Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Three)

The following is the third installment of the white paper on youth and participatory culture which I developed for the MacArthur Foundation. You can read the whole paper here. This blog offers more information about the larger Digital Learning and Youth initiative. For the full cites of the materials referenced, please check the white paper. I was assisted in preparing this report by Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison.

Today's installment digs deeper into the relationship between what we are calling the new media literacies and things schools have traditionally taught, and then it starts to lay out the frameworks of social skills and cultural competencies which we think are emerging through youth involvement in participatory culture. Today, I am dealing with the first two of eleven such skills we identify in the report.

These skills are things we think young people need to acquire if they are going to be ready for full participation in the new media cultures. These skills emerge from the existing research on youth, media, and informal learning. We have tried to anchor each skill with a range of examples of existing practices from schools and after school programs which suggest just some of the ways that these skills could be linked to instructional activity. We know many educators are already trying to incorporate these skills and competencies into their pedagogy. We see this white paper as offering them support as well as hopefully more insights that can further inform their efforts.

What Should We Teach?: Rethinking Literacy

"Adolescents need to learn how to integrate knowledge from multiple sources, including music, video, online databases, and other media. They need to think critically about information that can be found nearly instantaneously through out the world. They need to participate in the kinds of collaboration that new communication and information technologies enable, but increasingly demand. Considerations of globalization lead us toward the importance of understanding the perspective of others, developing a historical grounding, and seeing the interconnectedness of economic and ecological systems." -- Bertram C. Bruce (2002)

For the moment, let's take as our starting point a definition of "21st century literacy" offered by the New Media Consortium (2005): "21st century literacy is the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms" We would modify this definition in two ways.

First, textual literacy remains a central skill in the 21st century: the new media literacies include traditional literacies that took shape around print culture as well as the newer forms of literacy that have taken shape around mass and digital media. Much writing about 21st Century Literacies seems to assume that communicating through visual, digital or audiovisual media will displace reading and writing. We fundamentally disagree. Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write. Just as the emergence of written language changed our relationship to orality, and the emergence of printed texts changed our relationship to written language, the emergence of new digital modes of expression changes our relationship to printed texts. In some ways, as researchers such as Rebecca Black and Henry Jenkins have argued, the new digital cultures provide support systems to help youth improve their core competencies as readers and writers. They may provide opportunities for young people to get feedback about their writing and to gain experience in communicating with a larger public, experiences which might once have been restricted to student journalists but are now available to anyone who wants to blog or keep a live journal. So, even on the level of traditional literacies, we need to change our paradigms to reflect the media change which is taking place around us. Re-skilling involves expanding the required competencies, not pushing aside old skills to make room for the new.

Beyond core literacy, students need research skills. Among other things, they need to know how to access books and articles through a library; to take notes on and integrate secondary sources; to assess the reliability of data; to read maps and charts; to make sense of scientific visualizations; to grasp what kinds of information are being conveyed by various systems of representation; to distinguish between fiction and non fiction, fact and opinion; to construct arguments and marshall evidence. If anything, these traditional skills take on even greater importance as students venture beyond collections which have been hand screened by librarians and into the more open space of the web. Some of these skills have traditionally been taught by librarians who, in the modern era, are reconceiving their role -- less as curators of bounded collections and more as information facilitators who can help users find what they need, online or off, and can cultivate good strategies for searching out needed material.

Students also need to develop technical skills -- they need to know how to log on, to search, to use various programs, to focus a camera, to edit footage, to do some basic programming and so forth. Yet, to reduce the new media literacies to these technical skills would be a mistake on the order of confusing penmanship with composition. Since the technologies are undergoing such rapid change, it is probably impossible to codify which technologies or techniques students need to know. Schools have so far conceived of the challenges of digital media primarily in these technical terms with the computer lab displacing the typing classroom but too often, this training occurs in a vacuum cut off from larger notions of literacy or research.

As media literacy advocates have claimed over the past several decades, students also need to acquire a basic understanding of the ways media representations structure our perceptions of the world, the economic and cultural contexts within which mass media is produced and circulated, the motives and goals which shape the media that they consume, and alternative practices which operate outside the commercial mainstream. Such groups have long called for schools to foster a critical understanding of media as one of the most powerful social, economic, political, and cultural institutions of our era. What we are calling here the new media literacies should be taken as an expansion of rather than a substitution for the mass media literacies.

What New Skills Matter?: New Social Skills and Cultural Competencies

All of these skills are necessary, even essential, but they are not sufficient. And that brings us to our second point about the notion of 21st century literacy described above: the new media literacies should be seen as social skills and cultural competencies -- ways of interacting within a larger community -- and not simply as individualized skills to be used for personal expression. The social dimensions of literacy are acknowledged in the New Media Center document only in terms of the distribution of media content. We really need to push further by talking about how meaning emerges collectively and collaboratively in the new media environment and how creativity operates differently in an open-source culture based on sampling, appropriation, transformation, and repurposing. The social production of meaning is more than individual interpretation multiplied; it represents a qualitative difference in the ways we make sense of cultural experience and in that sense, it represents a profound change in how we understand literacy. In such a world, youth need skills at working within social networks, at pooling knowledge within a collective intelligence, at negotiating across cultural differences which shape the governing assumptions of different communities, and of reconciling conflicting bits of data to form a coherent picture of the world around them. We need to integrate these new knowledge cultures into our schools - not only through group work but also through long distance collaborations between different learning communities. Students need to discover what it is like to contribute their own expertise to a process which involves many intelligences, a process which they encounter readily in their participation in fan discussion lists or blogging, for example. Indeed, this may be what is most radical about the new literacies -- that they enable collaboration and knowledge sharing with large-scale communities who may never interact on a face to face basis. Right now, schools are still training autonomous problem-solvers, whereas as students enter the workplace, they are increasingly being asked to work in teams, drawing on different sets of expertise, and collaborating to solve problems.

Changes in the media environment are altering our understanding of literacy and requiring new habits of mind, new ways of processing culture and interacting with the world around us. We are just starting to identify and assess these emerging sets of social skills and cultural competencies. We have only a broad sense of which of these competencies are most apt to matter as young people move from the realms of play and education and into the adult world of work and society. What follows, then, is a provisional list of eleven core skills needed to participate within the new media landscape. These skills have been identified both by reviewing the existing body of scholarship on new media literacies and by surveying the forms of informal learning that are taking place within the participatory culture we are describing here. As suggested above, mastering these skills remains a key step in preparing young people "to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life." In short, these are skills some kids are learning through participatory culture but they are also skills that all kids need to learn if they are going to be equal participants in the world of tomorrow. We identify a range of activities which might be deployed in schools or after school programs, across a range of disciplines and subject matters, to foster these social skills and cultural competencies. These activities are by no means an exhausted list but rather are simply illustrations of the kind of work already being done in each area. Part of the goal of this report is to challenge those who have responsibility for teaching our young people to think more systematically and creatively about the many different ways they might build these skills into their day-to-day activities in ways that are appropriate to the content they want to teach.

Play-- the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem solving

Play, as psychologists and anthropologists have long recognized, has a key role in shaping children's relationship to their bodies, tools, communities, surroundings, and knowledge. Most of children's earliest learning comes through playing with the materials at hand. Through play, children try on roles, experiment with culturally central processes, manipulate core resources, and explore their immediate environments. As they grow older, play can motivate other forms of learning.

Anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt describes what her son and his friend learned through baseball card collecting:

"Sam and Willie learned a lot about phonics that year by trying to decipher surnames on baseball cards, and a lot about cities, states, heights, weights, places of birth, stages of life.... And baseball cards opened the door to baseball books, shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, magazines, histories, biographies, novels, books of jokes, anecdotes, cartoons, even poems.... Literacy began for Sam with the newly pronounceable names on the picture cards and brought him what has been easily the broadest, most varied, most rewarding, and most integrated experience of his 13-year life."

Pratt's account suggests this playful activity motivated three very different kinds of learning. First, the activity itself demanded certain skills and practices, which had clear payoffs for academic subjects. For example, working out batting averages gave Sam an occasion to rehearse his math skills, arranging his cards introduced him to the process of classification, and discussing the cards gave him reason to work on his communication skills. On another level, the cards provided a scaffold, which motivated and shaped his acquisition of other forms of school knowledge. The cards inspired Sam to think about the cities where the teams were located and learn map- reading skills, the history of baseball provided a context through which he understood 20th century American history, and the interest in stadiums introduced some basics about architecture. Third, Sam developed a sense of himself as a learner: "He learned the meaning of expertise, of knowing about something well enough that you can start a conversation with a stranger and feel sure of holding your own" (Pratt, 1991, p. 34).

Game designer Scot Osterweil (The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis) has described the mental attitude which surrounds play as highly conducive for learning:

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

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

While to date much of the discussion of games and education have seen games as motivating kids to learn other kinds of content (Pratt's move from baseball cards to geography), there has been a growing recognition among researchers that play itself -- as a means of exploring and processing knowledge, as a mode of problem-solving -- may be a valuable skill children need to master as preparation for subsequent roles and responsibilities in the adult world. In other words, by itself, play is helpful for understanding a content area in the sense that it allows a player to "experiment" with a learning environment. Playing with baseball cards won't teach a student the principles of statistics, but it will orient him or her to the experience of thinking about statistical variations.

Part of what makes play valuable as a mode of problem solving and learning is that it lowers the emotional stakes of failing: players are encouraged to suspend some of the real world consequences of the represented actions, to take risks and learn through trial and error. The underlying logic is one of die and do over. As literacy expert James Gee has noted, children often feel locked out of the worlds described in their textbooks through the depersonalized and abstract prose used to describe them. Games construct compelling worlds players move through. Players feel a part of those worlds and have some stake in the events unfolding there. Games not only provide a rationale for learning: what players learn is put immediately to use to solve compelling problems with real consequences in the world of the game. Game designer Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims) has argued, "In some sense, a game is nothing but a set of problems. We're actually selling people problems for 40 bucks a pop....And the more interesting games in my opinion are the ones that have a larger solution space. In other words, there's not one specific way to solve a puzzle, but, in fact, there's an infinite range of solutions. .... The game world becomes an external artifact of their internal representation of the problem space." For Wright, the player's hunger for challenge and complexity motivates them to pick up the game in the first place.

Games follow something akin to the scientific process: Players are asked to make their own discoveries and then apply what they learn to new contexts. No sooner does a player enter a game than she begins identifying core conditions and looking for problems which must be addressed; based on the available information, the player poses a certain hypothesis about how the world works and what are the best ways of bringing its properties under their control; she tests and refines that hypothesis through actions in the game which either fail or succeed; the player refines the model of the world as she goes. More sophisticated games allow her to do something more -- to experiment with the properties of the world, framing new possibilities which involve manipulation of relevant variables and see what happens. Meta-gaming, the discourse which surrounds game play, provides a context for players to reflect upon and articulate what they have learned through game play. Here, for example, is how Kurt Squire describes the meta-gaming which occurs around Civilization III: "Players enroll as advanced players, having spent dozens, if not hundreds of hours with the game and having mastered its basic rules. As players begin to identify and exploit loopholes, they propose and implement changes to the games' rules, identify superior strategies, and invent new game rule systems, including custom modifications and scenarios."

Early readers of this report have expressed some skepticism that schools should or could teach young people how to play. This resistance reflects the confusion between play as a source of fun and play as a form of engagement and experimentation. While it is certainly not a bad idea to introduce more fun into our schools, we are really focusing here on a mode of active engagement, one which encourages experimentation and risk-taking, one which sees the process of solving a problem to be as important as finding the answer, one which offers clearly defined goals and roles which encourage strong identifications and emotional investments. As we will see, this form of play is closely related to two other important skills, Simulation and Performance.

What Might Be Done:

Educators (in school and out) tap into play as a skill when they encourage free-form experimentation and open-ended speculation.

*

History teachers ask students to entertain alternative history scenarios, speculating on what might have happened if Germany had won World War II or if native Americans had colonized Europe. Such questions can lead to productive explorations centering on why certain events occurred the ways that they did and what impact they had. Such questions also don't have right and wrong answers; they emphasize creative thinking rather than memorization; they allow diverse levels of engagement; they allow students to feel less intimidated by adult expertise; yet they also lend themselves to the construction of arguments and the mobilization of evidence.

*Art and design students are turned loose with a diverse array of everyday materials and encouraged to use them to solve a specified design problem. Such activities encourage students to revisit familiar materials and everyday objects with fresh perspectives, to think through common problems from multiple directions, and to respect alternative responses to the same challenge. This approach is closely associated with the innovative design work of Ideo, a Palo Alto consultant, but can also be seen in various reality television programs, such as Project Runway or The Iron Chef, which require contestants to adopt distinctive and multiple approaches to shared problems.

*Games offer the potential to learn through a new form of direct experience. Physics teachers use the game Supercharged, which was developed as part of the MIT Games to Teach initiative, to help students to better understand core principles of electromagnetism. As a means for learning the laws of electromagnetism through first-hand experience, students navigate electromagnetic mazes by planting electrical charges that attract or repel their vehicles. Teachers can then build on this intuitive and experiential learning in the classroom, introducing equations, diagrams, or visualizations that help them to better understand the underlying principles that they are deploying and then sending them back to play through the levels again and improve their performance.

Simulation -- the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes

New media provides powerful new ways of representing and manipulating information. New forms of simulation expand our cognitive capacity, allowing us to deal with larger bodies of information, to experiment with more complex configurations of data, to form hypotheses quickly and test them against different variables in real time. The emergence of systems-based thinking across a range of academic and professional fields has gone hand in hand with the development of digital simulations. Simulations can be effective in representing known knowledge or in testing emerging theories. Because simulations are dynamic, and because they are governed by the systematic application of grounding assumptions, they can be a tool for discovery as researchers observe the emergent properties of these virtual worlds.We learn through simulations by a process of trial and error: new discoveries lead researchers to refine their models, tweaking particular variables, trying out different contingencies. Educators have always known that students learn more through direct observation and experimentation than from reading about something in a textbook or listening to a lecture. Simulations broaden the kinds of experiences users can have with compelling data, giving us a chance to see and do things which would be impossible in the real world.

Contemporary video games allow kids to play with sophisticated simulations and in the process, to develop an intuitive understanding of how we might use simulations to test our assumptions about the way the world works. John Seely Brown tells the story of a 16 year old boy, Colin, for whom the game, Caesar III, had shaped his understanding of the ancient world:

"Colin said: "I don't want to study Rome in high school. Hell, I build Rome every day in my on-line game" ... Of course, we could dismiss this narrative construction as not really being a meaningful learning experience, but a bit later he and his dad were engaged in a discussion about the meaningfulness of class distinctions - lower, middle, etc - and his dad stopped and asked him what class actually means to him. Colin responded: "Well, it's how close you are to the Senate." "Where did you learn that, Colin?" he said, "The closer you are physically to the Senate building, the plazas, the gardens, or the Triumphal Arch raises the desirability of the land, makes you upper class and produces plebians. It's based on simple rules of location to physical objects in the games (Caesar III)". Then, he added, "I know that in the real world the answer is more likely how close you are to the senators, themselves - that defines class. But it's kinda the same."

Colin's story helps us to see two important aspects of simulations for learning: first, students often find simulations far more compelling than more traditional ways of representing knowledge; consequently, they spend more time engaging with them and make more discoveries. Second, students experience what they have learned from a robust simulation as their own discoveries. These simulations expose players to powerful new ways of seeing the world and encourage them to engage in a process of modeling which is central to the way modern science operates. Many contemporary games -- Railroad Tycoons for instance -- incorporate spread sheets, maps, graphs and charts, which students must learn to use in order to play the game. Students are thus motivated to move back and forth across this complex and integrated information system, acting upon the simulated environment on the basis of information gleamed from a wide range of different representations.

As games researcher Eric Klopfer cautions, however, simulations enhance learning only if we understand how to read them:

"As simulations inform us on anything from global warming to hurricane paths to homeland security, we must know how to interpret this information. If we know that simulations give us information on probabilities we can make better decisions. If we understand the assumptions that go into simulations we can better evaluate that evidence and act accordingly. Of course this applies to decision makers who must act upon that information (police, government, insurance, etc.); it also is important that each citizen should be able to make appropriate decisions themselves based on that information. As it is now, such data is either interpreted by the general public as 'fact' or on the contrary 'contrived data with an agenda.' Neither of these perspectives is useful and instead some ability to analyze and weigh such evidence is critical. Simulations are only as good as their underlying models. In a world of competing simulations, we need to know how to critically assess the reliability and credibility of different models for representing the world around us."

(personal correspondence).

Students who deploy simulations through learning have more flexibility in being able to customize models and manipulate data to explore questions which have captured their own curiosity. There is a thin line between reading a simulation (which may involve changing variables and testing outcomes) and designing simulations. As new modeling technologies become more widely available and as the toolkits needed to construct such models are simplified, students have the opportunity to construct their own simulations. Ian Bogost argues that computer games foster what he calls procedural literacy -- a capacity to restructure and reconfigure knowledge, to look at problems from multiple vantage points, and through this process, to develop a greater systemic understanding of the rules and procedures which shape our everyday experience. Bogost writes, "Engendering true procedural literacy means creating multiple opportunities for learners --- children and adults -- to understand and experiment with reconfigurations of basic building blocks of all kinds". Young people are learning how to work with simulations through their game play and schools should build upon such knowledge to help them to become critical readers and effective designers of simulation and modeling tools. They need to be given a critical vocabulary for understanding the kind of thought experiments which get performed through simulations and the way these new digital resources inform research across a range of disciplines.

What Might Be Done:

Students need to learn how to manipulate and interpret existing simulations and how to construct their own dynamic models of real world processes.

*Teachers in a business class ask kids to make imaginary investments in the stock market and then monitor actual business reports to track the rise and falls of their "holdings." This well-established classroom practice mirrors what kids do when they form fantasy sports leagues, tracking the performance of players on the sports page to score their results, and engaging in imaginary trades to enhance their overall standings. Both of these practices share a movement between imaginary scenarios (pretend investments or teams) and a real world data set. The simulated activities introduce them to the logics by which their real world counterparts operate and to actual data sets, research processes, and information sources.

*Groups such as OnRampArts in Los Angeles, Urban Games Academy in Baltimore and Atlanta, or Global Kidz in New York City involve kids in the design of their own games. These groups see a value in having kids translate a body of knowledge -- the history of the settlement of the New World in the case of OnRampArts's Tropical America -- into the activities and iconography of games. Here, students are encouraged to think of alternative ways of modeling knowledge and learn to use the vocabulary of game design to represent central aspects of the world around them.

*Simulation games like SimCity provide a context for learning a skill Andy Clark calls "embracing co-control". In this game, creating and maintaining a city requires exerting various forms of indirect control. Instead of having a top-down control to design a happy thriving city, the player must engage in a bottom-up process, where the player "grows" a city by manipulating such variables as zoning and land prices. It is only through gaining a familiarity with all the parts of the system, and how they interact, that the player is able to nudge the flow in a way that respects the flow. Such a skill can be understood as a process of "com[ing] to grips with decentralized emergent order" , a mandatory skill for understanding complex systems.

*Students in New Mexico facing a summer of raging forest fires throughout their home state used simulations to understand the way flames spread. Manipulating factors such as density of trees, wind and rain, they saw how even minute changes to the environmental conditions could have profound effects on fire growth. This helped them understand the efficacy of common techniques such as forest thinning and controlled burns.

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part Two)

What follows is a second excerpt from the white paper which I authored, along with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, for the MacArthur Foundation. The report is intended to offer a provocation for educators at all levels to think about how our pedagogical practices need to shift to reflect the demands of a more participatory culture. In Part One, I outlined some of the changes that are taking place in the media landscape and the ways they impacted young people. In Part Two, I make the case for why adult intervention is needed and why youth will not be able to make these adjustments all on their own. My hope is that the release of this report will stimulate reflection and discussion among educators, parents, and students about the ways media education is or is not being taught through school and after-school programs. I hope this discussion will also be of interest to the many other groups who read this blog -- many of whom are helping to shape the participatory culture we are discussing here and thus have some responsibility for thinking about how we insure that every youth is given a chance to participate.

As always, I welcome questions and comments. I am going to try to respond to any questions I receive once I have rolled out all of the parts of this report via the blog. While I have excluded sources from the blog version to insure ease of reading, you can see a full bibliography in the downloaded document.

Why We Should Teach Media Literacy: Three Core Problems

Some defenders of the new digital cultures have acted as though youth can simply acquire these skills on their own without adult intervention or supervision. Children and youth do know more about these new media environments than most parents and teachers. In fact, we do not need to protect them so much as engage them in critical dialogues that help them to articulate more fully their intuitive understandings of these experiences. To say that children are not victims of media is not to say that they, any more than anyone else, have fully mastered what are, after all, complex and still emerging social practices.

There are three core flaws with the laissez faire approach. The first is that it does not address the fundamental inequalities in young people's access to new media technologies and the opportunities for participation they represent (what we call the participation gap). The second is that it assumes that children are actively reflecting on their media experiences and can thus articulate what they learn from their participation (what we call the transparency problem). The third problem with the laissez faire approach is that it assumes children, on their own, can develop the ethical norms needed to cope with a complex and diverse social environment online (the ethics challenge). Any attempt to provide meaningful media education in the age of participatory culture must begin by addressing these three core concerns.

The Participation Gap

Cities around the country are providing wireless Internet access for their residents. Some cities, such as Tempe, Arizona, charge users a fee: others, such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Cambridge, plan to provide high-speed wireless Internet access free of charge. In an interview on PBS's Nightly News Hour in November 2005, Philadelphia mayor John Street spoke of the link between Internet access and educational achievement:

Philadelphia will allow low-income families, families that are on the cusp of their financial capacity, to be able to be fully and completely connected. We believe that our public school children should be--their families have to be connected or else they will fall behind, and, in many cases, never catch up.

Philadelphia's Emergency People's Shelter (EPS) is ahead of the curve; the nonprofit group's free network access serves shelter residents and the surrounding neighborhood. Gloria Guard of EPS said,

What we realized is if we can't get computers into the homes of our constituents and our neighbors and of this neighborhood, there are children in those households who will not be able to keep up in the marketplace. They won't be able to keep up with their schoolmates. They won't be able to even apply for college. We thought it was really important to get computer skills and connection to the Internet into as many homes as possible

However, simply passing out technology is not enough. Expanding access to computers will help bridge some of the gaps between digital haves and have nots, but only in a context in which free wi-fi is coupled with new educational initiatives to help youth and adults learn how to use those tools effectively.

Throughout the 1990s, the country focused enormous energy in combating the digital divide in technological access. The efforts have ensured that most American youth have at least minimal access to networked computers at school or in public libraries. However, as a 2005 report on children's online experience in the United Kingdom concluded:

No longer are children and young people only or even mainly divided by those with or without access, though 'access' is a moving target in terms of speed, location, quality and support, and inequalities in access do persist. Increasingly, children and young people are divided into those for whom the Internet is an increasingly rich, diverse, engaging and stimulating resource of growing importance in their lives and those for whom it remains a narrow, unengaging, if occasionally useful, resource of rather less significance

What a person can accomplish with an outdated machine in a public library with mandatory filtering software and no opportunity for storage or transmission pales in comparison to what person can accomplish with a home computer with unfettered Internet access, high bandwidth, and continuous connectivity. (Current legislation to block access to social networking software in schools and public libraries will further widen the participation gap.) The school system's inability to close this participation gap has negative consequences for everyone involved. On the one hand, those youth who are most advanced in media literacies are often stripped of their technologies and robbed of their best techniques for learning in an effort to ensure a uniform experience for all in the classroom. On the other hand, many youth who have had no exposure to these new kinds of participatory cultures outside school find themselves struggling to keep up with their peers.

Wartella, O'Keefe, and Scantlin reached a similar conclusion:

Closing the digital divide will depend less on technology and more on providing the skills and content that is most beneficial....Children who have access to home computers demonstrate more positive attitudes towards computers, show more enthusiasm and report more enthusiasm and ease when using computers than those who do not.

More often than not, those youth who have developed the most comfort with the online world are the ones who dominate classroom use of computers, pushing aside less technically skilled classmates. We would be wrong, however, to see this as a simple binary: youth who have technological access and those who do not. Wartella and coauthors note, for example, that game systems make their way into a growing number of working-class homes, even if laptops and personal computers do not. Working-class youth may have access to some of the benefits of play described here, but they may still lack the ability to produce and distribute their own media.

In a 2005 report prepared for the MacArthur Foundation, Lyman finds that children's experiences online are shaped by a range of social factors, including class, age, gender, race, nationality, and point of access. He notes, for example, that middle-class youth are more likely to rely on resources and assistance from peers and family within their own homes, and thus seem more autonomous at school than working-class children, who must often rely more heavily on teachers and peers to make up for a lack of experience at home. The middle-class children thus seem "naturally" superior in their use of technology, further amplifying their own self-confidence in their knowledge.

Historically, those youth who had access to books or classical recordings in their homes, whose parents took them to concerts or museums, or who engaged in dinner conversation developed, almost without conscious consideration, skills that helped them perform well in school. Those experiences, which were widespread among the middle class and rare among the working class, became a kind of class distinction, which shaped how teachers perceived students. These new forms of cultural participation may be playing a similar role. These activities shape what skills and knowledge students bring into the classroom, and in this fashion determine how teachers and peers perceive these students. Castells tells us about youth who are excluded from these experiences:

"Increasingly, as computer use is ever less a lifestyle option, ever more an everyday necessity, inability to use computers or find information on the web is a matter of stigma, of social exclusion; revealing not only changing social norms but also the growing centrality of computers to work, education and politics"

Writing on how contemporary industry values our "portfolios" as much as our knowledge, Gee suggests that what gives elite teens their head start is their capacity to:

pick up a variety of experiences (e.g., the "right" sort of summer camps, travel, and special activities), skills (not just school-based skills, but a wide variety of interactional, aesthetic, and technological skills), and achievements (honors, awards, projects) in terms of which they can help to define themselves as worthy of admission to elite educational institutions and worthy of professional success later in life".

They become adept at identifying opportunities for leadership and accomplishment; they adjust quickly to new situations, embrace new roles and goals, and interact with people of diverse backgrounds. Even if these opportunities are not formally valued by our educational institutions or listed on one's resume when applying for a job, the skills and self confidence gathered by moving across all of these online communities surely manifest themselves in other ways, offering yet another leg up to youth on one side and another disadvantage to youth on the opposite side of the participation gap.

The Transparency Problem

Although youth are becoming more adept at using media as resources (for creative expression, research, social life, etc.), they often are limited in their ability to examine the media themselves. Turkle was among the first to call attention to this transparency problem:

Games such as SimLife teach players to think in an active way about complex phenomena (some of them 'real life,' some of them not) as dynamic, evolving systems. But they also encourage people to get used to manipulating a system whose core assumptions they do not see and which may or may not be 'true'.

Not everyone agrees. In an essay on the game Sim City, Friedman contends that game players seek to identify and exploit the rules of the system in order to beat the game. The antagonistic relationship between player and game designer means that game players may be more suspicious of the rules structuring their experiences than are the consumers of many other kinds of media. Conversations about games expose flaws in games' construction, which may also lead to questions about their governing assumptions. Subsequent games have, in fact, allowed players to reprogram the core models. One might argue, however, that there is a difference between trying to master the rules of the game and recognizing the ways those rules structure our perception of reality. It may be much easier to see what is in the game than to recognize what the game leaves out.

This issue of transparency crops up regularly in the first wave of field reports on the pedagogical use of games. Shrier developed a location-specific game for teaching American history, which was played in Lexington, Massachusetts; her game was designed to encourage reflection on competing and contradictory accounts of who fired the first shot of the American Revolution. The project asked students to experience the ways historians interpret evidence and evaluate competing truths. Such debates emerged spontaneously around the game-play experience. Yet Shrier was surprised by another phenomenon, the young people took the game's representation of historical evidence at face value, acting as if all of the information in the game was authentic.

Shrier offers several possible explanations for this transparency problem, ranging from the legacy of textbook publishing, where instructional materials did not encourage users to question their structuring or their interpretation of the data, to the tendency to "suspend our disbelief" in order to have a more immersive play experience. Squire found similar patterns when he sought to integrate the commercial game, Civilization III, into world history classes. Students were adept at formulating "what if" hypotheses, which they tested through their game play. Yet, they lacked a vocabulary to critique how the game itself constructed history, and they had difficulty imagining how other games might represent the same historical processes in different terms. In both cases, students were learning how to read information from and through games, but they were not yet learning how to read games as texts, constructed with their own aesthetic norms, genre conventions, ideological biases, and codes of representation. These findings suggest the importance of coupling the pedagogical use of new media technologies with a greater focus on media literacy education.

These concerns about the transparency of games, even when used in instructional contexts, are closely related to concerns about how young people (or indeed, any of us) assess the quality of information we receive. As Hobbs has suggested, "Determining the truth value of information has become increasingly difficult in an age of increasing diversity and ease of access to information." More recent work by the Harvard Good Works Project has found that issues of format and design are often more important than issues of content in determining how much credibility young people attach to the content of a particular website. This research suggests some tendency to read "professional" sites as more credible than "amateur" produced materials, although students lack a well developed set of standards for distinguishing between the two. In her recent book, The Internet Playground, Seiter expresses concern that young people were finding it increasingly difficult to separate commercial from noncommercial content in online environments: "The Internet is more like a mall than a library; it resembles a gigantic public relations collection more than it does an archive of scholars" .

Increasingly, content comes to us already branded, already shaped through an economics of sponsorship, if not overt advertising. We do not know how much these commercial interests influence what we see and what we don't see. Commercial interests even shape the order of listings on search engines in ways that are often invisible to those who use them. Increasingly, opportunities to participate online are branded such that even when young people produce and share their own media, they do so under terms set by commercial interests. Children, Seiter found, often had trouble identifying advertising practices in the popular Neopets site, in part because the product references were so integrated into the game. The children were used to a world where commercials stood apart from the entertainment content and equated branding with banner advertisements. This is where the transparency issue becomes especially dangerous. Seiter concludes, "The World Wide Web is a more aggressive and stealthy marketeer to children than television ever was, and children need as much information about its business practices as teachers and parents can give them". Children need a safe space within which they can master the skills they need as citizens and consumers, as they learn to parse through messages from self-interested parties and separate fact from falsehood as they begin to experiment with new forms of creative expression and community participation.

The Ethics Challenge

In Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work, Fischman and coauthors discuss how young journalists learn the ethical norms that will define their future professional practice. These writers, they find, acquired their skills most often by writing for high school newspapers. For the most part, the authors suggest, student journalists worked in highly cohesive and insulated settings. Their work was supervised, for better or worse, by a range of adult authorities, some interested in promoting the qualities of good journalism, some concerned with protecting the reputation of the school. Their work was free of commercial constraints and sheltered from outside exposure. The ethical norms and professional practices they were acquiring were well understood by the adults around them.

Now, consider how few of those qualities might be applied to the emerging participatory cultures. In a world in which the line between consumers and producers is blurring, young people are finding themselves in situations that no one would have anticipated a decade or two ago. Their writing is much more open to the public and can have more far-reaching consequences. The young people are creating new modes of expression that are poorly understood by adults, and as a result they receive little to no guidance or supervision. The ethical implications of these emerging practices are fuzzy and ill-defined. Young people are discovering that information they put online to share with their friends can bring unwelcome attention from strangers.

In professional contexts, professional organizations are the watchdog of ethical norms. Yet in more casual settings, there is seldom a watchdog. No established set of ethical guidelines shapes the actions of bloggers and podcasters, for example. How should teens decide what they should or should not post about themselves or their friends on Live Journal or MySpace? Different online communities have their own norms about what information should remain within the group and what can be circulated more broadly, and many sites depend on self-disclosure to police whether the participants are children or adults. Yet, many young people seem willing to lie to access those communities.

Ethics become much murkier in game spaces, where identities are assumed and actions are fictive, designed to allow broader rein to explore darker fantasies. That said, unwritten and often imperfectly shared norms exist about acceptable or unacceptable conduct. Essays, such as Julian Dibbel's "A Rape in Cyberspace", Henry Jenkins's "Playing Politics in Alphaville", and Always-black's "Bow Nigger" offer reminders that participants in these worlds understand the same experiences in very different terms and follow different ethical norms as they face off against each other.

In Making Good, Fischman and coauthors found that high school journalists felt constrained by the strong social ties in their high school, unwilling to publish some articles they believed would be received negatively by their peers or that might disrupt the social dynamics of their society. What constraints, if any, apply to in online realms? Do young people feel that same level of investment in their gaming guilds or their fan communities? Or does the ability to mask one's identity or move from one community to another mean there are less immediate consequences for antisocial behavior?

One important goal of media education should be to encourage young people to become more reflective about the ethical choices they make as participants and communicators and the impact they have on others. We may, in the short run, have to accept that cyberspace's ethical norms are in flux: we are taking part in a prolonged experiment in what happens when one lowers the barriers of entry into a communication landscape. For the present moment, asking and working through questions of ethical practices may be more valuable than the answers produced because the process will help everyone to recognize and articulate the different assumptions that guide their behavior.

As we think about meaningful pedagogical intervention, we must keep in mind three core concerns:

• How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future of our society?

• How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understanding of how media shapes perceptions of the world?

• How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and as participants in online communities?

To address these challenges, we must rethink which core skills and competencies we want our children to acquire in their learning experiences. The new participatory culture places new emphasis on familiar skills that have long been central to American education; it also requires teachers to pay greater attention to the social skills and cultural competencies that are emerging in the new media landscape. In the next sections, we provide a framework for thinking about the type of learning that should occur if we are to address the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenges.

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Part One)

I spent Thursday in New York speaking on a panel with the University of Chicago's Nicole Pinkard and the University of Southern California's Mimi Ito as part of the public launch of the MacArthur Foundation's exciting slate of new initiatives in the area of youth, learning, and digital media. People interested in understanding the full context of this initiative should keep an eye on the Foundation's new blog. The event was simulcast on Second Life and on Teen Second Life.

This is the context in which we have been pursuing our own Project nml (New Media Literacies) initiatives which I have been discussing from time to time in this blog. The New York City press event was the launching point for a white paper which I wrote for MacArthur identifying what we see as the key social skills and cultural competencies which young people need to be full participants in convergence culture. In Convergence Culture, I devote one chapter to thinking about the impact of participatory culture on our current understandings of education. Here I -- and my collaborators Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison -- have been able to dig much deeper into the pedagogical implications of the world I discuss in the book as well as to lay out some of the key insights from contemporary research on informal learning, games-based pedagogy, online communities, and participatory culture.

My hope is that this white paper will spark conversations among educators at all levels -- in schools and in after school programs, in public institutions, and in churches and other community centers -- about how we need to change our practices to reflect the new ways that young people are engaging with the world around them.

In hopes of sparking such a conversation, I am publishing the white paper in installments through my blog. This first installment sets the stage, describing some of the challenges and opportunities participatory culture represents in the lives of our young people.

For those of you who are impatient and want to read the whole report at once, you can download it here.

The Needed Skills in the New Media Culture

"If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, it could be said that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life."

-- New London Group

Ashley Richardson was a middle-schooler when she ran for president of Alphaville. She wanted to control a government that had more than 100 volunteer workers and that made policies that affected thousands of people. She debated her opponent on National Public Radio. She found herself in the center of a debate about the nature of citizenship, about how to ensure honest elections, and about the future of democracy in a digital age. Alphaville is the largest city in the popular multiplayer game, The Sims Online.

Heather Lawver was 14 years old. She wanted to help other young people improve their reading and writing skills. She established an online publication with a staff of more than 100 people across the world. Her project was embraced by teachers and integrated into their curriculum. She emerged as an important spokesperson in a national debate about intellectual property. The website Lawver created was a school newspaper for the fictional Hogwarts, the location for the popular Harry Potter books.

Blake Ross was 14 years old when he was hired for a summer internship at Netscape. By that point, he already had developed computer programming skills and published his own website. Frustrated by many of the corporate decisions made at Netscape, Ross decided to design his own web browser. Through the joint participation of thousands of other volunteer youth and adults working on his project worldwide, the Firefox web browser was born. Today, Firefox enjoys more than 60 times as many users as Netscape Navigator. By age 19, Ross had the venture capital needed to launch his own start-up company. His interest in computing was sparked by playing the popular video game, Sim City.

Josh Meeter was about to graduate from high school when he completed the claymation animation for Awards Showdown, which subsequent was widely circulated on the web. Meeter negotiated with composer John Williams for the rights to use excerpts from his film scores. By networking, he was able to convince Stephen Spielberg to watch the film, and it was later featured on the Spielberg's Dreamworks website. Meeter is now starting work on his first feature film.

Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are the future politicians, activists, educators, writers, entrepreneurs, and media makers. The skills they acquired--learning how to campaign and govern; how to read, write, edit, and defend civil liberties; how to program computers and run a business; how to make a movie and get it distributed--are the kinds of skills we might hope our best schools would teach. Yet, none of these activities took place in schools. Indeed, many of these youth were frustrated with school; some dropped out and others chose to graduate early. They developed much of the skill and knowledge through their participation in the informal learning communities of fans and gamers.

Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are exceptional individuals. In any given period, exceptional individuals will break all the rules and enjoy off-the-charts success--even at surprisingly young ages. But, Richardson, Lawver, Ross, and Meeter are perhaps less exceptional than one might at first imagine.

According to a 2005 study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life project, more than one-half of all American teens--and 57 percent of teens who use the Internet--could be considered media creators. For the purpose of the study, a media creator is someone who created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. Most have done two or more of these activities. One-third of teens share what they create online with others, 22 percent have their own websites, 19 percent blog, and 19 percent remix online content.

Contrary to popular stereotypes, these activities are not restricted to white suburban males. In fact, urban youth (40 percent) are somewhat more likely than their suburban (28 percent) or rural (38 percent) counterparts to be media creators. Girls aged 15-17 (27 percent) are more likely than boys their age (17 percent) to be involved with blogging or other social activities online. The Pew researchers found no significant differences in participation by race-ethnicity.

If anything, the Pew study undercounts the number of American young people who are embracing the new participatory culture. The Pew study did not consider newer forms of expression, such as podcasting, game modding or machinima. Nor did it count other forms of creative expression and appropriation, such as music sampling in the hip hop community. These forms are highly technological but use other tools and tap other networks for their production and distribution. The study does not include even more widespread practices, such as computer or video gaming, that can require an extensive focus on constructing and performing as fictional personas. Our focus here is not on individual accomplishment but rather the emergence of a cultural context that supports widespread participation in the production and distribution of media.

Enabling Participation

"While to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat, games-- and here they are already content producers. Too often neglected, except as a source of risk, these communication and entertainment focused activities, by contrast with the information-focused uses at the centre of public and policy agendas, are driving emerging media literacy. Through such uses, children are most engaged-- multi-tasking, becoming proficient at navigation and manoeuvre so as to win, judging their participation and that of others, etc.... In terms of personal development, identity, expression and their social consequences-- participation, social capital, civic culture- these are the activities that serve to network today's younger generation." -- Sonia Livingstone.

Participatory Culture

For the moment, let's define participatory culture as one:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2. With strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others

3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

4. Where members believe that their contributions matter

5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.

In such a world, many will only dabble, some will dig deeper, and still others will master the skills that are most valued within the community. The community itself, however, provides strong incentives for creative expression and active participation. Historically, we have valued creative writing or art classes because they help to identify and train future writers and artists, but also because the creative process is valuable on its own; every child deserves the chance to express him- or herself through words, sounds, and images, even if most will never write, perform, or draw professionally. Having these experiences, we believe, changes the way youth think about themselves and alters the way they look at work created by others.

Most public policy discussion of new media have centered on technologies--tools and their affordances. The computer is discussed as a magic black box with the potential to create a learning revolution (in the positive version) or a black hole that consumes resources that might better be devoted to traditional classroom activities (in the more critical version). Yet, as the quote above suggests, media operate in specific cultural and institutional contexts that determine how and why they are used. We may never know whether a tree makes a sound when it falls in a forest with no one around. But clearly, a computer does nothing in the absence of a user. The computer does not operate in a vacuum. Injecting digital technologies into the classroom necessarily affects our relationship with every other communications technology, changing how we feel about what can or should be done with pencils and paper, chalk and blackboard, books, films, and recordings.

Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them. The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies, and the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology may inspire certain uses. Yet, these activities become widespread only if the culture also supports them, if they fill recurring needs at a particular historical juncture. It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools.

That is why we focus in this paper on the concept of participatory cultures rather than on interactive technologies. Interactivity is a property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture. Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends.

We are using participation as a term that cuts across educational practices, creative processes, community life, and democratic citizenship. Our goals should be to encourage youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture. Many young people are already part of this process through:

Affiliations -- memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media, such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace).

Expressions -- producing new creative forms, such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups).

Collaborative Problem-solving -- working together in teams, formal and informal, to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling).

Circulations -- Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)

The MacArthur Foundation has launched an ambitious effort to document these activities and the roles they play in young people's lives. We do not want to preempt or duplicate that effort here. For the moment, it is sufficient to argue that each of these activities contains opportunities for learning, creative expression, civic engagement, political empowerment, and economic advancement.

Through these various forms of participatory culture, young people are acquiring skills that will serve them well in the future. Participatory culture is reworking the rules by which school, cultural expression, civic life, and work operate. A growing body of work has focused on the value of participatory culture and its long-term impact on children's understanding of themselves and the world around them.

Affinity Spaces

Many have argued that these new participatory cultures represent ideal learning environments. James Paul Gee calls such informal learning cultures "affinity spaces," asking why people learn more, participate more actively, engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with the contents of their textbooks. Affinity spaces offer powerful opportunities for learning, Gee argues, because they are sustained by common endeavors that bridge differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, and because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with each participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine their existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others. For example, Rebecca Black finds that the "beta-reading" (or editorial feedback) provided by online fan communities helps contributors grow as writers, mastering not only the basic building blocks of sentence construction and narrative structure, but also pushing them to be close readers of the works that inspire them. Participants in the beta-reading process learn both by receiving feedback on their own work and by giving feedback to others, creating an ideal peer-to-peer learning community.

Affinity spaces are distinct from formal educational systems in several ways. While formal education is often conservative, the informal learning within popular culture is often experimental. While formal education is static, the informal learning within popular culture is innovative. The structures that sustain informal learning are more provisional, those supporting formal education are more institutional. Informal learning communities can evolve to respond to short-term needs and temporary interests, whereas the institutions supporting public education have remained little changed despite decades of school reform. Informal learning communities are ad hoc and localized; formal educational communities are bureaucratic and increasingly national in scope. We can move in and out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education.

Affinity spaces are also highly generative environments, from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge Andrew Blau's 2005 report on The Future of Independent Media argued that this kind of grassroots creativity was an important engine of cultural transformation:

The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers...A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.

Blau's report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution. The Pew study suggests something more: young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy. Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media, toward one in which everyone has a more active stake in the culture that is produced.

David Buckingham argues that young people's lack of interest in news and their disconnection from politics reflects their perception of disempowerment.

"By and large, young people are not defined by society as political subjects, let alone as political agents. Even in the areas of social life that affect and concern them to a much greater extent than adults--most notably education--political debate is conducted almost entirely 'over their heads'"

Politics, as constructed by the news, becomes a spectator sport, something we watch but do not do. Yet, the new participatory culture offers many opportunities for youth to engage in civic debates, to participate in community life, to become political leaders, even if sometimes only through the "second lives" offered by massively multiplayer games or online fan communities.

Empowerment comes from making meaningful decisions within a real civic context: we learn the skills of citizenship by becoming political actors and gradually coming to understand the choices we make in political terms. Today's children learn through play the skills they will apply to more serious tasks later. The challenge is how to connect decisions in the context of our everyday lives with the decisions made at local, state, or national levels. The step from watching television news and acting politically seems greater than the transition from being a political actor in a game world to acting politically in the "real world."

Participating in these affinity spaces also has economic implications. We suspect that young people who spend more time playing within these new media environments will feel greater comfort interacting with one another via electronic channels, will have greater fluidity in navigating information landscapes, will be better able to multitask and make rapid decisions about the quality of information they are receiving, and will be able to collaborate better with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. These claims are borne out by research conducted by Beck and Wade into the ways that early game play experiences affect subsequent work habits and professional activities. Beck and Wade conclude that gamers were more open to taking risks and engaging in competition but also more open to collaborating with others and more willing to revise earlier assumptions.

This focus on the value of participating within the new media culture stands in striking contrast to recent reports from the Kaiser Family Foundation that have bemoaned the amount of time young people spend on "screen media." The Kaiser reports collapse a range of different media consumption and production activities into the general category of "screen time" without reflecting very deeply on the different degrees of social connectivity, creativity, and learning involved. We do not mean to dismiss the very real concerns they raise: that mediated experience may squeeze out time for other learning activities; that contemporary children often lack access to real world play spaces, with adverse health consequences, that adults may inadequately supervise and interact with children about the media they consume (and produce); or concerns about the moral values and commercialization in much contemporary entertainment. Yet, the focus on negative effects of media consumption offers an incomplete picture. These accounts do not appropriately value the skills and knowledge young people are gaining through their involvement with new media, and as a consequence, they may mislead us about the roles teachers and parents should play in helping children learn and grow.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Two): An Interview with Manifesto Game's Greg Costikyan

We will develop for open platforms, not proprietary consoles. We will work in the white-hot ferment of our own imaginations, striving to produce games of enduring merit, games so fine that generations to come will point to them and say, this, this was important in the creation of the great artistic form we know as games.

We will strive for innovation over imitation, originality over the tried and true.

We will explore the enormous plasticity of what is "the game," the fantastic flexibility of code, seeking new game styles and new approaches to the form.

We will create games we know gamers will want to play, because we ARE gamers, not MBAs or assholes from Hollywood or marketing dweebs whose last gig was selling Tide.

We will work in small, committed teams, sharing a unified vision, striving to perfect that vision without fear, favor, or interference.

We will find our market not by bribing retailers to stock our product, but on the public Internet, reaching our audience through the excellence of our own product, through guerilla marketing and rabble-rousing manifestoes, by nurturing a community of people passionate about and committed to games.

We will create, through sheer force of will, an independent games revolution, an audience and market and body of work that will ultimately redound to the benefit of the whole field, providing a venue for creative work, as independent cinema does for film, as independent labels do for music.

We will turn this industry on its head.

-- Designer X, The Scratchware Manifesto

Designer X (better known as Greg Costikyan) doesn't mince words. He says what other designers are thinking but are afraid to say -- though they weren't afraid to give him a standing ovation at the Games Developers Conference in 2005 when he denounced the contemporary mainstream games industry and vowed to create an alternative model for how games can be produced and distributed.

Manifesto Games, the company he created with Johnny Wilson, a long time trade press reporter and games critic. Both Costikyan and Wilson are tired of talking about what's wrong with the games industry. We heard some of their analysis of the problems here last time. They are working to change the infrastructure to make it easier for creative game designers to work outside of the major games publishers, do innovative work, and get it into the marketplace and also to allow discriminating, engaged consumers to find the best work to emerge from the indie games movement. Something of the mixture of ideological and business motivations behind the venture can be seen at Manifesto's home page, which combines what they see as a utopian vision statement with a more pragmatic description of their business plan. They hope to exploit the current moment of digital distribution of games content and web 2.0 strategies to expand the public's access to innovative game content. All of this is spelled out in Manifesto's, er, manifesto.

Go to their website and you can already seen a broad range of independent games content as well as space for critical commentary and for community members to share their own impressions of what works and doesn't work about individual titles. The group is taking on itself some of the challenges of educating the public about the diversity that is emerging from independent game designers as well as to provide a portal which allows interested designers and curious consumers to interact.

I am sure there will be plenty written down the line about what works or doesn't work in this approach. For the moment, I simply want to let people here Costikyan's arguments for themselves and decide whether this represents one potential direction for the future of games culture.

What factors have led you to step out of the world of major games publishers and create Manifesto?

I don't know that this is an accurate characterisation--almost everything I've done has been in one niche market or another: tabletop, online (mostly pre-Internet, and certainly before EQ proved the market), and mobile... Rather, I think that, as with online and mobile, I've identified an emerging market that has great potential. The difference is that I'm doing it this time as a distributor instead of a developer--but I think that's where we can make the most difference at present.

You describe Manifesto Games as a "Long Tail play." Can you explain how this effort has been informed by the "Long Tail" theory? Companies like EA clearly aim for the mass market end of the tail. What evidence do we have that niche game products might succeed?

Back in the late-80s and early 90s, companies like Talonsoft were profitable on the basis of 15,000 unit sales. Companies like Codemasters were happy with 25,000 unit sales.

The problem is that today, you just will not get retail distribution if that's all you can project. Thousands of games are published every year, a typical game store has maybe 200 facings, and if your game doesn't sell well within the first two weeks, they take it off the shelf to make room for a new release that might.

Why shouldn't it be possible to recreate, online, a retail environment that recreates the conditions of the game market overall in the late 80s and early 90s? There are vastly more gamers now--and their seems to be a palpable feeling of ennui with the prevailing industry's attachment to franchise and licensed titles.

What evidence is there that niche product can succeed? Well, Stardock has sold over 100,000 copies of Galactic Civilizations. Garage Games has sold over a million copies of Marble Blast (which, admittedly, by my definition is "casual" rather than truly indie). Those are outliers, but they imply the promise.

You seem to associate a kind of entrepreneurial or artisan based mode of production with a range of aesthetic virtues, including innovation and diversity. What makes you think an entrepreneur is more likely to embrace these virtues than a larger studio?

Well, it may be a romantic failing on my part. However, I'll point out, the single thing you can point to as an example of dramatic creativity on the part of the larger industry today is Spore, which is largely the product of the vision of a single creator, who happens to be one of the very few people in the field with the track-record and clout to force his vision through. Novels and symphonies are not written by committees, and while other media, such as film, involve the participation of many talents, we still generally ascribe the artistic success of movies to one or a handful of people.

Still, film demonstrates that "larger studios" can succeed in creating interesting and innovative work; but film, unlike games, has also embraced the "cult of celebrity" (for better or worse), with the consequence that some individuals in Hollywood can force their vision through. In games, you can count the people with that kind of clout on the fingers of one hand, and the hand of a toon at that: Will Wright, Shigero Miyamota, Peter Molyneux.

In other words, I don't think the critical factor in supporting innovation is necessarily the size of the operation, but in the ability of creative people to control the process. Development at internal studios is marketing-driven rather than driven by creators; and while independent studios operating in the conventional market theoretically have a bit more freedom, the need to pass through the (broken) green-light process drastically diminishes that freedom.

Part of the interest of independent cinema is that the film express alternative perspectives -- political, cultural, sexual, what have you -- which would not otherwise gain broader circulation. Is the same likely to be true for independent games? Would this require a greater focus on what the game is about rather than simply the play mechanics? What relationship are you positing between indie games and art games or serious games?

I hope so, albeit we have relatively few examples to hold up at present. Although I'll note that one of our best-sellers at present is The Shivah, an old-school graphic adventure about a Rabbi having a crisis of faith. I'd love to have more games that strike off in odd directions--from a crass commercial perspective, The Shivah is far more promotable for us, far easier to interest people in than another shmup or third-person shooter.

To date, most games that do "express alternative perspectives" (e.g., Escape from Woomera, the Columbine game, Disaffected!) have been freeware--perhaps because the creators don't really see a path to market. If we can demonstrate a market, however....

Your focus on creator-controlled games seems to parallel the creator-owned comics movement of the past few decades. What, if any, inspiration have you taken from this? What will you learn from the successes or limits of that movement?

Hm... Well, there's a risk in trying to hew too closely to independent comics model--e.g., there's a feeling on the part of many independent comic creators that doing anything other than self-publishing and distributing yourself is selling out. Part of the reason this is feasible in comics is that there are a handful of important distributors, and it's quite feasible for an independent creator to contact them all, and get distribution. We are dealing in a different retail environment here--online is a different beast...

But in general, I think independent comics really is a good example of how, if you create an environment where independent creators can find an audience and live an adequate middle-class living, you open the floodgates of creativity--and help to reinvigorate the mainstream. Remember that not too long ago, both Marvel and DC viewed themselves as primarily licensing companies, with the merits of the actual content they published hardly considered by management. I think that's less so today...

Do you see the primary goal as to publicize existing indie games or to provide incentive for their production?

I don't think there's a contradiction between the two goals. I believe there are many excellent indie games today that haven't gotten the exposure they deserve, and to the degree that we can expose them to a new audience, that's great.

Contrariwise, I know there are a great many highly creative people in this field who feel constrained and unhappy by the circumstances of market reality--and I know that if we can prove that independent games can achieve adequate distribution and sales, and reach an adequate market, I'm positive that the floodgates will open, and we'll see a dramatic florescence of creativity.

As an example, consider Eric Zimmerman. He's found a viable niche doing casual games, and his company, GameLab, does some excellent ones. But Eric is a -gamer- at heart, and while I imagine he's happy enough developing games for an audience (middle-aged women) that prizes games of types very different from those he himself loves, I'm sure he'd much prefer to be developing games of greater cultural significance and intellectual merit. In other words, if he could make as much money doing a game that appeals to people who have a passion for games, rather than for those who view them as light entertainment, I'm sure he'd be happy to. But he also has a payroll to make, and there's demonstrable money in casual games, and indie games are pretty much unproven as a market.

How is the digital distribution of games going to change the ability of indie publishers to get their content in front of the general public? Clearly part of what you hope will work here is a web-based model for the delivery of content and a web 2.0 model for users assessing and evaluating the content which is offered.

Well, we're back into "long tail" theory here. The problem with brick-and-mortar retail is that you're either on the shelf, or not. And if you're on the shelf for an extended time, you can sell in huge quantity--but if you're not, you've got nothing. In a web environment, at least in theory, things are different; you might not have huge sales velocity out of the gate, but word-of-mouth might lead you to substantial sales over time.

In essence, the conventional market leads to a sales curve the looks like a parabola until it reaches some point and suddenly declines to zero. But online, there's no shelf space, and games can continue to be stocked, and instead of a precipitous decline to zero, you can have a slow gradual decline, or even an increase if the game gets good word of mouth. And games in that long tail can still be profitable, if they are developed for less than the conventional market demands.

But making that works means recognizing the differences between conventional retail and online retail, too; it astonishes me that most of the conventional portals use the best-sellers list as the main, in some cases only, view into content. They make it actively hard to find a game that the herd may not like, but you might. Amazon, by contrast, doesn't push best-sellers in your face; rather, it pushes books your previous interests suggest you might like. We need to get away from recreating the constraints of the conventional market in an online environment, and learning from ecommerce best practice.

What criteria should we use to measure the success of Manifesto games?

Heh. Well, survival for a start. But ultimately, my goal is to establish 'indie games' as a category that people talk about in the same way they talk about mobile and casual games today: as a large, emerging market with lots of opportunity. In some ways, I'll view it as a victory when we attract real competition, because that means the indie market is being taken seriously.

The Independent Games Movement (Part One): An Interview with Manifesto Game's Greg Costikyan

This is intended to be the first of a series of interviews with some key thinkers in the independent games movement which I will be running in this blog over the next few weeks. Many of us have long wondered when and how a strong independent games culture might emerge. Across most other media, we have seen in recent years the resurgence or emergence of strong indie and niche media production: the rising visibility of documentary films; the growing respectability of graphic novels; the fragmentation of the music marketplace, the proliferation of ever more specialized periodicals, and so forth. This is what Chris Anderson is talking about when he describes the Long Tail effect. Yet, during this same period, there have been strong barriers of entry into the platform market and companies like Electronic Arts have been gobbling up more and more so-called boutique studios resulting in a consolidation of games publishing. In such a world, what incentive is there for diversity and creativity in games design? How might we support distinctive and visionary work in games? How do we broaden which publics get addressed by the games industry or expand the range of acceptable game genres?

Over the past year or so, though, we've seen signs of the kinds of support systems that might be needed to sustain a substantial Indie games movement. Through this series, I will be looking at the fledgling efforts in this direction and talking to some of the key players in the indie games space.

I begin that series with this two-part interview with Greg Costikyan, the CEO of Manifesto Games. Costikyan has designed more than 30 commercially published board, role-playing, online, computer, and mobile games. His games have won five Origins Awards, a Gamer's Choice Award, and have been selected on more than a dozen occasions for Games Magazine's Games 100, their annual round-up of the best games in print. Greg began his career when he was 14, assembling and shipping games for Simulations Publications, Inc., for whom he designed 6 games before he graduated from college. Over the years, he has also served as Director of R&D for West End Games, a house husband, lead designer for Crossover Technologies, Chief Design Officer for Unplugged Games (a mobile games start-up he co-founded in 2000), a game industry consultant, and a games researcher for Nokia. As a consultant, his clients have included Viacom, Mattel, France Telecom, Sarnoff Corporation, IBM, Intel, Nokia, the Themis Group, and Roland Berger & Partner. He left Nokia in 2005 to found Manifesto Games. He is the author of four published novels and a number of short stories.

Most of the above comes from his official biography. But anyone who has been observing games culture in recent years knows that he is one of the smartest and most outspoken thinkers about the medium -- a real maverick who overturns apple carts and chases the money changers out of the temple (to mix metaphors). You can get some sense of why Greg (AKA Designer X) is such a breath of fresh air by reading what his website describes as "My GDC Rant on the iniquities of the game industry, which seems to have established me as the industry's voice of cynicism and despair :)." Here's part of what he had to say:

Games GROW through innovation. Innovation creates new game styles. Innovation grows the audience. Innovation extends the palette of the possible in games. The story of the last twenty years hasn't been, as you've been sold, the story of increasing processing power and increasing graphics; it's been the story of a startling burst of creativity and innovation. That's what created this industry. And that's why we love games.

But it's over now.

As recently as 1992, the average budget for a PC game was $200,000. Today, a typical budget for an A-level title is $5m. And with the next generation, it will be more like $20m. As the cost ratchets upward, publishers becoming increasingly conservative, and decreasingly willing to take a chance on anything other than the tired and true. So we get Driver 69. Grand Theft Auto San Infinitum. And licensed drivel after licensed drivel. Today, you CANNOT get an innovative title published, unless your last name is Wright, or Miyamoto....

EA could have chosen to concentrate on innovation, rather than continually raising the graphic bar to squeeze out less well capitalized competitors, but they did not. Sony could have chosen to create a Miramax of the game industry, funding dozens of sub-million titles in a process of planned innovation to establish new world-beating game styles, but they declined. Nintendo could make dev kits cheaply available to small firms, with the promise of funding and publication to to the most interesting titles, but they prefer to rely on the creativity of one aging designer.

You have choices, too. You can take the blue pill, or the red pill. You can go work for the machine, work mandatory eighty hour weeks in a massive sweatshop publisher-owned studio with hundreds of other drones, laboring to build the new, compelling photorealistic driving game-- with the same basic gameplay as Pole Position.

Or you can defy the machine.

Costikyan's remarks might be seen as the prelude for the launch of the aptly named Manifesto Games, which is already becoming a key center promoting the cause of independent games in all of their many shapes and sizes. The first installment sets the stage by laying out Costikyan's vision for what a thriving indie games culture would look like and his critique of creativity in the current games industry. Next time, we will look more closely at what he is trying to accomplish through Manifesto Games.

Manifesto Games has some bold ambitions. I'd like to walk readers through them. First, you want to promote independent games, drawing an analogy to independent cinema. In the Independent cinema model, films are independent if they are made outside of the Hollywood studios, though this quickly got blurred by the emergence of studio owned boutiques aimed at niche consumers. Today, it is not clear whether an independent film is one made outside of the studio system, one made for a niche public, one made with an "indie" aesthetic, one made outside of traditional genres, or what have you. Will we get into this same problem in thinking about independent games as a movement? Can we agree on a definition of what an independent game is?

Actually, not really. Here's the IGF's [Independent Game Federation] definition: "An independent game is any game that is not published by a member of the ESA. [Electronic Software Association]"

That's kind of a ridiculous definition; if I recall correctly, Eidos (being British) is not a member of the ESA, but they are a substantial publisher. I'd have a hard time considering games produced by their internal studios to be "independent." But of course the IGF needs a definition, so they can distinguish between eligible and ineligible games, and it's the one they've chosen.

Traditionally, "independent developer" has meant any developer that is not owned by a publisher; but by that definition, Doom 3 is an "independent game," since id is privately owned. Surely, though, any game that high profile is a mainstream title.

I'm not at all sure it's helpful to nail down the definition of an "independent game" too narrowly. Some would define it as "any game released without a publisher," but from my perspective, games published by, say, Matrix or Stardock or Strategy First are adequately "indie", since they don't achieve much exposure to the conventional retail market, and what they publish are clearly of interest primarily to a niche rather than a mass audience. Certainly none are ESA members, but also, all are moving increasingly to direct sale online, rather than via conventional retail.

In other words, we have a spectrum, from "true indie" developers like, say, Digital Eel or Dan Marshall or Dave Gilbert, through operations like Three Rings that pretty much operate independently but occasionally distribute through conventional publishers (there was an Atari version of Puzzle Pirates), through companies that think of themselves as conventional publishers but are forced to find alternative distribution paths for their product, like Matrix et al.

I'm not even entirely sure I'd want to exclude id from the definition of "indie"; after all, even though they produce best-sellers and get retail distribution, they operate without the need for publisher financing, and forge their own path.

I also tend to exclude as "independent games" some that others would think are definitely contained within the definition; from my perspective, "casual games'" are a separate, parellel, and pretty much distinct market. But they're selling to a very different audience from the "indie" movement.

I note that the definition of "indie" for other markets is equally nebulous. Miramax is a leader of "independent film"--but it's a Disney subsidiary. New Line is a studio for "independent film," but it's a Time Warner subsidiary. Vertigo publishes "independent comics," but it's a DC imprint.

I don't think a clear definition of "independent game" is particularly necessary or useful, although I think "independent games" do have certain characteristics. They are created by developers that are not owned by publishers, who retain ownership of IP, and are typically distributed primarily in channels other than conventional retail.

I'm reminded of an interview I read sometime ago with Samuel R. Delaney, who decried the impulse to try to define science fiction precisely as "Stalinist." (I'd provide a link, but Google is not my friend at the moment). Indie is something you know when you see it.

Are significant numbers of independent games being made now? If so, by what entities?

Yes, at least the way I look at things, significant numbers of independent games are being made now. We have more than a hundred in our catalog at present, and I fully expect 1000 or more by this time next year.

But again, a lot depends on how you define indie.

First: Offbeat, innovative, creative games created independently of the conventional publishers; we love these, but they are limited in number. Dozens, perhaps.

Second: Games of styles that still have enthusiastic fans, but that the major publishers no longer find worth supporting--adventure games, wargames, shmups, third-person shooters, turn-based fantasy, et al. Hundreds, possibly thousands.

Third: European games that don't get distribution here because they are viewed as too odd for the mass American audience: dozens, perhaps hundreds.

Fourth: Japanese dojin games that achieve conventional distribution neither at home nor here but have an otaku fan base: dozens or hundreds.

Fifth: Niche MMOs that will probably never attract more than a few thousand or tens of thousands of players but are often among the most creative of their field. Dozens at best.

Sixth: Games out of the 'serious games', art games, or educational game movements that are primarily aimed at a non-commercial market but that may well be of interest to gamers....

When you start looking around, there's just an amazing amount of stuff out here.

Your press release offers some pretty harsh criticism of the existing games industry, within which you have worked for a number of years. You write, "Ever-spiraling budgets and ever more risk-adverse publishers have turned what was once the most creative art form on the planet into a morass of stultifying drudgery and sterile imitation." What factors within the current market model have led to "sterile imitation" and in what ways might the model represented by Manifesto Games alter those conditions?

It's quite simple. In 1998, a typical budget for an A-level title was $1.5m, and you could creep into profitability at 100,000 unit sales. Today, a typical budget is $15m, and you need 1m+ unit sales. At those kinds of budgets, and with that need to reach a mass market, publishers are forced to be conservative, to reduce their perceived development risk however they can. Thus number 3 in a series the first two of which sold well will gets funded; something based on a big-budget Hollywood movie, where they can piggyback on the huge studio market spend will also get funded. Occasionally, "original IP," meaning a backstory for a game that hasn't been seen before, will get funded, but only if the game itself slots into an established marketing category and genre that the publisher knows can succeed.

The rise in budgets is a direct corallary of Moore's Law; as processors increase in power, they become capable of displaying better graphics, and therefore, if you want to achieve shelf-space in a market where shelf-space is highly restrictive, you need to provide the better graphics that newer machines can provide. If you don't, your competitors will, and your product will be viewed as dowdy by comparison. Thus budgets ratchet up year by year--and while sales have increased, they have not increased anywhere near to the same degree.

The result is that the offbeat, quirky, and innovative cannot get funded; that genres that can't produce 1m unit sales drop away; and that market considerations, rather than imagination, become paramount.

What we're trying to do--and we're not alone; Steam, Garage Games, and Stardock are all fellow travellers, all trying to break the iron logic of the conventional market in their own ways--is to say that this is absurd, and that there has to be a better way. The drive for ever better selling product is typical of a pre-Internet era; the move to "long tail" markets where niche product can find a home is typical of the modern (or post-modern, if you prefer) era. Even though games are digital in nature, music and books have gotten there before us, but it has to be possible to create a similar dynamic for games.

Do the announcements this summer around the Microsoft 360 give you any optomism

that indie games will thrive on the platforms as well as on the web?

Yes, and no. Clearly, Xbox Live Arena has proven a boon to some developers--I find it both astonishing and heartening that a game like Geometry Wars--a classic shmup, a genre that hasn't been commercially successful for more than a decade--can become commercial successes.

However, there's also a big danger in the way that Microsoft (and Sony and Nintendo) are running their portals. They are, in essence, disintermediating both the retailer and the publisher--but they are the ones in control. If you project the Arena model into the future, and assume that all games are ultimately distributed digitally, then on each platform there is one, single, monopolistic provider that controls the distribution chain wholly: the console manufacturer.

And while Arena is offering a very attractive share of the consumer dollar at present, it's also very clear who holds the market power there: Microsoft. And just as the casual game portals have slowly demanded a larger and larger share of the consumer dollar, I'd expect Microsoft to do so in future as well.

In other words, this distribution channel offers developers short-term opportunities--but in the long term, it offers the opportunity to be screwed by Microsoft rather than EA.

Peachy.

Portrait of a Transmedia Designer: Interview with Kevin McLeod (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced my readers to transmedia designer Kevin McLeod, whose career has moved from film to alternative reality gaming to magazine publishing. Everything he has done has been informed by a unique analysis of our current media landscape -- He refuses to make distinctions between high and low, old and new; He has tremendous respect for the intelligence (collective or otherwise) of the media consumer; His work reflects his fascination with the intersections between different media and the opportunities for creative expression which stand at the borders between different modes;His work displays a fascination with stretching the limits of visual intelligence and challenging us to look at the familiar through fresh perspectives.

When I first got my hands on Mstrmnd, I have to admit that I had no idea what to make of it. I couldn't even tell what kind of magazine it was supposed to be. Mstrmnd was a seemingly random assortment of stuff -- old etchings from 19th century books, essays on popular cinema, eye-catching charts, graphs, and photographs, mock advertisements, and long stretches of comics.

It was the kind of magazine that you notice on the coffee table at the home of your most pretentious friends. When they leave the room, you pick it up furtively, flip through it nervously, twist your lips skeptically, and then shove it back on the table, hoping nobody noticed you moved it. You don't understand and you don't ask. I will admit that I have a low threshold for avant garde experimentation in all forms. I am a fan boy at heart and I like my reading pulpy not pretentious. But then the more I looked at the publication, the more I started to see elements there that spoke to me on a different level. It was clear that McLeod was interested in many of the same works that I was. Indeed, many of the works which are repurposed and remixed in Convergence Culture make their appearance in this magazine -- suggesting someone who has been thinking along parallel tracks. And that's what compelled me to reach out and interview him for this blog.

You write, "Mstrmnd is not an art or a design magazine but it is often mistaken for one." Explain. It is clear lots of thought has gone into the visual design of this publication. Behind the design choices, I see an interest in visual literacy -- in communicating as ideas as much through pictures as through words. Does this approach grow out of a particular understanding of how people are living and relating to information at the present time?

There is a ghetto of magazines that deal with art and design. Generally they're limited by aesthetics without complexity which are fashion, or they support a very primitive idea about art that is single creator in a primitively limited audience. The gallery-collector-museum relationship. Neither of these genres really wants to reach a mass audience but instead cater to a privileged group of users. There's an academic tone to many of these magazines, reaching brains that have been designed in colleges, where information has a pedigree that may not assist in consciousness but instead are there to reinforce the power modalities of education. And the idea of the critic, the individual critic gains power over an artist by illumination through obscurity. The defeat of images by text. Academia's manner in codifying a fluidly composed art form like film is to write text about it, it doesn't invent a new medium or genre to evolve it, it becomes a scribe system with many illusory chambers. The point of mstrmnd is to allow the images supremacy and let the audience do the perceiving. Lure, dare, induce. If we avoid text or use it in an unstable manner, then we can evolve with language rather than let those who command it lead. There's a whole arena where I say question the notion of structuralism, English is far from a great language, if left to its own democratic/academic growth, it's a slow cancer that will keep growing.

Well, yes, you hit the nail. The images and text and their progressions are provocations in visual literacy. We live in an age of vast literalness in mass media yet our censorship is innate, self-created, not the product of any conspiracy. Just look at captioning and the variations through magazine/news. One image can have three basic states of captions: the newspaper, the sly news journal (like The Economist), or the parody (The Onion). If you deform in any direction just this idea, the caption, you can reinvent a facet. What if a caption were hidden?

You make extensive use of found or borrowed materials which you have appropriated and recontextualized. How does it relate to earlier efforts by the avant garde to deploy "cutups" or "ready mades"?

I am not a visual artist by training or historian, so my knowledge of the backstory is limited, but I am retroactively aware of Max Ersnt's collages, and actively the work of the painter Vuillard who was a master of patterns, as well as Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York which was a new form of literature with images. I mention these three only because they are in the foreground for the moment and seem to illustrate what you are suggesting.

You create some pretty interesting juxtapositions between contemporary and much older materials. What status do these older images play in your work? How do the older materials fit within your call to readers to investigate "mythologies", a concept you seem to be taking from Roland Barthes, I take it?

I have only read fragments of Barthes and found him bland, like a self-parody. I look more at myth through sociobiology or sociology. Like Dorfman's 'How to Read Donald Duck' which is a manual more than it is a piece of academic research. Older images are essential in exhibiting how the visual cortex is evolving, devolving or maintaining status quo. Images reveal much more about the state of humanity than text, which can be endlessly translated, interpreted, converted into rhetoric. H.M. Stanley's ground glass images from 'Through the Dark Continent', which we caption with subtlety, relate uniquely to the first issue's content in a myriad of ways and also to some synonyms in the second issue like the 1936 Olympic images. That they have current parallels and antonyms is entirely up to your perception. In effect the magazine is half finished, you complete the relationship unknowingly by being aware of the interweaving. Now in terms of mythology I would borrow Cassirer and use his perception that the Nazis were the first synthetic myth and you have a subliminal non-linear history lesson you were probably unaware of. That we duplicate this synthetic state without thinking now is rather incredible, but wholly understandable since the medium of television is designed for this.

You seem to be very interested in popular art forms such as comics and advertising but you also make use of avant garde photography and graphics techniques. What do you see the value of juxtaposing high and low forms of expression in the same publication?

I guess I see no difference in that valuation or scale, or maybe just the danger in applying it. The contrast you exhibit is a border that restricts perception. To eliminate these 'class' distinctions is to evolve media and perhaps cognition and consciousness. A magazine ad for Tron suggests a depth provided by seeing the film, playing the coin-op or intellivision game, even logged onto a fansite, experiences stored or to be stored, whereas a reproduction of Church's 'Cotapaxi' (a vast canvas landscape of a massive Ecuadorian volcano), with its numerous light effects, optic distortion and message illuminates us to Church's eye opening experience of witnessing it. In which of these does an audience participate more? Ads in magazines are also in an unnecessarily conservative state of being, how many times will you see bizarre redundancy, a magazine editorially showcases a product or a person who also appears in an ad for a film in release or a product that is being launched. Another part of the Paradox puzzle. Ads are necessary for magazines but advertisers need to comprehend the next stage of ads requires their active conscious participation in a community, not their blank dictation of brand. That is the notoriety of the 20th century: a dictation of image. Also, are art forms like the 'Black Nationalist' sketch by Richard Pryor, "Back Orifice" the hack of Windows 98 by the cDc, or "Formulary for a New Urbanism" by Ivan Chtcheglov, a luminous but crude manifesto, are they high or low, as new genres appear or are discovered retroactively, doesn't this line blur? Comics are a stage above this ad business, the nuances are insanely dynamic, the name of the first serialized graphic novel in mstrmnd is called Wooden Mirror, a play on the material of paper and the first complex narrative offshoot, one of three in process for serialization in future issues.

You seem very interested in films -- especially films which are part of larger franchises or works that fit within what I have described as transmedia entertainment (such as The Matrix and Star Wars). How have you carried over this interest in media franchises into your thinking about MSTRMND? In what sense do you see such works as, in your terms, "large-scale mythologies?"

These films are part of a new level of superart coded for children to sense, feel, maybe even read. Adults are necessarily left behind in experiencing the complexity of these series' if only because of a literalness in western education that relies on text and math as primary statuses in intelligence. While children explore text and math in school (and regulated forms of art and code), they are enveloped alternately by mass media that relies only invariably on text or math. Visuals connect ideas to ideas in film, TV, games and in certain browser environments. Key to this era's awareness in context: Star Wars and The Matrix are both vast illustrations of Paradox, not irony. A religion in which men fight and kill to become fathers while denying themselves the ability to procreate. A simulation designed to both find a messiah of change and then make a deal with him or her to neutralize their ability. One need only to look at these films and see they are complex mirrors we cannot recognize because we hide the same properties from ourselves. Films like Kill Bill, Cache, Primer, A History of Violence, The Aviator, Ghost in the Shell are all deeply coded consciousness playgrounds, tempting audiences to comprehend their inner meanings and this playground is malleable into other media, it can locate tools to perceive and leave them for others to use. To me most of these films, despite their philosophical challenges, are still resolutely primitive and the allure is to evolve these ideals into 21st century simulas with even wilder nuances and optics and heroes and villains, and mstrmnd is a growth medium for this. How you converge the narratives and symbols in mstrmnd depends on both the editorial and the audience working in a commonality. How this evolves will depend heavily on user awareness and participation.

In our correspondence, you have discussed the complexity of contemporary cinema, even the complexity of very popular films. You seem to be picking up on Steven Johnson's arguments about the cognitive challenges posed by contemporary popular culture and the ways that it can be complex and still accessible. How does this interest shape the forms of complexity you are building into your publication?

While I agree with Steven Johnson on certain level, I am uneasy with his perceptive buckshot. When he claims media is evolving because certain films have extensive casts to absorb, forcing desire for cognition and repeated viewings, I shudder slightly. Perceptions must come into play. I see the Lord of the Rings as a terminally conservative text, with evil that is character-less (an all seeing eye), with a desire to wage wars that are good and defeat the loneliest of metaphors: darkness. Now this is a fear filled narrative that is strangely uncomplex, with a violent unease with a metaphorical east of exotic skins and animals. Although it is complex on a number of design and graphic levels, it is anti-evolutionary since it isn't self-aware of faults in its message, it hasn't been updated since its WWI origins, a film as wooden as Spartacus has more nuance than LOTR. I think Johnson has the right idea, he just recognizes the surfaces of the media he evaluates, not the underlying symbolic structures, a skill arguably necessary for future minds faced with our messy behavior both interspecies and intra-biome and soon, interplanetary.

You make use of a lot of subtle visual echoes between the first two issues of your publication. You seem to be daring readers to find the patterns on their own. What assumptions are you making about how people will read between the issues rather than simply reading each issue individually?

Yes I'm glad you put it that way, there is a dare involved that is about patterns and beyond. The challenge is on a few levels just a weird form of fun. Inside one bound object is a story, between them is their power of channeling multiple overlaps. The way a mad-lib book was or a choose-your-own-adventure is bound temporally by staples or glue. Then step outside that boundary, what are the possibilities? I make no assumptions but hope that the user will observe all this on some cognizant level. The mag develops its aura by the reader sensing these similarities. The reader sees them slowly, connects multiple patterns, colors, etc, grows a lexicon visually, utilizes this to discern other hidden narratives, even flaws in other media. This is obviously meant to be consciousness inducing in stages. In example: The 2 yuan note in the first issue is related to both the US 10 dollar note in the 2nd issue as well as the satirical Tibetan Gum (as well as a few others). Scale matters, as well as shape.

In many ways, you seem to be constructing what Convergence Culture calls a cultural activator -- that is, a work which sets a collective intelligence community into motion. Yet, is it possible to be a cultural activator without being a cultural attractor. In other words, Lost or The Matrix work by creating a large scale audience and providing them with things they can do together. How does this work with a smaller scale project like your magazine?

A great question. Stanley Kubrick, whose films are composed of incredibly secret plots inside what appear to be very strange, stilted major studio releases, never explained them, though this lack of awareness on a mass scale doesn't diminish their powerful hold on users, in fact, The Shining finds a larger audience today than the summer of 1980 when it was released to a maximum theater count of 600 screens. The relative scale of the initial audience seems puny now (though certainly they experienced it more intensely, projected in a communal darkness). What draws new viewers to The Shining? What draws them to repeatedly view it? What is hidden, are they aware of it on a level they are not entirely conscious of? Someone, a cinematographer, recently explained to me why watching it numerous times was so riveting: he could never remember certain details or the order of the story. Why is a visual thinker forgetting details in a film he's watched many times? This model, the activator, perhaps can take many forms and start at unusually small scales, increasing its usability and longevity, and it can evolve with its audience until it approaches the level of attractor. And key is the cost effectiveness of beginning at a selective level in a medium that has a built in audience searching for new formats. The magazine is the perfect medium to develop a set of users in the age of the internet.

Portrait of a Transmedia Designer: Interview with Kevin McLeod (Part One)

Some years ago, Kevin McLeod produced a documentary called The Cruise about a New York City eccentric who takes tourists on his own idiosyncratic tour of the city. Anyone who has seen that film will recall the breathless, stream of consciousness monologues which offer us a window into the subject's distinctive view of the world. At first, it makes no sense, but then, you start to get into his groove.

Kevin McLeod's writing and design work has that same breathless quality -- full of sentence fragments and snarled syntax which never-the-less works itself out into fascinating juxtapositions. Sometimes, thoughts seem half finished but then the ellipsis provokes us to dig deeper and come away with a deeper understanding of what he is trying to say.

This makes sense when you think about what McLeod has done through his work. He is someone who has moved fluidly across different media platforms -- producing an acclaimed documentary film, collaborating on "the Beast," which helped to launch the Alternate Reality Games movement, and editing the perplexing and yet somehow engaging Mstrmnd magazine.

His argument also moves fluidly across media -- making unexpected and interesting juxtapositions between different sites of cultural production. He makes demands on us as viewers, players, and readers that grow out of deep respect for and trust in the potentials of participatory culture.

Over the next two installments, I will share a recent interview I did with Kevin McLeod. In this segment, we discuss his background and how he came to be involved as editor of Mstrmnd. Next time, we are going to dig more deeply into Mstrmnd and the ways he is trying to reinvent the magazine as a medium.

Take us through the steps of your career. What can you tell us about the path you took to your current project?

My career has moved through media, and I have been associated with some good work at various levels. I was a special production assistant for Silence of the Lambs, a role both microscopic and at rare times macro, like adding details, spotting errors, a great director like Demme is many minds in one. I worked in music video and animation production for a time, watching and assisting some pretty dynamic minds. This was pre After Effects and the oxberry was still king.

From there I was a journeyman producer, was a coproducer of the documentary The Cruise, the first DV film to gain a major distributor. Cocreated a documentary pilot called Eden, it was designed to make directors out of anyone with a daring story, hand them a cameraperson and let them explore its details. Eden was financed by the same man who financed Vice Magazine's expansion. Ultimately it was as unrealistic as its name. You Tube has converted many models like this, from commercial to consumer, and the realm can only improve in sophistication.

In 2000-2001 I traveled a great deal, India, South America, Africa, Honduras. When I returned a proposal I had written to no one in particular convinced a friend I should join a project called 'The Beast,' a non-linear narrative web-based sequel to the film A.I. Despite having no prior experience in web design or writing, I was offered one of two positions end-developing some of the sites, about a 1/3. The project was a success. In 2003 I was invited by Phoebe Elefante to contribute to a magazine called Mastermind, then became its director.

I was very interested to learn that you were part of the team that put together

the Beast. Tell me something of your role in that process. What can you tell us about the thinking which went into your design for this project?

For many readers of your blog who have never heard of it, the Beast may be difficult to comprehend. In brief imagine a film, a linear narrative, is broken up into many websites that 'tell' the story non-linearly. Each site becomes a facet through puzzlement that additively creates a complete story and the act of searching for the existence of these sites is an element in the storytelling. In effect a merging of film and hacking. The framework, the invention, the story and the conceptual was developed before I was hired.

These three innovators, Weisman, Stewart and Lee developed on paper and in motion media and in sound all the pieces of a vast narrative puzzle, still in my mind a phantasmal risk. I was asked to put their site descriptions and concepts into working web environments (context). In most cases what sounded interesting on paper seemed too logical for web design. They sometimes saw the web as a literal and logical series of tropes, the color pallets, puzzle doors, even red herring backgrounds seemed at times too pointed, almost blunt.

My role was to add the illogical, the possibility that the world this came from was living and breathing and dynamic in its time. I worked with three brilliant flash brains and we used the web content as starting points for deeper visual narratives. The lead character's company site included a brief four image 'history' of structure conceptuals that ended with a Dogon 'Mask' House that suggested a metaphorical source of the company's purpose, the creation of sentient houses. This and many other details, functions, codes were added in the websites' creation.

We distorted key environments even coded colors in ulterior narratives that added to the general search for a coherency inside a storyline that was unusually unstable. It's somewhat like adding Mario Bava touches to genre films. And the effect was immediate, soon they were adapting storylines with some of our visual pushes, minutely of course but the potential became obvious.

The project was a revelation for me. The three as well as Bob Fagan were cool short-term mentors, and as a result I became conscious of an audience you could call the first generation of media hackers. A kind of explosion of the hacker group cDc's mental state into unconscious local cells, searching for media to reconfigure, dismember, reinterpret. To glue the pieces of our fragmented data together to reveal our flaws collectively by people who are not authors per se, unconscious or not, is a new stage in media.

How did these experiences lead to the development of MSTRMND? What are your goals for this publication?

Mmm. Convergence. Ideas: My great friend Allan Maca is an anthropologist consistently recommending text and ideas in brain cognizance, perhaps I reached a melting point with his prodding.

And Movies: In 2003 I was amazed by the intelligentsia's poor reaction to The Matrix Reloaded, it was after all both satire and reconfiguration, a reverse of The Matrix's glee (no more 'whoa's). A process Lucas incorporates in his latest trilogy that they boldly affected inter-trilogy. And Reloaded is probably the first feature length film that had to be seen in Imax to be fully understood. Optically a masterpiece. The internet sped these reactions to me and made me want to respond.

A lecture I was to give on gaming suddenly was a defense of the film. My amazement led me to make a slideshow with text and puzzling image overlays in flash that described what I saw in Reloaded and I distributed this weird explanation to friends and players of the game anonymously.

This incredibly long analysis was invited to be included in a magazine named Mastermind and one thing led to another and I was asked to become editor. They sat me down and asked what content I thought would work and rattled off some jarring ideas floating in my head, a transcript of role-playing in progress, a subway map of merged lines, a Slavery Museum for Washington DC, a videogame script involving terrorism countdowning, a day by day study of the post 9/11 anthrax narrative, a comic book called Wooden Mirror.

Now the magazine is made up of many with myself in the role as puppetmaster, and content is touched, fleshed or created by other incredibly unique personas to make a finished product. The initiator of the business and the board members and I continue a dialogue together that is about testing the limits of this medium. I discovered a process while I worked. Friends and participants began pointing out relationships, then strangers; consistencies across genres within. Issue one is the most obscure, and basic version of mstrmnd, each issue becomes clearer as they progress.

The magazine is a medium frozen in time, look at The New Yorker, a text that compliments the intelligence of the baby boomer generation, a cover that betrays a political leaning, advertisements that are more subliminal than its content, especially in graphic ways, and text, the linear inner voice of 8-10 writers, skewing each piece into an opinion, however subliminal. The magazine is only one medium of many awaiting an upgrade, but the mag is a necessary place to start. Look at the model: masthead, briefs, letters, features, endnote, a formula seemingly from the age of the movie palace, still coding information through journalism, a 20th century profession unable to interpret our age, our innovations. Look at other models, National Geographic, Time, Wired, all are contained in highly rigorously designed genres.

The goal is to bring the innovations of other media to the magazine, introduce new non-fiction genres, finally take the comic-graphic novel to its place in a pantheonic context, and display all this without a full explanation. No one can be prepared for the next step. Update the magazine as an object of longevity like a great DVD. Ultimately mstrmnd should provoke questions the way journalism used to, it should make us question choices in perception and symbolism the way hackers of the 1990's questioned hierarchy and representation. Can myths be hacked? Can religions be hacked? The past is fertile ground to explore, and the past is both 6000 years ago and four seconds ago whether we like it or not.

David Pescovitz wrote, "Mastermind is an immersive experiment on paper. You don't really read it, but rather open it up and just drown in its surrealism." What kind of relationship do you hope to create with your readers?

Mstrmnd should advance openly with an audience that wants to explore the lack of limitation in curiosity. I mean our species is ripe with self-deception, our addiction to branded symmetry (like the cult of the model), the father figure, borders, it becomes more and more obvious we have the power to solve humanity's disturbances with open minds, distortion like allegiances to ideology, the use of texts that are centuries old to decide scientific research, human paradox is a constant deformity in innovation. We use entertainment to defeat these things in fictional environments, how easy will it be to comprehend these things are here, in reality, where are the tools? They're here. Who can unleash them? Anyone can but the visual cortex needs help. Or maybe unlearning.

Did you know Bunuel broke with the surrealists and continued making surreal films, but correctly realized his withdrawal and denial gave him the right to continue its experiment. His search magnified without this unnecessary label and returned power to an audience that could approach his work more objectively.

"The Only Medium That Can Make You Blush in the Dark": Learning About Radio

"There are things about not being able to see someone who is talking that somehow gives you a much more direct link to that person than if you see their face. There's an awful lot of emotion conveyed in their voice and there's an awful lot of their personality conveyed in their voice. There's the obvious thing that you are able to create your own pictures in your head. It's also a lot more intimate. It's like someone is whispering to you in the dark. There was a guy at this radio festival I go to every year called the Third Coast International Audio Festival. One thing he said was radio was the only medium that can make you blush in the dark. You have to think about it for a moment but yeah, you can't read in the dark, you can't watch TV in the dark because it's emitting its own light, and it's true. It's like being at a slumber party all the time. It's really wonderful."

-- NPR reporter Sean Cole

Sean Cole is an award winning radio reporter, working out of WBUR in Boston, and producing content for such shows as Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Marketplace, and This American Life. He is also the subject of one of the exemplars we have produced as part of the MacArthur-funded Project NML. Previous entries here have described some of our goals for this project -- to expose young people to the choices that get made in the production of various forms of media, to provide them with role-models of what it might be like to create and distribute work in those media, to provide educators -- in school and out -- with a vocabulary for talking about and assessing student work within those media.

This profile of Sean Cole was produced by Comparative Media Studies graduate student Orit Kuritsky with assistance from CMS graduate student Amulya Gopalakrishnan. Kuritsky, herself, is an experienced media producer, having worked developing new formats, scripting and editing for children's television in her native Israel and in radio production here in the United States, She moved from intern into a producer position on The Connectiona syndicated talk show that aired from WBUR Boston before returning to graduate school. She has also been part of a team of our graduate students which has been working with the Terrascope Program in the Earth Sciences department at MIT to help scientist learn to communicate their ideas through radio. The students focused their energies this year on the earthquake and tsunami that hit the coast of Chile in 1960 – the largest one ever documented. The students went to Chile during spring break to do interviews and collect sounds which would eventually be edited into a 23 minute piece dealing, as they put it, with “ecological, cultural and personal survival during a devastating earthquake and tsunami”. The piece aired on WMBR and is also available on the public radio exchange

In a recent e-mail, Kuritsky explained to me some of the factors that went into her choice of Cole as an exemplar subject:

I love to listen to him on the radio. His quirkiness, combined with genuine curiosity and wit, generate great radio pieces. And I'm not alone. He is regarded as one of the most interesting and unique voices in the world of public radio. He is a very warm, attitude-less person. When I was new at the station, besides simply being nice, he kept telling me that he also started as an intern, and that it took time for him to get a permanent position, all things I needed to hear at the time. I think this unassuming attitude, combined with willingness to give advice, translates well on the screen. Sean is technically savvy. Many highly regarded public radio reporters still send interview, narration and ambiance clips to their respective headquarters, where professional editors/engineers lace their pieces together. Sean insists on doing it himself. He is also active in online communities of radio enthusiasts (like transom and prx, commenting on othersÂ’ works and offering advice). In these regards, Sean represents where public radio is heading, or at least one among contradicting directions; younger, more personal, more participatory, more diverse.

Here, Kuritsky collaborated closely with Cole to help students develop a better understanding of what goes into the production of a segment for Morning Edition from its conceptualization and planning, through the collection of interviews and environmental sounds, the logging and selection of sounds, the scripting and editing process, and the final product. Like the Nick Bertozzi profile I showed here recently, this series of short digital films lays out the choices which shape the production process at every step along the way, offering very good professional advice to would be radio producers. Indeed, this advice seems particularly timely given the revival of interest in recorded sound production brought about by the emergence of podcasting.

Throughout the segment, Cole is passionate about radio as a medium -- as my opening quote above suggests -- and very attentive to the ways it differs from other ways of presenting the same material:

In print, you write a story and pepper it with quotes. In radio, the tape is everything. The tape is the structure of the story. It is the architecture, it's the skeleton of the story and the script is the muscle and sinew around it.

As students begin to watch these tapes of producers working in different media, we hope they will learn to think ethnographically. We want students to focus not just on what people are saying but how they say it. So, in the case of Sean Cole, part of the fascination is the ways that the kinds of metaphors which characterize NPR style emerge spontaneously throughout his interview. He speaks in the segment about the need to construct a conversational style for radio which is nevertheless concise, accurate, and evocative. Watching him talk in this extended interview, one can see how he has internalized this style and how it becomes a natural part of the way he engages with people around him.

Cole is very interested in getting youth not only to listen closely to the mix of sonic elements which constitute a radio segment but also to listen closely to their own physical surroundings. He talks about how radio producers seek to capture the characteristic sounds of a particular location -- whether it is the clacking of needles at a knitting convention or the burbling street noises which he acknowledges are something of a cliché in public radio work. This emphasis on hearing one's environment is consistent with the approach which Kuritsky had taken with the students in her own radio class:

We spent a lot of time in class listening to a variety of radio pieces and talking about them. It was striking at first to discover that the students are really not familiar with the medium (except as a vehicle for music), and have a very small vocabulary in their conceptual tool boxes to discuss it. This changed quickly as they listened to more pieces and became more sensitive to the elements of radio stories, how they work together, and how they react to them. Besides listening, students learned by doing; they created their own radio pieces, simple ones at first, and more complicated ones as final projects. (In order to do that, they had to master recording techniques and editing software, as well as develop their skills as interviewers and writers)

Throughout the series, we want very much to show the professional contexts in which these media artists produce their work, especially stressing forms of collaboration within the workplace. We feel schools put too much emphasis on individual creative expression and not enough on the ways people often work together to insure the production and distribution of art. Here's what Kuritsky had to say about her goals in depicting WBUR:

Despite the fact that Sean is very much self sufficient in his daily work it was important for me to portray him in context, banter from his boss included. (see chapter 9 “collaboration”.) It takes a certain personality, as well as certain socio-economic conditions for creative people to posit themselves as ‘artists’. Many people still need to work for organizations to make a living, and express, their creative skills. Working in organizations does not mean lack of creative freedom, but it certainly entails some give and take, which is reflected in this chapter and others.

Cole is a gifted storyteller, as the people who work with him are quick to tell us here, and this segment explodes with fascinating narratives about his experiences in the field. The primary focus is on a basic story in which he follows the evacuation route out of Boston being recommended by local government officials but along the way he also shares with us stories about Sherlock Holmes fans, about a young man who discovers the recycling of musical themes by Nickleback, and a range of other assignments on which he worked.

The goal of this project, however, is not simply to provide technical instruction to help young people become better media makers or to prepare them for professions in the media industry. We also want to heighten their awareness of the ethical issues which media makers face as they go about their work. We are especially proud of segment 8 in this series which deals with the choices Cole make in producing this segment: in particular, he has to think about the best way to preserve the original context and meaning of his interviewee's remarks, even as radio requires a ruthless pairing down of material. He encounters a situation where he could make a policeman he interviewed look foolish and has to decide the best way to preserve what the man was trying to communicate. Cole speaks forcefully about the responsibilities which reporters have to their subjects and the various professional procedures they follow in order to maintain the integrity and fairness of what they produce. This attention to journalistic ethics seems especially urgent at a time when so many young people are generating media through blogs or home pages or LJ entries without much oversight by adults. It is also urgently needed at a time when many young people are increasingly cynical about all forms of journalism, drawing limited distinction between the partisanship that often charges the blogosphere and more traditional forms of journalism. Cole makes it clear that all journalism involves making choices about how to represent what one has observed, that these choices are made by human beings who make mistakes, and that these choices have an impact on the people who they are representing through their work.

Much media literacy work has historically been concerned about the effects of media on the people who consume it. If I had my way, we would recenter those questions from media effects to media ethics, getting students to think through the choices they make as they generate and circulate their own media and the consequences of those choices on other people. Many of the same issues would resurface in such an approach but they would have greater immediacy as young people were actively involved in making choices about the kinds of media they are producing.

When Transmedia Goes Wrong: Studio 60 and DeFaker

Through the work of our Convergence Culture Consortium, CMS faculty and students have been monitoring ongoing experiments in transmedia storytelling, trying to help our client companies to better understand when entertainment producers are creating something valuable for their consumers and when they are antagonizing them. In a recent newsletter, CMS student Ivan Askwith wrote about Studio 60 on Sunset Strip's failed attempt to build a fictional blog set in the world of the series -- an experiment which was shut down in only a few days time. I asked Ivan if I could share this post with the readers of my blog. I am reminded here of the long-standing complaint from fans that official websites are often less satisfying than fan-generated sites: for one thing, they tend to be relatively static, built once and rarely updated, even on shows that have fairly dynamic character development or elaborate and unfolding story arcs. Kurt Lancaster made some of these points contrasting the official and fan websites for Babylon 5 in his book about the series, for example. For another, those who produce official content often do not pay attention to the details which matter most to fans. Janet Murray and I wrote an essay some years ago (published in Greg Smith's On a Silver Platter) which compared the kinds of details included in the early cd-roms about Star Trek with those which cropped up most often in fanzine stories. We found that the official materials supported some kinds of fan interests (those of male technologically inclined fans) and not others (those of women fanzine writers interested in the relationships between the characters.)

Those official sites which have broken out of this trap -- such as Dawson's Desktop, which I discuss in Convergence Culture -- have been real labors of love, often created by tapping the fan community for potential collaborators in their production.

Of course, those of us who have regularly watched Aaron Sorkin's series through the year know that his characters wage a running battle against online fan communities: Josh Lyman ran into trouble with a discussion list on The West Wing and we've already heard the characters opine negatively about bloggers on Studio 60. So, the conflict Askwith describes here seems almost inevitable.

Online Content Experiments: The Fate of Defaker

By: Ivan Askwith

In May, speaking before an audience of advertisers and television executives, NBC CEO Jeff Zucker declared, "No longer is content just for the television screen!" This might as well have been the official slogan of this year's upfront week, where many network executives spent more time promoting their new online strategies than previewing their new on-air programming. In their coverage of the event, the New York Times reported that "analysts are calling this upfront week a watershed because the networks are significantly expanding their presence in the new media, whether through Webisodes, video downloads, podcasts or mini-series created for cellphones." (Elliott, 5/16/06)

Of course, the upfront announcements themselves weren't much of a watershed -- they simply articulated, for the benefit of the press, a trend that has been accelerating over the past two years: the television industry's growing awareness of the importance of compelling online content. Over the past year, almost all of the major networks have made arrangements to distribute their broadcast content online. Now that the core programming content is online, however, the more interesting (and dangerous) step begins: networks must begin to understand their audiences well enough to provide meaningful online-only content.

I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss an notable online experiment: Defaker, an "in narrative" blog that NBC launched to promote their much-anticipated Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Defaker went live shortly after Studio 60's premiere on the evening of September 18. Designed to look almost identical to Defamer, a popular Hollywood gossip site, Defaker

presented itself as a source for "insider, behind-the-scenes information" for fans of Studio 60's fictional show-within-a-show.

In theory, this isn't a bad idea: a show like Studio 60, which focuses on backstage

relationships and network politics, would actually lend itself beautifully to an irreverent gossip blog. A site like Defaker could be used to generate audience investment in the show, reporting "rumors" that provide resolution on throw-away moments seen in previous episodes and foreshadow the action of future episodes. Fictional "interviews" or "news articles" could provide details and anecdotes that flesh out the show's characters, elaborate the events that led up to the show, hint at future guest stars, and more. This, in turn, could deepen a viewer's engagement with the show -- readers of Defaker would become "local experts," capable of reporting to casual viewers on the significance and implications of the (in-narrative) online rumors. Did I say Defaker wasn't a bad idea? I take it back: Defaker has the potential to be a

brilliant idea.

In practice, however, Defaker turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. Rather than delivering on its claim to offer an "insider's" perspective on the show, the site's first entry was nothing more than a mediocre recap of the events that took place on the show, and a series of HD screen captures presented as "behind-the- scenes photos." (As several visitors pointed out, the recap got some details wrong.) The writers also seeded the entry with a handful of meaningless, enthusiastic "in character" comments, from fictional fans, to set the tone. The design logic behind the site was clear: Defaker didn't need to offer any new content to viewers, because the gimmick of presenting the old content in character was so clever. Fans of the show would love it, right?

Wrong. The attacks began within minutes.

A sample of the feedback:

-

"This is lame, you can't even get stills from the set? You had to use screengrabs?"

- "Whoever they hired to write this horrible blog didn't even understand the show."

- "This site is awful. An ounce of effort could have made it all right."

- "You must be kidding. This is the worst fake I've ever read.

- "The show is OK but this writing is a mess and the whole thing's a turn-off! BOO!"

- "This blog is sh*t."

Some visitors went so far as to declare that they had enjoyed the show, but shared the sentiments of one commenter who declared that "out of protest against this ridiculous, lazy and unoriginal marketing attempt, I'm going to boycott the show."

So, where did Defaker go wrong?

Well, as one of the most astute commenters pointed out, Defaker "is a laughably bad attempt at viral marketing. Not since the Flinstones rappin' about Fruity Pebbles has a major corporation so completely misunderstood the phenomenon they're trying to cash in on." Despite the apparent assumptions of the show's promoters, a show cannot simply go online and expect fans to be impressed -- it has to offer visitors something new, and create opportunities for engagement that the show alone can't offer.

Many of the posts were proactive, offering clear advice to help improve the project.

One viewer wrote:

"if you want to make a fake blog like this, don't just give us a summary of a show we already saw, with lame screen shots right from the show... give us stuff NOT on the show we just got finished watching, and make it worth our while to come back."

Another was even more articulate, pointing out that:

"this blog isn't giving us any new perspective on the show. It's just rehashing everything we already saw on the show. Take a page from HBO, their blog for Big Love wasn't much to write home about but they posted a blog from one of their character's point of view. It gave some insight on her character which wasn't portrayed in the show. You could do a blog from [a PA's] point of view. Now that would be something worth reading."

So what lessons are we supposed to take away from this?

1) Know who you're developing online content for, and design it accordingly.

In the case of Defaker, NBC failed to recognize that the most likely audience for the blog would be the viewers who were most invested in the show -- and as such, the viewers who would be the most knowledgeable and critical.

2) Online content should add something new to the experience.

Successful online content -- as so many commenters pointed out -- has to offer the audience something new. It's tempting to see this as a hassle, since it requires additional time, effort and thought. Instead, I think we need to understand it as an opportunity: online content gives us the ability to expand and deepen the narrative world depicted on television, which in turn allows viewers to immerse themselves far more completely in the show and the characters. Online content extensions should help transform a show from passive viewing into an immersive experience.

3) Listen to what your audience is telling you.

The comments posted to Defaker, harsh as they were, offered direct, articulate advice that the blog's author(s) could have followed to improve the site. Instead, however, they chose to post a second (and final) entry, which included this tragically misguided response:

"To my detractors... who think that this is 'viral marketing bull' for NBS, viral marketing (I just looked up what this means on Wikipedia!) only works if people with nothing better to do jabber on about the thing in question, so apparently, the more you talk, the more I grow stronger.... insert evil laughter here."

...which leads us to a fourth important lesson...

4) Don't ever insult your audience or try to tell them they're wrong.

The response posted above simply blows my mind: the writer is not only dismissing the(admittedly harsh) criticism from the site's visitors, but insinuating that the show's most invested viewers have "nothing better to do [than] jabber" about the show. This response all but dares the viewer to stop watching the show. If someone didn't lose their job for posting = this, I'd be surprised; in any event, the blog was taken offline the day after this entry was posted.

---

One final detail worth noting: while Defaker illustrates precisely what not to do when developing online television extensions, Studio 60 has had more success with a second blog, launched at the same time.

On this "official" non-fiction behind-the-scenes blog, writer- director duo Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme have been posting interesting (if short) responses to viewer-submitted questions, as well as occasional entries hinting at their own thoughts on the evolution of the show. Eschewing the half-baked gimmick of Defaker, the official Studio 60 blog re-affirms that the best online offerings don't need to be clever; they simply need to add something new, and help transform television watching into an engaging experience.

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.