The Shape of the Page: More Thoughts on Haw Par Villa

I am writing this as I am hiding out in my hotel in San Francisco -- jet lagged and under the weather from some evil germ that was working its way through the airplane's ventilation system -- and I can't get the Haw Par Villa out of my mind. In my previous posts, I wrote about it in terms of its thematic content -- the antimodernist impulses, the representation of classically Chinese conceptions of transgression and punishment, and the place of violent representations in moral instruction. But what interests me today has to do with the formal organization of the exhibits themselves. Remember that these exhibits were built in 1937. I'm going to go all art history on you for a moment so read at your own risk. Consider this image (taken by William Uricchio) which allows us to see one of the tableaus in its largest possible context. The first thing which may strike you is that the space breaks down into a series of different frames which can be read sequentially but which may be taken in as a whole.

In that sense, I am reminded of comic book creator and theorist Will Eisner's arguments about the ways comics might be read -- both in terms of the organization of information into a series of framed boxes and in terms of "the shape of the page" which we take in through peripheral vision and which shapes our interpretation of each framed image. It is this notion of the "shape of the page" which got dropped when Scott McCloud reworked Eisner for Understanding Comics and for my money, it may be Eisner's most significant contribution to the theory of the medium.

Eisner's own work was very good at exploiting the relationship here between information communicated sequentially -- panel by panel -- and simultaneously -- through the shape of the page. Consider this example taken from one of Eisner's very last published pieces -- note how he weaves the Spirit and the Escapist, his two protagonists, across the page in multiple ways. We can take in an overall impression of what's happening here at a glance but as we examine the page more closely, we see that it does contain a series of implicitly and explicitly framed actions which can be read sequentially to form a narrative.

In the case of the Haw Par Villa vignette depicted here, some of the frame lines are defined very emphatically -- there are two separate scenes staged side by side here -- while others are more ambiguous -- see the way features of the space function as implicit frames encouraging us to focus on one part of the action at a time. And there is even some activity taking place in the space between frames -- in what we might describe as the gutter if we were talking about comics. We are to see the people drowning below as at once a separate scene and part of the larger scene being depicted. Even within a single space, we are invited to scan the image, break it down into clusters of figures (such as some of the specific examples of combat depicted here), create a narrative context for the interplay of the figures, and then draw them back into the larger scene. The demands which this places on the viewer are quite complex. We can take in the scene as a whole on first impression but we really only understand it when we work it over with our eyes over a more prolonged period.

Other vignettes depend upon relatively straight forward juxtapositions within the same space -- as in the contrast here between the chaste peasant couple in the background and the more sexually transgressive modern couple in the foreground. We can read each scene individually but we only really understand the moral message when we understand the significance of this juxtaposition.

I find it productive to compare my first example here to a surprisingly similar aesthetic effect in a work better known to western readers -- Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

Bosch's painting is a triptych, allowing for the use of framing to create a similar play between simultaneity and sequentiality.Here's how one art-history-focused website tells us to read the image:

The triptych depicts the history of the world and the progression of sin. Beginning on the outside shutters with the creation of the world, the story progresses from Adam and Eve and original sin on the left panel to the torments of hell, a dark, icy, yet fiery nightmarish vision, on the right. The Garden of Delights in the center illustrates a world deeply engaged in sinful pleasures.

One's first impression upon looking at any of the framed segments is one of total visual chaos. The image is not organized for us in the ways we anticipate -- there is no central focus, no coherent whole. We are staring into a space that defies human comprehension -- and we can only begin to experience the painting by breaking it down into smaller narrative chunks, clusters of figures or bits of terrain which take on local significance as we scan across the image.

Bosch is one of those artists that I have always had trouble situating inside any coherent mental map of the trajectory of western painting. I love his work but what makes them interesting are all of the ways they break from the representational structures one associates with other classical paintings of the period. He seems to look towards the work of surrealists like Salvador Dali rather than having much to do with the realist impulses that would shape so many of his contemporaries.

Increasingly, though, I am wondering if there might not be some value in looking at a range of these "eccentric" forms of expression side by side as I am trying to gesture towards here and see if we might identify an alternative aesthetic system -- one which is more often than not associated with popular forms of representation and one which has to do with simultaneity of impressions or to go back to Eisner, "the shape of the page".

There has been a tendency to see the introduction of framing in comics, for example, as a step forward in organizing the chaos of the page -- with the resulting fascination with all of the wild experiments in framing and segmentation done by an early comics pioneer like Windsor McCay. But I have always been fascinated with the work done by R. F. Outcault on the early Yellow Kid strips. Here, the entire page of the newspaper may be given over to a single image (and some loosely affiliated text) which is so dense in details that one can not take it all in at once but rather must scan across it, slowly forming logical links between different actions which at first seemed unrelated, and thus working through the sequence of what must have occurred.

Most writers on comics have seen Outcault's work as more primitive than McCay's but what if we saw them as operating according to a different aesthetic principle -- one which is interested in capturing the sensation of living in a city where many different things may be occurring at the same time at the same space and may only have a loose connection to each other, even if they intersect or interrupt each other at various points. Read in these terms, the goal of the artist is only superficially to tell a story or to lay out information for the viewer; rather, the artist seeks to create a rich, immersive world. Each of these works I am discussing here represent consummate examples of spatial stories of the kind that I have discussed regularly in my writing on games -- most notably in my essay, "Game Design as Narrative Architecture."

I made a similar point about the relationship of games to other forms of world building activities in popular art in a column I wrote with Kurt Squire for Computer Games magazine after a trip to Japan, where I encountered yet another example of this world-making practice:

To get to the new Ghibli Museum, I (Henry) had to travel by train to Mitaka, a sleepy little suburb of Tokyo. The world outside is green and lush, full of Japanese school girls giggling on their way to class. The world inside is unlike any place I'd ever been: A physical embodiment of the great Japanese filmmaker Hiyao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away). Miyazaki personally designed or supervised almost everything in this enchanted, maze-like building. It's not just the big things -- a giant stuffed version of the flying cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro, an even bigger giant robot soldier from Castle in the Sky -- but also the little things, like the snack foods in the recreation of Miyazaki's cluttered studio.

Panorama boxes -- small windows into imaginary microworlds with titles like "The Great Underwater Adventure," "Monman the Water Spider," and "The Ogre's Snack Box" sit close to the ground forcing adults to get down on their hands and knees to look inside. On a plaque, Miyazaki explains, "Just as people wished to make pictures move, they also wished they could look inside a different world. They yearn to enter the story or travel to a faraway land. They longed to see the future and landscapes of the past. The panorama box with no moving parts was made much earlier than the zoetrope." Cinema, for Miyazaki, originates from a desire to step inside these microworlds and become a part of the story.

The next day, I had the rare privilege of talking with Toshio Suzuki, Miyazaki's long time producer. Suzuki is a thoughtful man, passionate about cinema and knowledgeable about its history. I shared my observation that every scene in Spirited Away centered around an interesting space and a compelling task and that the scene continued until the characters had fully explored that space and completed their assigned goals. His eyes sparkled as he completed my thought, "Like a video game."

But Suzuki wanted to talk about space. First, he sketched a Western Cathedral, reminding us that from above, the configuration resembled a cross and that every object was organized in relation to that overarching shape.

He sprang up to use the chalk board, and drew a tiny little room, and then a hallway, and then another room, until he had drawn a complex maze. This, he said, was how the Japanese designed a space -- one interesting detail at a time. The whole was an unpredictable but aesthetically satisfying conglomeration of details. This space makes no sense from above. One can only map it by walking down the hallways and being surprised -- and delighted -- as you turn each corner. Then, he pointed to a poster from Howl's Flying Castle, and said that this was how Miyazaki approached designing its mechanical world -- one detail at a time. It is a world so rich that the human mind can't take it all in at once but can only explore

it, one space at a time.

Finally, returning to my question, he revealed that Miyazaki is a close friend of Shigeru Miyamoto, the master video game designer. And suddenly it was clear to me that Miyazaki-sen and Miyamoto-sen share something in common: both design complex and compelling microworlds that we want to explore. Miyazaki's heart contains only cinema; his films have never been adopted into games. They don't need to be -- in a real sense, they already

are games.

Many unusual things about Tokyo suddenly made sense: the 8-9 stories high manga shops in Akihabara with one whole floor devoted to scale models anime robots, spaceships, and characters; the rows of Gachapon machines which yield a plastic ball with a toy anime figurines; the kids who gather on the outskirts of YoYogi Park on Sunday afternoons playing cos; the toy kits depicting levels from early Nintendo games. All across Tokyo, Otaku are

obsessing over the details.

Such richly detailed worlds allow multiple points of entry, routes for exploration, and things to carry back into everyday life. Media scholars talk about Japan's "media mix" culture, starting from the idea that story details get scattered across multiple media products.

Miyamoto's games (think Mario Brothers or Zelda) follow the same principles: they are micro-worlds built from detail to delightful detail. In his Master's Thesis for Georgia Institute of Technology, Chaim Gringold describes Miyamoto's works as "miniature gardens": "Gardens, like games, are compact, self-sustained worlds we can immerse ourselves in... A miniature

garden, like a snow globe, model train set, or fish tank, is complete; nothing is missing, and nothing can be taken away... Miniatureness makes a garden intelligible in the mind of a player, and emotionally safe in his heart. Miniature scale, clear boundaries, and inner life help players to wrap their heads, hands, and hearts around a world."

Miyamoto's games are a later-day variation on Miyazaki's panorama boxes -- microworlds that delight us in their details and invite us to get down our hands and knees to see inside. Seen in that way, the computer game predates the cinema -- at least in Japan.

This is all heady stuff -- and it may just be the cold medicine talking here -- but I hope it provokes my readers to look at some of these works from a somewhat different point of view.

Supernatural: First Impressions

Late last fall, I asked for readers of this blog to pimp their favorite shows. Overwhelmingly, the most popular choice was a CW series called Supernatural -- of course, there was a concerted campaign within the show's fan community to write in and share the love for the series in hopes that it might generate greater awareness of the program. Here's just a few of the things readers had to say about Supernatural:

Every week is like a new little horror movie that, most times, is really quite frightening. But that's not what really drives it. The true strength of Supernatural lies in the absolutely touching family ties and brotherly love exhibited every episode by Sam and Dean.

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The tight brotherly bond, driven by the love of their father is what keeps the fans coming back. The lore [hellhounds, demons, vamps, wendigos] keeps the fans sticking around for more and a crossover from the [Joss]Whedonverse thrills us! Each week a new puzzle piece is put down in the mystery of their family's trials and tribulations and we LOVE Eric Kripke for such a great show.

*****

John, Sam and Dean are a dysfunctional family, and so intriguing with it that all the exchanges they have about their family issues have us fan(girls, mostly, I think) squee in delight. They all have a definite character, differences and similarities quite cleverly written and filmed (the way Dean and John move, the way in which John and Sam say the same words, etc). The feelings implied in looking out for each other not only as fellow hunters but as a family make the tension in the fighting/dangerous scenes raise up a notch. We want to see Sam telling it all to his father, we want to see what Dean would do, who would he side with, we want to see John worried about his boys. In short, we want to see MEN EMOTE for each other, and the family ties allow for a narrative that can play with this instead of justifying it.

******

Usually when there's a friendship that fan glom onto, there will be hints of it onscreen--banter, and maybe once or twice per season they save each other's lives. It's the fans who had the really deep, strong emotional undercurrent in fanfic. But in Supernatural, the intense bond between the brothers is part of the text.

*********

It's got a lovely mix of an overall mytharc as well as standalone bits and episodes.

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The arch narrative is threaded all throughout the first season, picked up in some episodes and just mentioned in others, but it's what gives the series a fundamental unity and reason d'eitre.

*******

The continuity is fabulous, and works in all sorts of extra information, both on the characters and whatever myth they're investigating. I find myself re-watching episodes, figuring out what's going on, and the researching the history of the legends.

Each of the paragraphs above comes from a different reader but they represent steps in an argument that certainly got my attention. All I can say is that your campaign worked -- at least in my case. I had only a vague awareness of Supernatural before I started getting flooded by these earnest pleas and recommendations. Frankly, I had lumped it together with Medium and The Ghost Whisperer, seeing the whole lot as basically TV knockoffs of The Sixth Sense. But, once I read those recommendations, I know I had to see it for myself and so I put the Season One DVD boxed set on my Christmas list. I've been watching Supernatural while coping with jet lag during my trip to Singapore -- maybe not the best choice under the circumstances because instead of putting me to sleep, I keep wanting to watch just one more and end up staying up later than I should be. I more or less ended up inhaling Season One -- watching the last eight episodes more or less back to back on the flight back from Singapore, and I am now craving season two.

I kept planning to write a midterm report on my viewing but given the choice between watching another episode and writing about the series, I kept choosing to watch another episode. Every statement I quoted above is absolutely true -- this is a show which delivers real haunted house style horror every week and does so while giving us an extensive look into the emotional life and personal growth of its core protagonist. Each episode is self contained enough that you can watch it out of sequence and get something rewarding out of the experience, yet there's a powerful cumulative effect of watching the episodes in sequence and thus seeing the character's inner lives come bubbling up again and again. The writing is crisp; the characters have a distinctive voice.

You can try to compare it to X-Files or Buffy or Night Stalker, all of which it superficially resembles, but this series does things its own way (as I hope to illustrate in a moment).

It's hard to imagine how or why a series this good is suffering from such total neglect from the network, from the critics, though clearly not from its most hardcore fans.

Let me tell you I was nervous going in. Having decided I wanted to write something in response to the community's push, I was terrified I wasn't going to like the show and would then have to write something negative. I never want to pee on someone else's fandom but I was starting to see some folks out in LJland grumbling because I hadn't said anything about Supernatural while I had posted about Heroes, the runner up show in my contest (You know who you are). I was already writing Heroes; Supernatural took homework and the end of a term is not the best time to be adding on extra assignments.

As it happens, the first few episodes didn't quite grab me -- they were good enough, they worked well within the terms of the genre, the characters and plot had potential, but I wasn't hooked. For me, the episode that pushed me over the edge was "Skin." And from there, it just got more and more intense. Retrospectively, it was all there from the beginning.

For those who, like me, got it confused with some of the other supernatural shows that hit television around the same time, this one deals with two brothers who are traveling across America doing battle with demonic forces and searching for their missing father. The creatures they encounter in any given episode are the stuff of campfire stories -- they are inspired by roadside Americana and by urban legends. It is supernatural horror of a kind which movies rarely give us any more -- spin tingling without being overly gory (other than an odd preoccupation with dripping blood). Indeed, its dependence on shadowy figures owes something to the vintage horror films of producer Val Lewton (The Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man) than anything in contemporary horror cinema. On the making of tape, Eric Kripke cites a range of filmic exemplars, including Poltergeist, An American Werewolf in London, and The Evil Dead movies.

The film scholar Robin Wood has identified the core formula for the horror film -- "normality is threatened by the monstrous" -- and suggested that the formula breaks down into three elements - normality, the monstrous, and the relationship between the two. And it is on that level that we can understand what separates Supernatural from many of the other horror series on television.

Joss Whedon has described the vampires and demons represented on Buffy as "metaphors" for teenage experience in America: they embody the horrors to be found in the hellmouth that is American public education.

The monsters in The X-Files ultimately became clues within the vast governmental conspiracy that Scully and Muldar wanted to uncover: the truth was out there and each monster we unmask brought us closer to the truth. Earlier in the series, everything hinged on the debate between faith and science, with the two partners contesting the validity of each other's world views.

Something similar can be said of Lost where the supernatural elements are few and far between but seem to be just one more tantalizing clue to the puzzle that constitutes the series.

In Supernatural, the monsters are, in effect, emotional scars and psychic wounds. They represent unresolved emotional issues, often within the context of family life, and they are also external correlatives for the emotional drama taking place in the lives of the series' protagonists. Sam and Dean go out there looking for things that are strange and unfamiliar and they end up seeing themselves and their relationship more clearly.

This is the stuff of classic melodrama: Peter Brooks tells us that melodrama externalizes emotions. It takes what the characters are feeling and projects it onto the universe. So that the character's emotional lives gets mapped onto physical objects and artifacts, gets mirror backed to them through other characters, gets articulated through gestures and physical movements, and on a metalevel, speaks to us through the music which is what gives melodrama its name. Supernatural is melodrama in the best sense of the term.

On one level, it is made up of classic masculine elements -- horror, the hero's quest, sibling rivalry, unresolved oedipal dramas -- but on another level, it seems ideally suited to the themes and concerns which have long interested the female fan community. Heck, this series is one long hurt/comfort story. Every episode seems structured as much around the character moments as around the monster of the week plotlines. Everything here seems designed to draw out the emotions of the characters and force them to communicate with each other across all of the various walls which traditional masculinity erects to prevent men from sharing their feelings with each other. Dean in particular seems to hate "chick flick moments" and has a running commentary on how much he would like to avoid getting in touch with his feelings but this doesn't prevent us from having some real emotional revelations in almost every episode and the last few episodes of the season force each character to decide what matters most to them and to weigh their goals against their ties to their family in the most immediate ways possible.

I am someone who is definitely closer to Sam than to Dean in my outlook on life and indeed, there are moments in the series that I absolutely hate Dean, yet the series is well enough constructed that each time you reach that point, they peal back another layer and show some other aspect of his character. There are several episodes near the end of Season one which show us why he acts the way he does and suggests that his emotions run a lot deeper than his machismo will allow him to admit.

What gives the series its epic structure is the quest for the demon that took the life of the boy's mother. The goal is what holds the dysfunctional and centrifugal family together; it is also what pulls them apart (since each of them holds within them some secrets about what happened that night that they have never shared with each other and the trauma has hit each of them on a different level.) Not every episode contributes directly to this core quest narrative -- though many of them are connected to it in ways that are not immediately clear and the quest gains momentum as you move into the last third of the first season (and perhaps beyond). This is not an ensemble drama of the kind which most often wins recognition from critics these days: the focus is strongly on the two protagonists but around them, we accumulate, episode by episode, a richly drawn set of supporting characters, some of whom are recurring, some of whom appear in only a single storyline. It is not always clear which is which when we watch an episode and a real strength of the series is that what may at first seem to be throw away or one shot characters may resurface later. The series spends enough time setting up many of these characters that it produces considerable negative capability: we want to know what happens to these characters after the episode ends and in the case of the various family friends we encounter, we'd like to find out more about their history with the father before the series itself starts. There's more than enough suggestions of back story here to sustain an army of fan writers for a long time to come.

A real strength of the series is the construction of female secondary characters, all the more unusual in a series which is so centrally about its core male leads. But each week, we seem to introduce one or two women who are struggling not only against supernatural forces but against the circumstances life has thrown their way. As Carol Clover suggests in Men, Women, and Chain Saw, horror films have traditionally offered a range of strong roles for women in part because men can accept the experience of risk and vulnerability at the heart of horror by mapping it onto the female victim. Clover describes the role of the Final Girl in the slasher film genre, for example, showing how the women overcome and ultimately face down their fear in the course of the action. These women sometimes surface as romantic interests for Sam and Dean but more often, they are extensions of their emotional drama: that is to say, each of them is dealing with some aspect of family drama which strongly parallels the issues which Sam and Dean are grappling with in their own lives. The men do not so much desire them as romantic or sex objects as they use them as mirrors to see into their own and each other's souls. Each woman teaches them something they need to learn before they can become emotionally whole again and in the process, each teaches the viewer something about the men that we would not know otherwise. The show never patronizes the women, never denies them their core humanity, and indeed, often, it is clear that the men admire the women's courage, intelligence, integrity, and passion. The result are some of the most compelling male/female relationships I've seen on prime time network television.

I am trying to write this without giving away too many spoilers. Part of my pleasure here was going into this series without knowing what to expect. Yet, I am hoping that I can lend my voice to the other fans of the series who wrote in this fall to pimp this show. You can certainly discover some of the virtues I've identified here in a single episode seen out of context but there really is a value in going back and watching this series from the beginning. There is a growth in the emotional life of the characters which is best experienced watching several episodes in a gulp. This is the kind of series that dvd box sets are made for.

I hope to write some more about Supernatural down the line. One of the things I am still working on are the parallels between Supernatural and Heroes, the other show which did very well with readers of this blog. There are several plot elements here -- the theme of dopplegangers in "Skin" for example parallels the Niki/Jessica storyline in Heroes and the slow discovery of the extend of Sam's powers has a lot in common with what happens to the various protagonists on the NBC superhero drama. I also think there's a fair amount to be said here about what I see as the surprisingly negative portrayal of fans in "Hell House," especially given the discussions we've had here about the "Love & Monsters" episode of Doctor Who.

I still have read none of the fan commentary beyond what's been posted here or the fan fiction so I don't know for sure what elements fans are picking up on in this series. That will be the next step once I get caught up with season two. But for the moment, I think you can add me to the list of Supernatural fans.

The Sony Game Design Workshop

For those of you following my travels, I am now back in the United States (San Francisco to be precise) where I will be through tuesday. Further legs on this trip take me to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Durham, and New York City, before returning in Boston for the start of the term. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scordose from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

Here's the basic details:

Storytelling and Games in the Digital Age

Prof. Henry Jenkins, Sande Scoredos and Thomas Hershey, Sony Pictures Imageworks

Mon Jan 29 thru Thu Feb 1, 10am-05:00pm, 14E-310

Fri Feb 2, 10am-05:00pm, 2-105

Enrollment limited: advance sign up required (see contact below)

Signup by: 10-Jan-2007

Limited to 40 participants.

Participants requested to attend all sessions (non-series)

Prereq: None

Student teams develop story concepts for various media, including motion picture visual effects and computer games. Sponsored by MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) and Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI), this non-technical activity focuses on the theoretical, historical, cultural, social, and aesthetic elements of interactive narrative and game structures. Morning lectures explore linear and non-linear storytelling across media, audio-visual elements, game theory, and techniques to increase the depth of interactive console games and enhance storytelling. Afternoons run as workshops where participants collaborate in teams to design interactive story scenarios to be presented during a final session on Friday afternoon.

Held in 14E-310. Friday February 2nd will be held in 2-105.

Contact: Generoso Fierro, 14N-207, x3-5038, generoso@mit.edu

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants though there are limits to how many people we can absorb.

The following text is taken from a teacher's guide for the workshop which currently resides on the Education Arcade website. Parts of it have previously appeared in Telemedium. We have also produced a series of reality television style short documentaries showing the process at work and displaying highlights from the final presentations. And we have notes from some of the key lectures during one year's run of the workshop. These are all designed to encourage teachers at other institutions to try their own hands at conducting this kind of workshop process.

The workshop has two basic components - a design competition where teams conceptualize and present their approaches to adopting an existing media property into a game and a series of lectures designed to provide them with the background knowledge they need to complete this task. The contest provides greater motivation for students to pay attention to the information presented through the lectures and to apply it to the specific challenges of conceptualizing their games.

Some aspects of the workshop take advantage of the unique resources of MIT, yet we believe that the basic structure of the workshop could be adopted by local teachers at the high school level. We have had several high school aged students in the past and they have done as well or better than their older counterparts. In any case, the content of the workshop has adjusted slightly each year to reflect the available faculty and their interests.

Educational Goals

This workshop emerged from a series of conversations that Henry Jenkins and Alex Chisholm had with more than 50 different companies, large and small, which might be interested in hiring Humanities-trained media studies students upon their graduation. We were consistently told that while Liberal Arts students are highly desired by employers because of their mental flexibility and breadth of background knowledge, they often lacked some core skills that would make them ideal employees. Among those things most often identified were leadership experience, teamwork, communication skills, brainstorming and problem solving skills, competitiveness, and the experience of carrying a project through to completion. So, one important thrust of the workshop was to give our own graduate and undergraduate students training and experience in these areas.

Team leaders are selected from our own graduate students or undergraduate majors. In the case of a high school, they could be selected from upperclassman and (after the first year) students who had performed well in the previous competition. These students are given some additional training in leadership, brainstorming, and communication skills so that they can insure the success of the workshop as a whole.

At the same time, the workshop was designed to expose students to the basic building blocks of computer and video games - introducing them to current industry trends, technological opportunities of the current game systems, the tools the industry uses to select and develop potential properties - storytelling, genre, character, emotion, space, game play, community building, violence and ethics, gender and generational factors, visual elements, and sound track. Students are introduced to these ideas through the lectures and then apply them to their team projects. The judging criteria for the competition are designed to insure that all of the key concepts get applied.

A third educational goal here involves encouraging students to analyze the key components of an existing media text. Students need to think deeply about what aspects of those texts are essential to defining the 'world' of the story and to insure the audience's recognition and pleasure. Any adaptation involves maintaining certain core features while changing other nonessential features to reflect the specific nature of the medium in which the work is being presented and increasingly, to offer consumers an expanded experience of the 'world' of the story. One reason why we ask students to work with existing properties is that this workshop is designed to foster the analytic skills that we introduce to students through our existing courses on film, literature, or television.

Preparing Team Leaders

The success of this process depends on having good team leaders who can be trusted to keep their groups on track and help them to cross the finish line. Over the years we have been running this process, we have had only one team totally self-destruct. Given the several dozen teams we put through this process, the intensity of the demands placed on participants, and the fact that most of the participants are working without pay or academic credit, we consider this success rate to be a major victory. In order to get teams out of the gate first, we choose a team leader prior to the start of the week. We typically select graduate students in the Comparative Media Studies program, since these are students we already work with closely and who already come into the week with some solid knowledge of media theory and production practices. In some cases, we select undergraduate students from our program who have been working on some of our games related projects or we select people who have gone through the team process once before and have been successful. In the case of a school or after school program, you should consider recruiting some older students with whom you have worked in the past to be team leaders for your first run through this process and then create a system where, if possible, participants of winning teams get asked if they will come back next year to help with the contest. In the worse case, you should select students you think have real maturity and leadership potential to head the teams. Part of what our students get out of this process is experience in managing teams and a chance to test their theoretical insights into media against the challenges of an actual production process. We have been able to recommend a significant number of our students for internships with media related companies on the basis of the leadership skills they demonstrated through their participation in this process.

One of the key things we tell our student leaders is to think of themselves as facilitators. We strongly discourage them from coming into the weeklong course with strong ideas about what kind of project they want to lead. The ideas should come from the entire team and not simply from its leaders. This is key if all participants are going to feel a sense of ownership over the finished product and if they are going to be expected to work actively to realize the group's goals. Of course, in any given group, some students will feel closer to a particular idea than others and some disagreements about goals and choices is bound to occur. But, if the leader thinks of themselves as insuring the integrity of the process and making sure that each participant has a valuable experience, then the groups are less likely to face a serious rupture on their way to the finish line. In many cases, other leaders emerge organically from the group process and may supplement or assist the selected leaders. What you want to avoid, however, is a situation where struggles over leadership blocks progress on the project. It's that reason why we want to select leaders from the start.

The group leader needs to know how to brainstorm. Brainstorming involves all participants throwing out their ideas in an non-evaluative process. The leader wants to frame open-ended questions and not dismiss any idea out of hand. Brainstorming should be seen as an iterative process in which one will not necessarily know what the final value of an idea is until it has been worked over and reconsidered several times.

At the beginning of the week, the first phase of brainstorming should involve identifying what content will serve as the basis of the game. The leader may want to get participants to throw out media properties that they think have potential and write them down on a chalkboard or on poster board so everyone can see. A good leader may start to cluster ideas that seem related as they emerge so that the participants start to see relationships between materials. Often in this first phase, it will be hard to separate out the ideas about subject matter from ideas about game play or presentation. The ultimate choice will need to be a game concept that captures people's imaginations, which allows for innovative use of the medium, and which can be presented in a lively and compelling fashion. Once you have a list of possible properties, then you want to circle back through the list again and again, thinking through the value of each nomination and winnowing out those which pose insurmountable problems or which are unknown to a larger number of people in your group. By the end of the first day, you want to have a manageable list of potentially valuable options and you want participants to spend some time researching on their own their favorite options. The second day the group leaders work to further narrow the list and to reach a consensus about what the group is doing.

The second night, group members may plan on getting together and consume the media property that has been selected, making notes, or sharing ideas about what they want to do. The third day is focused on developing the ideas which had emerged around the property throughout the first two days of brainstorming, to begin to focus on aspects of game play, audio-visual design, and marketing, which will shape the final presentation. The group leader needs to keep good notes of the lectures and to be able to insert ideas from the talks into the brainstorming process in a timely way so that participants see their application to their current design problems.

By the third day, the group leader will also have thought about a division of labor based on the skills and passions of participants. In some cases, they may put one person in charge of each aspect of their presentation and send them off to work on their own; in other cases, the group may work through each level collectively and collaborate in the completion of tasks. We have seen both approaches produce successful results in the competition. What is important is that the leader know how they are approaching the tasks and know who is responsible for completing each one. On the third day, we have a review session where group participants meet with the faculty in charge of the competition and walk through the choices which have been made so far. We recommend that the group leaders check in with the supervising faculty at the end of each day to make sure that things are on track.

On the fourth day, the group will start to shift its focus from generating new ideas towards executing those it has developed. The focus shifts more decisively onto the challenges of developing a presentation that will effectively communicate to the judges what is exciting and innovative about this particular project. Here is where the diverse skills of the team come handy with programmers helping to develop the digital embodiment of the idea, graphic artists helping to develop materials that visualize the concepts, and business students helping to develop the business plan which shows why this approach might prove commercially viable. The group leader should be prepared to work late into the night checking in with individual team members or keeping the group working together until they know they have what they need for their presentations.

The final day involves the presentations. In some cases, the group leaders may be the most effective people to communicate their ideas, though we encourage many if not all members of the team to play a role in expressing their concepts to the judges and especially in addressing questions. In other cases, the group leader may play director and stage manager, pulling out of the immediacy of the presentation in order to watch each participant and give them feedback on their performance. You want to make sure you know more or less how long each part of the presentation will take because the judges will cut students off at the end of their time whether or not they have finished their presentation. The leader needs to anticipate problematic team members and have plans about how to deal with them should they "act up" during a presentation. We have seen people try to dominate the presentation, overstepping their assigned roles, interrupting fellow panelists, or even trying to reorder PowerPoint slides mid-presentation. These are the kinds of crisis that try leader's souls, but the leader must have established enough of a relationship with each member to be able to intervene quickly and effectively to put things back on course. Other times, students develop stage fright and the leader may have to step in and fill their roles at the last moment.

The judges will have a chance to ask participants questions about their project. The leader should try to anticipate the most likely questions, develop a division of labor so that the most qualified member addresses each point and so that the group sticks by what is said even if the point is one for which no consensus has been reached. In many cases, the leader may have to be the person who addresses unanticipated questions since the leader is the one who can be expected to have the fullest sense of the project as a whole.

Throughout the process, the leader needs to maintain team spirit and morale, since the more "up" the team members feel about what they are doing, the more effectively they will communicate that enthusiasm to the judges. Morale also is what keeps someone working later in the evening or pulling out the extra stops creatively.

The Presentations

The teams have 30 minutes to present their material, 10 minutes to dress the stage, and 10 minutes to respond to the judges' questions. We keep a tight time clock to insure fairness to all involved. The teams have to be well organized in order to get themselves into position by the start of the time and to stay on schedule so that all aspects of their presentation can be heard within the allotted time. We have certainly had teams who fell behind and the team leader had to make decisions on the fly about what should/could be cut in order to get the key ideas into the time. Ideas that don't get presented aren't considered by the judges even if the judges have heard them at earlier points in the process, since the judges have no way of knowing what changes might have been made in the last minute preparations for the presentations. No matter how many times you review the projects, there are always surprising elements in the final presentations as the projects only take their final shape the night before.

The order of the presentations is chosen by drawing slips of paper the day before. Everyone comes into the day knowing when their team will present and what the ground rules are for the presentation.

All participants in the competition have to be in place at the start of the first presentation and no further work can be done once the first presentation begins. All participants hear all presentations. The other teams are pushed out of the room momentarily when the judges ask their questions. Clearly, even with this precaution, later groups have some advantage since they can absorb information into their oral presentation, even if they don't adopt it into their visual materials. But, there have really never been any complaints about unfairness here.

As the competition has continued, the quality and elaborateness of presentations has grown each year. We find consistently that showmanship counts for a great deal in terms of the relative merits of presentations. Groups have become more theatrical. For example, it is very common for participants to create and wear costumes that help to establish the characters contained within their game. These costumes range from glitter rock garb for a Making the Band project to Purple Hats and capes for Willy Wonka. Very often, they will dress the stage with elements that evoke the atmosphere of the story world. For Spirited Away, they created the look of a Japanese bathhouse. Several times, we have had teams use puppets to communicate their ideas. One memorable presentation on Princess Smartypants included both a puppet imitating the regal voice of a princess and a man dressed up like a fairy. Given the technical skills of MIT students, it will not be surprising to learn that they build power point presentations, which can contain very elaborate mock-ups done in Photoshop or flash of what the actual game might look like.

Sometimes, there are very elaborate computer animations that help communicate the core premise. A group focused on Survivor had animations of cracking fires on laptops arranged around the room. The 1984 team, which won last year, turned a video camera on the audience and projected live feed on the wall so the judges and audience had the uncomfortable experience of watching themselves watching the presentation.

More and more students provide give-aways to the judges: one year, for example, a Matrix team provided a gold box with a red and blue sugar pill, asking us to decide which one we would take. Another group, working on Homer's The Odyssey, offered us bottles of root beer with a label designed to imitate the culture of ancient Greece. Some groups mimic the advertising materials or box designs for their products, even going so far as to give us blank CDs in jewel cases mocked up to look like the finished product. For a Fugitive project, each judge was given a 'wanted' poster with his or her own image on it. The groups frequently use music to communicate the audio design of their projects - in most cases, songs sampled from existing CDs, but in a few cases, original compositions the students created for the occasion.

The judges strive to separate out flash which is simply flash from elements carefully chosen to communicate the core elements of the concept and make it come alive for the audience. If there is no serious thinking behind the performance, it can upstage rather than compliment the other elements of the presentation. Throughout the contest, the students are ask to distill down the core features which most be present in order to allow their new product to fit coherently within the existing media franchise. Here is their chance to show you how fully they have achieved that goal. Yet, students need to be aware of the importance of underlying what aspects of the performance are in the game and why. Often, students will play interesting music throughout the presentation but not talk explicitly about sound design elements in their pitch.

We now ask the groups to identify a specific audience to which they are pitching the game. This element requires the groups to do their homework on the different companies which produce games, their connections with other media companies, their existing product lines and preferences, the core market to which they are addressing the bulk of their products, and any notable successes or failures which might impact how they think about your particular product. The group working on Spirited Away, for example, chose to address the Japanese branch of Sony, opening with an extended greeting in Japanese, and drawing on what they knew about protocol and business practices in that culture. Most of the information students need to know about the business can be found on the web.

Students search for games that may be similar to what they are proposing and need to know how well they did and what markets they reached. They can find this by reviewing the large number of games-related websites produced by fans, industry insiders, or journalists. They may look up the property that they are drawing upon to conceive the game to see who produced it, how well it did at the box office, and what other connections may exist between the production company and a games-related company. They may look at other games linked to that studio's properties to see which games companies developed and released them. Those with more business interests can look for trends through industry-oriented publications, which might make the company more or less receptive to the kind of game proposed.

When we first started the competition, these business aspects took a back seat to the more aesthetic dimensions of the presentations, but in recent years, we have attracted more and more management students interested in getting into creative industries. The teacher may need to assess her or his own students to know where their strengths and weaknesses lie and decide how much emphasis to place on this aspect of the presentations. Some focus on the industry, however, seems desirable as a way to help students understand the economic contexts in which creative decisions get made (including the impact of concentration of ownership on the current media environment); this focus on factual information also gives incentive for students to work on their research skills and especially their web searching skills, since this up to the minute information is not going to be found in books.

The goal of the pitch is to put together the key elements of the game in a way that is compelling for the audience. Everything students know about presentation skills comes into play during this part of the process. Students need to think about the ordering of elements - so that the information makes sense to the audience as they are hearing it, so that the most compelling elements get the proper degree of attention, and so that the closing drives home the core elements with an extra persuasiveness. The groups need to make sure that they address each of the elements they will be judged upon while not getting bogged down in local details to such a degree that the judges do not get a clear sense of the game as a whole.

Frequently, students divide up the roles in their presentation based on their expertise and enthusiasm for different aspects of the product. Often, they also identify someone who is their best "finisher," that is, some one who has strong sales skills who can drive home the final pitch at the end of the presentation. We do not require every participant to speak, since we see the value of students who are uncomfortable in front of groups making contributions on other levels. This is, however, a philosophical question, which teachers need to consider in the context of their own programs. If the goal is to get students to really hone their presentation skills and get experience speaking in front of groups, the desire to have every student participate in the presentation is greater than if your goal is to focus on brainstorming and conceptual skills.

The presentations are a time for all team members to drop disagreements and work towards the common good. Often, team leaders instruct participants not to contradict each other during the presentation. If a team member gets hit with a question for which they are unprepared, he or she should make up an answer consistent with the overall approach they are taking and then subsequent team members will need to factor that answer into what they say about the game. One year, we had a group which totally failed to reach a consensus to the point that one group member disagreed about the order in which the PowerPoint slides should be presented and kept flicking back and forth throughout the presentation in a distracting fashion, upstaging and confusing his team mates. Needless to say, this group did badly in the competition and much anger was directed against him after they got off stage.

Judging The Presentations

We recommend having 5 or 6 judges, since each judge will see the presentations in slightly different ways and will focus on somewhat different elements. Having a broad based group of judges helps to take the pressure off any one participant and helps to even out any potential biases the judge may feel towards one group or participant. The judges are given a score sheet. We have established ten criteria of evaluation, which are known by the participants in advance. For each category, the judge gives a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest score. Each judge keeps a running tally throughout the day and reserves the right to adjust scores upwards or downwards as they hear subsequent presentations. Judges often have to rethink their responses to the first few presentations, in particular, since they do not have a very clear baseline of expectations at the start of the day. Each group must be judged by every criterion, which means that they may lower their score significantly if they do not directly address one or another aspect. For some reason, students typically offer much more on game play, narrative, and visual design than they do on sound design.

The judges should set their own standards for each category. As long as they are consistent in applying those standards to each group, then their numbers will be correctly weighted in the final score. It doesn't matter if one judge is strict and another lenient since in the end, it is the total score across all of the judges which we use to weigh the teams. But those judges who are too generous in their grading need to realize that they are flattening out the distinctions between the teams.

In our process, we tally the scores to get a straw poll vote of where the judges have aligned themselves. The judges are often surprised by their own overall scores on the different projects. Subjectively, we will weigh some elements more than others in forming our overall impressions of the team. But if we weigh each element equally, we may find a team did better overall without being the best in any particular category. Once we have a set of scores, we then discuss the presentations to make sure we are fully comfortable with where the collective tally breaks. In some cases, we end up with two teams, which are only a few points apart in scoring, well within the margin of error, and we have occasionally had absolute ties on the first stage of the scoring. Talking through the presentations may help us appreciate things we missed the first time through or think more deeply about potential problems in the team's approach. We often will then recalibrate our scores and retally the results.

Another reason why you always discuss the projects among the judges is because ultimately, we see winning and losing the competition as less important than the critique we are able to provide to each team on its work. Talking it through helps us to identify high and low points on each presentation, which will be discussed as we critique their work. Often, we will give secondary awards which foreground what we see as the biggest strength of each presentation, so that each team has some kind of moral victory in the final presentation. So, for example, we may take each of the criteria and decide which team performed best on each, giving out recognition for best visual design, most faithful to the original content, or most innovative approach to narrative.

When the students come back into the room, we go through each group in order offering our critiques of their strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, one tries to be tactful in describing flaws in the presentations but we also feel it is important for all participants to have a sense of how the judges responded to each presentation. Doing the critiques first keeps students focused on what we are saying since they are looking for clues into which group may have pleased the judges the most. Usually, we have one judge designated to lead the critique of each group with the others jumping in as needed to elaborate on key points. It is important for the students to hear how a range of different judges with different types of expertise and backgrounds responded to their projects.

Typically, we spend 5-10 minutes on each group; trying to be even in the amount of time we spend on each. At the end of the process, we then announce the superlatives assigned to each group and finally, the ultimate winner of the competition. In the MIT context, because of our association with Sony, each member of the winning team receives some moderately priced electronic gadget. All participants in the process receive a certificate and many years, Sony brings a book or video tied to one of their current releases for each participant. Teachers will need to think about what kind of prize is appropriate for their students - perhaps a gift certificate from a local merchant.

Asian Cinema and the Slash Subtext

When I opened up the arts section of the Straits Times last Saturday I was surprised to read a story there about Hong Kong Actor Ti Lung and his latest film --which has a strong slashy subtext. Here's what the paper reported:

In all of his showbiz career of over 30 years, Hong Kong actor Ti Lung is known for his alpha-male, authoritative roles. Fans will remember fondly his swordsman characters in 1970s martial arts movies like Duel of Fists and The New One-Armed Swordsman or his Golden Horse-winning role as a gangster leader in A Better Tomorrow.

But Ti, 60, as a gay cop?

In his first Singapore movie One Last Dance, directed by Brazilian director Max Makowski, the actor plays a roguish police captain who has a special relationship with an assassin named T., played by Francis Ng.

While there are no intimate scenes in the unconventional mafia tale to indicate homosexuality, Ti felt his character had to be irrationally in love with NG's philosophical killer or he would have arrested T for his crimes....

"Mind you, when we filmed this, Brokeback Mountain was not even out yet. I asked the director, but he didnt give a definite yes. If he had, I would have added more hints in my acting."

What slash does is make explicit the feelings that such films leave implicit? It is, as I suggest in Textual Poachers, about crossing the divide between the homosocial and the homoerotic.

As I read this story about Ti Lung, I was reminded of another story about the rise of Bhaisexuals in Hindi cinema from the Indian Express, which my former student, Parmesh Shahani, sent to me a while back. Here's part of what the story said:

Hindi cinema celebrated the metrosexuals (the smoothies of Dil Chahta Hai). It has paid homage to the retrosexuals (Abhishek Bachchan, with his rugged, awkward macho-ness in everything from Bunty aur Babli to Sarkar). Now, it is seeing the rise and rise of a new breed. Call them the Bhai- sexuals. Unlike the Gucci-sporting, new-age DCH boys, the Bhai-sexuals are macho, retro and raw. And though, like the retrosexuals, they'd rather be sporting the newest gun rather than the latest designerwear, there's one crucial difference that sets them apart.

The Bhai-sexual shares a chemistry with his best pal that often even overshadows his chemistry with his lady love.

Again, these sounds like the kinds of tough but sensitive males who have often been the center piece of slash fan fiction in the west. And indeed, as the story continues, it starts to spell out the kinds of hurt/comfort contexts that lead to some of the most angsty of fan fiction.

If you recall, arguably the highpoint of Lage Raho Munnabhai was not the gently budding Vidya Balan-Sanjay Dutt romance, but the emotional scene where a contrite Munna approaches Circuit to apologise to him for losing his temper. Heart-wrenching drama follows when Munna reveals that the loyal Circuit, who has resorted to kidnapping chefs in the middle of the night to source hakka noodles, had also nursed Munna back to health, cradling him on his lap so that he does not miss his mother.

Then there's Rang De Basanti, which can claim to a more than a few of its own bhai-sexual moments -- not only do Aamir Khan and his friends hang out shirtless in rough fields that set off their own rough and tough physiques, they also pick up the gun for each other and sacrifice their lives. Not since Jai and Veeru, who -- riding their scooter, singing Yeh dosti... -- immortalised male friendship in Hindi cinema forever has Bollywood taken up male bonding with as much fervour.

These celluloid pals do not shy away from being emotionally intimate. It's a trend that's described as "bromance", that is, friendship between brothers, or two heterosexual males or as a "male-ationship". The metrosexuals typically bonded over hair gels and conduct their relationships with both their men pals and their women pals with equal new-age ease. On the

other hand, there's nothing easy about the retrosexual... angst, fury and raging testosterone defines not just all his actions, but also his relationships.

Like the

Straits Times

writer, this report raises but then denies the possibility that this structure of male friendship may have emerged from a western source -- i.e. Brokeback Mountain . These writers use Brokeback to stand in for a more explicitly homoerotic relationship in films and instead pull towards the homosocial. Of course, it may be no accident that Brokeback Mountain had an Asian director, Ang Lee.

Our heroes are straight heterosexual males and Brokeback Mountain is not an inspiration for anybody yet. "Male bonding in our movies has to be taken at face value. There cannot be any homoerotic tinge to it. No Bollywood hero will ever risk his reputation by acting as a homosexual. Actors are very concerned about their reputation. The life span of an actor is too short for such risks," points out Gadhvi.

Instead, the reporter shows the continuities between the Bhai-sexual friendship and more classic representations of male-bonding in Indian cinema.

In many ways, the Bhai-sexual has always existed in Hindi films. While Sholay is a show-piece for the early Bhai-sexual, Yarana, Dostana and Amar Akbar Anthony are examples of films where full-bloodied heterosexuals who wouldn't know a metrosexual from a train station, matching steps with one another, and thinking nothing of falling into hard embraces in moments of high drama.

However, social observers do point to one difference. Whether is it Sangam, Yaarana, Dostana, Qurbani and, of course, Sholay, sacrifice has been the ultimate test and enduring hallmark of the male friendship in Bollywood. According to anthropologist Shiv Vishwanathan: "In the films of the '70s and '80s, the friends were condemned to sacrifice. It was almost a duty relationship. You either had to die for each other or give up your love for your best friend."

Not so, the new age friendship. The 21st century celluloid buddies know how to have a good time. They simply hang out and talk to each other, like the Dil Chahta Hai gang. "You can live for the new age friendship, you don't have to die for it. The punitive aspect of friendship is gone from Hindi cinema. It is now celebratory and light-hearted without being over intense or sacrificial in nature," adds Vishwanathan.

"A lot of the films that we've loved and watched have had male friendship as the eternal theme. There's something universally appealing about male bonding, one can connect with it very strongly," says director Rohan Sippy, son of Ramesh Sippy who created Bollywood's most famous friends, Jai and Veeru. "Everybody wants buddies like Jai and Veeru. Their relationship is playful, emotional, loyal and they're ready to give up everything for each other," adds Rohan. Both his movies Bluffmaster and Taxi 9-2-11 explore the friendships between Abhishek Bachchan and Riteish Deshmukh and Nana Patekar and John Abraham, respectively. For Rohan, the archetype of the friendship is classic, but the setting is modern. "The friendship is as unconditional as it was in the movies of the '70s, but it is packaged for a modern audience," he says.

So, slash may represent an important half-way point as countries around the world edge up to the sexual explicitness they associate with Brokeback Mountain. Implicitly or explicitly, they may be drawn towards the rough and tumble style of male friendship which inspires slash but leave it up to their viewers to connect the dots for themselves.

There's a whole world out there waiting for you to slash, my friends, and thanks to the (legal and illegal) global circulation of content, sooner or later these movies will be accessible to you. We've already seen the influence of anime and manga on American slash fan. What will happen when Bollywood and Singaporean films enter the mix?

Given the international readership this blog attracts, I'd be curious if readers have spotted other slashy films in your countries.

Get a (Second) Life!

Clay Shirky has been a longtime pundit about digital culture: sometimes he gets it right (or at least, more accurately, sometimes I agree with what he writes) and sometimes he doesn't. For example, he was one of the first journalists to really think hard about the emergence of participatory culture as something different from the same old consumer culture; he also took what I see as the wrong side of the debate with Scott McCloud about micropayments (though the jury is still out on that one.) I always respect what the guy has to say -- even if he tends towards the cynical side and I tend to the more optimistic. He is someone who asks the right questions -- even if he doesn't always come up with the right answers -- and that's all you can ask of anyone who writes regularly and sticks his neck out about emerging trends in a still developing medium. Lots of folks are dismissing Shirky right now without knowing the range of insightful and provocative essays he has posted in the past. Check out his homepage Agree with him, disagree with him -- as I said, I've done both through the years -- Clay Shirky's no idiot.

Right before Christmas, Shirky posted a critique of the media hype around Second Life, which has been stirring up a lot of fuss among my various friends and neighbors. The piece is worth reading as a corrective to some of the more breathless prose which claims that Second Life is "Web 3.0" and will totally change the world as we know it.

Basically, Shirky's arguments boil down to the following:

1.Claims about Second Life's user base have been dramatically overstated because the focus has been on the number of people who try out the multiverse rather than on those who return regularly. As he explains, "Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn't really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer."

2. He argues that the hype around Second Life simply repeats earlier waves of enthusiasm about virtual worlds, none of which have turned out to be the "next new thing" claimed for them by their most ardent supporters. He concludes, "If, in 1993, you'd studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you'd have a better grasp of online community today than if you'd spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City."

3. The hype about Second Life is emerging because tech reporters are young and have no sense of history, because virtual reality is easy to grasp compared to the complexities of social networks, because writing about SL still keeps the focus on content, and because so many powerful groups have a vested interest in sending out press releases about the cool project they are doing in Second Life.

Shirky concludes, "Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand....There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived."

This story has already generated some smart responses from people I know and trust. Here, for example, is my MIT colleague Beth Coleman:

Second Life may turn out to be the Friendster of the "metaverse"--the first to disseminate the signal strongly but also fast to disappear once the My Space of this format appears. Last winter there were 200,000 who visited SL. Today there are somewhere around 2 million who have at least stepped in to use the interface, to see for themselves what this is all about. WoW has already demonstrated a mass scale of technical application and popular interest for MMORPG. SL, Multiverse, and the growing numbers of virtual world platforms beg the question of future network use. It's not like real life. Not by a long shot. One is animating a proxy through multilayered terrains of information. Some of them might take the shape of cliché singles bars, but the procession toward ever more complex simulation in computing is there. Not every user can code, but certainly more users will learn to script (or edit video or stream media) as Flilckr and Youtube have made clear. It also seems incorrect not to recognize exponential user growth in regard to 3d virtual worlds. Let's not look at the U.S. for a moment but Asia, specifically the Korean Cyworld that is a 3D world massively used for social-networking in the way that My Space functions for American youth. The all-encompassing metaverse that Philip Rosedale promises Second Life will become may be a fiction of the CEO's own virtual world fantasy. The potential of 3D search engines do not trump text-based and 2D formulations. But it seems short-sited to says that 3D imaging and spatial representation do not open doors for emergent use of communications networks. At the very least, the qualities of 2D social networks are mutated, amplified, and animated by these real-time moving image worlds. VW platforms, including SL, can claim the following qualities:

1. Community building of social networks that reach on and offline

2. Communal projects that span systems designs to educational, business, and activist organization

3. Avatar proxies are not minor. Yahoo avatar, Wii's Miis, Facebook....every place where users are able to created multi-media profiles they do. The puppet show of virtual worlds speaks very strongly to a collective desire to play in this way.

We are still in the beta stage on this, a continuing beta from the 1990s I suppose, but the tipping point from niche to popular use seems to have arrived.

Here's danah boyd:

Lately, i've become very irritated by the immersive virtual questions i've been getting. In particular, "will Web3.0 be all about immersive virtual worlds?" Clay's post on Second Life reminded me of how irritated i am by this. I have to admit that i get really annoyed when techno-futurists fetishize Stephenson-esque visions of virtuality. Why is it that every 5 years or so we re-instate this fantasy as the utopian end-all be-all of technology? (Remember VRML? That was fun.)

Maybe i'm wrong, maybe i'll look back twenty years ago and be embarrassed by my lack of foresight. But honestly, i don't think we're going virtual.

There is no doubt that immersive games are on the rise and i don't think that trend is going to stop. I think that WoW is a strong indicator of one kind of play that will become part of the cultural landscape. But there's a huge difference between enjoying WoW and wanting to live virtually. There ARE people who want to go virtual and i wouldn't be surprised if there are many opportunities for sustainable virtual environments....

If you look at the rise of social tech amongst young people, it's not about divorcing the physical to live digitally. MySpace has more to do with offline structures of sociality than it has to do with virtuality. People are modeling their offline social network; the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical. In an environment where anyone _could_ socialize with anyone, they don't. They socialize with the people who validate them in meatspace. The mobile is another example of this. People don't call up anyone in the world (like is fantasized by some wrt Skype); they call up the people that they are closest with. The mobile supports pre-existing social networks, not purely virtual ones.

GSD&M thought leader Joel Greenberg spells out what matters to him about Second Life and does some pretty interesting analysis of the same numbers Shirky has been working from:

SL has two interesting charactistics: 1) SL is a community; until you start participating with other people, you haven't really experienced it to its fullest, and 2) Linden Lab does not spend money on traditional advertising, so much of the growth can be attributed to community marketing and PR.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Shirky's column has sparked a long overdue discussion about what Second Life is and why it matters which moves us beyond the first flirtations with virtual life and gets to the heart of the matter. I've written a lot here about Second Life, including describing in some detail my own first steps into this new terrain. There's a lot about Second Life that really fascinates me -- starting with Linden Lab's enlightened views about user-generated content as well as the range of different groups that are using Second Life as a site for running what I have described here in the past as thought experiments.

For me, Second Life is a powerful embodiment of what Yochai Benkler has been talking about in The Wealth of Networks: a place where commercial, educational, nonprofit, governmental, and amateur groups co-exist and interact. It is a playground where we can try on new identities, test new products and practices, explore new ways that core institutions might operate.

Second Life is NOT web 3.0.

Second Life is NOT the future of the web.

We will NOT abandon physical reality for virtual life.

Immersive realities are NOT the primary way we will interact with information environments in the future.

But it IS important as a social experiment -- even if the user numbers were in the tens or hundreds of thousands as opposed to the millions. This isn't about statistics; it's about cultural innovation and social experimentation. If Second Life didn't exist, we -- those of us who care about grassroots creativity -- would have to invent it because it is a vivid illustration of the trends towards participatory culture which are springing up all over the place.

Second Life isn't interesting to me because of how many people go there; it's interesting because of what they do when they get there.

I got asked the other day to predict which of the current hot new websites will survive a decade from now. The answer is probably none of them will survive in anything remotely like their present form. But, if I had to make a guess, I'd guess that Second Life will outlast YouTube and MySpace even though -- or maybe precisely because -- its user base is smaller.

We have seen rapid churn with social network sites; teens don't want to hang out where their older siblings hung out and they certainly don't want to hang out where their parents hung out. So, as long as MySpace gets defined around its teen user base, it will quickly be, as Clueless put it, "so-so twenty minutes ago." Social networking as a practice will continue and grow but MySpace is toast.

YouTube is going to face an uphill battle to make money for Google on the scale anticipated and almost every choice they make to generate revenue -- from charging subscriptions to incorporating advertising or selling content -- is going to alienate large chunks of its users. Some other site will offer the same services for less money and the amateur media makers whose culture is larger than YouTube will go to whichever media sharing site offers them the best deal.

Most multiplayer games will have a life-span of four or five years: sooner or later, the producers who are generating the content will run out of creative energy, will set the wrong policy, or will simply fail to keep up with their competitors, and they will lose their marketshare to the new game in town.

But Second Life may outlive them all for several reasons: people feel a deeper investment in Second Life as a community because they have built it in their own images, because they have invested time in constructing the physical artifacts and social processes which constitute this multiverse. The core users of Second Life will be there as long as Linden Lab is there and the folks at Linden Lab seem to have a pretty realistic understanding of what it takes to support the diverse kinds of communities who are embracing this technology.

I suspect Second Life's numbers will always be lower than those of World of Warcraft or its descendents: more people want to have master entertainers construct their fantasy lives for them than want to build them from scratch. I have been surprised by how many are trying Second Life -- suggesting that there may be some hunger out there for at least testing the waters with virtual reality -- but I am also surprised how intimidated even my MIT students are of trying to build something in virtual space. So, I don't know that this will represent the tipping point in terms of multiverses -- simply that it will be an important community that has the potential to sustain itself for an extended period of time.

Shirky's column has sparked an important conversation, has caused us all to catch our breath and examine our assumptions. For that, I am personally grateful, even if this is one of those times when I think he's probably more wrong than right.

I can't say the same about some of the company he is keeping. Shirky's article appeared on a site called Valleywag, which bills itself as a "tech gossip rag." Another Valleywag reporter, no doubt inspired by Clay's critique, decided to crash a press conference being held in Second Life and act, frankly, like a wild boar. Here's the reporter's own description of what happened:

The sex is less satisfying, the money meaningless, but in one regard, at least, Second Life has matched the real world. Political events in Linden Lab's overblown virtual environment are carefully controlled, lacking in authenticity, and mind-numbingly tedious. Valleywag sent along a video reporter to the opening session of Congress, or rather an online discussion of the day's momentous events in the virtual world. The event, sponsored by marketing consultancy, Clear Ink, and has-been computer maker, Sun Microsystems, was as sparsely attended as a New Hampshire at-home with a no-hope candidate. Those attendees not from the press were Second Life publicists making sure the participants stayed in their seats. So much like the meatworld. It's uncanny. Valleywag's reporter ran into trouble with the virtual world's flacks after he floated up and spoiled the photo-op by getting into the frame. "They were really freaking out. Dude, I was laughing so hard I was crying when they finally kicked me out." Well, at least someone enjoyed themselves.

Whatever the value of your criticism of Second Life may be, acting like a jerk in a virtual world is no different than acting like a jerk in the real world. This suggests the actions of someone who imagines virtual worlds as simply a playground where individuals can do anything they want and not expect any social consequences. It suggests the actions of someone who has contempt for anyone who takes what's going on in such a space seriously and wants to show his contempt by bearing his rump to the world. Here's hoping that we can debate the issues surround virtual worlds with a bit more civility and maturity in the future.

Singaporean Girls Gone Wild...

Singapore is so known for its work ethic and sense of decorum that I have joked off and on about marketing a series of videos of Singaporean Girls Gone Wild which consisted of school girls in uniforms throwing peanut shells on the floor of the Raffles Hotel bar with wild abandon before returning to studying for their exams. After all, one of the first things that I ever learned about this country was that the law specified that one could be thrashed with a bamboo cane for chewing gum in public. My first impression then was something like that planet in Star Trek: The Next Generation where one could be put to death for stepping on the grass. That said, spending time here has given me a much more nuanced picture of what lies behind those stereotypes and of the ways that such a society is confronting the potential anarchy being brought about by the new kinds of participatory culture being fostered on the web. When I was speaking at the Singaporean National Library, Dr. Tony Tan, my host, the former Deputy Prime Minister and current head of the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation, drew a comparison between the invention of movable type in the 15th century (and the print revolution that followed) and the invention of Movable Type (the bloging software) a few years ago and the profound impact it was having world wide. Dr. Tan argued that it would be impossible to hold onto old constraints on expression or to close off possible access to these new technologies, even if governments wanted to do so. Instead, they needed to find ways to help new bloggers develop a deeper understanding of their civic responsibilities.

Frankly, the government officials I have met in Singapore are better educated than anyone I can imagine in the Bush administration. Well, that's damning with faint praise, isn't it? Many of them have advanced degrees from elite institutions -- many of them have doctoriates -- and then approach problems with a calm and humane rationalism. They are both knowledgible and thoughtful about the issues they confront as they transition from an era where there is tight control over the press to one where there is broad democratic participation in the blogosphere.

What's Wrong with Singaporean Teen Bloggers?

What is clear from my many conversations here is that parents in Singapore as in other parts of the world worry about what young people are doing online. Their children are going places and doing things that were not part of their own childhood experiences and they are concerned about ways that these decisions may come back and hurt them later. As I have spoken to people here, three very distinct stories of youth "misbehavior" online have cropped up again and again as reference points for this conversation. I thought I would share them with you here because of the insights they offer into Singaporean culture and the ways that these technological changes are being understood in this country. Since two of them involve young female bloggers, these may be a truer picture of Singaporean Girls Gone Wild.

The first story involves Wee Shu Min, the teenaged daughter of a member of the Singaporean Parliament, who become the center of a national controversy about economic privilege and almost ended her father's political career because of something she had posted on her blog. Here's how the story began according to a news report on the CNN website:

When Wee Shu Min, the teenage daughter of a Singapore member of parliament stumbled across the blog of a Singaporean who wrote that he was worried about losing his job, she thought she'd give him a piece of her mind.

She called him "one of many wretched, undermotivated, overassuming leeches in our country" on her own blog and signed off with "please, get out of my elite uncaring face".

Wee was flamed by hundreds of fellow bloggers, but when her father Wee Siew Kim -- an MP in Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's constituency -- told a Singapore newspaper that "her basic point is reasonable", the row moved well beyond the blogosphere.

The episode highlighted a deep rift in Singapore society and was an embarrassment for the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) and prime minister Lee, who has made the reduction of the income gap one of the priorities of his new government.

The CNN story goes on to contextualize this controversy in terms of a growing public concern about income disparities in a country which generates the second largest per capita income in the world (after Japan). There is great suspicion here that moves towards a welfare state might undermine the country's work ethic so there are no government pensions or minimum wage laws though there are widespread educational benefits. The flame war that erupted around this teenage girl's blogs brought to the surface deeply buried class antagonisms with the youth, who was attending one of the country's elite schools, being compared with Marie Antoinette for what many saw as insensitive comments about the nation's underclass.

Part of what gave this story its sensationalistic qualities though was the idea that what this teenage girl wrote might be reflective of the views expressed in private by one of the nation's political leaders, an impression re-enforced by the father's attempts to defend his daughter's actions. A story on AsiaMedia quoted the father as saying: "As a parent, I may not have inculcated the appropriate level of sensitivity, but she has learnt a lesson."

The second story centers around a 19 year old female blogger who posts under the name Sarong Party Girl. Her posting of nude photographs of herself placed her at the center of a national controversy about exhibitionistic uses of digital technology and about sexual propriety among young women. Her user-name already seemed calculated to spark controversy.

According to the Wikipedia, Sarong Party Girl (or SPG) is a derogatory slang term used in Singapore and parts of Malaysia to refer to a young woman who "dresses and behaves in a provocative manner; and exclusively dates and prefers Caucasian men." The entry continues, "The stereotypical Sarong party girl has extremely tanned skin, a false foreign accent, and is provocatively dressed. Originally, the outfit of choice was thought to be a bikini/tank-top paired with a sarong, though that now exists only in the name. Many of them frequent clubs or nightspots that are popular with expatriate Caucasians in order to meet and form relationships with these men. Sarong party girls are known to prowl specific nightspots in Singapore along Boat Quay, Clarke Quay, Emerald Hill and City Hall, the classic place being the now defunct Carnegies at Far East Square."

So in choosing to call her blog, Sarong Party Girl, the youth was trying to reclaim a negative term which embodies an explosive mixture of sexual and racial transgression, while no doubt thumbing her nose at traditional sexual morality in her country. Interestingly, though, as much controversy centered around the decision of the Singapore Straits Times to report on the incident (and thus drive potentially much more traffic to her site) as on her decision to post the nude images and frank commentary. This suggests uncertainty about the public/private status of blogs and about the interface between centralized and participatory media.

The third incident involves blogger Gan Huai Shi, a 17-year old student, who was charged with seven counts of "promoting ill will" under Singapore's Sedition Act, for posting negative remarks about the country's largely Islamic Malay population. Each offense carries a potential punishment of up to three years in prison. Here's part of an editorial in the Straits Times referring to this and two other cases of young bloggers sparking race antagonism:

The Internet is not a personal space.

Yet those who air their diatribe do so in the belief that they are not only anonymous, but also that there are no rules and constraints. This perception is reinforced if site hosts and moderators fail in their duty to act, and if fellow netizens don't come down hard and fast on them.

There are thought to be more than one million active Internet users in Singapore, and the maths would suggest there are more people with the ability to do good and police the system than there are those who preach intolerance, ridicule and call others' beliefs into question.

So rather than question why it is that the authorities had to act, or the merits of which is the more appropriate law to use, or whether this is a prelude to a political clampdown, the Internet's cause will be better served if active users weigh in and do their own clamping down...

What these guys have done, as some have already suggested, is to give bloggers and chatrooms a bad name.

And if the community does not want to have Big Brother watching, then it's best that it does the watching itself.

In a society composed primarily of three major racial groups (The Chinese, the Indians, and the Malay) who have had some history of antagonisms, the Singaporean government officially promotes multiracial harmony. And thus the image of Singaporean young people freely posting anti-Islamic comments on their blogs provoked a very stern response from both the mainstream media and the national government.

As each of these examples suggest, the concern with transgression by youth bloggers (male and female) points to potential fault lines within the culture. The forms these fears take are culturally specific (as no doubt are the concerns that American parents have about what constitutes misconduct by youth on line -- whether read through the lens of the Post-Columbine controversies about violent video games or the more recent hysteria about sexual risks faced by young women on MySpace). Yet, in each case, these concerns translate into a more generalized anxiety about the risks young people face as they enter into the digital world. The young blogger becomes a figure of freedom and license, an embodiment of the breakdown of the old order as average citizens gain the ability to express their thoughts and fantasies through these powerful new communication platforms. We can't begin to address those generalized fears about youth and digital media until we understand the ways they get linked to deeper and often implicit cultural and political anxieties.

For a sense of what a good Singapore blogger looks like, one need look no further than the Jan. 8 edition of The Straits Times, which is running a series called "Piecing Together the Digital Native." (Marc Prensky, are your ears burning?) There's a full color graphic of the digital native, depicted as a tribal chieftan, complete with body and face paints and a quiver of arrows, but also depicted with a mouse hanging as a talisman on his shark tooth necklace, and with an ear and mouthpiece from a cellphone wrapped around his face. The headline on the story tells it all: "Business-Saavy Kids Turn Blogs Into E-Shopping Outlets. They Find Ready Customers Among Fellow Youngsters."

To Hell and Back...

If the notions of what constitute being "bad" are culturally specific, then so are the fantasies about what happens to people who are bad. All of this was brought home to me Sunday when I paid a visit to Haw Par Villa, a distinctly Singapore attraction owned by the Tiger Balm Company. For a small fee, you can enter the 10 Courts of Hell: a series of garishly colored plaster statues from the 1930s, represent the harsh punishments awaiting men and women alike for their transgressions (as understood within classical Chinese mythology). So, by way of illustration, here are some offenses and the punishments they bear:

Disrespect for Elders -- heart cut out.

Tomb Robbers - tied to red hot copper piller

Stealing -- frozen into blocks of ice

Misuse of books, possession of pornographic materials, wasting food -- body sawed into two

rumors -- tongue pulled out.

driving someone to their death -- thrown into wok of boiling oil

cheating during examinations -- intestines and organs pulled out

And so on. All of these punishments are depicted with blood-gushing everywhere and piles of dismembered limbs and decapitated heads. Trust me, I haven't encountered much in American popular culture which is as vivid in its depictions of mutilation and impailment.

Here are some images taken by my colleague William Uricchio when he was there last year.

This image depicts prostitutes drowning in a pool of "unclean" blood.

This man refused to pay his taxes and is being pounded by a stone mallet.

It is hard to imagine a more grisly form of public amusement, yet many Singaporeans tell me that they went to this park regularly as young people and that it played a central role in their moral instruction. American discourse about media violence assumes that young people identify with those who commit violence; this attraction, on the other hand, assumes that young people identify with those who are being punished for their transgresions and may change their ways if they see enough blood and guts, decapitated limbs, and impailed bodies. Well, it's a theory...

Elsewhere, there are a series of scenes which represent various virtues and vices: the images here are fascinating because of their surreal fusion of the human and animal, folk tradition and images of the modern world as a debauched utopia.

This debased and lustful pig represents a character from the Chinese classic, Journey to the West.

And this is one of the many images which depict the sinful nature of western dress and modern life -- jazz clubs in particular take a drubbing in these exhibits.

And consider this image of the lustful Spider demons who have taken human female form in order to deceive the unsuspecting man. What William's picture doesn't show is a cloak drapped over in the corner which is red and white checked. All I could see was Spider-Man's costume! You get some feel for at least the coloring of the cloak from the halter tops these Singaporean Girls Gone Wild are wearing.

Again, one gets a sense that one could transgress a lot of social taboos by cloaking these sensationalistic depictions of modern life with an aura of moral instruction and spiritual uplift. In the name of redemption, we can look at men and women groping each other or naked breasts. The same of course was true in the western world during the Silent era where nudity was not uncommon in the films of D.W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMile as long as the goal of the film was to bring the viewer closer to that old time religion.

The Price of Transgression

Of course, these same anxieties about transgression and punishment crop up elsewhere in popular culture. For example, I picked up a DVD of what has been billed as the first Singapore produced horror film, The Maid. I have not yet had a chance to watch but I found the description of the film illuminating:

Filipino Maid, Rosa, arrives to work in Singapore during the Lunar Seventh Month, or the Hungry Ghost Festival -- believed to be a time when the Hell gates open. Life turns into a nightmare where Rosa unwittingly breaks the rules of the Month, tumbling into the world of the dead and glimpsing strange apparitions at night. To keep her job, she has to stifle her screams and fears.

I can't begin to unpack the mixture of anxieties which are bound up in this story, even understood in its broad outlines on the DVD box description: concerns about immigration, the breaking of traditional taboos, the relations of servants to their employers, and so forth. I am told that there have been a series of disturbing news reports in the Singapore press about servent girls being sexually and physically abused by their masters, which could account for the themes of this work.

Let me close with another symptom of the ways Singapore is adjusting to the consequences of media change. The elevators at my hotel in the Raffles complex advertises that one can go to the in-house spa for special treatments designed to help those who have overused Blackberries, cell phones, and other mobile technologies. The image of people wracking in pain because they have spent too much time text messaging and being nursed back to health at the spa represents a particularly adult anxiety about the dangers of embracing new media technologies.

Oh, by the way, when I wandered by an ice cream parlor at the local mall, I couldn't help but notice that they were selling Seaweed Washabi flavored soft serve ice cream, a dish which to my western taste buds sounds as close to a combination of the freezing and burning hells depicted at Har Paw Villa.. :-)

An Aside:

It seems appropriate in a post about horror and the internet to end with some good news. Those of you who have been following this blog regularly know of my strong opposition to the Deleting Online Predators Act. The new year has brought good news: the Act seems to have lost steam as some of its key supporters were defeated in the midterm elections. In any case, the bill will have to be reintroduced in the House since it failed to pass the Senate. There's a better report than I can offer right now of what happened over at PBS Teacher Source. The reporter is a bit more optomistic than I am that the bill is really and truly dead. I don't think Republicans have a monopoly on moral panic and censorship. Indeed, many Democrats in the House supported this bill the first time through and might rally around it again if it looked like it would give Hillary Clinton cover with the Security Moms and Cultural Conservatives. But let's celebrate our minor victories where we can!

Jenkins-Isms?

As I mention the other day, I am currently posting this blog from Singapore. I was invited here as a guest of the Singapore Press Holdings Foundation which hosted a public lecture at the National Library's Drama Center on Friday night which was attended by some of the country's political, economic, and intellectual leaders and was designed to focus public debate around the issue of Media in Transition. The talk has received enormous interest here -- I think I have been interviewed at this point by pretty much all of the English language media in Singapore. (I am starting to feel like Noam Chomsky!) The first interview came on my first morning of the country and went up on line almost immediately. It was with AsiaOne and resulted in this story. They asked for my photograph, having no time to get a photographer over to my hotel, and wondered if they could take some images from my blog. I was amused to see that they went with a picture of my Mii, created by Alice Robison, and the photograph of me reading a Polish comic book outside the Warsaw train station. In this context, the Mii looks a little bit like the kind of artist renderings a police might circulate about a crime suspect but I suppose it does drill home my attitude towards game and digital technology.

The article ran with the provocative headline, "The Youtube of Tomorrow Will Come from Asia," and discusses in some depth my interest in the flow of Asian produced goods into the west and my belief that Singapore as a nation may be posed to become a key broker in that relationship.

On Saturday, I opened up the Straits Times over breakfast and found a full page article about my talk, including a side bar on "Jenkins-isms" which included the following tidbit about my recent visit to Teen Second Life:

"Prof Jenkins himself went into Second Life and met a young girl from Mexico City. Despite their age gap, they could talk freely about many things."

So, Mariel, it looks like our encounter the other day is making international news!

It's pretty scary when people start naming "isms" after you!

I have also found this rather interesting blog post from a Singaporean who attended the public lecture and who describes some of the kinds of questions and concerns that got raised from the audience:

I was amused to hear about the story of how one lady was not too happy with her daughter studying before the exams with her iPod plugged in. Her daughter was actually listening to her own lecture notes, but hey, when I was studying, the radio or Walkman was always on full blast. This is what we define as The Generation Gap.

But I was not amused was when this PR practitioner stood up and said most of the online stuff that people are crazy over is "rubbish" to her.

Actually her point was that it was difficult for her to find useful stuff on the Internet apart from traditional media content (like a PDF of a print magazine interview), and she couldn't get the hang of being a constant web community. It's this sort of dismissal that will cause the older folks to be blindsided when the carpet is suddenly pulled from under their feet and they realize the old media ground no longer exists.

On Sunday, there was a second, longer profile of Prof Jenkins in the Straits Times. written by Cheong Suk-Wai, a high profile Singaporean journalist. I was really impressed with the quality of the reporting here: she manages to convey some of the core concerns animating my work and also to capture something of my personality as well. There are a few glitches -- most notably, she took my estimate that this blog gets 4000 visitors per week (more or less) and wrote that it had gotten 4000 hits since June.

I am also struggling with her side comment that I speak in a "chirpy rapid-fire throttle." I will certainly buy rapid fire throttle -- I do talk way too fast, just trying to fit in everything I want to say, but I never thought of myself as "chirpy" before.

The portrait captures both my optimism and the concern that we need to work together to confront some of the challenges and risks represented by this moment of media transition. A heavy focus here was on the work we are doing with MacArthur on new media literacies and with my own experiences raising a son during the digital age. My southern background -- described her as "homespun" -- seems to strike a note in this piece which is at once exotic (a world not often encountered here) and familiar (with its stress on family and religion.) This is perhaps the first article about me that talks about being raised a Southern Baptist by a mother who ran our church's vacation Bible school.

In addition to the public lecture, "From YouTube to YouNiversity: Learning and Playing in An Age of Social Networks," I did a workshop with employees of the various newspapers represented by my host, the Singapore Press Holdings, which centered around the relationship of old and new media as it impacts news and journalism. Since this talk was off the record, I can't really share with you what they asked or what I said. But much of what I conveyed drew upon some speculations I put together along time ago for Technology Review and for the MIT Communications Forum. Anyone who wants to read my thoughts on the future of news would do well to start with these two articles, now somewhat out of date, though many of the same issues remain.

One journalist said that Singapore was a great country which suffered because it was in a "shabby neighborhood." A central theme of my remarks had to do with the ways that geographic location might be playing a less central role in the production and circulation of news in the future. So, in 2001, I wrote that the American tradition of local newspapers might give way -- was indeed already starting to give way -- to a culture centered around national papers. More and more Americans get their news from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor or USA Today, all of which are essentially national rather than local or regional newspapers. Many techies still read the San Jose Mercury online, both because it was one of the first online newspapers and because it has unique access to developments in Silicon Valley and on Sandhill Road. I personally get my national news from the Washington Post and my international news from the New York Times. I know many Americans who prefer to read about Iraq and the War on Terror through the British media because they don't trust how the American trust has handled this story.

Can we imagine, then, other newspapers developing specializations which play on their core competencies and which thus attract readers nationwide? Could the Boston Globe, say, build on its access to leading colleges and universities by becoming in effect a center of excellence (or something like the journalistic equivalent of a magnet school) focused on covering Education? Could the LA Times beef up its coverage of entertainment news and start to attract nationwide readers online? What happens next -- I am seeing students in my dorm who continue to read the online editions or listen to the digital radio broadcasts from journalists in their home country. And the same thing is happening to readers of small town newspapers in this country when they go away to college.

In such a world, is it far fetched to imagine that a publication like the Straits Times, which does a first class job covering developments in Asia (both political and cultural), might become the newspaper of choice within the Chinese Diaspora or might even attract the interest of pop cosmopolitans in the west who want to read more about anime, manga, Jpop, Bollywood, and other forms of Asian popular culture or the Asian business scene?

In such a scenario, newspapers as a medium will survive but there's no guarantee that any particular paper will survive. Some newspapers will wither and die in such a world, just as we've seen over the past several decades, the consolidation of rival newspapers in major cities. How many American cities still have competing dailies? Surprisingly few. So, the next step may be the consolidation of publications within the Northeastern Megalopolis, say, so that papers in Boston and Providence start to fold into each other. Those newspapers which survive will be those which know how to identify and serve specific interests not just for their local readership but for interested consumers nationally or even globally.

All of this is of course totally speculative. I am channeling my inner McLuhan here! You can just chalk it up as another example of Jenkins-ism run amok!

An aside: While I am in Singapore, my name seems to be cropping up in relation to a controversy in the American gaming community. Penny Arcade's Tycho ran a piece last week discussing a new documentary, Moral Kombat, which centers around video game violence. I gather that the film's trailer is pretty sensationalistic (though I have had trouble accessing it here in Singapore). As Tycho notes, "I sincerely doubt the tone of the piece matches this trailer, given some of the participants - for example, I don't think that Henry Jenkins would be party to a hysterical dialogue, even in an attempt to tame it."

Thanks, Tycho for the vote of confidence. I haven't seen the film yet myself so I can't guarantee what its contents actually look like. I have been snookered before by producers who seemed earnest and then ambushed me. See the article in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers about my experience on Donahue. And there was the guy who signed me up for an interview and then ended up confessing mid-interview that he had lost his son to the evils of gaming: actually, his son was a national CounterStrike champion but the father couldn't accept the place of computer games in his son's life. Needless to say, that was not a fun interview from that point forward and the final film -- which will remain nameless here (primarily because I've blocked it out) -- ended up having a major ax to grind.

But my sense is that Spencer Halprin, the producer of this film, really wanted to get out both sides of the argument. He spent time following around Jack Thompson and hopefully gave the old buzzard enough rope to hang himself with. And he asked me some pointed but thoughtful questions, giving me a chance to spell out my arguments for why the links between video games and real world violence have been over-stated. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the finished product has the same reasonable tone and rational perspective as the interview I did with the producer several years ago. If I get an advanced peek at the work, I will certainly share my impressions here.

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part Two)

Over the past six months, I have been closely following the debates regarding the Deleting Online Predators Act. danah boyd and I issued a collective statement at the beginning of the summer based on our research on social networks and participatory culture. I also ran a post here describing some of the ways that banning youth from accessing MySpace and other social network sites in schools and public library might slow the potential use of blogging and other network software for pedagogical purposes. Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part series focused on NetFamilyNews and its editor, Anne Collier. Collier's site has helped parents address their fears about MySpace and has kept all of us on top of the latest developments regarding governmental policies that might restrict young people's access to online space. These policies, and the fears that motivate them, play an important role in today's installment.

Many parents express an anxiety that they can not realistically control the flow of media into their homes, let alone know what their young people are doing when they are outside of their supervision. How would you respond to that concern?

I understand that concern and the frustration many parents have about diminishing control over what their children are exposed to. It isn't just parents who are experiencing diminishing control. Schools, corporations, and governments at all levels of society worldwide are too. This is an unnerving, fascinating shift we're experiencing, and I think it's calling upon all of us to think it through together out loud, bringing a whole lot of skill sets into the discussion. Because the situation seems to be requiring us to figure it out together as we go along. Problems in a participatory medium like Web 2.0 are calling for participatory solution development.

At the family level, as I suggested above, the life and tech skills of parents and kids are both needed to find solutions to Net-related problems. In schools, challenges involving defamation or cyberbullying in blogs or social sites need the best thinking of a bunch of people - students, administrators, counselors, network administrators, school-safety experts, teachers, and sometimes First Amendment legal advisers and law enforcement people. In a way, that's really exciting. It used to be that school-safety people, techies, and counselors, for example, had their spheres and hardly ever talked, much less hammered out solutions together. Now the pooling of those areas of expertise is being demanded, and I can't imagine that there won't be some creative and very positive outcomes because of it. Think, for example, about what we're all going to be learning about free-speech rights. Maybe not since the Constitutional Convention has the First Amendment been such a prominent topic in American schools!

Then I look at what's happening in other parts of the world where people are using the participatory Web. I just blogged about a report in The Guardian that, even though the Iranian government "remains a staunch opponent of Internet freedoms ... Farsi has made it into the top 10 languages on the Net." There are 70,000-100,000 active blogs in Iran, The Guardian article said. Then there's the social site ChinaKids with 800,000 registered preteen users and sponsored by the youth wing of the Chinese Communist Party. The Wall Street Journal reported that the site encourages kids to speak

out, "sometimes against authority"! The question of how to control the flow of media into homes, schools, cybercafes, and kids' mobile phones is being eclipsed by what to do about the media that flows out from those places and devices!

You have readers from around the world. What similarities and differences do you see in the concerns raised by parents in different parts of the world?

I do have readers in more than 50 countries, but I don't get email from many readers outside North America, interestingly - only some in the UK. So I mostly rely on English-language news-media coverage of technology in other countries to know what the general concerns are. It does appear that parents' concerns are fairly universal, but there are degrees of differences. For example, European parents seem to be less concerned than American parents about blocking nudity and more concerned about hate speech on the Web. But cyberbullying is a big issue everywhere. In the UK, Europe and Asia, so far it has been happening more on mobile phones than in IM and social Web sites, as we're seeing here. People are being impersonated and defamed in social sites everywhere. I did hear from a colleague in Portugal about harassment in a US-based social site popular there, one case involving a co-worker and another a teenager whose dad contacted him for help. Someone who said he was a teenager in India emailed me recently about his concern that he was accessing porn too much online, that it would hurt his future prospects. I've seen and linked to news reports of "videogame addiction" in South Korea and counseling centers established to help addicted players. Just a few examples.

One thing's for sure: Social networking sites and all the good and bad happening in them are certainly international. India has nearly a dozen social-networking sites and 1.2 million bloggers (compared to China's 19.9m, Japan's 10m, and the US's 50m), India's Economic Times reports; Japan's Mixi recently had a $1.8 billion IPO; Cyworld has saturated the teen and 20-something market in South Korea and its diaspora, so it launched a US version this past summer; LunarStorm reached the saturation point in Sweden (reportedly 90% of Swedish h.s. students) and launched a UK version - and on and on. So all the stuff that's causing worries here in the US, from bullying to piracy to PC security, is causing similar ones in other countries.

You've written a book specifically addressing adult concerns about MySpace. Why do you think social network sites like MySpace have sparked such anxiety? How real are the dangers that are being claimed?

For grownups, MySpace kind of came out of nowhere. It wasn't just for teenagers, of course (only around 20% of its users were teens), but to any parent who knew about it, it was a teenage thing, and my guess is teenagers weren't inclined to tell their parents about this new hangout if they didn't have to. So I don't think it was really on the radar for parents until it was all over the news media as a dangerous place where "predators" could contact their kids. An AP story out of Connecticut last February reported that "at least seven" girls 12-16 had been "sexually assaulted by men they met through the popular Web site MySpace." As far as I could tell following the news coverage closely, parents were hearing nothing about MySpace or social networking that wasn't at least negative, and some of it was really scary. It was that combination of a totally new thing adults knew virtually nothing about and very negative news coverage that sparked such anxiety, I

think. Then, too, there was the '06 election; politicians stood to benefit from saying they would act on those fears. It was, you might say, a "perfect storm" of parental-concern creation. By May, when our publisher, Peachpit Press, asked us to write the book ( My Space Unraveled ), there simply was no balance to the public discussion. We wanted to offer some balance - share the views of teens, researchers, children's advocates, and law enforcement people who understood social networking; encourage parents to check MySpace out themselves with simple step-by-step instructions; and explain the actual risks and the research.

How real are the dangers? There are dangers in social sites for out- there, risk-seeking people just as there are for them in "real life." As Janis Wolak, one of the authors of both of UNH's studies about child online victimization, told me last spring, "Basically, what puts kids at risk is when they talk about sex with people they meet online, and the vast majority of them don't get involved in that kind of situation." The first study was the widely misrepresented one about "one in five children" being sexually solicited online that, when actually read, said that "none of the solicitations led to an actual sexual contact or assault" and many of those solicitations came from other teens. The second study found the number of solicitations had gone down, to one in seven, but - though published this past summer - the survey was conducted before social networking took off. So even the second study from the Crimes Against Children Research Center at UNH wasn't about social networking. What these researchers have found in other studies, though - as Janis indicated - is that it's the young people responding to and seeking out sexual contacts with strangers who are at risk.

Most of the research we have so far - or the most publicized research - is about exploitation of online kids by adults. That's important research to have, but it's only part of the picture. We know almost nothing yet about child and teen behavior on social sites, good and bad, or about the impact of online socializing, media-sharing, social-producing, or creative networking. In our book I call it "collective self-expression," this social aspect of all the mashing-up and remixing that's going on with digital media, and I think it's fascinating. I think it's kind of in its infancy, and we have so much to learn about and from it. In any case, a much more complete picture is needed before any conclusions can possibly be drawn, I feel.

But I digress. ;-) There are other "dangers," depending on a person's definition. Certainly some parents would define exposure to nudity or sexually suggestive content as a danger, and there is definitely greater risk of that than sexual predation in social sites. MySpace says it's deleting x-rated content as it finds it, and it has both scanning technology and staff dedicated to finding and deleting it, but users are posting and finding it. The general Web itself, though, is known to have much more hard-core content than anything I've seen on MySpace, if kids are seeking it out.

The risks that I suspect will affect most young social networkers, though, fall under the very large category of bullying, or social cruelty, which parents and kids have probably always dealt with and always will. Since school social life has moved online, so have bullying, gossip, harassment, etc., and they can be particularly insidious online because the behavior can go on 24x7 and be anonymous. Kids and teens often don't think about the implications of their actions because that part of the adolescent brain, the prefrontal cortex, is still in development, so they can impulsively post text and other media about themselves and others and not be able to control the outcome (see my comment above about the teenage girl emailing sexually explicit photos of herself to a boyfriend). Digital media, parents too need to know, can be cut and pasted into Web pages, attached to IMs and emails, and shared on file-sharing networks - they usually can't be taken back. This, to me, is a real risk that I've been telling parents about in NetFamilyNews for years.

Your site monitors legislation designed to "protect" youth from various perceived dangers of the new media landscape. What do you see as the most pressing trends in this area as we enter 2007?

Better-written laws that reflect understanding of the Internet and its users! Most disturbing to me was the now-defunct Delete Online Predators Act, written before hardly any research had been done on the impact of the social Web on the people it was purportedly written to protect.

The metaphor that occurred to me as I was writing a chapter of our book was Penn Station in New York. A tourist walks into that giant, confusing, fast-paced, populated space at rush hour and feels a sudden urge to look for the nearest exit. That's most adults' first experience of MySpace. But like a MySpace user going straight to his or her page, a commuter just heads to his usual platform, gets on the train and goes home. He doesn't remotely see what the tourist finds so daunting. This is changing now, I think, but when we were working on the book last summer, the tourists were in charge of the entire public discussion; legislation was being written by the tourists! For a balanced picture and sound solution development, we've got to have the commuters' perspective too, I think.

Some parents argue that when in doubt, they should simply prohibit social networking sites. What's wrong with this approach? What do you see as positive about social networking sites?

I don't think prohibition is possible, at least it'd be even harder now and with the Internet than when it was given a serious try in the 1920s and '30s. I talk about this above - it's too easy for kids to "go underground" online, with all the free accounts available to them in sites parents have never heard of, proliferating wired and wireless access points, and new Net-enabled products constantly arriving on store shelves.

We're only just beginning to see the positives, with research like that funded by the MacArthur Foundation. But I think we'll discover many positive developments involving digital media and socializing online. I think of how the Rock for Darfur profile got started on MySpace (see this on "Powerful Change Agents ); of a woman I just met in an airport whose teenage granddaughter first started publishing her poetry on MySpace and has since won a prize for her work; of the ski videos my son shoots, edits, and posts at Newschoolers.com and YouTube.com; of the html and other software code kids are learning while embellishing their pages in social sites; of the youth social activism being fostered at YouthNoise.com; of all the future professional writers who got their start vying for and trying to hold their peers' attention in their daily blogging; of the garage bands that wouldn't otherwise be finding fans and signing record deals.

I often receive letters expressing concern about addiction to digital media. Is this a realistic concern and if so, what steps should parents take if they fear that their teen may be addicted to games, social networks, or other digital media?

I'm not really qualified to answer that, but the question of whether there is such a thing as Internet addiction is getting more and more attention in the medical field (and coverage in the news media). In November the Washington Post took an in-depth look at the subject , reporting that an international neuropsychiatric medicine journal published a study that "claimed to be the first large-scale look at excessive Internet use," and "the American Psychiatric Association may consider listing Internet addiction in the next edition of its diagnostic manual." I just talked with a 16-year-old in New York State who loves playing World of Warcraft (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and says he spends 3 hours a night on school nights and 5 a day on weekends playing it, but - from communicating with both him and his librarian mom (who sounds like a great mom) - it doesn't sound like he's addicted. His mother says she's not thrilled by the amount of time he spends in WoW and his grades have gone down a bit, so there will probably be some repercussions, but there are things about his experience with the game that she likes too.

"Game addiction" is coming up more and more. South Korea opened its first game-addiction treatment center in 2002, and the Washington Post reported last June that the country had just launched a game addiction hotline. Europe's first game addiction clinic reportedly opened last summer in Amsterdam (here's an item I ran on it last June last June ).

How much should parents know about the online lives of their youth? Is there a point where adult supervision becomes intrusive?

I do think parents need to know enough about the online part of their children's lives to feel assured that it's safe and reasonably constructive. The best gauge is probably how much parents feel they need to know about their kids' offline social lives. The online part is just as individual. And it changes as young people mature, right? The responsibility for staying safe and assessing risk increasingly shifts from parent to child as the latter grows; that's no different in their online lives, I'd say.

I think there can be a point where adult supervision becomes intrusive, but it's different for every child. Some parents seem to want to remove all risk from their teenagers' lives. So - having heard from a couple of researchers that risk assessment is one of the primary tasks of adolescence and having quoted them in our book - I later asked a prominent pediatrician what he thought about this risk- removal tendency, and he very definitely said we're doing our children a disservice if we don't let them do that assessment work that helps develop their brains.

Much of the legislation that seeks to "protect" youth gets argued on the basis of protecting childhood innocence and yet gets applied to regulating the conduct of adolescents. What role should an understanding of child development play in developing meaningful response to the online lives of our offspring?

My co-author Larry Magid recently quipped that the Delete Online Predators Act was more like the Delete Online Kids Act - in the sense that it would've done nothing to "delete" predators but rather focused on banning kids from social sites in schools and libraries. The legislation that Sens. McCain and Schumer just announced they would be introducing this year is clearly aimed at keeping out predators, because it would require sex offenders to register email addresses and other online contact information in addition to offline data such as phone numbers. This makes sense if it succeeds in extending existing child-protection law into cyberspace. It seems based on what is already known and understood, but I still think more child-development expertise needs to be folded into the public discussion and lawmaking. These have been dominated so far by law enforcement and research on criminal behavior online. There are some wonderful cops out there doing fine child-protection and online-crime-prevention work, but we do badly need to broaden and balance the discussion. For example, state attorneys general have called for age verification of minors in social-networking sites, but they haven't seemed inclined to entertain a full discussion about the implications for children's privacy, and the subject of social networking became so negative and associated with predators late last year that social-networking companies were reluctant to take any position on best practices that might counter-balance politically based regulatory efforts.

"The Family's CTO": An Interview with Net Family News's Anne Collier (Part One)

I've spent a fair amount of time in this blog talking about the challenges of educating the next generation of youth so that they acquire the social skills and cultural competencies needed to become a full participant in the emerging media culture. Much of this discussion inevitably centers around what happens in school-based or after-school media literacy programs. But, as I wrote in Technology Review some years ago, media literacy begins in the home. Parents have an essential role to play in helping their young people make sense of the new media landscape and giving them the ethical foundations they need to make meaningful decisions when they go on line. Unfortunately, we offer parents very little guidance on how to perform those roles. Indeed, most of the advice literature can be reduced to a simple message: the less media your kids consume, the better off they are. I don't think this is very good advice for a number of reasons: it reduces media consumption to a social problem rather than recognizing the pedagogical benefits of actively participating in media culture. Such advice, which often talks about media in terms of "screen time," produces enormous anxieties, anxieties which in turn get fed by sensationalistic news reports, shoddy research, and culture war rhetoric from political leaders, until parents are left terrified of this online world that they often know little about and totally uncertain where to turn for thoughtful advice. I often speak to groups of MIT alum as I travel around the country and inevitably, no matter what the topic of my talk is, the questions circle around the anxieties these highly educated and thoughtful adults feel about their children's relaitons to mass and digital media. In many cases, even a little bit of information will calm their fears and offer them another way of thinking about these issues. One of the best places for parents to turn for information about the world young people are encountering and creating for themselves online is a site called NetFamilyNews.com. Here's how the site describes its beat:

* Online safety and privacy news and tools

* New technologies and Web resources for kids

* Research about the impact of digital media on kids

* Legislation affecting children's online experience

* School and library Net-use policy

* How Web-literate kids, parents, and teachers are using the Internet.

Today and tomorrow, I am going to be sharing an interview with Anne Collier, who identifies herself as a journalist and children's advocate. Collier offers a sensible middle ground perspective on the issues which concern contemporary parents: she recognizes both the risks and potentials of these new media, helping parents to see past the sensationalism and focus on the matters they need to really be concerned about. Collier also recently published a significant book dealing specifically with social network sites and young people, MySpace Unraveled: What It Is and How to Use it Safely, and so many of my questions here are designed to draw her out about the specific issues surrounding children's involvement with Web 2.0.

I am excited to call this important online resource to the attention of this blog's readers. I hope you enjoy her down to earth perspective on youth and media as refreshing as I do.

What led you to create Net Family News? What needs do you think it fills for your readers?

A couple of colleagues actually thought of the idea of a monthly email newsletter for parents in mid-'97 and asked me to write it but lost interest in the project after a while and moved on. I felt strongly it needed to continue because it was the only "community newspaper" I knew of serving an increasingly important interest community, so I renamed the newsletter NetFamilyNews, made it a weekly, and incorporated it as a nonprofit organization in '99. Later I added a daily blog and RSS feed to increase accessibility. But it was really just a blog before there were blogs - annotated links to news of tech-parenting relevance.

As for needs being filled: NFN is a news filter for busy parents, educators, children's advocates, etc. I feel it's helpful for people working directly with tech-literate kids to know what's going on "out there," have a sense of context and maybe solidarity. It's almost a cliché now that young people are more tech-literate than their parents. That's true in many cases, but it's also true, and apparently less obvious, that adults and young people use the same technologies differently, and adult Net users make incorrect assumptions about teen Net use. IM at the office is a different experience than IM among middle schoolers. So all these teen tech "anthropology" stories in newspapers and magazines around the world about how teenagers are using Lunarstorm, Bebo, MySpace, Cyworld, IM, mobiles, There.com, and World of Warcraft are, I hope, frequent reminders of and insights into a perspective that can help adults intelligently negotiate this part of parenting and policymaking.

In cases where parents are intimidated by child tech literacy, information is empowering. When I started doing this I saw parents as a "silent majority" in a vital public discussion. I don't think that has changed much, actually. They're still a silent majority, and people are writing laws that would affect their children, the implications of which I think neither the legislators nor the constituents fully understand. So, I figured, people need information before they can have a voice and become active participants, and parents are essential parties to this particular discussion. So "community news" was a start. The next step was our forum, at the moment called BlogSafety.com (we're working on a more enduring name), where people could talk about all this publicly at their convenience. I wrote the mission statement for it back in 1998 but couldn't find funding until social-networking sites saw too that parents needed a place to air their concerns and get answers other than their customer- service departments.

How well do you think the mainstream media covers the issues which concern parents about Web 2.0? What do you gain by addressing these issues through the web?

I think the mainstream media, particularly the big names and mostly print (but also some broadcast) - the New York Times, the Associated Press, USATODAY, the Boston Globe, Business Week, WSJ, NPR, the BBC, etc. - have been doing a great job of covering Web 2.0 developments but not so much Web 2.0 where youth is concerned. I try to alert parents to the implications for kids and families of what tech journalists cover. For example, the Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry recently took a thoughtful look at virtual communities as another kind of "third place," or hang out, as first considered by Prof. Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. Jason wasn't writing about what these places mean to teenagers, but I thought parents might be interested in a piece about how important they have long been to people of all ages (online hanging out is really not a big leap), so I linked to it. That's just one example. There are zillions of topics - recent ones include reports and press releases all over the Web about new social-networking sites and "niches"; a New York Times report on how police are incorporating social sites into their investigative work; coming state and federal about barring sex offenders from social sites; the BBC on how a third of 8-to-13-year-olds in the UK already swap tunes on their phones ; and MTV's "The N," mobile social site Mbuzzy.com, and a market research firm teaming up to turn teen users into "a panel of 10,000 young people for immediate feedback about their lifestyles as well as network programming, advertising, events and other information."

As for what I gain from this project: I'm basically a beat reporter, given (or choosing) an interesting assignment and getting increasingly interested and invested in it as time goes on. Youth and the Internet is the assignment of a lifetime. I got my MA in East Asian studies, focusing on China, and did some TV and print reporting from Asia - which would've been a fascinating, beat right now - but in the early '90s the story that I found truly compelling was the Web. It seemed clear to me it was going to be a story about every part of life - "human interest," education, law, media, business, politics.... I wanted to follow this story for the long term in a way that might be useful to other people too.

Much of the existing advice literature for parents implies that the best advice is to minimize the amount of media children and youth consume and to keep screen technologies out of their bedrooms. What do you see as the limits of this approach?

That second basic bit of advice isn't all bad. My own common sense as a parent suggests to me that keeping screen technologies in high- traffic parts of the house is a good idea if it helps parents to be more aware of and engaged in their children's online experiences. I doubt anybody disagrees that awareness and involvement are good things, where kids' social lives are concerned, online and offline.

General safety tips - like keeping connected computers out of kids' bedrooms - have their place and usefulness (because of the simplicity they suggest, and adults need to know parenting online kids is not rocket science!), but I think anything that suggests parents can completely control their children's media exposure or Internet access is getting less realistic or practical. As the number of access points, devices providing access, and kids' workarounds multiply, we probably need to think more in terms of communication and guidance. "Just say no" and kids can simply go into stealth mode (e.g., set up a new, harder-to-find account from a friend's house or at some drive- by wireless hot spot in the neighborhood), which is increasingly easy for them as access points proliferate; delete an account and six more profiles or blogs can appear in its place in the same or any of hundreds of other social sites.

Another limitation of rules and tips is that they really only reach those who want to comply with them. It has gotten very easy to be noncompliant. I mentioned workarounds above, and there are all kinds - from proxy services that allow kids to visit sites blocked by filters to friends' houses with different Internet rules or absent parents to accessing the Web from anywhere on Web-enabled cell phones. So more thought needs to be given to how to protect kids not reached by safety tips and rules - how to educate them to protect themselves.

What kinds of things worry parents the most about web 2.0? How legitimate are those concerns?

My guess is that, if they aren't talking with their kids about their Net activity and are relying on local TV news or Oprah, they're worried about "predators" on the social networks. They're a factor to be aware of but way over-hyped, politicized, and reported out of context. I'm aware of no comparative research on this, but my close observer's take on the risks of online socializing is that cyberbullying or online harassment and negative self-exposure will affect a great many more young people than sexual predation.

About a year ago a youth officer and detective in Connecticut emailed me about a story that hadn't made it into the local paper, and he felt parents would want a heads-up. A 13-year-old girl in his community had emailed sexually explicit images of herself to a boyfriend. The boy soon became an ex-boyfriend who had shared his account password with a friend, who in turn proceeded to find and post those images on a Web page, then to share the URL with students at their school. The page was shut down, but not before "everyone" had seen it. It's that kind of age-old awful teenage "prank" that can now be so damagingly public in online digital media. Mild versions of that story - basically everyday middle and high school life, happening all over the Web - are being eclipsed by media like Dateline's endless Predator series, which isn't even about the Internet but is reflexively associated with misrepresentations of statistics like the "1 in 7 kids sexually solicited online" out of the University of New Hampshire (people who study that data say most of those solicitations are coming from peers, and none of the "1 in 5" of the original 2000 study on the subject resulted in sexual assaults).

Another risk that has gotten almost no reporting but I think will be getting more attention is what I'd call negative online reinforcement of risky offline behavior, such as eating disorders, self-mutilation, and substance abuse - young people finding support on the social Web for their harmful behaviors. We increasingly need to fold a great deal of offline expertise into the "online safety" discussion - adults who work with youth who have expertise in these behaviors. Actually, the term "online safety" will probably soon go away, as the online/offline distinction collapses. Also, our children the digital natives will be parents before long, right? So they will naturally be thinking more holistically about safety and privacy than we adults are right now.

One other thought: We really don't know how much of the (to parents) disturbing teenage behavior we're seeing on the social Web is really new and how much of it has always been a reality but is just more public all of a sudden. This exposure is probably mostly good. Parents, researchers, psychologists, and child-development experts have a lot more material to work with and learn from; suddenly they can be flies on the wall like never before (for a while, anyway - some teens are aware of this and using privacy tools more, others don't really care). Some school crises reportedly are being prevented because of threats found online. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline told us last June that, since it established its profile in MySpace, that site's users have become the hotline's largest source of calls - lives are being saved because of its presence in MySpace.

All this exposure itself probably also affects individual and social behavior in some ways, maybe a little along the lines of the Heisenberg theory with all those observers out there affecting the "experiment," and it'll be very interesting to see what coming research tells us about that.

Are there some general principles parents should apply in making decisions about their youth's relations to new media?

Really just the one about how the line between online and offline is blurring for young people, so it makes great sense to apply a family's ethics and values and what one has always known about plain old parenting to the online part of children's lives. The same goes for academic ethics and citizenship. For example, discussions about plagiarism and respecting copyrights (as we watch copyright law evolve!) need to embrace online media use. We want our children to use good judgment about who they socialize with on Friday night; the same goes for who they spend time with online, who's on their friends or buddy lists, right? We ask them questions like who's driving them home, or whether there will be hundreds of people at that party; we can ask them things like whether they know all 375 people on their friends lists, if they're careful about what they click on in IMs, emails, and Web pages, if they use privacy features, and what music they use in the videos they upload to media-sharing sites.

It's getting harder to generalize. Sites like MySpace on Web 2.0, the participatory Web, the user-driven Web - whatever people want to call it - are really whatever any user wants or creates them to be. The profile is a reflection of its owner, is his/her online "self," as is each user's experience in virtual worlds such as Second Life or There, I've learned from researchers such as danah boyd at Cal Berkeley and David Huffaker at Northwestern. So family rules and school policies more tailored to the individual or, at most, to the community are more effective than general rules or federal laws, I think.

In talks, I tell parents that this is about life, not technology. Of course there are some general principles that make all of life better (in fact, they're probably even more important in the more anonymous environment the Net represents), such as the ethic of reciprocity in virtually all the world's faith traditions, or the Golden Rule, as Christians call it. We're all talking about the First Amendment and intellectual property a lot now, which I think is great; maybe Web 2.0 is also presenting us - all the Web's participants - with a prime opportunity to be talking about behavioral ethics and citizenship.

Many parents worry that their children know more about new media than they do. What advice might you have for such parents?

Not just about new media! A friend and educator in the L.A. Unified School District said recently that kids know so much more about just about everything than we did as kids that teachers' jobs are changing. As much as giving students information, they're helping them figure out what to make of it. He said it better than I can, but I think he was simply stating the new reality. Adults have street smarts or life literacy, youth has tech smarts or literacy - one could see these as complementary skills, presenting an opportunity to strengthen parent-child communication and mutual respect. Ask them what they know, turn them into the family CTO, set the preferences in IM software together, ask questions that aren't about confrontation and control but are instead aimed at understanding their online experience and helping them use good judgment online in it.

It's also important to tell our children our concerns and why we have them - not constantly, but clearly and effectively (calmly). I understand if that sounds ingenuous to parents who have uncommunicative teenagers - that has always been a challenge - but I don't think parents can afford to view teenage tech competency as purely negative. If they do, there is a risk of marginalizing themselves even more, from a teen's perspective.

He's Back....!

Didja Miss Me? This week, I am blogging from Singapore so the dates and times of posting are going to be all over the map. When I write will have more to do with my state of jet lag than anything else. I am here, as regular readers will have predicted, doing some ground work for the launch of the MIT-Singapore Games Lab this summer -- as well as giving a big public lecture about Convergence Culture.

I haven't blogged in a little over a week -- it feels like much longer. I can't tell you how deeply blogging has gotten under my skin over the past six months. I am coming back from even this brief break bursting with new ideas which I want to share with my readers. I spent a good hour on the flight just scrawling out some notes about what I might talk about over the next month. And I had already lined up four or five new interviews which I will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

For a long time, I had resisted the impulse to blog out of fear that it would take over my life. It has certainly filled a number of very important needs for me both personally and professionally. My eyes start to roll and fire sparks out of my mouth -- like Mr. Toad in Disney's version of The Wind in the Willow -- whenever anyone starts to talk to me about blogging.

I know when I started this blog some people misread me to suggest I was only going to do this for a short while -- as a publicity stunt for Convergence Culture. I hope by now I have convinced you -- and me -- that I am in this for the long haul. I am still struggling with whether I can maintain the five days a week pace I kept over the academic term. But I am going to keep doing this for a long time to come.

Let me begin the year by congratulating You (us?) or being chosen as Time Magazine's Person of the Year!

Time closed the year with two issues in a row which more or less summed up the themes and ideas we've been discussing here since June. First (December 18), they did a cover story on "How to Build a Student for the 21st Century." The central focus of the story is the release of the report, "Tough Choices for Tough Times," by the New Commission on Skills in the American Workplace. The report argues that American schools have not kept pace with the times and are not preparing young people to be competitive in a global economy where creativity, innovation, media literacy, and social networking skills represent the edge needed to succeed. In many ways, I was struck by the close parallels between what Time identifies as key themes in this report and the kinds of social skills and cultural competencies we identified in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation.

Here are a few excerpts from Time's story:

Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy--the ones that won't get outsourced or automated--"put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos," says Marc Tucker, an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. Traditionally that's been an American strength, but schools have become less daring in the back-to-basics climate of NCLB. Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that's where most new breakthroughs are made. It's interdisciplinary combinations--design and technology, mathematics and art--"that produce YouTube and Google," says Thomas Friedman, the best-selling author of The World Is Flat.

Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what's coming at them and distinguish between what's reliable and what isn't. "It's important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it," says Dell executive Karen Bruett, who serves on the board of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a group of corporate and education leaders focused on upgrading American education.

Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today's workplace. "Most innovations today involve large teams of people," says former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. "We have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures."

In other words, the report places a new value on being able to access and meaningfully process new sources of information, being able to participate in social networks and knowledge communities, and being able to think creatively and act globally.

One can't help but note that these are the same skills which are emerging through the kinds of activities which Time documented the following week in its cover story naming You the Person of the Year:

Look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos--those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms--than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses--its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses--but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Our schools are failing to teach these skills -- indeed, these are the kinds of meaningful activities that are being killed off as schools are facing increased pressure to insure that their young charges perform well on the standardized tests which are the legacy of No Child Left Behind. But these are the kinds of skills that many young people are acquiring outside of school through their engagement with MySpace and Facebook, YouTube and Second Life, Wikipedia and Flickr, and all of the other kinds of web 2.0 activities that Time is celebrating. Time does a pretty good job identifying the different strands of contemporary social computing -- though it still has a tendency to focus on expressive individuals rather than on grassroots communities, despite its opening rhetoric about moving us from a focus on great men to a focus on the creativity of a democratic culture. It's odd, under the circumstances, that Time didn't do more to draw attention to the link between the two stories -- the idea that these informal learning cultures or what James Paul Gee calls affinity spaces might be the seedbed for the new educational culture which is being advocated by the big Washington think tanks.

Of course, recognizing the value of these various activities is only the first step because then we have to confront what I have been calling the participation gap -- the gap in experiences (and the social connections and cultural knowledge which comes along with those experiences) between those who have easy access to new media technologies at every moment of the day and those who have restricted access through schools and public libraries. If we accept that the world of tomorrow will require those skills we are learning through playing around on web 2.0, then we need to figure out how to insure that every child in America has a chance to explore and develop those skills inside and outside of school. I have said it before and I will say it again: if the key debates in American culture in the 1990s seemed to circle around issues of privacy, the key debates for the 21st century will center on participation.

On my flight over to Singapore, I finally caught up with a great documentary produced by Zoe Silver and hosted by Alan Yentob for the BBC 1, herecomeseveryone.co.uk, which covers much the same ground as the Time magazine cover story -- including thoughts about Wikipedia, blogging, MySpace, YouTube, and Second Life, among other topics and featuring a who's who of the key thinkers on social media, including Clay Shirkey, David Weinberger, Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales, the Arctic Monkeys, Chris Anderson, and ahem, Henry Jenkins. It is the kind of documentary that I wish would get produced for American television -- and barring that, I wish would get aired on public broadcasting here. Oddly enough, it hasn't left much of a trace on the web -- though the blog, Feeling Listless has created a pretty comprehensive resource page about the people who get interviewed or discussed in the program. I am mostly featured talking about blogging, which brings me back to where I started this.

Not surprisingly, the BBC picked up on an analogy I drew between what is today a little known social movement in England during World War II, The Mass Observation movement, and the role which blogs play in contemporary culture. There's surprisingly little about the movement in Wikipedia but here's what they tell us:

Mass-Observation aimed to record everyday life in Britain through a panel of around 500 untrained volunteer observers who either maintained diaries or replied to open-ended questionnaires. They also paid investigators to record people's conversation and behavior at work, on the street and at various public occasions including public meetings and sporting and religious events.

The early prime movers behind Mass Observation were anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and the film-maker Humphrey Jennings. Collaborators included the critic William Empson, the photographer Humphrey Spender, the collagist Julian Trevelyan, and the painters William Coldstream and Graham Bell.

Mass Observation has a special place in the history of participatory culture and in the politics of everyday life. As Wikipedia tells us, the goal of the Mass Observation movement had been to record, in as much detail as possible, the everyday lives of Brits in the period during and following the Second World War. They took copious notes on what people ate, what they had in their closets, what they talked about, and these records have become an incredibly valuable resource for social historians. One of the challenges of the mass observation movement was scale - even with more than 500 untrained volunteers contributing, how can you really sample the diversity of life even within a single culture. There was also a methodological concern raised by academic researchers about subjectivity -- can untrained people really chronicle their own real life practices?

We might see Live Journal as continuing this tradition of Mass Observation. Taken as a whole, it is an incredible social document of our thoughts, our everyday lives, our sexual practices, our fantasies, our conversational topics, etc. at the dawn of the 21st century. One can scarcely call LJ a movement. It's hard to imagine a future Wikipedia essay telling us who its leaders were or even what its goals were in the way that it is possible to recount who led the Mass Observation movement. The issue of scalability has shifted in the other direction: the problem isn't collecting enough data; it is processing the sheer volume of information which has been recorded. A researcher could spend their lifetime simply trying to mine the amount of data produced on Live Journal in a single day.

I think about Mass Observation, though, whenever I hear people protest about whether anyone is really interested in reading hundreds of people describe their relationship to their cats or whatever else the pundits want to reduce LJ content to. In fact, there has been a long tradition of efforts by everyday people to document their own experiences as part of a historical record for future generations -- as a way of preserving and remarking upon the details of everyday life and ordinary existence. What blogs do, what LJ does is, in that sense, not new -- though what is remarkable is the scale on which it is occurring.

So, congratulations, You, for becoming Time's Person of the Year. Time's cover suggests just how central the idea of participatory culture has been to popular discourse in 2006. Let's hope that we continue to push to reform society to defend our right to participate.

Should I Cornrow My Beard? and Other Questions at the End of 2006

This will be my last blogpost of 2006. By agreement with my family, I am going to take next week off, spending as little time online as humanly possible, and relaxing after the end of a term which has included at least 16 talks outside my home institution (and quite a few inside) as well as a period of six months during which I have made more than 165 blog posts. I think I have earned a short break. But have no fear, I will be back ready and rearing for conversation by early next year. I've already lined up some great interviews and have some cool topics in mind. There will also be some cool new announcements from the Comparative Media Studies community. Never a dull moment around here. I want to use this last post to provide a few updates and announcements -- especially concerning the podcasts of our events --- and then share a few thoughts about my recent venture into Teen Second Life thanks to the help of Barry Joseph and the other fine folks at Global Kids. (And I promise to answer or at least explain the title question by the end of this post).

CMS Announcements

We now have all but one of the webcasts of the Future of Entertainment conference up on line. That last one should be up soon.

We promised a while back that we would have a webcast version of Jesper Juul's talk, "Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player" and that podcast went up earlier today. We are experimenting here -- and in the Futures of Entertainment content -- with video podcasting. All feedback on these efforts would be welcome.

I wanted to flag an upcoming event. For the past eight years, the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program has worked with Sony Imageworks and various local games companies to produce a workshop on Transforming Traditional Media Content into Nonlinear and Interactive Formats. The course, in the MIT context, runs intensively for five days during a week in January. I run this workshop in collaboration with Sande Scoredos from Sony Imageworks. This year, we will be assisted by Ravi Purushotma, the technological advisor to the Education Arcade.

The dates for this year's event will be Jan. 29-Feb.2.

Our students include undergraduate students from MIT and Wellesley College, graduate students, visiting scholars, staff, and other members of the MIT Community. While we offer a limited amount of academic credit for participating in the program, most of our students opt to do it purely on a volunteer basis. We also would welcome outside participants. If you are interested in joining us, contact me at henry3@mit.edu. More details will be coming early next year.

Now About the Beard.

From the start, my beard seemed to be the object of fascination and speculation among the teens at Second Life. Barry Joseph told me about this interest following my participation in the MacArthur Foundation's announcement event earlier this term. And it was one of the reasons why I wanted my own avatar so I could enter Second Life and interact with these youth. One of them wanted to know how long it took me to grow my beard. In truth, that's not an easy question to answer. I have had a beard since I left the University of Iowa to start my PhD work at the University of Wisconsin. This means I have not shaved it off completely in almost 20 years. We have watched it grow from black to salt and pepper to grey over that time. Yet, since hair continually replaces itself, it is hard to know how long I have been growing the particular beard follicles which are currently attached to my face.

At one time, we even jokingly discussed making my beard available for distribution on Second Life, though so far this hasn't happened. Part of the issue is to figure out which beard length might be most popular -- the tightly trimmed Henry beard at the start of the term or the long and shaggy one by the end when my schedule has kept me from getting to a barbershop for a trim.

Last Wedsday night, I made my live public appearance on the Global Kids island in Teen Second Life to talk about games, learning, and popular culture. I wasn't surprised when one of the first questions I got asked was when and if I would have my beard put up in cornrows. It is an interesting question -- and one I am pondering deeply as I enter into the Holiday season. So, here's the heart of my response: I welcome any and all attempts to digitally doctor photographs of my beard. I especially throw this out as a challenge to teens in Second Life. If you want to use Photoshop to cornrow a picture of my beard or if you want to fix the beard on my avatar to have a funkier do, then it's fair game. And I promise to share the results here on the blog early next year. Think of it as a technical challenge: how to cornrow Henry's Beard.

My students have long tested their skills against the iconic quality of my persona --dressing up in Henry's costumes (complete with "suspenders of disbelief"), using Barbie Fashion Designer to put me in drag, doing graffiti on photographs of my bald head. So I welcome anyone from Teen Second Life to do their stuff!

How's this for the perfect narcissistic scenario: Last Saturday, I tried out my new avatar for the first time by beaming myself onto a desert corner of the Global Kids Island. I was going to stay for just a minute, try to work through some of the control mechanisms, make sure the connection works. There was no one else in the entire world that I saw on the screen. And then, out of nowhere, someone walks up and says "Are you really Henry Jenkins?" It turns out to be Mariel, a teenaged girl from Mexico City, who has been using some of her work for a school assignment. So, here we are: only two people in the whole world on a Saturday afternoon and one of them turns out to be a fan! It's probably the only time in my life that I hit 100% market recognition! It turns out that Mariel, who introduced me at the event on Wedsday, and asked really probing and intellectually sophisticated questions, is one of the closest readers of my work I've met in some time.

People have asked me why I wanted an avatar for my appearance on Second Life. This goes back to the meaning of the word, Avatar, which is a metaphor which has gotten lost as the word has taken on such common usage. Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In Hindu philosophy, an avatar, avatara or avataram (Sanskrit: अवतार, IAST: avatāra), most commonly refers to the incarnation (bodily manifestation) of a higher being (deva), or the Supreme Being (God) onto planet Earth. The Sanskrit word avatāra- literally means "descent" (avatarati) and usually implies a deliberate descent into lower realms of existence for special purposes. The term is used primarily in Hinduism, for incarnations of Vishnu whom many Hindus worship as God.

I remind us of this meaning half-ironically. I don't mean to imply that I am somehow a divine being taking earthly form. Rather, I mean to critique what happens when adult speak to youth much of the time. I felt vaguely uncomfortable at the MacArthur event because we -- the panelists -- were speaking from another order of representation (cinematically) in a world occupied by virtual beings. I wanted to get down to the same level (socially, representationally) with the community I was talking with. I think this is a real issue. Too often, adults talk about kids, maybe even speak to youth, but they don't talk with them. And becoming an avatar seemed like the best way to signal my desire to speak on the same level with my audience. Anyway, it made sense to me.

The whole experience was amazing. I will let you listen to the actual exchange which has been recorded and put on line if you wish. There's also a really wonderful video of highlights of the event which is now in circulation on YouTube. Frankly, I come off sounding much more coherent in the video than I did at the time. There was something truly overwhelming about the whole experience.

For one thing, I really am a newbie and so moving around in that body -- and indeed, remembering to keep moving -- was a challenge for me. At one point, I accidentally flew up, planted myself on the top of a sign suspended over the event, and couldn't figure out how to get down. I've had embarrassing experiences speaking before but none like that. At another point, I just slumped over in my chair because I didn't remember to keep poking at my avatar. There's a high learning curve here and doing your learning in public eye can be awkward. My students are talking about creating an animation sequence which has my characteristic hand gestures. Nobody has ever seen me speak for long without gesticulating wildly. I've got a ways to go before I blend fully and comfortably into my avatar but I was really taken with the sense of presence I felt interacting with all of the people attending the event from remote locations.

I kept getting distracted by the sheer array of avatars in attendance -- characters from anime, dancing Pandas in Ninja costumes, a monster from Will Wright's Spore... At one point I made a reference to the struggles City of Heroes had with Marvel over the fact that players might use their character design tools to create a knockoff of the Incredible Hulk and then looked out a moment later to find someone in the audience had turned themselves into the Hulk. And I was blown away by the fact that my avatar has much better moves on the dance floor than I've ever managed to master. He's one cool dude and I am, well, not. So, all in all, it was an amazing experience but I was not at my most articulate as one thing or another distracted me mid-sentence.

Thanks to everyone who made it possible and to everyone who turned out to enjoy the show. I hope to have more chances to interact in Second Life in the coming year.

And to all of you who have read and contributed to the blog this year, thanks -- and best wishes on the holiday season.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Five): Interview with Eric Zimmerman

A while back, I ran a series of interviews with Manifesto Games's Greg Costikyan (Part One, Part Two) and Indiecade's Stephanie Barish (Part One, Part Two) talking about the current efforts to spark an independent games movement. Both of them offered some unique perspectives about what independent games are, why they matter, how they fit within the current games culture, and what steps need to be taken to promote more experimentation and innovation in game design. I plan to continue this series from time to time with other interviews which showcase innovators, experimentors, and entrepreneurs who are helping to build the independent games movement. Eric Zimmerman was the person who introduced me to the concept of an independent game some years ago and his work for GameLab consistently embodies for me the experimental mindset I associate with this particular category of cultural production. I run into Zimmerman four or five times a year at various conferences and consistently find him an engaging personality and a lively thinker. As long as I have known him, Zimmerman is someone who has consistently pushed us to broaden our definition of what games can do and who has proceeded to prototype, build, and market games that expand our conception of this still emerging medium. Eric Zimmerman would rank high on anyone's list of the top game theorists -- Rules of Play remains probably the best book written to date about game design and is rapidly emerging as perhaps the most widely taught text in the emerging field of games studies. What gives his ideas about game design such credability is the ways he has put them into action, working with his smart team of fellow designers, through projects like Arcadia, Diner Dash, Loop, Blix, and Sisyfight 2000, among other Game Lab titles. Every Gamelab game has a point -- as we discuss here -- an underlying theoretical question which drives the design process. Each one contributes something vital to our understanding of the medium as well as illustrating that there are a whole lot more different kinds of play and fun that the marketing department of Electronic Arts might care to imagine. The GameLab titles are the best case I can imagine for the value of producing and distributing games outside of the major studios. I will be running this interview over the next two days. The first part deals mostly with the issue of independent games and with the ways GameLab approaches its business. The second part digs deeper into the Game Designer project which Zimmerman is developing with Katie Salen and James Paul Gee -- which promises to be a significant part of the new Digital Learning and Youth project recently launched by the McArthur Foundation.

You have been a longtime advocate of the independent games movement. How do you

define independent games and what do they bring to games culture?

The idea of "independent games" is a slippery but important concept. I think there are a number of ways to consider what they are - I like to use the notion of independent film as a way of thinking through what indie games might be.

On the one hand, it's possible to think about independent film as something which is small-scale in terms of scope of production - a homemade film project on a shoestring budget, as opposed to a major studio release. Related to this is another definition of independent film, which refers to the ways that a movie is funded and distributed - perhaps funded through an arts grant, and distributed via festivals, instead of more mainstream means. Lastly, an independent film might be seen as something which questions the conventions of mainstream cinema through its form or content - from avant-garde experiments to political documentary.

There are other ways of conceiving of independent cinema as well, but these three (production, business, & design) help describe some of the challenges of creating independent games. The game industry is a cultural field that is currently dominated by large-scale games that cost $10 to $20 million or more to create, games that are funded by large corporations, distributed through the bottlenecks of retail, and are largely genre-generic titles. At Gamelab (a company I founded in 2000 with Peter Lee), we try and address these questions, making small-scale experimental games that are still commercially viable.

To me it is less important to define exactly what independent games are and instead figure out how to create innovative games that expand the boundaries of digital games, a form of culture that is only a few decades old and still has vast spaces for experimentation and invention.

What do you see as the major factors enabling or hindering the emergence of the

independent games movement at the present time?

We are more or less stuck in the middle.

It is certainly possible to create new kinds of games through traditional big-money funding and major studio production - Will Wright and his very large team at Maxis are doing some fantastic work along those lines. On the other hand, there are plenty of players and amateur designers creating levels and mods, and games as a form are great at engendering this kind of productive fan culture.

But at my company Gamelab we've chosen a middle route. For our purposes, as a studio with a staff of 35, we need to figure out how to make independent games that are in the middle between huge retail titles and freeware fan culture and still be commercially viable. To solve this problem, we've been attacking it from all the angles I mentioned in my response to the first question - how to keep games small but something that will still generate revenue; how to get these games funded and distributed; and how to explore new kinds of content, aesthetics, and gameplay.

There aren't any easy answers. For example, some look to the business model of downloadable games. [Sometimes called "casual games" - although I personally despise that term, as what musician would say that she creates "casual music"?!] The model of downloadable games seems promising - at first. It allows smaller games to be distributed to a very large audience over the internet. However, the major game portals are surprisingly conservative about what they will put up on their sites. And as a whole, downloadable games are generally quite generic and often shameless clones of other games - hardly a burgeoning sector full of gameplay innovation and cultural insight. Right now there aren't any perfect contexts for independent games.

On your website, you suggest that project-based funding may be a key economic

model for the independent games movement. Explain. What does this mean and how

does it change the way games get made?

Well, at least it sounds good on paper!

Generally, a game development company like Gamelab does not have the money to pay for its own games to be created. The most traditional route for finding this money would be for us to work with a publisher, who funds our games, and then also markets and distributes them. Because of the nature of most game publishing contracts, it is difficult for developers to earn healthy royalties from this kind of deal, even if a game is successful.

Another possibility would be getting venture capital investment, in which individuals or organizations invest in the company, and then own a piece of it. The hope of the investors is that the company will go public (which is unlikely for a game developer) or be purchased by a large publisher or other company (somewhat more likely). We have resisted this scenario so far because our independence is important to us - becoming the kept studio of a large publisher would curtail the kind of experiments we want to explore.

So working with Ruth Charny, an independent film producer, we cooked up a third option, which is project-based financing, a funding model borrowed from the film industry. In project-based financing, investors invest only in one project, or possibly a slate of projects, rather than in Gamelab as a whole. They earn back their money (and hopefully some profits) directly from the revenue the games generate. Gamelab in this scenario is acting like the publisher, marketing and distributing the games.

We have gotten three downloadable games funded in this manner, each with a different partner. We are working with NYC-based animation studio Curious Pictures to create Out of Your Mind, a game about little creatures inside everyone's heads; an individual investor funded a game called Work, a parody of office life; and we partnered with LEGO to create an original, somewhat psychedelic game called LEGO Fever.

Luckily, the process of distributing downloadable games is much easier than distributing them through retail, so it is something that Gamelab can manage on its own - although we will also be working with partners to get the games on cell phones and in retail boxes. It has been difficult to find project-based investors, however. My feeling is that in 10 or 15 years, when there are enough wealthy people that believe games are an important cultural form, we'll see a boom in independent games. Right now, however, the people that invest in independent film aren't gamers and don't see the glamour or importance of games.

We recently participated in an online forum discussing whether games are art.

You offered an interesting response, distinguishing between design and art.

What do you see as the value of understanding games as a field of design? Why

do you resist the concept that games might be considered art?

Henry, Henry, Henry...! I don't resist the concept that games might be considered art. I resist the naïve way that most game developers themselves conceive of the concept of "Art." I recently attended a think tank-style weekend gathering that included many amazing game developers. As we discussed the future of game design, a common note in the conversations was a lamentation of the eternal, oppositional relationship between art and commerce.

Even a little study of art history reveals that for the past 500 years (at least!), the creation of culture has been intimately intertwined with economics. Although today's game developers work with cutting-edge technologies, they cling to a pre-Modern, Romantic idea of cultural production, one that I believe hampers the creation of games that are more relevant to our contemporary times. Games don't have to be self-contained Renaissance windows into coherent narrative universes. In fact, play is always already self-referential and metacommunicative (referencing Gregory Bateson).

For me "design" (instead of "Art") is a way of thinking about game creation that sidesteps these thorny issues. Design in my mind is associated with problem solving rather than with the expression of the artist's inner life. It is also a mode of cultural production that acknowledges the importance of integrated research and an iterative, playtesting-based process. The naïve version of "Art" too often implies a solitary visionary being internally inspired, something at odds with a healthy game development process.

But ultimately the distinction between art and design is more of a tactical one for me than a definitional one. I want to see game developers creating games that can speak to our times, and I don't think that will happen as easily when they are operating from outmoded cultural models.

Most of your games seem to emerge, in part, from your group's interest in experimenting with the basic building blocks of games. Walk us through some of the thinking behind your most recent games --Plantasia and Egg vs. Chicken. What ideas drove this design process?

I'll do even better and talk about a couple of games that we are about to launch - Arcadia Remix and Out of Your Mind (a game I mentioned earlier). You are definitely right that often our design focus at Gamelab has to do with investigating the "core mechanic" of a game - the repeated action that forms the heart of the interactivity. That's in part due to the fact that because of the downloadable business model, we make small-scale games that need to "hook" players with an addictive play mechanic.

Arcadia Remix , published by VH-1, is a redesign of a small game we did a few years ago, Arcadia. (Henry, I believe you've actually written about Arcadia.) Arcadia Remix is made up a series of tiny, very simple games that are all played at the same time. The mini-games are incredibly straightforward - actually bordering on boring - but playing several of them simultaneously becomes quickly challenging. The play emerges as the player manages her own attention to the different games, with strange, syncopated rhythms evolving from the overlapping play patterns. It's also an interesting game because the mini-games are all parodies of classic Atari-era games, and so we're appropriating our own history as the cultural and formal building blocks for the experience.

Out of Your Mind is a somewhat perverse and silly game in which the player works in a brain spa, removing nasty little creatures called Nega-Tics that live in our minds and cause bad behavior. In this case, the gameplay involves drawing lines with the mouse to spear the creatures and remove "brain gunk" by looping around sections of the playfield. The interaction consists of making quick and elegant gestures with the mouse, as the player's cursor swoops and loops through the space. Again, this kind of play pattern is something we haven't seen in other games.

There are many ways to innovate on the level of game experience. Often, game developers try to create new kinds of stories, content, and aesthetics for their games. In addition to these vectors for innovation, we try at Gamelab to invent new ways to play, which means focusing on new kinds of play mechanics, game logics, and interactions. Both of the games I mentioned will be available for play by the end of January.

The Independent Games Movement (Part Six): An Interview with Eric Zimmerman (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part interview with Eric Zimmerman, game theorist, designer, and teacher, during which he spoke at length about his vision for the Independent Games movement and the ways that his company, Game Lab, has developed distinctive and original content. Today, I shift the focus onto some of the public service aspects of Zimmerman's work, especially in his efforts to promote games literacy. Across the term, I have been sharing with you some news about the MacArthur Foundation's 50 million dollar commitment to exploring youth and digital learning. Our own Project NML is part of this effort as was the white paper I published on the social skills and cultural competencies young people need to participate meaningfully in the new media landscape. Another dimension of this effort is the Game Designer Project, which Zimmerman is developing in collaboration with Katie Salens and James Paul Gee. I got a chance to see some early prototypes of this project at the Serious Game Summit in Washington DC earlier this term and was blown away by the wit and imagination, not to mention the pedagogical sophistication, which is informing its design. As Zimmerman discusses below, this is an attempt to use the game platform as a vehicle to teach students about the design process. The goal is not to turn young people into game designers but rather to use the design process to help them to think critically about games as a mode of experience.

In a recent interview on this blog, Greg Costikyan commented, "Consider Eric Zimmerman. He's found a viable niche doing casual games, and his company, Gamelab, does some excellent ones. But Eric is a -gamer- at heart, and while I imagine he's happy enough developing games for an audience (middle-aged women) that prizes games of types very different from those he himself loves, I'm sure he'd much prefer to be developing games of greater cultural significance and intellectual merit. In other words, if he could make as much money doing a game that appeals to people who have a passion for games, rather than for those who view them as light entertainment, I'm sure he'd be happy to. But he also has a payroll to make, and there's demonstrable money in casual games, and indie games are pretty much unproven as a market." Do you agree or disagree with that description of the context within which you work?

God bless Greg Costikyan (and I mean that in the secular, idiomatic sense).

Greg is half right. While Gamelab strives to have every game we make be in some way innovative, I believe we are just scratching the surface of the tip of the iceberg in terms of the kinds of games that could be made. So of course I would love to be doing more radically experimental and unusual work, in terms of gameplay and interaction, narrative and cultural content, contexts for play, audio and visual aesthetics, etc. In this sense, yes Greg, I'd like to be doing more than I am. But when I look around at all of the game companies out there, I'm very happy with what we are doing at Gamelab and I don't think there is another place I'd rather be.

But I certainly wouldn't frame these issues as Greg does. For example, I wouldn't describe the work I want to do as my own personal desire to make games that I want to play. As a designer, I like solving design problems, which doesn't merely mean making games that are fun for me. And even if it did, the intrinsically collaborative nature of game development means that a game is the product of many people's desires, not just those of a single author.

Greg is also certainly over-generalizing the online game audience. Online games include far more than the "middle aged woman" stereotype he invokes. I'd much rather be making games for the Internet, as the players there are vastly more diverse than for consoles and PC retail games. I can say with confidence that the two games I described in my response to the last question, Arcadia Remix and Out of Your Mind, are not designed just for middle-aged women.

Lastly, I would hesitate to set up an opposition between running a business and "creativity," something implied in Greg's quote. Part of what we are doing at Gamelab is not just engaging with design questions, but engaging with questions of funding and producing and distributing our work as well. And Greg's company Manifesto Games is certainly doing this too. The fact that there are still so many unanswered questions about games - in terms of design, culture, business, etc - is what makes it so exciting to be working in the game industry right now.

Tell us something about the Game Designer project. You hope to help young people develop an understanding of the game design process. Why? What do you see as the benefit of everyday people understanding games on this level?

Game Designer is a project funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant in partnership with Jim Gee's research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Game Designer will let junior high and high school students learn about game design by creating and modifying simple games. However, the point of the project is not to train future game designers. It is to engender media literacy.

Our position is that there is an emerging form of media literacy that we sometimes call "Gaming Literacy." Gaming Literacy has to do with information management, understanding complex systems, social networks, a critical design process, and creativity with digital technology. Increasingly, this new form of literacy will be crucial in the workplace and in our social and civic lives. The process of game design, which combines mathematics and logic, storytelling and aesthetics, writing and communication, systems and analytic thinking, among other elements, is one of the best ways of engaging with this form of literacy.

Katie Salen here at Gamelab is leading the Game Designer project design and working directly with our academic partners, who are focusing on research, pedagogy, testing, and assessment. Game Designer is not an open-ended prototyping tool like GameMaker - it is a guided, scaffolded experience that teaches game design concepts. So it is important that the instructional components of the project are really well-tuned. Right now there is nothing like Game Designer out there - and from kids' reaction to our prototype testing, it may be a very popular application.

One obvious analogy might be to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which translates the theory of comics into a graphic novel format. What do you gain by exploring the mechanics of game design through a game as opposed to a book

like, say, Rules of Play?

I hadn't thought of that analogy, but I like it! Thanks for the generous comparison.

Game Designer in some ways is an extension of Rules of Play, in which Katie Salen and I tried to establish a set of concepts for the practice and theory of game design. But that textbook is really designed for a university classroom - a very different audience and a very different instructional context than Game Designer!

One of the reasons why Game Designer needs to be embodied as a game creation application, rather than just as a book, is because one of our emphases in the project is on the process of game design. Interacting with Game Designer won't be just about making games in and of themselves, but will involve sharing them online, having friends playtest your games, as well as writing critical reviews of your games and of others' games. We want to borrow some elements from the practice of game design, because this process also embodies the kind of literacy we want to teach.

You announced at the Serious Games Summit the launch of a new nonprofit entity. Explain how this group will be related to Gamelab and what its goals will be?

We're still in the process of forming the nonprofit, so I can't say too much just yet. But the organization, called The Gamelab Institute of Play, is dedicated to the idea that playing, understanding, and creating games is an important learning experience. Rather than focusing on "serious games," the Institute of Play consists of programs and experiences that turn players into designers, letting them learn about and create games both on and off the computer. A close relationship between the new organization and the commercial game studio Gamelab, will also allow for new kinds of collaborations across the for-profit and not-for-profit divide. We're pretty excited about the Institute of Play! Expect to hear more about it this Spring.

There has been a lot of debate this summer about the value of games criticism and whether the field needs strong and recognized critics who might cultivate the audience for more innovative games. What do you, as a game designer, see as the role of the game critic?

Sorry to hear I missed that debate! Where and when did it happen?

I certainly agree that there is a role for game criticism, as one piece in the puzzle of growing what games are and what they might be. Education and the scholarly study of games is another piece. As are many of the design and business issues I have mentioned here. In many ways, the role of the critic binds all of these diverse elements together. The critic needs to have some kind of scholarly background, although she isn't necessarily writing for an academic audience. The critic has an educational function, although he isn't a formal instructor. And the critic needs to understand the design and business of games, even though the critic isn't selling or creating them.

Critics serve many roles for those of us working in the industry. We're usually too busy to be reading everything out there, so critics are important sources of information about what is happening. Critics also reflect audience opinion, giving us a sense of what our fans might be thinking. They also of course help generate audience opinion, giving us a way to reach our players. At their best, critics can raise issues and concerns about what, how, and why we are making games that we in the myopic industry might not ourselves see.

Props to the critics.

Sampling the Polish Comics Scene

According to Tim Pilcher and Brad Brook's The Essential Guide to World Comics, "Of all the countries in the former Eastern Bloc, Poland has perhaps the largest comics scene -- you could almost call it an industry." My host and translator, Miroslaw Filiciak , took me to several comics shops on my visit -- the largest of which was located in the railroad terminal at the center of the city, a location which reflects the connection in many people's minds between comics (and other forms of popular fiction) and railroad transportation. This picture was taken of me reading some of the local product outside the train station in front of some murals (covered with graffiti) that suggest several of the other graphic arts traditions in Poland.

And here's a somewhat more traditional form of graphic arts -- some remarkable murals painted on the fronts of buildings in the old section of Warsaw. This one is signed and dated in the mid-1950s.

(By the way, thanks to Cynthia Jenkins for all of the great pictures of Warsaw I have been running over the past few entries).

Pilcher and Brooks tell us, "As in most countries, comics in Poland have been looked down upon as trash for subnormal people and slow children. Much of this attitude was created by the communist regime, which on one hand dismissed comics as imperialist garbage and on the other used them for propaganda amongst children and adolescents. During these years, such morally edifying comics like Kapitan Kloss, Kapitan Zbik, and the still published Tytus Romek I A Tomek had their salad days." Kapitan Kloss and Kapitan Zbik were among those works of Communist era popular culture whose loss was being lamented by nostalgia buffs at the Kultura 2.0 conference.

After the collapse of communist, independent comics emerged to fill a gap left by the end of state subsidized publishing of comics. In some cases, these new companies simply reprinted comics from abroad -- including the pulpy Prince Valiant inspired Thorgal series which happened to have been co-created by a Polish comics artist, Grzegorz Rosinski. Rosinski was the star of the Polish comic market (he prepared some of the best books of the Kapitan Zbik series) and wanted to cooperate with publishers on the other side of the iron curtain, but after the fifth part of Thorgal the martial law began in 1981 and there was no more possibility for postal cooperation. So he moved to Belgium where the author of the series lived. As a result, Thorgal is the Polish comic best known in the west.

This image suggests the larger than life heroics and blood and thunder fights that characterize the Thorgal series as a whole. Thorgal continues to be enormously popular if its high visibility not only in the comics shops but also the bookstores across Warsaw are any indication. It commands almost as much shelf space in the comics shop we visited as the entire output of DC comics.

This page comes from a graphic telling of the adventures of Janosik, who has been compared to Robin Hood (Text by Tadeusz Kwiatkowski and illustrations by Jerzy Skarzynski, 1972). The comic is an adaptation of a popular television series about the folk hero. Jerzy Skarzynski has been a member of the artistic elite of Poland and the most known theatre's stage designer -- given the work a reputation in both high art and popular culture circles.

Here's what one website tells us about this traditional Polish folk hero:

Juro (George) Janosik was a robber, who with a group of friends, plundered, robbed, and burned the houses of the rich. And was said to operate on those on both sides of the Tatra Mountains, Polish and Slovak, and hide out in the forests at the foot of the Tatra mountains. However, according to legend he never harmed the poor in any way; on the contrary, he gave them money and gifts. Hence, the story circulated that Janosik robbed the rich to feed the poor, and the comparison with Robin Hood. Folk tales present Janosik as a hero who had supernatural powers; a magical resistance to arrows, bullets and wounds achieved with the help of a herb he carried in his pocket, an ability to move from one place to another quicker than any other human being; and was able to leave the impression of his palm in a slab of stone.

To my western eye, this graphic style -- including the intense use of color shading -- owes something to the American horror and adventure comics produced by E.C. in the 1950s -- especially the work of B. Krigstein. Here, Janosik does battle with a bear, using only his belt, an image that recalls Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as much as it does Robin Hood.

Another popular early comics series in Poland, Janusz Christa's Kajko i Kokosz, has been compared to the Asterik books from France. It was so successful at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s that it ran to 20 volumes and has since been adopted into both films and video games.

As one might expect, given the country's history of ideological ferment and turmoil, many of the independent comics are deeply political in their content -- though the subject matter may range from student protest movements, as in the case of Ryszard Dabrowski's Likwidator & Zeielona Gwardia which reminds me a bit of Manuel "Spain" Rodriguez's Trashman, a key icon of the American underground comics movement.

to gender politics, as in the case of Agata "Endo" Nowicka's inventive and stylistically diverse Projekt:czlowiek, an autobiographical comic dealing with a young woman's pregnancy and the breakup with the child's father. The book mixes and matches stylistic elements with wild abandon but in the process gains the immediacy one associates with the best cultural projects of third wave feminist world wide.

The haunting Achtung Zelig! (Krzyszlof Gawronkiewicz and Krystian Rosenberg) uses surrealistic images -- including the metaphor of the rounding up and slaughter of kittens -- to depict the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. One can not help but compare its use of animal imagery to Art Spigelman's Maus which offered a much less sympathetic depiction of the relationship between the Poles and the Jews during this period. The Kultura Gniewu publishing house is currently preparing a book which pairs artists and writers from Poland and Israel on stories that comment on their shared historical experiences.

Some of the books deploy images one might associate with the Socialist Realist art of the Stalinist era and deploys it either to comment on contemporary political issues, as in the case of this page from ComX, an important underground comicbook...

Or these images from Poznanski 1956 Czerwiec (Maciej Jasinski, Jacek Michalski, Witold Tkaczyk, Wiktor Zwikiewicz) which depict an uprising against the Soviets through images which might have come from Soviet poster art or juxtapositions which recall the work of Sergei Eisenstein.

At the same time, we can see signs of Polish appropriation and transformation of images from American popular culture, ranging from the use of hip hop iconography in Adoptuj Rapera (Pierweza Paracirafowa and Gra Komiksowa), a work which is also designed to function as a choose your own adventure style game....

Or the use of superhero characters (borrowed liberally from both DC and Marvel, a sure sign that they didn't get permission) in Piotr Drzewicki's "Good Morning U.S.A." (which was reprinted in Komiks: Anthologia Komiksu Polskiego (edited by Najlepsi Mtodzi Rysownicy).

The Komicks anthology which features work by younger Polish artists includes an exciting array of visual styles and techniques, suggesting that Polish comics, like their counterparts in Western Europe, are understood at least in part within an avant garde context. There are wild experiments in color, as in these images from Marek Adamik's Weronika Sama W Domu....

or in Piotr Kowalski's "Niebezpieczne Zwiazki" which captures the excitement of the Polish rock scene.

There are stories which show strong gothic influences, such as this work by Aleksandra Czubek...

or in Rafal Szlapa's "Spotkanie"....

Or there may be surrealist influences as in this panel from Andrzej Janicki's "Przypadek Rajmunda K"....

On the other end of the spectrum altogether, there can be lyrical painted images, such as Piotr Kania's "On Obraz i Ona"...

Each of these images give us a glimpse into the artistic traditions shaping contemporary Polish comics. Some people I spoke with on the trip were surprised that I was bringing back comics in a language that I can not read. I will admit at times to frustration in wanting to know more about these books, but the pictures are so evocative that they communicate a great deal about Polish culture. (Not that I wouldn't welcome any Polish readers who wanted to send us a translation of the texts contained in these images). I always try to collect comics when I visit other countries and by this point, I have a pretty far ranging collection, but this is one of the best hauls of comics I have ever brought back from a trip to a foreign culture.

Niech zyje polski komiks!

My Adventures in Poland (Part Three)

On the second day of my trip, I went over and spoke at a conference on internet research hosted by the Warsaw School of Social Psychology, built inside an old factory, in what was described to me as the "dodgy" side of the Vistula River. The river divides the city into two parts: historically more working class people lived on the west bank. This area, however, is now undergoing gentrification and the university itself was a modern, inviting facility. I will have less to share about this conference because it was mostly conducted in Polish without translation facilities and so I was not able to really engage with the other presenters as much as at the Kultura 2.0 event. I did hear a really interesting presentation on a phenomenon called Couchsurfing, where people use social networking tools to arrange to stay in people's homes as they travel around the world. The presenter discussed it in terms of the interplay of virtual and physical spaces and the different kinds of sociality that each enables. Later that night, we ended up going out with a group of students to a typically European drinking hole, Sklad Butelek. I spent much of the evening talking with Alek

Tarkowski, who is the primary person in Poland organizing and promoting the Creative Commons movement.

The Polish Reggae Scene?

One of the most interesting aspect of his conversation, however, centered around the emergence of a Reggae movement in Poland. Keep in mind: There are almost no Jamaicans living in Poland. This is not a case of emigrant populations porting music to another part of the world. Poland is an incredibly homogeneous country with very limited immigrant populations and clearly, there are no cultural reasons for Jamaicans to want to relocate to this part of the world. Reggae emerged here because it served Polish interests and reflected Polish tastes and thus it has taken some distinctly Polish shapes.

I shared some of the music I brought back with Generoso Fierro, who works in the CMS offices. For more than a decade, he has hosted Generoso's Bovine Ska and Rocksteady which airs every Tuesday from midnight to 2AM (EST) on 88.1FM WMBR Cambridge and can be found online. His show focuses on the beginnings of Jamaica's music

industry (1955-1970) from the earliest recordings of mento (sometimes referred to as

Jamaican calypso) through Jamaican R & B,ska, rocksteady and the rise of reggae. Here's his insights into the Polish reggae phenomenon:

I have found that Jamaican music truly appeals to any culture that is in a dire economic position. In the case of England there was the effect of children of post WW2 Jamaican immigrants who were brought to England due to the labor shortage, living in depressed neighborhoods with white London youth turning them onto Jamaican rhythms during the Mod and Skinhead movements of the late 1960s..The whole merger of punk and reggae (i.e The Clash covering Jamaican music) happened due to a London DJ named Don Letts who, due to the small amount of punk records available at the time, would spin reggae before live punk rocks shows. But in the case of Mexico, which has a huge Jamaican music community, this seemed to have spawned from radio broadcasts from California during the Jamaican revival in the early 1990s. Several of the revival bands that formed in Mexico told me in interviews that California radio really turned them onto the sound.

A group called Izrael was the first to introduce the sound into Poland in 193. Some members of Izrael heard a few songs and were so fascinated that they started to produce music in this style (at least as they understood it). I gather there's a good deal of reinvention going on here given how limited their initial exposure to the music was. The name created confusion in Poland with some people assuming this was a Christian Rock group. Indeed, my hosts shared with me stories of older people storming out of the concert, confused and angry, having hoped for a more conventional religious experience.

Generoso added, having heard some of this music:

Rastafarianism which is what alot of the Izrael record expounds (based on titles of songs and style) really wouldn't mix with Polish Catholicism so I understand their confusion. There are American "Jamaican" bands like "The Israelites" that actually are born-again Christian. They keep the Jamaican patois accents but side-step the mentioning of Hellie Selassie or Rastafari. The Izrael record is quite sincere in it's production and sound. On the compilation disc you gave me what I find great is the variance in style from what is dancehall to dub to modern ska sounding tracks. During one barrage of Polish dancehall toasting (singing over the rhythm) the occasional Jamaican patois word like "Samfi" or "Ganja" that get's thrown in which is almost too bizarre to the ear.

Much of the growth of the community has taken place online. There is apparently one store in Warsaw which sells only Reggae and its variations. Many Polish groups send their masters to the west Indies in order to get them cut onto Vinyl by Jamaican recording companies and then shipped back so they have the particular sound they want.

As the sound was introduced into Poland, and as Polish youth started to respond to its cultural politics, Reggae spread. There emerged at least one store in Warsaw devoted entirely to the sell of Reggae albums, which has become the headquarters of the local culture. And there is a very active internet community which helps direct fans to clubs where various groups are performing and educate them about the music. A recent album, Polski Ogien, showcased the younger artists who have emerged in Izrael's wake, and included a surprising array of different sounds and rhythms.

What had attracted my interest in the club had been a song I heard on the radio which was collaboration between Twinkle Brothers (a Reggae roots group well known in the west) with Trebunie Tutki (a traditional Polish highlands group): they had discovered a similar rhythm pattern in their music. This was an amazing cut and I am told the rest of the album is this good, but I couldn't find it in the two record shops I was able to visit.

This was one of the major signs I saw of the ways globalization was impacting Polish culture -- a fascinating story of cultural appropriation and transmission. (Where is George Lipsitz when you need him?)

Here's another: a Chinese restaurant has opened in the old section of Warsaw.

When I spoke to people there about the internet, it was clear that the local political leadership and news media has stirred up some anxiety about the erosion of the distinctive qualities of Polish culture in the face of the globalizing force of the World Wide Web. It was a question I asked about often as I spoke to people there. And it is certainly the case that they have extensive exposure to American and British television, films, and comics. Yet, it is also the case that there was probably more local content for sale in the comics shops (more on this tomorrow) than I see traveling in most other parts of the world.

The Global Marketplace

Another site of globalization is the vast flee market which has sprung up along the outskirts of what was once the national Soccer Stadium. I have frankly never seen anything like it in terms of scale -- it spreads out below you in all directions.

The merchants came here from across the old Soviet empire -- Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusian, Latvians, and Lithuanians -- and from parts of Asia -- especially from Vietnam. Most of what we saw were knockoffs of goods which we could buy for only slightly more in the western world -- there was just lots and lots of it. I, however, purchased good quality Russian fur hats for my son and myself. Growing up in the cold war era, I had a fascination for those hats which were a central icon of my imagination of what Communists look like.

And I am told if you wander deeply enough in there you can buy anything you want -- legal or illegal -- if you just know where to look. There were certainly plenty of signs there of the illegal trade in pirated dvds, cds, and software and only the thinnest efforts to cover it over, often with totally transparent sheets of plastic and a few stray items, whenever word goes out that the police may be paying them a visit.

Trying to head off the spread of piracy, Polish media importers have struck deals with local magazine publishers so that one can buy cheap legal copies of many recent releases bundled in with the periodical, much the way our magazines used to come with AOL discs (clearly a less desirable trinket) stuffed inside. My hosts suggested that this practice has become so widespread that Poles would be reluctant to buy a magazine which didn't come bundled with some media content. These legal dvds circulate without any of the extras -- to get these, you have to buy the full package.

A Walk Through Oldtown

We also walked through the restored Oldtown section of Warsaw, which, on this particular afternoon, was full of street performers of all kinds. I was particularly taken by this traditionally dressed organ grinder who was playing Polish folk songs -- in part because of my fascination with pre-20th century forms of popular culture.

And of course, as the holiday season approaches, Christmas decorations were everywhere -- some traditional

some a bit more eye catching like this scene of Santa Clause trying to break into the second floor of a shop.

(I was struck by how widespread the American iconography of Santa was here -- which is, as most of you know, really an invention of the advertising firm handling the Coca Cola account in the 1920s and 1930s rather than the Gwiadorz or Star Carriers, wandering mummers, who were once a central part of Polish Christmas traditions). As a western observer, I would note ways, however, that the iconography of Santa was a little off, as in this display in front of a department store, where Santa's bag bears Red Stars (Is this a nod to the Communist past, the star carriers, or just a confusion about cultural iconography?)

Sorry, Bruce, There Are No Dead Media...

On my last morning in Warsaw, I was waiting for my wife to extract some cash from the bank machine and looked up to see a sign for what looks to be a fascinating attraction. There seems to be a fully functioning Fotoplastikon.

Unfortunately, this being a Catholic country, it was exactly open on a Sunday morning, so I suspect I will have to catch it on my next trip. But a little Google-searching got me to the English language of the establishment's web site which explains:

The viewer for three-dimensional pictures, known as the Photo­plasticon, was invented in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. The new invention soon became popular, enabling everyone to visit the most distant parts of the world, at a reasonable cost, without having to undertake an expensive and risky journey. The three-dimensional pictures produced by a special dual-lens camera provided an amazing illusion of reality. Thus, the Age of Steam, offered the average citizen the possibility of enjoying virtual tourism without the usual restrictions of time and space. Photo­plasticons (known as Kaiser­panorama in Germany) appeared in every corner of the world. By the turn of the century they already numbered about 250 in the whole of Europe. However in time, the Brothers Lumière in Paris introduced their cinema of „living pictures" -- an appealing invention which soon displaced the Photo­plasticons. Gradually, the strange, impractical Photo­plasticon drums were forgotten

.

I am posting this here so that others who share my fascination with what Bruce Sterling calls "Dead Media" might learn about this site and visit it should they ever find themselves in Warsaw.

Next Time: Polish Comics

My Adventures in Poland (Part Two)

The first thing you need to understand about Warsaw is that the city still has not recovered from its traumatic past. Almost every Pole I met during my visit, at one time or another, apologized to us about the state of their city. Warsaw was once one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe but it was devastated during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 -- a two month period during which the Poles actively resisted German occupation with the result that by some estimates 85 percent of the city was destroyed and more than 250,000 civilian lives were taken. (These estimates come from Wikipedia). The German occupation was followed by decades of Soviet dominance during which the old buildings were replaced by newer buildings in the Stalinist tradition. Only in recent decades have the Poles regained control over their city and been able to exert their own influence on its architecture again. And as a result, the Poles are often deeply apologetic about a city that they variously described as "ugly" and "dirty" and "without cultural identity." There are constant comparisons made to Krakow, which is described as an older, more sophisticated, more culturally rich city (though we never actually got out of Warsaw on this trip and found this city had its own charms and attractions.)

Some of the older sections of the city have been rebuilt -- including some of the fortifications whose origins can be traced back to the early 14th century.

The Palace of Culture Meets Kultura 2.0

My primary talk on this trip was at a conference called Kultura 2.0 which was held inside the Palace of Culture -- a gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland -- which remains perhaps the most controversial buildings in the city. At 30 stories, it is also still the tallest building in the city and can be seen from almost every corner of Warsaw. Some Poles believe the building should be destroyed, seeing it as a painful reminder of the Soviet occupation of their country. Others embrace the building for its architectural distinction and the vast cultural complex of theatres, auditoriums, and museums which it houses.

There was something paradoxical about hosting a conference themed around the transformative power of new media technologies (i.e. the digital revolution) inside a building so strongly associated with the centralizing power of the Communist State, an irony noted by a number of the speakers. (I could not resist comparing Nicholas Negroponte's predictions in Being Digital that mass media as we know it would collapse under its own weight in the face of personalized media to the old Marxist rhetoric about "the withering of the State." Neither prediction has or seems likely to come to pass anytime in my lifetime.) The conference organizers had brought together a very interesting mix of key players in the Polish context (more about this in a minute) as well as some leading thinkers about digital media from across Europe and the United States (me). I found the audience tremendously hungry for new ideas and perspectives.

There was some skepticism expressed in the questions about some of my utopian ideas about where all of this may be going (as well there should be). I had spoken at some length about Second Life as an illustration of participatory culture, the collaborationist relations of producers and consumers, and the bringing together of multiple levels of media production (a la Benkler's Wealth of Networks) into one shared environment. Several people in the audience, however, were deeply concerned about the implications of a single company -- even one as benign as Linden Labs -- providing this kind of shared context for business, education, foundation, journalism, activists, sexual minorities, and artists to interact.

Wouldn't the business impose some degree of censorship and regulation on what goes on within this new multiverse? This is a legitimate concern -- though perhaps premature -- yet it is not clear that a state sponsored version of Second Life would provide any greater protection for the creative and political rights of its citizens, a point which landed perhaps more heavily than I intended speaking in the center of a monument to Stalinism. But, it seems to sum up some of the tensions which Poland itself faces as it sheds its Communist past and embraces both democracy and capitalism (the old headquarters of the Communist Party has ironically enough been transformed into the stock exchange.)

Treasuring My Translation

For me, a highlight of the first day was getting to meet my translators -- Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak -- and holding in my hands the very first foreign translation of my work -- Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. The translators and publisher had worked incredibly hard to get the book ready for print and distribution in time for my visit to the country and participation at the conference. Indeed, their turnaround was significantly faster than the book received from its American publisher (not that I am complaining on that front).

There is something so curious about holding this text which is yours and yet not yours: I can recognize, even without reading Polish, the structure of the argument with occasional names popping off the page and thus providing me some landmarks for figuring out where we are in the text. There are surprisingly many cognates or near cognates between Polish and English (despite very different linguistic origins) which also help me to spot specific passages. And yet, it is odd to not be able to read your own book.

I also am not quite used to speaking through translation. The auditorium was equipped for multiple language real time translation and there were translators in a booth high above the stage who I could watch as I spoke trying to figure out how to turn my own mangled, fast-paced, and highly colloquial English into proper Polish. There were odd moments when those listening in English laughed and then a few seconds later there would be a somewhat more muted round of laughter from the Polish listeners. Most of the questions came in English, though some had to be translated from Polish: my sense was the translation must have been excellent because there were few real obstacles to communication at these moments of more direct interaction and the people asking questions seemed to have a good understanding of my core claims and arguments.

The Witcher: Transmedia Storytelling and Global Culture

A highlight of the morning's festivities was a rare public appearance by popular fiction writer Andrzej Sapkowski to honor the 20th anniversary of the first publication of The Witcher, which has become a landmark work in the history of modern Polish popular culture. The Witcher is already a powerful example of transmedia storytelling, existing across films, television,magazine short stories, novels, comics, and games, and is also already an international phenomenon ( translated into Czech, Slovak, German, Russian, Lithuanian, French and Spanish). The first English translation of the material does not appear until 2007.

The Witcher, as I understand it from what I heard at the conference and what I have pieced together via a Wikipedia entry, are an elite group of highly trained monster killers. The series protagonist, Geralt, is one of the most skilled of the witchers and the series deals with his various battles against the forces of evil. The witchers are sterile mutants with supernatural abilities and have learned to suppress their feelings through their training. The series is deeply immersed in traditional Polish culture and Eastern European mythology but it also includes original contributions by the highly imaginative author.

The Witcher universe was first introduced in a series of short stories primarily published in Nowa Fantastyka. As Sapkowski explained during the public conversation, Polish publishers were, at that time, reprinting fantasy works from England, including the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, which were tremendously popular in Poland, but had been resistant to the idea of original fantasy fiction by Polish authors, convinced that it would not interest their readers. Sapowski's work helped to break open the market for Polish produced fantasy and horror fiction. The short stories led to a series of five novels which are known casually as The Witcher series and officially as Blood of the Elves. These stories and novels were, in turn, adopted and expanded into a comic book series (1993-1995), a feature film (2001) and a 13 episode television serial (2002).

Sapowski was frank in the conversation about his dissatisfaction with the results of some of these adaptations, acknowledging that his decisions were shaped in part by commercial motives but suggesting that he needed to trust collaborators who knew these other media better than he did.

The series, however, is about to receive a major face-lift with the world wide release next year of a Witcher computer game, produced by a Polish company, CD Projekt RED. (There was already a live action role playing game based on the series released in 2001). The English translations of the stories are intended to coincide with the release of the game and several people at the conference commented on what it would mean that the game was the vehicle for introducing the 20-year-old stories to the English speaking world. And in Poland, a new comic book series was being prepared to build upon the revival of interest in The Witcher which the games release is likely to generate.

I had heard nothing about the game before the conference but a quick Google search on my return shows a large number of screenshots circulating in the English language media, an official homepage which offers English translations of its content, and some signs of growing fan interest in the franchise (including amateur translated versions of the television series circulating informally in the United States, at least according to Wikipedia). Their hope is that the game may open the way for other Polish popular media to gain broader circulation in Western Europe and the United States.

Critics who have seen the game so far describe it as beautifully executed with a strong sense of atmosphere. The Witcher game seems well situated to combine familiar genre elements with a fair amount of local color. Michal Madej from the company producing the game noted a number of distinctly Polish elements -- from the traditional garb and weapons associated with the Polish highlanders to the use of the old Slavic alphabet in ruins and puzzles, ruins of old Teutonic architecture and ships, and the use of demons drawn from the national mythology. As he explained, "it's own culture, our myths we are showing through this game." Many in the west already associate Eastern Europe with a strong tradition of horror narratives and this would seem to be the right genre to use to attract interest elsewhere in the world. We might add The Witcher to the growing list of projects we've discussed in this blog which seek to assert national culture through computer and video games.

Listening to Sapkowski, a surprisingly modest and down to earth fellow given his high visibility within his national context, gave me some glimpse into fan culture in Poland. As in the United States, most of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers got their start doing amateur writing -- i.e. fan fiction -- before seeking their first professional publications. Sapkowski, accordingly, welcomes fan participation within his world, describing fan fiction as a demonstration that his work has value and as a sign that it still generates interest in the marketplace. He says that he cracks down only on the commercial appropriation of his work and actively encourages fan expansions. Indeed, though I can't decipher much on his official homepage, it is clear that there's a space devoted to fan fiction about The Witcher, an acknowledgement that is not generally matched by western writers in the genre. In typically modest fashion, he moved from suggesting how proud he was to see his work generate this kind of grassroots response to the earthy comment that fan fiction was like "mushrooms" and "you know what mushrooms grow on." He expressed hope that as the Witcher franchise expands even further into the English speaking world, his fans will play important roles in offering informed criticism which will educate the new readers about its mythology and history.

We Want Capitan Zbik Back!

The morning sessions on The Witcher as a transmedia franchise culminated in a panel discussion of the state of Polish popular culture and its chances to enter the international marketplace. Though there were many specific references here which went untranslated, the core of the discussion dealt with some of the challenges of displacing the kinds of popular culture which were produced under Communism with the kinds being driven by the marketplace in the new Poland. Sapowski noted, for example, the paradox that the science fiction works of Stanislaw Lem were produced under the Socialist State and read with great interests by a public who saw them as veiled critiques of communism; these same stories have been neglected and even actively disdained in a capitalist economy. Lem (Solaris) still has some fans among the panelists but most of the younger participants had little interest in his works.

Many of the panelists expressed deep nostalgia for the classic cartoon and action-adventure series of their youth, produced under communism and therefore prohibited distribution today. The Ministry of Culture expressed concern that contemporary youth should not be exposed to the propaganda elements of these series but the panelists felt that most Poles would read past these and were simply interested in encounters with familiar characters and beloved stories which were still a vital part of their cultural memory. When you think about how central everything from Breakfast Cereal logos to old toys have been to Baby Boomers in other parts of the world, one can understand the emotional implications of this erasure of the natural popular culture legacy. The panelists were arguing that the state should license the re-release of this old content and then take the money to fund media literacy efforts.

I asked my translator, Miroslaw Filiciak, who moderated this session, to share with me some more perspectives on this issue:

Our government looks reluctantly on the communism times' popculture, still very

popular in Poland, although perceived totally funnily by the new generation, which can't

remember the times before the fall of communism. It's ironic, because we have a lot of

advertisements and new media products, i.e. comic books remakes, based on communist

brands, but some originals stay closed at the archive of Polish Television. The

situation is nonsense, because young people are not taking the vision of history in this

films as seriously as politicians do.

Another problem in our discussion was the question about government funding for

culture. In Poland - which is as you know probably the most pro American country in

Europe - many people believe the state's culture protection is the relic of the past and

we should not waste our taxes for such an uncertain investment as culture. I.e.

Sapkowski said that he (contrary to Lem) didn't need any support for his success. But

younger panelists - as Wojciech Orlinski and Mariusz Czubaj, the publicists of Polish

opinion-making press - gave examples of other European countries - especially France -

where culture is not only the element of the national pride, but also great business.

Thanks to Miroslaw Filiciak,Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, Edwin Bendyk, and everyone else who facilitated my visit and aided in getting the translated edition of my book in front of the Polish people.

My Adventures in Poland (Part One)

Malgorzata Bernatowicz and Miroslaw Filiciak are the two people who translated Convergence Culture into Polish as Kultura Konwergencji:zderzenie starych i nowych mediow. This picture was taken when they were showing me around the old section of Warsaw. The building in the background is the Namiestnikowski Palace, where the President of Poland lives.

What follows are some highlights from the introduction I wrote for the Polish edition of the book. I have focused here primarily on some thoughts I shared with my new Polish readers about the global context within which the issues discussed in the book are operating. The original plan was to have a chapter focused entirely around globalization be part of Convergence Culture. Much of that material ended up being included as the "Pop Cosmopolitanism" essay in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers, or developed through the sidebars in the book at the Animatrix and about anime fansubbing. But here, I tried to bring a few strands of my thoughts about global media change together.

Next time, I will offer more observations on digital and popular culture in Poland.

Welcome to Convergence Culture.

For those of you keeping score, The dotcom era has ended. The age of Social Networks and Mobile Media has emerged from its ashes. Blogging is thriving. Podcasting is on the rise. Everywhere you look the people are taking media in their own hands, speaking back to mass media, forming their own on-line communities, learning to think, work, and process culture in new ways.

We are no longer talking about a digital revolution, which envisioned new media displacing the old. We are now talking about media convergence, where old and new media interact in ever more complex ways, where every story, brand, sound, image, and relationship will play itself out across the maximum number of media channels and platforms.

We are no longer talking about interactive media technologies; we are talking about participatory culture. Talk to advertisers, media producers, network executives, game designers, fans, gamers and bloggers and they will all tell you that the consumer is gaining new visibility and new cultural influence in this emerging culture. This is at the heart of what some American observers are calling Web 2.0. Some of them are embracing this change with enormous excitement, others with great fear, none of them claim to fully understand what is going to happen next. The terms of our participation in this new convergence culture are very much under debate, being shaped by governmental policies and court decisions but also by choices being made both in corporate boardrooms and in teenager's bedrooms.

New media are being put out by technology companies and they are being redefined on the fly by various groups of consumers. Companies are trying to get ahead of the game by empowering their lead users, by allowing key fans and consumers to test their products before they even reach the market, and building on their insights to create a better mousetrap, build a better game, or produce a better television show. Media networks are trying new strategies to grab the attention of their viewers and insure longer term loyalty to their properties. As they do

so, viewers are every level are demanding the right to help shape the production and circulation of media content.

Sites like YouTube have emerged as meeting places between all kinds of different subcultures, fan communities, and participatory cultures, places where commercial and amateur media circulates side by side. They are producing their own stars and they are also turning out to be places where consumers re-evaluate network content, calling attention to moments on television which might otherwise have passed by without much comment. Online worlds, such as Second Life, are thriving based almost entirely on what people are calling consumer-generated content (though to reduce what happens there to content or describe the participants in these worlds simply as consumers is to grossly simplify what is taking place)....

Morover, these changes are occuring on a global level, impacting each country differently according to their own national cultures and traditions, but being felt around the world. There's a reason why they call it the World Wide Web. It is not simply that American media products are flowing into international markets -- this is scarcely news. More profound is the degree to which cultural goods from other parts of the world -- at the moment, especially from Asia -- are flowing into the American market at a rate so fast that it is breaking through the protective membrane constructed by American major media companies to block access to international competitors.

More and more American young people are embracing what I call pop cosmopolitanism -- seeking an escape from the paroachialism of their own cultures by embracing cultural materials from around the world. There is an ironic juxtaposition between an American government which acts more and more in unilateral terms and a younger American population which is embracing global media. I recently spoke to an American teenager who described this particular JPop group as her "favorite band in the whole wide world." Anyone who is the parent of an adolescent knows that's the way teenage girls have always talked. But this time, as I listened to her enthusiasm for a band which had no label and no distributor in the west, I thought she might be telling the truth. She had searched the world for a group that spoke to her and found it through networking with kids in Japan who shared her interests in anime, manga, and cosplay.

It isn't just that American youth are consuming more international media:they are also taking advantage of a network culture to engage on a regular basis with youth from around the world who share their common interests. I am struck by the story of Heather Lawver in the Harry Potter chapter of my book. When Warner Brothers first sought to shut down certain fan websites around their newly acquired franchise, they sent cease and desist letters to young people in parts of the world which would have once seemed very distant from their base. Yet, as Heather tells us, the word got back to their American fans almost instantly because they already participated in a global fan network. More recently, I watched fans of the American science fiction series, Stargate, mobilize fans to news of the series cancilation worldwide in just a few days time. They now understand television operating within a global framework, rallying fans in many different countries to put pressure on their local networks where the show is still thriving and using that economic clout to push the American producers to continue to generate new content.

In some ways, new media technologies are making more visible the kinds of cultural links that immigrants have long maintained back to their mother country. I see this pattern with my own students who have come to the United States for an education but still listen to radio stations, read newspapers, share music, and talk about fan cultures from back home. The web now serves the functions that ethnic grocery stores and community centers have long played in immigrant communities with one exception. The content is flowing from one community to another as people mix and match cultural materials with others from radically different backgrounds. I live in a dormatory at MIT and I have seen first hand the ways that media sharing is opening up students to new kinds of culture from around the world.

So, I have to confess that I wrote this book very much from an American perspective. My expertise is in American media and popular culture, though it is increasingly clear that one can no longer understand American media outside of a global context. I have never been to Poland and know only very little about your country. I hope to change this but for the moment, I can claim no particular expertise about the media changes that are impacting your corner of the planet. That said, I suspect much of what I write about here will sound familiar to anyone deeply immersed in popular media in any part of the world. Many of these same franchises are known in Poland -- either through American imports or through localization of larger multinational properties.

There are differences created as a result of different economic structures -- the difference between commercial and state run media production systems, for example, result in different opportunities and restrictions on participation. Some cultures have strong traditions of open debate and democratic citizenship; others have historically placed greater restrictions on what the public could see or say, but all of them are being rocked by a media culture which is more open and more participatory than anyone would have imagined a few decades ago. As the rate of internet access increases in countries around the world, they are one by one confronting some of the cultural, legal, economic, and educational challenges Convergence Culture records.

I am certain that there are new and innovative uses of media that have emerged among youth subcultures and fan communities in your country which are not yet known in our part of the world. But the key phrase here is "not yet known." As media flows more and more rapidly and fluidly across once rigid national borders, innovation on the grassroots level may still have a global impact. Throw a pebble in one part of the ocean and the ripples will eventually wash up

on every shore.

In the book's closing passages, I return to the issue of who gets to participate in the kind of robust participatory culture I am describing and who gets left out of the kinds of knowledge communities we are discussing. My own work has turned increasingly towards interest in media literacy as I am working with American foundations and educational institutions to identify the core social skills and cultural competencies young people need to acquire in order to fully participate in convergence culture. In doing so, I hope to shift the conversation beyond talk of the digital divide which is so often defined purely in terms of technical access and onto the participation gap which is concerned with the skills and opportunities needed for young people to actively engage with the affordances of the new media landscape....

This is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Each country is facing these difficulties on their own terms, on their own time table, in their own way, and on their own terrain, yet all of us are struggling with how to insure that the increased power and knowledge being generated by emerging technologies and cultural practice can be spread across the population as a whole. My hope is that this book will help people to better understand the implications of this participation gap both in terms of their own national cultures and in a more global context.

Webcasts of Futures of Entertainment Conference Now Online

Many of you have asked over the past month whether we were going to be webcasting the Futures of Entertainment conference panels. We had hoped to be able to stream these live through Second Life and ran into surprising legal obstacles in doing so. We have had to strong with the technical challenges of mixing this footage -- shot on multiple cameras, digitize it, and index it so that you could get much easier access to the material you want to hear. Keep in mind that we ran two and a half hour long sessions at the conference. Keep in mind as well that getting this material up required permission from each of the companies represented on the program. Special thanks goes to Rik Eberhardt, CMS's resourceful and hardworking technologist in residence, and to Joshua Green, the research manager for the Convergence Culture Consortium for their herculian efforts to make sure you guys had access to this content. We also want to thank the sponsors of the Convergence Culture Consortium for their continued support of our efforts to understand the changes that are occuring in our media landscape and to bring that understanding to a larger public -- MTV Networks, Turner Broadcasting, GSD&M, Fidelity, and Yahoo.

Posted so far are:

My opening remarks on the first day

The panel on Television Futures.

The panel on User-Generated Content.

The panel on Transmedia Storytelling

Josh Green's opening comments on the second day of the conference.

The panel on Fan Cultures

The panel on virtual worlds

I am going to be updating these links over the next few days as the material becomes available so book mark this post for your one-stop shopping needs.

There's so much material here that might be relevent to regular readers of this blog that it is hard to know where to start. Our students produced some very good summaries of key ideas from each session, more or less in real time, during the event:

Opening Comments by Henry Jenkins (that's me!)

Television Futures

User-Generated Content

Transmedia Properties

Joshua Green's Opening Remarks for Day 2

Fan Cultures

Not the Real World Anymore

Given our recent discussions here, I would especially flag for you:

the discussions of transmedia storytelling which involved DC comics Paul Levitz, Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, and [ICE]3 Studios's Alex Chisholm. There was lots here about Lost, Heroes, and superhero comics, all popular topics here.

the discussion of fan culture which involved Warner Brothers' Diane Nelson (who plays a prominant role in the Harry Potter chapter of Convergence Culture), Cartoon Network's Molly Chase, and social network research danah boyd.

But you won't want to miss Flickr's Caterina Flake's views on user-generated content, Ji Lee on the controversial Bubble Project, a lively discussion of virtual worlds with representatives from Second Life, Multiverse, and MTV's Lagoona Beach project, and some challenging comments from C3 advisor Josh Green on the metaphors driving the marketing of mobile technologies. And much much more.

For a list of blogger responses to the conference, check here.

Jesse Walker covered the event in depth in an article published in Reason magazine's online edition.

Spellcast offered special coverage of the event, including behind the scenes interviews with some of the folks who attended.

And here's the coverage of the event which was issued by the MIT News Office.

People keep asking me whether there will be a Futures of Entertainment 2 conference -- and the answer is we don't know for sure but we are definitely considering it given the enormous success of this event. If we do decide, readers of this blog will be among the very first to know.

Odds and Ends

It's Awards Season... Many of you are already starting to second guess which films are going to be nominated for Academy Awards. The past few days we are starting to see the major film critic's organization weigh in on the best films of the year -- so far, they are all over the map with no strong consensus behind any particular title. But my own focus is on the Edublog awards. As it happens, two of my projects this year got nominated. The white paper we wrote for MacArthur and which we serialized here on the blog is being considered for Best Research Paper 2006. And the public conversation which I did with danah boyd about MySpace and the DOPA act is being considered for Most Influential Post, Resource or Presentation 2006. Thanks for everyone out there who nominated me -- I am flattered!

Here's how the awards are described:

As the reality and potential of distributed learning and distributed learner identities and communities are increasingly acknowledged, articulated and understood education moves further towards facilitating truly learner-centered and learned driven environments. A lot has changed in the world of educational technology since this time last year. The continuing rise and mainstreaming of easy to use network-as-platform applications, and increasing access to affordable online speed and space, have seen the continued expansion of users of all ages creating and communicating online. Learners and educators still however face difficult issues around network restrictions, around data protection and ownership, and around commercial protectionism. This year has also seen a marked increase in hostility towards social networking sites in the US, demonstrating a widespread lack of appreciation of the informal and formal educational value of user-centered applications. The Edublog awards are more relevant than ever in this climate - a space for us to refocus the debate surrounding young peoples use of technology as irresponsible, dangerous or illegal, and look at the positive, powerful and transformative work which continues to be demonstrated.

Voting amongst the finalists will continue through December 14 with the winners announced on December 15. There are nominees in ten different categories representing a really interesting catalog of some of the most interesting writing online this year concerning youth and digital media. Many of my readers who are concerned with media literacy will find the nomination page a useful resource for further reading and reflection.

That's Transmedia Entertainment!

Paul Levitz, the President of DC Comics, shares some speculations about the future of comics in a fascinating interview with Newsarama.com. Levitz references his participation in the Futures of Entertainment conference and continues some of his thinking about comic's relationship to transmedia entertainment. Levitz thinks deeply about the comic's medium and clearly prepared himself thoroughly for his role at our conference, making a series of very thoughtful comments.

Here's what he said about the experience:

NRAMA: Thinking about the larger picture of the management of the characters and properties, are comics leading the charge in charting new territory? While there are

older properties and those that are as, if not more popular, like Mickey Mouse, but

Mickey Mouse hasn't had continuity or a line of stories that stretch back nearly 70

years.

PL: I was at a seminar at M.I.T. a couple of weeks ago on the futures of entertainment. The panel I was on was titled "Transmedia" which they defined as moving creative ideas from one medium to another. The professor who was running the conference made a similar point - how come comics have been doing all of this? What is special and peculiar about comics? He made the point in terms of superheroes, and I argued back that I felt it was really true about all comics.

I think there are a few characteristics that are relevant. One, by the nature of what comics are, we've generally had to create open- ended stories. Think of the differences between Batman and The Fugitive. Although the founding tragedy might be as tragic, the character of Batman was designed to go on to a seemingly infinite number of adventures.He wasn't restricted to just taking place in a certain narrowcast, or a certain narrow geography. Many of the great comics characters, not just the superheroes, were built with fairly complicated and interesting fictional worlds around them. Uncle Scrooge - for example.

There's also an interesting argument to be made, and I'm not sure if it's right, but McLuhan raised the issue that the less well-defined a character was initially, the more the reader or views has to interpolate into it, and therefore was not stuck in a specific image that they would measure against. Comics, with their rather raw visual structure, work very powerfully into that argument, that is to say that when you're introduced to Batman as a drawn character, you're able to more easily transform your vision between Adam West, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale and the different approaches those take, as well as the different visual styles that are developed over time. Compare that to a character you fell in love with because a particular actor was playing him or her in a particular role. That's not a well-researched issue, and there are arguments to be had about it, I'm sure, but there's something in there somewhere.

So I think we've had some natural opportunities available to us because of all of this. We also have the advantage in some comic characters, including Superman and Batman, that for them to succeed from early on, they had to open themselves to different creative talents. That's a very important issue in this world of Transmedia. If you've got something that is being guided uniformly by one great creative mind - which can yield terrific creative results - it's harder to make the jump to multiple other media, because the thing is so intimately reliant on the idea that one person so closely "gets" or sees...or understands.

So, for better or for worse, from early on, it was sort of battle- proven that Superman and Batman were ideas that multiple writers and multiple artists could get into and do good, creative work with.

As I suggested here in some of the outtakes from Convergence Culture, comics have a special relationship to convergence -- indeed, comics have been transmedia from their inception. Today, Buster Brown is best known as a brand of children's shoes but the character spanned across comic strips, Broadway musicals, and a range of other commodities at the turn of the century -- one of the first comic strip characters to make a significant impact on the public. In the first few years of his history, Superman moved from comic books to comic strips, radio shows, live action film serials, and animated short subjects, with each of these media making distinct contributions to the evolution of his mythology. Many historians argue that the character would not have had the same impact on our culture if he had not been so well designed to play out across such a broad range of media platforms. Levitz makes a good case here that it is not just the superheroes but a range of other serialized comic characters (including Uncle Scrooge) have also enjoyed extensive transmedia careers.

Today's No Prize goes to CMS graduate student Geoff Long for spotting this interview and calling it to my attention.

Speaking of Japanese School Girls...

We have been lucky enough to have a distinguished scholar of Japanese manga and popular culture, Sharon Kinsella, teaching in the Foreign Languages and Literature Program at MIT this term. Kinsella, the author of Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society, spoke at the last CMS colloquium of the term, sharing some of her work in progress, Girls and the Male Imagination: Fantasy of Rejuvenation in Contemporary Japan. Her talk, "Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation," might have been called "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Japanese School Girls But Were Afraid to Ask," crisscrossing between different media and across political discourse and popular culture, to argue about the ways that the schoolgirl becomes a figure of desire, dread, and fantasy identification among adult males in that society. Her talk included some interesting insights on texts which will be known to many of my readers, including Spirited Away, Battle Royale, and Sailor Moon, but also a broad range of b-movies and soft-core porn titles which helped me to read these cult classics through some new lens. The podcast version of this talk has just gone up on the CMS homepage and is recommended to anyone interested in Japanese popular culture.

While you are at it, you might also be interested in checking out some of the other programming on anime and other forms of Japanese popular culture which my colleague, Ian Condry, has put together through his Cool Japan program. For example, here's the transcript of a fascinating session he hosted on Violence and Desire in Japanese Culture: Anime Capitalism. Podcast of this and other Cool Japan events can be found at the Anime Pulse website.

Sharon Kinsella will be repeating her talk on Japanese school girls at Harvard University through an event being hosted by the Cool Japan program. Here are the details:

Prof. Sharon Kinsella's talk

"Men Imagining a Girl Revolution"

will be held

THURSDAY, December 14

4-6pm

William James Hall, Room 1550

Harvard University

My Mii -- Oh My!

Alice J. Robison, who just finished her doctorate working with James Paul Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been working this year as a post-doc in the Comparative Media Studies Program. This term, she has taught a course for us on games criticism and next term, she will be offering a course on new media literacies. When she's not teaching in the program or contributing to our various games and new media literacy initiatives, she has been spending time playing with her new Wii. I am still among the uninitiated among the ways of the Wii, despite being very enthusiastic about the concept of the new interface. As I understand it, the Wii ships with an avatar creation tool and players can build their own distinctive anime style characters known as Mii.

Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In certain games (including Wii Sports, WarioWare: Smooth Moves, Wii Play, and The Sims Wii), each player's caricature will serve as the character he or she controls in game play. Miis can interact with other Wii users by showing up on their Wii consoles through the WiiConnect24 feature or by talking with other Miis created by Wii owners all over the world. This feature is called Mii Parade. Early-created Miis as well as those encountered in Mii Parades may show up as spectators in some games. Miis can be stored on controllers and taken to other consoles. The controller can hold up to a maximum amount of 10 Miis.

Inspired in part by the Second Life Avatar which I featured here the other week, Alice has created a Mii in the likeness of, well, me. You might call him a mini-me/mii. The pun's just keep coming folks. Here's what it looks like:

Thanks, Alice. (I am told that she has also built Mii for some other prominent games scholars. Maybe some day we can create a collector set of leading media theorists which graduate students can pit against each other. It will certainly result in my much lively seminars.)

How Transmedia Storytelling Begat Transmedia Planning... (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part series examining the emergence of a new discourse about transmedia branding, inspired in part by the discussion of transmedia storytelling in Convergence Culture. Obviously, I am following these developments with great personal interest. I wrote this summary of the debates for the newsletter of our Convergence Culture Consortium. The (Burger) King Is Content

Yacob's post has generated a range of other responses across the blogosphere. Here's some of the advantages which Jason Oke of the Toronto based Leo Burnett agency sees in the transmedia model:

I think it addresses those two weaknesses of media-neutral planning: ignoring that different media are better at different things, and that people are social beings. And by putting a brand community in the middle, it also forces us to think about whether we are in fact making brands and communications which are interesting enough for a community to form, and for people to want to talk about our communications.... [We] have talked about the power of complexity in

communication - that people generally find complex, nuanced, layered things more interesting than simple straightforward things. But when we talk about this stuff, we still usually talk about people processing it individually - so each one person is rewarded for spending more time or if they see it again. But what if we looked at it through the lens of a brand community? Each different layer or detail could appeal to a different group of people, who could compare stories, and thus continually be getting new perspectives on the same thing....

"The idea of brand communities solves one issue that we sometimes run into when attempting to create complex and layered communications - the pushback that we shouldn't put details that everyone (or at least most people) won't or can't get. This is often combined with research findings that indeed, "most people didn't get this reference you were trying to make." This kind of thinking dumbs down communication into the lowest common denominator. But with the brand community model, that ceases to apply - as long as someone, somewhere will get

it, then lots of details and references can work. Whoever notices it will likely tell others about it, because the fact that they figured something out reinforces their ego, status and self-image, and because the tools to widely spread that knowledge are now readily available. So instead of talking down to everybody, we can talk up to everybody, by giving many different groups

something that makes them feel intelligent for getting a subtle reference. And we give them a reason to have multiple conversations about the brand.

Oke's version moves us even further away from the idea that transmedia centers only on narrative and instead focuses on this notion of layering. Oke discusses for example a particular Burger King spot which circulates on YouTube:

On the surface, it's a jingle about the new Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch chicken sandwich. But you might also notice that the guy singing the song is Darius Rucker from 90's band (and pop culture trivia item) Hootie & the Blowfish. Or that the jingle itself is based on the old hobo ballad and Burl Ives classic "Big Rock Candy Mountain." Or that it was directed by iconic photographer David LaChapelle with all kinds of sexual imagery, both hetero and homo. Or that model and TV host Brooke Burke makes a cameo at the end (she's often used in BK ads). But you probably wouldn't notice all of those things, and in fact I'd be surprised if the same people who know who David LaChapelle is are also into turn-of-the century hobo ballads (I'm guessing those circles don't tend to overlap much). But more to the point, not getting some or all of the references doesn't detract from the main brand message (there's a new

chicken sandwich), because each bit also stands on its own. By having lots of detail, though, it gives fans of the brand something to notice and talk about and deconstruct. So you might have missed some of the details but someone else can point them out, and this gives you a deeper appreciation of it, and completes your picture of the whole a bit more.

Oke seems to be describing something close to what game designer Neal Young describes in Convergence Culture as "additive comprehension." Young uses the example of the "origami unicorn" featured in the director's cut version of Bladerunner, a detail which led many to speculate that Deckard, the protagonist, may be a replicant. At the Futures of Entertainment conference, Alex Chisholm provided another example of additive comprehension drawn from one of the Heroes comics tie-ins, where the information that Hiro's grandfather survive Hiroshima adds new significance to both his name and to his response to the challenge of saving the world from what appears to be a threat of nuclear destruction.

Additive comprehension is a key aspect of transmedia entertainment/branding since it allows some viewers to have a richer experience (depending on what they know or which other media they have consumed) without in any way diminishing the experience of someone who only encounters the story on a single media platform. In this case, the same advertisement may support multiple interpretations depending on what kind of knowledge consumers bring to the encounter. If one can convey to the readers that there are secrets there to be uncovered, you can potentially motivate more conversation and engagement as online discussion forums rally to mutually decode the layered content.

Is Transmedia Branding Redundant?

Not everyone has embraced this idea of transmedia branding, though. In a post called "Transmedia Planning My Arse," Giles Rhys Jones argues that transmedia branding simply represents an expansion of the existing 360 branding model: there is still a need for redundancy in the messaging if the branding efforts are to be successful. Citing the Art of the Heist example, Jones suggests, that each element "surely required multiple channel exposure for full impact, rather than each channel living in its own right." I would argue that redundancy is an essential aspect of the transmedia experience. If every element were truly

autonomous, one would have no way to recognize the distinctive contributions of each medium to the media mix strategy. Indeed, much must remain the same across media for people to feel the strong sense of connection between the different installments and for communities to feel like the parts will add up to a meaningful whole if they work together to map the larger fictional universe. What we still need to explore -- whether we are talking about entertainment content or brands -- is the ballance between redundancy and originality, between familiarity and difference.

Will transmedia branding make a lasting contribution to contemporary marketing theory? It's too early to say. As an author, I am delighted to see some of my ideas are generating such discussion. As someone interested in marketing my own intellectual property, these discussions are themselves a kind of transmedia branding: after all, the more people talk about my book, the more people are likely to buy it. I don't have to control the conversation to

benefit from their interest in my product. The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do. In that regard, the book may have had greater impact on the discussions of branding because I didn't fill in all of the links between branding and transmedia entertainment, leaving the blogosphere something to puzzle through together.