"Never Let Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education" and Other Stories

For those readers who don't get enough of me in my daily posts here (I know that must describe, maybe, three or four people out there who seriously need to get a life), I guest blogged yesterday and today over on PBS's Media Shift site. If you go there you can find two posts dealing with the relationship between education and participatory culture, which touch on some of the work we have been doing through our New Media Literacies Project. Here's a sample of what I talk about in Thursday's post, "Learning Through Remixing":

America's children are become media-makers: they are blogging, designing their own websites, podcasting, modding games, making digital movies, creating soundfiles, constructing digital images, and writing fan fiction, to cite just a few examples. As they do so, they are discovering what previous generations of artists knew: art doesn't emerge whole cloth from individual imaginations. Rather, art emerges through the artist's engagement with previous cultural materials. Artists build on, take inspiration from, appropriate and transform other artist's work: they do so by tapping into a cultural tradition or deploying the conventions of a particular genre. Beginning artists undergo an apprenticeship phase during which they try on for size the styles and techniques of other more established artists. And even well established artists work with images and themes that already have some currency within the culture. Of course, this isn't generally the way we talk about creativity in schools, where the tendency is still to focus on individual artists who rise upon or stand outside any aesthetic tradition.

Most of the classics we teach in the schools are themselves the product of appropriation and transformation or what we would now call sampling and remixing. So Homer remixed Greek myths to construct The Iliad and the Odyssey; Shakespeare sampled his plots and characters from other author's plays; The Sistine Chapel Ceiling mashes up stories and images from across the entire Biblical tradition. Lewis Carroll spoofs the vocabulary of exemplary verses which were a standard part of formal education during his period. Many core works of the western canon emerged through a process of retelling and elaboration: the figure of King Arthur goes from an obscure footnote in an early chronicle into the full blown text of Mort D'Arthur in a few centuries as the original story gets built upon by many generations of storytellers.

The post goes on to discuss a range of media literacy projects -- include our own work teaching children how to rework the Cantina scene from Star Wars -- are teaching kids to understand how culture works by breaking down familiar texts and putting them back together again. It builds on some of the issues raised in my interview with Renee Hobbs on Monday.

Today's post, "Never Let Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education," talks about home schooling, "unschooling," and informal learning, tapping James Gee's concept of "affinity spaces" to talk about such groups as fan fiction writers, gamers, and poetry enthusiasts. (I plan to write more about the later group over here in the next week or so.) But it starts with a more personal account of our decision to home school my son for a year:

Some years ago, my wife, my son, and I came to a parting of the ways with the Sommerville Public School System. We felt the schooling process was failing our son. The science teacher conducted no experiments but simply had students write answers to study questions while he worked crossword puzzles in front of the class. The literature instructor had managed to walk them paragraph by paragraph through a single, not particularly challenging novel for the entire school year. And the history class had not progressed much past the American Revolution after 9 months.

The social environment of the school was hostile. When the other kids were taunting my son by throwing basketballs at him during gym, we suggested he spend a period sitting next to the teacher. When my son’s abusers accidentally hit her with a ball, she asked him to move rather than dealing with the bullies. The school was neither going to nurture his curiosity nor protect his dignity.

My wife and I had decided we wanted to take action but weren't sure how our son would feel about it. One day he asked us if he could stop going to that school and we shocked everyone by saying yes. He had mixed feelings from the start but we plowed forward anyway.

We had been reluctant to add to the ranks of Cambridge faculty members who were not supporting the public schools. We had both been a product of public education ourselves. But at the end of the day, the needs of the child came first. We were reminded of what my father used to say, “never let schooling get in the way of your education.

Anyway, I thought these two posts might interest some of you who regularly read this blog.

More on Games As Art

Reader Hugh wrote a very thoughtful response to my original post about games as art and I want to take the time to respond to it in some depth because it cuts to the heart of the question of why it matters and what it means to describe games as art.

What Makes Games Valuable

His response begins:

I find your comments about computer games (or games in general) needing to be considered "art" for it to be demonstrated that they have "positive cultural contributions to make," interesting.

Hugh is referring to my suggestion that part of the value of treating games as art is to counter claims made by the moral reform movement that has been trying to pressure for government regulation on youth access to video games in cities across the country. If you look closely, the movement often tries to compare games to other kinds of products and commodities -- such as cigarettes -- a common reference point or to forms of expression -- such as pornography -- which do not enjoy full constitutional protection. The goal is to dismiss out of hand the idea that games can be culturally meaningful activities. As I said yesterday, making the case that game playing is a meaningful activity is one of the most important functions of games criticism.

Hugh continues:

Clearly the contribution of value to our culture is not limited to art. Football (American or otherwise) is not art - in fact, it's a game. But it is very hard to question the value that children or indeed grown people playing sport adds to our culture.

Going for a long walk isn't art, either. But it's clearly valuable. Running a popular meeting point, a bar or a cafe, isn't art, but it has considerable value to society. Hell, running a garbage disposal firm isn't art, but I'd rather Edinburgh City Council didn't close their binmen down on that basis.

Even if, say, World of Warcraft isn't art, that doesn't mean it's not of value. In fact, it's entirely possible to argue that its artistic merit is in fact entirely irrelevant to its value to society.

Again, I would agree with Hugh's general conclusion here. We can go back to the 2002 Limbaugh decision, issued by U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. in response to a proposed Saint Louis regulation of youth access to games (and blissfully overturned subsequently). Limbaugh argued that games did not deserve constitutional protection from censorship because they did not represent a meaningful form of expression. He acknowledged that they probably held the same amount of social value as sports or traditional games but noted that there were no constitutional rights attached to these activities. We have freedom of speech, which belatedly was extended from political speech to artistic expression, but we do not have a right to play. More's the pity. At best, there is a vague right to "the pursuit of happiness" but I don't think you are going to find judges take you very seriously if you simply assert that playing games makes you happy.

Getting Serious About Games

Games can be valuable on many levels. Their status as art is simply one of them. Right now, we are seeing defenses of games emerging on multiple levels.

Some writers -- James Paul Gee or Kurt Squire or Steven Johnson, for example -- are making the case for games on educational or cognitive levels rather than aesthetic. Gee demonstrates that games are structured around solid pedagogical principles and that they are teaching young people new ways of processing knowledge. Johnson contends that games, like other modern forms of popular culture, have a degree of complexity (and thus pose cognitive challenges) which may be greater than most critics imagine. Squire has shown that communities emerge around games which enhance or expand the educational value of the play experience itself.

The serious games movement tackles the question of games as a form of political or social expression much more directly. They are demonstrating that games as a medium can serve a wide array of social and pedagogical purposes. Advocates like Gonzalo Frasca or Ian Bogost have made strong cases that games can be used for political speech. There are interesting experiments in the use of games for journalistic purposes. And so forth. If these efforts are successful, they will go to the heart of the legal debate -- representing the kinds of materials which are most cherished and protected under American constitutional law.

Yet this is treacherous territory since if we make too powerful a case that games can be a tool for persuasion or even education, games reformers are apt to cite it as proof that games "brainwash" or "train" the people who consume them. If a game can "teach" you world history (in the case of Civilization) or change how you think about genocide (in the case of Darfur is Dying), than can a game teach you to kill your classmates? I have tried to address this question in terms of a distinction between meanings and effects.

Here's a passage from one of my essays, "The War Between Effects and Meanings," which will be included in my forthcoming book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers:

Limbaugh and company see games as having social and psychological "effects" (or in some formulations, as constituting "risk factors" that increase the likelihood of violent and antisocial conduct). Their critics argue that gamers produce meanings through game play and related activities. Effects are seen as emerging more or less spontaneously, with little conscious effort, and are not accessible to self examination. Meanings emerge through an active process of interpretation; they reflect our conscious engagement; they can be articulated into words; and they can be critically examined. New meanings take shape around what we already know and what we already think, and thus, each player will come away from a game with a different experience and interpretation. Often, reformers in the "effects" tradition argue that children are particularly susceptible to confusions between fantasy and reality. A focus on meaning, on the other hand, would emphasize the knowledge and competencies possessed by game players starting with their mastery over the aesthetic conventions which distinguish games from real world experience.

Arguments for the aesthetic value of games represent a third important prong in this effort to develop an affirmative defense of video games rather than simply debunk claims made about media effects. In some ways, it is proving the most controversial in part because of conflicting assumptions about the nature of art.

The New Lively Art

And this is what Hugh gets to next in his comments:

John Carey's "What Good Are The Arts" provides a compelling dissection of the common belief that the arts are somehow inherently "improving". I wouldn't argue that the "art" in World of Warcraft is the reason that kids should be allowed to play it - I'd argue that learning team skills, discipline, perseverance, problem-solving skills and simple escapism are all reasons to play it....

One thing that's interesting here is that games are clearly a form of expression - "speech", indeed - but that doesn't necessarily translate to our conception of art, which is generally considered, at the moment, to be a one-way expression mediated by the author. As I understand it, the US constitution protects freedom of speech, not freedom of art - it is just that in the past 100 years or so, many things considered speech have also been considered art.

My own argument that games constitutes art stems not from a high culture notion of art as uplift or "improvement" but rather from Gilbert Seldes' concept of a lively art. I discuss this idea at some length in my essay, "Games, the New Lively Art," which will be reprinted in my forthcoming anthology, The Wow Climax. Here's some of what I have to say here:

Adopting what was then a controversial position, Seldes argued that America's primary contributions to artistic expression had come through emerging forms of popular culture such as jazz, the Broadway musical, Vaudeville, Hollywood cinema, the comic strip, and the vernacular humor column....Readers then were skeptical of Seldes' claims about cinema for many of the same reasons that contemporary critics dismiss games - they were suspicious of cinema's commercial motivations and technological origins, concerned about Hollywood's appeals to violence and eroticism, and insistent that cinema had not yet produced works of lasting value. Seldes, on the other hand, argued that cinema's popularity demanded that we reassess its aesthetic qualities. Cinema and other popular arts were to be celebrated, Seldes insisted, because they were so deeply imbedded in everyday life, because they were democratic arts embraced by average citizens. Through streamlined styling and syncopated rhythms, they captured the vitality of contemporary urban experience. They took the very machinery of the industrial age, which many felt dehumanizing, and found within it the resources for expressing individual visions, for reasserting basic human needs, desires, and fantasies. And these new forms were still open to experimentation and discovery. They were, in Seldes' words, "lively arts."

What I am arguing, then, is not that games should be removed from the realm of everyday life and put on a pedestal in an art museum. Rather, games are art because they represent a site of play and expression within the contexts of their everyday lives. They teach us to see the world through new eyes. They teach us new ways to interact with the computer. Art is not necessarily uplifting: it is enough that it refreshes us -- heightening our perceptual awareness, enhancing the quality of our lives. In that sense, I am arguing that play matters because it makes us happy.

Expression does not equal Narrative

Hugh continues:

It's also worth noting that whilst our culture generally considers art to be defined by passive consumption, there's plenty of precedent for art to be interactive. Theatre, for example, is highly dependent on the audience for its content, as actors "play" to the crowd. With no crowd and no crowd reaction, there is no theatre. That's even more true in improvised theatre. Architecture by definition is the crafting of an interactive artform, yet no-one doubts it is art.

The core of the problem comes from our assumption that if games are art, then the art must come through telling stories rather than creating new kinds of experiences. Improved storytelling might be one form that games as art will take. But games are not predestined to become a more interactive form of cinema. They could just as easily become about expressive movements -- like dance -- or spaces -- like architecture. For me, Shigaru Miyagawa is perhaps the consummate game artist -- not because he creates such compelling stories or psychologically deep characters but because he is so imaginative in his design of space, so open to exploring new ways of interacting with the medium, and so expressive in his use of movement and iconography. Games tap a spirit of experimentation and improvisation through our freedom to explore their spaces and interact with them in a variety of ways. So, again, I totally agree with Hugh's position here. Stories are one ways that our culture communicates meaning. Rituals are another. Games are still another. These forms may sometimes overlap but they have quite autonomous histories.

Culture and Commerce, Elites and Masses

Hugh concludes:

Possibly some of the resistance to the concept of a game as art comes from the fact that the creation of art is considered in the Western world to be a work of specialized artisans, rather than something which is part of everyday life? Once again, John Carey points out that that's an anomaly of the last few hundred years - art evolved in humankind as a form of play, and indeed several languages do not have separate words for the two activities.

Our culture, of course, has devalued play, as Pat Kane points out in "The Play Ethic". Perhaps this is part of the resistance that computer games find when they try to define themselves as art?

Again, I find myself in loud and emphatic agreement with Hugh's comments here. Games suffer two problems in terms of our modern understanding of art:

1. on the one hand, games are commercial products and there is a tendency to set art against commerce in our critical discussions. We see this even in terms of cinema where some movies get called "art movies" and others get called "popcorn movies," despite decades of criticism which has sought to identify the ways entertainment properties may nevertheless be meaningful and expressive and aesthetically compelling. I was in a debate recently with Ernest Adams, who is one of the most thoughtful commentators on the games industry and medium, but who is not convinced that games are art. His arguments hinge on this distinction between art and commerce.

2. On the other hand, games are not art because they are so accessible to the general population. Art has increasingly been seen as the property of the educated elite. Under this definition, you have to be taught to perceive and value art. Artistic appreciation becomes a form of social distinction. And there is a tendency to devalue the kinds of informal learning which surrounds our mastery of popular culture form. Trust me, none of us were born knowing how to beat a level.

Many gamers are also worried that if we discuss games as art, they will somehow stop making the kinds of games they like to play. Art is thought of as something stuffy or serious-minded, rather than something playful and engaging. I see this tied to some of the ways that modern art embraced an aesthetic of emotional and contemplative distance where-as Seldes' "Lively Arts" embraced an aesthetic that emphasized immediate emotional impact. When I promote the idea that games should be considered art, I don't mean that they should saddle themselves with some alien artistic tradition or that they should necessarily strive to be high art. I want them to remain a popular art. I want them to develop their own aesthetic principles that reflect the ways we engage with games in the course of our everyday life. Rather than strip play from games, I want us to reassert the centrality of play to artistic expression.

Hugh's comments take us a step further -- at least by implication -- in suggesting that the art of games is created not simply by the designer but also by the player. Imagine a world where players were judged not simply on the basis of their high scores but also on their expressive performances? To some degree, this tension has already surfaced around something like Dance Dance Revolution. I am happy to argue there that the best players don't necessarily rake up the highest scores; rather, they score as performers with the audience that watches them. Maybe we make art every time we pick up the joy stick. But in that sense, Hugh is right that this art becomes immediately devalued because these skills are too widespread within our culture and our modern notion of art emphasizes not simply an elite consumer but also an elite producer.

In the end, I don't think Hugh and I disagree. Hugh argues that games can be seen as meaningful without being considered art. I would argue that artistic expression is simply one of a number of different criteria by which we might identify the meaningfulness of games.

Thanks, Hugh, for such a rich response. Sorry it has taken me a while to get back to it.

More on Games Criticism

I hate to use this blog just to update on earlier posts but the debate about games criticism continues to rage across the blogosphere and there's lots of pretty smart things being said on the subject. And of course, being only human, I wanted to offer my ten cents worth on them. For anyone who missed my original post, you can find it here, complete with links to the Esquire article that kicked off this particular round of debate. Today, I am taking up the issue of games criticism. I will be back on friday with some more thoughts about games as art.

The Joy Stick Nation

Clive Thompson over at Wired is one of the smartest people writing about games and digital culture. He's offered his perspective on the state of game criticism. First, he says, there are no great games critics because their editors aren't allowing them to write about games in the same way that one might write about any other medium:

Today's mainstream editors mostly neither play games nor think about them much. When they do, they regard games either as juvenile fluff, or dangerous mind-control technology that is programming a kill-crazed generation of moral zombies. (Or, in a lovely bit of doublethink, both.) Nine times out of 10 their favorite angle is the bromidic "do games make ya violent?" crap; the reviews they commission are 400-word pellets. Worse, they force their critics to write as if games were some bizarre new fad that their shut-in readers have literally never heard of. This kills criticism.... What if the New Yorker had told Pauline Kael to write her columns under the assumption that the magazine's readers never actually watch movies?

At the same time, Thompson argues -- and I would agree -- that the most engaged, passionate, and knowledgeable writing about games comes not from professional critics writing in print publications but from grassroots writers using the web -- that is people who have to write about a particular game because it has changed their lives. This is a point which gets made again and again throughout this discussion: the best games criticism is going to come from people who grew up with this medium, who know it inside and out, who know hundreds if not thousands of games and can tell you what makes each of them interesting or innovative.

I see those kinds of students in my classrooms. I don't see them writing yet for major publications.

I have written and commented a fair amount about games through the years and I always feel vaguely inadequate in doing so because I know there's a 16 year old out there who can tell me why level 35 of this particular game was more interesting than level 12 and can offer a pretty good explanation why. And sooner or later, writers like me are going to be displaced by kids who were born with a joystick in their hands and who think games are not only art but are the highest form of art on the planet. And I will be a very happy man.

John Scalzi makes a very similar point in his discussion of the issue of games criticism:

If we grant that Kael and Bangs typify mature (or, given Bang's style, at least fully engaged) examples of criticism of their media, the reason there is currently no Kael or Bangs for video games is clear: It's awfully damn early for someone like them to arrive for the video game medium. Possibly the "Kael of video games" is the age of my daughter right now, and like her banging out rhythms on Dance Dance Revolution or getting immersed in some Mario World. Like Kael or Bangs, she'll never have known a time in which games were not fully narrative in their way, so like them she won't have to rely on metaphor or perspective that inherently views video games as a disruption (or the supplanter) of other artistic media...The hermeneutics of video games require a whole lot of button-mashing. How many critics are both able to get through a boss level and tell you what it means as a social construct? In the future, probably a lot. At the moment: Not so many.

Again, like Thompson, I am convinced that such games critics are already out there -- taking games studies classes at universities, posting their thoughts in blogs and webzines, doing their own podcasts, and probably working on a game mod or machinema project on the side.The participatory nature of this medium insures that the first wave of great games critics will be more like Sergei Eisenstein than Pauline Kael. This is one reason why I admire Eric Zimmerman so much -- because he works as a game designer to develop a critical vocabulary of game design and then he puts those insights into books (Rules of Play) so that it can be discussed and debated by others who care about this medium.

Entering the Penny Arcade

A number of the posts I've read on this topic arrived at the same conclusion: that the most powerful force for games criticism today comes not through prose writing but in the form of a comic strip, Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade consistently comments on the trends within the medium while also factoring in gamer culture, games industry practices, and social policy debates. That they do so with such wit and economy is a real tribute to these guys as critics/artists and to the richness of game culture. What Penny Arcade does is game criticism of the richest kind -- this has always been true of the strip itself and is even more true of the discussion which surrounds the strip.

I might also point you towards the work of the so-called New Games Journalists, which is perhaps best exemplified by the now famous/infamous "Bow Nigger" essay. These guys take you inside the game, describe what the player experiences from a subjective point of view, takes us through the steps of their mental process in playing the game which includes both things that emerge organically through their interactions with other players and through programmed features of the game itself. Again, it isn't quite criticism in the sense we are talking about but it is work that illuminates the aesthetics and sociology of games.

Retracing the Evolution of Film Criticism

Bill McClain offers a more detailed comparison between how film criticism evolved and the likely path towards a fuller and richer criticism of games:

After all, the earliest film criticism was internal industrial summaries of film products, what we might now call plot summaries, intended to help distributors and exhibitors chose and market their product ("users' guides" in any sense you chose to take it). Then, looking back to the earliest forms of academic/elite critical discourse to the Soviet Avant-Garde and even going as far forward as Andre Bazin we see an attempt to determine a) is film art, or merely entertainment, or perhaps even a social problem and/or tool? b) if it is art, how does it relate to other arts, what makes it unique and what makes it similar to existing forms of art and artistic discourses? c) if it is art, by what standards do we judge it, how do we describe it, how do we interpret it? d) and yes, of course, it's going to totally change the whole fucking world. Sound familiar? My concern is, as video game criticism develops, that it become, as film criticism did before it, so wrapped up in trying to figure out what the hell video games are and what essential properties (usually dependent on whether the medium in question is the savior or the Satan) they exhibit that it ignores the world that creates and uses video games. It would be nice to believe that we can learn from the mistakes of critics past, or at least that this is a sort of necessary phase in the development of a new critical enterprise that we can, with the aid of hindsight, dispense with all the sooner...but plus ca change...

Like Thompson and Scalzi, then, the argument is that the medium is too new and there hasn't been enough time for good critical practices to emerge. (This is different, by the way, from another claim about the history of the medium: that games themselves have not yet evolved to the point that they are worthy of serious criticism, that they are still learning their basic vocabulary. As far as I am concerned, while the medium still has plenty of room for growth, a game designer like Miyamoto proved games could be art a long long time ago.) First, let me suggest that the history of film criticism is more complicated than what we most often learn in film studies classes. I would note, for example, that someone like Epes Winthrop Sargent over at Moving Picture World might superficially be described as a trade press reporter offering "industrial summaries" of films for exhibitors but he also was carefully monitoring the step by step progress being made in the aesthetics of film, tracing the emergence of the close-up across a number of films, speculating on how this device might be used more effectively, articulating the rationale and standards of classical film style, etc. And the early writers who were bogged down writing about whether film were art -- Gilbert Seldes for one -- often managed to make some compelling observations about specific films and filmmakers. And there were great film critics well before Pauline Kael -- folks like Graham Green and James Agee and..., many of whom were writing by the early 1930s. It is precisely because such critics wrote with such great specificity about individual films that they are often not included in your average Introduction to Film class anymore.

What you tend to read are the generalists who mapped the field and not the specialists who applied those aesthetic standards to emerging work. But that doesn't mean that early film critics were "simply reviewers" and didn't play a very important role in shaping the evolution of film as a medium. Much as we suggested about the gamer critics above, though, the best of these writers grew up with film -- read James Agee's thinly veiled autobiographical account of going to see a Chaplin movie with his father in the opening of A Death in the Family for a wonderful account of what it was like to be a child at the moment cinema was being born. And you can see how those early childhood influences took shape into a landmark essay like "Comedy's Greatest Era." You didn't get those insights from Maxim Gorky, a literary figure who dained to write about cinema from time to time.

Technical Vs. Expressive Language

Scalzi seems to imagine that games will require a more technical vocabulary before they can generate solid criticism of the kind we are seeking:

Video games do have their auteurs -- Will Wright, John Carmack, Sid Meyer and Shigeru Miyamoto are examples -- but what they do and how they do it is frightfully opaque. Does a long discussion about Carmack's work on specular lighting or his latest game engine have the same critical accessibility as a discussion about, say, Orson Welles' directorial choices, or the making of Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" technique? Personally, I think it doesn't, save for a small, technically adept tribe.

Maybe -- I certainly have found it hard to explain to non-gamers why the technical advices represented by Grand Theft Auto enhances the art of the medium, even if its content can sometimes feel hard to justify to someone who hasn't played the game. Yet, if you go back and read someone like Kael, she certainly had access to a pretty sophisticated vocabulary of film techniques but she tends to avoid technical terms as much as possible. She isn't a formalist trying to analyze the specific techniques deployed: she left that for academics in the emerging field of film studies. She wrote in a more evocative language, trying to record her own passionate engagement, her own subjective experience of a particular film, trying to help us understand why the filmmaker was doing something fresh and original within the medium.

In my original post, I suggested we had neither the technical vocabulary to write in specifics about games techniques nor the expressive language to communicate effectively what it is like to play a game. Of the two, the second is the more important. Academic game studies is coming of age and will eventually give us the technical language needed to really dissect a game. This can be important. I would argue that it was because film studies classes were becoming more normative in American education that we were able to develop an audience for documentary or independent films over the past two decades: more and more people were open to kinds of films which had not played at their local multiplex and had some initial language for talking about what they were getting from watching such movies.

So, academic criticism has its place. We certainly need an educated consumer. But what's needed right now, more than anything, is a public voice of games criticism.

The Functions of Criticism

Such a voice has several key roles (some within the gamer community, some beyond it): they need to educate the general public about why this medium matters and that means making the big picture case for games as a form of artistic and social expression. They need to be able to deliver consumers behind innovative and interesting products so that they do not die in the marketplace and so that they empower the best game designers to push the limits of the medium. We shouldn't be seeing world class talent spent building expansion packs for top selling games. We should see them always moving onto the next frontier.

At the same time, there has be some accountability within the games industry. One reason I think it's important to start looking at games as art is because artists have responsibilities -- to their publics and to the traditions within which they operate. I don't buy the argument that the games industry has to ship product and so it can't think about the art of game design. Top Hollywood filmmakers of the 1930s might produce as many as seven feature films a year but someone like Howard Hawks or John Ford made sure each of those films mattered, each said something, each created a distinctive experience, each contributed to the evolution of the medium. And game designers need to start thinking about their craft in the same way. A good critic will push artists hard to refine their techniques and to think more deeply about what they are expressing through their work. There are so many commercial pressures exerted on game designers -- it would be nice to have some counterpressures to encourage innovation and diversity.

Yes, I agree with Clive Thompson that some such criticism is out there on the web and that blogs now function the way zines did during the Punk Scene of the 1970s and 1980s. Nobody reads what the mainstream press says about these issues. Indeed, establishment critics are all but irrelevant to the core of the games market (though the opposite may also be true. There are plenty of games which got slammed by every games critic on the internet and went on to sell a massive number of units.) This kind of insider criticism doesn't address the larger problem of the general public's perceptions of this medium. I am outraged that all the general reader hears about games is that some people think they are too violent. Imagine that we were thirty plus years into the history of cinema -- way past Great Train Robbery which demonstrated the films could tell stories, way past Birth of a Nation which demonstrated that films could be a form of political expression, way past Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Battleship Potempkin and Sherlock Junior which proved films could be art, and the only thing that anyone had written about film was that people got pies shoved in their faces. Games are facing steady and relentless public attack to no small degree because no one has made the affirmative case for this medium: we simply get bogged down in arguing that Grand Theft Auto isn't as bad as people think it is.

For this to change, we have to push for games to be regularly covered in Entertainment Weekly, for games to be criticized and debated in the New Yorker, because most of the people who are making our lives miserable right now are not reading Computer Games magazine. So, yes, Clive, it's great to see that no one whose hip looks to Esquire to tell them what games to buy -- I get that -- but then, it's not the hip people I'm worried about.

But this only takes care of the first function of the critic. The second and third functions (promoting innovation, challenging artists) is most likely to come from within the games community. And the challenge there is that a participatory culture is inherently fragmented. For this model to work, we need not simply one great games critics but hundreds of pretty good games critics who are willing to take on the responsibilities of the critic and are willing to ask hard and big questions about the medium they are writing about. There are some such people out there now -- but if this model is going to work, you need to build an army.

What I worry about are people like the reader at Scalzi's site who posted this helpful comment:

Guys don't play videogames for artistic content anymore than they rent porn for artistic content. If I want a story, I have an apartment crammed with books.

I get what he's saying. But keep in mind that there are people out there who want to regulate games precisely because they think they are like pornography -- that is, utterly without redeeming value.

Thanks to CMS graduate student Alec Austin and CMS alum Zhan Li for calling some of these pieces to my attention.

Field Notes from Project Good Luck: CMS in China

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, CMS is experimenting with new ways of opening up our research to the public. This week, a team of CMS graduate students and faculty are traveling to three cities in China -- Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen -- to learn more about how people are incorporating mobile technologies and social networking technologies into their everyday lives. They have created a website through which they are sharing their observations and continuing their dialogue with the people they meet in China. They are conducting this trip in collaboration with GSD&M Advertising as part of the work we are doing for our Convergence Culture Consortium partners. I thought I would share with my readers some of their initial observations based on their first few days of visiting in Shaghai. Here's part of some field notes filed by CMS graduate student Geoffrey Long:

We walked across town down to a shopping district, where we entered into a massive department store. We walked through the men's floor, up across the women's floor, and then to the cell phone floor.

Yes, the cell phone floor.

Were I a millionaire, I would go back to the States, go into my local Sprint store, cackle at their meager offerings and then grab the guy at the counter by the ear like some 18th-century school marm. I would haul him out of the mall, onto the T, down to the airport and straight back here, still dragging him along by his ear, right back to this floor of this store, where I would finally let him go. I would dump him unceremoniously on the floor and yell, "See? SEE? THIS is how it should be done!"

In the States, any given cell phone store only carries a paltry few models of phones. This is because so much of the market back home is totally segmented - the carriers try and convince people to switch by only offering particular models. As a consumer, this bites because it absolutely shatters the amount of choices we have, especially when every time we buy a phone we're basically committing ourselves to a new contract. Ugh. Here, though, you buy a phone and then you insert a SIM chip into it, which contains all of your user information. No matter which phone you buy, most of them will take any SIM chip. This means you can choose from any phone currently being manufactured, and allows for much, much greater choice - including opening up the market to a bunch of cell phone makers that you've never heard of. When you walk into this floor of the department store, you are faced with booths from the different manufacturers. Each one of these booths, from Nokia or Motorola or Sony-Ericsson or Anycall or a dozen others, offers more selection than any cell phone store back home. The phones aren't cheap, but many of the offerings offer seriously tantalizing options.

I'll admit I was a little disappointed by the lack of anything truly revolutionary - they didn't have the Nokia videocam-phone that I'd been eyeballing for a while, but they did have several others offering similar functionality. Videoblogging services are going to explode when people can create their own little moblog entries from anywhere, recorded at DV-level quality and then uploaded wirelessly to the web, which their friends can then download from anywhere. Imagine an RSS feed on your phone where you're sent a text message anytime a friend uploads a new videoblog entry from their phone, and with a click or two you can download that entry straight to your own phone to watch wherever. This is where mobile media is headed, and it seems like several manufacturers are leading the charge. Nokia is right out front - as they are with the design market as well. Motorola has a couple of contenders flitting about the ring as well, but Nokia's L'Amour Collection is a set of leather-trimmed phones with laser-etched (I think) floral patterns right in the metal. On the store floor these models were being displayed on pedastals with items like a Victorian mirror, a mock Tiffany lamp, and a little Asian treasure box, and they fit right in. These phones may be designed for women, but I want one - it's refreshing to see a phone design take a new direction than simply painting the sucker pink. As the RAZR proved for Motorola, the market is teeming with demand for great phone design - according to a BusinessWeek article, Motorola sold more RAZR phones last year than Apple sold iPods. Whether or not American cell dealers are being boneheaded and stingy or not, with markets like China opening up the worldwide mobile media landscape is going to become extremely interesting, extremely fast.

And here's how Beth Coleman, the faculty member who is supervising the trip, describes her experience at that same phone store:

So we are at the counter and I am asked to select the phone number that will go with said phone. There are at least three categories of price ranging from 100 RMB to 300 RMB. I ask, "What's the difference within the numbers offered," assuming that access, long distance, something about mobile IT would figure in here. No. the difference is that some numbers, those containing more 8s and 6s, are more auspicious than other, particularly those containing 4s. No kidding. The variable on price of the phone number was determined by some ratio between appearance of lucky numbers and the memorability of the number itself. And it was common enough for people to pay a premium for this god luck charm that it was built into the regular service. I myself went for a modest amount of good luck, opting for the 120 RMB number with three 8s and two 6s over the bare bones luck.

Liwen, who had translated the transaction for me and noted my look of incredulity when it came to the price variance on lucky numbers, had this to say. "Yes, it is true. It's very old this tradition and it comes from Cantonese where the pronunciation of 8 is "fah," which means "a lot of moneys" and the sound of 4 means "die." It is a bad number. Six sounds like successful. Who pays attention to this? Modern young women like herself? No, no really, but people with money do. Also, she let me know astrology is currently all the rage in Hong Kong with the under thirty set.

We hope you will want to follow along their further adventures over at the Project Good Luck website and in the process, learn more about the technological and economic transformations that are reshaping modern China.

How to Break Out of the Academic Ghetto...

Reader Katie King submitted an interesting question about how academic publishing relates to the new trends towards participatory culture we've been documenting here:

I'm wondering to what extent the participatory culture of fandom does or does not affect academic cultures? For example, academic publishing seems to be more and more conservative, more "broadcast" rather than "niche market" oriented.

The issue is a crucial one that speaks to the "Aca" part of my Aca-Fan identity. I know that not all of you are interested in academic politics but you may be interested in what follows because it speaks to the barriers blocking a fuller dialogue between academics and others who share our interests and passions in popular culture. As someone who studies popular culture and the people who produce and consume it, I have always felt an obligation to try to get my insights back into a larger public circulation. But this is easier said than done.

Publish And Perish

The current state of academic publishing poses some real challenges for those of us who want to engage with a public beyond the textbook market. For starters, there is the challenge of publication time. It can take as long as two years, sometimes longer, between the time that an academic completes a book and when that book hits the stores. For that reason, few of us are able to engage in meaningful ways with contemporary developments in popular culture. I can't tell you the number of books which were started with the goal of responding to popular media in real time and which ended with the phenomenon under investigation dead and buried by the time the book hit the market. There are certainly some things I will need to update about Convergence Culture on the blog even if the general trends I identified in the book remain valid.

Second, there are real filters that make it extremely hard for academics to get books into commercial bookstores where they might fall into the hands of non-academic readers. Most proposals for academic books on popularculture boldly assert that there is a potential crossover market around their topics but it's hard to figure out how they are going to reach that readership when their books are never going to appear in Borders or Barnes and Nobles or any of the other chain bookstores where the vast majority of books get sold.

My goal in writing Convergence Culture was to produce a general market nonfiction book. For all practical purposes, the book which NYU Press will publish was written with such a reader in mind -- the chapters are structured through narratives and examples drawn from familiar programs, the language has been striped down as much as possible (there are some purely academic terms but most of the terms I use come from the media industry or from fans rather than from other theorists. And I have added a glossary in the back which readers can consult if they run into an unfamiliar concept.) I don't think I dummied down the book: I simply did not assume that the reader was immersed in the same academic debates as I was. But I found it hard to find an agent who understood what the book was trying to argue or who could imagine a general reader interested in knowing about the logic by which current media operated. I was told again and again that a nonfiction book could only have three big ideas and that the most successful ones only had one core concept. The passage I quoted in my opening post was a bit of a parody of this claim -- trying to reduce the book's sweeping arguments to the core concepts of convergence, collective intelligence, and participatory culture.

There are some folks out there who think my prose is still much too academic but I work pretty hard to open up my arguments to the widest possible set of readers. If you have enjoyed reading some of the posts on this blog, then I doubt you are going to find Convergence Culture too difficult to read.

NYU Press, by the way, is doing an excellent job working with me and the MIT news office to help publicize the book and set up a press tour around its release, giving me treatment I have received from none of the other publishers I've worked before. They care as much as I do about getting these ideas out to a larger public which is being impacted by the changes in our media landscape.

Why Bad Books Happen to Good Writers

With little hope of writing to a general reader, most academics end up writing mostly to themselves. Certainly, the reader in their heads as they write is someone who goes to the same conferences and reads the same journals they do. And I think this as much as anything else contributes to the extensive use of jargon in most academic prose. You end up short-handing ideas to an in-the-know reader rather than imagining readers who might be introduced to those concepts for the first time. There emerges a kind of insularity -- it isn't just that you end up writing for other academics, but you also become isolated from other kinds of public conversations about the topics that matter to you. Academics often don't read non-academic books, which, after all, get sold in totally different kinds of bookstores.

This is bad enough in an established field but in an emerging field like media studies, at a moment when the whole media landscape is in flux, you cut yourself off from those other voices at your own risk. I have learned so much from conversations with journalists, policy makers, parents, classroom teachers, creative artists, industry leaders, venture capitalists, fans, etc., etc. And indeed, one of my hopes for this blog is that it can create a space where some of these different groups, each dealing with the same issues, may learn a bit more from each other.

Another consequence of the slow pace of academic publishing is that we tend to think of our work not as provisional but as monumental. The idea that you might throw out ideas just to create a dialogue with others interested in your topic is very alien to the way most academics think. What you put on the page is your life's work. It's what you've built your career around. It's what builds your reputation. It's what determines whether you get tenure or not. So, there's no room to explore ideas in the kind of open-ended fashion King is describing here. Instead, everyone wraps their ideas in armor. They start to play it safe. They start to hedge their bets. And the result can be deadening prose which has nothing to do with the way most of us live with or think about media.

There are other things going on with academic publishing right now that contribute further to this problem. Academic presses are facing serious economic difficulties. They are cutting down drastically on the books that they publish. Most of the books now need to have large sweeping themes that cut across the broadest possible range of academic disciplines. One might imagine a form of generalization that opened books up to general readers but that isn't what has happened. Instead, this push towards broader approaches encourages a certain kind of abstraction since theory moves across fields more easily than factual study. Academic presses are cutting back on the publishing of anthologies, which don't sell well but often play an important role in sparking dialogue around new topics or showcasing the work of emerging scholars. And there is a strong pressure to tighten the length of most books -- not always a bad idea but often resulting in further tendencies towards jargon as people shorthand their ideas even more and count on the reader to fill in the gaps in their arguments.

So, from one direction, all academic publishing is niche publishing. Most academic journals get read by fewer people than the average fan discussion list reaches. Most academic books are lucky to sell more than a few thousand copies and most of those go to libraries where many of them will go unread for decades. From the other, academic publishing is moving away from more specialized or niche publications. I can't tell you how many general introductions to game studies I've reviewed for presses in recent years -- all with more or less identical tables of contents and interchangeable introductions. Yet, presses have worried that more focused books on specific games, creators, genres, or issues will be too specialized to attract the "general reader."

Changing the Rules

King continues:

My own feeling has always been that the best "participatory" invoking television (my own interests have been Highlander and Xena) are from shows that are not seamlessly written, not exactly grade "A" (whatever that might mean) but "B" -- shows that have lots of "holes" fans can fill in various forms of participation.

My own academic aspirations are to produce not seamlessly argued academic texts, but suggestively extensive ones -- not intensively analytical, but maybe full of their own proper "holes" to be filled in.

Trying to create and argue for this seems to be an uphill battle now. Or is it? Do you have thoughts about this?

The good news is that the web is creating opportunities for academics to break out of the academic bookstore ghetto and engage in a broader range of conversations. Much as other media producers are taking advantage of digital distribution to reach around traditional gatekeepers, a number of academics are experimenting with ways of communicating their core insights to a more general readership, many of whom will not find our books in their local bookstore (thank goodness for Amazon!) and wouldn't be very engaged by our more specialized journals. As they do so, these academics are finding ways to be both more topical (having a chance to respond to media change in real time) and more provisional (floating ideas, getting feedback, and refining them before putting them into print). Academic culture is discovering what every other sector already knows -- the power of social networks to produce richer insights and pool knowledge.

For example, a growing number of my graduate students are starting their own blogs around their thesis topics, providing them with a strong incentive to write every day, creating opportunities to translate their insights into language which can be understood by lay readers, getting a reality check on their claims, and often connecting with people who have specialized or insider knowledge that they might not encounter otherwise. I am seeing such blogs spring up at many other institutions as well and it does produce the kind of exploratory writing King is describing here. For example, check out this site by CMS graduate student Ravi Purushotma. Ravi is researching the ways games and other forms of popular culture can be used for educational purposes. His site, which includes works in progress and videos designed to dramatize his concepts, has generated response from teachers, textbook publishers, and game designers, among others, who have contributed actively to his research and who have also opened up new job options for him after graduation.

Increasingly, we are also trying to make the work of the research group in CMS as transparent as our arrangements with various sponsors allow, opening up the work in progress to the public. For example, my CMS colleague Beth Coleman is currently in China, leading a team of our students, and working with our research partners from GSD&M advertising. They are looking at social networks and the use of mobile media, particularly with young people, university students, artists, and cultural leaders. The research team is comprised of individuals from heterogeneous fields of expertise, including media studies, network analysis, cultural

anthropology, and market planning.People can follow their adventures and learn of their discoveries via their Project Good Luck website where they are blogging some of their fieldnotes.

There have also been a number of collective projects where academics write about media or popular culture topics as they unfold. Bad Subjects has been going for more than a decade out of Berkeley, offering left-of-center social commentary (what they call "political education for everyday life"). Their writing can sometimes becomes a bit too abstract for my taste, but the site often offers unconventional and challenging perspectives on contemporary issues. Flow is a webzine focused on television and new media and published by graduate students at the University of Texas-Austin. Its contributors include many of the top scholars in the field, all trying to produce work which would appeal to a crossover readership. That said, the editors of Flow have told me that they are having difficulty -- even on the web -- reaching non-academic readers. Because the history of academic writing to the public has been so dismal, the public often runs in fear when they hear a writer is an academic and therefore don't give them a chance or meet them half-way. The borders are being policed from both directions.

And then there is the trend towards academics (not to mention journalists) putting up their works on progress on the web and seeking feedback from interested readers. Many university presses are nervous about us giving away our ideas for free but early signs suggest that where these books take on a life on the web, they actually increase public awareness of the project and thus increase sales. Writers who have been involved in such a process also confirm that they produce better books because they are able to clear up misleading or badly phrased passages and make new discoveries as their ideas get tested by the wisdom of the crowd.

A good example of this process at work right now would be McKenzie Wark's new book, GAM3R 7HE0RY -- a collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book, a group which is exploring innovative new approaches to publishing. Wark has posted the entire book on the web where it is generating lively discussions among gamers, game industry insiders, and games researchers alike.

Unfortunately, little or none of this activity counts towards tenure and promotion within most universities. Indeed, there are lots of institutional pressures discouraging younger academics from engaging in public outreach in forms which do not "advance their careers" and this slows down many who might otherwise try to broaden the conversation. Right now, these outlets end up becoming part of a "process" which leads towards a more monumental publication, rather than being seen as valuable in their own right. For the time being, it seems unlikely that we can escape the stranglehold that university presses have on our writing because of the credentialization issue. Yet, the push away from more specialized publications may force this to change. Whole disciplines may discover that they have no print outlets for their work and will have to reorganize and find ways to use digital publishing and peer-review to achieve the same goals.

Update: Jonathan's comments below are a useful corrective and I accept them as a friendly ammendment to this original post. I was speaking from the perspective of someone who very much wants to be sharing my current work with a larger public and has every reason to want to go beyond the academic bookstore and university library space. But university presses sometimes (less often than they once did) do valuable work when they publish research that does not have a strong market appeal, that is unpopular, challenging, difficult, or groundbreaking in ways that is not going to be finding a broad public audience anytime soon. Nothing in my text should be taken as devaluing either such work or the job that university presses play in publishing it. That said, I still question whether many academics don't fall back on this as an excuse for sloppy and jargon-filled writing when they might want to examine closely their motives for closing off such work from larger public scrutiny. I suppose I have more faith in the public's ability and willingness to engage with serious ideas than current academic practice acknowledges. More than anything else, though, I want to open up more options for different kinds of academic publishing that does have greater public access and that is open to a more exploratory process. I don't think Jonathan or I disagree on that point.

Mind Dump onThe Future of Television

Our conversations about Firefly and the Long Tail suggest that there is a good deal of public interest out there in the idea of viewer-supported television. I am convinced this is an idea whose time has come. It may not happen with Firefly, The West Wing, Global Frequency or Arrested Development, but it will happen for some show sooner or later. I for one want a ringside seat to see how the experiment plays itself out. Almost every day brings news that suggests small steps closer to this goal. Nobody's Watching? Guess Again

CMS graduate student Sam Ford reports at the c3 blog about a pilot for a show called Nobody's Watching which got rejected by NBC and the WB Network but is now being distributed via You-Tube. So far, the show has received several hundred thousand downloads from people curious to see a new series from Bill Lawrence, creator of Scrubs and Spin City, which is essentially a sitcom about the networks producing a reality television series about two guys trying to create a sitcom. Lawrence saw the series as a commentary on the current state of network television; network executives worried that it was too meta -- that is, it was too complex a concept to easily communicate to viewers. (It's also likely that with two other television network themed shows starting this fall -- Tina Fey's 30 Rock and Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip -- they were afraid they might oversaturate the market on this untested genre). In the old days, that would have been the end of the story but the You-Tube distribution has started to shift the network's perceptions of the pilot.

Ford writes:

Now, with its grassroots support, Lawrence claimed that it was being revisited by NBC and that he had had calls from both ABC and Comedy Central. And one has to wonder if the CW Network, after WB passed on the show, might now be interested in having a show with such a grassroots following built into its debut.

However, Lawrence sums up the reason why this experiment is successful and why the networks are stupid not to release their pilots more often when trying to decide how to formulate a future lineup. According to reporter Bill Carter in Monday's New York Times story, Lawrence "said he believed this was exactly the kind of development that television needed to break all kinds of hidebound traditions, including presumptions about what people will and won't watch as comedy, and decisions that are made based on small organized focus groups."

If the masses are willing to participate as a test audience, why not launch a legion of pilots on YouTube or allow people to BitTorrent them. Not only do you end up with shows developing strong grassroots potential before they ever hit the air, but you get a wider response to the show in a situation where viral marketing and word-of-mouth give the feedback as to which shows will generate the most popularity based on number of downloads. Of course, the only shows that would be hurt with a system like this one are shows that are low in viewer interest, that are not appealing...but those are the shows that would hit the air and get cancelled soon, anyway. And, for more complicated concepts like the one in Nobody's Watching, releasing the show on YouTube ahead of time allows fans to become educated on the concept and prepared for the premise before the show is ever broadcast.

By the way, readers of this blog who are interested in learning more about current trends in the media industry should check out Sam's posts at the C3 blog. This past week has seen posts about Survivor, Paul Simon, Kentucky Fried Chicken, the plight of weekly papers, and the successful web-based series Soup of the Day.

Tivo and Transformation

A reader sent me a link to this interesting article about the networks push to try to disable the fast forward button on our Tivos and other digital recording devices. Nick argues, however, that this is not the primary reason why networks should be worried about digital video recording devices:

Newer TiVo boxes can connect directly to the internet. Since they are internet enabled, they can download internet content. Combine that with the hard-drive and on-demand abilities, and Tivo is now a television network. Maybe even the television network.

Another way to describe a TiVo is "a box that saves your favorite content, whenever it is played, and allows you to watch it anytime you want." This is the way many people watch TV. The network is irrelevant. With some marketing savvy, any show could bypass the network gatekeepers and go direct to TiVo. RocketBoom did - and the resulting talent fallout shows a glimpse of what happens when the network is no longer relevant. The balance of power shifts to the talent, or at least equalizes it. Not only will networks lose viewers, they will have to compete on lower margins for high-quality content.

So, starting from a very different perspective (focusing on hardware rather than on cultural practices), this writer ends up more or less at the same place Sam Ford does: a world where viewers get to sample a broader range of different television content than would currently make its way onto network television; where some shows might remain "long tail" content which needs to be supported by committed but concentrated niches of viewers; where others would build up large enough grassroots followings to start to interest a network programmer. Right now, we are starting to see brands go to the network to pitch content which they think would be a good vehicle for their products -- that's more or less what happened with Coca Cola and American Idol. We might also see producers test market shows via YouTube and try to figure out which network is most interested in serving their fan followings.

Globalizing Television

Let's toss one more variable into the mix: imagine you are an international media producer who has content you think would have some strong appeal in the United States -- a producer of a successful Japanese anime program which has not yet been picked up by the Cartoon Network, the producer of a Latin American Telenovela which wasn't selected by one of the Spanish Language channels, the developer of a cult comedy from Australia that hasn't a clear point of distribution in this market. You've already covered your core costs of production in your own national market; you've picked up some syndication purchases from neighboring countries. Why not sell that content directly to your consumers here? There's a whole world of media producers out there right now. American companies have been largely successful in blocking most of them from having access to the U.S. market. But this is starting to change and the development of new infrastructures to support the distribution and monetizing of contents will simply accelerate the rate of change.

Of course, the interesting question is whether we will still be calling this stuff "television" content given that it neither uses television as a technology for distribution and consumption of this content (or at least doesn't necessarily do so in a world where there are video iPods and computer screens and...) nor does it use the broadcast networks as the primary system of producing, filtering, or distributing content. Yet, the dramatic and genre structures of television -- short units, serialization, recurring characters, etc. -- are likely to remain in place for sometime to come. Most of us, push come to shove, like watching television even if we don't necessarily fill that the current networks offer us the broadest possible range of options.

Behind the Scenes at My Pop Studio: An Interview with Renee Hobbs

Much of my attention on this blog so far has centered around issues of participatory culture -- the ways fans and consumers are taking media in their own hands whether through user-generated content or through exerting a collective influence over the circulation and reception of media content. I have suggested that the new media landscape -- and the social structures and cultural practices which grow up around it -- creates unique opportunities for everyday people to get involved as media-makers and as they do so, we all benefit through the increased diversification and innovation that results. To insure that every kid in America is able to fully participate within this emerging culture, though, there needs to be a greater commitment to media literacy education. By media literacy, I mean not simply the ability to critically interprete the images and stories that circulate in our culture, but also the ability to produce media (and to understand all of the factors that shape the production of media). We would not consider someone to be literate in the traditional sense if they could read but not write. We shouldn't consider someone to be media literate if they can consume but not produce media. Indeed, the greatest insights about media -- even mass media -- come when we are able to step into the role of media producer and understand the choices that shape the media that we consume.

Several weeks ago, Renee Hobbs helped to launch a fascinating new site -- My Pop Studio -- which takes this premise as a starting point. The site targets young middle school and early high school aged girls, encouraging them to reflect more deeply about some of the media they consume -- pop music, reality television, celebrity magazines, and the like -- by stepping into the role of media producers. The site offers a range of engaging activities -- including designing your own animated pop star and scripting their next sensation, re-editing footage for a reality television show, designing the layout for a teen magazine. Along the way, they are asked to reflect on the messages the media offers about what it is like to be a teen girl in America today and to think about the economic factors shaping the culture that has become so much a part of their everyday interactions with their friends. If you have a daughter, granddaughter, niece or neighbor who falls into that age bracket (and who may be looking increasingly bored with the same ol', same ol' by this point in the summer), you would be doing them a favor by sending them to this site. (Full disclosure: I was one of a number of leading media and child development experts Renee and her team consulted in developing this project.)

I wanted to use my blog today to alert my readers to this new project and share some of the thinking that went into it. Renee Hobbs has spent more than 20 years of her career focused on promoting media literacy education -- through schools, after school programs, and now, through this imaginative intervention into popular culture itself. Hobbs directs the Media Education Lab at Temple University and is a co-founder of the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), the national membership organization that hosts the National Media Education Conference. She co-directed the Ph.D. program in Mass Media and Communication at Temple University in 2004-2005 and currently hosts the Media Smart Seminars, a free professional development program for Philadelphia educators, media professionals and community leaders. She's one of the people in this field I admire the most: someone who remains concerned about the issues young people face in their long transition into adulthood and who seeks ways to empower young people to take charge of the media that surrounds them.

She was nice enough to agree to answer some of my questions about the project.

You've been involved with media literacy for a number of years. What do you see as some of the most important challenges facing media literacy at the present time?

Right now, there are a number of opportunities and challenges. One great opportunity is the impending retirement of millions of K-12 teachers. Over the next 10 years, there will be huge shift in the demographics of the teaching profession, and this will help media literacy. Younger teachers have different attitudes about media and technology than older teachers. They are aware that popular film, when used skillfully in the classroom, can promote rich learning experiences. These teachers are already using materials they haveobtained from the Internet--- and they recognize the need for critical thinking skills about images, media, popular culture and technology.

This leads to a great challenge. Lots of teachers are using media and technology in the classroom, but not always in ways that promote critical thinking and communication skills. Many teachers use audio-visual media as a reward or a treat. Other teachers send their students to the computer lab--- but do not create assignments that are structured to provide rich learning experiences. As a result, a lot of what is happening with media and technology in K-12 education is not building the kinds of skills that are important for success in the world outside the classroom. You can see my recent article, "Non-Optimal Uses of Media and Technology in the Classroom," from Learning, Media and Technology for more on this issue. Over half of classroom teachers say that film and television is used in non-educational ways in schools. This includes as a substitute teacher, for "downtime," as a reward, or to fill time. That's a problem that must be addressed, because educational leaders will never accept media literacy as fully legitimate until the problem of misuse of media and technology is confronted head-on.

Another important challenge is the need to keep media literacy relevant to the continually changing media environment of the 21st century. As media literacy becomes institutionalized in K-12 settings, for example, the curriculum tends to freeze. In some schools, students in 2006 are learning about how to critically analyze news and advertising using artifacts and examples from the early 1990s. Sometimes this works--- but often it diminishes one of the major strengths of media literacy: its perceived relevance in bridging the gap between the classroom and the culture. But this problem is challenging to address, because it's hard for teachers to continually adapt their curricula to match the changing media environment. Few have the training, knowledge, resources, time or tools to do this.

This project speaks directly to young girls through the use of images and activities inspired by popular culture. What are the advantages of this approach over one which is focused more on intervention through educational or civic institutions?

One advantage is obvious-- no gatekeepers are required. Girls will learn about My Pop Studio from their friends. Parents and teachers may steer a girl toward the site, but it's also likely that girls will share the site with their peers. Media literacy education has typically been "leader-driven," as individual teachers, parents or youth leaders initiate it with children and young people. My Pop Studio is an approach to media literacy that girls can experience independently.

There's another advantage as well. My Pop Studio makes an assumption about young people that comes from developmental psychology: that play and learning are related to each other. Play can help promote confidence and build a sense of social competence. Girls already participate in popular culture--- My Pop Studio aims to re-frame popular culture in ways that can be powerful for girls.

What do you see as the most important issues confronting young girls today? How do you see this project as addressing those issues?

Adolescence is a challenging time of life. A strange thing happens between age 10 and age 15 for many American girls. At age 10, girls are confident, spunky, outspoken, and see themselves as healthy, capable and strong. By age 15, 30% of teen girls are smokers. Many have chosen to avoid more rigorous courses in math and science, even when they have the capability to perform well in these classes. Teen pregnancy rates, while declining since the 1990s, are still high, especially among young women living in poverty. Tween and teen girls experience higher rates of depression. More than 4 million teen girls shoplift. Nutrition and body image are problems, too. The average teen girl guzzles 21 ounces of soda pop a day and less than 14 ounces of milk. Finally, the intense peer culture of adolescence is stressful: material possessions and social relationships take center stage. The hierarchies and gamesmanship can be overwhelming, exhausting and hard on the ego.

My Pop Studio gives girls an opportunity to be competent at creative activities involving technology, and a sense of competence is important for adolescents. The public health literature informs us that a sense of competence is a "protective factor" that can keep girls healthy during adolescence. The website lets girls take on, in a playful way, the role of a multimedia producer. This gives them the opportunity to feel the power of making creative choices that result in publishable products. At the website, girls can make their own pop star, reflect on values messages in media, and get feedback from peers on their creative choices. They can edit a teen TV program and compose a scene. They can compose a multi-page magazine spread and reflect on how digital images create unreal realities, depicting the bodies and lives of young women in a highly unrealistic way. On My Pop Studio, girls can create and share web comics about how digital media affect their own social relationships. Girls can comment on various kinds of social situations that occur with digital media. They can create their own comics, read comics created by other girls, and use a simple blogging tool to comment on them.

During a time when feelings of confidence diminish, these high-interest activities may help girls to continue to see themselves as capable, competent and part of a creative community, able to make good choices about their lifestyle and health.

How did you choose which forms of popular culture to address through this project?

We looked at the literature on the media consumption habits of children and adolescent girls aged 9 - 14. We talked to over 50 girls who participated in My Pop Studio focus groups from five geographically diverse sites around the nation. That's why popular music takes center stage in My Pop Studio. We looked carefully at girls' feelings of attachment to celebrities. We wanted to tackle issues related to celebrity culture, because this topic has not been well-explored in the context of media literacy pedagogy. Because girls this age are beginning to read fashion magazines, we wanted to address issues of body image and digital image manipulation. Although girls this age are not (generally) using social networking sites, they are feeling social pressure to own cell phones, watch R-rated videos, and many are quite active with IM/chat. So we wanted an opportunity to explore the diversity of family attitudes about media/technology use and encourage girls to reflect on how new media create new kinds of social relationships with family and peers. We wanted to focus on forms of popular culture that were most available to all girls, regardless of their families' economic situation.

How do you balance entertainment and education goals when working on a project like this?

The site has to be entertaining, or girls won't play with it. Play and learning are related, so the language of the site provides a "behind-the-scenes" perspective to offer information about issues in media industries -- minus the didacticism or preachiness.

We tried to build educational goals into the deep structure of the activities, as in Pop Star Producer, where in making choices about your pop star, you learn 1) that there are many choices to be made and 2) that different choices have consequences--- they affect how people interpret your character. Most girls in this age group are not aware of how media messages are constructed--- stuff just appears on the TV set, or on the radio, or in the magazines, or on the Web. These activities provide an "aha" about the constructedness of media messages just by playing.

At My Pop Studio, we have a learning community where younger girls participate in dialogue with older girls. Temple University undergraduate students enrolled in a "Mass Media and Children" course will be responsible for maintaining and updating the site, and they will comment on girls' creations and participate in the creative community. Undergraduates can share their ideas with younger girls, which will extend the learning of both groups.

We also created downloadable lesson plans that can be used by parents in informal, home-based learning as well as with middle-school students in a computer lab. The lesson plans show how My Pop Studio activities can be used to promote rich dialogue, reading, writing, and discussion to strengthen critical thinking and communication skills.

Several of your activities here are focused on remixing media content. Remixing has been a controversial aspect of contemporary youth culture. Do you see remixing as a media literacy skill? Why or why not?

Remixing is now an important part of contemporary media production. In remixing, media texts, now at the center of our cultural environment, get re-interpreted by other creative people through techniques of collage, editing, and juxtaposition. Remixing is a type of creative expression. Through remixing, people can generate new ideas. It can be a vehicle for people to comment upon the role of media and technology in society.

Remixing can strengthen media literacy skills because it can deepen people's awareness of an author's purpose and context. Context is often not well-understood as a component of meaning. Through strategic juxtaposition and shifts in context, messages change their meanings. Remixing illustrates a key concept of media literacy: that meaning is in people, not in texts.

Why the World Doesn't Need Superman

Before I start this, let me say that I have enormous affection for the DC superheroes, especially the Silver Age characters who were so much a part of my own childhood experience. There are still an ample number of DC books in my pull list at my local comics shop -- Million Year Picnic at Harvard Square. But of all of those classic characters, I have always had the least affection for Superman. (Frankly, for all of the bashing the poor guy gets, I have more good things to say about Aquaman as a protagonist than about Superman).

The reality is that Superman is and remains more of an archetype than a fictional character -- too powerful to be really interesting, too bland to be emotionally engaging, and too good to be dramatically compelling. Superman works best for me as a character when he is playing against someone else. Superman standing alone is like a straight man without a comedian, like vanilla ice cream without any topping.

Some writers manage to hit just the right note in the Lois Lane/Superman/Clark Kent relationship so that Lois represents a splash of vinegar tartness that plays well against Clark Kent's wide-eyed naivety (there's some great exchanges between the two in Warren Ellis's recent run on the Justice League that illustrate what I mean); Superman plays well against Wonder Woman especially if they tap the sexual tension between the two (see Greg Rucka's last issue on Wonder Woman, which works through the relationship between the two mighty heroes).

Superman plays well against Batman, setting up contrasting world views: the two keep each other honest, disagreeing about everything, yet ending up more or less in the same place at the end. In small doses, Superman pairs nicely with the Martian Manhunter or the Flash or the Green Lantern or Green Arrow. God help me, he even works in really small doses next to the anarchic comedy of Plastic Man.

I have enjoyed some recent books which explore him as an Icon (see what Alex Ross did with the character in Superman: Peace on Earth) or which turn the story upside down (see Red Son where Superman lands in Russia and ends up working for Stalin or Superman's Metropolis which melds together the myth of Superman's origins with Fritz Lang's German Expressionist classic). I can enjoy scenes where Superman's role as the ultimate establishment figure gets taken down a few notches -- see the treatment of the character in Darwyn Cooke's spectacular, DC: The New Frontier, where Wonder Woman and Superman debate the ethics and politics of the Vietnam War, or what Frank Miller did with an aging Superman (who looks more than a little like Ronald Reagan) in the original Dark Knight Returns series.

Perhaps the most interesting recent book to really systematically deal with the Superman character was Steven T. Seagle's It's a Bird, which really deals with the ambivalent felt by a long-time comics writer who gets assigned to do a script for the flagship superhero and doesn't know what to do with him. Superman is after all the top assignment -- even though he doesn't make the most money and isn't the most popular character with fans -- not by a long shot. The protagonist is struggling with a range of personal issues, mostly surrounding a family history of Huntington's disease, which distract him from but draw him back to engaging with the "problem" posed by the Superman character. He works through many key aspects of the character, providing both a historical context and a mythological analysis of the figure's place in contemporary culture. But in the end, he is no more able to articulate why we should care about this character than when it all started.

One can see why Superman exerts an inevitable influence across the history of superhero comics -- the place where all the parts came together for the first time and jelled in the public's imagination, the seed from which richer and more diverse characters could spring. Gerard Jones does a good job tracing the historical roots and impact of this figure in Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and The Birth of the Comic Book.

At the end of the day, though, he feels like a museum piece. I have been working hard to try to get excited about the new Superman movie. Honestly, I have. I have gone back and reread some classic Superman stories. I watched the first two Christopher Reeve films again on DVD. But I came out of the theatre and instead of feeling exhilarated, I shrugged. The film wasn't as bad as I feared or as good as I had hoped.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the filmmakers had to deal with two layers of iconicity: first, there is the character of Superman and then, there is the aura of Christopher Reeve, who has emerged over the past several decades as the closest thing imaginable to a secular saint in our culture. So, if you can't touch Superman and you can't touch Reeve's performance, then you are more or less painted into a corner -- all you can become is, to borrow a phrase from Pulp Fiction, "a wax museum with a pulse."

So, let me point you towards two links that I enjoy precisely because they don't treat Superman as sacred and instead, have fun at the character's expense.

The first is a now classic essay by science fiction writer Larry Niven -- "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" which explains once and for all, why Superman could not and should not make love with Lois Lane. This is not appropriate reading for small children, the politically correct, the faint of heart, or anyone else easily subject to irritation. As he explains:

Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he do to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit?

Consider the driving urge between a man and a woman, the monomaniacal urge to achieve greater and greater penetration. Remember also that we are dealing with kryptonian muscles.

Superman would literally crush LL's body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout.

Lastly, he'd blow off the top of her head.

(Garth Ennis plays around with precisely these images in The Pro in a moment which has to be seen to be believed.)

Thankfully, the filmmakers anticipated this issue and has the Man of Steel shed his super-powers long enough to bed Lois in Superman II and thus pave the way for the events of the current film.

The other link is to a webpage that reproduces a number of those classic Silver Age comic book covers where Superman looks like he is about to do something really nasty to one or another of his good friends. Anyone who read those books knows that the covers were usually deceiving and there was a perfectly rational explanation (like time travel or mind control or a especially virulent form of kryptonite) to account his uncharacteristic behavior. But, as this site suggests, if someone did a fraction of the things that Superman did on those covers (even for good reasons), you just might not want to be his friend anymore.

Have fun!

Truth, Justice and the South Asian Way

This past weekend, like millions of fanboys (and fan girls) around the world, I went to see that hot new superhero movie -- not the one you are thinking about, the one with that guy from the planet Krypton. I went to see the other one -- Krrish. Krrish is what some are calling the first superhero movie to come out of India and it is playing across the United States -- not at the local multiplex or even the art house but in small ma-and-pa run theatres which cater to the local south Asian population. Most of these theaters don't advertise in your local paper so if you are wondering if it is playing in your city, check here. Krrish is a huge box office success in India -- having more than doubled its production costs in its first ten days in theatres -- and there is already speculation that it will be the first of a long running superhero franchise.

In its broad outlines, Krrish features much which will be recognizable to American comics and superhero fans: a larger than life, too honest to be true, ruggedly handsome protagonist who becomes a masked crusader while hiding behind a secret identity; a plucky female reporter with a tendency to get in over her head; an evil scientist bent on global domination; lots of high voltage action sequences; and a headline-chasing publisher/network executive who is more interested in unmasking the hero than celebrating his contributions to civic virtue. There's even a moment of painful choice when the protagonist has to choose which of two loved ones he will save from a certain death.

This being a Bollywood production, there was a lot more -- spectacular musical numbers (including one at a circus which quickly turns into an action sequence when the tents catch on fire), broad physical comedy, intense melodrama, romantic scenes, and so forth. What many western fans love about Bollywood movies is their tendency to bundle together as many different genres as possible and to play them against each other to create an extended (3 hours plus) evening of entertainment. Another pleasure is seeing familiar formulas get transformed as they are rethought for the Asian market.

An Indian Superboy?

Much like the western Superman who has been read as an embodiment of national myths and ideals, there is much which speaks to the specifically Indian origins of this particular story.

For one thing, the early signs that young Krishna may have superpowers come when he turns out to be a protégé at sketching and then confounds the teachers at his local school with a spectacular performance on his I.Q. exam. The American counterpart would have led off with his strength, his speed, or maybe even his X-ray vision but having a superior intellect has rarely been a prerequisite for becoming a superpower in the western sense of the term. Throughout the film, in fact, the other characters consistently cite his "talents" but rarely his "powers" as if he were destined to become an extremely gifted knowledge worker (and indeed, it turns out that the ethics of knowledge work for hire are at the center of this epic saga.)

His special powers are modest by western standards, though spectacular enough by local standards. Much like the original Superman, he covers vast distances through long leaps but doesn't actually have the ability to fly. He can scale a mountain peak as if it were a series of stepping stones. He can run faster than the local horses. He can reach into the river and yank out a fish with his bare hands. And he can speak with the animals and get them to do his bidding. And, in several sequences, he demonstrates his superiority, Gandhi style, by withstanding enormous physical and emotional abuse without resorting to violence.

As with the western Superman, his adventures begin when he lives the small town (village) where he was raised and move to the city but in keeping with the modern era of South Asian Diaspora, he goes not to Metropolis but to Singapore in pursuit of the woman of his dreams, who turns out to be not only a modern working girl but a Non-Resident Indian.

Krishna must adopt a secret identity in order to do good deeds when he comes to the city because he must remain true to a promise he made to his grandmother -- there's a lot in this film about the obligations the young owe to their elders. In a move almost as unconvincing as that bit when nobody recognizes Clark Kent as Superman because he took off his glasses, Krishna masks his identity by adopting the superhero name, Krrish. (Of course, there's something of a joke being made about Singapore's reputation for multiculturalism when the public is quickly convinced that the South Asian superhero might actually be ethnically Chinese and go under the name Christian.)

The villain turns out to be Dr. Arya, the heads of a global information technology empire, who has made his reputation for his contributions to wireless mobile telecommunications, but seeks to develop a supercomputer which will allow him to see his future. He has built the original machine by exploiting Krishna's father -- another supergenius, who like his son, gains his powers from contact with a visitor from another planet. The wonderful machine functions like the magic devices of so many classic folktales: it shows just enough of the future to convince people to tempt their fate but they are always blindsided in the end.

A Global Production

The film was conceived and directed by Rakesh Roshan, who had previously created Koi...Mil Goya which he claims to be the first science fiction film produced in India. We get some glimpses of that earlier film here through flashback sequences and there is much which will remind you of E.T. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Green Lantern. As one Indian blogger notes, Krrish merchandise is holding its own across Asia with competing goods for the new Superman movie -- though she notes, both sets of products are actually made in China.

Westerners are going to be tempted to read the film as a symptom of cultural imperialism -- taking a strongly western genre and trying to sell it back to the American market. But that's too simple -- especially given all of the ways I've identified above that the superhero genre gets reworked to speak to specifically Asian values and concerns and the ways it gets mixed with other genre elements which are more closely associated with the Bollywood tradition.

Rather, we should think of this as a global cultural product, all the more so when you consider that the action sequences were directed by Tony Ching, the Chinese-born fight choreographer who worked on such PRC films as Hero and House of Flying Daggers; the special effects sequence were developed in collaboration with Marc Kolbe and Craig Mumma (whose work was featured in Godzilla, Independence Day, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) as well as a range of India-based effects houses, and the second half of the film is set amid the futuristic landscape of Singapore, including a sequence featuring the world famous Orang from the Singapore Zoo (who is identified in the film as Mao, perhaps appearing under a stage name).

As CMS alum Parmesh Shahani, a longtime observer of the Bollywood industry, explained to me:

This film has been made with loads of co-operation from the Singapore govt. Obviously some countries (Singapore, Switzerland, etc) have realized the vast reach of Bollywood - and want to tap into this. They are first movers and are thus gaining the tremendous equity that comes with this. Tourism is the most obvious thing that comes to mind that Bollywood films can promote - but bear in mind that Krrish also positions Singapore as a corporate center, a media center, and a center of cutting edge research and development - all the things that the Singapore authorities want to promote Singapore as internationally. So they're using Bollywood very savvily - as one more node to spread their very consistent brand message.

Hoping to capitalize on South Asian interest in the film, the Singapore tourism agency has organized a Krrish tour.

If you want to read more about this film, check out this New York Times story

Back Story: Indian Comics

The release of a South Asian superhero film comes as western comics fans are increasingly being drawn towards Indian comics. While comics are a worldwide phenomenon, superhero comics were until recently almost exclusively an American genre. Superman and Spider-Man's overseas appeal were totally dwarfed by the Phantom, an adventure comics figure largely forgotten in his home market but enormously successful across the southern hemisphere. The Indian comics market is dominated by Amar Chitra Katha, a comics publisher that primarily taps the country's rich historical and mythological traditions.

I have been told that there is also a lower-class local tradition of superhero comics -- many of them appropriated and reworked from western iconography -- but it is hard to get information on such comics here in the United States. (If there are any readers out there who know about such works, I'd love to hear from you.)

More recently, the American comics publisher, Marvel, collaborated with the India-based Gotham Studios to create Spider-Man: India, which depicted the adventure of the Mumbai-born Pavitra Prabhakar in his struggles against the Green Goblin who is the reincarnation of the ancient Indian demon, Rakshasa.

Even more recently, there was the announcement by Virgin of the creation of a new animation studio and comics publisher which will be introducing South Asian content into the global market. Japanese manga now far outsells U.S. produced comics even in the American market and other Asian publishers hope to follow their example. We can expect to see more Indian influences on comics in general and superheroes in particular in years to come.

And we can point to a growing number of western comics which have self-consciously displayed a South Asian influence, including Peter Milligan's Rogan Gosh, Grant Morrison's Vimanarama, Warren Ellis's Two-Step and Antony Mazzotta's Bombaby, the Screen Goddess.

Krrish is probably not the film that is going to open the western market for Asian-produced superhero movies (though there's lots to entertain western fan boys like myself.) But then, the Indian film industry outperforms Hollywood across Asia and many other parts of the world so they aren't exactly standing by and waiting for our approval. It's their party and they can fly if they want to.

Special thanks to CMS alums Parmesh Shahani and Aswin Punathamberkar for their help in preparing this post.

America's Most Powerful Fan Boys

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

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

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

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

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

I said, "You ever watched it?"

She said, "No."

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

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

"Okay."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy, Big Brother Style

When Americans get the choice [on American Idol]...they constantly surprise the producers and the celebrity judges. They go for gospel singers and torch singers and big band singers. They vote for fat people and geeky people and ugly people. They go for people like themselves....This is the most important thing that any business can learn from the first wave of this revolution and its impact on entertainment. We want the power to choose....In every industry, in every segment of our economy, the power is shifting over to us.

-- Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's campaign manager More People Vote for the American Idol Than...

A lot of fuss has been made lately about the "fact" that more people voted for the most recent American Idol than voted in the last presidential election. This is seen as a signpost of a decline of civic responsibility on the part of the current generation of American youth. I have been asked about this phenomenon everywhere I've spoken in recent months.

The claim just doesn't happen to be true. True, there were more votes cast for the recent American Idol contest than in the last presidential election but since there is no restriction on voting multiple times and since it is well known that some young voters use redial or text-messaging (not to mention other more elaborate electronic devices) for repeated voting, we have no reason to think that anywhere near as many people participated in this process.

Of course, if we could have cast multiple votes for our favorite candidates in the last election, there's no question that the folks at Moveon.org and Salon and... would have stood there all day casting their ballots for John Kerry or that churchs would have weighed in even more heavily across the Bible Belt.

The Case of Big Brother: All Stars

We can get a better understanding of how reality television show voting is and is not like real world democracy by looking at issues that have surfaced this summer around the selection of contestants for Big Brother: All Stars.

Big Brother has had difficulty with American's erratic voting habits from the get-go: during the first season, Americans routinely voted out the most colorful characters, gradually ridding the house of all interesting conflict, with the result that the contest became one of the survival of the blandest. After that, the producers re-invented the contest's mechanics so most of the voting occurs within the house and the public only got to decide weighty issues like what piece of exercise equipment the contestants got to use.

Everywhere else in the world, the public decides who stays and goes. As far as the producers are concerned, Americans aren't ready for that responsibility.

Last season, the show allowed the public to vote a booted guest back into the game -- with surprising results. The public overwhelmingly voted an Iraqi-American (Kaysar) back into the house over his arch-rival, a New York Fireman (Eric). For once, the producers should have been pleased because Kaysar was a colorful character who introduced a great deal of drama into the series. Unfortunately, the other houseguests voted him right back out again as soon as he was eligible for eviction.

The Power of Gossip

Reality television is an ideal form for a networked culture. As more and more of us move on line, we find ourselves engaged in conversations with people who know very few if any of the same folks in common. Yet, there remains a core human desire to gossip. Sociologists tell us that gossip serves a basic human need for the sharing of secrets and the making of evaluations. Who gets gossiped about is less important than the bonds that get formed between those who are sharing gossip with each other. Reality television is designed to produce moral conflicts and ethical dramas involving real people who become shared reference points for gossip amongst people nationwide. In effect, the houseguests (as the producers call them) or "hamsters" (as some fans call them) have agreed to allow the rest of the country to gossip at their expense.

So, how do you campaign for such a position? Look at the kinds of statements made by the candidates in this election:

Well, I caused a lot of drama in season 4, basically because I was dating a schmuck. But now things are different. I've matured and found the love of my life! Most of the HouseGuests from my season left hating me. It changed me, and it made me a stronger and better person. (Alison)

Don't vote for me... I dare you. You are looking around at the other options, and the truth is they all fall short. If you want the most entertaining contestant, you need look no further. You know it and I know it. (Will)

If I get in the house, you'll get the same competitor you saw last season. Love me or hate me, I'm here to play and here to win. (James)

Well, you get the picture -- each has presented themselves as offering the most opportunities for gossip.

Fan Politics

From the outset, the producers were hedging their bets -- hand selecting the nominees and then allowing the public to chose half of the contestants, reserving the right to cast the rest and thus counterbalance any strange patterns in the voting. Networks still tend to think of television viewers as socially isolated individuals, making decisions from their couches without much interaction with others. Maybe they were hoping that we would debate this around water coolers. Maybe they would imagine that we might vote along identity politics lines, voting for the African-American or Hispanic candidates, or amongst the gay candidates, with the hopes that the population of the house would look something like America.

But, where there are elections, as our founding fathers well knew, there are apt to emerge political parties -- efforts to combine votes for maximum effect. So, online, various hardcore fans began to campaign amongst themselves to cast their votes together to shape the outcome towards one or another favorite candidate, hoping to produce "the best show ever." Many of them were already calculating which candidates the producers would prefer and then pushing their votes towards weaker but interesting candidates who wouldn't get into the house otherwise.

Vote For the Worst

And then there was the Vote for the Worst party. Vote for the Worst first emerged as a player in reality television fandom around American Idol. Here's how the group characterizes its mission:

The show starts out every year encouraging us to point and laugh at all of the bad singers who audition. We want this hilariously bad entertainment to continue into the finals, so we choose the contestant that we feel provides the most entertaining train wreck performances and we start voting for them.... Vote for the Worst encourages you to have fun with American Idol and embrace its suckiness by voting for the less talented contestants. We rally behind one choice so that we can help make a difference and pool all of our votes toward one common goal....Our aim isn't to win every single week, but to get a bad contestant as far as possible. If our VFTW pick is ousted from the competition, we'll move onto someone new. If we can help someone undeserving inch a spot closer to winning, that's a great success! We care less about succeeding every single week than we do just enjoying the bad performances as they happen.

Some argue that the Vote for the Worst folks have their own aesthetic -- they are simply the folks who think it is more fun to see bad singing than to try to take the contest seriously on its own terms -- and their own politics -- they are the folks who don't want the producers and judges to tell them who they should vote for. (Interestingly, the movement got picked up and promoted by more explicitly political groups, including some which were involved in the intellectual property law suits against the RIAA. Anyone who wants to screw the recording industry was seen as an ally.) Critics, on the other hand, describe it as pure negation -- an attempt to exploit the public's right to choose in order to inflict as much damage on the show as possible. Critics claim that many of those participating in Vote the Worst are not even regular viewers of the show.

When the Vote for the Worst movement became public knowledge during the last season of Idol (and when some of its candidates seemed to remain on the air well past their logical rankings in the pecking order), the network executives and producers were quick to dismiss the idea that Vote for the Worst was having any real impact on the results. Here's part of the Fox Network's official statement:

Each week millions of votes are received for each contestant, and based on the tiny number of visitors this site has allegedly received, their hateful campaign will have no effect on the selection of the next American Idol. Millions of fans of American Idol have voted for their favorites so far this season, and that success speaks far louder than any vicious and mean-spirited website.

For their part, the Vote the Worst people have questioned how Fox could call them "mean spirited" when the show itself makes fun of bad performers like William Hung. Indeed, the early shows featuring bad performances often receive higher ratings than all but the last few weeks of the actual contest.

Chicken George's Revenge

Yet, speculation has run high among hardcore reality television fans that the group could have an impact on Big Brother which has significantly lower ratings than American Idol and might be predicted to have a much lower vote count overall.

Here's what they were advocating for the Big Brother election:

Vote for Chicken George to go back into the Big Brother house! The man cracked under the pressure of BB1, not even really having to evict people. Putting him back in the house would be excellent. Also, his wife staged the first ever VFTW by getting an entire town to vote for someone else to save George. We owe it to the chicken family to make the crazy chicken man an All Star.

Why "Chicken George"? Once again, there's a history here: during the first season, a fan campaign sought to smuggle messages into the house, where guests were allegedly kept in isolation, renting planes to fly over, lobbing balls containing messages inside, trying to convince the houseguests to walk out in mass and leave the producers holding the bag. If you've seen The Truman Show, you've got a pretty good idea of what this campaign looked like. Chicken George emerged as a key player in that effort -- the person most shook up by the messages they were receiving and the person who almost led the walkout of the program, before the producers succeeded in talking everyone into staying. Can we perhaps see the Vote the Worst campaign as a more refined strategy for foiling the plans of the producers and wrecking a primetime network series?

Suppose we applied the Vote for the Worst approach to national politics, the Democrats would have nominated Dennis Kucinich and the Republicans would have -- well, come to think of it, the outcome wouldn't have been radically different after all. :-)

Battle of the Autobots

Elsewhere, rumors surrounded other Vote the Worst efforts as contestants widely regarded among hardcore fans as bland, colorless, dumb, or annoying seemed to move up on the polls at the expense of long time fan favorites which others hoped to get into the house. (Keep in mind, though, what happened on season one when it turned out that these were the kinds of 'houseguests' who consistently got the most votes from the viewing public. Maybe we just want to vote for folks who don't cause trouble.) All of this might be passed off as simply partisanship among rival fractions within the fan community if it were not for the fact that the Vote for the Worst people were actively and openly deploying autobots to cast as many votes as they wanted:

Click here to open up an autoscript that will continue to vote for chicken George every few seconds. Get it set up on every computer that you can, it will vote without you having to do anything.

There is some dispute about how effective such devices may be. The official website urges viewers to vote once a day, implying that only one vote per machine counts in any 24 hour period. Yet, the site seems to register multiple votes on the same visit, and the best of the autobots will switch aliases from vote to vote, making it much harder for the vote counters to dismiss its input. But suppose that they work: a small number of people, consistently using such devices, could overwhelm a much larger majority of voters, trying to cast their preferences within the system.

The fans, themselves, are speculating about whether the network will want to discount all of those autobot votes. On the one hand, counting the votes may allow the producers to have an inflated vote count, implying greater public interest than really exists for the show. We've already seen how American Idol likes to use the most inflated numbers possible and loves the analogy to the 2004 presidential election. Others think they will discount bots because such votes may distort the results and end up with a program which has little or nothing to do with what the public wants to see. Because reality shows rarely announce the actual vote spread (using only raw numbers of the total votes cast), many viewers distrust the results on general principle, suspecting that the whole is simply a smokescreen that allows the producers to more or less do whatever they want. We have enough trouble trusting the results in national elections when we count every hanging chad -- imagine if they just announced which candidate won and didn't give a vote count. Which scenario is true? It all depends on how cynical you are -- and in what direction your cynicism takes you.

<Exporting Democracy

As always, these issues of participatory democracy are taken more seriously everywhere else in the world except in the United States.

The Chinese equivalent of Idol, the curiously-named Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Supergirl Contest, has run aground with the Communist government. The American news coverage has emphasized the debate about manners and language displayed on the show but my friends from China tell me a somewhat different story. The show generated enormous public interest and resulted in huge levels of voter participation. After all, for many of the Chinese viewers, it was perhaps the first time that they had been allowed to cast a vote in a contest where there was more than one candidate on offer. The show became the focus of enormous public discussion, emerging as a metaphor for the hopes of democracy within China. Here, there can be no question that reality television has explicitly political effects. But then, they seem to take democracy more seriously in other parts of the world than we do in the United States.

Happy Independence Day, Mr. and Mrs. America.

Thanks to Henry Jenkins IV for his help in preparing this entry.

Update: The cast of Big Brother: All Stars was announced on thursday July 6. Chicken George did indeed make the final cut as did several of the others who had been the target of vote for the worst campaigns, such as Alison Irwin and Diane Henry. Many of those supported by some of the other leading factions -- especially the team of Howie Gordon, Kaysar Ridha, and Janelle Pierzina -- also made the cut. The network expanded the number of contestants in the house from 12 to 14, possibly to accomodate the feedback from fans (though spoilers note that there was a picture showed in earlier previews with the series which, if frozen and scrutnized, showed 14 slots for pictures, suggesting this may have been part of the plan all along.) The show said that they received 15.7 million votes, which is lower than some of the estimates that circulated among those who had used autobots to cast votes.

Are Games Art? Wii, I Mean, Oui!

The issue of whether videogames can be considered art is a recurring one whenever gamers gather. Esquire's Chuck Klosterman has reignited the discussion this summer with a provocative discussion of why video games have attracted so few serious critics:

I realize that many people write video-game reviews and that there are entire magazines and myriad Web sites devoted to this subject. But what these people are writing is not really criticism. Almost without exception, it's consumer advice; it tells you what old game a new game resembles, and what the playing experience entails, and whether the game will be commercially successful. It's expository information. As far as I can tell, there is no major critic who specializes in explaining what playing a given game feels like, nor is anyone analyzing what specific games mean in any context outside the game itself. There is no Pauline Kael of video-game writing. There is no Lester Bangs of video-game writing. And I'm starting to suspect there will never be that kind of authoritative critical voice within the world of video games...

Let's suspend for a moment the question of whether he's right about this: there is an emerging academic field of games studies; there are a growing number of serious books which discuss the aesthetics of video and computer games (maybe this is a good place for me to plug an excellent recent book by Nic Kellman); there are some pretty good discussions of the art of game design at Gamasutra and some good game criticism at Game Critics; and ahem, Kurt Squire and I write a regularly monthly column over at Computer Games Magazine (which as far as I can see nobody out there reads.)

Given all of that, I suspect Klosterman is still correct that games have produced many more great artists so far than great critics and nobody speaks with the authority of a Lester Bangs or a Pauline Kael about this medium.

Kael (in film) and Bangs (in music) were critics who could identify important new artists and trends. A significant number of people would give these emerging artists a chance on the basis of their critical endorsement. Kael and Bangs were thus able to provide some minimal support for experimentation and innovation. Right now, given all of the market forces that are crushing innovation in the games industry, we need every counter pressure we can find to promote diversity and experimentation.

The Interactivity Issue

Kosterman goes on to discuss why games may be harder for critics to discuss than other media, which for him has to do with the interactive and largely unpredictable nature of this medium:

Look at it this way: Near the end of Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara asks Rhett Butler what she's supposed to do with the rest of her life, and he says that (frankly) he doesn't give a damn. Now, the meaning of those lines can be interpreted in many ways. However, what if that dialogue happened only sometimes? What if this scene played out differently for every person who watched Gone with the Wind? What if Rhett occasionally changed his mind, walked back into the house, and said, "Just kidding, baby"? What if Scarlett suddenly murdered Rhett for acting too cavalier? What if the conversation were sometimes interrupted by a bear attack? And what if all these alternative realities were dictated by the audience itself? If Gone with the Wind ended differently every time it was experienced, it would change the way critics viewed its message. The question would not be "What does this mean?" The question would be "What could this mean?"

This harkens back to some controversial comments which the film critic Roger Ebert made about games a little over a year ago:

..I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Let's ignore for the moment the high/low art assumptions underlying Ebert's claims that if games are not art, then they are simply a "loss of those precious hours." We are back in some pretty old territory here: art is about meaning and meaning comes from what the artist puts into the work that later gets recovered by the alert and knowledgeable reader. To continue with the example above, not everyone gets out of Gone with the Wind what Margaret Mitchell put there but we never doubt that she had something she wanted to say about what happened to the south following the Civil War or what made Rhett Butler a better man, even if he was less of a gentleman, than Ashley Wilkes.

We could see art in very different terms as evocative or provocative - that is, as setting into motion a play with possibilities, as encouraging the reader to create their own stories and project their own meanings onto the rich materials on offer. Art is measured not in terms of what it means to the artist but instead what it means to the reader. Or the artist can be seen as making a statement in a different way than in traditional art. Janet Murray's book, Hamlet on the Holodeck suggests a notion of procedural authorship: in interactive media, authorship involves creating code which sets parameters for our experiences and defines their underlying logic rather than producing texts which make certain statements. There are more than one way to think about art, artists, and readers, yet the debate about video games as art always seems to want to pull back to theories of art that have been dismissed and abandoned elsewhere in criticism.

A New Critical Language?

I stumbled into an interesting discussion of the Klosterman essay over at Easily Distracted where Timothy Burke offers some other arguments for thinking that interactivity per se is at the heart of an art of video game design and should be the central focus of game criticism, even though it can be challenging to describe the aesthetic quality of different modes of interaction:

When you strip away the experience of play, not just how sound and image come together, but the interactivity that defines the medium, a lot of the greatest video games (great both in the sense of being pleasurable to play and in their aesthetic achievement) can sound, well, stupid. Plot and narrative matter in games, meaning matters in games ... but games are less reducible to plot, to narrative, or even to meaning than films or novels.

Burke discusses the challenges a critic would face writing about some of the most interesting and important games on the market today. He has this to say about Katamari Damacy:

It's the game you'd give to someone who had never played a game. It's also one of the hardest games I can think of to describe, particularly in a way that captures its charm and makes clear why it's one of the greatest examples of the medium to date.

Let's agree that we do not yet have a very good vocabulary for discussing the 'gameness' of games and that's why we get bogged down into endless debates about whether meaning comes from the story or from the game play mechanics. We neither have a technical language for discussing the particulars of games with any accuracy (see the discussion that follows Burke's original post about whether Grand Theft Auto is 'open-ended' and what we mean by 'open-endedness') nor do we have an expressive language that evokes the experience of game play in ways that conveys its pleasures to people who have not yet played a particular title.

So Who Cares?

Given these problems, you might well ask whether the question of the artistic status of games is really that important. When folks line up at the EB for this month's hot new release, do they really care whether they are buying art or just a "kickass "game (a technical term)? I explore this question in some depth in an interview posted at GameSetWatch , but let me cut to the heart of the issue here:

The debate about whether games are art matters on several levels. First, it matters on the level of public policy. I recently was in a debate with a state legislator who wanted to restrict access to M rated titles because he felt violent games led to real world violence. I argued otherwise. His response was to say that his view should dominate either way. "If I'm right, then I've protected kids from the threat of youth violence. If you're right, all I've done is insured some kids spend more time playing outside. No harm either way." For this argument to hold, we have to assume that games have no positive cultural contributions to make, that they are commodities, like cigarettes, and not artworks. Try to imagine someone making a similar claim about books or cinema at this point. So, the fight to see games as art is a fight to protect games from censorship and mindless regulation.

It is also a fight to help game designers gain greater creative freedom from the marketing forces in their own companies, to gain a toehold for innovation within games. Players don't have to care about whether games are art if they don't care that every new game looks just like the games that were produced and sold to them last year....It doesn't matter whether there are games in the Museum of Modern Art. It does matter whether the best game designers are given enough room to push the limits of games as a medium and whether or not there are people out there who are willing to support risk-taking and experimentation within the medium.

(An aside about this interview: Adrian Hon, a key player in the Alternate Reality Games movement, takes me to task for some of my comments about ARGs in this interview over on his blog. Frankly, rereading that passage, I think I muddled much of what I wanted to say about ARGS. He's right. I'm wrong. Sorry.)

And Then Came the Wii...

Let me suggest another reason why it matters: the launch of the Wii offers a new opportunity for games to reinvent themselves, for us to see entirely new genres of game play experience emerge, and for games to attract new kinds of consumers who have been uninterested in the medium previously. The core question is whether the games industry and the games consumer is prepared to explore the range of possibilities opened up by this new piece of hardware or whether the hardware will quickly be subordinated to existing genre formulas because that's what designers know how to do and that's what consumers already think that they want. There was a good discussion over at IGN about how the release of the Wii is inspiring new thoughts about the games medium.

As my comments in that story suggest, I am pretty excited about the Wii as a spanner in the works of the current commercial mindset but change isn't going to happen without a fight. The easiest thing imaginable would be for the marketing department to get conservative about what they think will sell, for game reviewers to get conservative because the new games don't look like what they've seen before, and for gamers to get conservative because they don't know how to play these new kinds of games. For Wii's full impact to be felt, there has to be support for experimentation, diversity, and innovation within games and that brings us back to where we started -- the need for serious game critics.

I am indebt to CMS graduate students Alec Austin and Ivan Askwith for information included in this post.

Oreos, "Wal-Mart Time", and User-Generated Advertising

Driving around earlier this week, I happened to hear the distinctive voice of American Idol's Randy Jackson ("Yo, Dawgs") on my radio, telling listeners about a national contest for the best amateur rendition of the classic "Oreos and Milk" jingle. Jackson's participation in an advertising campaign is hardly surprising in and of itself-- after all, we got to watch Simon Cowell endorse Vanilla Coke and we've seen Ford run a series of spots featuring Idol contestants which become part of what fans evaluate as they judge who should win the talent competition. From the start, American Idol has been closely tied to a range of new marketing and branding strategies.

Upon further investigation, I found the Oreo site online. It turns out that Kraft Foods, the company which makes those delightful chocolate wafers with the vanilla cream inside, is hosting a national competition to identify musical groups who can put their own spin on the advertising ditty. The winning group receive $10,000, the opportunity to record an Oreo radio commercial and hang out with Randy Jackson in Los Angeles in August.

A panel of judges winnowed down the original submissions and now the public is being invited to go to the web and vote on the five finalists. There's Acappella Gold, a group of soccer mom types in zebra-skin pants suits, doing it up barbershop quartet style. There's the Chris Allen Band which gave the song a bit of Reggae backbeat and Odysy who perform it with a mix of hip hop and street harmony. The Oreo Cousins do it as a blues number and The Three belt it out to acoustic guitar and percussion.

Each of the videos has the ear-marks of amateur made media -- the kind of stuff the RIAA wants to take off of YouTube: most of them have fixed camera positions, poor lighting, and are shot in rec-rooms or other cluttered domestic spaces. The performances that made it this far are pretty good -- each has its own flavor and each set of performers seems to be really enjoying what they are doing. The website features a selection of the folks -- good and bad -- who got cut from the competition along the way.

Everyone Likes Oreos -- in Their Own Way

Kraft can be seen as the latest in a long series of advertisers which have embraced user-generated content as a means of generating buzz around popular brands. Such campaigns seek to tap the passion consumers feel towards cult brands and use it to draw other consumers into the fold.

I confess -- I enjoyed spending time with these entries. A great deal of the interest lies in the diversity of musical traditions represented. This makes me skeptical of the plans to select one winner and feature them on television. Each of these performers embodies different consumer niches and there's a message to be had in seeing the Oreos message translated in so many different musical languages. It seems silly to start with such multiculturalism and end up with a monovocal message -- no matter who ends up winning.

I am not sure whether Oreos represents a cult brand (perhaps it's simply a comfort food that reminds all of us of good times we had as kids) but I know that I am susceptible to peer pressure where Oreos are concerned. Some years ago, I was getting on a TransAtlantic flight to the U.K. and I saw someone sitting across the aisle from me loading a huge carry-on bag filled with Oreo Cookies which she was apparently taking back with her to England. I snorted smugly to the person sitting next to me about the degree to which some people become addicted to their favorite products. But once I got to London, I started craving Oreo cookies and couldn't find them anywhere -- at least at that time a decade or so ago -- and when I got back stateside, the first thing I wanted to do was stop at the local 7/11 and buy some Oreos and milk. I hadn't had one of those cookies for months prior to the trip but somehow traveling through a world without Oreos left me really desperate.

"It's Wal-Mart Time"

Of course, Youtube shows us that consumers will make videos about the most popular brands, even in the absence of formal contests and prizes. Just as fan communities will use the web to build visibility for their favorite media properties, brand communities celebrate their connections to their favorite brands.

Take the case of Wal-Mart -- scarcely a brand that might be expected to generate a high degree of passion or be regarded as hip. Yet, you can find countless examples of amateurs who have made media -- sometimes ironic, sometimes dead serious -- to celebrate the Wal-Mart shopping experience. Many of these videos are shot illicitly with cameras smuggled into various Wal-Mart outlets, often taking advantage of the products on display as unpurchased props. These can be snatch and grab affairs or much more elaborate. This parody of Eminem's song, "Just Lose It," involves elaborate production numbers, presumably filmed under the watchful noses of Wal-mart's ever attentive and friendly welcomers. I'm not sure that the brand managers would jump from joy to see Wal-mart associated with white trash lifestyles, cheap merchandise, shoplifting, and parking lot fisticuffs as occurs in "Wal-Mart Time", but it's hard to deny the vibrancy of this particular video. Even if we don't want to see these spots as actively promoting the brand's own agenda, they have a kind of affection for the store as a public space which contrasts sharply with the anti-corporate messages one associates with the ad-buster or culture jammers movement.

His First Oreo Cookie

And of course, look around a little deeper and one will find similar spots for other products, including a whole range of videos featuring people consuming or playing with Oreo cookies. This one is overly long but it does convey the idea that how one eats Oreos is part of standard cultural lore and that people can have a good time standing around twisting open cookies and dipping them into milk. The message here may be more mundane, more ambivalent, than what you are likely to see on a television commercial. But then, that's how we live with brands in the context of our everyday life. We snuggle down with them at the end of a hard day -- we are unlikely to speak in the hyperbolic language of television spots.

These unregulated consumer-generated segments suggest just how carefully filtered and fully scripted the official competition really is. Traditional notions of brand management stress the careful control over the brand's core messages -- every image, every bit of text gets scrutinized to make sure that it reinforces the core themes of a particular campaign. You can bet that anything that made it this far in the official Oreo jingle competition was put through that same process. The finalists were chosen as much for their reverence for the product as for their musical talent. The radio spot I heard features an unlikely Polka style version but it doesn't show people talking about being allergic to chocolate. We don't even see anything as awful as those William Hung style performances American Idol likes to play over and over on the air.

These other videos probably couldn't get assimilated into the official campaign, but then, they may be all the more powerful as brand statements because they are clearly unauthorized and outside the company's control. This could be another one of those spaces where official and unofficial culture co-exist within the crazy, mixed up world of convergence culture.

I am indebted to CMS graduate student Ilya Vedrashko for directing my attention to the amateur made Wal-mart spots. The Oreo material I found on my own.

Convergence and Divergence: Two Parts of the Same Process

ReaderMorgan Ramsay flaged a column by Al and Laura Ries which argues that we should be thinking less in terms of convergence and more in terms of divergence. Here's part of what they say:

Convergence captures the imagination, but divergence captures the market.... Why divergence and not convergence? Because convergence requires compromise and divergence satisfies the evolving needs of different market segments.... Irreconcilable differences will always doom such convergence concepts. Television is a "passive" medium; the Internet is an "active" medium. A couch potato will never put up with the complexities of interactive TV and an Internet junkie will never surf the Net with an awkward box designed for another purpose. Like automobiles, different market segments demand different products... Companies today are pouring billions of dollars into such convergence concepts as smart phones, smart gas pumps, smart homes, smart watches, smart clothing, smart refrigerators, smart toilets and smart appliances. This is a tragic waste of time and money. Companies would be more innovative, more profitable and more successful if they would focus on the opposite idea: divergence.

Here's my response. This may get a little more theoretical than some of my posts.

The Black Box Fallacy

Mr. and Mrs. Ries see convergence primarily in technological terms - that is, the combination of different media functions within the same device. This is what I call the black box fallacy. To some degree, this kind of convergence is already taking place - have you tried to buy a cellphone recently that only made phonecalls and did not perform a range of other media functions? Our cellphones represent this technological notion of convergence gone wild and the last time I looked consumers were gobbling them up even if they didn't use those other media appliances very much if at all. The camera/phone, for example, has taken off in a way that the flying boat never did. It is now the digital equivalent of the Swiss Army Knife. At least some convergence devices do capture the market. But if we are waiting for all of the media technologies to merge into a single media appliance, we will be waiting for a very very long time.

Convergence is a Cultural Process

My book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide isn't terribly interested in convergence on a technological level. Rather, my focus is on convergence as a cultural process which involves the flow of stories, images, sounds, brands, relationships across the entire media system.

Here's what I write in the book's introduction:

Keep this in mind: Convergence refers to a process, but not an endpoint. There will be no single black box that controls the flow of media into our homes. Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the portability of new computing and telecommunications technologies, we are entering an era where media will be everywhere....Our cell phones are not simply telecommunications devices; they also allow us to play games, download information from the Internet, and take and send photographs or text messages. Increasingly they allow us to watch previews of new films, download installments of serialized novels, or attend concerts from remote locations. All of this is already happening in Northern Europe or Asia. Any of these functions can also be performed using other media appliances. You can listen to the Dixie Chicks through your DVD player, your car radio, your walkman, your computer's mp3 files, a web radio station, or a music cable channel....

In turn, media convergence impacts the way we consume media. A teenager doing homework may juggle four or five windows, scan the web, listen to and download MP3 files, chat with friends, word-process a paper, and respond to e-mail, shifting rapidly among tasks. And fans of a popular television series may sample dialogue, summarize episodes, debate subtexts, create original fan fiction, record their own soundtracks, make their own movies--and distribute all of this worldwide via the internet.

Convergence is taking place within the same appliances... within the same franchise... within the same company... within the brain of the consumer... and within the same fandom. Convergence involves both a change in the way media is produced and a change in the way media is consumed.

In such a world, all of the media systems are increasingly interconnected; we use them all in relationship to each other, whether or not the technologies are actually hardwired together. I doubt we are going to see a stable relationship between the technologies any time soon. I doubt we will live any longer in a world where various media can be understood as discrete and self-contained.

Convergence is an Ad Hoc Process

The notion of convergence which Al and Laura Reiss are critiquing would indeed require top-down coordination and systemic management of the technological infrastructure and would seemingly priviledge some relationships between devices over others. I share their skepticism that this kind of convergence is coming anytime soon. But we are already living in a convergence culture. A cultural model of convergence allows us to examine incremental, ad hoc, decentralized, unofficial, unauthorized and uncoordinated change. This model of convergence focuses on conflicting goals and expectations amongst different groups (commercial, amateur) involved in the circulation (legal, illegal) of media content. Technological convergence requires control, where-as convergence culture is out of control.

Convergence culture is occurring precisely because the public does not want a one-size-fits-all relationship to media content. Consumers want the media they want where they want it when they want it and in the format they want. On the technological level, this does indeed involve divergence between technologies; on an economic level, this may involve fragmentation of the market. On the cultural level, though, this desire for a divergence of technology works to spread media content across every possible delivery system and insures that there will be multiple points of entry to many of the most successful media franchises. The "couch potato" and the "internet junkie", in the Riess's comments above, will establish very different relationships to this content as they consume it on different terms and in different media, yet increasingly, they are both engaged with aspects of the same media franchise. (Both of these are fictional constructs, by the way, since nobody consumes simply one medium nor does anyone enjoy a purely passive or purely active relationship with media content.)

Technologies of Freedom

My book is inspired in part by the work of MIT Political Scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool's Technologies of Freedom (1983) for whom convergence and divergence are interrelated processes. Here's what he wrote more than two decades ago:

A process called the 'convergence of modes' is blurring the lines between media, even between point-to-point communications, such as the post, telephone and telegraph, and mass communications, such as the press, radio, and television. A single physical means--be it wires, cables or airwaves--may carry services that in the past were provided in separate ways. Conversely, a service that was provided in the past by any one medium--be it broadcasting, the press, or telephony--can now be provided in several different physical ways. So the one-to-one relationship that used to exist between a medium and its use is eroding.

Pool predicted a period of prolonged transition, during which the various media systems competed and collaborated, searching for the stability that would always elude them:

Convergence does not mean ultimate stability or unity. It operates as a constant force for unification but always in dynamic tension with change.... There is no immutable law of growing convergence; the process of change is more complicated than that.

We are still learning just how complicated the process of change really is as we watch agents at various levels respond to the shifts in the ways our culture operates.

More on Firefly and the Long Tail

With apologies to Steven Colbart, let's take this out of the realm of faith-based reasoning and resort to facts. Reader Reinier Zwitserloot estimates:

There are about 50,000 or so fans, and I'm being generous. Let's be very amicable and say each ep sells 150,000 times. That's 300,000 income.

I was skeptical that this estimate was accurate or gave a full picture of what we know about the Firefly audience, so I e-mailed a friend in the television industry to see whether he had access to more reliable numbers. So here's what he had on the dvd sales:

The Hollywood Reporter reported last July ("Wheedon flock ready for 'Firefly'

resurrection" by Anne Thompson, 22 July) that the DVD set of all 13 episodes had sold more than 200,000 copies. There is an unconfirmed number posted at WHEDONesque.com ("Firefly listed in top 1 DVD sets on FOX.com," thread started by Chris Bridges, 31 March 2006) from someone named "The Hey" that put the sales at 2.5 million on 1 April 2006 -- but that seems really high. I'd guess it's somewhere in the middle, with an uptick last summer/early fall ignited by SERENTITY's release.

So let's assume that the 2.5 million number is over the top (unless someone can show otherwise) but we can see that there were at least 200,000 copies of the DVD set sold prior to the films release.

Let's Do the Math

If we assume 200,000 purchasers as the bare minimum, then the episodes would have to go for $5 to recoup Reiner's estimated budget per episode, which seems steep for impulse purchases, but perhaps not that far off what you ended up paying per episode if you bought the boxed set for roughly $60.

That said, this is probably the most conservative possible reading of the numbers. Keep a few things in mind: these are the number of the copies of the entire set sold at a bulk price. We do not know what percentage of people rented those dvds from Netflix or a similar service. We don't know how many would have paid a smaller price to sample just one episode. We don't know what the impact of the film's release was on the sales or rentals of the dvds (we can bet that it did draw a number of people to the dvds who had not seen the episodes when they were aired. I'd bet most of us know people who followed that route). All of this could boast the numbers over the 200,000 number cited above and start to make what I am proposing look more like a winning proposition.

Now as we turn to statistics about the television audience, the potential market looks even larger. Here's what Nielsen says:

On average, across 11 weeks that the show aired on FOX, there were 2.7 million people 18-49 and 3.1 million heads of households that tuned in.

Of course, these folks were watching for free and we don't know how many of them would pay to access the episodes. These numbers are low in terms of ratings for a broadcast show -- but if you could turn them into paying customers, they would be very strong numbers for direct to dvd or download sales. A big IF, I know.

Now, Compare the Feature Film

Here's what we know about the feature film:

Budget for Serenity was $40 million (not including marketing costs). Domestic box office totaled $25.5 million after a $10 million opening weekend (30 September 2005). Foreign take was an additional $13.3 million.

We learn two things from this:

1) if we are right at estimating a per episode cost of 1 million, then the producers could have made 40 episodes, in theory, for what was spent on the feature film.

2) while these numbers are considered poor return on a feature film, getting that many people to spend a good deal less money to download an episode would be considered a major success.

In the course of researching this, I stumbled onto another author, Adam Sternbergh, at New York magazine, who has made a similar case for why Firefly might be a good candidate for direct to consumer production:

Let's say that Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly, wanted to bring the series back to air. (Though "back to air" is a TV phrase now as anachronistically quaint as "switching the dial.") Let's say he found a million Firefly fans online--and, trust me, they're not hiding--who were willing to pay, say, $39.99 each for a sixteen-episode season of Firefly. (Not an unreasonable price, given how many people pay about that amount for full seasons on DVD.) Suddenly, Joss Whedon's got roughly $40 million to play with--and he doesn't need a network. Or a time slot. Or advertisers. He can beam the damn shows right to your computer if he wants to.

None of this makes the production of a direct to dvd season of Firefly a sure thing but at this rate, you could have made a number of television episodes for the budget of the feature film.

Predictible Returns: What Disney Teaches Us

I introduced the idea of an advanced subscription from fans because this would allow the production company to move forward with confidence that there was at least a minimal market for what they were making. Keep in mind most media production decisions don't have anywhere near that level of guarantee of market success. They bet on their best guesses of what the audience is going to be.

That's why the Disney analogy is interesting. Disney doesn't have to sell subscriptions for its direct to the consumer sequels to The Lion King or The Jungle Book. These videos have a reliable consumer base which regularly pushes them into the top dvd sales or rentals upon release and keeps them there, more or less, until the new titles hit the market. These are in effect presold. They may not make as much money per pop as a theatrical release - but then they also don't cost anywhere near as much money. They are, however, far less hit or miss than the theatrical films which depend on generating interest around new and untested properties (and Disney's track record there has been pretty grim).

Pay Check to Pay Check

Liza raises a question about whether a show with Firefly's ensemble cast might work under this model. She writes:

I think the pre-pay, direct-to-DVD/ipod idea has merit, but could not be applied to the task of assembling nearly a dozen actors (rebuilding all the sets!) and ask them to work, essentially, paycheck to paycheck.

My first response was to ask whether Liza has any sense how many television actors right now are living paycheck to paycheck. By this logic, television shows would never get produced at all. Many recurring character actors - anyone who is not a series regular - probably gets hired on a check by check basis and is grateful for the relative stability a gig on a television series represents. While it is true that a long-standing series offers a decent degree of security for a performer, the reality is that any television show can be canceled on the whim of a top network executive. It's not like tv actors get tenure. That said, she is probably right that it might be hard to hold together an ensemble as large as Firefly had.

I would argue that from the point of view of the production company, my direct to consumer television idea might make more sense (especially when you add my ideas about selling subscriptions in advance to the most hardcore fans): the production company can make a reasonable decision about how many episodes it wants to produce based on iestimates of its likely audience and return on investment. Under the current system, the production company is essentially producing on spec and really only returns its costs once it goes into syndication or DVD packaging. Under this model, the production company starts to get returns from the moment the first product ships.

Is it a risk to go this way? No doubt - all the more so because no other television show has ever done this before. I suspect this option was never considered when Whedon was thinking about the fate of the series. Clearly, the decision would have rested with the studios involved -- not with Whedon. (Sorry to have personalized this discussion around Whedon in my first post. I didn't mean for this to come across as an attack on the guy.) I am sure Whedon wasn't offered any options forward other than the movie and I am certain under those circumstances, he was better off going with the movie. What I am suggesting here is a way to rewrite the rules of American television. It hasn't happened yet. It may happen some day.

What The Video iPod Adds

Catana notes, speaking about video iPod, that:

We forget how quickly new technologies change things that didn't seem feasible a very short time before. It was just a bit too early for any choice but Serenity. Alas.

He's certainly right that using the iPod as the distribution channel wasn't even a hypothetical option at the point Serenity was made but direct to dvd would in theory have been a model. Video iPod adds two factors to the mix: a stable infrastructure which allows per episode sales to consumers (my assumption is that hardcore fans would buy dvds and that this system will appeal most to casual consumers who want to taste the series) and a global distribution channel which allows you to quickly enter a world-wide market without carrying some of the costs of physically shipping your product. Both are significant advantages but direct to dvd production was possible when the decision was made to go with the feature film.

The Bottom Line

In some ways, Firefly would have been the best test case for this model - because of Whedon's reputation and hardcore fan base. In other ways, it would have been a bad test case for reasons readers have identified - the costs of an ensemble cast and of the special effects budget required for this particular series.

Would it have worked? We will never know.

Web Comics and Network Culture

I am participating in a very interesting conversation about digital storytelling, visual culture, and web 2.0 over at Morph, the blog of the Media Center, which describes itself as "a provocative, future-oriented, nonprofit think tank. In the dawning Digital Age, as media, technology and society converge at an accelerating pace in overlapping cycles of disruption, transition and change, and in all areas of human endeavor, The Media Center facilitates the process by gathering information and insights and conceiving context and meaning. We identify opportunity, provide narrative, stimulate new thinking and innovation, and agitate for dialog and action towards the creation of a better-informed society." The Media Center has asked a fairly diverse group of media makers and thinkers to participate in a "slow conversation" to be conducted over the next month or so about creativity in the new media age. So far, the most interesting post has come from Daniel Meadows, currently a lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales, about work he has done with the British Broadcasting System to get digital stories by everyday people onto the air. He provides links to a great array of amateur media projects. I haven't spent as much time following these links as I would like but it's a great snapshot of the work being done in digital storytelling.

What follows are some excerpts from my own first post in the exchange which uses webcomics to explore some of the ideas in Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, a book I referenced here the other day.

I have been reading a new book by Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which offers a pretty compelling account of the ways that the technological and social shifts wrought by the so-called digital revolution are generating new models of cultural expression and civic engagement. In the book's introduction, he writes:

These changes have increased the role of nonmarket and nonproprietary production, both by individuals alone and by cooperative efforts in a wide range of loosely or tightly woven collaborations. These newly emerging practices have seen remarkable success in areas as diverse as software development and investigative reporting, avant-garde video and multiplayer online games. Together, they hint at the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century.

Benkler is describing a mediascape which is profoundly hybrid -- that is, communication occurs on multiple levels (some motivated by economic gain, some by a gift economy, some by a notion of reputation building or education or public service or civic engagement or fan appreciation). People create culture for many different reasons with different expectations in terms of rewards on their investment.

I am also reading alongside Benkler another new book, T. Campbell's A History of Web Comics, which describes the gradual emergence of the Web as a platform for graphic expression. At first, webcomics seemed largely fringe to the commercial mainstream of newspaper comic strips and printed comic books, a place for gifted amateurs and art school dropouts with much of the content focused on digital culture itself.

Scott McCloud's groundbreaking manifesto, Reinventing Comics (2000) made the case for the Web as an "expanded canvas" that might allow new modes of graphic expression, as a more open space for newcomers to prove their worth as artists, and as a technology which might broaden the potential public for comics by allowing writers and artists to explore themes that would never make it into mainstream publications.

All of this has proven true - at least to some degree. Today, webcomics thrive across many different communities. People are creating webcomics for very different reasons - some are trying to hone their skills, demonstrate market potential, or build a reputation before going pro. Some are moving into print once they've found their niche and others are choosing to remain digital despite offers from print-based publishers. Some have developed political communities around their web comics which take on a life of their own and, in some cases, overwhelm the comics themselves. Some have created virtual artists colonies where amateurs and commercial artists share work and give each other feedback. And a small number are generating at least modest revenues online through subscriptions, micropayments, or the sale of merchandise.

Campbell describes a moment early in the history of webcomics when Fred Gallagher, the co-creator of MegaTokyo, a man who thought he was doing amateur work on the way to turning pro, finds himself swamped at conventions by his intense fan following and realized "he had no control - no one had control -- over whether online readers labeled them 'professional,' 'amateur', 'true artist' or 'rock star.'"

The book similarly qoutes publisher Joey Manley's comments about Modern Tales, an important example of the "artist colony" model I referenced earlier: "We've got manga-styled werewolf/cop dramas butting heads (or, um, maybe some other body part) with Fancy Froglin, medieval fantasy side-by-side with 'straight' autobiography, space-opera-charged science fiction right next door to Borgesian metafiction. And we like it all (as do our thousands of subscribers.)"

Both of these comments suggest the instability which occurs when you bring together diverse kinds of media stakers working with different goals and interests for different communities but all available through the same communications platform...

These shifts in the nature of our media landscape have the potential to transform how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. Benkler writes,

They enable anyone, anywhere, to go through his or her practical life, observing the social environment through new eyes -- the eyes of someone who could actually interject a thought, a criticism, or a concern into the public debate. Individuals become less passive and thus more engaged observers of social spaces....The various formats of the networked public sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, without need to access the resources of a major media organization.

Benkler argues that the threat of fragmentation and babel on the Web has best been dealt with by harnessing the collective intelligence of Web communities -- through efforts at tagging, filtering, and blogging, which help us weigh the value of different contributions and direct them towards the most appropriate audience. At the same time, we are developing new modes of expression which do use images to encapsulate more complex bodies of knowledge.

There's more on this topic at Morph -- but I figured I'd port over the part that was most relevent to our focus here.

Do Snakes or Fireflies Have Longer Tails?

Reader Avner Ronen compares the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon with what happened to Serenity. He notes:

I'm looking forward to this movie as much as the next net.geek, but I don't expect as much of a box-office surprise as many seem to be anticipating, because I've seen it before.

What am I referring to? Serenity. It would be hard to beat the online buzz Serenity was getting, and sometimes it seems like it's difficult to find a blogger who isn't a fan of the prematurely cancelled series Firefly, but all of that buzz and a good deal of critical acclaim still couldn't get people into the theaters.

He may well be right - it is very easy living at the hub of digital culture to imagine that all of the buzz we are hearing is generalizable across the population as a whole. But let's look for a moment at what happened with Firefly/Serenity and then, I will try to explain why I think Snakes on a Plane is in a somewhat different situation.

Praise Be the Whedon

Let's be clear that I am a big fan of Firefly and of Joss Whedon's other work in television and in comics. I think he's one of the smartest and most creative people operating within the media industry today. He has enormous respect for his fans and he has earned our respect in return. He had constructed a television series he really believed in.

He was watching a very dedicated, very resourceful fan community form around a television series which either got canceled because a)the ratings were low and it was not seen as having a broad general appeal or b)the ratings were low because the network had not successfully targeted its most likely audiences and given it a chance to develop the word of mouth needed to expand its core viewership. We may never know which of these explanations is the correct one - I suspect some combination of the two.

Whedon still wanted to produce the content; there was a group of people clammering for the content; but the networks didn't think there's a large enough audience to sustain a prime time broadcast series. This is a situation we've seen again and again in the history of broadcast media. I think it's about time we rewrote the rules.

Serenity and the Long Tail

We are now in the space which Chris Anderson has documented so well in his discussion of the Long Tail. In Anderson's account, media properties can succeed by appealing to niche rather than mass audiences if you can lower costs of production, publicity, and distribution, keep the content on the market long enough for consumer interest to grow, and count on the most passionate consumers to help spread the word about your brand. By those criteria, Firefly should be as close to a natural for the Long Tail as anything produced for television so far and the brisk sales and rentals of the dvds of the original episodes illustrated that point pretty well.

But Whedon got greedy - or someone got greedy on his behalf - and Firefly moved the wrong direction up Anderson's Long Tail - towards a blockbuster Hollywood movie which would have required even more viewers to be seen as successful than would have been required to keep the series on the air on a second tier network. Yes, it was way cool to watch those characters up there on the big screen but Whedon set the bar much too high for the existing market for his property and we all paid a price for his hubris.

To make something that felt like a movie, he had to produce something that didn't feel like a television episode, creating a story that turned the world of the series upside down. Along the way, he killed off some of the most beloved characters and lost some of the elements which many of us liked about Firefly in the first place. At the same time, he compressed a season's worth of plot developments into two hours or so of screentime with the result that he produced a work that was confusing to many first time viewers and that lacked the gradual character development that was the hallmark of Firefly. I still liked a lot about the movie but what I didn't like was the fact that it would seem to have pretty much closed the door to further development in the Firefly franchise -- at least in the foreseeable future.

The Road Not Taken

Imagine, instead, that he had moved in the other direction down the tail, towards the production of television style episodes directly for dvd. I've discussed such a system in relation to Global Frequency (a show that suffered an even more premature death than Firefly -- canceled before it even reached the air). CMS graduate student Ivan Askwith has advocated the use of the video ipod as a distribution platform for essentially long tail television. We have seen fan groups advocating such an approach for recently canceled series such as The West Wing and Arrested Development.

From the perspective of a producer like Whedon, who has a strong and existing fan base, this should be a very attractive proposition - make as many episodes as you want in whatever story structure you want with no risk that a network will stand between you and your audience, start making money as soon as the first product ships rather than waiting for syndication to turn a profit.

What would make it even more attractive would be to create a subscription based model so that readers paid in advance for episodes they wanted to see and they knew more or less what the core market was before production started. This would be hard to arrange for a totally new property: easier for a canceled series or for a show by a brand-name creator like Whedon. I'd pay now to guarantee access to original content by Whedon, sight unseen, a year from now. So would most of the other brown coats, I would bet. And if he had gone that route, we would have been able to enjoy many more hours of quality science fiction/western action on television, where it belongs, instead of burning up the whole franchise in two hours of big screen excitement.

Yes, there are risks involved -- if for no other reason than because no television show has ever made this transition into direct to dvd production. We can point to the example of a growing number of Disney animated features which have generated direct to DVD sequels with a fair amount of success with their core market. But the risks involved would have been lower -- financially at least -- than trying to turn a failed television series into a Hollywood blockbuster. Whedon could have done it if anyone could and if he had, a lot of other television producers would have followed his example.

What About Snakes?

Serenity had one of the most committed fan bases in media history and they would have followed Whedon anywhere but they weren't enough on their own to make a success on the tall end of the Long Tail. They needed to draw in lots of non-fans of the franchise. We might imagine that non-fans were resistant to the film now for many of the same reasons that they were resistant to the original series and we can add one more factor: they were reluctant to jump onto a film they knew was based on a series that they hadn't seen because they were afraid they were going to be lost. Whedon worked hard to make the film accessible and we were told he was going to do so, but guess what, lots of folks didn't believe him.

So, if we follow the logic of the Long Tail, success on one end of the tail depends on deep commitments from a relatively narrow fan base (that's what Firefly had) and on the other end, on superficial commitments from a broader range of viewers (and that's what Snakes on a Plane has.) I doubt anyone really has the same level of passion for Snakes as they have for Firefly. It's a fun lark -- a one night stand, a vacation movie romance. But it isn't a once in a lifetime passion.

But that's okay. What's bad/good about the concept is something anyone can quickly grasp. You hear the title and you chuckle. You see the preview and you are hooked -- or not. You don't need to have seen another media product to consume this one. There's a star - Jackson - with some box office reputation - remember, Serenity had no stars except those who were in the television series. It's got some draw as a straight out peddle to the metal action film with a good leading actor and some appeal as the best example of camp and kitsch to hit the screen in some time. Those are good reasons to think the film will have a broader appeal than Serenity - even if, especially if, it is nowhere near as good a movie.

Whedon bet that his fan followers could tell the public to turn out at the multiplex to see his movie. The producers of Snakes have used the audience to tell them how to market this movie and then have applied the capacity of a major publicity campaign to amplify that approach towards the general audience.

Further Reflections on YouTube vs. RIAA

University of Chicago law professor Randy Picker was nice enough to pass along a link to what he has written - from a legal perspective - about the potential threat which the RIAA may pose to those folks who want to post lip-sync or karaoke songvids on YouTube:

For the music industry, this is a not-so-golden oldie and the conflict illustrates the persistent gap between actual law and the public's knowledge of that law and, frequently, perceptions of fairness. On these facts, far from being crazy or somehow a misuse of copyright, I think that music copyright holders have a straight-forward action against YouTube.... this is how we pay for music in the real world: different uses, different prices, and until we change the law and come up with a better way to pay for music, you should assume that the music industry is going to show up one day and knock on YouTube's door.

I don't pretend to be a lawyer so my views on the law should be taken with a grain of salt. I am pretty sure though that Picker is correct that the RIAA is almost certainly well within its legal rights to take action to shut down this use of its music via YouTube.

That said, I feel that we should be paying closer attention to that "persistent gap between actual law and the public's knowledge of that law and frequently, perceptions of fairness." True, ignorance of the law is no excuse but a democratic state should always be concerned if the gap between the law and the public's perception of fairness grows too great. (And I would suggest that gap is growing hourly at the present moment).

The current law regarding media use was written at a time when the freedom of the press was exercised primarily by those who could afford to own presses and was updated at a time when the key stakeholders at the table were thought to be broadcasters and other large media interests. It was never intended to function in a world where an ever-expanding number of amateur media makers are producing and circulating their work to a public. I would argue that our current law recognizes the rights of professionals fairly well - though clearly even here, it is having trouble keeping up during a moment of media in transition. As an academic, I know how much of a written text I can quote within scholarly commentary and fall within a Fair Use defense; I also have a pretty good sense as a journalist what constitutes legitimate quotation. Yet, as we turn to fans and bloggers and others within this expanding participatory culture, the lines become much less clear.

It is pretty clear that whatever systems of clearance that got set up to deal with commercial musicians and radio stations or even, to use Picker's example, singing waiters is not going to be adequate to deal with those high school guys in China who appeared in one of the more famous example of lip syncing videos. For one thing, the pricing for public performances is almost certainly beyond their capacity to pay and so they are going to be permanently locked out of being able to respond to a central element of their cultural environment. For another, it's hard to imagine a system which could accommodate requests every time one of us wanted to pre-register to perform "Happy Birthday", say, for our 5 year old's birthday party - as I am sure that the law clearly states we should do. Again, we are producing media on a scale rather different from even what was imagined in the most recent revisions of the copyright act. And for a third, did I mention those guys were from China and operate under a totally different copyright regime?

That's where we get to the second stage of this problem: a system of distribution like YouTube pushes grassroots creative expression to a level of visibility well beyond that received by any previous form of folk culture. The media industries could tolerate us lip syncing their songs at the local Lions Club meeting or as part of the school talent show because it did not reach a large enough public to demand their attention and concern. Enforcement would have been difficult and the damages caused by those public performances would have been so minimal that nobody would have taken the time to go after them. True, school drama clubs used to pay some small amount in licensing fees to the rights holders of plays like Harvey and Guys and Dolls, but there were many many everyday performances, even public performances, which would have been off the radar of the commercial rights holders.

But the same performance posted to YouTube can be seen by millions of people and in some well publicized cases, has led to commercial performances on television, even contracts for use in television advertising. The reach of YouTube breaks down the line between professional and amateur performance in a way which is going to force the recording industry to respond.

And that's the paradox of the present moment: you have amateurs reaching mass audiences without the means (or the legal representation) held by the media companies which previously were the only ones who could reach this scale of public.

It's not sufficient to simply tell us "this is the law." We need to work together to try to change the law into something that makes sense in relation to this emerging and expanding participatory culture.

That said, my key point in the original post was not that the RIAA would be exceeding its legal rights in going after such videos. Picker is correct to suggest that this would be a logical and clear cut extension of long-standing legal practice. Rather, my point was that attacking these amateurs would be going against the recording industry's own public and economic interests. Here I am thinking about a statement which the anthropologist and industry consultant Grant McCracken makes in his book, Plentitude:

Corporations will allow the public to participate in the construction and representation of its creations or they will, eventually, compromise the commercial value of their properties. The new consumer will help create value or they will refuse it....Corporations have a right to keep copyright but they have an interest in releasing it. The economics of scarcity may dictate the first. The economics of plentitude dictate the second.

Right now, the recording industry, more than any other entertainment sector, wants to fall back on an assertion of its legal claims over intellectual property -- trying to throw every legal and technological obstacle it can toss into the path of change. In doing so, they simply further erode public support and respect for their industry. They probably have the legal rights to do it: I wish they had the economic and cultural sense not to do so.

Thanks, Randy, for a very interesting post. I don't mean to be picking on what you wrote. I essentially agree with you on the legal argument but I hate to leave the entire future of our culture in the hands of lawyers (no personal insult intended). We have to fight a two front battle here: help to rewrite copyright law to respect the new realities of the media landscape and help to convince media companies that it is in their best interest to build a more collaborative relationship with their consumers.

Fun vs. Engagement: The Case of the Great Zoombinis

Scott Osterweil came to work with the Comparative Media Studies program a little less than a year ago as the head designer for the work we are doing through the Education Arcade -- primarily focusing on a collaboration we are doing with Maryland Public Television called Learning Games to Go. The Learning Games to Go project will develop handheld and mobile games to help young children master basic math and literacy skills. We were very lucky to get Osterweil to work on this project, since he is an experienced games professional, best known for his work on Logical Journey of the Zoombinis and its sequels. The Zoombinis games came out some years back but still crops up regularly when we ask teachers to identify examples of great educational games.

Osterweil is interviewed for the first of a series of podcasts about the project, which just went up this week.

He addresses throughout the interview what has become one of the most vexing problems in terms of convincing teachers and parents that games can be learning activities -- the fact that games are often, on purpose, fun.

I often have teachers, generally of an "older generation," tell me that it is a bad idea to try to make learning fun because most of the rest of our lives is work and work isn't supposed to be fun. (Such comments make me wonder how these people feel about their jobs but that's another matter). I usually respond that they have little to worry about. If being able to deal with prolonged periods of boredom is a necessary job skill for the future, then our current educational system may be doing a better job preparing kids for their adult lives than most of us imagine.

Scott offers a somewhat more tactful answer here:

When children are deep at play they engage with the fierce, intense attention that we'd like to see them apply to their schoolwork. Interestingly enough, no matter how intent and focused a child is at that play, maybe even grimly determined they may be at that game play, if you asked them afterwards, they will say that they were having fun. So, the fun of game play is not non-stop mirth but rather the fun of engaging of attention that demands a lot of you and rewards that effort. I think most good teachers believe that in the best moments classroom learning can be the same kind of fun. But a game is a moment when the kid gets to have that in spades, when the kid gets to be focused and intent and hardworking and having fun at the same time.

You will note here a shift in emphasis from fun (which in our sometimes still puritanical culture gets defined as the opposite of seriousness) to engagement. We think this is an important distinction. When you play a game, a fair amount of what you end up doing isn't especially fun at the moment. It can be grindwork, not unlike homework, which allows you to master skills or collect materials or put things in their proper place in anticipation of a payoff down the line. The key is that this activity is deeply motivated. You are willing to go through the grindwork because it has a goal or purpose which matters to you. When that happens, you are engaged -- whether we are talking about the engagement many of us find in our professional lives or in the learning process or the engagement which some of us find through playing games. For the current generation, games may represent the best way of tapping that sense of engagement with learning.

As the podcast continues, Osterweil describes how this principle of engagement informed his own design work on the Zoobinis project:

What we did when we started designing Zoobinis was to try to think about our own experience with the mathematics of the game and try to access our own learning of it -- trying to remember what it was like to encounter the subject in school or thinking about how we'd use the subject in our daily lives and try to identify times when we had been playful with the concepts in the past. In fact, most of us when we are trying to master something we find ways to be playful to it and in accessing our own playful approach to the material what we were really doing was finding the game that was inherent in the mathamatics. Instead of putting math in the game, we tried to find the game in the math.

Note here that play re-emerges as part of the ways we noodle with new concepts -- a form of informal, experimental, experiential learning that can sometimes precede formal classroom instructions. I often imagine the teacher coming into class to review the previous night's game play: "Think about level 7. How did you beat it? What was hard about it? Why was it difficult? What tricks did you use to get over it? Here's what you were doing" and then scratching out the formulas on the blackboard. "Now go back and try that level again and see if it gets easier." We see educational games as closely integrated into a more elaborate instructional process. We certainly can learn things by playing games -- and we can learn things independently on our own. Many of us would say that the most important stuff we learned growing up took place outside the classroom. But, we think that learning through games is going to be most powerful when we encounter the content on multiple levels and where informal and formal learning intersect.

Osterweil has a great deal more to say about the thinking which went into making the Zoombinis game such a great success.

YouTube vs. The RIAA

This is another in a series of posts highlighting trends which threaten our rights to participate in our culture. According to a report published in the Boston Phoenix this week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) may soon take aim at the amateur lip syncing and Karaoke videos which circulate on YouTube. Spokespeople from the RIAA, which has never been slow to assert the broadest possible claims on intellectual property, have so far not confirmed the claims that they will be using their power to force YouTube to take down such videos.

Participatory Culture's Most Powerful Distribution System

YouTube represents perhaps the most powerful distribution channel so far for amateur media content. More than 6 million visitors watch a total of 40 million clips per day and upload another 50,000 more, according to the Phoenix. Some of that traffic is no doubt generated by content grabbed from commercial media -- including a fair number of commercials which are virally circulated, music videos and segments from late night comedy shows, strange clips from reality television, and the like. But a good deal of the content is user generated and this content is generating wide interest.

Many people will have seen the footage of the guy who went a little extreme with his Christmas tree lights last year or, in regards to this current issue, some of the videos of pasty-faced and overweight people singing off key versions of their favorite pop songs -- often with demonstrably limited comprehension of the lyrics. Many of us had argued that earlier file-sharing services such as Napster provided an infrastructure for garage bands and the like to get their music into broader circulation but there, the illegal content swamped the legal and made it hard to support this case. With YouTube, there is no question that some of the most interesting content comes from grassroots creators. Via YouTube, what were once home movies are finding a public -- some coming to appreciate real creativity, some there to gawk.

Mixed Signals from Media Industries

The various media industries are struggling to figure out how to manage this service, which clearly yields them benefits in terms of increased audience awareness and interest in their content. The early circulation of a particular Saturday Night Live sketch ("Lazy Sunday") has helped to put YouTube on the map and has helped to increase ratings for the series. There was something funny on Saturday Night Live -- who knew? Many of us saw Stephen Colbert's appearance at the Washington Press Club dinner via YouTube. I suspect it was the only C-Span content a lot of young people had watched in a long time. In both cases, the rights holders -- NBC and C-Span respectively -- had the content removed.

More recently, a friend sent me to the site to see previews for some of the forthcoming Fall television series but by the time I got there, in some cases, the networks had them yanked. It's hard to imagine anything more bone-headed than to shut down grassroots efforts to sell your own products -- whatever else you think about the intellectual property issues in circulating actual program segments.

A few companies -- most notably the MTV Networks (full disclosure -- a sponsor of C3) -- have taken a more enlightened policy towards YouTube -- no doubt because a sizable chunk of young males spend more time these days surfing the web than zapping across cable. Taking advantage of YouTube as a source of viral marketing means letting go some of the control that the networks believe they have over what happens to their content: for some of the broadcasters, this loss of control has been hard to accept (and is complicated in the case of cable networks by expectations of their affiliates that they will be the exclusive source for program content).

We're Singing Their Songs!

Now, the RIAA, the most hated name in the entertainment industry, may be entering this picture and if history is any indication, they are likely to play rough. But they need to pull back and think more carefully about whether this kind of scorched earth policy is really the best approach to the challenges they are confronting.

After all, if their performing artists can't compete with some of the off-key, language-impaired performances in these videos, then nothing else they do is going to get any of us to buy their records anyway. It seems far more likely that these videos will drive us towards the professional performances, reminding us of songs we may have otherwise forgotten.

The RIAA is acting on the assumption that these amateur performances may be depreciating the value of their intellectual property. But these fans appreciate the original music in a double sense -- first, they want to show the world how much they like it and second, they increase the potential value of the music by heightening public awareness. Their emotional investments in the songs yield potential dividends for the rights holders. Media industries usually benefit when their content becomes a living part of our culture -- if nothing else, it extends the shelf life.

But then, technically, we are supposed to pay the record industry money every time we sing Happy Birthday to someone so it is no surprise that they take a dim view on amateurs playing rough with their precious lyrics or mouthing off to their songs.

As journalism professor John Battelle posts in his blog about this issue, "Good f'ing lord, RIAA. Wake up. This is how we use music in the real world. Get over yourselves."

Amen, Brother Battelle, Amen.

Thanks to Margaret Weigel for alerting me about this issue.