How Second Life Impacts Our First Life...

After having written so much about Second Life during my recent exchanges with Beth Coleman and Clay Shirky, I swore to myself that I would not write about this virtual world for a bit and let reality catch up with some of my theories. No such luck. I recently heard from digital theorist Trebor Scholtz suggesting that there had been some interesting responses to the Shirkey-Coleman-Jenkins exchanges over at the iDC (Institute for Distributed Creativity) mailing list. Scholtz asked politely if I might weigh in on some of their arguments (always a dangerous thing since I am not on the list and not fully following their conversations) and clarify my position. I asked if I could cross-post my response here on the blog.

The question which Scholtz posed to me was deceptively simple:

My main question to Jenkins and all of you concerns the relationship between this virtual world and "first life." Do these virtual worlds merely provide an inconvenient youth with a

valve to live their fantasies of social change (elsewhere), or do they, in some measurable way, fertilize politics in the world beyond the screen?

The last several decades of observation of the digital world teaches us that the digital world is never totally disconnected from the real world. Even when we go onto the digital world to "escape" reality, we end up engaging with symbolic representations which we read in relation to reality. We learn things about our first lives by stepping into a Second or parallel life which allows us to suspend certain rules, break out of certain roles, and see the world from a fresh perspective. More often, though, there are a complex set of social ties, economic practices, political debates, etc. which almost always connects what's taking place online to what's going on in our lives off line.

Here, for example, is a link to the webcast of a session of the 2005 Games, Learning, and Society conference at Madison, Wisconsin. (Check out the session called Brace for Impact: How User Creation Changes Everything). It was one of the first places that I heard extensively about the kinds of educational uses of Second Life. One of the stories there which caught my imagination dealt with the ways people were using this environment to help sufferers of autism and Asperger's syndrome to rehearse social skills and overcome anxieties that can be crippling in real world social interactions. (They call their island, Brigadoon). Those who are undergoing therapy in Brigadoon are able to interact through Second Life for several reasons, as I understand it: first, because it creates a buffer between the people lowering the stress of social interaction; second, because it reduces the range of social signals through the cartoonishness of the avatar, helping them to learn to watch for certain signs and filter out others. Ideally, participants then return with these new social skills and apply them to their interactions in their First Lives. But even if that is not possible for all of those involved, they have had a chance to interact meaningfully with other human beings -- even if through a mediating representation.

For me, Brigadoon offers both a demonstration of the value of having a Second Life that operates in parallel to your First Life and as a metaphor to think about the ways we can try things out, learn to think and act in new ways in virtual worlds of all kinds, and then carry those skills back with us to our everyday reality.

In some cases, the Second Life opens up experiences that would not be possible within the constraints of the real world. My former student and friend, John Campbell, wrote a book, Getting It On Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Identity, and Embodied Identity . His research primarily centered on much earlier forms of chatroom technologies rather than Second Life per se, but much of what he found there is still very relevant to our present conversation. One of the things I took away from Campbell's book was the idea that these chartrooms played important functions for queers who lived in small towns or in conservative regions of the country where there were little or no chances to socialize with others who shared their sexual preferences. Entering into a virtual world (even one as simple as the early chat rooms) allowed them to begin to explore aspects of their sexual identity that they could not yet act upon in their First Lives. Through this process, they developed the self confidence necessary to come out to their friends and family, they felt some connection to the realm of queer activism, and they made a range of other life-changing choices. I wanted to bring this into the conversation because I see from time to time academic theorists who want to dismiss the kinds of sexual experimentation that occurs in Second Life as interactive porn. Such language shows a limited understanding of what such spaces can and often do mean to the people who participate in these sexual subcultures in virtual worlds.

Those who have read my blog know how much I respect the work that Barry Joseph is doing through his Global Kids organization in Teen Second Life. Joseph has a strong commitment to using the virtual world to educate and empower young people and redirect them towards dealing with problems in the real world. Consider, for example, their recent collaboration with the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum to make images of the genocide occurring in Darfur visible to young visitors to Teen Second Life. The Museum was already projecting these photographs onto its own facade in the real world. The Global Kids group worked to showcase these same images within the virtual world, in the process learning more about real world suffering, and using Second Life as a platform to educate their contemporaries about a world problem that might otherwise have escaped their attention. By all reports, this was a transformative experience for the teens involved, resulting in them putting greater energy into trying to change the real world. Perhaps, Barry, who is a regular reader of this blog, will share more about his experiences.

How far might we push this? Consider the case of Kristofer Jovkovski, one of the readers of this blog, who wrote me recently to describe his proposal to construct a Virtual Macedonia through Second Life. Jovkovski's argument appeared in a Macedonia Arts and Culture magazine, Art Republica:

Macedonia is country of spiritual and profound people, having its culture originating from a deep tradition and culture. However, by implanting extremely materialistic culture and values that even the most developed capitalistic countries are revising and varying, the country is gradually losing its spirit.

Radical virtualization of reality would turn us back to our own natural needs. That would be the final, strongest slap in our own face, as radical immersion into the cyberspace would produce the opposite effect, at the same time, along the immersion path, would make us integrate, instead of enforce, the democratic and open values of the medium, process which would finally lead to reconciliation between the spiritual (i.e. cyberspace) and material world

It is essential to make space for the young people to create their individual and collective reality....

Macedonian government would accredit Virtual Macedonia as a legal state extension in the cyberspace and would give rise to virtual institutions and legal rights to the citizens, thus recognizing the first virtual sovereign state act that would make precedence in the international politics and instant popularity. Promotion of the first virtual state would incite knowledge and information revolution, changing the face of Macedonia. Everybody willing to embody themselves with a virtual identity, or Avatar, would have rights and possibility to create, own and trade virtual objects, thus empowering himself. Virtual Macedonia would be introduced to the older Macedonians in a nostalgic manner that would evoke ideological enthusiasm from their youth. Young people would, of course, be riding enthusiastic energy wave of even greater intensity.

Virtualization of reality would help us relive traumatic politization and transformation of everyday life. Experiences from the virtual reality would affect our real reality. We could help ourselves, and maybe most important, by taking more proactive part in creation of their own reality, young people could break the karma of cynicism and pessimism of elders.

Virtual Macedonia could be practical model of virtual state with its own territorial sovereignty, functional economy and community rights and regulations, opened to the world....

He has not yet tried to build a Virtual Macedonia. I don't want to get into this specific politics of the Macedonia situation but I was moved by this vision of how a virtual nation might revitalize a real one (which is in any case in the process of trying to reinvent itself after a complex history of struggles over national identity).

Might we imagine, for example, the construction of virtual homelands within Second Life that brought together disaporic communities and helped to cement their cultural and political ties to their mother countries? Might this result in new kinds of political alliances and affiliations that straddle between the real and virtual world? Could we use a similar structure to create a common space for interaction between groups which have very little face to face contact in the real world, even groups who have a history of conflicts over geographic space?

All of these examples work because Second Life does not perfectly mirror the reality of our First Lives, yet we could point to countless other more mundane and everyday ways that Second Life and other multiverses can and are being used to facilitate meetings in real world organizations, including those which result in all kinds of real world political effects.

That said, as Steven Shaviro notes on the iDC discussion list, there are some limits to the kinds of politics that can be conducted through Second Life at the present time:

Overall, Second Life is connected enough to "first life," and mirrors it closely enough in all sorts of ways, that we can pretty much do "there" the same sorts of things -- especially collaborative, social things -- that we do "here."...

A protest against the Iraq war in Second Life is little more than an empty symbolic gesture; but one might cynically argue, especially given the tendency of the media to ignore them, that

real-world protests against the war , however many people they draw, are at this point little more than empty symbolic gestures either.

On the other hand, I don't think that one could find any equivalent in Second Life of political organizing that takes place in "first life": if only because the people in Second Life are a fairly narrow, self-selected and affluent, group.

This goes back to the debate we've been having here about whether Second Life participants constitute a niche or an elite. Either way, the inhabitants of Second Life certainly are not a representative cross section of the society as a whole and there are many people who are excluded through technological or economic barriers to being able to participate in this world. These factors limit the political uses that can be made of SL: they make it hard for us to insure that a diversity of opinions are represented through the kinds of political deliberations that occur here; they makes it easy for participants to ignore some real world constraints on political participation, starting with the challenges of overcoming the digital divide and the participation gap; they make it hard to insure the visibility of online political actions within mainstream media.

That said, I don't think we can discount the political and personal impact that these online experiences may have on the residents of SL. We simply need a broader range of models for what a virtual politics might look like and need to understand what claims are being made when we debate the political impact of these virtual worlds.

Another list participant, Charlie Geer, goes a lot further in dismissing the value of Second Life. He takes issue with my claim that the participatory culture represented on SL is worth defending. Here's part of what he wrote:

It would seem to me obvious that trying to make some sense of and find ways of mitigating the violence and injustice in the complex world and culture we already necessarily inhabit, not least bodily, is far more pressing and considerably more worth defending than any supposed capacity to 'design and inhabit our own worlds and construct our own culture'. This seems to me to be at best a license for mass solipsism and at worse something like the kind of thinking that undergirds much totalitarianism, as well as an evasion of our responsibilities to the world as we find it. Such a fantasy seems to be at play in both the relentless construction and assertion of identity', a drive that militates against proper social solidarity, and thus plays into the hands of those sustaining the status quo, as well as the fantasy entertained by the Bush

government that the Middle East can just be redesigned as if in some video game

Apart from anything culture is not something that can simply be constructed. It is something we are thrown into and which we can only at best try to negotiate our relationship

with. Culture necessarily involves other people and prior existing structures. Has Jenkins considered what it would mean if everyone felt free to 'construct their own culture'. Even if

such a thing were possible, it is certainly not desirable, especially if we have any hope to produce a properly participatory culture.

Frankly as far as I am concerned SL is really just a kind of cultural pornography, and is to the real business of culture what masturbating is to sex with another person. I like

masturbation as much as the next man, or indeed woman, but I don't make the error of mistaking for something it isn't. Apart from anything else it lacks precisely the element

that sex has, that of involving a proper, embodied, responsibility to someone else and to the potential consequences of the act itself.

There are lots of misperceptions embedded in these comments. To start with, I was not suggesting that we should be concerned with SL to the exclusion of concern with the real world. But I do see the struggle to preserve participatory culture as a fundamental political struggle in the same way that the right to privacy or the efforts to defend free speech are foundational to any other kind of political change. We are at an important crossroads as a society: on the one hand, we have new tools and social structures emerging that allow a broader segment of the population than ever before to participate in the core debates of our time. These tools have enormous potential to be used for creative and civic purposes. On the other hand, we are seeing all kinds of struggles to suppress our rights to deploy these new tools and social structures. Even as we are seeing a real promise of expanding free speech, we are seeing real threats to free speech from both corporate and governmental sources. We should be working to broaden access to the technologies and to the skills and education needed to become a full participant rather than having to defend the new communication infrastructure against various threats from government and business.

Gere understands what's going on in Second Life primarily in individualistic rather than collaborative terms. It would indeed be meaningless to describe a world where everyone constructs their own culture. Culture by definition is shared. But it is not absurd to imagine a world where everyone contributes to the construction of their culture. It is not absurd to imagine different projects in SL as representing alternative models for how our culture might work. Indeed, the virtual world allows us not only to propose models but to test them by inviting others inside and letting them consider what it might feel like to live in this other kind of social institutions. I think of what goes on there as a kind of embodied theory. And I think what is interesting is that these are intersubjective models that are indeed being taking up and tested by communities large and small.

In each of the examples I cited above, participants are learning how to work together with others through the creation of a shared virtual reality. We certainly need to spend more time exploring how we can connect what happens in these worlds back to our everyday lives but that doesn't mean that what occurs in a symbolic space is devoid of a real world social and political context.

Often, real world institutions and practices constrain our ability to act upon the world by impoverishing our ability to imagine viable alternatives. This is at the heart of much of the writing in cultural studies on ideology and hegemony. SL offers us a way to construct alternative models of the world and then step inside them and experience what it might feel like to live in a different social order. I think there are some very real possibilities there for political transformation.

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Four of Four)

This is the last installment of Eitan Glinert's account of the Games Development Conference. Glinert is a graduate student working for GAMBIT.

Friday

For the past four days I've brought you coverage of GDC and tried to focus on different aspects of the conference, starting with serious games, then independent game development, followed by coverage of the "big" companies out there including Sony and Nintendo, and then women in gaming. Today, on my last day, I'm going to get into news related to my own research in game accessibility. But what is "Game Accessibility"? It seems to be one of those terms getting thrown around a lot in the industry, especially over the past week. Simply put, there are a huge number of disabled people out there; according to the 2000 American census, 19% of individuals aged 16 - 64 had some form of disability, be it physical or mental. Accessibility refers to games that are designed with this large group in mind, so that they can play along with everyone.

Actually creating accessible games is a task easier said than done, though. There are many forms of disabilities, ranging from sensory impairments (i.e. blind), to physical disabilities, to mental disabilities such as dyslexia, to medical conditions like arthritis. So how can you make a game that is accessible to all of these people? That's a great question that Dr. Dimitris Grammenos would like to try to answer. Grammenos has created Game Over!, the most frustrating, hilarious, and thought-provoking game I have seen in quite some time. Game Over! has 20+ levels, each of which displays a different accessibility deficiency that makes the game impossible to play. That's right - you can't win this game. Play advances when you either die, or self destruct, three times in any given level. Lighthearted enough to keep you from breaking your computer in frustration, playing through really gets you thinking about how the "bugs" that prevent you from winning could have been avoided. If you are developing software, I *strongly* suggest checking it out.

There are some games, though, that do a great job of being accessible. One notable example is Terraformers, winner of the innovation in audio award at the 2003 independent games festival. Terraformers features a rich world in which you need to make an alien planet habitable for humans (hence the name.) What's really impressive about the game, though, is that you don't need to be able to see to play the game. Through the novel use of 3D sound and a handy futuristic sonar system, players can navigate and interact with the world without ever seeing a thing. If the concept sounds interesting but you think you want something more action packed, you might want to check out AudioGames.net, a website devoted entirely to games for the visually impaired. Two of the more interesting offerings on the site (in my opinion) are Drive and Shades of Doom, though the list of some 200 games available should give you plenty to choose from.

Also present at GDC were games that took pains to provide useful closed captioning, to allow the user to adjust the speed and difficulty level of the system and a meaningful way, and a wide array of controllers that would allow users with one hand, or even paraplegics, to play games. The latter controller, which was controlled through a set of three puff straws, was truly an impressive feat, though I don't know of any plans to mass produce such items. If anyone does know of where to get such a device, it would have to be Game Accessibility, the best site around for what's new in the accessibility field. Along with links to dozens of games (some of which can be downloaded on the site) there are many useful tools for developers such as papers and testimonials on how to make these types of games.

That about wraps up my coverage of the Game Developer's Conference. Before I go though, a plug: check out The Education Arcade, a lab here at MIT that focuses on the creation of new engaging educational games, like Labyrinth. There's lots of great stuff on the site, including some particularly enlightening blogs. Ok, so mine aren't all that enlightening, but the other ones are. Check it out!

Have comments on Eitan's coverage of GDC? Feel free to contact him at glinert-at-mit-dot-edu and tell him what you really thought of his posts

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Three of Four)

Thursday

If I had to sum up Playstation's GDC message in one sentance, it would be: "The PS3 really is super awesome, check out all this cool stuff we have in the pipeline!" If you asked me to do the same for Nintendo, though, it would probably be "We're friends - let's talk about our design philosophy so you can learn from it." Personally, I find the latter message a bit more appealing as it is more tangible, and, quite frankly, the Wii has more credibility in my book at the time being (though I do want the PS3 to succeed on the same level as it's predecessor.)

That said, it wouldn't have killed Nintendo to make a *few* more announcements. With the exception of a multiplayer playable demo of the new Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, I didn't see or hear anything truly exciting. As for Phantom, while the single player game certainly looks like a fun DS version of the Wind Waker, the multiplayer part wasn't terribly impressive. At it's core a fun "hide-and-seek" concept, it is strictly one on one, and damningly has NO ELEMENT OF ZELDA GAMEPLAY. There are no swords, no boomerangs, and no dive-rolls with a pleasurable "HAA!" In fact, you could replace link and all the other objects in the game with kittens and dogs, the game would look the same. As a result, the functionality seems tacked on, and makes me wonder why they didn't take more time to really get that Zelda feel that we fans love so much.

Nintendo's biggest newsmaker of the day was the keynote delivered by the company's creative director Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto, the mastermind behind Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong, talked somewhat informally about the design principles of Nintendo, and then his own personal take on game creation. The keynote was not nearly as announcement heavy as the previous day's; indeed, only a brief video was shown of the upcoming Super Mario Galaxy, which was not very different than the one shown last year. In my opinion, though, Miyamoto more than made up for this with interesting anecdotes and an engaging narrative that followed through his career from a non-gamer point of view. Specifically, through a dynamic wife-o-meter, which showed his wife's (growing) interest in games as time went on and technology and game design improved.

I personally felt this wife-o-meter was an apt analogy, as it touched on the important issue of the growing female demographic. More and more, women are playing and buying video games, and are shattering the notion that women are only "casual" gamers. As I sat in various conference halls, I noticed (anecdotal evidence alert!) that there were more women playing with their DS's than men! And they weren't just playing "fluffy" games like Nintendogs either, but "hardcore" ones like Final Fantasy 3 and Mario Kart.

This shift is reflected in the changes being seen in industry. Development teams, typically mostly or entirely male, are beginning to realize that they can't just make games for themselves anymore, but have to design games that appeal more to a broader user base (which is always a good design practice in general.) Likewise, as women dive into gaming more than they have historically, more women get jobs in the field, which then in turn helps the design process and pushes innovation, something desperately needed in an industry dominated by sequels.

Tomorrow I'll conclude my coverage of GDC with a segment on the often overlooked area of game accessibility. In the mean time, how did my friend Kristina fare on her mission? Well, she tried everything; flattery, intimidation, humor, threats, and bribery, but unfortunately walked away without the Miyamoto-signed DS she had her heart set on. Will there be happy ending to her story?

No, probably not.

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part Two of Four)

The following is the second of a four part series of observations on the Game Developers Conference by graduate student Eitan Glinert. I am flying to Chicago today to attend the Society for Cinema Studies conference.

Wednesday

GDC proper kicked off today, with all the commotion and fanfare you'd expect from some ten thousand plus obsessed gamers. Phil Harrison, the president of Sony Worldwide Studios, started the show with a memorable keynote on what's next for the currently ailing PS3. Not just a preview of some cool games, Phil announced a company shift to focus on user-centric entertainment in the vein of YouTube, Second Life, or MySpace. But how does Sony hope to get people involved?

The first way is through the addition of a new service to the PS3 Xross Media Bar called Home. Similar to Second Life in many ways, users control a customizable avatar in a world where they interact with other players (no word yet on whether you can play as a furry.) You also own an apartment which you can decorate to your liking as in The Sims. Don't like the wallpaper? Change it. Don't like the selection of wallpapers you can use? Buy premium wallpapers from the Sony store. In fact, that seems to be the crux of the service; the free stuff is nice, but if you want the *really* cool stuff, you're gonna have to pay.

So what's cool in this world? Well, you can hang out with others in common spaces and play games, ranging from pool to old-school arcade games. You can watch trailers for upcoming movies in Hi Def - though I do have to wonder how they will manage to play them without either requiring long download times or terrible buffering. But perhaps most compelling is your personal trophy room, which displays badges of honor you earn in games by accomplishing certain goals in PS3 games. Kill 10,000 zombies? That's a trophy! Get 5 stars on Jordan in expert mode? Trophy! Figure out what the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2 Means? Trophy!

While a nice feature and a welcome addition, Home doesn't seem to be the killer app that Sony is looking for. But LittleBigPlanet just might be it. Where Home fails to allow for user generated content, LittleBigPlanet (which I will call LBP from now on because it sounds cooler) shines. Less a game than a toolbox, LBP allows users to create their 2D platformer with 3D objects in a simple and straightforward way. Once created users can play through the levels they've made, and invite their friends along for the ride.

So why is LBP so impressive? Well, for one thing, the game looks beautiful. The textures in the game are vivid and lifelike, and evoke a "realistic" feeling. Furthermore, the user interface seems pretty clean - scroll through nested lists to select what you want to create, then place them in the world using a lasso. But what is most impressive, in my opinion, is what Harrison focused on the least: The game has realistic, working soft body physics! In other words, users no longer have to settle for unsquishable bowling balls, they can now make nerf balls. It's unclear to me why this point wasn't stressed more. I hope it was a matter of the subject matter not fitting the audience, rather than the demo being a Wizard of Oz type "man-behind-a-curtain" thing, where the soft body physics are faked, and don't really work like in the demo.

If a game is going to center on user content, you'd better believe there's going to be a way to upload your creations and download other people's creations. LBP does it with a slick interface that allows people to search, post comments, and rate their favorites. Sure, it's a YouTube knockoff, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

In addition to the PS3 announcements, there were excellent talks on two other games that I am greatly looking forward to. The first is Valve's upcoming game Portal, one of the more original twists to come out of the puzzle genre in a while. Based on the Half-Life 2 engine, Portal features a wormhole generating gun that allows you to connect two points in space and then pass easily from one to the other. Don't get it? Take a look and you will.

The other game I was excited to see was Sega's Crush. Players alternate through a traditional 3D platform landscape, which they can "crush" (flatten) at any point into a 2D variant based on camera angle. This redefinition allows the user to traverse obstacles that would normally be impossible to get past. Sound cool? It is.

Kristina found a sharpie and has her Pink DS ready. Will she succeed in getting Miyamoto's coveted John Hancock? Tomorrow we'll find out.

GDC 2007 Coverage (Part One of Four)

This week, a large group of CMS students and faculty/researchers are spending time in San Francisco at the Games Developer's Conference. I was unable to attend this year due to other speaking commitments. In the next week, I will be speaking at the University of Minnesota, at the Society for Cinema Studies conference in Chicago, and at South By Southwest in Austin. I asked one of the students who is attending the Game Developer's Conference, Eitan Glinert, to share with my readers some of his impressions. Glinert recently arrived at MIT as a graduate student in Computer Science having worked with the Federation of American Scientists on the development of games for learning. We quickly snatched him up to contribute to the launch of GAMBIT, the Singapore-MIT Games Innovation Lab, and he has just as quickly become a familiar face at our community gatherings. What follows is some of his impressions of the first two days of the conference. Day One

For five days, Game Developer's Conference is a zoo of exciting discussion, innovative ideas, and social networking that becomes the focal point of many gamer's lives, including my own. I'm Eitan Glinert, and for the next week I'll be covering the conference from warm, sunny San Francisco.

Most people at such conferences might focus on a genre or a platform, be it first person shooters or the Wii, but today we're going to focus on an entire field of gaming, Serious Games. It's the market segment that involves all the games that your education obsessed aunt bought for you when you were little; the ones that made you roll your eyes and think "Great, another one of those games." The area runs the gamut from "Carmen Sandiego" and "Flight Simulator" to Captain Novolin. The trait that all these games share, though, is a desire to teach the user or elicit some sort of behavioral change through game play.

Who's making Serious Games? A growing number of people from myriad institutions - there's military instructors who want training simulators for their troops, educational companies trying to bring new learning technologies into the classroom, and non-profits that want to bring about social change and political activism. These games are fine, but (with the exception of government funded military simulators) they are generally smaller games on smaller budgets, and aren't aimed at or aren't successful with the mainstream market. This reputation is what causes most gaming companies to avoid serious gaming like the plague - they make games for the general public, and they're a guaranteed money loss. Right?

Wrong. Serious games are beginning to become serious money. In the past year, 5 of the top 20 games for the Nintendo DS in Japan have been serious games, including two variations of Brain Age, and English teaching game, and the ever popular "Cooking Navigation." And some companies are beginning to take notice. Last year, Square Enix (of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest fame) announced the opening of a new offshoot called SGlab , created to capitalize on this newly discovered market. The company plans to work with both game developers and Japanese schools and libraries to deliver educational gaming products - however, as of yet, I have seen no news about upcoming releases.

This year, Ichiro Otobe, Chief Strategist of Square Enix, delivered the keynote at the Serious Games Summit section of GDC and spoke about some of the new projects they were working on. While it still remains unclear what, if anything, will come out of SGlab, it is more than apparent that the parent company is dedicated to making games in the field, as was seen during the demonstration of a new game unceremoniously code named "Project GB." Running on the DS, it displayed some very impressive game capabilities: design, create, and play your own sprite based 2D games. The bottom screen serves as an editor in which the user "codes" the various objects that will comprise his game; meanwhile, the objects are displayed on the top screen and behave according to the proscribed rules. The demo featured a user-created version of Galaga, and displayed how easy it was to create new objects and change settings. I must say, it was rather enticing; I know I certainly wouldn't mind recreating a newer, better Marble Madness and then passing it around to my friends to try.

If the model works (and I hope it does) then I suspect these games, and more importantly their profit margins, will open the flood gates and we'll see many, many more serious games in the near future. The Wii and DS seem especially suited to such offerings, as the platforms are, at their heart, designed to draw in users that might be interesting in non-standard gaming options. After all, wouldn't you pay $50 to learn algebra from Mario?

Day Two

Making video games isn''t easy. Well, that's not entirely true; if you''re EA or Microsoft, and you have a huge number of developers and producers, and you have a money vault filled with gold coins you can swim through a la "Ducktales," then it's actually not that difficult. But for the rest of us, for the "Indie" developers out there, making games is a Herculean task. Frequently, independents have to work with a minimal or non-existent budget, a team that is too small and too inexperienced for the task, and usually have to take time off from development to spend time on other distractions, like classes or a job.

Here at GDC, these developers are getting a voice, and for good reason, as they are responsible for the majority of the games out there (even if many of them you haven''t heard of.) A small number of the games, like Second Life, manage to take hold and become a phenomenon. More of them graduate to "casual" online games, and if they''re lucky get linked to by a portal website and make a modest return on a few hundred/thousand downloads. The majority, though, never see the light of day. That''s why the conference has such as focus on making sure that the independents out there can learn what they need to know to at least help their chances of success.

So what advice was given? Innovate! Or, don''t innovate, but make a small change to something that exists and do a good job with that! Or do tons of self promotion, and make sure that you have a good market strategy! Get help from professionals in the field! Better yet, do all of the above, and then come and give advice at the following year's conference!

The truth of the matter is, there''s lots of good advice that can be given, and different things have worked for different people, though most agree that being "at the right place, at the right time, with the right idea" certainly helps. One of the more interesting teams to come out of the independent game field in the past two years is thatgamecompany, a company started by several USC graduates including Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, both of whom I had the pleasure of talking to at the conference. We discussed their new games Cloud and flOw (both of which are available for download through the = company website), and the thinking behind their creation. Instead of simply trying to design a game based on that one "good idea", they tried to identify an area that games were ignoring - in this case, they felt there weren''t enough games out there that promote feelings of relaxation and tranquility. Both games, especially Cloud, are designed around promoting these emotions, and the results are spectacular. When was the last time you played a game and the word "Zen" came to mind?

Certainly, their philosophy seems to work for them. But that''s only one way for independents to make games. Another great way is through contests, and here's one you might be interested in if you are a college student looking to get into game development. It's called Hidden Agenda, and at stake is $25,000 for the best educational game that is exciting and engaging, and teaches something on the side. But maybe educational games aren''t your thing, and you are interested in more basic, "fun" games? Consider making a game for One Laptop per Child, a new nonprofit trying to get cheap, durable laptops to children in third world countries. They''re really looking for talented, dedicated people to help them make games, and it will likely be a great way to get your name out there.

Tomorrow GDC proper starts, and we'll see if my friend Kristina is successful in her lifelong dream of getting Miyamoto''s signature on her DS.

From Participatatory Culture to Participatory Democracy (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of the text of my keynote address to the Beyond Broadcast conference. I conclude the text in today's installment.

Vote Naked

An advertisement for the Webby Awards, given in recognition for outstanding contributions to digital culture, depicts a pair of feminine bare feet with what would seem to be a blurry bed in the background. Its slogan was "vote naked." Ever since I first saw that advertisement, I have been intrigued by what it might mean to "vote naked." Might this be what democracy looks like? The advertisement suggests that the computer now allows us to conduct the most public of actions within the privacy of our own home in whatever state of dress or undress we desire. More than that, the image and slogan invites us to imagine a time when we are as comfortable in our roles as citizens as we are within our own skins, when politics may be a familiar, everyday, and intimate aspect of our daily lives much the way popular culture is today. We watch television in our underwear; we dress up to vote. All of this is to say that we too often treat American Democracy as a special event (organizing around elections, bemoaning the outcome, and then crawling back into our holes for another four years) rather than as a lifestyle. Redrawing the lines between participatory culture and participatory democracy might give us a way to revitalize citizenship, making it a meaningful aspect of our everyday lives, rather than as something we try to ignore as long as possible. This is an idea that I flesh out more fully (no pun intended) in the final chapters of Convergence Culture.

Here are a few other key concepts that we might draw from Convergence Culture into the current discussion of Democracy:

1. Convergence is a cultural rather than a technological process. We now live in a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms. As such, the system creates many points where it is vulnerable to intervention, appropriation, repurposing, and recontextualizing its contents towards political purposes.

2. In a networked society, people are increasingly forming knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence. The political potential of collective intelligence might be recognized through a closer examination of the Wikipedia movement. Wikipedia has developed strong ethical standards that enable people with wildly divergent beliefs to work together towards a common project; they focus on the shared infrastructure that they all need in order to achieve their aims rather than on the individual points of disagreement; the Wikipedia movement provides them with meaningful mechanisms that allow for the reconciliation between competing truth claims and the co-existence of differing perspectives.

3. We are seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture (a contemporary version of folk culture) as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their personal and collective interests. It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I consider Second Life to be one of the most powerful embodiments of this new participatory culture -- a whole world that is being constructed bottom up through the collective and individual efforts of participants.

In the white paper we wrote for MacArthur, I offer the following definition of a Participatory Culture:

1. there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2. there is strong support for creating and sharing what you create with others

3. there is some kind of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced gets passed along to newbies and novices

4. members feel that their contributions matter

5. members feel some degree of social connection with each other at least to the degree to which they care what other people think about what they have created.

Not every member needs to contribute but all need to feel that they are free to contribute when they are ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued if they do.

In such a world, many will only dabble; some will dig deeper; and still others will master the skills that are most valued within the community. But the community itself provides strong incentives for creative expression and active participation.

In the white paper, my focus was primarily on various communities of fans, gamers, and bloggers, many of whom are involved in creative expression, yet this description might also apply to various projects that are designed to promote real world civic engagement.

Don't let anyone tell you that participatory culture is new or that it has not made earlier contributions to the evolution of American democracy. We know, for example, that teenagers were using toy printing presses to produce what we might now call zines during the Civil War period, using them as vehicles to debate abolitionism and secession in publications that they circulated through an Amateur Press Association. We might similarly point to the various kinds of civic activities that young people were engaged with during the early history of American radio at a time when it was expected that there might be as many transmitters as receivers. Youth groups, such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, embraced amateur radio as a site of community service and civic engagement. The Radio Merit Badge was one of the very first created and was once central to what it meant to be a Scout. When the Federal Communications Commission sought to shift radio towards a medium of corporate broadcasting, they did so by vilifying the "boys in short pants," suggesting that young people had misused the public airwaves and that the experiment with participatory media had failed. Today, both of these earlier experiments in participatory culture have been written out of the history of American politics but they offer us valid historical antecedents for today's blogs, podcasts, and video-blogs. (For a useful history of the amateur radio movement, check out Susan Douglas's Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922.)

4. We are acquiring skills now through our play, which we will later apply towards more serious ends. Indeed, we are again and again seeing examples of entertainment technologies being repurposed for more citizenly ends. So, no sooner did the game, The Movies, hit the market with its promise of allowing players to create their own cinema than it was picked up by student activists in Paris and used to explain to the world their particular vision of French Democracy. Moveon's "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest took its model from the reality television series, Project Greenlight, and took advantage of the skills that young people had developed through the years putting together fan or skateboarder videos. Meetup was created as a vehicle for trading beanie babies and is today deployed by all kinds of interest groups, but it has also become a staple of political campaigns and was a hallmark of the Howard Dean effort in 2004.

YouTube may be the distribution channel for Lonelygirl15 and for college kids around the world who want to lip-sync with boy band songs, but it has also been a system by which amateur news footage of incidents like the tasering of the UCLA student by the campus police may gain much greater visibility and circulation. Indeed, we are just beginning to see the kinds of grassroots documentary work that can emerge in a world where almost everyone has both a camera and a video recorder built into their mobile phones and thus carries media production equipment with them where-ever they go. We can already point to the ways that these mobile cameras have changed public perceptions of the Bush administration's handling of Katrina. Early news reports were largely favorable since reporters were embedded in the teams of rescue workers but a different image of the events emerged as refuges started to tell their stories and upload amateur images of the same events. Others used Flickr and other photosharing sites to deconstruct and critique news media coverage of the incident, showing for example the different kinds of language used to describe the same actions taken by white ("finding bread and soda") and black refuges ("looting a grocery store.") These new communication platforms taught many of us to read past the official accounts and led to a significant decline in Bush's public support.

The Downsides of Participation

Of course, we should also look critically at some of the ways that these emerging models of participatory culture are being used in ways that are destructive to civic engagement. In many ways, as I discuss in the book, the candidates lost control of their own campaigns in 2004 to "truth squads" and bloggers who were often willing to be more negative than the official party spokesperson were willing to go. The result was an increasingly brutal campaign process, marked by partisan divisions that are very difficult for us to resolve once it comes time to actually govern this country. If participatory culture offers us a sense of empowerment as citizens take media in their own hands, there are also risks that it will prove more divisive as everyday people get sucked into the most negative aspects of the campaign.

An interesting case in point might be the use of photoshop collages as a form of political satire. We might see such transparently manipulated images as a kind of modern equivalent of editorial cartoons, translating political events into vivid, compelling, and amusing images which insure their wider circulation. In a high number of cases, these cartoons deploy images from popular culture to help the public understand the stakes of the political process. Already we are seeing images start to emerge of the candidates for the next campaign. A strikingly high percentage of them appeal to sexism (in dealing with Hillary Clinton) and racism, not to mention Xenophobia, (in dealing with Barack Obama). Some of these images are too offensive to be circulated in the mainstream media (though I wouldn't bet on it: the new Fox comedy news show had a skit about "B.O. [Barack Obama] Magazine" as part of its sample reel!) but they appeal to the urge towards politically incorrect speech that shapes so much of the participatory culture online. We will benefit as a society by broadening the range of perspectives on political life through tapping this new participatory culture but only if, at the same time, we foster civility and mutual respect as a cornerstone of our political discourse.

What We Should Fight For...

In the aftermath of the last presidential campaign, one widely circulated cartoon depicted America as divided -- more or less permanently -- between "Jesusland" and "The United States of Canada." At some point, we need to move beyond the cultural divide between Red and Blue States and try to provide some shared framework of values, some common social contract upon which democracy can function. I have personally found inspiration in the widely circulated image of the results of the 2004 elections not in terms of red and blue states but rather as a series of different shades of purple and maroon that reflect the mix of Republican and Democratic voters state by state.

Ideally, a participatory democracy supports the formation of coalitions across parties and across political categories, allowing people to work together to support those things which are absolutely essential if Democracy is going to thrive. We need, in other words, to work together to insure for the survival of participatory culture itself. (There will, of course, being other debates that are more divisive, debates which deploy the tools offered by participatory culture to try to sway voters in opposing directions, and this too is at the heart of a democratic culture.)

If privacy was in many ways the central political struggle of the late 20th century, manifested in a range of different political debates (from Gay Rights to Abortion), then participation may be the core battle of the early 21st century. Our right to participate in our own culture is being held hostage both by big government and by big industry and we need to adopt a multiple front strategy that will allow us to hold open a space for participation. The current media reform movement is focused on empowering the government to regulate media concentration but has had much less to say about the ways that the government itself encroaches into our rights to participate. This struggle manifests itself in a variety of different debates. On the one hand, we might point to struggles over the regulation of youth access to digital media in the face of regulatory efforts, such as the Deleting Online Predators Act or its revamping as The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act. We might point to struggles to redefine copyright law in terms which enable us to comment upon and debate core aspects of our contemporary culture. We might point to the debates around Net Neutrality as centering around preserving the technical infrastructure necessary for allowing all perspectives to be heard and the ongoing struggle against the Digital Divide (understood in terms of technical access) and the Participation Gap (understood in terms of access to core social skills and cultural competencies) as one which allows all citizens to fully participate in the new media landscape.

As we do so, we need to challenge the culture war discourse and the politics of fear which disempowers many from political participation by dismissing core aspects of their cultural identities. For many of us, popular culture offers us the most meaningful language for talking about our political identities and it may offer us a space for conversations across ideological and cultural differences in part because these conversations don't come precoded in partisan terms. To paraphrase Obama, we watch 24 in the Blue States and The Daily Show in the Red States and by discussing these programs together, we may start to identify common values and frames of references out of which we might achieve important political compromises. So, for example, we might deploy Survivor as the focus for a conversation about race in America or 24 to talk about the ethics and effectiveness of torture in the war on terror. Some activist groups have already seen such cultural events as key rallying points for political activism as when the environmental movement used the release of The Day After Tomorrow to educate people about global warming. We have seen a range of voter registration votes, such as MTV's Rock the Vote or the World Wrestling Entertainment' s Smack Down Your Vote, prove effective at getting young people registered and engaged with electoral politics. We are seeing the emergence of a range of other groups, such as Games for Change, The Entertainment Consumers Association, and The Video Game Voters Network, tap our identities as gamers to mobilize us for political action.

As we do so, we need to recognize the value of fantasy for empowering political action. In my book, I discuss Muggles for Harry Potter, a free speech organization that emerged to rally opposition to the censorship of the Harry Potter books in schools and public libraries. I also suggested, however, the irony of this effort, given how many of the young people involved felt compelled to recant their fantasies as "meaningless" in order to demonstrate that the books had no "effect" on them. Instead, we need to value fantasy as part of the process of political transformation and respect the kinds of cultural politics which emerge from the fan community. Consider, for example, the ways that Sequential Tart, an organization of female comics readers, has helped to impact both comics production and retailing practice by providing a space where women regularly discuss what they like and dislike about the comics they read.

There is real political power in this new participatory culture. We know this because of the emergence of Astroturf, fake grassroots media, created by major political groups or advertisers but circulated through bottom-up media channels. A classic example of this was the attempt of Al Gore's Penguin Army to debunk An Inconvenient Truth: the video tried to pass itself off as coming from amateurs when it was in fact produced by a major advertising firm which regularly worked for major oil companies and the GOP party. The story teaches us two things:

1) a decade ago, these groups would have taken advantage of their greater access to the channels of broadcast media to reach every American with a common message. Today, they are recognizing that many of us put greater trust in grassroots media than in mainstream media and so they feel the need to pass themselves off as powerless.

2) in an era of collective intelligence, citizens are becoming more effective at seeing through these Astroturf strategies, alerting the larger public to these frauds. And the public is becoming increasingly outraged by such efforts seeing Astroturf as morally akin to spam, an abuse of the participatory channels of communications.

Ask a Ninja?

If I was asked to identify a group which had been the most imaginative at seizing the potentials of politics in the age of participatory culture, it would be the movement to promote the concept of Net Neutrality. For starters, this effort attracted supporters from a range of different political traditions and encouraged them to suspend their disagreements long enough to work together to achieve a common cause -- that is, to protect the diversity of the internet. The Save The Internet organization provided a space for video makers, both commercial and amateur, to generate new works that helped to educate the public about these core debates. Many of these videos mobilized images from popular culture to help people to understand the stakes in this policy discussion and to capture the sense of the little guys banding together to battle major corporate interests. These videos move us beyond the policy wonk language that has frequently surrounded media regulation discussions and instead embraced a playful discourse that encouraged more widespread participation. We get some sense of what this politics looks like by examining some of the videos that were produced behind these efforts by groups such as Ask a Ninja and Rocketboom. I suspect we will be studying these efforts for some years to come as we try to imagine new relationships between participatory culture and participatory democracy.

Want to know what democracy looks like in the 21st Century? Ask a Ninja!

From Participatatory Culture to Participatory Democracy (Part One)

The following is my attempt to provide a written record of the remarks that I presented at the Beyond Broadcast conference that we hosted at MIT the other week. I would strongly recommend watching the webcast version of the talk to achieve the full effect since the talk depended very heavily on the visuals and I am not going to be able to reproduce very many of them here. You might also want to check out the interview I did for Thoughtcast in advance of the event. This post is intended, however, to provide links to all of the examples I presented during the talk. Getting Too Close to Reality

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, my recent book, opens with the curious story of Bert and Bin Laden:

Dino Ignacio, a Filipino-American high school student created a Photoshop collage of Sesame Street's Bert interacting with terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden as part of a series of "Bert is Evil" images he posted on his homepage. Others depicted Bert as a Klansman, cavorting with Adolph Hitler, dressed as the Unabomber or having sex with Pamela Anderson. It was all in good fun.

In the wake of September 11, a Bangladesh-based publisher scanned the web for Bin Laden images to print on anti-American signs, posters, and T-shirts. Sesame Street is available in Pakistan in a localized format; the Arab world, thus, had no exposure to Bert and Ernie, but were very aware of a blue chicken who serves as one of the series mascots in Arabic-speaking nations. The printer thus didn't recognize Bert, but he must have thought the image was a good likeness of the al-Qaeda leader. The image ended up in a collage of similar images that was printed on thousands of posters and distributed across the Middle East.

CNN reporters recorded the unlikely sight of a mob of angry protestors marching through the streets chanting anti-American slogans and waving signs depicting Bert and Bin Laden. Representatives from Children's Television Workshop spotted the CNN footage and threatened to take legal action: "We're outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner. The people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves. We're exploring every legal option to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future." It was not altogether clear who they planned to sic their intellectual property attorneys on - the young man who had initially appropriated their images or the terrorist supporters who deployed them. Coming full circle, amused fans produced a number of new sites, linking various Sesame Street characters with terrorists.

From his bedroom, Dino sparked an international controversy. His images crisscrossed the world, sometimes on the backs of commercial media, sometimes via grassroots media. And, in the end, he inspired his own cult following. Ignacio became more concerned and ultimately decided to dismantle his site: "I feel this has gotten too close to reality.... "Bert Is Evil" and its following has always been contained and distanced from big media. This issue throws it out in the open."

In the context of the book, I am interested in the ways that this story illustrates the ways that contemporary media culture is being reshaped by the intersection of top-down corporate media and bottom-up grassroots media. Here, though, I want to invite us to reconsider what it might mean for citizens in a participatory culture to get "too close to reality" and whether this is a new kind of political power that we could deploy to transform society.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

One place to starting addressing this question would be to consider the case of This is What Democracy Looks Like, a feature length documentary that emerged from the Indie Media Movement in the wake of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. 100 media activists were issued camcorders and dispersed across the protest, each recording their own perspective on the action. The finished documentary shows us the experience in the street by pooling together the best of their footage into a 72 minute film, which was in turn intended to be a rallying point for further community building and activism. We might see the project as an example of the kinds of politically committed grassroots media production that was showcased throughout the Beyond Broadcast event.

Yet, I also want us to pause for a minute and consider the question posed by its title. What does Democracy look like? As Americans, we have a rich image bank to draw upon -- dating back to the founding days of our nation, so often, when we depicted Democracy, we fall back upon images of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, various protest activities such as the Boston Tea Party, or various national icons such as the American Eagle or The Spirit of 76. More recently, the Popular Front movement of the 1930s revitalized many of these images, offering us new icons of American democracy from Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Yet, today, when we represent democracy, the images we construct have a vaguely and often an explicitly retro feel to them. It is as if democracy in this country has a past but not a future.

But, we might well ask what Democracy could look like for the 21st Century? It might, for example, look like the kinds of protest activities which are occurring within game spaces, such as Velvet Strike, a conceptual art project which involved "spray painting" any war graffiti inside Counter Strike, the recent gay pride march inside the World of Warcraft, or the massive protest rallies that took place in the Chinese multiplayer game world, Fantasy Westward Journey, or a broad array of activist uses of Second Life As someone who lives in Boston, it is worth recalling that the Boston Tea Party involved people adopting alternative identities (might we see the Native American garb as an early form of avatar?) and engaging in symbolic acts of political violence.

Democracy in the 21st century might look something like "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People." A Houston-area hip hop group, The Legendary K.O., used their music to express something they were hearing from the refuges that were pouring into their city. Randle lives near the Astrodome and Nickerson works at the Houston Convention center. Both found themselves listening to refuges tell their stories: "Not till you see these people face to face and talk to them can you appreciate the level of hopelessness. The one common feeling was that they felt abandoned, on their own little island." They found their refrain while watching Kanye West accuse Bush of being indifferent to black Americans during a Red Cross Telethon being broadcast live on NBC. The juxtaposition of West's anger and comedian Mike Myer's shock encapsulated the very different ways Americans understood what happened. The Legendary K.O. sampled West's hit song, "Golddigger," to provide the soundtrack for their passionate account of what it was like to be a black man trying to make do in the deserted streets of New Orleans. They distributed the song, "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" as a free download and it spread like wildfire. The song has been perhaps the most powerful demonstration to date of Chuck D's prediction that free downloads could turn hip hop into "the black man's CNN," offering an alternative perspective to mainstream news coverage and thus enabling communication between geographically dispersed corners of the Black America. Within a few weeks time, the song had in effect gone platinum,

achieving more than a million downloads, largely on the back of promotion by

bloggers. And soon, people around the world were appropriating and recontextualizing news footage to create their own music videos.

Democracy in the 21st century might look like some of the ways that citizen journalists have deployed photosharing sites like Flickr to circulate ground-level images of public events such as the London subway bombings.

Democracy in the 21st Century might even look like some of the activities surrounding the selection of the American Idol. As I noted here last summer, critics who claim more people voted for the last American Idol than voted in the last presidential election are confused. More votes were cast for American Idol to be sure but then, the system allows and even encourages people to vote as many times as they want. The Vote for the Worst movement around American Idol, on the other hand, does represent an interesting model for how people might pool knowledge and deploy shared tactics to shape the outcome of the selection process, trying to negate the expectations of mass media companies and use their power to select to keep bad contestants on the air.

Escaping the Culture War Rhetoric

These new forms of activism may not look very much like the classic images of democracy. Indeed, there has been a tendency for activists to look down upon these kinds of activities, seeing them often as distractions from rather than incitements towards civic engagement. The result has been a kind of culture war between old style activism and the emerging participatory culture. We know more or less the kinds of images which cultural conservatives -- and indeed, the mainstream mass media deploys to dismiss and often demonize the new participatory culture. On the one hand, there are images of tarnished innocence -- wide-eyed children staring slack jawed at the television or computer screen, being imprinted by its toxic content and on the other hand, there are images of savages, youth run wild, and the feral children of the boob tube. Indeed, as Justine Casell pointed out to me recently, these fears are heavily gendered with a tendency for us to fear for our daughter's innocence and to fear our son's savagery. What strikes me, though, is that the images promoted by the Media Reform movement and by the Culture Jamming/Ad Busting world of progressive activism falls back on almost entirely the same kinds of images to condemn young people for their interests in popular culture. Once again, there are images of young people being brainwashed by television or driven wild by the seductions of popular culture; the content they consume gets described as "bread and circuses" or "weapons of mass distraction"; brand messages are written more or less directly onto their hearts, minds, and bodies; the public is depicted with faceless conformity; consumers are described as "idiots" who lack any critical judgment and told to "get a life." Such images grossly overstate the power of mass media and underestimate the agency of media consumers. The result is a politics focused on victimization rather than empowerment.

I have never quite understood how we are supposed to found a democratic movement on the premise that the public as a whole is stupid and has poor taste. And I am reasonably convinced that such images and rhetoric has the effect of turning off many people who might otherwise support many of the policies being advocated by the Media Reform movement. What I want to do in this talk is suggest ways that we might reimagine the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy, embracing new political language and images that mobilizes us as fans as well as citizens.

To understand what such a politics might look like, I would suggest picking up a new book by NYU professor Stephen Duncombe -- Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. Duncombe's previous work has included Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and The Cultural Resistance Reader, work that has offered a range of models for how popular culture can be deployed for democratic activities. In his new book, he argues that the left has seemingly lost the ability to construct a utopian vision for the future or convey such a vision through popular fantasy. The left, he suggests, has developed a powerful critique of what Noam Chomsky calls "the manufacture of consent" but it has not developed any fresh models for the "manufacture of dissent." He urges us to reconsider our relations to popular culture before it is too late:

Progressives should have learned to build a politics that embraces the dreams of people and fashions spectacles which gives these fantasies form - a politics that employs symbols and associations, a politics that tells good stories. In brief, we should have learned to manufacture dissent.... Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if the people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it.

I found Duncombe's description of what a progressive popular culture might look like to be inspirational, though I might be inclined to describe this as a democratic popular culture since many of these traits he is discussing might also be embraced by at least some conservative groups as well and we would have a better society if these virtues were shared by both the right and by the left. We might sum up his key claims through the following terms:

Participatory: Dumcombe's example of this new kind of playful activism is Billionaires for Bush, a group which showed up in costumes and staged street theatre during Bush's appearances in the last presidential campaign, trying to remind reporters and citizens of what they saw as links between the Republican Party and corporate greed. Another example might be the Sorry Everybody website where many individuals posted snap shots and messages to the planet after the results of the election as a way of acknowledging what they saw as the damage Bush was doing to America's image around the world.

Active -- We might consider the ways that Alan Moore's graphic novel, V for Vendetta emerged as a response to Thatcherism, was produced as a film in time to be read as expressing dissent against the Bush administration, and has been literalized within participatory culture through a series of YouTube videos that link the film's dystopian future with the rhetoric and tactics of the current War on Terror. V offers progressives both a dystopian fantasy of where today's policies might logically lead (thus providing the basis for a critique of the manufacture of consent) and a fantasy of resistance (thus offering some idea of how we might manufacture dissent.)

Open-Ended -- Consider the kinds of political dialogue being sparked by comedy news shows such as the Daily Show, Politically Incorrect, or Colbert Report, which often call attention to topics that have been under-covered by the national news and encourages viewers to reflect on the mechanisms by which the news constructs our understanding of the world. I wouldn't turn to such programs for answers but I would see them as posing questions that might lead to further reflection and inquiry. The politics of this style of news comedy is clear at that moment when Colbert spoke truth to power at the Washington Press Club Dinner, directly confronting the president of the United States with what many see as fundamental contradictions in his world view. This style of news comedy has proven so effective at manufacturing dissent that Fox News has decided to create its own right wing alternative, The Half Hour News Hour.

Transparent -- Here, we might cite, for example, the kinds of progressive fantasies of an alternative America constructed on The West Wing. I wrote for Flow a few years ago about the ways that the program's construction of an alternative presidential campaign between essentially a maverick Republican in the John McCain mold and a progressive minority candidate of the Barack Obama school gave the program a chance to model what an alternative framing of the two parties might look like.

Transformative -- My example here was the work of JibJab, a group of animators who use borrowed and manipulated images to spoof the political process.

If we put all of these pieces together, the resulting organization might look something like True Majority, the pro-Democratic Party group created by Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry's fame), which is perhaps best known for circulating a video during the last election during which The Donald fires George W. Bush as if this were an extra-special episode of The Apprentice. As I discuss in Convergence Culture, this group embraced the concept of "serious fun" as a form of progressive activism, designing videos that people wanted to pass along not simply because of what they said but how they said it.

Videoblogging, Citizen Journalism, and Credibility

Today, I wanted to show off the latest in the series of short documentaries on media production which we are producing through Project nml, a project funded by the MacArthur Foundation to foster new media literacies. Regular readers of this blog will recall that we are producing a series of short digital documentaries on various aspects of the new media landscape -- ranging from independent comics to graffiti -- which are designed to get students to reflect more deeply about their own potential roles as media makers and to think about the place of media in their own lives. We have been delighted so far by reports that these videos are starting to be used in schools around the country and we would like to encourage other educators to send us reports of how you might be making use of these materials. Our latest release deals with the growing phenomenon of video-blogging (and as such, compliments the segments we produced last year in which Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow offered his advice to would-be bloggers.) The video was produced under the supervision of research manager Margaret Weigel and our recently hired production coordinator Anna Van Someren (who came to us from the Boston Based Youth Voice Collaborative); the primary author of the video was one of the CMS graduate students, Steve Schultze, who was also not coincidentally one of the key organizers of last week's Beyond Broadcast event. Among those featured on this video are Steve Garfield, who has been widely credited as the father of the videoblogging movement; John Barth from Public Radio Exchange; Ravi Jain, another former student of mine who has gone on to fame if not fortune as the host of Drive Time; Jason Crowe from Cambridge Community Television; and Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, the producers of Four Eyed Monsters.

One of the high points of the series comes in Segment 2 where we get into the issue of citizen journalism and how it relates to professional reporting:

John Barth: On the Internet, you have this great possibility to compare and contrast among a variety of vetted sources of news.

Steve Garfield: Videoblogging is news. Of course it is. The cool thing about it is that people will all be telling stories, let's say, from an event. So something happens and you'll get five, ten, who knows... right now if you go to an event and you have fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, a hundred bloggers blogging about an event... if you read a number of them you'll get a good sense of what actually happened.

John Barth: So can you trust what you see in a videoblog? How do you know that that's true or accurate?

Steve Garfield: Or if you read a blogger frequently, you know what their biases are and you know where they're coming from. So they become a trusted source for you. With video blogging it's the same thing. Video bloggers will become a trusted source for people of news, and if you have a number of videobloggers out covering the same event, seeing their different perspective on the same event, when you look at all those different videos then I think you'll get the story.

John Barth: You know this whole notion of, "all of us as smarter than some of us", is true. Except, not all of us are videoblogging and not all of us are blogging and not all of us are doing what you're doing. So, all of us don't have the benefit of being equal participants in trying to determine what the story is, or being able to see your videoblog and compare it against someone else's....

John Barth: So what would be so bad if videobloggers rule and mainstream media goes away because they just can't stay in business. Well here's what I think would happen: right now most investigative reporting, for better or worse, is being done by mainstream media. You have really good reporters at newspapers, at major networks like ABC news, and they are really developing their sources and getting to stories that frankly I don't think you and I could with a handheld video camera. We don't have the time, we don't have the money, and we don't know where to go.

Steve Garfield: The cool thing is that videoblogging is not TV. That's what's so cool about it. You don't have to have an intro, a voiceover... you don't have to get both sides of the story. You don't have to do anything. You can do it however you want to do it.

John Barth: Trust is what you're trying to get to. You're trying to get to credibility. So, if you work in a traditional news organization, there are dozens, hundreds of people and they all have points of view - they all have biases. The thing that's supposed to weed out all of that so that all you have is accurate information and good storytelling is that you do have editors and competitors and other reporters who help frame a story and get it out there every day. If you're a videoblogger, it's maybe you and maybe one or two other people and that's all. So, how do people know that what you've put out is accurate? How do you develop that trust? Well, there are some real basic things to understand. If you're going to pursue certain stories, you don't have your conclusion before you begin. That's why you're asking questions. So, a lot of times we get interested in a topic because we're passionately interested in it, but you need to have enough self-control and self-discipline to distance yourself from the outcome and also what you're hearing from different points of view....I think in terms of training people to be good videobloggers, I would argue they should spend some time with traditional journalists and get a sense about how much time it takes to beyond just putting up home movies to really tell a story well and really check some things out.

For those of you who enjoyed my post about Four Eyed Monsters last week, there's a very good segment (Chapter Five) in which the filmmakers discuss the ways they have tapped audience participation to shape the distribution of their independent film.

Susan Brice: Making a film is a very one-directional thing because you make it and it goes out to the world and they watch it and who knows what they really think. But making the video podcast was a really dynamic part of the project because you put it up and immediately people are commenting. Some people are making video comments back. The feedback is instantaneous and it affects the next video. It affects everything really. It affects our whole process.

Throughout the film places a strong emphasis upon the communal dimensions of production and circulation in the videoblogging world, resulting in a strong explanation of the kinds of social networks that operate in the realm of participatory culture.

Steve Garfield: Big media looks at videoblogging as a way to distribute content. The cool and fun and interesting part about videoblogging is this part about community and connection and conversation.

Jason Crowe (Chapter 7) situates videoblogging within a larger history of citizen media in America:

Jason Crowe: The history of citizen media in the United States starts with Thomas Paine, and he handed out pamphlets. So, similarly, people today are able to have their own videoblog and kind-of hand out their own pamphlets. So the tradition of independent voices needing an outlet has always been there, but this is just a new way to do it....

When the telegraph was invented, people thought that with the world being totally connected via these wires, and now that people from disparate parts of the world could talk to each other, that we would create world peace. Well, similarly with the Internet connected all different cultures and people... and you can put your media out, we've seen people say, "Oh well this is going to revolutionize the way that people create media and distribute it." I don't think that's necessarily true. I think it's a wonderful way to get your message out, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be the beginning of world peace.

Our hope is that this series of documentary segments will allow educators to generate valuable conversations with their students around some of the core skills we identified in our white paper for MacArthur: among them, collective intelligence, networking, and Judgment. In the coming weeks we will be rolling out the next generation of exemplar videos on topics such as "Big Games," DJ culture, Wikipedia, Cosplay, Documentary Production, and Animation. Our team will also be showcasing this work at a range of conferences focused on education and media literacy, including at a special event we are hosting during the Media in Transition conference which our program is hosting in April.

Awkward Conversations About Uncomfortable Laughter

Dear reader, please welcome me to the age of enlightenment. A few weeks ago, the MIT dorms, where I live, finally started to receive Comedy Central and I am now able to enjoy a daily dose of John Stewart and Steven Colbert rather than hoping that the hotels where I stay get the channel and that I can remember when they are on. (Of course, the MIT dorms, razzle frazzle, are no longer getting HBO or BBC America so it continues to be one step forward, two steps back). I am receiving Comedy Central just in time to see the early episodes of Sarah Silverman's new television series. So far, the series has not lived up to my hopes or expectations. It feels more like a female remake of Curve Your Enthusiasm about a woman whose self-centeredness becomes the basis of anti-social and politically incorrect conduct on a recurring basis (not that there's anything wrong with that from most people's point of view but I have never quite connected with Curve.) But the show is drawing very strong ratings so people out there seem to be liking what they are seeing.

I have been long interested in Silverman's work and wrote something about her film, Jesus is Magic, for Flow a few years ago. While I am reproducing my essay here, you may want to follow this link back because the essay generated a pretty rich and far reaching response when it first appeared. Silverman's film uses comedy to ask questions about how we are dealing with issues of race in America today, questions which may only be asked by pushing hard on the borders between jokes and insults. She has, as a consequence, found herself the center of controversies about inappropriate jokes.

I wish that were the problem with the new Comedy Central series which seems pretty tame compared to her earlier standup work. There were some moments which made me wince in an episode in which her character believes she's gotten AIDS and manages to turn efforts to combat the disease into a totally self-serving exercise, sending up the ways that celebrities gain status through attaching themselves to various causes or when she gets into a conversation with a zombie about the insensative ways that her people are portrayed in the media. But, in the end, the series falls back into safer sitcom territory rather than using comedy to probe our hot button issues as a society.

What follows is the essay I wrote for Flow:

In her book, Implicit Meanings, the anthropologist Mary Douglas explores the roles jokes play in mapping points of tension or transition within a culture. Only a thin line separates jokes and insults. The joke gives expressive form to an emergent perspective within a culture -- something which is widely felt but rarely said. When a joke expresses a view already widely accepted, it becomes banal and unfunny. When a joke says something the culture is not ready to hear, it gets read as an insult or an obscenity. The job of the clown is thus to continually map the borders between what can and can not be said. This is why a good comedy routine is accompanied as often by gasps as by laughter.

I was reminded of Douglas's perspective on jokes when I recently participated in a screening and discussion of Sarah Silverman's new film, Jesus is Magic. For those of you who have not heard of her yet, Silverman is a former Saturday Night Live writer who sparked national controversy in 2001 when she told a joke about "chinks" on Conan and when she defended the joke on Bill Mahr's Politically Incorrect. The Silverman controversy has resurfaced in recent months both because of a rather memorable appearance in The Aristocrats and because of the release of a film documenting her standup comedy show. She has recently been profiled in The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly and is currently shooting a pilot for her own series on Comedy Central.

To understand the controversy, we have to return to the now infamous joke she told on Conan in 2001. She was explaining that her various efforts to escape jury duty and her friend's suggestion that she could try to come across as prejudiced on the questionnaire by writing "I hate chinks." Silverman pauses, suggesting that she would consider being embarrassed to make such a comment, even in jest, and so instead she wrote, "I LOOOVE Chinks -- and who wouldn't."

Greg Aoki, the president of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, argued that the network showed a double standard in allowing the word, "chink," to air when it would almost certainly have bleeped "nigger." The network and host later apologized for the decision to air the joke but Silverman refused to apologize, contending "It's not a racist joke. It's a joke about racism." The controversy is one which looks differently depending on whether our focus is on the words used (Aoki rightly sees "chink" as a word deeply entwined in the history of racism in America) or the meaning behind them (Silverman is right that her comedy ultimately raises uncomfortable questions about how white people "play the race card.")

Writing in Asian Week, columnist Emil Guillermo argues that rather than seeing Silverman's joke as "fighting words," Asian-Americans should use it as "talking words," as the starting point for discussing the current state of American racism. This is not what Aoki experienced when he tried to challenge the appropriateness of Silverman's joke during their mutual appearance on Politically Incorrect, where the host and guests questioned his sincerity, made fun of his name, called him names, and cut him off when he tried to link the jokes to recent incidents of racial violence. And it is not what Silverman experienced when her critics simply label her a "racist" without exploring what she was trying to say.

How can we distinguish between racist jokes and jokes about racism, especially with the deadpan irony that is Silverman's hallmark? Most of us have no trouble thinking of cases where jokes have been directed against minorities as a racist exercise of power. Yet we should also keep in mind the many different ways that comedy has been used to challenge racism -- think about the first generation of African-American comics who went into black, white, and multiracial clubs and confronted their audiences with words and concepts that were designed to create discomfort; think about the ways that underground comics like R. Crumb sought to "exorcise" the history of racial stereotypes in his medium by pushing them to their outer limits; think about shows like All in the Family which exposed the ways that previous generations of sitcoms had remained silent about the bigotry which was often at the heart of American domestic life. And then there are jokes which are funny simply because they are "politically incorrect," that is, because they thumb their nose at anyone who would set any limits on speech whatsoever. Perhaps most strikingly, there are jokes which deny the reality of both race and racism simply by refusing to talk about it at all. When was the last time that you heard a joke on a late-night talk show (Okay -- outside The Daily Show) that you remembered the next morning, let alone one which provoked debate four years later.

Critics have read Silverman's comedy as simply "politically incorrect." There are plenty of times when Silverman's jokes are, to use Douglas's definition of obscenity, "gratuitous intrusions." Yet, at its best, her comedy reflects on the problems of living in a culture where old racial logics are breaking down and new relationships have not yet taken any kind of definitive shape and where there seems to be no established language for speaking to each other across racial lines. Her most consistent target is a white America which is so busy trying to watch its step that it falls on its own face. Several deal with the challenges of negotiating mixed race or multi-ethnic relationships. For example, she gets upset when her half black boyfriend objects to her "innocent compliment" that he would have made "an expensive slave" because he has

"self-esteem issues," smugly insisting, "He has to learn to love himself before I can stop hating his people." This is after she has suggested it would be more "optimistic" to say that he was "half white" rather than "half black."  At another point, she describes a particular audience as "black," then corrects herself to say that it was "African-American," then decides it was "half and half." Or again, she talks about how she and her Christian boyfriend will explain their religious beliefs to any future offspring: "Mother is one of the chosen people and Dad believes Jesus is magic."

Silverman's jokes do not in any simple or direct way represent her personal views; rather, she has adopted a comic persona (perhaps multiple personas) through which she reflects confusions and contradictions in the ways that white America thinks about race and racism, much the way some hip hop performers have argued that the views about race, criminality, and sexual violence they express through their songs are attempts to make visible some of the issues confronting their community. In both cases, critics have tended to read such personas literally. There are no words to describe whiteness which have the same sting as "chink" or "nigger" and so she has to perform whiteness, against a backdrop of other racial identities, so that it can recognize itself in all of its insensitivity and self-centeredness.

Consider, for example, a Silverman routine about her lust for a jewel which is formed by de-boning and grinding down the spines of starving Ethiopian babies. There is a level to the joke which is simply funny because of the cruel and insensitive way she is speaking about human suffering; there is another level, however, which works not unlike the way that Jonathon Swift's similarly-themed, "A Modest Proposal," works, exposing the infinite flexibility with which we can rationalize and justify the exploitation of the third world. Silverman delivers the joke with what New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear calls "quiet depravity." The expression that lingers on her face is usually one of tentative confusion or chipper self-satisfaction, as if she had finished her homework and cleaned up her room, and were waiting for a gold star. She doesn't smirk; she honestly thinks she has no real prejudice or animosity even as she bases her everyday decisions on gross stereotypes. Hers is the face of what cultural critics have called "enlightened racism," the smug satisfaction with which white Americans excuse ourselves for our own lapses in taste and judgment as long as they do not become too overt or openly confrontational. As she describes this jewel, she hits a moment of conscience, realizing that they probably exploit the "unions" which mine the babies' spines, but then concedes, "you have to pick your battles."

Early in the jewel routine, she describes her acquisitiveness as a "JAP," then pausing to explain that she doesn't mean "Jewish American Princess" (a stereotype which she has self-consciously embodied throughout the routine) but rather "Japanese." Instantly, she moves from a stereotype which is more socially acceptable (if only because she would be making fun of her own group) and into one which is totally unacceptable (and the joke only works if we recognize the offensiveness of the word). Indeed, she plays often on the ambiguities of her own status as white and Jewish -- sometimes speaking as a member of an oppressed minority, other times blending into a white majority, and often making this desire of Jews to escape their minority status a central theme in her work. It crops up for example when she makes bitter comments about contemporary Jews who drive German-made cars or when she tells a joke about Jews who want to escape racist charges of having killed Christ by blaming the Romans (and then pushing this historical scapegoating one step further by suggesting that personally she blames the blacks.)

Silverman's comedy depends upon the instability created as we move from thinking of race in black and white terms towards a multi-racial and multi-cultural society. A previous generation of comics would not have made jokes about Asian-Americans or Hispanics because they simply were not part of the way they envisioned America. Much contemporary race theory has sought ways to move us beyond simple black/white binaries in the ways we think about racial diversity. As recent demographic trends suggest, America is rapidly moving towards a time when Caucasians will be in the minority but they are not being replaced by a new majority culture: rather, America will be more ethnically diverse -- some would say fragmented, balkanized, or disunified -- than ever before and there has been few successful attempts to build coalitions across those diverse populations.

A musical number in Jesus is Magic self-consciously maps the fault lines in this new cultural diversity: dressed like a refugee from an Up With People concert, strumming a guitar, looking her most wide-eyed and innocent, she wanders from space to space, gleefully singing about how much Jews love money, how little blacks like to tip, how well Asians do at math, and ends with a particularly choice lyric about blacks calling each other "niggers." Then, the little white woman looks over and sees two angry looking black men who glare at her for a long period of silence; then they start to laugh and she tries laughing with them; then they stop laughing and glare at her even more intensely and for an agonizingly long period of time. It is hard to imagine a comedian who is more reflexive about the nature of their own comic practices or more insistent that the audience stop laughing and think about the politics of their own laughter.

Much of the Silverman controversy centers around what anthropologists often call joking relations: in any given culture, there are rules, sometimes implicit, often explicit, about which people can joke with each other, about what content is appropriate for joking in specific contents. During times of social anxiety, these rules are closely policed and transgressions of these boundaries are severely punished. Yet, in times of greater security, cultures may suspend or extend the rules to broaden the community which is allowed inside a particular set of joking relationships. But who determines which jokes are safe and permissible? She openly courts such questions by appearing on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, doing verbatim versions of Dave Chappel skits. Can a white woman make the same jokes as a black man or does changing the race of the performer change everything?

Comedy in the 1990s seemed often about securing boundaries as comedians emerged who could articulate the self perceptions and frustrations of different identity politics groups: Asians made Asian jokes, Blacks made black jokes (and sometimes about white people), Jews made Jewish jokes, and white comedians mostly avoided the topic of race altogether. This places an enormous burden on minority performers not simply to speak on behalf of their race but to bear the weight of any discussion about racism. And of course, when black comedians made jokes about black people, they often did so in front of white or mixed audiences. Just as white comedians were uncertain whether they could joke about race and under what circumstances, white audiences were uncertain whether they could laugh about race and under what circumstances. Silverman has thrust herself out there, saying it is time for white comics to joke about race, and has faced the inevitable push-back for trying to change the rules of discourse.

Contemporary cultural theorists have been urging a move away from identity politics towards one based on coalition building: race will not go away simply because we refuse to talk about it and we cannot meaningfully change how we think about race as a society by remaining within our own enclaves. Consider, for example, Frank H. Wu's Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. Wu is an Asian-American professor who has chosen to teach at Howard University Law School, a historically black institution, because he wanted to create a context where Asian-Americans and African-Americans can learn to communicate across their racial and ethnic differences. Wu argues that for such coalitions to work, one has to put everything on the table, confront past stereotypes, examine historic misunderstandings, give expression to fears and anxieties. We can't work through the things that separate us until we feel comfortable discussing them together. This isn't simply something that has to take place between different minority groups: there has to be a way where whites can express their own uncertainties about the future without being prejudged.

Jokes may fuel such social transformations because they force us to confront the contradictions in our own thinking. They are valuable precisely because the same joke will be heard differently in different contexts and thus can help us to talk through our different experiences of being raced. As Wu writes, "Race is meaningless in the abstract; it acquires its meanings as it operates on its surroundings. With race, the truism is all the more apt that the same words can take on different meanings depending on the speaker, the audience, the tone, the intention and the usage." Mary Douglas similarly suggests that the reason our culture has such trouble drawing a fixed line between jokes and obscenity is that unlike traditional cultures, we do not occupy "a single moral order" and there are no agreed-upon boundaries.

And that brings us back to Guillermo's appeal that Silverman's "chink" joke might be used as "talking words." From my perspective as a white southern-born male, Silverman is raising important questions about race and racism which white audiences need to hear if they are going to come to grips with a multicultural society. From Aoki's perspective, the same joke evokes a painful history, using words that many Asian-Americans hear too often. At the risk of sounding naive and idealistic, maybe that's something we should be talking about, however awkward the conversation is apt to be.

Capitalism and Cartoons: An Interview with Ragmop's Rob Walton (Part Two)

Yesterday, I began the first of a two part interview with Rob Walton, creator of the recently completed graphic novel, Ragmop. Greg Smith, whose research interest extend from cognitive theory of emotion to the translation of The Maxx for television, conducted this interview. Smith is the author of a great forthcoming book on Ally McBeal and the aesthetics of serial television, which is coming out later this year. Yesterday, Smith and Walton took us deep into the political and economic theories behind the book. Today, they explore some of the influences -- from Samuel Beckett to Jack Kirby -- that shaped this idiosyncratic story. Many of you, of course, live in areas where the comic book shops are sub par and don't stock Walton's Ragmop. I should note that the book is of course also available from Amazon and other online bookdealers.

Lest people think that Ragmop is an economic treatise, we should point out that it's incredibly funny too. The rhythm of the jokes feels a lot like the jokes in classic animation. What did you learn about joke structure from animation?

Drawing storyboards for ten years definitely helped refine my comic timing as well as what I absorbed as a kid watching Monty Python, Bugs Bunny, the Marx Brothers, and reading MAD Magazine. Animation also taught me how to use "beats". Those are moments of silence when a character suddenly clues into something, like when the Tetragrammaton realizes that there are dinosaurs in Heaven (page 241) or Alice's spit-take on page 178 (you don't see too many spit-takes in comics, do you?). Ragmop appropriates all of this material, which originates for our purposes with Vaudeville and Silent Film comedy. It was amazing to be able to distill eighty years of comedy culture in a comic like Ragmop. I don't think it could have been done any other way. It was a cartoon comedy or nothing. I was dealing with such grand themes and extreme viewpoints that it never once occurred to me that this would be anything other than a comedy.

Aside from animation I did read up on the history of comedy going back to the Greeks. I was happy to learn that what I was doing in Ragmop was nothing more than what was done at the original festivals, where ancient comedians would parody and lampoon the figures of establishment in their day. That's where comedy seemed to begin. It's also why it has always been reviled and suppressed over the centuries by the various targets of its humor.

I'd like to hear you pick an influence and talk to me about how you worked that through your comic.

I suppose I could talk about two influences, one from stage--Peter Barnes--and one from television--Monty Python. I don't think it's surprising that they're both British. British stage and comedy had an enormous influence on me as a teenager. Plays like Marat/Sade and The Ruling Class blew my mind, man, as they tackled subjects that seemed to me to be reserved for university lecture halls. Even Waiting for Godot and Endgame by little Sammy Beckett showed that comedy could convey big ideas and do so in a way drama could not touch. Monty Python showed me that comedy could be equally intelligent and downright silly at the same time. The Life of Brian exposes the absurdities of both religious institutions and revolutionary movements while making us laugh hysterically.

Barnes' The Ruling Class is a savage black comedy that says that given the choice society would choose hate and fear over love and compassion by choosing Jack the Ripper rather than Jesus Christ to rule us. His play Red Noses is a heartbreaking comedy about bringing comfort to people's lives through laughter in a world beset by war and plague and religious extremism. Meanwhile Chuck Jones had made cartoons about bullfighting, Opera, and transvestism. Bob Clampett had made his cartoon masterpiece Beanie & Cecil, and Jay Ward had brought new literary madness and a beat sensibility to my youthful generation with Rocky & Bullwinkle. MAD Magazine would tackle anything. MAD's influence is keenly felt throughout Ragmop from the front cover aping Jack Davis to the musical numbers that parody The Music Man. So is it any wonder that when I came to start drawing Ragmop it all came pouring out of me?

I'll make a shameful confession: I've never liked Jack Kirby. I grew up as a DC guy, and so when I finally read the great Kirby arcs as an adult, it all seems so overblown, the mythic stuff seems silly to me. And yet I like the Kirby stuff in Ragmop for some reason. Can you help me like Kirby?

I didn't start reading Kirby myself until his return to DC in 1970 or so. My primary reading focus was Spider-man, and I didn't start reading Kirby's Fantastic Four until it was reprinted in World's Greatest. I also caught up on Spidey through the reprints in Marvel Tales. Included in Marvel Tales was Kirby's Thor. I loved Thor. It was pure science fiction. It was totally groovy, especially inked by Chic Stone. The first Kirby Fantastic Four I read in reprint was "The Gentleman's Name is Gorgan" (FF #44). I was knocked off my socks. FF's # 55, 57, and 63 remain some of my favorite single issues of all time. I never tire of re-reading them.

The thing about Kirby (no pun intended) is that there were no limits to his imagination. Literally. If Marvel Comics is the House of Ideas, then it was the house that Jack built on the foundation of his ideas. The High Evolutionary, The Negative Zone, Galactus, the Silver Surfer: these were characters and concepts that inspired a generation of new creators. Jack's mind was so beyond anyone else's that few creators have been able to continue his creations with any satisfactory success. Both DC and Marvel have failed in my opinion to cope with the themes raised in The New Gods and The Eternals respectively. The New Gods in particular was Jack's attempt to use comics to achieve literary greatness. Unfortunately his writing skills were never equal to his ability to conceptualize, and his work is constantly marred by cornball dialogue.

Even so, Jack had something serious to say about religion (Judaism), technology, war, and totalitarianism. "The Pact" (New Gods #7) and "Himon" (Mister Miracle #9) were exceptions. In these two issues Kirby found his muse and wrote movingly about war, the freedom of the individual, and parentage. Only the writing of Alan Moore has equaled Jack's accomplishment on these two books as far as I'm concerned. For me, these are the two greatest single mainstream comics ever produced.

It wasn't to last, of course, but that was all right. There was plenty of Kirby to go around. Kamandi, the Demon, OMAC, The Losers, The Eternals, and even Devil Dinosaur proved that Kirby could take even the lamest of concepts and turn them into pure entertainment while lacing them with ideas that are still fueling comics to this very day. It's ironic that Kirby's OMAC ("Are you ready for the world that's coming?") is far more prevalent for us today than DC's current re-imagining of the character.

Captain Victory was one of the last books Kirby produced. Although his art was deteriorating by this time, his mind wasn't. Captain Victory harkened back to the themes of The New Gods and in a way brought them to some resolution. His trilogy of "Big Ugly" "The Lost Ranger" and "Gangs of Space" (issues 11- 13) proved that when it came to themes of war and sacrifice Kirby still had it in him to surprise, shock, and move this university educated reader. I proudly own the page where Captain Victory discovers the corpse of Alaria on the battlefield in issue 13. I find it profoundly moving as the last scene in the long drama that concludes his origin story, turning the boy into a man, and the soldier into a leader: "Triumph and loss too elusive to measure--and the burden of the strong."

Kirby showed me that all of time and space were open to me as a cartoonist, and I took that to heart in Ragmop. I never would have had my characters enter what I call "the Punyverse" had Kirby not first shown me worlds within worlds. The O-ring is sister to Kirby's Cosmic Cube. Kirby's kickboxing Devil Dinosaur is ancestor to my own trio of knuckle-headed dinos. Would I be waging a war in Heaven had I not read the mighty Thor? 'Fraid not.

Kirby saw it all first. Kirby paved the way and opened every door for every future writer and artist of comics. I can appreciate that Kirby is of his time and not to everyone's taste, given how the medium has evolved since the advent of Frank Miller, Chris Claremont, and Alan Moore in the early 1980's. But on the other hand, his time was so far ahead of us it could be decades still before we catch up to, let alone fully comprehend and appreciate, his massive perspective.

Nuff said.

So what's the meaning of the title Ragmop?

Why Ragmop? At the time I was developing the story, I had no title. That was the last thing that came to me. This was in 1993-94. Seth was publishing Palookaville, Chester Brown, Yummy Fur and Joe Matt, Peep Show. I liked those titles because they conveyed the artists' personalities while providing them with broad canvas to do a variety of stories. My wife Lucy and friend Mark Askwith and I all brainstormed on a title that could encompass the breadth of the comedy I was attempting to do. At the eleventh hour I remembered Beanie & Cecil. It probably happened accidentally as I was humming "Ragmop" to myself. Eureka! That became the title. It was jazzy. It was about animation and kooky, smart humor. It conveyed my personality. It was a title that said: "Anything goes."

Capitalism and Cartoons: An Interview with Ragmop's Rob Walton (Part One)

Today's interview with comics creator Rob Walton was conducted by my good friend, Greg M. Smith, who teaches media studies at my undergraduate home, Georgia State University. Whenever I come to Atlanta to visit my family, I make a point to get together with Greg, who takes me to the local comic shops and shows me what I have been missing all of these years. He's introduced me to a broad range of books that had otherwise slipped my grasp but one of the best was Ragmop. When Smith learned that the long unfinished Ragmop was going to be completed and reprinted as a graphic novel, he asked if I'd be willing to let him interview Rob Walton for my blog. What could I say? Wild Horses couldn't stop him and in any case, I was as excited as he was at helping to introduce my readers to this fascinating book. Everything from here is Greg's. Ragmop was one of the great unfinished comic stories until recently, when creator Rob Walton completed and published his 450 page graphic novel. Picture the love child of comic book great Jack Kirby and economist Adam Smith, all done as a Looney Tunes cartoon. Or maybe the best story of an interstellar conspiracy ever done by ALL the Marx brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, AND Karl).

Ragmop is the story of the chaotic pursuit of the "O-Ring," an emblem of power that keeps the current pretender to divinity named Tetragrammaton (you know him as "God") in heaven. Everyone wants the O-Ring: the American government (where an idiotic president is under the sway of the evil Mr. Black), insane lobotomizing psychologists, former Nazis, beatnik poet/physicists, the Pope and his cabal of assassin cardinals, an alien race known as the Draco (based on real life aliens!), and even Uncle Walt (yes, THAT Walt). Most importantly, our heroine Alice Hawkings (after her unsuccessful career as the super-villain Thrill Kitten) and her three dinosaur sidekicks (Darwin, Einstein, and Huxley) are also in pursuit, with the fate of the world in the balance.

Ragmop mixes pratfalls and economic theory in a way that is utterly distinctive to comics. Rob Walton can be reached at robwaltoon@sympatico.ca, or at his blog. Ragmop can be purchased at finer comic shops everywhere.

Tell us about the publishing history of Ragmop.

Ragmop began as a serialized comic back in June of 1995 published by my own imprint Planet Lucy Press. That lasted ten issues before moving over to Image Comics for two issues. The second issue could not carry the sales needed for it to remain with Image, so I published a final issue before abandoning the series to return to animation full time sometime in 1998.

Over the years people kept asking me when I would finish the book. I told them I had no plans to return to the material, especially since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Too much had changed on the political scene, and I felt the story would have to be completely updated to reflect the new realities of the War on Terror. Then came a bout of underemployment in 2004-2005. To fill the gap I began to pick away at Ragmop trying to find a new way back into the story.

I had reread the published issues and had a good idea of what worked and what didn't. I knew I needed a new opening, something that would plunge the reader right into the action. I also wanted to introduce the political angle immediately as a way of being honest and upfront with the reader. I also knew I wanted to incorporate and expand upon the "Plunder Blunder" backup story from issue six that told us a little of Alice's past criminal activity as a way of better establishing her as the main character of the story. This process alone took four to six months to resolve. My first pass at this material was modeled on the narrative structure of Rocky & Bullwinkle with a lot of stops and starts in the story as well as having a "voice over" narrator. Those who read that first version didn't like it at all. Thankfully they were right and that I had the good sense to trust their judgment. I excised the Rocky & Bullwinkle shtik and found myself off to the races.

Updating the script turned out to be a fun exercise and gave me a chance to correct a lot of the art and story. It took me a further year to complete the final edits and new pages required to bring the story to its soul-shattering conclusion. Having it complete in one volume I can finally appreciate the accomplishment. I think I did exactly what I wanted to do even if it falls short of some people's expectations. I'm personally proud of the book.

One of the main themes in Ragmop is how capitalism collaborates with democracy, how American democracy makes American imperialism possible. For those who haven't read the book yet, can you summarize the argument? How did your thoughts originate on these matters?

Alice actually does a good job summing up the argument on page 376 of the novel: "Capitalism alienates the human psyche while democracy is the toothless servant of authoritarianism." I should point out that the type of democracy we're talking about here is what's known as a "market-based democracy"; that is, the equating of democracy with the market where the function of democracy is not participatory politics but the management of economies for private profit. Now hopefully this should strike most readers as odd. Our common reaction should be, "Wait a second, that doesn't sound right." And it isn't. After making her summation Alice goes on to describe the Greek ideal of democracy: one in which we have a say in how our governments rule and make decisions on our behalf.

This was something I only began to research after I returned to the story a second time. Back in issue two of the Image run a character describes democracy as a form of social control (page 275 of the graphic novel). At the time I wrote that it was only an intuition based on some historical reading I was doing. Something wasn't right with democracy. What exactly, I couldn't fully tell. If democracy was such a good thing, then why were democratic reforms constantly paid for in blood? Think of the fight for the five-day workweek or the eight-hour day or the women's vote. Those weren't things that were bestowed upon us by benevolent governments after peaceful referendums had been held. These were concessions made to us only after men and women had won the rights with their lives.

Another thing that bothered me was that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet-style communism; capitalists quickly fixed their sights squarely on their own Western democratic governments as if democracy was the next thing to go. And as it turned out it was. Through their elected representatives they began stripping governments of any democratic power that would impede upon the growth of the new global market. This plan of action was followed by Democrats and Republicans alike. It quickly became obvious that democracy, while good for people (in theory), was bad for business.

I began to better understand what was going on when I read up on the 1930s. Back then Fascism was quite popular. After all, they were beating up the communists. They were also busting unions, depressing wages, shutting up the opposition, and partnering governments with business. During the early 1930s everyone was falling over themselves to invest in Germany. In 1932 a group of Wall Streeters planned and nearly executed a coup to oust Roosevelt in favor of their own Hitler-inspired American dictator. The plot failed thanks to General Smedley Butler, but no one was arrested because what was left of the American economy would have completely collapsed. It was then that I began to realize that Fascism is the true political partner of Capitalism. Which is why Mr. Black is so nostalgic about fascism in the book. If only Hitler hadn't given it a bad name! So where did that leave democracy?

My answers were found in several books published between 1998 and 2005. As it turned out, democracy was the most reviled political system of the last two thousand years. It was considered to be the politics of dictators and mobs. Remember, America was founded as a Republic (Rule of Law), not a Democracy (Rule of Masses). Then around 1905 democracy was given a total and deliberate makeover. "Democratic" elections allowed the business community to maintain control of their governments to further their globalizing markets.

The first wave of globalization actually took place in the 1880s when American production began to outgrow American consumerism. The basic idea is that to control worker revolts you give them some participation in decision making through an election. Unfortunately, candidates for election almost always come from business boardrooms or are fronted by business interests, and it is those interests that they end up representing in governments. It just goes on from there. We elect governments that increasingly use power carte blanche, as we have witnessed most notably with the current Bush administration. This aids Imperialism because we then start spreading "democracy" around the world. Originally Imperialism was about goods, labor and resources. It still is, but you can't say that. You can't say we're invading Iraq for their oil and cheap labor. You have to say we're bringing "democracy" to the uncouth masses when what we are bringing is in fact capitalism.

Which came first, the philosophy or the story?

People may be disappointed to learn that the story came before the philosophy. Since writing Ragmop I've earned the reputation of being something of a leftist-whatever, but I didn't start out that way. The evolution of the ideas came from the story itself and not from my political views at the time.

The original concept for Ragmop had to do with man's desire to control nature; not just the weather but of all physics itself. I began thinking about this the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Then Richard Feynman dropped the O-ring into a glass of water to show how the cold would cause the hinge to break and lead to the recent disaster. It was a simple and dramatic demonstration typical of Feynman. It was then both he and the O-ring became central to my developing story.

With that in place along with Alice (I don't remember where the dinosaurs came from) I began to think of a villain. Once I decided that the villains were going to be in government, I began researching their point of view. I also had to give Alice an opposing point of view, which is where the ideas or philosophy began to develop from. Now to be honest I did and do have a natural leaning toward the rights of my fellow brothers and sisters, so taking the side of the Global Justice movement was an obvious direction for me to follow and one that grew out of my own concerns for the common misery and exploitation of the majority of humankind. Now that Ragmop is done I feel as if I've said what needed to be said, so I can move on and let others follow up on the concerns that I've raised.

How do you lay out the structure for a 450 page graphic novel?

How do I do it? I'm not sure I want to say. I did work off a general outline but the comic series was very undisciplined and went off on a lot of tangents. It was both a strength and weakness of the book. When I returned to it I really had to reel it in and imposed a strict structure on the story. I treated the original material like raw film footage and edited it as I would a film. I was ruthless with the cutting to make sure the pacing was always brisk--except for those moments of exposition, which was always problematic, but I did the best I could. I also scripted everything before I drew it, something I don't think I always did with the original series which I wrote and drew on the fly to give it a sense of cartoon anarchy.

I read and reread the story as I went along rewriting and redrawing as needed. The biggest change was that I had a better ending for the book than the comic. Once I had read about the Draco that gave me the ending I needed. It was the perfect vehicle to present my thoughts on capitalism and democracy in the form of a master plan by an invading alien horde to take over the earth. Structuring and writing the ending became very easy after that. All I had to do was stick to the story. Some of my favorite material was cut for the sake of the story.

The epilogue to the book was the original epilogue to the comic that set up the second storyline. I left it in because it's playful and I liked the idea of an open ending. The graphic novel doesn't have a big resolution because there is no resolution. Where we go from here is up to us. That part of the story remains to be written.

The Escasy of Influence and the Power of Networks

Today, I want to call to your attention two recent articles which speak to themes that have been recurring interests in this blog since we launched last June -- the first deals with the relationship of intellectual property and creative expression, the second deals with web comics as a site of experimentation and innovation. Both warrant closer looks. Jonathon Lethem , an author whose fiction consistently plays around with themes of fandom and popular culture, has published a provocative essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence," in the most recent issue of Harpers, which explores the ways that copyright has operated to constrain and plagiarism and appropriation to expand the richness of our culture. Lethem's statement is impossible to summarize here because it expresses its ideas as much through its form (composed of remixing a range of writers who have dealt with the contemporary debates about copyright, including Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Richard Posner, Lewis Hyde, David Foster Wallace, and Henry Jenkins).

Something of the piece's argument can be determined by its opening quote from John Donne:

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated."

For those who are curious, Lethem mashes up a passage from Textual Poachers with the Michel DeCerteau's The Practice of Everyday Life, the book which provided me with my theoretical underpinnings:

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own--artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual poaching. The value of a new toy lies not it its material qualities (not "having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle"), the Skin Horse explains, but rather in how the toy is used. "Real isn't how you are made. . . . It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." The Rabbit is fearful, recognizing that consumer goods don't become "real" without being actively reworked: "Does it hurt?" Reassuring him, the Skin Horse says: "It doesn't happen all at once. . . . You become. It takes a long time. . . . Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby." Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

As a fan of Lethem's fiction (The Fortress of Solitude), I am tickled pink to see my own writing included in this context. Every so often, journalists, who see me as an advocate of very loose copyright protection, ask me how I would feel if someone took and used my work without my permission as if it were a kind of gotcha question. In reality, I am delighted to see people engage with my ideas; I give much of my own intellectual property away on a daily basis -- here in the blog and elsewhere -- because I care much more about having an impact on the debates that impact our culture and in providing resources for my readers than I am interested in regulating what they do with my text. Of course, it is nice when they acknowledge that I wrote the material, as Lethem does here, but I also understand as the quote from Donne suggests that new works get built on the shucks of old works and that to be part of the conversation is to become the raw materials out of which new texts get generated or perhaps simply the compost that allows them to grow.

This blog has periodically touched upon the artistic innovation which has occurred in and around web comics in recent years as well as the various scenarios which might support their future development. I wanted to flag for readers a very interesting overview of the space of web comics today which was developed by Joshua Pantalleresco over at the ComicBloc. Again, this is apt to seem self-serving since I was one of the people he interviewed for the story but Pantalleresco's article is most interesting for the comments he was able to gather from the web comics artists themselves, talking about what they see as the benefits of working in this medium. What follows are just a few of the better quotes from the article:

"I think the biggest advantage is also, ironically, the biggest disadvantage: distribution... The glory of online comics is that readers don't have to go to a comic book shop to read them and can instead read them at home, at work, the library or anywhere there's a computer with a high-speed Internet connection." -- Dirk Manning, creator and writer of both Nightmare World and Tales Of Mr. Rhee

"Really the sky is the limit at this point for self publishing. If you really have the will to put your stuff out there, the tools are all available...There's nothing to stop you except maybe fear. Fear of rejection, fear of taking risks, fear of failure.... Creators can get there work out there without the constraint of publishing or distribution companies. Sure, there will be more books out there that probably never should have existed, but the good books, the really good books will rise to the top.--Tom Stillwell, creator and writer of Honor Brigade

"You MUST have a website that looks professional and is user friendly...Blog on this site, post images, give free previews ...provide as much information about you and your books as possible. You also MUST make sure people can find this site. If you build it, they won't come. They won't know it exists. You need to bring them there. You get people there by self promotion. You aren't just selling the book. You are selling you as a creator."-- Stillwell

If you want to read what I had to say, you need to actually read the article.

What struck me about the two articles is that they both emphasize some of the skills we have been discussing through our work for the MacArthur Foundation. The first makes the argument that artists learn and grow through a process of appropriation and transformation of existing materials, the second that networking constitutes an important aspect of contemporary authorship. These are core insights we should be making available to our students, especially those who aspire to enter the creative industries.

And, oh, while I have your attention, MIT World recently posted a webcast of a very interesting lecture by John Seeley Brown, the former Director of Xerox-PARC and a key thinker on the social life of information. I was in the audience when Brown delivered these remarks which speaks about collective intelligence, participatory culture, and digital education. I recommend this webcast to anyone who regularly reads and enjoys this blog. Here's part of the summary that MIT World posted:

We learn through our interactions with others and the world, he says, and there's no more perfect medium for enabling this than an increasingly open and organized World Wide Web.

In a digitally connected, rapidly evolving world, we must transcend the traditional Cartesian models of learning that prescribe "pouring knowledge into somebody's head," says

John Seely Brown. We learn through our interactions with others and the world, he says, and there's no more perfect medium for enabling this than an increasingly open and organized World Wide Web.

While the wired world may be flat, it now also features "spikes," interactive communities organized around a wealth of subjects. For kids growing up in a digital world, these unique web resources are becoming central to popular culture, notes Brown. Now, educators must begin to incorporate the features of mash-ups and remixes in learning, to stimulate "creative tinkering and the play of imagination."

With the avid participation of online users, the distinction between producers and consumers blurs. In the same way, says Brown, knowledge 'production' must flow more from 'amateurs' - the students, life-long learners, and professionals learning new skills. Brown describes amateur astronomers who observe the sky 24/7, supplementing the work of professionals in critical ways. A website devoted to Boccaccio's Decameron welcomes both scholars and students, opening up the world of professional humanities research to all.

The challenge of 21st century education will be leveraging the abundant resources of the web - this very long tail of interests - into a "circle of knowledge-building and sharing." Perhaps, Brown proposes, the formal curriculum of schools will encompass both a minimal core "that gets at the essence of critical thinking," paired with "passion-based learning," where kids connect to niche communities on the web, deeply exploring certain subjects. Brown envisions education becoming "an act of re-creation and productive inquiry," that will form the basis for a new culture of learning.

Singapore-MIT Games Innovation Lab in the News

Chris Kohler ran a story in Wired last week about new academic programs in game studies and design, in which the new Singapore-MIT GAMBIT games innovation lab figured prominently, alongside the new Serious Games masters program being launched by Carrie Heeter at Michigan State University and the new bachelor's degree program in game art and design recently launched by the Expression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, California. These are to be sure only a few of a much broader array of colleges and universities which currently offer degrees or research opportunities in the area of game studies and design, each with their own strengths and emphasis. Certainly I would want to acknowledge here the pioneering work in this area at the University of Southern California, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University, to cite simply the American institutions. Kohler bases his representation of our efforts primarily on an interview he conducted with core participants some months ago. He recently reprinted the full transcript of the exchange via his blog and I am crossposting it here with his permission in hopes that it will give my regular readers a clearer picture of what we are trying to accomplish.

Kohler was flattering in his representation of "Prof. Jenkins" (that guy again!) as the key figure behind the project but in fairness, I should stress the degree to which CMS co-director William Uricchio has been the primary player in our negotiation to create the lab and that the day to day operations of the lab are being capably overseen at this point by CMS alum Philip Tan, who has been seconded to our team from the Singapore Media Development Authority. Both Tan and Uricchio play a prominent role in the interview which follows.

We got some thorough ribbing in the fall when we announced that the Lab would be called SMIGIL (Singapore International Games Innovation Lab) and I joked at Serious Games that we were going to change our name to GOLLUM (Games -- Online Learning, Large, Utterly Massive). In the end, we have settled for GAMBIT (Gamers, Aesthetics, Mechanics, Business, Innovation, and Technology). While we are still negotiating some final details of the arrangement, we remain optimistic that the lab will launch this summer with our first crop of games prototypes starting to surface in the fall. My trip to Singapore in January was partially focused on identifying collaborators at leading Singaporean institutions who would be working with us on the first round of research.

Chris Kohler: You've been on the front lines of research into video games for quite a long time, but if I understand correctly this is the first big push for CMS into actual work in video game design. Why get into this area of education?

Henry Jenkins: That's a bit of a simplification. I have long been a strong advocate of innovation, creativity, and diversity of games as well as a strong supporter of the serious and independent games movements. That's probably the part of my work which has been most visible beyond the MIT campus. But, we have been taking steady steps over the past eight or nine years through the Comparative Media Studies Program to move decisively towards games production. The Comparative Media Studies has embraced an ethos of applied humanities.

Some years ago, CMS collaborated with Bing Gordon to develop a Creative Leaders Program for Electronic Arts: our faculty and students sat down to brainstorm with key EA designers, including Will Wright, Neil Young, and Danny Bilson, about the future of the games medium. For the past seven years, we have run a week-long intensive games design workshop every January in collaboration with people in the training program at Sony Imageworks and with a range of local Boston area games companies. Our students conceptualize and pitch games in the course of the week and receive feedback from industry insiders (representing companies such as Harmonix, Mad Doc, and Turbine). We have gradually built on that foundation by having games-related courses taught on campus by games industry insiders, such as Christopher Weaver (Bethesda Softworks), Ian Lane Davis (Mad Doc), Eric Zimmerman (GameLab) and Frank Espinoza (Warner Brothers). We have a long tradition of bringing games industry professionals to MIT to mentor and advise students on their class projects. We have long brought game designers of all kinds to campus to interact with our students

and share with them front line perspectives on industry trends. We have had a steady stream of students who have sought to combine computer science and comparative media studies and have gone on to do internships and get jobs as game designers.

We have now six years of track record doing conceptual and playable prototypes for educational games -- starting with the Games to Teach project which was funded by Microsoft Research and then the Education Arcade, which has hosted major events on games and learning at E3. This group has experimented with the use of game mods as a platform for developing educational games, transforming Neverwinter Nights into Revolution, a game set in Colonial Williamsburg. We recently hired Scot Osterweil (The Zoombini's Logical Adventure) to head up a team of our students working with Maryland Public Television and Fablevision to develop Labyrinth, a multiplatform experience designed to help kids develop literacy and math skills. It will be, we hope, the first CMS developed game to find its way into distribution. Eric Klopfer, another colleague, has been a leading researcher working on Augmented Reality Games and Beth Coleman, yet another colleague, is doing important work on the use of machinema for artistic expression.

All of this is the focus on the work we are doing through the Comparative Media studies Program. But what's great about this initiative is that within MIT, we are partnering with some key faculty in the Computer Science Program who has been doing groundbreaking work in computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and voice recognition.

And beyond that, we will be working with leading researchers from a range of Singaporean institutions with a broad range of production, animation, and programming skills.

Chris: How did the collaboration with the Singapore government come about? Had you

worked together on any other initiatives prior to this?

Philip Tan: Late last year, Singapore announced that the country was embarking on a major effort to grow R&D spending to 3% of its GDP. This is a crucial direction for preparing the Singapore economy for the next couple of decades. They've been focusing on biotech for a good few years and they've had compelling domestic reasons to build up their environmental and water technologies. However, the government also announced a big commitment to Interactive and Digital Media as a research space that is simply too important to ignore.

[Added later: I mixed up some statistics in the paragraph quoted (above). The National Research Foundation of Singapore announced that they would allocate S$500 million over the next five years for a strategic research program to increase the value-added contribution from the interactive & digital media (IDM) sector from S$3.8 billion in 2003 to S$10 billion, and to create about 10,000 new jobs by 2015.

The Media21 blueprint of MDA, which was announced in 2003, aims to double the GDP contribution of the entire media industry to 3%, and to increase the number of media industry jobs.

Thanks for the opportunity to clarify this detail.]

Given Singapore's technological base, excellent education system, cosmopolitan influences, and constraints in population and geographical size, the country has already been investing heavily in its digital media industries. This announcement is important as it encourages a bigger push towards addressing the concerns of the Singapore industry through R&D, which necessitates an attitude of risk-taking and creativity. They're building on that strong IT base that they've developed over the past 25 years, but they also recognize that digital media has significant creative challenges in addition to technological complexity. This effort invites exploration into new business models, cultural explorations, and aesthetics, which now becomes an integral part of the R&D effort for Interactive and Digital Media.

For the past 8 years, MIT and Singapore have had an ongoing collaboration called the "Singapore-MIT Alliance." The trust and understanding between MIT and Singapore institutes of higher learning has grown during that time, which has made it easier for researchers and educators to build collaborations. Within this context, CMS has been looking for an opportunity to work with Singapore in various media-related initiatives, and CMS is still examining other potential collaborations, particularly in education. However, just as the rapid growth of the Singapore industry is beginning to uncover challenges and opportunities for research, CMS has been gradually expanding its game curriculum offerings and research endeavors, so the International Game Lab is just the right project at the right time for all the collaborators.

Chris: What exactly is the involvement with Singapore -- will they be sending a certain number of students to MIT every year? Undergrad or graduate or both? How will you be involving working game industry professionals in the Lab? Have you signed up any specific individuals who you could name?

Philip Tan: Singapore and MIT faculty, post-doc, and graduate students will be collaborating on research across a range of different game-related topics. We want to make sure that this is completely collaborative; the research thrusts need to make sense both all the researchers, drawing on strengths and interests of both Singapore and MIT collaborators. Without that complementary benefit, we would end up compromising the full effectiveness of the initiative. There will naturally be a lot of communication, researcher exchanges, and joint presentations, and we should expect to see simultaneous increases in research activity in MIT and in Singapore institutions.

Undergraduate and polytechnic students in Singapore already have access to pretty strong technical and creative curricula to prepare them for game careers, so we want to bring 30 to 40 a year to MIT and challenge them to take the results of the ongoing research efforts and translate those ideas and applications into playable games. We'll also help build up further opportunities for more industry-bound students to grapple with the research while they are in Singapore. Not only does this expose students to game technologies, practices, and concepts that are a little different from the standard development pipelines, it allows the initiative to assess the relevance of the research. If we can't even figure out how to apply our own research to our own games, then some reevaluation is in order.

We'll also have Singapore and US industry professionals attached and visiting the work occurring in Singapore and MIT to make sure that the research stays relevant and accessible to the industry. We're still interviewing and discussing possible means of collaboration, so we can't name names at this stage. In Singapore, the local IGDA chapter makes it a priority to collect input and speak for the concerns of the industry, so we will frequently be consulting with them to identify areas of research that might be beneficial for the industry but might potentially be too risky for the industry to undertake.

Chris: More generally, how will this affect MIT's student body? Say I'm an undergraduate at MIT with a strong interest in game design or game research -- how could I get involved in this program?

William Uricchio: The Lab provides us with an opportunity to redouble our efforts in the classroom, research lab, and outreach programs. Each of these venues offers our students ways of sharing in the benefits of the program. In the classroom, the presence of the Lab will not only allow us to increase our game-related course offerings, but should facilitate greater interaction among CMS students and those from other parts of the Institute such as Course 6

(Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Sloan. There will be plenty of games-related research opportunities throughout the year in direct support of the Lab. MIT has a strong tradition of involving undergraduates as active participants in applied research through its many labs -- a program called the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program or UROP. And our already active engagement of key figures in the games field, whether from the industry, or the journalistic or academic worlds, will intensify. The MIT community can look forward to more opportunities to interact with these 'key figures' through our weekly colloquia and occasional conferences, and even through our visiting scholars program. It goes without saying that we very much look forward to drawing upon the experiences and cultural perspectives of visiting Singapore students, using this as an opportunity to challenge some of our assumptions

about game play and the cultural specificities of the medium.

Chris: You talked about earlier and the press release mentions the "development of publicly distributable games". I'm especially interested in the idea that game publishers might be able to work with you to actually get the rights to the prototypes produced by the lab and work them into full games. Can you talk more about this?

Philip Tan: The game industry isn't particularly fond of reading research papers from academia, for a variety of reasons. They're dry, they're overly general, they don't necessarily consider market pressures, and they either discuss concepts that require technology that's still five or ten years from mass-market adoption or obsess over game play and ideas that are considered to be already dated and thoroughly explored by the industry.

Even if the International Game Lab puts out relevant, useful research, or reexamines old ideas to address new audiences, it needs to be communicated to the industry in a way that emphasizes its relevance and applicability. Naturally, the industry pays attention to games. A small, obscure game with a good idea can easily get noticed, highlighted in forums and industry press, played, and critiqued. That kind of close attention expands further if the game is available for online download, and we can then get direct feedback about how good the game and the idea really is. As a side effect, we'll also have to keep in mind the kinds of issues that game developers face every day: platform limitations, tight deadlines, player demographics, and bug patches.

We're challenging ourselves to actually make games that will be designed around the core ideas of the research from the initiative. And by taking them to publishers, we want to raise the bar of how game projects from academia will be judged. Some of them won't get picked up, so we'll just make them publicly downloadable as experiments. But if we can get them into retail channels, we now have a real metric to assess how successful the idea is, and we will have real pressure to work on ideas that actually make better games. For a student, being part of the Game Lab means you has an additional opportunity to graduate with a commercial product in your portfolio.

We're not under the illusion that we're going to be able to compete against triple-A, commercial off-the-shelf games. However, in the online digital distribution space, there appears to be a real market for the small, niche title with a good idea. We also want to be producing a lot of games, somewhere between 5 and 10 games each year. You can't really guarantee a hit in this industry; certainly not with our budgets. You can have all the production values and ideas, but the market can just choose to look the other way sometimes.

Chris: What do you feel needs fixing about the video game design process in general? In other words, what will the Lab do that the video game industry is currently failing to? I feel like truly innovative and groundbreaking great game ideas get squashed often because the powers that be are just looking for things that are marketable -- am I on the right track, or missing the point?

Henry Jenkins: The games industry emerged from the entrepreneurial energies of garage-based designers who were driven by their passions and who created, in a relatively short time, a powerfully expressive medium. We have now seen that initial entrepreneurial stage give way to a much more standardized, studio-based mode of production, based on bottom line calculations and reliable returns of investments, and pushed more and more towards franchise-based entertainment. Studio-based production, across all media, has had two effects: insuring a relatively high standard of production and capping opportunities for innovation and individual expression. As the costs of games get pushed higher and higher, many wonder where fresh new ideas will come from. Some have said that the games industry has become so risk adverse that only a Miyamoto or a Wright can break through the formulas and generate truly original approaches to game design. Many observers have said we need to step outside of that system and provide some place where interesting new game prototypes can be incubated.

We see university-based game labs as one model for how we can foster greater innovation. Much as university-based film production programs have been the place where fresh new filmmakers acquire their skills and do work that stretches the medium(helping to fuel the independent film movement), university-based games programs can be the place where the next generation of game designers stretch the medium (helping to fuel the emerging independent games movement). We see the lab as a space where we can move swiftly from pure research into compelling applications and then partner with the games industry to bring the best ideas to emerge to market.

Chris: What would be an example of a typical research project that the Lab might work on?

Philip Tan: We have six research categories and we expect many projects would

straddle multiple categories: technology, business, genres, culture, aesthetics, and mechanics. For instance, a culture project may examine several demographics and identify an underserved, potential audience, but reaching that audience may involve the creation of a new game genre, a drastically different aesthetic from current offerings, or altering game play mechanics to keep them engaging and accessible. You also need to figure out how to get that game into the hands of that audience, and possibly alter your pipeline to bring the cost of development under the projected returns from that audience. Finally, we build that game, scaled within our capabilities, and we test it all out for real.

Chris: Is the intent here mostly to work with established MIT researchers to produce papers and game designs, or are you hoping to get students involved at the undergrad or graduate levels who want to go into the game industry? If the latter is a part of the effort, how would you compare the Lab to other game design programs?

William Uricchio: The short answer is yes! yes! We certainly want to make the most of the established research talent that we have in house, and to intensify our research and creative collaborations with leading figures in the field. But doing so also implies that we continue to do what we do best: drawing on our extremely able student body in a collaborative research process. Their game experience is formidable, their ability to think outside the box well proven, and I can't think of a better educational strategy than working together to develop the future of the medium. We have had a steady stream of graduate and undergraduate students leave MIT and succeed in the industry, and see no reason to stop now! But we also hope that this initiative leads to innovations that, while game-centric, offer students opportunities to work with the medium in unexpected ways, ways that go beyond today's established industry.

Chris: Continuing that thread, what do you think is wrong with the current state of game design education? There is no shortage of colleges and universities that offer bachelor's or even master's degrees in game design, but... are they on the right track to continue innovation in the medium, or are they just churning out worker bees?

Henry Jenkins: I am not sure I think anything is wrong with the current state of game design education. We aren't doing this because other university programs are failing. Each of the existing programs fills a specific niche: some emphasize technical innovation, others character design and world building; some move fairly swiftly into games industry positions while others emphasize the development of an independent games aesthetic or are more closely aligned

with the serious games movement. We hope to add several things to the mix:

first, we want to get our students working in an international production context, fostering greater collaboration between the American and Asian games industries. More and more games are a global medium with many new countries developing games industry. As they are doing so, we are seeing more and more culturally distinctive games enter the marketplace. At one time, games seemed to have a global style, which sought to erase local cultural differences. Now, we are seeing different cultures explore different game genres, themes, and

styles. We think the next generation of game designers will need to be able to communicate in a global context and be able to appreciate and value the cultural diversity that characterizes current game production.

Second, we see real value in pushing forward games as a medium through a combination of cutting-edge research and imaginative applications. In that regard, strength of our program is that we teach students to think across media -- sometimes becoming more aware of commonalities and relationships between multiple media traditions, sometimes drilling down to what is distinctive about a particular medium. We are a program in Comparative Media Studies and not one that specializes exclusively in Games Studies or Game Design per se. This perspective has sometimes been misunderstood as the field gets bogged down in pointless debates about narratologists vs. ludologists. We see narratives and game play both as traditions that cut across multiple media channels and seek to help students develop a more integrated approach to thinking about the social and cultural potentials of each medium. With this project, we are bringing together researchers who understand games from a social and cultural perspective with those who are doing groundbreaking research on new media technologies. We see games as an important medium of expression for the 21st century: we are not just preparing young people to enter the games industry; we are challenging the games industry to think about their medium in new ways; we are daring people to imagine games that do things they have never thought of before.

Millenial Monsters: An Interview with Anne Allison (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of an interview with Duke professor Anne Allison talking about her recent book, Millenial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Today, I continue that interview. I mentioned last time that I spoke on a panel with Allison at Duke and thought I'd share a few more aspects of my interest in this area.

For one thing, the New Media Literacies project is currently working on a documentary about the cosplay community: our team went to Ohayocon this January to do interviews with anime fans and the costuming community. I wasn't able to share that footage at Duke but I was able to share some footage that a recent CMS alum, Vanessa Bertozzi, had produced of a young woman named Chloe who described the ways that cosplay and her fascination with JPop and anime motivated her to learn more about the Japanese culture and language:

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

Chloe is representative of what I have called "pop cosmopolitanism." I have mentioned this concept in the blog before and wrote about it extensively in an essay that is found in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers. She has attached herself to Japanese popular culture as a way to escape the paroachialism of contemporary American culture -- to find a world outside or beyond the American borders. And in doing so, she has moved from a fantasy version of Japanese culture towards closer engagement with Japanese fans via the internet and with Japanese language and culture through her courses at Smith College.

I also shared with the group some sense of the ways that the American comics industry has started to absorb influences from manga in the hopes of combatting a trend which finds Japanese comics outselling American comics by as much as four to one in the U.S. market, perhaps the only internationally produced media content that outsells its domestic counterpart in this country. I showed how companies like Marvel and DC had sought to absorb elements of the themes and style of Manga while attaching them to their flagship superhero characters with the greatest emphasis occuring in works that target female consumers. See for example the romance comic, Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, for a comic that deals with classic Marvel superhero themes in a manga style. Indeed, this turn towards manga style in both mainstream and indie comics is starting to open up a space for female writers and artists as well. A curiosity in this case is the link between manga and female readers/writers given that the Japanese comics being imitated here are not always or even primarily those aimed at female readers in Japan. Lots more here to reflect upon in the future, that's for sure.

I also suggested that this was an international phenomenon, citing as an example The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga , a British anthology that I picked up in Singapore. The editors struggled in their introduction to justify the use of "manga" to characterize a collection of works by a global set of contributors, including some very interesting work Asia Alfasi (Libyan by birth, Scottish by residence), who uses a manga style to tell the story of a hijab-wearing Arab Muslim girl living in the United Kingdom. The book represents one of a number of recent efforts to strip the term, "manga," of its specific reference to Japan and argue that "manga" refers to a specific set of styles and genres in comics that travel freely across national borders in an increasingly global marketplace of ideas and influences. On the one hand, this book suggests the world-wide influence of Japanese media and at the same time, it suggest ways that media producers in other countries are learning to attach themselves to this phenomenon to open up the western market to their own cultural products. A core question at the present time is whether "Cool Japan" is an unique phenomenon or whether we will see more and more national cultures attract their own passionate groups of young fans in the west.

Now, back to the interview...

In the book, you draw on the concept of de-odorization to talk about the ways cultural materials are stripped of their local specificity as they enter the local markets. Yet at this point, Japanese culture carries enough cache that it's styles and themes are actively being imitated by American companies. Do you see this as a shift in the strategies by which Japanese cultural goods are being marketed?

Yes, and it represents a change coming from both Japan and the US. Until about the early 1990s, cultural products from Japan that bore the trace of their cultural roots too strongly simply didn't sell very well abroad. Given this, companies like Sony purposely tried to make "global" versus "Japanese" products (Sony itself was a name chosen for its global-cachet and its electronics were colored gray with an aesthetic style meant to be modern and international rather than Japanese per se). For the past decade or even a bit longer, however, there has been a global fad for Japanese products that has now come to value, even fetishize, their "Japaneseness." A Saban executive told me that when Power Rangers came out in 1993, the show had to be Americanized and its Japanese roots heavily censored. However, by 2002 (when I was talking with him), showing Japanese script, riceballs, or temples in a Japanese cartoon was an added attraction and not only was it not airbrushed out, such signs of Asianness were now being actively solicited.

In your book, you write, "the quest is not so much for the authentic Japan but for what 'made-in-Japan' authenticates -- a leading brand name of coolness these days." Explain. What qualities do you think American young people associate with Japan? What fantasies are served by their quest of Japanese cultural goods?

What I think Japan authenticates in the minds, fantasies, and tastes of US fans of J-cool is not so much Japan as a real place as mush as a particular aesthetic. I characterize this aesthetic in my book by the qualities of polymorphous perversity ( a continual moving of borders,constant transformation, repetitive change and accretion of powers, body-parts, and mecha) and techno-animism ( a world that gets animated by technology and human bodies that, in this animation, also become cyborgs). Godzilla embodied these two qualities and arose in Japan at a moment of historical disrupture and postwar reconstruction. My argument is that--in part because of Japan's wartime and postwar history--it bred a fantasy culture more dependent on polymorphous perversity and techno-animism than was American pop culture at the time. Now, the US is less stable, complacent, and economically secure than it was in the 1950s and itself is experiencing some of the social and political tensions Japan was in the 1950s. Also this is a moment of heightened flux, migration, change, and mobility around the world; these social conditions breed and embrace the cultural tropes so rampant in J-cool and this is what the "Japan" of J-cool represents for American fans, I argue.

What developments in Japanese media content have occurred since you finished writing the book that you wish you had been able to touch upon?

Technology has developed ever further on cell-phones and in the kinds of story-telling and digital communication being conducted on various e-waves. There is also new trends in youth culture and in the kind of virtual companionship I dealt with in my chapter on tamagotchi. What is happening to the way "human" is getting constructed and "sociality" getting negotiated are questions I'd like to expand upon further in the future.

How important are the digital dimensions of the franchises you discuss? Chris Kohler has argued in an interview in my blog a while back that it was games which opened western markets for Japanese cultural goods. Do you agree or disagree with this claim?

I think games were a big factor in opening up western markets to Japanese goods but I think cartoons, manga, action toys (like transformers), morphing fantasies like Power Rangers, and media-mix complexes like Pokemon were as important.

Thinking of Power Rangers, for example; this was a live action show that incorporated morphing at the heart of the fantasy. This was hardly a brand-new idea in American popular culture, of course, but what made it so popular was, in part, the lines of action figures that accompanied it (and helped spread the fantasy) and also the fact that it was targeted to young kids who grew up socialized into what we could call a Japanese aesthetic. Consumers and fans of genre like anime and manga often point to how young they were when they became interested in this fare and how what drew them in was the very distinct aesthetic, explicitly different from what they understood to be an American aesthetic. In the wake of the popularity of Power Rangers (broadcast on Fox Network started in 1993 and is still going on today, 14 years later), a host of Japanese cartoons, live action shows and other youth-targeted cultural products flooded the US market (not all acquiring success, however--Masked Rider, another live-action morphing show, was a bust, for example). While some of these programs/products were not overtly identified as Japanese, consumer kids picked up on and acquired a taste for their aesthetics and, by now, at a later age, are more than happy to accept anime, manga, and video games that come from Japan (and are explicitly packaged as such).

I do agree with Chris Kohler, however, that what constitutes what he calls a "nationally specific" element versus a "transnational" element in a product like a video game or manga is constantly changing. Today, there are many "manga" produced outside of Japan and by non-Japanese. So is the aesthetic at work here "Japanese" or not? Difficult questions and tricky operations of national/transnational.

Millennial Monsters: An Interview with Anne Allison (Part One)

In January, as part of my three week lecture tour, I stopped off in Durham, North Carolina where Duke University was hosting a special event designed to discuss the issues being raised by Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, which was written by one of their faculty members, Anne Allison. I was one of several outside researchers who shared their insights into the issues the book raised. I had a great time interacting with the students and faculty there both through this event and a seminar session the following day. I have long been an admirer of Anne Allison's work which touches in complex ways on issues of globalization, cultural identity, fan cultures, sexuality, and popular culture. For me, one of the real values of her work is that she has read deeply into what Japanese cultural critics have had to say about some of the materials that have made their way over to this country. Given how little of this writing has been translated into English, this is an especially valuable service to those of us interested in this topic. The book offers a richly detailed series of case studies of the interplay of Japanese and American popular culture, going back to the tin toys produced during the American occupation, Godzilla and Astro Boy, and other early texts which made it into the western marketplace. The core of the book describes the emergence of an ethos of "coolness" around Japanese cultural imports -- moving from a time when the industry sought to erase markers of cultural difference to the present moment when many western consumers are embracing these products (toys, anime, manga, games) because of their Japaneseness.

Today and tomorrow, I will be sharing with you an interview with Anne Allison about her latest project. Here's her official biography which will provide some background about who she is and how this project fits into the larger trajectory of her career:

Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist currently working on the globalization of Japanese pop culture in entertainment goods like Pokemon. Her recent book, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006) looks at the global marketplace, capitalist logic, and fantasy construction of Japanese toys through the lens of Japan-US relations. Allison has published two previous books. The first, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press 1994) is a study of the Japanese corporate practice of entertaining white collar, male workers in the sexualized atmosphere of hostess clubs. Her second book, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (Westview-HarperCollins 1996, re-released by University of California Press 2000) examines the intersection of motherhood, productivity, and mass-produced fantasies in contemporary Japan through essays on lunch-boxes, comics, censorship, and stories of mother-son incest. Anne Allison is Chair and Robert O. Keohane Professor of the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

Let's start where your book ends. You write, "Finally, of course, there is the significance and signification of Japan in the creation of a global imagination no longer dominated (or at least not so completely) by the United States. The attractive power at work here may be less for a real place than for the sense of displacement enjoined by the postindustrial condition of travel, nomadicism, and flux generated and signified here by somewhere "not-the-United-states" but within the orbit of the globally familiar. Still, American hegemony is being challenged in the symbolic virtual medium of fantasy making. And in this a see a positive contribution to the cultural politics of global imaginings in millennial monsters and Japanese toys." Explain. In what sense is it more important that this is not American popular culture than that it is culture from Japan? Or conversely, why does it matter that American youth are consuming culture produced elsewhere? What do you see as the political, cultural, and economic implications of this shift?

It's always struck me that Americans are very insular; we tend to see America as the center of the world, American culture as the global standard and norm, and the American lifestyle as the best in the world. Much of this is unconscious and comes from, among other things, a popular culture so dominated by US-produced fare. So, to disturb this sense of American-centeredness and to open up Americans to understanding and recognizing cultural difference is good, I'd say. Of course the question then is: does the popularization of J-cool amongst American youth really signal an opening up of consciousness and sensitivity to cultures and a cultural way of life that is different? I would say - to a degree, yes. But what matters here is not that fans of J-cool necessarily understand the complexity of "Japan" as the origins of this different popular culture. Rather, what is important here is more the disruption of the dominance of American culture. This is the cultural implication of a shift in pop culture in the US.

But you also ask about the political and economic implications and this is a harder question to answer. Economically, Japan is as much a postindustrial, neoliberal economy as the US so I'm not sure there is a radical shift here in the wave of J-cool spreading across the US. Politically, we could say there is more possible significance: the acceptance of soft power from somewhere else implies a challenge (well, a "soft" challenge)to the unilateralism of the US empire and the way the US nation-state is imposing its will and policies on the global stage (invasion of Iraq) without consulting or cooperating with others.

What led you to write this book? How does it emerge from the earlier books you have done on Japan?

All my earlier work has examined the relationship between fantasy and what I call material relations (of work, school, and home) in various spheres: hostess clubs, home life, pornographic comic books, and the lunch-boxes mothers make for their children. Here too I look at the relationship between fantasy and the material production of youth goods in Japan though extend this into the global sphere of fan traffic and consumption. What triggered my original interest in this was my younger son's fascination with transformer superheroes which he watched with avid interest the year we spent there when he was 2. Not only would he watch these shows, but he also became a consumer of all the action figures and paraphernalia to wear and adorn his own body with (helmets, swords, blaster guns). My son was always a gentle child: sweet, calm, and non-violent. So I was intrigued by his own transformation into this fantasy world and became interested in studying the phenomenon further.

You begin the book with a discussion of the relations between American and Japanese popular culture following the end of World War II. How would you characterize the core shift that has occurred since that time? What factors led to this shift? Do you see this as occurring because of a push by Japanese companies into western markets or because of a pull by American fans demanding more access to Japanese cultural goods?

Great questions and the relationship between US and Japanese popular culture is complex. The two countries and, more importantly, the popular cultures of these two countries have long pollinated one another though the influences Japanese pop culture has had on

American are rarely recognized or acknowledged. It is said that Tezuka Osamu, the creator

of Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy)and other popular manga and anime was heavily influenced by Disney as he started up in the late 40s and 50s. But he, in turn, influenced Disney; Kimba the Lion is said to have been the inspiration for The Lion King. But Japanese influence and imprint on the American imaginary has vastly increased in recent years and the first reason why this is so is due to marketing and entrepreneurship on both sides. Haim Saban, the CEO of Saban Entertainment in the US, was the one who tried for 8 years to get US television networks to air what eventually came out as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. He did this for strictly economic reasons; the footage was relatively cheap and he thought it would be a big hit (and would therefore make him money). And, once this hit in 1993, it opened the floodgates for more Japanese programming to come into the US, peddled by both Japanese and American marketers. Once enough of a market was established though, I think the demand of fans became significant in that they kept pushing for more and more J-cool products to enter the States (and also, as Henry Jenkins and Ian Condry have shown in their own work, the fact that these fans were adept at dubbing and translating helped push the market as well).

The Japanese were once reluctant to imagine many of these goods as being of interest outside of Japan. What changed their minds?

I don't think it was so much that Japanese changed their minds on this as much as Americans changed their minds. Once Americans started approaching Japanese and soliciting deals to broker their products, relations opened up more. This is not to say, however, that the business relations between Americans and Japanese are always smooth in negotiating the sale and transmission of Japanese products to the US.

As I understand it, these deals are often difficult, full of cross-cultural misunderstandings. What US marketers have said is that, if Japanese are going to do global sales, they need to understand how the logic of this market operates--i.e. not cling on to products or storylines that won't sell. What Japanese marketers have told me is that it's all business on the US side but, for them, they care about these products/characters/games as if they were their own children and they're not always willing to change or abandon something simply on economic grounds. There is also the interest of American fans who, because they understand and appreciate Japanese-fare and are also willing to add translations and dubbings, the market for i.e. anime has grown in the U.S. Japanese marketers would not have predicted this and figured, for a long time, that a Japanese aesthetic was simply something few non-Japanese would ever get or even take to. This was true in the case of Pokemon which, designed for a Japanese audience, was never intended or imagined to go global. It had an "odor" and "taste" thought to be appealing only to Japanese or perhaps other Asians. When it hit in places like the US, its Japanese marketers and designers were astounded. With such successes, however, they also became attuned to producing for this wider audience: not making their products "global" per se but designing them with a Japaneseness that could travel.

When Piracy Becomes Promotion Revisted...

Last fall, Reason magazine reprinted the "When Piracy Becomes Promotion" section from Convergence Culture, foregrounding the ways that the arguably illegal practices of fan subbing have helped to build the American market for anime. More recently, I received a tip from reader David Mankins about the ways that the commercial marketing for the anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, sought to explicitly tap into the fansubbing circuit. Haruhi had been a huge success in Japan and had generated growing interest in the American Otaku community through its circulation in fansubbed versions. Wikipedia offers this history of the international reception of the series:

DVD sales in Japan have been strong with 70,000 and 90,000 units sold of the first two DVDs respectively as of August 2006. A 2006 online poll of Japan's top 100 favourite animated television series of all time, conducted by TV Asahi, placed the series in fourth place. The series has also become somewhat of an internet phenomenon in both Japan and English-speaking countries thanks to the distribution of English language fansubs, and over 2000 clips of the series and user-created parodies and homages were posted to video sharing websites such as YouTube. The popularity of these clips (and those of other popular Japanese series) lead the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) to request that YouTube remove clips protected under copyright.

Rather than ignore this history, the company releasing the anime series officially in the United States openly courted anime fans, urging those who have loved the fan sub version to support the commercial releases.

Here's an account of the campaign published last December on The Anime Almanac:

Buzz was generating through out all off last week as a mysterious website popped onto the internets with promises of the popular anime series, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, being licensed in the US. The website only claimed that "The World as we know it will end" that Friday. But for those looking around, one could find hidden messages to decrypt written in the website's source code. The popular website AnimeOnDVD.com also played along with the highlight of the letters SOS written on their news posts. The hype was big, and many started to speculate who was behind the mystery....

Bandai's idea behind the ASOS Brigade is to reach out to everyone who has already become fans of the series through watching the fansubs. They have created their own amateur-style home movies and are posting them on the internet. They have also created a Myspace page and encourage fans.

The movie is done "for fans by fans" style, and they really know their target audience. The movie interlaces Japanese and English dialog with a Korean-Americain, former Pink Ranger Patricia Ja Lee, playing the lead role, and two Japanese actresses playing her sidekicks. Lee even admits in the film that the Japanese actresses are only meant to appeal to the otaku fanboys. This is a very suitable attitude for the character she portrays, and is even more entertaining when we, the otaku-fanboy audience, realize how true it is.

But the video also dives into other aspects of the online anime community that we weren't expecting from a company like Bandai. Internet catch-phrases like "O Rly?" and "No Wai!" are used through out the video, which are only used by visitors of such otaku-influenced websites like 4chan.org and ytmnd.com. Also, after fans complained over Lee's choice to translate a word to "psychic" over the word "esper", a new subtitled version of the video included the fan-prefered word written under the original recording...

Many people feel that Haruhi will never sell well in the US because most of the fans have already seen the show through illegal methods. This campaign is an attempt to target the fansub community into actually supporting the series financially when the opportunity is available to them. The movie ends with special thanks to "All fansubs lovers who buy the official DVDs and who help support more creative works," and specifically gives no thanks to "downloaders/bootlegers who never buy the official DVDs." This is a very bold statement, but I completely understand where they are coming from.

This case suggest just how central the fan network is to the release strategies of anime publishers. Rather than trying to shut down the fans, the company is recognizing the ways that fans have appreciated the value of the series, helping to familiarize at least American otaku to the content, and encouraging them to put their money behind a cultural product that they have already enjoyed in an underground form. I will be curious to see how this turns out and would welcome any insights from readers of this blog who are more involved in anime than I am.

For anime and manga fans in the Boston area, I wanted to share details of the forthcoming Cool Japan conference being hosted by Ian Condry, a faculty member in the Foreign Languages and Literature section at MIT and an active contributor to the Comparative Media Studies Program. Here are some of the highlights of the event (taken from the press release). Events will be split between MIT and Harvard, reflecting the joint affiliation of the "Cool Japan" Project:

Wednesday, February 28

Anime Screening & Director's Talk: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

7pm, MIT Room 32-123 (enter at 32 Vassar St.)

Anime director Mamoru Hosoda will screen and discuss his feature film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (Toki o kakeru shôjo, 2006, Kadokawa/ Madhouse), which was awarded Best Animation by the Media Arts Festival 2007.

Thursday, March 1

Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization Book Launch and Dialogue with Author Ian Condry. 4-5:30pm, MIT Room 4-237 (enter at 77 Massachusetts Ave.)

MIT Associate Professor Ian Condry will discuss his recently published book with comments from local hip-hop scholars Thomas DeFrantz (MIT Associate Professor) and Murray Forman (Northeastern) and dialogue with audience.

Miss Monday in Concert. Tokyo hip-hop artist and local hip-hop sensations Akrobatik and Danielle Scott. Tickets: $8 Adv./$10 Door (18+). 9pm (doors open at 8:30pm), The Middle East, Upstairs (472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge).

Friday, March 2

Scholars Panel Discussions. "Love and War in Japanese Pop Culture." Harvard CGIS (South, Room 020 Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge).

"Visual" with Susan Napier (Tufts/ U Texas), author of Anime: From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle; Roland Kelts (U Tokyo), author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Invaded the US; and Adam Kern (Harvard), author of Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and Kibyoshi in Edo Japan. 1pm.

"Design" with Marcos Novac (University of California, Santa Barbara), artist, transarchitect, and designer; Kostas Terzidis (Harvard), author of Algorhithmic Architecture; and Larry Kubota (GLOCOM), filmmaker, Black Current Productions. 3pm.

Afro Samurai Screening and Discussion with Manga Artist Takashi Okazaki. Screening of one 25-minute episode from the new five-part animated series produced in Japan and starring Samuel L. Jackson. Discussion follows with Afro Samurai manga artist Takashi Okazaki, who drew the original cult comic that launched the project. 7pm, Gund

Hall Piper Auditorium (Harvard, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge). WARNING:

Mature content, not suitable for children.

Saturday, March 3

Scholars Panel Discussions. "Love and War in Japanese Pop Culture." MIT Stata Center Room 32-124 (32 Vassar St.).

"Culture" with Laura Miller (Loyola), author of Beauty Up: Exploring Japanese Beauty Aesthetics; Christine Yano (U Hawaii), author of Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and Nation in Japanese Popular Song; Ian Condry (MIT/Harvard), author of Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and Paths of Cultural Globalization. 1pm.

"Politics" with David Leheny (U Wisconsin), author of Think Global Fear Local: Sex, Violence, Anxiety in Contemporary Japan; Theodore J. Gilman (Harvard), author of No Miracles Here: Fighting Urban Decline in Japan and US; and Ueno Toshiya (Wako U), author of Urban Tribal Studies: A Sociology of Club and Party Cultures. 3pm.

For those of you who are not in the neighborhood, you may have to make due with Anime Pulse's extensive coverage of the previous Cool Japan conference. Here's hoping they provide a similar record of this event.

Four Eyed Monsters and Collaborative Curation

Attend the tale of plucky young independent filmmakers Susan Buice and Arin Crumley who have tapped every device available to them in the era of participatory culture to get their feature film, Four Eyed Monsters in front of an audience. Rather than waiting for the film to come out on DVD to offer director's extras, Buice and Crumley shot a compelling series of videos about the film's production and released them via iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube, where as of August 2006 they had been downloaded more than 600,000 times. As audience interest in the property grew, the team used their own blog/website to solicit support from their fans, promising that they would insure that the film got shown in any city where there were more than 150 requests. Indeed, they were able to use the online interest expressed in the film to court local exhibitors and convince them that there was an audience for Four Eyed Monsters in their community.

As Crumley explained in an interview with Indiewire:

Most theaters would normally avoid a project like ours because we don't have a distributor who would be marketing the film and getting people to show up. But because the audience of our video podcast is so enthusiastic about the project and because we have numbers and emails and zip codes for all of these people, we've been able to instill enough confidence in theaters to get the film booked.

As of today, the site has received more than 8000 requests from screenings. Fans can use their website to monitor requests and to help them to identify other potential viewers in their neighborhood. As Crumley explained,

We've learned that it's almost impossible to distribute your film to theaters the way the current system works, but their are loop holes, and they are building your own audience and then proving to theater owners you have that audience and that they are willing to show up to pay money to see your film that's something distributors don't have to do, but theaters would really benefit if they did.

The film and the web campaign behind it has drawn interest from the Sundance Channel which plans to broadcast it down the line but who used it to launch a series of screenings of independent films in Second Life, where once again it played to packed houses.

Based on their experiences, the filmmakers have started talking about what they call "collective curation" of content: a scenario where independent producers court audiences via the web, creating interest through clips and previews, and identifying where they have a strong enough following to justify the expense of renting theater space and shipping prints. They believe that such an approach will help other directors get their work before enthusiastic paying customers.

Seeking to support other filmmakers who want to follow in their footsteps, the Four Eyed Monsters team has posted a list of more than 600 movie theaters around the country which they think might be receptive to independent films and encouraging others to fill in relevant details.

The filmmakers will be sharing some of their experiences and perspectives to those attending the Beyond Broadcast conference this Saturday. As reported here earlier, this conference is being co-hosted by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet Law, and Yale's Information Society Project.

The Four Eyed Monsters team also play a prominent role in the newly released documentary on videoblogging which CMS graduate student (and Beyond Broadcasting organizer) Steve Schultz has helped to produce for the Project nml Exemplar Library. As I have mentioned here before, we are producing a series of web-based documentaries for use by schools and after school programs interested in getting young people involved in media production projects. I will be featuring more information about this documentary down the line but I wanted to call it to your attention in advance of the Beyond Broadcast conference since it provides such a useful overview of the implications of citizen-based media. This is the first of the documentaries produced under the supervision of our newly hired production coordinator, the talented Anna Van Someren.

From YouTube to YouNiversity

I wrote the following article for Chronicle of Higher Education and it seems to be stimulating some discussion out there. Since at some point it will be taken off the Chronicle's site, I figured I would exercise my rights as an author to republish it here. My one regret is that the Chronicle removed a reference to William Uricchio who is my co-director of the CMS program and whose contributions are key to the program's success. Consider these developments: At the end of last year, Time named "You" its Person of the Year "for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game." Earlier in the year, Newsweek described such sites as Flickr, MySpace, Craigslist, Digg, and YouTube as "putting the 'We' in the Web." The business "thought leader" Tim O'Reilly has termed these new social-network sites "Web 2.0," suggesting that they represent the next phase in the digital revolution -- no longer about the technologies per se but about the communities that have grown up around them. Some are even describing immersive online game worlds such as Second Life as the beginnings of Web 3.0. All of this talk reflects changes that cut across culture and commerce, technology and social organization.

Over the past few years, we have also seen a series of books (both journalistic and academic) that analyze and interpret these new configurations of media power. In his recent book The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler describes the reconfiguration of power and knowledge that occurs from the ever more complex interplay between commercial, public, educational, nonprofit, and amateur media producers. Grant McCracken's Plenitude talks about the "generativeness" of this cultural churn. Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) shows how these shifts are giving rise to niche media markets, and Thomas W. Malone (The Future of Work) analyzes how such changes are reshaping the management of major companies. My own book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, describes a world where every story, image, sound, brand, and relationship plays itself out across the widest possible array of media platforms, and where the flow of media content is shaped as much by decisions made in teenagers' bedrooms as it is by decisions made in corporate boardrooms.

These writers come from very different disciplinary perspectives -- business, law, anthropology, and cultural studies -- and they write in very different styles. We can't really call this work an intellectual movement: Most of us didn't know of one another's existence until our books started to hit the shelves. Yet taken together, these books can be read as a paradigm shift in our understanding of media, culture, and society. This work embodies an ecological perspective on media, one that refuses to concentrate on only one medium at a time but insists that we take it all in at once and try to understand how different layers of media production affect one another. As such, these books represent a new route around the ideological and methodological impasses between political economy (with its focus on media concentration) and cultural studies (with its focus on resistant audiences). And these books represent a new way of thinking about how power operates within an informational economy, describing how media shifts are changing education, politics, religion, business, and the press.

Many of these books share the insight that a networked culture is enabling a new form of bottom-up power, as diverse groups of dispersed people pool their expertise and confront problems that are much more complex than they could handle individually. They are able to do so because of the ways that new media platforms support the emergence of temporary social networks that exist only as long as they are needed to face specific challenges or respond to the immediate needs of their members. Witness, for example, the coalition of diverse ideological interests that came together last year to fight for the principle of network neutrality on the Web.

The science-fiction writer and Internet activist Cory Doctorow has called such groups "adhocracies." An adhocracy is a form of social and political organization with few fixed structures or established relationships between players and with minimum hierarchy and maximum diversity. In other words, an adhocracy is more or less the polar opposite of the contemporary university (which preserves often rigid borders between disciplines and departments and even constructs a series of legal obstacles that make it difficult to collaborate even within the same organization). Now try to imagine what would happen if academic departments operated more like YouTube or Wikipedia, allowing for the rapid deployment of scattered expertise and the dynamic reconfiguration of fields. Let's call this new form of academic unit a "YouNiversity."

How might media studies, the field most committed to mapping these changes as they affect modern life, be taught in a YouNiversity?

First, media studies needs to become comparative, teaching critics to think across multiple media systems and teaching media makers to produce across multiple media systems. The modern university has inherited a set of fields and disciplines structured around individual media -- photography, cinema, digital culture, literature, theater, and painting are studied in different departments using different disciplinary perspectives. Programs have taken shape through an additive logic (with members of each new generation fighting for the right to study the new medium that affects their lives the most). For a long time, my institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had a program in film and media studies, a redundant term that strikes me as the rough equivalent of calling the English department the books-and-literature department. For a long time at MIT, books about film were in the architecture library, and those on television were in the humanities library -- unless they were about gender, in which case they were in the women's-studies library, or they took a Marxist perspective, in which case they were in the economics library. Such fragmentation does a disservice to students, so that when we ask journalism students to decide whether they want to go into print or broadcasting, or when we ask business students to choose between marketing, advertising, or public relations, we don't reflect the integrated contexts within which media are produced, marketed, and consumed.

A conceptual shift took place eight years ago at MIT when the program in film and media studies recast itself as the program in comparative media studies -- inspired in part by the models of comparative literature and comparative religion. The word "comparative" serves multiple functions for the program, encouraging faculty members to think and teach across different media, historical periods, national borders, and disciplinary boundaries, and to bridge the divide between theory and practice as well as that separating academic life from other institutions also confronting profound media change.

This comparative approach has allowed the program to respond more fully to the needs of students with different career goals, disciplinary backgrounds, and professional experiences. By design, about a third of our master's students will go into Ph.D. programs and pursue careers in higher education; the rest will take jobs as advertising executives, game designers, educational-technology specialists, policy makers, museum curators, and journalists. Many are returning to graduate school after the first phases of their careers, coming with a new urgency and determination to master the "big picture" issues shaping the spaces where they have worked.

To educate such students, we don't so much need a faculty as we need an intellectual network. The program has a large pool of loosely affiliated faculty members who participate in an ad hoc manner depending on the needs and interests of individual students: Sometimes they may contribute nothing to the program for several years and then get drawn into a research or thesis project that requires their particular expertise. Our students' thesis advisers come not only from other universities around the world but also from industry; they include Bollywood choreographers, game designers, soap-opera writers, and journalists. We encourage our students to network broadly and draw on the best thinking about their topic, wherever they can find it.

Second, media studies needs to reflect the ways that the contemporary media landscape is blurring the lines between media consumption and production, between making media and thinking about media. A recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57 percent of teens online have created their own media content. As our culture becomes more participatory, these young people are creating their own blogs and podcasts; they are recording their lives on LiveJournal and developing their own profiles on MySpace; they are producing their own YouTube videos and Flickr photos; they are writing and posting fan fiction or contributing to Wikipedia; they are mashing up music and modding games. Much as engineering students learn by taking apart machines and putting them back together, many of these teens learned how media work by taking their culture apart and remixing it.

In such a world, the structural and historical schisms separating media production and critical-studies classes no longer seem relevant. Students around the country are pushing to translate their analytic insights about media into some form of media production. And they are correctly arguing that you cannot really understand how these new media work if you don't use them yourself. Integrating theory and practice won't be simple. Some students in the entering classes in the program in comparative media studies have had little or no access to digital tools, and others have been designing their own computer games since elementary school. Even among those who have media-production experience, they have worked with very different production tools or produced very different forms of media content in very different contexts.

Responding to these wildly divergent backgrounds and expectations requires us to constantly redesign and renegotiate course expectations as we try to give students what they need to push themselves to the next level of personal and professional development. We have encouraged faculty members to incorporate production opportunities in their courses so that students in a children's-media class, for example, are asked to apply the theories they have learned to the design of an artifact for a child (medium unspecified), then write a paper explaining the assumptions behind their design choices. We may have students composing their own children's books, building and programming their own interactive toys, shooting photo essays, producing pilots for children's shows, or designing simple video games or Web sites.

Before we started our master's program, I went on the road to talk with representatives of more than 50 companies and organizations. They told me that they value the flexibility, creativity, and social and cultural insights liberal-arts majors bring to their operations. They also shared a devastating list of concerns -- liberal-arts students fall behind other majors in terms of teamwork, leadership, project completion, and problem solving. In other words, they were describing the gap between academic fields focused on fostering autonomous learners and professional contexts demanding continuing collaborations. Those desired skills were regularly fostered in other disciplines that have laboratory-based cultures that test new theories and research findings through real-world applications. At a university with strong traditions of applied physics or applied mathematics, we needed to embrace the ideal of applied humanities. And as a result, we have created a context where our students put their social and cultural knowledge to work through real-world applications such as designing educational games, developing media-literacy materials, or consulting with media companies about consumer relations.

Third, media studies needs to respond to the enormous hunger for public knowledge about our present moment of profound and persistent media change. Given this context, it is nothing short of criminal that so much of contemporary media theory and analysis remains locked away in an academic ghetto, cut off from larger conversations. Media scholars have much to contribute to -- and much to learn from -- the discussions occurring among designers, industry leaders, policy makers, artists, activists, journalists, and educators about the direction of our culture.

At such a moment, we need to move beyond preparing our students for future roles as media scholars, wrapped up in their own disciplinary discourses, and instead encourage them to acquire skills and experiences as public intellectuals, sharing their insights with a larger public from wherever they happen to be situated. They need to be taught how to translate the often challenging formulations of academic theory into a more public discourse.

Academic programs are only starting to explore how they might deploy these new media platforms -- blogs and podcasts especially -- to expand the visibility of their research and scholarship. Consider, for example, the case of Flow, an online journal edited at the University of Texas at Austin. Flow brings together leading media scholars from around the world to write short, accessible, and timely responses to contemporary media developments: In contrast with the increasingly sluggish timetable of academic publishing, which makes any meaningful response to the changing media environment almost impossible, a new issue of Flow appears every two weeks.

Blogs represent a powerful tool for engaging in these larger public conversations. At my university, we noticed that a growing number of students were developing blogs focused on their thesis research. Many of them were making valuable professional contacts; some had developed real visibility while working on their master's degrees; and a few received high-level job offers based on the professional connections they made on their blogs. Blogging has also deepened their research, providing feedback on their arguments, connecting them to previously unknown authorities, and pushing them forward in ways that no thesis committee could match. Now all of our research teams are blogging not only about their own work but also about key developments in their fields. We have redesigned the program's home page, allowing feeds from these blogs to regularly update our content and capture more of the continuing conversations in and around our program. We have also started offering regular podcasts of our departmental colloquia and are experimenting with various forms of remote access to our conferences and other events.

We make a mistake, though, if we understand such efforts purely in terms of distance learning or community outreach, as if all expertise resides within universities and needs simply to be transmitted to the world. Rather, we should see these efforts as opportunities for us to learn from other sectors equally committed to mapping and mastering the current media change.

Each media-studies program will need to reinvent itself to reflect the specifics of its institutional setting and existing resources, and what works today will need to be rethought tomorrow as we deal with further shifts in the information landscape. That's the whole point of an adhocracy: It's built to tap current opportunities, but, like ice sculpture, it isn't made to last. The modern university should work not by defining fields of study but by removing obstacles so that knowledge can circulate and be reconfigured in new ways. For media studies, that means taking down walls that separate the study of different media, that block off full collaboration between students, that make it difficult to combine theory and practice, and that isolate academic research from the larger public conversations about media change.

Until we make these changes, the best thinking (whether evaluated in terms of process or outcome) is likely to take place outside academic institutions -- through the informal social organizations that are emerging on the Web. We may or may not see the emergence of YouNiversities, but YouTube already exists. And its participants are learning plenty about how media power operates in a networked society.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

The other day, I had a discussion of the politics of fear with Doug Thomas (USC), Carrie James (Harvard), and Larry Johnson (The New Media Consortium) as part of a gathering of MacArthur foundation grantees working on their Youth and Digital Learning Initiative. I was pretty happy with some of the ideas that emerged from that conversation so I thought I would share them with my readers. Let's start with an example of how the politics of fear works. Consider, for example, the case of a recently proposed piece of legislation here in Massachusetts which would regulate violent video games as in effect a form of pornography. Here's how GamePolitics describes the legislation:

The proposed legislation, which does not yet have a primary sponsor, would block underage buyers from purchasing any game which:

* depicts violence in a manner patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community, so as to appeal predominantly to the morbid interest in violence of minors

* is patently contrary to prevailing standards of adults in the county where the offense was committed as to suitable material for such minors

* and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.

The bill in question was written by Jack Thompson, who has sought similarly legislation around the country and has consistently been overturned by court decisions. Interestingly enough, the most outspoken backer of this law is none other than Boston Mayor Thomas Menino -- who is, incidentally, the same local politician who is responsible for the city's gross over-reaction to the Aqua Hunger Force signs the other week. I find myself pondering why we can't just tell people that Menino is someone who has demonstrated already that he is so out of touch with popular culture that he can't tell the difference between a cartoon character and a bomb and that he is someone who is afraid of his own shadow (or more accurately, who understands the political advantages to be gained by fostering a climate of fear). Given the current logic of the way our fear-based politics functions, we might expect them to ban cartoon characters on airplanes and have our children line up to be searched for coloring books and stuffed toys before they can pass through security!

Or consider the case of the late and unlamented Deleting Online Predators Act which would have prohibited school and public libraries which receive federal funds from allowing patrons to access social network and blogging software. Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) has introduced a new piece of legislation, the so-called Protecting Children in the 21st Century act, which would incorporate and expand upon many of the more noxious features of the original DOPA. I am sure we will be talking about this more in the months ahead. It would seem to one of the clear hallmarks of the politics of fear is the use of the term, "protection" or "protecting" in the name of the legislation.

In both cases, these bills, which are based on a fundamentally wrong-headed understanding of the issues they are designed to address, attracted or are likely to attract significant levels of bipartisan support. Indeed, in a highly partisan political climate, these kind of bills may be the only pieces of legislation which pass with little or no debate and with overwhelming support.

Why? Well, consider what it would mean to be opposed to a bill which promised to protect young people from online predators. And indeed, even if you decided to oppose such a bill, you either would have to deny that the problem existed (which would leave you to be labeled as hopelessly out of touch with the darker side of reality since these bills usually feed on at least some high profile tragedies or some sensationalized news report) or you would have to suggest the problem is not as bad as has been claimed (in which case your acknowledgment of the problem will be used as evidence of how wide spread the concern being addressed really is.) So, the politics of fear works because the costs of opposing the child protection acts are simply too high, especially in an era where political leaders are permanently raising money and campaigning for re-election.

The politics of fear also works because the benefits of a fear-based politics are so high. Basically, such legislation enjoys bipartisan support because it allows culturally conservative Republicans to appeal to their base and liberal Democrats to show their independence from theirs. Why do Joseph Lieberman and Hillary Clinton line up behind pretty much any piece of legislation which would restrict free expression in the name of protecting young people? Because it allows them to adopt positions which make them see "moderate" and appeal to so-called "security moms" without really crossing any core constituency. There would be costs in, say, opposing abortion but there is no real cost in trying to regulate youth access to digital technology.

The politics of fear works because it serves the interest of the news media in two ways: First, the mass media are feeling the erosion of their consumer base to digital media. If they can convince parents that it is unsafe to allow their sons and daughters to go online or play video games, they may slow the erosion. They have little to fear from alienating those young viewers further since they are already defecting in great numbers and essentially mass media news speaks to an older consumer base. Second, fear-based coverage leaves us glued to the set, seeking out more information. We are doomed to go from one crisis to another, to have Anna Nicole Smith's death and custody battle push Barack Obama's announcement for the presidency off the lead slot on CNN, because fear and outrage trumps hope everytime.

Justine Cassell and I have been talking some recently about the gender dimensions of this fear based politics. Specifically, the ways that there have been recurring efforts throughout modern history to capitalized on the perceived sexual threat young women face from any new media and on the perceived threat of violence and aggression which surround young men's relations to any emerging technology. In other words, we are consistently being taught to fear for our daughters and to be afraid of our sons. This fear based politics plays an important role in normalizing and regulating gender relations.

So what do we do about it?

We need to stigmatize the politics of fear. We need to call it what it is -- not protection but fear mongering. We need to construct a counter-narrative in which fear-based politics is itself a threat to our families because it locks our young people out of access to knowledge, skills, and experience which they need to learn and grow and in many cases, because it prevents those kids who are most at risk from access to information that they need to pursue good jobs and educational opportunities in the future. Such bills are dangerous both because they undercut core constitutional rights and because they distract us from locating real solutions to the "problems" that they are allegedly designed to combat. DOPA and its sequel will do nothing about actual child molestation other than to leave children even more vulnerable because they have to access these social networking sites outside of schools and public libraries. The legislation that goes after violent video games will do nothing to address the actual causes of violence in the lives of American teens.

Right now, we are tending to go after the politics of fear with facts. Indeed, we do need facts, not to mention a more reasoned perspective (and that is going to be one of the real values of the work the MacArthur foundation is doing in the area of youth and digital learning) but as a range of recent progressive writers (George Lakov, Steve Duncombe, Tom Frank) have suggested, we also need to think about how we frame the issues, the kinds of stories we deploy to explain those facts, the kind of language we use to define the debate, and the kinds of fantasies we mobilize on the part of our supporters.

We need to define the issues in ways that appeal across party lines. The politics of fear is not an ideological issue -- at least not one which can be defined along Liberal/Conservative lines. Just as many "Liberal" Democrats line up to support attempts to regulate free expression and association or restrict privacy in the name of combating fear, there are libertarians on both the left and the right who would oppose those regulatory efforts and who would be willing to stand up against the moral blackmail which underlies them. In a context where some Liberal Democrats back such legislation, any campaign which assumes conservatives are the bad guys and progressives the righteous ones is doomed to fail, simply fracturing the Left without mobilizing potential supporters on the right.

We need to be able to translate our insights and information, our alternative perspective, into concrete advice which can help parents and teachers to address the concerns that are currently being addressed only by those who are advancing the moral panic. Right now, most writing about media for parents starts from assumption that media is a social problem and that the best form of parenting is to limit if not prohibit outright any and all access to media. We need to develop alternative approaches to parenting that translate our understanding of the value of digital media for children and youth into specific principles and actions which allow parents to maximize benefits and minimize risks and which address the kinds of fears that lead them open to regulatory solutions.

Might we see this anti-fear politics as something like the Take Back the Night movement on American college campuses? Yes and No. In some ways, Take Back the Night is an empowerment movement: participants refuse to live in fear; they seek to reclaim the streets by collectively confronting the risks and by learning skills that might allow them to feel greater control over their own situation. In some ways, the Take Back the Night movement depends on the cultivation of fear -- creating a sense of victimization which can fuel the protest in the first place. We need to learn the right lessons here.

A key element of the campaign against fear would be the need to create a space where young people could speak about their own experiences with digital media and be taken seriously on their own terms. This is going to be hard to pull off because even well meaning groups have a tendency to patronize or suppress aspects of youth expression. In Convergence Culture, I raised the question of whether free speech advocates in the Muggles for Harry Potter campaign may have promoted the right of young people to read J.K. Rowling's books at the expense of forcing them to recant their fantasy lives. Young person after young person posted messages explaining that they knew that the world of Hogwarts was purely fantasy and that it had no meaningful connection to their everyday lives. Something similar happens when gamers try to defend their relationship to violent video games: they end up arguing that Grand Theft Auto is "only a game" and that it doesn't have any influence on their everyday lives. Surely, there needs to be a space for meaningful fantasy in our discourse about the right of people to participate in their culture.

One of the ways that a politics of fear works is by convincing us that we have to act because everyone is afraid. Yet, many of us are not quite as frightened as the political leaders want us to believe. Perhaps one way forward would be to produce a fear index that functioned more or less in the opposite way that the terror index currently works. The terror index amplifies the perception of risk in order to justify government regulation. A fear index might demonstrate that there is less fear in our culture and thus allow us to rally behind the idea of less government regulation over our lives.

At the end of the day, we need to convince more Americans that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

The Future of Television (Circa 1999)

Bill Densmore of Clickshare recently shared with me the text of an e-mail I had sent him in May 1999 describing what I saw as one scenario for the future of digital culture. I decided I wanted to share it with you to spark a conversation about how far we have gone towards realizing some of the key elements of this scenario as well as how far we have yet to go on other fronts. (the reference points to The X-Files and My So-Called Life give you some sense of the time when this was written.) I was responding to an essay he had written about micropayments and the struggle to insure the diversity of digital culture. Everything from here is part of the original text:

My own research has centrally concerned the ways that popular audiences consume and create value from the resources provided them by the mass media. As I suggested yesterday, I don't find the lowest common denominator model helpful for thinking about the success of most popular entertainment. Rather, I see the popular audience composed of a coalition of different

audience interests who may share certain programs, films, stories in common but who get fundamentally different things from them and who interact with them in different ways. The most creative producers understand this now, while the broadcasting paradigm helps to mask the degree of diversity and fragmentation of the contemporary media audience. It is clearer when we go on line and survey the range of web sites constructed around a particular series or parse through the flame wars on fan discussion lists which occur when radically different reading publics are brought together.

A second focus of my research concerns what I call "cultural convergence," which refers to the social and cultural changes in how we relate to media content in our everyday life that help prepare the way and establish the market viability of technological convergence. When we try to understand what is happening in our culture, we see two things: a growing desire to participate

more fully in our media culture -- not just as passive consumers but active transformers of media content -- and a growing tendency to tighten corporate control over intellectual property law. This is resulting in a crackdown on fan web sites, MP3 files, etc. and thus a closing off of the cultural participation encouraged by the web.

Now, here's what I imagine occurring when we add something like your clickshare to the mix -- along with dramatic improvements in the delivery technology for digital media:

1)All television content becomes available via some form of webtv, including past episodes. If I want to join a series midprogress, I can go back and watch earlier episodes for a reasonable rate with micropayments as the means of exchange between me and the television producers.

2)Television series will be annotated to link back to relevant back story information. If I am watching X FILES and there is reference made to Muldar's sister and her disappearance, I can be offered the chance to see those earlier scenes, again at a modest price. This will enable even more elaborate form of serialization and backstories in American television, a tendency that has grown in the two decades since the introduction of the VCR.

3) Fan websites will play an important role in the cultural economy, if they are allowed to function not unlike the Amazon Associates program. Fan sites will comment on or annotate the aired episodes, thus establishing reasons why various kinds of viewers might want to see them for the first time or watch them again. They can link back to the producer's sites where the

episodes can be downloaded for a viewing fee and the producers will in turn provide an incentive to the fans for creating sites which essentially help market their products. At the same time, fans should be allowed freedom to discuss, comment, and appropriate the material in any way they want since doing so helps to establish niche market value for the content.

4)Certain series may debut on network and then move rather rapidly to the web where their continued support will come from viewers paying to watch them. This will be attractive in cases -- such as MY SO-CALLED LIFE -- where a series attracts an intense following in a definable demographic group but does not register a broad-enough viewership to be powerful according to the Nelson Ratings measurement. The ability to collect payments on a per view basis for a broad audience will enable continued production of such series assuming price scale can be resolved.

5)New networks may emerge which reflect under-served segments of the population that are geographically dispersed and therefore couldn't be addressed by existing broadcast and cable structures. Examples might include various language groups that constitute immigrant populations or the gay and lesbian community. Here, original programming is produced and made available for a modest pay-per-view fee.

6)International circulation of media product is facilitated. We can imagine viewer-supported networks emerging for British/Australian comedy or Japanese Anime for example, which will enable these products fair access to the American market. It will be possible to access television without regard to its original point of origin. Again, this depends on some structure that allows us to pay for what we watch at a modest enough scale to make this attractive to the average viewer on a regular basis.

The micropayment structure would seem to offer the best basis for this model, which leads us step by step towards a more diverse media culture that more fully reflects the range of viewer taste and interest. It will create new basis for profits for the entertainment industry while also enabling more popular access to media content. What is needed is a structure which can lower the per unit cost (and thus broaden the potential base of viewership), can be collected quickly and efficiently, and can be distributed to a range of different media producers as opposed to create narrow gateway companies that will once again determine what we can and cannot see based on broadcast models of the mass audience.