Fun and Games with Copyright

This seems to be a week for confessions in the blog: I have already come out as a slash writer, one who tampers with the high cannon no less; I should also confess that I am an Eagle Scout. This is not exactly the most common combination of backgrounds and identities. (I use the present tense because officially, once you earn Eagle, it is something you carry with you the rest of your life, even though I haven't really done anything with Scouting in several decades now.) Scouting was a value part of my life: I taught for the first time when I was asked to lead classes for various merit badges for my troop, including classes in photography (which ended up centering on cinema) and in Theater (which allowed me to script and direct plays.) I can still recite the scout oath and still try to follow much of its standards. I have had more difficulty in recent years by the way the organization has gone to court to try to block membership to gay scoutmasters and scouts. I also lost some more respect for the organization when I read recently about a project conducted by the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles in association with the Motion Picture Association of America which seems designed to indoctrinate the youth into a particular ideological perspective on copyright and intellectual property.

My MIT colleague David Thorburn has shared with me the following excerpt from a recent story in the New York Times:

The 52,000 Boy Scouts in Los Angeles have a new virtue to strive for: respect for copyrights. In return for learning about the harms of downloading pirated movies and music, they will be awarded an activity patch showing a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a "C" enclosed in a circle, The Associated Press reported. By means of a curriculum devised by the movie industry, the Scouts will be instructed in basic copyright law and learn to identify five types of copyrighted works and three ways that copyrighted materials may be stolen. In addition, they must choose an activity from a list that includes visiting a movie studio to see how many people may be harmed by film piracy, and creating public services announcements urging others not to steal music or movies. "Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property.

A little research found the actual curriculum on the web and not surprisingly, it makes no mention of the role of fair use as a balance for the more extreme assertions of intellectual property control being promoted by the film industry. Here are some excerpts:

Intellectual property is no different than physical property. Stealing intellectual property that is copyrighted is against the law and can have serious consequences. Movies, music, games, and software are forms of intellectual property that are usually copyrighted to protect the people who make them.

Some of the required activities include:

Demonstrate your knowledge of the following:

a. What is copyright?

b.Why do copyrights matter?

c.Identify five different types of copyrighted works (two of which may be your own). For each, give the author/creator and the date the work was copyrighted.

d. name three ways copyrighted works may be taken.

Visit a video sharing network or peer to peer website and identify which materials are copyrighted and which aren't.

Go to a movie and stay through all the credits. Tell you counselor/or scout leader who you think, in addition to the main actors and actresses, would be hurt if the film was stolen?

Keep in mind, of course, that the Boy Scouts of America does not yet offer a Media Literacy merit badge -- though the Girl Scouts do. There is a Communications badge which is required for Eagle but it's emphasis is on interpersonal communications and public speaking. And there is an optional Cinematography merit badge which focuses entirely on the filmmaking technology and process.

The scouts who were asked to participate in this program, then, are given no instruction which might speak to the structure of the American entertainment industry, the corporate interests which shape the media we consume, the role of participatory culture in contemporary society, or the forms of appropriation and parody which might be protected under Fair Use provisions.

Of course, when I was in the Scouts, there was a specific provision which prohibited you from engaging in partisan political activities while wearing the uniform. Boy Scouts were encouraged to promote citizenship in the abstract sense, including helping to get people to vote, but they were not to take sides on public policies while acting as Scouts. I have been trying to find this policy on the web but so far, have not had much success. Since the activities described above clearly take the side of the media industry on an important public policy debate, it seems curious to me that Scouts were not only encouraged to do these activities while in uniform but that they resulted in a badge which could be sewed onto the uniform.

My Secret Life as a Slasher

So, my dirty little secret is finally out in the open. A few weeks ago, I did a podcast interview for Emma Grant at Slashcast about slash fan fiction and spoke openly about the fact that I have one published story out there in a relatively obscure little zine called Not What You Think. As a gift to all of my readers out there in LJ-Land, I figured, now that the cat is out of the bag, that I would share some excerpts from the story itself and for the rest of you, I figured I might use this to offer some reflections on the nature of slash as a form of critical commentary, an issue which I raised here in the blog a few weeks ago. The story is called "Golden Idol." It was published, if you can call it that, in 1998 and promptly disappeared into obscurity. Here's how the story starts:

'Another Idol has displaced me,' the fair young girl in the mourning dress exclaimed, her eyes misted with tears. 'If it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grief.'

He gasped, stung by her sudden revelation. She knew! Nancy had found out the secret that he hadn't uttered aloud even in private, and if she knew, who else might know? Did he? He trembled at the thought and then tried to mask his discomfort with a half-felt denial.

'What idol has displaced you?'

He wanted to probe, hungered for an answer, and yet feared to find out how much she knew. He was certain in any case that she would not be able to put what she knew into words. His secret, as he had always known, was unspeakable and so her language was circumspect. She hinted at things without saying them directly.

But how could she know? He had always acted the part of the perfect gentleman with her, since that day long ago when they first spoke of marriage and began to imagine a future together. He had taken her to dances and let her show off her new beau to her blushing friends. He had brought her flowers and had dinner at her house. As time passed, they had moved from speculations of marriage to treating it as something that would happen someday, then soon, then in a matter of months, whenever he got his affairs in order, whenever he was sure he would be able to support them. He was eager to believe that things could work out between them, that they were in love, even if he often had trouble finding those feelings inside himself, even if his emotions towards her lacked the intensity with which romantic love was described in books or songs.

He danced the dance -- did it matter so much that he didn't really quite hear the music? He held her hand, on occasions when it was deemed appropriate, and stroked it softly, admiring her slender digits, running his fingers ever so gently along her wrist. He kissed her playfully on the ear when that was appropriate, uncertain if this was too much of an advance for someone in their position or not enough of one. He always played the part, always aware of an audience that included her but also many others. He tried to convince her (not to mention himself) that all of this came naturally, spontaneously, grew from honest emotions (which he was increasingly doubtful that anyone in his position really felt.)

Note: Not What You Expect is now back in circulation if you wish to order it and read the entire story, you can do so here.

Yet somehow he knew he was lying, and more to the point, somehow she knew he was lying. That much was certain. The sham was unveiled, and with its demise had ended his hopes of settling comfortably, easily, respectably, into married life. Perhaps she had known even before he had known himself. But that only increased his guilt since this meant that perhaps she knew him better than anyone else and had come to understand his emotions, his thoughts -- even his desires? -- from the inside out.

The seconds seemed to linger in the air, and she was not responding to his question. She looked at him with hurt, perhaps a little anger, though less than he would have expected under the circumstances. Did he imagine a little pity in her eyes, or was it dread? He waited and she waited and then he asked again, "What idol has displaced you?"...

"A golden one," she said, again speaking ambiguously, telling only what was necessary to extract both of them from their painful circumstances, moving forward with a dignity that was mixed with more than a little denial.

A golden one. How tangled that one remark seemed to him at that moment, for there were two economies at stake in this discussion. There was the economy of business, of profits and loss, of red ink and black ink, of ledgers and columns; and there was the economy of desire, of things saved and spent, of things consumed and yet remained to be consumed. There was the gold, silver and copper that he could hold in his hands and count, and there was the gold, silver, and copper that he desired and yet could never touch -- the gold of Jacob's wild shock of hair pulled up in a tail, the silver of his eyes so keen and shrewd, and the copper of his glistening skin flushed with sweat. And there was the gold that passed between them, the coins that had touched the skin he dared not touch and that passed into his own hands still warm from Jacob's body.

He tried to pretend that they were speaking only of crowns and shillings and so protested that the world was unjust in issuing almost as much reproach to those who worked hard for their money, who labored and earned and saved and counted and stored away their money, as they did to the poor and worthless, lazy and lame. Perhaps she was, after all, simply protesting the many hours he spent at his work, the hours he neglected her to earn money. Yet he knew he could not extract himself that simply.

The time he spent earning money was not only time he had not spent with her; it was time he had spent with Jacob. He always found excuses to prolong it. They worked side by side in silence, often for hours on end, so close to each other that he could feel his partner's breath on the back of his neck. He would lose count, counting instead the ebb and flow of his partner's breathing, straining to hear the sound of his heart beating, to be aware of his body, until Jacob would speak, jarring him back to consciousness, pulling him back to the world of bargains and investments. Jacob never rebuked him for his dreaminess, for his inattention to the hard facts of the matter at hand but laughed softly, a gleam in his eyes.

If the hour was late and the day's work had been sufficiently profitable, they would close the big leather books and walk out into the streets together, stopping at their private club for a few drinks. Those who knew them rarely saw one without the other, and after a while, many of them had trouble remembering which was which. They had been partners in business for a little over a year at that point. Still he had trouble remembering when it had started since those arrangements had become so comfortable that it was harder and harder to imagine when they had not been together. He had already forgotten what it was like to be alone -- to be without a partner, to be without a fiancée, to be working for old Fezziweg as a clerk, to be away from the warm glow of Jacob Marley.

Part of the pleasure of publishing the story for the first time in the context of a multimedia zine was to let people slowly discover for themselves who this story was about. I got the idea for writing a Scrooge/Marley slash story while listening to a tape of Patrick Stewart's one man show version of the Christmas Carol. Suddenly, for the first time, the scene when Scrooge breaks up with his finance Nancy had popped out at me. It was one of the few times in the entire novel that we hear from someone who can see inside Scrooge and really understands what he is thinking. Normally what characters say about Scrooge is projected onto him from a more distanced perspective. I was intrigued by this phrase, "a Golden Idol," and the way that she presents this "idol" as if it were a flesh and blood rival for his affections. She most likely is referring to his workaholic tendencies and to his greed, those traits we most associate with Scrooge, yet what if she wasn't? What if there really were a secret rival who stood between Scrooge and his intended bride?

Every line in this scene comes directly from the novel. What I was doing here was recontextualizing Dicken's original language to offer up an alternative interpretation of what the characters might have been thinking -- this integration of original dialogue and internal monologue is a common literary device in fan fiction. I was rewriting it for the purpose of critical commentary and in the process, I was trying to include as many elements from the original novel as possible while offering explanations for the character issues which have long concerned literary critics writing about the book. Even the idea that the partnership between Scrooge and Marley might have a homosocial/homoerotic undertone would not seem radical in the era of queer literary criticism. (For more on this point, see the slash chapter in Textual Poachers). But from an academic perspective, the fact that I used a fictional form rather than an analytic essay to construct this argument might have seen nonconventional.

The Victorians had been very interested in using economic vocabularies to talk about the expenditure of bodily fluids that took place through sexual encounters and so I played with this to describe the relations between the two men.

Let me continue further with the scene we started:

He had met Marley years before when they had been schoolboys, he an upperclassman who tried hard to teach the young Jacob his proper place but instead had been charmed by the lad, captivated by his quick wit and warm smile, fascinated by the workings of his mind, and stirred by his developing body. They had enjoyed a closeness then that no adult could know, become intimates in every sense of the word, sharing everything, withholding nothing, until the whole school was atalk about their crush, until the threat of scandal had loomed large on the horizon and begun to play upon even Scrooge's mind. Then his father, perhaps hearing gossip, perhaps getting a report from the schoolmaster, withdrew him from that school, took him home and 'made him a man.' His father was harsh and unloving, knowing little of matters of the heart. His mother had died when he was young, so there was little to bring joy into that house. His young sister, sweet little Fan, had done her best to reconcile the two of them, not really ever understanding the differences that kept them apart. Inevitably, voices were raised, harsh words were uttered and neither man could find reconciliation. When he had been younger, after his mother died, the old man had beaten him, punching him in the ribs, slapping him in the face, until he ran away and hid. Yet when he had returned home to find a father who no longer drank and who had discovered religion and so had learned to contain his violent rage, Scrooge found that some things hurt even more than fists. His father prayed for him every night and made certain that he knew that he knew that he had fallen far short of the old man's sense of what was proper, normal, respectable. His father's harsh whispers, not able to confront the problem directly, not able to forget it either, bruised him with their intensity. His eyes, stone hard, merciless, unforgiving, cut into his flesh.

At last Scrooge left, seeking his fortune elsewhere, looking for some place where he could escape his forbidden feelings for Jacob and avoid his father's wrath and judgment. He had gone to work at Fezziweg's, starting as a young apprentice and gradually gaining more responsibilities. Scrooge found in the red-faced, round and jolly man a second father, one as kind-hearted and generous as his own father was bitter and brutal. Fezziweg trust him and through his trust, Scrooge had learned to trust himself again and had opened himself up to friendship, this time with a young man named Dick Wilkens....

Dicken's novel includes surprisingly few elements, tell us relatively little about Scrooge. We are expected to see him from the outside -- as a cranky old man -- and not from the inside -- as someone who is described as deeply lonely, even as a boy. I wanted to use this story to examine that loneliness and to use that loneliness to explain what happened between Scrooge and Marley.

Part of what interested me was the doubling that occurs in the book as we see Scrooge as an old man watching himself within scenes that occurred when he was a much younger man and the sense of powerlessness he must have felt reliving those moments without being able to change them. And this led me deeper and deeper into thoughts about being haunted by memories, about wanting to say things that had gone unsaid or do things that hadn't been done. As I thought about what kind of slash story I could construct about Scrooge and Marley, I realized it needed not to be a love story per se but about the story of a romance that almost happened and that Scrooge, so much concerned by the judgment of the world, had backed away from. It became a story about how one internalizes homophobia and how it blocks one from the experience of one's desires.

Scrooge, no an old man, his face hardened into a caricature of itself, had trouble remembering times in his life when he had not been alone, cut off from the others around him. As a young boy, crying in the school house rather than return home to his father, he watched through the window as a parade of mummers passed, bursting with Yuletide spirits. As a young man, having at last found his one true friend, he was forcefully removed from the boarding school by his father and isolated once again, this time in a suffocating realm of Bible verses and condemnations. As a young clerk working for Fezziweg, trying to play the part of the respectable adult, he learned that the illusion of friendship and community could be maintained only if one didn't inspect it too closely or demand from it more than it was prepared to give. As a young suitor, he fumbled to convince the world that he was very much in love; as a young businessman sitting at night in the club by himself, he pretended not to care that no one invited him to join him for a drink.

My story contains very little sex in the end -- this is unusual for slash but not unheard of. What interested me was the emotional life of the characters and that is certainly the driving force behind most slash. I have them make love one time in a burst of enthusiasm on Christmas eve and then have Scrooge, alone in the dark, feel shame and crawl away, never to speak of the experience again. The closeness they feel is shattered by their efforts to consummate their relationship sexually (the reverse of what happens in most slash). And this prepares us for the last phases of their life together.

In his later years, after that fateful night when everything had come apart for them, Scrooge and Marley became simply a business concern. The two old men worked side by side yet scarcely spoke as they pored over their books. Marley came to communicate with him only through his clerk, Bob Cratchet. In the years since Marley's death, there was no more hope for them, no possibility of changing what had been said or finishing what had gone unsaid. Marley had died, and he had gone on living, though he had by that point become so paralyzed that he could scarcely be called alive. He went through life snarling at those who demanded form him what was no longer his to give, angry at those who enjoyed the happiness and good fellowship that he was denied, and harsh towards those who wanted what he had without being prepared to pay the brutal price.

I was fascinated that Marley returns from the dead to communicate with Scrooge and then shows him nothing of their life together, even though on other levels Dickens hints that this must have been the most defining relationship of Scrooge's life. One reason why people initially struggle to imagine a Scrooge/Marley story is that we never see Marley in his prime, as a young man, and have only the image of the rotting corpse with the slack jaw and the chains. So, in the story, I have Scrooge trying to read through the lines, looking for the scenes that Marley doesn't show him, and in the end, this is the level on which they communicate with each other.

He was confused. What was the meaning of any of these scenes that the Ghost had brought him to witness? Why these scenes, not others? What pattern was being slowly but surely developed form these fragments of time, bits of old memories, many of which he had long ago forgotten? It seemed to him that these choices missed the point somehow, did not fit within the narrative had had constructed to make sense of his own life, seemed to point consistently to a life he had not lived and the lies that he had tried to tell the world. But where was the truth? Perhaps some outside observer might look upon these as turning points in his life, but surely Marley, of all people, knew better.

Marley had returned from the dead -- for that was certain, Marley was dead, dead as a doornail, dead as a coffin nail, dead. Yet he had come back to him, at no small cost he was certain. To what purpose, what end?

Marley had sought to warn him about the cost of denying the world its due, about the price he had paid for hardening his heart and shutting out his feelings. He was prepared to learn that lesson as best he could and act upon it insofar as was appropriate.

But these were the wrong moments. Removed from context, they made little or no sense. He could witness the actions, hear the words, but he could not feel the emotions. The people around him meant even less to him than they had the first time. Could the truth of anyone's life be summed up in a few scattered moments without looking at what had come before and after? Were the words that had been said so many years before adequate to the occasion when he was powerless, as a mere witness, to rewrite them, to modify them, to speak them again but try to convey their meaning more fully? What mattered ultimately, he feared, was not what he had said and done but what hadn't happened, the silences rather than the utterances. What mattered were the gaps which fell between the scenes that the world chose to remember. That had always been the problem....

The Ghost had not offered him the chance, which he would gladly have taken, to relive that moment when he saw Jacob again at his club, that firm embrace, that happy reunion, or the time when they agreed to become partners, or those heady first days as a company when the two together gained the success that had been denied them both separately and they felt as if the world were out there waiting for them to pluck it like a bauble. The Ghost didn't let him hear Marley's laughter again or see his smile or watch the sparkle in his eyes. Instead he was forced to watch himself pretend a love he did not feel and try to accept the release Nancy was offering him with appropriate grace and appropriate regret.

None of that mattered. At that moment all that mattered was Marley and the time they had spent together and the scenes the Ghost was omitting from this journey down memory's crooked pathways. It was as if Marley had never existed, had not been part of his life -- the best part, the most important part, the only true and meaningful part. It was as if Marley was shoving him away with all of his might towards the life that might have been his if he had simply forsaken his unnatural love and conformed to what was normal and expected of him.

Everything in the next passage is there in Dicken's novel. There's a lot that seems psychologically odd about Scrooge's relationship to Marley if we read the novel closely yet these are the passages that get skipped over in the dramatization of the story. This is a good example of how slash writing requires the marshalling of evidence, the presentation of data, which supports the slash interpretation -- again, like other forms of critical commentary. The actions I describe are in the book; the motives I ascribe to them come from my analysis of the book through the slash interpretation.

Scrooge could not bring himself to paint out Marley's name on their sign, so he still went by Scrooge and Marley some seven years later, and people still came there looking for Marley and settling for Scrooge. He could not bring himself to fire Cratchet, even though his very presence was painful to him, since it reminded him of the times when he and his partner were unwilling or unable to speak to each other. He snarled at Cratchet and he punished Cratchet because he needed to strike out at someone and Cratchet was at his mercy. He wanted Cratchet to go away and take the memories of Marley with him, but he could not fire him, no matter how much he grumbled about giving him a day off at Christmas or using too much coal to light the wood stove. He couldn't fire Cratchet because, for all of the sad memories he provoked, Marley had hired him, had trusted him, had valued his friendship, and he could not undo what Marley had done. Scrooge moved into Marley's house to be close to him, to feel the presence of his spirit in the things the man had accumulated, and Scrooge slept, when he was able to do so, in Marley's bed, the bed curtains still hanging there as they had that night. He grew to hate Christmas as he did no other day of the year because it had brought him nothing but misery and stood as a reminder of how out of favor he was with the world's expectations.

In the end, I am impressed by the healing which Marley offers Scrooge in returning from the dead and offering him back memories of his life while it is still possible to change. Several writers have theorized that slash is a genre about nurturance, about men trying to heal each other of the pains caused by their repressed sexual and emotional lives, often in the forms of nursing each other back to physical or mental health. Seen through this lens, Marley's return to Scrooge is a great romantic gesture -- certainly embodying the idealized notion of romantic male friendship that many writers have found in slash.

Marley had come back from the dead to speak with him again, after all those years of silence, those years when the office had been like a tomb and those years when Marley had been buried in his tomb, as if it mattered, in the end, whether the silence between them was shared with a body that was living or dead. What must Marley have gone through to win that right denied so many other doomed souls, to return for even a moment to the world of the living, to intervene in the affairs of men and set them right again, to try to heal Scrooge before it was too late. But then Marley had always been a gifted negotiator and a good man for a bargain.

Marley had, miracle of miracles, come back for him, to him, still cared about him, still loved him above all men, still cared about what he did and what he felt and what fate befell him, still remembered the days and hours of his life and still lamented the times that they had not spent together or that, spent together, had come to nothing but painful silence.

So there you have it - a slashed up Christmas Carol, just in time for the holidays. I would offer the whole story but I no longer have it in an electronic form, only in hard copy. But I wanted to at least retype these bits to give you some sense of what the story was like and what it taught me about the nature of slash.

The Craft of Science Fiction

Those of you in the Boston vicinity may want to make your way to the MIT Media Lab's Bartos Theatre this Thursday for what promises to be a fascinating event -- "The Craft of Science Fiction" -- which will feature of a reading by Four time Nebula Award winning writer Joe Haldeman (The Forever War) and a discussion of his work. I will be moderating the event which is being hosted by the MIT Communications Forum from 5-7 pm. Those who can't make the event can catch the streaming audio version which will go up on the Communications Forum website several days later. Something of the tone of the discussion may be suggested by some comments about science fiction's place in contemporary culture which Haldeman penned for the CMS newsletter:

Whatever its shortcomings, actual science fiction (as opposed to fantasy tricked out with space ships and ray guns) is a bastion of rationalism. The universe works by rules, even if those rules are imperfectly understood. Problems are solved not by wishing things were otherwise but by trying to understand what is actually wrong and taking action to change it. We live in a world where wishful thinking and magical thinking prevail at the highest levels of leadership. Our own government thinks it can control reality by denying scientific evidence. We're in a war that at least one side justifies by ferocious religious dogma. More Americans believe in ghosts than in evolution. For that matter, more than half believe the story of Creation in the Bible are literally true and are waiting for the Rapture. Belief in oddball ideas like faith healing, extrasensory perception, communication with the dead and haunted houses have

all been on the increase in the past decade. These people don't read science fiction, or at least they don't read it well. But they may read books that are shelved in the science fiction section, or go to movies that call themselves sci-fi....

Basically, Haldeman, a hard sf guy to the Nth degree, is drawing a distinction between science fiction which he sees as a fundamentally rationalist mode of literature (and thus as a tool to teach scientific reasoning) and sci-fi which he thinks is increasingly faith based and mired in fantasy. For Haldeman, science fiction is both a mode of popular science education and a form of social commentary. And as such, he feels it does increasingly important work in the face of what he sees as anti-science attitudes at large in the country today. As I said, lot's here to talk about.

Almost a decade ago, Joe Haldeman and I organized a science fiction reading series at MIT which brought to campus such writers as Octavia Butler, Bruce Sterling, Orson Scott Card, Frederick Pohl, Neil Gaiman, and many others. We paired national figures with local authors from the greater Boston area such as Ellen Kushner, James Patrick Kelly, Allen Steele, and Alexander Jablakov. Buried deep on the Communications Forum website are a series of essays I wrote about the science fiction writers we featured as well as transcripts of the public conversations we hosted. What follows is an excerpt from the essay I wrote at the time about Haldeman's work -- particularly about how his experiences during the Vietnam War shaped the themes of his science fiction writing. It should offer good background reading for anyone planning to attend this event. You can also read the transcript of a conversation between Haldeman and fellow hard science fiction writer Gregory Benford.

Joe Haldeman (1943- )

"Life begins in a bloody mess and sometimes it ends the same way, and only odd people seek out blood between those times, maybe crazy people."

-- Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman's vision of the universe was profoundly shaped by the Vietnam War. Vietnam surfaces as a theme, a backdrop, or a reference point in many of his stories. Born in Oklahoma and raised in Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Washington D.C. and Alaska, Haldeman was drafted in 1967. He fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the 4th Division. He received a Purple Heart for severe wounds he suffered during the war.

Haldeman's wrenching personal experiences enable him to write about war with a rare, brutal honesty. What's intriguing is that while many of his obsessions are with the past, his favorite way of exploring those issues is through representations of the future.

His first novel, War Year (1972) was a realistic account of the war. His second, The Forever War (1975) read the conflict through the filter of "space opera," and in turn, radically rewrote the conventions of that subgenre. Bran Aldiss has described the core Space Opera formula:

"Ideally the Earth must be in peril, there must be a quest and a man to watch the mighty hour. That man must confront aliens and exotic creatures. Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher. Blood must run down the palace steps, and ships launch out into the louring deep. There must be a woman fairer than the skies and a villain darker than the Black Hole. And all must come right in the end."

This formula shaped science fiction's representation of war -- from the lusty pulp sagas of E.E. "Doc" Smith to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy. The "Space Opera" subgenre depended upon a peculiarly American conception of war, grounded in idealism, optimism, technological power and a simple black-and-white morality. But, the Vietnam experience changed how Americans understood the nature of war, and Haldeman's Forever War demonstrates how absurd many of the old cliches look to someone who had seen real combat duty.

His writing is blunt, earthy, and anti-heroic. His battle sequences are as technically detailed and vivid as any in science fiction. But, his war is anything but a glorious adventure. Haldeman depicts war as the pathetic slaughter of an enemy incapable of defending itself. More of his characters die in accidents training for battle (or of shock when they must confront the horror of their own actions) than in their initial military action against the Taurans. Much of their time is spent waiting and only a fraction is spent ducking and covering, trying to stay alive in the face of enemy attack.

The causes of the "forever war" are murky; his protagonists are fighting against an enemy they can not comprehend. No one really knows what started the war or why the stakes are so high.

The book's anti-hero never has any real sense of what he is fighting to protect. Private William Mandella is a draftee, chosen because of his superior intellect and education. (Of course, during the Vietnam era, college boys were exempted from the draft!) He feels himself to be fundamentally unsuited for military life, yet the military gives him few options except to re-enlist, blacklisting him from all other employment.

Using ships that travel faster than light, the fighting takes him light years from earth. The campaigns take a subjective time of months, but span centuries in human history back home. Mandella is one of the few who survives nearly 1,200 years of war. He has no family, few friends and those few can be killed or transferred at any moment. As the war progresses, he has little or no chance to understand the men placed under his command, since they are products of Earth cultures about which he knows nothing. Late in the book, Mandella poignantly calculates whom he might save in an emergency:

"The thought did dip into my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field....I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I'd be picking six at random."

Under such circumstances, war becomes meaningless, a situation no one controls, as the protagonist learns as he moves from raw recruit to commanding officer without ever getting a firm grasp on the events around him.

Truth is, of course, the first casualty of war. In The Forever War, Haldeman gives us several intriguing glimpses of how public opinion is artificially shaped to build and maintain support for the prolonged fighting. In the war's early years, soldiers are pumped with hypnotic suggestions to insure that they conceptualize the war and the enemy in propagandistic terms, images which are triggered by a centralized command just as the troops move into combat:

My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: Shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists' vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (The colonists never took babies; they wouldn't stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein)....A hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters. I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-lust.

These images mirror common themes in wartime propaganda, including those promulgated by publications like Reader's Digest throughout the Vietnam War.

Those back home receive no more reliable information. When he returns home after his first hitch, Mandella tries to correct misperceptions about the war, but finds his words re-edited or fabricated by the news media: "He had kept me talking and talking in order to get a wide spectrum of sounds, from which he could synthesize any kind of nonsense." If Mandella is not exactly the hero we anticipate from a space opera, the news media transforms him into one for the purposes of shaping popular opinion.

Worlds, the first of a major trilogy, offers Haldeman's take on the student "revolutions" of the 1960s. His protagonist, Marianne O'Hara, comes to NYU from an off-world colony to major in American Studies and finds herself pulled deeper and deeper into political conspiracies. What begins as a "research project" in comparative political and economic cultures ends up being a matter of life and death. She is never sure whether she is working for or against the overthrow of the government, struggling to find the truth despite constant manipulations of information from all parties. Haldeman places no more faith in revolutions than he does in war.

The problem of communication between alien cultures runs through his work, often with good intentions ending badly for all involved, as in the slaughter that ensues as a result of an ill-considered and ill-informed ethnographic expedition in "Seasons." As a Xeologist in "Seasons" explains:

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, old style, there were dozens of isolated cultures still existing without metals or writing or even, in some cases, agriculture or social organization beyond the family. None of them survived more than a couple of generations beyond their contact with civilization.... The records are fascinating not only for the information about the primitives, but also for what they reveal of the investigating culture's unconscious prejudices. My own specialties were the Maori and Eskimo tribe and (by necessary association) the European and American cultures that investigated and more or less benignly destroyed them.

"A Tangled Web" offers a more comic (and somewhat more optimistic) take on what happens when businessmen confuse mastery over a language with understanding of an alien culture. The message seems to be that if we could so badly misunderstood our enemy in Vietnam, we are ill-equipped to deal with even more alien cultures who come to us from other worlds.

"Ghosts," memories of the war, haunt Haldeman's writing. A recurring theme in his fiction is the image of characters circling through the same traumatic event, again and again, trying either to achieve some moment of clarity or to avert fate. In "The Cure," the protagonist restages the same disturbing dream many times, trying to find an ending free of bloodshed. Images of brutal violence -- a rotting body in the jungle, the smell of burning flesh, the gurgle of blood -- surface in many Haldeman stories, appearing, often with startling intensity, when we least expect them. The war's impact on Haldeman's fiction can be seen in his titles, such as Planet of Judgement, All My Sins Remembered, Study War No More, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, and 1968.

Haldeman writes across many different genres, ranging from supernatural horror to hard science fiction, from psychodrama to broad satire, from spy thrillers to Star Trek novelizations. Yet underlying most of his stories is a sense of discomfort and dread. "The Cure" opens with a virtuoso passage, evoking almost all of the major genres of popular fiction, yet in each the protagonist seems doomed to an all-but-certain death.

His protagonists must often struggle with wounds (both psychological and physical) frequently linked to their wartime experiences. In "The Hemingway Hoax," a series of time paradoxes allows the protagonists to shift consciousness from body to body across a string of parallel universes. Each of his bodies was wounded in a different place during the same wartime incident. An inch higher or lower marks the dramatic difference between sexual potency and life-long pain. "Images" describes a healing erotic encounter between a man and a woman, each badly scarred, each so self-conscious about their bodies that they have cut themselves off from all sexual outlets except voyeurism.

Many of these shattering experiences result in profound alienation from the body. The protagonists in The Forever War become estranged from their own flesh, when new limbs are grown to replace amputated parts; no one else can tell that their bodies have been altered, yet they still have difficulty bonding with their "prosthesis." A doctor warns two lovers, both amputee patients, that "you're going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other." "More Than the Sum of the Parts" pushes this theme further, showing how the cybernetic replacement of human flesh results in a gradual loss of all ties to the human body.

From Serious Games to Serious Gaming

Last week, I presented a keynote address at the Serious Games Summit held in Washington DC. The event drew together participants from all of the groups which constitute the serious games movement -- educators, activists, entrepreneurs, government officials, military, emergency workers, scientists, therapists, nonprofits, foundations, and doctors. As such the serious games movement is a powerful illustration of what Yochai Benkler has taught us about networked culture -- the ways that it creates new and unexpected points of contact between commercial, amateur, nonprofit, educational, and governmental forces which are shaping the contemporary communications landscape. As I told the group there, it is unlikely that there was very many other circumstances which might result in a military leader, a corporate HR person, and a political activist sitting down to break bread together, yet at the Serious Games Summit, these groups were all trying to see what they could learn from each other. If these folks do their jobs well, there will not be such a gathering in a few years time because each of the subfields they represent will have expanded until they can support their own convening. And indeed, we are already seeing more specialized meetings for those involved in games for health, games for education, and so forth.

If you want to see my presentation itself, check out this webcast of the talk (1). Much of what I had to say in the first part of the talk was already stated in an earlier post on my blog, Getting Serious About Serious Games. A primary goal of this talk was to suggest how the ideas from Convergence Culture might inform the work of those of us who are trying to produce games for learning. You might see this talk, in part, as a response to some criticisms that Ian Bogost raised about my book -- that it was too invested in commercial culture and didn't have enough to say about noncommercial uses of media. I see these remarks as pointing to ways that the serious games movement might benefit from a greater understanding of concepts like collective intelligence, participatory culture, and transmedia storytelling.

Today, I want to pick up on an important theme which ran through the talk -- my goal was to shift the discussion from talking about serious games (as in a product) towards talking about serious gaming (as a process). .

Learning as a Process, Not a Product

Several years ago, I was approached by a Christian organization which wanted to construct an arcade where all of the games would promote prosocial values. They had believed the stories that suggested that violent games "programmed" young people to become school shootists and they wanted to design games which "programmed" young people to become saints instead of sinners. Often, when I talk to reporters, they act as if we could just plant kids in front of a black box and have them "learn" as if learning required nothing more than absorbing content. And teachers worry that they will be replaced by a computer terminal which will be more fun, more efficient, and more cost effective than the human labor involved in current pedagogical practices.

These comments suggest a core misunderstanding about the role games may play in the educational process. We see games not so much as programmes with content that must be delivered but rather as spaces for exploration, experimentation, and problem solving. We do not simply want to tap games as a substitute for the textbook; we want to harness the metagaming, the active discussion and speculation which takes place around game play, as a catalyst for a broader range of other learning activities.

Games as Interdisciplinary Spaces

Speaking at the Education Arcade conference which we hosted at E3 several years ago, Will Wright offered his vision of the relationship of games to education. It's a long quote but worth reading slowly and carefully:

"Our whole idea of schooling is based around this industrial model: here's the stuff that you're going to study; we'll fill you up with that knowledge. Before education was quite so structured, people wandered a little more freely across the landscape of learning. We keep trying to think about how we can use games to make people learn something. How do we use them to communicate content? Whereas, the most effective uses I've seen of games are actually more on the motivational side. It really strikes me how much kids can get motivated by playing a game and then all of a sudden they discover that the subject they always thought was going to be boring is actually totally interesting....I can imagine some kind of technology where game makers could very cheaply mark up the game with little tabs, you know, that kids could click and they would bring them to external resources, maybe on the web. It could be even like Slashdot with all kinds of people adding annotations. If you're interested in longboats, click here and you get the top links for longboats. The game remains an entertainment experience, but it's really motivating you. It's not like, you like chemistry; here's a game for chemistry. Basically here's the entertaining experience that covers a lot of ground;; it's very interdisciplinary. Typically teachers look at the interdisciplinary pockets in these games and say, 'you know, let's do a game about chemistry,' or about this or that. That's a very hard game design problem....The best games will probably be very interdisciplinary and cross all these boundaries. The chemistry teacher will like a little segment of it or the history teacher will like a little segment, and the kid going through there will be motivated by the different aspects. It's very hard to package a really compelling experience into one disciplinary boundary."

The learning which games foster, in Wright's model, is "undisciplined" in the best sense of the world -- the child is encouraged to pursue their interests where-ever they lead without regard to the way schools divide up content or time. And different kids might pursue different interests side by side within the same game learning from each other. We can read Wright as arguing for multipurpose game environments which are not restricted by the configurations of knowledge we find in school syllabi or textbooks. Second Life looks something like the world Wright is describing -- a space where many different groups are conducting educational experiments of all kinds and where those educational experiences take place alongside a variety of other kinds of experiments in social, political, or economic interactions. We can also see something of the multidisciplinary approach to games and education through the work of Whyville, an online game world set up to get young girls interested in science but which introduced an in game economic system to reward points for participation in the various science activities. The Whyville team has discovered that the economic transactions -- and the production of stuff for trade -- does not simply motivate the other learning activities; they become important sites of learning in their own right, helping girls conceptualize themselves as entrepreneurs as well as scientists.

Wright's notion that we might simply annotate a traditional game, providing a series of links to other sources of information which might enhance the game play experience, represents another way of thinking about gaming as a process which is not contained within the game itself. I recall Kurt Squire describing the work he has done with the use of Civilization in high school world history classes; he suggested that he would sometimes catch students coming into class early and "cheating" by scanning through their textbooks for information which might help them perform better in the game. In that sense, the best games encourage us to look for information beyond their borders as we try to solve the problems they contain.

Serious Games and Participatory Culture

Educators might also benefit from tapping the participatory impulses within games culture -- especially by harnessing gamers interest in modding and machinema. I have already discussed in this blog the ways that projects such as MyPopStudio or our Cantina Improv exercises have encouraged young people to learn how culture works by taking media texts apart and remixing the pieces. The Education Arcade at MIT is one of a number of academic research groups which has found modding to be an effective approach to quickly generating educational games. For example, we took the fantasy role play game, Neverwinter Nights, and transformed it step by step into Colonial Williamsburg on the eve of the American Revolution for a game which could be used to teach American History.

This approach allows us to get a game produced quickly and cheaply by building on the existing framework and programming Bioware had provided. We were even able to reprogram the game in significant ways, such as creating a system for interaction with the nonplayer characters that acknowledged the role of class, gender, race, and political divides in colonial society. Yet, there were other constraints on what we could get the game engine to do which meant that the commercial game left some imprint on the finished title. And we faced more difficulty than we might have imagined getting this game into schools because schools had to buy the existing commercial game before they could play our mods and there was resistance given the "dark arts" themes running through Neverwinter Nights. Ironically, at the present time, most of the games most open for modification almost all have contents which will be objectionable in school settings.

Russell Francis, an Oxford University researcher who was working with us on Revolution, pushed this notion of modding one step further -- having students translate their game play experiences into short machinema films which functioned as a kind of in character diary to recount their impressions of what has taken place. We have found this practice extremely valuable in helping students to pull together information from multiple sources to express what they have experienced and learned through their game play. It has also proven very helpful for the design team as we try to understand what features of the game encourage or get in the way of individualized learning.

A group of my students, Dan Roy and Ravi Purushotma, have been experimenting with modding some basic platform games -- The Sims 2 and Grim Fandango -- in order to turn them into resources for language learning. The games which are produced for the global market already contain multiple languages inside them: all it takes is the flip of a switch to localized them for different markets. Dan and Ravi have explored the benefits of reprograming these games to allow players to play with them in a foreign language or even mixing and matching English and Spanish language features to provide scaffolding as they are mastering the second language.

Some educators have begun to see the game design process itself as a catalyst for learning as can be seen in recent projects by OnRampArts in Los Angeles, Urban Games Academy in Baltimore and Atlanta, or GlobalKidz in New York City. In each of these cases, the educational payoff comes not from playing the game but rather from working through the process of identifying how to transform a body of knowledge into a game play experience for someone else. Katie Salens, Eric Zimmerman, and James Paul Gee are currently collaborating on a new project, Game Designer, being produced for the MacArthur foundation to give young people basic literacy in game design. Here, again, it is the process of game design and not the product of a finished game that facilitates engagement and learning.

Reality -- Augmented, Alternate, and Otherwise

The serious games movement might also learn from the concept of transmedia entertainment -- thinking about how to shape a flow of information that extends beyond a single platform. One clear example of this kind of serious gaming would be the kinds of alternative reality games that Jane McGonigal has discussed. Right now, alternate reality gaming is primary used as a promotional platform -- see The Beast (A.I.), I Love Bees (Halo 2), The Lost Experience, or The Art of the Heist for examples. Yet, there is a compelling case for the kinds of research and collaborative problem solving which has been sparked by the effort to solve these complex multimedia puzzles. The games encourage a movement from digital space back to the real world and value the ability of social networks to pool knowledge and trade information as they work together to beat the game. The kinds of augmented reality games being developed by Eric Klopfer at MIT might represent another way of integrating information from the game back into real world spaces. David William Schaffer has used the term, epistemic games, to refer to a style of educational gaming where players are asked to deploy the tools and knowledge which might be used by professionals as they confront real world problems. So, he develops games where kids learn geography by working as urban planners or composition by playing at being journalists. These games encourage kids to trace information across multiple sources and media platforms, mixing things they have learned through digital and mobile media with things they have learned through direct observation of the real world.

Mapping Labrynth

I closed the talk with a preview of Labrynth, a Education Arcade project which will develop a multiplatform game designed to help middle school children develop some basic math and literacy competencies. Scot Osterweill is the head designer on the project, working with a team of CMS graduate students that includes Kristina Drzaic (whose storyboards for the game are featured here), Dan Roy, and Evan Wendell. CMS alum Ravi Purushotma has been hired as a technical advisor.

At the start of the game, the player spends some time designing and customizing their pet and then, the pet runs away, disappearing into a drainage pipe. Pursuing the pet, the player finds herself in an underground world full of threat and mystery. Along the way, they begin to suspect that the ambiguous meat products on sell may come from harvesting pets, creating a strong goal of rescuing not only one's own beloved pet but also freeing all of the other captured creature.

Each of the game's puzzles encourages new modes of thought and problem solving which can eventually be named and explained in the classroom but which seem simply part of the process of working through the game level. Here's how Drzaic described some of the thinking which has gone into the design of puzzles for the game:

When we first pitched our vision of what would constitute a good educational game to

middle school math teachers we were met with some skepticism as to how this model of

video game learning would help them meet the stringent information goals of NCLB [No Child Left Behind]. There was a dominant idea that the best kind of educational game is the kind that has overtly demonstrable math value along the tones of Math Blaster. While many educational games do subscribe to the Math Blaster flash-card based model, that was not the type of learning we were going for. We want to make the kind of thinking that sticks with you, not rote memorization.

As you might expect from a puzzle game, we have a mathematical basis for each puzzle

that requires mathematical-based reasoning to solve and, in keeping with NCLB, we had to

cover certain math topics. As such groups of our puzzles target different areas of the

math curriculum but, in keeping with the idea of an experience that sticks with you we

provide a wide range of modes to think about similar types of mathematical problems. For

instance, four of our puzzles deal with proportion in entirely different ways:

Puzzle 1: proportion as numerical value - feeding monsters proportionally related

ambiguous meat products

Puzzle 2: proportion as movement over time - different proportioned movement of boinging

robots

Puzzle 3: proportion as visual measurement - outfitting singing monsters who are dancing

at different distances

Puzzle 4: proportion as a rate - using gears to help a canning assembly line function

smoothly

I love that our game allows you to approach a topic through a variety of ways and does

not involve memorization in the least!

Literacy is encouraged through the game in two ways: first, the back-story for the world unfolds through a series of comic books which appear at the completion of each level and function more or less like cut scenes. Second, the players are encouraged to participate in an online forum where they trade advice and insights with other players on your team; this forum contributes directly into the game's reputation system.

The games are designed to be persistent so that the player can log in from multiple locations -- from the computer in the school library, through a handheld device, or through their home computers, integrating game play and problem solving across the day.

The game involves a partnership between Maryland Public Television, the MIT-based Education Arcade, the federal Star Schools program, and Fablevision, a commercial game developer which will take our student's designs and turn them into a finished game which will be distributed to the public. One of the most vexing challenges facing academic game developers has been the last mile problem -- how to move from prototypes to products which get into the hands of teachers, parents, and students. With this project, we think we have a plan which will translate our conceptual prototypes into a reality.

The game taps many aspects of contemporary gaming culture -- the customization of characters, the use of forums to share advice about mastering games, the process of experimentation and puzzle solving -- as central features of its pedagogical process. For Scot and his team, this is not about designing a serious game so much as it is about creating something which will encourage serious gaming.

Update 19/05/23:

(1) Source for talk no longer available. For a review of keynote see Forbes and to know more about the cessation of blip.tv, click here.

Political Reality

Another in a series of outtakes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, this passage explores ways that reality television might become a vehicle for political education. The section was inspired in part by this passage from Joe Trippi's book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, The Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything:

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

In one telling passage from his campaign memoirs, Howard Dean's campaign manager Joe Trippi imagines what would happen if the presidental campaign had presented itself through the lens of reality television: "

Send a camera out with the candidate every day to film the rallies and debates, everything going on behind the scenes and on stage. No secrets, no background dealings - open up the campaign and let the people see inside it, a running journal of a campaign, an all-access video blog. This is the opposite way that political campaigns generally function, of course. Most campaigns do everything in their power to control every element of the candidate's image and message, from the clothes he wears to each word out of his mouth.

"

Trippi's vision of "Dean TV" was something akin to Big Brother, where people, individually and collectively, would monitor the candidate's every word and gesture, comparing notes on the internet, bringing transparency to the political process. In the end, the campaign budget supported a much more modest effort, where supporters and staffers were given digital camcorders and produced a limited amount of behind the scenes footage for web distribution.

Documentary filmmaker R. J. Cutler (The War Room) also saw reality television as the ideal vehicle for turning viewers into voters. In August 2004, Showtime debuted a Cutler-produced series, The American Candidate, modeled loosely after the similarly named American Idol. Cutler explained, "Reality television has borrowed so much from the world of politics, whether it's alliances or voting or the kind of strategizing that's done."

So why not turn the lens around and use reality television to teach politics? Average (or not so average) citizens would emerge through a elimination process, acquire skills in political organizing, take their views to the American public, and gain public visibility for their issues. Host Montel Williams summarized the core concept: "What if you didn't have to spend millions of dollars to get elected? What if you didn't have to go to the right schools? What if your gender or the person you love or the color of your skin didn't matter at all?"

On the one hand, the series producers hoped to educate the public about how the political process actually worked. On the other hand, they wanted to encourage fantasies of reform which might broaden the range of candidates and expand the level of public participation. Noel Holston, a critic for Chicago Tribune, clearly read the series in those terms: "The most fascinating thing about these folks is that, like most of us, they can't be neatly categorized... The candidates' discussions among themselves repeatedly remind us how pigeonholed and polarized the debate we see on TV typically is."

As with other reality programs, the public was encouraged to turn these real people into the objects of their gossip and to evaluate their performances and ethics. In this case, they were being taught a new perspective on the political process. The candidates were coached and the public were educated by political consultants drawn from both parties, including Carter Eskew, Joe Trippi, Frank Luntz, Ed Rollins, Rich Bond, Bay Buchanan. As Cutler explained,

"We're going to draw the curtain back and show how the process really works. We're going to show just how challenging it is to run for president. We're going to show the difficult decisions that have to be made between your convictions and what is politically expedient. We're going to show how polling works. We're going to show how opposition research works."

Much as American Idol helped educate Americans about the criteria music producers used to assess new talent, American Candidate proposed to teach the public new criteria for assessing political candidates.

Cutler's original plan had been to film the series in real time and have the public vote on who remained on the ballot, similar to the way American Idol works. When the series shifted to Showtime from the USA Network, its public visibility was diminished and the decision was made to complete the series production before the first episode was aired. In the end, the program failed to make a dent in the ratings and drew very little media coverage.

Adding to the Quilt: An Interview with Brad Meltzer

As a longtime comics fan, it's hard to remember a time when there were so many really astonishingly good writers generate content for the major companies at the same time -- Brian Bendis, Greg Rucka, Robert Kirkman, Ed Brubaker, Warren Ellis, Brian K. Vaughan, Geoff Johns...

There are several reasons why writing in comics is so good right now but one of them is what DC President Paul Levitz described to me in an interview as the "permeable membrane" that exists between comics and other media sectors in the midst of an increasingly transmedia culture. Some of the most exciting writers in comics today come from other media -- look at Joss Whedon over at Astonishing X-Men or J. Michael Straczinski or the occassional forrays of Kevin Smith into comics writing. It's in that category that I place Brad Meltzer.

Meltzer first came to my attention when he took over control of the Green Arrow series from Kevin Smith. Smith had literally brought Oliver Queen back from the dead and demonstrated the continuing appeal of this character that many of us associated with the late 1960s. When Smith left, there was a wide spread expectation that the character might sink back into obscurity but crime novelist Meltzer stepped in and keep the momentum going. From there, Meltzer created Identity Crisis, one of the most controversial and talked about miniseries to hit mainstream comics in some time. I have to admit that the death of Sue Dibney, the wife of the Elongated Man, brought tears to my eyes, even though I had only limited familiarity and interest in the character previously. And the ethical issues explored through the series cut deeper than most superhero comics on the market today. Some feel that he has permanently damaged the relations among the core DC characters, but he argues below that he has simply paved the way for the redefinition of their relationship that is starting to unfold as he has taken over control of Justice League. And, oh, by the way, when Meltzer isn't writing novels or comics, he helped to create the television series, Jack and Bobby.

Meltzer was nice enough to respond to some of my questions about his experiences of moving between media and about the particular experience of writing within a mainstream superhero franchise.

You would seem to be part of a new generation of storytellers who move fluidly across different media platforms, having work in comics, novels, and television. What factors have shaped or hindered your ability to work across so many different media?

With the world running on Internet time, I think there's been a huge shift in the fluidity between mediums in just the past five years, thanks in large part to people like Kevin Smith. Once that happened, the walls really came down. Especially, in Hollywood, where the Emperor's New Clothes rules, and where so many people need to have someone else say it before they'll say it themselves. For example, when I first said that I'd like to try television, I was told, "Well, you're a novelist..." But the moment CBS said they were interested in one of my novels, suddenly I was a TV creator. That's how Jack & Bobby was born. Today, the movement seems obvious -- a good story is a good story. But that's only a recent development.

You have worked as a novelist constructing your own characters and you have worked for DC developing new storylines for characters such as Superman or Batman which have been around since the 1930s. What do you see as the benefits and challenges of working with pre-established characters?

They force you to work different muscles in your brain. With Superman or Batman, I can't just make up any character trait. I have to work twice as hard to find something in them that a reader has never seen before. But that's the thrill.

The Elongated Man mourning the death of his wife Sue Dibny has quickly emerged as one of the iconic moments in contemporary comics, reappearing across a range of other books as we play out the implications of this moment for the entire DC universe. What do you think it is about this moment that has had such a great impact?

I think so much of it belongs to Rags Morales's stunning visual. In the script, I wanted this shot to be just like that shot in The Shawshank Redemption, with Tim Robbins looking up at the sky, the rain falling down around him -- but instead of joy, I wanted a moment of horror. I wanted to be looking straight down at Ralph and Sue. Rags called me up and said "I really want to do it at a little bit of angle." I said "No, no, no, you have to trust me on this." He said, "I'll do it my way and if you don't like it, I'll do it your way." I sat at the fax machine waiting for it to come through and when he sent me the sketch, I called him and said "Your way."

Some critics have argued that superheroes are governed more by ethics than by politics. Clearly, the events of Identity Crisis reveal very different ethical codes at the hearts of the different superhero characters. Can you help us to map the different ethical compasses which govern their decisions?

I think the mistake is to assume that the superhero "ethical code" is limited to only truth and justice. If these characters are us, or at least ideals for us -- as I think every great hero must be -- then they should also be filled with our flaws. Embarrassment, revenge, regret, anger, and selfishness are hardly the things we think of when we think "superhero." But they are real emotional components of all of us. That's not my way of dancing around the map question -- it's my way of saying that I think there is no one map. No one moral compass. The range is what makes it interesting. Otherwise, everyone is Superman.

The DC universe has historically been known for the strong feeling of "comrades in arms," yet Identity Crisis really shattered the alliances that held the Justice League together. What do you see as the long-term implications of that loss of trust? How do you plan to deal with it as you move into writing Justice League?

It's odd -- I designed Identity Crisis to be a full return to that "comrades in arms." That's what I thought was lost all the years prior to it. It's what I thought Batman had lost being turned into such an ass (in some warped way of "honoring Miller"). Identity Crisis shows you the break-up -- but in doing so, it reaffirms why the "marriage" (and I mean that for all the characters) was so important. At the end, we once again realize why those comrades need to mend the family again. SO long-term...well, that's what you're seeing now in Justice League.

You have described yourself as a comics fan. In what ways can we see your work within the comics industry as a form of fan fiction? To what degree are you playing out fantasies you had as a reader of comics? What changes as you get the power to shape the official mythology?

It's all fanfic until the copyright owners pay you to do it. And that may seem a small distinction, but it's not. As for playing out fantasies, I sure hope it's not just that. The stories I tell aren't what -I- -want- to happen. They're what I find most interesting. Again, a subtle distinction that gives headaches as you contemplate it. But what does change when you shape the mythology officially is, well...I think you add this x-factor of seriousness that you just don't get when you're standing in front of the mirror singing into your hairbrush. When you're on the stage and the lights are on you and the crowd is waiting for you to open your mouth...only a fool or a corpse doesn't treat it differently.

The superhero genre is constantly shaped by borrowings from other genres. I wonder what you bring to writing comics from your work in other genres -- crime fiction, political drama? What changes as you play with these conventions within the superhero comic?

The odd part is, I think my novels are more influenced by my comic work. The commitment to character in the comics forces me to make the novels more character-driven. I owe comics for that. As for my effect on comics, that's for others to decide...

You are now writing Justice League. I am really not looking here for spoilers about the series, but I wonder if you could give us some sense of the philosophy which will shape these stories? What do you want to add to their saga that differs from the ways they have been treated by previous writers?

I hope I always bring an exploration of the characters that's true to each character -- and fascinating for us in that it explores some part of the human condition. Certainly, The Tornado's Path, the first arc, tackles that issue from page one. As for what I add that differs from others before, I don't need or want to change the past. All I want is to add a new section to the quilt.

To Prospective Students

If reading this blog has left you interested in learning more about the Comparative Media Studies Program, you might want to check out an online information session at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. If you are interested in participating, please send your AOL instant messanger name to generoso@mit.edu and he will send you the information needed to participate. Thanks.

In Yoyogi Park

The other week, I was asked to speak about globalization and new media to a delegation of Japanese businessmen who were visiting MIT. In the process of preparing for this talk, I dug back through a few of the things I wrote after a visit I took to Tokyo a few years ago. I thought it might be worth dusting them off and sharing with my readers here. What follows is an excerpt from an essay called "Media Literacy -- Who Needs It?" which builds on my experience of visiting Yoyogi Park on a Sunday afternoon. I found Yoyogi to be a key location for understanding not simply the varied subcultures of Japan (they all seem to have a niche somewhere in the park's eleborate cultural ecostructure) but also the global exchange of cultural materials. I write here about two things I saw in the park -- the cosplay which takes place around anime and the rockabilly inflected youth culture called Yanquees -- but I could have taken you deeper into the park, where, for example, one could see teens rehearsing elaborately choreographed imitations of boy band music videos, even as a few feet away others are pounding on traditional Japanese drums.

In YoYogi Park

Our story starts in Yoyogi Park on a bright Sunday afternoon last spring. Yoyogi Park is a center for youth culture in Tokyo - near Akiharbara which used to be the electronics sector but is increasingly known as the Otaku (or fan) district and Harajuku where fashionable young girls go to buy clothes. In my short time in Japan, I had already discovered the way cultural practices - forms of consumption for the most part - mapped onto spatial locations, much the way the geography of the World Wide Web structures the interactions between various American subcultures and fan communities.

Every group seemed to have their own district, their own homeland, within contemporary Tokyo. The second thing that had struck me is the public nature of these passions and fascinations - the need to act out ones fantasy, the desire to form affiliations with others who shared your tastes. Yoyogi Park is where all of this comes together. In this realm, to consume is to participate and to participate is to assume some kind of new identity.

As you approach Yoyogi Park from the Harajuku train station, the first thing you see are the Cosplay Kids. These are young girls (and a few young boys) who have come to Yoyogi dressed as characters from anime, manga, or Jpop. They have come to see and be seen. Often, if you go into the manga shops, you can find brightly colored fliers urging fans of a particular cartoon series to rendezvous in the park on a certain date often with very specific directions about what to wear. Yet, because there are so many different fan communities, one can see many different identities being performed on this somewhat narrow piece of concrete - spies with shiny new weapons, space adventurers and demonic figures, people in Goth or renaissance courtly garb, the furries who are fascinated with anthropomorphic animals, Nanas who most often wear Victorian nurse and nanny uniforms, and so forth.

Many of them spent a good deal of time posing for pictures being taken not simply by tourists but also by their fellow fans; these pictures are being recorded by cell phone, camcorder, or digital cameras and many of them soon to be distributed via the web. The costumes and makeup are elaborate, richly detailed, and for the most part, home crafted. The kids take great pride in their costumes though they may own multiple costumes reflecting multiple cultural identities.

For many Americans visiting Tokyo for the first time, all of this is apt to seem alien or typically Japanese. But I knew about this cosplay before I arrived in part because of an interview my graduate student, Vanessa Bertozzi, had done with a 17 year old American girl named Chloe Metcalf. One of a number of teenagers we contacted as part of the Young Artist project, Chloe was active in the American cosplay community.

Here's some of what she told Vanessa:

I have been really interested in Japanese culture since I was in Sixth Grade. When I was in the Seventh grade, I started studying Japanese on my own. When I got into high school, I started taking Japanese courses at Smith College. I got into costuming through anime which is actually how I got interested in Japanese. And I taught myself how to sew. ...I'm a stage hog. I like to get attention and recognition. I love acting and theater. The biggest payoff of cosplay is to go to the conventions where there are other people who know who you are dressed as and can appreciate your effort. At the first convention I ever went to, I must have had fifty people take my picture and at least ten of them came up and hugged me. It's almost like whoever you dress up as, you become that person for a day....People put the pictures up on their websites after the con. So after a con, you can search for pictures of yourself and if you are lucky, you will find five or ten.

A number of things interest me about Chloe. First is the degree to which she transforms fantasies born of media consumption into various kinds of performance. In this context, I see performance, impersonation, enactment as important kinds of media literacy skills which are often neglected in our recent focus on visual or digital literacy. A growing body of literature has shown that children acquire basic literacies and competencies through learning to manipulate core cultural materials. As they do so, they negotiate a space between self and other which helps them to work through issues of personal identity and cultural membership. These ways of playing with texts become more and more sophisticated as children mature with adolescence becoming a central site for identity play and self-invention. For her, assuming the role of a Jpop character becomes a way of expressing her mastery over favorite texts - fusing her identity with that of a fictional character. Kids have told me that role play allows them to become the person they want to be rather than simply satisfying adult demands or accepting the often unwelcome identities projected upon them at school.

For Chloe, the identity she is constructed doesn't simply involve breaking with the parochialism of her local culture but it also involves the creation of strong emotional bonds she feels towards cultures produced in other parts of the world, cultures that are not easily accessible in a marketplace which historically has been highly protective of its local culture industries.

When she told Vanessa that a particular JPop group was "her favorite group in the whole wide world," one has the sense that she is actually talking on a global scale, especially when she adds that the group is little known outside of its genre or beyond the Asian context. She has sought out more and more information about forms of Asian popular culture. And in the process, she has begun to re-imagine her relations to the world - seeing herself as tied in important ways to the kinds of Japanese youth culture I had encountered in Yoyogi Park.

This search for more information expresses itself across a range of media - the videos or DVDs she watches of Japanese produced anime, the recordings of JPop music which may consumed on MP3 or on CD, the information she finds on the internet as well as information she shares with her fellow fans about her own activities, the physical costumes she generates as well as all of the photographs that get taken of her costumes, the magazines and comics she reads to learn more about Japanese popular culture, her face to face contacts with fellow fans. An elaborate underground economy emerges to support the circulation of these materials, including grassroots efforts to translate and dub illegally imported anime so that it can be made accessible to a broader public.

These activities around popular culture in turn translate into other kinds of learning including much which would warn the hearts of educators. As a middle school student she has already begun to study Japanese language and culture first on her own and later at a local college. This is a story one hears again and again from language instructors - how kids like Chloe are moving from interest in Asian popular culture towards seeking out classes in Asian cultures and languages.

Here, we run up against old anxieties about marketing and cultural imperialism which have animated earlier stages of the American media literacy movement. Some would argue that Chloe is not so much learning or experimenting as being possessed by cultural materials not of her own making. Others would argue that she is simply a victim of the economic expansion of Japanese media companies into the American marketplace. Yet, it would be a mistake to see Chloe and the other American cosplayers as simply duplicating cultural experiences imported into Japan or buying into media franchises. Rather, they are as much involved in transformation as consumption, in localization as globalization.

We can see this more clearly if we walk another few yards into Yoyogi Park. Here, you see a very different kind of cultural phenomenon - a pack of fifty or more Japanese rockabilly fans dancing to recordings of Elvis, wearing black leather jackets and exaggerated greaser haircuts, and performing flamboyant and energetic dance moves which mix traditional rock and roll with break-dancing. They call themselves the Yanquees and by all reports they have been coming to the park every weekend for several decades to pay tribute to the King.

At first glance, it is easy to see their passionate response to American popular culture but one needs to look more closely to see the ways that those influences have been reabsorbed back into more distinctly Japanese cultural practices. For one thing, this is a highly hierarchical culture with many rituals designed to insure discipline within the rank and file as well as respect for the most esteemed members. In this case, the leader of the pack is the only one allowed to wear a red jacket - an insignia of rank based on the red jacket which James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. In their cultural mythology, the only person more powerful than Elvis is Jimmy Dean. Almost certainly the reverse is also true - Chloe and her friends pull the Japanese practice of Cosplay back into the social dynamics of 21st century suburban America. Even as they seek to connect with other cultures, they read them through the lens of their own culture.

For another, there is the gender segregation of the group. If cosplay is mostly but not exclusively female, the Yanquees are overwhelmingly but not exclusively male. I keep finding myself wondering what it meant for the two female members of the pack to dress in Elvis drag and dance with all of these muscular guys in the park. How might the fantasies provided by American popular culture allow them to escape constraints on gender performance in their own country? Or conversely, how are American boys taking advantage of the cross-dressing elements of cosplay to escape repressive constraints on male gender performance in the United States? In both cases, these youth seek a kind of freedom or fluidity of identity denied them in their own country but granted them more readily by engaging in cultural practices from elsewhere.

A long tradition of cultural scholarship has focused on the ways that youth around the world have used American cultural imports to break free from - even if only temporarily and even if only in their own imaginations - the parochialism of their own societies. Much less has been written about the ways American youth escape the parochialism of our own culture through engaging with forms of popular culture imported from Japan, China, India, or Latin America. In a recent essay, I described these practices as pop cosmopolitanism.

Historically, cosmopolitans sought knowledge and experience which took them beyond the borders of their local community. We associate the term cosmopolitanism with various forms of high culture - fine wine, painting, music, dance, theater, the art cinema, gourmet cooking, and so forth. Yet, today, popular culture performs this same function for a growing number of young people around the world. Their mastery over these cultural materials help them form emotional bonds, however imaginary, with their counterparts in other countries - not simply with Japan where this culture originates but in many other countries where these materials are also consumed. It provides common cultural currency for exchanges on the internet which may cut across national borders. This turn towards global identities is all the more striking when you consider the unilateralism currently shaping American foreign policy and the anti-Americanism which is surfacing around the world. Kids may be learning how to become global citizens through their engagement with popular culture at a time when their parent cultures are increasingly shaped by fundamentalism and nationalism.

I came to a new understanding of this pop cosmopolitanism when I stopped for groceries in a chain store in Clayton. Georgia, a small community in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As I got in line, I heard the man in front of me ask in a broad southern accent why the "rolley-poley" and very white checkout girl had a Japanese name on her badge. She was trying to explain to him that this was an identity she assumed through her cosplay and that many of her friends - especially on the internet - knew her through that name. He was perplexed and demanded to know "how in the world she got interested in that." I could have pointed out the fact that this grocery store didn't sell Time, Newsweek or Entertainment Weekly - but did carry about a dozen gun magazines and the American edition of the Japanese manga, Shonen Jump. She tried to explain her interest by pointing towards the growing popularity of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!! and the young kid in the grocery cart, who was little more than a toddler, pulled out his Pokémon cards and started waving them proudly to his father. They went away and I told her that I was an otaku myself. She was shocked both because she had never met an anime fan quite as old as I was and because she didn't know that there were any other fans locally. We talked briefly and I went on my way.

I often reflect on that moment as one that illustrates a kind of transition in our culture - each person in the story having a somewhat different relation to the flow of Asian popular culture into the American market - the father finding it inexplicable, his son finding it normal, the girl finding it a source of personal identity and I finding it a kind of intellectual interest. I also think often of what being connected to anime fandom must have meant to this Appalachian girl - a connection to the world beyond the often narrow confines of this town, a means of knowledge and experience which set her apart both from the adults around her but apparently from many of her classmates. We might well imagine that this experience meant for her some of the same things that imitating Elvis might have meant to the Japanese women I saw in Yoyogi Park.

I have devoted time on my experiences as a tourist visiting Yoyogi Park because I think what I saw there - and what I saw in the North Georgia grocery -- illustrate fairly well the complexity of young people's relationship to popular culture. Those relationships can not be reduced to traditional dualisms of production and consumption. In no meaningful sense are these kids simply consumers of cultural materials produced by others even if they are very much drawn to the content of commercial culture. Rather I would argue that they are participants - shaping the flow of cultural materials across national borders, tapping into a global information network to support their activities, transforming the media they consumed into new forms of cultural expression, moving beyond the constraints placed on them in their local environments to tap a freedom that comes from stepping outside one's own culture and embracing pop cosmopolitanism.

At the same time, it doesn't make sense to talk about this purely in terms of new media or digital culture. The availability of new technologies has enabled some of their activities but kids are also enacting these interests through very traditional forms of cultural practice. Chloe, for example, told us about a friend who had taught himself how to make his own buttons in order to more perfectly recreate the costumes of a Japanese Jpop band. What would it mean to think of these kinds of activities as a kind of media literacy put into practice? To recreate Japanese costumes and customs, they must first study and then master them. They understand these cultures from the inside out - drawing on personal reflection to flesh out things they might otherwise have known only through books or media representations. As they mimic these cultural practices, they are drawn towards further research, trying to master the language, trying to understand the much older traditions which gave rise to this popular culture, trying to understand the lives of their friends in other parts of the world. We can see performance and role playing as a catalyst which motivates media literacy on the one hand and informal learning of academic disciplines on the other. Of course, it's worth noting how few American schools offer Japanese as a language or provide any real opportunity for kids to dig this deeply into Asian culture. These informal learning communities, in fact, are teaching kids things that most adults would see as valuable but which they can't learn in schools.

For more thoughts on the concept of Pop Cosmopolitanism, see my new book, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape

The following text was written as part of the original draft for the MacArthur white paper about educating young people for a participatory culture. It was cut due to length considerations but it providees useful background for people reading the report. Most often, when people are asked to describe the current media landscape, they respond by making an inventory of tools and technologies. Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices. Rather than listing tools, we need to understand the underlying logic shaping our current moment of media in transition. These properties cut across different media platforms and different cultural communities: they suggest something of the way we live in relation to media today. Understanding the nature of our relationship with media is central to any attempt to develop a curriculum that might foster the skills and competencies needed to engage within participatory culture.

The Contemporary Media Landscape is:

1. Innovative. We are the midst of a period of prolonged and profound technological change. New media are created, dispersed, adopted, adapted, and absorbed into the culture at dramatic rates. It is certainly possible to identify previous "revolutions" in communication. The shift from orality to literacy, the rise of print culture, and the emergence of modern mass media in the late 19th and early 20th century each represent important paradigm shifts in the way we communicated our ideas. In each case, a burst of technological change was followed by a period of slow adjustment. If, as Marshall McLuhan (1969) has suggested, "media are often put out before they are thought out," then there was ample time to think through the impact of one media before another was introduced. As historians and literary scholars have long noted, the explosion of new technologies at the end of the 19th century sparked a period of profound self-consciousness which we now call modernism. Modernism impacted all existing institutions, reshaped all modes of artistic expression, and sparked a series of intellectual breakthroughs whose impact is still being felt today. If anything, the rate of technological and cultural change has accelerated as we have moved through the 20th century and shows no signs of slowing down as we enter the 21st century. The turnover of technologies is rapid; the economic fallout cataclysmic; and the cultural impact unpredictable.

Today, the introduction of new media technologies sparks social and aesthetic experimentation. Anthropologist Grant McCracken has described the present moment as one of cultural "plenitude," represented by an ever-expanding menu of cultural choices and options. McCracken argues that "plentitude" is emerging because the cultural conditions are ripe for change, because new media technologies have lowered barriers to entry into the cultural marketplace, and because those traditional institutions which held innovation in check have declined in influence (what he calls "the withering of the witherers".) The result has been the diversification of cultural production. Each new technology spawns a range of different uses, inspires a diversity of aesthetic responses, as it gets taken up and deployed by different communities of users. Such transformations broaden the means of self and collective expression.

2. Convergent. Every major idea, image, sound, story, brand, and relationship will play itself out across the broadest possible range of media channels. As Henry Jenkins (2006) argues in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, convergence is being shaped top-down by the decisions being made by massive media conglomerates who have controlling interest across all possible media systems and who enjoy the power to insure that their content circulates globally. It is in their economic interest to move any successful media content from one delivery system to another in order to maximize profit and broaden market potential. At the same time, convergence is being shaped bottom-up by the participatory impulses of consumers, who want the ability to control and shape the flow of media in their lives; they want the media they want when they want it and where they want it. And, as a result, they pull media content into new spaces illegally if that content is not available for purchase in those formats. Moreover, these consumers are taking advantage of the new media technologies to respond to, remix and repurpose existing media content; they use the web to talk back to media producers or tell their own stories about fictional characters.

3. Everyday. The technologization of the American home has been an ongoing process across the 20th century. Our family rooms have become home entertainment centers. Our family hearths are now electronic. Media technologies are fully integrated into our everyday social interactions. In some ways, these technologies have been a wedge between family members; young people often deploy media to cut themselves off from the people around them. Yet, at the same time, these new technologies have enabled greater connection to more dispersed family members, helping to combat some of the forces which are breaking down extended families. The science fiction writer Bruce Sterling famously contrasted the monumental technical achievements of the early 20th century ("the great steam-snorting wonders of the past") with the more everyday and familiar technologies of the late 20th century ("the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens.") Contemporary technology "sticks to the skin, responds to the touch....pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us." There is a danger that as this technology becomes so familiar, so much a part of our daily routines that it becomes invisible to us: we can no more see the layer of media that surrounds us than fish notice the water they are swimming in.

At the same time, we can now take our media with us wherever we go. We are still coming to grips with the full implications of this latest shift in media access. Once again, this technology can be used to cut us off from our environment and isolate us from people around us -- the iPod is advertised as allowing us to create a soundtrack for our lives. In some cases, the availability of these media adds a sense of tentativeness to our real world interactions which can now be interrupted at any time by demands from elsewhere. We engage in what sociologist Linda Stone calls "continuous partial attention," shifting focus between mediated and face to face inputs as different needs arrive. We can also use these technologies to annotate our environment -- giving us access to information when we need it and thus to heighten our awareness of the world around us. As Mizuko Ito has described, we can use these technologies to maintain ongoing contact with the people in our lives who matter to us the most. And as Howard Rhiengold has suggested, we can use these technologies to mobilize quickly in response to urgent demands on our attention.

4. Appropriative. New technologies make it easy for people to sample and repurpose media images. We can now quote and recontextualize recorded sounds and images (both still and moving) almost as easily as we can quote and recontextualize words. Increasingly, our culture communicates through snippets of borrowed media content. Young people construct a mix tape to share how they feel with each other. They create a collage of images to express how they see themselves. Their webpages function as the digital equivalent of the old commonplace books, a heady mixture of personal expressions and borrowed materials. Artists have always borrowed and built upon earlier works in their tradition. As the new technologies has expanded who gets to express themselves through media, this practice of creative rewriting of previous works has also become more widespread. We still do not have a well considered ethics of appropriation. We are expressing ourselves in new ways but we do not yet have the conceptual resources to allow us to pull back and reflect on what we are creating.

New communications technologies, such as the digital video recorder or the DVD player, allow consumers to more fully control the flow of media into their homes. New modes of entertainment, such as computer and video games, depend on our active engagement: we do not simply consume them; we make them happen. Online fan communities and modding cultures are blurring the lines between consumer and producer. We want to become a part of the media experiences which matter to us; we want to create and share our own media with others. In some ways, mass media displaced the participatory impulses which characterized the folk culture of 19th century America: we moved from a country of cultural producers to one of cultural consumers. Amateur cultural production was pushed underground, hidden from view, through it was not totally destroyed by the rise of mass media. The Web has made this layer of amateur production more visible again, providing an infrastructure where amateurs can share what they created with each other: this ability to share media has helped to motivate media production, resulting in an explosion of grassroots expression.

5. Networked -- Media technologies are interconnected so that messages flow easily from one place to another and from one person to another. Communication occurs at a variety of levels -- from intimate and personal to public and large-scale. The one sender-many receiver model which dominated print culture and modern mass media is giving way to a many-to-many model in which any given participant can easily circulate their work to a larger community. The capacity to "network" has emerged as an important social and professional skill. Young people become adept at calculating the advantages and disadvantages of deploying different communications systems for different purposes -- trying to decide how to communicate their ideas only to those people they want to see them while maintaining privacy from unwanted observation.

6. Global -- Media content flows fluidly across national borders; people deploy the new communication networks to interact with others around the world. The global scale of this new media landscape changes the way we think about ourselves and our place in the world. We might imagine a progression from nations sending single diplomats to interact with each other over a distance to the modern era of international flight where many have the experience of directly visiting other parts of the world to the present moment when an increasing number of people interact daily, if not hourly, with people living on the other side of the planet. The long-term consequences of this experiment in global cultural exchange are still being discovered. Some have argued that this expanded communication will bring about greater understanding; others see the return to fundamentalism as a reaction against the threat posed by these global exchanges. Some worry that the most economically powerful nations will overwhelm the rest, insuring a homogenization of global cultures; others contend that such a world requires the constant production of cultural difference in order to satisfy a seemingly insatiable hunger to step outside the parochialism of our own culture.

7. Generational -- Historically, cultural traditions and norms were passed from one generation to another: these kinds of transfer constituted a primary focus of educational practices in these traditional societies. Throughout the 20th century, however, as the rate of technological and cultural change accelerated, young people adopted cultural styles and values radically different and often fundamentally at odds with their parent's generation. Recent research suggests that young people and adults live in fundamentally different media environments, using communications technologies in different ways and forming contradictory interpretations of their experiences. Adults know less than they think about what young people are doing on line and young people know less than they think about the values and assumptions that shape adult's relationship to media.

8. Unequal -- Some have suggested that this new media culture should be described as "elective," suggesting that people can opt in and out of different levels of participation. Roles are adopted and shed easily at least by those who have the access and skills needed to adjust quickly to new communities. Yet, in another sense, it would be wrong to describe these cultures as "elective." In so far as participation within them represents a new source of power, wealth, and knowledge, it also represents a new site of privilege and inequality. Participating may be elective for those who have the resources needed to belong in the first place but no such option can be exercised by those who are being left behind. Expanding access to cyberspace has the potential of empowering new segments of the public to become fuller participants in cultural and civic life, yet we can be concerned by the ability of these electronic technologies to render invisible anyone who is not able to participate. As British research Sonia Livingstone notes, ""teaching the skills required to produce content is more crucial than ever. Indeed, not to do so would be positively disempowering for citizens given the present rush to duplicate, or even to displace, our present social and political institutions online." .

Of these eight traits, the only one which might describe our current educational institutions is "unequal." Otherwise, our schools have not kept pace with the changing environment around them. If we were to start from scratch and design an educational system to meet the needs of the culture we have just described, it would look very little like the current school system. Our schools doubly fail kids -- offering them neither the insights they need to avoid the risks nor the opportunity to exploit the potentials of this new participatory culture. Indeed, the skills kids need to function in the new media landscape are skills which are often read as dysfunctional and disruptive in the context of formal education. Kids are, for the most part, learning these skills on their own, outside of school, with the consequence that they are unevenly distributed across the population.

On Hobbits, Hiro, and Other Matters

Today, I wanted to call attention to several online resources which will be of interest to the Aca/Fan community.

Hoping for Hobbits

A week or so back, I got an e-mail from Kristin Thompson telling me that she and her oft-times collaborator and my graduate school mentor, David Bordwell, have launched a new blog. Together, Bordwell and Thompson have written and continually updated what is certainly the most important textbook in cinema studies, Film Art: An Introduction. If I got started describing the full range of their contributions to cinema studies, I'd be here for a long long time: this dynamic duo, individually and collectively, are enormously prolific, cranking out a big scholarly book about once a year, and between them, they have expertise on the entire world cinema. Whatever they turn their attention to, they master thoroughly and break dramatic new ground. In fact, I am teaching a contemporary cinema class at MIT this term primarily as an excuse to dig deep into Bordwell's most recent book, The Way Hollywood Tells It. So, I will be reading what they have to say in their blog about cinema and other media matters with great interest.

So far, they have tackled a range of topics, including some really provocative comments by Bordwell on Scorsese's The Departed and its relationship to Internal Affairs, the Hong Kong film upon which it was based, and by Thompson about contemporary cinema and the push towards interactive narrative, to cite just two examples.

Thompson is in the process of putting her finishing touches on a forthcoming book about Peter Jackson and the making of the Lord of the Rings trilogy called The Frodo Franchise. I was lucky enough to read an early draft of the book and found it an absolute treasure. Thompson had access to pretty much every key contributor to the LOTR films: she turns out to be a very engaging storyteller but also is able to put what happened into a much larger context of shifts in the contemporary film industry -- including some very good writing about the ways Jackson courted the fans of the original Tolkien novels and the forms of fan cultural production which have grown up around the franchise. (In a recent post, Thompson struggles with whether or not she is an aca/fan in the ways that I have been using it here but she is certainly someone with a fan's mastery over the books and films and with a long standing passion for the content. When she tells me about going behind the scenes in New Zealand to meet with the production team, you do get the sense that there's a fannish tingle going up her spine.) I will be doing an interview with Thompson about the book once it is released in 2007. But she is already updating her account, using the blog to share some great insights into the announcement the other week that they will indeed be producing a film based on The Hobbit and that Peter Jackson is currently considering whether to direct it. She takes us back through the complex history of negotiations around the rights for the film, describes all of the many Peter Jackson projects that have been announced in recent months, and pulls together many of the scattered interviews with Jackson which shed some clues about his thinking in regard to the timing of the various projects.

Here's some of what she has to say:

Could someone that busy take on The Hobbit as well? Jackson's talking as if he could. In a long interview posted on Ain't It Cool News September 16, he said that no one had contacted him about making the film, but he was already tossing out ideas about bringing back some of the characters from LOTR to fill out the plot. A week later, Jackson chatted with EW.com, sounding even more enthusiastic and brushing aside the idea that his current lawsuit against New Line (over DVD payments) would be a factor: "I'd love to make another film for New Line. And certainly The Hobbit isn't involved in the lawsuit." He also pointed out, "We've still kept the miniatures of Rivendell in storage, and the set of Bag End, Bilbo Baggins' house, has also been saved" ("Action Jackson").

So how could he do it? Whether with an eye to a possible Hobbit project or not, Jackson has organized his projects in a remarkably flexible way. Halo (to be distributed by Universal in North America and Twentieth Century Fox abroad) and The Dam Busters (co-financed by Universal and StudioCanal) are being directed by others, and an executive producer doesn't necessarily have to do a whole lot of hands-on work. As Jackson pointed out to his EW interviewer, Steve Daly, "That's one of the reasons we're producing a number of things now rather than directing. Producing is fun and it's not as all-consuming."

As to the "Temeraire" series, that is a long-range project that Jackson speaks of putting into pre-production when Halo and The Lovely Bones are substantially finished. He's not sure yet whether he'll direct the resulting film or films. The Lovely Bones is not all that far advanced, either, with Jackson, Walsh, and co-writer Philippa Boyens having only recently finished a first draft of the script. The rights for both of these projects are owned entirely by Jackson and Walsh, with no studio yet attached--which means they have no deadline. In another remark that sounds calculated to encourage MGM and New Line, in the same interview Jackson remarks, "We're not imposing any deadline on ourselves with all these projects. They'll take as long as they need to until we're happy with them." It sounds a lot like he's hinting that they could also be put off if another attractive project comes along.

It sounds an awful lot like this was written by an aca/fan to me.

Holding Out for a Hiro

In Media Res is another great new online resource which will be of interest to the aca/fan community. In Media Res is being organized by the editors of Flow and by the Institute for the Future of the Book. As their FAQ explains:

In Media Res plucks fragments out of the media stream and revolves them in a critical conversation.

Every week, a different media scholar will present a 30-second to 2-minute clip accompanied by a 100-150-word impressionistic response. The goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst media scholars and the public about contemporary media through clips chosen for either their typicality or atypicality in demonstrating current narrative strategies, genre formulations, aesthetic choices, representational practices, institutional approaches, fan engagements, etc.

Jason Mittell and I were asked to provide content for the launch of the site. I chose to focus on the segment from Heroes when Hiro, superfan/superhero, teleports from Tokyo to Times Square and discovers that his experiences are already being enshrined in a comic book, 9th Wonders. You can watch the clip and read what I have to say at the Media Commons site. I will just note that I wrote about this series here midsummer, after getting a sneak look at the pilot, and Heroes has more than lived up to my expectations for a television show which takes an indie comics slant on the superhero genre. It has emerged as one of the most popular new series this season with good reason.

Jason, who is a sometime reader and contributor to the blog, focuses on a telling moment from 30 Rock which he suggests both parodies and enacts the synergies that are defining contemporary media culture.

A fan friend described the 100-150 word essays as an academic form of drabble. Drabble is a highly condensed form of fan fiction where writers take on the challenge of conveying a complete story in just a few hundred words. I know that I found it very difficult to say anything original and interesting about the clip in such a tight word count: I ended up cheating and going to around 250 words -- this is probably no surprise to regular readers of this blog.

In Media Res is taking a bold stance on intellectual property rights:

MediaCommons is a strong advocate for the right of media scholars to quote from the materials they analyze, as protected by the principle of "fair use." If such quotation is necessary to a scholar's argument, if the quotation serves to support a scholar's original analysis or pedagogical purpose, and if the quotation does not harm the market value of the original text -- but rather, and on the contrary, enhances it -- we must defend the scholar's right to quote from the media texts under study.

This goes well beyond, for example, what MIT's lawyers have allowed on the Open Courseware initiative. I know many of us are going to be watching closely to see what happens here and keeping our fingers crossed.

Check It Out...

It's been a while since I have reported back on the various colloquium events we have been hosting through the CMS program but I wanted to remind folks that we are preparing our events for download as podcasts this term. I heard from some people at the Flow conference that they are finding these to be useful resources or just interesting things to listen to while jogging. Here's a few of the events I haven't linked to here before.

Chris Boebel and David Tames talk about MIT's new efforts towards video podcasting, a project called Zig Zag.

Scott Donaton, associate publisher and editorial director of the Ad Age Group and author of Madison & Vine talked about why user-empowerment is the key trend in business, and the ways marketers are adapting to it, including the rise of branded entertainment.

A roundtable discussion on New Media and Art put together by my MIT colleague Beth Coleman and featuring Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome.org; and Jon Ippolito, media

Taking the You Out of YouTube?

YouTube, along with Second Life, Flickr, Wikipedia, and MySpace, has emerged as one of the key reference points in contemporary digital culture -- emblematic of the move towards what people are calling web 2.0. As Newsweek aptly put it last year, web 2.0 is "putting the we into the web." Elsewhere, I have argued that web 2.0 is fan culture writ large, fan culture without the stigma. Nobody is telling these guys to move out of their parent's basement -- though some of them have started multimillion dollar companies out of their parent's basements. What separates these companies from the dotcoms which fueled web 1.0 is the emphasis upon participation, social networking, collective intelligence, call it what you want. What distinguishes them is that their content arises bottom up from the community of users.

One by one, these insurgent companies are being absorbed into the surviving digital giants (as has happened through Yahoo's purchase of Flickr or more recently, Google's purchase of YouTube) or by old media companies (as in Rupert Murdock's takeover of MySpace). With each new buyout, there is renewed speculation about what happens to the "we" --what becomes of the communities that made these activities and services so attractive in the first place.

Today, I wanted to share two really interesting responses to the buyout of YouTube and what they might mean for the future of participatory culture

The first comes from John McMurria, a professor from DePaul University, who is doing some of the best contemporary writing on media policy. McMurria is one of a number of young and established scholars who writes regularly for Flow, a academic webzine about television and new media that is part of a larger effort to tap the power of new media to reinvent what scholarship looks like.

In the past, McMurria has written interesting pieces about some of the pressing issues facing the Federal Communications Commission, including the nature of indecency, the impact of convergence, and the concept of a la carte programming. In his most recent post, he takes on YouTube.

His essay starts with this vivid description of how the YouTube community responded to the news:

Between the millionaire founders who promised their continued allegiance to "the community" and the cultural commentators who lamented the loss of an idealized space outside the global totality of commercial culture were the millions of YouTube users who responded to the Google acquisition. In the five days after the YouTube founders uploaded their announcement video, users played the video 1,837,554 times, posted 6,989 written comments and uploaded 84 video responses to it. The comments ranged from those who worshiped the YouTube creators for their vision and entrepreneurship to those who feared that Google and commercialization would destroy YouTube. Users called the founders "filthy rich dorks," asked to borrow money, and demanded they should get a piece of the pie -- as user PrinceofGraves put it, "I'm still broke and miserable -- so this is less than meaningless to me." Others debated whether Google was evil or not, admonished the founders for illegally profiting from copyrighted material, and worried that advertisements would inundate the site. The video responses were equally varied. But unlike cultural critics who imagined YouTube as outside commercial popular culture, many used popular cultural references and icons to craft their commentaries, including a video of Darth Vader flipping them off.

This is an issue I raised here a few weeks ago. At the heart of the Web 2.0 movement is this idea that there is real value created by tapping the shared wisdom of grassroots communities, composed mostly of fans, hobbyists, and other amateur media makers. I have often celebrated these efforts as helping to pave the way for a more participatory culture -- one that will be more diverse and innovative because it expands the range of content we can access. Yet, as I suggested here a few weeks ago, there is a nagging question -- if these grassroots efforts are generating value (and in fact, wealth) and their creative power is being tapped by major corporations, at what point should they start receiving a share of revenue for their work?

We have all seen major media companies telling us that file-sharing is bad because it takes other people's intellectual property without just compensation. So, why are these same companies now taking their audience's intellectual property for free? Do we understand their profits primarily as a tax to support the infrastructure that enables their distribution?

I am still struggling with where I stand on this issue but as McMurria notes, the purchase of Google for such astronomical sums of money certainly ups the ante for those of us who are grappling with this issue. (David Edery has taken up the debate held here with Joel Greenberg and written some further thoughts on this issue which are worth reading.)

As McMurria's thoughtful essay continues, he examines more deeply the claims made about YouTube as a community and whether it really is enabling the democratic participation and cultural diversity we are claiming for it. What interests me about YouTube is the ways it creates an "impure" culture, one that brings together very different kinds of cultural production into a shared space:

1. YouTube functions as a meeting place for different subcultures, fan communities, and other forms of participatory culture, enabling the crosspollination of formal practices, themes, and ideas. I see this crosspollination as likely to accelerate the speed with which cultural innovations get picked up and deployed at other social sites.

2. YouTube participants are monitoring mass media and rescuing content that deserves greater attention than it has received -- see here the circulation of Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, Stephen Colbert's Washington Press Club talk, or some of Keith Oberman's commentary on the Bush administration and the war, all of which were seen by many more people on YouTube than on television.

3. Grassroots content circulating on YouTube is being pushed upward through a combination of old and new media into greater and greater public visibility -- the movement from blogs to A List blogs (Boing Boing) to major web publications (Salon, Slate) to niche television (Daily Show, Letterman) to mainstream television (The Early Show) to advertising. This is such a powerful illustration of how convergence culture works.

4. YouTube is forcing major media companies to opt in or out of participatory culture -- with companies like MTV Networks enabling certain content to circulate through this channel or several major Japanese media companies deciding to yank their anime-related content off last week.

In each case, YouTube is a powerful illustration of the interplay between different forms of cultural production which Yochai Benkler discusses as Network Culture.

But, McMuria reminds us that while YouTube is relatively open to all kinds of grassroots participation, it does not necessarily deal with them all in an even handed manner. He writes:

A glance at the top 100 rated, viewed and disused videos, and most subscribed channels reveals far less racial diversity than broadcast network television. Most were US uploads with some non-US sports and Japanese popular culture...While Google's acquisition of YouTube and its deals with old media corporations including CBS, Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, NBC Universal and Warner Music Group have meant that, in the words of one active video maker, "the Wild West feel of YouTube is already slipping away," we might also recognize that just as the democratic frontier myth of America's Wild West has obfuscated the exploitations upon which the nation was born, the mythic idealizations of electronic frontiers such as YouTube also obfuscate the ways in which video culture has reproduced, or at least has failed to excite a concerted challenge to, the inequalities that persist in our American culture. Perhaps we might think about the difference between what it means to be a YouTube community and what it would take to use the YouTube video sharing technologies to help expand the movement for racial and economic justice.

This brings us back to the issue of the Participation Gap. Who gets to participate? What factors leave some groups more comfortable participating than others? And if they do participate, what factors shape how their contributions get valued or responded to by other members of their community? I am still touched by some of the things Jane McGonigal wrote about the misogynistic discourse that confronted LonelyGirl15 :

Each lonelygirl has roughly 1000-4000 comments, and the level of hate, mean-spiritendess, crudeness and often downright misogeny of the majority of them is impossible to ignore. I want to be very careful that we don't fetishize the participation aspects of this experience that was had by a very few who may have intelligently, passionately and seriously investigated and responded to the texts and the media objects, with the mainstream experience of and participation in this project.

How might this "mob rule" influence how comfortable certain groups are in posting their work in this forum? I am reminded of the research that shows that basically only middle and upper class people go to museums and other public institutions, even when they open their doors for free, because the barriers are not exclusively economic but speak to issues of cultural entitlement.

I am not certain that McMuria's methodology here -- looking at the highest ranking videos -- is the best way of determining what constitutes participation in the era of YouTube. After all, this amounts to using a broadcast paradigm -- how many eyeballs -- to measure success in a medium which is marked by audience fragmentation and niche culture. Perhaps there are some subcultures that attract majority interests and others that serve their own community here. Of course, should this be a case, then it would also raise questions about the value of diversity -- whether it should be assessed in terms of its impact upon the subcultures that generate this amateur content or in terms of its ability to crossover and speak to a broader range of publics. The very nature of YouTube -- its scope and scale -- makes a real assessment of its cultural diversity a daunting task but McMuria's essay certainly leads me to want to dig deeper into this question.

The second response comes from Comparative Media Studies graduate student Geoffrey Long and was written as part of the newsletter we share with the members of our Convergence Culture Consortium. Long came to CMS as an experienced designer and storyteller, someone who is deeply interested in the ways that technological change will impact the ways we produce, share, and consume stories. I first heard from Long when he responded to an essay I wrote for Technology Review about transmedia storytelling and we engaged with an extended and stimulating e-mail correspondence before he applied to our graduate program. Long is now hard at work (or at least is supposed to be hard at work) on a thesis which deals with Jim Henson's film projects (from The Dark Crystal to Mirrormask) as examples of transmedia entertainment and promises to be groundbreaking research. Here, though, he takes up the question of exactly what Google is buying when it purchases YouTube and explores more generally the value(s) associated with web 2.0 companies.

GOOGTUBE: TV 2.0, OR BUBBLE 2.0?

By: Geoffrey Long

That does it. I am the bane of the technology industry.

I am not a superstitious kind of guy. If I spill some salt I don't toss a pinch over my shoulder, I love black cats, and I have no great problem walking under ladders (unless there's someone on top of it dropping a can of paint). However, when I first read about Google buying YouTube, I literally groaned out loud. I spent the first dotcom boom (Web 1.0?) earning my bachelor's degree at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, cramming in tutorials on web design between doses of Joyce and Falkner. Some of my friends dropped out of school to go work in the industry, and I followed their adventures with a mixture of envy and silent superiority. Sure, I thought to myself, they're driving around in their shiny red New Beetles now, but I can go play once have my degree. I was so excited when I graduated, standing there with my newly-minted degree clutched in my hand, eyes bright and confident the offers would start rolling in. I was so proud to be a member of the class of 2000.

Yeah. We all know how that turned out. Now a second wave of high- tech excitement is sweeping over the media, I'm able to see the end of my time at MIT without a telescope, and I'm plagued with a crazy sense of deja vu. Sure, some lessons have been learned --strange how none of the new media darlings officially end in ".com"! -- but when you read about a deal as massive as Google buying YouTube, it's hard to fight off that feeling of "Here we go again." 1.65 billion dollars! If there was such a thing as a million-dollar bill, Google would have just forked over a whole suitcase full of them. How in the world can Google justify spending that kind of money, which is reportedly 1% of their entire market cap?

The deja vu is strong, but there are more differences at play here than it seems. In truth, there may be a very real place for GoogTube, and there's a chance -- a chance! -- that Google just walked away with a bargain. Let's explore some of these reasons, using as our guide some new possible advertising slogans for the emerging GoogTube network.

GOOGTUBE. BECAUSE SOMETIMES HUMANS ARE STILL BETTER THAN MACHINES.

It's possible to see the YouTube acquisition as a kludge, a stopgap solution until Google can get its own video search services up and running. There aren't a lot of places where humans are still steadily beating the machines hands-down, but the deceptively complex process of video search is one of them. So far Google's mighty machines are unable to sweep through a video clip and recognize that this mess of pixels is actually a picture of two frat boys dropping a roll of Mentos into a 2-liter of Diet Coke. Show the same mess of pixels to a human being, though, and they can start to classify the clip using taxonomy tags such as "Mentos" and "Diet Coke". Show it to more than one human and you start to accumulate looser tags, such as "chemistry", "explosion", and "morons". Part of the joy of YouTube is typing in a search parameter and just seeing what turns up.

GOOGTUBE. NOT JUST MENTOS AND DIET COKE!

A second reason for the purchase can be seen as the value of YouTube as a brand. For all the more that YouTube is trumpeted as a pillar of user-generated content, my recent attempt to find independent animation clips on the site was thwarted by an avalanche of pirated Naruto clips. Both YouTube and Google know that this is dangerous territory. (If you kick over some leaves, you can still find little bits of Napster littering the ground.) However, Google has the prowess to turn this liability into an asset -- something that YouTube has already demonstrated as a possible path to profitability through their recent contract with CBS.

Everyone knows that what music was to Web 1.0, video is to Web 2.0 -- and the media companies are all bound and determined to not let Apple run away with the market again. This is good and bad. While it's laudable that no one company should exert that much control over a developing media form (or at least a developing media delivery mechanism), the problem with TV on the Internet is that it's insanely difficult to find all the shows you want to watch. Apple's iTunes Store provides a one-stop shop for music -- if you want a particular album, it's almost a sure bet that you can find it there. Video, however, does not yet have such a reliable clearinghouse. Apple is getting close, but it still has a number of companies to get on board, and its new movie download service is having trouble signing other studios due to heavy pressure from retail competitors such as Target and Wal-Mart. Microsoft has a huge one-two punch in the works in the form of its Zune handheld coupled with its [name] online video service, but if there's going to be a third "network" giant emerging in this space (a CBS to Apple's NBC and Microsoft's ABC), GoogTube is likely to be it. Google has the clout to close deals that YouTube alone might not be able to swing, and -- perhaps more importantly -- it has a proven model for how to monetize on what is otherwise free content.

GOOGTUBE. ADWORDS FOR TV.

I used to edit an online 'zine, so I can tell you how much of a revelation Google's AdWords system happened to be. By analyzing the content on the page to dynamically deliver relevant ads, Google changed the game. Now, apply the same reasoning to a system that dynamically inserts targeted ads into video clips instead of text ads into websites. Google on its own couldn't do this -- but coupled with YouTube's existing community of happy little folksonomy taggers, implementing such a system becomes a walk in the park.

What's likely to happen is that certain clips or shows are uploaded by the content producers with certain "seed" keywords that tell the Google system which ads to dynamically insert into the clip. As more people watch it and add their own tags, though, the selection of ads appropriate to the clip narrows to become more relevant. Another option, which is even more exciting, is the possibility that GoogTube will serve up the Holy Grail in targeted advertising: ads dynamically inserted into the clip based on the preferences and demographic data that each user has already provided in their user profiles.

GOOGTUBE. BRIDGING THE USER-GENERATED CONTENT GAP SINCE 2006.

Personally, if YouTube had to be sold I'm glad it was Google that signed the check and not Microsoft. This is because Google has already displayed a cunning willingness to work with the blogosphere in their AdWords program -- which I'm hoping will extend to a willingness to work with the independent content creation market. Google already has the perceived corporate culture of supporting grassroots -- or "user-generated" -- media, whereas if it had been Microsoft attempting to implement these kinds of programs, the general air would have been one of fear and corporate ownership. Dealing with Google, despite its massive size and scope, still feels like dealing with an "indie", approachable company, versus Microsoft's vast and horrifying monolith. Content creators are therefore likely to approach Google for advertising partnerships in ways that Microsoft could only dream about. Google could connect smaller advertisers with independent content creators, tapping into advertising niche markets such as book publishers, comic shops, conventions, local musicians, local bars, and so on - the same advertisers who use the textual AdWords system.

On the flip side of that, Google also has enough clout to strike deals with major advertisers. This means that YouTube could serve as the missing link between major advertising companies and independent content producers. Google could theoretically create a middleman program that matches up indie creators with major advertisers to fund different stages of development for new properties, based on the success of those creators' previous small projects, or solely on the need of content for niche markets. The C3 group has been chattering amongst ourselves for months about how a big company like Target or Wal-Mart could finance an entire season of a show like ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT or FIREFLY which has a passionate following but not enough numbers to warrant a precious slot on prime-time TV -- but GoogTube has no such time constraints. If Google steps in as both delivery service and an advertising go-between, GoogTube could become a future home for all kinds of niche shows delivered to very specific, passionate, influential and extremely valuable eyeballs -- extending both existing franchises and new projects from existing or emerging content creators.

1.65 BILLION CHANNELS AND NOTHING ON?

These are only some of the ways that Google can possibly justify its purchase of

YouTube. There are others, of course, and the blogosphere is on fire this week with

people arguing both sides of the debate. As someone who enjoys both video delivered

over the Internet and creating content myself, I'm excited to see how this whole thing

shakes out. Sure, there are also 1.65 billion ways in which this could just be a signal

of the Web 2.0 boom imploding even faster than the first one -- but much like the first

time around, lessons are being learned and the field is changing in ways that will be

felt for years. Even if GoogTube tanks, there are dozens of companies springing up to

explore this new frontier. Here are just a few of them, and how they're selling

themselves.

- BRIGHTCOVE. "Brightcove is an Internet TV service."

- VEOH. "Internet TV is the next step in delivering video to consumers everywhere, providing millions of channels of programming for viewers and millions of channels of capacity for broadcasters."

- SMALLCARROT. "Small Carrot delivers user generated movies for small screens."

- FIREANT. "FireAnt delivers a rich media experience through a simple to use, unified viewer that lets you watch all types of content without having to worry about which format it is (QuickTime, Windows Media, Real, Flash, MP3 and more)."

- DABBLE. "Dabble's mission is to help you find and collect videos from all over the web, no matter where they are hosted."

- VIMEO. "Vimeo is for sharing video clips that you've created. It's very easy to use, and filled with interesting people."

- DAILYMOTION. "Dailymotion is about finding new ways to see and show the world."

- GROUPER. "Grouper is the best place on the web to WATCH, SHARE and CREATE video."

- PODTECH. "PodTech Network is a growing network of audio and video podcasts for influencers and leaders in the global technology and media industries."

- PODSHOW. "Welcome to PodShow, where you get to choose what you listen to and when and where you listen to it."

- RADIOTAIL. "RadioTail's podcast ad network, advanced metrics and dynamic ad serving technology ensures that advertising in podcasts will reach the right audience and deliver a great return on investment".

- BLOGBURST. "BlogBurst is a syndication service that places your blog content on top-tier online destinations. You get visibility, audience reach and increased traffic, while publishers get a wide range of new coverage to broaden their reach and increase page views."

- SOCIALROOTS. "SocialRoots is a social media agency connecting media creators with new audiences and opportunities."

- BLOGADS. "We're the blog advertising specialists." www.blogads.com

- FRUITCAST. "You love publishing your podcast, but did you know you could make some pretty good money from it as well?"

- THE DECK. "The premier advertising network for reaching web and design professionals,

The Deck serves up millions of page views each month and is uniquely configured to

connect the right marketers to a targeted, influential audience."

-ODEO. "Odeo is a creative way to record and share audio - and it's free." www.odeo.com

So would I spend $1.65 billion on YouTube? I don't envy the execs who had to make those decisions. If they pull it off, GoogTube will deliver years of entertainment (and billions of dollars in revenue) from a hat trick of content creators, advertisers, and consumers. If they don't pull it off, it'll be entertaining to watch them crash and see who rises to take their place. One way or the other, there will definitely be something on.

Games as Art Discussion Tonight

update: If you would like to read the transcript of the event, Jesper Juuls runs it on his blog, The Ludologist, I am not sure if we broke much new ground but it was a spirited discussion. Join Manifesto Games on Wednesday, November 1st for a chat with on the subject of games and art with Henry Jenkins, Jesper Juul, Marc LeBlanc, and Eric Zimmerman.

Network: irc.freenode.net

Channel: #gamesandart

Time: 6PM PST, 9PM EST, 2 AM GMT

See Manifesto's page on how to get on IRC.

More About the Topic:

Hideo Kojima says "If 100 people walk by and a single person is captivated by whatever that piece radiates, it's art. But videogames aren't trying to capture one person. A videogame should make sure that all 100 people that play that game should enjoy the service provided by that videogame. It's something of a service. It's not art."

And Roger Ebert says "To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers... for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."

Contrariwise, Henry Jenkins says "Computer games are art--a popular art, an emerging art, a largely unrecognized art, but art nevertheless... The time has come to take games seriously as an important new popular art shaping the aesthetic sensibility of the 21st century."

Are games art? If not, why not? And if so, why? Is thinking of games as art useful or actually a hindrance for game developers? If games are art, what should our aspirations for the form be?

Participants:

Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including the recently published Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and an Assistant Professor in video game theory and design at the Center for Computer Game Research Copenhagen. He is author of Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds and numerous articles about games, and his prestigious and influential blog is The Ludologist.

Marc LeBlanc is a twelve-year veteran of the game industry. At Looking Glass Studios, he was a core contributor to several award-winning games, including the Thief and System Shock series. In collaboration with Andrew Leker, he developed Oasis, the 2004 Independent Games Festival Game of the Year in the web/downloadable category.

Santiago Siri is an Argentinean game designer whose work includes Football Deluxe and Utopia (forthcoming). He works for Three Melons, an advergaming firm that offers innovative branding through games. He is also a writer and theoretician, and his blog, Games as Art, is a resource for all members of the game community.

Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and academic exploring the theory and practice of game design. He is the is the co-founder and CEO of gameLab, a game development company based in New York City. He is the co-editor of several works in the field, including Rules of Play, a seminal study of game design technique.

Anyone who would like a preview of my perspective on this question should check out "Games, the New Lively Art" which will be reprinted in my forthcoming anthology, The Wow Climax.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Four): Behind the Scenes at Indiecade

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has long served as the showcase of the games industry. The event's host, the Electronic Software Association, announced this summer that the event was going to be discontinued, leading to heated debates in the blogosphere about what this decision might be signaling about the cultural status of games. The noisy, garish, spectacular quality of E3 had set the tone for the commercial games industry: this was the place where the buyers for the major retail chains went to see the new product and design and marketing decisions were often made with an eye to what would look really spectacular when displayed on the big monitors that dominated the floor at E3. One could even argue that the costuming of game characters were designed so that those characters could be embodied by the "booth babes" who worked the floor, trying to lather up the mostly male patrons of the convention, and get them "excited" about some new title. Many people wondered what would happen if this show disappeared. In this blog, I argued for one possible scenario:

One step is to separate out the various functions which E3 served and see whether they should be combined or remain separate. Clearly, the industry will need some ways to introduce its new products to retailers and there's some danger that the next step will be to fragment this process -- allowing the major companies to have their own shows (as Next Generation suggests) but leaving the smaller publishers out in the cold. I don't think that would be a very good thing for the games industry. A second key function would be to inform the public about the current state of the games industry. For example, the Penny Arcade Expo may function more like San Diego Comiccon in providing a space where industry figures communicate more directly with their fans, while there are moves underway to develop an independent games festival that functions more like Sundance does within the film industry, offering a place to showcase work by smaller publishers or games that fall further outside the commercial mainstream. We are seeing a growing number of gatherings with more specialized focuses, such as those centering on casual games, mobile games, serious games, even religious games, each of which serves a specific niche as compared to the general interest focus of E3. The Game Developers Conference may absorb more of the training and recruitment functions that were associated with E3. And so forth.

One of the new events which have emerged in the wake of the collapse of E3 is the Indiecade, which is presenting itself as a celebration of games and play in all of their many manifestations. As envisioned by Stephanie Barish and her collaborators, the Indiecade will be an event designed to heighten public awareness of the diversity of games production and to recognize innovative and distinctive work across all games platforms. It will be an event where new games, as well as works in progress, get displayed. So, if E3 helped to shape the content and style of commercial games, one may wonder what will happen if there is another kind of event which really does attract critical awareness and public interest and which operates with different aesthetic, economic, and pedagogical goals.

Last time, Barish offered some thoughts about the current state of the games industry and why she feels an independent games movement and a games festival is needed. Today, I am running the second part of that interview, allowing Barish to talk about what kind of role her festival hopes to play for the producers and consumers of independent games. I am running it as part of an ongoing series showcasing key movers and shakers within the independent games movement.

For more information about the festival, check out their home page. The festival is scheduled to run in Fall of 2007 in Santa Monica, California.

Barish asked me to acknowledge the contributions of her collaborators to shaping her responses to these questions:Scott Chamberlin (Partner) , Janine Fron (Conference Chair), Sam Gustman (CMC V.P., Partner), Kirsten Paul (IndieCade Program Manager), and Celia Pearce (IndieCade Festival Chair).

*Sidebar: Anyone who would like to see my keynote address from the Serious Games Conference can see it here.

What roles do you see Indiecade playing in fostering an Independent games movement?

While the industry needs the equivalent of Run Lola Run, Billy Elliot, and any number of other important independent work, independent game designers don't necessarily need IndieCade for inspiration. They are already inspired. Independent gamemakers make games for the same reason independent filmmakers make movies, to express something they are passionate about. Of course they hope to make money as well, but this is not necessarily their driving force. On the other hand, they do need and want a public forum to show their work, a place to meet collaborators, a community, and public acknowledgment of their work. In other words, a wide-scale dedicated universal gathering. At least in the United States, all of the other independent game festivals are buried under a film festival (Slamdance) or an industry conference (GDC). We need a forum of our own, fully playable, inclusive of all forms and screens, and with public access. "Play" needs to be exalted. Independent games need an environment dedicated to making them successful, and that is our dedication.

Can a games festival serve the same needs as a film festival given the very different nature of the two media (that is, films are designed to be watched in large scale social settings, where-as most games facilitate only a limited number of participants.)

Effectively showcasing interactive media is one of our biggest challenges, particularly since games are generally designed as such an intimate experience. We're all leveraging our diverse backgrounds to think beyond rows of computer kiosks or big-screen auditorium. We have had to design the IndieCade experience from the ground up, to design exhibition experiences in keeping with the spirit of the games themselves. Games need to be given a forum that speaks to their innovations. Our goal is to capture the excitement and creativity in the content and translate it into the festival.

One of our team partners, KTGY (led by exhibition designer Jeff Mayer) has had a lot of experience with events like SIGGRAPH, E3, and the foundational designs for GameWorks. Among others, they are helping us realize some of the inspirations we have had for sharing game experiences among multiple participants playing roles across the player/spectator spectrum. New forms can be challenging in many ways, and they need to be presented in an appropriate context. We have seen this done very well, and want to ensure that the audience has a play experience, even as spectators.

You are creating a games festival at the same time that the games industry is

abandoning its major trade show. How has this decision benefited or hurt your

efforts?

Well, on the negative side we lost our fabulous location for board meetings, and like so many others we have come to rely on E3 for the inside scoop, the community of practice, the inspiration, the radical socializing, and the overwhelming sensory experience. But generally the operative word for us is synergy. As you know, the President and Senior Vice President of the ESA, Douglas Lowenstein and Carolyn Rauch, are on our advisory board, and we're working closely with them to forge a kind of complementary relationship between the new E3 and IndieCade.

Happily, they have scheduled E3 close to our own date and moved it over to our location, Santa Monica. I think that we can also say that with the number of exhibitors so drastically reduced (only 30 of the usual 400 will be exhibiting in the new E3), there is even more of a sense of the power of the major publishers and thus even more of a need for an independent counterpoint.

Without a doubt, the move creates a bigger demand for IndieCade. We believe that one of the reasons for the downsizing of E3 is that the big companies don't need it anymore; they already have their distribution channels in place. On the other hand, smaller companies and international participants get a lot out of E3 because it exposes them to potential distributors and publishers. So the E3 reduction is really going to impact the little guy more than anyone and we are receiving an extremely positive reaction from this constituency, as well as the public who regularly attends the expo, and the public who always wanted to attend but didn't have the industry credentials.

Art films have been celebrated as offering us windows into cultural difference, giving us access to the beliefs and everyday practices of distinctive cultures around the world. Do you think games also reflect cultural differences in this way or has the global circulation of games meant that from the beginning they have developed a culturally neutral style and content?

I wouldn't be here if I didn't see an incredible potential in games for cross-cultural interactions, far beyond watching a new experience in a film. The collaborative aspect to certain games will give us an unprecedented window into cultural dialogue in the future, particularly as more diverse gamemakers emerge. We are now seeing a glimpse of what is possible as American kids embrace Japanese games and their culture, aesthetics, and play styles - the Wii and the DS being great examples. Indeed, a lot more of the world could be seen through the lens of games.

There are three ways to think about it. One is games that are specifically about other cultures, much parallel to film. The Games for Change movement is to be lauded for working to make headway in this area - focusing on political games and games about different cultures. Another is games in which people from diverse cultures cohabitate and collaborate and opportunities exist, particularly in the MMOG sphere, to create more connection between people of different cultures. Cross-cultural exchange is particularly interesting because often it is within the framework of a non-culturally-neutral game. I think more people are aware of Korea today because of games like Lineage and Ragnarok. And finally, ways in which game makers can challenge mainstream game culture through modding the game itself afford us opportunities for questioning, countering, and commenting upon culture that other media simply just cannot offer. I believe this ability to connect with others and to author, facilitates questioning that can address cultural differences and enable us to interact with them on a global level.

Getting to your question, though: on the formal side, I do not agree that games are culturally neutral. To the contrary, I think they reflect the biases of the fairly homogenous gamemakers who design them. And in terms of content, I don't think games have yet been able to approach the nuances of culture and human understanding that film has reached.

But, what makes independent games so exciting is that they represent new voices and new points of view. We want to pave paths for many more voices to come to the mix and the public eye. It is our desire to follow in the footsteps of the independent film community and salute the creative forces that take risks, run up their credit cards to follow a vision, and turn convention on its head to make independent games that are truly innovative and expand our definitions and experiences of play.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Three): Behind the Scenes at Indiecade

>Independent gamemakers, like their counterparts in film, make products that can be a lifelong passion, that rely upon the creative inspiration of innumerable collaborators, and that often deplete a life savings or run up credit card debt to create. Like independent filmmakers, they compete for support, publicity, and distribution against established producers and productions that can cost millions of dollars... But the game industry, unlike cinema, has no comprehensive, public venue to introduce, explore, and celebrate groundbreaking independent work. Worthy independent games, prospective funders, and players hungry for new experiences rarely find one another. Imagine an annual global crossroads and marketplace, open to the general public - a yearly celebration of this community's new voices and their trailblazing work. Imagine thousands of independent creators, developers, thinkers, players, and fans, traveling from across the world to be at the same place at the same time....

--Indiecade website.

This is the second of a series of interviews I plan to run over the next month or so with key movers and shakers in the independent games movement. I am running this series out of a belief that we may be at a vital crossroads in the history of computer and video games as a series of announcements and developments this year may pave the way for greater innovation, diversity, and experimentation in game design. For a long time, the games industry seemed in danger of being completely swallowed whole by Electronic Arts and a few other major publishers. Suddenly a number of institutions are emerging which will enable distribute and critical engagement with works by smaller games developers or will encourage amateurs to produce and distribute games. Like many of my readers, I love many mainstream games but I also believe that there need to be an alternative games culture if we are going to avoid standardization and stagnation.

A little over a week ago, I featured a two part conversation with Greg Costikyan about Manifesto Games, its support for creator rights, and his critique of the mainstream game publishers.

Today and tomorrow, I will be talking with Stephanie Barish, Founder and President of Creative Media Collaborative, the group which is organizing Indiecade, which they hope will function for the independent games industry the way Sundance has functioned for the independent films movement -- a gathering place, a training ground, a focus for critical attention, and a showcase for the best new work from around the world. Full disclosure dictates that I acknowledge that Barish asked me some time ago to serve on the board of advisors for the festival and through telephone conversations and e-mail correspondence, I have watched her and her team grapple with some of the challenges of building the infrastructure and identifying the sponsors needed to pull off a pretty ambitious plan. The first Indiecade is going to be held in Santa Monica, California in the fall of 2007.

I first met Barish when she was working as the producer and director of multimedia publications at Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and then later as the executive Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center. Barish comes not from the heart of the games industry but rather from the world of independent media production and multimedia literacy education. She brings an alternative sensibility and perspective to the effort to promote independent games.

Here, Barish suggests the ways that the Indiecade has emerged from a particular analysis of what's working -- and what isn't -- in contemporary games culture and explores some of the ways that a games festival might contribute to greater public awareness of the independent games movement. Along the way, she speaks to the question of games criticism, which was a central focus of discussion across the blogosphere earlier this year. Tomorrow, she will speak more fully about what it means to create a festival around games and how games might be understood as reflecting differences between different national cultures.

Barish has asked me to acknowledge the contributions of other members on the Indiecade team who helped her think through how to address some of these questions: Scott Chamberlin (Partner) , Janine Fron (Conference Chair), Sam Gustman (CMC V.P., Partner), Kirsten Paul (IndieCade Program Manager), and Celia Pearce (IndieCade Festival Chair).

How are you defining an independent game?

It is funny that there is not a standard answer to this question. For the festival we are using a simple determinant: an independent game is one that is created without the umbrella of a deal with a major publisher. This also excludes games funded by the majors or their subsidiaries, using the industry standard, as others have before us, to define these majors as the 30 companies on the ESA board -- those included in the new E3.

We have had a lot of very interesting conversations about the definition of independent in this community, and the particulars can obscure the real issue, which boils down to an independent game being one in which the creative decisions are not made down the hall at Marketing. Obviously, there are gray areas, but independence can be found at the other side of that spectrum, where inspiration is the motivation.

Some have argued that the conservativeness of the games industry (tending to make franchise titles or games that fall into familiar genres) is simply a reflection of the conservativism of the hardcore gamer market (which tends to judge new titles against prior play experiences.) Do you agree or disagree with this claim? What can independent games designers do to encourage the public to experiment more with alternative forms of gaming?

First the industry finds itself having to cater to the appetite of hardcore gamers for increasingly impressive and sophisticated graphics and technologies. Given the financial premium of all this innovation, it's no wonder the industry then takes safe harbor in marketing decisions they know will appeal just enough to what is in fact a very dedicated following. We should not expect the industry to eschew proven formulas, but need to encourage parallel development streams that meet a known taste for altogether-new flavors and ultimately drive the industry forward. This is not even to say that there are not some beautiful and highly original games created by the industry, like the newly released Okami for the PS2. But the state of the industry is such that as one of our advisors, a lead game designer, recently pointed out the irony that he could get millions of dollars for the design of another licensed title, but could not get a few hundred thousand dollars to do something new and creative.

No doubt it is a challenge for independent game designers to compete with the kind of graphic and technical expectations and experiences regularly offered by the big players. But we don't expect the latest special-effect blockbuster to render all previous films and future non-technical films obsolete, and we have to start painting game design and marketing with a subtler brush. There are more kinds of play experiences than those repeatedly offered by the majors, and not all audiences are interested only in those particular types of experiences and narratives. IndieCade Festival Chair Celia Pearce, an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech, conducted a study on Baby Boomer gamers and found they were much less demanding in terms of graphics technology, but far more interested in artistry. "The people I studied prefer games with story, classic point-and-click adventure games ... a genre that big publishers simply abandoned in the late 1990s." Just think about industry precedent, the enormous underserved audience that emerged to play The Sims. Or look at casual games, which tend to be minimized by the big companies in the industry, despite games like gameLab's Diner Dash, which have garnered remarkable followings. It is not insignificant that the major audience for these games are women, who have a markedly different set of expectations and requirements than those supposedly demanded by the hardcore gamer. Mods are also a case in point, as for instance Counter-Strike has more copies in circulation than the original game it was based on. As the audience for these independent so called niche games expands, it reveals a tremendous desire for diversity of play experience and a large audience underserved by the current mainstream industry.

Independent game designers don't need to figure out how to serve specific public needs; they simply need opportunities for voice. For every independent game that is a phenomenon a dozen never get seen except at the odd industry showcase. If they don't get picked up by short-sighted publishers, how are they going to have the chance to even FIND an audience? Right now the biggest marketing channel for independent games is word of mouth, but public forums and the Internet are really lowering the hurdles for distribution. Such outlets as Valve's steam system and the newly launched Manifesto are helping to propel independent game distribution forward. IndieCade, by bringing the independents together in a community and a marketplace, will also serve as a catalyst by uniting the community and throwing a spotlight on a lot of those user experiences that are not necessarily technical wonders. We believe the audience will expand in response to the exposure to this innovation and diversity.

Film festivals benefit enormously from the role of film critics who use them to preview smaller and international titles before they open in their markets. Can

one have the same impact as Sundance with an independent games event without

serious participation from games critics who are prepared to educate the public

about experimental and innovative titles?

We think this is a really big problem with the game industry, and we are glad you pointed it out. Since most of the game writers fall into the hardcore gamer category, the perspectives are not particularly diverse. (Most of the game magazines panned The Sims when it came out.) First, I think we should point out that there is a generation of gamers, fans, and critics, who are students of people like you, Henry, and are interested in better and more critical game writing. As a juried festival, IndieCade jurors will facilitate this discussion by writing reviews of all of the featured games in our catalogue -- there are many small steps we need to make as a community to begin to open this dialogue to the greater public.

But to more directly answer your question, we are optimistic about movement in different areas. Blogs and other online forums are becoming crucial points of reference across culture, and in our field some fantastic game culture blogs, fan blogs, and independent discussion forums are beginning to emerge. At the festival, we expect prominent game bloggers and other "netroots" gamers -- already accustomed to imparting and consuming information on laptops, PDAs, telephones -- to generate the kind of buzz and attention you're talking about. They will play the critic role in more ways than one, and they will do so with more immediacy, more energy, and more drama.

This is more appropriate to the medium. The use of participants' phones and laptops are integrated into the design of the festival itself, so they will already be wired and inclined to beam news of the latest works to remote lands. As the years go by and the media channels for independents crystallize and mature, a central annual event will create the same sense of anticipation and discovery that film festivals nurture so carefully through traditional media.

Given how totally commercial interests have dominated games culture, many wonder whether there are enough interesting independent games out there to provide content for a large scale event every year. Where are you finding the games you will feature at your event? What steps are you taking to identify new content for the initial festival?

Submissions are a hot topic for us. We honestly don't think that we will have any trouble finding high quality independent work, not this year or any other. There is a lot of independent work with phenomenal promise out there. We have a large international jury and we are being extremely aggressive about submissions. We have a system of chairs who will be responsible for evangelizing in their categories. We also have a category for works-in-progress, which will allow independent developers lacking the resources to take a great idea to fruition, to compete and get the attention of those who do. We will draw submissions from around the world, and we can expect to see some interesting submissions from students. We expect to launch our initial website just after the winter holidays, and will open our submissions by February, 2007 at http://www.indiecade.com.

As years go by, we are not going to settle into familiar forms and comfortable media. Of all people, we have to have a very expansive sense of the types of games and play experiences to be included in the festival. We want games that are pushing the envelope and are interested in displaying hybrids of all forms, not merely the purely digital. At the festival itself, we want to put the practitioners, industry specialists, players, fans, and spectators together into a dynamic environment: we'll have round-robin tournaments, LAN parties, social game activities integrated throughout the festival; as well as both a "Big Game" that will take place across the city of Los Angeles and an international ARG game which is being designed specifically for the festival. Each year we expect these activities to grow and transform along with the festival and the industry.

If You Live in Boston...

The What: CMS has agreed to act as the local organizer for a street-game called Cruel 2 B Kind, which will be held on Halloween night -- that's October 31 -- from 6:30-8:30 PM near Harvard Square. Cruel 2 B Kind was created by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost (both sometimes readers and responders to this blog).

Here's what their website says about the game:

Cruel 2 B Kind is a game of benevolent assassination.

At the beginning of the game, you and a partner-in-crime are assigned a secret weapon. To onlookers, it will seem like a random act of kindness. But to a select group of other players, the seemingly benevolent gesture is a deadly maneuver that will bring them to their knees.

Some players will be slain by a serenade. Others will be killed by a compliment. You and your partner might be taken down by an innocent group cheer.

You will be given no information about your targets. No name, no photo, nothing but the guarantee that they will remain within the outdoor game boundaries during the designated playing time. Anyone you encounter could be your target. The only way to find out is to attack them with your secret weapon.

Watch out: The hunter is also the hunted. At the beginning of the game, you and your partner will also be assigned your own secret weakness. Other pairs of players have been given your secret weakness as their secret weapon, and they're coming to get you. Anything out of the ordinary you do to assassinate YOUR targets may reveal your own secret identity to the other players who want you dead.

As targets are successfully assassinated, the dead players join forces with their killers to continue stalking the surviving players. The teams grow bigger and bigger until two final mobs of benevolent assassins descend upon each other for a spectacular, climactic kill.

Will innocents be caught in the cross-fire? Oh, yes. But when your secret weapon is a random act of kindness, it's only cruel to be kind to other players...

Not sure you're cruel enough to play as an assassin? Don't worry - you can still experience killer kindness. Just show up to any game site at the right time. You can hang out, watch the game, and play along as an "innocent bystander"!

Sorry for the last minute notice -- I've been traveling and have just now gotten my hands on the relevent information.

You can sign up to play in game here.

http://www.cruelgame.com/signup/

All you need to play is a partner (the game starts off in pairs), and a cell phone that can receive text messages (to get instructions and updates during the game).

Hope to see some of you there.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Seven)

This is the last installment of my series on the white paper which we wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on participatory culture and media literacy. If you want to read the whole paper, check it out here. If you want to learn more about the work that the MacArthur Foundation is doing on youth and digital learning, you can follow their blog -- which regularly features comments from some of the country's leading educators and experts on youth media. This last installment concludes with some general thoughts about what all of this means for parents, schools, and after school based programs. Project nml will now be turning its attention to developing a range of curricular materials and activities based on this framework, which we will be rolling out through this blog, among many other places.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this material. Do let us know what you think and do share this with others you think would be interesting.

Once again let me acknowledge the contributions of Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison without whom it would have been impossible to pull this report together.

Who Should Respond? A Systemic Approach to Media Education

We have identified three core problems that should concern all of us who care about the development and well-being of American's young people:

• 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 the way that media shapes perceptions of the world?

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

We have also identified a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture:

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

Performance -- the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

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

Appropriation -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking -- the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition -- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence -- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment -- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation -- the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation -- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Some children are acquiring some of these skills through their participation in the informal learning communities that surround popular culture. Some teachers are incorporating some of these skills into their classroom instruction. Some afterschool programs are incorporating some of these skills into their activities. Yet, as the above qualifications suggest, the integration of these important social skills and cultural competencies remains haphazard at best. Media education is taking place for some youth across a variety of contexts, but it is not a central part of the educational experience of all students. Our goal for this report is to encourage greater reflection and public discussion on how we might incorporate these core principles systematically across curricula and across the divide between in-school and out-of-school activities. Such a systemic approach is needed if we are to close the participation gap, confront the transparency problem, and help young people work through the ethical dilemmas they face in their everyday lives. Such a systemic approach is needed if children are to acquire the core social skills and cultural competencies needed in a modern era.

Schools

In the above descriptions of core social skills and cultural competencies, we have spotlighted a range of existing classroom practices that help children become fuller participants in the new media landscape: the use of educational simulations, alternative and augmented reality games, webquests, production activities, blogs and wikis, and deliberation exercises. Such exercises involve actively applying new techniques of knowledge production and community participation to the existing range of academic subjects in the established school curriculum. We have seen how history classes are making use of educational games, how science classes are teaching youth to evaluate and construct simulations, how literature classes are embracing role play and appropriation, how math classes might explore the value of distributed cognition, and how foreign language classes are bridging cultural differences via networking. As these examples suggest, many individual schools and educators are experimenting with new media technologies and the processes of collaboration, networking, appropriation, participation, and expression that they enable. They are engaging students in real-world inquiries that require them to search out information, interview experts, connect with other students around the world, generate and share multimedia, assess digital documents, write for authentic audiences, and otherwise exploit the resources of the new participatory culture.

We see this report as supporting these individual educators by encouraging a more systemic consideration of the place these skills should assume in pedagogical practice. We believe that these core social skills and cultural competencies have implications across the school curriculum, with each teacher assuming responsibility for helping students develop the skills necessary for participation within their discipline. Clearly, more discipline-specific research is needed to more fully understand the value and relevance of these skills to different aspects of the school curriculum. Skills that are already part of the professional practices of scientists, historians, artists, and policymakers can also help inform how we introduce students to these disciplines.

Much of the resistance to media literacy training springs from the sense that the school day is bursting at its seams, that we cannot cram in any new tasks without the instructional system breaking down altogether. For that reason, we do not want to see media literacy treated as an add-on subject. Rather, we should view its introduction as a paradigm shift, one that, like multiculturalism or globalization, reshapes how we teach every existing subject. Media change is affecting every aspect of our contemporary experience, and as a consequence, every school discipline needs to take responsibility for helping students to master the skills and knowledge they need to function in a hypermediated environment.

After School

Afterschool programs may encourage students to examine more directly their relationship to popular media and participatory culture. Afterschool programs may introduce core technical skills that students need to advance as media makers. In these more informal learning contexts, students may explore rich examples of existing media practice and develop a vocabulary for critically assessing work in these emerging fields. Students may also have more time to produce their own media and to reflect on their own production activities. The approach proposed here takes the best of several contemporary approaches to media education, fusing the critical skills and inquiry associated with media literacy with the production skills associated with the Computer Clubhouses, and adding to both a greater awareness of the politics and practice of participatory culture.

The media literacy movement emerged in response to the rise of mass media. Here, for example, is a classic definition of media literacy created by the Ontario Association for Media Literacy in 1989:

Media literacy is concerned with developing an informed and critical understanding of the nature of the mass media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of those techniques. It is education that aims to increase students' understanding and enjoyment of how the media work, how they produce meaning, how they are organized, and how they construct reality. Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create media products.

Although some media literacy educators have instituted groundbreaking work on digital media, the bulk of presentations at national conferences are still focused on more traditional media -- print, broadcast, cinema, popular music, advertising -- which are assumed to exert the greatest influence on young people's lives.

Media literacy educators are not wrong to be concerned by the concentrated power of the media industry, but they must also realize that this is only part of a more complex picture. We live in a world in which media power is more concentrated than ever before and yet the ability of everyday people to produce and distribute media has never been more free. Existing media literacy materials give us a rich vocabulary for thinking about issues of representation, helping students to think critically about how the media frames perceptions of the world and reshapes experience according to its own codes and conventions. Yet these concepts need to be rethought for an era of participatory culture.

Consider, for example, the framework for media literacy proposed by Thoman and Jolls:

•

Who created the message?

• What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?

• How may different people understand this message differently than me?

• What lifestyles, values, and points of view are represented in - or omitted from - this message?

• Why is this message being sent?

There is much to praise in these questions: they understand media as operating within a social and cultural context; they recognize that what we take from a message is different from what the author intended; they focus on interpretation and context as well as motivation; they are not tied up with a language of victimization.

Yet, note that each question operates on the assumption that the message was created elsewhere and that we are simply its recipients (critical, appropriating, or otherwise). We would add new complexity and depth to each of these questions if we rephrased them to emphasize individuals' own active participation in selecting, creating, remaking, critiquing, and circulating media content. One of the biggest contributions of the media literacy movement has been this focus on inquiry, identifying core questions that can be asked of a broad range of different media forms and experiences. This inquiry process seems key to overcoming the transparency problems identified above.

By contrast, education for the digital revolution stressed tools above all else. The challenge was to wire the classroom and prepare youth for the demands of the new technologies. Computer Clubhouses sprang up around the country to provide learning environments where youth could experiment with new media techniques and technologies. The goal was to allow students to set and complete their own tasks with the focus almost entirely on the production process. Little effort was made to give youth a context for thinking about these changes or to reflect on the new responsibilities and challenges they faced as participants in the digital culture. We embrace the constructivist principles that have shaped the Computer Clubhouse movement: youth do their best work when engaged in activities that are personally meaningful to them. Yet, we also see a value in teaching youth how to evaluate their own work and appraise their own actions, and we see a necessity of helping them to situate the media they produce within its larger social, cultural, and legal context.

We have developed an integrated approach to media pedagogy founded on exercises that introduce youth to core technical skills and cultural competencies, exemplars that teach youth to critically analyze existing media texts, expressions that encourage youth to create new media content, and ethics that encourage youth to critically reflect on the consequences of their own choices as media makers.

School-based and afterschool programs serve distinct but complementary functions. We make a mistake when we use afterschool programs simply to play catch-up on school-based standards or to merely reinforce what schools are already teaching. Afterschool programs should be a site of experimentation and innovation, a place where educators catch up with the changing culture and teach new subjects that expand children's understanding of the world. Afterschool programs focused on media education should function in a variety of contexts. Museums, public libraries, churches, and social organizations (such as the YWCA or the Boy Scouts) can play important roles, each drawing on its core strengths to expand beyond what can be done during the official school day.

Parents

We also see an active role for parents to play in shaping children's earliest relationship to media and reinforcing their emerging skills and competencies. The new media technologies give parents greater control over the flow of media into their lives than ever before, yet parents often describe themselves as overwhelmed by the role that media plays in their children's everyday activities. As UK Children Go On-line concluded, "Opportunities and risks go hand in hand...The more children experience one, the more they also experience the other." Rather than constraining choices to protect youth from risks, the report advocates doing a better job helping youth master the skills they need to exploit opportunities and avoid pitfalls.

Parents lack basic information that would help them deal with both the expanding media options and the breakdown of traditional gatekeeping functions. Most existing research focuses on how to minimize the risks of exposure to media, yet we have stressed the educational benefits of involvement in participatory culture. The first five or six years of a child's life are formative for literacy and social skills, and parents can play an important in helping children acquire the most basic versions of the skills we have described here. Throughout children's lives, parents play important roles in helping them make meaningful choices in their use of media and in helping them anticipate the consequences of the choices they make. Adults often are led by fears and anxieties about new forms of media that were not a part of their own childhood, and which they do not fully understand. There are few, if any, books that offer parents advice on how to make these choices or that offer information about the media landscape. Few education programs help parents to acquire skills and self-confidence to help their children master the new media literacies. There are few sites that provide up-to-date and ongoing discussions of some of the issues surrounding the place of media in children's lives.

The Challenge Ahead: Ensuring that All Benefit from the Expanding Media Landscape

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 19, 2006), Bill Ivey, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Steven J. Tepper, a professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, described what they see as the long term consequences of this participation gap:

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

Ivey and Tepper bring us back to the core concerns that have framed this essay: how can we "ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, [Creative] and economic life?" How do we guarantee that the rich opportunities afforded by the expanding media landscape are available to all? What can we do through schools, afterschool programs, and the home to give our youngest children a head start and allow our more mature youth the chance to develop and grow as effective participants and ethical communicators? This is the challenge that faces education at all levels at the dawn of a new era of participatory culture.

Announcing: Media in Transition Conference

I wanted to direct my reader's attention to an event our program will be hosting in April 2007 -- our 5th Media in Transition Conference. We try to use these events to bring together scholars from across a range of different disciplines and from around the world to talk about underlying issues that cut across media platforms and across historical periods. We also very much encourage participation from artists, community leaders, and industry people who also might want to share their perspectives on these issues. This year's topic should be of particular interest to many of the different groups represented among regular readers of this blog, including fans, media literacy educators, and others. media in transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age

April 27-29, 2007

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS (submission deadline: Jan. 5, 2007)

Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Networked culture is enabling both small and large collaborations among artists who may never encounter each other face to face. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Bloggers are appropriating and recontextualizing news stories; fans are rewriting stories from popular culture; and rappers and techno artists are sampling and remixing sounds.

These and related cultural practices have generated heated contention and debate. What constitutes fair use of another's intellectual property? What ethical issues are posed when sounds, images, and stories move from one culture or subculture to another? Or when materials created by a community or religious or ethnic tradition are appropriated by technologically powerful outsiders? What constitutes creativity and originality in expressive formats based on sampling and remixing? What obligations do artists owe to those who have inspired and informed their work and how much creative freedom should they exercise over their borrowed or shared materials?

One source of answers to such questions lies in the past - in the ways in which traditional printed texts - and films and TV shows as well - invoke, allude to and define themselves against their rivals and ancestors; and - perhaps even more saliently - in the ways in which folk and popular cultures may nourish and reward not originality in our modern sense, but familiarity, repetition, borrowing, collaboration.

This fifth Media in Transition conference, then, aims to generate a conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices. We hope this event will appeal widely across disciplines and scholarly and professional boundaries. For example, we hope this conference will bring together such figures as:

* anthropologists of oral and folk cultures

* historians of the book and reading publics

* political scientists and legal scholars interested in alternative approaches to intellectual property

* media educators who aim to help students think about their ethical responsibilities in this new participatory culture

* artists ready to discuss appropriation and collaboration in their own work

* economists and business leaders interested in the new relationships that are emerging between media producers and consumers

* activists and netizens interested in the ways new technologies democratize who has the right to be an author

Among topics the conference might explore:

* history of authorship and copyright

* folk practices in traditional and contemporary society

* appropriating materials from other cultures: political and ethical dilemmas

* poetics and politics of fan culture

* blogging, podcasting, and collective intelligence

* media literacy and the ethics of participatory culture

* artistic collaboration and cultural production, past and present

* fair use and intellectual property

* sampling and remixing in popular music

* cultural production in traditional and developing societies

* Web 2.0 and the "architecture of participation"

* creative industries and user-generated content

* parody, spoofs, and mash-ups as critical commentary

* game mods and machinima

* the workings of genre in different media systems

* law and technological change

Short abstracts of no more than 200 words for papers or panels should be sent via email to Brad Seawell at seawell@mit.edu no later than January 5, 2007. Brad can be reached by phone at 617-253-3521. Email submissions are preferred, but abstracts can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell

14N-430

MIT

Cambridge , MA 02139

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Six)

Today's post wraps up my list of the eleven social skills and cultural competencies which I argue we should be incorporating into our educational practices with transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. Next time, I will wrap up with some recommendations about what this might all mean for parents, schools, and after school programs. We haven't received many responses here from readers but I am very pleased to see localized discussions of some of these issues start to spring up on a number of other blogs. Do let me know what you think about some of the issues raised here?

Transmedia Navigation -- the ability to deal with the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

In an era of convergence, consumers become hunters and gatherers pulling together information from multiple sources to form a new synthesis. Storytellers exploit this potential for transmedia storytelling; advertisers talk about branding as depending on multiple touch points; networks seek to exploit their intellectual properties across many different channels. As they do so, we encounter the same information, the same stories, the same characters and worlds across multiple modes of representation. Transmedia stories at the most basic level are stories told across multiple media. At the present time, the most significant stories tend to flow across multiple media platforms.

Consider, for example, the Pokémon phenomenon. As Buckingham and Sefton-Green explain, "Pokémon is something you do, not just something you read or watch or consume." Several hundred different Pokémon exist, each with multiple evolutionary forms and a complex set of rivalries and attachments. There is no one text for information about these various species. Rather, the child assembles information from various media, with the result that each child knows something his or her friends do not. As a result, the child can share his or her expertise with others. As Buckingham and Sefton-Green explain, "Children may watch the television cartoon, for example, as a way of gathering knowledge that they can later utilize in playing the computer game or in trading cards, and vice versa. The fact that information can be transferred between media (or platforms) of course adds to the sense that Pokémon is unavoidable. In order to be a master, it is necessary to 'catch' all its various manifestations" .

Such information feeds back into social interactions, including face-to-face contact within local communities and mediated contact online with a more dispersed population. These children's properties offer multiple points of entry, enable many different forms of participation, and facilitate the interests of multiple consumers.

One dimension of this phenomenon points us back to collective intelligence, given that what Ito calls "hypersociability" emerges as children trade notes and exchange artifacts associated with their favorite television shows. A second dimension of this phenomenon points us to what Kress calls multimodality. Consider a simple example. The same character (say, Spider-Man) may look different when featured in an animated video than in a video game, or a printed comic book, or as a molded plastic action figure, or in a live-action movie. How then do readers learn to recognize this character across all of these different media? How do they link what they have learned about the character in one context to what they learned in a completely different media channel? How do they determine which of these representations are linked (part of the same interpretation of the character) and which are separate (separate versions of the character that are meant to be understood autonomously)? These are the kinds of conceptual problems youth encounter regularly in their participation in contemporary media franchises.

Kress stresses that modern literacy requires the ability to express ideas across a broad range of different systems of representation and signification (including "words, spoken or written; image, still and moving; musical...3D models..."). Each medium has its own affordances, its own systems of representation, its own strategies for producing and organizing knowledge. Participants in the new media landscape learn to navigate these different and sometimes conflicting modes of representation and to make meaningful choices about the best ways to express their ideas in each context. All of this sounds more complicated than it is. As the New Media Consortium's 2005 report on twenty-first century literacy suggests, "Young people adept at interpreting meaning in sound, music, still and moving images, and interactive components not only seem quite able to cope with messages that engage several of these pathways at once, but in many cases prefer them."

Kress argues that this tendency toward multimodality changes how we teach composition, because students must learn to sort through a range of different possible modes of expression, determine which is most effective in reaching their audience and communicating their message, and to grasp which techniques work best in conveying information through this channel. Kress advocates moving beyond teaching written composition to teaching design literacy as the basic expressive competency of the modern era. This shift does not displace printed texts with images, as some advocates of visual literacy have suggested. Rather, it develops a more complex vocabulary for communicating ideas that requires students to be equally adept at reading and writing through images, texts, sounds, and simulations. The filmmaker George Lucas offers an equally expansive understanding of what literacy might mean today:

We must teach communication comprehensively in all its forms. Today we work with the written or spoken word as the primary form of communication. But we also need to understand the importance of graphics, music, and cinema, which are just as powerful and in some ways more deeply intertwined with young people's culture. We live and work in a visually sophisticated world, so we must be sophisticated in using all the forms of communication, not just the written word.

In short, new media literacies involve the ability to think across media, whether understood at the level of simple recognition (identifying the same content as it is translated across different modes of representation), or at the level of narrative logic (understanding the connections between story communicated through different media), or at the level of rhetoric (learning to express an idea within a single medium or across the media spectrum). Transmedia navigation involves both processing new types of stories and arguments that are emerging within a convergence culture and expressing ideas in ways that exploit the opportunities and affordances represented by the new media landscape. In other words, it involves the ability to both read and write across all available modes of expression.

What Might Be Done

Students learn about multimodality and transmedia navigation when they take time to focus on how stories change as they move across different contexts of production and reception, as they give consideration to the affordances and conventions of different media, and as they learn to create using a range of different media tools.

• Students in literature classes are asked to take a familiar fairy tale, myth, or legend and identify how this story has been retold across different media, different historical periods, and different national contexts. Students search for recurring elements as well as signs of the changes that occur as the story are retold in a new context.

• French language students in New York recreate characters from various French literary works in the best-selling video game The Sims 2. Students then tell new stories by playing out the interactions between different characters inside the game world. Characters are projected onto a screen in front of the class for students to do live performances with their characters. see http://www.mylenecatel.com

• An exercise developed by MIT's New Media Literacies asks students to tell the same story across a range of different media. For example, they script dialogue using instant messenger; they storyboard using Powerpoint and images appropriated from the Internet; they might later reenact their story and record it using a camera or video camera; they might illustrate it by drawing pictures. As they do so, they are encouraged to think about what each new tool contributes to their overall experience of the story as well as what needs to remain the same for viewers to recognize the same characters and situations across these various media.

Networking -- the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

In a world in which knowledge production is collective and communication occurs across an array of different media, the capacity to network emerges as a core social skill and cultural competency. A resourceful student is no longer one who personally possesses a wide palette of resources and information from which to choose, but rather, one who is able to successfully navigate an already abundant and continually changing world of information. Increasingly, students achieve this by tapping into a myriad of socially based search systems, including the following popular sites.

• Google.com: At the core of the now ubiquitous Google search engine is an algorithm that analyzes the links between websites to measure which sites different website creators consider valuable or relevant to particular topics.

• Amazon.com: Suggests books a customer may like on the basis of patterns gleaned from analyzing similar customers.

• Movielens.org: Predicts if a particular user will like a given movie based on preferences from similar users.

• Ebay.com: Creates a complex reputation system between users to establish trust for a given seller.

• Epinions.com: Establishes reliability of a given product on the basis of previous consumer experiences

• last.fm: Generates personalized radio stations on the basis of correlations between similar listeners' music preferences.

• Del.icio.us: Suggests relevant websites for a given term on the basis of other users' bookmarking habits

• Answers.google.com: Offers a mass collective-intelligence marketplace in which users can offer money to anyone worldwide who may have answers to their questions.

• Citeulike.org: Academic citation manager that both helps users locate relevant articles on the basis of other users' citation management and allows users to flag important information about given articles, such as inaccuracies.

• Getoutfoxed.com: Allows trusted friends and users to provide annotations and meta-discussion about a given website that a user might be browsing, such as warnings about inaccurate content.

• RSS: Intelligently aggregates and consolidates content produced by friends and trusted sources to help efficiently share resources across networks.

Business guru Tim O'Reilly has coined the term, "Web 2.0" to refer to how the value of these new networks depends not on the hardware or the content, but on how they tap the participation of large-scale social communities, who become invested in collecting and annotating data for other users. Some of these platforms require the active participation of consumers, relying on a social ethos based on knowledge-sharing. Others depend on automated analysis of collective behavior. In both cases, though, the value of the information depends on one's understanding of how it is generated and one's analysis of the social and psychological factors that shape collective behavior.

In such a world, students can no longer rely on expert gatekeepers to tell them what is worth knowing. Instead, they must become more reflective of how individuals know what they know and how they assess the motives and knowledge of different communities. Students must be able to identify which group is most aware of relevant resources and choose a search system matched to the appropriate criteria: people with similar tastes; similar viewpoints; divergent viewpoints; similar goals; general popularity; trusted, unbiased, third-party assessment, and so forth. If transmedia navigation involves learning to understand the relations between different media systems, networking involves the ability to navigate across different social communities.

Schools are beginning to teach youth how to search out valuable resources through such activities as "webquests." In the last ten years, webquests, that is, activities designed by teachers "in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet", have exploded in popularity. In a typical webquest, students are given a scenario that requires them to extract information or images from a series of websites and then compile their findings into a final report. For example, students might be told they are part of a team of experts brought in to determine the most appropriate method for disposing of a canister of nuclear waste. They are provided a series of websites relevant to waste disposal and asked to present a final proposal to the teacher. For many educators, webquests provide a practical means for using new media to broaden students' exposure to different perspectives and provide fresh curricular materials. Rather than requiring textbook authors to develop "neutral" accounts of facts, teachers develop and share webquests by simply referencing existing web content. This both exposes students to a variety of opinions and trains them to synthesize their own perspectives. Yet, critics argue that most existing webquests fall short of fully exploiting the potential of social networks--both in terms of teaching students how to exploit networking to track down information and in terms of using networks to distribute the byproducts of their research.

Networking is only partially about identifying potential resources; it also involves a process of synthesis, during which multiple resources are combined to produce new knowledge. In discussing "The Wisdom of Crowds," Suroweicki describes the conditions needed to receive the maximum benefit from collective intelligence:

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarizing people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

Because new research processes depend on young people's resourcefulness as networkers, students must understand how to sample and distill multiple, independent perspectives. Guinee and Eagleton have been researching how students take notes in the digital environment, discovering, to their dismay, that young people tend to copy large blocks of text rather than paraphrasing it for future reference. In the process, they often lose track of the distinction between their own words and material borrowed from other sources. They also skip over the need to assess any contradictions that might exist in the information they have copied. In short, they show only a minimal ability to create a meaningful synthesis from the resources they have gathered.

Networking also implies the ability to effectively tap social networks to disperse one's own ideas and media products. Many youth are creating independent media productions, but only some learn how to be heard by large audiences. Increasingly, young artists are tapping networks of fans or gamers with the goal of reaching a broader readership for their work. They create within existing cultural communities not because they were inspired by a particular media property, but because they want to reach that property's audience of loyal consumers. Young people are learning to link their websites together into web-rings in part to increase the visibility of any given site and also to increase the profile of the group. Teachers are finding that students are often more motivated if they can share what they create with a larger community. As students make their work accessible to a larger public, they face public consequences for what they write and, thus, they face the kind of ethical dilemmas we identified earlier in this document.

At the present time, social networking software is under fire from adult authorities, and federal law makes it more difficult to access and deploy these tools in the classroom. Yet, we would argue that schools have a different obligation--to help all children learn to use such tools effectively and to understand the value of networking as a means of acquiring knowledge and distributing information. Learning in a networked society involves understanding how networks work and how to deploy them for one's own ends. It involves understanding the social and cultural contexts within which different information emerges, when to trust and when not to trust others to filter and prioritize relevant data, and how to use networks to get one's own work out into the world and in front of a relevant and, with hope, appreciative public.

What Might Be Done

Educators take advantage of social networking when they link learners with others who might share their interests or when they encourage students to publish works produced to a larger public.

• Noel Jenkins, a British junior high teacher, created a geography unit in which he asks students to play the roles of city planners determining the most appropriate location for a new hospital in San Francisco. First, students familiarize themselves with the city layout by exploring satellites imagery of the city, navigating through three-dimensional maps and watching webcam streams from different parts of the city. Next, students are shown how to layer the data most relevant to their decision atop their city maps. Finally, students are asked to decide on a final location for their hospital and illustrate their maps with annotations justifying their decision. See http://www.juicygeography.co.uk/googleearthsanfran.htm

• Students use online storefront services such as cafepress.com and zazzle.com to share their artistic creations and personal hobbies with the general public. In many cases, young entrepreneurs are able to make up to $18,000 per year doing so.

• Educational Technology enthusiast Will Richardson used the community news application crispynews.com to create edbloggernews.crispynews.com, an online nexus for teachers to share educational resources with one another. Each participant helps to rank the different curricular suggestions using collaborative filtering technologies.

• Students at Grandview Elementary School publish an online newspaper and podcast their works. See http://www.grandviewlibrary.org/Fold/GrandviewNews.aspx

• Outraged by a House bill that would make illegal immigration a felony, more than 15,000 high school students in Los Angeles staged a protest coordinated primarily through Myspace.

Negotiation-- the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms

The fluid communication within the new media environment brings together groups who otherwise might have lived segregated lives. Culture flows easily from one community to another. People online encounter conflicting values and assumptions, come to grips with competing claims about the meanings of shared artifacts and experiences. Everything about this process ensures that we will be provoked by cultural difference. Little about this process ensures that we will develop an understanding of the contexts within which these different cultural communities operate. When white suburban youth consume hip hop or Western youth consume Japanese manga, new kinds of cultural understanding can emerge. Yet, just as often, the new experiences are read through existing prejudices and assumptions. Culture travels easily, but the individuals who initially produced and consumed such culture are not always welcome everywhere it circulates.

Cyber communities often bring together groups that would have no direct contact in the physical world, resulting in heated conflicts about values or norms. Increasingly, critics are focusing on attempts to segregate membership or participation within online social groups. The massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft has faced controversies about whether the formation of groups for gay, lesbian, and bisexual players increased or decreased the likelihood of sexual harassment or whether the formation of groups based on English competency reflected the importance of communication skills in games or constituted a form of discrimination motivated by stereotypes about the ethics and actions of Asian players. The social networking software that has become so central to youth culture can function as a vehicle for expressing and strengthening a sense of affiliation, but it can also be deployed as a weapon of exclusion and, as a consequence, a tool for enforcing conformity to peer expectations.

In such a world, it becomes increasingly critical to help students acquire skills in understanding multiple perspectives, respecting and even embracing diversity of views, understanding a variety of social norms, and negotiating between conflicting opinions. Traditionally, media literacy has addressed these concerns by teaching children to read through media-constructed stereotypes about race, class, sex, ethnic, religious, and other forms of cultural differences. Such work remains valuable in that it helps students to understand the preconceptions that may shape their interactions, but it takes on added importance as young people themselves create media content, which may perpetuate stereotypes or contribute to misunderstandings. If, as writers such as Suroweicki and Levy suggest, the wisdom of the crowd depends on the opportunity for diverse and independent insights and other inputs, then these new knowledge cultures require participants to master new social skills that allow them to listen to and respond to a range of different perspectives. We are defining this skill negotiation in two ways: first, as the ability to negotiate between dissenting perspectives, and second, as the ability to negotiate through diverse communities.

The most meaningful interventions will start from a commitment to the process of deliberation and negotiation across differences. They depend on the development of skills in active listening and ethical principles designed to ensure mutual respect. Participants agree to some rules of conduct that allow them to talk through similarities and differences in perspective in ways that may allow for compromise, or at least agreeing to disagree. In either case, such an approach seems essential if we are going to learn to share knowledge and collaborate within an increasingly multicultural society. Such an approach does not ignore differences: diversity of perspective is essential if the collective intelligence process is to work well. Rather, it helps us to appreciate and value differences in background, experience, and resources as contributing to a richer pool of knowledge.

What Might Be Done

Educators can foster negotiation skills when they bring together groups from diverse backgrounds and provide them with resources and processes that insure careful listening and deeper communication.

• Researchers at Stanford University's Center for Deliberative Democracy have been experimenting with new forms of civic engagement that depend on bringing people together from multiple backgrounds, exposing them to a broad array of perspectives, encouraging them to closely examine underlying claims and the evidence to support them, and creating a context in which they can learn from one another. Their initial reports suggest that this process generates powerful new perspectives on complex public policy issues, which gain the support of all parties involved. For some participants, the process strengthens their commitment to core beliefs and values. For others, it creates a context in which they are more open to alternative points of view and are able to find middle-ground positions. The project's focus on the process of deliberation--and not simply on the outcome--represents a useful model to incorporate into the classroom. Rather than having traditional pro-con debates that depend on a fixed and adversarial relationship between participants, schools should focus more attention on group deliberation and decision-making processes and on mechanisms that ensure that all parties listen and learn from one another's arguments.

• The Cultura project, developed by Furstenberg, links students in classrooms in North America and France. In the first phases, they are asked to complete a series of sentences ("A good parent is someone who..." ), address a series of questions ("What do you do if you see a mother strike a child in the grocery store?"), and define a range of core terms and concepts ("individualism"). The French students write in French, the American students in English, allowing both classes to practice their language skills and understand the links between linguistic and cultural practices. Students are then asked to compare the different ways that people living in different parts of the world responded to these questions, seeking insights into differences in values and lifestyles. For example, individualism in France is seen as a vice, equated with selfishness, whereas for Americans, individualism is seen as a virtue, closely linked with freedom. These interpretations unfold in online forums where students from both countries can respond to and critique attempts to characterize their attitudes. As the process continues, students are encouraged to upload their own media texts, which capture important aspects of their everyday lives, artifacts they believe speak to the larger cultural questions at the center of their discussions. In this way, they learn to see themselves and one another more clearly, and they come away with a greater appreciation of cultural difference.

• Rev. Denis Haak of the Ransom Fellowship has developed a series of probing questions and exercises intended to help Christians work through their responses to popular culture. Rejecting a culture war rhetoric based on sharp divisions, these exercises are intended to help Christians to identify and preserve their own values even as they come to understand "what non-believers believe." The Discernment movement sees discussing popular culture as a means of making sense of competing and contradictory value systems that interact in contemporary society. For this process to work, the program encourages participants to learn how to "disagree agreeably," how to stake out competing positions without personalizing the conflict.

• Schools historically have used the adversarial process of formal debate to encourage students to do research, construct arguments, and mobilize evidence. Yet, there is a danger that this process forces students to adopt fixed and opposing positions on complex problems. One might instead adopt a deliberative process in the classroom that encourages collaboration and discussion across different positions, and thus creates a context for opposing parties to learn from one another and reformulate their positions accordingly.

• Sites such as Wikipedia and Wikinews include a tab labeled "discussion" above each article or news entry. Here readers can view or participate in an online discussion with people of different viewpoints to arrive at a neutral point-of-view framing of the issue to be displayed on the main page.

We began this

discussion by suggesting that literacy in the twenty-first century be understood as a social rather than individual skill and that what students must acquire should be understood as skills and cultural competencies. Each of the skills we have identified above represents modes of thought, ways of processing information, and ways of interacting with others to produce and circulate knowledge. These are skills that enable participation in the new communities emerging within a networked society. They enable students to exploit new simulation tools, information appliances, and social networks; they facilitate the exchange of information between diverse communities and the ability to move easily across different media platforms and social networks. Many of the skills schools have been teaching all along, although the emergence of digital media creates new pressure on schools to prepare students for their future roles as citizens and workers. Others are skills that emerge from the affordances of these new communications technologies and the social communities and cultural practices that have grown up around them.

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Five)

Today, I continue our serialization of the white paper written for the MacArthur Foundation. Today's excerpt outlines three more of the social skills and cultural competencies we think young people need to develop if they are going to be able to fully participate in the new media landscape: Distributed Cognition, Collective Intelligence, and Judgment. Distributed Cognition-- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand our mental capacities.

Challenging the traditional view that intelligence is an attribute of individuals, the distributed cognition perspective holds that intelligence is distributed across "brain, body, and world", looping through an extended technological and sociocultural environment. Explaining this idea, Pea notes,

"When I say that intelligence is distributed, I mean that the resources that shape and enable activity are distributed in configurations across people, environments, and situations. In other words, intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed"

. Work in distributed cognition focuses on forms of reasoning that would not be possible without the presence of artifacts or information appliances and that expand and augment human's cognitive capacities. These devices might be forms that externalize memory, such as a database, or they can be devices that externalize processes, such as the widely used spell checker. The more we rely on the capacities of technologies as a part of our work, the more it may seem that cognition is distributed.

Teachers have long encouraged students to bring scratch paper with them into math examinations, realizing that the ability to construct representations and record processes was vital in solving complex problems. If, as Clark notes, technologies are inextricably interwoven with thinking, it makes no sense to "factor out" what the human brain is doing as the "real" part of thinking, and to view what the technology is doing as a "cheat" or "crutch." Rather, we can understand cognitive activity as shared among a number of people and artifacts, and cognitive acts as learning to think with other people and artifacts. Following this theory, students need to know how to think with and through their tools as much as they need to record information in their heads.

Gamers may be acquiring some of these distributed cognition skills through their participation in squadron-based video games. Gee suggests that in playing such games, one must form a mental map of what player and nonplayer characters are doing (nonplayer characters are characters controlled by the A.I of the game). To plan appropriately, players may not need to know what other participants know, but they do need to know what it is those participants are likely to do. Moreover, in playing the games, one may need to flip through a range of different representations of the state of the game world and of the actions that are occurring within it. Learning to play involves learning to navigate this information environment, understanding the value of each representational technology, knowing when to consult each and how to deploy this knowledge to reshape what is occurring. Instead of thinking as an autonomous problem-solver, the player becomes part of a social and technological system that is generating and deploying information at a rapid pace. Humans are able to play much more complex games (and to solve much more complex problems) in a world in which keeping track of key data and enacting well-understood computational processes can be trusted to the processing power of the computer, and they can thus focus more attention on strategic decision making.

Distributed cognition is not simply about technologies; it is also about tapping social institutions and practices or remote experts whose knowledge may be useful in solving a particular problem. According to this understanding, expertise comes in many shapes and sizes (both human and non-human). Experts can be expert practitioners, who can be consulted through such technologies as video conferencing, instant messaging, or email; some knowledge can emerge from technologies such as calculators, spread sheets, and expert systems; new insights can originate from the teacher or students or both. The key is having expertise somewhere within the distributed learning environment and making sure students understand how to access and deploy it.

Distributed Cognition-- the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand our mental capacities.

Challenging the traditional view that intelligence is an attribute of individuals, the distributed cognition perspective holds that intelligence is distributed across "brain, body, and world", looping through an extended technological and sociocultural environment. Explaining this idea, Pea notes,

"When I say that intelligence is distributed, I mean that the resources that shape and enable activity are distributed in configurations across people, environments, and situations. In other words, intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed"

. Work in distributed cognition focuses on forms of reasoning that would not be possible without the presence of artifacts or information appliances and that expand and augment human's cognitive capacities. These devices might be forms that externalize memory, such as a database, or they can be devices that externalize processes, such as the widely used spell checker. The more we rely on the capacities of technologies as a part of our work, the more it may seem that cognition is distributed.

Teachers have long encouraged students to bring scratch paper with them into math examinations, realizing that the ability to construct representations and record processes was vital in solving complex problems. If, as Clark notes, technologies are inextricably interwoven with thinking, it makes no sense to "factor out" what the human brain is doing as the "real" part of thinking, and to view what the technology is doing as a "cheat" or "crutch." Rather, we can understand cognitive activity as shared among a number of people and artifacts, and cognitive acts as learning to think with other people and artifacts. Following this theory, students need to know how to think with and through their tools as much as they need to record information in their heads.

Gamers may be acquiring some of these distributed cognition skills through their participation in squadron-based video games. Gee suggests that in playing such games, one must form a mental map of what player and nonplayer characters are doing (nonplayer characters are characters controlled by the A.I of the game). To plan appropriately, players may not need to know what other participants know, but they do need to know what it is those participants are likely to do. Moreover, in playing the games, one may need to flip through a range of different representations of the state of the game world and of the actions that are occurring within it. Learning to play involves learning to navigate this information environment, understanding the value of each representational technology, knowing when to consult each and how to deploy this knowledge to reshape what is occurring. Instead of thinking as an autonomous problem-solver, the player becomes part of a social and technological system that is generating and deploying information at a rapid pace. Humans are able to play much more complex games (and to solve much more complex problems) in a world in which keeping track of key data and enacting well-understood computational processes can be trusted to the processing power of the computer, and they can thus focus more attention on strategic decision making.

Distributed cognition is not simply about technologies; it is also about tapping social institutions and practices or remote experts whose knowledge may be useful in solving a particular problem. According to this understanding, expertise comes in many shapes and sizes (both human and non-human). Experts can be expert practitioners, who can be consulted through such technologies as video conferencing, instant messaging, or email; some knowledge can emerge from technologies such as calculators, spread sheets, and expert systems; new insights can originate from the teacher or students or both. The key is having expertise somewhere within the distributed learning environment and making sure students understand how to access and deploy it.

Applications of the distributed cognition perspective to education suggest that students must learn the affordances of different tools and information technologies, and know which functions tools and technologies excel at and in what contexts they can be trusted. Students need to acquire patterns of thought that regularly cycle through available sources of information as they make sense of developments in the world around them. Distributed intelligence is not simply a technical skill, although it depends on knowing how to use tools effectively; it is also a cognitive skill, which involves thinking across "brain, body, and world." The term "distributed intelligence" emphasizes the role that technologies play in this process, but it is closely related to the social production of knowledge that we are calling collective intelligence.

What Might Be Done

The theory of distributed cognition informs educational research and practice when it provides a perspective for envisioning new learning contexts, tools, curricula and pedagogy, participant structures, and goals for schooling.

• Augmented reality games represent one potential application of distributed intelligence to the learning process. Klopfer and Squire developed a range of games in which students use location-aware, GPS-enabled handheld computers to solve fictional problems in real spaces. For example, in Environmental Detectives, students determine the source of an imaginary chemical leak, which is causing environmental hazards on the MIT campus. Students can use their handhelds to drill imaginary wells and take readings on the soil conditions, but to do so, they must travel to the actual location. Data drawn from the computer is read against their actual physical surroundings--the distance between locations, the slope of the land, its proximity to the Charles River--and multiple players compare notes as they seek to resolve the game scenario.

• Students in the Comparative Media Studies Program have experimented with the use of handhelds to allow tourists to access old photographs of historic neighborhoods and compare them with what they are seeing on location . Elsewhere, students travel across the battlefield at Lexington conducting interviews with historical personage to better understand their perspective on what happened there in 1775 . In each case, direct perceptions of the real world and information drawn from information appliances are mutually reinforcing. The players combine multiple information sources in completing the tasks at hand.

• Byline is an Internet-based publishing and editing tool designed to focus attention on the organizational and structural features of journalism. By providing a space for the body of the story, the byline, and the lead, this "smart tool" scaffolds students' processes of learning to write a journalistic story. By cueing students on what to write, where to write it, and even into such journalistic values as the need to catch the reader's attention, this specially designed program helps students to learn the conventions and values of journalism.

• A classroom designed to foster distributed cognition encourages students to participate with a range of people, artifacts, and devices. The various forms of participation composing such cognitive activity might be understood more generally as the skill of knowing how to act within distributed knowledge systems. Interested in designing learning environments that would foster such a skill, Bell and Winn describe a classroom not only in which participation requires active collaborations with people and tools that are physically present, but also with people and tools that are virtually present through, for example, video conferencing with a science practitioner, using the web to connect to a database in Japan, and using Excel spreadsheets to simulate a mass spectrometer. In such classrooms, knowing how to act within the distributed knowledge system is more important than learning content. Because content is something that can be "held" by technologies such as databases, websites, wikis, and so forth, the curricular focus is on learning how to generate, evaluate, interpret, and deploy data.

• With new technologies, new cognitive possibilities arise. Educators need to create new activities when new technologies are introduced into the classroom. If the calculator is used to add 2+2, it is the capacities of the calculator that are solving the problem; when calculation is "off loaded" onto the calculator, the student is free to solve more complex problems. The proliferation of digital technologies requires a concerted effort to envision activities that enable students to engage in more complex problem domains. For example, as a vehicle for assessing the various ways ecommerce affects the environment, students could be given the problem of comparing the environmental impact of shipping 250,000 copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire directly to individual customers rather than to bookstores. Reflecting on the intended outcome for such a comparison, Yagelski notes, "The click of the computer mouse to order a copy of Harry Potter from Amazon.com can seem a simple and almost natural act, yet it represents participation in this bewilderingly complex web of material connections that is anything but simple. And that participation contributes to the condition of our planet." See http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/6.2/features/yagelski/crisis.htm.

Collective Intelligence-- the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal

As users learn to exploit the potential of networked communication, they participate in a process that Levy calls "collective intelligence." Like-minded individuals gather online to embrace common enterprises, which often involve access and processing information. In such a world, Levy argues, everyone knows something, nobody knows everything, and what any one person knows can be tapped by the group as a whole. We are still experimenting with how to work within these knowledge cultures and what they can accomplish when we pool knowledge. Levy argues that as a society, we are currently at an apprenticeship phase, during which we try out and refine skills and institutions that will sustain the social production of knowledge. Levy sees collective intelligence as an alternative source of power, one that allows grassroots communities to respond effectively to government institutions that emerge from the nation state or to corporate interests that sustain multinational commerce. Already, we are seeing governments and industries seek ways to "harness collective intelligence," which has become the driving force behind what people are calling Web 2.0.

Currently, children and adults are acquiring the skills to operate within knowledge communities be interacting with popular culture. As has often been the case, we learn through play that we later apply to more serious tasks. So, for example, the young Pokémon fans, who each know some crucial detail about the various species, constitute a collective intelligence whose knowledge is extended each time two youth on the playground share something about the franchise.

Such knowledge sharing can assume more sophisticated functions as it moves online. For example, Matrix fans have created elaborate guides which help them track information about the fictional Zion resistance movement featured in the film. Young people are playing with collective intelligence as they participate in the vast knowledge communities that emerged from the online game I Love Bees. Some estimate that as many as 3 million players participated in history's most challenging scavenger hunt. After working through puzzles so complicated they mandated the effective collaboration of massive numbers of people with expertise across a variety of domains and geographic locations, players gathered clues by answering more than 40,000 payphone calls across all 50 U.S. states and eight countries. They then fed those clues back into online tools designed to support large-scale collaboration for all players to deconstruct and analyze. If players were unfamiliar with how to participate in the community, other players would train them in the necessary skills. In another example, fans of the television show Survivor have used the Internet to track down information and identify the names of contestants before they are announced by the network. They have also used satellite photographs to identify the location of the Survivor base camp despite the producer's "no fly over" agreements with local governments. These knowledge communities change the very nature of media consumption--a shift from the personalized media that was central to the idea of the digital revolution toward socialized or communalized media that is central to the culture of media convergence.

As players learn to work and play in such knowledge cultures, they come to think of problem-solving as an exercise in teamwork. Consider the following postings made by members of The Cloudmakers, a team formed in a game similar to I Love Bees:

The solutions do not lie in the puzzles we are presented with, they lie in the connections we make, between the ideas and between one another. These are what will last. I look down at myself and see that I, too, have been incorporated into the whole, connections flowing to me and from me, ideas flowing freely as we work together, as individuals and as a group, to solve the challenges we are presented with. The solution, however, does not lie in the story. We are the solution.

* * *

The 7500+ people in this group ... we are all one. We have made manifest the idea of an unbelievably intricate intelligence. We are one mind, one voice ... made of 7500+ neurons... We are not one person secluded from the rest of the world... We have become a part of something greater than ourselves.

Indeed, these groups have been drawn from playing games to confronting real-world social problems, such as tracking campaign finances or trying to solve local crimes, as they develop a new sense of self-confidence in their ability to tackle challenges collectively, challenges that, as individuals, they would be unable to face.

This focus on teamwork and collaboration is also, not coincidentally, how the modern workplace is structured--around ad-hoc configurations of employees, brought together because their diverse skills and knowledge are needed to confront a specific challenge, then dispersed into different clusters of workers when new needs arise. Doctorow has called such systems "ad-hocracies," suggesting that they contrast in every possible way with prior hierarchies and bureaucracies. Our schools do an excellent job, consciously or unconsciously, teaching youth how to function within bureaucracies. They do almost nothing to help youth learn how to operate within an ad-hocracy.

Collective intelligence is increasingly shaping how we respond to real-world problems. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina tore apart the levee that protected New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Not only was the ability of ordinary citizens to share self-produced media and information pivotal in shaping the view of the situation for the outside world (thereby bringing in more relief funds), but it allowed for those affected by the disaster to effectively assist one another. After Jonathan Mendez's parents evacuated from Louisiana to his home in Austin, Texas, he was eager to find out if the floods had destroyed their home in Louisiana. Unfortunately for him, media coverage of the event was focused exclusively on the most devastated parts of New Orleans, with little information about the neighborhood where his parents lived. With some help from his coworker, they were able, within a matter of hours, to modify the popular "Google maps" web service to allow users to overlay any information they had about the devastation directly onto a satellite map of New Orleans. Shortly after making their modification public, more than 14,000 submissions covered their map. This allowed victims scattered throughout the United States to find information about any specific location--including verifying that the Mendez's house was still intact.

Unfortunately, most contemporary education focuses on training autonomous problem solvers and is not well suited to equip students with these skills. Whereas a collective intelligence community encourages ownership of work as a group, schools grade individuals. Whereas Jonathan Mendez was admired for having appropriated Google's mapping web service , students in school are often asked to swear that what they turn is their "own work."

Leadership within a knowledge community requires the ability to identify specific functions for each member of the team based on his or her expertise and to interact with the team members in an appropriate fashion. Teamwork involves a high degree of interdiscipline--the ability to reconfigure knowledge across traditional categories of expertise. In early February 2004, Eric Klopfer, an MIT professor of urban studies and planning, along with a team of researchers from the Education Arcade, conducted "a Hi-Tech Who Done It" for middle-school youth and their parents inside the Boston Museum of Science. Teams of three adult-child pairs were given handhelds to search for clues of the whereabouts and identity of the notorious Pink Flamingo Gang, who had stolen an artifact and substituted a fake in its place. Thanks to museum's newly installed wi-fi network and the players' location-aware handhelds, each gallery offered the opportunity to interview cyber-suspects, download objects, examine them with virtual equipment, and trade their findings. Each parent-child unit was assigned a different role-- biologists, detectives, or technologists--enabling them to use different tools on the evidence they gathered. This is simply one of many recent cooperative games that assigned distinct roles to each player, giving each access to a different set of information, and thus creating strong incentives for them to pool resources.

Schools, on the other hand, often seek to develop generalists rather than allowing students to assume different roles based on their emerging expertise. The ideal of the Renaissance man was someone who knew everything or at least knew a great deal about a range of different topics. The ideal of a collective intelligence is a community that knows everything and individuals who know how to tap the community to acquire knowledge on a just-in-time basis. Minimally, schools should be teaching students to thrive in both worlds: having a broad background on a range of topics, but also knowing when they should turn to a larger community for relevant expertise. They must know how to solve problems on their own but also how to expand their intellectual capacity by working on a problem within a social community. To be a meaningful participant in such a knowledge culture, students must acquire greater skills at assessing the reliability of information, which may come from multiple sources, some of which are governed by traditional gatekeepers, others of which must be crosschecked and vetted within a collective intelligence.

What Might Be Done

Schools can deploy aspects of collective intelligence when students pool observations and work through interpretations with others studying the same problems at scattered locations. Such knowledge communities can confront problems of greater scale and complexity than any given student might be able to handle.

• Scientists in fields requiring simple, yet extensive, data analysis tasks could partner with junior high teachers to have students help collect or analyze real data. Eelgrass is both the most abundant seagrass in Massachusetts and one of the most ecologically valuable marine and estuarine habitats in North American coastal waters. The MIT Sea Grant College Program developed a project where students in different schools learn to cultivate eelgrass and collaboratively share data regarding the levels of nitrates, oxygen, and so forth in affected habitats through the project website: http://seagrantdev.mit.edu/eelgrass/

• Sites such as ning.com offers nonprogrammers tools for rapidly creating social web applications that allow users to interact with and share information with one another. For example, a Mandarin teacher could easily create an online travel guide in which students (potentially nationwide) would each contribute write-ups of interesting sites in their local areas that would be of interest to visitors from China.

• Students taking civic classes might be encouraged to map their local governments using a Wikipedia-like program, bringing together names of government officials, reports on government meetings, and key policy debates. The information would be accessible to others in their own communities. They might also compare notes with students living in other parts of the country to identify policy alternatives that might address problems or concerns in their communities.

Judgment-- the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Although it is exciting to see players harness collective intelligence to successfully solve problems of unprecedented complexity, this process also involves a large number of errors. Misinformation emerges, is worked over, refined or dismissed before a new consensus emerges. We are taught to think of knowledge as a product, but within a collective intelligence, knowledge is also always in process. As such, one must understand where one is in the vetting process to know how much trust to place in any given piece of information. In a game such as I Love Bees, these mistakes are generally of little consequence and often serve as a source of amusement than anything else. As these same technologies are employed in understanding world events, we must better understand the strengths and limitations of these new practices of knowledge production.

For example, one key technology in online collective intelligence communities is a wiki. Although it may be possible for a small group of individuals to contribute erroneous information, wiki enthusiasts argue that giving all members of a larger community the ability to correct any mistakes will ultimately lead to more accurate information. In many cases, this concept has proved surprisingly effective. In one study, Nature magazine compared the accuracy of articles in Wikipedia, an enormous online encyclopedia constructed entirely through the efforts of volunteers using wiki technologies, with equivalent articles in Encyclopedia Britannica. They concluded the accuracy levels of the two to be roughly the same. (This wasn't because Wikipedia was flawless, but rather because even sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica are flawed). Students must be taught to read both sources from a critical perspective.

The Nature article also identifies that wikis perform best when a large number of participants are actively using the technology to correct mistakes. Whereas the Wikipedia article on global warming enjoys more than 10,000 authors, each passionately committed to ensuring the accuracy of its content, the biographical article on John Seigenthaler cited him as having a possible involvement in the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy for a period of 132 days before someone corrected it. Given the disparity in the accuracy of different articles, students need to develop an intuitive understanding of how the contents of a wiki are produced by participating in their construction, and then actively reflecting on the different possibilities for inaccuracies.

In truth, schools should always teach students critical thinking skills for "sussing out" the quality of information, yet historically schools have had a tendency to fall back on the gatekeeping functions of professional editors and journalists, not to mention of textbook selection committee and librarians, to ensure that the information is generally reliable. Once students enter cyberspace, where anyone can post anything, they need skills in evaluating the quality of different sources, how perspectives and interests can color representations, and the likely mechanisms by which misinformation is perpetuated or corrected. We need to balance a trust of traditional gatekeeping organizations (Public Television, Smithsonian, National Geographic, for example) with the self-correcting potential of grassroots knowledge communities. Traditional logic would suggest, for example, that 60 Minutes, a long-standing network news show, would be more accurate than a partisan blog, but in fall 2004, bloggers working together recognized flaws in the evidence that had been vetted by the established news agency. As Gillmore notes, we are entering a world in which citizen journalists often challenge and sometimes correct the work of established journalists, even as journalists debunk the urban folklore circulated in the blogging community.

Misinformation abounds online, but so do mechanisms for self-correction. In such a world, we can only trust established institutions so far. We all must learn how to read one source of information against another; to understand the contexts within which information is produced and circulated; to identify the mechanisms that ensure the accuracy of information as well as realizing under which circumstances those mechanisms work best. Confronted with a world in which information is unreliable, many of us fall back on cynicism, distrusting everything we read. Rather, we should foster a climate of healthy skepticism, in which all truth claims are weighed carefully, but there is an ethical commitment to identifying and reporting the truth.

Students are theoretically taught in school how to critically assess the pros and cons of an argument. In an increasingly pervasive media environment, they also must be able to recognize when arguments are not explicitly identified as such. The new mediated landscape of mainstream news sources, collaborative blog projects, unsourced news sites, and increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques aimed at ever-younger consumers demand that students be taught how to distinguish fact from fiction, argument from documentation, real from fake, and marketing from enlightenment.

"To be a functioning adult in a mediated society, one needs to be able to distinguish between different media forms and know how to ask basic questions about everything we watch, read, or hear," says Thoman and Jolls.

"Although most adults learned through English classes to distinguish a poem from an essay, it is amazing how many people do not understand the difference between a daily newspaper and a supermarket tabloid, what makes one website legitimate and another one a hoax, or how advertisers package products to entice us to buy"

.

Even when media content has been determined credible, it is vital for students to also identify and analyze the perspective of the producer: who is presenting what to whom, and why. Existing media literacy materials excel in examining the forces behind controversial media properties, particularly provocative visuals, its intentions, and effects.

As Buckingham notes, children may lack some of the core life experiences and basic knowledge that might help them to discriminate between accurate and inaccurate accounts:

[T]here is as yet relatively little research about how children make judgements about the reliability of information on the Internet, or how they learn to deal with unwelcome or potentially upsetting content. Children may have more experience of these media than many adults, but they mostly lack the real-world experience with which media representations can be compared; and this may make it harder for them to detect inaccuracy and bias"

Reviewing the literature on how children make sense of online resources, Buckingham finds that students lack both knowledge and interest in assessing how information was produced for and within digital environments: "

Digital content was 'often seen as originating not from people, organisations, and businesses with particular cultural inclinations or objectives, but as a universal repository that simply existed 'out there'"

. Other studies find that children remain unaware of the motives behind the creation of websites, have difficulty separating commercial from noncommercial sites, and lack the background to identify the sources of authority behind claims made by website authors.

As this discussion has suggested, judgment might be seen as part of our existing conception of literacy--a core research skill of the kind that has long been fundamental to the school curriculum. Yet, this discussion also underscores that judgment operates differently in an era of distributed cognition and collective intelligence. Judgment requires not simply logic, but also an understanding of how different media institutions and cultural communities operate. Judgment works not simply on knowledge as the product of traditional expertise, but also on the process by which grassroots communities work together to generate and authenticate new information.

What Might Be Done

Judgment has long been the focus of media literacy education in the United States and around the world as students are encouraged to ask critical questions about the information they are consuming.

• The Boston-based Youth Voice Collaborative has developed an exercise that gives students a range of news stories and asks them to rank the stories according to traditional news standards. The process is designed to encourage students to understand what criteria journalists use to determine the "news value" of different events and to encourage students to express their own priorities about what information matters to them and why.

• http://news.google.com aggregates articles from thousands of news sources worldwide. This allows users to compare and contrast the framing of a single issue from different media sources. Students are encouraged to read several articles closely, underlining words they believe might shape how readers understand and feel about what they are reading.

• The New Medial Literacies project at MIT has developed a set of activities to involve students in understanding how representations of "truth" and "fiction" vary in different media forms and, therefore, how different techniques must be learned, and choices must be made, when seeking to manipulate meanings by altering representations. For example, in an image manipulation activity, students search for an image of an event (such as the March on Washington, the Kennedy assassination) and are taught how to change the picture in a way that changes the meaning. By manipulating images, students become familiar with the ways images may be altered to persuade and influence. In developing this manipulation skill, students are encouraged to think about why image, sound, and textual representations are altered and what that means to them as consumers, voters, and citizens.

• A growing number of teachers are using the Talk Pages for contested Wikipedia entries as illustrations of the types of questions one might want to ask about any information and the processes and criteria by which disputes about knowledge might be resolved.

• Tools such as lijit.com allow readers of a website to alert friends who subsequently read the same website that its content may be suspect. Students might also be encouraged to take advantage of sites such as snopes.com, which regularly report on frauds and misinformation circulating online and provide good illustrations of the ways that one could test the credibility of information

Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture (Part Four)

I have been serializing in this blog the white paper I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on youth, learning, and participatory culture. If you want to read the whole report, you can find it here. My collaborators on this report were Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katherine Clinton, and Alice J. Robison.

Yesterday, I began to identify some of the core social skills and cultural competencies that we think should be embedded in contemporary educational practices. These skills reflect the best contemporary research on the informal learning which is taking place as young people assume roles as fans, gamers, and bloggers. Yesterday, we spoke about Play and Simulation; today, we will discuss Performance, Appropriation, and Multitasking.

I am hoping that if you are enjoying reading this discussion, you will bring it to the attention of parents, teachers, church leaders, librarians, and others who regularly interact with young people. We would very much like to use this report to open up discussions about the place of media in young people's lives. Yet, we want to have a discussion which is not led by our fears and anxieties about what media is doing to our children but rather one that reflects our best research into what our children are doing with media.

Performance-- the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.

So far, we have focused on game play as a mode of problem solving which involves modeling the world and acting upon those models. Yet, game play also is one of a range of contemporary forms of youth popular culture which encourage young people to perform fictive identities and in this process, develop a richer understanding of themselves and their social roles. In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee coins the term, "projective identity" to refer to the fusion that takes place between game players and their avatars. Gee sees the term as playing on two senses of the word, "project": "to project one's values and desires onto the virtual character" and "seeing the virtual character as one's own project in the making". This projected identity allows the player to strongly identify with her character and thus have an immersive experience within the game and at the same time, to use the character as a mirror to reflect on her own values and choices.

Testing the educational video game Revolution with middle school students, Russell Francis found a number of compelling examples where projected identities had pedagogical payoffs for participants. For example, Margaret, a girl who played a loyalist character in the game which was set in Colonial Williamsburg on the eve of the American Revolution, was shaken when she was shot by the redcoats in the midst of a street riot:

"The towns people were very mad. They went to the Governor's mansion to attack. I support the red coats, but they started shooting at me, and then they arrested me. I felt horrified that they would do something like that to me. I don't even believe in violence. I wonder what is going to happen to me. I run the tavern and I have no family. Will I get sent back to England or will I be able to stay here?

" She had seen herself as a supporter of the British troops, at worst an innocent bystander, but she came away from the experience with critical insights about political violence.

Francis built on this process of introspection and projection by asking students to write journals or compose short films reflecting in character on the events that unfolded in the game. In constructing and inhabiting these virtual characters, participants drew together multiple sources of knowledge, mixing things they had read or learned in other educational contexts, information explicitly contained within the game, and their own introspection based on life experiences to create characters that were more compelling to them than the simple digital avatars the designers had constructed. One can think of the process as closely paralleling what actors do when preparing to play a role. Here, for example, is how a young African-American girl explained her experiences in playing Hanmah, a house slave (an explanation which reaches well beyond anything explicitly present in the games and even invents actions for the non-player characters in order to help her make sense of her place in the social order being depicted):

"You don't really have as much support as you would like because being a house slave they call you names, just because most of the time you're lighter skin -- you're the master's kid technically...I had to find the ways to get by because, you know, it was hard. On one side you don't want to get on the Master's bad side because he can beat you. On the other side the slaves they ridicule you and are being mean."

Children acquire basic literacies and competencies through learning to manipulate core cultural materials. In The Braid of Literature: Children's World of Reading, Shelby Anne Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath trace the forms of play which shaped Wolf's two preschooler daughters' relationship to the "world of words" and stories. Wolf and Heath are interested in how children embody the characters, situations, generic rules, even specific turns of phrase, through their socio-linquistic play. Children do not simply read books or listen to stories; they re-enact these narratives in ways that transform them and in this process, the authors argue, children demonstrate they really understand what they have read.This play helps them to navigate the world of stories and at the same time, elements of stories help them to navigate real world social situations. Children learn to verbalize their experiences of reading through these performances and in the process, develop an analytic framework for thinking about literacy. Anne Haas Dyson's Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy extends this analysis of the connection between performance and literacy into the classroom, exploring how educators have used dramatizations to teach children to reflect more deeply on their experiences of stories. Wolf and Heath describe individualized play in the context of the home; Dyson recounts social play among peers. In both cases, children start with a shared frame of reference -- stories they have in common, genres they all understand -- so that they understand the roles they are to play and the rules of their interaction. Performing these shared fantasies (such as the scenarios which emerge in superhero comics) allows children to better understand who they are and how they connect with the other people around them.

Role play is a persistent interest among contemporary youth whether we are looking at the coplay of young anime fans, the role play that takes place around Yu-Gi-Oh! or Magic or Hero Clips, the fusion with a digital avatar through computer gaming or fantasy role playing, or the construction of alternative personas in sub cultural communities like the Goths. Such play has long been read as testing identities, trying on possible selves, and exploring different social spaces. Susannah Stern has stressed the forms of self-representation which occur on teenagers websites and blogs: "the ability to repeatedly reinvent oneself is particularly appealing since home pages and blogs can be updated as often as desired and because they may be produced anonymously".

These more elaborated and complex forms of role-play may also provide a point of entry into larger spheres of knowledge. Consider, for example, this interview Comparative Media Studies graduate student Vanessa Bertozzi did with a 17 year old American girl named Chloe Metcalf: "

I have been really interested in Japanese culture since I was in sixth grade. When I was in the seventh grade, I started studying Japanese on my own. When I got into high school, I started taking Japanese courses at Smith College. I got into costuming through anime which is actually how I got interested in Japanese. And I taught myself how to sew. ...I'm a stage hog. I like to get attention and recognition. I love acting and theater. The biggest payoff of cosplay is to go to the conventions where there are other people who know who you are dressed as and can appreciate your effort. At the first convention I ever went to, I must have had fifty people take my picture and at least ten of them came up and hugged me. It's almost like whoever you dress up as, you become that person for a day....People put the pictures up on their websites after the con. So after a con, you can search for pictures of yourself and if you are lucky, you will find five or ten"

For Chloe, assuming the role of a Jpop character demonstrated her mastery over favorite texts. Assuming this new identity requires a close analysis of the originating texts, its genre conventions, its social roles, its linguistic codes, and so forth. She has to go deep inside the story in order to find her own place within its world. In this case, she also has to step outside the culture that immediately surrounds her to embrace a text from a radically different cultural tradition. She has sought out more and more information about forms of Asian popular culture. And in the process, she has begun to re-imagine her relations to the world -- as part of an international fan culture which remains deeply rooted in the everyday life of Japan. This search for more information expresses itself across a range of media - the videos or DVDs she watches of Japanese produced anime, the recordings of JPop music which may consumed on MP3 or on CD, the information she finds on the internet as well as information she shares with her fellow fans about her own activities, the physical costumes she generates as well as all of the photographs that get taken of her costumes, the magazines and comics she reads to learn more about Japanese popular culture, her face to face contacts with fellow fans. These activities around popular culture in turn translate into other kinds of learning. As a middle school student Chloe began to study Japanese language and culture first on her own and later at a local college.

Role play, in particular, should be seen as a fundamental skill used across multiple academic domains. So far, we have suggested its relevance to history, language arts, and cultural geography. Yet, this only scratches the surface. Whether it be children on a playground acting out and deciphering the complex universe of Pokémon,Orville Wright pretending to be a buzzard gliding over sand dunes, or Einstein imagining himself to be a photon speeding over the earth -- role playing enables us to envision and collaboratively theorize about manipulations of entirely new worlds. Consider, for example, the way role-play informs contemporary design processes. Increasingly designers construct personae of would-be users, who can serve to illustrate different contexts of use or different interests in the product. These personae are then inserted into fictional scenarios so that designers can mentally test the viability of their designs and its ability to serve diverse needs. In some cases, this process also involves the designers themselves acting out the different roles and thereby, identifying the strengths and limits of their approaches. Improvisational performance, then, represents an important life skill, one which balances problem solving and creative expression, one which invites us to reimagine ourselves and the world and allows participants to examine a problem from multiple perspectives.

Educators have for too long treated role play as a means to an end -- a fun way to introduce other kinds of content -- yet we are arguing here that role play skills may be valuable in their own right and are increasingly central to the way adult institutions function. Performance brings with it capacities to understand problems from multiple points of view, to assimilate information, to exert mastery over core cultural materials, and to improvise in response to a changing environment. As with play and simulation, performance places a new stress on learning processes -- on how we learn more than what we learn. These learning processes are apt to sustain growth and learning well beyond the school years.

What Might Be Done:

Performance enters into education when students are asked to adopt fictive identities and think through scenarios from their perspective. These identities may be assumed within the physical world or the virtual world.

*The Model United Nations, a well-established educational project, brings together students from many different schools, each representing delegations from different member countries. Over the course of a weekend, participants work through current debates in foreign policy and simulate the actual procedures and policies of the international organization. Students prepare for the Model United Nations by doing library research, listening to lectures, and participating in group discussions and they return from the event to share what they learned with other classmates through presentations and written reports.

*The Savannah Project, created by researchers at the University of Bristol, has children playing the parts of lions stalking their prey in physical spaces, such as the school playground, but reading them through fictional data provided on handheld devices. This approach encourages students to master the complex ecosystem of the veldt from the inside out -- learning the conditions which impinge upon the lion's chances of survival and the skills they need in order to feed on other local wildlife.

*Teachers in a range of subjects can deploy what David Shaffer calls "epistemic games." In an epistemic game, the game world is designed to simulate the social context of a profession (say, urban planning), and by working through realistic but simulated problems players learn the ways of acting, interacting, and interpreting that are necessary for participating in the professional community. In effect, rather than memorizing facts or formulas, through performances of being an urban planner, lawyer, doctor, engineer, carpenter, historian, teacher, or physicist the player learns the particular ways of thinking of these professions.

*Medieval Space, a MySpace clone created by teachers at Byrd Middle school, asked students to create online profiles for the various historical figures studied in their classes. Rather than seeing figures such as Richard III, Henry VI and Queen Elizbeth as distinct characters, students explored the complex social relationships between them by imagining how they might have interacted if they had online spaces in the 15th century. For example, students were asked to imagine what their character's current song might be, with as 2Pac's "Only God Can Judge Me Now" listed for Richard III.

Appropriation -- the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Journalists have frequently used the term "Napster generation" to describe the young people who have come of age in this era of participatory culture, reducing their complex forms of appropriation and transformation into the simple, arguably illegal action of ripping and burning someone else's music for the purpose of file sharing. Recall that the Pew study cited earlier found that almost a quarter of American teens had sampled and remixed existing media content. The digital remixing of media content makes visible the degree to which all cultural expression builds upon what has come before. Appropriation is understood here as a process by which students learn by taking culture apart and putting it back together again.

Art doesn't emerge whole cloth from individual imaginations. Rather, art emerges through the artist's engagement with previous cultural materials. Artists build on, take inspiration from, appropriate and transform other artist's work: they do so by tapping into a cultural tradition or deploying the conventions of a particular genre. Beginning artists undergo an apprenticeship phase during which they try on for size the styles and techniques of other more established artists. And even well established artists work with images and themes that already have some currency within the culture. Of course, this isn't generally the way we talk about creativity in schools, where the tendency is still to focus on individual artists who rise upon or stand outside any aesthetic tradition.

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

Many of the forms of expression that are most important to American youth accent this sampling and remixing process, in part because digitization makes it much easier to combine and repurpose media content than ever before. Jazz, for example, evolved through improvisation around familiar themes and standard songs, yet the digital remixing of actual sounds which occurs in techno or hip hop music has raised much greater alarm among those who would insist on strong protections of copyright. Fan fiction clearly involves the transformative use of existing media content, yet it is often treated as if it were simply a new form of piracy. Collage has been a central artistic practice running across the 20th century, one closely associated with the kinds of new creative works that kids are generating manipulating images through Photoshop. Despite the pervasiveness of these cultural practices, school arts and creative writing programs remain hostile to overt signs of repurposed content, emphasizing the ideal of the autonomous artist. Yet in doing so they sacrifice the opportunity to help kids think more deeply about the ethical and legal implications of repurposing existing media content; they often do not provide them with the conceptual tools students need to analyze and interpret works produced in this appropriative process.

Appropriation may be understood as a process which involves both analysis and commentary. Sampling intelligently from the existing cultural reservoir requires a close analysis of the existing structures and uses of this material; remixing requires an appreciation of emerging structures and latent potential meanings. Often, remixing involves the creative juxtaposition of materials which otherwise occupy very different cultural niches. For beginning creators, appropriation provides a scaffolding, allowing them to focus on some dimensions of cultural production and rely on the existing materials to sustain others. They are, say, able to focus more attention on description or exposition if they can build on existing characters and plots. They learn how to capture the voice of a character by trying to mix borrowed dialog with their own words. Mapping their emotional issues onto preexisting characters allowed the young writers to reflect on their own lives from a certain critical distance and work through issues, such as their emerging sexualities, without facing the stigma which might surround confessing such feelings through autobiographical essays. These students learn to use small details in the original works as probes for their own imagination, overcoming some of the anxiety of staring at a blank computer screen. Building on existing stories attracts wider interest in their work, allowing it to circulate far beyond the community of family and friends. In turn, because they are working with a shared narrative and many others have stakes in what happens to these characters, they receive more feedback on their writing.

Classically, engineers learn by taking machines apart and reassembling them, acquiring in the process familiarity with core processes and materials and with an underlying logic that will shape their future construction projects. Appropriation represents this same learning process applied to cultural rather than technological materials. In a world where creativity is often expressed through sampling and remixing, schools need to make their peace with these creative and highly generative processes: they need to help students to better understand the poetics and politics of remixing, to understand how artists draw inspiration from their tradition and what ethical responsibilities they bear in their treatment of materials that others have generated.

What Might Be Done:

Appropriation enters education when learners are encouraged to dissect, transform, sample, or remix existing cultural materials.

*The MIT Comparative Media Studies Program runs a workshop each year, asking students to work in teams to think through what would be involved in transforming an existing media property (a book, film, television series, or comic book) into a video or computer game and then preparing a "pitch" presentation for their game: starting from a preexisting property allows students to get started quickly and more or less on equal footing since they are able to build on a text they have in common as readers rather than one created by an individual student author; the process of identifying core properties of the original work teaches students important skills at narrative and formal analysis while the development of an alternative version of the story in another medium emphasizes the creative expansion of the original content.

*The crew of Public Radio International's program, Sound & Spirit, has gone into schools around Boston, encouraging students to develop scripts and to record radio broadcasts which involve critical commentary around existing songs to explore a common theme or topic. They have found that this process of sampling and remixing music motivates kids to think more deeply about the sounds they hear around them and motivates them to approach school related topics from a fresh perspective.

*Artist and filmmaker Juan Devis , has been working with the University of Southern California Film School, the Institute for Media Literacy, and the Los Angeles Leadership Academy, on a project which will eventually have minority youth developing an online game based on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Devis drew a number of strong parallels between the experiences of minority youth in LA and the world depicted in Twain's novel -- including parallels between "crews" of taggers and the gang of youth that surround Huck and Tom, the use of slang as a means of separating themselves out from their parents culture, the complex experience of race in a society undergoing social transitions, and the sense of mobility and "escape" from adult supervision.

*Ricardo Pitts-Wiley,the Artistic Director of Mixed Magic Theatre, has been working with students from Pawtucket (RI) area high schools to develop what he calls his "urban Moby Dick" project. Students worked closely with mentors -- artists, law enforcement officers, business leaders, from the local community -- to explore Herman Melville's classic novel together. Through a process of reading, discussion, improvisation, and writing, they are scripting and staging a modern version of the classic whaling story, one that acknowledges the realities of contemporary urban America. In their version, the "Great White" turns out not to be a whale but the international drug cartel. Ish and Quay are two members of Ahab's posse as he goes after the vicious force which took his leg and killed his wife. Through re-imagining and reworking Melville's story, they come to a deeper understanding of the relationships between the characters and of some of the core themes about male bonding and obsession which run through the book.

*Renee Hobbs, a 20-year veteran of the media literacy movement, recently launched a new website -- My Pop Studio -- which encourages young middle school and early high school aged girls to reflect more deeply about some of the media they consume -- pop music, reality television, celebrity magazines, and the like -- by stepping into the roles of media producers. The site offers a range of engaging activities -- including designing your own animated pop star and scripting their next sensation, re-editing footage for a reality television show, designing the layout for a teen magazine. Along the way, they are asked to reflect on the messages the media offers about what it is like to be a teen girl in America today and to think about the economic factors shaping the culture that has become so much a part of their everyday interactions with their friends.

Multitasking-- the ability to scan one's environment and shift focus onto salient details on an ad hoc basis.

Perhaps one of the changes most alarming to many adults about the new media landscape has been the perceived decline in young people's attention spans. Attention is undoubtedly an important cognitive ability: all information to be processed by our brains needs to be temporarily held in short-term memory and the capacity of our short-term memory is sharply limited. Attention is critical: learners need to filter out extraneous information that is not relevant to the task at hand and sharpen their focus on the most salient details of their environment. Instead of focusing on narrowing attention, young people often respond to a rich media environment through a strategy of multitasking, scanning for relevant shifts in the information flow while taking in multiple stimuli at once. Multitasking and attention should not be seen as oppositional forces -- rather, we should think of them as two complementary skills, both strategically employed by the brain in order to intelligently manage constraints on short-term memory. Whereas attention seeks to prevent information overload by controlling what information enters short-term memory, successful multitaskers seek to reduce demands on short-term memory by mapping where different information is externally stored within their immediate environment.

In Growing up Digital, John Seely Brown (2002) describes an encounter he had:

Recently I was with a young twenty- something who had actually wired a Web browser into his eyeglasses. As he talked with me, he had his left hand in his pocket to cord in keystrokes to bring up my Web page and read about me, all the while carrying on with his part of the conversation! I was astonished that he could do all this in parallel and so unobtrusively.

People my age tend to think that kids who are multiprocessing can't be concentrating. That may not be true. Indeed, one of the things we noticed is that the attention span of the teens at PARC--often between 30 seconds and five minutes--parallels that of top managers, who operate in a world of fast context-switching. So the short attention spans of today's kids may turn out to be far from dysfunctional for future work worlds.

Right now, young people are playing with these skills as they engage with games or social activities which reward the ability to maintain a mental picture of complex sets of relationships and to adjust quickly to shifts in perceptual cues. We can already see the multitasking process being applied to news and information, embodied within the "scrawl" of contemporary television news: the screen is organized around a series of information surfaces, each contains a relevant bit of data, none of which offers the complete picture. Our eyes scan across electoral maps and ticker tapes, moving images and headlines, trying to complete a coherent picture of the day's events, and to understand the relationship between the data inputs. Similarly, as Gunther Kress notes, the contemporary textbook is increasingly deploying a broader array of different modalities as it represents information students need to know about a given topic: here, again, readers are being taught to scan the informational environment rather than fix attention on a single element.

Historically, we might have distinguished between the skills required of farmers and those expected of hunters. The farmer must complete a sequence of tasks which require localized attention; the hunter must scan a complex landscape in search of signs and cues of where their prey may be hiding. For centuries schools have been designed to create "farmers" . In such an organization, the ideal is to have all students focusing on one thing, and, indeed, attention is conceived of as the ability to concentrate on one thing for an extended period of time while the inability or refusal to maintain such a narrow focus gets characterized as a "disorder." Yet, fixed attention would be maladjusted to the needs of hunters, who must search high and low for their game. Schools adapted to the needs of hunters would have very different practices and might well value the ability to identify the relationship between seemingly unrelated developments within a complex visual field. As we look to the future, one possibility is that schools will be designed to support both "hunters" and "farmers," ensuring that each child develops multiple modes of learning, multiple strategies for processing information. In such a world, neither attentional style is viewed as superior but both are assessed in terms of their relative value within a given context.

Multitasking often gets confused with distraction but as understood here, multitasking involves a way of monitoring and responding to the sea of information around us. Students need help distinguishing between being off task and handling multiple tasks at the same time. They need to acquire skills in recognizing the relationship between information coming at them from multiple directions at the same time and they need to acquire skills at making reasonable hypothesis and models based on partial, fragmented, or intermittent information (all part of the world they will confront in the workplace). They need to know when and how to pay close attention to a specific input as well as when and how to scan the environment searching for meaningful data.

What Might Be Done:

Multitasking enters pedagogical practice when teachers recognize the desires of contemporary students to come at topics from multiple directions all at the same time or to maintain what some have called "continuous partial attention," interacting with homework materials while engaged in other activities.

*A teacher's assistant blogs in real time in response to the classroom instructor's lectures, directing student's attentions to relevant links that illustrate and enhance the content being discussed, rather than providing distractions from the core activity. Students are encouraged to draw on this related material as they engage in classroom discussion, grounding their comments in specific examples and quotations from relevant documents.

*At the Brearley School in Manhattan, foreign language class materials are transferred directly from the school's servers to student's iPods. Rather than needing to set aside dedicated study time to practice a foreign language, this allows students to access their homework and foreign songs while walking home from classes or while engaging in other activities (Glassman, 2004).

*The online game cybernations.net, a simulation game that lets players learn about nation building and international diplomacy, breaks player actions down into distinct choices that can be made at the player's own pace. This encourages players to keep a browser window open to periodically check in on updates from their nation throughout the day while working on other tasks, rather than playing the game only during a dedicated play time. Homework assignments in the form of online games could be designed in a similar manner to facilitate patterns of multitasking.