Participatory Poland (Part One): Participatory Poland -- An Introduction

This past May, I received an email from Agata Zarzycka, Assistant Professor of Literature at the Department of English Studies, Wrocław University:

"We are writing to you on behalf of a team of academics and doctoral students from the Department of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland, inspired by your words from the foreword to the Polish edition of The Convergence Culture, where you wrote about your specifically American focus and range of experience, but also about the impossibility of ignoring the mutual exchange between medialized cultural movements across the world. You also mentioned your potential interest in supporting a dialog between participants and commentators of American and Polish popular culture, which has encouraged us to ask for your opinion about the general concept and the possible collaboration potential of the combined didactic and research-oriented project aimed the cultivation of ''new media literacies'' among high school students – an enterprise that, to the best of our knowledge, no one has yet ventured to launch in the academic context. "

I was well aware that there was growing interest in my work there: the very first translation of my work, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, was into Polish and I shared this account of a visit my wife and I made to this country several years ago in this blog: Part One, Part Two, and more recently, I featured a report by Polish researchers on the intellectual property struggles in their country. There are dramatic cultural changes taking place in Poland, which has also been a key pillar in the Creative Commons movement.

As our correspondence continued, and as they shared with me the curriculum they were developing, I was impressed by the thoughtfulness with which they were seeking to translate some of my ideas about participatory culture and new media literacies for the Polish academic setting, but I challenged them to think even more deeply about what the concept of participatory culture might mean in contemporary, Post-Communist Poland, and about what kinds of lived experiences Polish students might be having with these practices.  After all, part of the goal is to have students bring their own expertise and passions into the educational setting. In response, they launched a remarkable project, which brought together key scholars and aca-fan from Poland, to write a series of overview essays describing different participatory practices in their country. I was blown away by this response, and even more so, by the depth and richness of what they produced. I am very honored to be in the position to share these reports with readers around the world via this blog.

I hope you will learn as much from the Participatory Poland series as I have, and I hope that it will inspire scholars in other countries to consider producing similar accounts of what participatory culture might mean in their national contexts. I would love to see proposals from elsewhere which might fill similar gaps in our understanding of traditional and contemporary cultural practices.

This first piece, broken down into two installments, provides the context through which to understand this series, an account of the dramatic cultural and political changes which have impacted Poland over the past few decades.

PARTICIPATORY POLAND: AN INTRODUCTION

Agata Zarzycka and Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak

Department of English Studies

University of Wroclaw

Poland

THE SCOPE AND GOALS OF THE REPORT

This essay introduces the “Participatory Poland” report: a series of essays in which Polish aca-fen analyze several branches of Polish participatory culture and try to locate their specificity by considering the historical context in which it has so far developed. While we are aware that the factors involved in this phenomenon are numerous and complex enough to become a material for at least one book, which makes our Introduction selective and imperfect by definition, we have attempted to characterize the background for the discussions to follow in the subsequent blog entries and show their shared relevance as facets of the contemporary “participatory Poland”.

Undoubtedly, a groundbreaking feature of the Internet-boosted participatory culture is its globalized character, resulting in what Henry Jenkins calls “pop cosmopolitanism” (Fans 155-156) and providing common cultural and civic “languages” connecting people from all over the world. Because of that, however, we find it even more interesting to see how the “local color” of fan-based practices can be shaped by the heritage of national, historical and political factors that are seemingly detached from the fandom community, whose traditions, in their most influential form, have originated in the English-speaking, and specifically American, cultural sphere.

In Poland, the emergence of fandom as we know it was belated by several decades. Nevertheless, the cultural and social potential for participatory entertainment proved powerful enough to quickly bring about a whole spectrum of movements that continue to evolve. The preliminary edition of the report is composed of close-ups on just a few samples from various parts of that spectrum: speculative fiction as the core inspiration for the contemporary participatory culture; historical reconstruction as a movement closely connected to the local context; role-playing games as a form of entertainment which, once adopted by Polish practitioners, have proved flexible and responsive to various, more or less nationality-dependent activities; comics as possibly the most directly subversive and politically involved phenomenon; manga as an example of a genuinely foreign factor that has become a noticeably nationalized element of the participatory landscape in Poland; and finally bra-fitting, which, while inspired by prosumerism rather than fandom activity, constitutes one of uniquely successful Polish grassroots movements. While participatory culture is most often associated with digital media or fandom centered around cult pop cultural works, its crucial aspects as defined by Jenkins et al. in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (2009), underline also other aspects of participation – the collectivity of the experience, the appreciation of the input of others, the experience of belonging to a community supporting the activity, and the development of a grassroots organization based on more experienced participants introducing and guiding newbies etc. (Jenkins e. a. 7). Thus, although not all movements discussed in the report can be traced back to fan activity inspired by some originally offered official material, they share those features of participatory culture that make it a prominent phenomenon in the sphere of contemporary civic activism.

POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The boom of most movements explored in this report could be observed either in the 1990s – the first post-communist decade in Poland – or in the young capitalism of the first decade of the 21^st century. In the U.S., the time between the 1960s and the end of 1980s, though far from peaceful in terms of social and political issues, brought a natural growth and formation of core fandom phenomena which together with the digital media revolution were to bring participatory culture to the level of a new cultural paradigm that we experience now: J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings spiraled up to the status of cult texts, reinforcing on their way the development of role-playing games; movies and TV shows such as Star Wars and Star Trek triggered large-scale fan communities; and the comic-book underground flourished. In Poland, the growth of popular culture in the same period, though enjoying some highlights, especially in the 1970s, was marked and limited by political and cultural isolation from the rest of the world, oppression, poverty, political infiltration and resistance, propaganda, censorship and fear. Obviously, this is not to say that American fandom developed in a socio-political void. It was the post-McCarthyist reaction that implicitly led to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, fuelled by the hippie movement and accompanied, among others, by a boom of American interest in Tolkien. Fandom-related phenomena and cultural practices have on a regular basis been scrutinized for their supposed moral harmfulness and psychological threats, as exemplified in the 1950s by the famous Senate activities inspired by Fredrick Wertham with regard to comic books in the 50s, the Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons activity in the 80s, or the post-Columbine media panic leading to Henry Jenkins’ 1999 intervention in defense of Goth and gaming cultures in Congress in 1999. In 2010, a politically loaded TED performance of Lawrence Lessig, who considers the copyright issues in the Internet remix culture from the perspective of Right – Left conflicts, underlined the political dimension of contemporary fandom-related practices on the structural level (http://www.ted.com/talks/lessig_nyed.html).

Still, regardless of the unquestionably dynamic bonds of American participatory culture with broader social and political contexts, one of the factors that make the growth of similar movements in Poland significantly different is the position and functions of grassroots and otherwise informal collective activity in general. Two stereotypical images of community actions as shaped throughout the socialist period might be compared, however remotely, to the American distinction between grassroots and astroturfing. On the one hand, the so called “czyn społeczny” (subbotnik) practice in frames of which communist authorities forced people to carry out unpaid work for the “common good,” as well as the general pressure on the society to manifest fake enthusiasm for the imposed ideology, negatively affected the concept of collective activity and laced most such initiatives with a political undertone unwanted by the participants. On the other hand, it is exactly through the more or less spontaneous grassroots resistance movements as reflected by the very name of “Solidarity” that the most serious and effective campaign against the regime was waged until its successful conclusion in 1989. In the social reality so heavily conditioned by one or another aspect of the nationwide political conflict, it was difficult to set up any kind of shared activity that would not have to, at some point, position itself somewhere in its spectrum. That is why the discussion of the development of Polish participatory culture necessitates historical contextualization.

The 1945 intervention of the Soviet army in Poland resulted in the establishment of the communist government, which in turn meant that the country soon became a socialist state following the Soviet model. Poland, or rather the People’s Republic of Poland, as it was officially known from 1952 to 1989, remained under that influence until 1989 but open social opposition to the communist rule existed throughout the period, assuming a variety of forms and guises, including initiatives inspired by popular culture. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Poland had its share of Stalinist rule, such as strong censorship, ideological manipulation and persecution of the Roman Catholic Church. A short interval of “thaw” came after Stalin’s death in 1953 and resulted in bloodily quenched worker protests in 1956. In October that year Władysław Gomułka became first secretary of the PZPR (the Polish United Workers’ Party), proclaiming that Poland was to follow the Polish way to socialism, defined by the specificities of the country’s traditions. Nevertheless, the years 1956-1980 were marked by a progressing economic crisis and the growing dissent on the part of the Church, workers and the intelligentsia.

Of particular importance in that period was the Warsaw Pact of 1968 (a mutual defense treaty between communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War), students’ protests against the lack of intellectual and cultural freedom in March 1968, and widespread strikes in shipyards and factories on the Baltic coast in 1970. In 1970 Gomułka was replaced by Edward Gierek, whose idea to assuage social discontent was to introduce moderate liberalization and boost the economy by massive borrowing from the West. The latter resulted in another crisis, the increase in food prices and social unrest. Simultaneously, the Helsinki Accords in 1975, the growing influence of the Catholic Church under the leadership of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, and the papacy of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła (1978) as well as his visit to Poland in 1979, culminated in the formation of Solidarity, the free national trade union. Solidarity’s growing membership and its unrelenting opposition to the regime on the one hand and the pressure of the Soviet Union on the Polish government to deal with the turbulent situation on the other led to the declaration of Martial Law in December 1981 by general Wojciech Jaruzelski.

Everyday life became difficult. The borders were closed and travelling in the country was drastically limited. Moreover, curfew was introduced between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Also numerous Solidarity activists were imprisoned without court sentence, and Solidarity itself was officially dissolved. Nevertheless, the communist regime was weakening. In 1989 the Polish Round Table was formed as a forum for discussions between the government, Solidarity and other opposition groups. The first democratic elections took place in summer 1989, sweeping communism away, and the Catholic intellectual Tadeusz Mazowiecki became prime minister. The post-communist era in the history of Poland began.

Unfortunately, despite the triumphant victory of democracy and capitalism over communism, for many Poles the transition from the predemocratic Poland to a liberal economic system, democracy, as well as the integration into the European Union, has proved difficult and disillusioning. As Leszek Koczanowicz puts it,

[c]ommunism in Poland as well as in other European countries led to the total absorption of the public sphere by the state apparatus. Communist ideology adapted almost the whole field of traditional thinking, reformulating it in collective terms. In the fight against “bourgeois” ideology, stress was put on the deficiencies of the concept of individualism as a useful tool for understanding and organizing social reality. Instead, communist ideology proposed a collective solution which was embodied in the idea of the Communist Party. (43)

Therefore it is no wonder that the mentality of Homo sovieticus – a type of a human being who is enslaved by the system but who is also glad to have his or her basic needs satisfied by it (Tischner 125) – cannot be smoothly replaced by a radically new national identity stemming not only from the sense of responsibility for oneself but also from a conscious exercise of one’s civic and personal freedom in a plural society. Simultaneously, as Elżbieta Matynia points out, Polish social and cultural life remains to be shaped by the romantic salvational paradigm of Poland as torn by foreign powers (153-154). For Matynia, its most significant elements are “the general preoccupation with history” and “the recounting of a heroic past”; the idea of a persecuted nation, typically linked with the Catholic religion; and “in the absence of a satisfying reality, a life within symbols and allegories, a community of the spirit, nurtured by family memories of the resistance experience and shared by each generation” (154).

Bartłomiej Radziejewski identifies a unifying and potentially more empowering root of Polish traditional rebelliousness in the “Sarmatian spirit” echoing the nobles’ democracy of the 15th and 16th century, which affirmed individual independence and the distrust of government (n.p.). Throughout the 1990s, however, a radically different, but equally influential element of Polish post-totalitarian mentality has developed in the form of “communist nostalgia” (Koczanowicz 8), which stems from people’s sense of uncertainty in the new political situation. As Koczanowicz comments, Poles “who got used to living in circumstances defined by communist bureaucracy came to feel lost in the new situation of market economy” (8). Moreover, as he continues, for many the previous system was ideal just because it was predictable and secure, as well as enabling people to assume a clear moral stance (8): “Freedom became for most of them [people] too much of a burden” (52).

One of the most recent phenomena shaping contemporary Polish identity is post-post-communism, which could be defined as a sense of anxiety about “losing identity in the face of globalization, immigration, and the power of international institutions” (Koczanowicz 149). Hence, as Koczanowicz argues, Poles desire the restoration of traditional values on the ideological level and the strengthening of the role of state perceived “as a system of organizations” (149).

As can be concluded, Poland in the first decades of the 21st century is to a large extent driven by the longing for the past. As Koczanowicz explains, “[t]he social time of the Polish society (the ontology of expectations) is predominantly colonized by the attitude toward the traditional national and religious values. People imagine that traditional values should serve as a point of reference in the changing social reality for the long time” (150-151). The significance of such philosophy and past-oriented sentiments may be expected to decrease in the relatively younger generations of today’s 30- or 20-year-olds, not to mention teenagers. Still, the unease connected with the lack of a coherent and optimistic alternative, combined with the general challenges of existence in the late capitalist reality, are reasons why the imprint of the socialist period remains relevant.

In terms of Polish participatory culture development, the experience of socialism not only induced the fundamental fandom initiatives with a subversive undertone, but also inspired some politics-focused initiatives. A spectacular example of the political employment of participatory techniques is Orange Alternative movement.

 (MORE TO COME)

Dr. Agata Zarzycka is Assistant Professor of Literature at the Department of English Studies, Wrocław University. She has authored a monograph on role-playing games, Socialized Fiction: Role-Playing Games as a Multidimensional Space of Interaction between Literary Theory and Practice (2009). Her other publications deal with role-playing games, fantasy literature and participatory culture. Her current research project is devoted to Gothic influences on popular culture. She is also interested in remix, game studies, fandom and subcultures, as well as broadly understood speculative fiction.

Dr. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is Assistant Professor of Literature and Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture at the Department of English Studies, Wroclaw University, Poland. She has published a monograph on Salman Rushdie, Rushdie in Wonderland: “Fairytaleness” in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (Peter Lang 2004). She has also published articles on Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, fairy tales, YA fantasy, and Polish children’s literature, for example in Folklore and Marvels & Tales. She co-edited Towards or Back to Human Values? Spiritual and Moral Dimensions of Contemporary Fantasy (Cambridge Scholars Press 2006), Considering Fantasy: Ethical, Didactic and Therapeutic Aspects of Fantasy in Literature and Film (ATUT 2007), and Relevant across Cultures: Visions of Connectedness and Earth Citizenship in Modern Fantasy for Young Readers (ATUT 2009). Her research interests include children’s literature and culture, reader response, utopianism, ecocriticism, and intermediality. As Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture, she organizes and coordinates numerous creative workshops and courses for children and young adults. Since 2012 she has been on the editorial board of Filoteknos: Children’s Literature-Cultural Mediation-Anthropology of Childhood, the first Polish academic journal in the field. In 2003 and 2004 she was awarded the Scholarships of the Foundation for Polish Science for young scholars. Her expertise was recognised internationally in 2004 through the Study Fellowship at the International Youth Library in Munich and in 2013, through Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship and Fulbright Senior Advanced Research Award to work at the Institute of Effective Education and the Department of Childhood Studies, at Rutgers University.

"Media Mix Is Anime's Life Support System": A Conversation with Ian Condry and Marc Steinberg (Part Four)

As both of you mention, Walt Disney’s work as an animator and as an industry leader exerted a strong influence on the development of the Anime system. What did the Japanese learn from Disney and how were his practices localized for the specific Japanese context?

Ian: Tezuka watched Bambi, 80 or 100 times, depending on which story you believe. He made fanzines of Disney characters. In his manga, “Metropolis,” one of the characters escapes from an evil-doer’s prison by sewing himself inside a giant irradiated rat that looks suspiciously like Mickey Mouse. Anime fans often note that remarkable similarities between Tezuka’s “Kimba the White Lion” and the much later “Lion King” by Disney.

Then again, as Otsuka Eiji noted at conference that Marc organized at Concordia University: “It’s true that Disney’s Lion King stole from ‘Kimba.’ But that’s OK because Tezuka stole from Bambi.” That got a laugh.

In his 2004 book, “The Complete History of Anime” (in Japanese, Nihon no anime zenshi), the anime historian Yasuo Yamaguchi identified a range of influences that reach from aesthetics to labor and business practices:

• The use of exaggerated expressions—for example, the “squash and stretch system” of deforming characters to emphasize their personalities.

• The storyboard system, which allowed Disney to use a variety of sequential pictures to convey the story and the feeling of the scenes to the animators.

• A curriculum for training new talent, which was necessary because with each hit production, animators would be hired away from Disney at higher salaries. Disney responded by developing a system to train new workers.

• The division-of-labor system, which allowed the Disney studio to work on animated shorts and feature-length films at the same time.

• Establishment of the Disney brand—for example, by describing all works as “Walt Disney presents” and polishing the brand image by having Disney himself personally introduce the works.

• The development of merchandising, whereby the licensor of animated characters would receive 3–7 percent of the sales price of goods related to those characters, which was necessary to offset the deficits incurred by animation production (Yamaguchi, Nihon no Anime Zenshi, 2004: 36–38).

The big adaptation of Disney’s ideas comes from relying increasingly on limited animation to make anime more cheaply, and by relying on already-popular manga characters to ensure a wide viewership.

Henry: One of the things many of us think we know about Anime and Manga is that its readership extends well beyond children, that it is much more diverse than would true of similar productions in the west. How is this diversity managed? Some forms of cultural production seem structured around generational or subcultural niches, while others get discussed in terms of their ability to enable transgenerational communication. What can you tell us about the relationship between niche and mainstream as they operate in this context?

Ian: Perhaps the key to the diversity around manga is that it is not well managed, at least not from above. What is managed is incorporating reader responses.

As I discuss in my book’s chapter 5, some writers have pointed out, correctly I think, that manga represents a kind of “democratic capitalism,” in the sense that the most popular works are also the best. They contrast this with music and film, where heavy-handed marketing can make somewhat mediocre productions become big hits. Not so, they argue, with manga. People who love manga read a lot of it. You can read it for free standing in a convenience story, and even manga that is purchased generally gets passed around to at least a few friends.

I’ll never forget when I met one of the founders of Comic Market (the enormous manga fanzine convention), and I asked him what manga I should be reading. He said, “All of it.”

I think that’s the attitude of the serious fans. They go through a tremendous amount of material. Each weekly-serialized magazine comes out with about 20 stories, and the readers are asked to send in postcards evaluating the best and worst three. The major publishers receive about 3000-4000 postcards a week. Popular series keep going, and less popular ones are removed to make way for a few of the legions of amateur artists hoping for their big chance.

Indeed, the diversity makes it difficult to characterize the links between niche and mainstream. Put simply, however, that niche series become mainstream often do so the old fashioned way, by building an audience.

Marc, you draw a useful distinction between toys which replicate the characters and toys which help the consumer to become the character. How central are forms of role-play to the cultural and economic processes you are both describing?

Marc: It’s a complex issue. In my book I note how there’s a shift from characters that you can be or play to characters toys that you can play with. In the late 50s costumes for the various characters were the rage, and children imitated their favorite characters, they became them. For a number of reasons including growing urbanization, the decline of play space and time, and the general rise in income that gave children greater spending power, the 1960s saw the rise of toys that can be played with. Children no longer bought the mask, the gun and the gloves, they bought the Astro Boy replica toy. In that moment they were cut out of a certain kind of play that allowed them to be the character – they could only play with the character.

This was followed closely after by the kaiju monster toy explosion that extended this. What I don’t talk about in my book is that the 70s sees a different shift: the rise of video games, where the character appears on screen. In some ways this was an extension of the character you play with, but it was also an opening towards that earlier form of play: you could feel like you are the character onscreen.

Another space we can see the return to being the character is in cosplay, where you build and inhabit the character for particular periods of time. I think it’s in these moments that you find the collaborative energy that Ian discusses. The character becomes the nexus for a kind of creative, or community-forming activity on the part of the cosplaying fans, and a kind of excitement for the surrounding people too.

 The concept of “moe” has been central to the study of Japanese anime, but it may not be familiar to many western readers. What is “moe”? What role does it play in shaping production and reception?

Ian: “Moe” (pronounced “moh-ay”) is a very unusual term. It generally refers to an affectionate yearning, often for young, female characters, and there’s a lot of debate about whether there is a sexual element to this longing or whether it is more about an innocent desire to nurture and protect.

“Moe” also has the same sound, though different kanji character, as “burning.” So, there can also an implication of raging flames of desire.

More precisely, however, “moe” refers to a kind emotional response to visuals, with or without a storyline or world around it. People publish photo books on “factory moe,” for example, aimed at those who respond to the elaborate architecture of refineries or manufacturing plants.

The point of using the term, I think, is to acknowledge the enormous diversity of fascination and desire that can arise from visual elements. Hiroki Azuma, who Marc mentions above, offers an extended discussion of moe in his book Otaku. He makes the point that moe is another departure from the emphasis on story, and even character, focusing instead on elements of characters, like cat ears, a tail, or glasses.

Indeed, the science fiction writer Mari Kotani organizes a regular club event in Tokyo for women who are fascinated by eyeglasses (megane moe). Their response is to the eyeglasses, not the personality of the person behind those eyeglasses. Talk about post-gender!

 Many of us have turned to Japan in search of alternative models for consumer-producer relations. What insights did you gain from your research about the ways that fans have sought to insert themselves in the production process around Anime? To what degree do Japanese media producers solicit the active participation of their audiences?

Ian: This is a really interesting question. My experience is that there is a sharp generational difference among Japanese media producers. The higher-ups at major manga publishers and anime studios begrudgingly admit that fan appropriation is something that they have to accept. The manga publishers I spoke to, for example, hate the idea of Comic Market amateur producers using their characters without permission or recompense. But they don’t really fight it either.

Some say that’s because the Japanese legal system would be harder to navigate successfully. I like to think it’s because deep down, they recognize their need to let fans have their spaces of participation.

As I mentioned already, manga publishers very much do solicit the feedback of fans and work these responses into their selections for future issues of their magazines. Anime producers don’t have this luxury because they have to start work six months in advance of broadcast, so they have a much more difficult time incorporating fan ideas.

But when I interview younger media producers, they seem to be aiming to create a very different kind of media object. They want to produce something that can be a “platform” rather than a narrative or some kind of “content.”

They are learning from the success of Miku, Japan’s crowd-sourced virtual singing idol. Miku started as voice synthesizer software that Crypton Future Media released, along with a free-to-use image of her as a blue-haired, 16-year-old pixie. Fans made the music, elaborated on the illustrations, and created their own videos, such that Miku has become one of the leading singing stars today, even though, technically, she doesn’t exist. Or rather, she exists as the social energy of fans that bring her to life.

In this, younger media producers see that openness, not control, can be the key to success. (Isn’t it interesting how copyright control no longer seems the key to making money?) When I spoke to a recent college grad with his own media startup, he similarly spoke of his desire to follow the path to success of the Toho Project, a vast transmedia phenomena that started as an amateur video game.

In both cases (and we could identify others), the success arises from creating something—a character, a world, a certain kind of premise, or a participatory space around something completely different—that others can build upon. To me, this represents a further shift from thinking about media in terms things internal to a world (story, character, premise) and more about creating figurative platforms that others can build upon.

This perspective has the potential to completely transform what we think of as media, and I think it offers some fascinating possibilities for thinking of the politics and pleasures of media. I guess it simply remains to be seen how spreadable these practices can be.

Ian Condry is professor of media and cultural studies in Comparative Media Studies at MIT.  He is the author of The Soul of Anime:  Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story (Duke U Press, 2013).  The book explores ethnographically the global spread of Japanese animation, from fieldwork in Tokyo's studios to participation in fan conventions in the US.  His first book, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Duke U Press, 2006), analyzes the way rap music took root in Japan.  His research focuses on "globalization from below," that is, cultural movements that succeed, despite skepticism from elites.  He is the founder and organizer of the MIT/Harvard Cool Japan research project, which examines the cultural connections, dangerous distortions and critical potential of popular culture.  More info:  http://iancondry.com

Marc Steinberg is assistant professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and has published essays on anime, franchising and digital media in Japan Forum, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal,Parachute, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory, Culture & Society, Mechademia, and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Continuing the study of the media mix, his current research project explores the close relation between “contents” and “platforms” in Japanese media industry discourse and practice, from the 1980s to the present.

"Media Mix Is Anime's Life Support System": A Conversation with Ian Condry and Marc Steinberg (Part Three)

The term, “character goods,” is often attached to cultural productions from Japan. What does this term suggest about the centrality of character to Japanese media mix? What ideas about character shape these productions? What factors led to this focus on character (as opposed to, say, story or world, or simply style) in the Anime system?

Ian: I see characters as operating in a space somewhere between celebrities and brands. Pikachu can act like a brand logo, standing for the Pokemon franchise when it’s plastered on the side of an airplane. Pikachu is also a character that can be active, like a celebrity, doing things in the Pokemon universe.

I think the dominance of Hollywood in the US makes Americans like myself more accustomed to viewing celebrities as pinnacles of human renown. Yet in Japan, characters, more than brand logos, are commonly used for even very serious organizations. I feel I know the FBI logo from all those DVD warnings to stop illegal copying. But Japan’s National Police Agency has a cutesy character.

In the end, maybe the ubiquity of logos in the US and characters in Japan have the same cause. In the US, if I was starting a new company, or trying to rename my academic department, I would naturally think: What should our new logo be? In Japan, I’d have to ask, what should our character look like?

Popularity breeds more popularity, and we learn those forms from all around us.

In the United States, there’s a tendency to speak of toys, candy, and other tie-in products as “ancillary” yet they seem to have at times exerted very strong influences on Japanese popular culture. How would you define their roles here?

Marc: The more I looked into the practices around the media mix, the more it seemed that every part played an important role. The work “ancillary” just doesn’t do justice to the significance of the sticker in the popularity of Astro Boy in the 1960s.

Or, to take a more contemporary example, Pokémon is not first a game, and only secondarily comics and animation series. It is all of these. Sure, some media have more weight than others, but what’s so fascinating about the media mix is the way the addition of each new element reconfigures the entire ensemble.

Jonathan Gray does a great job of pointing out the centrality of the “ancillary” in the North American context in the wittily titled Show Sold Separately. I think we have to do the same for the Japanese context where actually it’s more difficult to say what is primary to begin with.

Again, taking the case of Astro Boy, the TV show acts back on and influences the comic, the logic of replication found in the stickers work their way back into the theme of replication in the comic, character designs developed for the anime inform the toys, and so on. There’s a way you can write the history of Japanese pop culture from the point of view of candy makers (I was initially tempted to do this), or toys (with video games flowing naturally out of the character-centrism of manga and anime, and toy makers like Bandai becoming major anime producers), or freebees.

Marc, you especially make a point in your book that practices of fragmentation, multiplication, and dispersal, central to the media mix practices, precede the emergence of digital networks. What are some of the roots of these practices then and why do you think that these logics have been so influential on Japanese media?

Marc: The roots of these practices are difficult to pin down exactly. But I’d say the most two important elements here are an intensified serialization and transmediation that occur in the early 1960s.

First, we have a serialized narrative running in a monthly comic magazine. The long-form narrative serial really started in the 1950s. (There were pre-war and wartime serialized manga, but these were more like what television studies calls “series”: sit-com like formats that don’t have any narrative progression.) Then this narrative is transposed to another medium like television, or the character is transposed to another medium like the metal or plastic toy. So there is a further fragmentation of an already fragmented narrative. The more series develop out of the initial one, the harder the consumer has to work to chase after them all.

Granted, 1960s serials hadn’t yet formalized the transmedia storytelling approach where different narratives were told in different media. It’s really not until the 1980s that this approach becomes formalized. But still, I see the early transmedia serialization of 1960s TV anime as an important precursor to the fragmentation and dispersal we find with digital media.

Some media mix producers like Otsuka Eiji have even remarked on this, saying digital tools make the narrative experiments they were doing in the 80s all the more easy to pull off. So while there is an intensification of the fragmentation and dispersal with the rise of digital networks, the serial and transmedial format of the anime media mix already contains the logic of digital networks in nascent form.

Ian Condry is professor of media and cultural studies in Comparative Media Studies at MIT.  He is the author of The Soul of Anime:  Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story (Duke U Press, 2013).  The book explores ethnographically the global spread of Japanese animation, from fieldwork in Tokyo's studios to participation in fan conventions in the US.  His first book, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Duke U Press, 2006), analyzes the way rap music took root in Japan.  His research focuses on "globalization from below," that is, cultural movements that succeed, despite skepticism from elites.  He is the founder and organizer of the MIT/Harvard Cool Japan research project, which examines the cultural connections, dangerous distortions and critical potential of popular culture.  More info:  http://iancondry.com

Marc Steinberg is assistant professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and has published essays on anime, franchising and digital media in Japan Forum, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal,Parachute, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory, Culture & Society, Mechademia, and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Continuing the study of the media mix, his current research project explores the close relation between “contents” and “platforms” in Japanese media industry discourse and practice, from the 1980s to the present.

"Media Mix Is Anime's Life Support System": A Conversation with Ian Condry and Marc Steinberg (Part Two)

Research on the Japanese “media mix” and the western “transmedia” phenomenon both must grapple with the blurring boundaries between storytelling/imagination/creativity/play and branding/marketing/promotion. Are these two forces separable at this point within the system you describe? Does the presence of branding necessarily negate the meaningfulness of the characters and stories for those people who are playing with their likenesses?

Marc: My book focuses more on the marketing side of things, and Ian’s on the collaborative side of things (fan collaboration and production-side collaboration). Simply put the system and the soul. I’d hazard to guess that we both agree that in practice one can’t be separated from the other. They can be described separately but they work together.

Our books are very complementary in that sense. The marketer in me wants to say: send us proofs of purchase for both and we’ll send you some stickers!

But joking aside, I think if you look at developments in the media mix over the last couple decades, the storytelling-creativity and branding-marketing are getting closer and closer.

One of the reasons for this is the rise of amateur production and the fluidity of boundaries between amateurs and pros. The Comike (Comic Market) where amateurs meet to sell their creations is one of the places where these boundaries break down. Publishers learn from fans, and successful dojinshi creators become professional comic artists.

In more recent years many of the top amateur game makers have gone pro. But what pro means is itself hard to pin down. My pessimistic side sees this as the increasing appropriation of fan labor and fan production by large corporations. But I also tend to see the circulation of character images as having a media life of its own. Corporations may see this as moving for their own profit. Fans see this circulation as moving to their benefit. But neither can exist without the other, and creativity exists on both sides of this equation, producers and consumers.

I think this is something Ian shows really nicely in his ethnographies of production sites, and it’s something I feel all the more concretely the more I learn about particular moments of media mix production.

Ian: You ask, “Does the presence of branding necessarily negate meaningfulness . . . ?” Certainly not. I recall an acquaintance that wore a T-shirt with an illustration of the playful “Pipo” character, who represents the National Police Agency, and it was version of this: (The orange character is Pipo, who represents the National Police Agency in Japan).

As graffiti artists have shown for a long time, those without the resources to pay for them can use the power of billboards. On the question of whether the forces of play and imagination are separable from branding and marketing, I like to think so, but deep down, I’m not sure.

Or, to put it another way, maybe that distinction is not the one that matters. Maybe a different question is the purposes that marketing and advertising are put towards. Both Greenpeace and Wal-Mart rely on branding and marketing, but evaluating their role depends on thinking beyond the category of marketing to include an analysis of the larger roles organizing play in our society. As an FCC chairman once said, “All TV is educational; the question is what does it teach.” So, too, with advertising.

Even fan activity can be marketing, but what are the implications for what is being exchanged? That’s something I learned from Textual Poachers and it’s still vitally relevant today.

Both “media mix” and “transmedia” imply a certain kind of immateriality -- characters that can draw interest across a range of media -- and materiality -- a focus on the affordances or material properties of the different medium involved. When and how do the specific properties of the media involved in “media mix” matter?

Marc: Materiality is a good way to keep an eye on the specificity of its medial incarnation. Even in the age of digitization, where there is to some degree a convergence around hardware or platforms, there is still the materiality of the interface, and the specificity of the particular media object you’re reading or watching or playing. Immateriality is a way of understanding the character as something that exceeds any one of these material incarnations or interfaces. Whenever we engage with a media mix property we’re engaging with both at the same time.

Personally, I came to these questions of materiality and immateriality when I wanted to understand why children of the 1960s went so crazy over Astro Boy stickers. And why they also wanted Astro toys, and all else, from comics to shoes to records with the theme song.

Ian: When I think of immateriality, I would draw attention to the social energy that flows through characters and worlds. Characters and worlds are certainly one aspect of immateriality. They can move among media forms, from comic book pages, to TV screens, to portable gaming systems. But I see these characters as a link between people.

For me, the immateriality is a kind of social energy that flows through the characters and helps bind us together as creators and fans. When I meet someone who cares about an anime series that I like as well, I experience a kind of electrical charge. I get energized in the sense of having an urge to learn more, to connect, to share.

The materiality of media has a mirror image in the sociality of media. If not, how could media be meaningful? To what degree are the practices described as “media mix” a byproduct of media conglomeration? Is it possible for smaller companies and independents to compete effectively within a media mix economy?

Marc: That’s a key question, and something that’s interesting me more and more. The media mix came out of a franchising or licensing model at a time when there wasn’t much conglomeration, at least not between the companies doing the media mix. Publishers were publishers, animation companies were animation companies, albeit with licensing divisions that dealt with the commercial side of the media mix. There seemed to be little in the way of horizontal conglomeration in the media sphere (though the exception might be in the television industry, with a kind of TV-radio-newspaper companies like Asahi).

But as far as I can tell, it’s really in the 1970s when Kadokawa Books starts a film division that media conglomeration develops around media mix practice. This was based on a blockbuster model of high investment, high return – and the returns weren’t always so high.

So in the 1990s and especially the 2000s, Kadokawa and other companies shift to a “production committee” model of financing that sees the outlay spread over a number of media or non-media companies. Book publishers promise funds, novelizations, or promotions in bookstores; TV stations promise funds, but also spots on air; ad agencies promise TV spots, and so on.

The total cut a given company takes is based on their initial investment. That’s why you often see the words “ ‘XYZ’ Production Committee” at the end of a production – for instance “‘Attack on Titan’ Production Committee” at the end of the credits for the current show Attack on Titan. Most Japanese anime, TV drama and films have this credit line and use this kind of financing. I think of it as a kind of distributed or temporary conglomeration. (There are two excellent reports on this trend available at: http://www.mangamoviesproject.com/publications.html)

That said, the companies that tend to make up the production committees are often the large publishing houses, TV stations and ad agencies. The best chance for independents to develop their own media mix is for their content to catch on in one of the many informal channels – like NicoNico Douga (the YouTube of Japan), or the Comic Market – or to start as a serialization in one of the many comic or novel magazines.

Lucky Star, for instance, started off as a 4-frame “gag” comic in Comptiq, a game magazine. It was basically just filler. But it really caught on, and became one of the media mix hits of the 2000s, and helped kick off a whole craze around 4-frame comics. There are also some daring animation production houses like Kyoto Animation or Shaft that are willing to take chances on untested material.

Many of the media mixes with the greatest impact actually start out as a manga print serialization, and magazines have been called the R&D labs for the media mix. So compared to a Hollywood production or even an HBO TV series, the bar for entry even to official media channels is a lot lower in Japan.

Henry: Anime has become a global phenomenon with consumers world-wide. To what degree are decisions surrounding animation production driven by local market conditions and to what degree are producers seeking to develop a product which will have transnational appeal?

Ian: In my experience, few of the companies in Japan were specifically aiming for a transnational market. The story I often heard was that Pokemon was designed for Japan with no consideration for overseas’ audiences, and yet it was a huge success, so Japanese creators would do best to aim simply for a Japanese market.

At the same time, the prices for anime DVDs in Japan are much higher than the US, often upwards of $60 for 50 minutes (two episodes) worth of animation, so there was also less incentive to make animation for American audiences.

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed. I went to script meetings in part to hear about how the creators thought about audiences both in Japan and the US. I remember writing grant proposals with this as a research question. But in script meetings, no one ever talked about fans.

In my experience, the creators viewed themselves as the fan-experts who mattered. When Mamoru Hosoda, an anime director said he also rarely thinks about the audience, I admitted that I was a little hurt by that. I always imagined media creators imagining me when they worked. He laughed and said I was getting it all wrong: “I don’t think about your reaction because I’m hoping you’ll have reactions that I can’t even imagine.” That, for him, is what makes anime an intriguing art form.

On the other hand, some studios, like Gonzo, were thinking at least somewhat about reaching out overseas, and this was one of the reasons that they set their series Red Garden in New York City. By and large, though, anime studios felt they had to aim for their main, domestic audience first.

I think some of the current backlash among US fans against “fan service” (i.e., racy or sexist, depending on your perspective) anime is partly an outcome of Japan’s studios aiming for a particular, domestic fan.

Ian Condry is professor of media and cultural studies in Comparative Media Studies at MIT.  He is the author of The Soul of Anime:  Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story (Duke U Press, 2013).  The book explores ethnographically the global spread of Japanese animation, from fieldwork in Tokyo's studios to participation in fan conventions in the US.  His first book, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Duke U Press, 2006), analyzes the way rap music took root in Japan.  His research focuses on "globalization from below," that is, cultural movements that succeed, despite skepticism from elites.  He is the founder and organizer of the MIT/Harvard Cool Japan research project, which examines the cultural connections, dangerous distortions and critical potential of popular culture.  More info:  http://iancondry.com

Marc Steinberg is assistant professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and has published essays on anime, franchising and digital media in Japan Forum, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal,Parachute, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory, Culture & Society, Mechademia, and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Continuing the study of the media mix, his current research project explores the close relation between “contents” and “platforms” in Japanese media industry discourse and practice, from the 1980s to the present.

"Media Mix is Anime's Life Support System": A Conversation with Ian Condry and Marc Steinberg (Part One)

This is the second in a series of interviews with key thinkers whose work addresses questions of world-building as they relate to media mix and transmedia practices. The previous installment featured Mark J. P. Wolf talking about his work on Tolkien's notion of "subcreation" and the larger concept of "imaginary worlds." In a Making Of video included on the dvd release of The Matrix, it is revealed that the Wachowski Siblings first conceived of their transmedia approach to the franchise as they were flying back from the first film's premiere in Tokyo. I have always assumed that this mid-Pacific brainstorming was inspired by what they saw when they visited the media capital of Japan and no doubt talked to creators there who have long worked in the media mix tradition. Some years back, I made this trip myself, tagging along with my then-MIT colleague Ian Condry as he began to do the interviews with anime and manga producers that would form the foundations for his new book, The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story. For me, the experience was eye-opening as I developed a sense of the scale, scope, and speed with which a pop culture phenomenon moves through this culture. I still discuss with amazement the cosplayers I saw in Yoyogi Park and the massive manga stores we visited in Akiharbara. Japanese media mix long proceeded the American transmedia tradition and it's no shock when I discover yet another transmedia producer who started out as an anime/manga geek. I have featured an interview here before with Condry about his earlier work on hip hop in Japan and about a fascinating Anime-inflected performance he helped to stage while I was at MIT.

My own understanding of media mix has been strongly informed by the work of Marc Steinberg -- both his own recent book, Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan and his translations of some key works by Japanese critics and practioners about the media mix tradition. I had a chance to sit down and talk with Marc when I visited Concordia University earlier this year, and at the time, I invited a scheme to get Marc and Ian to do a joint interview which might help place the Japanese approach into greater clarity for my readers. What follows is that exchange, conducted this summer, via email.

Henry: Let’s start with a question that Ian raises early in his book, “Why did Japan, of all places, become a global leader in animation”?

 Ian: Japanese animation or “anime” makes up 60% of the world’s broadcast TV cartoons, according to JETRO, a Japanese trade organization. Feature film anime is a global presence as well, with notable directors like Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii, and Mamoru Hosoda. Anime has gone global with both mass audiences and a diversity of subcultures. I would break down the sources of Japanese success in these too simple terms:

• Astro Boy beat Bambi by making animation more cheaply and quickly.

• Much anime is based on already popular comics, or “manga,” and manga are more expansive and diverse compared to US comics in part because Americans fell for junk science in the 1950s.

• Anime’s success centers on characters more than stories, opening particular spaces for fan participation and transmedia collectives.

I discuss each of these elements in more detail in my book, but let me touch on some of the highlights. Osamu Tezuka was a pioneer in television animation in Japan, and also a leading comic book artist from the 1950s to his death in 1989. He was deeply influenced by Disney’s classic animated films, including Bambi, which he allegedly watched more than 80 times. (The “big eyes” of anime characters might be traced in part to this influence and that of the Fleischer Brothers’ animation like Betty Boop.)

Marc will discuss the business model Tezuka relied on for his first TV series Astro Boy, begun in 1963, which was based on an already popular manga character of his. Let me point out that his production studio also innovated in the sense of pushing “limited animation” further than other studios. Tezuka Productions was able to meet television deadlines and work with a tiny budget in part by radically reducing the number of frames that had to be drawn (using few mouth movements, re-using flying scenes, and relying on dramatic poses rather than detailed action, etc.).

This produced relatively poor quality animation, at least, poor in comparison to Disney’s full animation, but, as Tom Lamarre argues in his book Anime Machine, certainly even limited animation was and is artful in its own way. Still, the legacy of slight embarrassment continues today: When I interviewed Japanese animators and asked them what made Japanese animation distinctive, I often heard, “Well, it’s not very animated, is it?”

Even so, with Astro Boy, the series was a huge success. This solidified the notion in Japan that even relatively poor animation could be popular, especially if it relied on already-popular manga characters. To this day, about 60% of Japanese animation is based on popular characters.

Japan also has a much larger comic book universe compared to the US, constituting about 40 percent of the units sold, and 20 percent of the value of Japanese publishing overall. Manga is read by children, teens and adults, even as it increasingly moves online and into mobile phones.

Manga is famous for generally having more sex and violence than comics in the US, and there is a historical reason for that. As David Hajdu describes in his book The Ten-Cent Plague, in the 1950s, America was rallied to protect children from salacious and gritty comic books in part by the research of psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, whose 1954 book The Seduction of the Innocent found comic books harmful to kids. US publishers at the time responded by setting up the Comics Code Authority, which required comic books to be suitable for children. There were always doubts about Wertham’s research, and recently more evidence has emerged showing a misuse and even falsification of data (see, for example, this coverage )

In Japan, there have been outcries against troubling comic book material, but in general, a wider range of manga is readily available and continues to attract enormous readership. This variety lends itself to a diversity of source material for anime as well.

Arguably, fan participation has played a larger role in the history of anime than is the case with TV cartoons in the US. To take one example, the giant robot TV series Gundam, which began airing in 1979, was initially deemed a failure due to low viewership and poor sales of toys. Over time, however, amateur activity around the series grew, as fans created encyclopedias and timelines extending the fictional world of the series. Importantly, the Gundam producers did not object to these extensions, and eventually the series was revived, and has become one of the longest-running and most successful series of all time.

This kind of fan activity remains part of the bedrock of anime’s success, and can be seen in other media forms as well. Japan’s largest annual convention is Comic Market held each year in August, and it draws almost half a million people over three days to buy and sell fan-made comics (often with unauthorized uses of copyrighted characters). Miku is a virtual singer made popular through crowd-sourced production, where some people make music and others make the music videos, for example.

The concept, “media mix,” seems central to the project of both of your books. What does this term imply about the ways popular culture is produced, marketed, distributed, and consumed in Japan?

Marc: The media mix is really central to how media operate in Japan. One of reasons I call my book Anime’s Media Mix is because ever since the beginning of television anime in 1963, the media mix has been central for anime’s very existence.

Betting that TV stations would refuse to pay the actual costs of production of a 30-minute animated TV show, Tezuka Osamu sold Astro Boy at a loss. He figured he’d make back the money on licensing fees for character goods – what we’d now call franchising – and international sales. So anime depends on other media (from toys to comics to video games) for its very survival.

The media mix is anime’s life support system. In turn anime grabs audiences that wouldn’t otherwise read a comic, or a novel, expanding the fan base. So ultimately there’s a kind of virtuous circle between the financial side of things and the fan side of things. As time moved on, and especially into the 1980s and 1990s, these grew closer and closer together. In the end it is rare to have a stand-alone cultural product, at least in the spheres considered “subcultural” in Japan, like comics, animation and light novels.

The media mix practice has even become central to “mainstream” areas like live-action films and TV dramas, especially since the 2000s.

Ian: I like the idea that the “media mix is anime’s life support system.” One of the questions I think about is, who supports the media mix? Whose activities bring this “media mix” to life?

As a cultural anthropologist, I like to draw more attention to the people, both professional producers and amateur creators, who form a nexus of collaborative creativity. The outcome is the “media mix,” but to ask about collaboration brings about a slightly different focus, in my opinion.

Like you, Henry, I too am interested in “spreadable media,” but I guess I see the impetus in the people who do the spreading, rather than being a function of the media object itself. (Editor's Note: I would have said that the focus of our Spreadable Media book is on the community that is circulating the content and the ways the content functions as social currency in their interactions with each other. So I don't think we are actually disagreeing here.) Granted, there is something amazing about Susan Boyle’s rise to stardom, and a lot of that has to do with her superior singing talent. It’s interesting as well, however, that her fans found something worth sharing and reached out to friends and colleagues to push interest in her even farther than the TV show alone could.

What relationship exists between “media mix” and the western concept of “transmedia storytelling”? How has the emergence of “media mix” changed the nature of storytelling in Japan?

Marc: This question about the relationship between media mix and transmedia storytelling is an important one. On the one hand I see Japan’s media ecology as really central to the conceptualization of transmedia storytelling. I think back to what I think is a key chapter of your book, Convergence Culture, where you analyze The Matrix as a key example of transmedia. As you point out, the Wachowskis develop the conception of The Matrix expanded universe on the way back from Japan, and you point out how influential the Japanese model of dispersing content across media was to them.

The conception of an expanded world which consumers access part by part was developed in Japan around Kadokawa Books by Kadokawa Tsuguhiko, Otsuka Eiji, Mizuno Ryo, Sato Tatsuo, Inoue Shin’ichiro and others in the late 80s and early 90s. These magazine editors and media creators associated with Kadokawa effectively shifted from being authors to being media mix producers. Otsuka, Mizuno and others create manga, or write novels – MPD Psycho and Record of the Lodoss War being two of their most renown works, respectively – but most importantly they oversee the production of various media incarnations or fragments of a whole. They were also keen to include fans as part of this, leaving holes in the narratives for fans to fill in.

Gainax’s Evangelion – funded and then published in part by Kadokawa – is an excellent example of this kind of media mix. Storytelling became focused not on development in a single medium, but around the development of a world or series of narratives across media. So I see the more recent emphasis on transmedia in North America especially as at least partly influenced by media mix practice from Japan.

Of course the twist to this narrative is that Kadokawa Tsuguhiko and others were deeply influenced by the table top role playing game (TRPG) model – where a preexisting world could be developed across multiple works. They give Dungeons and Dragons and the Dragonlance series of books that used D&D as a basis as an example.And in an early theorization of Kadokawa media mix practice, Otsuka analogizes the producer position to the TRPG “game master.” So there’s definitely a kind of mutual influence going on.

On the other hand, and this brings us back to some of what Ian said a moment ago about the importance of the popularity of characters, there are debates as to just how central narrative is to the media mix. Azuma Hiroki’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals makes the case that from the late 90s through the early 2000s there is a decline in “grand narratives” and an increasing centrality of non-narrative characters in the media mix. Basically he revives the postmodern thesis about the decline in grand narratives to apply it to developments in anime, manga, and games.

And it’s true, there are a lot of character-based works that don’t have much emphasis on narrative at all. Lucky Star comes to mind, and so does Ian’s discussion of Hatsune Miku. But we can think a little more historically about this too. Hello Kitty is one of the most successful characters of all time, but narrative was only an afterthought, and generally unimportant to what is for all intents and purposes a hugely successful media mix.

Ian and I both make the case that characters and worlds come first, and narratives are often built subsequently to the characters and worlds. Again, I think Japan is an important precursor to the recent trend towards world-building in Hollywood that you’ve highlighted, Henry. So there is an important connection between transmedia storytelling and the media mix.

But the media mix is not always about storytelling. That said I personally find the development of narratives across media a particularly interesting way of using the affordances of Japan’s rich media ecology to create fascinating story worlds. And I’m personally intrigued by the high tolerance for inconsistencies or divergences in media mix worlds that I find in Japan, much more than in North American models of transmedia. /blockquote>

Ian: I agree completely. I experienced this ambiguity around storytelling in an unusual way during fieldwork in Tokyo when a colleague invited me to meet with some producers from Bandai Visual to hear about their then-forthcoming series Code Geass. They spent an hour describing the characters and world of the series, but never talked about the story. I left the meeting thinking, “I still have no idea what happens in the series.” My Japanese friend was surprised at my confusion. “They probably haven’t written the story yet,” he noted.

For them, the key part of the planning was the characters and the worlds, which ideally would be spun off into a range of stories. The design is much more about characters and the rules of the world.

Ian Condry is professor of media and cultural studies in Comparative Media Studies at MIT.  He is the author of The Soul of Anime:  Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story (Duke U Press, 2013).  The book explores ethnographically the global spread of Japanese animation, from fieldwork in Tokyo's studios to participation in fan conventions in the US.  His first book, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Duke U Press, 2006), analyzes the way rap music took root in Japan.  His research focuses on "globalization from below," that is, cultural movements that succeed, despite skepticism from elites.  He is the founder and organizer of the MIT/Harvard Cool Japan research project, which examines the cultural connections, dangerous distortions and critical potential of popular culture.  More info:  http://iancondry.com

Marc Steinberg is assistant professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and has published essays on anime, franchising and digital media in Japan Forum, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal,Parachute, Journal of Visual Culture, Theory, Culture & Society, Mechademia, and Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Continuing the study of the media mix, his current research project explores the close relation between “contents” and “platforms” in Japanese media industry discourse and practice, from the 1980s to the present.

"Hope is an Active Verb": Brenda Laurel Revisits Computers as Theater (Part Three)

In Utopian Entrepreneur, you offered a powerful call for designers and industry people to bring more of their own social values and political commitments into their work, making an argument for the ways that the design of media and culture can help change the world. Amazingly, you wrote this book after some of the set-backs you suffered with Purple Moon. Throughout this revision of Computer as Theater, we get a strong sense of your own commitments and values, especially as regard gender politics and environmentalism. Are you still optimistic about the potentials of Utopian Entrepreneurship? Can you point to some recent examples of people you admire who are working to achieve these kinds of meaningful change through entrepreneurial means?

These days I’m questioning both words. ‘Utopian’ has a statist tone historically, although the common meaning, I think, is to do things that are good for people and societies in sustainable ways. ‘Entrepreneurship’ leaves out the great work done in universities and non-profits, but it does provide an explicit measure of success.

That said, I must confess that Elon Musk is at the top of my list. People sometimes scoff at his excellent work with Tesla and SpaceX because they think Pay Pal was an egregious way to make money. Such folks need to remember that the big idea of Pay Pal was not to boost consumerism but to help people make monetary transactions of many types via the internet. I count that as good, if not utopian, work. SpaceX is filling a niche that is being vacated by NASA as it loses funding, and the working methods at SpaceX are speedier and yield a better product essentially because they are entrepreneurial.

Jane McGonigal is another great example. Her game “World Without Oil” won her the South by Southwest award for activism in 2008. Her goal is to create games that improve the quality of human life. She describes her latest work, “SuperBetter”, as “a game that has helped more than 250,000 players so far tackle real-life health challenges like depression, anxiety, chronic pain and traumatic brain injury.” Her work has also made her a best-selling author and a presenter in high demand.

In the world of serious games we have great examples of successful games like “Democracy” and “Democracy 2” from Positech. Another well-received example is “Peacemaker” from ImpactGames, originally developed by a team at Carnegie-Mellon. This particular game is one of many examples of work incubated within institutions of higher education. Although ImpactGames was later formed to publish the game commercially, it’s really important to remember its roots in the university. Your own work in the Games-to-Teach project at MIT provided a huge stimulus for the serious games movement, and much of the work is still done in universities. ‘Entrepreneurship’ may or may not be involved. Universities and non-profits can be great host organisms for pro-social work.

The ‘entrepreneurship’ qualification is only important if you measure the value of the game by its success in the commercial marketplace. Entrepreneurial approaches help us to demonstrate value by noting that a particular sort of ‘utopian’ product or service has found a sustainable niche in the ecology of commerce, but success in entrepreneurship is not an accurate measure of the Good.

Across the book, you shared some of your experiences as a Dead Head and as a participant in the Renaissance Fair culture. What models do these kinds of participatory culture offer us for thinking about the designed of shared social spaces and experiences within digital media?

I’m also a Trekker, as you recall.

I take away two important things from Deadhead culture. The first is a climate of trust. At Dead concerts, I never needed to worry about leaving a backpack on the lawn while I went to look at merchandise or buy a beer. I could be sitting next to a raving libertarian or a homeless hippie; it didn’t matter. Deadheads took care of each other as an ad hoc community. It would be lovely to establish a similar ethos in a social network or a multiplayer game.

Boundaries are definitional of communities. People who behaved outside of albeit unstated norms of Dead culture were eased out of the community (or the space) by Deadheads.

The other thing that really worked was the Dead’s attitude toward intellectual property. People taped the shows and special accommodations were made them. And anybody could hack the artwork to distribute their own home-grown merch. The Dead culture understands and accommodates appropriation as a need of fans. They made (and their successor make) their revenue from concerts, not intellectual property.

In the book, I used the Renaissance Faire as an example of how the clever selection and arrangement of materials (to quote Aristotle) could predispose individuals with differing traversals through the space to have dramatically satisfying experiences. This moves the notion of the dramatic from a line to a field. Interaction designers can also think about what sorts of predispositions are set up by the arrangement and potential ordering of experiences and encounters.

The embodied joy of walking around the Faire and speaking Faire-dialect English is not marred by the fear of attack or the need to fight. This demonstrates to me that it’s possible to create excellent multiplayer games without the need for explicit conflict as part of the play pattern.

I was surprisingly moved by your final line, “Hope is an active verb.” So, what are you hoping for in terms of digital culture in the next decade?

I hope we learn to use these capabilities that we continue to extrude to love our planet, ourselves, and one another better and more actively. Like the telescope and microscope, computer technologies hold the promise of allowing each of us to see deeply into nature, wild or urban. I believe that to see in this way can lead to both love and action. And I believe that we can develop digital tools that empower us to take action.

I hope that we can model good governance and civility in the digital world that will ripple through reality to change our institutions and behaviors.

I hope that we find highly engaging alternatives to violence and combat as the central element in the play pattern of most games. I remember when I came to Atari back in 1979, I played “Star Raiders” fanatically. But my first reaction was, “where is the negotiate button?” I hope we develop actionable negotiate buttons. I hope that the cultural ecology of connection and compassion can be strengthened. If we can do that in the digital domain, we can do it in our world.

Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976 as a designer, researcher, writer and teacher in the domains of human-computer interaction and games. She currently serves as an adjunct professor in Computer Science Department at U. C. Santa Cruz. She served as professor and founding chair of the Graduate Program in Design at California College of Arts from 2006 to 2012 and the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2001-2006) and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs (2005-2006). Based on her research in gender and technology at Interval Research (1992-1996), she co-founded Purple Moon in 1996 to create interactive media for girls. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Computers as Theatre (1991), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre: Second Edition (2013).

"Hope Is An Active Verb": Brenda Laurel Revisits Computers as Theatre (Part One)

Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre was one of the few truly transformative books to emerge in the heady early days of the "digital revolution," demanding that we think of the computer as posing a series of creative problems that might best be address through the lens of the dramatic arts rather than purely technical problems that remain in the domain of the computer scientists. In a new edition released this month, she revisits that classic text in light of her rich and diverse experiences as a designer, educator, and entrepreneur. The resulting work looks backwards, at how far we have come towards transforming the computer into a new expressive medium and looks forwards to the technical and cultural problems we still need to resolve if we are going to produce a diverse and sustainable digital culture in the years ahead. I have been lucky enough to have had Laurel as a friend throughout my professional career and especially to be able to watch her journey with Interval Computing and Purple Moon games, where she broke new ground in seeking to broaden who played computer games, what kinds of experiences games offered, and what this new expressive media could accomplish. Justine Cassells and I documented some of her core insights in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games and we were with her shortly after Matel acquired and pulled the plug on the whole Secret Paths franchise. But, the story is perhaps best told through Brenda's own book, Utopian Entrepreneur, which I still turn towards when I seek inspiration about the value of doing interventions into the creative industries as a vehicle for promoting one's own personal and professional agendas. Laurel's insights predicted much that has happened in the games industry since, including the success of The Sims, which in many ways followed her template, the growth of transmedia entertainment which she helped to model, and the expansion of the female market around casual games.

Brenda Laurel has been and remains an important voice -- in many ways, the conscience of the digital industries -- and so it is with enormous pride that I share with you this exchange conducted online over the summer. Here, she reflects back on where we have been in digital theory and expression and speculates on some directions forward.

Reading back through this, I was struck by curious parallels between your work in Computers as Theatre and what Sherry Turkle was writing about in The Second Self around that same period. Both of you were trying to understand something of the mental models people brought with them to computers, even as you were asking questions that operated on different levels. What relationship do you see between these two key early works of digital theory?

Neither of us could have foreseen the firestorm of FPSs, social networks, and tiny interactions on tiny screens. In a way, I think that Sherry spoke a note of caution which I am trying to make actionable by suggesting that it’s not that these things exist, but to what use they are put (and how designers think about them) that can make them good for us or not (or somewhere in between). The relationship between the books may have been that we were each looking at the coming wave of technology as something fundamentally about humans, our social and developmental and cultural contexts.

Humans extrude technology. It is part of us. We are responsible for it. Each generation of the last 10 has had a new technology to deal with, to set norms about, to learn about appropriate usage. Parents and schools can help with media literacy—this would fit well into a Civics class, if we still had those.

As the topology of social networks complexifies, so do the opportunities and risks. I remember sitting with our girls in the age of television advertising and asking them, what are they trying to sell you? How are they trying to do it? Now they ask others the same questions as casual media critiques.

As I sat down to re-read this book, I was struck by the fact that I had no problem accepting the premise that what Aristotle had to say about drama might be valuable in thinking about what we do with computers (a theme upon which I gather you had some push back at the time the book was first published) but I had more difficulty wondering whether something written so early in the history of digital media would have anything to say to contemporary designers. It did, but the fact that this question surfaced for me leads me to ponder, what does this say about the nature of media change over the two decades since you first published this book?

It’s gratifying to me that many folks have worked on ideas in that first book and have made some progress, even recently. The largest excursions in the new edition are probably those about using science more robustly to model interaction. I’ve also emphasized the combined causal factors in multiplayer games and social media. Pointing back to your first question, I think that governance and civility are still essentially unsolved problems in this new world. I included Pavel Curtis and Lambda MOO in the new edition because there was such a valiant effort to figure out governance. I suspect that the lack of civility in multiplayer spaces today (especially in terms of sexual harassment) has something to do with the general lack of civility in our national character at this moment in time. But it also has to do with the designer’s role in framing and normalizing civil relations among multiple participants. There are great opportunities in this regard that might well channel back to our national discourse.

As I fan, I appreciated your rant about J. J. Abrams, Lost, and of course, Star Trek. What do you see as the limits of his “magic box” model for thinking about how to generate interests around stories? What alternatives do you think a more drama-centered approach offers?

As far as JJ says, his Magic Box has never been opened. That’s a problem for starters. If he wants to keep a virgin souvenir, great. But thoughtful plotting does not come out of thin air (or a closed box). Pleasing dramatic structures do not arise ad hoc. To the extent that character is a material cause of plot, the damage JJ has done to Spock and Uhura is unforgivable. It’s like throwing out some of the enduring stock characters in a Commedia piece. Spock stood for pure (if tortured) intellect; overtly sexualizing him was not a good thing for the Star Trek mythos. Transforming Uhura from a kick-butt, competent female officer into a romance queen (whose phasers don’t work as well as a man’s) fundamentally changed the ethos of the character as well as the mythos. That’s like saying that Oedipus held his temper at the crossroads and lived happily ever after with Mom.

A more drama-centric approach offers the pleasures of a well-structured plot, including catharsis. For enduring characters and ‘properties’ (e.g., The Odyssey), some core of dramatic tension already exists in the potential of the myth, and it can be spun out into many stories without exhausting its potential to deepen our relationships with the characters, their actions, and their universe.

Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976 as a designer, researcher, writer and teacher in the domains of human-computer interaction and games. She currently serves as an adjunct professor in Computer Science Department at U. C. Santa Cruz. She served as professor and founding chair of the Graduate Program in Design at California College of Arts from 2006 to 2012 and the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2001-2006) and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs (2005-2006). Based on her research in gender and technology at Interval Research (1992-1996), she co-founded Purple Moon in 1996 to create interactive media for girls. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Computers as Theatre (1991), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004), and Computers as Theatre: Second Edition (2013).

"To JK Rowling, From Cho Chang": Responding to Asian Stereotyping in Popular Culture

This is the second in a series of blog posts produced by the students in my Public Intellectuals seminar at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. We appreciate any feedback or response you'd like to share.  "To JK Rowling, From Cho Chang": Responding to Asian Stereotyping in Popular Culture

by Diana Lee

Awhile back, my friend and fellow graduate student sent me a simple email with the subject line, “Calling out the representation of Asian women in Harry Potter books,” and a short one-line message:

“Saw this and thought of you – the videos are really interesting!!”

I was immediately intrigued by her email because she is, as I mentioned, a respected friend and colleague, and I know she is thoughtful about her communication, but also because before clicking on the link, I wasn’t certain what she was referring to. Had she thought of me because of my love of the magical world of Harry Potter? My academic and personal interest in representations of Asians, Asian Americans, and gender in U.S. media and popular culture? Was it because of my deep appreciation of people who create counter-narratives that challenge stereotypes and forefront voices that are not frequently heard in “mainstream” dialogue? Or perhaps it was a show of support for my hopeful but yet-to-be-solidified desire to combine my enthusiasm for all of these things in academic life? The answer? Yes. Turns out she was pointing me towards something that exemplified all of these things, and much more.

In April 2013, the Youtube video of college student spoken word artist Rachel Rostad’s “To JK Rowling, from Cho Chang” went viral. In the video, she is shown performing a poem which challenges the representations of Asian women and other marginalized groups in the Harry Potter series and other popular stories (such as Ms. Saigon, Madame Butterfly, and Memoirs of a Geisha). Written and delivered in the style of many spoken word performances, Rachel uses a powerful, clear, strong voice, and the poem is filled with provocative examples artfully expressed to maximize emotional impact.

You can hear her frustration with the fact that Asians and Asian women in the U.S. are constantly misrepresented in shallow and/or stereotypical roles in books, movies, and television shows. You follow along as she exposes the subtle but sadly pervasive ways these caricatures are presented – with “Asian” accented English, with “foreign” names that may or may not make sense in actual “Asian” languages, as disposable minor characters used to set up the focus on the White, leading woman who is the “real” love interest, as sexually “exotic” Asian women who are submissive and/or hypersexualized, and only to be used and then discarded or left behind. And finally, at the end of the poem, through a story that comes across as her own, she draws a connection between why we should pay attention to these limited representations and speaks about an example of how they can influence our everyday interactions.

She makes the case that when we don’t see other representations of characters with depth and breadth that look and sound and think and love like real people, then the limited portrayals can impact not only the possibilities we can imagine for ourselves, but also what others see as possible for or with us. Rachel Rostad used this poem as a creative and powerful challenge to pervasive, potentially damaging, familiar portrayals, urging us to think critically about the stories, images, and identities we participate in consuming and perpetuating.

But that wasn’t all. She also did something else that we should highlight and celebrate.

The video of her spoken word performance went viral, generating a flurry of criticism and commentary. Instead of ignoring or dismissing these responses or getting pulled into destructively defensive or combative flame wars, she used the opportunity to reflect, learn, teach, and engage in a (public) conversation. She did this in a number of ways and across multiple platforms (e.g., YouTube, tumblr, blog posts, Facebook), but the most visible one is the follow-up video she created a few days after the first video was posted, which was called, “Response To Critiques of ‘To JK Rowling, from Cho Chang.’”

In the response video, Rachel speaks directly to the camera, beginning with “hey there, Internet!,” and point by point, articulately, sincerely, and calmly addresses the five main critiques that came pouring in to her through the various mediated forms she was involved with.

One point addressed the possibility that “Cho Chang” could be a legitimate name, despite what she articulated in her poem about “Cho” and “Chang” being two last names. Rachel admitted ignorance in Chinese and other naming practices, acknowledged that the line in the poem about Cho’s name was problematic, apologized for marginalizing and misrepresenting parts of a community she was trying to empower, and urged viewers to also focus on the other themes she draws on in the rest of the poem.

Following that, Rachel’s next series of comments emphasized that she does not speak for all Asian women, and is not claiming to through her work. She apologized again for unintended mischaracterizations, especially to those who reached out to her saying they felt misrepresented by her poem. Rachel then used these interactions to encourage reflection about and reemphasize the importance of a wider range of media and pop cultural portrayals for Asians and Asian women, which was one of the main points of her spoken word piece, saying, “I’m very sorry I misrepresented you. But I don’t think either of us is to blame for this. I would ask you, what conditions are in place that make it so that you are so defensive that I, someone with a completely different experience of oppression, am not representing your voice? It’s sad that we live in a society where my voice is so easily mistaken for yours - where our differing identities are viewed as interchangeable.”

Continuing on the theme of advocating for a wider range of media representations and prompting us to think critically about the representations we do see, Rachel’s third point was about the realistic portrayal of a grieving character versus in-depth character development of Asian and White female lead characters. Yes, Cho was sad about boyfriend Cedric Diggory’s death and confused about her developing feelings for Harry so she was crying, pensive, and sad most of the time, but JK Rowling intentionally set up Cho as weak to make Ginny, Harry’s eventual love interest and a White woman, look stronger. This may not have been intentionally racially charged, but it is important to think about because discrimination and prejudice are oftentimes not only about intentionality. This is a theme that recurs in mainstream films and stories – women of color appear as minor, brief, undeveloped characters to set up the “real” relationship for the main White characters later in the narrative, and the more we see it repeated with no alternative portrayals, the more it has the potential to seem “natural.”

Similarly, her fourth point is also about different ways that problematic representations take form, describing why she talked about Dumbledore’s sexuality, which some argued seemed tangential to the main themes of the poem. Thinking about representation and whose stories are privileged is not only about who is invisible from the story, or the limited roles people are allowed to play, but it is also about considering that even when in prominent positions within stories, aspects of character’s identities aren’t developed in a way that illustrates the depth and complexity of our lived realities.

Rachel’s fifth point in her response video is about how she does not hate Harry Potter or JK Rowling (or Ravenclaw, I’m assuming!), but rather is a fan who grew up on the books and went to all the midnight showings, and importantly, is also able to think critically about and critique a world that she also enjoys.

And finally, she closes the response video with this message:

That's it for now. I understand if you still disagree with me, but I hope you now disagree with me for the arguments I'm actually making, and it's been humbling and amazing to watch people respond to this video. I think that the presence of so much passionate dialogue means that this is an issue that needs to be talked about. And yes, I made mistakes, and just as I think JK Rowling did with some of her characterizations. But what I hope people realize is that dialogue about social justice is not about blaming people for making mistakes, whether it's me or JK Rowling. It's about calling attention to mistakes, which I'll be the first to admit, is painful, and using those mistakes as an opportunity to grow.

I personally have learned so much from the mistakes I've made in this process, and I want to thank the community for calling me out on that. Social justice is about holding each other accountable. And I hope as a devoted fan base and as an amazing community we can continue to use my piece as a jumping off point for further dialogue, growth, and reflection.

Thank you.

We should celebrate this as an exemplary instance of reflexivity, of praxis  – of the liberating power of reflection, awareness, and action. Of an intelligent, passionate young person invested in learning from and contributing to her community. Of the engaging, participatory possibilities available through working with popular culture and using technology, media, and newer forms of mediated communication as tools for transformative education. This is also a great opportunity for educators and families to unpack the pedagogical implications of what happens when you find something young people are excited about and engage in this kind of expression and communication with a larger community. And this is also an example of what media scholar Henry Jenkins calls participatory culture, specifically, in relation to new media literacies and civic engagement.

These words – reflexivity, praxis, pedagogy, new media, media literacy, civic engagement – get thrown around in academic institutions and circles all the time. And we should continue to teach them and explore their philosophies and apply their meanings, but we cannot forget the importance of grounding them in concrete examples, not just for academics or practitioners, but also for people who may not use these same terms, but still find the practices empowering. Rachel Rostad’s two videos, along with her other critical engagement with this discourse, is a great, accessible example of what we hope that people of all ages are doing when they are participating in mediated communication, engaging with popular culture, and otherwise interacting out in the world. We hope that people are actively engaged with their media and popular cultural stories and artifacts, and with each other. We hope that people are thinking about ideas, sharing them, playing with and acting on them, challenging each other and working out responses, incorporating new information, helping each other to learn and grow, and then repeating that process again and again.

By following Rachel’s videos and active online engagement with a larger community, we can literally see and hear this messy, discursive, interactive transformative learning and teaching process unfolding. One of the key messages Rachel communicates is that she has learned a lot through the process of writing this poem, performing it, posting it online, receiving and engaging with all of the responses to it, and creating the follow-up video. She used these interactions in several ways. She apologized for areas where she made mistakes, where she misrepresented or silenced populations she was trying to empower. She clarified her perspective or points that either were not clear through the delivery of the poem, or could not be expanded on given the format of spoken word poetry. She used the experience as a way to take in and address critiques about areas she could have presented differently. And finally, she also spoke about the complexity of representation and tokenization both within the poem itself, which spoke about popular cultural representation via Cho Chang, but also in terms of her speaking about these topics from her positionality as a woman of color, who is considered “Asian” in the United States. She shared with us her processing and grappling with these issues, thanked all those that responded or commented, and kept the door open for future dialogue over these issues. She did all this, and publicly. What a courageous thing to do.

In one instance, for example, a blogger at Angry Asian Girls United (AAGU) posted a response to the original poem, calling Rachel out for her glaring misrepresentation of South Asians and for ignoring Pan-Asian solidarity and identity. The blogger also critiqued her for taking up the term “Brown” as an East Asian, and for conflating the varying meanings of the “Asian” label when you consider U.S. versus U.K. contexts (where Harry Potter’s world is set; because then “Asian” would refer to Indians or other South Asians, e.g., Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and people who look like Cho Chang would be referred to as “Chinese,” “Korean,” or another label associated with the East Asian country they hailed from). In the poem, Rachel speaks of “Asians” as if it equates to East Asian, and does not count Indian characters Padma and Parvati Patil when she speaks of “Asians,” a common issue when people have not fully unpacked the deeply ingrained, volatile, problematic U.S. (and global) race categorizations. In the poem, Rachel does include the Patil twins, as well as herself, as “Brown” and “minority.” I believe she used the term “Brown” as an attempt to empower and connect with discourses of identity politics that are possibly specific to U.S. cultural context, but whether (East, South, Central, Middle Eastern) Asians are included in that term, or whether she should or can use it can be saved for a separate conversation. The point is, the AAGU blog post called her out on her conflation, misrepresentation, and the silencing nature of Rachel’s use of these terms, and she heard them, learned from and engaged with the criticism.

This one relatively small but important part of this larger example shows how many people were actively engaged, challenging both their own and each other’s thinking processes through this topic, and in a public way, which allowed others (like me and you) to witness and/or participate in the discussion, even months later. Additionally, Rachel and the people commenting on her videos were engaged through the combination and use of multiple, networked avenues. In the example above, the video was first posted on YouTube, which acquired comments. Rachel was looking for a way to succinctly learn about and respond to the YouTube comments about the misrepresentation of South Asians, which she found through the Angry Asian Girls United blog post. Rachel then linked to this blog post and responded to it on her tumblr site, and also apologized for misrepresenting Asian women in her response video, which was posted on YouTube. And to begin with, both Rachel and the AAGU blog poster were familiar with Harry Potter, whether through the books or movies (or some other form, e.g., video games, news, conversations), and the conversation and rapid spread of the discussion were supported because of an already existing Harry Potter fan base. Through their dialogue, both Rachel and the AAGU blogger were pushing ideas of the fluid markers and conceptions of identity and how it impacts and is impacted by visibility, representation, and socio-historic context.

When thinking about social justice or civic engagement, we often look for big things – movements, large groups mobilizing many people – but sometimes we should shift our perspective a bit and focus in on the incredible things small groups of individuals are doing. They can also have a big impact. Word of mouth is a powerful thing.

In the end, it all comes full circle. Rachel shared her performance and reflection with communities in person and on the internet, my friend shared the videos with me, and now I’m sharing my thoughts with you. I will join both Rachel Rostad and my friend and echo their sentiments. Hi. I saw this, and thought of you. The videos are really interesting! I hope we can continue to use these conversations as a jumping off point for further dialogue, growth, and reflection. Thank you!

For more information on Rachel Rostad, visit her tumlbr or facebook pages. Rachel is currently a student at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In keeping with voicing diverse stories about Asian Americans, she also has a great poem, “Adoption,” which is about identity, belonging, and family, from the perspective of a Korean adoptee growing up with a non-Korean family in the U.S., and one of her latest poems is about her Names.

Diana Lee is a Ph.D. student at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her work explores representations of race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and other aspects of identity in U.S. media and popular culture. Specifically, she focuses on media portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans, implications of stereotypical and limited representation, and the educational and empowering nature of counter-narratives. Of particular interest are counter-narratives created through networked, mediated expressions, as well as participatory experiences and communities.

How to Watch Television: The Walking Dead

Today, I want to showcase the launch of an exciting new book, How to Watch Television, edited by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. The editors recognized a gap in the field of television studies between the kinds of essays we ask our students to write (often close readings focused on specific episodes) and the kinds of exemplars we provide them from scholarly publications (often theory-dense, focused on making much larger arguments, and making moves which it is hard for undergrads or early graduate students to match). Contributors, myself among them, were asked to focus on specific episodes of specific programs, to do a close analysis with limited amounts of fancy theoretical footwork, and to demonstrate the value of a particular analytic approach to understanding how television works. Thompson and Mittell brought together a who's who of contemporary television studies writers and encouraged them to write about a broad array of programs. You can get a sense of the project as a whole by reading the table of contents. I have only read a few of the essays so far, having just recently gotten my author's copy, but so far, the book more than lives up to its promise. I. TV Form: Aesthetics and Style

1. Homicide: Realism – Bambi L. Haggins

2. House: Narrative Complexity – Amanda D. Lotz

3. Life on Mars: Transnational Adaptation – Christine Becker

4. Mad Men: Visual Style – Jeremy G. Butler

5. Nip/Tuck: Popular Music – Ben Aslinger

6. Phineas & Ferb: Children’s Television – Jason Mittell

7. The Sopranos: Episodic Storytelling – Sean O’Sullivan

8. Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!: Metacomedy – Jeffrey Sconce

II. TV Representations: Social Identity and Cultural Politics

9. 24: Challenging Stereotypes – Evelyn Alsultany

10. The Amazing Race: Global Othering – Jonathan Gray

11. The Cosby Show: Representing Race – Christine Acham

12. The Dick Van Dyke Show: Queer Meanings – Quinn Miller

13. Eva Luna: Latino/a Audiences – Hector Amaya

14. Glee/House Hunters International: Gay Narratives – Ron Becker

15. Grey’s Anatomy: Feminism – Elana Levine

16. Jersey Shore: Ironic Viewing – Susan J. Douglas

III. TV Politics: Democracy, Nation, and the Public Interest

17. 30 Days: Social Engagement – Geoffrey Baym and Colby Gottert

18. America’s Next Top Model: Neoliberal Labor – Laurie Ouellette

19. Family Guy: Undermining Satire – Nick Marx

20. Fox & Friends: Political Talk – Jeffrey P. Jones

21. M*A*S*H: Socially Relevant Comedy – Noel Murray

22. Parks and Recreation: The Cultural Forum – Heather Hendershot

23. Star Trek: Serialized Ideology – Roberta Pearson

24. The Wonder Years: Televised Nostalgia – Daniel Marcus

IV. TV Industry: Industrial Practices and Structures

25. Entertainment Tonight: Tabloid News – Anne Helen Petersen

26. I Love Lucy: The Writer-Producer – Miranda J. Banks

27. Modern Family: Product Placement – Kevin Sandler

28. Monday Night Football: Brand Identity – Victoria E. Johnson

29. NYPD Blue: Content Regulation – Jennifer Holt

30. Onion News Network: Flow – Ethan Thompson

31. The Prisoner: Cult TV Remakes – Matt Hills

32. The Twilight Zone: Landmark Television – Derek Kompare

V. TV Practices: Medium, Technology, and Everyday Life

33. Auto-Tune the News: Remix Video – David Gurney

34. Battlestar Galactica: Fans and Ancillary Content – Suzanne Scott

35. Everyday Italian: Cultivating Taste – Michael Z. Newman

36. Gossip Girl: Transmedia Technologies – Louisa Stein

37. It’s Fun to Eat: Forgotten Television – Dana Polan

38. One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling – Abigail De Kosnik

39. Samurai Champloo: Transnational Viewing – Jiwon Ahn

40. The Walking Dead: Adapting Comics – Henry Jenkins

You can order it at the NYU Press website, along with previewing the introduction or requesting a review copy for faculty thinking about adopting it in a class. You can also order it on Amazon. Or please request it at an independent bookstore near you, if you’ve got one.

Thompson and Mitell have shrewdly offered those of us who have blogs the chance to share our own essays from the collection with the idea of helping to build up the buzz around this promising release.  Spreadability at work! So, I am happy to share today my musings about The Walking Dead, written after the end of Season 1. (Don't get me started about the speed of academic publishing: by normal standards, this one had a pretty rapid turnaround, but we still lag behind any other mode of publication. This is why I so value sites like Flow,In Media Res, and Antenna.)

The Walking Dead: Adapting Comics

Henry Jenkins

Abstract: One of the key ways that television connects to other media is by adapting pre-existing properties from films, comics, and other formats. Henry Jenkins uses one of the most popular of such recent adaptations, The Walking Dead, to highlight the perils and possibilities of adaptations, and how tapping into pre-existing fanbases can pose challenges to television producers.

The comic book industry now functions as Hollywood's research and development department, with a growing number of media properties inspired by graphic novels, including not only superhero films (Green Lantern, X-Men: First Class, Thor) and both live-action and animated television series (Smallville, The Bold and the Brave), but also films from many other genres (A History of Violence, American Splendor, 20 Days of Night, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World). There are many possible explanations for Hollywood’s comic book fixation:

1. DC and Marvel are owned by Warner Brothers and Disney, respectively, who cherry pick what they think will satisfy mass audience interests.

2. Comics-based stories are to contemporary cinema what magazine short stories were to Classical Hollywood—more or less presold material.

3. Hardcore comics readers fall into a highly desired demographic—teen and twentysomething males—who have abandoned television in recent years for other media.

4. Comic books are a visual medium, offering something like a storyboard establishing basic iconography and visual practices to moving image media.

5. Digital special effects have caught up to comic’s most cosmic storytelling, allowing special effects houses to expand their technical capacities.

6. Contemporary television and comics involve a complex mix of the episodic and the serial, deploying long-form storytelling differently from most films or novels.

7. The streamlined structure of comics offer emotional intensification closely aligned with contemporary screen practices.

Despite such claims, comic adaptations often radically depart from elements popular with their original comics-reading audience. Mainstream comics readership has been in sharp decline for several decades: today’s top-selling title reaches fewer than a hundred thousand readers per month—a drop in the bucket compared with the audiences required for cable success, let alone broadcast networks. Some graphic novels have moved from specialty shops to chain bookstores, attracting a “crossover” readership, including more women and more “casual” fans. Adapting a comic for film or television often involves building on that “crossover” potential rather than addressing hardcore fans, stripping away encrusted mythology.

AMC's The Walking Dead (2010-present) is a notable exception, establishing its reputation as "faithful" to the spirit if not the letter of the original, even while introducing its original characters, themes, and story world to a new audience. Robert Kirkman’s comic series was a key example of the crossover readership graphic novels can find at mainstream bookstores. Kirkman has freely acknowledged his debts to George Romero’s Living Dead films, while others note strong parallels with 28 Days Later. The Walking Dead’s success with crossover readers and Kirkman’s reliance on formulas from other commercially successful franchises in the genre explain why producers felt they could remain “true” to the comics while reaching a more expansive viewership.

Using “Wildfire,” the fifth episode from The Walking Dead’s first season, I will explore what aspects of the comic reached television, what changes occurred, and why hardcore fans accepted some changes and not others. As a longtime Walking Dead reader, I am well situated to explore fan response to shifts in the original continuity.

To understand what The Walking Dead meant to comics readers, one might well start with its extensive letter column. Here, dedicated fans ask questions and offer opinions about every major plot development. Kirkman established a deeply personal relationship with his fans, sharing behind the scenes information about his efforts to get the series optioned and then developed for television, responding to reader controversies, and discussing the comic’s core premises and genre conventions (“the rules”). Kirkman summarized his goals in the first Walking Dead graphic novel:

With The Walking Dead, I want to explore how people deal with extreme situations and how these events CHANGE them.... You guys are going to get to see Rick change and mature to the point that when you look back on this book you won’t even recognize him....I hope to show you reflections of your friends, your neighbors, your families, and yourselves, and what their reactions are to the extreme situations on this book... This is more about watching Rick survive than it is about watching Zombies pop around the corner and scare you.....The idea behind The Walking Dead is to stay with the character, in this case, Rick Grimes for as long as is humanly possible....The Walking Dead will be the zombie movie that never ends.[1]

If, as Robin Wood formulated, the horror genre examines how normality is threatened by the monstrous, Kirkman’s focus is less on the monstrous and more on human costs.[2] The comic’s artwork (originally by Tony Moore but mostly by Charlie Adlard) offers gorehounds detailed renderings of rotting faces (lovingly recreated for the television series by makeup artist Greg Nicotero) and blood splattering as humans and zombies battle, but it is also focused on melodramatic moments, as human characters struggle to maintain normality in the face of the monstrous. This merger of horror and melodrama may explain why, despite its gore, The Walking Dead comics appeal almost as much to female readers as it does to the men who constitute the core comics market. Early on, some fans criticized the comic’s shambling “pace,” going several issues without zombie encounters. However, once they got a taste of Kirkman’s storytelling, many realized how these scenes contributed to the reader’s deeper investment in the characters’ plights.

Given his intimate and ongoing relationship with readers, Kirkman’s participation as an executive producer on the television adaptation was key for establishing credibility with his long-term readers. Series publicity tapped Kirkman’s street cred alongside AMC’s own reputation for groundbreaking, character-focused television dramas (Mad Men, Breaking Bad) and the reputations of executive producers Frank Darabont (The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption) and Gale Anne Hurd (Aliens, The Abyss, The Terminator franchise) with filmgoers, establishing an aura of exceptionality.

The Walking Dead was a key discussion topic at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con, a gathering of more than 200,000 influential fans. Posters, specifically produced for the convention, compared the television characters with their comic book counterparts. The trade room display reconstructed an iconic comic location, a farmhouse where a family had killed themselves rather than change into zombies. Both tactics reaffirmed that the series was closely based on the comics. And Kirkman was front and center, promising fans the series would capture the essence of his long-articulated vision. If the producers won the hearts of the hardcore fans, they might count on them to actively rally viewers for the series premiere. Thanks, in part, to the fan support in spreading the word and building enthusiasm, The Walking Dead broke all ratings records for basic cable for its debut episode and broke them again with the launch of Season 2.

By the time The Walking Dead reached the air, Kirkman had produced and published 12 full-length graphic novels, representing more than 70 issues. Yet, the first season of the television series only covered the first six issues. On the one hand, this expansive narrative offered a rich roadmap. On the other, it threatened to lock the producers down too much, making it hard for the series to grow on its own terms. Speaking at the Paleyfest in Los Angeles after season one, Kirkman acknowledged that exploring different paths through the material allowed him to explore roads not taken in his own creative process.

The challenge was to give veteran fans recognizable versions of the established characters and iconic moments. Fans must be able to follow the story structure in broad outlines, even as the producers were changing major and minor plot points, adding new themes and character moments. The audience anticipated that any changes would be consistent with Kirkman’s oft-articulated “ground rules” and yet the producers wanted the freedom to take the story in some new directions. The Walking Dead had built its reputation for surprising its readers in every issue—any character could die at any moment and taboos could be shattered without blinking an eye. How could the television series have that same impact if the most dedicated fans already knew what was going to happen next?

“Wildfire” was perhaps season one’s most emotionally powerful episode, where many core themes came into sharpest focus. It was based upon the final chapter of the first graphic novel, which set the tone for the rest of the comics series. The episode includes several memorable moments from the comics, specifically the death of two major characters (Amy and Jim), yet also several shifts that hinted at how dramatically the producers had revised things. Fans embraced some of these changes, while others violated their collective sense of the franchise.

As “Wildfire” opens, the protagonists are recovering from a traumatic and abrupt zombie attack that killed several recurring characters and forced the survivors to confront the vulnerability of their encampment, preparing them to seek a new “home” elsewhere, a recurring quest in the comics. The attack’s basic outline remains consistent with the graphic novel. For example, Amy gets caught by surprise when she separates from the others, while Jim gets chomped in the ensuing battle. The brutal attack disrupts a much more peaceful “fish fry” scene, which provides an excuse for characters to reveal bits of their backstory. The ruthless battle shows how each character has begun to acquire self-defense and survival skills.

Yet, a central emotional incident, Andrea’s prolonged watch over her dead sister Amy’s body, occupied only two panels of Kirkman’s original comic. There, Andrea tells Dale, “I can’t let her come back like that,” capturing the dread of a loved one transforming into the undead. The television series used this line as a starting point for a much more elaborated character study, built across several episodes as the two sisters, a decade-plus apart in age in this version (though not in the original), offer each other physical and emotional support. The two sisters talk in a boat about the family tradition of fishing and how their father responded to their different needs. Andrea plans to give Amy a birthday present, telling Dale that she was never there for her sister’s birthdays growing up. The image of Andrea unwrapping the present and hanging the fishing lure around her dead sister’s neck represents the melodramatic payoff fans expect from The Walking Dead in whatever medium. The expansion of this incident into a prolonged melodramatic sequence has to do both with issues of modality (the range of subtle facial expressions available to a performer working in live action as opposed to the compression required to convey the same emotional effect through static images) and AMC’s branding as  network known for “complex narratives,” “mature themes,” and “quality acting.”

 “Wildfire” shows Andrea protecting Amy’s body as the others seek to convince her to allow her sister to be buried, We hear the sounds of picks thrashing through the skulls of other zombies in the background and watch bodies being prepared to burn. And, finally, Amy returns to life for a few seconds. Andrea looks intently into Amy’s eyes, looking for any signs of human memory and consciousness, stroking her sister’s face as Amy’s gasps turn into animalistic grunts. The producers play with these ambiguities through their use of makeup: Amy is more human-looking compared to the other zombies, where the focus is on their bones, teeth and muscle rather than their eyes, flesh and hair. In the end, Andrea shoots her sister with the pistol she’s been clutching, an act of mercy rather than violence.

Much of the sequence is shot in tight close-ups, focusing attention all the more closely on the character’s reactions. This is the first time the television series has shown us humans transition into zombies. Several issues after this point in the story (issue 11), the comic revisits this theme with a troubling story of Hershel, a father who has kept his zombie daughter chained and locked in a barn, unable to accept the irreversibility of her fate (an incident which was enacted on screen near the climax of the series’s second season). Here, Andrea’s willingness to dispatch Amy is a sign of her determination to live.

The comic explores Jim’s death, by contrast, in more depth. Jim’s family had been lost in a previous zombie attack: Jim was able to escape because the zombies were so distracted eating his other family members. The book’s Jim is a loner who has not forged intimate bonds with the others, but who aggressively defends the camp during the zombie attack. In the comic, Jim is so overwrought with guilt and anger that he smashes one zombie’s skull to a pulp. In the television series, this action is shifted onto an abused wife who undergoes a cathartic breakdown while preparing her dead husband for burial. On the one hand, this shift gave a powerful payoff for a new subplot built on the comic’s discussion of how the zombie attacks had shifted traditional gender politics and on the other, it allowed a tighter focus on Jim’s slow acceptance of the prospect of becoming a zombie.

In both media, Jim initially hides the reality of being bitten from the other campers. Finally, he breaks down when someone notices his wounds. While the producers used the comic as a visual reference for this iconic moment, there are also substantial differences in the staging, including the shift of the bite from Jim’s arm to his stomach and the ways the other campers manhandle him to reveal the bite.

Jim’s story conveys the dread with which a bitten human begins preparing for a transformation into a zombie. In both the comic and the television series, Jim asks to be left, propped up against a tree so that he might rejoin his family when the inevitable change comes. Here, again, the television series elaborates on these basic plot details, prolonging his transformation to show the conflicting attitudes of the other campers to his choice. The television series is far more explicit than the comic about parallels with contemporary debates about the right of the terminally ill to control the terms of their own death.

In both sets of changes highlighted here, the television series remains true to the spirit of the original comic if not to the letter—especially in its focus on the processes of mourning and loss and the consequences of violence, both often overlooked in traditional horror narratives. Both represent elaborations and extensions of elements from the original book. And both link these personal narratives with the community’s collective experience, as in the scene where many from the camp say goodbye to Jim as he lies against a tree awaiting his fate. Some offer him comfort, others walk past unable to speak.

On the other hand, two other “Wildfire” plotlines represent more decisive breaks with the comics—the confrontation between Shane and Rick and the introduction of the Center for Disease Control. Rick had been cut off from his wife and son when Shane, his best friend, helped them escape, while Rick was lying comatose in the hospital. Believing Rick dead, Laurie and Shane couple until Rick finds his way back to his family. In Kirkman’s original, Dale warns Rick that Shane made advances on Laurie. In the television series, Rick has no idea of the potential infidelity, but the audience knows that Shane and Laurie have made love. In the graphic novel, the two men go out to the woods to have it out. In the final panels of the first graphic novel, Shane attempts to kill Rick and is shot in the head by Rick’s 8-year-old son, Carl. The boy collapses in his father’s arms and says, “It’s not the same as killing the dead ones, Daddy.” Rick responds, “It never should be, Son. It never should be.”

In “Wildfire,” tension mounts throughout the episode as the two men clash over what the group should do next. Both turn to Laurie for moral support, which she is unable to offer, instead saying, “Neither one of you were entirely wrong.” In the television version, Shane initially mistakes Rick for a deer in the woods until he has his friend in his gun sights and then finds himself unable to draw down. Dale, rather than Carl, comes upon the two men, ending Shane’s moral dilemma. When he returns from the woods, Shane seems ready to accept Rick’s leadership. Shane’s survival represents a decisive shift from the original, though by the season’s end, its ramifications were not clear. Perhaps this is a case where Kirkman saw unrealized potentials that, given a chance, he wanted to mine more deeply.

But, in removing Carl from the scene, the television producers could be accused of pulling punches, given how central the sequence of the young boy shooting the adult male (and its refusal to engage in sentimental constructions of childhood innocence) had been in the comic’s initial reception. Carl’s repeated brushes with violence, and his willingness to take action when adults hesitate, is a recurring motif throughout the books. If the comics often shocked readers by abruptly killing off long established characters, here the producers surprised some viewers by refusing to kill a character whose death represented an early turning point in the comics.

The visit to the Center for Disease Control, which is introduced in the closing scenes of “Wildfire” and becomes the focus for the season’s final episode, “TS-19,” has no direct counterpart in the comic book series. One of the hard and fast rules Kirkman established in the comics was that he was never going to provide a rational explanation for how the zombie outbreak occurred. As Kirkman argues in an early letter column:

As far as the explanation for the zombies go, I think that aside from the zombies being in the book, this is a fairly realistic story, and that’s what makes it work. The people do real things, and it’s all very down to Earth... almost normal. ANY explanation would be borderline science fiction... and it would disrupt the normalness. In my mind, the story has moved on. I’m more interested in what happens next then what happened before that caused it all.[3]

One reason Kirkman has Rick in a coma at the comic series start is so that the audience is not exposed to the inevitable theorizing which would surround a society coping with such a catastrophe. ( A web series, produced for the launch of the second season, further explored what had happened when Rick was in his coma, offering a range of contradictory possible explanations for the zombie epidemic.)

Many fans were anxious about the introduction of the CDC subplot, which implied a medical explanation. At the same time, the closing scenes at the CDC also represent the first time we’ve cut away from Rick or the other members of his party to see another perspective on the unfolding events (in this case, that of a exhausted and suicidal scientist). For both reasons, many fans saw this subplot as another dramatic break with the spirit of the comic.

And it came at an unfortunate moment—at the end of the abbreviated first season, as the last taste before an almost year-long hiatus. If the series’ publicity and presentation had largely reassured long time readers that the series would follow the established “rules,” these final developments cost the producers some hard-won credibility, especially when coupled with news that the production company had fired most of the staff writers who worked on the first season, that AMC was reducing the budget per episode for the series, and that producer Frank Darbout was also leaving under duress.

By this point, The Walking Dead was the biggest ratings success in AMC’s history, leaving many comics fans to worry whether their support was still necessary for the series’ success. It would not be the first time that a series acknowledged a cult audience’s support only long enough to expand its following, and then pivoted to focus on the new viewers who constituted the bulk of its rating points.

As this Walking Dead example suggests, there is no easy path for adapting this material for the small screen. There are strong connections between the ways seriality works in comics and television, but also significant differences that make a one-to-one mapping less desirable than it might seem. Television producers want to leave their own marks on the material by exploring new paths to occasionally surprise their loyal fans. The challenge is how to make these adjustments consistent not with the details of the original stories, but with their “ground rules,” the underlying logic, and one good place to look to watch this informal “contract” between reader and creators take shape is through the letter columns published in the back of the comics. It is through this process that the producers can help figure out what they owe to the comics and to their readers.

Further Reading

Gordon, Ian, Mark Jancovich, and Matthew P. McAllister, eds.  Film and Comic Books 

(Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2007)

Jones, Matthew T.  Found in Translation:  Structural and Cognitive Aspects of the Adaptation of Comic Art to Film (Saarbrücken:  VDM Verlag, 2009)

Pustz, Matthew. Comic Book Culture: Fan Boys and True Believers (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2000).

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[1] Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead Vol. 1: Days Gone By (New York: Image, 2006).

[2] Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Bill Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 195-220.

[3] Robert Kirkman, “Letter Hacks,” The Walking Dead 8, July 2004.

A Whale Of A Tale!: Ricardo Pitts-Wiley Brings Mixed Magic to LA

Last February, I announced here the release of Reading in a Participatory Culture, a print book, and Flows of Reading, a d-book extension, both focused around work my teams (first at MIT and then at USC) have done exploring how we might help educators and students learn about literary works through actively remixing them. Our central case study has been the work of playwright-actor-educator Ricardo Pitts-Wiley from the Mixed Magic Theater, who was successful at getting incarcerated youth to read and engage with Herman Melville's Moby-Dick by having them re-imagine and re-write it for the 21st century. You can read more about this project here. And you can check out the Flows of Reading d-book for free here. 

If you live in Los Angeles, you have a chance to learn more about Pitts-Wiley and his work first hand. I've been able to bring Ricardo for a residency at USC this fall, which will start with a public event at the Los Angeles Public Library on September 26. Ricardo is going to be recruiting a mixed race cast of high school and college aged actors from across the Los Angeles area and producing a staged reading of his play, Moby-Dick: Then and Now, which will be performed as part of a USC Visions and Voices event on Oct. 11th. You can get full details of both events below. I hope to see some of you there. We are already hearing from all kinds of artists here in Southern California who have sought creative inspiration from Melville's novel and used it as a springboard for their own work. But you don't have to love the great white whale to benefit from our approach to teaching traditional literary works in a digital culture, and we encourage teachers and educators of all kinds to explore how they might apply our model to thinking about many other cultural texts.

For those who live on the East Coast, our team will also be speaking and doing workshops at the National Writing Project's national conference in Boston on Nov. 21.

Thursday, September 26, 2013 7:15 PM

Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library

Thu, Sep 26, 7:15 PM [ALOUD]

Remixing Moby Dick: Media Studies Meets the Great White Whale 

Henry Jenkins, Wyn Kelley, and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley

Over a multi-year collaboration, playwright and director Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, Melville scholar Wyn Kelley, and media expert Henry Jenkins have developed a new approach for teaching Moby-Dick in the age of YouTube and hip-hop. They will explore how "learning through remixing" can speak to contemporary youth, why Melville might be understood as the master mash-up artist of the 19th century, and what might have happened if Captain Ahab had been a 21st century gang leader.

* Part of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Public Library’s month-long citywide initiative "What Ever Happened to Moby Dick?"

Henry Jenkins is Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has written and edited more than fifteen books on media and popular culture, including Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. His other published works reflect the wide range of his research interests, touching on democracy and new media, the “wow factor” of popular culture, science-fiction fan communities, and the early history of film comedy. His most recent book, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the Literature Classroom was written with Wyn Kelley, Katie Clinton, Jenna McWilliams, Erin Reilly, and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley.

Wyn Kelley teaches in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York and of Herman Melville: An Introduction. She also co-author Reading in a Participatory Culture: Re-Mixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom with Henry Jenkins and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley. She is former Associate Editor of the Melville Society journal Leviathan, and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville. A founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project, she has collaborated with the New Bedford Whaling Museum on lecture series, conferences, exhibits, and a scholarly archive. She serves as Associate Director ofMEL (Melville Electronic Library), an NEH-supported interactive digital archive for reading, editing, and visualizing Melville’s texts.

Ricardo Pitts-Wiley is the co-founder of the Mixed Magic Theatre, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to presenting a diversity of cultural and ethnic images and ideas on the stage. While serving as Mixed Magic Theatre’s director, Pitts-Wiley gained national and international acclaim for his page-to-stage adaptation of Moby Dick, titled Moby Dick: Then and Now. This production, which was presented at the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, is the centerpiece of a national teachers study guide and is featured in the book, Reading in A Participatory Culture. In addition to his work as an adapter of classic literature Pitts-Wiley is also the composer of over 150 songs and the author of 12 plays with music including:Waiting for Bessie Smith, Celebrations: An African Odyssey, andThe Spirit Warrior’s Dream.

Reservation Policy for Free Programs: As most [ALOUD] at Central Library programs are free of charge, it is our policy to overbook. In the case of a FULL program your free reservation may not guarantee admission. We recommend arriving early. Space permitting, unclaimed reservations will be released to standby patrons at 7 PM. 

Book signings ALOUD is one of the many free programs the Library Foundation makes possible at the Los Angeles Public Library. Most ALOUD author programs are followed by book signings.  To help sustain this valuable cultural exchange, at least one copy of the author’s book must be purchased from the Library Store if you wish to participate in the post-program book signing. Proceeds support the Los Angeles Public Library.  Library Foundation members receive a 15% discount on all Library Store purchases.

From Page to Stage: Moby-Dick: Then and Now Featuring Ricardo Pitts-Wiley and Mixed Magic Theatre Visions and Voices
	Friday, October 11, 2013 : 7:00pm University Park Campus Annenberg Auditorium (ASC) Reception to follow. Admission is free. Reservations required. RSVP at the links below beginning Tuesday, September 17, at 9 a.m. USC Students, Staff and Faculty: To RSVP,click here. General Public: To RSVP, click here.
The fateful voyage of the Pequod and its revenge-obsessed Captain Ahab is reimagined in Moby Dick: Then and Now. Alba, a young woman in contemporary urban America, is hell-bent on avenging the gang-related death of her brother Pip in this adaptation of Herman Melville’s classic American novel. Moby Dick: Then and Now emerged through Ricardo Pitts-Wiley’s work with incarcerated youth at the Rhode Island Training School, a juvenile prison. Pitts-Wiley, an actor, director, playwright and composer with Mixed Magic Theatre, encouraged the youth to read and rewrite this challenging novel in relation to their own realities. The 19th-century whaling trade became the 21st-century drug trade, and the young writers’ creativity inspired the stage production, which remixed Melville’s language with hip hop. Pitts-Wiley’s approach is featured in the new book Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom, co-written by USC professor Henry Jenkins. This staged reading will feature student actors from USC and local high schools. Henry Jenkins will moderate a post-show discussion with Pitts-Wiley and the cast. Organized by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Co-sponsored by the USC School of Dramatic Arts. For further information on this event: visionsandvoices@usc.edu

What Do We Know About Participatory Cultures: An Interview with Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (Part Two)

As you note, the term, "participatory culture," can be seen as emerging from the cultural studies tradition, but there is also a strong history of writing about "participatory politics." Are these separate conversations? What might these two strands of research have to say to each other?

The participation conversation is a very broad one, and rightly noted, one that has ebbed and flowed across the centuries.  Rather than the concept of participation, it is the dominant focus of the participation that is unique to the time period - political participation, economic participation, social action.  Of course, even when one topic dominated the push for participation, thousands of smaller participatory cultures also thrived around issues such as crafting, gamesmanship, agriculture, and invention.  The communication technologies of this century have simply divided and amplified the topics allowing many more participatory cultures to flourish in unison.

Some have argued that all cultures are by definition participatory. What distinguishes contemporary forms of participatory culture from their predecessors within, say, folk culture?

Participatory cultures are not new.  They are simply the most recent manifestation of human's desire to be a part of something. One of the reasons there is so much attention placed on participatory cultures now is that they are starkly contrasted by the postmodern theories that immediately preceded them.  Postmodern theorists valued resistance, disruption and divergence, while participatory cultures value contribution and collaboration.  Today's participatory cultures are both uniquely new and comfortably traditional venues – like returning to your family home for Thanksgiving to find your bedroom is the new home office.

Writing about participatory culture poses a different set of questions than writing about audience resistance, a concept that dominated cultural studies a few decades ago. Resistance to what? Participation in what? What are some of the current models for describing what people "participate" in when they are part of a participatory culture? Is participatory culture necessarily a collective phenomenon or does it make sense to talk about participating as an individual?

The concept of audience resistance played an important role in cultural studies, but the notion of resistance seems almost quaint when one considers the nature of political, economic, and cultural power in the early 21^st century. As individual citizens, each one of us is situated within multiple power networks.

In many instances (e.g. the physical borders of the nation-state, the globally dispersed contours of global capitalism), power relationships are imposed upon us at birth. We might be proud to be Americans (or Chinese or Canadians), but our national pride is a lucky accident. The physical coordinates of our birthplace and the citizenship status of our parents determine our initial location in the networks of state power. Financial power networks are also imposed upon us; we are born into capitalism. We might choose to remedy the shortcomings of the economic status quo by building alternative exchange networks (e.g. farmers markets, cooperatives, gift economies, remix culture), but it is almost impossible to completely subtract ourselves from the domination of global capital.

The good news is that we can also situate ourselves in political, economic, and cultural power networks of our own choosing. This is hardly a new phenomenon – Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated free associations in Democracy in America as far back as 1835 – but the emergence of the global Internet and affiliated communication technologies has accelerated our ability to create alternative networks from the ground up at the same time that we work to transform dominant institutions.

Is participation necessarily a collective phenomenon? To the extent that we participate in networks with other human beings, there is always a collective dimension. We engage, we share, we mentor, we feel connected, and we care about what other members of the community think. This is necessarily social.

However, the decision about which networks we select as meaningful outlets for participation is almost always an individual decision. If we truly value participatory culture, we must recognize the right of individuals to choose to not participate.

Pedagogical concerns remain central to these discussions, if we are to insure that the widest possible range of people have access to the skills and resources they need to meaningfully participate. What insights might the book offer to educators who want to bring more participatory practices to schools, libraries, and other public institutions?

The difficult part about participatory pedagogy is that educators must be willing to relinquish absolute control over the conversation.  For a very long time, especially in Western educational settings, teachers were situated at the top of hierarchical learning models. In educational participatory cultures, learning does not necessarily happen quickly, it is not delivered in a tidy, self-contained package, and it certainly does not conform to government standards.  Learning emerges from the conversational and collaborative journey; it is not located in "the correct answer to the teacher's question." Members of participatory cultures find their own way to solutions, often not by the most direct or conventional paths.

Your book discusses practices such as participatory budgeting which involve the interface between citizens and governments. What has been the track record so far for such initiatives? What are the biggest challenges in opening existing institutions to greater forms of democratic participation?

Neither of us are experts in participatory budgeting, but we were encouraged to see related panels at the SXSW Interactive Conference this year in Austin. For example, one panel focused on participatory budgeting and the use of crowdsourcing to determine how government funds should be spent.  To date, most of the successful initiatives have taken place in Latin America and Europe.  It was heartening to see similar discussions in the United States.

Aaron Alan Delwiche (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University. His research interests include participatory culture, intergenerational gaming, and wearable computing. In 2009, with support from the Lennox Foundation, he organized the lecture series Reality Hackers: The Next Wave of Media Revolutionaries. In 2010, he delivered a talk titled "We are all programmers now" at TEDx San Antonio. He is also co-editor of the The Participatory Cultures Handbook (2012).

Dr. Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.  Her research addresses the boundaries of speech in media and participatory cultures as well as the ethics of this speech.  Jennifer is the author of the 2010 book Defending the Good News: The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Their Plan to Expand the First Amendment and co-editor of the The Participatory Cultures Handbook (2012).

What Do We Now Know About Participatory Cultures: An Interview with Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (Part One)

I am happy today to be introducing Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson, the editors of an important new anthology, The Participatory Cultures Handbook. Anyone who has followed this blog over the years will recognize the names of many of the contributors to this collection, which includes Christopher M Kelty, Jason Mittell, Suzanne Scott, Mia Consalvo, Benjamin Stokes, Owen Gallagher, Pierre Levy, Daren Brabham, Howard Rheingold, Barry Joseph, and Paul Taylor, among many others, each represented by an original essay which expands their earlier writings on this topic and seeks to contribute to a larger conversation about the nature of participation (cultural, political, educational) in the early 21st century. The core topics include collective intelligence, new media literacies, crowd-sourcing, participatory democracy, fandom, serious games, blogging, and the digital arts, among much much more. In short, there's something in this book which will speak to pretty much anyone who regularly checks out this blog. I have been raiding this book for my teaching and my writing ever since I first got my hands on it, and my students have found it a valuable resource for a broad range of projects. (Full disclosure: I have a short essay in this collection written in conversation with Suzanne Scott about her work on contemporary "fan boy auteurs." Both essays add some more specificity to oft-made claims about the blurring boundary between fan and author.) Over the next few posts, I am going to be grilling Delwiche and Henderson about some of the core themes that cut across the collection. I have to admit that I had a lot of fun framing these questions, since many of them are questions I am often asked in other interviews or that I am currently struggling with in my own work, and the two editors do a great job of putting forth some original reflections about these core and recurring concerns that we all confront as we seek to better understanding the participatory turn in contemporary culture. From my perspective, their responses, like the book itself, strikes an appropriate balance, embracing the collective push towards greater and more meaningful participation while also expressing skepticism about the ways that the term has been taken up and deployed rhetorically by a range of powerful and entrenched institutions. They welcome both writers who are excited about contemporary developments and those who offer strong critiques of some of the underlying assumptions driving this work. In the end, their work brings much greater rigor to our understanding of participatory culture, both by expanding the range of case studies we have to work with and pushing for more precise distinctions between different models of participatory practice.

The book includes a range of different practices, from those associated with fandom to those associated with crowd sourcing or community organizing or citizen science or digital poetry. How are you defining the core concept of participatory culture?

In The Participatory Cultures Handbook, we use the definition of participatory culture from the 2006 white paper Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century that you and your co-authors wrote for the MacArthur Foundation. As a starting point, we rely on your explanation that participatory cultures are characterized by "relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of information mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices" (p. 7). A participatory culture "is also one in which members believe that their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connectedness with one another (at least they care what other people think about what they have created" (p. 7).

After completing the book, we would now suggest there are three primary kinds of participatory cultures: consensus cultures, creative cultures, and discussion cultures.  While we acknowledge these are fuzzy categories, they do offer a structure for thinking about what it means to participate. We believe the nature of participatory cultures shifts just as it does in real world settings where cultures are shaped by venue, topic, participants, and interest level.

The most traditionally "productive" participatory cultures are often consensus cultures, or agreement-based.  They frequently reside in the realm of "work" where there is a goal or outcome to be met.  Something must be completed or solved or fixed.  These could easily be subdivided into expert cultures where people with specialized knowledge join together to leverage the power of collective intelligence and democratic cultures where "average citizens" do the same thing.  In the book, chapters about CERN and crisis mapping tend to the former while those about participatory budgeting tend to the latter.

Creative cultures are those in which participants are encouraged to create, share, and comment all within a safe and supportive environment.  Remix cultures live in this space, as do art and writing cultures.  The creative portion of fan cultures reside here – the fan fiction and fan-art sub-sites, for example.  In these spaces, participants are passionate about their creativity and the topics that spur those passions.  They are often lifers, who join a culture and stick with it.

Discussion cultures are ones where a topic rather than an outcome is at the heart of participation.  Sports fandoms, news sites, and food blogs all fall within the realm of discussion cultures.  Here, we often see more disagreement than support with participants engaging in sometimes heated, often real-time, exchanges on topics of personal and professional interest.  Participants in discussion cultures are not always long-time residents; they often roam from site to site as they chase the topic.

­­I have been seeing increased skepticism about the concept of participatory culture as a rhetoric of participation gets applied to many different sets of relationships between consumers and commercial interests. What qualities need to be in place before meaningful participation may occur?

This skepticism is well founded. One can think of many instances in which organizations use the rhetoric of participation to legitimize non-participatory relationships. This often happens when commercial interests leverage participatory culture practices to promote marketing goals (e.g., crowdsourcing slogans for a new flavor of tortilla chips), but corporations are not the only entities that attempt to pass off faux-participation as something more meaningful. The rhetoric of participation is regularly applied (and misapplied) to relationships between governments and citizens, as well as to relationships between activist groups and their members. This happens in groups of all sizes -- from smaller community groups to national political associations.

In some ways, the pretense of participation is more troubling than the absence of participation. When authentic participatory energy turns out to be little more than democratic window dressing for top-down decision-making, those who devoted time and energy to the process might walk away feeling cynical, hopeless, and discouraged. This is why it is so important for us to ask questions about participatory procedures.

To what extent can the objectives of a participatory project be defined and refined by all participants? If the power to articulate project goals is concentrated in a handful of individuals, the process does not deliver meaningful participation.

To what extent are participants' contributions filtered and edited before they are shared with the broader community? Often, organizations include "talk back" sections on institutional web sites; these components give the appearance of engaged member feedback. However, when one takes a closer look, it becomes clear that user comments are carefully filtered before they are posted. Meaningful participation is inversely proportional to the extent of censorship and editorial control.

It is true that there might be some situations in which community moderation is necessary – for example, in participatory communities that include minors. In these instances, participants have every right to scrutinize the transparency of moderation practices.

Some would argue that meaningful participation is a binary concept: it exists or it does not. However, it might be more useful -- and more realistic -- to think of participatory culture in analog terms. Some processes offer more authentic participation than others, and we should agitate for arrangements that are as close to the participatory ideal as possible.  There are times when we can only nudge. There are times when we push harder. And, every once in a while, as Mario Savio reminds us, "you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… upon all the levers, upon all the apparatus… and you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people that own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

Some argue that opportunities for meaningful participation still rest almost exclusively within groups which have enjoyed various forms of privilege in the past -- especially those within elite or dominant segments of the population. What do we know about inequalities in opportunities to participate? Are there compelling cases of participation "from the bottom" and what lessons might we learn from these examples that would help us broaden opportunities for participation?

Privileged elites have always had greater access to participatory technologies and political structures. In Athens, direct democracy was erected on the backs of women and slaves who were excluded from the polis. In America, representative democracy was erected on the backs of women and slaves who were excluded from the voting booth. Thankfully, the history of democratic institutions is progressive, and more people have access to participatory culture than ever before.

This progress stems directly from the fact that disenfranchised human beings have agitated for full and equal participation, often risking their lives in the process. The most crucial battles for civil rights have been waged "from the bottom" by networks of individuals who have wrestled communication tools (literacy, the printing press, radio, music, film, video, computers) from the hands of elites. In turn, activists have used these tools to penetrate and transform political and economic systems in which they are located.

How can we broaden the opportunities for meaningful participation? First, we should nurture media literacy projects at all levels of society, making sure to address what you termed "the participation gap" in the report (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture) that you co-authored for the MacArthur Foundation. In practical terms, this means fostering the competencies and social skills identified in the report: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation.

However, redefining media literacy to include an emphasis on skills required for participation is only the first step. If we want to preserve and extend opportunities for participation, we must broaden our thinking about the term "digital literacy." It is no longer sufficient for citizens to understand how to use computers; we must also learn how to program the machines that rule our lives.

If we continue to accept technological gadgets and protocols as neutral gifts from benevolent technical elites, we pave the way for our future subjugation. As Douglas Rushkoff observes in Program or Be Programmed, digital technologies are always embedded with external purposes. "They act with intention," he warns. "If we don't know how they work, we won't even know what they want. The less involved and aware we are of the way our technologies are programmed and program themselves, the more narrow our choices will become; the less we will be able to envision alternatives to the pathways described by our programs; and the more our lives and experiences will be dictated by their biases" (p. 148-149).

Scholars and activists often mystify digital technologies even as they celebrate them. We convince ourselves that computer programming is conceptually difficult or ideologically suspect. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is not difficult to learn basic programming, and it is easy to master the fundamental concepts that empower us to "speak back" to technology. Yet, even as progressive iterations of computer programming languages become more and more accessible, our fellow citizens seem increasingly willing to think of themselves as users rather than programmers – as consumers rather than coders.

It is only possible to sustain and broaden participatory culture for all citizens if we take up this challenge. If we dodge this responsibility – if we fail to teach our neighbors and ourselves how to program, and thus control, the ubiquitous machines that regulate our lives – we squander the accomplishments of those who have fought to expand the boundaries of participatory culture throughout human history.

We are all programmers now. Or, at least we can be, if we are willing to try.

Aaron Alan Delwiche (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University. His research interests include participatory culture, intergenerational gaming, and wearable computing. In 2009, with support from the Lennox Foundation, he organized the lecture series Reality Hackers: The Next Wave of Media Revolutionaries. In 2010, he delivered a talk titled "We are all programmers now" at TEDx San Antonio. He is also co-editor of the The Participatory Cultures Handbook (2012).

Dr. Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.  Her research addresses the boundaries of speech in media and participatory cultures as well as the ethics of this speech.  Jennifer is the author of the 2010 book Defending the Good News: The Jehovah’s Witnesses and Their Plan to Expand the First Amendment and co-editor of the The Participatory Cultures Handbook (2012).

"Same Old Shit!": Fan Resistance at Wrestlemania 29 (Part Two)

 

The best wrestling performers know how to work with the audience, pumping them up or reacting on the fly to their moods. When we visited the Fan Axxcess event the day before, we saw some of the wrestlers from the WWE’s NXT school training. You could see that they were all working to learn how to communicate emotions through broad gestures and facial expressions that could be read by fans on the other side of the auditorium; they were working to develop a recognizable personality through which they could deliver those stock gestures and devices. And we saw people at various stages of development, including a few who had appeared prematurely on the WWE’s main stage and then been sent back down for retooling because they couldn’t deliver what was expected of them. For the most part, they were performing in character, but not really reaching across the fourth wall and engaging with the audience.

A great wrestler knows how to pull that off. I was impressed, again, with the melodramatic elements of the Jack Swagger vs. Alberto Del Rio match. Here, we saw a kind of classic “agit-prop.”

When I got pulled into WWE years ago, it was by waking up on a Saturday morning to hear the show-down between Hulk Hogan and Sgt. Slaughter. Slaughter was an American soldier who had been brainwashed by the Iraqis; Hulk was seeking to protect the American spirit and inspire the young “Hulkamaniacs,” especially those whose parents were fighting overseas. This was in the midst of the first Gulf War, and the storyline seemed well designed to play upon the emotions of the spectators.

The Swagger fight was equally of-the-moment: Swagger and his manager, Zeb Colter, represent the Tea Party. Their patter emphasizes the nativist side of the Tea Party. They wrap themselves in the American Flag and chant “We the People,” yet they are militantly anti-immigrant. So, in New Jersey, they rode out in a military vehicle and Zeb began to denounce people who speak Spanish, Italian, Greek, and finally, Yiddish, with the crowd booing louder and louder with each new prejudice. Then, Del Rio was introduced as a Mexican-American success story, reading aloud the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, and talking about how much he loves his new country. The effect on the crowd around us was visceral. For the most part, the crowd was playing their parts, booing the Tea Party and cheering the Mexicans. Add to this mix Del Rio’s announcer, Ricardo Rodriguez, who wobbled out on crutches, having been mercilessly attacked by Swagger on Raw a few weeks before, and you had a classic melodrama.

I was struck by two specific fans in the crowd. Behind us, there was a massive black guy who was standing up on his seat and chanting “white power” in response to Swagger. It was clearly a self-consciously ironic performance. But, then, across the aisle from us, there was this knot-head who keep chanting “USA, USA, USA”, and it was not clear to me where he was coming from. We were holding up a sign which jokingly read, “If Swagger wins I’ll move to Canada”. He was enraged that we were holding up a Canadian sign. I definitely thought from the way he harassed us that he might well be celebrating Swagger without any sense that he was the heel in this particular match. But here, the line between reality and performance was blurred beyond recognition.

I thought Cena’s performance on Raw after Wrestlemania was striking. It’s clear he knows that many of the hardcore fans don’t like him, and he was playing into this, giving people reasons to boo and reasons to cheer in more or less equal measures. Above all, he was seeking to bring on the heat and provoke as loud of a reaction as he could.

It’s the most dignified thing he can do. Most of those fans aren’t going to cheer for him. If he begs for their approval then he’ll look pathetic. By re-framing the boos as a sign of his success or proof of the fans’ passion for him he saves some face.

I’ve found the Del Rio-Swagger feud to be very polarizing among fans. Trust me: I wish the audience was eating it up. I like it. But here’s what I see instead: Everyone has a different opinion. Some fans like us think it’s a cool story and admire the way all of the performers are playing their parts. Other fans think the whole story is in poor taste. They say they watch escapist TV to get away from the ugliness, racism and political deadlock of the evening news. Some fans feel offended by Del Rio’s Mexican character because they view him as a stereotypical immigrant. Others – perhaps like the bald dickhead who was yelling at you for waving a Canada sign - more or less agree with Jack Swagger’s frustration with immigrants, or refuse to boo the USA and cheer Mexico. From an artistic standpoint I think it’s great that this story is challenging the audience. The WWE should be telling this story. But the result has been that crowds been restless, and their vocal reaction has been kind of muddled. You’re hearing weak boos for Swagger intermingling with weak “USA! USA!” chants. None of that reads well on TV.

As for the minor league wrestlers from NXT I agree with everything you said. It’s very cool to see these guys so early in their careers. All of today’s top superstars, including John Cena, The Rock and CM Punk, trained somewhere. There is an audience of fans out there who is even more interested in watching unknown athletes in the small independent wrestling promotions than in watching the established stars, and for much the same reasons that there’s an audience might prefer home town indy rockers to famous pop stars. They can watch the action really close up, even catch a few words with them in between performances. Pose for a picture, sign an autograph. Scout the talent. There’s a romance and simplicity to the trainees. They’re sacrificing a lot for their dream. I don’t personally focus on indy wrestling. I only have so many hours to devote to wrestling, and I prefer the grand spectacle of the WWE. But I get why so many fans prefer the indies.

Yes, like any other fandom, the WWE fans incorporate a range of interests and different forms of subcultural knowledge. In many fandoms, the result is fragmentation and individualization. Yet, this may be one of the reasons I am so interested in the collective dimensions of fan response – the shouts and chants at the match require a high degree of cooperation. There are certainly moments where two fractions play against each other in a kind of call-response fashion. So, “Let’s Go Cena” is followed by “Cena Sucks” or “Undertaker” is followed by “CM Punk”, with two sides working together to create a rhythmic dialogue. There are other times these factions are set against each other with boos and cheers trying to drown each other out.

Yet, often, everyone joins in a shared response – or at least a large segment of the crowd does. That response may represent a consensus which has been hammered out online and then expressed spontaneously at ringside. So, “boring” may be an aesthetic reaction to the performance, but it seems grounded in shared criteria, or “same old shit” seems like a spontaneous response to the scripting and the plot, but it often reflects the fans’ disappoint that the more imaginative speculations discussed online haven’t panned out. Some of the chants represent the shared lore of the wrestling fans, so they may chant the name of the referees or the announcers, rather than the wrestlers in the ring, and that seems to require a deeper, inside knowledge than most casual fans would possess.

There seem to be certain basic chants which may persist even when the wrestlers they are associated with are no longer performing. It seems the crowd will use any excuse to go into Ric Flair’s characteristic hooting sound. At the same time, we can see processes which support innovation. So, someone may try out a new chant or gesture. If it seems to express something the crowd cares about at that moment, it may start to spread really rapidly. Some of the best contributions become part of the collective repertoire and may resurface at other events around the country (especially if the chant is clearly audible on the television broadcast). As we’ve suggested, sometimes, this is about playing along with the official storyline and sometimes, it may be about resisting or playing against the dominant narrative.

All of this brings us to the now legendary crowd responses on the RAW after Wrestlemania. You and I, alas, had to fly back to LA for our respective jobs, though you caught some of that broadcast via the airplane’s media system (thank you, Virgin Atlantic) and I caught up with much of it on Tivo later. Can you share some of your impressions of what was going on there?

Let me answer that in a round-about way. Every year there are literally dozens of wrestling shows and conventions booked to coincide with Wrestlemania weekend. Virtually every regional/independent group in the country travels to the host city to perform at some small boxing gym or other dive. Past stars like Hulk Hogan and Bret Hart sell tickets for intimate Q&A sessions (to fund their retirement years.) WrestleCon is a whole fan convention which brings in past legends. A lot of these individual performances only draw 100 people. Then everyone comes together for Wrestlemania.

You’d think that the crowd response for the big event would be through the roof, but that’s usually not the case. Part of it’s the acoustics of the space. When you’re in an open-air venue like MetLife Stadium the crowd noise travels upward into the sky instead of echoing around an enclosed arena. Part of it’s that the core fanbase is already worn out from the past few days, and just wants to settle in and watch the show. It’s also harder to get 80,000 fans on the same page at the same time than it is to get 16,000 fans. So even when everyone’s saying the same thing, the left 40,000 people will be shouting it two seconds after the right 40,000 people, and the result is a wordless din.

There’s also a different audience who’s joining the “core” Internet fans there – families from the local area who don’t get very rowdy, or people from the area who don’t know much about wrestling and just come to see what all the fuss is about. They dilute the concentration of the raucous crowd, and to some degree shame the loudest fans into behaving themselves. Every time I’ve ever heard fans start chanting something profane at Wrestlemania someone sitting next to them has told them to watch their mouth.

The next night when the WWE tapes their weekly television show, RAW, everything is different. The curiosity seekers stay home. So do the families. They’ve spent all they’re going to spend. What’s left are 16,000 Internet fans (and 5 horrified “other people”) wedged into an enclosed basketball arena, with acoustics designed to echo. They see that as their chance to air their agenda in front of WWE management and a worldwide television audience: to show how united they are in support of some wrestlers, and how unanimously they detest others.

One of the most dramatic moments this year was when the crowd got fed up with a match between Sheamus and Randy Orton. Instead of cheering or booing either performer in the ring, they decided to show just how little they cared by chanting the referee’s name. “Mike Chioda! Mike Chioda!” Then they chanted for each of the television broadcasters, one at a time. Then they called for RVD, a wrestler who’s in TNA!, the WWE’s rival promotion. They even threw in a Mexican soccer chant used by indy wrestler El Generico. When a villain, The Big Show, prematurely ended the match by ambushing Sheamus and Randy Orton with a steel chair the crowd chanted “Thank you, Big Show! Thank you, Big Show!”

Later, the crowd decided to show their appreciation for Fandango, a young performer they wanted to elevate, by humming his orchestral theme song. Listening to the broadcast, you can hear the humming begin as a faint murmur. Then more and more people start doing it, until almost the entire 16,000 person audience is shouting full blast and dancing in their seats. When Fandango’s match ended after just a minute or so and the WWE tried to move on the crowd kept singing. They kept it up for almost the last half hour of the show, right through John Cena’s match. Every time it would die down someone would start it back up again. Even though the event was in New Jersey, a video came out a couple of days later of the Houston Texans NFL cheerleaders doing the Fandango song-and-dance in practice. PETA employees in animal costumes did it too. Even a weather man danced on the news. Now fans around the country are apt to follow suit. Someone mixed Fandango and the Peanuts gang. That’s spreadable media.

The crowd basically held the broadcast hostage. They did not let the WWE tell the story that management directed. They started telling a new story about how bored they were with the “same old shit” the WWE was trying to sell. I’m sad that we weren’t there for it. As rude and bossy as the Internet fans can be, I’m proud of them.

But here’s the truly sad part. Just a week later the WWE has already made Fandangoing the least cool thing there is. On RAW they brought out all of the marketing statistics and glossy PR videos about how many people are Fndangoing. Then they had Fandango try for 10 minutes to get the crowd to do the Fandango dance on cue. He looked more and more desperate as he screamed hoarsely over and over for people to get out of their seats. Instead of just letting Fandangoing be a fun thing the fans came up with they turned it into a corny marketing gimmick.

Even worse, rumor has it that the WWE is considering holding next year’s RAW after Wrestlemania in the Louisiana Superdome “to make it an even bigger event.” But as I’ve already explained, the acoustics of such a giant stadium, the difficulty of getting 80,000 to harmonize at once, and the presence of so many families is all apt to discourage next year’s crowd from acting so disobedient. If the rumor is true, then the WWE is either out of touch (possible), or machiavelian (very possible).

The WWE constantly pushes fans to social media on their shows, and pops up updates on the screen every time they trend on Twitter. They write in press releases that every live audience is a focus group, and that they have their finger on the pulse of their fanbase like no other producers in Hollywood. But it often doesn’t seem like they actually give a damn what fans are saying. They just care that the fans are marketing them free of charge on social media, and giving them impressive statistics that their PR people can distribute. If the fans don’t embarrass the WWE by making a mockery of their broadcasts I don’t think management is going to take them seriously. I’ll probably remain a fan for many years to come, and I’ll be at Wrestlemania next year. But I won’t be there to dance and sing when the corporate fat cats tell me to. I’ll go to experience natural emotions and shout my genuine opinions. That’s what pro wrestling is about.

Postscript: WWE referee Jimmy Korderas said in a podcast interview:

"I appreciate the fact that the fans who paid their hard-earned money come and enjoy themselves and they cheer and boo and chant for whomever they want. They only issue I had with the post-WrestleMania Monday night crowd was it got a little bit crazy and overboard where they did it to amuse themselves as opposed to being entertained with what was going on inside the ring. So, it was almost like ‘We don’t care what’s going on in the ring, it has nothing to do with what’s going on in the ring; we’re going to start chanting and almost kind of hijacking the show to some extent... To me, it didn’t feel like it fit with the actual presentation of the show... I just thought, like you said, it was more to entertain themselves than to be entertained by the festivities."

And this week's edition of Dave Meltzer's Wrestling Observer reports:

"Multiple WWE employees were upset with the crowd's unwelcoming reaction to Maria Menounos, particularly since they love affiliations with celebrities and with her subsequent letter acknowledging the negative response, it got out that a strong portion of their fanbase lack proper manners, refinement and decency."

Both of these items seem to show that wrestling employees expect their audience to "be entertained", "care about what's happening in the ring", and not be "unwelcoming." But fans expect the show to be entertaining and welcoming, and for the WWE to care about what's happening in the audience. I guess it could show a lack of 'manners, refinement and decency' if Rockne S. O'Bannon showed up at Paley Fest and the audience booed and chanted "Same old shit!" But it would seem even more ridiculous for Rockne to criticize his audience for not being entertained by his show. WWE Fans boo almost every time a celebrity comes on the show, and have for years. I can see how this puts Vince McMahon in an uncomfortable position with some of his business associates. But he's got a problem, because they're booing how corporate wrestling has become, and I think they'd like to sabotage those business relationships. That's definitely unfriendly. I just think the producers and their audience have irreconcilable differences in what they want.

As the World Stops Turning: A Conversation with Lynn Liccardo about Soap Operas (Part Three)

Much of your writing has focused on parallels between daytime serialized drama and the rise of "quality" shows, primetime dramas which marry serialized storytelling with higher budgets, deeper production values, and much shorter, season-based dramas which pack intense meaning into typically between 10 and 20 episodes in a season, as opposed to 260 episodes per year. What do you feel is the nature of the connection between today's critically acclaimed dramas on FX, AMC, HBO, Showtime, and elsewhere and the daytime serial drama?  

The success of early primetime serials like Dallas (1978) and Dynasty (1981) redefined the public perception of soap opera. Larger-than-life, over-the-top characters like J.R. Ewing and Alexis Carrington, who more resembled stock characters from the commedia dell'arte, than ATWT's Hughes family, were enormously entertaining to watch, but not because viewers found "meaning and resonance through a deeper connection."  And while Larry Hagman's (J.R) called Dallas as a cartoon rather than a soap opera, to the media and public these guilty pleasures were soaps simply by virtue of their seriality. The popularity of these primetime soaps coincided with Gloria Monty's transformation of General Hospital,, and had at least as profound an impact on daytime soaps. The spirit of Dallas and Dynasty continues in current primetime soaps Revenge and Scandal, and for the teenage demo, Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars.

The Best of J.R. Ewing from Dallas

The true heirs of ATWT comprise a long list of often critically-acclaimed, always ratings challenged, and ultimately short-lived serial dramas.  While thirtysomething may not have looked anything like ATWT, the the day-to-day lives of two baby boomer families, the Stedmans and Westons, mirrored those of the Hughes and Lowells 30 years earlier. Thirtysomething ran from 1987-91 and never rose above 40th in the ratings. Its very ordinariness (tensions between career and family, visiting parents, finding a babysitter) made it, and similar shows that followed (My So-Called Life, Joan of Arcadia, Jack and Bobby, Friday Night Lights, Men of a Certain Age, to name but a few), a challenge to promote effectively.

How networks schedule these quiet, slow-paced shows creates another obstacle. Broadcast network programmers, under pressure to win time slots, often shuffle their lineup, making it difficult for viewers to find these shows, which, unlike episodic television, need to be watched in order. Sometimes networks cancel them after a handful of episodes, creating a self-fulling prophecy when fans hear about a promising new serial drama, but fearing yet another heartbreak (not being hyperbolic here:), decide not to watch.

Since cable networks rarely pull a serial drama before the first order of episodes has aired, and are able to place the show in a fixed time slot followed by multiple repeats (sometimes even daylong marathons), viewers have ample opportunity to connect with these quiet, slow-paced shows. But there are still issues beyond the obvious disadvantages shorter seasons create for serial dramas: less time to fully develop characters and their relationships means less time to fully engage viewers. When networks pick up serials dramas, the creators face uncertainty about the number of episodes that can undermine the pace of the storytelling. After a 13-episode first season, Parenthood was picked up for 22 episodes, then renewed for a 18-episode third season and 15 for the fourth. Since the season often ends before the network has announced that the show has been renewed (or not), the season finale could well be the series finale.

Sometimes, scheduling uncertainty can cause a show's demise. When the first season of TNT's Men of a Certain Age ended in February 2010, the show was averaging 2.6 million viewers per episode, enough for the network to order an additional 12 episodes. After the episodes were completed, TNT decided to air them in two batches.  The first set of six episodes ended in January 2011, and the show was holding its own, averaging 2.4 million viewers. But TNT held the second set until June, when average viewership dropped to 1.5 million and the show was cancelled, a fate that might well have been avoided had all 12 episodes aired as the writers intended when they laid out the second season.

The real challenge is how to describe these quiet, slow-paced shows, which, by their very nature, defy brevity, and struggle even on premium cable, where In Treatment lasted three seasons on HBO and Enlightened is currently fighting to be heard over the noisier Girls and Showtime's Homeland. When Ray Romano pitched Men of a Certain Age to FX, he was told it "wasn't loud enough." The show wound up on TNT, where it never really fit in with the network' s other original programming, procedurals like The Closer, and the light-hearted Franklin and Bash. When Men... was cancelled, critic Alan Sepinwall admitted , "I don't always do the best job of articulating the greatness of this series, but it's there in those moments I described above, and so many more. It is a series about small details, and those details add up into big things: big laughs and big emotion; big pain and big joy."

Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano) has said that she always saw The Sopranos as a family drama. She's right; but take away the mob and what are the odds that The Sopranos would have been picked up, much less become a cultural phenomenon? Peter Horton (thirtysomethings's Gary) perfectly articulated the situation, describing how networks, cable and otherwise, are driven to create shows where something stands out: "'I'm a mother who sells pot,' (Weeds); 'I'm father, but I'm a meth dealer,' (Breaking Bad); 'I'm a gangster, but I have therapy,' (The Sopranos). There's always a but, whereas thirtysomething is about people," which is exactly how Irna Phillips described As the World Turns.

"Quiet" shows with no "buts" are the 21st-century manifestation of  the "your mother's soap opera" dilemma that ultimately doomed ATWT. The challenge facing today's vertical storytellers and programmers is to develop a brand evoking the appeal of "quiet" and the missing "but," that will stand out in an ever more crowded media landscape without compromising the integrity of the vertical storytelling axis. Developing that brand demands a more precise description and definition of vertical storytelling. That means first breaking down the characteristics of these shows at the elemental, even molecular level, a task hampered by the ambiguity of language that so flummoxed Alan Sepinwall. Virginia Heffernan's insightfull 2008 observation that Friday Night Lights "ferociously guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity," which limits "platforms for supplemental advertising" also applies to these shows, and adds to the challenge, and urgency, of developing a brand for them.

What are the most interesting experiments with soap opera storytelling that you feel are capturing the unique nature and potential of the "U.S. soap opera format" of storytelling?

And therein lies the fundamental (and vexing) question: what exactly is the unique nature of the "U. S. soap opera format?"  There's a vast difference between the public perception of soap opera as a melodramatic guilty pleasure populated with campy, over-the-top, plot-driven characters motivated by agendas rather than emotions, and mine. I would argue that soaps' unique nature lies in a narrative structure that emphasizes storytelling's vertical axis, revealing characters' interiority, their emotional and psychological back stories, and providing time for viewers to fully absorb that information. All of which creates the opportunity for viewers find meaning and resonance through a deeper connection to characters.

A conversation to be continued. But first, the economic realities and the toll they've taken on soap opera's unique nature.

From the time soaps moved from radio to television, the genre expanded: first adding the visual element, then growing from 15 minutes to a half hour, and in the late 1970s, to an hour . At the time, soaps were still a profit center for networks, and their budgets, while paltry compared to primetime shows, were sufficient to hire large casts with which writers wove rich, densely interconnected stories. After O.J., ratings took a hit from which they never recovered. Networks reduced the licensing fees they paid to the production companies, who cut the shows' budgets. There are a number of ways for producers to reduce the cost of on-screen talent (shifting highly-paid veterans to recurring status and reducing the guarantees for contract players), so smaller budgets didn't necessarily translate into fewer characters. What did happen was that there with fewer actors populating each episode, characters interacted less frequently, which limited opportunities for viewers to experience the full pleasure of the vertical axis. So, what had been a rich storytelling tapestry frayed and eventually shredded into the fragmented storytelling discussed above.

In July 2011, Prospect Park announced that they had acquired the online rights to two cancelled ABC soaps, All My Children and One Life to Live, and planned to launch the shows in early 2012. Grateful fans cheered and the mainstream media took note. But, PP's announcement was premature: they had not yet negotiated contracts with the unions, and their business plan, which retained the shows' hour format, failed to attract sufficient financing. When PP said they were suspending their efforts a few months later, most observers believed the deal was dead.

Fast-forward to last December: PP announced that they had negotiated collective bargain agreements with the guilds and secured sufficient financing to begin production in February. PP had lost a credibility with many fans when they suspended their initial effort, and not surprisingly, the reboot's reboot was met with skepticism (and barely a mention in the mainstream media). Initially, PP took a lot of heat on the boards, but as their plans solidified, veteran actors signed on and distribution deals were struck with Hulu and iTunes, fans began to believe (the mainstream media silence continues). Production began on February 25th.

What PP's done over the the past 18 months is what the networks and Procter & Gamble Productions ought to have been doing before soaps' economic model, so successful for so long, was no longer viable. It took PP to recognize that for soaps to survive into the 21st-century, the Web would have to be more than just an additional platform for showing and promoting shows, then come back from an initial failure to make it happen. Perhaps the most important aspect of this resurrection is that the online reboot streamlines the format: 30, rather than 60 minutes; four episodes a week, rather than five. No doubt scaling back helped to convince investors, but will PP recognize the opportunity it has to exploit the shorter format and recapture the unique nature of soaps that has been lost over the years? I'm encouraged by the relatively small, multi-generational (of the 14 contract players, eight are over 40; of the eight, two are over 50, four past 60) cast that's been assembled for One Life to Live. All of the characters are deeply-connected, with long histories between and among them, so the elements are in place for PP to turn economic necessity into the mother of reinvention. The rebooted AMC and OLTL are slated to premiere some time in April.

When Irna Phillips blazed the trail for serial drama in the 1950s, the television landscape was minuscule, three networks, and relatively expensive to enter -- the $10,000 cost of the ATWT pilot was twice the median household income at the time. Today, as the price of technology continues to drop, anyone can make and upload video to a media landscape incalculably larger than 60 years ago.  Since the mid-1990s, the Web has been flooded with mostly free content of varying quality, including an ever-increasing number of online serials designed to appeal to soap fans. Like their primetime counterparts, these Web-series are most often considered soap operas only by virtue of their seriality.  Despite barebones budgets and minimal monetization, many of these series, juggle large casts of characters squeezed into short (7-12 minute) episodes, limiting possibilities for deep viewers engagement. Only a handful have fully engaged my inner soap fan. My favorite, the critically acclaimed Anyone But Me, premiered in 2008 and ran for 26 episodes over three years before the series finale in January 2012.

Last May, while Prospect Park was off the grid getting its ducks in a row, there was a small news item on the We Love Soaps site announcing a new YouTube channel, WIGS: Where It Gets Interesting. The channel promised "high-end, original, scripted series, short films, and documentaries, all starring female leads." WIGS co-creator, Rodrigo Garcia, had long plumbed the vertical storytelling axis in films like Things You Tell Just By Looking At Her, Ten Tiny Love Stories and Nine Lives, along with  HBO's In Treatment. He brought the same sensibility to the work he created for WIGS.

Blue

Serena

 Celia

WIGS co-creator, filmmaker Jon Avnet, shares his partner's storytelling sensibility, but even more important is how the two men went about creating the channel. With first-round seed money from Google, WIGS  became an official YouTube channel, making the project attractive to media partner, News Corp, and advertisers, AMEX and Unilever. As the pieces fell into place, including collective bargaining agreements with the entertainment unions, Avnet and Garcia invited more than a dozen writers and directors to create projects built around a female lead. Established actors, aware that their industry is in flux, were eager to participate even if it meant working for scale.

Before WIGS went live on May 14, Avnet and Garcia had produced enough content to run three episodes a week for almost seven months. Enough time to build an audience: more than 25 million views and 110,000 subscribers. The first season of WIGS included a few documentaries and short films, but the channel's foundation was13 scripted serial dramas made up of 2-15 episodes running 7-10 minutes with small casts -- sometimes as few as two characters.

Last month, FOX Broadcasting signed a multi-year deal with WIGS "to expand the breadth of offerings through the WIGS channel, and test and nurture dramatic concepts and talent in the digital realm..with an eye toward building content that can be programmed on FOX and/or other channels." On March 15th, WIGS returns with a second season of Blue, followed later in the spring by the next installments of Lauren, and a new series Paloma.

Avnet and Garcia created WIGS specifically with women as the target audience. So, what to make of one commenter's question, "what does it say that I, a 35-year old man, find myself addicted to WIGS?" What to make of the substantial number of women who were (and are) deeply engaged fans of Friday Night Lights and Men of a Certain Age, both shows ostensibly for and about men? The appeal of vertical storytelling clearly transcends gender; what about other demographic markers? What are the characteristics of viewers drawn to the vertical storytelling axis?

These questions, and others yet to be articulated, need to be explored before vertical storytellers can identify and maximize their potential audience. The data generated by the 110,000+ WIGS subscribers contain essential information for brand development, which, properly analyzed, can also inform the qualitative insights necessary to fully identify viewership.

Where has this project led you? Now that you've put together a personal reflection on your relationship to As the World Turns, what's the next step in your ongoing research about the soap opera's place in our cultural history and in our contemporary culture?

Probably the most frustrating part of writing about soap opera has been the lack of a framework within which to consider soap opera's place in our contemporary culture. Identifying the underlying factors has been challenging because there's no hierarchical relationship among them. Over the past several years, I've posted over 100 short articles on my blog. This piece represents my first effort to begin crafting those pieces into a larger context; I've barely scratched the surface.

I first began writing about soaps as a fan. And it's as a fan, saddened and angered with the premature demise of show after show carrying on (consciously or not) the legacy that Irna Phillips began when she created As the World Turns, that I began exploring what it would take to carve out a place for this kind of storytelling in today's rapidly-shifting media landscape. Personal as my efforts have been, this work can only continue with the collaboration of media scholars and professionals along with institutional support.

On related fronts, I'm currently completing the syllabus for a class, "The Influence and Evolution of the American Soap Opera, I'll be pitching to Boston area schools, and considering the possibility of a book to follow.  Also in progress: a proposal for an Irna Phillips biography.

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning... Among her other publications are "Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps" (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); "Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera's single mother 1901-1973" (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University's Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA's Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

As the World Stopped Turning: A Conversation with Lynn Liccardo on Soap Operas (Part Two)

You provide a very personal account of your own gradual disconnect from enjoying and having an emotional engagement with As the World Turns. How would you describe your relationship to the show, both as a fan and as a critic, and how did that relationship evolve over time?

It's ironic, and no small testament to the power of its storytelling, that I became so deeply involved with ATWT: Since it aired on the East Coast at 1:30, while I was at school, I was far more familiar with, and have far more vivid memories of, Search for Tomorrow and Guiding Light, which were on when my sister and I came home for lunch in grammar school, and Another World, which I could see if I came straight home from junior high school.

I only got to watch ATWT on holidays, vacations and sick days, a pattern that continued after I moved to Boston in 1973, found a full time job and worked on my undergraduate degree at night. In those pre-VCR days, what I remember more than specific stories is the familiarity of the characters, who were always there when I was able to watch. That was until I took a year off (1982-3) to complete my degree.  While I had been peripherally aware of the General Hospital phenomenon, I had  no idea that GH's success was why the ATWT on my screen was so different from what I remembered.  But, I actually enjoyed what I saw and never considered abandoning the show. At the time, I was in advertisers' target demo, so from that perspective, the change in direction was a success.

But, while I was enjoying the ATWT's new direction, my mother was not. She missed the show she had loved for 25 years and eventually stopped watching. She wasn't the only one; the show lost more viewers than it gained and a couple of years later (1984-5) the Calhoun-Marland team righted the ship and the show rose in the ratings. But, without my mother, although she continued to watch GL.

After college, the combination of a flexible job and a VCR allowed me to become a serious fan. I was writing about nursing (like soaps, strongly associated with women and thereby marginalized. Also, like soaps' "not your mother's soap opera," nursing had internalized the belief that to be valued they had to become something else: "professional" nurses who didn't want to be seen as "that kind of nurse," dealing with bodily fluids at the bedside.")  While writing an article for Soap Opera Weekly on how nurses were portrayed on soaps I interviewed Doug Marland. A few months later, what was supposed to be a short news piece about CBS ending its head writer training program morphed into a longer article about the paths of three head writers (including Marland), which got me thinking seriously about soaps.

In 1995, I began pitching a piece to coincide with ATWT's 40th anniversary in 1996 to Smithsonian Magazine; it took over a year to convince the editor. By the time I arrived on the set in mid-March when the anniversary episode was taped, there was a new production team in place (see above) and the mantra of the executive producer, head writers and publicist was "we're not 40 years old, we're 40 years young."  I could see that things were falling apart, and while I could identify bits and pieces of what was wrong, I couldn't figure out how those pieces fit together (even if I could, I'm not sure Smithsonian would have been the right place), so I was forced to abandon the piece. I wrote one more article analyzing the demographics of soap opera audience, then turned my attention to writing a screenplay (isn't everyone:) and short plays.

It wasn't until Sam Ford asked me to be on his thesis committee in 2006 that I was able to begin identifying the "bits and pieces" that had undermined the Smithsonian piece. The task now is to integrate those elements into a cohesive framework within which to consider the full impact of soaps -- a task made all the more challenging since there is no obvious hierarchical relationship among the elements.

The book begins with a deep look at Irna Phillips and how the details of her own life so intensely shaped many aspects of As the World Turns. You also recently published a piece about Irna for Harvard Magazine. What do you believe Phillips' place is in the history of the soap opera in particular, and in the greater landscape of U.S. television?

Irna Phillips was a risk taker who, rather than fear failure, learned from it. In 1948, she wrote to P&G's William Ramsey that she had doubts about televising soaps, suggesting that it would be some time before a televised serial could succeed. (She doesn't explain why, but at the time there were roughly 100,00 television sets in the country, most concentrated in the New York area, up from 44,000 the previous year. As the post-war economy expanded, the number of sets increased exponentially; by 1953, over half of US household had a television.) Yet, just a few months later, in January 1949, Irna approached NBC about creating what many consider the first television soap, These are My Children. Accounts vary (some say the network pulled it after five weeks; Irna says she pulled it after 13 weeks when the network shifted its time slot), but by any measure, the television's first soap opera was a failure. Whether the show failed because it was bad (according to Television World) or because the low viewership was a function of too few households with televisions is impossible to determine.

The success of two early television soaps on CBS (Search for Tomorrow and  Love of Life), convinced Irna that the time was right to move Guiding Light from radio, where it began in 1937, to television. But GL's owner, P&G believed that only serials created specifically for television would succeed.  Undaunted, Irna revised two GL "highly dramatic" radio scripts (it's not clear if she secured P&G's permission), then spent more than $5000 of her own money (in 1952, the median household income was $3900) to tape the episodes and the show premiered on CBS in June, while remaining on radio until 1956 (when 71% of households had at least one television).

When Irna first floated the idea of a half-hour soap the suits were again skeptical. One executive told her, "we don't believe in investing in a possible failure." But, as with GL, Irna persevered, this time collaborating with longtime colleagues, Agnes Nixon and Ted Corday, to write and finance ($10,000) a pilot for ATWT. According to Irna, the nine cast members were so impressed, "they agreed to hold themselves available for six months" until the pilot was picked up.

In the early 1960s, Irna became a consultant for what would become the first successful primetime soap opera, ABC's Peyton Place (1964-1969). She then created a primetime ATWT spinoff, Our Private World, which ran for 19 weeks (38 episodes) from May 5 - September 10, 1965. CBS's decision to air the show over the summer, rather than launching it as part of the new fall season, likely contributed to its short run, and may also have reflected a lack of confidence in Irna. Since her unfinished memoir, All My Worlds, ends in late 1963 with her creation of Another World, if Irna had any thoughts about All My Worlds and the two shows she later created, Love is a Many Splendored Thing and A World Apart, they would be in her papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society archives.

Much of your book focuses on the ways in which management practices and corporate structure in the last 15 years of As the World Turns' 54-year run damaged both the quality of the story and the relationship the show maintained with its fans. In the course of your research and writing, in what ways were soap opera fans drawing these connections between industry news and what played out on their screens on an everyday basis? And what can media scholars and those who work in or study other media industries learn from studying the ongoing relationship between longterm viewers and a media property like ATWT?

When fan magazines covering soaps first appeared in the late-1960s, soaps had been on television for almost 20 years. Those early publications consisted mainly of interviews with actors and features that took fans behind-the-scenes of the shows. It wasn't until Soap Opera Weekly came on the scene in November 1989 that fans had timely access to industry news and serious criticism. In addition to episode recaps, Weekly published spoilers that let fans know what would happen when. According to founding editor, Mimi Torchin, fans welcomed information that allowed them to prioritize. Of course, in a extreme example of unintended consequences, spoilers have become a vexing challenge for all serialized storytelling in the digital age.

Both Weekly and its sister publication, Soap Opera Digest, included "Comings and Goings" and "The Revolving Door," features that alerted fans when actors left roles, or were cast as new characters. This information became a form of spoiler that allowed fans to speculate outside of what they saw on the screen. Producers and writers exacerbated this phenomenon by sharing information about who the new (or recast) character would be paired with, and the direction the story would take.  With the final years of ATWT  characterized by a seemingly endless array of new characters, few of whom were connected to the core Hughes family, when fans heard the news online, many were not inclined to give the show the benefit of the doubt and wait to see how stories played out before passing (usually negative) judgment.

Another factor to consider: the unintended consequences of rebranding, which requires a willingness to to alienate, and even lose, existing customers to attract desired customers. This worked brilliantly for AMC when the network shifted its focus from showing old movies to become the HBO of basic cable. But movie buffs had plenty of options; not so with soaps. Whether it was articulated or not, when ATWT shifted the show's focus in the early-1980s to capture younger viewers, the show seemed willing to lose its existing viewers, like my mother, who left and never returned, even when the show corrected course a few years later. But, with all soaps trying to recreate General Hospital's success, there was no place for disaffected fans to turn. So many stayed, and with the remote controls that came with their new VCRs in hand,  fast forwarded through many of the new characters that populated the ATWT canvas, contributing to the show's increasingly fragmented storytelling. One consequence  of fragmented storytelling is a fragmented audience, with each segment expressing its own spin on the genre's aesthetic. The result: divergent and often conflicting comments that made it difficult to interpret and apply fan feedback.

In 1996 P&G set up a toll-free number to provide viewers with inside information about the ATWT. At the end callers were asked who they wanted to see the troubled Emily Stewart paired with: "press 1 for Diego, 2 for Jeff." Since "other," "none of the above" or,"in the case of this particular character, "a good therapist," were not among the choices, the results were  meaningless. And the way in which the question was posed (the only option to bypass the question was hanging up) made clear that this was not a serious effort on the part of PGP to engage viewers, but rather a ham-handed token.

Another example of the show's tin ear was someone's (probably not the executive producer or head writer, both of whom had worked in soaps long enough to understand the subtle intricacies of how time unfolds on soaps; depending on the circumstances, sometimes compressed, sometimes extended.) literal interpretation of a frequent complaint about soaps: "the stories move too slowly." In 2008, ATWT abandoned soap opera's traditional narrative structure and began a series of short-term story arcs, some of which wrapped up in a single episode. The combination of self-contained episodes and spoilers made at least one fan happy: "Not sure how or why TPTB have come up with this new concept, but is sure is working well. I think I've watched a total of one or two episodes in the last two weeks." An unintended consequence that inflicted considerable damage in ATWT's final years.

Without an understanding of not just what's being said, but what it means, soliciting feedback is at best, futile, at worst, damaging. When it came to soap opera, however, there was no guarantee that those who were conducting the research had ever watched soaps. According to one former network executive I talked with, it was the rare researcher who even took the time to familiarized themselves with the show for which they were collecting feedback. So, while their empirical observations may have been accurate, without a shared experiential frame of reference with their subjects, researchers often lacked to tools to infer, then accurately interpret and apply how fans experience soaps.

When it comes to suspending disbelief, the very nature of daytime soaps demands more of viewers than other dramatic media. But as the genre's scope expanded over the years, traditional elements -- intimate relationships between family, friends and lovers -- began to share space with time travel, the supernatural, omnipotent villains and characters whose repeated returns from the dead often defied both logic and the laws of physics. When ATWT's James Stenbeck first reappeared in 1986 after being presume dead, he provided a simple explanation: "I had a parachute."  But as explanations for his subsequent resurrections became more and more preposterous, some fans were angry, feeling that the writers were taking advantage of their willingness to suspend disbelief -- even insulting their intelligence. Others chalked it up to a "it's a soap opera. No one gives a shit if it makes sense" mentality on the part of writers and producers. By 2009, when Stenbeck returned from the dead for the fourth and final time, the writers didn't bother to even go through the motions. And rather than get angry, those fans still watching responded with detached bemusement.

The number of serialized dramas has exploded in the past 15 years, so dominating television programming that a recent piece in TVGuide suggests that serial dramas may be reaching the saturation point. The challenges facing these shows -- maintaining the integrity of the storytelling in the face of network interference and the shuffling of show runners, spoilers, time-shifting, and more recent additions to the lexicon, binge watching and, perhaps most important, hate-watching -- all have their antecedents in soaps. Current and future storytellers facing the challenge of attracting viewers in a media landscape drowning in serial drama have much to learn by understanding how soaps and their fans have dealt with these issues.

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 Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning... Among her other publications are "Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps" (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); "Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera's single mother 1901-1973" (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University's Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA's Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

As The World Stopped Turning: Lynn Liccardo Talks About Soap Operas (Part One)

I have often acknowledged that fans are the true experts on popular culture: their passionate relationship with a favorite series or franchise often motivates them to research it more deeply, read it more closely, and interpret it more richly than an academic would be able to do. Not all fans know how to articulate their findings in ways that move beyond the particular details and speak to the larger context and implications of their objects of study, but those who do have much to teach us about their particular corners of the popular culture universe. Lynn Liccardo is an extraordinary soap opera fan, who over the course of her life has moved from a passion for As the World Turns and its creator Irma Phillips, towards more and more active engagement with the soap opera industry (such as it has become) and who has written professionally about soaps for a number of years. I was lucky to meet Liccardo when she served on the thesis committee for one of my MIT graduate students Sam Ford, now co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Network Culture; she has been coming to our Futures of Entertainment conferences ever since; she contributed to Sam's book on the future of soap operas; and now, she has an e-book of her own, As the World Stopped Turning, which shares some of what she knows about the history, aesthetics, production, and reception of soap operas.

I am the first to admit that soaps are a blind spot for me as a fan and as an academic, though I also would acknowledge that those of us who care about transmedia storytelling and contemporary primetime drama have much to learn from the soap opera tradition about expansive storyworlds and long-form serials in particular. So, I asked Sam Ford if he would interview her for the blog. Below aresome of Liccardo's thoughts connecting As the World Turns to some of the industry trends and developments over the past six decades that have impacted serialized television storytelling.

As the World Stopped Turning is a full ebook of your essays dedicated to the soap opera As the World Turns. Why is this particular daytime serial drama so important to study, in your opinion? What is As the World Turns' particular place in our cultural history?

As The World Turns was the first 30-minute serial, doubling the standard 15-minute episode. But  it was more than its length that contributed to the show's impact on the genre and cultural history. When creator, Irna Phillips, conceived the show, she wanted the additional time not to tell more story, but to develop "better story and characterization." Before ATWT debuted in 1956, serials concentrated on a single family; in her new creation, Irna contrasted the stories of two families, one united and solidly middle-class, the Hughes, the other, wealthy and divided, the Lowells, "because by the 1950s divorce and separation were becoming a more pronounced element in our social structure." Irna also believed (more than 30 years before GH's Luke and Laura), that including teenagers as a major part of the story, "added the valuable asset of longevity to the serial."

But what set ATWT apart from earlier soaps was Irna's skillful juxtaposition of vertical and horizontal storytelling axes, with her emphasis on the former (character), which slowed the latter (plot), sometimes to a seeming standstill.  In fact, the first year of the show there was virtually no plot, just these rather ordinary characters going about everyday lives that resembled those of many viewers. The intimacy of the connection between viewer and character was reinforced as the camera moved slowly over actors' faces, laying the groundwork for future audiences to recognize what a character in Ron Howard's film, Frost/Nixon, called "the reductive power of the close-up."

Irna gave voice to her deeply-held belief that "nobody is all good or all bad and each human being can exhibit all of these elements, often at the same time," through stories that gave equal weight to the conflicting emotions within each character,  forcing viewers, in the words of critic Robert LaGuardia, "to grieve over the heartbreak of the human condition rather than to hang on to a fixed value judgement."  In her outline, Irna was emphatic that ATWT "not a melodrama," but rather "a show about people." That ambiguity deeply permeated the cultural ground water and became the foundation of what's now called quality television and complex storytelling, although, as I discuss below, for viewers who only know daytime soaps after Luke and Laura, the connection is not at all clear.

The episode below aired about a year into the show's 54-year run. While it contains none of ATWT's trademark closeups, it is an elegant example (one of the few still available) of how soap opera historically used character to move plot: a narrative structure that ties current stories to back stories and uses history and memory to contextualize current plot and character development. The power of this episode lies in its four deceptively simple scenes, each a conversation between two of the episode's four characters. While almost nothing happens in the episode, when it's over viewers understand the relationships, not just among the characters in the episode, Chris, his father, Pa, and sister,, Edie, who was involved with his law partner, Jim, but between every character on the show: Chris's wife Nancy, his daughter, Penny, who became estranged from her aunt Edie when Penny's best friend, Ellen, revealed that her father, Jim, was involved with another woman, Edie. Even a character who never appeared on the show, Chris and Edie's brother, John, was fully contextualized.

As the World Turns #268 Part 1 

 As the World Turns #268 Part 2

What do you believe were the biggest factors in the demise of As the World Turns?

The demise of ATWT actually began in 1978, when Gloria Monty's was hired to fix a show on the verge of cancellation, ABC's General Hospital. At the time, most soap operas followed the model Irna Phillips had created on ATWT: intergenerational families made up of rather ordinary characters living rather ordinary lives that resembled those of most viewers.

Monty altered that model by speeding up the pace of the storytelling by shifting the focus from the day-to-day lives of the doctors and nurses of General Hospital to the young, Laura, and the hip, Luke, who, in the process of saving the world from being frozen by the Ice Princess, also saved General Hospital, thereby forever altering the public's perception of soaps. As college lounges  filled with students following the adventures of Luke and Laura, for the first time it was cool for kids to watch soaps.

 Luke & Laura - Lover's on the Run Volume 1

But GH wasn't their mother's soap opera; ATWT was. How CBS and Procter & Gamble responded to the end of ATWT's 20-year reign at the top of the ratings is a lesson in what not to do. Rather than take a deep breath and think about ways to exploit the perception of ATWT as "their mothers' soap opera" to the show's advantage, the new executive producer, Mary-Ellis Bumin, approached her task from what, in light of GH's explosive success, seemed like a logical assumption, but ultimately proved deeply flawed: the only way to attract the younger viewers advertisers coveted was by excluding older characters. So, what had been the ATWT's  greatest assets -- its 20+-year history and the multi-generational Hughes family -- was seen as its greatest weaknesses. Soon after Bunim took over familiar characters were pushed to the sidelines and viewers found themselves watching Tom and Margo (Oakdale's Luke and Laura) chase a dwarf named Mr. Big -- ATWT's version of the Ice Princess.

 As the World Turns: Vintage Tom and Margo

But what had worked so brilliantly for GH never caught on with ATWT's core audience. When Laurence Caso took over CBS's New York daytime operation in 1983, he realized that ATWT would never succeed by continuing to copy what the ABC soaps were doing. He pushed Procter & Gamble to replace Mary-Ellis Bunim with Robert Calhoun, then hired head writer Douglas Marland, who rebuilt the show around Hughes. ATWT thrived until Marland suddenly died in 1993. A year later, the show was still in the process of rebuilding as the country obsessed over the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

ATWT's missteps of the early 1980s have to be understood in the context of GH's unprecedented success, which threw all soaps into uncharted waters. But CBS and P&G had clearly failed learn from history when, in 1995, a new regime once again distanced the show from its history and the Hughes family. As the show floundered until its cancellation in 2010, no one even tried to right the ship by reestablishing the centrality of the Hughes. Even if they had, it might well have been too late. P&G's other two shows, Guiding Light and Another World, were in even worse shape than ATWT. In 2005, P&G eliminated the position of executive in charge of production and subsequently transferred the shows' day-to-day operations to a subsidiary, TeleNext Media. Then, in 2008, the TeleNext logo replaced P&G's in the show credits, sending a clear message that P&G was content to let the clock run out on their soaps.  

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She released an ebook of essays detailing the final years of As the World Turns, entitled as the world stopped turning... Among her other publications are "Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps" (1996, Soap Opera Weekly); "Irna Phillips: Brief life of soap opera's single mother 1901-1973" (2012, Harvard Magazine). Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published in The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Sam Ford is co-editor (with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington) of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (2011, University Press of Mississippi) and co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture(2013, NYU Press). He is also Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm, an affiliate with both MIT Comparative Media Studies and Western Kentucky University's Popular Culture Studies Program, and a frequent Fast Company contributor. Sam serves on WOMMA's Membership Ethics Advisory Panel and was named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has written for Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal,BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News,Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and CommPRO.biz. Sam lives in Bowling Green, KY, with wife, Amanda, and daughters, Emma and Harper.

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation About The Future of Television (Final Installment)

Suzanne Scott: Thanks, AJ, for doing the heavy lifting by synthesizing the tensions emerging out of this conversation, and for tackling the industrial context. You’re absolutely right, fans and producers both know the score, and I think it’s vital to acknowledge fan agency in this discussion, despite my qualms about how the campaign frames fan participation and labor.  That said, I’d add a couple of corollaries to the core tensions you’ve identified above, drawing on the framing of fans across the past few exchanges.

First, I want to revisit Maurício’s point about the ultimate “winner” of the shifting power dynamics between media audiences, producers, and distributors being the story itself.  Both Maurício and Henry make a strong case for the how this emerging model might be most beneficial for liminal producers and properties, those that don’t fall neatly into the categories of “mainstream” or “independent” production.  But there’s a catch with fan-funded stories, and it’s already visible in the discourses around the Veronica Mars Kickstarter.  It’s baked into the FAQ’s nod to shipping and fan expectations (see image), and it’s directly addressed in this remark from Thomas after the success of the campaign:

“I had some desire, as a filmmaker, to take Veronica in a slightly new direction and do something adventurous with her. Or, there's the ‘give the people what they want’ version. And I think partly because it's crowd-sourced, I'm going with the ‘give the people what they want’ version. It's going to be Veronica being Veronica, and the characters you know and love. Certainly, I think I can make a fun, great movie out of that, and I'm excited about that, but it was a creative debate I had with myself, and I finally made the decision that I'm happy with it, to go with, ‘Let's not piss people off who all donated. Let's give them the stuff that I think that they want in the movie.’”

It’s the “give them the stuff that I think they want” that troubles the notion that story emerges the clear “winner” in this particular case.  Whether Thomas is justifiably hedging his bets in response to the intense scrutiny that has accompanied the campaign’s success (“If the movie ultimately sucks, don’t blame me, my vision was hindered by fan service…after all, they paid for it…”) is beside the point.  To return to the first tension AJ identified, fan “satisfaction” is clearly the central concern here, but it’s ultimately framed as a potential detriment to Thomas’ creative control.  There is something empowering about the fact that, in Maurício’s terms, we can now frame fans as studios.  But what I think might be getting lost here is the fact that fans are independent creators too, and it’s often their dissatisfaction with a story, or the industrial structures and strictures that limit it, that drives their textual production.  Henry’s right that fans will always be read, first and foremost, through an economic lens.  But, fans aren’t just storybuyers, they’re storytellers.  They make their own satisfaction.

On a second and related point, you all make a compelling case for how distribution on Netflix, or similar platforms, might help reshape industrial investments in media properties, encourage experimentation with transmedia or non-linear textualities, and cater to pre-existing fannish consumption patterns such as binge watching. Our conceptual understanding of what “television” is (who produces and distributes it, and where, when and how we consume it) continues to be radically reimagined in the post-network era.  Within the Netflix television model, the television temporalities of seriality and seasonality are effectively eradicated. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, but I do wonder how these new “telelvision” models might fundamentally alter our conception of television fandom.

If fans produce their richest work in the gaps and margins of a television text, they’ve also historically used the temporal gaps and margins between episodes and seasons to their advantage.  I return, time and again, to Matt Hills’ Fan Cultures and his useful notion of “just-in-time” fandom to describe how fan practices have “become increasingly enmeshed within the rhythms and temporalities of broadcasting” (178).  Moreover, Hills cautioned (back in 2002, no less), that eradicating time lags function “ever more insistently to discipline and regulate the opportunities for temporally-licensed ‘feedback,’ and the very horizons of the fan experience” (179).  So, what happens when we begin to reconceptualize the afterlife for cult television series strictly as films, or in one large seasonal installment with no lag time between episodes?  The pleasures of television fandom are deeply tied to its form, and the impact of these shifts deserves further consideration.

My concern here isn’t just the horizons of the fan experience, but the horizons of the industrial and cultural framing of fans and fan participation. Whether we’re talking about fan-funded film extension of a cult television series, or an entire new season of a cult show dropping on Netflix, these temporal horizons are potentially less generative for fans, which in turn might make it increasingly difficult to discursively shift our understanding of them as producers of anything but capital.  If I’m being totally honest, as a Veronica Marsfan, what I really want is another season of Veronica Mars.  And as an Arrested Development fan, I will absolutely binge watch the new season (and, let’s be real, I’ll binge watch the prior three seasons as an amuse bouche the day before the launch).

Understandably, we all want to focus on what we’re gaining.  I’m admittedly more interested in what’s potentially being lost or overlooked, but I don’t want that emphasis to be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm about these developments.  I do think they have game-changing potential, particularly as the beginnings of a creators’ rights movement.  I just worry that fans’ legacy as creators in their own right will once again be obscured in favor of celebrating industrially sanctioned modes of fan engagement.

Mauricio Mota:

From all of our contributions so far, the ones that mostly intrigued me were the ones related to roles (fans, producers, distributors) and business models.

And both rely on a discussion that, if not well explored, can become a "chicken or the egg" equation.

Some questions to provoke that discussion:

Would Veronica Mars raise all that money on Kickstarter if it was an independent movie from a new director with an unknown actress about an unknown character?

Do we really need algorithms to figure out that BBC Format + David Fincher + Kevin Spacey + Washington politics is a success formula for House of Cards?

Is 60 thousand people as a Box Office number for a movie a sufficient number for a studio to green light to produce it?

When fans "invest" or donate for IP development and or production they are looking for some sort of creative control or ownership or just wanting the story to come to life?

We are entering - with or without the help from the Studios - an era of what we like to name as  "Grassroots Blockbusting": where IPs are nurtured to the ground up and more independent of the "normal" way of becoming a success. All Studios have what we name "Dormant IPs" - stories that have already a whole world built, good story arches and some sort of audience built through generations. But very few of these IPs (and even less Studios) are being developed in a way that allows them to become something profitable and successful.

Unfortunately it is still naive to come to a studio or any big show runner in town and tell them to "hand over IP". This is not only a conversation about studios focusing on blockbusters and mainstream stories because of shareholders. They are also investing on their libraries and keeping as much control of that IP as possible. Their framework is built around owning as much % of the IPs as possible since the same framework is built around giving more power and control for the part that invests more to make a story happen. And although roles are blurring,  very few creators can say they can make their own shows without a major investment from a studio.

In Brazil, the Government is making an immense effort to grow our TV industries by creating a new law that makes every cable channel to invest massively on original content produced by Brazilian companies (like mine). It is a huge achievement but it has also been very tricky and challenging for the producers to convince studios and networks ( still the most important distribution channels) to give up on a big percentage of an IP they would air because of that new law. Simply because it forces them to not own majority of brazilian original content. So, better said than done.

However, there are independent funds - in the US, Latin America and Asia - that are starting to invest into new green IPs or buying turnaround scripts from studios/production companies to re-start them from the ground using transmedia and the digital tools to start them small and sustainable. Like I said before, lines are blurred, roles are confused and money and knowledge about what works is more democratized.

The existing cases we have been discussing are actually good starters for a possible different model where fans and creators are closer by sharing a common dream and making it happen. And by doing so more and more the Studio system will then have new competitors among the same people they see as consumers. Which is a good thing since humans and companies tend to pay more attention to things and people that threat them than to people that they take for granted. And to AJ's points looks like creators and fans are paying more attention to what is happening around them.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.

Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation on the Future of Television (Part Two)

Suzanne Scott:

Hi everyone, I’m looking forward to this conversation.  I’ve been attempting to work through my ambivalent response to the Veronica Mars kickstarter for the past few days, particularly where it bumps up against my unadulterated fannish glee that Netflix Saved Our Bluths.  Two of my favorite cult TV series are being revived.  It should feel like a win-win, but I can’t shake this sense that the Veronica Mars Kickstarter (or fan-ancing generally) sets a problematic precedent for what constitutes fan “participation.”  Or, to AJ’s point, my concern doesn’t stem from the kinds of value producers and fans generate from television, or even the value that fans are generating from this kickstarter campaign, but how producers are increasingly and strategically generating value from fans.

My work broadly engages with industry-fan relationships within convergence culture, and how those relationships are gendered.  In particular, I’m interested in which types of fans and modes of fannish engagement are valued, normalized, or incorporated, and which remain marginalized or are subject to containment.  I’ve written in the past about how industrial efforts to engage fan culture often function as re-gifting economies, or planned communities that strive to “repackage fan culture, masking something old as something new, something unwanted (or unwieldy) as something desirable (or controllable, or profitable).”  I’ve also blogged about the problematic legitimization discourses that surround industrial efforts to co-opt fan practices and retain ownership over fan texts.  Many, myself included, are inclined to view the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a prime example of fan empowerment (or, in Henry’s terms, as a techno-realization of a longstanding fannish frustration with audience measurement metrics, and a desire to revive media properties that were cut down in their prime).  But, I still worry about what it means to discursively celebrate fans’ power in purely economic terms.

I’m a frequent donor to Kickstarter campaigns, especially those like Womanthology or Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games that are attempting to make a transformative intervention into media industries and fannish subcultures that can be unwelcoming to women.  I’m also all for using Kickstarter to launch creator-owned projects.  For example, I get why Batgirl writer Gail Simone, who was recently fired and rehired by DC Comics after a massive pushback from fans, would want to kickstart a graphic novel where she’ll have full control over the creative direction and, more importantly, the intellectual property rights. I’ll probably pull the trigger and donate to the Veronica Mars movie before the days tick down to zero…or, let’s be realistic, probably before the end of this conversation.  But it’s not because I want a t-shirt, or a digital download of the finished product from Flixter, Warner Bros.’ proprietary video platform.  What I want is information, however filtered through Warner Bros. publicity brass that it might be, about how this grand experiment is playing out, and to see if fans are addressed primarily as partners, or promotional agents.

As AJ rightly notes above, crowdfunding may not be the great equalizer, but it is a vital emergent tool that allows minority voices and audiences that are too often underrepresented by media industries to carve out a space to be heard.  The figures that you’re tracking on your blog are vitally important.  They aren’t just dollars, they’re pointed messages sent to media industries by media audiences.  Can we view the massive success of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter as a call to television executives that there’s a market to be tapped for programs with compelling, complex young female protagonists?  Hopefully.  Would I feel better if Rob Thomas had Kickstarted an original web series, where the profits would be funneled into developing the next Veronica Mars, rather than into Warner Bros.’ coffers?  Absolutely. It's the slippage between crowdsourcing and outsourcing financial risk here that I find troubling.

Mauricio Mota:

Ok, here comes the black sheep-capitalist storyteller from Brazil ;-)

I was born - literally - at the intersection between Academia, Commerce, Storytelling and Marxism. While my parents were academics and Marxists during the 70-80's, my mom was a fiction writer trying to figure out how to keep working, teaching, studying, paying bills and finally get picked by a publisher to bring her words to the world. The funny thing of that intersection is that till I was 8 I thought one of my grandfathers was Karl Marx - because of a picture my parents had in the home office. But actually my grandfather was considered the Latin-American Shakespeare.

That mix of backgrounds, struggles and opportunities trained my eyes and perceptions (with some scars and learnings) to always pay deep attention to the relationship between Creators (Storytellers), Distributors (Storysellers) and Readers (Story…buyers?) and to keep on the pace around one of the most fascinating dynamics ever. In the past, the roles were so clear, the imposed status quo was so comfortable/a given and people in general were just having fun with their stories that the Veronica Mars/House of Cards models were impossible to imagine.

Kickstarter didn't invent crowdfunding for storytelling. Neither did Felicia Day or Joss Whedon. The most efficient systems of crowdfunding for storytelling that I ever seen in my life are the Catholic and the Evangelical Churches. People have been funding saints, bibles, sagas, music concerts, souvenirs or tokens for more than 2000 years. In Brazil, the evangelicals own one of the top three tv channels (where they air religious programs, produced telenovelas and bought series from the US like Veronica Mars). So the whole conversation about "exploring" fandom or using fans to fund a movie owned by a big studio is a little bit strange for me because generally people want to watch and share an experience around a story: be it that story about a guy who could regenerate fast (no, I'm not talking about Wolverine, I'm talking about Jesus), Veronica Mars or about an elite group that uses people's trust to do whatever they want (I'm talking about House of Cards).

The line between owning something and owing was completely blurred when the Veronica Mars kickstarter campaign started. Many fans donated something because they feel such an emotional connection to that cannon that gave them so many good times that they feel the owe something to it and they want more of the pleasure that story gives -- with or without having something material back (a shirt or equity). It is the difference between Profit Sharing and Sharing Collective Value.

The roles are also blurred, thanks G'd -- both on Veronica Mars and House of Cards. And today I'm able to fund the stories my company creates from different sources: fans, non-profits, global advertisers, studios, networks or a toy company.

Because the Veronica Mars campaign is like advance money given by fans to the creator that implicitly says: "Hey, here is the money I would already buy for this and that, so now go make that extension so I can have the storytelling experience that no money nor a shirt can give me. Oh, I can also make it with my Mastercard and don't need to wait for someone to decide to fund it?". Instead of investing money on the IP after it airs, fans are doing it before.

Everyone, on the House of Cards case, was mesmerized by two things: launching 13 episodes at once on Netflix and the fact that some of the decisions to produce were based on algorithms. In the end of the day, the "series marathon" culture is something that is part of the fabric of pop culture consumption; Kevin Spacey is a great actor and amazing villain; politics brings eyeballs, fans add value whenever they watch something and the British version was already really good. If we build it, they will come. And with David Fincher behind, maybe (just maybe), the execution will be good. ;-)

By the way, The funders behind House of Cards are also "outside" the regular model as the Kickstarter examples: Goldman Sachs, WPP Group (one of the largest advertising groups in the world) and AT&T.

Netflix move to offer exclusive content at once was brave and risk taking strategy in a town where networks kill shows on episode 3. VOD changes the importance of focus groups and research to a level that makes me love where all this is going. Because so many amazing pilots or shows would have survived if Netflix, Amazong, Hulu and Kickstarter existed and gave that opportunity to fans, creators and last but not least, studios to make a decision.

Yes, studios.

Because everybody loves to blame the Studios for Hollywood's lack of innovation. Being a Studio is HARD. Crowdfunding is also hard. But what happens next is the point I'm trying to make.

The Veronica Mars case will show how sending the gifts and tokens for all the 50k+ backers (including movie sessions into remote cities) is really, really, really hard to accomplish but a Studio knows how to make something like this happen. And before the tomatoes come, the discussion is not if the studios do it well or not, but they make it and they have a system. If fans, indies, academics and writers believe there are improvements to be made, fight for it or kickstart a project and start your own Studio. It is about re-allocation of power and responsibilities and not resetting a whole organism that has brought to the world amazing stories - including Veronica Mars.

The Studios used to have the formula of success. Using Henry's recent book as a reference, the formula was "If doesn't get picked by studio it is dead". Now it probably would be "If doesn't get picked, lets talk to the fans and other distribution channels" (not so charming as "If it doesn't spread, it's dead" but really fascinating).

Now nobody has is total control, decision-making power is more shared. But Studios/Networks still have the most efficient marketing and logistics machine in the world and they deserve their share. Fans and storytellers that know how to build their own micro-networks also deserve a share.

Fans are now Studios. Advertisers are Studios. Amazon is a studio. Netflix too.

So, the roles are not only changing, they are blurred and the winner is the story. Because generally we don't know what we want until a story is in front of us and we say: I want more of that. And I will pay with my time, my emotions, my network of friends and my money.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.

Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

Kickstarting Veronica Mars: A Conversation About the Future of Television (Part One)

Henry Jenkins: When I was writing Textual Poachers in the late 1980s, I stumbled across a fascinating scheme being floated by fans of George R.R. Martin's fantasy series, Beauty and the Beast, a series with a very committed audience, but one that was small enough that the program was always in danger of being canceled. The fans were suggesting a plan where fans would pay into a fund that would cover the cost of the series production and then would received VHS tapes of episodes once they had been made. The fans rightly recognized that the Nielsen Ratings measured the scope of viewership but not its intensity, and that the scale of success demanded to stay on network television was considerably lower than what would be required to cover the costs of production. At the time, such plans were unlikely to succeed, given the nature of the media environment: they really did not have a robust method for collecting funds from dedicated fans, the producers would not have had a viable business model for proceeding under this unstable system, and the distribution of episodes via VHS was going to be clunky at best.

We flash forward two decades and recent events suggests we have moved dramatically closer to making such a scenario possible. First, we have seen Netflix become a producer and distributor of original television content -- programs that look and feel like network television (actually like HBO or AMC programming) but which are distributed digitally without ever being broadcast. Netflix's first venture in this direction was House of Cards, which seems to have attracted a very solid audience, and their second will be the relaunch of Arrested Development, a fan favorite series that Netflix has brought back after several years in limbo. We are seeing similar moves by Hulu and YouTube, both of which would like to get into the business of producing and distributing web-based television content.

And, then, we have seen Kickstarter emerge as a platform that, with the example of Veronica Mars, has demonstrated the possibilities of fan support pushing a once canceled program back into production -- in this case for the big screen. And for the Veronica Mars scheme to work, we have to assume there were behind the scenes discussions between Rob Thomas and Warner Brothers (which still owns the rights to Veronica Mars) that would allow them some basis of proceeding. We now are hearing that a range of other producers and show-runners are starting to explore whether they might deploy similar tactics to gain a second chance for their passion projects.

This week, I have gathered together three friends, who bring different kinds of expertise to thinking about the short term and long term implications of these developments.

Aymar  Jean “AJ” Christian:

Hello!

It’s been fascinating to see relationships between producers, fans and distributors reconfigured in digital marketplaces!

About a year before Kickstarter launched, I was drawn into the world of crowdfunding through Felicia Day. Day was a working actress with credits on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she decided she wasn’t ever going to get a leading role and showrunner status unless she did it herself. Intermittently unemployed as so many workers in Hollywood are, she wrote a pilot for The Guild, about a group of gamers, based on her experience playing World of Warcraft in between gigs. She and a skeleton crew produced most of the first season on a dime and then came to place a lot of indie producers find themselves: without funds to continue. But those few episodes had built a fan base, and, through a Paypal link on the show’s active website, she raised thousands to kick-start the rest. That early fan interest shocked the industry, distributors came calling, and The Guild found distribution through Microsoft, who was/is trying to build an entertainment platform outside of television. Day is now a huge source of inspiration within and outside the web television industry and a key brand ambassador for MSN.

In my years researching the “web series” or independent television market I’ve seen crowdfunding take a central place in show development (so much so I’ve tried to track it on my site). Series that built communities of fans early and quickly inevitably turned to crowdfunding. Soon shows targeting all sorts of groups dissatisfied with legacy television used sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to keep indie brands alive. Lesbian web series Anyone But Butraised over $30,000 for its third and final season; The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl ($56,000, nearly twice the ask) for its second; The Outs (over $20,000, many times the ask), a gay-led show, did it in two rounds; last year brought Black & Sexy’s The Couple ($32,000) and Latino-focused show East WillyB ($51,000), not to mention the prodigious work of Freddie Wong, whose canny, Asian-American-led Video Game High School has crowdfunded over $1 million to date (season 1, season 2).

Raising money not only gave them funds to survive, and extra opportunities for press and marketing, they also let creators build a database of their strongest fans and supporters, who would then proselytize the show on social networks. This sometimes led to distribution and development deals with both online and on-air networks.

In short, crowdfunding causes us to rethink relationships in media industries, and think very specifically about the kinds of value producers and fans generate from television, as a number of scholars are exploring, from Jason Mittell, to Michael Newman, to your work in Spreadable Media. For independent producers, crowdfunding rewards creators with a clear pitch to specific communities, who are in turn rewarded with a show conglomerates might be reluctant to green light. Of course, this kind of value is hard to sustain in our media landscape, and the fact that Veronica Marsraised several times more than most projects before it in 24 hours speaks to the kinds of value conglomerates are able to generate when they have already invested in marketing properties.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. His manuscript, tentatively titled Off the Line, Independent Television and the Transformation of Creative Economy, explores the politics and value of the web series market. He edits a personal blog, Televisual, has been published in the academic journals Continuum, Transformative Works and Cultures, First Monday and Cinema Journal, and in the popular press in Slate, Indiewire, The Wall Street Journal and The Root, among others. For more information, visit his site.

Suzanne Scott is a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College.  Her work on fandom within convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and fanboy auteurism has been published in the anthologies Cylons in America, The Participatory Cultures Handbook, and A Companion to Media Authorship, and the journal Transformative Works and Cultures.  She blogs at Revenge of the Fans and tweets @iheartfatapollo.

Mauricio Mota is one the founders of The Alchemists, Entertainment Group responsible for building original transmedia narratives and content for studios, publishing companies, fans and brands. Some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Petrobras, TV Globo, CW, Elle Magazine, NFL, Nextel and the Brazilian Ministry of Education. He was responsible for bringing the concept of transmedia storytelling to Brazil and implemented the Transmedia Communication Department for Globo Television (4th largest network in the world).

He began his career as an entrepreneur at the age of 15, when he developed a story-creation platform with writer Sonia Rodrigues. Used in over 4000 schools, it was licensed 8 times and used as a tool to facilitate innovation and creativity for  many top 500 companies and the UN.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Monsters: A Conversation (Part Three)

Studying Monster fandom places a new emphasis on issues of collecting, which have remained marginal to the studies of fan culture, but which are a very large part of the phenomenon itself. What existing work do you think provides the best insights into collecting cultures and what questions do you think still need to be addressed?

Mark: I think that matters of collecting have been tangential in part because the background so many media scholars have in Marxist /Frankfurt School criticism still makes a lot of us reticent to look at conspicuous consumption as anything other than totally negative--I know I’m leery of being accused of false consciousness or bougie-ness when making a case for collecting as a form of amateur cultural preservation. That said, I’ve been relieved to encounter an increasing number of writings which take a more complicated approach to the consumption of commercial product. I would specifically mention Sara Gwenllian-Jones’s essay “Phantom Menace,” Alan McKee’s “How to Tell the Difference between Production and Consumption,” and Matt Hills’s concept of performative consumption, presented in Fan Cultures, and which I apply to Chaney fans in my essay. I’m also interested in the idea of creative consumption proposed by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green in their book on YouTube, although I wish they would have developed the concept for the reader a little more. I think Jose van Dijck has many interesting ideas about material culture and collecting in Mediated Memories, and I just discovered a book by Richard Cox on the practice of personal archiving that looks promising and is on my reading list. As far as questions that still need to be addressed, I’m interested in distinctions between the physical object and the digital--is downloading digital artifacts collecting in the same sense as “having” tangible objects? There’s been work done in this area in museum studies, which may provide an inroad for looking at this matter in media studies.

Bob: A great list, Mark -- I’m making notes! I’d add Baudrillard’s System of Objects and, less abstractly, Jonathan Gray’s Show Sold Separately as ways of understanding collectors and collecting in conversation with mass media marketing. Lincoln Geraghty’s upcoming book with Routledge on “cult collecting” will also be useful, I’m sure.

Matt:  As a collector of Silver Age comic books and vinyl records, the issue of collecting is rather personal to me.  In terms of questions to pursue re: collecting, I’m particularly interested in issues of commodity value and “collectability” of an object.  I have a friend who is intensely proud of his collection of early Silver Age issues of The Justice League of America.  They are all of very high grade (virtually untouched warehouse copies in some cases) and are “slabbed.”  For him, they retain a nostalgic value (he owned copies as a kid) but he mostly values them as a financial investment.  On the other hand, my collecting has always been motivated by a desire to read or listen to something and am much less concerned about condition.  In fact,  I frequent comic book conventions looking for “reader copies” of old comic books in part because they are much more affordable but also because  I’m very interested in objects that bear traces of their use-histories.  Usually with comic books this comes in the form of a signature of ownership on the cover or the first page but sometimes there are surprising traces left behind, such as an attached personal object.  I once found a nearly incoherent response to a ‘Dear John’ letter tucked inside an LP.  It provided a strange resonance to the love songs on the record.

Natasha: As a former product developer who designed collectibles, I am very compelled by this question.  I’m shocked there hasn’t been more work done on collectibles in relation to fan studies.  Enormous amounts of time, capital and passion are put into collecting.  I believe that closely studying the motivations, desires, patterns, and strategies of fan based collectors can provide valuable insights and new ways to think about fan cultures.   A couple of edited volumes I’ll add to the list are: Acts of Possession: Collecting in America (ed. Leah Dilworth) and The Cultures of Collecting (ed. Roger Cardinal).

A key claim here is that Famous Monsters and its fans shaped the canon of which older films mattered and also informed the ways we made sense of those movies. What are some of the films or performers that got reappraised thanks to being featured in this publication?

Matt: More than anything, I think FM is notable for spotlighting special effects artists, especially Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen, and make-up artists like Jack Pierce.  Ackerman’s narratives regarding individual artists foregrounded the tactile labor involved in filmmaking that inspired so many readers to create their own make-ups and make their own films.  The visible traces of these artists translated to the visible traces of the artist(s) of the amateur film.

Mark: Certainly FM played a major role in making Chaney appear intriguing to a generation of monster fans who may have never actually seen any of his films, and in shaping his remembrance as a star of horror films rather than as a more versatile character actor. FM was particularly instrumental in keeping one of Chaney’s lost films, London After Midnight (Browning, 1927), in memory, and of touting it as a masterpiece of horror. Ackerman may have been one of the last surviving people with a clear memory of having seen the film, and he spoke glowingly of it to the end--as he did at a Monster Bash convention Matt and his brother and I attended in 2006. In doing research for this essay, I was also fairly amazed at some of the stills and information found in the pages of FM on obscure, foreign, and/or avant-garde films like Dreyer’s Vampyr, the 1930s French version of The Golem (even now hard to find), and non-western films like Kwaidan.

Ackerman, as several of you note, was an important bridge figure -- between fans and the industry, but also between fandom and a range of other alternative cultural movements, and perhaps between childhood and adulthood. What kind of role model did Ackerman provide for what a mature fan identity might look like?

Matt:  Ackerman’s liberal attitudes about life are, I believe, quite relevant to his fannish affections for science fiction.  I am particularly intrigued by how certain aspects of his life are very problematic for some fans (in particular his practice of nudism in the 1950s and 1960s).  More than anything, Ackerman modelled tolerance and the necessity to think about new ways of living with one another.  Interestingly, this model is seemingly lost on some fans, who reduce Ackerman to the status of “grand collector” and nothing more.

Mark: In addition to the inclusivity and progressive perspectives Matt refers to, I think Ackerman also modelled sincerity, generosity, and kindness. One of the things I discovered while looking through old issues of FM was a series of announcements by Ackerman about an upcoming cross-country road trip he was taking, with the offer to readers that if their parents gave permission, he would visit them en route and show them some of the monster memorabilia he had with him. Imagine that! Ackerman also demonstrated a respect for children that is admirable. While I still find his sense of humor hard to take, he seems like he would have been a genuinely nice person to know.

Bob: Actually, it’s Ackerman’s sense of humor that most appealed to me as a kid; it set up a lovely counterpoint to the horrific imagery the magazine often featured, and went a long way toward “defanging” some of the primally upsetting stuff that I was drawn to, but disturbed by, in other formats (cf. the 1974 Exorcist coverage I mention above). In addition to signalling geniality and likeability, as Mark points out, Ackerman’s prose voice also delighted in its own corny panache, and encouraged me -- not always for the better -- to emulate his punning, Mad-magazine-style in my own writing.

Natasha: Ackerman’s quest to promote respect, understanding and acceptance of all people regardless of their gender, race, sexual orientation or age is what I have always admired most about his cultural legacy.  Not only was Ackerman a prominent and outspoken supporter of female-produced science- fiction work, but he was also a stanch advocate for gay rights.  He was dubbed an honorary lesbian by Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organization in the U.S. He believed that monster films and science fiction had the capacity to take viewers out of their comfort zone and imagine alternative realities that could challenge existing sexist, racist, sexist, and ageist thinking.  Ackerman had the foresight to know that fan participation is not whimsical and irrelevant, but can be a very powerful thing that can change the way people see and interact with each other.  Best of all, he always did this with a sense of humor.

Matt was lucky enough to have had a chance to interview Ackerman before he died. If the rest of us had a chance to ask “Uncle Forry” a question, from beyond the grave (of course), what would you most like to know about his life, his magazine, or its cultural impact?

Mark: I’m curious as to how conscientiously he promoted his social politics in the pages of FM: he absolutely influenced genre fandom and formation of a canon of stars and films, but was he also trying to influence readers’ perspectives? More than asking him specific questions, though, I would’ve really liked to just talk about horror films with him, and get more of that first-hand view of London After Midnight.

The recent film, Super 8, offers some glimpses into the world of amateur filmmaking and model building which Famous Monsters inspired. To what degree do you think the film adequately captured the cultural milieu we are documenting through these essays?

Matt: Super 8 overwhelmed its superficial take on 1970s monster kid culture with sci-fi spectacle.  Joe Dante’s Matinee, while not a great film, is more successful at capturing the spirit of horror fandom because it shows us why kids loved this culture.   Super 8’s computer-generated spectacle is absent of the trace evidence of an artisan and thus distances us from the affective connections we make with classic horror and science fiction films.  In the end, the film’s nod toward kids’ amateur films of the period feels just like that, a nod.  There’s nothing substantive behind the title reference to home movies/amateur films or the storyline of the kids making a movie, no clear reason as to why they want to make a monster movie.

Bob: Funny, when I gave a talk based on my article recently, I started with a clip from Super 8: it shows the young protagonist at work painting one of Aurora’s Hunchback of Notre Dame kits. I wanted to contrast the plastic monster’s humble cameo against the movie’s CGI “star,” which was -- and here I agree with Matt -- a dispiriting genuflection to the state of the art. (If only J. J. Abrams and crew had had the guts to give us an actual creature of late 70s special effects -- a Rob Bottin or Carlo Rambaldi creation of latex and servomotors.) Its false notes aside, I respect Super 8 for what it’s trying to do (and be), and in the film’s enshrining of an earlier moment in the evolution of fantastic media -- the late 70s/early 80s golden age of Spielberg and Lucas -- heard curious nested echoes of other, prior golden ages: the late 50s-early 60s monster culture in which Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, Zemeckis, Dante, and others came of age, as well as the period 20-30 years before that, when the classic Universal horror films were first released. Famous Monsters bridged at least three generations in this fashion, and overgrown “monster kid movies” like Super 8 are to me a way of carrying that tradition forward: revisiting and rearticulating shared, nostalgic pleasures while driving the continued industrial production of fantastic media.

Mark: Super 8 is nostalgic, in the way David Lowenthal uses the term to describe “memory with the pain removed.” There’s an implication that the young filmmakers/adventurers are misfits, or aren’t performing masculinity “correctly,” and that this somehow lends itself to their shared interest in monsters. But even though they’re misfits, they are in a group of friends, and all appear to be in a position of class privilege (except the Elle Fanning character, but she’s the exception in multiple ways). The film doesn’t really address the isolation, loneliness, ostracization, or queerness that has led many a young person to interest in fantasy, monsters, science fiction, role playing games, ancient mythology, the goth subculture, the occult, etc. But of course, isolation, loneliness, and queerness aren’t topics one sees addressed too often in big-budget Hollywood action films.

Mark Hain is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, and is currently working on his dissertation, which is a historical reception study looking at star image and how audiences interpret and find use for these images, with a specific focus on Theda Bara.

Bob Rehak is an Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at Swarthmore College. His research interests include special effects and the material practices of fandom.

Natashia Ritsma is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her research interests focus on documentary, experimental and educational film and television.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theater and Film at the University of Toledo. His research interest is on the reception of Hollywood genre films.