, MIT Media Lab

Jerome Armstrong (Crashing the Gate), Pablo Boczkowski (Digitizing the News), Danta

Chinni (Project for Excellence in Journalism), David Thorburn, (MIT)

Working journalists, media critics and digital visionaries discuss the ongoing transformation and apparent decline of American newspapers. Topics to be addressed: the aging of the newspaper reader, the emergence of citizens' media and the blogosphere, the fate of local news and the local newspaper, news and information in the networked future.

This is the third in a series of forums that asks Will Newspapers Survive? Also in the

series: The Emergence of Citizens' Media (Sept. 19), News, Information and the Wealth of Networks (Sept. 21).

Series co-sponsor: Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation

Forums are free and open to the public.

More information: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum

A reception in the lower atrium of the Media Lab follows the forum.

"Random Acts of Journalism": Defining Civic Media

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

Imagining New Kinds of Imaginary Communities

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

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

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

Creating the Daily Us

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

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

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

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

Slashers for a More Democratic Society

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

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

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

Newspapers in Network Culture

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

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

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

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

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

Who Gets to Participate in Participatory Culture?

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

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

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

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

Cory Doctorow as Exemplar

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

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

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

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

Here are some highlights:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

time to write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

City Blogging in Beirut

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

Here's what she wrote to me:

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

Here's what happening:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are I heart Beirut stickers in NYC:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America's Most Powerful Fan Boys

So, what happens when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, talk show host Rush Limbaugh, political operative Mary Matalin, and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff get together? Maybe they talk about what Jack Bauer did to get out of the latest scrape this week on their favorite television program, 24.

Rush Limbaugh moderated and Chertoff participated in a special discussion last week of 24, hosted by the Heritage Foundation, and featuring some of the program's writers, producers, and stars. Clarence Thomas and his wife was in the audience. And along the way, Limbaugh outed a number of other high powered fans of the series.

Limbaugh, who says he hasn't become obsessed with a prime time drama since Dallas, described one marathon viewing session with Matalin on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan:

So a friend went out and got the first two seasons on DVD and I stopped in Washington and picked Mary up, and I said, "You ever heard of this show 24?"

She said, "Ah, people have told me about."

I said, "You ever watched it?"

She said, "No."

I said, "Well, I've got the first two seasons on DVD. Let's pop a DVD of season one in and see what happens."

Sixteen hours later we landed in -- (Laughter.) Sixteen hours later landed in Dubai, having watched 18 episodes of season one. We did not sleep. After the first four or five episodes, I said, "Mary, let's just watch one more. We've gotta get some sleep. We're going to Afghanistan."

"Okay."

We kept on after every episode, "We'll just watch one more." (Laughter.) And the only reason we stopped is because we landed in Dubai, and the whole week we're in Afghanistan -- which was another story itself, and it was an amazing trip -- the whole week we can't wait to get back to finish the final six episodes of season one and watch season two on the way back. .

That's how I became familiar with it. I came back from that experience, and I was telling everybody on my radio program about it. I like to share my passions and the things that I enjoy, and the co-creator of the program, unbeknownst to me, is a huge fan of my program. I'm not surprised, but -- (Laughter.) (Applause.) ...Joel Surnow called and thanked me for plugging the show and so forth. I can't believe that. So this relationship started. I've been out there twice, once a set visit while they were actually filming the last two weeks of the previous season.

Most of us who have started watching a good television series on DVD have had similar experiences -- it's really hard to stop after only one episode ... even if the fate of the free world is in your hands.

Personally, I stopped watching 24 after the second season but I learned a long time ago that you should never knock someone else's fandom. I may have some questions, though, about the reasons why these powerful fanboys like this particular program. Here's Limbaugh again:

I don't think a majority of the American people, but it's active in the minds of many in what I call the Drive-By Media, trying to stir things up -- that's "Club Gitmo," I call it. Abu Ghraib. The program 24 routinely portrays what people would consider torture. The ticking- time-bomb scenario happens in 24 sometimes multiple times an episode. The aspect of torture as portrayed on the program versus the way the media in this country en masse is trying to portray us as evil.

The comment is a little jumbled but I think Rush is saying that he likes the show because Jack gets to torture people without having to feel bad about it.

The program's producers were quick to discount Rush's interpretation -- suggesting that the show was a little more ambivalent about torture than he was -- but they seemed pleased as punch to have these kinds of friends in high places. After all, these guys know how to stay on the air despite some really low ratings and that knowledge might come in handy one of these days.

As for Chertoff, here's what he had to say about the resemblances and differences between his agency and 24's Counter Terrorism Unit:

Typically, in the course of the show, although in a very condensed time period, the actors and the characters are presented with very difficult choices -- choices about whether to take drastic and even violent action against a threat, and weighing that against the consequence of not taking the action and the destruction that might otherwise ensue.

In simple terms, whether it's the president in the show or Jack Bauer or the other characters, they're always trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options, where there is no clear magic bullet to solve the problem, and you have to weigh the costs and benefits of a series of unpalatable alternatives. And I think people are attracted to that because, frankly, it reflects real life. That is what we do every day. That is what we do in the government, that's what we do in private life when we evaluate risks....Sometimes acting on very imperfect information and running the risk of making a serious mistake, we still have to make a decision because not to make a decision is the worst of all outcomes.

Chertoff went on to suggest that what he envied about the characters on the show is that they got to deal with problems in 24 hours and didn't have to face the long term political fallout.

It would be easy to make fun of these powerful people and their pop culture consumption habits. How much fun would it be to tell the Vice President to "get a life?" But it sounds like these guys are using media more or less the same way the rest of us do. We all want to have a larger than life escape from the problems we face in our everyday lives at work and at home. We all fantasize about transgressing social norms and stepping outside of the law. Some of my readers enjoy playing first person shooters. These guys enjoy imagining a world where the battle against global terrorism doesn't have to slow down and wait for congressional approval and where the newspapers don't report on all the things they do that step outside the law. Pretty much the same thing, wouldn't you say?

Thanks to CMS alum Zhan Li for bringing this transcript to my attention