Brain Dump: Games as Branded Entertainment

Here are some stray tidbits which came across my desk in the past week or so which warrant your attention: Games as Lifestyle Brands

David Edery, who is one of the smartest observers of the business side of the games industry (I should know -- he works in the CMS program with me as our key corporate relations person), published an article this week in Next Generation \which explores whether game companies can join the ranks of so-called "lifestyle brands," such as Harley-Davidson or Apple -- that is, brands which transcend individual products and seem to embody a particular taste or philosophy. His examples were EA Sports and RedOctane/Harmonix in the music game sector. We might add Maxis as a company which people associate with intelligent simulation style games. To put this in context, though, a recent industry study found that only 2 percent of gamers consciously consider the publisher or developer in deciding to purchase a particular title.

For another take on this issue, read CMS graduate student Sam Ford over at the Convergence Culture Consortium (c3) blog.

Avatar-Based Marketing

Paul Hemp has a fascinating new article in the Harvard Business Review which explores what it would mean to try to sell brands and products not to consumers but to their avatars. He explains, "Advertising has always targeted a powerful consumer alter ego: that hip, attractive, incredibly popular person just waiting to emerge (with the help of the advertised product) from an all-too-normal self. Now that, in virtual worlds, consumers are taking the initiative and adopting alter egos that are anything but under wraps, marketers can segment, reach, and influence them directly." What might it mean to read an avatar as embodying consumer fantasies and in game experience as a kind of aspirational consumption -- trying out brands, lifestyles, products which consumers might aspire to consume some day in the real world? Paul Hemp presented these ideas in an earlier form at a closed door event we hosted for the sponsors of the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3).

Lost's Alternate Reality Game

Jason Mittell, who participates as an academic advisor to the C3 consortium, has an interesting article this week in Flow about Lost and the alternate reality game which it is running this summer. Lost has sought to extend the experience of the series through an experiment this summer in transmedia storytelling -- creating an online game which reveals more about the evils of the Hanso Foundation. Mittell discusses the contradictory demands of fans (for more series specific information), advertisers (for compelling product placements), gamers (for challenging puzzles), and the networks (to insure that nothing here is so essential to the series that it confuses regular viewers when they return to the aired episodes in the fall).

For those of you who don't know Flow, you should. It's an interesting experiment in media criticism being run out of the University of Texas-Austin: every two weeks, they produce a webzine with a handful of smart, provocative essays by some of the world's leading media scholars addressing themes in contemporary television and new media. For those of you who don't know about alternative reality games, you might also want to check out this column I published in Technology Review a while back.

The Snakes on A Plane Phenomenon

I am watching with great interest the growing hubbub about the new suspense/disaster film, Snakes on a Plane, scheduled for release later this summer and expected by many to yield some of the strongest opening weekend grosses of the season. In many ways, we can see the ever expanding cult following of this predictably awful movie as an example of the new power audiences are exerting over entertainment content. Here's what I think is going on here:

Enter the Grassroots Intermediaries

First, the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon has been building momentum for well over a year now. In the old days, the public would never have known about a film this far out of the gate. They might have learned about it when the previews hit the theatre -- a phenomenon which itself is occurring earlier and earlier in the production cycle -- or even given the fairly low-brow aspirations of this particular title -- when the film actually hit the theatre. In the old days, this would have been an exploitation movie of the kind that Roger Corman used to crank out in the 1950s and 1960s and destined to play on the second bill at the local drive-in. The goal would be to use a easily exploitable concept, a vivid poster and advertising campaign to generate heat quickly: then get into town and out again before anyone knew what hit them.

But, these days, grassroots intermediaries such as Ain't It Cool News are feeding the public's interest for inside information, starting to generate buzz almost from the moment rights are purchased or stars cast for a forthcoming production. Much as day traders have used the online world to become much more aware of every tick and twitch of the Fortune 500, the movie fans are ever attentive to anything which might impact a film's performance at the box office.

Alerting the public to a film so far in advance is a high risk matter for the movie producers -- since people can form strong opinions based on leaked photos or footage on such sites and those first impressions can be hard to shake. (There was a reason why Corman wanted to get into and out of town quickly.) With Snakes on a Plane, the early fan response suggested that the whole concept was a really big hoot -- this was going to be one of these films which is so bad that it is good.

Trash Film Aesthetics: From Niche to Mainstream

Think about that for a moment. The celebration of trash cinema used to be itself a niche audience taste. But over the past decade or two, this niche consumption practice has become progressively more widespread. Cable programs like Mystery Science Theater 3000 helped to introduce the pleasure of razzing a really bad movie to the masses. And so, we can now anticipate that a high percentage of the youth market and beyond will turn up just to throw rotten tomatoes at the screen and laugh about the whole premise.

Fan-Made Media

More than that, the film's fans (if you can call them that) started producing their own movie trailers and music videos; they've created all kinds of bad art -- like this or this or this. Check out this site, Snakes on a Blog, which documents the wild world of fan appropriations surrounding this film. This also reflects the growing ability of media consumers to archive, appropriate, and recirculate media content. These fans are using a wide variety of tools and distribution channels -- including both Flickr and YouTube. What's striking about the present moment is how easily such materials can attach themselves to a major -- or in this case, minor -- media property and get widespread attention. In fact, the fan response keeps generating news coverage for the film -- Entertainment Weekly in particular seems to have a Snakes on a Plane story every few issue.

Hollywood Listens to Its Consumers

But that's not all. In this case, you had a production company which was monitoring the fan response and like a real leader, figured out where the crowd was going and ran out in front, shouting follow me. You could imagine a film getting this kind of public drubbing and having the producer decide that the safest option was to pull it from theatrical distribution and send it direct to video.

In fact, though, the producers listened closely enough to hear the affection underneath the raspberries and realized that the audience was actually looking forward to going out to the theatres and see this turkey. It's hard to tell now whether the film was going to be marketed as camp all along -- somehow I doubt it -- but everyone's busy mythologizing the choice. Samuel L. Jackson is reputed to have insisted that the film keep its over-the-top title: "What are you doing here? It's not Gone with the Wind. It's not On the Waterfront. It's Snakes on a Plane!". The producers reportedly went back and reshot some scenes to include really bad dialogue proposed by fans. The new previews really play up the absurdity and improbability of the core premise -- and when I saw the preview at a theatre in Boston the other week, the audiences cheered and clapped like there was no tomorrow. And I have never seen a official site which so aggressively played up fan response to a film which is still sight unseen by its potential audience.

So, if the film really strikes it big at the box office, we can see this as a powerful illustration of what happens when fans take charge of the promotion of a major Hollywood release.

MySpace and the Participation Gap

Everyone seems to agree that we live in a era of participatory culture. Few people agree on what should be the terms of participation. From time to time, I will direct attention towards challenges and obstacles to the public's right to participate. More often than not, these debates center on young people and their access to media. Young people are the shock troops in the digital revolution -- early adopters and adapters of technology in their constant search for a room of their own in a culture where adults get to define all of the rules.

DOPA

The latest battle in the ongoing struggle over young people's access to and participation within digital cultures is HR 5319, better known as the Deleting Predators On-Line Act (or Dopa). Essentially, this proposed legislation would require any school or library which receives federal funds to ban a range of social networking software, including most notably MySpace, but also potentially including Live Journal and blogging software. This legislation has emerged in response to media coverage of a range of social problems which critics associate with MySpace, including concerns about the threat posed to young people by adults on the prowl for underage victims.

My former student, danah boyd, has been researching MySpace and the other social network sites. She's become a go-to gal with the media on MySpace issues and a sharp critic of the proposed legislation. Recently, the two of us got together for a joint interview about DOPA and MySpace more generally.

My own concerns about DOPA center around two key factors:

The Participation Gap

First, if passed, the legislation would further exaggerate the gaps in social experiences between kids who have a high degree of access to new media technologies at home and those who do not. Throughout the 1990s, there was a great deal of discussion about the so-called Digital Divide which was understood as a gap in access to new media technologies. Concerted efforts were made by those who saw digital resources as valuable to wire every classroom in America and to get networked computers into public libraries. Yet, as the dust has settled, we are realizing that the problem is only partially technical. There's a huge gap between what you can do when you've got unlimited access to broadband in your home and what you can do when your only access is through the public library, where there are often time limits on how long you can work, when there are already federally mandated filters blocking access to certain sites, when there are limits on your ability to store and upload material, and so forth. We call this the participation gap and if passed, this new law will only leave lower income Americans further behind in their ability to participate in the defining experiences of their generation.

The Worth of Networks

All of this would matter less if it wasn't for the second issue -- the ability to operate within social networks is a core skill which we should be cultivating in all young Americans. Increasingly, our professional lives are shaped by large-scale collaborations within knowledge communities. Yet, schools tend to be invested in training autonomous learners. Students, by and large, are acquiring networking skills on their own, outside school hours, through their involvement with MySpace or fan discussion lists or game guilds. In a hunting-based society, kids played with bows and arrows. In a networked society, they play with information and online communities.

Around the country, some teachers are already incorporating social network sites and blogs into their teaching practices. They are using them to connect kids with others who live in very different circumstances or who have specific expertise relevant to a particular assignment. They are using them to generate data which can be used in math or social studies classes.

But if this law is passed, it will make it much harder for these teachers to do their job in preparing students for their future digital lives. True, the law allows exemptions for recognized educational purposes but it creates some strong barriers for teachers to overcome before they can pursue such projects. Having dignified the fear that MySpace is a "Big Bad Evil" through federal legislation, they will face increased public pressure not to take Little Mary or Johnny into their horrible place.

Are We Really Protecting Kids Here?

To be sure, there are some real risks involved in letting young people enter into social networks without some degree of adult guidance -- issues of privacy and cyberbullying for example. And yes, there are some predators there -- though right now, these sites are being heavily policed. We do encourage parents and teachers to discuss responsible and appropriate ways of interacting in virtual worlds and give periodic reminders that while the world may be virtual, the people they are interacting with are real people with real feelings. We do not advocate parents spying on their kids; we do advocate adults communicating with their children about their values, expectations, and norms as they relate to these emerging digital environments.

You would think that if MySpace were as dangerous as critics claim, there would be a stronger effort made to educate young people about the safe and responsible use of social network software, much as earlier generations of educators taught kids what to do if a stranger calls on the phone when their parents are not there. Instead, the law would leave kids to confront these challenges on their own, outside of adult supervision, and off of school grounds.

Our position is in favor of education and against regulation.

For a short interview segment with me talking about these issues, see Beet TV.

Networked Publics Group Tackles Participatory Culture

The Networked Public group at USC's Annenberg Center recently posted a fascinating new essay on participatory culture, written by Adrienne Russell, Mimi Ito, Todd Richmond, and Marc Tuters. The group has been conducting conversations with leading thinkers about contemporary media and is now putting its collective heads together to jointly author a new book for the MIT Press. I was lucky enough to be included in the process, having an animated two hour conversation with them after they had read an advanced copy of Convergence Culture.

I was pleased to see that they had taken some of my insights to heart, expanding and enlarging on some of my book's arguments about participatory culture and linking it in productive ways with ideas from Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Convergence and Media Change

Here's what they have to say in the essay's conclusion:

"Convergence culture is not only a matter of industry and technology but also more importantly a matter of norms, common culture, and the artistry of everyday life. Professional commercial media brought us a slick common culture that has become a fact of life, the language of current events, shared cultural reference, and visual recognitions that lubricate our everyday interactions with one another. Commercial media, for better and for worse provide much of the source material for our modern language of communication. The current moment is perhaps less about overthrow of this established modality of common culture, but more a plea for recognition of a new layer of communication and cultural sharing. At best, this is about folk, amateur, niche and non-market communities of cultural production mobilizing, critiquing, remixing commercial media and functioning as a test bed for radically new cultural forms. At worst, this is about the fragmenting of common culture or the decay of shared standards of quality, professionalism, and accountability. The history of networked public culture has opened with a narrative of convergence and participatory culture; we lie at the crossroads of multiple unfolding trajectories."

The group describes our present moment as one where both grassroots and commercial interests are adjusting to some profound shifts in the relationship between media production and consumption brought about by the rise of networked media. The new media landscape, they argue drawing on Benkler, is characterized by a proliferation of different groups (some grassroots and amateur, some civic or public funded or educational, some commercial) which are producing and distributing content and by new kinds of social communities which are emerging to produce, evaluate, and discuss new forms of culture and new forms of knowledge. The era when commercial media dominated the marketplace of ideas is ending -- even if the mass media continues to exert a disproportionate claim on our collective attention. The commercial industry is reacting with great anxiety and often limited foresight, trying to shut down many of the opportunities which are emerging as the public exerts a greater control over the circulation and production of media. Yet, they are being forced to give ground again and again as fan communities are beginning to operate as collective bargaining units. Those interests which can not adjust to the changes become increasingly imperiled.

Transforming the Music Industry

At the heart, the essay outlines a series of compelling case studies of the interface between commercial and public culture -- including discussions of how amateur music is being reshaped by new technologies of production and distribution, how anime fans are partnering with Asian media interests to get their desired content into the market, how Madison Avenue is learning -- mostly by making mistakes -- ways to tap viral marketing, and how the journalistic establishment is struggling to adjust to the competition and critique offered by the blogosphere.

For my money, the discussion of amateur music production was perhaps the most interesting, if only because it is the area that I know the least about going in. The authors argue that "music has always been a domain of robust amateur production, making it particularly amenable to more bottom-up forms of production and distribution in the digital ecology, and ripe for the disintermediation of labels and licensors....As late as 2001 the prevailing wisdom described local/amateur music being considered by fans, scholars, and musicians alike as 'something to get beyond.' In other words, the end game for the artist was still 'getting signed' and following the traditional industry model, with the time-honored decision-making chain. However as the lines further blur, remix becomes embedded into the culture (even beyond music), and technological changes continue to occur, it would appear that perhaps "getting beyond" might no longer be the goal."

The Saga of the Legendary K.O.

Reading this passage, I was reminded of recent news about how the hip hop community in Houston was using web distribution of music to respond to the aftermath of Katrina. The Legendary K.O., a little known Houston based group, used their music to express what they were hearing from the refuges that were pouring into their city. Randle lives near the Astrodome and Nickerson works at the Houston Convention center. Both found themselves listening to refuges tell their stories: "Not till you see these people face to face and talk to them can you appreciate the level of hopelessness. The one common feeling was that they felt abandoned, on their own little island." They found their refrain while watching Kanye West accuse Bush of being indifferent to black Americans during a Red Cross Telethon being broadcast live on NBC. The juxtaposition of West's anger and comedian Mike Myer's shock encapsulated the very different ways Americans understood what happened.

The Legendary K.O. sampled West's hit song, "Golddigger," to provide the soundtrack for their passionate account of what it was like to be a black man trying to make do in the deserted streets of New Orleans. They distributed the song, "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" as a free download and it spread like wildfire. The song has been perhaps the most powerful demonstration to date of Chuck D's prediction that free downloads could turn hip hop into "the black man's CNN," offering an alternative perspective to mainstream news coverage and thus enabling communication between geographically dispersed corners of the Black America. Within a few weeks time, the song had in effect gone platinum, achieving more than a million downloads, largely on the back of promotion by bloggers. And soon, people around the world were appropriating and recontextualizing news footage to create their own music videos. The song may have started in Houston, framed around both local knowledge and national media representations, but where it was going to end up was anybody's guess. They have since used their reputations to produce more songs which speak to topical concerns, especially those facing the black communities of Houston and New Orleans.

The Legend of Grizzly Bear

I was also reminded of the story of Grizzly Bear, one of the young artists which my student, Vanessa Bertozzi interviewed for a project we were doing together. Grizzly Bear created music in his own bedroom, making imaginative use of found objects, and deploying low-cost but highly effective digital tools to record and manipulate the sound. He tapped local networks to get his music out into the world via mp3 files and into the hands of a record company executive. He ended up getting a contract without ever having performed in public and then faced the challenge of putting together a band to go on the road and perform in public.

I suspect we will be hearing many more stories about groups like The Legendary K.O. and performers like Grizzly Bear in the years to come -- more groups coming from nowhere and exerting some influence on our culture. As these two examples suggest, sometimes these artists are going to be making and distributing music -- and building up a loyal fan base -- almost entirely outside the commercial sphere and beyond the control of record labels. In other cases, they are going to find labels to be effective allies in getting their sounds before a larger public. It is the hybrid nature of this new communications landscape which is central to Convergence Culture and to the Networked Public group's essay.

Ode to Robot Chicken

I recently had a chance to catch up with the first season DVD of The Cartoon Network's Robot Chicken series and found it an interesting illustration of some of the trends I discuss in Convergence Culture. For those of you not in the know, Robot Chicken is a fifteen minute long, fast-paced and tightly-edited, stop motion animation series, produced by Seth Green (formerly of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Austin Powers) and Matthew Senreich: think of it as a sketch comedy series where all of the parts of played by action figures. The show spoofs popular culture - vintage and contemporary - mixing and matching characters with the same reckless abandon as a kid playing on the floor with his favorite collectibles.

For example, the first episode I ever saw included a Real World: Metropolis segment where Superman, Aquaman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Cat Woman, the Hulk, and other superheroes share an apartment and deal with real life issues, such as struggles for access to the bathroom or conflicts about who is going to do household chores. The same episode also included an outrageous parody of Kill Bill, in which Jesus does battle with the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and George Burns (as God). And a spoof of American Idol where the contestants are zombies of dead rock stars and the judges are breakfast cereal icons - Frankenberry (as Randy), Booberry (as Paula) and Count Chocula (as Simon).

The humor is sometimes sophomoric (in the best and worst senses of the word) - lots of jokes about masturbation, farting, vomiting, and random violence - an entire "nutcracker suite" sequence consists of nothing but various characters getting hit or kicked in the groin. Yet, at its best, it manages to force us to look at the familiar icons of popular culture from a fresh perspective: one of my favorite segments features a series of breakfast cereal icons (Tony the Tiger, Toucan Sam, Captain Crunch, The Trix Rabbit, and the Lucky Charms Leprechaun) as forming an international drug cartel smuggling "sugar" into the country. Many of the sketches depend on the juxtaposition of toys remembered fondly from childhood with adult realities (such as a segment which restages the violent murders of S7even within the Smurf kingdom): it has all of the transgressive appeal of cross-dressing a G.I. doll or staging a ritual hanging of Barney the Dinosaur, speaking to a generation which has only partially outgrown its childhood obsessions.

Action Figure Cinema as Fan Practice

In Convergence Culture, I described the ways that the ancillary products surrounding Star Wars were being redeployed by amateur filmmakers who wanted to pay tribute or spoof the original film franchise:

"The amateur filmmakers often make use of commercially available costumes and props, sample music from the soundtrack album and sounds of Star Wars videos or computer games, and draw advice on special effects techniques from television documentaries and mass market magazines... The availability of these various ancillary products has encouraged these filmmakers, since childhood, to construct their own fantasies within the Star Wars universe....The action figures provided this generation with some of their earliest avatars, encouraging them to assume the role of a Jedi Knight or an intergalactic bounty hunter, enabling them to physically manipulate the characters in order to construct their own stories. Not surprisingly, a significant number of filmmakers in their late teens and early twenties have turned toward those action figures as resources for their first production efforts." For many of us, these action figures introduce us to the idea of participatory culture, creating a space where we can rewrite the narratives of popular television and where we can immerse ourselves in vast fictional universe. For some kids, the goal is to lovingly recreate the worlds of their favorite fictions with as much accuracy and plausibility as possible. For others, the goal is to subvert -- do rude things with characters from television, turning Skeletor into a good guy, criss-crossing program boundaries at will.

I go on to discuss the works of amateur filmmaker Evan Mather: "Mather's films, such as Godzilla Versus Disco Lando, Kung Fu Kenobi's Big Adventure, and Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars, represent a no-holds-barred romp through contemporary popular culture. The rock-'em sock-'em action of Kung Fu Kenobi's Big Adventure takes place against the backdrop of settings sampled from the film, drawn by hand, or built from LEGO blocks, with the eclectic and evocative soundtrack borrowed from Neil Diamond, Mission Impossible, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and A Charlie Brown Christmas...Apart from their anarchic humor and rapid-fire pace, Mather's films stand out because of their visual sophistication. Mather's own frenetic style has become increasingly distinguished across the body of his works, constantly experimenting with different forms of animation, flashing or masked images, and dynamic camera movements."

Action figure cinema is an emblematic example of the capacity of grassroots media makers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content. Fan filmmakers essentially take toys that were sold to them as commodities and transforming them into resources for their own creative output. Action figure cinema makes a virtue of the technical limits of amateur filmmaking. The movies are intentionally crudely done -- everyone is supposed to recognize that the sets are built from Lego blocks and the roles are performed by molded plastic figurines.

Mass Media Absorbs and Amplifies Grassroots Creative Practices

Action figure cinema was quickly absorbed by commercial media-makers. We see a similar blend of low tech production and pop culture references in MTV's Celebrity Death Match and Nickelodeon's Action League Now!!! series, both of which used stop motion animation and in the case of Nickelodeon, actual action figures, to parody icons of contemporary popular culture. If amateur filmmakers parody and remix popular culture, commercial media engages in "cool hunting," monitoring their local innovations and pulls back into the mainstream those that they think may have a broader market appeal. And then the process begins all over again. Innovation is most likely to occur on the fan fringes where the stakes are low; the power of mass media comes through its capacity for amplification.

We can trace this process at play within the history of Robot Chicken. As the show's head writers Douglas Goldstein and Tom Root explain, the series originated as part of a regular feature in Toy Fare, a niche magazine which targets action figure collectors and model builders. Seth Green, a fan of the publication, asked Goldstein and Root to help him put together a special animated segment for Green's forthcoming appearance on Conan O'Brien's show, which, in turn, led to an invitation to produce a series of web toons for Sony's short-lived but highly influential Screenblast, which, in turn, led to an invitation to produce a television series as part of the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup. We can thus trace step by step how this concept moves from the fan subculture across a range of sites noted for cult media content.

As the aesthetics of action figure cinema moves more mainstream, the media producers never-the-less want to maintain some of the grassroots authenticity which gave the approach its initial edge. Many of the earliest web cartoons (see the shows at Mondo for example), specifically spoofed the content of television and cinema - trying to establish themselves as closer to the viewer than the mass media (even when, or especially when, the content was actually produced by companies like Sony which were themselves part of the so-called "mainstream media.") In fact, almost every journalistic account I've read of the series stresses Seth Green's own status as a fan boy and toy collector and often describes the challenges faced by the program's "toy wrangler" who often has to go onto eBay or move into retro shops in search of the specific toys needed to cast a particular segment, again blurring the line between amateur and commercial media making practices.

Fan-Friendly Television

When this approach is done well - and Robot Chicken really does this about as well as any show I've seen, the program enjoys enormous credibility within the fan community. For all of the crude comedy and broad parody, the show consistently respects the nuances and details of popular culture. As a parent, I would sometimes step on some artifact of my son's action figure collection trying to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Extracting a sharp chard of molded plastic from my barefoot, I would grumble about "god damn Teela" only to be told by my still three-quarters asleep son, "No, Daddy, that's from Evil-Lyn." My son would respect a show like Robot Chicken because it would know the difference between Teela and Evil-Lyn, even as it breaks down the borders between different fictional universes and brings the characters screaming and kicking into the world of adult realities.

Welcome to Convergence Culture

Welcome to my blog. I launched this site in June in anticipation of the release of my new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The book is now out and can be purchased here.

What's it all about? Here are some key passages from the book's introduction:

Reduced to its most core elements, this book is about the relationship between three concepts - media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence....

By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes, depending on who's speaking and what they think they are talking about. In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms. Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want....

Right now, convergence culture is getting defined top-down by decisions being made in corporate boardrooms and bottom-up by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms. It is shaped by the desires of media conglomerates to expand their empires across multiple platforms and by the desires of consumers to have the media they want where they want it, when they want it, and in the format they want....

This circulation of media content - across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders - depends heavily on the active participation of the consumer. I will argue here against the idea that convergence can be understood primarily as a technological process - the bringing together of multiple media functions within the same gadgets and devices. Instead, I want to argue that convergence represents a shift in cultural logic, whereby consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections between dispersed media content. The term, participatory culture, is intended to contrast with older notions of media spectatorship. In this emerging media system, what might traditionally be understood as media producers and consumers are transformed into participants who are expected to interact with each other according to a new set of rules which none of us fully understands. Convergence does not occur through media appliances - however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers. Yet, each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information we have extracted from the ongoing flow of media around us and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives.

In a culture which some have described according to information overload, it is impossible for any one of us to hold all of the relevant pieces of information in our heads at the same time. Because there is more information out there on any given topic than we can store in our heads, there is an added incentive for us to talk amongst ourselves about the media we consume. This conversation creates buzz and accelerates the circulation of media content Consumption has become a collective process and that's what I mean in this book by collective intelligence. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.... Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day to day interactions within convergence culture. Right now, we are mostly using collective power through our recreational life, but it has implications at all levels of our culture. In this book, I will explore how the play of collective meaning-making within popular culture is starting to change the ways religion, education, law, politics, advertising, and even the military operate.

The book develops these ideas through case studies of a number of key media properties, including Survivor, American Idol, The Matrix, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Global Frequency and the presidential campaign of 2004.

Here's What the Blurbs Say (Skip This Part)

At the risk of being immodest, let me share with you some of the things that others have been saying about the book:

"I thought I knew twenty-first century pop media until I read Henry Jenkins. The fresh research and radical insights in Convergence Culture deserve a wide and thoughtful readership. Bring on the 'monolithic block of eyeballs!'" --Bruce Sterling, author, blogger, visionary

"Henry Jenkins offers crucial insight into an unexpected and unforeseen future. Unlike most predictions about how New Media will shape the world in which we live, the reality is turning out far stranger and more interesting than we might have imagined. The social implications of this change could be staggering."

--Will Wright, designer of SimCity and The Sims

"One of those rare works that is closer to an operating system than a traditional book: it's a platform that people will be building on for years to come. . . . It should be mandatory reading for anyone trying to make sense of today's popular culture--but thankfully, a book this fun to read doesn't need a mandate."

--Steven Johnson, author of the national bestseller, Everything Bad Is Good For You

Henry Jenkins is the 21st century McLuhan I've been waiting for. With all the fuzzy generalities, moral panics, and gloomy pronouncements from industry spokesmen and social critics, Jenkins's clearly communicated and nuanced analysis is sorely needed. The world McLuhan foretold back in the age of electric media has become immensely more complicated in today's many-to-many, converged, remixed and mashed-up, digital, mobile, always-on media environment. If you are a parent, a student, an educator, a creator or consumer of popular culture, an entrepreneur, or a media industry executive, you need to understand convergence culture­­. And you will only after reading Henry Jenkins. --Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

"I simply could not put this book down! Henry Jenkins provides a fascinating account of how new media intersects old media and engages the imagination of fans in more and more powerful ways. Educators, media specialists, policy makers and parents will find Convergence Culture both lively and enlightening." --John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp & director of Xerox PARC

And oh, one more endorsement, for a second book also coming out this summer, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture:

"Jenkins is a one of us: a geek, a fan, a popcult packrat. He's also an incisive and unflinching critic. His affection for the subject and sharp eye for 'what it all means' are an unbeatable combination. This is fascinating, engrossing and enlightening reading."

--Cory Doctorow, author of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and co-editor of Boing Boing

Check Out This Webcast

For those who would like to see me talk about convergence culture, check out webcast of a keynote presentation I did about some of the key themes from the book at the New Media Conference in 2004.

About This Blog

I am going to be using this blog to talk about some of the issues raised in the book -- including providing some of the sections I had to edit out of the book for length reasons, updating some of the case studies in the book, commenting on recent events which reflect some of the book's key themes, and responding to questions and criticisms from readers. Frankly, one of the challenges of writing about contemporary media change is that many of the specifics of popular culture will have shifted by the time a print book appears, so I am excited to have a space where I can play catch-up.

Have no fear, though, if you have not read the book yet, this space will also allow me to comment on many other contemporary developments in the new media landscape. This is after all my 12 book over the past 16 years and so I have a broader array of interests than can be gleamed from any given publication.

And along the way, I will be sharing more about the work we are doing through the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT to put the ideas found in these books into practice through work on consumer culture, media

Update: Some people have read this to suggest this site is purely a "publicity stunt" for the book or to imply that I plan to stop blogging once the book tour is over. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have been overwhelmed by the positive response to this site. I am going to do my best to keep blogging in the months ahead. Getting the book out has given me an incentive to start blogging. But it isn't the only reason for this blog. I've wanted to do this for a long time but like many of you, I have been procrastinating. In any case, I plan to continue to blog once classes start back up. This may result in some cut back in the number of entries per week but I am going to try to continue to get out something every weekday, even if it means more use of interviews and guest bloggers to fill in some gaps in my schedule.

Who the &%&# Is Henry Jenkins?

ABOUT HENRY JENKINS The simple answer is:

Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

Until recently, Jenkins wrote a monthly column and blogged about media and cultural change for Technology Review Online. A longtime advocate of games culture, he currently co-authors a column with Kurt Squire for Computer Games magazine which seeks to promote innovation and diversity in game design. Jenkins recently developed a white paper on the future of media literacy education for the MacArthur Foundation, which is leading to a three year project to develop curricular materials to help teachers and parents better prepare young people for full participation in contemporary culture. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. He was also one of the principal investigators on collaboration with Initiative Media to monitor audience response to American Idol with an eye towards developing new approaches to audience measurement. He is one of the leaders of the Convergence Culture Consortium, which consults with leading players in the branded entertainment sector in hopes of helping them adjust to shifts in the media environment. Jenkins also plays a significant role as a public advocate for fans, gamers, and bloggers: testifying before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee investigation into "Marketing Violence to Youth" following the Columbine shootings; advocating for media literacy education before the Federal Communications Commission; calling for a more consumer-oriented approach to intellectual property at a closed door meeting of the governing body of the World Economic Forum; signing amicus briefs in opposition to games censorship; and regularly speaking to the press and other media about aspects of media change and popular culture. Jenkins has a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from Georgia State University, a MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at MIT for more than 16 years, where he is also housemaster of Senior House dormitory.

Well, that didn't seem so simple after all. For a somewhat more personal account of whom I am, read below.

ABOUT ME

The first thing you are going to discover about me, oh reader of this blog, is that I am prolific as hell. The second is that I am also long-winded as all get out. As someone famous once said (Thomas Jefferson, I think), I would have written it shorter but I didn't have enough time.

My earliest work centered on television fans -- particularly science fiction fans. Part of what drew me into graduate school in media studies was a fascination with popular culture. I grew up reading Mad magazine and Famous Monsters of Filmland -- and much as my parents feared, it warped me for life. Early on, I discovered the joys of comic books and science fiction, spent time playing around with monster makeup, starting writing scripts for my own Super 8 movies (the big problem was that I didn't have access to a camera until much later), and collecting television-themed toys. By the time I went to college, I was regularly attending science fiction conventions. Through the woman who would become my wife, I discovered fan fiction. And we spent a great deal of time debating our very different ways of reading our favorite television series.

Textual Poachers

When I got to graduate school, I was struck by how impoverished the academic framework for thinking about media spectatorship was -- basically, though everyone framed it differently, consumers were assumed to be passive, brainless, inarticulate, and brainwashed. None of this jelled well with my own robust experience of being a fan of popular culture. I was lucky enough to get to study under John Fiske, first at Iowa and then at University of Wisconsin-Madison, who introduced me to the cultural studies perspective. Fiske was a key advocate of ethnographic audience research, arguing that media consumers had more tricks up their sleeves than most academic theory acknowledged.

Out of this tension between academic theory and fan experience emerged first an essay, "Star Trek Reread, Rerun, Rewritten" and then a book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Textual Poachers emerged at a moment when fans were still largely marginal to the way mass media was produced and consumed, still hidden from the view of most "average consumers" and as such, represented a radically different way of thinking about how one might live in relation to media texts. In the book, I describe them as "rogue readers." What most people took from that book was my concept of "poaching," the idea that fans construct their own culture -- fan fiction, artwork, costumes, music, and videos -- from content appropriated from mass media, reshaping it to serve their own needs and interests. There are two other key concepts in this early work which takes on greater significance in my work today -- the idea of participatory culture (which runs throughout the Convergence Culture book) and the idea of a moral economy (that is, the presumed ethical norms which govern the relations between media producers and consumers.)

Aca/Fan Defined

Textual Poachers and much of my subsequent work has been written from the perspective of an Aca/Fan -- that is, a hybrid creature which is part fan and part academic (hence the current, provisional title of this blog). The goal of my work has been to bridge the gap between these two worlds. I take it as a personal challenge to find a way to break cultural theory out of the academic bookstore ghetto and open up a larger space to talk about the media that matters to us from a consumer's point of view. This philosophy has governed my various stabs at journalism and public advocacy and they are what are motivating me to develop a personal blog.

Convergence Culture

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Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide returns to this question of media audiences and participatory cultures at a moment where fans and fan-like activities are absolutely central to the way the culture industries operate. At all levels, the assumption is that consumers will become active participants but there is widespread dispute about the terms of our participation. We are seeing enormous experimentation into the potential intersections between commercial and grassroots culture and about the power of living within a networked society. At the same time, the media industries are struggling to keep up with these changes, issuing contradictory responses out of different divisions within the same companies. Convergence Culture was designed as a public intervention into this situation, trying to help both consumers and producers understand the changes which are occurring in their relationship.

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, my second new book, maps the transition between the world described in Textual Poachers and the world depicted in Convergence Culture: it reprints many of my key essays about participatory culture through the years, including early writings about fans and later writings which sought to respond to some of the moral panic kicked up by Columbine and claims that games and other forms of popular culture were leading young people to the brink of damnation.

It's safe to say that neither of these books would have come about if I had not moved to MIT 16 years ago and found myself immersed in the vibrant digital culture of the past decade. I often claim that I am a walking, talking oxymoron -- a humanist from MIT. But I think that my unique perspective as someone studying culture within one of the world's leading technical institutions gives me some distinctive insights into the ways that culture and technology are reshaping before our very eyes.

Comparative Media Studies

One of my proudest accomplishments so far in life has been the creation of the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) graduate program at MIT. At its core, this program encourages students to think across media, across historical periods, across national borders, across academic disciplines, across the divide between theory and practice, and across the divides between the academy and the rest of society. Our goal is simply to train the next generation of leaders for industry, government, education, the arts, journalism, and academia to think in more imaginative ways about the process of media change. I like to joke that CMS is a program for people who could never decide what they wanted to major in. It is "undisciplined" in the best sense of the terms -- my own sense is that the academic disciplines which emerged around the problems of the industrial age have outlived their usefulness in a networked culture and that we need to reconfigure the ways we organize and communicate knowledge to our students.

Central to the vision of CMS is the idea of "applied humanism." MIT has applied math, applied physics, and applied chemistry so it made sense to me that there should be an applied branch of the humanities. Our goal is to take what we are teaching in our classrooms and give students a chance to apply it more pragmatically to think through some of the core challenges being faced out in the field as core institutions confront media change. With this in mind, we have launched a range of research initiatives which I will be writing more about as this blog continues.

Convergence Culture Consortium

The Convergence Culture Consortium is a direct outgrowth of the books coming out this summer. We wanted to bring together key thinkers from a number of different disciplines and universities who were interested in the kinds of social and cultural changes that were impacted the branded entertainment sector. We wanted to bring together leading entertainment companies, advertising firms, and key sponsors to create a dialogue about where media is going and how it impacts consumers. We are developing white papers on topics such as advergaming and product placement, transmedia storytelling and mobile entertainment, alternative reality games, and fan cultures, among other topics. And I get to go into places like Cartoon Network or the MTV Networks and lecture them about what they need to know about the fan communities I study.

Project NML

Project New Media Literacies also grows out of the ideas in my most recent books. Here, the focus is on the educational challenges of making sure that every kid in America has the social skills and cultural competencies needed to participate in a networked society. According to a recent study by the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, more than half of all American teens have produced media and a significant portion have distributed that media content on line. We need to be aware of the challenges faced by both halves of that statistic -- those faced by media makers who lack the traditional mentorship and apprenticeship into production practices and ethical norms which would have shaped previous generations of media makers (student journalists, for example) and those faced by those who are not yet making media -- what we are calling the participation gap between those who have anywhere, anytime access and those who may only be able to go online on a library computer with limited bandwidth, filtered content, short work spans, and no capacity to store or upload what they create. This project argues that media literacy skills, broadly defined, need to be integrated into school-based and after-school programs, into adult education for parents and teachers, and into popular culture itself if we are going to fully address the challenges of this moment of media in transition.

The Education Arcade

The Education Arcade represents a systematic attempt to explore and experiment with the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games. I was one of the first humanities scholars in the world to write seriously about video games -- not as a social problem but as an emerging medium of aesthetic expression and social experience. Through the years, my work on games has led me to consult with Purple Moon on the development of the girls game movement (and later to co-edit a book, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games), to run a creative leaders program for Electronic Arts, to become a key public critic of the media effects argument and the push to regulate games content, and to become actively involved in the design and implementation of "serious games."

We have more new initiatives coming soon -- including, we hope, some work on public policy and civic media. But these three initiatives illustrate the ways we are trying to fuse theory and practice through the program.

And Stuff

And of course, this just scratches the surface in terms of my academic interest. I began my career writing about vaudeville and early sound comedy (What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Anarchistic Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic). Through the years, I have written about WWF wrestling, Doctor Seuss, Lassie, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and a host of other popular culture works. This strand of my research is represented by yet another forthcoming book, The Wow Climax: Tracing The Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, coming out near the end of this year. And comic books are my current popular culture passion. I hope to write a book about genre theory and superheroes before much longer.

I never can keep my personal life separated from my professional life. This is what comes of being a fan/academic. Much of what I write about popular culture comes from an autobiographical impulse and also reflects the tastes and interests of my son, Henry, now in his mid-twenties, and my wife, Cynthia, who helped get me into fan culture in the first place. I also seek inspiration from not only the students I teach through the CMS program but also the students who live in Senior House, the dorm where I am housemaster. I expect all of these folks will be making appearances in my blog posts from time to time. My wife would no doubt tell you that it is symptomatic of my workaholic tendencies that I cram my personal life into the last paragraph of an overly long and overly detailed account of my life. The reality is that most of my work is deeply personal and my personal relationships shape everything else I do.

And Now a Blog...

This blog is frankly long overdue. I've wanted to have a blog for some time. I used to blog for Technology Review; we run blogs for many of the projects; and I've run blogs through several of my classes. But I have until now been reluctant to make the time commitment needed to make a personal blog work. Reread the account above and you will see the reason why I have been a little preoccupied. So I've blogged for other people; I've written about blog; and now I have my own blog.

Karolin Lohmus has translated this post for Estonian readers. You can find it at https://www.espertoautoricambi.it/science/2018/02/04/kes-on-henry-jenkins/