Second Life (Round Three) -- 'Nuff Said

By now, you know the drill. Clay Shirkey, Beth Coleman, and I are going around and around about Second Life. Round One Henry Beth Clay

Round Two Henry Beth on Clay Beth on Henry Clay on Henry Clay on Beth

Round Three Henry Beth Clay

For some other smart and thoughtful responses to the debate, check out:

Irving Wladawsky-Berger,

Grant McCracken,

Sam Ford,

Ron Burnett,

Mark Wallace,

Jesse Walker,

Intellagirl.

All of this is going to make much more sense if you've already read the earlier rounds of the conversation.

Mapping the Debate

Clay began his most recent post with the following:

We agree about many of the basic facts, and that most of our variance is about their relative importance. So as to prevent the softness of false consensus from settling over some sharp but interesting disagreements, let me start with a list of assertions I think we could both agree with. If I succeed, we can concentrate on our smaller but more interesting set of differences.

I think you and I agree that:

1. Linden has embraced participatory culture, including, inter alia, providing user tools, using CC licenses, and open sourcing the client.

2. Users of Second Life have created interesting effects by taking advantage of those opportunities.

and also

3. Most people who try Second Life do not like it. As a result, SL is is not going to be a mass movement in any meaningful sense of the term, to use your phrase.

4. Reporters and marketers ought not discuss Second Life using phony numbers.

The core difference between our respective views of the current situation is that you place more emphasis on the first two items on that list, and I on the second two.

Yes, that about sums it up except that for me, there's another issue on the table here: whether purely quantitative measures are adequate to the task of meaningfully evaluating an emerging media experience.

Let's suppose all of Clay's numerical claims were true, then would they negate the cultural importance or likely influence of the cultural experiment we are calling Second Life? I have been trying across my posts to suggest other levels on which Second Life is culturally meaningful and influential other than those which depend entirely on its head count.

Clearly, there is a need for reliable data points about the scale, composition, and levels of engagement witnessed by various online environments. I share Beth's call for further refinements of such tools. I am simply rejecting the idea that this issue can be reduced to a single data point and I am certainly rejecting the idea -- widespread in the business community -- that the only thing that counts is what can be counted.

Relying purely on quantitative data is especially dangerous at a time when things are in flux and when we do not yet have an adequate framework in place to interpret the data that we are collecting. These numbers may answer some of the questions we want to answer but only if we understand how to read them meaningfully.

"Approximately Insane"

Clay writes:

You compare Second Life with the Renaissance and the Age of Reason. This is approximately insane, and your disclaimer that Second Life may not reach this rarefied plateau doesn't do much to make it less insane.

It says something about how vested Clay is about quantitative language that even insanity requires an approximation. (Yes, I know he was joking -- so am I).

So, let me first of all concede that the metaphor in this case has gotten in the way of the point I was trying to make. It would be excessive to draw comparisons between Second Life as a specific platform and something as epoch-changing as the Renaissance. I withdraw the analogy. I don't know if it is insane but it was dumb.

All I was saying is that quantitative measurements would not be adequate to evaluate the importance of the Renaissance. Imagine what a small, small, small percentage of the people living in Europe, let alone living in the world, during that period were in any direct way participating in the events we now call the Renaissance. By any purely numerical standard, the Renaissance involved earlier adapters and adopters of several then emerging technologies -- the most important of which was movable type. Any numerical count of who participated in the Renaissance would be "approximately insane" if it was applied without an understanding of the cultural contexts within which the Renaissance occurred, including things like the class structure and literacy rate of the period, or if it was to use the limited take up of Renaissance ideas and experiences at the time as a means of dismissing their long-term cultural impact.

Clay writes:

Participatory culture is one of the essential movements of our age. It creates many different kinds of artifacts, however, and it is possible to be skeptical about Second Life as an artifact without being skeptical of participatory culture generally. Let me re-write the sentiment you reacted to, to make that distinction clear: Second Life, a piece of software developed by Linden Labs, is unlikely to become widely adopted in the future, because it is not now and has never been widely adopted, measured either in retention of new users or in the number of current return users.

On this point, we do agree, though again, my argument has never rested on whether SL or even multiverses are "widely adopted," only that they are now sites where important experiments and innovations occur and that they are likely to play even more central roles in the not too distant future.

Mulching Kittens?

Clay writes:

Giving a pass to laudatory Second Life stories that use false numbers, simply because they are "keeping alive" an idea you like, risks bootstrapping Second Life's failure to retain users into unwarranted skepticism about peer production generally. More importantly, though, lowering your scrutiny of people using bogus Linden numbers, just because they are on your team, is a bad idea.

Clay misreads what I was saying here. I was not saying that we should ignore distortions of the data just because they come from people who share my position. That would be the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty. I have said it before and I will say it again: Clay does us a service by asking hard questions about the numbers here.

So, suppose for the sake of argument, Clay's critique of the numbers turns out to be essentially correct, then what do we do about it? Clay seems to be adopting a "gotcha" posture, trying to use the data to debunk Second Life, to damage the credibility of Linden Labs, and to dismiss the viability of "virtual worlds" altogether. For Clay, everyone involved is either "a schlemiel or a schuyster" and that his role in all of this is that of the one truly honest man rooting out "corruption." Hmm, from where I sit, that is "approximately insane," assuming that egomaniacal paranoia (the idea that everyone around you is either stupider than you are or simply out to get you) constitutes a form of insanity in Brooklyn.

By contrast, we might use that same data set to try to identify more precisely what factors might be resulting in a dissatisfaction or defection of potential members and offer some advice on how we might improve Second Life, seeing it as a worthy experiment in creating a more participatory cultural community. This is precisely the difference between constructive criticism and criticism intended to inflict damage.

To play upon one of Clay's metaphors, it matters to me that Linden Labs isn't trying to mulch kittens but rather they are trying to figure out how to construct a space whose residents get to design and build their own world, that they have invested a fair amount of effort into community building and educational outreach, that they have reasonably enlightened views about intellectual property and so forth. Given that, I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, assume they want to improve user experience and customer satisfaction, and roll up our sleeves and figure out how to fix the problems you have identified. That's what I meant when I said Second Life was worth fighting for.

Are They Coming or Going?

One of the problems with purely quantitative analysis of cultural phenomenon is that sooner or later, the numbers fail you and you end making a leap of faith. (And this is almost always where the underlying biases and assumptions behind the research emerge.) In Clay's case, he seems to want to move from the data point that there is a low retention rate for SL visitors to a conclusion about why people are leaving. He has a pet theory that he thinks explains why people leave Second Life and remain in World of Warcraft. It is a reasonable hypothesis but his number play gives it the aura of scientific veracity which it hasn't earned. Readers here have already suggested a range of other hypothesis to account for this same data, having to do more with technical difficulties in the specific applications associated with SL than with a rejection of the idea of a multiverse altogether. If, as Clay suggests, Second Life is simply a single product/platform/service, then why would it follow that not liking SL demonstrates that they were not going to like other 3d immersive environments in the future?

What if we turned this around and consider the opposite question: if people are only interested in game worlds, why are they trying out Second Life in the first place? Are they simply confused about what they are getting themselves into or are they seeking something like a multiverse and being frustrated that this particular one doesn't live up to their expectations?

Before I can evaluate whether Clay is right or wrong about why people are leaving Second Life, I would need to know what they were expecting when they got there, what role they hoped it would play in their lives, and in what ways they were disappointed in the gap between the motivating fantasy and whatever they experienced after they got there. To my mind, this is an ethnographic question and not purely a quantitative one.

So, let me invite those who read this blog to post their own answers to the following questions:

If you visited Second Life but chose not to remain involved, what turned you off?

If you visited Second Life and chose to remain actively engaged, what captured your imagination?

In either case, what drew you to Second Life in the first place?

And if you have heard about SL and haven't tried it, is there a reason you haven't been motivated to explore it yet?

(That should cover pretty much all of our bases there.)

Bad for Business?

Both Beth and Clay at various points imply that it would be bad for business -- (or to use Beth's terms, bad for "shopping") if it were demonstrated that SL's population were significantly smaller than the numbers currently being claimed in the most inflated news stories. Maybe but keep in mind that companies are embracing Second Life for a range of reasons, some of them good, some bad, and only some of them rest on the issue of how many members are drawn to Second Life. We might consider some of the other functions:

Many companies are using Second Life as a site of corporate training, allowing their own members to congregate together across multiple geographic locations, to hear a speaker, engage in discussion, or simply get to know each other better. Such activities take advantages of the affordances of 3d worlds to create a kind of shared presence.

Many companies are using their elaborately constructed and beautifully designed worlds as a kind of prestige showcase -- a place they go to show clients and demonstrate their own mastery of the emerging language of geek chic. Indeed, this function might be served just as well if there was something exclusive about Second Life than if it was a mass phenomenon.

Some companies are using Second Life as a site of niche marketing to reach the very kinds of early adapters and adopters who are coming and staying. In that sense, Second Life functions the way PBS or Sunday Morning News Shows function for certain corporate advertisers -- because it reaches a very specific niche of consumers whose tastes and experiences set them off from the general population.

Some companies, as Ilya Vedrashko has noted, use Second Life to test market new products or campaigns, recognizing that they can do so with limited exposure and low risk in Second Life compared to what it would take to launch a full scale national broadcast campaign. In this case, the value of Second Life depends on whether they recognize the specific quality of its population or confuse it for a cross-section of the population at large.

Some companies are using Second Life to encourage employees to break with their normal ways of doing business, to explore an alternative realm which is more fluid and flexible, and thus to encourage thought experiments and to create a climate which supports innovation.

And yes, some of them imagine that Second Life will allow them to reach hard to reach consumers -- the teenaged males who are defecting from television. Frankly, if that's their goal, they would do better trying to target WOW!

Niches Vs. Elites

A reader, Nick, wrote into the comments section:

If, as you say "it has always been the case that the playgrounds of the rich and the powerful take on a cultural significance that far outstrips the realm of our own everyday lives" Second Life represents the historical continuation of something we are seeking to avoid in an era of networks and relative freedom. Let me put that into less conceptual terms: it sounds as if Second Life is being lauded for having rather elitist principals - if you're not a programmer then there is little there for you, bar what other people choose to give or sell. When I first heard about it I imagined Second Life to be rather like the 'Lego' of software - simple tools made available to all that could be used to build whatever users' imaginations were capable of.

The reader's comment mixes together two sets of claims I was trying to make about why SL might matter beyond the population figures:

1. Second Life represents an important testbed for ideas about participatory culture. We have a company here which has adopted a collaborative attitude towards its consumers, empowering them to actively participate in the design of their own world.

2, Second Life is attracting a growing number of powerful institutions (corporate, governmental, educational, nonprofit) who are using it as a site to experiment with how they might adopt a more collaborative and participatory relationship with their consumers/constituents/students/what-have-you.

Given the kinds of people currently using SL, these two claims are certainly related but they are not the same.

Is SL a niche or an elite? Is it a specific demographic, a self-selecting community of those who share a common interest in the experience of building and inhabiting a multiverse, a particular constellation of early adapters and adopters -- i.e. a Niche? Or is it a group defined around the exclusion of other potential participants -- i.e. an elite?

I will continue to ponder this one.

A Betting Man?

Clay begins and ends his post by asking whether I am a betting man. I think he is trying to call me out. Leave it to Clay to find one of the few statements in my argument which would seem to rest on a quantitative claim (never mind that it comes as an aside) and try to push me to quantify it even further. It's a pretty good rhetorical tactic because if I agree to a bet, then I have ceded that in the end, it all does boil down to the numbers and if I refuse the bet, then he can claim that I am unwilling to get more specific about what I am claiming will be the future of virtual worlds.

I have been struggling all week to figure out how to respond - not because I am opposed to betting but because I do not think, as I have said throughout, that the quantitative issues are the most interesting ones to be thinking about vis-à-vis SL and the other multiverses which will follow in its footsteps.

Here's the statement he wants me to put my money behind:

Most of us will find uses for virtual worlds one of these days; most of us will not "live" there nor will we conduct most of our business there.

So, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, it all depends on how you define "us." For starters, most people on the planet have not ever made a telephone call, let alone used a computer, let alone gone on the web, let alone visited an immersive 3d environment. I suppose at the time I made the statement, I was imagining something like most of the people who are currently online regularly.

Then, we would have to specify what we mean by "use." I suppose what I had in mind was something like the following: given how many companies are using SL (and are likely to use other such sites) for corporate training and community building and given how many educational institutions are beginning to experiment with SL (and other such sites) as a form of distance learning, a significant portion of people are apt to have had at least some exposure to these worlds. (Indeed, it would be interesting to know what percentage of people who visit SL and don't return came for a special event of this kind. They were, in effect, tourists rather than settlers.)

As Beth notes, the text based world of e-mail is already being augmented by a range of other forms of audiovisual communications (including Flickr, Skype, YouTube, and Google Maps to cite only a few) which are being adapted to a range of different uses. It is not a big stretch of the imagination to assume that there will be occasions when our communication needs are best served by interfaces which allow participants interacting over distances to have a more embodied experience of telepresence or that there may be times and places when 3d modeling is more effective to communicate an idea or to collaborate in the production of a project than either text or audiovideo. So, I do think these kinds of environments -- whatever we want to call them -- will become more pervasive in our society over time. But we may no more inhabit such worlds than we inhabit Google Maps. We may simply consult or deploy them as needed to serve specific tasks. It may be more of a resource than a lifestyle.

Our current experience of membership or affiliation with a multiverse may reflect the particular needs of early adapters and may or may not be a model which will carry over to subsequent generations of users. We might compare it to the difference between belonging to a discussion group online and using e-mail. Lots of us belong to discussion groups and mailing lists, to be sure, but much of the time we are simply using e-mail to connect to people we know from our face to face interactions in the real world. We use it because it has certain affordances we need. Few of us would self identify as "people who use e-mail."

Let's pause a moment to think about terminology: I share Clay's conclusion that it is not productive to lump together WOW and SL into the same conceptual category. So rather than talking about virtual worlds, let's adopt Stephenson's term, multiverse, to refer to 3d environments which are not games and which facilitate social interactions. I am certainly not unique in using the word in this manner.

In the short run, I think Shirkey is right that games will prove more attractive to more people than multiverses will. Yet, we use play to acquire skills that we later deploy to more serious purposes. I think our play experiences with game worlds may accustom us to navigating through digital space and occupying avatars and interacting socially with people we may never meet face to face and all of these constitute the building blocks necessary to pave the way for broader use of multiverses as tools for social interactions and research collaborations. And in that sense, I think Beth is right that SL may turn out to have been an important early prototype for subsequent forms of social interactions online -- even if the numbers never come together there as its promoters might have hoped.

I am not sure how we are going to be able to quantify that and I have no idea how long it is going to take for this prediction to come true. I simply don't think any of us know enough yet about how these worlds work, about what people are seeking when they visit SL and the other multiverses, about which of these applications will reap rewards and which ones will fail.

So, in that sense, I am not a betting man. I am not willing to reduce this prediction to the kinds of data points that could meaningfully serve as the basis for a bet. Clay argues:

I do not believe the portmanteau category of virtual worlds will reach anything like half of internet users (or even half of broadband users) in any predictable time.

The key word here is predictable and I can't bet Clay because I don't think the rate of growth, given our current body of knowledge, is meaningfully predictable. And for me, that's part of the fun. I don't think there's anything inevitable about technological development. The future of the web is what we collectively make of it.

But if I were to make a prediction now, based on current conditions, I would bet that some significant portion of the people who are currently using the web will have used some form of 3d environment for purposes other than playing games within the next decade.

In any case, I don't really think Clay needs me to buy him dinner. And I'm eating pretty well myself these days, thank you. So, instead, let me suggest that in the short run, we invest some of the energy and resources that we are currently deploying to talk about virtual real estate to help those who lack a roof over their heads in the real world. I am happy to send a check for the price of a meal in a decent Boston restaurant to the homeless shelter of Clay's choice in Brooklyn.

In Defense of Crud

"Ninety percent of everything is crud" -- Theodore Sturgeon

I have found myself thinking a lot lately about the issue of quality as it relates to the emergence of participatory culture. Several things have raised the issue in my mind:

The first was reading a very interesting essay written by Cathy Young, a regular columnist for Reason magazine, debating the merits of fan fiction. In fact, Young outs herself as someone who has written and published fan fiction set in the universe of Xena: Warrior Princess. She is in turn responding to a diatribe against fan fiction by fantasy writer Robin Hobbs. She writes:

Hobb's indictment made the standard charges against fan fiction, from intellectual theft to intellectual laziness. Deriding the idea of fanfic as good training for writers, Hobb wrote, "Fan fiction allows the writer to pretend to be creating a story, while using someone else's world, characters, and plot....The first step to becoming a writer is to have your own idea. Not to take someone else's idea, put a dent in it, and claim it as your own."

Young works through some of the standard defenses of fan fiction (I won't go into all of them here, since I've delivered most of them in the past myself and am a little tired of the arguments.) But she ends with the following:

So is the growth of Internet-based fan fiction a cultural development to be wholeheartedly applauded? Not quite. The good news about the Internet is that, in a world without gatekeepers, anyone can get published. The bad news, of course, is the same. Much fanfic is hosted on sites such as fanfiction.net, where authors can get their work online in minutes--which means that professional-quality stories coexist with barely literate fluff, and reader reviews will sometimes congratulate an author on good grammar and spelling. Even sites that prescreen fanfic and encourage authors to use beta readers and a spell checker tend to be quite lax with quality control, and only a few fan fiction archives are genuinely selective.

For the more sophisticated fanfic lovers, the high crap-to-quality ratio can mean a frustrating search for readable stories. The real problem, though, is that less experienced readers may develop seriously skewed standards of what constitutes a readable story. It is frankly disturbing to encounter teenagers and young adults whose recreational reading is limited to fanfic based on their favorite shows, and there have been moments when I have felt like telling some of my own readers to put down the fanfic and pick up a book. It is even more troubling, as far as educational experiences go, that a teenager can wantonly butcher the English language at fanfiction.net and get complimented on a "well-written story."

Golubchik thinks that such concerns are exaggerated. "If anything," she says, "I think that fanfic teaches kids to be more discerning. The quality stuff does tend to percolate to the top; it gets recommended and popularized." Indeed, while the worst of fan fiction can make a Harlequin romance look like Charlotte Bronte, the popular stories are at least no worse in quality--and sometimes far better--than, say, The Da Vinci Code.

The mainstreaming of fan fiction is likely to raise standards further, bringing more educated people into the arena and perhaps encouraging some voluntary gatekeeping, such as contests with input from professional writers or editors...

Perhaps, as with other cultural products often dismissed as intellectual junk food, the answer to bad fanfic is simply better fanfic.

The second was reading a debate between Andrew Keen, the author of a forthcoming book, The Cult of the Amateur (which I am sure to be saying more about down the line) and Chris Anderson, the promoter of the concept of the "Long Tail."

Here's some of what Keen had to say:

Much of the euphoria and optimism about this latest wave of technology is suggesting that we, through these new technologies, are creating better culture. Better movies and music, for instance.

I am not convinced of that. Perhaps I am a reactionary here, defending an anachronistic culture, but my sense is that this latest, democratized culture, this user-generated content, is actually undermining many of our most valuable institutions, including movie studios, music labels, newspapers and publishing....I still think that the wisdom that I value -- the scarcity, to put it in economic terms -- is not in the crowd, but in people with talent and experience, whether they exist in political life, in economic life or cultural life. Rather than fetishizing this idealized crowd -- it seems tremendously abstract -- one can pick up so many examples from history where the crowd has not behaved in a very wise or gentlemanly way. I would rather focus on the value of expertise and the wisdom of people who are trained.

Keen's overtly and unapologetically elitist comments, frankly, get under my skin -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing if it forces those of us who believe in participatory culture to question and defend our own assumptions at a moment when the world seems to be moving more decisively in our directions. So, I find myself thinking a bit more about the vexing issue of quality. So let me offer a range of different responses to the issue:

1.We should not reduce the value of participatory culture to its products rather than its process. Consider, for a moment, all of the arts and creative writing classes being offered at schools around the world. Consider, for example, all of the school children being taught to produce pots. We don't do this because we anticipate that very many of them are going to grow up to be professional potters. In fact, most of them are going to produce pots that look like lopsided lumps of clay only a mother could love (though it does say something about how we value culture that many of them do get cherished for decades). We do so because we see a value in the process of creating something, of learning to work with clay as a material, or what have you. There is a value in creating, in other words, quite apart from the value attached to what we create. And from that perspective, the expansion of who gets to create and share what they create with others is important even if none of us produces anything beyond the literary equivalent of a lopsided lump of clay that will be cherished by the intended recipient (whether Mom or the fan community) and nobody else.

2. All forms of art require a place where beginning artists can be bad, learn from their mistakes, and get better. A world of totally professionalized expression masks the apprenticeship process all artists need to undergo if they are going to achieve their full potential. A world where amateur artists can share their work is a world where learning can take place. If the only films you see are multimillion dollar productions by Steven Spielberg, then most of us will assume that we have nothing meaningful to contribute to the culture and give up. If we see films with a range of quality, including some that are, in Sturgeon's terms, "crud," then it becomes possible to imagine ourselves as potentially becoming artists. Bad art inspires more new artists than good art does for this reason: I can do better than that!

3. A world where there is a lot of bad art in circulation lowers the risks of experimentation and innovation. In such a world, one doesn't have to worry about hitting the marks or even making a fool out of oneself. One can take risks, try challenging things, push in new directions because the cost of failure is relatively low. That is why a participatory culture is potentially so generative. Right now, innovation occurs most often at the grassroots level and only subsequently gets amplified by mass media. Professional media is afraid to take risks.

4. Bad art inspires responses which push the culture to improve upon it over time. I have argued elsewhere that fandom is inspired by a mixture of fascination and frustration. If the show didn't fascinate us, we would not keep returning to it. If it fully satisfied us, we would not feel compelled to remake it. Many of the shows that have inspired the most fan fiction are not the best shows but rather they are shows with real potential -- the literary equivalent of the "fixer-upper" that real estate agents always talk about. Over time, bad art may become an irritant, like sand in the oyster, which becomes a pearl when it gets worked over by many different imaginations. Good art may simply close off conversations.

5. Good and Bad, as artistic standards, are context specific. Good for what purposes? Good by what standards? Good for what audiences? In some ways, one can argue that professionally published fiction about popular television shows is superior to at least most fan fiction -- in terms of a certain professional polish in the writing style, in terms of its copy editing, in terms of perhaps its construction of plots. But it is not going to be as good as fan fiction on other levels -- in terms of its insight into the characters and their relationship, in terms of its match with the shared fantasies of the fan community, in terms of its freedom to push beyond certain constraints of the genre.

6. Standards of good and bad are hard to define when the forms of expression being discussed are new and still evolving. This would apply to many of the forms of participatory culture which are growing up around digital media. The forms are too new to have well established standards or fixed cannons.

7. This is not a zero-sum game. It is not clear that the growth of participatory culture does, in fact, damage to professional media making. One could argue that so far most popular work by amateur media makers has been reactive to stories, characters, and ideas generated by mass culture. The two may exist in dialogue with each other. This is certainly true of the kinds of fan culture that Cathy Young is discussing.

We should be less concerned with the presence of "bad art" in participatory culture than with the need to develop mechanisms for feedback which allow artists to learn and grow, the need to develop aesthetic criteria which allow us to meaningful evaluate new and emerging forms of expression or which reflect the particular needs of specific contexts of cultural production, and the need to develop mechanisms which help each consumer to locate forms of cultural expression which they regard to be good.

All of this brings us back to Sturgeon's Revelation: If 90 percent of everything is crud, then we are playing the law of averages. If you increase the number of people producing culture, you increase the amount of good art even if you don't increase the percentage of good art to bad. This is debatable, I suppose, but what is not debatable is that you also increase the diversity of the culture. Many many groups of people have felt excluded by a system of professionalized art and storytelling that might have vital contributions to make to our culture. To embrace what they produce doesn't require us to "lower" our standards but it may require us to broaden them to appreciate new forms of expression that do not fit comfortably within existing aesthetic categories.

The News From Second Life: An Interview With Peter Ludlow (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced readers to Peter Ludlow -- philosophy professor, editor of the Second Life's town newspaper, someone who thinks deeply about what civic engagement means in the context of a virtual world. Today, I continue that interview with some of Ludlow's thoughts about the recent debate sparked by Clay Shirkey's critiques of Second Life and continuing into some of his insights about the challenges of governing online communities. I am hoping this interview whets your interest in the book he is writing with Mark Wallace. Wallace and Ludlow are lively writers and provocative thinkers who are raising questions we need to consider if we are indeed moving towards the era of Web 3.0. An Aside

Okay, let's get back to this matter of Web 3.0. Of all of the things I said about Second Life in the exchanges with Shirkey and Coleman, I've taken the most heat for my dismissal of the concept that virtual worlds might represent Web 3.0. (Well, maybe my historical analogies but I will get back to those in another post.) Ludlow comes back to this matter here and takes a few whacks at me himself and perhaps justly so. But let me at least explain what I was responding to. I was talking about some of the hype and misrepresentations that have emerged from journalistic coverage of Second Life. I suggested that this reframing of virtual worlds as Web 3.0 might not be the most helpful way of understanding what is going on. There does seem to be a lot of confusion out there about what exactly is meant by the phrase, Web 3.0 -- whether it describes what comes after web 2.0 or whether it describes the enhancement and augmentation of the existing communications system. I suspect very few thoughtful people who are really engaged in online worlds imagine that they will displace the existing web altogether, though I have talked to some journalists who seem to imagine this is some kind of a realistic possibility.

Many of the popular representations of the evolution of the web offer a sloppy way of modeling the transition from one state of the web to the next. Consider this widely circulated image. It shows some moments of overlap between web 1.0 and web 2.0 but also seems to depict a moment where web 2.0 replaces Web 1.0 altogether and the same seems to be occuring here as web 2.0 gives way to web 3.0. I don't see any other way of reading what is being depicted on this particular chart.

But as I suggest in Convergence Culture, there are no dead media (though there may be some dead delivery technologies). Old media do not go away; they become part of a much more complex layering of different communications options within the media landscape. The web doesn't replace television or newspapers; virtual worlds won't displace social networks; they all will be available as possible ways to communicate. The emergence of a new medium may create a crisis for the old medium, requiring standard practices to shift, forcing us to rethink its social status or functions, redirecting patterns of production and consumption, but in the end, the old medium will survive in some form. This is what Ludlow says below. It's also what I was trying to say about the affordances of virtual worlds. Tell me that virtual worlds will be more central to our culture in the future and I won't argue with you. Tell me as some journalists -- and as the above chart seems to suggest -- that web 3.0 will displace earlier models of the online world and I am going to be skeptical.

OK, enough self justification. Now onto the interview...

I wanted to give you a chance to respond to Clay Shirky's recent critique of the hype surrounding SL. Do you agree or disagree with his concerns about how the mainstream media has been 'duped' about the population of SL? What has the response to this story been like within SL?

The exchange between Clay and the community hasn'’t been very productive. Clay came along with some true, but very obvious and not so interesting observations about the “Second Life residents” number, and then people on Terra Nova started genuflecting and saying what a genius Clay was. This was infuriating for a lot of us, because we have been calling out those numbers as bogus for over a year. For example, in the Herald we called a foul on the residency stats when they crossed 100 thousand, but more than that, we also pointed out that the “US Dollars Spent” numbers were bogus.

Clay took us to be saying that if insiders knew about the bogus number, then it was enough – the major media didn’t need to know. But of course that wasn’'t our point at all – it was more frustration with the mainstream business media and the eggheads on Terra Nova for only reading a very narrow bandwidth of sources (of which Clay is one). Apart from pointing out the obvious meaninglessness of the “residents” number, Clay's contribution was weak, for reasons that you pointed out: The interest of Second Life has nothing to do with the number of eyeballs it is delivering, and everything to do with the quality of the people that are in world and the kinds of activities they are engaged in, how those are going to influence future iterations of the web, and the long tail their activities are going to have.

IÂ’'ve seen lots of virtual communities, ranging from the WELL, to Mindvox, to the Italian PeaceLink network of the 90s. The WELL was not important because of how many people were there, but who was there and what they were doing. I made so many amazing contacts there, ranging from people like Mike Godwin and John Perry Barlow, to Josh Quitner, Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Jon Lebkowsky, R.U. Sirius, and the list could go on and on. The contacts IÂ’'m making and the things I am learning in Second Life are even more amazing, perhaps by an order of magnitude.

There was something retro about Clay’'s critique, and that something is this: it assumes the value and success of Second Life is tied to the number of eyeballs that are converging there. That is, the critique is assuming a push media model of value. But push media is in trouble, and that is the reason that SL is crawling with marketing and PR people -- they are trying to come to grips with “life after the 30 Second Spot” (to steal a line from the title of a book by Second Life resident Joseph Jaffe. Second Life isn’'t about counting eyeballs, it is about establishing relationships with quality technical, social, and artistic contacts that have a high impact and will continue to do so, learn from them, and then try to engage them in your own projects.

I also have a bone to pick with you regarding something you said in your response to Clay. It is certainly true that Second Life is being hailed as an example of Web 3.0, but no one is claiming that Web 3.0 replaces or even dominates the future of the internet. If you think of Web 1.0 as the commerce web and Web 2.0 as the social web, no one would argue that 2.0 replaces 1.0. This is a point that Giff Constable of the Electric Sheep Company made in response to you and Clay. No one thinks Web 3.0 is going to replace asynchronous communication. It is just something else that is being added to the mix, and it is going to contribute to the commercial and social aspects of the web, but it will also be its own weird thing. The interest of Web 3.0 at the moment is that the people who are there are younger early adopters and social trend setters (IÂ’'m thinking of my 11 year old daughter and her friends as a case in point.) Asynchronous communication is useful, but real time in-world meetings are very effective for some social and commercial applications.

In your forthcoming book, you and your co-author write that SL is a great world but a poor country. Explain. What issues do you have with the governance of SL?

The problem with governance in Second Life is basically this: the governance model is one where the Lindens are Greek gods up on Mount Olympus. They don'Â’t have the time and inclination to deal with the problems of us mortals, but they will dabble from time to time depending upon the whim of the particular god, the kind of day he or she is having, and whether they favor the mortal that petitions them or is involved in some sort of interplayer dispute. That model of governance makes for wonderful Greek tragedies (and comedies!) but itÂ’'s no way to run a country.

Some people argue that if a company produces a game, they should be able to set the rules that govern it. You have drawn an analogy to the way U.S. courts have historically addressed the problem of company towns to show that there may still be some constraints on the regulations they impose on their users. What rights do you think users should have in virtual worlds?

People often reason as follows: The company owns it, so they can do whatever they want with it. The problem is that there are many things that you can own and not be entitled to damage. If you buy a horse, you are not entitled to torture it, and if you buy an historic home you are not entitled to damage or deface it. Sometimes ownership entails responsibility and stewardship. Typically this is the case when the property or thing owned is important to the broader community. Platforms like Second Life have owners, but the existence of the communities that grow up in those spaces mean the platform owners have responsibilities to care for those communities and see that they are not harmed.

In Second Life, the responsibility is more acute because their advertising campaign has been beating the drum that you can make money in Second Life and that you own the property and assets and intellectual property you acquire and produce there. Given that, there is at a minimum a responsibility to make good on that promise, even if you have fine print in your terms of service agreement that says you donÂ’t really mean it.

In your book, you offer a number of examples of where companies under-respond or over-respond to "crimes" or transgressions within game worlds. Why do you think companies have had such difficult finding a balanced approach to online conduct?

The companies have a difficult time because the people they place in charge of policing the spaces are typically either people with an engineering background or unpaid volunteers with little to no formal training. Dispute resolution is hard, and dealing with troubled adolescents and troubled adults is hard. It can be done, but the people that game companies throw at these social problems rarely if ever have any training in the area. The net result is that game moderators seldom act in a unified and impartial way, and when they do act they often end up throwing gasoline on the fire.

In a way we can understand this. Social problems are very labor intensive. On the other hand, if you are running a MMORPG you are in the business of providing a product that is fundamentally social. It isn't a game in a box where all the parameters are fixed. There are thousands of content contributors making for a very dynamic and unpredictable social environment. Electronic Arts never did figure this out. Linden Lab seems to understand the problem, but for some reason has been unable or unwilling to act to solve the problem.

The News From Second Life: An Interview with Peter Ludlow (Part One)

I first became aware of Peter Ludlow and his work for the Alphaville Herald when NPR called me up and asked me to be a pundit commenting on a nationally broadcast debate between the candidates for the leadership of the largest town in The Sims Online -- a debate between a 14 year old girl from Palm Beach and a 20-something airline employee from Virginia. I watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the mechanisms surrounding the election broke down, some voters were denied the right to cast their ballots, the election technology was manipulated, and charges of corruption and poor sportsmanship flew right and left. The Alphaville elections, in other words, were the game world counterpart to what happened in Florida in the 2000 elections. Ludlow, who was far more deeply emershed in this world than I was, became my expert guide through this whole process. I wrote about these events for Technology Review and later revisited them for a section of my book, Convergence Culture. I lost contact with Ludlow for a while but recently he wrote me to see if I might give him some advice about his own new book project -- his account of his time as the editor first of the Alphaville Herald and then of The Second Life Herald, co-authored with Mark Wallace. Their book recounts a fascinating saga of mobsters and griefers, of civic boosters and would be socialites, and of the challenge of governing virtual worlds. The book will be coming out some months from now from the MIT Press but in the meantime, what Ludlow had to say was so timely, especially given my recent exchanges with Clay Shirkey and Beth Coleman about the value of Second Life and given our forthcoming Beyond Broadcasting conference that I wanted to share some of his reflections with you much sooner than that. When he is not playing the part of a muckraking journalist in Second Life, Ludlow is a professor in the department of Philosophy and Linquistics at the University of Michigan.

In the conversation that follows, he explores more systematically what it means to construct civic media in Second Life and discusses his contributions to the life of this emerging online community. Tomorrow, he will share his reflections on the Second Life Debate as well as his thoughts about the challenges of governing online worlds. Together, these two installments represent a fascinating inside perspective on the nature of civic engagement in Second Life.

Axel Springer announced the other day that they would establish a full time newspaper in Second Life. What do you see as the significance of this announcement? What does it mean to the existing local newspapers which are indigenous to SL?

The Axel Springer virtual newspaper, called The Avastar, launched a few weeks ago, and they have had, suffice it to say, a rough start trying to find their way around Second Life. One problem is that Second Life is a very complex and hard to understand cluster of social spaces, and the Avastar managers don''t seem to understand the world very well. I also don''t think they have had great success in lining up knowledgeable and articulate writers, and if they think people are going to *pay* to read their paper (or, for that matter, advertise in it) they are badly mistaken.

The fundamental problem with their project, however, is their idea that there is some sort of value added by virtue having their newspaper in a PDF format, rather than a blog-like format. PDF doesn't integrate into the Second Life infosphere in the appropriate way (they can't link to other stories, we can't link to them, people can't comment, the stories are stale by the time they appear, etc).

If you think about it, their project is somewhat reactionary. They had an opportunity to come to this strange and fantastic new place where all the rules can be rewritten, and the only thing they could think of doing was coming up with a product that mimics meat space newspapers as much as possible. Far from offering us a new way to think about news and entertainment and how it should be presented, they are effectively trying to make a last stand for static push media by using PDF instead of a blog or some sort of social software.

From the outside, I''m sure they look all bleeding edgy ("oh look, a newspaper in a virtual world!") but from inside they look reactionary in concept, and clumsy in execution.

You've been involved with local newspapers in two virtual worlds now -- SL and Sims Online. What do you see as the importance of civic journalism in imaginary space? How important is it that the perspective be "local" -- coming from the player community itself?

Civic journalism in virtual worlds is very important, and it has grown up a lot over the three+ years I have been involved with The Alphaville Herald, and now the Second Life Herald. When we started in October of 2003 there were lots of fan sites for online games, but the concept of blogs/journals that covered in game events and player/owner conflicts with a critical eye was foreign. People reacted to the Herald like it had come from outer space. I can''t speak for other virtual worlds, but today in Second Life there is a very rich community of dozens of bloggers - many of which are self-labeled as newspapers. It makes for a very interesting media ecology for Second Life.

Some of the sites are merely fan sites, and some are personal journals of some form or other, but there are some that take a serious and critical look at the world and Linden Lab policies from time to time. All of them play an important role in recording and commenting on various aspects of this very rich and complex space.

This sort of journalism is important, and the way I think of it, there are three audiences: the internal audience, the external audience, and the audience that isn''t born yet.

The internal audience involves other players, and the flow of information can be crucial to maintaining a fair playing field. Just as an example, we ran a story about a memo the Lindens had sent to some key land owners, informing them that prices for private islands would be going up shortly and that if they acted now they could grab islands at the current price. That story embarrassed the Lindens into opening the offer to everyone and extending the buy-in period for land at then-current prices. There are lots of instances of this sort - policies and actions have serious economic consequences and virtual journalism can be a watchdog.

For the external audience, we provide a window onto the world that hopefully accurately reflects what is going on there, so that people will come join for the right reasons and not the wrong reasons. Also, if you have thousands of people in a given space interacting, it is important that people on the outside know what is going on. If this isn''t clear, consider the case of The Sims Online, which is a space that is supposedly suitable for children as young as 13. Well, I think it is important that parents and policy makers be informed about what is going on in that space. I''m not going to tell them what to do about it, but I do think there is a kind of civic responsibility to point out some of the adult activities that are taking place.

The future audience: a hundred years from now people will want to know what was happening in the rapidly evolving social web of our era, and these journals provide important records. Sometimes when I write for the Herald I even imagine that I am writing for an audience that won''t come along for a hundred years. (Usually though, I''m just banging something out as fast as possible.)

Some of your critics have argued that your coverage of the issues facing the communities in game world could be used to spur on reform and regulation efforts by outside government authorities. How do you balance your responsibility to the community within the game world (to expose problems so they can be addressed) with what they perceive as your responsibility beyond the community (to not stir up public controversy which could bring outside attention)?

It certainly can''t be my responsibility to cover up in-world problems. I understand that people view critical commentary and exposure of outrageous in-world behavior to be an attack on the community, but of course it is nothing of the kind. The problem is that sites which constantly spin the world in a positive light have no credibility when an outside critic comes along. For example, when Clay Shirky launched his recent attack on Second Life, it was easy for him to dismiss the defenders of SL as a bunch of breathless logrolling fanboiz. He can''t do that with the Herald however, and we are, I think, positioned to slap him down good and hard when we have the time to get around to it.

I should also add that over time people do come to understand that we are not attacking the community, and some of the Herald''s harshest critics have gone on to be good friends and contributors to the Herald. If you stick around, that shows people that you are committed to the community, and that is what really counts the most.

Some people have made fun of your efforts suggesting that these virtual worlds are "only games" and that you are taking them "too seriously." How do you respond to this criticism?

The ""only a game"" meme is of course not merely leveled at the Herald, but at anyone who participates in online worlds (and participatory culture more broadly - it is a species of the "get a life" meme that you have discussed in Textual Poachers and elsewhere). The first thing that has to be said is that as applied to Second Life it is badly mistaken, since Second Life is barely a game at all --- it is a completely open platform the content of which is provided by participants (that is they build, texture, and script whatever they want). The platform can be used for many purposes, but developing and playing what might be called games has never really been a big part of Second Life.

Beyond that, I tend to think that not much in life is *only* a game. Even spaces like World of Warcraft that are pretty clearly designed to be games are also spaces where people socialize, exchange real world information, work on projects together etc.

The more interesting question is why people keep repeating ""only a game"" so much. If you google ""only a game"" and "Second Life" together, you get nearly 12,000 hits. It is like a mantra that people keep repeating to keep some thought or idea at bay - and I think the dangerous idea that Second Life shoves in your face every day is this: our wealth is virtual, our property is transient, and our social lives are mediated by technology, nomadic, and often fleeting. I think that when people keep saying "it''s only a game" they are really saying "the rest of my world isn''t like this: my wealth is tangible and permanent, my friendships are unmediated and also permanent." Saying "it''s only a game" is like saying "this isn''t how things really are, this is just a bad dream." People need to pinch themselves, because this ain''t no dream. This is reality; deal with it.

At various times, you have seemed to struggle with whether you are playing a reporter in a game and taking seriously your responsibilities as a journalist covering real people in a real community. To what degree does the "magic circle" give players --- including yourself -- license to shed real world responsibilities in virtual world? Where should we draw the limits?

I don''t think we struggle with whether we are in or out of the magic circle so much as we intentionally play at the circumference. Sometimes, when I think we are getting too serious, I will post a silly story, and when we are starting to get too silly I will put together a serious interview or offer a polished essay or piece of serious journalism. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable; they want to know if we are serious journalists or just playing at being journalists. But the answer is we don''t respect the distinction and we are constantly trying to flout it.

Playing (sometimes even being) seedy tabloid journalists has helped us to learn the role that tabloid journalism plays in the media ecology of Second Life and the internet more broadly. I''m fascinated by this topic. If you think of media as a kind of eco-system them you see that tabloid journalism plays an important role - churning up stuff that publications with bigger budgets and more time can sift through and investigate.

What is frightening, however, is seeing the number of so-called serious media outlets that pick up our stories (and other blog flotsam) and just reprint them as though it was the word of Gopod. More frightening than that, however, has been the many instances we have seen where major news organizations research their own stories and end up with great big piles of steaming crap. So I am in this strange position of thinking both that (i) people should not be reprinting our stuff without doing their Serious Journalism thing with it and (ii) the content we generate is on the whole more reliable and informative than what they come up with when they do that Serious Journalism thing.

The net effect of this has been that it has made me very pessimistic about the state of journalism in the business and technology sector; it seems to be mostly about recycling press releases without reflection. And it's even worse than that. The *real* problem is that too many people now equate Serious Journalism with the recycling of press releases. Critical journalism is so foreign to people (except maybe on the sports page) that they recoil against it. Well, let me modify that statement. People in the US have this problem. Readers from other countries (Germany, Italy, etc.) find the critical stance of the Herald altogether natural and they are baffled by the Americans who complain about it. So maybe this is just a problem with the American media consumers - they have forgotten what a genuinely critical media looks like.

The Culture of Citizenship: A Conversation With Zephyr Teachout

On February 24th, MIT Comparative Media Studies will host a conference in collaboration with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. The one-day event will be held at MIT, and is entitled "Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy." It will bring together industry experts, academic leaders, public media professionals, and political activists for panel discussions and focused working groups. Beyond Broadcast 2007 builds on the overwhelming success of last year's sold-out event, "Beyond Broadcast 2006: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture" held at Harvard Law School. Over 350 people took part in-person and online through the virtual world Second Life. Attendees used several unique online tools, including a web-based "question tool" to probe panelists, a collaborative wiki, live blogging, flickr photo sharing, del.icio.us tagging, and YouTube video production. These tools enabled the conference to practice what it preached, turning the event into a two-way participatory interaction in contrast with many conferences. The tools have been expanded upon this year, already spurring an active conversation on

the conference web site, weeks before the event.

I will give the Keynote Address, followed by panel discussions from media makers and policy commentators. Details of these panels are being updated on the conference web site

In the second-half of the day, the conference turns its focus to working groups that attendees will help organize. Building on themes coming from the plenary sessions, participants will target specific issues or questions and join efforts with the diverse crowd of others. In the past, these groups have been facilitated by thought leaders in technology, policy, and academia. Many attendees last year expressed their appreciation for this hybrid conference approach in

which they had a chance to "do something before heading home."

There will also be an evening reception, called "Demos and Drinks," showcasing groups that are doing exciting work related to conference themes.

Registration is only $50 (before February 9), and includes lunch and the evening reception. There is also a special 50% discount for students. The conference follows the 2007 Public Media Conference taking place in Boston February 20-23.

As we lead into the conference, I am running a series of features on the blog which foreground the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy. In today's post, I offer an interview with another of the conference's speakers, Zephyr Teachout. The Director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, Teachout has emerged as a leading thinker about the role of new media in fostering what she describes here as a "culture of citizenship." After the presidential campaign ended, she worked at America Coming Together and Current TV and was a fellow at the Berkman Center. In 2006, Teachout became the national director of the Sunlight Foundation as the group's national director. According to Wikipedia, "The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. At the core of all of the Foundation's work is a focus on the power of technology and the Internet to transform the relationship between citizen's and their government."

In the conversation that follows, Teachout shares her perspective on politics and popular culture, Second Life and Wikipedia, all focused on helping us to better understand what elements in the new media landscape might be deployed to intensify civic engagement and insure a more transparent government.

Let's start with the core conference theme. Many media reformers have attacked the "bread and circus" aspects of popular culture as distracting voters from serious aspects of politics. Yet, this conference's theme, "From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy" invites us to imagine a different relationship between popular culture and grassroots politics. What do you see as the relationship between the two?

Both of these seem right to me -- the possibility and the threat. In the last four years, I've met thousands of people whose political creativity, public thinking, and public activity has vastly increased directly because of the internet. I've met people who I think you can fairly say have switched from never thinking of being a citizen as one of their central roles, to thinking of citizenship as being an integral part of their identity, the way being a mother or employee or sister or cousin is part of an identity. The internet has enabled that switch -- for some, its been a gradual shift, from reading arguments on blogs to contributing to arguments on blogs to joining groups making political statements to holding community fora. For others, its been an instant jump -- a Meetup-enabled political meeting has led to a leadership role. For still others (and here I'm thinking mostly of geeks and internet artists), a habit of creativity and responsibility in one arena has led to taking the same attitude in a political arena.

There are millions who have participated in political life because of the internet, first by ventriloquism (an email along the lines of "hey, I thought this political article was interesting") then by speaking (an email along the lines of "hey, I thought this article is interesting because x, but they got it wrong because...") who then become more comfortable in their other communications, on and offline, in speaking about political issues.

And then there are those extraordinary people, like those we've seen at the Sunlight Foundation, who take citizenship to a whole new level. Simply by being asked, "help us investigate this question about earmarks," a handful of people not only responded to that question but have becomes intrepid, creative citizen watchdogs, digging up information about our politics and sharing it broadly, all on their own time.

There are still more who have participated in a one-dimensional way, the way one "participates" in the coca cola industry by drinking coke (and an increasing greed on the part of candidates to increase this kind of participation -- big lists, assigned tasks), where neither personal responsibility nor creativity are engaged. But even this flat kind of participation leads a handful to taking the role of citizen seriously.

The internet breaks down some barriers to creativity, to public expression, to information, to public conversation, and to collective action.

That said, our human hunger for humor, connection, games, entertainment, gossip, is nearly limitless, and when the supply is nearly limitless it is hard to avoid. When I go to the airport, I can't tear my eyes away from celebrity gossip magazines, even though there is no barrier to my reading the Economist -- when I'm online, the celebrity gossip, the games, and the political gossip constantly beckon. There is now no barrier to instant dopamine hits from playing games, from reading gossip, from emailing and instant messaging friends. I can't generalize from my experience, but I know I'm not completely alone when I say that the internet has diminished many of my other experiences -- I cook less, read fewer books, plan fewer parties, and wander the streets aimlessly less frequently because I can always trust in some small comfort online when I would have to risk much more by taking on the streets. As applied to politics, its an open question -- will we, as a culture, choose the limitless entertainment because its there, and will our civic culture continue to decline (with a small percentage the exception?). Or will the new possibilities lead to a new culture of citizenship?

I happen to think the culture of citizenship is possible, but it will take real vigilance, care, cultivation, and a collective choice to make it a priority. It may also take some serious thinking about whether we want something like the fairness doctrine for the internet -- whether, looking at ourselves in the mirror, we decide we want some structural supports for our civic selves -- it will take a choice. The internet -- no matter all the joyful possibilities of political engagement it enables -- will not make us citizens, we will have to do that ourselves.

You were The Director of Internet Organizing for the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Given those experiences, what advice would you offer the current crop of Democratic candidates about the potential use of new media in the forthcoming campaign? Do you have any predictions about which campaigns seem to best understand this current era of web 2.0?

I am far more interested in who will make the best President than in who uses the best tools, and a clumsy use of email, youtube, and blogs wouldn't dissuade me from supporting a candidate who I largely support. The only way they really relate is that part of any support for me is necessarily a commitment to citizenship and to transparent government.

If you were advising a candidate in this election cycle, would you recommend that they adopt an avatar and go into Second Life?

Yes, I would have a full time staffer, with three interns at least, who were

responsible for gaming outreach.

For the past 40 years or so, there have been basically three ways a citizen can reliably interact with a Presidential candidate:

1) She can join a group (like a labor union) and engage in that group's decision-making, which is then communicated to the candidate through an intermediary.

2) She can watch the candidate on TV in a debate, on a news story, or in an ad

3) She can live in New Hampshire or be lucky.

Other forms of interaction were possible, but there were not that many, and they were not scalable. Suddenly there is Second Life, listservs, email, games that a candidate can play with and against others, a dizzy mess of kinds of interactions that are possible. The only real limitations on these new kinds of interactions are scale, creativity, and political will.

I once saw an interesting talk by a Microsoft sociologist, in which he talked about the kinds of characters that show up in list-servs. Its easy to be inauthentic in one forum, one time or a few times, he said, but over time, its pretty clear who isn't acting like a human - there are certain personality types we all recognize (including the trolls) and those that don't quite seem right we shy away from, picking up subtle signals that suggest that "this person is sort of lying." This is finally a positive conclusion for internet communities - it sugests that guerrilla marketers may be able to strike once, but astroturf will reveal itself in the end. Language, used unrelentingly over weeks and months, will out the shill.

This thesis is also interesting when reflecting on the efforts candidates make to engage people in completely new forms of interaction - a chat room, say, or in Second Life. While candidates won't necessarily lie, inasmuch as they do not sound like humans sound and bring prefabricated phrases, or phrases of others, it can undermine their credibility - and certainly undermine their interest. (The cookie cutter emails that so many campaigns now send have growing lists but idle members, who do not believe that the emails carry any authentic connection to them.) Likewise, even if thousands of people show up to watch candidate y "chat" or "blog", the interest will only remain so long as there is some reason to think they are getting something more than a press release or scripted notes. And the fashionable time-delayed "chat" in which questions are submitted before hand is not a new form - is similar to having a guest on talk radio, except leaves the candidate more control.

But back to your question -- a real time chat, or a conversation in Second Life, is a new form. That, as it develops, will be fascinating for politicians, who have so much more on the line in every word than the reporters who regularly do this. Would I recommend it? Yes. Presidential

candidates should be outreaching in gaming forums, including game-of-life forums, actively. But it will take some innovation and looseness to work well.

We had some very fruitful real time chats during the Dean campaign, when they were used for policy experts from the staff to answer basic policy questions by chatters. It was a narrow enough context that policy experts were quite forthcoming, and the discussions were fruitful from both sides - the chats we had with Dean involved were more chaotic and less likely to be fruitful. In both cases, much of the interesting conversations that I had were the side-chats, carried on in groups of two and three who pinged me, seeing the name of a staffer. In Second Life, with new dimensions added (and the possibility for visual demonstrations), I can imagine these lecture-like moments being even more valuable - a candidate could have a forum on net neutrality, for example, in which he presents not only himself but his policy experts, creating a new kind of conversation, but one more likely to inform a citizen both about the issues and about the way in which a candidate makes decisions.

Second Life, chat rooms, and social networking tools makes it easier to both create groups and be creative -- so instead of having to speak to a candidate through a large community years in the making, 30,000 people with shared interests can get together and ask for a town-hall meeting from each of the candidates, and invite tough questioners to attend.

The forms and format of the meetings can go beyond the classic candidate forum, because of the low cost of bringing people together - and it may be that in these liminal forms we learn more than we thought possible, even if the candidate does not step on his tongue.

What lessons do you think political leaders should take from the Wikipedia movement?

I think there are two key lessons:

1) Small groups of people who feel responsible are highly competent to manage difficult and boring and very important tasks. I think this is one of the most under-told stories, especially in politics -- politicians are eager for mass numbers, big email lists, big readerships, big donations, and thousands of people door-knocking for them. This is all fine -- but to truly be a democrat (small d) they must also believe that citizens are competent at decision-making and governing, and express that belief through their campaign structures and their governing structures. Any politician you ask will gush about the possibility of the internet to enable citizens to give her good ideas, but most are wary of actually distributing roles, not tasks, to groups of people that are not on the payroll. Wikipedia should help change that story -- self-governance is possible.

2) Millions of people want to engage as creative, intelligent adults in political life. Wikipedia, for all its neutral point of view, is a profoundly political project, and evidences, along with hundreds of other examples, the hunger of people to be meaningful contributors to political society.

What connection do you see between the ideals of citizen journalism and the kinds of voter participation and government reform efforts being promoted by the Sunlight Foundation?

Sunlight Foundation is committed to using technology to strengthen the relationship between citizens and Congress. Our grants support people who are making amazing transparency tools, and other parts of our work is more explicitly political, lobbying (with facebook groups and an open, distributed attititude) for Congress to open up its processes and join the 21st century. We beleive that a transparent budgetary process, once impossible, is now possible because of the internet, and the more citizens engage in that process, the closer we are to achieving ideals of self-governance.

I don't personally have an ideal of citizen journalism, but an ideal of citizenship -- which is to say that people actually take responsibility for their government. They can discharge that responsibility in infinite ways -- much as one can discharge the responsibility of motherhood or owning a pet in infinite ways. But we all know the difference between someone who owns a pet and takes responsibility for it, and one who does not -- what I seek is a culture in which most of us take responsibility. One of those ways is to research and write and mashup and make videos and generally engage others in Congress, and we are working to enable those (a quickly growing community) that are interested in this. There are some amazing people who work with Congresspedia and our Senior Researcher, Bill Allison, doing the hard investigative work it takes to actually understand how Congress works, and they are doing all of us an extraordinary service.

Can you give us a preview of your remarks at the Beyond Broadcasting conference?

Nope! Because I don't know what they are yet...

More Second Thoughts on Second Life

A week ago, Clay Shirkey, Beth Coleman, and I launched a three-way conversation across our blogs which was designed to spark a greater public conversation about the value of Second Life. We have been extremely pleased by the range of other responses to our posts which have cropped up on other blogs. By agreement, we are each returning today to respond to each other's posts and offer some concluding thoughts on the issues which have emerged through the conversations so far. Beth's post can be found here. Clay's post can be found here.

As some readers have noted, the disagreements here may be more apparent than real. Clay, Beth and I agree that Second Life is probably being over hyped if our criteria of significance is defined statistically but that it may still be an important site of cultural innovation and deeply meaningful to the people who spend their time there if we adopt more qualitative measures.

The "debate", if you can call it that, circles around competing criteria by which we might measure the importance of Second Life. Shirkey's original post sparked such heated response in part because it seemed to be pushing statistical and commercial criteria forward at the expense of other ways of evaluating the importance of what is going on there.

Shirkey says as much:

Concerning popularity, I predict that Second Life will remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it. Such niches can be profitable (an argument I made in the Meganiche article), but they won't, by definition, appeal to a broad cross-section of users.

Beth believes that Second Life may well push well beyond niche status by providing a compelling model for how we might live in a virtual world that captures the public imagination and paves the way for subsequent developments in the design and deployment of virtual worlds. Second Life, she suggests, represents one step further along a century long evolution of human communications capacity:

What virtual worlds promise is an augmentation of human-to-human communication. We seem to yearn for synchronous connectivity and virtual worlds promise to deliver exactly that. Looking at the 150-year build out of telecommunications capabilities, what we find with many of the current platforms from text message to instant messaging to virtual worlds are designs for simultaneous connectivity. Putting a human face to things is a lot of what this is about, even if that human face is a codebot. These platforms are not simply to facilitate shopping but to develop further (or perhaps more massively) the ways in which virtual and "portable" spaces can be inhabited as a home.

Shirkey, by contrast, believes that "virtual worlds" is not a meaningful category:

Put another way, I believe that the group of things lumped together as virtual worlds have such variable implementations and user adoption rates that they are not well described as a single conceptual group...Pointcast's management claimed that email, the Web, and Pointcast all were about delivering content, and that the future looked bright for content delivery platforms. And indeed it did, except for Pointcast. The successes of email and of the Web were better explained by their particular utilities than by their membership in a broad class of "content delivery." Pointcast tried to shift attention from those particularities to a generic label in order to create a club in which it would automatically be included.

I believe a similar thing happens whenever Second Life is lumped with Everquest, World of Warcraft, et al., into a category called virtual worlds. If we accept the validity of this category, then multi-player games provide an existence proof of millions-strong virtual worlds, and the only remaining question is simply when we arrive at wider adoption of more general-purpose versions

Ironically, of course, many bloggers have responded to Shirkey by arguing that he is comparing apples and oranges by lumping Second Life together with these other gaming platforms. Second Life, they argue, is not a game. And in doing so, they are making his point for him: Second Life, he argues, can not be meaningfully lumped in with these other forms of virtual worlds because it is not a game and read on its own terms, it does not demonstrate there is a robust or widespread public demand for this kind of online experience. Again, though, this is to revert back to a set of statistical criteria for evaluating the cultural significance of Second Life.

Let me repeat for the third time the statement which may best sum up my own position: "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."

Here, we can imagine a range of other ways of evaluating the importance of what happens in Second Life:

1. on the basis of which groups or institutions are conducting business there. As I have suggested, Second Life embodies a mixed media ecology in which business, government, educational, civic, nonprofit, and amateur media makers co-exist, each using Second Life as a test bed for innovation. It has always been the case that the playgrounds of the rich and the powerful take on a cultural significance that far outstrips the realm of our own everyday lives.

2. on the basis of the quality of civic engagement which emerges there. In a forthcoming book, Peter Ludlow, the editor of the Second Life Herald and the former editor of the Alphaville Herald (based in The Sims Online), has described what has happened as players move from one "virtual world" to another. Ludlow argues that there are a number of people who were "griefers" in The Sims Online who have begun to make meaningful contributions to the community on Second Life. His implications is that there is something in the mechanisms through which community life is conducted in Second Life which fosters a greater sense of civic engagement and personal responsibility -- in part perhaps because people are constructing their own reality and making their own rules there. (By the way, watch for an interview with Ludlow about Second Life on my blog later this week).

3. On the basis of the specific kinds of outcomes which emerge from our social experimentation in Second Life. We may need to wait longer to evaluate impact on this level but Second Life will matter if it teaches us new things about what it is like to live in a virtual environment or if, for that matter, we take innovations and insights from Second Life back with us to reshape our real world institutions and practices.

4. On the basis of the ways that Second Life incites the public imagination and thus becomes part of the general cultural understanding of what it might mean to inhabit a virtual world. In that sense, Second Life might occupy a space closer to Snow Crash or Diamond Age -- that is, as a fragment of the popular imagination rather than as a real space. In a literal sense, if Second Life didn't exist, we would have to invent it because it plays such a vital role in contemporary discussions of participatory culture, user-generated content, and online worlds. One could argue, in fact, that the public imagination of virtual reality is so far in advance of the current state of the technology that we may never have the patience to actually take the baby steps needed to get from where we are to where as a cultural we want to be. There's a danger that the public imagination of Second Life is so much more vivid than the reality that this contributes to the phenomenon of people trying it out and abandoning it.

Perhaps we can identify many more ways that Second Life might matter culturally without necessarily mattering statistically.

As we look more closely at Shirkey's arguments, he seems to hold onto a very specific set of criteria by which we might evaluate the quality of experience visitors have in Second Life -- criteria which start from the assumption that Second Life is designed to be a "simulacra" of reality, that it is judged according to its fidelity to the real world. Consider this passage from Shirkey's post

Games are not just special, they are special in a way that relieves designers of the pursuit of maximal realism. There is still a premium on good design and playability, but the magic circle, acceptance of arbitrary difficulties, and goal-directed visual filtering give designers ways to contextualize or bury at least some platform limitations. These are not options available to designers of non-game environments; asking users to accept such worlds as even passable simulacra subjects those environments to withering scrutiny.

All of this makes sense if you assume the goal of Second Life is "maximal realism." In my last post, I argued for a different understanding of what it might mean to have a Second Life -- based on the classic notion of carnival. By this criteria, Second Life is a place we go to escape the constraints on our everyday life, to explore new possibilities through our imagination which would be hard to realize in the realm of our First Lives. It doesn't mean everything goes: in fact, much of the literature on carnival implies that it re-enforced existing rules and norms precisely by inviting people to imagine what would happen if they were overturn.

Second Life can be immersive without in any way convincing us that it is a thorough model of the real world. After all, Second Life is a place where people routinely embrace identities -- say, a panda in a ninja costume -- which would have no basis in the realm of our real world experience, where people may casually swap avatars as they move from one space to another, where they may just as readily copy the space ship from Firefly as duplicate the architecture of Tokyo. Hell, it's a world where there are giant flying penises!

None of this has anything to do with "maximal reality" and everything to do with the "consensual fantasy" William Gibson saw as the defining characteristic of cyberspace. I am certain there are people and institutions that strive relentlessly for "maximal realism" but that's only one potential goal people might embrace as they enter this realm. Second Life is what we as participants make of it.

Shirkey himself demonstrates that games, because of their structures, may create immersiveness without achieving anything near "maximal realism" or even "passable simulacras." Who is to say that Second Life may not be generating altogether different mechanisms for achieving immersiveness -- having to do with our own shared participation in the design of the world -- without depending on perfectly mimicking the realm of our everyday experience? The problem is that if the "immersiveness" of Second Life is a product of our own participation then it may not be immediately communicated to the casual visitor who doesn't contribute directly to the production of this consensual fantasy but simply goes there expecting to consume it much as they consume an amusement park or a multiplayer game. This would surely account for the difference in how casual visitors and immersed participants experience the quality of experience created within this world.

The Beatles Win the IAP Games Competition

A few weeks ago, I shared with readers of this blog some of the thinking behind our annual workshop on translating traditional media content into interactive entertainment experiences. This is a workshop we have done for the past seven years in collaboration with Sande Scordes from Sony Imageworks. Students with different skills and backgrounds are put onto teams together and asked to select an existing media property that they think would form the basis for a compelling game experience. In the course of the week, these teams think through issues of narrative structure, character development, graphic presentation, interactivity, audio design, market potentials, and business models to come up with a 20 minute "pitch" for how and why they think such a game might succeed. The students worked long, long, long hours trying to pull together their presentations and on Friday, they gave their pitches and got feedback from our panel of judges (which combine industry and academic expertise). Every year, we get blown away by the quality of the presentations and this year was no exception.

The winning team this year, led by CMS graduate student Neal Grigsby and including Cabell Gathman, Ben Decker, Sarah Sperry and Laura Boylan, imagined a unique partnership between Apple Music (which owns the rights to the Beatles's songs and likenesses) and the Nintendo Wii (which offers an exciting platform for a new kind of games/music experience). The presentation opened with a montage of clips designed to display the unique sense of humor and comradary that one associates with the classic Beatles movies, the game like potential of some of the sequences from Help and A Hard Day's Night, and the ways that the Beatles themselves had experimented with the construction of animated avatars through the Yellow Submarine and other projects. Their high concept -- "Grand Theft Auto meets the Fab Four" -- a "sandbox" game experience which allows players to take on the role of the Beatle of their choice. As they explained, people have strong feelings about which Beatle they want to be and might not take kindly to starting out the game as Ringo and working their way "up" to John or Paul. They might also have strong feelings about which period of the Beatles' lives they wanted to inhabit or preferences about which of the many imaginative realms introduced through their songs they might want to visit first.

The Wii would allow novel play mechanics which might range from trying to "net" the Blue Meanies or deliver flowers to "all of the lonely people" to performing as a band -- they even imagined a level which might be called "Sitar Hero" which reflects a particular memorable moment in the group's development. Periodically, the player might be besieged by mobs of screaming fans that rip off their clothes and delay their movement through the levels. As they successfully complete a level, they would get to perform another hit song from the group's repertoire and they might be able to enter a more surreal, psychedelic realm such as the Octopus's Garden or Lucy in the Sky with Gardens. Each level starts with a muted palette designed to mimic the black and white of their classic films but as the Beatles master the challenges and spread love through their music, they color our world.

The group's witty presentation was peppered with a range of compelling slogans -- "All YOU need is Love. Wii provide the rest" or "Let it Wii." They even were able to offer some convincing arguments that this project might not be as far fetched as it might seem, given Apple's recent venture in allowing Cirque du Soleil to repurpose and remix classic Beatles cuts for their new performance piece.

And if anyone wondered what the Fab Four would look like as game characters, they ended with a series of Beatles Mii (see above) that drew their inspiration from their previous embodiments in animation.

Another team, headed by CMS graduate student Orit Kuritsky, tackled the challenge of converting the classic television series, The Twilight Zone, into a new kind of psychologically inflected Survival Horror title, partnering with Buena Vista Games. Disney has made a good deal of money off of the Twilight Zone attraction at their various amusement parks worldwide, while the rights to the Rod Sterling series belong to CBS. The game would include the figure of the narrator, modeled in Sterling's likeness, who provides unreliable and sometimes wickedly witty guidance to the player by stepping outside the action and providing comments on his/her fate. The game tried to capture the film noir look and feel of the classic series while taking advantage of the potential of digital media to create distorting and disorienting representations of architectural space. Like the classic series, which drew heavily on classic short stories and original works by top flight genre writers, the episodic content of the game would be developed by contemporary masters of fantasy, suspense, horror, and science fiction, including Michael Resnick and Carol Emshwiller, while music would be provided by Masami Ueda, the composer behind the Resident Evil and Okami games.

The doors (famous from the opening credits) would provide portals into different game worlds where situations would mix elements familiar from the original series with new elements that reflect the extension of Sterling's social commentary into such contemporary issues as cloning or terrorism. Many elements of the world will be familiar to those who are fans of the series: one can rejuvenate by kicking a can, for example, or one might look outside the window and see a monster on the wing of your airplane, suggesting the creator's affection towards the original, yet new generations of gamers will anticipate twists and surprises around every corner and Disney would expect tie-ins to its ride.

Another team, headed by CMS undergraduate students Chris Casiano and Kenny Peng, asked us to imagine what would happen to the Harry franchise once J. K. Rowling had published the last book in the series. Rowling has hinted that she might not be opposed to further fleshing out the world around Hogwarts even if she doesn't plan to write any more stories about Harry himself and has expressed some disappointment in the quality of the Electronic Arts games based on the films. So, what if they could get J.K. herself to help flesh out the back-story of James Potter and the Marauder's Map -- that is, the story of Harry's father and his classmates. As they noted, the Marauders have been central figures in the fan fiction which has grown up around the Potterverse and the books have provided just enough information to interest even more casual readers in their adventures. In that regard, Harry Potter would not be the first fictional world to use games to broaden the scope of its narrative: they pointed to the success of the Knights of the Old Republic titles in the Star Wars franchise.

Like the Beatle's team, they were drawn to the Wii as a platform which could allow for an immersive player interaction and they offered a spectacular and playful demonstration of how the controller might support the casting of spells, wizard battles, and quiddich matches. They envisioned a cooperative multiplayer game similar in style to the Zelda Twilight Princess game that is already offered for the Wii but based on elements from the Potter books and associated materials (such as the Fantastic Beasts book which Rowling did as a side project). While we all felt fans would have competing ideas at this point about the story of Harry's father and mother, we agreed that Rowling was probably the only person who could flesh out those plot elements in a game and have it maintain a high level of credibility with fans. They imagined if the game was successful it could be the springboard for further sequels which took the Potter family into its fateful confrontation with Voldemort and his legions.

The fourth team, led by CMS graduate student Andres Lombana, proposed a heist game set in a virtual Las Vegas and modeled after the Ocean's 11 movie franchise. They pitched Ubisoft on what they envisioned as a "thinking man's multiplayer game" which built on lessons learned from the Splinter Cell titles about how to create a breaking and entering play mechanic and which might redeploy some of the assets developed for the company's recent Rainbow Six Las Vegas title. Players could be either the thieves trying to rob a major casino or the guards assigned to prevent the robbery from taking place. Guards might have capacities such as the ability to use trained dogs to sniff out identifying residue or lie detectors to determine what statements are false. The movie already provided a range of different character types, each of whom offered their own skills and introduced new play mechanics into the series: the pickpocket, the card shark, the acrobat, the pyrotechnic, the weapons expert, the hacker, and so forth. The thieves have to keep an eye on their suspicion meter let it tip off the guards prematurely; they might be able to diminish suspicion through the use of disguises or by spending more time at the gaming tables (involved in various minigames). The game would preserve the smooth style and bantering dialogue of the original franchise, hopefully drawing in George Clooney and the other members of his brat pack to provide original voice acting for the title. Barring that, they envisioned a lower cost alternative where Julia Roberts led a team of original female characters who were trying to beat the boys at their own game. (Robert is noted to be a hardcore Halo fan, according to some interviews, so the speculation is that she might like to be the protagonist of a game series.)

Follow the Yellow Arrows: An Interview with Michael Counts (Part Two)

Well, in the midst of running this interview with Michael Counts about environmental advertising and spatial storytelling, it turns out that a major controversy has been brewing in Boston over the past two days about environmental advertising. To be specific, The Cartoon Network had placed a series of flashing light displays promoting Aqua Hunger Force at various locations around major cities, including apparently under some bridges in Boston. You can see what the displays looked like in this image produced by CMS alum Rekha Murthy and distributed via Flickr.

Here's what happened next according to one news report:

A television network's marketing campaign went badly awry on Wednesday, causing a day-long security scare in Boston that closed bridges, shut major roads and put hundreds of police on alert.

Apologising for Boston's biggest security alert since the September 11 attacks more than five years ago, Turner Broadcasting said it had placed electronic devices at bridges and other spots to promote an animated cartoon.

Police mistook the small, battery-powered electronic billboards as possible improvised bombs.

The discovery of the first one on a bridge led police to stop morning rush-hour traffic on an interstate highway just north of Boston, halt a busy train line, cordon off the area and deploy a bomb squad, which blew it up.

By afternoon, at least nine more of the "suspicious" devices were found. Authorities mobilised emergency crews, federal agents, bomb squads, hundreds of police officers and the US Coast Guard as traffic froze in parts of the city....

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said he was prepared to sue.

"It is outrageous, in a post 9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme," he said. "I am prepared to take any and all legal action against Turner Broadcasting and its affiliates for any and all expenses incurred during the response to today's incidents."

The alarm prompted the Coast Guard to close the Charles River that runs through the city and caused authorities to shut down major bridges along with several roads.

"This has taken a significant toll on our resources," Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told reporters.

Sam Ford offers a much more detailed analysis and the incident over at the Convergence Culture Consortium blog than I can provide at the present time. It has clearly proven to be a hot button issue for lots of people, sparking a debate which circles around contemporary advertising practices, the "liberal bias" of the media, the breakdown of communications, and the hair trigger response of governments to any perceived threats in a "post-9/11" society. Lots for us to dissect here for some time to come.

I should note, as Ford does, that Turner is a sponsor of the Consortium and that we were not consulted in any ways about what they planned and executed in this case.

Meanwhile, let's return to our regularly scheduled interview with Michael Counts in which he discusses the Yellow Arrow project and its relationship to his background in popular theater. For more background on Yellow Arrow and Counts, check out yesterday's post.

Many critics see media as distracting us from the world around us, yet your projects seem to be using media to force us to look at the real world from a different perspective. Is that a fair summary of your focus?

Yes. A different perspective and one that celebrates each individual's unique perspective. As so many aspects of our culture are doing right now -- from myspace to youtube -- we have been interested in the value and significance of the subjective and commonplace. So many things today seem to be driving towards the idea that the "ordinary" is in fact quite extraordinary if you can find the right vantage point.

Your work tends to blur the lines between art and advertising. Many of your early projects are treated as independent theatrical productions yet your current website seems to be pitching many of these same techniques and practices to potential corporate clients. Can you say something about the ways you walk the lines between these two worlds? Why might a commercial client today be drawn to techniques that might have seemed experimental and out there even a few years ago?*

If Yellow Arrow is an effort to help people find things in all categories that they might be looking for out in the "real world" by allowing others to publish their thoughts, ideas, histories and the like, there is no reason in my mind that products or brands shouldn't be a part of that. One of my favorite stories that I heard about Yellow Arrow being applied successfully involved someone who had posted an arrow pointing out a cool coffee place in San Francisco at which the owner made one outstanding coffee at a time and paid great attention to detail -- that the experience of being there and talking with the owner was quite memorable. The original post was found by another guy who was going to San Francisco and looking for interesting things to do -- not the everyday tourist stuff. He followed the original post, went to the coffee shop, experienced what the original poster had described and used the "comment" feature of YA which sent a text to the original poster at that moment - meanwhile, he was back in Australia. This created a link between the two guys and a sort of reward for the guy who originally found and "mapped" this spot - others had followed in his path and enjoyed his recommendation. In truth, the coffee guy is a brand and his establishment commercial. People are looking for all sorts of things and YA and projects like it should simply help people find them -- brands too. The problem, I think, emerges when brands (or individuals for that matter) lie or try to get people to engage with them at all costs like so much modern advertising has done. To me that type of business practice will increasingly be a thing of the past. If the guy who posted the original anecdote about the excellent coffee was the coffee guy himself and his coffee sucked, few would follow the advice after one or a few people caught on. Hopefully this type of blogging, be it on-line or using text messaging, will keep us honest and help good things and interesting and hidden histories find those who are looking for them.

Tell us more about your roots in experimental theatre. Reading through your portfolio, it sounds like from the very beginning you were attracted to the idea of mobile art -- moving the theatre patron through space rather than having them sit in a fixed position inside a theatre -- and urban projections-- such as projecting faces onto clocktowers or setting up screens in unexpected locations.

My interest in theatre was less about "theatre" really and more about creating unique and compelling experiences for people - I simply found that theatre had the best tools. The type of theatre I made didn't sit the audience outside of the action but instead included the audience -- in effect, my productions cast the audience in the show. The best example was a fairly large production of Dante's Divine Comedy ("So Long Ago I Can't Remember", 2001) set in 13 installations in a 40,000 square foot warehouse that took 100 people or so at time on an actual journey. Instead of telling the audience the story of The Divine Comedy this production cast the audience in the role of Dante and offered a similar type of experience. For 10 years or so I was making this type of show and then began to read stuff like Pine and Gilmore's Experience Economy and John Beck's Got Game and, of course, your book Convergence Culture. To me immersive entertainment, travel, culture, what-have-you, is where everything is going. To paraphrase John Beck, the audience today needs to be at the center of the action, the hero of the story, because that has been their primary relationship to the dominant media experience shaping their world view - video games and the like.

What drives this interest in mobility and urban space?

A desire to enrich our (and by "our" I mean everyone's) experience of the world. Though a little heady, John Cage once said, "structure without life is dead, life without structure is unseen." I think things like Yellow Arrow and the growing number of projects and ideas that are pointing in a similar direction are about providing that "structure" and, of course, connecting people.

Follow the Yellow Arrows: An Interview with Michael Counts

From the launch of the Comparative Media Studies Program, we have had a steady stream of students who have been interested in the role which media plays in urban spaces. In part, this is because there is a strong crossover between our program and the MIT tradition of work in architecture and urban studies. We've had students do thesis projects which center around how we conceptualize and map urban environments; we've had interesting projects in the space of augmented reality -- projects which use handheld and gps enabled technologies to create an interesting overlay of digital and physical space, allowing people to annotate the world around them. I've mentioned here before the project Rekha Murthy did examining the flow of official and unofficial communications media in the Central Square area just off the MIT campus. In the course of this research, she started stumbling onto yellow arrow stickers that were posted on lampposts and walls through her study area, which led her to learn more about the Yellow Arrow project. Based on her contacts, we developed an MIT Communications Forum event on Branding the Urban Landscape, which featured Jesse Shapins of the Yellow Arrow Project, as well as Thomas V. Ryan, senior vice president of mobile and digital development for EMI Music North America, and Jon Cropper, then creative content channel strategist at Young & Rubicam Brands. Today and tomorrow, I am featuring an interview with Michael Counts, the head of Counts Media, which organized and deployed the Yellow Arrows as an innovative effort to try to get people in cities around the world to look at their environments in a different way. Yellow Arrow, which Counts describes below, is a fascinating example of participatory culture and viral marketing. If you don't know about Yellow Arrow, you may be interested to check out their home page.

I asked Counts to share with me some basic biographical information. Here's what he sent:

Michael Counts is an artist and entrepreneur who has been a pioneer in experimental theatre, art and entertainment for over a decade. As co-founder and artistic director of Gale Gates et. al. he was instrumental in the development of DUMBO, Brooklyn and

served as primary architect of the creative identity of this now vibrant cultural

district.

In 2002, Michael started The Ride New York LLC. which later grew to become Counts Media Inc. Backed by some of Broadway's major producers, this new company has allowed Michael to further expand into international entertainment and continue the pursuit of large-scale environmental productions and installations. Some of the initial Counts Media investors include the founders of Blue Man Group; Vivek Tiwary of Starpolish and Tiwary Entertainment Group; Robyn Goodman, producer of Avenue Q and founder of Second Stage Theatre; and Charlie Flateman, former President/CEO of Gray Line New York. Counts Media's projects over the past years have drawn the attention of major media globally, including The New York Times, CNN, NBC, Wired Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, The London Times, Liberation, Politiken, the Sydney Morning Heraldand the Discovery Channel among countless others. As Chief Creative Officer and Chairman, Michael drives the creative vision and organizational culture of the company, defining his team's unique entertainment products and properties that bridge all media.

Michael grew up in New York City and studied at Skidmore college under Gautam Dasgupta, author, critic and founding editor of Performing Arts Journal. He continues to reside in DUMBO, Brooklyn

.

Counts is a fascinating mixture of theorist, entrepreneur, and artist, someone who is helping to change the ways residents think about the cities around them. I am pleased to share with you some of his thinking.

How would you describe Yellow Arrow?

Since Yellow Arrow began, we have defined it several different ways. Initially we called it a M.A.A.P (Massively Authored Artistic Project), that then became M.A.A.P (Massively Authored Artistic Publication), which finally became M.A.P (Massively Authored Publication) as we determined that its use could extend beyond the creative or artistic aspects of the project. For example, we learned a great deal as we began to work with Lonely Planet and their community as they were primarily interested in the "travel" aspects of Yellow Arrow. We ultimately found that what we were really creating was a new and subjective map of the world. I became particularly interested in the idea that there should really be as many maps of the world as there are individuals or perspectives - for instance, your map of New York, based upon your interests would likely be very different than my map, based upon my interests in New York. The patent application actually calls it a "deep map." We have also been very interested in the idea that each object or location has a really compelling history if only it can be unlocked or revealed - for instance, the corner of 38th and 8th in New York, consider how many events have occurred there and how those events and histories might relate to each other and how interesting it would be to access that invisible reality. I think that Yellow Arrow and the growing number of projects and ideas like it, both on-line and in the "real" world, can help us navigate increasing complexity and reveal the patterns in apparent chaos.

What are its goals and how successful do you think you have been in achieving these goals?

Based on the varied definitions and intentions outlined above, I think that Yellow Arrow has had a successful beginning. In a short time, we've had arrows placed in hundreds of cities in over 30 countries around the world. The book we did with Lonely Planet, Experimental Travel, distributed hundreds of thousands of arrows to potential users and on yellowarrow.net there is a growing library of content. We also experimented with different uses and ended up with two projects or applications that I think hold the most promise. The first, the "Capitol of Punk", was created with the founders of Discord Records in Washington, D.C., which was an epicenter for the early Punk scene in America. The project linked Yellow Arrows and created a tour of several areas of the city that anyone could navigate. On-line there were video interviews and a ton of content that really delivered on the idea of Yellow Arrow as a new type of publication. The second project, which is very similar to the Capitol of Punk, is a series of "text-tours" of New York, called "cityTXT", that one would begin at any of 18 subway stops along the NR subway line. Once initiated, a user would be lead on a 45 min tour of the area. Jesse Shapins who is a tremendously bright and insightful urban explorer and one of the founding creative team, developed the tours in a way that really reveals hidden and deeply compelling aspects of the city

How do you see YellowArrow as changing people's relations to urban space? What parallels or differences do you see between similar efforts to expand the information environment around our cities -- such as geocaching, alternative and augmented reality games, and the Big Urban Games movement?

The ultimate vision for Yellow Arrow, I suppose, would be an infinitely large publication about public spaces -- cities -- that would allow one to access all of the information and mostly subjective information in a way that helped a user find "their city" within the greater city that they were looking for. Yellow Arrow is an attempt to make the invisible city visible. The publication aspect of YA makes it different than these other projects or movements and the depth of the YA site makes it more practical. That said, I love the projects you've mentioned and have been deeply fascinated with them all. As I said above, we are interested in all aspects of how media and technology are changing, the consequent opportunities that are emerging and most importantly how the interests and values of the "game generation," that John C. Beck discusses in his book Got Game, are different from past generations or demographic segments.

Are You Hep to That Jive?: The Fan Culture Surrounding Swing Music

When Sue Turnbull (a scholar who has written very interesting work on murder mysteries, their female readers and writers) asked me to be the outside reader on a PhD dissertation being written by one of her students at LaTrobe University (in Melbourne, Australia), on contemporary swing dance, I was resistant at first, insisting that I knew little or nothing about the scholarly literature around dance. Sue pushed me harder, suggesting that this project had much more to do with my own work than I might imagine, and being a trusting sort, I agreed to read the work, satisfied in having made my own lack of credentials clear, intrigued by why she was pushing so hard, and a bit pleased to be reading something on swing since I am a closset enthusiast of the new Swing revival (though I certainly can't do the Lindy Hop to save my life.) Thus, Sam(antha) Carroll entered my life. Carroll's dissertation did indeed fascinate me -- it is frankly some of the best work by a graduate student in cultural studies I have read in some time. She draws not just on the literature in performance studies on popular dance traditions in America but it also shows a deep familiarity with cultural studies work on fan appropriations and transformations on media content as well as work in digital studies on virtual and online communities. She captures the world of swing dance culture -- from the inside out -- and traces it across multiple media channels, showing how their lives online are connecting to their physical encounters in geographic space, and especially exploring how they trade video clips of obscure dance performances which become core resources in the development of their own performance repertoires. And, hey, the dissertation came with its own dvd of amazing clips -- and you could dance to it!

I felt that some of her work would be of great interest to readers of this blog given our ongoing discussions of various fan cultures, of the ways digital media is transforming traditional cultural practices, and of the poetics and politics of remixing media content. (And to add to my pleasure, she writes about Hellzapoppin', a much beloved film in my household, and one which I regularly assign to graduate students in our program.) Even if, like me, you think this may be outside your field of interest, think again and give it a closer look.

The following entry was written specifically for this blog by Sam Carroll. I asked her to give us some more biographical data and here's what she wrote:

Sam Carroll has just completed her Phd at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. In that doctoral thesis she discussed contemporary swing dancers and their use of digital media in embodied practice - or, in other words, what dancers do with computers. In addition to writing about dancing (and computers), Sam also likes dancing very much. And watching footage of dancing on her computer. She began learning lindy hop in 1999 in Brisbane, but found the swing dancing community an excellent complement to academic life when she moved to Melbourne in 2001 to pursue a postgraduate degree - less writing, more dancing. Sam is now trying to learn as many authentic jazz routines from the 1930s and 40s as possible. Her progress is more a performance of fandom than an embodiment of elite fan knowledge.

THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN BY SAM CARROLL

This is a clip of the Whitey's Lindy Hoppers dancing a Big Apple routine (choreographed by Frankie Manning) in the 1939 film Keep Punchin'. In the last section of this clip they dance lindy hop on a 'social dance floor'.

And here's footage of dancers in the US dancing the same routine in 2006.

If you follow this link you can listen to the Solomon Douglas Swinged playing the same song on their recent album.

Both dancers and musicians have painstakingly transcribed what they see and hear in that original 1939 clip.

Lindy hop - the partner dance most popular today in swing dance communities - developed in Harlem in the late 1920s and early 30s by African American dancers. Over the following years it moved to mainstream American youth culture, carried by dance teachers and performers in films like Keep Punchin' and in stage shows, and then moved out into the international community, again in film and stage plays, but also with American soldiers stationed overseas. Though it was massively popular in its day, by the 1950s changes in popular music, where jazz was replaced by rock n roll or became increasingly difficult to dance to with the rise of bebop, saw lindy slipping from the public eye.

In the 1980s, dancers in Europe and the US began researching lindy, using archival footage like Keep Punchin' but also including films like Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races - popular musical films of the 1930s and 40s. The aim of these dancers was to revive lindy hop, to recreate the steps they saw on screen. Learning to dance by watching films, particularly films that were only available at cinemas or in archival collections, was unsurprisingly, quite difficult, and these revivalists began seeking out surviving dancers from the period. Among these original lindy hoppers were Frankie Manning, Norma Miller, Al Minns, Sugar Sullivan and Dean Collins.

Twenty years after these revivalists began learning lindy, there are thriving swing dance communities throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and Korea. They come together in their local communities for classes and social dancing, and also travel extensively for camps and lindy exchanges. My research has focussed on the ways these contemporary swing dancers utilise a range of digital media in their embodied practices. This has involved discussing the way DJs in the swing community use digital music technology; the way swing dancers use discussion boards (Swing Talk, SwingDJs), websites (Dance History), instant messaging and email to keep in contact with dancers in their own community and overseas and to plan their own trips to other local scenes; and the ways in which swing dancers have use a range of audio visual technology. These uses of audio visual technology include the sorts of revivalist activities first practiced in the 1980s, but continuing now in lounge rooms and church halls in every local scene, but also to record their own dancing and local communities and also performances (on the social or competitive floor) by 'celebrity' lindy hoppers.

The Big Apple contest from Keep Punchin' is a useful example of the ways swing dancers make use of digital media in their embodied practices. But it's also the focus of my own dancing obsessions at the moment. I've been dancing lindy for at least eight years, and dance a few times a week in my local, Melbourne scene. I've travelled extensively within Australia to attend dance events, I've run events in my own city and I've travelled overseas for large dance events (such as the Herräng dance camp). This year, having just finished my Phd, I've decided I finally have time to work on my own dancing, in the sweaty, embodied sense, rather than the academic or abstract.

Writers in fan studies like Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills and Camille Bacon-Smith have discussed being a scholar-fan (to use Matt Hill's term), where you're a member of the community of fans you're researching. This approach is fairly standard in much of the dance studies literature - it is notoriously difficult to write about dance and dancing with any degree of convincingness if you don't dance - it's a little like dancing about architecture. I've also found that combining my academic work with my everyday, making my everyday experiences my work, has been a satisfying way to extend my fanatical obsession with dance into every corner of my life (a little like Henry's writing about Supernatural, a program I also love, here on this blog).

So when I decided I needed to get back to some level of dance fitness, to end the thesis-imposed hiatus from hardcore dance training, I chose this Big Apple and a number of other 'vintage' or 'authentic' jazz dance routines as my focus. I've learnt the Big Apple and Tranky Doo (another venerable jazz dance routine choreographed by Frankie Manning) before, but this was to be my first solo mission, using clips garnered almost entirely from the internet, though also making use of sections of an instructional DVD produced by a famous teaching couple.

Dancing alone is an essential part of lindy hop. The dance itself revolutionised the European partner dancing structure with its use of the 'break away', (which you can see danced by the last couple in the film After Seben), where partners literally broke away from each other to dance in 'open' position. In open, partners are free to improvise, and the most common improvisation in that historical moment and today, is to include jazz steps from the vast repertoire of steps developed by African American vernacular dance culture over centuries in America. Learning to dance alone not only offers dancers the opportunity to work on body awareness, fitness, coordination, individual styling and expanding their own repertoire (a point upon which I was relying), but also encourages a creative, improvised approach to music which they can then bring to their lindy hop for those 5 or 6 beats of the 8 count swing out - the foundational step of lindy hop.

I've written a great deal about the gender dynamics at work in lindy hop, a dance which prioritise the heterocentric pairing of a man and a woman, beginning with my own discomfort with a dance where the man leads, the woman follows, and traditional gender roles prevail. But I've also written a great deal about the liberatory potential of lindy. The open position and the emphasis on improvisation are an important part of this - in those moments both partners are expected to 'bring it' - to contribute to the creative exchange within the partnership. Lindy, as it was danced by African American dancers in that original creative moment, also embodies a history of resistance and transgression, as a dance with its roots in slavery and created during a period of institutionalised racism and oppression. One of my own research interests has been the extent to which the resistant themes of lindy hop, of African American vernacular dance, have been realised by contemporary swing dancers. The fact that most of these contemporary dancers are white, middle class urban heterosexual youth goes some way to discouraging my reading of contemporary swing dance culture as a hot bed of radical politics and revisions of dominant ideology and culture. Yet I have also found that lindy hop and African American vernacular jazz dances like the Big Apple structure and the Tranky Doo offer opportunities for the expression of self and resistance of dominant gender roles.

As a woman, and as a feminist, I've found that archival footage such as that Keep Punchin' clip offer opportunities for reworking the way I dance and participate in the public dance discourse. When we watch that Big Apple clip, while we can clearly see that each dancer is performing synchronised, choreographed steps, they are also clearly styling each step to suit their own aesthetic, athletic and social needs and interests. We see the personality of each dancer as they execute a set piece of choreography. The very concept of a Big Apple contest involves dancers performing specific steps as they are called, and being judged not only for their ability to dance the correct step in time and with alacrity, but more importantly (in a setting where dance competency, as Katrina Hazzard-Gordon has written, is demanded by the social setting - everyone can dance), for their individual interpretation of the step. This is a performance of improvisation within a socially, collaboratively created structure. The representation of individual identity within a consensual public discourse. This is the sort of thing that jazz musicians do - improvise within a given structure.

And man, is that some serious fun.

For contemporary swing dancers, the idea of taking particular formal structures and then reworking them to suit their own discursive needs extends from the dance floor to the mediated world. Online, swing dancers upload digital footage of themselves dancing, edited to best display their abilities. Or they edit whole narrative films like Hellzapoppin' and Day at the Races and edit out the sequences they're most interested in - the dancing. And dancers like myself are still watching these edited clips, recreating entire routines, and then, even more interestingly, editing out particular steps and integrating them into their lindy on the social dance floor, or into their own choreographed routines.

The notion of step stealing is not new in African American vernacular dance - it reaches back to Africa. And Frankie Manning himself is often quoted as saying 'dance it once and it's yours, dance it twice and it's mine'. For me, as a dancer, this is exciting stuff. If I put in the time and effort, I can learn these steps (well, some of them - watch that Hellzapoppin' clip and you'll see what I mean). And if I practice, time it properly and really bring it, I can pull that out on the social dance floor. Perhaps. Contemporary dancers enact that philosophy on the dance floor every day -stealing steps that catch their attention on the social dance floor, or 'ripping off' moves they see performed in footage of dancers in competitions or performances or in social dance settings all over the world. Or from seventy years ago.

For me, swing dancers' tactical use of digital media in their embodied use of archival footage is not only a source of academic fascination, but also a very practical skill to develop. I have had to learn how to watch footage of dancing in a way that lets me apply my knowledge of dance to separate out distinct steps, then figure out how they work, practically. Learning to poach dance steps from archival footage is a useful skill for lindy hoppers. But the testing of my skills is not online or in my ability to write and talk about these things. The real challenge to my creative and critical faculties comes on the dance floor, when I have to bring it - to bring the right step at the right time, but with my own unique, creative twist.

Bacon-Smith, Camille. (1992). Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

---. (2000). Science Fiction Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Clein, John, dir. (1939). Keep Punchin'. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Frank Manning and Hot Chocolates. USA.

Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. (1990). Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hills, Matt. (2002). Fan Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York and London: Routledge.

Kaufman, S. J. (1929). After Seben. Short film. Perf. "Shorty" George Snowden. USA.

Potter, H. C., dir. (1941). Hellzapoppin'. Film. Chor. Frank Manning. Perf. Whitey's Lindy Hoppers and Frank Manning. USA.

Solomon Douglas Swingtet. (2006). Swingmatism. USA.

Wood, Sam. (1939). A Day at the Races. Perf. Whitey's Lindy Hoppers. USA.

A Second Look at Second Life

A few weeks ago, I posted here about the debate surrounding Second Life which was triggered by a high-profile critique of the popular multiverse by longtime cyber-pundit Clay Shirky. After corresponding with Shirky and with my colleague Beth Coleman, it was decided that we would offer some new statements about this controversy across our three blogs today and respond to each other's posts in about a week's time. We also agreed that we would post links to the other posts through our sites which would help readers navigate between the various positions. So, if you want to read the latest by Clay Shirky, you can find it here and if you want to read the latest by Beth Coleman, you can find it here. (These links will only go live once I know the other material is up on line.) None of us have had a chance so far to review what the others will say so I anticipate that the first round will mostly be a restating of or clarification of our previous positions. Clay's arguments rest on the following claims:

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."

A lot of effort has been put into debunking Clay's analysis of the numbers by writers such as Joel Greenberg

and Prokofy Neva. Frankly, my interest in Second Life has little to nothing to do with the statistical dimensions of this argument. I've never been one who felt that arguments about cultural change could be reduced to counting things.

I certainly agree that we should be concerned if the press's interest in Second Life is fueled by inflated numbers but I also recognize that these numbers give only a partial indication of the level and kinds of investments people make in these worlds, that Second Life may have cultural importance even for people who have never been there because it embodies a particular model of civic participation and cultural production.

The numbers matter if we are asking whether Second Life represents "the future of the web" but personally, I have never believed that SL is going to be a mass movement in any meaningful sense of the term. As I stated last time, I do not buy the whole nonsense that immersive worlds represent web 3.0 and will in any way displace the existing information structures that exist in the web, any more than I think audio-visual communications is going to replace written communications anytime soon. If nothing else, the ability to scan through text quickly gives it an efficiency that will not be replaced by more "technically advanced" solutions which are more time consuming to produce and to consume. I am pretty sure that the value of the web/net lies in asynchronous communications and that real time interactions -- whether we are talking 3d or skype -- will always represent a special class of uses which competes not with the web but with other teleconferencing technologies. Most of us will find uses for virtual worlds one of these days; most of us will not "live" there nor will we conduct most of our business there.

I do not even think that Second Life represents the future of multiplayer games -- it represents one end of a spectrum of player experiences which maximizes player generated content and minimizes the prestructured experiences we associate with most computer games. World of Warcraft represents the other end of that spectrum and so far, that model draws more customers. My own ideal lays perhaps some place in the middle. As such, this becomes a debate not about affordances but about the desirability of professional entertainment versus the pleasures of participatory culture. It also becomes an exercise in mapping what some have described as the pyramid of participation in which the harder it is to create content, the higher the percentage of participants who will chose to consume content someone else has produced. What's striking to me is not that so many people still prefer to consume professionally generated content (it has always been thus) but what a growing percent of people are willing to consume amateur content and what a smaller but still significant percentage of people are willing to generate and share content they produced themselves. Second Life interests me as a particular model of participatory culture.

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."

I get the historical analogies Shirky is making here and he's at least partially right about the over-promotion that surrounded some of those earlier MUDs and Moos. My own sense is that Second Life has struck a deeper chord in our culture than those previous MUDS and MOOS did -- in part because of the engagement by other powerful institutions in our culture. To some degree, all of the corporate, academic, nonprofit, and foundation interest in SL is part of the hype which Shirky is dismissing here. There has certainly been a snow ball effect where this group has to be in SL because that group is in second life and so forth. But there is also a way in which SL embodies a new mixed media ecology in which institutions with very different levels of power, wealth, and influence co-exist in a shared virtual space creating more equivalence in terms of their relationship to the media landscape. This is the heart of what Benkler writes about in The Wealth of Networks and there is perhaps no more powerful illustration of this new hybrid media ecology than SL.

Some have dismissed SL as a costume party -- I see it more as carnival in the medieval sense of the term -- as a time and place within which normal rules of interactions are suspended, roles can be swapped or transformed, hierarchies can be reordered, and we can step out of normal reality into a "magic circle" or "green world" which can be highly generative for the imagination. The difference is that in the old days, carnival was something that existed for a very short period of time and people planned for it all year. Now, in the era of SL, carnival exists all the day and people have to decide how much time they want to spend there. In the old days, the power structures that led to carnival were religious and the church had to decide whether or not to embrace the popular rites. Today, the power structures that lead to SL are corporate and companies have to decide whether or not to embrace the popular rites. That corporate America seems to be experimenting with the alternative reality that constitutes SL is news -- even if many of these experiments fail and even if many of these companies have no clue what to do with their islands and even if most of them go back into their cloisters in another year or two.

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.

All of these seem valid criticisms of the media coverage of SL which is historically ill-informed, is simplistic, is subject to press releases proclaiming that "this is the first time that x has ever happened in a virtual environment before." That said, I am personally grateful that most of the coverage of SL has generally been supportive of participatory culture compared to the relentlessly negative coverage associated with sexual predation in MySpace or violence in video games. I take my good news where I can find it and for the moment, the coverage of SL, bad though it often is, is helping Americans in general adjust to the idea that there may be something positive to be gained by having an active fantasy life on line. I have always said that the myth of a digital revolution is more empowering, perhaps, than the reality may be because it keeps alive the idea that real world institutions may be subject to change from below and thus encourages us to imagine and push for the possibility of change. It only becomes disempowering when it gets draped in an aura of inevitability which convinces us that things are going to change by themselves and all we have to do is sit back and watch.

I care only a little bit about the future of virtual worlds. I care a great deal about the future of participatory culture. And for the moment, the debate about and the hype surrounding SL is keeping alive the idea that we might design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture. That's something worth defending.

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."

By those criteria, the Renaissance and the Age of Reason were less than rounding errors since the key innovations occurred among a much smaller number of artists and thinkers. This is to subscribe to a quantitative model of history which simply doesn't reflect the reality of how cultural innovation occurs. A small community of people can generate an enormously rich culture and can have a transforming impact on society as a whole. I am not saying SL has achieved this yet -- and indeed, it may never live up to that potential -- but I don't want to lose sight of the fact that the importance of SL has squat to do with such statistical measures -- though what those measures have to say about its market value may be another value.

I respect what Shirky is doing here in questioning the numbers. I just want to push us to ask deeper questions about the criteria we use to measure the value of Second Life.

As I wrote last time, "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."

Front Line Perspective on the Boston Games Jam

Earlier this month, The Education Arcade played host to the first Boston Game Jam. Dan Roy, a CMS master's student, who has been working on the Labrynth project through the Education Arcade and is currently doing his thesis on the models of learning and reward underlying multiplayer game design, offered to share with us some of his perspectives of the event. What follows is his account of what happened when you put a bunch of creative game designers -- both professionals and students -- in a room for a weekend with the goal of testing the limits of their medium. (Personally, I am waiting to see Game Jam turned into a reality series not unlike Project Runway!) Boston Game Jam

by: Dan Roy

It's 9 a.m. on Saturday and about 15 professional video game developers from the Boston area are taking their seats in The Education Arcade lab at MIT. They've come alone or in teams of two for the first annual Boston Game Jam, armed with ideas for games involving the Jam's theme of "shifting." They are programmers, designers, artists, and musicians, and they've committed the next 36 hours of their lives to making experimental games. Though developing games is work and they do it every day, there's something special in the air this Saturday. It's an opportunity to leave behind the pressures of the game industry, with its years-long development cycles, escalating budgets, increasing team sizes and specialization, sequelitis, and publisher-developer tensions.

Once upon a time, a single crackerjack programmer or a team of three could bestow their unique vision of gaming on the world with only a few months of work. Development cycles were short. Genres were undefined. Risk was low and creativity was high. The trend in the ensuing decades has moved away from all of this. We've reached the point as an industry where failure on a project costing tens of millions of dollars means lots of lost jobs and maybe a shuttered business or two. In that environment, publishers rely on proven intellectual property and remaking established genres to meet their quarterly targets. When publishers hold the money and the IP, contracted developers have little choice but to live hand to mouth. One missed milestone or delayed contract could be the end for such a developer with no savings.

In addition to the rising budgets and reduced financial risk-taking, individual employees find themselves working on more and more specialized tasks. This assembly line model stifles a lot of creativity. The benefits of feeling like you are part of something bigger than yourself are offset by lack of control over the direction of the project.

And so, these game developers gather at MIT to seize back their creative control. They've come with plans for games they would like to make entirely by themselves. The programmers are no longer just graphics coders or physics coders or tools coders or artificial intelligence coders. They now hold the grand vision of the game, as well is the responsibility for wearing hats normally left to others.

By noon, everyone had settled in with his project and was making steady progress. Max McGuire in particular seemed ahead of the game, as he already had something playful-looking up on his screen. At a game jam, one can always step away from his computer, wander around the room, and become inspired by the ideas and energy of all the other auteurs. A casual observer would notice that screens full of code intermittently give way to intriguing visual representations of progress.

Later in the day, Jam organizer Darius Kazemi warned us that if we didn't have something playable by this evening, we were in bad shape. A couple of teams took this opportunity to step back from their original visions and refocus on something more practical. However, a surprising number of projects were right on track. It seemed we had scoped our projects well to not fall into the common trap of taking on too much.

After dinner, some participants started to call it quits for the day and head home. As the coordinator of the Jam facilities at MIT, I resolved to stay in the lab until everyone was finished. I was quite tired when I walked home at 5 a.m. As most people who have ever been excited about a project can tell you, there are good and bad kinds of sleepy. The energy that I took from the group and from my own creative process had not yet dissipated, and even as I lay in bed exhausted I found my mind eagerly bounding between the possible features I could implement the following day.

That following day began three hours later. In my exhaustion, I must have set my alarm incorrectly, because I was awakened by the ringing of my cell phone. When I arrived at the lab to punch in the door's security code there was already a line of antsy developers. I felt guilty for standing in the way of their work, even early on a Sunday morning.

As the clock drew closer to the 6 p.m. deadline, the entire room tightened its focus. As time ticked features a way, developers became even more earnest to preserve what they could of their initial visions. You could hear the whir of productivity, punctuated by semi-sarcastic exclamations from Al Reed like, "I just realized I don't know how to program." Kent Quirk and his son/teammate Lincoln also had their moments, like when they both leaned in close to the

screen and simultaneously grunted. "Huh?" and "Hmm."

Darius stopped us all precisely at six, and we gathered around the projector to present the creative gold we had mined all weekend with our pickax keyboards (handy tools, those). Max McGuire had managed to conjure up a respectable competitor to Will Wright's forthcoming game Spore, in which you take creatures from their basest existence through the height of civilization and into outer space. The core mechanic is shifting terrain up and down. Impressive, and as fun to watch as to play.

Eric Rosenbaum and Jonah Elgart created a game around shifting rhythms, redirecting streams of beats to create a symphony or cacophony of precautions and notes. It seems like a great game if I could just figure out how to play it.

Philip Tan, who has been flying back and forth between MIT and Singapore for half a year as he sets up an international game lab called GAMBIT, made a game about jetlag. In it, players must manage passengers' moods so that they're in peak state when they hit the ground (hopefully softly). The whole room had listened earlier in the day as Philip recorded the voiceovers for the flight attendants. It was definitely the fifth take of "Coffee, tea, or soda?" where the humor of the flight attendant's annoyance finally came through.

Kent and Lincoln Quirk made the only 3D game of the Jam, in which players shift an avatar between conveyor belts to reach the center of a maze. The tricky part was that if you stayed on the conveyor belt long enough, you would flip over with it... to the dark side.

Al Reed and Alex Rice somehow overcame Al's inability to program, creating a Mario Brothers type game called Squish in which players hop from platform to platform shoving boxes around in an attempt to crush each other. The only explicitly multiplayer game of the Jam, it clearly showed off the potential of humor in social interactions. The hilarity of watching Al's stick figure accidentally squish itself cannot be denied.

Darius, who had originally planned to not make a game and only assist others, had found himself twiddling his thumbs and cranked out a Game Boy Advance game of shifting mazes.

Darren Torpey and David Ludwig created a game about shifting seasons. They made the executive decision that four seasons was far too many, and unilaterally cut it down to two. Personally, I'll miss fall and spring tremendously and can't condone their actions.

Geoffrey Long and I (Dan Roy) created a game about shifting perceptions around the diamond industry. Conflict diamonds, or blood diamonds, have been used to fuel terrible violence for years, and I wanted to educate some consumers who might be unaware what their purchase might be funding.

Jim Ingraham and Duncan Watt contributed art and sounds respectively to all of the projects, and they did so valiantly in the face of our common and impending deadline. Duncan in particular knows how to triage.

Most of these game concepts would never have been made if not for an environment like the Boston Game Jam. At least, they never would have been made within the industry model that only makes space for AAA titles. However, there are promising signs that at least some segments of the industry are shifting back to smaller teams, smaller budgets, shorter development cycles, and wackier concepts. Digital distribution helps here tremendously, as do content delivery models like episodic. Chris Anderson's Long Tail is just regaining prominence in the game industry, and the "hits" of the future may be niche subscription titles. Henry did a number of posts on the rising independent games movement not too long ago that readers may find interesting.

The mood in the Education Arcade lab after giving our presentations was inspired exhaustion. Everyone agreed that they'd like to do the Jam again, with some calling for it every six months instead of annually. Most participants didn't seem to mind that they had just worked halfway through the Patriots-Colts game, even with New England's team represented. We had just had our own game of realizing our visions, in which we proved ourselves as much as played in the sand. I think I speak for everyone at the Jam when I say we are fortunate to do what we do.

How Computer Games Help Children to Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shaffer (Part Two)

Yesterday, I introduced blog readers to my former student, David Williamson Shaffer, and his new book, How Computer Games Help Children to Learn. This book is a must read for anyone who is invested in the concept of Serious Games or anyone who wants to have a better understanding of what games might contribute to the reform of the educational process. In yesterday's post, he walked us through his roots in Seymore Papert's notion of hard fun and his concept of epistemic games. Here's a bit more background on David taken from his blog:

Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Shaffer taught grades 4-12 in the United States and abroad, including two years working with the Asian Development Bank and US Peace Corps in Nepal. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he taught in the Technology and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a founding member of the GAPPS research group for games, learning, and society. The group recently received a $1.8 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study games and media literacy in the digital age. Dr. Shaffer has a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his work on Alternate Routes to Technology and Science and was the recipient of a Spencer Foundation National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Shaffer studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn. His particular area of interest is in the development of epistemic games: computer and video games in which players become professionals to develop innovative and creative ways of thinking.

Today, I asked Shaffer some of the hard questions which all of us who are promoting games and education are facing. He offers some candid and compelling responses.

You describe powerful activities which certainly require students to deploy a rich array of school content. But by classical definitions, not all of the activities you describe are games. And many teachers remain resistant to the concept of games in school. So what value do you see in referring to these experiences as games?

This is a great question, and I'm glad you asked it. Part of the problem with the word "game" is that there isn't a single agreed-upon definition. The definition I use in the book is closer to some than others--and as you know, I talk about this very issue and how my use of the term compares to others in the book.

A major point of the book is that digital technologies force us to reexamine and rethink a number of concepts whose original definitions come from an age of print literacy: things like games, learning, thinking, innovation, professionalism, school, and so on. It is an argument that I know you are quite familiar with, since you similarly argue that new media force us to reconceptualize the nature of concepts like production and consumption, genre and medium, and so on.

The argument I make in the book is that in the digital age there is a new set of relations between games and school--and school and learning, professional practices and academic disciplines, innovation and education--and this reorganization of how we think about thinking and learning, play and education, creativity and rigor is an essential step in thinking about the future of learning.

Some skeptics have argued that the serious games movement is imposing a utilitarian logic on play (making it into something serious) when in fact, the value of play as a form of mental recreation may come from the fact that it invites us to suspend real world consequences and constraints. How would you respond to this argument?

I've heard that argument, of course, but honestly I think it is a bit of a straw man. First of all, no one (that I know) is arguing that *all* play should be "serious" in the sense you describe here--that is, devoted to some larger purpose. Second, for all the reasons that Seymour and others (and I) have talked about, there is such a thing as "hard fun"--that is, the fun of doing something difficult but worthwhile. It is an important and legitimate part of fun, and of learning, and of being a well-adjusted and happy person. Finally, and perhaps most important, serious games do suspend some real world consequences and constraints. Any game imposes some constraints and relaxes some, abates some consequences and introduces others. Different games have a different balance, and serve different functions. But I don't think there is some form of pure or idealized play (except as a theoretician's fancy) which games that serve some larger purpose somehow "pollute." Any game is played in some social context, and therefore serves some larger purpose.

Other critics of the serious games movement have argued that we are moving too quickly from ethnographic evidence that some kids learn well through games to larger claims that all youth can/should learn through game play. How would you respond to this argument?

Well, not all the evidence is ethnographic. My work is based on experimental studies: we design a game based on a specific set of hypotheses about what players will learn and how they will learn it; then we study the experiences of players to see whether that's what happens. Others in the field have done similar studies, some at quite large scales.

No one would deny that there has been a lot of enthusiasm in recent months and years about the potential of games, and some claims have no doubt been inflated, or premature, or speculative. But that doesn't mean that all claims are suspect: it depends on the claim and the evidence.

I will say that this form of argument (games for learning are all hype) is a little ironic, in the sense that the other major criticism of games is that they will teach kids the wrong thing: that playing violent games will make them violent, and so forth. We seem to think it is easier to learn bad things than good--which is, at the very least, a very Hobbsian view of the human condition.

I do think that an important part of any game is the context in which it is played. So you can take a good simulation and make it part of a game that leads to the development of useful skills, knowledge, values, and identity in service of a useful way of thinking about the world. You can also set up the conditions of play in such a way that the outcomes are quite different.

So I am skeptical of any claims about what "games" in general do or don't do for kids. That's why my book is titled "HOW computer games help children learn" and not "DO computer games help children learn?" We know that children learn from all of their experiences. The question is whether and how we can design experiences that will help them learn things we think will help them become better citizens, happier individuals, and more productive members of society.

You end your book with some speculations on the future of education. How would schools change -- for the better or for the worse -- if various kinds of game-like activities were to displace some of the activities that currently constitute the "game" of schooling?

I don't know what the ultimate shape of schools will be in the digital age. It took decades to design the modern industrial schools we have now, and they look very different from their predecessors. Schools right now focus on standardized tests of basic facts and skills for a paper and pencil world. They need to become more about learning to use sophisticated technologies to find creative and innovative solutions to real problems. I think well-designed computer games can, should, and ultimately will play a large role in that process. But to get there will mean redesigning almost everything about schools in the long run: the architecture of the buildings, the content of the curriculum, the schedule, and perhaps most important, the means of assessment.

This is going to be a big change, and a big task. But as I argue in the book, wise, well-educated, and affluent parents are already using new technologies to help their kids prepare for life in a complex world. If schools don't keep up, they risk becoming at best a footnote in the real process of education in the digital age, and in the worst case, a road to failure and an impediment to educational opportunity for those who can't afford access to the tools and pedagogies for success in a world of global competition.

Some have argued that we necessarily distort the real world phenomenon we are representing when we reduce them to the structures of a game. Do you agree with this concern? If so, how might educational game designers address it?

As Don Norman points out in his wonderful book Things That Make Us Smart any representation of reality is a simplification, leaving out details that are not relevant to solving a particular problem or accomplishing a particular task. Moreover, all of our thinking takes place through representations--whether external representations like diagrams, pictures, or spreadsheets, or internal ones, such as memories, words, or images.

So all thinking is a deliberate distortion of reality in this sense.

The power of epistemic games is that they are based on a specific theory of how you determine what it is safe to leave out in designing a game that models professional training as a way of teaching innovative thinking. The book describes that process in more detail, but the specifics aside, the point is that epistemic games are based on a specific pedagogical theory--a theory about what is worth learning and how people learn it.

There are other theories one might use, of course. But in the end, I think that any good educational game has to be based on a corresponding theory of how learning takes place. The theory might work or not--which is why we test the games we build. But it is that theory that tells you which simplifications you have to make (and which ones you can not make) in re-presenting real world phenomena in game form.

How Computer Games Help Children Learn: An Interview with David Williamson Shafffer (Part One)

I've known David Williamson Shaffer for more than a decade. I was lucky enough to have him as a student in my media theory and methods proseminar back when he was finishing up his PhD at the MIT Media Lab. where he was doing work with Seymor Papert. I've reconnected in recent years with Shaffer through his work on games and education. Shaffer has come out this month with a very important book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn. A colleague of James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, and Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Shaffer has long contributed to our conversations about the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games.

He has especially promoted the idea of epistemic games, which he discusses at some length, in the interview that follows. He is interested in the ways that we can use computer-based games (including games that involve interacting with real people in real spaces) to introduce children to the basic conceptual frameworks that govern various professional practices. For him, this is the most powerful aspect of games-based learning.

His new book makes a powerful case for this mode of teaching, including detailed case studies of games he has developed to cover a range of different professional contexts and academic disciplines and drawing parallels to commercial games already on the market. The writing is accessible and engaging, driven by his own experiences as a classroom teacher and his own passion for helping to reinvent American education.

Over the next two days, I am going to be running this interview with Shaffer. In the first part, he lays out the book's core premises and in the second, he addresses the debates around serious games more generally.

Your biography in the back of the book lists one of your titles as "game scientist." So, I suspect the readers might be interested to know what a game scientist does and how you train for such a position. The cynic in me wants to know what the implications are of using scientific language to describe what is essentially a position in the humanities.

There are a few different ways of explaining where the title "Game Scientist" comes from. The most superficial answer is that as we were founding the GAPPS (Games and Professional Practice Simulations) Group here at the University of Wisconsin Advanced Academic Distributed Learning CoLaboratory, we needed to decide what members of the group would be called. The title "Research Scientist" is often used for appointments in research labs that do not grant tenure, so given that we were all studying games someone (I think it might have been me) suggested that Game Scientist would be an appropriate title.

So originally the term was something of an historical artifact.

But I do think that there is some value in referring to the work I do as game science. Games are, as you point out, a forum of human expression, like books, movies, and other things that are studied as "humanities." But it is also possible to ask scientific questions about books: to study, for example, how people read, or to study the social, economic or psychological impact of a particular kind of book. So we can ask scientific questions about games and peoples' experiences with them.

In using the term "scientific" here, of course, I am making a statement about research methods, not values. By "scientific" I only mean asking questions that can be answered with empirical data, which can be quantitative data (surveys, brain scans, and the like) or qualitative data (like interviews and observations).

In truth, though, I am not sure that drawing explicit distinctions between the sciences and the humanities is actually all that productive. Nelson Goodman made a strong case decades ago that the similarities between the two are more striking than the differences on a philosophical level: both try to warrant claims about phenomena in the world. This is a point I have made in some of my own writings as well.

All of that having been said, I am a game scientist because the work that I do uses methods of the field of psychology, which is a form of social science.

As a graduate student, you worked with Seymor Papert, among others, at the Media Lab. Papert has written about "hard fun." In what ways is your new work a theory or application of this concept of "hard fun?"

There are a lot of connections between Seymour's work and my own. The concept of "hard fun" is one that I talk about in the book, but there are others as well.

Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that it hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than "fun," but the net effect is pleasurable overall.

The concept is certainly one that applies to almost any good game--not just the games I work with, or games for learning in general. I make this point in my book, and Steven Johnson talks about it in Everything Bad is Good for You as well. Jim Gee talks about the games that work have to be pleasantly frustrating. Good games require a lot of work.

What makes hard fun valuable from an educational point of view is when the challenge you face is worthwhile in some context beyond the game itself. In Seymour's work, kids who used Logo had to solve problems in differential geometry and computer science to build things they thought were interesting and exciting.

In my work, the challenges are the kinds of problems that professionals face in the real world: engineering design, graphic design, mediation, urban planning, and so on. The games are hard because the problems are hard. But they are fun because it is fun to solve difficult problems that matter, that have no right answer, and that give you a chance to see what it would be like to run the world--or at least some part of it.

So, let's get to the heart of the matter. What are epistemic games and what value do you think they bring to education?

Simply put: Epistemic games recreate in game form the things that people do in the real world to learn to think in innovative and creative ways about problems that matter.

They are, in other words, role-playing games where players take on the role of being a professional in training--where "professional" in this sense refers not to so-called white collar professions, but to any kind of work in a complex domain that requires the exercise of autonomy and judgment.

Professional training is based, for the most part, on professional practica: times and places where professionals-in-training do supervised work, and then talk with their peers and mentors about what they did and why. Think about internship and residency for doctors, moot court for lawyers, the design studio for architects, capstone courses for engineers and journalists, and so on.

These repeated cycles of action and reflection create a particular kind of professional thinking that Donald Schon (also at MIT, as you know, before he passed away some years ago) characterized as "reflection-in-action": literally the ability to think and to work at the same time, and thus to do work that requires constant evaluation of the situation and adjustment of the work plan in order to solve non-routine problems.

So epistemic games give players a chance to work on simulations of real problems, and to think about what they are doing--to debrief, if you will--the way professionals do when learning to solve those problems.

The games are "epistemic" because any professional practice has a particular epistemology: a way of justifying actions and warranting claims. To be a professional of some kind means you solve problems in a particular way, and you accept some kinds of solutions as legitimate and not others. The way a doctor argues that removing a patient's spleen is the "right" thing to do is different than the way a lawyer argues about it. If you're in the hospital, you probably want to go with the doctor's way of thinking. If you're in the courtroom, stick with the lawyer--assuming, of course, that you have both a good doctor and a good lawyer.

Put another way, practica are where new professionals learn the epistemology of their chosen profession--along with the skills, knowledge, and values they need to put that epistemology into practice. Epistemic games recreate those practica in game form so players can learn to think like professionals who solve non-routine problems.

The point, as I emphasize in the book, is not for players to become professionals, but rather to have innovative and creative ways of thinking about real problems as part of their intellectual toolkit.

You discuss a number of these epistemic games in the book. Can you pick one of them and describe how it might contrast to existing school practices in this area?

As you know, the book has two chapters that look at this very question. One chapter looking at history and what it means to think about history--in school, as a real historian, and in a game called The Debating Game. Another chapter looks at mathematics as it is learned in school and in a game called Escher's World.

I think the history example is an interesting one because the differences are so clear. Sam Wineberg at Stanford University did a lovely study comparing how graduate students in history and high school history students evaluated a collection of historical documents.

What Wineberg found (and here I'm summarizing from my book, which summarizes Wineberg's study) is that what distinguished the high school students from the historians was not the number of facts that they knew about the American Revolution. Instead, the difference was in their understanding of what it means to think historically. For the students, history is what is written in the textbook, where "facts" are presented free of bias. For the historians, historical inquiry is a system for determining the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth--it is a way of knowing based on using specific evidence to support claims rather than trying to establish a set of facts that exist without bias.

In the same chapter, I describe a game--The Debating Game--that asks players to think about historical evidence the way historians do... or at least more like the way historians do. The game is described in more detail in the book, but basically in the game players compete in a debate over whether the actions taken by some historical actor or actors were good or bad, selfish or public-spirited, constructive or destructive.

To win the debate, they have to convince the judges of the debate that their interpretation is better than their opponents' interpretation. To do that, they have to find specific pieces of the historical record to support their position: they have to argue, as Wineberg suggests professional historians do, for the validity of historical claims based on corroboration of sources in conversation with one another rather than an appeal to a unitary source of truth.

The kinds of things that players of the game do are very different than what happens in most high school history classes. (The game has been played by middle school students as well, and there the contrast is even more striking.) Players in the game (debaters and judges) have to write essays where they defend a point of view, rather than take tests where they remember facts or recite received interpretations of events. They work with primary and secondary sources with conflicting viewpoints, rather than a text with one point of view. They make their own interpretations and judgments about arguments and evidence, rather than trying to decode and remember some canonical interpretation. And so on.

So the differences are quite striking: the game is about learning to use the "toolkit" of historical analysis to think for yourself; the class is about learning to give the right answers for a test. Thus the game is more realistic, in a sense, than class is.

A recurring emphasis in your discussion is on the movement from abstract school subjects towards school subjects framed around specific real world professions -- the difference between studying math, say, and studying accounting. What's the case for the use of these professional categories for secondary school education?

As I point out in the book, school is organized around a set of things that are supposedly fundamental ways of knowing--the building blocks of all thinking if you will--which in the case of school are the traditional academic disciplines.

This is a very old view of thinking, going back to ancient Greece. The disciplines were organized a little differently then, but the basic idea was the same: education is about learning some basic ways of thinking out of which all more advanced thinking is formed.

The problem is that a century of study in the psychology of learning suggests that this just isn't how it works. Complex thinking of the kind that characterizes expertise isn't simply lots of basic pieces put together. You can't teach a bunch of facts and skills and then expect that people will reassemble them as needed.

Expertise--indeed anything beyond rudimentary skill--is based on experience working with real problems, and usually quite a lot of experience. So if we want people to learn to think about problems in the real world, they need experience learning how experts solve those problems.

I should add that there isn't anything wrong, in principle, with having school focus on learning to think like historians or mathematicians, if we decide that these are the kinds of problems kids will really face later in life. But if that's what we want to do, then we should build games (and by extension design curricula) where players meet simulations of real historical and mathematical problems the way historians and mathematicians do--which is a far cry from what they are doing now.

I'd also want to see the argument made that teaching everyone to be 5 or 6 different flavors of academic is really more useful than learning to think as professionals. What, for example, would our health care system look like if everyone who went to a doctor's office understood the kinds of questions that the doctor should ask, and the kinds of answers that she or he would use to make decisions? What would our body politic look like if everyone who read a newspaper or listened to talk radio understood how a journalist thinks about stories--and thus what makes it into the news and what doesn't, and why stories get reported the way they do? How would that kind of education compare to what we have today--or to doing a better job of teaching students to think like biologists or historians?

No Matter How Small: Revisiting Seuss's 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

Every January, for the past fifteen years, I have conducted a salute to the great children's book author, Doctor Seuss. It started the year that Doctor Seuss passed away. I was struck by how central this author had been to American culture from the late 1930s until near the end of the 20th century. His children's books are all classics but they get read outside of any historical context and few people have connected them to the much broader range of work that he did -- as a humorist for adult publications such as Judge and Life, as an important copywriter in advertising, as an editorial cartoonist for the progressive PM in the years leading up to America's entry into the war, as the animator for the Private Snafu training films and script writer for Frank Capra's Why We Fight films during World War II, as script writer and designer for 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, as the author of the radio script which led to the classic animated short, Gerald McBoing Boing, as a promoter of modern art through a series of educational specials for American television, and so forth. The Seuss story spans across media and bridges high and low culture in fascinating ways. Every January, I share his story with students, faculty, and staff at MIT, reading from his works, and sharing some historical perspectives. This year, I am going to be joined by Nancy Newman, who traches music history at SUNY-Albany and who has written a fascinating essay on the score for the Seuss-inspired feature film, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. The highlight of the event every year is the screening of this rarely shown film from the 1950s which features Hans Conreid as a demonic (but campy) piano teacher bent on global domination. We will be concluding the evening with a screening of this rarely shown classic from the 1950s, which is one of my all time personal favorite movies.

You may not know that there's a real cult that has grown up around 5000 Fingers, including this excellent website, which is full of details about its production and includes audio files of a number of songs recorded for but cut from the film.

I wrote about 5000 Fingers in an essay I published about Seuss's relationship to the Popular Front and permissive childrearing in my anthology, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. I am hoping the following excerpt may intrigue you into either coming to our event (if you are in and around Boston) or renting the film.

The event will be held next Monday, January 29, 7-10 PM, in room 4-237 at MIT.

Here's some more information about Nancy Newman's talk:

"We'll Make a Paderewski of You Yet!:

Acoustic Reflections in The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T."

Abstract:

One of the striking aspects of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953) is its staging of a young boy's search for musical identity as an Oedipal drama. The story pits two men as competitors for the boy's widowed mother. One potential father represents the tradition of classical piano, the other, American popular song. This paper shows how the film's musical numbers resolve this crisis of identity and affection. Frederick Hollander's memorable tunes and innovative score affirm the individual's capacity to develop a distinctive "voice," a message with political overtones at the time of the film's release.

Biography:

Nancy Newman is an assistant professor at the University at Albany-SUNY, where she teaches courses on music history, both ancient and modern. Her article, "Acoustic Reflections in The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T" is forthcoming in Lowering the Boom: New Essays on the History, Theory and Practice of Film Sound (University of Illinois Press). She is currently writing on Björk's role as composer and performer in the film musical, Dancer in the Dark. Dr. Newman is also working on a book about the Germania Musical Society, Good Music for a Free People. An article on this 19th-century orchestra appeared in the Yearbook of German-American Studies (1999). Her years as a piano teacher will be put to use in SUNY-Albany's Extensible Toy Piano Festival this spring.

Seuss's live action feature film The 5000 Fingers of Doctor T represents the fullest elaboration of Seuss's conception of children as "thwarted people," struggling to find their own voice in a world dominated by dictatorial adult authorities. When we read through Seuss's notes and original drafts for the script, we see strong evidence that he was consciously mapping permissive child rearing doctrines over images associated with the Second World War.

5000 Fingers deals with the plight of an average American boy, Bartholomew Collins (Tommy Rettig), who finds learning to play the piano a threat worse than death.His instructor, Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried), is an old school authoritarian, who insists that "practice makes perfect" and who demands constant drill and repetition. The bulk of the film consists of Bartholomew's dream, in which he and the other boys rise up and overthrow the dictatorial Terwilliker and his plans to dominate the world through his music. As Seuss explained in a memo to the film's producer, Stanley Kramer: "The kid, psychologically, is in a box. The dream mechanism takes these elements that are thwarting him and blows them up to gigantic proportions."

If this description foregrounds issues of child psychology, concerns central to the finished film, the early drafts of the script make frequent references to the struggle against fascism. In Bart's waking reality, Dr. T is "not especially frightening," a "tight lipped and methodical looking old gentleman ... no more vicious and harmful than Victor Moore." Once we enter Bart's dream, however, Seuss increasingly characterizes Dr. T as the reincarnation of Der Fuhrer. Seuss describes his kingdom as "plastered with posters, showing Dr. Terwilliger in a Hitler-like dictator's pose." His soldiers wear medals that "resemble an iron cross, only it is engraved with a likeness of Dr. Terwilliger in the center." The mother has a "devotion to the man...bordering on the fanatical," a "gauleiter-like allegiance" which blinds her to her son's agonies. When he is challenged, Dr. T "flies into a Hitlerian rage." He sees the "piano racket" as a scheme for global domination, and his study is decorated with an enormous world map captioned "The Terwilliger Empire of Tomorrow." He has built a massive piano, designed for the enslaved fingers of 500 little boys, upon which he will perform his musical compositions.

Many traces of this Hitler analogy find their way into the final film. The sets are hyperbolic versions of monumental Bauhaus architecture, and the grand procession borrows freely from Leni Rieftenstahl's Triumph of the Will, with his blue helmeted henchmen goose stepping and holding aloft giant versions of his "Happy Fingers" logo. Terwilliger's elaborate conductor's uniform, one reviewer noted, was "a combination of a circus band drum major, Carmen Miranda, and Herman Goering." Most of the Henchmen bear Germanic names. Hans Conried's long thin body and his floppy black hair closely resemble Seuss's PM caricatures of Hitler (minus the mustache). The fact that Conreid had provided some of the narration for Design for Death, performing the voices of the fascist leaders, could only have strengthened the association for contemporary viewers. Even the film's musical score bore strong Germanic associations; its composer, Eugene Hollander, had studied under Richard Strauss, done music for Max Reinhardt in Berlin before the war, and was the musical director for The Blue Angel.

Some of the film's more disturbing images drew on popular memories of the Nazi concentration camps. Arriving by yellow school buses, rather than railway cars, the unfortunate boys are herded through gates, where their comic books, balls, slingshots, and pet frogs are confiscated. Then, they are marched off to their "lock-me-tights" in the dungeon. There, Dr. T dreams up fiendish (and Dante_esque) tortures for all those who refuse to play his beloved keyboard. The captive musicians have sullen eyes and sunken cheeks, lean and gaunt in their prison uniforms.

In constructing the more sympathetic plumber, Zlabadowski, Seuss drew upon other associations with the war. In the first draft of the script, Zlabadowski is described in terms that strongly link him to Eastern Europe. "Shaking his head sadly in deep Slavic gloom," Zlabadowski is "a big shaggy edition of Molotov, a kindly Molotov with the cosmic unhappiness of Albert Einstein." As the script progresses, Zlabadowski abandons all of his Slavic associations, except for his rather distinctive name, becoming a more all-American type, a reluctant patriot who must first shed his isolationist impulses before he can be enlisted as Bart's ally in the struggle to stop Terwilliger. In one of his notes about the script, Seuss summarizes the character: "Z's conflict: Desire to help people. Desire to keep out of trouble. An old soldier trying to be a pacifist. He's tired of war. It's futile." In the early drafts, Zlabadowski knows Terwilliger's evil plans, but he doesn't want to get involved if it means losing his overtime pay for installing the sinks.

In the finished film, many of these adult concerns have vanished. Zlabadowski represents the ideal permissive parent Initially, he is a bit distracted by his work and eager to make a buck, a bit eager to dismiss Bart's warnings as wild eyed fantasies. Ultimately, he becomes a warm-hearted playmate (engaging the boy in a pretend fishing trip) and a wise counselor (helping him concoct from the contents of the boy's pockets a sound-stopping device). Angered by his initial indifference, Bart challenges his adult privileges and sings a song that might have been the anthem for permissive child rearing:

Just because we're kids, because we're sorta small, because we're closer to the ground, and you are bigger pound by pound, you have no right, you have no right to push and shove us little kids around.

Proclaiming children's rights, Bart denounces adult assumptions that deeper voices, facial hair, or wallets justify unreasonable exercises of power over children. Zlabadowski regains his idealism: "I don't like anybody who pushes anybody around." The two cut their fingers with Bart's pocketknife and take a blood oath that binds them together,father and son,in the struggle against Terwillikerism.

In the film's opening scene, Bart off-handedly remarks upon the death of his father, presumably during the war, and Zlabadowski and Terwilliker are cast as good and bad surrogate fathers, respectively. In his nightmare, his piano crazed mother is hypnotized into accepting Terwilliker's hand in marriage, a deal to be consummated immediately following the great concert. Not unlike Lord Droon in The King's Stilts, Terwilliker represents the pre-war Patriarch who demands obedience and silence from his children. In his fantasy, Bart hopes that the more permissive Zlabadowski will fall in love with his mother and become his father, an arrangement consummated by their blood oath. Zlabadowski understands the needs of boys; he represents the manly virtues of fishing and baseball against Dr. Terwilliker's effeminate high culture, defending America against Terwilliker's Germany.

In the end, the task of finding the right father and overcoming the bad patriarch falls squarely on Bart's shoulders. He alone will face down Terwilliker, using his "very atomic" sound-catching device to disrupt the concert and liberate the children. The closing moments, where rebellious children hurl their music sheets in the air, shouting in defiance, stomping on and punching the piano keys, represents one of the most vivid images of resistance in all of American cinema. By this point, Bart's struggle against Terwilliker has absorbed tremendous ideological weight, a struggle of the freedom fighting all American boy (with his red and white striped shirt and his blue pants) against an old world tyrant, the struggle of those who are "closer to the ground" against those who "shout" and "beat little kids about," the struggle of permissive parenting against more authoritarian alternatives.

Broadway meets Reality Television

As an American Idol fan, I have been very pleased to see Jennifer Hudson get such wide-spread acclaim for her performance in Dreamgirls. Hudson got bumped prematurely from the Idol competition during the season which I document in Convergence Culture and it is delightful to see her get a second chance at success and really knock the ball out of the park. Beyonce's performance in the film seems surprisingly subdued while Hudson gets all of the showstopping moments (or at least all of the ones not commanded by Eddie Murphy!) And of course, now both Hudson and Murphy have walked away with Golden Globes and seem destined to be "players" in the Oscar race. I was curious, however, to see how her performance was being perceived by perhaps the most exacting fan audience for this particular film -- the community of enthusiasts of Broadway shows, many of whom have firm memories of the way this same role was handled by another Jennifer, Ms. Holliday, who won a Tony for playing Effie in the original stage production. So, I asked my friend and longtime collaborator, Alex Chisholm, himself a seasoned First Nighter, to suggest some places where I might get a taste of Ms. Hudson's reception. He directed me to the discussion over at Broadway World, a leading forum for fans of the American musical theater. The verdict is definitely split -- perhaps along generational lines -- with many of the younger fans knowing Holliday's performance only through the soundtrack album or glympses captured on the Tony Award show rather than from first hand experience. Here are just a few of the more thoughtful posts on this issue:

Holliday's voice barrels rapidly up and down the notes in AIATY in such a way that that I get a sense that she's truly feeling something powerful and emotional course through her body while she's singing. I find her singing on all of the other songs to be quite stirring also.

While Hudson's voice is astounding to me, she comes off more like she's decided how she wants to sing the song from the start and that's also how her singing on most of the soundtrack feels to me. However, I'm not exactly sure whose vocals I prefer. I love the way Hudson sings "that would be just fine" in I Am Changing.

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I do not think that Jennifer Holliday was a very good actress and soley won the tony for her amazing singing in the part. Hudson, on the other hand, blew me away as a first time actress and her rendition of the songs, I felt, were more emotionally charged and controled.

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How can you say that Hudson's a good actor. Don't get me wrong I loved the movie and her performance of the song but her acting was nothing special. Now, I've only seen Holiday's Tony performance and I think her acting is a little crazy to but her overacting works on stage Hudsons lack of acting isn't good for film.

Now as for the song itselfs, I have to say Hudson was amazing and killed it, but Holliday destroyed it. Holiday's version is clearly better in my opinion and I will always consider it her song.

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I saw Dreamgirls on broadwy with Holliday and just loved the whole thing. It was a dream for me. I was 10 and it was like this is what my life is all about. She will always be my dreamgirl.

BUT... Jennifer held her own. In many ways, it is different. Maybe not vocally as they both belt out a storm and take full control of it but with Holliday, there is a desperation in her voice, perhaps a I have ALWAYS been in control and she ain't going to take it lying down. Hudson's is more of a mental breakdown.. the hysterical kind..

I loved them both.

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Holliday was a force of nature on stage. I would venture to say her sheer power and vocal energy can never be topped. She can't even get to that level herself anymore. She was 21 back then, and heavier, and both helped her to explode with the unmatchable excitement of "And I'm Tellin' You." It was as if she was self-destructing in front of you. Tearing out her voice like that, every time. It worked in a HUGE way, but it also took its toll on her.

Hudson is fantastic on that song too, but she doesn't reach Holliday's power. Close! But no cigar. She doesn't push off the deep end into self-destruction.

However, Hudson gets my vote OVERALL, because her acting is much better than Holliday's ever was. Later in Holliday's run you even got the sense that she was almost "marking" the show to save herself for "And I'm Telling You" and "I Am Changing." She kinda walked through the rest of it, a bit. And it's understandable. She was like an athlete pacing herself for the triple somersault.

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Hudson's work is on film, and I don't think she could do any better sustaining Effie on stage than Holliday did, plus she already can't deliver the song with THAT much power (nobody can). She had multiple takes, and didn't have to worry about pacing herself for the rest of the show. So I'm already "discounting" my choice...

But since I'm basing my ultimate decision on the impact of the entire performance, I'm picking Hudson (qualifiers and all).

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I saw Holliday in Dreamgirls back in 1982 for me (and most others who saw her) there's really no comparison between the two performances -- Holliday owns that role. She embodies Effie like no other and the passion, pain and sheer power she brought to her performance is unparalleled. She was a force of nature and her raw intensity was so emotionally overwhelming, I can recall literally shaking afterwards (several people around me were actually in tears). No performance by anyone I've ever seen (and I've seen over 1000 shows) has had the same impact.

Hudson was fine -- quite solid in fact -- and gave the sort of very committed, but scaled down kind of performance that the screen demands. It's an appropriately strong Effie, but not an overwhelming one, which works well for the film. But, out of the dozen or so Effies that I've seen (including about 5 during the original Broadway run, another two for the '87 revival, and the others during the various national tours and regional productions), I'm not sure she'd even be in my top 5 -- and again, I say that realizing that making comparisons between stage and film can be rather unfair.

Nevertheless, Hudson deserves all the accolades she has received and I, for one, would be happy for her if she ends up nabbing an Oscar for her performance. But, at the same time, I would never begin to compare her performance to Holliday's which was the stuff of legend and in a different category altogether.

What surprised me is that there seems to be no real backlash here based on the fact that Hudson is known primarily as an American Idol contestant and is not a Broadway veteran. Chisholm notes that there has been so much crossover from American Idol to Broadway in recent years, including cast members on Rent (Frenchie Davis ), The Wedding Singer (Constantine Maroulis), Bombay Dreams ( Tamyra Gray), and Hairspray (Diana DeGarmo). Some have even gone so far as to cite A.I's influence on the new production of A Chorus Line which is more a showcase for singers than dancers.

A more heated controversy about the relationship between reality television and the Broadway musical is brewing around NBC's new series showing the casting process for a revival of Grease. Some Broadway fans have embraced the strategy, supporting anything which will get people into the theaters at a time when large scale musicals remain a highly risky proposition:

If anything, BROADWAY and the theater arts and those aspiring to be a part of that world will have weekly exposure to the United States. And, if it does well in the ratings, can be nothing but a positive thing. Hopefully it will inspire a new generation to embrace theater and the arts even more, and possibly stem the tide of diminishing Arts programs in schools and communities.

Others see a range of reasons for skepticism, each reflecting some of the tensions points which surround efforts to broaden the commercial appeal of the stage musical:

The reason for doing a revival is "usually" because someone has a new vision or something fresh to bring to an old show. But this revival is only being done to promote another reality TV show.

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The only problem with it I have is the fact that there are many Broadway actors/actresses who are "established" and been in the biz for years, worked hard, auditioned, Equity card holders ect. and this gives Joe and Jane Everyday a chance to slip in and take two primo, well know roles in a beloved classic as they bring it back to Broadway. Which in itself is all good: bring in new blood, find new Broadway talent, yes... But not American Idol style. It's over done.

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They could have also picked something that would allow non-white people to actually participate in.

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Could they have picked a better show?

Something that's NOT done every year around the country by high school?

Of course, one could argue that it is precisely because Grease is so familiar and because there is a generation of high school cast members fantasizing about repeating their roles on Broadway that it makes sense to use it as the platform for a reality television series. Grease represents the kind of show that many middle Americans want to see when they go to the Big Apple for the first time -- they know the songs, they like the movie version, and they know they will be entertained.

Something that's becoming clear is that when there are more opportunities for new talent

to emerge through both mass media properties on network television or online through

social spaces such as YouTube and MySpace (the new hit Spring Awakening turned to MySpace to find young performers who could sing and act) there is a greater chance that someone extremely talented and completely unknown one minute can get a lucky break and become something of an overnight sensation, whether on a large scale or within smaller communities that become devotees of a particular contestant. One doesn't have to be the "understudy" who takes over for the star in 42nd Street or the wannabe actress who has to lie to get what she wants in Applause, which was inspired by the classic All About Eve. Rather, in this age of participatory culture, audiences exercise a louder voice in choosing whose name goes up in lights on the Great White Way or at the cineplex. In the end, we all get to play casting director and critic for a day.

Engagement Marketing: An Interview With Alan Moore (Part Two)

Last Friday, I introduced my readers to Alan Moore -- not the comic book creator but the brand guru -- a cutting edge thinker about the ways that grassroots communities are reshaping the branding process. Moore, with Tomi T Ahonen, wrote a book called Communities Dominate Brands. The book spells out their vision for where media is headed -- towards what Moore described last time as a "connected society"-- and what it means for the branding process. Here, Moore gets deeper into some of the issues which will be of particular interest to regular readers of this blog -- the economic value of fans to advertisers and media producers, the issue of compensating for user-generated content, the case of Pop Idol as a global media franchise, and the concept of transmedia planning. Moore will be speaking at the CMS colloquium later this term and we hope to make a podcast of his remarks available down the line.

There seems to be an implicit tension running through this book between the focus on the individual consumer (which has been a cornerstone of branding theory and which gets new attention in an age of personalized and customized media) and the focus on communities (which take on greater importance in the age of networked communications.) I wonder if you could talk a bit more about this tension -- should companies be targeting individuals or communities? What do you see as the relationship between individual consumers and these

new kinds of brand communities you are describing?

My view is that one can create greater opportunities, by appealing to communities of interest.

Doc Searls said that markets are conversations. I think communities form around 3 principle tenets.

1. Information

2. Entertainment

3. Commerce

Lets take the equine community, or the climbing community, the motivations for belonging are at a deep human level.

By creating platforms that can better serve these communities around these 3 tenets, one can build I believe sustainable businesses, that are not geographic specific.

Communities form around values, not demographics.

Also, I believe that by combining, user generated content, peer production, inter-community trade and knowledge exchange, in conjunction with services and entertainment specific to that community, the community will grow and expand. This is where the advertising becomes the content and the content becomes the advertising. The advertising becomes the conversation and the conversation becomes the advertising.

Also, there is an opportunity to listen carefully to the community so that one is in a constant process of refinement of how best to serve that community.

The money flows in a different way.

Of course such a view is heresy, within the world of mass media, which are tied to location and old distribution/business models.

In the book, you describe the emergence of "brand promiscuity." As Sex and the City might put it, we are just not that into you any more. What do you mean by brand promiscuity? What factors are giving rise to it? and what steps might companies take to make sure they still have some place in the hearts of their most loyal consumers?

There is no doubt brands wax and wane. But the brand manager wants their customers to always consider their brand before others, and where hopefully price is not part of that consideration process.

However, through the process of search, customers have been able to do much more research about the products and services they want to buy. There is mounting evidence that people go online - and research before they buy.

Customers have become far more aware, that their interests are not always put before the company interests.

That's not to say certain brands don't have die-hard fans, many do, and Apple is a great example of the extraordinary loyalty shown by Apple users.

But none the less, we know that by researching, we can find a better deal on our terms.

The steps companies have to take are to put the customer at the start of the value chain and not at the end. There can never be an excuse for disappointment. Brands have to learn that customer service is not lip service.

Recently I flew to the US via the business airline EOS. It was quite clear to me that they had designed their service from start to finish around the customer experience. I would advocate flying with that airline to anyone.

Such an experience means I will always consider EOS before anyone else and they are cheaper than BA.

Equally, when a community reacts angrily to what they consider as malpractice by a brand, the brand has to engage with that community.

If we look at the near collapse of Kryponite, the resigning of Trent Lott from the Senate, of Jeff Jarvis's personal crusade against Dell computers, Brands have to understand that at the very least they could suffer severe bad publicity at the very worst they could loose their business.

The most extreme example of brand promiscuity comes from China. Chinese stores are being hit by mobs of customers who are engaging in a spot of Tungou, or team buying. Shoppers are coordinating times to hit stores using the web. The shoppers turn up en-masse and demand discounts - and often store owners concede! Sites such as www.51Tuangou.com and www.teambuy.com.cn provide forums for shoppers to meet and plan their next target.

You have interesting things to say in the book about fans: "Such fans are more precious than gold. You should find them, recruit them to work with you, never try to 'brainwash' them, but let them be themselves and use their own creativity and passion to promote your product or service. Find gentle but supportive means to promote them and their work. Pay them for their

intellectual property, at least as well as you would reward a star-performing advertising agency. Celebrate this kind of passion -- you will ignite other such sleeping giants from amidst your fan base." You touch on a key issue here we have been discussing on the blog -- should companies be compensating fans for user-generated content? Why or why not?

Like all things its about context.

The BBC for example, feel they should not be paying for user generated content. Whereas, Current TV pays those that get their 15min pod onto cable $1000.

Spreadshirt.com - which enables me to create my online shop and to trade and transact, with spreadshirt handling all the printing, distribution and financials, are in a way benefiting from user generated content. In a more sophisticated manner.

What about fans writing for the Soprano's or TV formats? Should we be paying them. Well yes. Wikipedia? No, because the motivation is completely different.

Again, we are the mid-wives of a new socio-economic model. It is interesting that we have never ever before really considered seriously that engaging such a fan base could be of huge benefit to various companies.

But, there is enough evidence to show that redirecting some capital in different ways can ignite creativity and therefore drive commerce.

Andy Warhol it was that said in the future everybody will be famous for 15mins. I don't think he could have ever possibly imagined how this would manifest itself. But we are living with that prophecy today.

Could we fire our advertising agencies, that cost us millions if not billions of dollars and just get our most passionate fans to create our advertising for us?

So I guess the formula, is to think about what is the incentive? What is the benefit? Is it short term or long term, is it about reputation and just a sense of belonging or do we want something else? Do we corrupt what we are by paying a revenue share, or are we really igniting the blue touch paper of our passionate community by offering a financial reward?

More generally, what advice would you provide to media companies about forming strong ties to their fan base? Can you cite some examples where companies got this right and where they've gotten it wrong?

So the old rules of command and control don't apply. It is about listening and building trust, it is about real dialogue and actions being taken on that dialogue.

It is about persistent conversation, and creating platforms that will attract, and reward in a variety of ways. It is about a better customer experience, and always, always delivering on the promise.

Who got it right?

Well I think Spreadshirt has got it right, Jamie Oliver and his School Dinner campaign got it right (through a TV programme he invited his audience to form as a community and embarrass the British Government in changing its policy as to how we feed our kids in UK schools), the Boeing Design Team, Soloman sports .

Trent Lott got it wrong, as did Kryptonite, as did Dell, Sony and Verizon all vie for the "how we really fucked it up" award.

But let me also say that, this is work in progress, and your fan base could be the many thousands of employees that work for your company, they are quite often a small army.

Jonathan Schwartz the COO of Sun Microsystems famously said:

The perception of Sun as a faithful and authentic tech company is now very strong. What blogs have done has authenticated the Sun brand more than a billion dollar ad campaign could have done. I care more about the ink you get from developer community than any other coverage. Sun has experienced a sea change in their perception of us and that has come from blogs. Everyone blogging at Sun is verifying that we possess a culture of tenacity and authenticity

And he talks about how Sun's bloggers have created a more transparent company that appears more human as a result. This is the natural consequence of two-way flows of communication. Something that many brand and advertising managers struggle with. Command and control should no longer be part of any marketing communications strategy.

We are at the very beginning now of a revolution in marketing communications. How businesses will engage with their audiences, how marketing budgets will be spent, and how marketing departments will be organized.

You've done some writing about the Pop Idol phenomenon worldwide. What factors have led to the consistent level of engagement which this property generates? What do you see as the most significant commonalities and differences in the ways consumers respond to this franchise in different parts of the world? What lessons might other media producers draw from the success of Pop Idol?

Today's world is a world of experience of content, of culture and of content-rich brands, a world where knowledge is profit and interconnectivity is power, where enabling and personal empowerment are keys to future success. The implications for business are clear. People will want more 'experiences' and to be able to define themselves by those experiences.

In no TV show worldwide has this been more obvious, than in . Generating over 3.2 Billion viewers over the past six years, the various national editions of Pop Idol are regularly the most watched TV show in their respective countries when they air, and the final episode to Pop Idol has broken viewing records from Norway to Singapore.

In Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy, Professor Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan, and, Professor Christian Welzel Professor at the University of Bremen, have been studying how developing economies affect and change individuals and society. Living in a world where survival is now taken for granted, and migrating from an industrial economy to a knowledge society places increasing emphasis on individual autonomy, self-expression, and free choice. Emerging self-expression values transform modernization into a process of human development, giving rise to a new type of humanistic society that is increasingly people-centered.

This new society they argue, seek true voice; direct participation, unmediated influence and identity-based community. Taking control of one's life, having total control over one's identity. These issues therefore, are central to the underpinning of Pop Idol.

Most viewers fully understand that Pop Idol is a manufactured format. What is crucial is not that these wannabe stars are just great performers, but that they come across as genuine and authentic.

Authenticity is one of today's zeitgeists. The cumulative net result of blogs, the explosion of user generated content and self-publishing, is about the exploration of identity on the one hand and on the other it is about communication that is unmediated, unfiltered, and perceived as genuine/authentic. Distrust of Governments and global brands explain why authenticity plays such a critical role in post-modern society.

In one Pop Idol show a contestant is told by the judges that her singing style lacks emotion. Her response to this observation is that she is not interested in the judges view, because she is performing for the audience. It is the audience with their voting power that she appeals to. Su Holmes explains in her paper Reality Goes Pop! Reality TV Popular Music, and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol: Sage publications 2004:

Contestants situate the audience not only as the primary point of address and recipient of the performance but the primary arbiter of its meaning. This structure validates audience choice, discrimination and agency at the moment of transmission in which the audience is actively encouraged to adopt a viewpoint at odds with an official or expert opinion.

In early Hollywood the stars were exceptional stage performers who transferred their skills to the silver screen. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin fell over for real, Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers truly did dance, though Rogers did dance backwards and in high heels! Elvis and Frank Sinatra did sing. The movie was special, and stars were closely guarded maintaining their sense of aura, and a heroic image. Today's Hollywood star relies on stunt doubles, plastic surgery and special effects. Doing the publicity tours for each movie, the stars are over-exposed, and discuss the tricks of the trade ad nauseum, destroying any lingering admiration for skills beyond purely that of acting. Actors are now known to be that and nothing else: actors. Audiences sense that this is more fake, than authentic. While a movie or TV show may be great entertainment, it is still fake, whilst there is an increasing demand for authenticity.

Reality TV is built on co-creation, participation, and persistent peer-to-peer flows of conversations on the television via voting in the chat rooms and forums. This signals that commercial success for broadcasters can be defined by better improving the dialogue via rich flows of communi-cation. Modern viewers think like this: "When I can see, that my vote counts, that my voice counts, then I will willingly engage. When I can be identified as myself within a group context, and listened to, that is important to me."

Sure, some of us may not want to participate in the Pop Idol's of this world, but we may be passionate about other issues, and Pop Idol is more about participatory democracy, true enough in a crude from, than some people may care to accept. If this is the case, then it is worth pausing as a broadcaster, to mull over; how am I engaging my audiences? How as a commercial broadcaster could I better retain our customer base thus reducing our acquisition costs? Or keep the size of our audiences, and therefore keep our advertisers?

Here are 8 key points to consider as a commercial broadcaster

1). Attraction = Pull to engage. We are deeply social

2). Co-creation / participation / peer production / collaboration / persistent conversations

3). Transparency and authenticity are key components of any engagement initiative.

4). Flowability of content across all media platforms

5). Valuable and contextual content

6). Idea driven

7). Deliver a memorable experience

8). Editorial can link to commercial revenue streams

As an American reading your book, I was consistently fascinated with your accounts of mobile media and SMS in other parts of the world. We lag so far behind Asia and the Nordics in terms of our adoption of these technologies. You've spent a lot of time helping clients to understand how they change the information flow and alter their branding efforts. So, what do you see as the future of mobile media and SMS in the North American context? What do you see

as some of the innovative uses of these technologies in other parts of the world and what changes would need to take place if American companies wanted to deploy these approaches in our context?

This is such a vast topic I feel defeated before I even start.

Well - operators have to really consider how they stimulate peer to peer flows of communication.

Mobile is not a mass market. it's a market of mass niche audiences.

In Norway you can buy plane tickets, pay for your parking space. In Finland you can be notified by your library that the book you wanted is now in stock or you can renew your borrowing by SMS, pay for your train tickets via SMS or buy your lottery ticket.

Bands have their own MVNO including the rock group Kiss and P.Diddy.

There is the obvious Citizen Journalism package, for example the Norwegian newspaper Aller, has equipped its journalists with video mobile phones where a print is translated into a 5 min sound-byte via the web.

In Hong Kong one can play the community horse racing game super stable, and in Japan play the community treasure hunt game Mogwai. As teams hunt a prize in an urban jungle.

Mobile is not Heinz baked beanz. One has to put the tools in the hands of creators.

There was one passage in the book which provoked sharp disagreement from me. You write, "Undebiably the storylines of content in popular culture have shrunk, which has shortened the attention spans of especially the younger audiences." Yet, writers like Steven Johnson have made a convincing argument that popular culture texts have greater complexity now than ever

before. We can certainly point to the short lengths of music videos, YouTube segments, or content for the mobile platform, yet we can also point towards people camping out all weekend to watch long marathons of complex serialized dramas on DVD. How would you respond to the claim that popular culture is demanding more, not less, from its consumers in response to the fragmentation and interweaving of storylines you discuss?

I agree, and it is something we have been researching from the last book. Culture is more layered. And is an area we have given more thought to.

I think what we were trying to say was that conventional storylines had been exhausted. Pulp Fiction was perhaps the last film to exploit the old movie genres to great success, where narrative is pulled, pushed and squeezed in innovative ways.

I think kids watch less television, my kids do, but seek greater immersion, in myspace or Grand Theft Auto, or any other gaming experience, or fan fiction site one cares to think of.

But the important criteria is, that they CAN be part of the co-creation experience. That changes everything.

Think about it, you're a kid, you're 9 standing in the schoolyard. Your lonely, you see the cool kids playing soccer, or baseball. The coolest kid in the school comes over to you and says, "do you want to join in?" what are you going to say?

All of a sudden you belong. Your identity recognised.

We've been talking here about transmedia planning as an approach which recognizes the growing complexity of popular culture and rewards the competency and mastery of fans. This approach would seem to be consistent with your own emphasis on fan engagement and brand communities. How do you respond to this concept and how might we reconcile it with your discussion of fragmented attention and declining brand loyalty?

Create context, attraction and reasons to engage. These are myriad.

Deliver a valuable experience, and rewards for engaging. Again, depending on what the reasons are for creating engagement will depend on how one structures the engagement initiative.

I like the concept of transmedia planning, it acknowledges the complexity of story-telling, and co-creation in a super-connected world.

It requires the combination of different skill sets, to develop and deliver such an experience.

All writers about media change face the problem of print being too slow a medium to respond to unfolding events. What recent developments do you wish you had been able to discuss in the book?

Well, we are blessed, with the sequel or son of. So I have no regrets. At times I wondered if we had gone too far. Also we built the book off of the SMLXL blog, and had 172 pages of draft text in the 1st weekend. When we went to print we were right on the bleeding edge.

It has however, taken until the middle of 2006, for the rest of the world to catch up.

The conversations that I am having with many companies and organisations demonstrate that we have pushed the envelope. They are just starting to grapple with the difficult issues of Darwin. Adapt or die. Or as we say, engage or die.

I think organisational structures, is perhaps the one issue Tomi and I grossly underestimated. Companies are struggling to grasp what they should be doing, how and why.

But everything pretty much that we wrote about has evolved into reality.

I am proud of the book as a body of work, as we tried very hard to mix theory with practical examples. Proving that our assumptions were and are already true, which they are.

As a creative person, I deal with putting things into reality, its no good, offering advice others can't see as practical.

Of course web/mobile 2.0 was still a twinkle in the sky, and the Apple iPhone a mere dream.

Its amazing what has happened in 15 months.

Engagement Marketing: An Interview with Alan Moore (Part One)

Alan Moore created quite a stir when he called my apartment a little over a month ago. The guy on the phone had a delightful British accent of the kind one might imagine coming from the British comic book artist who is responsible for such works as Lost Girls, From Hell, Watchman, League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Promethea, Top Ten.... Well, it wasn't that Alan Moore. This Alan Moore is a distinguished figure in the marketing world -- the CEO of SMLXL, the Cambridge based "engagement marketing" firm, and the co-author of Communities Dominate Brands: Business and Marketing Challenges for the 21st Century. In Convergence Culture, I write about what I call "affective economics" -- the reappraisal of the value of fan and brand communities within the marketing sphere. I'd recommend Communities Dominate Brands to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the realm of "affective economics." Moore and his co-author, Tomi T Ahonen, have thought deeply about the changes that are rocking the current media landscape and their implications for the ways that brands will court consumers. The book is informed by contemporary media theory and rich in examples for recent marketing efforts that put the theory into practice.

In this interview, Moore shares with us some of his insights into what is going to happen to the branding process given the rise of participatory culture and the breakdown of the traditional broadcast paradigm.

HJ: Your Bio in the book describes you as a specialist in Engagement Marketing, which begs the question -- what is Engagement Marketing and for that matter, what constitutes engagement from your point of view?

AM: Engagement marketing is a very broad term, and purposefully so. At its heart, is the insight that human beings are highly social animals, and have an innate need to communicate and interact. Therefore, any engagement marketing initiative must allow for two-way flows of information and communication. We believe, people embrace what they create.

And why is this important? Because in advanced economies the values of society and the individual change. AT the heart of this is the key issue around identity and belonging. We have always had community. Pre- industrialization, we were tied to our communities by geography, tradition, the state and birthright. External forces shaped our identity. However, in a post-modern world we can have many selves, as we undertake a quest for self identity.

This is described as Psychological Self-Determination the ability to exert control over the most important aspects of ones life, especially personal identity, which has become the source of meaning and purpose in a life no longer dictated by geography or tradition.

The Community Generation, shun traditional organizations in favor of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The Community Generation, seek and expect direct participation and influence. They possess the skills to lead, confer and discuss. These people are not watching television and have grown up in a world of search and two-way flows of communication.

Going further Engagement Marketing is premised upon: transparency - interactivity - immediacy - facilitation - engagement - co-creation - collaboration - experience and trust these words define the migration form mass media to social media.

The explosion of: Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and other MMORPG's, Citizen Journalism, Wicki's and Swicki's, TV formats like Pop Idol, or Jamies School Dinners, Blogs, Social search, The Guinness visitor centre in Dublin or the Eden project in Cornwall UK, mobile games like Superstable or Twins, or, new business platforms like Spreadshirt.com all demonstrate a new socio-economic model, where engagement sits at the epicentre.

For example Al Gore believes Current TV's hybrid of digital platforms and broadcasting can help re-engage young people with politics and the media. A third of its schedule is created by its mainly 18 to 34-year-old audience with digital video cameras and desktop editing software. Al Gore says It's not political, it's not ideological. You get a cornucopia of points of view and fresh perspectives that force people in rigid frameworks to reassess everything.

You can load up your 15 min film. The community gets to vote if it should be broadcast on cable and the creator gets $1000

Interestingly it's a different set of incentives both personal and commercial.

So reputation begins to play an important role here. And will increasingly do so.

I see this process as having value, not only in a commercial context, but also in education, civil society, science and politics.

Engagement Marketing could help sell a product, an industry, a region, combat a social issue. It can attract and deploy the collective intelligence of the many people.

Engagement Marketing is built upon the power of the meritocracy of ideas, and the strategic combinations of different media to propel that idea into the world, stimulating and facilitating the involvement of its audience to a commonly shared goal.

Engagement Marketing is about connecting large or small communities with engaging content to a commercial or social agenda. Rather than boiling everything down to a unique selling proposition, Engagement Marketing creates bigger ideas that emotionally engage its audience, who have a desire to participate.

Rather than focus on the one single proposition which would be a manufactured communication strategy, Engagement Marketing is built upon the fundamental notion of shared experience, something which 'interruptive' communications cannot do.

Mass media, presumes, only one thing of its audience that they are passive and they will consume as much as marketers can persuade them to.

Mass media is cold media, its push, its myopic, its about as relevant to the 21st Century as First World War military strategy. The age of set piece competition is over.

If the 20th Century was about managing efficiencies, then the 21st Century will be about managing experiences.

In the book you write, "Conventional marketing and advertising is the silent movies of the 21st century. The proletarian nature of the internet, blogging, moblogging, the mobile phone, interactive TV, media choice and the PVR, the rich flows of information and the reach of that information, have all contributed to bringing an era to an end." A bold claim, indeed! I'd love to

see you unpack this for us a bit more. Why is this era ending? What evidence can you offer that this era has ended?

"TV advertising is broken, putting $67b up for grabs, which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup." Stated Bob Garfield in a Wired article just before Christmas. He cites "evolution of dance," which has got nearly 35 million views in six months on YouTube, as evidence that conventional media is in meltdown. These numbers are impossible in a conventional media world.

P&G bankrolled commercial television, so when Jim Stengel CMO for P&G said:

In 1965, 80 per cent of adults in the US could be reached with three 60 second TV spots. In 2002, it required 117 prime time commercials to produce the same result. In the early 1960s, typical day-after recall scores for 60 second prime time TV commercials were about 40 per cent and nearly half of this was elicited without any memory aid. Currently a typical day-after recall score for a 30 second spot is about 18- 20 per cent and virtually no one is able to provide any form of playback without some form of recall stimulate.

The number of brands and messages competing for consumer attention has exploded, and consumers have changed dramatically. They show an increasing lack of tolerance for marketing that is irrelevant to their lives, or that is completely unsolicited. Traditional marketing methods are diluted by a hurried lifestyle, overwhelmed by technology, and often deliberately ignored.

One has to start to question the value of traditional marketing communications, which is further supported by Glen L.Urban. Professor at the Sloan School of Management. MIT, who argues that:

Marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suited to the last 50 years of mass media to trust-based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment.

On top of that we are witnessing the emergence of a new socio-economic model as Yochai Benkler explains in his book the Wealth of Networks:

We need not declare the end of economics as we know it. We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production. That is, behaviours and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere their own patterns. what has changed is that now these patterns of behaviour have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship amd mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and organising productive behaviour at the very core of the information economy.

And lets not forget TRUST. According to the World Economic Forum, Trust is at its lowest level for Governments, Global Brands and even the UN since tracking began in 2001. Trust plays a key role in any interaction, and the media and business have done a great job in destroying that trust.

For example Sony being sued for the pernicious use of spyware on 24million music CD's it sold, without the buyers consent. Or Verizon promoting Bluetooth capability in its ads and then turning the Bluetooth functionality off. Which resulted in a class action against the company. the lawsuit against Verizon Wireless - and the way it came about - highlights the challenges that weblogs pose to corporations.

Verzion advertised the Motorola V710 with Bluetooth this made it possible for file sharing between the mobile device and a computer. Verizon However turned the bluetooth functionality off.

This case has been identified as being possible purely through the power of the blogosphere and the millions that provide such overwhelming force via "word of mouth"

And how about Fake TV news?

Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms' use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)--a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98 separate instances, without disclosure to viewers. Collectively, these 77 stations reach more than half of the U.S. population.

The VNRs and SMTs whose broadcast CMD documented were produced by three broadcast PR firms for 49 different clients, including General Motors, Intel, Pfizer and Capital One. In each case, these 77 television stations actively disguised the sponsored content to make it appear to be their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients' messages with independently-gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the pre-packaged VNR in its entirety.

So, once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't really want to go back to your boring day job. In this instance, the day job is the consumer as an; uninformed, unconnected, passive, ignorant, non-participative, controlled individual that will happily consume and not question what is put in front of them.

The point is that neither the media, nor brands are in control, and we are not waiting for them. We see image advertising as junk mail and by default irrelevant, we don't believe the hype, and we have learnt to question the motive. We the people formerly known as the audience are no longer content to be good foot soldiers.

So the upshot of all of this is the people taking control and creating their own media platforms like OhMyNews . Founder and Editor Oh Yeon-ho said in an interview with Wired Magazine "With OhmyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media. Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves."

The article goes on further to say that the Guardian has described it as the world's most domestically powerful news site and a South Korean diplomat was quoted as saying that the no policy maker can now ignore OhMyNews.

What does this mean? It means we are redefining what journalism is, what media is and who controls it. If this is the case we are redefining what advertising is, what business is and who benefits. It means we are redefining how we communicate and to whom.

We are witnesses at the birth of a new socio-economic model.

The Silent Cinema analogy suggests less a fundamental break than the reconfiguration of the system to reflect a new technological environment. Your book talks a lot about what needs to change. What lessons will these new marketers carry over from the era of conventional marketing and advertising?

What can they carry over?

Well - not a lot as I can see.

It's a new set of rules and a new language.

I think there is a great deal that can be left behind. The worse thing that can happen to you is irrelevance which is always the precursor to obsolescence. And that is a one-way street.

With TV audiences in decline, globally what is the model for the future?

Your book describes a shift from a Networked Culture to a Connected Culture. Explain what you see as the difference between the two. How does this distinction map onto the distinction people are starting to make between Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0?

Web 1.0 is representative of a networked culture. We're all plugged in, and can be defined as Metcalfe's Law.

But a connected culture is a world of hot media, of Current TV, peer production, collective intelligence, Second Life, the world of Warcraft, Pop Idol, Citizen Journalism, Myspace, Bebo, YouTube, mobile social networking, new business platforms which is about utilising digital technologies to radically challenge the status quo of our industrialised world. It is all about persistent conversation and extended narrative.

A connected culture is one that can be better described as Reeds Law and Group Forming Networks

(GFNs) are an important additional kind of network capability. They allow small or large groups of network users to connect and to organize their communications around a common interest, issue, or goal.

GFN's have an exponential effect and significantly out perform either Sarkov's Lawthe law of the mass media and Metcalfe's Law which is the Law of the internet.

Connected culture is about Commons based peer production as a third model of production that relies on decentralized information gathering and exchange and more efficient allocation of human creativity.

For example Yahoo talk about better search through people. Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo talks about User generated content that is Tagged, Described, Organized and, Discovered not by editors but by the users.

Yahoo talks about: User Distributed Content, and, User Developed Functionality

And they talk about F.U.S.E. = Find - Use - Share - Expand

Another illustration of a connected culture is >em>The Elephant's Dream, the world's first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use

The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world .

All mobile/web technologies are designed around social interaction of one form or another. It's a world of Social Media not Mass Media. Niche mass audiences - forming around passion based interests that are not geographic specific.

The Merits of Nitpicking: A Doctor Diagnoses House

My son and I are both big fans of the television series, >em>House. I watch the show for the characters and their interactions -- especially for Hugh Laurie's performance but also for his interplay with the other doctors. My son has shown a bit more curiosity about the medical dimensions of the series and in search of information, he stumbled onto a fascinating blog, Polite Dissent, which offers medical insight into House, superhero comics, and a range of other popular culture texts. The blog promises us "Comics, Medicine, Politics, and Fun." Its author, Scott, describes himself as being part of a large family practice in Southwestern Illinois. Scott's blog is a good illustration of a mode of fan criticism which sometimes goes by the name of nitpicking. Nitpickers examine their favorite programs through a particular lens -- in this case, medicine -- in which they have developed expertise. I became very interested in nitpicking when I did research for Science Fiction Audiences about the reception of Star Trek at MIT. What I found at that time -- the late 1980s -- was that MIT students were often drawn to our school because of an early interest in science fiction and used science fiction -- especially debates about the lines between known science, reasonable speculation, and implaussible technobabel -- to work through their own mastery of core scientific concepts. The pleasure was in being able to prove to each other what was "wrong" with the science in a particular Star Trek episode and to explain a more plausible or realistic way of dealing with the same themes. Indeed, they classified the ST:NG episodes by discipline, often using the numerical codes ("Course 6") which are most often used to refer to majors within the MIT Context, suggesting just how much the shows functioned in parallel with what they were learning in their classes.

These scientists and engineers in training were not being obnoxious in trying to show their superiority to the program: part of the pleasure for them came in sorting out the differences between real and bogus science. In some senses, this was to look at the series through a realist lens but that's too simple a way to understand what is going on since all science fiction fans recognize that science fiction involves speculation and about social commentary, not simply about reproducing the world of known science but pushing beyond it to explore alternative possibilities. There were just "rules" that governed how far outside known science science fiction "should" stray and in what directions.

The classic nitpicker has a love/hate relationship with their favorite program: the show has to be good enough to stretch the outer limits of their knowledge at a regular basis and yet at the same time, it has to be flawed enough that they can catch it when the authors "fake it" in a particular domain of knowledge.

So, Scott takes House apart in terms of hospital procedure, medical tests and equiptment, and the specifics of the various ailments they appear in the speculations surrounding a particular case. Taken as a whole, Scott seems to enjoy the speculative aspects of the series but to be displeased by the various shortcuts the writers take to get us through a complex medical process in under an hour of screentime. Scott recognizes the tension between story telling and communicating actual medical knowledge but remains frustrated, as he puts it, "when House does a "character show," the medicine suffers."

Here, for example, are some of the key concerns he raised about "TB or Not TB", a second season episode about a grandstanding doctor who works on the medical problems in the third world and who provokes special ire from the series protagonist:

I

f the patient is suspected of having TB, why is no one treating him wearing a mask? Why he wandering around the hospital and not in isolation? Why is he not in a negative-pressure room?

PPDs are not read by sight, but by feel. It doesn't matter how red it looks, but instead how indurated it is.

TB is slow growing. How did the team know almost immediately that it was resistant TB? How did the antibiotics kick in so fast?

A nesidioblastoma would explain most of Dr. Charles's symptoms, but *wow* that's a convenient tumor. Small enough that it can't be seen on x-rays or MRIs. Intermittent, so it only releases insulin periodically. And yet strong enough to lower the sugar level in his CSF. It's more of a deus ex machina than a diagnosis.

When Dr. Charles coded, why did no one in a room full of doctors start CPR while waiting for the paddles to charge?

I'm certainly no surgeon, interventional radiologist or endocrinologist, but the scene where the team is trying to induce the tumor to release insulin seemed wrong. Injecting calcium directly into the pancreatic blood supply may be a legitimate procedure, but I doubt those four are qualified to perform it. Also, since they expected the blood sugar to drop to dangerous levels, they should have had the D50 ready to inject and not scramble for an IV setup

Frankly, most of these questions never crossed my mind: for me, the medical language on >em>House is as much technobabel as anything heard on Star Trek, but I found I had to stop watching Jack and Bobby a few years ago because I got so frustrated in how they dealt with academic life and I am starting to get more frustrated with Veronica Mars along similar lines. It all depends on where your expertise and interest lies but that's part of the value of creating a space where shared texts get examined through multiple lens.

It has been widely observed that procedural shows like House or CSI can play an important role in exciting the American public about the professions being represented. They are often accompanied both by an increase in sales of nonfiction works on the same topics and by increased applications to colleges which offer programs in those areas of specialization. The obvious parallel here is to the MIT students who got turned onto science through Star Trek. In such a context, sites like this one play an important role in providing a corrective to some of the more hairbrained ideas that find their ways into dramatic television or simply to provide further background on the medical conditions and practices discussed on the program.

I wonder how we can incorporate something like the nitpicking process into the educational system. What is the value of getting students to apply their knowledge to deconstruct a popular representation? What is gained by the process of walking through such critiques and then trying to verify competing truth claims through reference to concrete evidence and information? What gets added when we move from a single knowledgible critic like Scott to the incorporation of a larger community of interested people who might bring slightly different expertises to the table or who might have competing interpretations and evaluations of what is represented in the program (as occurs in the comments section of this site)? The key point is that the procedural shows themselves do not have to be 100 percent accurate as long as they offer problems for students to work through and solve and as long as a spirit of playful debunking is built into how they get discussed in the classroom. Indeed, the shows may be a better basis for such an experiment if they are good enough to capture the imagination but ultimately flawed or compromised in their representation of real world practices. Such an excercise would seem to be a great way to introduce media literacy concepts into the biology classroom.

Five Things You Don't Know About Me...

Normally I avoid chain letters like the plague. Don't send them to me if you don't want me to break the chain and bring down the curse upon all of mankind or cost that little cancer-ridden girl her miracle cure or win a million dollars from Microsoft or whatever else good, bad, or indifferent you imagine will happen if you don't imediately pester your friends with some stupid task. But this past week, I got "tagged" by David Edery (Game Tycoon) in a vast game which is making its way across the blogosphere. Bloggers are being dared to tell their readers five things about themselves that they probably don't already know and then to pass the tag along to someone else.

I figured it was probably worth one blog post to share with you guys some behind the scenes information about yours truly, though given my tendency for openness about things like being a slash writer or an Eagle Scout, I found this more challenging than it might have seemed at first. Besides, if I have to tell you stuff that David Edery doesn't know about me, that narrows the field even more since David and I have spent many hours in each other's company as we traveled together trying to raise money for the Comparative Media Studies Program. So here goes my best stab.

The first book I ever wrote was a guidebook to the Atlanta Zoo. My CV lists me as the editor and/or author of 12 books. I lie. There's a book I wrote which doesn't appear on any of my resumes. I wrote it shortly after I graduated from Georgia State University. At the time, I was working as the public relations director for the Atlanta Zoological Society. Most of the job consisted of drafting press releases, editing a newsletter, and going out and giving talks to school groups. But the task which most captured my imagination was rewriting the guidebook, which I did with probably a bit too much personality, since the project got abandoned after I left the organization to go off to graduate school. What I wrote was never actually published.

My favorite portrait of my mother depicts her as a clown. It is a portrait painted by a longtime family friend, Glen LaRue. My mother used to love to make people laugh. It went all the way back to her high school days in the Gilbert and Sullivan club. She would periodically dress up as a clown and go to entertain people at local orphanages or old folks homes. When I was a boy, I would sometimes dress up in clown clothes and go with her. I suspect it is my mother's love of laughter that was her greatest gift to me - and as someone who grew up as a mother's boy, that's saying a lot. I am sure this love of comedy led to my dissertation topic - on the influence of vaudeville on American film comedy during the early sound period. Years later, when I got ambushed on Donahue, my mother's only comment was that I forget to make them laugh. It is a mistake I've tried hard not to make again. My students know that my mind runs on bad jokes. I seem to compulsively take words and concepts, twist them around looking for puns or comic structures. Sometimes, the results can be painful. Sometimes, they can break up a bad meeting. Often, they can result in a creative insight which pushes me to the next level in my thinking

My nickname is Mountain Man. The phrase came from an early newspaper article which described me as "looking like a mountain man who happens to be a genius." My wife immediately picked up on the first part of the statement, seeing it as an indictment of how shabby my beard and hair get when I try to push too long between trips to the barbers. I always have to remind her about the second, much more significant part of the statement. The name stuck when I ended up spending my sabbatical a few years ago living by myself in a cabin in the North Georgia mountains. In fact, the cabin was located not far from where they found Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic bomber, during that same time period. News reports suggested that he had stayed alive by eating acorns and lizards. So I started to make jokes in my e-mail correspondence back to the office suggesting that I was staying alive on acorns and lizards. I also joked that it was like living on Walden pond if Thoreau had a crappy dialup connection. Ironically, the year I spent at the cabin, using a really slow land line, was the year that I wrote Convergence Culture. This probably isn't up there with the revelation that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter. :-)

I played Elwood P. Dowd in my high school's production of Harvey. My mother's clowning probably gave me the acting bug. I loved to perform in church plays and scout skits. I performed a comedy routine in our seventh grade talent show as an eccentric professor who was obsessed with the problem of violence in children's literature (a reversal of the role I ended up playing before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee some decades later). When I was in high school, I acted in two plays and in both cases, I got cast as the leads - as Dorian Gray in a heavily sanitized version of the Portrait of Dorian Gray and as the eccentric but lovable Elwood (he who sees the invisible 7 foot tall rabbit) in Harvey. I also won an acting award for my appearance in a super 8 movie spoofing James Bond which had me roller skating in a trenchcoat down Peachtree Street but that was another story altogether. Some years later, I did some amateur standup comedy and used to do comic guest slots on a local Atlanta radio program, King of Schlock. All of this seems like an appropriate preparation for my current public speaking responsibilities.

When I was in late elementary school, I found a dolphin's skull washed up ashore on a beach. When I was a boy, I had a small museum in my basement of oddities of natural history. It started I think when a country cousin gave me the stuff carcus of a Red Fox and when my grandmother bought me a stuffed baby caiman at a roadside stand during a trip to Florida. Along the way, we purchased cobra skins which were advertised in the back pages of Boy's Life magazine and I had a black bat preserved in a jar of formaldahide. But the prize possession was the skull of a dolphin which I found while walking on Tybee Beach when I was in 6th or 7th grade. It was encrusted with barnacles and had been lodged underneath the peer. I recognized it because we had seen one in a museum earlier in the day. We bleached it and left it out in the sun to dry.

I am not sure how much any of this taught you about media change or participatory culture or education or any of the other main themes of the blogs. At best this is a digression from my usual content but I hope I at least managed to be entertaining.

Now, it is my turn. I will tag five other bloggers who are regular readers here - Jason Mittell, Derek Kompare, Mark Deuze, Ilya Vedrashko, and Nancy Baym. Tell us something we don't know about you. (Sorry, friends.)