Singapore-MIT Collaborate on Games Innovation Lab

I am going to be writing a great deal about this project in the months ahead. I am not able to tell you much more yet than is found in this news article which was released by MIT News Office this morning. But suffice it to say that all of us in the Comparative Media Studies Program are extremely excited about these developments, which have been under negotiation since January. As you will read below, William Uricchio and I will have a central role in this project, which is designed to spur innovation, diversity, and creativity in games design. Singapore - MIT collaboration aims to spur gaming sector

October 9, 2006

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Singapore Media Development Authority have announced an agreement to establish the Singapore-MIT International Game Lab (SMIGL). The pioneering collaboration aims to further digital game research globally, develop world-class academic programs in game technology, and establish Singapore as a vital node in the international game industry.

The directors of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program (CMS) -- Henry Jenkins, DeFlorez Professor of Humanities, and William Uricchio, professor of comparative media studies -- will co-direct SMIGL, which will have offices both in Singapore and at MIT. Jenkins and Uricchio will serve as the leading principal investigators in the collaboration.

In announcing the SMIGL collaboration, Uricchio, a specialist in trans-national media distribution and reception, said, "We are excited by this collaboration with colleagues in Singapore and the opportunity to push game research and the industry in new directions, and we very much look forward to initiating an international dialogue among leading scholars, designers, students and gamers."

Uricchio described SMIGL as a "unique chance to reflect on games and to push them in new and unexpected directions, whether in terms of emerging technologies and interfaces, diverse cultural vocabularies, or important niches that have simply been neglected in the rush to seize the largest market share."

Jenkins researches media and the way people incorporate it into their lives. "The Singapore-MIT International Game Lab collaboration will provide a strong catalyst for innovation by bringing together students, industry leaders and faculty from very different cultures and backgrounds to work together and to conduct research that could have a great impact on the international game industry," he said.

The SMIGL initiative will enable students and researchers from Singapore to collaborate with MIT researchers and game industry professionals in international research projects. Beyond technology development, SMIGL will also conduct research on the artistic, creative, business and social aspects of games. The new initiative will also provide Singapore game researchers and professionals with access to cutting-edge technologies, the latest conceptual developments and links to international game development and research communities.

Michael Yap, executive director of the Interactive & Digital Media R&D Programme Office, said, "Over the next five years, we expect some 300 of our best talents from the industry and academia to take advantage of this unique opportunity to work closely with the best research minds at MIT.

"We are delighted to collaborate with MIT, one of the world's leading technology and research institutes. The Singapore-MIT International Game Lab will initiate and produce groundbreaking research in games, which is rapidly emerging as a global research focus. At the same time, the collaboration will further equip our industry-bound students to make a significant impact on the local game industry," Yap said.

Outcomes planned for SMIGL's initial period include development of both an academic and a high-impact research program, publication of peer-reviewed research papers and production of publicly distributable digital games.

The research resulting from the SMIGL collaboration will expand the ways in which the Singapore game industry can build and develop future products, and will aim to identify unique genres and aesthetics that are relevant to the Singapore game industry. In addition, according to the Media Development Authority, it will enhance the country's competitive advantage in areas such as education and tourism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Viewers for Quality Television to Television Without Pity

Another in a series of outtakes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, this sidebar takes a look at two very different mechanisms by which audience members expressed their feelings about television programs -- Viewers for Quality Television and Television Without Pity. Each emerged, in part, in response to shifts in the ways the television networks conceptualized their viewership -- TQT reflected a new focus on demographics (and the recognition that middle class consumers were highly desired by advertisers) and TWP reflects a new focus on expressions, that is, on the emotional investments audience members make in the programs they watch. This originally appeared in Chapter Three of the book. The shift in the ways networks and advertisers think about consumers is reflected in the differences between the two audience forums which can be seen to characterize their respective eras - Viewers for Quality Television (in the 1980s and 1990s) and Television Without Pity (in the early 21st century). As Sue Brower notes, Viewers For Quality Television (VQT) was a product of a specific historic juncture, where Nielsen first began to provide information about audience demographics and media producers sought to exploit this information to sustain shows which had low ratings but attracted highly valued niche audiences. Shows, such as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, and St. Elsewhere, touted themselves as "quality television" because they attracted "quality audiences" and their producers formed alliances with fan groups to construct a case for keeping these series on the air.

Viewers for Quality Television emerged from these grassroots, but corporately supported, efforts to sustain programs that appealed to college educated and upper middle class consumers. The group regularly polled their membership to identify not only what shows they liked but who they were and what products they purchased. Evaluations of quality emerged through consensus within the readership of VQT monthly newsletter, though the group's founder and spokesperson Dorothy Swanson offered this definition: "A quality show is something we anticipate before and savor after. It focuses more on relationships than situations; it explores character, it enlightens, challenges, involves and confronts the viewer; it provokes thought and is remembered tomorrow. A quality show colors life in shades of grey."

While the group supported a range of shows, including sitcoms such as Frank's Place, Designing Women, or Brooklyn Bridge, VQT was most closely associated with hour long ensemble-cast serialized dramas, such as ER, Murder One or NYPD Blue. VQT held an annual convention where they announced their list of recognized shows for the year. Their rankings were widely monitored by industry leaders and media observers, who saw them as giving a boost, no matter how small, to deserving series.

If VQT embraced the ensemble cast drama, TWP has become central to building up and sustaining audiences for science fiction, fantasy, reality, and other cult programs. In the summer of 2004, featured series included 24, Alias, Joan of Arcadia, Gilmore Girls, Smallville and The Sopranos, not to mention Survivor and American Idol. Most of these series define their quality more in terms of their contributions to popular genres than in terms of the concept of "novelistic" television Swanson promoted.

If VQT became emblematic for the shift towards "high demographic" programming, TWP may become emblematic for this search for a more interactive, attentive, and committed consumer. The site offers recaps and discussion forums for 25 shows, most which fall into those genres which attract the highest viewer commitments, according to Initiative's research. While VQT asserted itself as an earnest and aesthetically-minded tastemaking community, TWP is an altogether more playful group as suggested by its motto, "Spare the snark and spoil the network." Swanson argued that the most active segments of the television audience were drawn towards quality and that fans of lesser shows wouldn't put the effort into sustaining such collective efforts. Yet, TWP demonstrates that shows which no one would call high quality may provoke strong emotional reactions and generate net chatter.

VQT sought the ear of network leaders and program producers; these same people are increasingly monitoring TWP as a window into their illusive younger consumers. If the networks had to wait a year to learn how VQT ranked their shows, TWP responds instantly and in a much more nuanced fashion: its professional recappers post a detailed and often scathing critique of each episode within days and sometimes hours after it aired; these reviews in turn generate extensive discussion among the site's readers. As the site's FAQ explains, "Our mandate is, more or less, to give people a place to revel in their guilty televisual pleasures. In most cases, we have a complex love/hate relationship with the show, and this site is a way for us to work through those feelings. If we plain hated a show, we wouldn't pay it any attention at all."

While VQT was about quality, TWP is about passion. Many production companies will assign an intern to monitor the TWP lists to see how the audience reacts to various plot twists and character revelations, though many producers, at least those with thick skins, have been known to lurk there themselves. According to Sep, one of the site's resident experts, "It's certainly a tool for networks to see direct and immediate fan reaction that is far more specific than the Nielsen system."

How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution (Part Two): An Interview with the Wu Ming Foundation

Last time, I introduced readers to the Luther Blissett movement and to two of its principle architects, Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2. Across the interview, they described how the group drew inspiration from Slapshot and Star Trek, not to mention Raymond Carver, Joseph Campbell and Jorge Luis Borges, They discussed a range of creative and expressive activities which included the writing of novels and manifestos as well as the staging of elaborate pranks designed to quell some of the moral panics being sparked by local media. They offered a perspective on culture which is one part avant garde theory and one part fan politics, categories which only rarely mix in the American context. Today, we continue this interview with some more reflections on the ways Luther Blissett related to the emergence of digital culture, how they interacted with their readers, and how this emerged from their appreciation of popular culture.

The Luther Blissett movement has transmogified into the Wu Ming Foundation and the group has been publishing a range of genre-busting, collaboratively-authored novels, which are compared by critics who like them to the work of Umberto Eco and called by those who don't, "novels for multitaskers." To give you some taste of their work, here's part of what Publisher's Weekly has to say about 54:

The midlife crisis of Cary Grant, the founding of the KGB and the Neapolitan years of mafioso Lucky Luciano are just three of the plot lines woven into this dense, playful and always surprising literary behemoth set mostly in the year of the book's title, at the height of the Cold War. Anchoring the tale with a relatively conventional narrative is a young Bolognese man named Robespierre (Pierre), who embarks on a transcontinental odyssey to find his father, Vittorio Capponi, a former Mussolini loyalist who left the Italian army to join the Communists in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, Britain's spy agency MI6 approaches Cary Grant (who's in a career slump) with a bizarre proposal: the role of Yugoslavian leader Marshal Tito in a propaganda biopic. It seems impossible that the multitudinous names and story threads could converge, but, deliciously, they do--in Yugoslavia, where Grant meets Tito, Pierre finds his father, and Luciano's driver Steve "Cement" Zollo tangles with the KGB, which is about to pull off a big hit. The latest joint effort (after the novel Q) from Wu Ming--a collective of five Italian intellectuals who named themselves "anonymous" in Mandarin--offers political commentary-cum-complicated escapism for the brainiac reader.

In some ways, the Luther Blissett movement and the Wu Ming Foundation novels might be seen as working in parallel with what critic Mark America has called "Avant-Pop," a new aesthetic sensability which refuses to remain firmly within any given category of cultural production, choosing to play with the contents of popular culture in ways that reflect an avant garde sensibility. America writes:

The artists who create Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents who have much less influence over them)....Avant-Pop artists have had to resist the avant-garde sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations to process experience. At the same time, A-P artists have had to work hard at not becoming so enamored of the false consciousness of the Mass Media itself that they lose sight of their creative directives. The single most important creative directive of the new wave of Avant-Pop artists is to enter the mainstream culture as a parasite would sucking out all the bad blood that lies between the mainstream and the margin. By sucking on the contaminated bosom of mainstream culture, Avant-Pop artists are turning into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is....Our collective mission is to radically alter the Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal, and subtly ironic gesturing that grows out of the work of many 20th century artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, Raymond Federman, William Burroughs, William Gibson, Ronald Sukenick, Kathy Acker, the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch), art movements like Fluxus, Situationism, Lettrism and Neo-Hoodooism, and scores of rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater, Tackhead, The Breeders, Pussy Galore, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Ministry, Jane's Addiction, Tuxedo Moon and The Residents.

In what follows Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2 offer their own perspective on the ways their project intersects both the historic avant garde and popular culture. I fully confess that I am much more a creature of popular culture than of the avant garde, yet I find myself really connecting with a lot of what they have to say about their poetics and politics here.

HJ3: You wrote, "A vast, transnational community of people surrounds us and interacts with our books in a creative way, we encourage all kinds of sharing, reappropriation, derivative works etc." What can you tell me about your relationship to your readers and the forms of appropriative works they produce?

WM2. Since the beginning of our career as professional storytellers we have exhorted our readers to get in touch with us and become a sort of collective "sixth member", in constant osmosis with the original group. To be part of the Wu Ming's "democratic republic of readers" does not mean to have a seat in the front row or a privileged access to our output. It means to take part, in a more or less direct manner, to a process of collective intelligence and creation that we usually compare with the relationship between community and storyteller in old folk culture.

It must be said that this co-operation does not take place only on the Internet, there are also many face-to-face moments, there's warm physical participation, which we deem as absolutely necessary. We're "on line" but we're also "on the road".

The Internet allowed us to skip intermediates such as the publishers' press office and PR department, our presentation tours are completely self-organized. Being a group of five people, Wu Ming is almost ubiquitous, two or three delegations can discuss our work in different places simultaneously, hundreds of miles apart from each other. We go to places that are usually snubbed by mainstream authors, such as tiny bookshops, public libraries in small villages, squats, sometimes even private apartments - we literally deliver the presentation at home, if there's a group of friends willing to get together one night and listen to what we have to say.

There's constant interaction between us and the readers, they send us comments, suggestion, and criticism. The female characters in our novels have had a positive evolution thanks to the harsh critiques expressed by some female readers. Our newsletter, titled after general Vo Nguyen Giap, has about 10,000 subscribers and regularly features the readers' feedback: reviews, comments, and pieces on various subjects. We don't rely on any open forum or blog -- we tried, but it took too much time to get rid of trolls. We prefer to receive a lot of stuff via e-mail, and make a quality selection.

Having said this, I think that the most explicit invitation to appropriate our work is the "copyleft notice" included in all our books, which can be copied, xeroxed, or downloaded straight from our website. We encourage people to use our works. Our novel Q was deconstructed and rewritten as a very original theatrical drama. 54 became the inspiration for an album by folk-rock band Yo Yo Mundi...

WM1... not to mention the use of our characters in role play games. I'll say a few things about this later.

WM2. Even more explicitly, we have launched several collective writing projects. The first one was "I Shall Call You Russell", and it bordered on the commonplace: we wrote the first chapter of a sci-fi novel, and anyone could write and send the following ones. The selection of chapters took place in public, on a temporary blog run by us. A jury selected the three best versions of any chapter, and people could vote their favorite one, which became the next chapter in the "official" (i.e. collectively approved) sequence, though all the other versions remained available as sources of inspiration, creating a web of plot "bifurcations" and "dead end streets". There was no "official" last chapter, all the versions were published ex aequo.

The most important result of this experiment was the birth of another collective of novelists, Kai Zen (Japanese for "Constant improvement"). Kai Zen themselves have launched more and more projects like that, and their debut novel will be published in a few weeks by the biggest Italian publisher.

The second project was an experiment in "open source literature", as in "open source software". The main difference between storytelling and software programming is that almost everybody can work on the sourcecode of a story. The sourcecode of a story is the story itself. We wrote a short story titled "The Ballad of Corazza" and we put it on line. We asked readers to work on it, be it to change an adjective or rewrite a whole paragraph, or insert a new character. We received alternative versions of the story, do the revision accordingly, and make the result available.

After a couple of months, we released "The Ballad of Corazza 2.0", which was a consistent synthesis of all suggested modifications. This version was also edited collectively until we had the (potentially) definitive text. The more open nature of this second project managed to stir creativity with greater effectiveness, as "The Ballad of Corazza" has become a graphic novel, a theatrical act (based upon one of the alternative versions), a two different reading performances, one of which with live musical accompaniment, and the score was the result of a similar "open source" process.

Last but absolutely not least, there's the kind of interaction generated by the novels or short stories written by our readers, with no direct connection to our work. Back when we started, we publicly stated that we were willing to read unpublished stuff. Call it "talent scouting" if you like. Well, we received so much stuff (poetry, fiction, scripts, whatever) that we had to wave the white flag. We couldn't possibly read all those novels and short stories, no way.

Our community's collective wisdom solved the problem for us: fifteen Giap subscribers responded and volunteered for reading anything submitted by other readers. These people formed a collective on their own, iQuindici [TheFifteen, even if they are about thirty people now]. They have their own website and their own e-zine (Inciquid), they organize public readings of the best stuff they receive and select, and promote the adoption of open licenses (creative commons,copyleft, you-name-it) in the Italian publishing industry. Several new authors were "discovered" by publishers thanks to iQuindici.

HJ3: More recently you drew a comparison between your projects and ARGS. What similarities do you see? What might ARG designers and players learn by studying what you did a decade ago?

WM1 What you had was a huge number of people from different backgrounds and geographical areas, all interacting with each other in order to introduce ever new elements into a legend they were constructing in real time and telling all together. It is important to point out that these people didn't know each other personally, some of them never met, never talked or wrote to each other, not even on the phone, not even via e-mail, for the whole duration of the project. I never met the majority of people who operated under the Luther Blissett pseudonym in other cities, not to mention people calling themselves Luther Blissett in other countries. Since the beginning, the Bolognese collective (which was more tight-knit than other informal groups springing out all over Italy) labeled itself "the only central committee whose aim is to lose control of the party".

Yes, there was some sort of coordination between the different local groups, and a few things were explicitly prohibited: the Luther Blissett could not be used to spread racist, sexist or fascist material, and no Luther Blissett material could have a copyright. That's all the "organization" we had.

Most of the time we ended up taking each other by surprise, we heard the news about a prank pulled by Blissett in Southern Italy and immediately claimed co-responsibility by playing a similar one or by giving a completely different motive for the prank! We enjoyed leaving clues for other Blissetts, and give wild interpretations of the clues left by them. In several cases the same hoaxes or actions were given different interpretations by different Blissett "coopeting" with each other. It was all grist to the mill, or as we say in Italy, "tutto fa brodo", everything adds to the soup.

And it was transmedia storytelling taken to its extreme, clues were left on BBSs, websites, fanzines and other DIY media, pieces of mail art sent all around, restroom walls, Hertzian waves, and even classified ads on local newspapers. Sometimes we used Luther Blissett stickers in order to leave clues and give hints on how to take part in a hoax.

I think there are many similarities between what we did, RPGs, ARGs, and other storytelling games, in spite of the fact that our experience was and is very peculiar. These similarities were acknowledged many times by the communities playing RPGs in Italy. When our novel Q was published in 1999, some of the characters were immediately introduced into ongoing RPGs. More recently, in Pescara (Central Italy) dozens of people played an RPG inspired by one of our novels called Free Karma Food. It seems that our fiction is so multi-layered and "centrifugal" that it incites continuation on other platforms.

I really don't know what the ARG community might learn by studying what we did. Certainly they might have fun reading about it.

HJ3: Typically avant garde work frames itself in opposition to popular culture. Yet it is clear that you are in some senses a fan of popular culture. How would you descrive your relationship to the entertainment texts which you draw upon in your work?

WM1. I grew up reading sci-fi pulp books, my room was choke-full of tons of Marvel and DC comics, as well as Italian comics which you probably never heard of. I spent days watching soccer matches, spaghetti westerns, Bruce Lee movies (or even worse/better, "Bruce Li" movies and other crap cashing in on Bruce Lee's death), Star Trek (every afternoon on a local tv station), British series like Space 1999, and funky detective series like Baretta and Starsky & Hutch. I was a raving fan of Japanese anime, like every other kid I knew. In the late Seventies UFO Robot Grendizer, Great Mazinger and Steel Jeeg took Italian television by storm, episodes were watched by millions of kids. I always listened to all genres of popular music from Italian singer-songwriters to Frank Zappa to LA punk acts like the Germs of Black Flag, through to Tony Bennett and Brazilian Hip Hop. I used to play soccer games on my Commodore 64. I went to the movies as often as I could. I played table games like Monopoly and Scrabble.

In short, I started to expose my brain and body to all kinds of popular culture at a time when the Internet didn't exist. I've always been in love with pop culture. All the other members of Wu Ming have similar backgrounds: sci-fi, comics, martial arts, rock'n'roll - two of them played in punk rock bands, one of which was fairly famous in the Italian underground. I think that if you don't know pop culture, you don't know your culture, thereby you don't know the world around you. If you don't know shit about pop culture, how can you be on the cutting edge of anything? If you don't soil your hands with pop culture, if you snub and sneer at today's participatory culture, you can't be "avantgarde", no matter how hard you try.

By the way, what does "avantgarde" mean? "Avantgarde" is French for "vanguard", it is a military connoted term. "Avantgarde" means being at the front point of the battle. Too often, the avantgarde turn around and find out there's no rearguard, nobody's following them. That's because they marched too fast, or in the wrong direction. This is the common problem of artistic and political vanguards. It didn't happen to Luther Blissett because Luther Blissett was about spreading a disease, plus there was an "educational" aspect. Once a prank had been played successfully, we claimed responsibility and explained it in detail. Explain: that's what the avantgarde never do, indeed, they enjoy being obscure, they mistake obscure for radical, they don't want to give the people access to their work. They are enemies of the people. We never acted like that: the more people understand what we're doing, the happier we are. From that point of view, we're not exactly "avantgarde".

For Those in the San Francisco Area...

I will be staying in Palo Alto this weekend and will have some time on my hands on Sunday. Several friends suggested that I might organize a meetup of readers of this blog who live in the Bay area. I wondered if there were people out there who might want to meet each other and join me for a Sunday brunch. I am thinking of 11 am or thereabouts at some place in Palo Alto. If you are interested, send me e-mail at henry3@mit.edu and once I get there, I will try to scout out a location.

How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution (Part One): An Interview with the Wu Ming Foundation

About a month ago, I received an empassioned e-mail, a fan letter of sorts, about Convergence Culture from someone calling himself Wu Ming 1. Being named Henry Jenkins III and having a son named Henry Jenkins IV, I wasn't thrown by the whole name and number thing, but I was fascinated by his description of the commonalities between the world I described in the book and "the things we've been doing and theorizing for more than twelve years, albeit with a more radical/activist edge (multitudinous authorship, crossmedia storytelling, world making, identity games, RPG guerrilla warfare, old/new media collision, copyleft-oriented practices, media hoaxes and so on)." It turns out that Wu Ming 1 was one of the leaders of the Luther Blissett movement and now was part of a writing collective that has published such collaboratively authored novels as

Q and 54.

The more I have dug into the Luther Blissett movement and the Wu Ming Foundation, the more fascinating it has all become. They have been experimenting with various forms of grassroots convergence for political and artistic purposes for some time now and have apparently had a much greater impact across Europe than they have so far had in the United States. Here's part of what Wikipedia has to tell us about the movement:

Luther Blissett is a multi-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe since Summer 1994....For reasons that remain unknown, the name was borrowed from a 1980's British soccer player of Afro-Caribbean origins. In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the so-called Luther Blissett Project (an organized network within the open community sharing the "Luther Blissett" identity) became an extremely popular phenomenon, managing to create a legend, the reputation of a folk hero. This Robin Hood of the information age waged a guerrilla warfare on the cultural industry, ran unorthodox solidarity campaigns for victims of censorship and repression and - above all - played elaborate media pranks as a form of art, always claiming responsibility and explaining what bugs they had exploited to plant a fake story. Blissett was active also in other countries, especially in Spain and Germany. December 1999 marked the end of the LBP's Five Year Plan. All the "veterans" committed a symbolic Seppuku. The end of the LBP did not entail the end of the name, which keeps re-emerging in the cultural debate and is still a popular byline on the web.

Wu Ming 1 shared with me the following Youtube link which includes some discussion of their movement and its relationship to the British footballer. It includes an apperance from the "real" Luther Blissett, i.e. the soccer player who was the first black man to score a goal for a British team., who reads some rather experimental prose taken from one of the group's novels.

And here's the group's official website.

Fascinated by our ongoing correspondence about such topics as fan fiction and ARGS, all suggesting that this European avant garde movement was also deeply immersed in popular culture, I asked Wu1 (we are now on first name and number basis) if he would answer some questions for my readers. I am going to run the extensive interview with Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 2 in two installments.

HJ3: You talked about the Luther Blissett movement as "grassroots mythmaking," comparing it with fan fiction and contrasting it with the Culture Jamming movement. What do you see as the value of grassroots mythmaking?

WM1. While there's a tendency to use "myths" as a fancy synonym of "lies", I'd like to stick to a more precise definition. To put it very simply, myths are stories that keep communities alive and together. We couldn't interact with each other without the bonds we create by swapping stories, and myths are stories with the strongest symbolic value, stories that hint at the mysteries of how we all came to be here, how we're managing to get along in some way, and what the future looks like.

Myths are not weird stuff from an ancient past, they keep changing shape and context, and they always belong to the present day, they tell us about us here & now. Even the most rational of people recognize the power of myths in their life. As Joseph Campbell once pointed out, if you look at any professor at play in a bowling alley, and "watch him twist and turn after the ball has left his hand, to bring it over to the standing pins", you'll see that he's trying to summon supernatural powers, the same we find in myths and folk tales populated by demons, witches, magicians, gods etc.

Moreover, myths have a very important function: they can incite abused people into fighting back, as stories of injustice and rebellion, repression and resistance, are handed down from one generation to the next. For example, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are both historical and mythical figures, they're the beloved martyrs, the guys who dared to stand up and tell the truth and payed dearly for this. On the other hand, myths persuade suffering people to endure their situation and hope for a settling of scores, as in the myth of the Final Judgment, when the last shall be first, or the myth of revolution, when the poor shall take over and eat the rich.

In the early/mid Nineties the "Luther Blissett" collective identity was created and adopted by an informal network of people (artists, hackers, and activists) interested in using the power of myths, and moving beyond agit-prop "counter-information". In Bologna, my circle of friends shared an obsession with the eternal return of such archetypal figures as folk heroes and tricksters. We spent our days exploring pop culture, studying the language of the Mexican Zapatistas, collecting stories of media hoaxes and communication guerrilla warfare since the 1920's (Berlin Dada stuff, futuristic soirées etc.), obsessively re-watching one particular movie, Slapshot by George Roy Hill, starring Paul Newman as hockey player Reggie Dunlop. We liked Reggie Dunlop very much, he was the perfect trickster, the Anansi of African legends, the Coyote of Native American legends, Ulysses manipulating the cyclop's mind.

What if we could build our own "Reggie Dunlop", a "trickster with a thousand faces", a golem made of the clay of three rivers -- the agit-prop tradition, folk mythology, and pop culture? What if we started a completely new role play game, using all the media platforms available at the time to spread the legend of a new folk hero, a hero fueled-up by collective intelligence? (BTW, we'd read Pierre Lévy's books, WM4's father ran a small publishing house and had just published a translation of Les Technologies de l'intelligence, he was Lévy's first Italian publisher, and we met the guy in Bologna a couple of times).

We were in touch with many people in Italy and abroad -- thanks to BBS networks like FidoNet, the mail art network, and the national scene of occupied social centers. We spread the word and it all happened very quickly. In a few months, hundreds of people were using the "Luther Blissett" name and the new golem was getting a lot of coverage by baffled journalists.

Yes, there was a disruptive element, a confrontational stance, something that made us cousins of "culture jammers", "subvertisers", or theorists like the Critical Art Ensemble etc., but there was an important difference. Adbusters-type disturbance was all right, screwing up corporate propaganda is probably a necessary phase to go through: make parodies of advertisements, criticize consumerism, those are certainly good deeds... However, Luther Blissett also had a more positive attitude, the main purpose was to create a community around Blissett's myth. Pranks, media stunts, and culture jamming were more the means to spread the myth than the ends of the project. The most important aspect of our activities was not sabotage, but the way sabotage increased Blissett's mythical status.

It was an amazing upheaval, so many people writing, acting, performing under the same pseudonym, coordinating their efforts in some way without the need to know each other, by sending each other messages in bottles. It was an open, informal community. Fake news and media hoaxes served the purpose of making our very presence on the media landscape legendary, so that ever more people joined us and adopted the name. "Culture jamming" was just a subordinate part of the project: the practical exploration of a grassroots, interactive mythology was the most important thing.

HJ3: The Wikipedia describes the movement as an "open reputation," implying that the name Luther Blissett was open to being appropriated and used by hundreds of different participants. Can you explain this concept of an "open reputation" and what does it suggest about the nature of authorship in contemporary culture?

WM2. "Open reputation" means that the different participants in the "Multiple Name" game were not shreds of a schizophrenic conflict of personalities, they were all facets of one identity. Every time you used the name "Luther Blissett", you were doing more than adhering to a project: you were becoming Luther Blissett, you were Luther Blissett.

On planet Tlon, the famous fictional world invented by Jorge Luis Borges, "books are rarely signed, nor does the concept of plagiarism exist... It has been decided that all books are the work of a single author who is timeless and anonymous." It isn't by chance that, according to one of Tlon's philosophical schools, "All men who speak a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."

I think that Luther Blissett was an experiment in practical philosophy. Luther faced the belief in the Author as an individual genius with telling a moral fable on how creativity really works. We believe that any author is a collective author.

Several years ago, the world of literature was informed that Raymond Carver wasn't really Raymond Carver. Carver's original drafts were much longer than the published versions. All the exceeding parts were cut out by his editor, Gordon Lish. Carver's endings were actually Lish's endings.

I've got a question: what if Mr. Lish weren't an editor, but just a friend of Carver's? Let's imagine that Gordon Lish was a post office clerk living across the street from Carver. One night Carver rings Lish's doorbell and says: "Let's go to the bar and have a beer, I need your opinion about the story I'm writing". Carver reads the short story to Lish, and the latter says: "It's good, but it drags on for too long. Why not cut the last paragraph? That would make a sharper ending, wouldn't it?" Carver goes home and follow Lish's advice. We the readers will never know about that conversation. Nothing strange happens. Carver is still Carver, and we're going to talk about Carver's sharp endings, not Lish's.

Now I've got a few more questions: how many authors happen to talk with post office clerks? How many books are the result of conversations between authors and post office clerks? How many times an author gets an idea from a person she talks with? And is there something she can do about it? Can she confine herself to an ivory tower in order to save "her own voice"? In that case, except for a diary of her confinement, she'd have nothing to write about.

Storytellers must immerge their hands in the sea of stories, and accept the fact that they are just complexity reducers, "filters" between the mythosphere and the people. There's no "originality" out of this, you can be "original" only in the way you filter and re-elaborate what you get from your community.

As a consequence, stories belong to everyone, private property of popular culture is a contradiction in terms. Stories should be free to circulate, fertilize brains, and enhance the open reputation of any author. That's the reason why our books, as physical objects and containers of stories, have a price -- so that we make a living out of writing them -- , while as immaterial stories they can be freely reproduced, in an economy that's based upon abundancy instead of scarcity: there can be no maximum amount of stories, the tank can be filled endlessly.

HJ3: I am tempted to describe the Luther Blissett movement as a fandom without an originating text. How did you go about creating a community around Luther Blissett? How might we compare and contrast what emerged here with a traditional fan community?

WM1. In a way, since every single action done by anybody under the pseudonym ended up expanding and enhancing Luther Blissett's reputation as a hero, we may say that every action was "fan fiction". Fan fiction delves into an originating set of texts (a TV series, a movie and its sequels etc.) in order to expand the lives of the characters and improve the fan's experience. That's what we did all the time.

In the context of the Luther Blissett Project, we even produced "proper", explicit fan fiction -- Star Trek fan fiction in particular, e.g. an interview with Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on some architectural absurdities in Bologna. The references to fandom and fan culture were frequent, we were all sci-fi and genre fiction fans (and my brother is an old-time Trekkie).

At the end of 1995 we published a book called Mind Invaders, whose first chapter was mainly devoted to discussing the mythopoetical language spoken by Tamarians in a famous episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, you know, phrases like: "Shaka, when the walls fell", or "Sokath, his eyes uncovered". Tamarian language provided us with a way of incorporating tradition into our activities. We often described the LBP as a "Picard and Dathon at El Adrel" kind of situation (i.e. working together for a common goal, even without knowing each other). We even broadcasted the whole episode (only the audio, of course) during our local radio show, "Radio Blissett".

Once you've got a situation in which everybody can be the masked hero, it isn't difficult to create a community around this concept. Here's the ensuing virtuous circle: if a whole community takes responsibility for what single members say or do (think of the scene in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus when every captured slave says: "I am Spartacus!"), members will feel themselves surrounded with warmth and complicity, and will be driven to give their best to the project.

HJ3: Many of the best pranks associated with Luther Blissett seem to have been played upon traditional media -- on television producers and print journalists primarily. How might we see what you did as reflecting the shifting relations between bottom-up grassroots media power and top-down corporate media power?

WM1. In the Italian press, from 1994 to 1999, "Luther Blissett" (whose advent coincided with the rise of the Web) became almost a synonym for "Internet activism" and net-culture. Traditional journalists felt both fascinated and threatened by this "new media" thing, it was growing so fast and they were totally unprepared, unable to understand. They couldn't find words for such a complex social trend (an epoch-defining shift from top-down communication systems to horizontal networks and personal media!).

They could find words for Luther Blissett though, as the Sheriff of Nottingham could find words for Robin Hood. Luther Blissett was a person -- well, sort of, I mean that he was an anthropomorphic figure, he literally embodied what was happening all around. I keep a ten-inches stack of press clippings in my apartment; leaf through it, and you'll find all kinds of definitions for Blissett: "terrorista culturale", "bandito dell'informazione", "pirata informatico", "guerrigliero digitale"...

In 1996-97 Italy and Europe were swept by a tide of moral panic and mass paranoia on the subject of pedophilia, all of a sudden the Internet was described as an evil place, far more dangerous than any other place, the wood where child abusers lurked from behind trees, waiting for Little Red Riding Hood. It didn't matter that in Italy 91% of reported child abuses took place in the family and had nothing to do with computers: the Internet was the new folk devil. Traditional gatekeepers had the pretext for venting their anxiety for the Internet, and slandering those who dared do without them.

That's when the Luther Blissett Project started to pull well-organized media pranks on such morbid subjects as pedophilia, the Internet, and satanic ritual abuse. We wanted to prove that that kind of sensational stories was picked up and printed with no fact-checking at all. Some panic-spreaders cut extremely sorry figures because of us. A few of them angrily commented that, by sidetracking the press, we were protecting actual pedophiles. An interesting logic: if there are no pedophiles, we're going to invent them, and if someone proves that we invented them, we'll accuse them of defending pedophiles... that didn't exist in the first place!

In one particular case, Luther Blissett even conducted a grassroots counter-investigation in a criminal case in Bologna, where a bunch of heavy metal fans (they called themselves the "Children of Satan") had become scapegoats for the local law authorities. They were arrested during a poorly-thought-out operation targeting alleged ritual abusers. No evidence at all, no reliable testimony, nothing. Of course they were savagely calumniated in the media, at least at the beginning, there was much talk about "secret websites for pedophiles" etc. Luther Blissett, by means of some carefully planned stunts, managed to instil in the public opinion reasonable doubts about the solidity of the case against those guys. In the end they were fully acquitted and indemnified by the state for eighteen months of unjust detention.

Slowly but steadily moral panic decreased and Luther Blissett switched to other tactics and targets (e.g. the highbrow art world and the Holy See), four of us focused on "Operation Dien Bien Q", and the whole network prepared for the end of Blissett's Five Year Plan.

As I look back, I understand that Luther Blissett pioneered the collision between old and new media, in a phase when the boundaries of old and new were sharper than they are now, and there were less intersections, only a few newspapers had an online edition, journalist didn't have their own blogs, and file sharing was still far from being a mass phenomenon.

HJ3: How did the work of the Luther Blissett movement bridge between the online world and physical reality, taking the work of imagination and giving it some real world consequences?

WM2. Imagination has real world consequences if it reaches other people's brains. Mass media were used by Luther Blissett as a privileged vehicle for this. On the most trivial level, TV and newspapers replaced Aristotle as the source of "truth" long ago. On the other hand, luckily, many people are capable of critical thinking, and false news can have a greater impact if they are exposed and explained, instead of remaining hidden under the big heap of information.

I'll make two examples: at the beginning of 1994, even before Luther Blissett started his career, some of us coined the slogan: "You decide tomorrow's scoop!" and put the concept into practice in the streets. Local newspapers are very penetrable, and their weakest point is the "Letters to the editor" page. We started to send letters to Bologna's dailies, pretending to be horrified citizens who had found animal entrails on park benches, car windshields, child swings, and traffic signs. In two weeks, the news moved from letters to feature articles, headlines got bigger and bigger, and journalists found a name for this new phenomenon: "Horrorism". Art critics and sociologists were asked about the meaning of this provocation. Then someone really left a big ox heart hanging from a tree, leaving people bewildered. Emulation was the only real world consequence... except for the teachings we got from the prank, which was a prelude to bigger things.

Two years later, we filled a schoolbag with alleged remnants of a satanic ceremony (black candles, two human shinbones, and a skull), then put it in a luggage locker at the Bologna railroad station. We anonymously sent the deposit receipt to a journalist who was particularly keen on spreading moral panic, along with a communiqué announcing the birth of a new anti-Satanist vigilante group. The story was that "we", the vigilantes, had assaulted satanists during a black mass, we had beaten them and put them to flight, then we'd stolen that stuff and sent them to the journalist as evidence of our presence in town.

As WM1 said, this was part of our counter-information campaign on the case of the "Children of Satan". However, it was a hot summer, and that particular journalist was on vacation. He went back to work after three weeks, found our letter, paid one month due of deposit taxes (about $150), found the skull and the other stuff, and the story made the frontpage, under a banner headline. He didn't know that we had already claimed responsibility for the prank and explained our motives, on the pages of a local mag. This "preemptive confession" sounded like: "This guy's going to find a schoolbag filled with crap and write a sensational piece about it. After all the lies he spread, at last he reaps as he sowed. We invented one story, but he invented many more".

As a "real world consequence", everything changed: the guy never wrote about the "Children of Satan" anymore, the other two Bologna daily papers started to question the solidity of the case. It was like a crash course in media education for an entire city. Until that moment, by using the tools of traditional counter-inquiries, we had gotten no results. The "homeopathic" effect of one single lie cured the illness better than the traditional media medicines usually administered to the public opinion.

From a "Must Culture" to a "Can Culture": Legos and Lead Users

Joel Greenberg from the Austin-based GSD&M advertising firm is one of the fascinating people I am collaborating with on the Convergence Culture Consortium. Greenberg is a true believer in the collaborationist model I describe in my book and discussed here a while back. He's been putting together a series of podcasts called Friends Talking which interview some of the key thinkers in and out of industry on topics such as viral marketing, user-generated content, and community-based innovation. Greenberg brings in guests like The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, Got Game's John Beck, Linden Lab's Philip Rosendale, and others, sits down with them for a substantive conversation about cutting edge issues, and then runs the entire conversation via his podcast . In the most recent installment, Greenberg focuses attention on the concept of lead users and applies it to examine the development of the new Lego Mindstorms NXT product which is being released in time for Christmas. Lead user innovation is a term most closely associated with my MIT colleague, Eric Von Hippel, who wrote a book, Democratizing Innovation, which should be better known among media scholars than it has been. Von Hippel's focus is innovation in manufacturing -- how companies are tapping insights from their consumers to produce more effective products -- but what he says has many implications for the kinds of fan communities that emerge around popular culture. Indeed, I learned of Von Hippel's work -- not through hallway conversations at MIT but because Robert Kozinets combined Von Hippel's work in management science and my work in fan studies to talk about consumerism around Star Trek in his dissertation.

Basically, Von Hippel is arguing that companies need to identify what he is calling Lead Users -- these are both early adopters (in the sense that they are quick to purchase new products) and early adapters (in the sense that they often hack the products to retrofit them for their specialized needs.) By dealing with these communities and understanding how they appropriate and remake products, these companies can accelerate the design process, anticipating uses and desired features before the product even hits the mass market.

Inspired by an article in Wired, Greenberg sought out contact with some of the executives at Lego who are working on the new Mindstorms products. (Many will recall that the original insights that generated the Mindstorm series came from MIT Media Lab professor Seymour Papert, though adapted to the needs of the mass market. These tool kits which allow kids to do simple programming and build and control their own robots have been embraced in schools around the world.) When it came time to create the next product in the Mindstorm series, Lego pulled together some of the most innovative users of its products and incorporated them fully in the design process.

Attending a national conference and robotics competition in Austin, Greenberg was able to interview Soren Lund, the man Lego put in charge of the initiative and Ray Almgren, one of National Instruments' VP's who had worked closely with Lego to adapt their Labview software as the programming environment for Mindstorms. Lund speaks about the value of linking the "must culture" of a major corporation with the "can culture" which is emerging from the hobbyist and lead users within the networked community surrounding their products:

In a company, and this goes for pretty much every company, you have a must culture. That means, if I am your boss, I can tell you I want you to do this and that and maybe you are not really into it or maybe you have other priorities but as your boss, I can say you must do this. And if you say No, you're fired, right? Any company culture is a must culture, a must organization. You must do what I tell you to do. You can put it in a nicer way but that's how it works. With a community, it is a can organization. They can decide to do something. They can decide not to. You can't say to the guys in the community -- now you must help us in doing this and now you must.. Guess what, I'm out of here. I can't fire you because you are not part of the company. So, that is what is so valuable because they can keep pushing. They don't come up with what they think the average user needs or wants. They say as a member of the community what they want. I want it to do this. I want it to do that. I don't care about the rest. It's me. So you get honest and candid feedback from these guys focused only on what they are looking for and how it can be the best tool they can ever have. And they keep pushing. We've had interviews where we say thank you for the input on that topic but we must move on and the community has said no. We want this and they keep pushing....

For these guys, it has nothing to do with money. Their passion is building Mindstorms robots out of Lego bricks, programming them, hacking them, all of that stuff. so this is their favorite Hobby. For them, it doesn't get any better. Suddenly I can influence the product I like to work with. I may have my little fingers there on some of the development....then of course afterwards there is recognition among peers in the community.

What Lund has to say about Lego echoes what I report in Convergence Culture about the games industries. Will Wright, for example, told me that the game companies are now essentially competing to see which one can attract and sustain the most creative community since user-based innovation is the key to keeping a games franchise fresh and interesting over the long haul.

This is still so different from the relationship most television production units have with their fans, yet if they had more regular contact with their fans, they might learn to anticipate audience tastes and interests, producing episodes which better reflected the themes and characters that drive the community's passions towards a particular series. For example, in the mid-1980s, my work on fan cultures was showing me that fans were pushing hard for a more serialized approach to television narrative: they were reading even the most episodic series in terms of story arcs and program history. My work on Twin Peaks fans was showing that online communities would support much greater narrative complexity than current television was offering. And my work on fan video producers was showing that people wanted simple tools which would allow them to sample and remix television content as well as platforms by which they could share what they produced with the general public. It has taken a while for the rest of the viewing audience to catch up with where the fan community was at more than fifteen years ago but fan culture in the late 1980s looks very much like the television culture of today. What we are now calling Web 2.0 is simply fan culture without the stigma.

That said, the interview keeps circling back around what is the real sticking point in the conversation about lead user innovation: if consumers are helping to generate the intellectual property and helping to market the product, shouldn't they receive some economic return on their participation? Lund says No -- that this would fundamentally change their relationship to the company, turning everything back to work for hire and returning it to the "must culture" that shapes corporate life. Yet, skeptics might note that user-generated content taken to its logical extreme would result in cutbacks in the creative labor market as experienced professionals are displaced by grassroots volunteers. Lund is correct to depict lead users as having a strong desire to influence the decisions made by the companies that make the products they use and admire -- whether physical products like programmable bricks or cultural products like television shows. At the moment, they are grateful that people will simply listen to them and take their ideas seriously, especially given the history of not just neglect but open hostility to these grassroots communities. Yet, at what point, does this collaboration become exploitation? This is a core question all of us need to think through as we move towards a more collaborative and participatory culture.

Announcing: The Futures of Entertainment Conference

The Comparative Media Studies Program is proud to announce an exciting forthcoming conference, The Futures of Entertainment, to be held at MIT on Nov. 17 and 18. The event is designed to bring together leading thinkers from across the entertainment industry to speak about core issues around media convergence, transmedia storytelling, user-generated content, and participatory culture. Speakers confirmed so far include The Long Tail's Chris Anderson, Flickr's Caterina Fake, DC Comic's Paul Levitz, Warner Brother's Diane Nelson, Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, social networking researcher danah boyd, television scholar Jason Mittell, and many others, including representatives from MTV, Cartoon Network, Bioware, and other leading companies in this space. The event is free and open to the public but we ask that you preregister since seating will be limited. The event is being hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium. Here's a more detailed description of the themes for the scheduled panels:

Television Futures

New distribution methods, new revenue strategies and changing modes of audience engagement are transforming how television works. Off- and post-broadcast markets make 'old' television valuable as a continuing source of income and suggest new ways to reach viewers. Digital video recorders threaten the 30-second commercial but offer the possibility of more detailed information about audience members. Some television producers may reach out to consumers directly rather than going through the networks and networks are using online distribution to generate buzz about new shows before they reach the air. Creative responses to these challenges are re-writing how we understand what was once just the box in the corner.

User-Generated Content

Media culture is becoming more participatory, rewriting the relations between media producers and consumers. New tools and distribution platforms, a changing cultural ethos, and innovative corporate approaches to user-generated content are turning viewers into active participants. Innovation may occur at the grassroots level yet influence decisions made within corporate media. Yet, are media companies ready for the grassroots creativity they are unleashing? What challenges does greater user-participation pose to both producers and audiences? What corporate policies enable or retard the growth of user-generated content?

Transmedia Properties

The cultural logic of convergence lends itself to a flow of narratives, characters, and worlds across media platforms. Moving beyond older models based on liscensed ancillary products, transmedia extensions are now seen as expanding the opportunities for storytelling, enabling new kinds of entertainment experiences, building up secondary characters or backstory. Transmedia extension may also create alternative openings for different market segments and enable more extensive contact with brands. The great potential of transmediation is to deepen audience engagement, but this requires greater awareness of the specific benefits of working within different platforms. How are media companies organizing the development of transmedia properties? How are storytellers taking advantage of the "expanded canvas" such an approach offers? How do transmedia strategies impact the new integration between brands and entertainment properties? What new expectations do transmedia properties place on consumers?

Fan Cultures

Once seen as marginal or niche consumers, Fan communities look more 'mainstream' than ever before. Some have argued that the practices of web 2.0 are really those of fan culture without the stigma. Courted, encouraged, engaged and acknowledged, fans are more and more frequently being recognized as trendsetters, viral marketers, and grassroots intermediaries. Fan affinity is being seized as a form of grassroots marketing, representing the bleeding edge of brand and property commitment. The sophistication of fan-created products rivals the professional products they honor, sometimes keeping defunct properties alive long after their shelf life might otherwise have expired. How is the increasing importance of fan behavior re-writing the media landscape? What kinds of accountability should media companies have to their most committed consumers? What kinds of value do fans create through their activities? What are the sources of tension that still exist between media producers, advertisers, and fans?

Not the Real World Anymore

Virtual spaces are more than sites for emulating the real world. They are becoming platforms for thought experiments -- some of which involve fantasies we would not like to enact in the real world, others involve possibilities that we may want to test market before putting into practice. Much more than simulacra of Real Life or a 3D version of text-based Internet communities, online worlds represent new sites for considering questions of community and connectivity. Marked by user- creativity, online worlds balance, sometimes precariously, the rights of users with the rights of sponsoring organizations. As we move closer to the cyberpunk vision of a wholly parallel 'metaverse', questions of power, community, and property are coming to the fore.

More information is forthcoming but for some provisional information and to register for the event, check out this website. I hope to see many readers of the blog at this event which promises a front line perspective on many of the trends I discuss in the books.

God Things and Small Sizes: Convergence and Ganpati

As we have stressed here before, the changes described in Convergence Culture are occurring on a global scale, though the rate of change differs from country to country. Everywhere, we are seeing convergence as working on top of existing layers within the culture -- old practices continue, old media survives, yet both are transformed by the emergence of new media technologies and new sets of cultural practices. Convergence is marked both by continuity and transformation. I was reminded of this play between old and new recently when I received the following e-mail from Parmesh Shahani, a CMS alum who recently returned to his native India after spending three years in the United States. Shahani had been a key player in the development of our Convergence Culture Consortium and continues to be involved in our activities -- offering us a view from Asia on the trends in consumer culture we are monitoring.

This essay describes some of his impressions of the ways that new media technology is transforming Ganpati, one of the key religious and cultural festivals in Bombay. Western observers might want to compare it with the ways that new media has or has not been embraced by various religious groups in our own countries. I asked Shahani if I could share the following field notes with you.

God Things and Small Sizes

By: Parmesh Shahani

God is Everywhere

Greetings from Bombay, India. I have come back here right in the middle of the Ganpati (Lord Ganesh) festival fervor - a ten-day spectacle that begins with millions of people in the city bringing statues of the elephant god to their homes and community pandals (lavishly decorated statue stages, erected on almost every street corner in the city) - and culminates in the immersion of these statues into the ocean, accompanied by street processions, fire crackers, color, and noise, noise and more noise.

It is the final day of the event, and I am walking to Chowpatty beach near my home, the biggest immersion site in the city. It's been several years since I've been in India during Ganpati time and one of the changes I notice is that each pandal I pass is 'sponsored'. The one on the street corner near my house sports banners from Silver House (a local jewelry shop in the adjoining market) as well as ICICI bank and Britannia Tiger biscuits (huge pan-Indian brands). Just then my cell phone beeps; it's a text message from my cell phone service provider (Hutch) about Ganpati ringtones and wallpapers that I might wish to download. This is again something I hadn't experienced before.

Flashback to one week ago. I am on a 6 am flight to Calcutta, and each TV screen in the Mumbai airport departure lounge is tuned in to Star News (Murdoch's Indian news channel), beaming the early morning Ganpati aarti (ceremonial ritual based on the lighting of oil lamps) live from the city's Siddhi Vinayak temple. I visit the temple website and am quite impressed. They have a live darshan (viewing of the aarti) webcast, online booking of pujas (prayer rituals) and prasad (sweets consumed by devotees after first being offered to the deity) delivery both within India and abroad (via FedEx or other courier services). There are several ways that patrons can make donations to the temple: Union Bank of India, IndusInd Bank, BillDesk, ICICI Bank NRI Services, Remit2India, Itz Cash, Wallet 365... There is also a service to process donations and prasad requests via SMS, or text messaging. The temple has tie-ups with most of the major cellphone companies in the country for SMS alerts of prayers and aartis, downloads of Lord Ganesh wallpapers, ring tones, logos, e-cards, and so on.

Siddhivinayak is by no means the only temple to provide such extensive and intensive digital devotion possibilities - different versions of the above model are being adopted by other temples in the country (for eg: Tirumalai in south India). And it's proving to be immensely popular. Siddhivinayak's online darshan, for instance, has 4 million hits per month. In contemporary India, it seems God is not just in the details, but in the detailed choices that one has to access him with.

My mother is surprised that I want to walk all the way to the beach to see the immersion. It's so much better on TV, she urges. And she is probably right - almost every TV channel - local or national, cable or terrestrial (over 500 in the country now, and still counting) is beaming out assorted Ganpati images. Sahara News has a 4 way split screen, - showing live immersion-casts from 4 major immersion points in Maharashtra state (of which Bombay is the capital), other channels have reports from other parts of the country or abroad; there are celebrity pujas, interviews, talk shows, Ganpati teleshopping and Ganpati dance contests... I switch to MTV hoping for some variety, only to see Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan vigorously shaking his hips to the Ganpati song from his forthcoming film - Don, just as my cellphone beeps and offers me the very same music video download for 9 rupees.

I enjoy my walk, feeling the cool monsoon sea breeze on my face. In a few days, the city will become boiling hot once more as the rain season subsides. Several processions pass me by: small handcarts with baby Ganpati statues on them, being guided by 10 or 12 family members, and large trucks, with 50 and 60 foot tall statues surrounded by their giant entourages, security guards and private videographers.

Just opposite the large Times of India billboards at Chowpatty beach, (featuring humongous images of Ganpati, what else?) there is a VIP entrance where special guests can view the beach proceedings from a raised platform, and on plush sofas, while sipping on delectable non alcoholic beverages. Alas, I don't have an invitation. Instead, I am squashed and squeezed with the general population (and we're talking hundreds of thousands here) as the crowd inches its way to the beach, and chants of Ganpati Bappa Morya (Lord Ganpati, come back again) fill the air. It is claustrophobic and stinky but there is electricity in the air and beaming smiles all around and I realize that despite my discomfort, I am smiling too.

No, Bombay's devotion for Ganpati has not changed in the few years that I have been away. (It might have even become stronger... and the presence of such a huge mass of people, just two months after terrible bomb blasts have ripped through the city's trains, must surely be read as an act of defiance as well as devotion.) But what has certainly changed is the experience of Ganpati.

The array of choices made possible by media in the Bombay of today has enabled a qualitatively different experience of the spirit of Ganpati: a transmedia experience that is more complex, more extensive and more intensive than ever before. Secondly, all these different levels or touch points at which the Ganpati narrative can be experienced by individuals merge in and out of and influence and are influenced by what was essentially conceived as a communal spiritual experience by Indian freedom fighter Lokmanya Tilak about a century ago. The experience is thereby transformed into something that more personal, more portable and more pedestrian (in both senses of the term), to borrow language from Mimi Ito. This personalization of the communal is what I find especially exciting, more so in the light of our existing C3 research, where we are studying the reverse phenomenon - the communalization of the personal - through our work on college dorm culture. In both instances, I reckon, we will find that what Grant Mcracken calls multiplicity, is taking place. People are able to experience something personally as well as communally at the same time. It is never a case of either/or; always a case of bothness, or rather, severalness.

Small is Beautiful

Ganpati is the god of wisdom, of intellect and of logical solutions, and I am sure that he is very happy to note how intelligently marketers have adapted to India's fascination with smallness and customized their products and services accordingly. What works in India is the micro, the small, the miniature, the bite sized. Microfinance initiatives (small loans of less than US$ 200 to poor entrepreneurs, mostly women) from larger Indian commercial banks like ICICI are a hit. Consumer goods companies have realized that their biggest market often lies in single serve sachets, priced at between 1 cent to 5 cents, and shampoos, biscuits, tea, or mouth fresheners have all proven to be extremely successful in this format. (Companies like Lever and P& G have quickly capitalized on this).

A CK Prahlad note that today, the penetration of shampoo in India is 90% and about 70% of the shampoo sold in the country comes from single serve sachets. Similarly, the cellphone market in India largely operates on a pre-paid model - and this includes everything from monthly access and bill payment to value added services. Indians don't want the burden of regular monthly fees but are very willing to make tiny one off expenditures to try out something new. Some exciting experiments taking place in this space include:

- Ringtone scratch cards in different denominations (Users text message their pin number as well as preferred ringtone code to their cell phone company and the tone is downloaded to their phone)

- Astrology, feng shui, Bible on demand, personality tests, travel planning and other lifestyle services

- Reservation services like cinema ticket booking (where movie selection, ticket purchase as well as cinema theater entry, are all done using the cellphone screen and without any paper ticket involvement); railway ticket booking, etc.

- Creation of cellphone based communities such as book clubs

- 3D wallpapers, games of all kinds, especially based on cricket and Bollywood, videotones, text message tones, full movie trailers and videos, full songs, visual radio... the list is endless.

Fast Company

It may be productive for folks in the US to keep an eye on India's TV 18 group for a workable model of a 21st century media company that can successfully navigate the confusing waters of convergence. It's a interesting story - they began as a tiny content production house a little more than a decade ago, ramped up and launched their first cable channel via a joint venture with CNBC, and followed it up with an English news channel CNN-IBN (another JV that brought CNN to India), as well as Hindi news channels (Awaaz and Channel 7). Now they're getting into overdrive by integrating the internet into everything they do - they are the only ones to actually 'get' the spirit of citizen journalism in the country, and constantly integrate these reports within their regular programming. Their existing TV brands are supported by what I consider to be India's best news websites (live video streaming of the main channels, all kinds of interactivity and participation opportunities for viewers - check here for instance) and these sites all have robust communities present on them. More importantly, they seem to have realized that one can't think of convergence as something you add on top of your existing media efforts, it has to be at the very root of how you conduct your day to day operations. For example: a friend of mine - Rajeev Masand - is the Entertainment editor of CNN-IBN and he also anchors the weekend film review show called Now Showing. He continuously addresses his online community on the show... he checks the bulletin boards regularly and responds to the most interesting comments, both on the web as well as on TV. A lot of the innovations he's launched within the show format have come in as suggestions from the online community.

I'm pretty confident that these guys are going to give current Indian media giants - the Times of India and (Murdoch's) Star group - a pretty good run for their money. Here are some of the their latest moves:

- Launched a new technology site

- Launched a new travel site.

- Acquired edgy internet design company Urban Eye

- Acquired a cricket site

- Acquired a comparison shopping website

___

For coverage about its digital devotion activities, see this and this.

Several references in this note are from the Contentsutra blog, which provides an excellent converge of India's media convergence scene.

An interesting article on satchet marketing can be found here Also see 'The Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid' by CK Prahalad.

I've borrowed the terms 'Personal, Portable, Pedestrian' from cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito's book by the same name. Check out her blog on digital media use in the US and Japan.

For Those Who Live in Boston...

MIT COMMUNICATIONS FORUM Why Newspapers Matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Series co-sponsor: Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation

Forums are free and open to the public.

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

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

Making Comics: Nick Bertozzi as Exemplar

Several weeks ago, I wrote here about the New Media Exemplar Library -- a digital filmmaking project that is being funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of our larger project to develop curricular materials and activities to support the teaching of new media literacies. The Exemplar Library will consist of a series of short films showing media makers discussing the core choices they make -- both craft decisions and ethical dilemmas -- as they create their work. Our goal is to produce films that educators can use in classes and after school programs and that young people who are enthusiastic about media production might seek out on their own via the web. The first one I introduced to my readers centered on blogger, science fiction writer, and digital activist Cory Doctorow. Today, I wanted to share a second exemplar -- this one focused on independent comics creator Nick Bertozzi as he shows us the process by which he created a single page of his forthcoming graphic novel, The Salon The Salon centers around the circle of friends who helped generate the cubist movement and includes vivid portrayals of Gertrude Stein, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Alice B. Toklas, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The Salon was not created as a kids comic and indeed, much of the content deals with mature themes, but it's melding of fact and fiction makes it a rich text for us to examine in the context of a project on new media literacies.

Having gotten to know Bertozzi through the years, one can't help but wonder if his fascination with this circle might have something to do with the tight circle of comic book artists in Brooklyn with whom he hangs out and sometimes collaborate, a circle which includes Jessica Abel, Paul Pope, Dean Haspiel, and Matt Madden, among others. Several years ago, these friends piled into a car and drove to MIT to visit Nick's sister, Vanessa Bertozzi, a Comparative Media Studies Masters Student, and to talk at our colloquium series. Various combinations of that circle have passed through the program in the years that have followed and this exemplar grew out of those conversations. In the interview, Bertozzi talks about why cartoonists and other artists need to work within creative communities:

You need a community of other artists of other cartoonists who understand, because nobody else will understand the insanity that you go through. And they're people who don't bug you too much because they're doing the same thing you're doing and they want to be left alone a lot of the time. But we do need to come together, because we are human after all believe it or not.

His former roommate Dean Haspiel described what he got out of working side by side with a fellow artist:

What was really good about when Nick lived with me, was we were really able to share that space and maximize the energy of that room. And turn what a lot of what we were doing separately into this combined force of this infectious, vibrant kind of brain trust. It was a really good time. I really miss those days of when I could look over my shoulder and see Nick drawing when I didn't feel like drawing and that would just inspire me to keep trudging on when I was struggling, facing that blank page and not knowing what to do next.

The video was produced and filmed by Vanessa which allowed her to achieve real trust and intimacy with her interview subject. Bertozzi turns out to be extremely good at explaining his creative process in language that is broadly accessible and there's a real fascination in watching this page take shape step by step across the videos. He takes us from the scripted concept, through the research into the historical period that insures the accuracy of his details, through penciling, inking, coloring (which occurs on the computer), and the final proofs. Bertozzi's comfort in explaining the creative process reflects his own experiences teaching and mentoring young would-be comic book artists in Brooklyn. The video also features his fellow comics artist and former roommate Dean Haspiel and one of his former students sharing their impressions of his work and creative process.

Here's how one of Bertozzi's students described the first day of class:

I was sitting in a class with all these kids who were interested in Spiderman comics, and Thor and Green Lantern. and in walks this guy, Nick. He said, the other guy who was supposed to teach this class, he's not teaching it anymore and I'm the replacement. And he comes in with this book On Directing by David Mamet and this other book called Story by Robert McKee. The first things he writes on the board are "ARCHETYPE! STEREOTYPE!" So he was talking about story structure in comics and saying that linear comicbook narrative structure has been done many, many times. And he said that what we're going for is something more, something more experimental. And I remember the first day of class he brought in a pile of superhero comics and he passed one out to everyone. And some of these students were like, "Oh, these are great, I have these in my own collection." And he said, "Now pick up the comic book and TEAR IT TO PIECES!" He said, "We're going to destroy these old idols and we're going to make new!"

One of the themes which will run across the series is an emphasis on how contemporary artists build upon the past, sampling and remixing pre-existing work as a source of inspiration for new expression. We hope to help teachers and students understand the difference between plagiarism and creative appropriation, providing a context for thinking about the ethics of what we do with other people's creative content. Comics fans will be relieved to see Bertozzi has a large library of classic comics to which he returns for inspiration whenever he confronts creative problems . Teachers will probably be gratified by the degree to which Bertozzi stresses throughout the project the importance of doing research. As he explains:

A good cartoonist has to have a lot of reference materials because you're going to be drawing a ton of things. And it's a lot easier to draw it from reference than it is to make it up out of your head.

I was taking an art history class and I was learning about Cubism, which is an art movement that was started by Pablo Picasso and George Braque. And I'll be honest, I paid attention in class but I never really understood what cubism was. So I always wanted to do a story that was about cubism so I could do the research and so I could spend a lot of time figuring out why cubism was so important.

Another fascinating part of the interview has to do with Bertozzi's choices to draw and ink the comics panels by hands but then to scan them and digitize them for the coloring process. As he explains, "You don't have to do the coloring on a computer, but I do because it saves me a lot of time." As a project, we are placing a lot of stress on the ways artists choose which tools to use and are especially interested in the hybrid nature of contemporary production practices, where some things are done physically and others digitally.

Bertozzi is not the only member of that circle who is strongly committed to introducing comics to young readers and artists. We have spent a good deal of time on Project NML discussing Matt Madden's recent book, 99 Ways to Tell A Story: Exercises in Style, which we think would be an outstanding tool for teaching storytelling techniques in any medium. Madden took a very basic situation and restaged it using different narrative devices, reading it through different points of view, accepting different artistic restrictions, and fitting it within a range of different genres. His focus clearly is on how a fairly simple set of building blocks can be used creatively to generate new stories simply by tweaking different variables in their presentation. This book teaches us how to see the choices which storytellers make in producing their work while inspiring us to think of other variations that he has not yet considered.

Triumph of a Time Lord (Part Two): An Interview with Matt Hills

Last time, I ran the first of a two part series featuring an interview with Matt Hills, a leading British thinker about fan culture and genre entertainment, discussing the revamped Doctor Who series. Hills is currently hard at work writing a book, Triumph of a Time Lord, which discusses the retooling of this classic British series for new audiences and new times. In the first installment, I focused on questions concerning the series's relations to its most hardcore fans, discussing the argument that the new Doctor Who represents what happens when fans take over control of a media franchise. But that's really too simple an explanation for all of the changes which have happened here. This time, I asked Hills to drill down on how the changes in the series format reflect trends in British and global television production as strategies to broaden the viewership of the programme. As with last time, Hills assumes readers are relatively familiar with the contents of both seasons of the new Doctor Who -- and makes frequent and telling references to individual episodes. He's pretty careful not to kill the drama for poor Americans who haven't had official access to all of the episodes this season (and haven't figured out how to order them from UK Amazon or download them from some extra-legal source.) But if you've really remained in the dark about what happens this season, you may not want to read this since there are some major plot developments that get discussed here.

Of course, there are going to be spoilers afloat in the Doctor Who community at this point: it is really absurd to have such long delays in the distribution of the series between the United Kingdom and the United States, two countries seperated by a common language, at a time when information flows so fluidly across national borders along various digital networks. Television fan culture is now global and producers run a high risk when they muck about with the temporality of information flows!

To what degree do you think the new Doctor Who has been conceived for a global rather than a national audience? I gather there were complaints early on about

the "Americanization" of Doctor Who because of shifts in the format. Have those concerns settled down?

If anything, I'd say that UK fandom has shown a certain pride in the show's volume of overseas sales - back in the day, this always used to be cited as a barometer of the old series's popularity. There are still some residual and highly proprietary attitudes among a few UK fans, though, who very much perceive the show as 'theirs', which isn't always helpful. The history of Who has frequently been one where certain groups of fans have contrasted its supposed "Britishness" to the allegedly "American" values of, say, the likes of Star Trek. And that hasn't totally gone away, even in an era where fans can internationally access the same production information, and spoilers etc, at pretty much the same time via web-based communities like Outpost Gallifrey.

I think one sign that the show has absolutely been conceived of as a global vehicle is its comparative reliance on London as a setting. Filming in Cardiff has frequently doubled for London - even causing some consternation to drunken passers-by on those late-night occasions when the Welsh capital city has been 'dressed' as London: I overheard one Welshman shout "how rude!" as he lurched past a London underground sign which the production team had erected in the city centre for the filming of 'Rose'.

Contemporary London helps to sell the show's Brit identity abroad: it makes sense as a setting for international audiences much more readily than other UK cities would. The 'showreel' used to promote series one to buyers and advertise it on-air to audiences, included that scene of Big Ben being demolished by an alien spacecraft: 'marvel as an international icon of tourism is trashed' was evidently just as strong a subtext as 'we've actually got decent special effects'.

And Cardiff's first appearance was, of course, in 'The Unquiet Dead', which compensated for this by capitalising on the BBC's reputation for costume drama (again, something likely to help sell the show overseas). This combination of 'cool London' - set up in the very opening montage of the series - and 'heritage'/period drama settings makes the show a likely candidate to travel well. And the emphasis on clear storytelling (by Who's standards) and iconic monsters are also both tokens of a global ambition, as are the occasional inserts of media coverage within invasion stories, which the show has been increasingly careful to internationalise, so that fictional US newsflashes, for instance, are seen on-screen alongside UK ones.

The 1996 US-UK co-production of Doctor Who was far more self-evidently "Americanized" than the current series. There, the TARDIS had a "cloaking device", and the Doctor kissed his 'companion' in a more straightforwardly romantic manner compared with the various contrivances Russell T. Davies has used to justify this event. And though some fans may feel the latest show has been "Americanized" in the sense that it's followed in the wake of US TV successes like Buffy, or adopted a story arc approach characteristic of shows like The X-Files, in fact elements of the new series' format can be traced back through previous Russell T Davies' screenplays and even his own Who novel - the emotionally complex, hard-hitting, and beautifully condensed Damaged Goods - as well as being indebted to developments in other Who novels: for example, the matter of groups of people (conspiracy theorists) trying to track the Doctor was raised in the Virgin novel Who Killed Kennedy, and is not simply or directly a reaction to developments in genre 'realism' in US cult TV (even if some of these 1990s Who novels may, themselves, have been written in the shadow of The X-Files). And the self-reflexive depiction of fandom (done far more directly than 'Love & Monsters') is carried out in Kate Orman's Virgin novels Return of the Living Dad and Room With No Doors, in which a fan actually discusses negative fan stereotypes and asserts that he wanted to "get a life" by emulating the Doctor. Given that these adventures were written for, and sold to, a fan niche market, it's not at all surprising that they moved ahead of the new series in terms of explicitly addressing fandom as a subject. But there is a very strong argument that far from simply reacting to American cult & quality TV, the new series is partly reacting to developments there (and production values) and partly reacting to developments within an international community of professionalised fan writers.

If the series were conceived of more centrally for a national rather than global audience, then I'd argue that it would display far more of a sense of UK regionality than it does. Even Christopher Eccleston's "all planets have a North" Doctor has been rapidly replaced by David Tennant adopting an estuary English (or London-ish) accent in line with his Casanova performance, and the international sales that presumably garnered. And Peter Kay's Bolton accent surfaces in 'Love & Monsters' only when he is under heavy monster make-up, seeming to suggest that the producers wanted to reinforce the point - yes, this is still Peter Kay the famous comedian, even under all the prosthetics. Otherwise, the dominant norm in the new series of Who is that its characters and settings are London-default and largely speak in 'received pronounciation' or Queen's English: plus ca change. UK regionality is suppressed because of its irrelevance to a global audience: the fact that the series is made by BBC Wales has made relatively difference to its material form, though it has undoubtedly been a great boost to the Welsh TV industry, which - much like UK fan audiences - has again shown considerable pride in its success. And I think that takes me back to where I came in on this answer!

Doctor Who has been perceived as a children's program in the U.K. but largely watched by adults in North America. Do you think the current series retains this focus on children viewers? How have the producers sought to balance between these two likely audiences?

In the UK, the new series has been credited with 'reinventing' or 'rediscovering' the family audience for prime-time TV drama. Press reports have made much of this, and the general sense appears to be that the success of the show has challenged industry wisdom, which had previously stressed the break-up of trans-generational audiences into different age-based 'niches' who would hardly ever watch the same programme together. The show has also been successful in terms of the relative gender balance of its audience: it really does seem to represent all things to all people right now!

So, though the old series may sometimes have been deemed a kid's show - or 'children's telly that it was almost OK for adults to enjoy' - this depiction seems to have fallen by the wayside rather. To be honest, I think the old show was always something of an oddity in terms of its unusually broad appeal: when it was pretty much at its height in terms of popularity in the 1970s, it always bridged a massively wide range of ages - audience data given in The Unfolding Text (1983) proves that. And the reinvented series is no different, typically balancing its 'adult' and 'child' appeals very carefully so as to work as a cross-over show.

One of the key shifts is the massive influx of family-based storylines, many featuring child actors and characters in major roles. Not only does the show work hard to represent the Doctor and Rose as desirable travelling companions - the brief being that audiences should like them and want to befriend them - it also uses families in a variety of ways. Yes, there's the Tyler family and Mickey, but even beyond this, the family really is omnipresent. The Slitheen aren't just an alien race, they're a family group. And the human family in 'Fear Her' confront an alien which is alone, cut off from its kind and its own vastly extended family. 'The Empty Child'/'Doctor Dances' revolves around the question 'Are you my mummy?' of course, and 'Idiot's Lantern' also centrally features a family dynamic. The majority of new series' stories involve family crises - even the parallel world of 'Age of Steel' is viewed through very much through the lens of family. And in 'Fear Her', the Doctor alludes to his own family, something which the series may well build on.

There's also more than a hint of family-type relations in the warmth and affection between the Doctor and Sarah Jane in 'School Reunion', and Rose talks of getting a mortgage with the Doctor in 'The Impossible Planet'/'The Satan Pit', which though it may carry some romantic implications, is also about the idea of elective rather than biological 'family'.

There are limits to the series' portrayals of family though, and the way these can work to bridge different generational audiences. While childhood is well represented - frequently giving younger audiences an identification figure in addition to the Doctor and Rose - the show has neglected older audiences and characters. The first Doctor, back in 1963, was a 'grandfather' type: the casting of Eccleston and Tennant seems to view the nominally lead character as necessarily youthful and energetic, if not unconventionally 'sexy'. Age and ageing don't seem to play well in this new series: the inclusion of some slightly older characters in the Graeme Harper-directed 'Rise of the Cybermen'/'Age of Steel' (in the forms of Mrs Moore and Lumic's henchman) appear to be indebted to Harper's own role as the 'elder statesmen' of directors, and his use of a repertory of actors whom he's worked with across his career. 'Fear Her' and 'Idiot's Lantern' do also feature grandmother characters, though in relatively minor roles. On the whole, the cross-generational world of new Who is one where youthfulness remains at a premium.

The show has also sought to balance appeals to younger and older audiences through its patchwork of different tones. One minute slapstick or broad humour, the next political satire, and the next pop-culture referencing: Davies's show-runner role has lent the programme a deftness of touch, making it much more of a combinatorial matrix of darker and lighter moments than ever before. This may again be something learnt from the best of contemporary and recent US TV.

But again there are limits, always limits. Despite this leaping to and fro between different tones, nothing too 'adult' should intrude: sex exists only as a euphemism or an implication, and death is curiously bloodless. Much of the new series still has to happen off-screen, or through unfolding subtexts.

Writers do sometimes seem to view these limits as boundaries to be toyed with, however. Steven Moffat's award-winning series one script may use the euphemism of 'dancing' for the Doctor's apparent sex-life, but it does so with such insistency, if not nakedness, that the idea that this is a "subtext" really seems to melt away. At the very least, there is only a wafer-thin line between 'coming right out and saying it', and the strategy which Moffat pursues. And he introduces Captain Jack Harkness, a bisexual character - OK, he's science-fictionally coded as 'omnisexual' - into a prime-time "family" show... without any tabloid newspaper outcry.

Forget 'reinventing' the family audience against industry wisdom: this was the greatest achievement of series one, in my opinion. What might have looked, in some ways, like cosy viewing - oooh, the BBC does war-time period drama, and Rose is wearing a Union Jack flag - was really cutting-edge television with a sharp twinkle in its eye, and a mischievous banana in its pocket (bananas are good). I couldn't believe the production team had got away with it - but they not only did so, they did it with style to spare.

Perhaps this tightrope-walking hasn't just been about 'balancing' different audiences. It's also been about challenging where, exactly, the lines should be drawn between audience 'niches', and between 'child' and 'adult' viewers. And although some older fans have decried the Slitheen fart gags, the inclusion of farting in TV drama has, on some occasions outside the world of Doctor Who, acted as a marker of 'quality television'. For example, the Jimmy McGovern-created BBC series, The Lakes, featured at least one scene of repeated farting by way of marking out its 'realist' and inclusive intent - it was as if the star writer was saying, 'hey, you don't hear much of this in TV drama, do you, but I bet you do plenty of it in real life, right?' And arguably, Russell T Davies wasn't just playing to the child audience with a whiff of toilet humour, as older fans have complained: he was also daring to include such material, making this sort of moment and tone an example of 'sophisticated' risk-taking with dramatic seriousness, and simultaneously an instance of 'childish' glee or rebellion against good taste. The old series didn't boast alien races farting while the Doctor sought to save the world.

Another point in its favour: 'Aliens of London' also features what may well be the fastest (intentional!) tone-shift in Doctor Who history: from farcical comedy to pure, pure tragedy in the time it takes for poor, poor space piggy to be gunned down.

Honestly, give international Who fandom about ten years, and these episodes ('AoL'/WWIII') will be acclaimed as classics...

Much of the interest of the new series has centered around Rose, who has to be

one of the most popular companions of all time, as well as being key to bridging between Doctors Nine and Ten and thus knitting together the two new seasons. Rose's emotional life and secondary relations have been much more central to the series than previous companions. Is there a concern that her departure may adversely impact the series in a way that is very different from the departure of the other companions or for that matter, the shifts in casting of the various Doctors?

The production team seem to be putting a specific gloss on this departure, namely that it simply indicates one of the strengths and core values of the Doctor Who format: that the Doctor's adventures will always go on. The show is bigger than any one star. Eccleston's departure, and Tennant's successful first season, would certainly seem to lend grist to this mill, even if it suggests that in the context of the fast-moving contemporary media industry, Doctor Who may never again see an actor in the lead role for more than three or four years.

Though Rose and her family have been crucial to the new show's success, it looks as though the programme will return to its roots in 'similarity and difference'. In other words, giving the 'companion' a family has worked well: solution - bring in a new family with a tweaked and slightly different dynamic, but still recognisably following the by now established template. Rose's departure was also, of course, seemingly the narrative end-of-the-line for the rest of the Tylers, with Jackie and Pete reunited in that alt-universe at the end of 'Doomsday'.

I think the challenge presented here is the same sort of challenge which Who has always responded to across its run, whether new or old series; how much novelty do you inject with a change of cast, and how much sameness do you play safe with? It sounds as though the new companion, Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), will again be London-based, continuing the metropolitan bias of the new series which has already worked so well to sell it globally. The latest character's family apparently includes a brother - so at the very least, there are already new narrative possibilities opened up by the likes of sibling rivalry! But these possibilities are clearly very much constrained by a need for continuity and sameness - just as the change from Eccleston to Tennant couldn't afford to make radical changes to the format. Film and TV critic Kim Newman commented on this in his recent 'BFI TV Classic' book dealing with the series, observing that given the success of the new series, it is highly unlikely that its producers will want to make radical changes, at least in the foreseeable future, to what's now a proven hit formula and a flagship BBC product.

Arguably, Doctor Who's biggest format shifts have come in the past when there have been major upheavals in the TV industry - whether this was the shift to colour TV in the UK in the seventies, or the industry perception that fragmented target audiences were more important than a 'mass' audience which took hold across the eighties, and caused Who to be self-consciously positioned in the UK as a 'cult' show with its own dedicated but dwindling fan-base who would watch it no matter when it was scheduled. By contrast, with the new series sparking an interest in the UK in the 'family audience', and doing remarkably well in multi-channel, digital TV households - its high production value special effects and multi-tonal approach seem to have made it collective required viewing on the main 'cinema'-style TV in many households - it is in the rare position of being a trend-setter at this point, rather than having to react to industry changes.

Given all this, I was still sad to see the Tylers vanish out of series two's story-arc as a job lot. I think it would've been interesting to confront the Doctor with his responsibilities to Jackie, had they both been trapped together on 'our' side of the universal fault-lines. What would she have made of him finding a new travelling companion, someone who was effectively replacing her daughter? Would she have hated the Doctor for cutting her off from Rose forever? Though the end of 'Doomsday' certainly felt like a full and satisfying resolution - a proper ending, which if I hadn't already known better, would've had me speculating it was the end of the 'Russell T Davies era' - I think there was potential for many more loose threads.

That's the price you pay for a big ending, I guess. It does mean that the show's newfound emotional realism now won't be able to develop its post-companion theme in such full-blooded ways. Instead, Rose's absence will no doubt be referred to, but in a more anodyne and less dramatically-compelling, threatening manner. And given the Doctor's repeated promises to Jackie that he would keep Rose safe, a headline failure for him would've really been something to focus on and pick away at. However, it would also have been too dark, probably, for the current format - too much family angst and not enough uplifting optimism!

Some have commented on the different emotional dynamic of the new series - more romantic, melodramatic, operatic, pick your term, compared to the emotional reserve one associates with some of the earlier Doctors. What factors led to this shift in tone?

Three words: the female audience.

There, thought I'd finish with a succinct answer!

Oh, OK, it isn't quite that simple, but almost. A key aim for the new series, from what I've heard, was to make it a TV drama 'brand' achieving very close to gender parity in its audience. What the show absolutely could not afford to be was 'science fiction for the boys'. It had to appeal to women via its re-branding. So it was that early promotional images played up action-adventure and pretty much removed science-fiction from the advertised genre mix, making the show about the Doctor and Rose and their thrilling, transcendent escape into space and time.

Part of that ambition was to integrate modes of storytelling which would appeal to male audiences with those appealing to women - it being taken as read that you can't definitively characterise sci-fi as 'boys' stuff' and melodrama as 'for girls' (though there are gendered patterns in media consumption, which is why broadcasters think in such terms). Making Rose's role basically equal to that of the Doctor was only part of this process. Techno-babble was banned, as was 'outer space' sci-fi - the fear being that audiences wouldn't 'relate' to visions of the far future. There's some anecdotal evidence to support this sort of assumption - I interviewed female fans for one research project recently, and a number of them spoke about finding Buffy 'realistic', but said that they hated certain Star Treks for their 'lack of realism'. Some generic hybrids, and themes, obviously play better than others, whereas some genre imagery, such as science-fiction construed as spacecraft, seems to turn off specific audiences - such are their prejudices and opinions.

Where new Who has done 'outer space' it has generally sought to anchor this in relation to immediately recognisable present-day concerns and themes - whether looking satirically at abuses of journalism and TV news in 'The Long Game', or Big Brother reality TV in 'Bad Wolf'. And though 'End of The World' and 'The Impossible Planet'/ 'The Satan Pit' buck this noticeable trend somewhat, they each have their present-day points of identification: in the former, Rose phones home, and the show ends with a walk through a present-day city (Cardiff, again doubling for London). And the latter two-part story was, surely by design rather than accident, originally broadcast in the UK either side of media fuss about it being the 6th of the 6th of 2006 - hence accumulating free media publicity and tying into the absolutely contemporary, even as it depicted a far-future space opera dealing with demonic forces. This sort of planned tie-in also indicates, for me, the almost unprecedented extent to which the new series is planned and rationalised as a continual media event.

As well as desperately seeking the female audience, and not wanting to alienate anti-sci-fi viewers, the new series' emotional dynamic is also evidently part of its critique of the original, and part of its attempt to fit into norms of contemporary 'quality' TV which tends to offer genre and tonal hybridity unified around core emotional content and a detailed 'series memory' rewarding audience loyalty. I've heard it said that the new romanticism of the programme is simply about fitting into a more openly emotional context in the UK - post-Princess Di - but this strikes me as incredibly lazy copy-writing, to be frank. Britain hasn't suddenly changed that much; I don't find myself knee-deep in extravagant emoting on a day-to-day basis. No, the series has changed in response to US and UK TV industry patterns in 'quality' content, as well as fans' criticisms of plot-holes and emotional absences in the old series: it certainly isn't a mirror of some supposedly vast social upheaval in the UK! What it is, is a very cleverly constructed and managed brand, which is far more intently controlled and policed for consistency than ever before.

In essence, it's the 'MacDonaldization' of what used to be a rather rickety old cult Brit show.

I mean this in a non-pejorative and analytical sense (American sociologist George Ritzer has written about MacDonaldization, at some length): the new series delivers a consistent series of pleasures, just as one would properly expect from a brand. Already in an episode like 'Fear Her', there's a sense of the writer - Matthew Graham - looking to tick the boxes of what should go into a "new series" pitch: strong family story and child-actor presence; monsters-of-the-week in the guises of an animated scribble and the possessed Chloe; emotionally uplifting, with the Doctor rescuing the Olympic flame; a little quirky moment encapsulating one of fandom's critiques of the original series (why does the TARDIS always land facing the most convenient or easily accessible way out?). It's not that any of this is ersatz, or even self-parody, just that it seems a touch too much like self-imitation pursued in the interests of serving up the same, established and regulated format. Old-school Doctor Who's defining quality was probably, above all else, its sheer patchiness; new Who would never dream of stooping to such radical inconsistency. It's a far more disciplined and rationalised beast, down to every last emotional beat. But no doubt it's just a phase the show's going through - after all, regeneration has always been its greatest strength.

-- Matt Hills, Cardiff University

HillsM2@cardiff.ac.uk

Thanks again to Cynthia Jenkins and Henry Jenkins IV for their help in formulating these questions.

Triumph of a Time Lord (Part One): An Interview With Matt Hills

For the past decade or so, I have had people come up to me and treat me as though I were an expert on Doctor Who. This is because I co-authored a book with Doctor Who expert John Tulloch (Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text) called Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. I provided the sections on American Star Trek fans and Tulloch wrote the sections on British and Australian fans of Doctor Who. I hate to say it but I really didn't like the classic Doctor Who very much, though my wife and son were hardcore fans. My son dressed up as Jon Pertwee when he was a wee lad, much to the confusion of our midwestern neighbors who had never heard of the actor before. But when Doctor Who returned, I fell hard -- again, perhaps not as hard as my wife and son -- but hard enough. So, I reached out to my friend and colleague Matt Hills of the University of Cardiff to share with us a British fan's insights into what has happened to the new series. Wisely, I let my wife and son frame the questions. Hills wrote Fan Cultures which is perhaps the most important new book on fandom since... hmm, what was the name of that book again. There's a conversation between the two of us about generations of fan studies in my new book, Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, and as you will learn below, he is now hard at work on a new book about the Doctor. So what follows taps Hills's special expertise as a fan and academic obsessed with this particular series.

I am going to run this interview, which is quite long (no doubt a shocking development for readers of this blog) but also quite rich, in two installments. This part focuses heavily on the relationship of the new series to its long-time fans, reading the new Doctor Who as a prime example of what happens when the fans take over the franchise. Along the way, there are lots of minor spoilers so for those of you who have not seen the second season, read this at your own risk. I don't think there are any fatal spoilers here but it's death by papercuts. And in any case, the more you know the individual episodes, the more you are going to get from his more specific comments.

Tell me a little about your relationship to the series and how you came to be

writing a book about the new production.

I've been a fan of the series since I was at least three years old - according to family stories, I used to be quietly absorbed in watching long before I learnt to talk! So, I suppose I've been a fan longer than I can actually consciously remember. My earliest proper memories of the show are of watching 'Genesis of the Daleks' on its original transmission, and 'The Deadly Assassin', both of which must have made a big impression. Davros really did terrify the younger me, even in 'Destiny of the Daleks'. And Tom Baker's eventual departure in 'Logopolis' formed a major part of my childhood emotional life...

As for how I came to be writing this book about the 'new' (2005--) series - Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the 21st Century - well, it was really just something I felt I had to do, given my previous work on fandom and science fiction TV, and my love for the show.

I was fortunate enough to get the chance to discuss the idea, however briefly, with Russell T Davies. He was absolutely supportive, and welcomed the notion that scholars might want to study the programme's latest version.

One interesting snag, though, is that because I'm not doing the book as an official BBC publication, BBC contracts apparently mean that production personnel are not able to grant me interviews. This is what I've been led to believe, anyway. It seems to be a very different situation, and a very different moment, to when John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado were writing Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text back in 1983 - they interviewed a wide range of then-current and former production personnel. It strikes me that right now, something like Doctor Who, especially with the success it's had, is much more intensely about information control and 'brand management' than it ever was before. It's almost as if there is a kind of info-war taking place - sometimes between the lines, and sometimes bursting into full view - between producers, fans and academics.

So, this book will probably have to be written without behind-the-scenes access, which is a shame in a way - but it's not as if working from 'the text' has ever stopped academics before: there's still masses of interesting things to be said about the new show and its audiences from different kinds of media studies perspectives.

I've ended up working with I.B. Tauris because of their excellent track record in publishing books on US and UK cult/quality TV: I've contributed to their books about Angel and a forthcoming one on CSI, and they've also done things like Reading the Vampire Slayer and Reading Desperate Housewives - spot the trend in titles! I wanted to avoid 'Reading' in my own title, though: it sounds a little limiting. And as I argued in Fan Cultures (2002), my very dense first book, being a fan is about so much more than 'reading' a beloved TV series. By now, I think 'reading' is a rather old-school academic concept or metaphor for what we all do in relation with television shows.

I.B Tauris have also recently published James Chapman's excellent study Inside The Tardis, which focuses on the 'classic' series of Doctor Who. My own book will be a little more theoretical than James's: he begins, only semi-humorously, by likening cultural theorists to Daleks and Cybermen, which I find truly astonishing. For me, 'theory' isn't ever going to be the monster of the piece. I begin my manuscript by suggesting that the ideals and politics of media theory - which often involve championing the underdog and challenging systems of power - are actually really much closer to the ideals of the Doctor himself. And in any case, Who fan writers and luminaries such as Paul Cornell, Lawrence Miles, and Tat Wood have been making very interesting use of so-called 'theory' in their work for years. Like the best of their writings, I'm aiming to provoke fandom, and sometimes challenge received wisdoms, but not disappear up my own fundament at the same time (hmmmm, famous last words, there!).

From the perspective of American fans of Doctor Who, the past decade has been something of a black hole with relatively limited new content. Yet, in the United Kingdom, Doctor Who was kept alive in various ways - from radio broadcasts and books directly based within the franchise to a variety of media projects which were thinly veiled references to the Doctor. Can you describe something of this process?

This seems to have been dubbed 'the wilderness years' by some fans: basically, the period between the original show's cancellation in 1989, its all-too-brief return in 1996, and then on through to 2005. From my perspective as a UK fan, the TV show may have been off-air, but the franchise (if we're going to call it that) was always active. Some of the best stories ever produced have, arguably, actually happened in original Who novels and audios - things like Paul Cornell's Human Nature or Rob Shearman's Chimes of Midnight. It's not at all surprising that the new television series, in episodes such as 'Dalek' and 'Rise of the Cybermen'/'Age of Steel' has occasionally taken inspiration from these other imaginings of the Doctor.

I'd hazard the observation that the series of Virgin novels really helped, if not forced, Doctor Who to develop beyond its original TV series format and limitations (and yes, despite the fan belief that Who is the ultimate flexible TV format, it clearly does have, and has had, its limits...). And in a sense, that growth was one of the most important things ever to happen to the programme. The fact that it has more emotional depth and resonance in its latest production may be partly down to contemporary changes in TV drama, and partly down to Russell T Davies's less stridently gendered vision for the show, but I'd say it also has a lot to do with what happened to Doctor Who when it was off-air, and when a generation of writers who (mostly) loved the programme sought to address the limits and blind-spots of the original TV series, as well as just having fun with the characters.

Along with the Virgin novels, and the later BBC range - which, for me, really took off with the arrival of Lawrence Miles's stunningly revisionist Alien Bodies - there's also been the ongoing Big Finish series. These were all licensed Who products, created by fan-professionals for fan-consumers. And there were also the more tangential Who-based dramas that you refer to - often taking place without the character of the Doctor, and featuring various more-or-less surrogate characters such as 'The Stranger' (not much of a leap there) or Lockwood, both in assorted BBV productions. Fan producers are continuing to make some great Who-based dramas: for example, Magic Bullet have done a few audios featuring Sutekh (Gabriel Woolf). And this has produced a rather odd paradox whereby it's the less clearly Who-branded fan product which explicitly refers to old Doctor Who monsters, while the official series has used the same voice artiste (Gabriel Woolf) but has only very vaguely implied any possible continuity going back to Sutekh. It's a reversal of what you might expect - namely, that the 'official' show would exploit and explicitly name its continuity references, whilst the slightly more tangential fan products would be forced to make veiled references. Instead, the official series has started to favour these sorts of thinly veiled mentions, whether to Davros or Sutekh, really as a way of winking at long-time fans without alienating the newer audience.

It can be very instructive to watch some of the fan-produced videos from around the time of the 'wilderness' years alongside the new series. Auton and Auton 2 are currently available as reissued DVDs: while each is a highly worthwhile watch, they absolutely depend on the detailed continuity surrounding their monster. By contrast, the use of the same foe in 'Rose' is played out as pure iconography rather than continuity. The Autons are brought back for their immediate visual impact - and to hark back to older audiences' nostalgic memories of the programme's 'golden age' - not for any continuity-fest. They aren't even named in the episode. Again, though you might expect the new series to capitalise on its continuity, this has been handled very, very carefully right from the outset.

'Continuity' has almost become a dirty word, as if any strong continuity back to the original series is a step too far, or instant continuity-porn. The series isn't afraid to exploit its icons - its strong visual images such as monsters' appearances or the look of K-9 - but this imagery has consistently taken precedence over continuity. I'm almost tempted to suggest that Elisabeth Sladen's wonderful reappearance as Sarah Jane Smith would never have happened if the actress had, today, been virtually unrecognisable as her former self. Fortunately for the story 'School Reunion', Lis Sladen today looks uncannily like Lis Sladen from 1970's Doctor Who. Just like the Daleks, Cybermen and K-9, there was no call for a radical change of look: iconography, and the pull of nostalgia, again won out over excessive continuity. Of course, once the production team start bringing back the likes of Peter Davison and Tom Baker - both of whom now appear quite different to their time on the show - then my argument won't hold, but I can't imagine either happening any time soon! The moment Tom appears will be the moment the show tips over into pleasing its long-term fans rather than looking for a mainstream, mass audience...

Some have suggested that the new series represents fans taking over the franchise. Russell T. Davies comes out of fan culture. Where does his fannish side come through most loudly in the current series?

I think the argument that the show has undergone a fan take-over is an absolutely compelling one: it's a case of what you've called 'textual poachers' - fans outside the official production process doing their unlicensed and supposedly less 'legit' things with a show - becoming a whole new generation of 'textual gamekeepers'. I would guess that that process has some precedents (even in relation to the 'classic' series of Who), but I'm not sure it's ever quite happened as thoroughly as with this latest version. All sorts of people working on the programme have professed their fandom, including producer Phil Collinson, whose fan credentials have come to the fore through such things as the podcast/web-based episode commentaries he's participated in. The majority of new series writers have also been fans of various stripes, so it's not at all something restricted to Russell T. Davies - though, of course, he has always been incredible vocal about his Who fandom, even down to using clips from 'Pyramids of Mars', and the K-9 prop in Queer as Folk (not to mention the series' less-than-realist and Who-indebted ending).

You might expect fans, who are also major industry players, taking over a show to lead to obvious differences. I'm not sure that it has. Certainly, as I've already started to indicate, it hasn't lead to a massive surge in constant continuity references. I think the fannishness that now underpins the programme has emerged, if at all, in two ways: in the manner in which the old show's shortcomings have been critiqued, and in the tendency to settle, at the same time, for a new formula.

Updating a TV series - changing it, reinventing it - can involve responding to perceived failings or problems with "the original". In that sense, I'd say that new Who is very much its own 'critical reading' of the classic series. Though 'reading' may be limited as a academic metaphor, it does accurately capture some of what media producers do when they give 'notes' on a script, or when they think about how to build on a show's previous successes and failures. Russell T Davies doesn't need media studies or TV studies to tell him that there were things that didn't work in old Who: he already knows that instinctively as a dramatist, and communally as a fan.

How has the new series criticised the format of the old?

Firstly, by suggesting that the Doctor's companions don't just walk out of their existing lives to travel with him, but bring some baggage and prior human connections with them. This is a challenge to many basic assumptions made in the old show, where 'companions' were usually just that: an allocated role in the script of the day, typically devoid of any human back-story which played an active role in the Doctor's ongoing adventures (after their introductory tale or first few stories, anyway).

Secondly, by recalling that the Doctor travels in time. Watching the old series, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was merely a device for getting the character into different adventures: time-travel was featured as an integral part of the story only relatively rarely, and in the 1996 TV Movie it was reduced to little more than a narrative cop-out.

A certain Douglas Adams remembered that Doctor Who was ostensibly about a time-traveller when he contributed 'The City of Death', but in later years this was hardly the norm. And though the UK fan response to series one's 'Aliens of London' has been less than ecstatic in some quarters, the pre-credits sequence for this episode has been, for me, the sharpest and most thrilling of the new series. Like Douglas Adams at his creative best, it remembered that time-travel could be a downright tricky - if not absurdist - business. In fact, this opener, and the Eccleston Doctor's uncomfortable apology to Rose for his bungling, seem just as much of a tribute to Adams as did the entirety of 'The End of The World'. The most likely inheritor of Adams's crown as Who-genius and sci-fi humorist, Steven Moffat, also puts time-travel narratively and emotionally at the heart of his series two contribution, 'The Girl in the Fireplace', and Paul Cornell's tear-jerking 'Father's Day' does likewise in series one. Some fans may feel that Doctor Who is 'less sci-fi' than it used to be - i.e. there are fewer alien worlds and societies - but in terms of its use of time-travel as a story driver, rather than a handy device, it has possibly never been more convincingly science-fictional than it is now!

And thirdly, there's the fact the Doctor's accretion and accumulation of "victories" has also been challenged, most obviously in the episode 'Boom Town'. Surely there was a major blind-spot in a series whose hero apparently put things to rights on a planet, or at any one time, and then promptly disappeared into the ether? What of the defeated 'monsters'? What happens after the Doctor has departed for another (weekly) adventure in time and space? And doesn't anyone notice that the Doctor has been popping up throughout Earth's history and sorting out alien threats?

This lumbering plot-hole, or general story problem, has been addressed from the word go by Russell T. Davies, both through the introduction of a fan-like character Clive (Mark Benton) in 'Rose' who had been tracking the Doctor's earthly appearances, and in series two's 'Love & Monsters', as well as in a developing story arc whereby the general population of the Earth have become aware of the existence of aliens (from 'The Christmas Invasion' onwards - this being referred back to in 'School Reunion' and 'Love & Monsters').

The influence of fan culture, then, appears most readily in the form of criticisms of the original show, and production or storyline 'fixes' which aim to make the show critic-proof, or at least more internally coherent and hence not immediately dismissable on a point of logic. If iconography has been preferred over continuity, then so too has internal consistency generally been favoured over in-jokes.

Some fans have alleged that Russell T Davies's scripts have sometimes shown a tendency to collapse into deus ex machina endings - with the 'God in the machine', or rather the obvious hand of the scriptwriter, coming to the aid of the hero all-too-conveniently. This has provoked fierce online fan debate over whether the new series' stories are as riddled with plot-holes as those of the original show: demonstrating that fans, at least, are still worried about the possibility that general audiences might spot some inherent silliness in 'their' show.

Perhaps the most obvious candidate for this sort of fan criticism is 'New Earth', where intermingled brightly-coloured liquids magically avert an outbreak of zombification. However, what fans miss here is that this supposedly 'magical' resolution is really a version of a children's game like 'it' or 'tag', where the "lurgy" is transmitted or taken away by touch. It's a kind of narrative short-hand, literally: an embracing of primitive thought which probably works best for the child audience, just as the coda where Cassandra dies in her own arms (another beautiful remembrance of time-travel) probably works best for an adult audience. Attacking this sort of thing for 'plot-holes' misses the point that Davies is scripting for a range of different audiences. If anything, the peril or the pitfall of 'New Earth' is that it doesn't adequately integrate its child-like and more adult moments and motifs, unlike, say, Steven Moffat's Hugo-winning 'Empty Child'/'Doctor Dances'. It's not the plot-holes that are the problem: it's the clear segregation of 'stuff for the kids' and 'grown-up' emotional resonance - though this is not a problem that all of Davies's scripts suffer from, as his series one and two finales more-than-amply demonstrate.

I suggested a little earlier that Davies's fandom shows though both in his critique of old Who and also in his own establishment of a new format. So, what is this new set of limitations, and how does it relate to Davies's fandom?

In a word: monsters. Davies seems to be especially in love with a certain phase of the series - around the eras of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, when the show was respectively focused on clearly-drawn tales of alien invaders rampaging across the Earth, and gothic monsters emerging from various shady ids. Earlier in its run, the programme had attempted 'straight' historicals (i.e. there were no monsters, just characters drawn from history), and later on it seemed to dispense with clear narrative altogether in favour of strangely condensed multiple threats and layers of storytelling (e.g. 'Resurrection of the Daleks'; 'Ghostlight'; 'Curse of Fenric'). Here, bits of different generic plots were stapled together, either as an example of post-modern self-reference, or post-script-editing laissez faire - 'let's chuck in a bit about android doubles'; 'there aren't any traditional monsters in this'; 'what about adding a bit about the end of all life on a future earth?'

Davies's 'golden age' is apparently one of relatively uncomplicated monsters. And though he offers a 'critical reading' of much of the old series, he also proffers a very devoted re-creation of the feel of its type of cod-space-invasion and reheated-gothic. Every story has its monsters; neither series one or two have had the courage to depart from this template and risk a 'straight' historical. And, as of yet, the new series hasn't widened or deepened its palette and range of genre borrowings - there's been no time-travelling spy story; no outright psychological thriller; no crime tale or noir filtered through the series format; no intimate epic following a group of friends or budding politicians across their lives, with the Doctor intervening to save humanity from political corruption, or just from one bad decision. There's no reason why the series couldn't tell these types of stories and still be recognisably new Doctor Who. Or rather, there is a reason: the show's reinvention is seemingly in thrall to its previous fan-perceived 'golden ages', settling into a certain set of formulas, whether this is the 'celebrity historical' (a 'name' from British history, e.g. Dickens or Queen Victoria, is combined with an alien menace) or the space opera. Even at its most experimental, as in perhaps 'Love & Monsters' and 'Boom Town', the show still uses monsters as a sign of 'proper' Doctor Who-ness.

If anything, the new series has massively intensified its dependence on monsters by using them as mid-series publicity "relaunches" (Daleks in series one; Cybermen in series two) and as series finale audience-grabbers. Paradoxically, this almost domesticates the show's monsters, making them a matter of audience familiarity, safety and branding at the same moment that they are supposedly terrifyingly monstrous. A truly human monster - a psychopath, a serial killer, a despot or tyrant - seems to be simply too dark and too threatening for the new show's format to contemplate, even if it can tolerate moments of "humanity" in its Slitheen combatants, as well as pantomiming monstrosity in the guise of mad scientist John Lumic. Van Statten is probably one of the new series' darkest turns, and even he doesn't really take centre-stage, instead serving to magnify the threat of just one Dalek in comparison with his greed and ruthlessness.

Davies has also engaged in 'setpiece' or fan-pleasing showdowns such as the Doctor regenerating after a battle with the Daleks, and the Daleks and Cybermen going head-to-head. Yet again, pure continuity is a dirty word - here, it is the unusual (in fact, pretty much unprecedented) loading or addition of established, singular elements which speaks to and from fandom: regeneration and Daleks!; Daleks and Cybermen!; and, through the implied back-story of the Time War, the Daddy of all neo-continuity recombinations - Daleks versus Time Lords. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the highly fannish Time War (along with 'Bad Wolf') was not especially foregrounded in Russell T. Davies's original pitch document for series one (published as part of the Series One Companion), but it has certainly appealed very strongly to fans. And the Dalek-Cyber confrontation was rationalised by Davies in his Doctor Who Confidential commentary on these episodes as being what his "eight year-old self" would've loved, i.e. that this battle was designed to especially appeal to the child audience. What this missed out - I would suggest purposefully - was the extent to which Davies was also deliberately upping the ante in terms of giving fandom what it had dreamt of for years - as well as doing something which received wisdom held could only ever be 'fanwank'.

Here's a mission-statement you'll probably never hear Russell T. Davies admit to in any promotional and publicity material: what he really, really wants is to prove that 'fanwank' is the new black.

One of the second series episodes, "Love & Monsters," directly represents what many perceive as a fan community. What kinds of images of fans emerge there and what has been the response to this episode from British fans?

Oh dear; I've got my 'Best Of...' ELO CD playing as I type this! Really. 'Love & Monsters' has probably been the single most divisive episode of the new series - some fans seem to love it, and others feel that it isn't "really" Doctor Who, though quite how that argument can be sustained, I don't personally know.

What is most interesting to me about the episode is the fact that it has not only given rise to opposed fan opinions, but also to entirely opposed interpretations of how it represents fans. Those who focus on the Victor Kennedy (Peter Kay) character argue that the ep attacks fans as obsessive, possessive types who destroy what they love by seeking to regiment and control other fans' activities. In this account, Victor Kennedy stands in for a kind of hierarchy-obsessed 'superfan', and so challenges socially-organised fandom to reform its ways. And it is clearly possible to interpret the majority of LINDA - certainly, those who are absorbed - as rather lacking in social ability: these are evidently misfits and outcasts. A relatively early scene which depicts each of the group in turn also appears to poke considerable fun at their artistic, creative and scholarly achievements, almost as if Davies the professional scriptwriter is pouring cold water on many fans' creative but amateurish, unprofessional efforts.

Against all of this, there's the character of Elton Pope (Marc Warren), which the script and production are consummately careful to depict as 'normal'. It's as if his normality can only be purchased at the cost of projecting negative fan stereotypes more or less heavily across other members of the LINDA group. It needs to be remembered, as well, that this allegorical interpretation of the episode is never directly licensed - the term 'fan' is not used to described these "followers" of the Doctor, and in their world he is a real rather than a fictional construct.

But, through the figure of Elton, fandom is affectionately reclaimed as a positive thing; as a source of solidarity, as a defence against traumatic memories and feelings, and above all, as a space for cultural creativity. Elton is a textbook 'good' fan. These representations of fandom may sound rather gendered, concerning pathologically "powerful" versus "normal" male characters whom women either support (Ursula's love for Elton) or are subordinated to (we witness Victor absorb a number of female 'fans'). However, Davies's notes for the episode indicate that Elton's character was originally to have been a woman, and perhaps the loss of a more conventionally 'feminised' fan in favour of a 'normal' fanboy shouldn't be entirely lamented.

In the end, though, perceiving the episode as a fan allegory slightly closes down its richness and its possibilities - especially as one of its strengths is to challenge the usual dramatic device whereby characters in genre TV seemingly endlessly flag up and discuss their past traumas. Here, it is Elton's silences, elisions and gaps - moments where he literally does nothing other than stare listlessly off-camera into space or where he motions to switch off the camera - which carry and convey his emotional hurt. And, as a result, when his childhood trauma is revealed, it seems to come almost out of nowhere rather than having been prefigured; a whole system of silences suddenly breaks down. There's a kind of emotional truth, power and realism to Elton's silence and his busy-doing-nothing which much TV drama frequently fails to achieve, let alone 'genre' TV. And the episode is also among the most self-reflexive of the run so far, with Elton virtually speaking in scriptwriter Davies's voice, and asserting that he's put the most exciting events at the start of his story. In Triumph of a Time Lord I compare this episode to Davies's much-heralded instalment of The Grand which focused on just one character (the barman Clive) speaking to his father. Both adopt a kind of kind of intimate, oral storytelling mode, making much use of voice-over and subjective POV. It is something which also crops up in the to-camera opening in Queer as Folk, and in Bob & Rose, not to mention Rose's unusual voice-over at the beginning of 'Army of Ghosts' and 'Doomsday'.

While emphasising the emotional bond of oral storytelling, 'Love & Monsters' definitely appears to chastise those fans who oppose the show's newfound emotionality - Victor Kennedy asserts that he doesn't like to be touched "either literally or metaphorically". And this is his great failing; he can't be emotionally moved or touched - i.e. impinged on from without - he can only greedily devour and incorporate external objects (which is all people are to him). 'Love & Monsters' must surely be the favourite Doctor Who episode of psychoanalysts everywhere! Yet its representations of fandom are, I would say, relational: it depicts fandom positively, but only in relation to other negative portrayals, leaving audiences to negotiate and navigate between the good and the bad in order to reach their own (often conflicting) conclusions. Not quite a Rorschach test for fandom, it is nevertheless an apt space for audiences to project in their own prejudices or positions on what it means to be a fan.

With the relaunch of Star Trek, there was a splintering of the fan community with some remaining "loyal" to the classic series and others embracing the new entries in the franchise. To what degree has that occurred around the relaunch of Doctor Who?

It's hard to say, because the fans who are very 'anti' the new series may have drifted away from organised fandom, or may not have bothered to voice their dislike online. There has been much debate, though, about the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the new series, some of which has shaded into what have been caricatured as 'pro' and 'anti' Russell T Davies camps. Such splintering is, I suspect, much more about creating an easy shorthand for different groups of fans to bash each other with, then it is about real debate. The dominant sense would seem to be that most fans love old and new Doctor Who, and value each for their very different identities. In this respect, a lot of fans are good media historians, acutely aware of the different production and industry contexts which have fed into the making of different eras.

Who may have been helped in this by the fact that its 'classic' series was always marked by the recasting of lead and supporting cast. Whereas Star Trek: TOS was really defined through its iconic lead actors (with far less variation than Who), Doctor Who has always been a little more changeable and much less identified with one central cast - Tom Baker's pre-eminence in the US notwithstanding. Fans have therefore got very used to championing certain Doctor Who stories or actors while attacking others: as a result, the fandom is much more decentred than simply revolving around 'classic' versus 'new' factions, I'd say, because of the show's long initial run and its many reinventions from the 1960s onward.

Having noted all that, I am personally aware of some fans - a very small number - who have simply stopped watching the show, saying it's just not for them any more, and that it isn't the Doctor Who they've loved all their lives. It may be that for these people, the pleasures of the show were so powerfully linked to a certain phase in their own lives, or to a sense of appreciating something outside the media 'mainstream', that the show's reinvention, rebranding, and newfound commercial omnipresence have put it beyond the pale. Sometimes being a fan is about a lot more than simply appreciating any one TV show: it can also mean making a statement about the obscurity (or not), and the individuality (or not) of what are felt to be one's defining tastes.

-- Matt Hills, Cardiff University

HillsM2@cardiff.ac.uk

Fan Fiction as Critical Commentary

This has been my week for dealing with law professors -- having engaged in a conversation with Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler last week at the MIT Communications Forum, I was pleased to find a review of Convergence Culture over at the blog of the University of Chicago Law School written by Randy Picker. The first and second parts of the review mostly provide a detailed, accurate, and positive summary of the key points from the book, targeting those passages which may be particularly relevant to people interested in the legal implications of participatory culture. The last segment, not surprisingly, gets into the book's discussion of fandom and intellectual property law. I thought I would use my post today to respond to a few of Picker's key points there. Now let's be clear that I am no expert on the law. My wife happens to have a law degree from the University of Wisconsin and we both take some interest in developments in the area of intellectual property law and regulation of free speech. I suspect I know more than most laymen about these matters as they impact fan culture and the other sites of grassroots participation I have written about. But I would be a fool to try to debate the fine points of the law with a scholar of Picker's stature.

Fan FIction and Fair Use

Picker writes:

Jenkins pushes (p.190) for a reformulation of fair use "to legitimate grassroots, not-for-profit circulation of critical essays, and stories that comment on the content of mass media." But he clearly wants more, as he recognizes that most fans aren't that interested in producing work that the law is most likely to protect (parody or critical commentary of the sort seen in The Wind Done Gone), but who want instead to write about Ron and Hermione kissing.

Let me spell out a little more precisely what I argue on page 190 in the book:

Nobody is sure whether fan fiction falls under current fair-use protections. Current copyright law simply doesn't have a category for dealing with amateur creative expression. Where there has been a public interest factored into the legal definition of fair use -- such as the desire to protect the rights of libraries to circulate books or journalists to quote or academics to cite other researchers -- it has been advanced in terms of legitimated classes of users and not a generalized public right to cultural participation. Our current notion of fair use is an artifact of an era when few people had access to the market place of ideas and those who did fell into certain professional classes. It sure demands close reconsideration as we develop technologies that broaden who may produce and circulate cultural materials. Judges know what to do with people who have professional interests in the production and distribution of culture; they don't know what to do with amateurs or people they deem to be amateurs.

For me, the phrase, the public right to cultural participation is a key concept underlying the book's discussion. If I had my way, the right to participate would become as important a legal doctrine for the 21st century as the right to privacy as been in the late 20th century. I argue elsewhere in the book that a right to participate might be abstracted from the combined rights listed in the First Amendment and the right to participate would include the right to respond meaningfully to core materials of your culture. In that sense, I might go beyond our current understanding of fair use.

But a key point here is that I regard all or at least most fan fiction to involve some form of criticism of the original texts upon which it is based -- criticism as in interpretation and commentary if not necessary criticism as in negative statements made about them. Not being a legal scholar, I have had trouble producing a more precise definition of what constitutes critical commentary for the purposes of Fair Use. I'd be curious if any reader could provide a workable one for the purposes of this discussion.

For the moment, I am relying on my understanding as someone who is in the criticism business. I reviewed a number of guides for critical essays written at writing centers at major universities. What they seem to have in common is the following: a critical essay puts forth an interpretation of the work in question, one which includes debatable propositions which are in turn supported by the mobilization of some kind of evidence -- either internal (from the work itself) or external (from secondary texts which circulate around the work). All of them make clear that critical commentary may, in fact, embrace the ideas included in the original work as well as take issue with them.

Hand Holding, Snogging, and Critical Commentary

My discussion of critical commentary in the book continues:

One paradoxical result [of current copyright law] is that works that are hostile to the original creators and thus can be read more explicitly as making critiques of the source material may have greater freedom from copyright enforcement than works that embrace the ideas behind the original work and simply seek to extend them in new directions. A story where Harry and the other students rise up to overthrow Dumbledore because of his paternalistic policies is apt to be recognized by a judge as political speech and parody, whereas a work that imagines Ron and Hermione going on a date may be so close to the original that its status as criticism is less clear and is apt to be read as an infringement.

So, yes, I am concerned about stories where the characters hold hands or snog and not simply those where same sex couples end up in bed together or when the story is told from the perspective of He Who Must Not Be Named. This goes to the very nature of fan culture: fans write stories because they want to share insights they have into the characters, their relationships, and their worlds; they write stories because they want to entertain alternative interpretations or examine new possibilities which would otherwise not get expressed through the canonical material. These interpretations are debatable -- indeed, fans spend a great deal of time debating the alternative interpretations of the characters which appear in their stories.

Fan stories are in no simple sense just "extensions" or "continuations" or "extra episodes" of the original series. Unlike the model critical essays discussed by the various university writing centers, the insights about the work get expressed not through nonfictional argumentation but rather through the construction of new stories. Just as a literary essay uses text to respond to text, fan fiction uses fiction to respond to fiction. That said, it is not hard to find all kinds of argumentation about interpretation woven through most fan produced stories. A good fan story references key events or bits of dialogue to support its particular interpretation of the character's motives and actions. There are certainly bad stories that don't dig particular deeply into the characters or which fall back on fairly banal interpretations, but the last time I looked, fair use gets defined in functional terms (what is the writer trying to do) and not aesthetic terms (what they produce is good or bad artistically). Fan fiction extrapolates more broadly beyond what is explicitly stated in the text than do most conventional critical essays and may include the active appropriation and transformation of the characters as presented but even here, I would argue that the point of situating the characters in a different historical context, say, or in another genre is to show what makes these characters tick and how they might well remain the same (or be radically different) if they operated in another time and place. Fan fiction is speculative but that does not mean that it is not at its core interpretative.

Elsewhere, I have argued that fan fiction emerges from a balance between fascination and frustration. If the original work did not fascinate fans, they would not continue to engage with it. If it did not frustrate them in some level, they would feel no need to write new stories -- even if the frustration comes from an inadequate amount of material. In most cases, the frustration takes the form of something they would change in the original -- a secondary character who needs more development, a plot element that is underexplored, an ideological contradiction that needs to be debated. And in that sense, fan fiction is often critical of the original in the looser sense that it expresses some concern about the story it tell.

Commercial Competition

As Picker notes, I do acknowledge the rights of creative industries to protect themselves against commercial competitors even as I would argue for a broader definition of fair use for amateur media makers who circulate their works for free. As I note in the book,

Under the current system, because other companies know how far they can push and are reluctant to sue each other, they often have greater latitude to appropriate and transform media content than amateurs, who do not know their rights and have little legal means to defend them even if they did.

In so far as they impact fan fiction, the studio's intellectual property "rights" are the product of intimidation and chilling effects and not based in any real legal doctrine; so far there is no case law which speaks directly to the fair use or parody status of fan fiction. Unfortunately, so far, the various public interest law organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have been more willing to protect the rights of Napster to facilitate illegal downloads than the rights of fans to publish stories which comment critically on the characters of Harry Potter. And a teenager confronted with a threat from a major studio that could bankrupt their family tends to fold rather than seek legal counsel.

My distinction between commercial competitors and amateur cultural production leads Picker to make the following observations:

Jenkins asserts that IP holders attempt to use IP rights to control authoritativeness. I think that is probably right, but authoritativeness is much more organically tied to the author herself. So I don't think that Jenkins provides any examples of fans hijacking the canon from the author. This is almost a question of market share. In a world without fan fiction, Rowling had a 100% share in the Harry Potter creation market. With fan fiction, her share is smaller, but I suspect that it is still in the high 90s. This isn't about sheer number of words written--fans could quickly surpass an original author--but more about reading share and mindshare. Every fan will read HP VII, but what fraction of those has read whatever is the leading non-official Potter text?

Actually, I wouldn't read this simply in terms of market share. It is almost certainly true that the commercial text will outdraw any texts fans are going to be able to produce. Moreover, anyone reading the fan text is in almost every case going to end up reading the commercial inspiration for that work -- after the fact if not before. The fan work depends on a reader with at least some superficial familiarity with the original and one could argue that fan texts may extend the shelf life of the original by generating new generations of readers.

Canon and Fanon

But again, it doesn't stop there: I would suggest that most fans take the "canon," that is, the official texts (in almost every instance) provide the base line for the conversation. The author makes a statement about the characters; the fan writer proposes alternative interpretations of the characters. That's why fans draw a distinction between canon (the original text) and fanon (the works produced by other fans which may or may not be constraining on subsequent interpretations).

There are instances where fans reject canon but it is most often in cases where subsequent developments in the series go against what fans took to be something foundational to their experience of the program. Fans reject canon when canonical authors contradict themselves or violate the spirit of their contract with the readers. I discuss one such instance in my earlier book, Textual Poachers, around the series, Beauty and the Beast, where plot developments tarnished aspects of the series which fans had been taught were sacred in earlier episodes and were rejected by a sizable section of fandom. The value which fans place on canon has to do with the moral economy that emerges around the series and only holds when the producer plays fair with her readers.

My concern is not just that the original texts exert a certain authority over fans. It is that the producers use that authority to police fan interpretations, normalizing some and marginalizing others. In the book, for example, I discuss the ways that Lucas's official Star Wars film contest adopts seemingly neutral rules which a) only grant to fans those rights it would be most difficult for the company to restrict -- the right to make parodies or documentaries and b) have the effect of making the works of male fans highly visible while pushing the work of female fans underground.

Picker continues:

IP matters here in the sense that if commercial competitors could write Harry Potter stories, a non-Rowlings text might do well. A commercial house would engage a professional writer and could put its marketing muscle behind the story. That would look a lot like Lucasfilm with its sixty best sellers, except that we would have more competitors. But I don't think that copyright is driving control over the canon against fans. The fan texts would have to achieve greater mindshare to become canonical.

It is possible to imagine a commercial competitor producing a text which generates a good share of the market -- especially given, as Picker notes, the likelihood of aggressive marketing but also given the possibility that the competitor really did their homework and were more willing to provide fans with what they wanted. But the new text might still not be read as canon, would be judged against the original, and would likely be perceived as a rip-off which tarnished rather than enhanced the experience of the series. One should not under-estimate the degree of loyalty fans will feel towards original creators or their desire to see themselves as protecting the integrity of favored works. There would be very few works produced by commercial competitors which would carry the same cultural authority whatever their commercial fates may be.

Picker continues:

When we don't observe licensing to extend the story, it seems unlikely that fan fiction competes with the authoritative texts or with licensing opportunities in adjacent markets. So Rowling licenses for movies, but she isn't building--yet--the Harry Potter Extended Universe. Lucasfilm has done exactly that, and, in that context, fan fiction may compete with officially licensed versions and represents a missed licensing opportunity

Hmm. My hunch is that in practice, fan fiction rarely decreases the amount of commercial content any given consumer consumes regardless of whether there is commercial content available. When fans get really interested in something, they want to suck in as much information and insight as possible. But I would be hard pressed to know how to prove this. He's right that the more broadly extended the universe becomes, the lower the likelihood that any given fan will consume all of that material. Very few people have consumed every story associated with Star Wars or Star Trek. Yet, this would be true for people who did not read fan fiction as well and I'd wager that the people who read fan fiction are likely to consume more not less of the commercially produced material than fans of the series who do not read fan fiction, just because they have a deeper engagement of the material over all, and because the fan fiction is likely to send them back to the primary text in search of evidence with which they may adjudicate conflicting claims about the characters and their motivations.

Erotic Criticism

He continues:

As Jenkins describes it (p.150), Lucasfilm has been most aggressive in trying to block erotic stories involving the Star Wars characters. (I haven't gone looking but my guess is that if we permute and combine Han/Leia/Luke/Chewie, we can come up with a full-range of variations.) This is like parody in the sense that we think that it is outside of what the author would be willing to agree to, but probably unlike parody as it may not operate as a commentary on the original text. As the parody case makes clear, copyright has been willing to protect as fair use the use that wouldn't be licensed voluntarily.

Again, we come back to a core question I identified earlier: for me, all fan fiction constitutes a form of critical commentary on the original texts and indeed, erotic fiction seems most often interested in providing a critique of the constructions of gender and sexuality found in the original works. This is part of what distinguishes fan erotica from much of the pornography that circulates in our culture: it is not anonymous sex; it uses sex as a vehicle to investigate the psychology of the characters and as such, it may be the form of fan fiction which most clearly comments on the original text. Fan erotica does more than comment on the original text: it clearly has mixed motives but there is very little fan erotica that is not also involved in critical commentary in some form.

This is a fascinating legal discussion -- though as I suggest in the book, I am more apt to put my faith in the short term in companies liberalizing their policies towards fan fiction because it is in their economic interests to do so. We are already seeing this shift happen with very little fanfare. The Powers That Be are recognizing that fans create value by generating greater interest in their works, expanding rather than diminishing the market. I often argue that fans can be seen to appreciate a favorite show in two senses: they like it and they add to its value through their various creative and emotional investments. They do invisible work which is increasingly valued by media producers and as a result, we are seeing studios start to turn a blind eye to fan fiction and in a few cases, actively promote it. This will result in a liberalization of fan fiction in the short run which may or may not help to settle the legal issues in the long term. Can they give us free access to walk across their land for a period of time and then reverse course and start prohibiting access or charging us rent? The law would seem to give us some contradictory messages on this point

Ms. Doonesbury's Lament or Why She Can't Take Our Class

We've been getting some calls and messages here at the Comparative Media Studies Program regarding the situation with Mike Doonesbury's daughter getting lotteried out of our Introduction to Media Studies subject. See the most recent installments from the long running comic strip.

An installment a few weeks ago introduced the problem, saying that she was lotteried out of a HASS-D subject in Media Studies.

So let me clarify some of the background. In MIT lingo, a HASS-D is a Humanities Arts and Social Sciences Distribution subject. Essentially, this is our variant on the core curriculum. Each student selects from a broad array of possible options. Interestingly, there is only one HASS-D in Media Studies at MIT: the Introduction to Media Studies class which we teach each fall. I created this class in collaboration with Martin Roberts about a decade ago. It is currently being taught by my colleague, Beth Coleman, who doesn't look very much like the guy shown in the cartoon.

The class is a large lecture hall subject which draws 50-75 students and breaks out into a range of smaller discussion sessions.

By design, HASS-Ds are small subjects. We are not allowed to have more than 25 students in the discussion sections. A Lottery system is set up to deal with the overflow problem created by the most popular classes. One of the prides of MIT is that these HASS-D subjects are taught by MIT faculty -- we all spend time in the undergraduate classroom -- unlike a certain place up the road from us, where such subjects would likely be taught by graduate students.

Ironically, Introduction to Media Studies has never actually had a lottery. Gary Trudeau is correct that the subject draws strong interest -- many students share Ms. Doonesbury's passionate engagement in the topic -- but because of the mixture of lecture and breakout session, we have been able to accommodate every student who wants to take the class.

That said, I would have little sympathy for Ms. Doonesbury's protests for special treatment. MIT is very much a meritocracy and would not make exceptions to its policies based on parental pressure or other forms of personal influence. MIT is proud of the fact that it does not allow "legacies" -- students whose parents have MIT degrees do not receive preferential treatment in our process -- and has never given out an honorary degree. Those who wear the brass rat have earned that honor by hard work. We try to be flexible in accommodating special needs of students but at the end of the day, a lottery is probably the fairest way to decide who stays when a class is oversubscribed.

Anyway, I thought people would be interested in knowing the back-story on these particular strips. I can say that we in the Comparative Media Studies program are delighted that Ms. Doonesbury is so enthusiastic about wanting to get into our classes. We hope she makes it one of these days. We'd love to see her become a major. A growing number of frosh are arriving at MIT wanting to major in our program. We are now the largest Humanities major at MIT.

Several people have noted that the guy in the cartoon doesn't look very much like me -- and he looks even less like Beth (who as I said is the person teaching the class this term). So, here's the offer. I will send a free copy of Convergence Culture to the first person who sends me a doctored version of the cartoon which replaces the rather generic professor character with an authentic Henry Jenkins avatar. Send them to me at henry3@mit.edu.

Update!: We have a winner and in record time. Genie, a reader from Australia, was the first to send me a "corrected" (or some would say "doctored") version of the Doonesbury cartoon with my likeness embedded. Here it is:

After all, to "doctor" is to make someone better, isn't it?

Picking Over Pilots

Let's take a moment today to think about the shifting status of the pilot episode on American television -- a worthy topic in the midst of the rolling out of a battery of new television shows across the various networks. In the past, the pilot served very specific functions within the behind-the-scenes decision-making at the networks. We might think of the pilot as functioning in television the way that a character sheet functions in comics or animation: it seeks to define the core characters and central premise of the series but it also does so by pushing them into their most extreme versions. The characters in pilots are often over-defined to the point of being reduced to stereotypes as the producers try to show who these people are, how they relate to each other, and what functions they serve in terms of the plot.

Compounding this problem is the degree to which performers have not yet fully jelled with their characters -- in many cases, they may have just received news that they were assigned these roles and been rushed into production on short notice. They are trying desperately to prove they can act so they can hold onto these parts. In the past, it was not at all unusual to recast key roles after the pilot was shot and before the series reached the air. In any case, we know that character on television is generated as much by choices made by the performer on set as they take up the roles as written and make them their own and typically it takes a few episode for the rough edges to give way to more fully human characters. (Of course, the opposite can also happen and a compelling character in the pilot can be smoothed out or compromised through the production process.)

Radical shifts in the conception of the series may occur after the pilot has been shot (see, for example, the case of classic Star Trek where Spock was a highly emotional character in the pilot and Number One, a character cut after the pilot, represented the voice of cold rationality). The pilot was almost never a particularly strong episode from the point of view of the audience but producers and network executives knew how to read pilots, or thought they did, and used them as tools to make decisions about the show's fate. It would not be rare for the pilot to get shuffled into rotation later in the run of the series (again, Star Trek is the classic example here where the original pilot got reframed and turned into a two part episode -- a flashback -- later in the run of the series). There was a clear separation between the pilot and the first episode.

And all of this took place behind closed doors. Network executives saw lots of pilots; they knew more or less which ones turned into good shows down the line and they knew what were the symptomatic rough spots experienced by most pilots. They might be anxious about innovation and shut down shows which took them in new directions; many of those shows are more likely to be embraced by at least cult audiences than network executives, but for most series, they knew what they were looking at when they saw a pilot.

Now, let's consider the functions that pilots play in contemporary television, where much of what used to go on behind the scenes now takes place in public view, and where audience participation and anticipation of series is becoming more the norm. We can start with the sheer number of pilots in circulation and public access this summer compared to previous television series. Some shows -- Studio 60 on Sunset Strip and Kidnapped -- are circulating above-ground via a special arrangement with Netflix; others could be downloaded off of the network's own home pages. Still others -- Heroes for example -- circulated unofficially through bittorrent (though in such cases, it is not clear the networks are exactly heartbroken that they have escaped their control as long as they build up buzz for new series).

And increasingly pilots for shows that have not been picked up -- think Global Frequency and Nobody's Watching -- make it into digital distribution as well and can become rallying points for audience activism with varying degrees of success. Some are even predicting a world where pilots will be distributed to audiences first over the web and those which get strong support there will be sold to the networks -- more precisely, the audiences they attract will be sold to the networks in return for money to produce more episodes. One can certainly also imagine a world where niche media properties will go directly into digital or dvd distribution and be supported by their subscribers.

The pilot faces new demands in such scenarios. The pilot now becomes the public's first introduction to the characters and their situations. And the public has less experience looking at the stereotypes and broad performances found in most pilots and knowing how to anticipate what will happen when the writers and actors have brought these characters more fully under their control. Bury the pilot midseason and people will think it was an off episode. Lead with it and they will think the series sucks.

And this new context where we have so many shows thrown at us is pretty unforgiving. I know there are any number of shows this season which are lucky to get a first glance from me. I watched pilot episodes for Men in Trees, The Class, and Standoff and trust me, I don't plan to give these series a second look, even though I know full well that some of the elements which annoyed me there may get resolved when the writers and actors develop more comfort with their roles. There are some pilots which knock the ball out of the park in terms of grabbing the public attention and never letting them go. For me, the pilot of Lost will remain the high bar mark for a long time to come -- it hooked me within five minutes and never give me a moment to rethink that decision -- and Studio 60 on Sunset Strip may do the best job this season in terms of introducing the characters and premise in an engaging way -- a mixture of biting satire, nuanced characterization, kickass writing, and performers who are strong enough that they instantly fall into a grove with each other (and even here, fans are expressing concern about Amanda Peet's performance.)

A little bit further down the food chain are the pilots for Heroes and for Jericho -- both shows I definitely plan to watch but which had uneven pilots. Jericho suffered from the problem of having too broadly defined characters but there was one really compelling sequence involving a school bus full of endangered children which suggests to me that the series may know how to balance out its elements and get down to real drama.

Heroes suggests yet another risk which pilots face at the present time -- they no longer have to introduce three or four major characters in the first episode. In an era of ensemble dramas, they have to introduce dozens of characters, help us learn enough about them that we know who they are and how they are connected to each other. Heroes and Six Degrees both spend their entire first episodes introducing their large cast of characters and provide almost no information about plot developments: we know who these people are but we don't know where the series is going. In the case of Heroes, I cared enough that I will certainly watch again -- and indeed, as I wrote earlier this summer, I have high hopes for this series. In the case of Six Degrees, I don't think the pilot gave me enough that felt fresh or distinctive to get me to tune in next week, given the high volume of good alternatives that seem to be emerging this season. Some of this no doubt has to do with my high threshold for superhero stories and my low threshold for coincidence.

In this context, it is easy for a pilot to do something unforgivable and just turn you off from the series altogether. For me, Smith hit that low mark when it had a supposedly sympathetic character kill several people in cold blood because they made fun of him. To me, this fundamentally violated the deal I make when I watch heist stories -- that I will enjoy stepping outside the law as long as it is harmless fun. I like heist stories because they feature intelligent and charming mavericks who plan carefully, minimize risks to human life, and do daring stunts: I don't watch it to see thugs and psychopaths, though I may well tolerate such characters on The Sopranos, The Wire, or The Shield, which set me up for very different kinds of emotional experiences.

Part of what inspired me to put these ideas down was a quote from critic Robert Bianco in USA Today last week about the pilot for Kidnapped:

You can easily imagine yourself settling in with Kidnapped for six, eight, maybe even 13 episodes. But 22? Sorry, no. And that, in the end, is the strange bind this season's run of one-story serials have created for themselves: they force you to decide upfront whether you want to wait a year for the answer to the question posed by the pilot. Every TV show, obviously, hopes to hook you on a weekly basis, but these shows are asking, not just for a week-to-week choice, but for an immediate season-long commitment. To make that kind of demand on an audience, you had better be incredibly compelling from the get-go. 24 was. Kidnapped isn't.

I've reached somewhat different conclusions about Kidnapped, which I saw earlier this summer, and plan to give a few more episodes to find its footing. But I get Bianco's point: it was one thing to try an episode of an episodic series, then try another to see if the series was starting to jell, and indeed, to wait a few weeks and try again based on word of mouth. It's another to have to make a decision right away which complex ensemble-cast serial drama you want to watch, knowing that the full experience will come to those of us who sign up for discussion lists, check websites, work through the secrets and puzzles together, and so forth. (And of course, it is precisely this tendency towards serialization which puts added pressure on the pilot to also be a compelling first episode. You can no longer shuffle the pieces as easily and bury a bad pilot in the middle of the season.)

The only thing which makes this scenario viable at all is the prospect that we can download episodes and catch up later if one of these things turns out to be better than our first glance and word of mouth starts to build around it. That's why rerun on demand is going to become even more central to the way television works in the years to come.

Update: The Flow Television Poll

A while back, I posted here my choices for Flow's television poll: Flow is an online zine where media scholars share their insights about contemporary developments in the medium with what they hope will be a diverse and engaged general readership. Participants were asked to identify but not rank their top ten favorite television shows of last season. Well, the results are now in and can be read in their entirity over at Flow for anyone who might be interested in what a bunch of academics think is worth watching on television. The top ranks look like this: Lost won overall, identified by 12 of the 24 critics who participated; the second tier down was Arrested Development, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with 10 votes each (Keep in mind that 7 people also voted for Colbert's appearance at the Washington Press Club which may suggest that news/entertainment got more votes overall than Lost depending on how we count). 8 people (myself included) vote for Veronica Mars; Project Runway and Deadwood got 6 votes each; and altogether, 94 different series, specials, commercials, and YouTube videos got identified by at least one voter. Of the shows I identified on my original list, Spooks/MI-5 was the only one unique to my rankings. I don't know whether I should be depressed because my taste is so mainstream or kind of proud.

As Jason Mittell notes, many of the shows identified reflect the ways that new media is impacting our relationship with television -- shows that have not yet aired legally in the markets where the critics live, content which circulated only on Youtube or as in the case of Colbert's remarks, gained visibility through digital circulation, and series which really only found their audiences among academics once they became available on DVDs. In fact, he suggested that The Wire might have ranked very high indeed, based on feedback from academics who were discovering it on DVD had it not been off the air during the 2005-2006 season and thus been ineligible for inclusion. Mittell predicts it is an early front-runner for status in this coming year on the strength of its new season which is indeed getting rave reviews. (I still have to catch up with Season 3 on dvd before I can watch it but my Tivo is storing away episodes for the cold winter months ahead.)

Anyway, I thought you might be interested.

"Random Acts of Journalism": Defining Civic Media

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

Imagining New Kinds of Imaginary Communities

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

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

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

Creating the Daily Us

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

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

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

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

Slashers for a More Democratic Society

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

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

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

Newspapers in Network Culture

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

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

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

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

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

Who Gets to Participate in Participatory Culture?

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

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

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

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

For Those Living In Or Around New York City...

My book tour promoting Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide takes me to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria next week. Here are the details:

Convergence Culture:

A Conversation with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson

Wednesday, September 27, 7:00 p.m.

Henry Jenkins, author of the new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, and Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good for You), two of the nation's most incisive cultural critics, will discuss the ground-shifting and often surprising ways in which audiences are participating in the creation, distribution, and consumption of media in the digital age, and the effects of these developments on entertainment and learning. The program will be followed by a reception and book signing. Tickets: $10 public/$7.50 for students with ID/Free for Museum members, call to RSVP. Buy Tickets Online

I hope to see some of my blog-readers from the Greater New York City area in the audience. I am told that they will put up a streaming audio and transcript of the talk sometime in October and I would announce it here when they do.

I am also scheduled to be interviewed on Tuesday night on the Joey Reynolds Show on WOR and the WOR network. For those not in NYC, the show seems to be available online here.

Comics and Micropayments: An Interview with Todd Allen

Yesterday, I ran an outtake from Convergence Culture which centered around the efforts of Scott McCloud to build public interet in micropayments as a means of supporting digitally distributed comics. Like McCloud, I believed that micropayments offered perhaps the best way to provide a commercial infrastructure which would preserve the diversification of content that currently characterizes the web while at the same time allowing artists to make a living off of their work. When McCloud spoke at MIT last week, he told me that Reinventing Comicswas designed to be a book about the future when it was published more than five years ago and it was still a book about the future now. We are just moving towards the future at a slower rate than any of us might have imagined. The success of iTunes suggests that people are willing to pay small amounts of money online to consume content they want (and thus suggests that some micropayments model might still make sense). At the same time, they are doing so through a central distribution channel which could easily become a gatekeeper locking lots of content producer out. I have not been paying as much attention as I should lately to developments in the debates around micropayments and other ways of paying for online content. A few years ago, I served as a member of a thesis committee for Todd Allen, a student at New York University's Gallatin School, who was doing a project focused on business models for digital comics producers. He has since self-published the thesis as a printed book and made it available online Allen is now a Chicago-based consultant and author on matters related to digital media and its business applications. He teaches E-Business for the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management Department at Columbia College Chicago. Allen's writing on technology has been seen in the Chicago Tribune and Iconocast. Allen has worked with a diverse group of companies including the American Medical Association, National Parent Teacher Association, Modem Media and the Marketing Store. Outside of technology, Allen spent two seasons covering the New York Knicks for New York Resident, a Manhattan weekly paper, where he also penned a humor column. He once appeared on MTV in a futile attempt to explain computer science to Pauly Shore.

Todd is someone who follows digital comics very closely and so I decided to check in with him this week to see if he could bring us up to date about developments in that area.

You investigated alternative ways of funding digital comics through your thesis research. What models offered the greatest promise and why?

If I had to point to one, I'd point to merchandising. T-shirts, posters, printed collected editions (graphic novels, if you prefer)... selling things seemed to be the highest revenue generator when viewing the area from a high level.

That said, the more popular web comics - your PVPs and Penny Arcades - do quite well with advertising. In these cases you have high page view counts and higher than average CPM rates for the advertising, owing to a desirable demographic, particularly to gaming companies.

Ultimately, different revenue streams will work for different web comics. There will be differences in audience demographics and merchandising options from property to property that cause variations in the productivity of a revenue model. There's no reason not to mix the models until one clearly overtakes the other. Initially, merchandising will be a better option for more web comics. Advertising becomes a more viable option as your strip's traffic grows.

I would also caution against the use of contextual advertising for web comics. Contextual advertising is based on the _text_ elements of a web page, not the graphic elements. While theoretically, you could structure the text of the page to sync with the individual strip, I haven't heard a lot of success stories about cartoonists striking it rich with AdWords. Feel free to correct me on that one if a few instances have popped up.

What did you learn about the effectiveness of micropayments? What has happened in this space since Scott McCloud launched his experiment with BitPass?

You really don't hear much about Bit Pass these days. There seem to have been two nails in the coffin:

1) The Goats.com boys tried a download experiment last year with BitPass. They weren't happy with the response they got, which didn't translate into a lot of money (owing to the nature of micropayments requires a lot of transactions to start adding up to significant money). They also found their normal merchandising sales took a significant hit. It wasn't immediately apparent whether this was due to a focusing of attention on download distracting attention away from the t-shirts or whether people bought the low-margin download, instead of the higher margin merchandise, but the experiment did not go well and Goats.com is a site that's serious about its income, so people paid attention.

2) PayPal now lets you do micropayments with a credit card. This speaks to what, in my mind, is the biggest problem with BitPass - namely you're dumping $3.00 into a glorified bus pass to spend on their system. What if, like me, the only thing you want to get off their merchant system is Scott McCloud's "The Right Number" web comic? Then you've spent fifty cents on the first two parts and you have $2.50 in an account just sitting there, gathering dust. Having to open a separate account is a deterrent to sales. Having to open that account and drop in 12x the amount you intend on actually spending is silly. The power of their network wasn't strong enough to overcome the barriers... and I'm still waiting for the final part of "The Right Number" to come out, for that matter.

But we should back up and talk about micropayments in a more braod sense. People define micropayments a few different ways. Could be a payment under $3. Under $2. Under $1. Under $0.50.

By and large, iTunes and their $0.99 downloads are considered proof that micropayments work. Downloading the pilot for Aquaman at a $1.99 price point may or may not be considered a micropayment, depending on who you talk to.

There has not been a great deal of micropayment experimentation done in comics, past BitPass and I would argue that having that bus pass/minimum deposit system does not make BitPass a valid test.

In a very recent development (as in, within the last two weeks) Slave Labor Graphics has started offering some of their titles as digital download for $0.69 cents a pop. That price not only qualifies as a micropayment, you can also use it as a punchline.

What have been some of the more interesting recent efforts to provide support for the production and distribution of comics?

A few things. Web comics, traditionally, have followed the comic strip model, more than the comic book model.

On the strip side, the syndicates are expending a bit more energy to talk you into buying a subscription to their content. You can get the strips in an e-mail. You can access a deep archive. You have access to a few strips that are web only, including reprints of classic, discontinued strips.

It was a long time coming, but the syndicates are experimenting with what they can do online... after all, if the newspapers are having problems, then the syndicates are having problems.

The most interesting thing on the comic book side of web comics would be the migration of independent comics away from print and onto the web.

I should probably preface this with a thumbnail recap of the foibles of the direct market for comic books.

Most comic books are bought in specialty stores these days, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of direct market sales is controlled by a single distributor - Diamond Comics. Diamond has a catalog which features a handful of the larger publisher (who they have special contractual relationships with) in individual sections in the from of said catalog. Everyone else is mixed in the back of the catalog, alphabetical by publisher name. It makes it very hard to stand out in the catalog, and since there's a lot of crap (and I'm being nice when I say crap... trust me, I've seen the catalog) in that amalgamated section, many retailers don't even bother to read through it, making it even harder for a book to stand out. Sound like a mess for a small publisher? It is.

So when you add the retailer apathy towards independent/small product lines that exists in any industry to the problems with catalog placement in such a centralized distribution market, you can see where your independent artists who publish there own material might get squeezed out.

Well, Diamond recently put some minimum sales requirements on their catalog. This scared some people and we're seeing a migration to web of a few critically acclaimed books that didn't sell well in single issues, but did just fine in trade paperback editions (collected editions, graphic novels, pick your term of preference).

Phil Foglio was the pioneer for this trend _prior_ to Diamond throwing down the sales minimum with http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ , a continuation of his Girl Genius comic.

This has been followed by Carla Speed McNeil's "Aboriginal SF" feature Finder at http://www.lightspeedpress.com/ and Batton Lash's self-explanatory Supernatural Law at http://www.webcomicsnation.com/supernaturallaw/. There will, doubtless, be more to come.

Foglio is more aggressive with embracing non-collected edition merchandising (t-shirts, pins, etc), but over-all, what we're seeing is a shift away from small-print-run monthly comics to web publications aiming for a graphic novel as the end product. Placing material online, one page at a time, and offering an archive offers an infinitely wider distribution network than depending on the owners of an already-small network of comic book shops to stock your product.

Anecdotal evidence is that it helps the sales of the collected editions and the artists haven't felt an additional pinch for not having the traditional comic book's income. (In fairness, the income off the "monthly" editions for a series selling under 3000 copies would likely be minimal and there's a great deal of production and solicitation work that goes away in the straight-to-web scenario).

Do you believe Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory applies to comics? Why or why not?

Absolutely.

At the most basic level, you have the very existence of the collected edition. That's someone buying a book that's really 4 - 12 issues of OLD MATERIAL.

Kick it up a level, and look at Sin City or V for Vendetta. They've been around for years, selling a decent amount of books each year. Then they have films come out, based on the originals, and suddenly you're selling a LOT of Sin City and V for Vendetta. In bookstores, too.

Old properties sitting around and suddenly find an audience? That's the Long Tail in full force.

Back issue sales in print comics could be construed to be the Long Tail, although the collectors market makes it a bit different.

As fiction, and usually serial fiction at that, comics fit into the Long Tail model much better than news periodicals. New readers will seek out the backstory. And with web comics, since the back issues are, essentially, an on-demand feature for most strips, the Long Tail is built in.

Have DC and Marvel backed off of web-based distribution of their content altogether? Does the web have more to offer smaller publishers or independent artists than major companies?

DC offers little more than a few pages of previews. One occasionally hears rumblings, but DC seems to be a little on the web-phobic side, to look at their actions.

Marvel continues to waffle. They stepped back from their web comics, then returned to them with a strategy geared more towards promotion of upcoming collected editions. Their initiative of late have been establishing a wiki and instituting some editorial blogs. On the other hand, Marvel also issued a survey about attitudes towards digital downloads, including questions on how much the consumer would be willing to pay for one. So with Marvel, they're definitely thinking about it, if not jumping to action.

As to what the web offers to whom, that would depend on the context. If you were just looking at the world of people who go to comic shops, the web has a lot more to offer the independents. After all, most of them have trouble getting good physical distribution. This is a no-brainer.

If you look at the whole world, the web opens up possibilities to all, but more to DC and Marvel. Why? Because DC and Marvel are recognizable brands. You will have a magnitude more people seeking out Batman and Spider-Man online, than you will something like Fear Agent or Queen & Country. Your smaller publishers will need to do more marketing to catch up, when using brands that are, effectively, unknown to the mass market. That's not to say that something like Fear Agent couldn't become popular with the mass market, similar to how the Sin City film turned people onto the comics, but its a longer and harder road.

On the flip side, independent comics have more non-super hero fare, and could potentially play to a wider audience. Or at least so goes one line of thinking.

The web does not appear to be a zero sum market for comics at this point.

You've been doing some experiments lately with comics as download. What were the results?

Promising. Again, this is a story that needs some framing, particularly since your blog will have some people far removed from the comics scene.

Rich Johnston is a London (UK)-based ad man who writes copy for radio advertisements by day and also does a gossip column about the comic book industry ( http://comicbookresources.com/columns/?column=13 ). Every year or two, Rich will produce a comic, usually as the writer. While the do alright for small press titles, these aren't books that set the sales charts on fire. After all, Rich is known as a journalist, not a comics scripter, in these circles.

This year, Rich wrote a comic called The Flying Friar. A mild satire of the Superman legend co-mingled with the history of an actual Catholic saint, the book received an unusual amount of publicity in Europe, prior to publication. And when I say unusual, I'm referring to the BBC and the London Times.

It was obvious this book would sell out quickly in a fair number of venues and the publicity would definitely reach areas it wasn't stocked, so it was decided we would offer a PDF download of the book for sale.

As there was a copy on the store shelves, we decided to offer the download for cover price, as not to be undercutting the shelf copies (which would be unethical to do without first announcing the cheaper online version during the solicitation period). We also gave the book a few days on the shelves before announcing the online offering (on Super Bowl Sunday, actually).

Net effect was we've sold a bit over 2% of the initial print orders. The raw number isn't all that amazing, but when taken in context of a small press book, 2% is definitely significant. This was also a month AFTER the media mentions in Europe.

More interestingly, links coming in from comic book websites converted to purchase at a 2% rate. Ask anyone in web retailing, 2% is a healthy conversion percentage. People who came to the site, came with their wallet open. For an eBook, essentially. 20-25% of the audience was from Europe.

As a proof-of-concept piece, this suggests that there is an audience for online comics, and one willing to pay full cover price for an item they can't find locally (or just prefer to have in a digital edition).

It goes without saying that there are no print costs or distributor fees with digital downloads, so the margin is superior to the print version.

This was all accomplished with a slightly known, if not unknown creative team. One wonders what the percentages would be like with a known brand or "name" creative team. The only marketing done was shotgunning some press releases. Again, one wonders what would be possible with a marketing budget. The concept played out soundly.

(Interested parties can view the book at www.richjohnston.com.)

If you were to predict the future of digital comics distribution five years from now, what changes do you expect to see and which present models will have disappeared?

The ball is definitely moving and more people are talking. No two ways about that.

The micropayment "networks" like BitPass will be gone.

PayPal will have forced other credit card processors to adopt micropayment-friendly policies.

At least 50% of monthly comics will have a digital download available. The question here being whether the publishers handle it themselves or farm it out to stores, ala iTunes.

Comic book stores will become more firmly entrenched as a collector-specific market, not a medium-specific market. (That is to say, right now, if you want to read comics, you have to go to a comic shop. In the future, if you want to _collect_ the print editions, the monthlies, you'll need to go to a shop, as will casual readers who have a strong preference to print. Casual readers without the strong preference for print will start migrating to online, where its easier to find the material.)

You will see more creator-owned properties starting out as web properties and migrating to print, much like PVP has, but starting out this way with the expressed intent of following that path.

You will see the web and print industries actually admit that they're both in a market aimed at collected editions/graphic novels as the enduring product.

The wild card here is what happens with the newspaper market and the traditional syndicates.