The Future Isn't What It Used to Be: An Interview with Comics Creator Dean Motter

Later today, I am flying to Berlin where I will be speaking at a conference on "Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence." The conference will include talks on comics creators from around the world whose work has been particularly shaped by their conception of the city. My talk will center on the concept of retrofuturism and the works of Dean Motter (Mister X, Terminal City, Electropolis). I hope to be reporting on the conference in the blog next week but for those of you who are interested in what I mean by retrofuturism, you should check out this column I wrote for Technology Review a few years back, discussing the topic in relation to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Art Spigelman's In the Shadow of No Towers. Basically, Retrofuturism refers to a subgenre of science fiction which seeks to revisit older imaginings of the future. It is particularly fascinated with the iconography of the future city as seen, say, at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, on the cover of old science fiction and popular science magazines, in Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and so forth.

As I was getting ready to write my talk, I reached out to Dean Motter to see if he would be open to being interviewed (as part of my research and for the blog). What follows is the exchange, conducted over the past week or so, via e-mail. I have long been a fan of Motter's comics, which manage to be forward-thinking in their use of the comics medium and retro-thinking in their visual style, narrative elements, and themes. Mister X, which featured early artwork from the Hernandez Brothers and Seth, among many other collaborators, became one of the most influential American comics of the 1980s. His subsequent work has continued to explore the themes of that earlier work, pushing them in new directions, and personally, I think his exploration of what he prefers to call "antique futurism" reaches its peak in Terminal City, my favorite of the three series he has developed around this theme.

All three books, though, deal with the idea of a fallen utopia -- a great city, built with futurist intentions, which has stiffled in the face of social and cultural change, never achieving its full potential, and in fact, becoming deeply destructive to the people who live there. In this way, he is able to read the iconography of the technological utopians, which shaped early science fiction, through the lens of its critics, who have been influential in more recent work within the genre.

As I have dug more deeply into Motter's background, I quickly became interested in the fact that he was a student and intellectual ally of Marshall McLuhan, a connection which I still hope to explore more deeply when I turn my conference talk into a published essay. Motter has also worked extensively in publishing (where he helped to protect the literary legacy of some of science fiction's early masters) and in the design of record covers. In the following interview, I focus primarily on his images of the city but it also provides a good introduction to some of the central concerns in his comics career.

I was intrigued to read in the bio at the back of Terminal City that you "studied at Marshall McLuhan's Institute for Culture and Technology." Did you work directly with McLuhan or was this after his death? What drew you there to study in the first place?

I studied MEDIA under his son (and ghost-writer) Eric, while enrolled in a progressive art and media course at Fanshawe College in London. After I graduated I moved to Toronto and did continue to work with Eric, as well as his father. I was considered the resident expert on comics art the institute, consulted in a modest way on his final book The Laws of the Media, and was an invited participant in many, many seminars. McLuhan loved talking about comic art and its relation to iconics. (He loved Pogo, L'il Abner, Superman and always compared them to the Altamira Cave drawings, the stained-glass designs of St, George & the Dragon, and the illuminated manuscripts of medieval monks. It always made some kind of sense to those of us who listened. And still does.) He was a wonderful avuncular acquaintance and mentor of enormous influence.

What influence do you think McLuhan's ideas have had on your later work?

At his most popular, McLuhan's detractors (and they were everywhere- from faux-intellectuals like Walter Cronkite to his fellow Canuck Pierre Berton) were many and obstreperous--and all proven wrong today. They scoffed at his ideas as 'bad science-fiction.' His ideas simply could NOT be credible! (hhmph.) Imagine a world of electronic interactive media, where phones and television had merged into a seamless media, where every household had a terminal that connected them to some kind of 'world wide network.' Crackpot ideas. Could his critics have been more unimaginative? Marshall represented the worst low-brow 'Buck Rogers' stuff to the effetes who were thinking so last-century. Imagine! An electronic society where any citizen could one day broadcast their own videos to nearly anywhere in the world in some kind of crazy 'You-Tube 'venue.'. Where the printed version of the W.R. Hearst-style newspaper would shrivel into near impotence. Where the 'Global Village' (Marshall's own term!) was considered frivolous. Cronkite and Berton have been proven the gigantic ignoramae, Simply because they were supercilious stuffed -shirts. Not because they weren't informed.

I digress. I try to recast some of his notions in the vernacular of the technology- or the imagined technology of the 50s- when he first wrote The Mechanical Bride and Understanding Media. In the prescient words of Tom Wolfe back in the 70s - "What if he's Right?"

Oh, Tom....

Vintage science fiction authors and works have been a recurring theme across your work in a number of media -- going back to the comics you helped to produce for Andromeda comics, which adapted the works of Arthur C. Clarke and A.E. van Vogt. and continuing through your role as Editorial Art Director at Byron Preiss Visual Publications where you worked with Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. What connections do you see between this work with classic science fiction authors and texts and the themes that emerged through Mister X, Terminal City, and Electropolis?

Working 0n Andromeda and more importantly at Byron Preiss Visual Publications with so many great authors, especially Asimov, Bradbury and Ellison gave me a deep appreciation of how well-written science fiction could be 'exploited' by the then largely adolescent-male oriented media. At Byron's I also art-directed many great artists (Wayne Barlowe, Ralph McQuarrie, Matt Wagner, Dave Gibbons, Rian Hughes, David Lloyd, the list is almost endless, and I even had the chance to work with Eisner and Kurtzman. It was akin, it its own way, to sitting at McLuhan's feet and learning from true visionaries. )

You have coined the phrase, "antique futurism" to refer to the ways you base your fictional worlds on the utopian visions of the future from the mid-twentieth century American imagination. Can you explain what you mean by this phrase and how it relates to your work?

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, our society has been predicting the cultural future via the machine. Whether in gigantic architectural visions such as the World Fairs, or the near-whimsical Popular Science covers, dreams of flying cars, household robotic servants, or jet packs. These visions, while engineering achievements of varying degrees of success and accuracy, were often oblivious as to how the culture would change. McLuhan (as well as the fictions of Orwell, Huxley and H.G. Wells) considered what would happen to humanity itself, not simply the evolution or devolution of our artifacts. The same kind of mystery that the ancient Egyptians pose for us would certainly puzzle our descendants if civilization came to a sudden stop as it seems to have done for eons. So 'antique futurism' became my way of having some fun, while raising the questions.

What is it about these particular visions of the future which have so captured your imagination? What relevance do you see these visions having for our present society?

It's a kind of funhouse mirror of our persistent state of naivete when it comes to technology. Our blind faith in the idea that technology can act as a cure-all? I love how that concept is reflected the impossible Rube Goldberg contraptions and hallucinogenic reversals that have bent the standard laws of physics. Be it Gates & Jobs or Nikola Tesla.

How would you characterize the attitude your works take to those earlier visions of tomorrow -- nostalgic, ironic, campy, or some combination of all three?

Definitely the combination. Each approach has different nuances- different modes of entertainment. Some dramatically different from the others. German expressionist film, the 50's version of the 'house of tomorrow combined with a hard-boiled gumshoe pastiche-VERY different genres, but very compatible. In my mind, anyway. While exploring 'vintage sources' I have begun to think anything is game. Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre had the best take on it; in his introduction to Terminal City -- A city being imagined in the 30s, built in the 40s and stalled somewhere in the 50s. I'd add that is was forlornly recalled in the 80s ('dreamed in other men's bodies, I think he said'.)

Mister X (1984) appears at about the same time as Mirrorshades:The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) which included William Gibsons' "The Gernsback Continuium" and Rudy Rucker's "Tales of Houdini," both of which evoke themes I associate

with your comics. It is also telling that the phrase, "retro-futurism" that is often used to describe your work was coined by art critic Lloyd Dunn in 1983. Was there something in the air at the time which was leading to this reconsideration of "yesterday's tomorrows"? Is all this just a product of the anticipation that surrounded the year, 1984?

Of course, for me, there was approach of 1984, also the millennium looming on the horizon. But also it was the rise of Punk Rock and New Wave pop culture, the sudden ubiquity of synthesizers in music, 'theoretically' giving a single musician or two the power of an orchestra, the artistic mastery of technology and a non-chaotic, almost 'Aryan' control over their art (as opposed to the found art of Warhol, or action paintings of Pollock a few years earlier.) Very 'futuristic'-- combined with the Orwellian proletariat underpinnings of Punk Rock. It was an exciting time. Certainly Gibson and Rucker were operating in a milieu I was reading (Gibson's. The Differential Engine is one of my very favorite novels of all time. But J.G. Ballard, Thomas Berger and Harlan Ellison remain my literary patron saints. )

Some critics have linked your particular brand of "antique futurism" to the images of futuristic cities found in François Schuiten's Les Cités Obscures. What relationship, if any, do you see between Schuiten's future cities and your own work?

We both share a vision of gigantic, somehow old-fashioned urban landscapes populated by cold-hearted antagonists/protagonists- many 'temporally' disadvantaged'. That's obvious- we both derive it, I believe from Metropolis, and Hugh Ferris's drawings as well as newsreels of New York's golden age of skyscraper construction in the early part of the 20th century. I wasn't familiar with Schuiten's work until I was well into the creation of Mister X. His exposure at that time was minimal, maybe in the pages of Heavy Metal (Metal Hurlant) meaning his work was eclipsed at the time by their superstar, Moebius.

The visual style of Mister X becomes increasing abstract, stylized, and disorienting as the series continued. Is this growing abstraction a reflection of the mental state of the characters? Of the increased sophistication of readers now trained to read your book? Of the differences between the succession of the artists you were working with?

Again it was that combination of factors. Once Mister X went from being primarily a burlesque of a 'gangster crime story'- to a tale about existential madness, we could get away with more abstractions- It hit its peak with Seth's final issue (my penultimate issue- no. 13) where he had refined his style into a very elegant 'retro' look. The issue 14 finale was concocted with lackluster fill-in art (and my admittedly uninspired script.)- but it was SO unsatisfying I went back and did REDUX version myself a couple years back for the ibooks anthology - cribbing shamelessly from the Hernandez Bros, Rivoche, and Seth (as well as adding as much of my personal style I could fit)-- just to wrap it up properly- mind you some decades late - (but it is also available in a solo edition at www.lulu.com)

There are some very consistent elements in your conception of the city that run across the books, despite or perhaps because of the shifts in the visual styles with which these cities get represented. You have worked with artists who have their own distinctive approaches, many of whom share your interests with earlier graphic styles and conventions. How were you able to maintain such a consistent set of images across all of these collaborations? Can you describe something of the design process that went into the development of these cities?

Well, this is largely a question of 'chemistry' I have been lucky to have found simpatico collaborators. But I have always been careful to supply reference and inspiration when I had a particular vision in mind. As you can imagine I have a substantial library of such imagery, But usually my friends were already in possession of the source material and we enjoyed 'fanboy' discussions of Loewy, Hood, Corrbussier, Tesla, etc.

What similarities and differences do you see in the key cities that run through your works -- Radiant City, Electra City and Terminal City? You portray each of them as cities that have fallen short of their utopian beginnings, yet they seem to have fallen for somewhat different reasons. What draws you to this image of the fallen utopia?

It's a symbolic thing I suppose. The idea of a huge city that has seen better days isn't very 'realistic.' Except in antiquity. Modern cities are organic, evolving and constantly being re-invented. But often we can't say the same thing about the artistic culture.

Aesthetic values wax and wane. There are obvious peaks and valleys, and sometimes complete expirations. The same can't be said for the physical world we have constructed to live in. It remains, even if its inspirations fade from memory. "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair..." quotes Shelley in Ozymandias.

In one panel of Terminal City, you jokingly success that these cities co-exist in the same reality as Metropolis or Gotham City. What similarities or differences do you see in these different conceptions of cities in comics?

Very little can be said about cities in comics that I read in my youth.. There were a few exceptions. McKay, Williamson, Wood, Kirby, Eisner...until recently. It was all pretty generic, and illustrators rarely did more than draw boxes with windows. Architecture was boring to draw when compared to super-heroes, villains and monsters. Anatomy was a difficult enough to master- but perspective! That involved math, geometry. Schoolroom stuff, So only those with a native talent made a mark. Even Gotham City's architectural characteristics didn't take on any personality until after Mister Xcame out.

Tim Burton and art director Anton Furst told me that there were Mister X comics scattered all over the art department when I visited the set of the first Batman film. And I have to confess that as I wandered the studio with DC staff, the sets looked AWFULLY familiar. And I did get some furtive glances from my tour-mates.

When you draw on the iconography of the 1939 World's Fair, of Just Imagine and Things to Come, of Alex Raymond, you also evoke the social vision behind those design principles which often had to do with central planning, social engineering, and technocratic policies. I see your idea of "psychetecture" and its corruptions as a kind of critique of some of those earlier ideas that cities could be designed and human beings engineered. I also see Mister X as in some ways a response to Ayn Rand's own critique of those ideas in The Fountainhead. To what degree are you using the collapse of these utopian cities as a critique of the political, economic, and social philosophies which informed the works of the 1930s and 1940s that inspired them?

The great dream between the wars that mechanization could solve society's ills. War machines had after all won us the Great War. But I suppose it was the image of Hindenburg, and The War of the Worlds broadcast that caused the modern American culture to begin to lose their optimism --and then there was the Great Depression- We have never completely abandoned the central planning model. A concept our enemy in the following war championed to the extreme.

McLuhan CONSTANTLY warned that de-centralization was inevitable in the electric age. (Rhetorical question-- just where is the server for the site this interview is posted on? I'd be surprised if its downtown ANYWHERE. USA.)

Social historians have noted that at the 1939 Worlds Fair, the utopian images of Futurama and of the experimental architecture co-existed with a series of sideshow attractions which could not have been more earthy in their inspirations. Throughout your books, you seem as fascinated with those side show entrepreneurs and the night clubs of the era as you are with the utopian visionaries. Can you speak to the role that carnival showman, daredevils, boxers, and nightclub performers play in your stories?

That era of entertainment was rich with spectacle. Live public exhibition isn't much these days- With TV and the internet now doing most of the work. Arena shows and NASCAR are commonplace. But in the early part of the 20th century, show business was big, clumsy and dangerous (in the pre-Disneyland era,) and pretty 'rustic' (in terms of finish.) It was exotic, and not always predictable (Chris Angel notwithstanding.) The industry simply makes it easier and safer today.

There is a lesser parallel in my own business- when I was doing album cover design the craftsmanship was at once delicate and brutal. Emulsion stripping, airbrushing with toxic pigments, dye-transfer prints with the masking, burning, dodging, press-type (Letraset)- it was all about illusion, -creating the impression of masterful printmakers. It was simulation- ledger-main. All of that technology- now primitive and quaint- obsolete! It was replaced, just as McLuhan had predicted 30 years back. To pure scorn! It was all replaced with desktop publishing technology- accessible to amateurs and experts alike. The day of the self-trained, dedicated artisan had passed in a mere couple decades. A tiny bit earlier than McLuhan had forecasted.

If you draw on visual references to earlier constructions of the world of tomorrow, you also borrow stock characters and plots from pulp fiction and early comics across your books. Can you speak about the ways your characters and plots rework elements from the pulps or from Dick Tracy?

This was often more for my own amusement. These extraordinary environs needed to be populated by familiar, likeable characters. Archetypal, even cliché. This also kept the stories from becoming too grim. Strictly fun. McLuhan had something to say on such matters. From Cliche to Archtype remains one of the most useful reference books in my library.

Your books also make extensive use of verbal puns or visual in-jokes that make playful references to iconic figures of the utopian visions that shaped yesterday's tommorrows -- for example, your references to Edison, Tesla, Gernsback, Huxley, or Orwell, across the various books in the Terminal City series. The result is a layering of references and allusions which shape reader's expectations about your stories. How might you describe the expectations you place on the readers of your work? Do you expect them to know about all of these references coming into the book? Do you see the book as opening them up to a larger library of stories of which your tales are simply the most recent installment?

Of course I hope my readers are hip to my world by now. Initially the approach was to put as many of my influences on the table without the stories becoming scrapbooks for 'Professor Motter's hobbyhorses.' This was the way I gave a wink and a nod to those who were similarly inspired by the same subjects. It paid off, I think. I have met many like-minded creators as a result.

But I was trained by looking at the masters. The McLuhans were Joyce freaks. Eliot masters. Pound scholars. Finnegan's Wake was their Talmud. And it was (remains) FULL of treasures. I was convinced that I also had hidden treasures in my auxiliary 'influences.' Maybe not so profound but I was optimistic-though not overly so. The comic book arts are iconographic- as McLuhan ALWAYS insisted. R. CRUMB, Maus, Dark Knight, Watchmen proved that point in the 80's. In this millennium, the mixture of comic book media, the motion picture and the internet makes it a bit harder to distinguish the watersheds. So what? We comic-book folks have been laboring on that for years.

What did you think of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? Did you see this as a kindred project or do you see them as using retro-futurism in a different way?

A favorite film. I was asked to be involved in the project very early on, But I was more concerned with getting my (never-quite-viable) Terminal City film into the works- plus I didn't see how a film with THAT title would ever make it to the theaters. See? Predicting the future isn't as easy as it looks....

What are you working on now? Have we seen the last of Electropolis?

At the moment I have finished Unique, with Platinum, (a bit of a change pace- as it takes place in modern day Chicago and its counterpart nocturnal dimension), I am also well into writing and drawing next year's re-boot Mister X series for Dark Horse.

I am also at work on a children's fantasy book about houses around the world with long-time friend, collaborator and ex-sweetheart Judith Dupré,. She's written definitive titles on skyscrapers, bridges, churches and other icons of the built world. She uses the archetypal forms of architecture to comment on the book itself as an object to be revered or a vestigial cultural artifact to be mourned. Her commentaries more eloquently parallel many of my own.

Electropolis - It will be collected soon. And maybe another series down the road. As the omnipresent TV narrator reminded us way back when: 'there's a million stories in 'The Naked City'- this is just one of them..."

Happy (Belated) Henry Day

Yesterday (June 4) was my birthday. I'm not telling how old I am. But I figured the world would excuse me under the circumstances if a)I didn't write a lot for today's post (which was actually put together last night) and b)I was a tad self-centered. So today seems like the best time to share a few things that have come in my mail over the past week. The first are some doctored (as in "improved") images of me that are making the rounds of the internet. Several people had called to my attention a shift from the phenomenon of LOL cat pictures to LOL theorist pictures. There's even a site where people regularly post pictures of theorists, such as Foucault, Brecht, Jung, even Dewey (of the decimal fame) with pithy comments. And to my astonishment, yours truly has become a favorite target in this new academic pass-time. My students have long considered my face an icon upon which they can test their emerging mash-up and remixing skills so I am delighted to see these practices extended into the culture at large. Anything which will further the cause of participatory culture.

So here are two examples of the theory in action.

Most of the rest of the objects of these tributes are not around to respond, let alone post them to their blog so I should say thank you on behalf of Barthes, McLuhan, and Eisenstein, who I have channeled in my lectures often enough to know would have enjoyed these tributes every bit as much as I do. Thanks to Nancy Baym and Selki for sharing these links with me.

On other fronts, I wanted to pass along a link to the podcast of the slash panel from Phoenix Rising, "Shipping the Velvet: Slash Fandom, Convergence, and Why You Should Care About Harry Potter Mpreg," which Spellcast is making available to the world. Participants in this session included Aja, Erica George, Henry Jenkins, Mathilde Madden and Catherine Tonsenberger. I will confess to being a tad intimidated about participating in the session since I had not read very much Harry Potter slash and most of my work on the genre was done more than a decade ago. But Erica and Aja organized a really fun session and I learned so much from the other participants. Don't let the title of the session throw you -- there's not that much about "Mpreg" (a genre of fan fiction depicting men getting pregnant and having babies together for those of you who are uninitiated) though I do stir up a little controversy by suggesting that Mary Shelly's Frankenstein might be considered as an early contribution to the genre. There's even less explicitly about convergence, so the title may be a tad misleading. :-) But a good time was had by all. By the way, this panel got specific, though less than fully supportive, mention in Salon's recent article about the con.

Finally, let me at last acknowledge that reader Angela Thomas wrote me a while back to say that she has given me a Thinking Blogger Award. Thanks for the recognition, Angela, and all I can say is that the end of the term left me less thoughtful than usual so it has taken me a while to get around to acknowledging the recognition here. I promise to pass along the honors to someone else soon.

So, for now, Happy (Belated) Henry Day!

Reading the UpFronts: A Conversation with Media Analysts Stacey Lynn Schulman and Alex Chisholm

Last week, I previewed a CMS course description for the fall 2007 semester, Quantitative Research: Case Studies in the fall 2007 Television Ecosystem. As a follow-up, Alex Chisholm and Stacey Lynn Schulman, the course instructors, started a dialog around some of the dominant issues in the television marketplace as they create the syllabus. Much of the discussion here follows upon the recent upfronts, an annual event during which each of the networks announce their plans for the coming television season. Their perspectives illustrate both the urgency of change and the breadth of historical perspective these two will bring to students at MIT this fall. Characterizing the State of Primetime Television Performance

AC: This year's television season was, at best, lackluster. Despite some really great promise, especially with the arrival of many new and expanded extension strategies, there wasn't much to get excited about. Viewers either tuned in or didn't show up at all -- there didn't seem to be much of other networks catching the "run off" when a proven or presumed hit didn't deliver. Even juggernaut hit American Idol ended the season down in year-to-year ratings despite a strong early showing. Ratings that used to guarantee a show would be cancelled (anywhere between 4.0 and 6.0) are now regarded as highly respectable (the CW seems to be sustaining a business with shows averaging 0.5-2.0). At face value it seems that the sky is falling...

Meanwhile, with DVRs, online extensions, iTunes downloads, and advertiser-supported streaming video at network sites, we're seeing a significant shift in how people consume television content. While actual numbers aren't available because they're proprietary,

I believe that during the Tuesday and Wednesday following the broadcast of the Heroes series finale, NBC set a network record for the total number of page hits and video streams it served. Heroes was arguably the biggest new hit of the season.

SLS: The current season's performance is actually part trend, part business-as-usual. Keep in mind that new season successes are few and far between -- very few shows make it past the 4th quarter (October - December) and even fewer are picked up for the next season. Each year around this time I present the new season to advertisers and make the same point -- networks are in first place this year with ratings that would have left

them in third place just a year before ... and what constitutes a "hit" is relative to the network (i.e. CW). This trend is unavoidable in a fragmented entertainment market where the average home receives 102 channels. So, these observations have been fairly standard in TV analysis over the past 15 years. In the past, the industry has blamed cable as both thief and benefactor of disenfranchised network TV viewers. What is different about this past season, as Alex correctly points out, are new challenges facing programmers in a universe of time- shifting and on-demand viewership. Nielsen reported in April that DVR penetration had reached nearly 18% of the TV population and networks began full-force efforts to provide multiple viewing windows on air (in repeats) or online (on demand) throughout the season. Subsequently, the "live" TV audience for many established hits appear to be waning - and new shows are being

sampled, but in totally new ways. Unfortunately, without good cross-media metrics, we still can't tell whether the online (or alternative view) audience is the same or different from the TV audience ... and if their viewing once or multiple times. Here the question of actual audience size comes down to an old metric of reach and frequency ... how much of your audience is unique or unduplicated? And which environment is better for advertising - one in which you CAN skip the ads or one in which you CAN'T?

Look at how HBO's long-awaited final season of The Sopranos has declined every week from its premiere. The network wants to explain it away by the multiple windows they're

providing throughout the week to catch the show (on air)... but one has to wonder whether the bloom is far off the rose when there is significant audience erosion on the first original airing each week -- clearly not a water- cooler event!

Programming and Scheduling Strategies in a New Media World

AC: Last year was my first chance to attend all of the network upfronts. As a "newbie," I found the whole experience to be fairly entertaining and very much like what I've seen at other "pitch fests" such as the old E3Expo, the Consumer Electronics Show, and Macworld. It was a challenge to focus on what was "new" and what was "business as usual" (or "business in crisis"). I remember being excited by the amount of time NBC had spent on their digital strategies and then was disappointed to see that presentation slammed so badly in various media and financial reports through the rest of the week. What did I know? Given the way that last year's television upfront presentations were pitched -- new shows, mid-season replacements, lots of promos that started as early as last May -- and the reality of what happened during the year, I started to seriously question how much longer the traditional "season" of September to May is going to endure.

Two years ago, Prison Break was introduced in the late summer and has gone on to do very well. Last summer, The Closer became the highest premiering cable show ever in June. This year, ABC didn't premiere one of its midseason replacements, The Traveler until May. NBC pulled the plug on several shows within three weeks of premiere this year, while ABC was criticized by angry fans of both Desperate Housewives and Lost for the long periods between the airing of original shows, which were held to artificially inflate sweeps periods. Even Heroes, which has been a breakout, still could not give NBC a full victory on Monday nights when Nielsen data was analyzed; it helped NBC win the night during the fall and early winter, but it's not been able to bolster the network's programming through the spring, where it repeatedly lost the night to ABC (Dancing With the Stars) and Fox (24 and Prison Break).

SLS: In Gail Berman's last year as the head of entertainment for FOX television, she unveiled a progressive plan to move out of the traditional season and develop year-round

programming. That year, the FOX presentation stood out among others as the most confusing and complicated schedule ever presented. Not only was the industry confused, but so was the audience. The experiment failed miserably and Gail left to helm Paramount before the season was completed. Regardless, I applauded the effort, having proven through audience research that cable gained significantly in periods where the broadcast networks aired more repeats of established series. Sweeps stunts have been diminishing over the years - and this is an issue we will cover at some length in the course. The existence of sweeps is largely to gauge and set ad rates for individual stations in markets where there is not continuous measurement. Complicated network affiliate agreements that involve station compensation by the networks are at risk - and one might argue that digital viewing windows for content strain the relationship even further. While stations - owned or affiliated - pour millions into upgraded station equipment for HD transmission, their back-end is less and less secure...

The issue here is thus a good economic exploration of the business on multiple fronts. It costs a lot of money to produce television series, particularly fictional (although non-fiction costs are significant for series like, Survivor). It's not possible to produce the same quality of content every week of the year.. and networks depend on repeat windows to actually break-even on the cost of producing shows. When the FCC repealed the Financial Interest in Syndication Rules in the early 90's (which led to the expansion of the FOX network and the launch of the WB and UPN networks among other things), most believed that networks would take financial interest in the series they picked up for the schedule - and would thus benefit financially in the lucrative syndication marketplace. While we do have a much greater portion of the schedule owned by the networks (an increase from 20 - 60+% over the past 15 years), the declining trend of success and new digital distribution streams have significantly limited the syndication windfall. Three years ago, John Wells pre-empted the network in canceling his own series after only a handful of episodes, knowing full well that the cost of production would never be re-gained because the network would soon shut them down and there would be no pot of gold in syndication. And while the promise of digital distribution is tempting, no one has figured out how to properly monetize it and keep digital rights issues in check at the same time.

AC: My sense is that the traditional "tent-pole" programming strategies of creating an entire evening for a particular audience or demographic target have eroded dramatically in the past few years. It's hard to sit down and commit to one network's slate of shows. During the research we did around American Idol a few years ago, when I observed a single family week after week during the winter and spring, it was interesting to note that the minute the show ended, the kids were chased from the family room so the parents could settle in for 24, which was then in its second season, I think. The parents didn't necessarily watch American Idol with the kids, but rather entered the room 15 minutes before the transition to prepare the kids for the "chase." During our regular "design squad" research groups with about 65 teens for a "news for education" project this winter and spring, only a handful reported that they watched any television at all -- most surfed for entertainment content online, especially YouTube.

SLS: The bonds created by good audience flow are definitely diminishing, and yet, when we look at audience viewing clusters, we typically find that the shows which hold

together the strongest are those which fall on the same night on the same network. These bonds confound our common sense further because their linkages are stronger than linkages of genre. So there is a significant population of couch potatoes out there who settle into a night of TV, on basically the same channel. I believe that this is a phenomenon that may be explained by both generational and lifestyle gaps. A frequent urge in the media community is to want to study the habits of teenagers and young adults in order to forecast the eventual behavior of the population. While I agree that younger folks grow up in different circumstances and bring new expectations to experiences with technology (how long do I have to wait for x?), the life factors - children, job pressures, physical exhaustion, etc... provide a balancing factor (of how much we don't know) to the technological glee of earlier behaviors. Also, one of the hardest things to do in evaluating programming is to remove yourself from the audience and consider the overall complexion of the nation ... it may not be appealing to you the analyst, but it really plays in Peoria... It's the same with new technologies ... rapid adoption in some sectors doesn't always balance out laggard adoption rates in others...

On Changing TV Business Models...

AC: This year's upfront presentations were reportedly lean and mean, suggesting that all networks learned some lessons after last year's bloated and extended pitch fests. I didn't attend any but followed events and announcements on blogs and through popular and

industry media while I was traveling. Both TV Week and Variety reported that many in the industry thought the length and pitches were just right, a good compromise between total glitz and eliminating the upfront presentations altogether. The general observation is that television executives, long considered immune to criticism of excessive glitz in the business world, are now having to tighten their belts and be held more accountable for the businesses they steward; it seems the message that television executives need to respond to shareholders not just studio and network chiefs, has gotten through (General Electric, for example, constantly needs to "qualify" earnings per share limits given NBC Universal's performance; and, last year saw Viacom split CBS from its cable operations).

SLS: While certainly longer than this year's pitches, last year's bloated pitch-fests were actually shorter than years past... when I first began in the business each network presented for three-four hours a piece... and some of them were still doing that as of

last year. The debate around the upfront presentations is actually just the easiest target to hit first. What the industry really wants to debate is whether there should be an upfront marketplace AT ALL. Some marketers like J&J have taken strong positions to step out of the market, opting instead to negotiate throughout the year in the scatter market. Others are tried and true believers in the power of television. What becomes interesting is how we define "television" and whether marketers are best served with upfront dollar commitments to take advantage of new bells and whistles ... or not...

AC: The ouster of Kevin Reilly as head of NBC Entertainment over the Memorial Day weekend is perhaps the most immediate sign of how turbulent things have become at the "longtime-first-place-now-fourth- place" network as executives scramble to optimize development and business models. Reilly was released less than two weeks after the upfronts at a time when he should be one of the biggest champions of the new season's schedule and potential. Ben Silverman, owner of the company that produces The Office and The Biggest Loser for NBC, will replace Reilly, a sign that NBC is committed to following through on a strategy to create slates of reality programming across the board for the 8:00-9:00 p.m. and focus on high- quality dramatic/comedy program for 9:00-11:00 p.m. - Jeff Zucker outlined this strategy in October 2006, even before he rose to CEO. This strategy is having a ripple effect across the networks.

Indeed, only Fox touted a new comedy this year as a big chip in its line up ( Back toYou with Kelsey Grammar and Patricia Heaton); the rest of the networks buried anything new as replacement fare and actually cancelled most of the 30-minute sitcoms that

premiered and failed to impress this past season. What implications do business realities have on the development of new creative content? I'd love to do some case studies on how economics have long been part of the "culture machine," from Shakespeare's work at The Globe to Dickens's publication of stories in serial form in Victorian papers. I want to show that this business influence doesn't so much create a crisis of creativity but forces artists to, well, be more "creative," that it's not simply a matter of producing "art for art's sake" in many instances.

SLS: The ups and downs of entertainment executives is just part of the cycle... most don't last more than than 2-3 years (better than CMOs of late, but not by much). Ben's

appointment is interesting having grown up out of the talent agency business in London and making his mark by successfully importing formats to the US. This is a 33 1/3 proposition -- sometimes it really works (American/Pop Idol), sometimes it works marginally (The Office / Ugly Betty - critically acclaimed, but not a MASS audience

vehicle or time-period winner) and other times it disappoints (Big Brother - never as big as European success, Coupling -- ugh, remember that?). It will be interesting to see Ben in a true development role that isn't about harvesting success across the pond, but

is steeped in real scheduling and programming needs... Zucker's strategy wasn't exactly played out in the schedule that was announced, either... The creativity case studies are an excellent idea on Alex's part .. particularly in recent times relative to the FinSyn Repeal and the jockeying for schedule slots among Independent and Established producers. As networks demanded financial interest in order to get picked up, more independent voices emerged because established ones wouldn't play. Only the most celebrated producers and show-runners could make demands over the last 15 years creating a marketplace of hi and lo- end talent exposure with very little middle...

On Capitalizing on Fan Forums

AC: Finally, another interesting development this year was the acquisition of Television Without Pity by Bravo, an NBC Universal cable network. It will be interesting to see if the neutrality and honesty -- the brutality we've come to know and love -- of the site will be retained as NBC "absorbs" it into the machine. I'm concerned, especially since we've seen other really cool sites wither as they are consumed by their conglomerate owners. Still, it will be great to see what the Aggregated Television Fan Site 2.0 looks like when the next "buzz" site pops up as the answer to what TWOP used to be.

SLS: Totally agree. Lame way for Bravo to capitalize on the fan movement without putting the work in to create it organically for themselves... but a great asset if NBC leaves it alone and mines it for insight, but I doubt they'll go that route...

Our Course

AC: Stacey and I have worked together, along with Henry and others at MIT and in New

York and Los Angeles, to explore new ways to evaluate audience engagement with media content. It's been a great partnership because we bring some very complementary perspectives to bear on both the quantitative and qualitative research methods needed to better analyze what's happening in the market. We're creating a course syllabus and lab experience that will, we hope, immerse students in the fall 2007 television season in a unique way, celebrating the great new content to come to market, critically evaluating what's not working, and exploring the business issues of the successes and failures as they emerge in real time. Hope to see some folks in the fall. If you're not able to take the course at MIT, we may open our Facebook group to a larger set of networks for people to engage in our online conversations. As they say, please stay tuned!

SLS: Having spent so many years in the television business, it's hard to take a step back and have an "outsider looking in" perspective. The only way to do that is to explore the landscape with great thinkers like Alex and Henry -- or get out of your market altogether and observe how other cultures do it. This course is going to give a strong foundation in the metrics and processes that make the US TV market work today while simultaneously inviting students to challenge what has developed as business-as-usual - all with the tapestry of the network TV fall season to draw from. We hope you'll be a part of it!

If you have comments on the above dialogue or questions for Stacey or Alex, you can

e-mail them directly to or .

==========================================================

Stacey Lynn Schulman is CEO, Chief Insight Officer of Hi: Human Insight, a media consultancy practice that specializes in unearthing insights that drive better connections between consumers and content. A recognized expert in fan culture behavior, Ms. Schulman was the president of The Interpublic Group of Co.'s fully-dedicated Consumer Experience Practice through January 2007. The practice advised marketers on how to effectively connect with consumers in the evolving media landscape, conducting proprietary research across the wide array of business sectors that reflected Interpublic's client roster. Insights led marketers to better understand the essence of the consumer experience in three distinct areas - brands, media technologies and content. Clients benefited from insight on emerging trends as well as customized advice on how to communicate with the consumer of the future.

Prior to her appointment at Interpublic, Stacey served as executive vice president, director of global research integration for Initiative, a media agency within the Interpublic family. Stacey was a key member of the global research team and applied her broad research skills to a wide array of critical research issues, with an emphasis on understanding consumer media behavior. She joined Initiative in August 2001 when TN Media merged with Initiative. Stacey played an integral role in Initiative's exclusive research partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which resulted in breakthrough research on a number of key industry issues, including consumer behavior, interactivity and media convergence.

Before joining TN Media in 1997, Stacey conducted television and print research for D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B) while concurrently earning her master's in media studies from New York University. Stacey began her career at Katz Communications after completing her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. At Katz, she conducted programming and local market research before moving on to spend several years at CBS.

Stacey is a former president of the Radio and Television Research Council (RTRC) and is a member of the Media Rating Council (MRC). Widely respected in the industry, she is routinely quoted in trade and consumer media outlets, and regularly appears on CNN, CNBC and FOX News Channel to discuss media trends. Stacey was honored in 2005 as a "Wonder Woman" in the cable industry by Multichannel News, one of the cable industry's most prestigious awards. In 2005 and 2003 she was named the most quoted executive in the industry by Advertising Age in the publication's annual "Media Talk" survey. In 2004, she was inducted into the American Advertising Federation (AAF) Advertising Hall of Achievement, the industry's premier award for outstanding advertising professionals under age 40. Stacey was the first research professional to be inducted into the Hall of Achievement in the AAF's history. Also in 2004, Stacey was named "Media All Star" in the research category by Mediaweek. In 2003, she was honored as a "Media Maven" by Advertising Age. In that same year, Stacey was profiled in Crain's New York Business as part of the prestigious "40 Under 40 - New York's Rising Stars" feature.

Stacey maintains an alternate career as a studio vocalist lending her voice to various projects in the New York City area. She resides in Harlem.

Alex Chisholm is founder of [ICE]^3 Studios, a media research and development consultancy that creates transmedia entertainment and educational properties, and is currently developing several projects with NBC News, NBC Olympics-Beijing 2008, and The Children's Hospital Trust. As Co-Director of the Education Arcade at MIT, Chisholm manages a variety of "games in education" projects, coordinates university-industry partnerships, and produces MIT's Games in Education conferences.

Previously, he organized the NBC Olympics Presents the Visa Championships-Torino 2006,

an "Olympics for the rest of us" experience that ran alongside NBC's coverage from Italy. As part of his ongoing work with MIT Comparative Media Studies and as a contributor to The Expression Lab, a research partnership with Interpublic Group's Consumer Experience Practice, Chisholm co- authored the third in a series of papers on the "expression," a new research model to better define consumer engagement with content across today's multiple media channels; this work was presented in Shanghai at ESOMAR's Wordwide Multi-Media Measurement Conference and was awarded Best Paper honors (June 2006).

Over the past seven years, he has collaborated on research, product, and program development with Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Interpublic Group, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, Children's Hospital Boston, and the MacArthur Foundation. While Director of External Relations and Special Projects for MIT Comparative Media Studies between 1999-2003, Chisholm oversaw creative development efforts and research with the Royal Shakespeare Company, producing a computer game concept inspired by The Tempest, and managed research with Initiative Media around American Idol; as part of this work, he co-authored the first two papers on the "expression," which were presented at the ESOMAR/ARF Audience Measurement Conferences in 2002 (Cannes, France) and 2003 (Los Angeles, California).

Chisholm is the author and producer of Earthen Vessels, an independent storytelling project that emerges from a novel, film, and web site. He is currently working with

Sarah Smith, author of Chasing Shakespeares, to adapt her novel to the stage. Chisholm earned his B.S. in General Studies from Cornell University.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round One, Part Two): Karen Hellekson and Jason Mittell

Yesterday, we launched my big summer long discussion of fan culture with an exchange between Karen Hellekson and Jason Mittell. Today, I bring you part two of that conversation.

5. Bridging the gender divide?

[5.1] JM: I want to raise some practical questions. What can be done? Overturning the patriarchal systems of the academy and copyright isn't going to happen anytime soon (if ever), so let's put on our Gramscian hats - what ground can be gained to lessen the gender divides within the realms of both fandom and fan studies? What micropractices might we be able to achieve in our tiny corners that could overcome some of the issues that have been raised? As faculty in a teaching-oriented college, my mind turns to pedagogy - what can I teach my students about fandom that would help make the next generation of media consumers & producers more inclusive and accepting?

[5.2] KLH: Teaching your students well is always a good thing, but in a way, this just pushes the problem onto someone else - although just leading discussion may lead to helpful debate that will show students that the field lacks consensus. Particularly since I don't teach, I'm far more likely to just do something myself. Yet my own attempt to create a publishing opportunity for aca-fans got very few submissions from men. Part of the problem is self-selection, or selection from within a gendered network.

[5.3] How desires circle! How little headway has been made in more than 15 years! Here's Donna Haraway, from her Cyborg Manifesto (1991): "We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender" (181). We are at an historical moment of upheaval where we stand united, ready to read new things in new ways, and yet given a creature as fabulous as a cyborg, we return to intractably gendered structures to organize how we do it. It's too easy to exhort everyone to cast them off. Such change is difficult, even with all the new technological tools we have at our disposal, men with joysticks at World of Warcraft and machinima, and women with keyboards at fanfic and songvids.

[5.4] Exhorting people to spread their networks wide, and doing so oneself, is perhaps one step in the right direction. So is this project - the debate in this blog. Conceiving and executing projects, like publishing opportunities, should attempt gender equity when it comes time to craft the contents and call for submissions. Further, I would ask more women to talk loudly, in unlocked forums, and both inside and outside their networks about things that concern them.

[5.5] JM: OK - since we have this open forum across gendered communities and traversing some aspects of the aca/fan divide, here's a set of questions that I grapple with: what is the relationship between the fan viewer and non-fan viewer? When we study fan practices, are we looking at people who consume differently in degree, or in kind? My own sense is that fans (of the creative/community variety) engage in a distinct kind of viewing practice, consuming for different reasons and investments than most viewers; but interestingly my students see it more as a matter of degree - even though few of them self-identify as fans in any significant ways. So what do acafans think of this central issue?

[5.6] KLH: I'm with your students: we engage for so many reasons that only degree can explain it. For things like the creation of fanfic, reasons for engagement may include the following (I'll not cite them, but all these ideas have seen print): Fanfic is written as a way to fill in the gaps of the text. Fandom and fanfic are ways to appropriate media texts and provide power to the consumers, not the producers of the media, so fanfic is written as a form of empowerment. Slash fanfic permits an equal-power relationship because the two principals are of the same sex, thus reinscribing certain gendered cultural concerns about sex and power. Fanfic is a feminine appropriation of masculine power. Fan texts are results of a consumer culture, with the passive consumer turning into an active fan, so fan writing is a way to obtain meaning and pleasure. And fan texts are part of a community-based fan engagement, where the artifact (the fanfic, the vid) may not be the point of the exercise. All of these ideas attempt to provide motivation for the creation of a fan-created artifact, and right there, we're excluding fans who don't engage in these practices but who are, by dint of practice, members of a fan community.

[5.7] JM: While I see all of these motivations as good explanations of what fanfic creators/readers do, I see most of them as atypical & exceptional practices, not extensions of mundane engagements with media. Let me go on a brief theoretical detour: even though I was intellectually forged in the fires of cultural studies, active audiences, and textual polysemy, for me one of the missteps of this facet of the field has been an almost totalizing politicization of everyday life. While we need to be aware that all cultural practices occur within systems of power relations and thus everything is potentially political, the political is not ultimately determinate of all practices - we need to consider more than just power relations to understand practices like media consumption. There is no space outside of politics, but there are many things under the umbrella of everyday life that cannot be reduced to politics - everything may be political, but politics cannot explain everything. In this way, the forces of domination & resistance have taken the structuring place of Marxist economic determinism within the analytic lens of much cultural studies.

[5.8] It seems that power relations matter a great deal within the fanfic community, for both producers & consumers, but I don't think similar forces are as central for most media consumers - most people don't watch TV to appropriate, invert, or mock power relations. So what other elements of cultural consumption might be considered beyond political struggle? I think that emotional engagement, narrative comprehension, interpersonal relationships, and cultural rituals are all key components of how we consume media, and that they are not primarily determined or motivated by politics - I'm not claiming they exist outside of power relations, but that they cannot be explained away as mere manifestations of domination or resistance. These other elements matter for fans as well as mundane viewers, but it seems that the political engagement of fans is an added variable.

[5.9] Looking at my own recent research on Lost spoiler fans (which crossed gender lines pretty evenly) - these viewers, unlike Henry's Survivor spoiler fans, are not in battle with producers or actively protesting the hegemony of television or forging communities through assembling spoiler info. They love the show and are trying to extend their experiences via paratextual consumption, not reading against the grain. Many do read spoilers to manage their own narrative experiences in differing ways than network scheduling, but I'm loathe to explain this behavior in the political terms of institutional control versus emergent resisting poachers. In fact, many suggest that spoiler consumption is something that they wish they could stop, but they lack the willpower to refrain from peeking ahead - they are disempowered by the very act of "resistant reading"!

[5.10] Back to my point - if fanfic communities are self-defined in politicized terms (although there might be a chicken-egg question here as to how much of the fandom is using the analytic terms provided by fan scholarship to justify, legitimize, & explain their own practices...), these spoiler fans seem to consume media in comparatively non-politicized ways. And I'd say for most avid consumers of media, political rationales are not centrally determinate in what they watch or how they watch it (again, I'm not suggesting that media is just escapism/entertainment/etc., but rather that politics doesn't necessarily explain why people watch what they watch). So this is why I see the practices of active fan communities as a distinctive and atypical mode of consumption, more explicitly politicized than average viewers. Politics seem to matter more for fans invested in their own practices as tied to media, rather than people whose engagement primarily starts & ends with the primary text.

[5.11] KLH: I don't see us talking at cross-purposes here. I'm not attempting to essentialize the process or the artwork or the fan's engagement to political practices; I'm attempting to create a consistent scaffolding for this conversation so we are talking in the same terms. It's always more interesting for critics to write about resistant readings, but a lot of work has only highlighted how not resistant certain fan activities are: lots of fanfic rehashes the tired romance genre, for example; and we can talk all day long about how subversive the genre of slash is, but its very existence only highlights and reinforces the boundaries it claims to transgress.

[5.12] I would argue that anybody who goes online (or goes to conventions, or subscribes to newsgroups, or buys fanzines, or whatever) and engages in discussion with others about something is pretty much a fan; and many, but by no means all, fans create artworks around it. This brings in a community component. An average viewer watches but doesn't feel the need to engage beyond chitchat at the water cooler at work, where the text is simply a pretext for social engagement unrelated to the pleasure of the text. Why is the latter interesting to study? (Or maybe the text is the interesting thing to study, and you want her reaction to it.) People who follow spoilers go online and get spoiled, but they get spoiled within a community that handily lays it all out for them, and suddenly, with no warning and without their really knowing how it happened, they're engaged in a fannish practice.

[5.13] JM: I actually do think the water cooler viewer is interesting to study. In my study of the talk show in my TV genre book, I surveyed people about their perceptions and practices involving talk shows, regardless of their personal interests & investments in the form. Casual viewers and even non-viewers help foster discourses about genres and programs, working to build cultural assumptions and norms about media. Additionally, I'm interested in understanding how different people can make differing investments in the same texts - the water cooler viewer might feel like they love a show as much as the fanfic writer, but they engage in distinctly different ways. Understanding why such various engagements emerge and what they mean culturally requires us to study & respect not only the hardcore fans, but also the mundane viewers.

[5.14] KLH: At its heart, fan activity attempts to make meaning and create pleasure. The structures used to study it rely on politics, sexual and otherwise; on notions of community; on ideas about creativity versus derivativeness; on genre; on authority; on gift culture; on text and subtext; and on a thousand other different things, some of which, such as authority, happen to provide a vocabulary that is useful for discussing these things. Ethnography, close readings of fan-generated texts, studies of reception and of community, queer studies - all have usefully been brought to bear on fans, whether hardcore or casual. You asked about the political issues of the acceptance of versus the othering of fandom, and I'd turn that around to ask about the political issues of the acceptance of versus the othering of the critic, and of the critical apparatus she uses, because that's the reason we're having this conversation: what's at stake when the critic makes her decisions about what and how to study? Gender is one of those things. Authority and power are others. We've come full circle, therefore: the acafan has been reconstituted and redescribed, just as she constitutes and describes her field of study.

[5.15] Politics, sexual and otherwise, can't possibly inform the totality of fans or the study of fans. We're not assimilating these structures; we're using them to create boundaries around a discussion because those boundaries are useful, and they provide a vocabulary to talk about these things that shorthands and compresses a whole bunch of meaning. I self-consciously chose the word authority to organize my thoughts about this issue because of the word's connotations, and because of everything we all understand goes into authority in our culture. Just uttering the word generates a form of meaning. Each discipline comes with a wonderful history, a fascinating methodology, a differently trained critic, a differently informed fan, someone in media studies and someone in English talking about the same thing but in different terms. Yet I would argue that these boundaries, which aren't set as firmly as the word boundary implies, and which can be manipulated, need to be manipulated in such a way that gender doesn't become a point of exclusion, and the way to do that is simply through critical practice.

[5.16] JM: And I would just add to your last sentence: ...and through dialogue, opportunities to talk across disciplines, genders, fan engagements, and mind-sets. It's been a pleasure!

Gender and Fan Studies (Round One, Part One): Karen Hellekson and Jason Mittell

As promised, we are going to be running a mega-event through my blog this summer -- an ongoing conversation among some of the leading scholars of fan cultures and cult media. This conversation has grown out of a perceived disconnect in the ways that male and female scholars are writing about this phenomenon, though I hope that it will evolve into something else -- a discussion of fan studies as a field, its theoretical groundings, its methodologies, and its most important insights. There has been an explosion in recent years of exciting new work on fan culture which is coming from an emerging generation of scholars -- male and female. I am hoping that this event will help introduce this work to a larger public and that this discussion can be seen as a sign that fan studies is really coming of age. Here's how it will work: Every Thursday and Friday, we will introduce a new pair of scholars, who will continue the discussion, seeking to explore commonalities and differences in the ways they approach the work. Jason Mittell and Karen Hellekson have gotten things rolling here with some thoughts about the nature of fannish and academic authority.

Our hope is that this discussion will spill over into other blogs as well and I will try to post as many links to these other discussions as possible. So far, for example, Kristina Busse and Will Brooker have started a public discussion in anticipation of the series which Kristina is running over at her blog.

I am also encouraging other participants to add their thoughts and comments here whenever something in the public discussion sparks their interests. Karen and Jason suggested the use of numbered units to make it easier for people to refer to parts of the exchange.

So, let the fun begin.

Authority

by Karen Hellekson & Jason Mittell

1. Academic authority

[1.1] KLH: It seems that every discussion about fan studies somehow has something to do with authority - not only with establishing who has it (apparently not the fans, unless they appropriate it), but indicating the closeness of the relationship with the subject matter (apparently being an academic means you're inauthentic if you're a fan, and being a fan means you can't be a properly dispassionate, disinterested academic). My problem with this led to my coediting, with Kristina Busse, a recent volume of new essFays about fan studies, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, all by academics who are also fans, because I think that this connection is a useful and good thing.

[1.2] Interestingly for this discussion, the academy does not employ me. I'm employed full-time as a copyeditor in the scientific, technical, and medical market - a good fit for me, because I prefer not to teach. My academic credentials include a PhD in English, with an emphasis in science fiction, and I've published some books and articles, some of which happen to be about fan studies. I write book reviews about SF titles for Publishers Weekly. However, I've found that a lack of an academic connection is terribly disenfranching. The simplest research project is fraught with annoyance and pain as roadblocks are thrown in front of me: it's ridiculously difficult to get the books and articles I need, thanks to all the limits placed on me by the library; and I don't have an affiliation to put on my abstract submissions, which results in their being kicked back to me for "completion."

[1.3] My work in fan studies includes literary and historical readings of fan texts and/or the bits of the Internet given over to fan community. I'm currently interested in notions of authorship; of truth-claims, authority, and analysis; and ideas about constructing and editing reality (as, for example, editing blog posts to alter the historical trace). I've also done some work on the idea of fandom as a gift culture. I blog occasionally about my academic-type thoughts.

[1.4] JM: My aca-identity is comparatively traditional - I teach Media Studies at Middlebury College, writing about television primarily in the forms of books (author of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture [Routledge, 2004] and a textbook in-the-works called Television & American Culture), articles (essays on TV narrative, genre, discourses about television as a medium), and blog (JustTV, where links to many of my other writings can be found as well). I'm primarily interested in the intersections between television programming, industrial strategies, and viewer practices, and have recently been focusing these interests on the development of new forms of television storytelling emerging in the past decade or so in the United States.

[1.5] Importantly for this discussion, I do not consider myself a scholar of fandom; although occasionally my research does peer into fan practices, such as a new essay on spoiler fans of Lost, my motivating question in such research is not focused on understanding fandom as a distinct set of practices - I'm not the least bit hostile to such scholarship, but it's just not my primary interest.

2. Fannish authority

[2.1] JM: My fan-identity is a bit more muddy. While I'm an eager consumer of many types of media & popular culture (including TV like Lost, Veronica Mars, BSG, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Arrested Development, etc.; a lot of animation; much music; and a fair number of videogames), I would not self-identify as a fan per se. And to me, this cuts to the heart of the debate framing this discussion - what are the boundaries of being a "fan" and who is invested in the label as an identity? I'm interested in fans as part of my pedagogy, regularly teaching academic work about fandom and showing examples of fan creativity & engagement. I read fan studies, even blurbing the excellent new volume Fandom.

[2.2] But I have no real personal investment in the fan label, or the practices and communities that tend to coalesce around the notion of fandom. For me, fandom centers around three main aspects: fan creativity (paratexts, fanfics, vidding, etc.), fan community (in-person and/or online), and fan self-identification (prominent self-branding through fashion, online profiles, behaviors, etc.). I don't really engage with any of these (save for wearing a Red Sox cap on bad hair days), so that's why I don't conceive of myself as a fan. (I realize that many people would argue that my notion of fandom is too narrow - I invite more discussion about those boundaries as they're crucial to the debate.)

[2.3] KLH: I myself am an active fan, involved in newsgroups and blogs about my few primary fandoms. I write fan fiction under a pseudonym, and occasionally, I go to fan conventions. Although I'm a longtime fan - I was into Doctor Who first, in 1981, with a live-action fan club - I took some time off and got back into it in a big way in 2002, when I turned to fandom basically as a form of social engagement, because I live in an isolated, fairly rural area. I run a fanfic archive in my primary fandom. Within fandom, I do lots of large project type things - things that involve organizing the time and effort of others, because I can get such projects done. I spend fannish time in actor- and fan-specific newsgroups and in the LiveJournal blogsphere.

3. Gendered academic authority

[3.1] KLH: Although I don't think that my lack of an institutional affiliation or a tenure-track job has hurt my chances at publication - although it might if I decided to publish the results of a survey and didn't have an institutional review board to approve my methodology - I can't help but wonder how such a tenuous position affects so many women just like me, like lecturers without offices and freeway fliers without a single institution to call home. The gender split between those in positions of authority (professors, say) versus those in positions of dependency (lecturers) has been well documented by the Modern Language Association, among others, and I'm pretty sure independent scholars, those zany dabblers, aren't even on the list. To my mind, these gendered notions of power and authority tacitly underpin all conversations about acafans, as rank becomes linked to topic, and as texts written by professor scholars are treated more seriously than texts written by independent scholars, lecturers, or graduate students.

[3.2] JM: I agree with Karen's assessment about the gender splits within academia - even in a field like media studies, which is both invested in feminism and new enough that the old boys' network is less old and less boyish, power & authority is male by default. And the field itself is feminized within the larger academy, treated as a weak & flighty discipline compared to more traditional humanities, social sciences, and sciences. I would hope that within media studies, the gender divides would be less structuring than in older & grayer fields, but there's no doubt that divisions between tenure-track and adjunct, affiliated and independent scholars are gendered across the board. Even perusing the lists of Henry's invitees for this forum suggests that more women are in less traditional academic roles.

[3.3] In terms of the broader issue of the divisions within fan studies/fandom communities that stimulated these discussions, here's how I understand the questions & investments that have been articulated (in generalized & oversimplified terms): the technological & industrial shifts that Henry analyzes in Convergence Culture & on this blog are making fannish activities more mainstream and acceptable, but also more commodified and privileging fanboy over fangirl practices. Mirroring that shift, academic interest in fandom has splintered along gendered lines, with prominent male academics emphasizing fanboy & industrial practices, leaving many female academics on the margins to study & defend fangirl practices that have arguably been more important in the history of fandom; and like the old saw about children's programming, the girls will consume work pitched at both genders, while the boys only concern themselves with boy-stuff (be it machinima or G.I. Joe). Whether this reluctance to engage female fandoms & fan scholars from male academics is intentional or truly captures what specifically happened in particular instances is beside the point - the broad-based impression amongst the female acafan community that there is a gender split means that it matters & must be discussed.

[3.4] KLH: I agree with this overview. Part of the gender/authority fault line is simply the result of what people happen to be interested in. But part of it is the deliberate invitation of various groups to perform or create artworks that lie within a gendered sphere. So George Lucas can invite fans to create vids within a certain very structured format by providing clips for mashups, as a kind of advertisement, while simultaneously shutting out derivative works created from sources like the films. Men are far more likely to respond to that kind of prompt than women. This gives the male-gendered activity the gloss of acceptability and pushes women onto the fringes, although I'm happy to say that Lucas has seen the light: he will permit fanfic type stuff in 2007. I see this kind of change of mind as tremendously hopeful, because it places the stamp of official approval on a marginalized fan practice, which will in turn permit more unrestricted free play. I like to think it's the result of the margin being erased. This ought to help with gender equity in responses, too.

4. Gendered textual authority

[4.1] KLH: When I think about a gendered divide, I think about men controlling the publishing outlets. I think about the volume I coedited, when two men, the outside reviewers, critiqued and approved work spearheaded by us, two women - and I think of how happy and grateful I am that they did. And I think about the academic privileging of creative over derivative artworks. "What fanboys do" and "what fangirls do" interests me less than the larger, completely entrenched worldview that privileges the work and authority of men over that of women, and much of this debate strikes me as something within the realm of a sex-divided culture war.

[4.2] For example, the polarizing FanLib debate, part of which is featured in this blog, involves an effort by outsiders (men) to gain financially by using woman-generated content, and there has been a call for (women) fans to take action, to seize control of their own work before someone does it for them. The fact that those who propose a business model such as FanLib think that the time is right to address certain legal and ethical concerns indicates that a change is coming in how derivative works are perceived, so the gender issue takes on a sudden new urgency. The disenfranchising is poised to begin, and the women who generate the content have been prodded into action. Activism is a good thing, but the gender lines here are obvious and troubling.

[4.3] Within the academic realm, part of the gendered split is, I suspect, the result of certain practical copyright concerns that affect publication - concerns that I, as a copyeditor and as coeditor of a volume that reprinted fan artwork, know to worry about. (I'm not going to discuss the whole "copyright and derivative artworks" thing. That can be left to someone in law. I'm speaking purely practically here: imagine simply that somebody wrote an article and she wants to publish it.) If a scholar (probably a man) writes an article about machinima, as one did for the volume I worked on, then he can illustrate it with screen shots. But if another scholar (probably a woman) writes about a vid, she gets hit with the double whammy: reproducing popular song lyrics costs big money, and so does reproducing screen shots [JM: as an aside, screen captures should be considered fair use, but that's another issue]. The prohibitive cost means that she probably can't publish her work intact, and it's hard to write a well-documented article about a songvid without quoting the song or the vid. In fact, it's very difficult in general to write an article about a text that hasn't been published in commercial outlets and can't be easily purchased on Amazon.com - like fanfic, or a vid, or other texts that the scholar may think she wants to talk about.

[4.4] The academic world isn't going to wait for major changes in copyright law or technology to rethink how it grants things like privilege and tenure, and publishing outlets aren't going to change their standards of documentation. Yet I would argue that part of the problem is that men are more likely to work on topics that are easier to publish about, because these topics are free of certain legal encumbrances; and women are more likely to present a paper orally, to give informal papers on texts that trouble those in authority, like production editors, who need to get their pieces of paper from the copyright holders before the article can see print.

[4.5] JM: This highlights how the gender issue is mapped onto the corporate vs. citizen divide as well - fandom has traditionally been outside the power of the industry, and now that media companies are trying to work with (or, less charitably, co-opt) fan practices, the female realm of fandom is having to deal more directly with the more traditional (read male) world of copyrights and licensing than back when fan creativity was via photocopies and conventions. As Jenkins discusses in Convergence Culture, the legal realm of fair use favors (perhaps by coincidence or maybe by deep-seated ideologies, depending on your theoretical stripes) the more masculine practices of parody over female extensions of storyworlds and relationships.

[4.6] KLH: This debate highlights how disenfranchising in general being on the outside is. This kind of split isn't unique to media studies. The discussion has reinforced my annoyance at the inflexibility of the structures currently in place, even as I'm employed in a field that asks me to police them. For example, I'm under orders to delete all popular song lyrics from the texts I edit, because my employers don't want to deal with the cost and hassle. At least copyright rules and the unspoken rules governing the appropriateness of documents meant for publication, no matter how inflexible or troubling, or are the same for everyone, regardless of discipline or sex.

[4.7] All of this comes back to the gendered nature of authority and its place in the governing structures that underlie certain aspects of our culture: the academy; the transmission of knowledge through (print) media; the policed ownership of content. The best thing about the red team/blue team debate is that we're talking about these issues. But it's out of my power to change things like copyright holders' demands, even as our culture lurches on, with mashups and songvids put up on YouTube faster than the YouTube copyright police can take them down. Music, TV, and movie downloads, and peer-to-peer file sharing - all of this permits easy access to copyrighted material that's in a perfect form to be co-opted and used in a new way.

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW...

Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media (Part Two)

Yesterday, we ran the first part of an essay written by Sloan MBA candidate Eleanor Baird about the current fate and future branding of network television. Baird's work calls attention to shifts in the ways that networks measure their audiences, shifts which are going to be played out in dramatic ways as the networks launch their new season this fall. A team of MIT students -- graduate and undergraduate -- will be monitoring closely the week by week fluctuations in viewership figures and the ways that the networks are adjusting their programming strategies and branding practices in response. Here's the description of the course, which would be open to students from MIT, Harvard, or Wellesley, thanks to our various exchange programs. I hope to report on some of their findings here throughout the term.

Quantitative Research: Case Studies in the Fall 2007 Television Ecosystem

Alex Chisholm and Stacey Lynn Schulman

As creative development and business models change for television and cable networks making the transition from broadcasting to a mass market to immersing viewers in content across digital platforms, new opportunities to engage audiences in more meaningful ways are emerging as quickly as the underlying businesses that support production and distribution are outgrowing traditional valuation metrics and advertising currencies. There is a significant disconnect between what we know and can price versus what we're learning and where businesses are headed in the years to come.

Using the Fall 2007 television season as a basis for discussion and exploration, this seminar and lab course are designed to introduce students to the research metrics and business issues associated with broadcast and cable television, as well is with a variety of digital content extensions across web, mobile, and other platforms, all intended to create additional revenue streams while engaging audiences. In the lab, students will apply their learning to an analysis and revenue forecasting exercise for the television season as it unfolds in real time. The goal of the course will be to enable students to explore new ways of thinking quantitatively as we attempt to bridge the gap that currently exists between the known and unknown.

Our aim will be to begin the course with summaries of the networks' annual "upfront" presentations and programming strategies, immersing students in the creative and strategic pitches of the four major networks and explaining the corresponding business/programming rationale behind the new fall TV season. Then, in subsequent weeks, students will be introduced and become fluent in the mechanics and intricacies of rating points, Nielsen ratings, and other data to help understand the programming and business (e.g., marketing, advertising pricing inventories, sweeps strategies and case students, etc.) of the season as it progresses through the fall. Students will also be introduced to emerging strategies and tools to analyze "buzz" and other online behaviors -- such as online video viewing, iTunes purchases, etc. -- that now enable networks to better understand the "total" audience for their shows. While the course will focus on quantitative research methods and analysis, connections will be made to some new qualitative strategies and methods. Guest speakers from the major television networks, production companies, and advertising agencies will complement seminar discussions and readings.

As part of the weekly lab, students will work in teams representing the major television networks to "forecast" what the networks might and should do to revise their programming strategies and re-price their advertising inventories over the course of the fall season. The lab is supplemented by an online discussion/wiki where student teams will collaborate and collect data.

Stacey Lynn Schulman is CEO, Chief Insight Officer of Hi: Human Insight, a media consultancy practice that specializes in unearthing insights that drive better connections between consumers and content. Through January 2007, Ms. Schulman was the president of The Interpublic Group of Co.'s fully-dedicated Consumer Experience Practice, which advised marketers on how to effectively connect with consumers in the evolving media landscape. Widely respected in the industry, she is an award-winning professional who is routinely quoted in trade and consumer media outlets, including appearances on CNN, CNBC and FOX News Channel to discuss media trends.

Alex Chisholm is founder of [ICE]^3 Studios, a media research and development consultancy that creates transmedia entertainment and educational properties, and is currently developing several projects with NBC News, NBC Olympics-Beijing 2008, and The Children's Hospital Trust. Over the past seven years, he has collaborated on research, product, and program development with Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Interpublic Group, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, Children's Hospital Boston, and the MacArthur Foundation.

Now for Part Two of Baird's essay:

Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media

by Eleanor Baird

Digital downstream

Even if audiences are not planning to sit in front of a network television affiliate for hours on end, networks hope, as they probably always have, that the consumer will be at least be engaged with the some of the content and keep coming back for more. The interactive, on-demand nature of the Internet seems to make it a natural medium for audience engagement for a consumer who could access the content from a wide variety of channels at a variety of times. Network executives and programmers hope that enhanced and more interactive experiences through the "ancillary channel" of the Internet will increase retention, engagement and, time spent viewing the show and related content and ultimately, revenue going back to the original program source. With a network branded site, this strategy is another opportunity to have consumers interact with the meta brand

Caldwell argues that television styled itself a "pull" medium, while bidding to make the Internet a "viable 'push' medium" . The relationship between television and Internet may seem natural and complimentary in this way, but it is problematic in others, requiring the interaction of content created by a few and consumed by many to adapt to a medium where greater participation in consumption and production of the content and flow are the norm. Moreover, this relationship has implications for a network trying to maintain a clear brand identity in an environment where users expect to be able to repurpose content in ways that the producers may never have intended. In contrast to television, this medium gives the network far less control of the image of both the sub-brand (the content) but also the meta brand, then context in which the sub-brand is experienced (the network).

So, although consumption of digital content may engage the viewer more, there is no guarantee, given the nature of the technology and the norms surrounding it, that the engagement will be with the network brand, the show's sub-brand, a combination of the two, or other factors entirely. That said, a recent study suggest that, if presented through a number of media channels, network affiliation awareness seems to grow stronger, echoing multiple studies on marketing messages and consumer retention.

Although there is certainly potential for branding and revenue generation online, interactivity is not the silver bullet that will save the networks from a consumer standpoint either. Various companies have tried to launch costly interactive television initiatives since the 1970s, all of which failed because they overestimated the audience interest in the service.

The public's interest in interactivity does not seem to be much better for network websites. Even though the vast majority of homes have a television and Internet penetration in U.S. households is quite high, there are estimates that as little as 5% of broadcast networks' viewers actually watch streaming video, in contrast to the 15% of cable channel viewers who do. A recent study of cable network website users found that they enjoyed using the website, but did not see it as the "Internet brand of the network" or as a "functional alternative to television". In fact, the usage of the cable television websites was heavily dependent on if they had been mentioned on air - a factor that accounted for about two thirds of visitors - and, not surprisingly, the popularity of a cable network's website mirrors the popularity of the network's broadcasts.

This raises the question of the utility of focusing branding efforts on these channels at all. If the users are highly engaged "content junkies" who usually learn about the site through watching television anyway, is network brand development online a worthwhile area to explore?

Re-run or Pitch: Anything new?

One could argue that the current challenges facing the networks are nothing new. Viewership and ratings of network television have been in decline since the introduction of cable television channels and the VCR; network primetime share of the TV audience Network prime time viewing shares have dropped from over 90% in 1979 to about 50% in 1998, the same year the four networks' season rating slipped to 36%. The growing ubiquity of advertising in everyday western life and the issues that raises first drew comment in the mid-1800s, and many of the "new" advertising ideas, from the single sponsor to the commercial-program integration were used in TV's earlier days. Hand wringing about the propensity of consumers to skip advertisements on television began as early as the 1950s and 1960s when articles appeared in the popular press on how to "zap" commercials with a remote.

Going with the flow

If we take the opposite view, that these changes are significant and, as some have argued, we are living in a "post-network" or possibly even "post-television" era , where traditional channels will become obsolete and consumers will be left to their own devices in selecting the content they want to view. Although sensational and interesting to contemplate, these scenarios would not be consistent with the evolution of media where, as Henry Jenkins argues, "once a medium establishes itself as satisfying some core human demand, it continues to function within a larger system of communication options". This outlook would also be inconsistent with the current and historical behaviors of "mass" audiences who have been known to vary widely in their adoption of new technology and consumption habits, as we have seen.

If the latter case is true, how can television, and more specifically the networks, adapt to a brave new world that includes not only cable, and DVRs but digital distribution channels and an audience that wants more and more control over what it watches and when. If content is indeed king, where do broadcast networks fit in, and how do they keep their advertisers happy and revenue streams flowing?

The answer seems to be in stealthy advertising and broad diversification. John Caldwell argues that television is going through a rhetorical shift that directly reflects the industrial context and reality in which producers and distributors now find themselves. Productions are "content", not "programs", that media companies are now "repurpose[ing] and "migrating" to "platform[s]". As Sumner Redstone, Chairman of Viacom, a media conglomerate explained the company's philosophy in 2004: "What advertisers buy is platforms to get their brand promoted, and we've got four platforms for them [broadcast TV, cable TV, billboards, and radio]...[w]e're everywhere, because in this day and age you have to be where the advertisers need to be."

Unfortunately for the broadcast networks, the shocks of industry deregulation in the 1980s allowed "emerging media conglomerate were reaping the benefits of vertical integration in the cable landscape, but the broadcast networks were precluded from doing the same thing." When regulations changed again in the mid-1990s, a there was a "phase of frenzied merger and acquisitions activity characterized by an unprecedented commitment to vertical integration and 'synergy'" for broadcast networks, including extensive re-branding campaigns when the quality and familiarity message did not seem to help get an audience.

The new multi-platform, on-demand universe of repurposed channels and content disrupts Raymond William's concept that flow, sequences of items in a programming lineup, is a defining characteristic of television as a medium. Without the ability to control flow, broadcast networks - lacking the strong viewer identification and brand strength common to cable - seem to be in danger of loosing relevance as a medium or distribution channel and moving further and further into content production and promotion of engagement with a stable of content sub-brands.

Much has been written about brand extension and dilution. Most relevant for networks, however, are the risks and benefits associated with having a strong meta brand. Consumers like consistency and predictability. The more consistent, predictable and good a sub-brand, the more it would benefit from a strong meta-brand, and vice versa. If the meta-brand is weak, there is much more latitude to experiment, but no chance to benefit from a strong meta brand and market reputation for a certain competency or style. One 1993 study found that "when a firm systematically introduces brand extensions consistent with a broader, more superordinate product category, it not only modifies the brand's core business definition but also enhances the brand's ability to accommodated more and diverse extensions." Therefore, a strong network brand could actually help a broadcaster expand and diversify its offerings and protect it from some of the risk associated with new shows in an inherently risky industry.

As we have seen, advertising revenue and audiences have fallen, despite the desire to consume network television programming. New technologies for circumventing the push towards traditional network television "appointment viewing" are clearly causing some loss of revenue. However, even though lost revenue from piracy and illegal downloads online is difficult to estimate, these new technologies do not seem to have as great an impact on the networks as the advent of cable, still their main competitor, or industry consolidation in the 1990s.

If this is indeed the case, this moment in time may be a key opportunity for networks to establish themselves as meta brands and ensure that viewers identify with the channel and the product before cultural practice aligns itself more with the available technology.

Hustle and Flow - Network branding analysis

As the stage has now been set, and the larger issues in network branding addressed, this part of the paper will be devoted to an analysis of branding practices of the four U.S. networks from the mid-nineties until the 2007 upfront presentations.

Essentially, there are two models of network branding in use by these four players: the flow, or push, method and the hustle, or pull, method.

The first method of network branding, used by ABC, and NBC and FOX to a lesser extent, is what I would call the flow model. It relies on the traditional channel, the broadcast network to push content to the viewer, but uses a branded online presence as a secondary opportunity to engage the viewer in the content, but with the ongoing presence of the network brand in the virtual space. This approach is not about holding back content, but retaining control over how it is accessed by users outside of the television medium.

TV Week reports that ABC and NBC have worked aggressively to drive visits to their branded websites, largely by providing high volumes of content quickly in a single place. From September 2006 through February 2007, ABC.com and NBC.com were almost tied in first place with about 9 million unique visitors each per month, trailed by CBS.com with 5.5 and Fox.com with just 3.7 million, according to Nielsen Net Ratings. NBC and FOX have announced that they will collaborate to launch a yet unnamed content delivery site this year.

Where the three networks diverge is in their emphasis on event programming versus branding campaigns to encourage "appointment viewing". For example, FOX has relied on long-running programs American Idol to fuel some of its rating power. A true event program, Idol has been able to command huge premiums on advertising time for six seasons. FOX has released its content gradually relative to competitors, and has fewer 'high concept" programs like Heroes or Lost, which tend to drive online ratings by virtue of their complex story lines and serial narratives that prompt viewers to seek out information outside of their regular TV viewing time. FOX is the top ranked network in the lucrative 18-49 demographic, with a brand that has been described by one executive in as "noisy, inventive, [and] talk[s] with viewers not at them", which "transferred into Fox's new on-air look, characterized by bold type, kinetic footage and distinctive color palette."

ABC and NBC have also both created flow-based marketing campaigns to brand their content on television.

Perhaps the more well known was NBC's "Must-See TV" campaign that made the network's Thursday "clearly the most watched and most profitable night in network television during the 10-year use of the line". It was flow-based because it promoted a sequence of shows rather than a single piece of content as a weekly event. This enabled the network to leverage its own meta brand and program in a rerun and sometimes new or weaker shows with the support of proven hits.

Nancy San Martin also argued that the line-up had an internal logic, that "naturalizes and reinforces a traditional narrative order- providing a readily discernible beginning, middle and end" and thus encouraged viewers to stay tuned for the entire programming set. In the midst of the "Must-See-TV" era, the network launched the NBC-2000 campaign to bring errant affiliates, and their viewers, into the fold by presenting the organization as one big family. Although the network is lagging in the ratings, Mike Pilot, President of Ad Sales, recently said in an interview that "[y]ou have to believe in our heritage [brand] and that programming success is cyclical and we'll get back to a great place", adding that the Thursday night slot was (still) the one they would focus on. The network, perhaps to hedge against its aforementioned DVR woes, has invested in both TiVo and ReplayTV.

ABC has employed a similar logic to promoting its whole lineup, although it takes a much broader, less time-dependent approach and uses themes that are more abstract and popular music to create a meta brand. The "Yellow" campaign to promote the network's entire fall lineup several years ago, using the color, a set of clever taglines and a popular coldplay song to promote itself, the channel, as a sense of irony and ultimately a fun destination rather than just a position on the dial. This season, the network has been promoting their lineup under the title "One", using a Mary J. Blige song by the same name in spots, this time emphasizing "[t]he idea...that our shows bring people together, so the network brings people together." Mentions were made in the press of ABC's core demographics in articles about the 2007 upfront presentations, with one writer at Variety referring to them as "the most upscale-skewing of all broadcasters" and a writer for the LA Times blog referring to ABC's colorful and female skewing brand .

If the "flow" approach employed by ABC, NBC and FOX is a push strategy that involves a branded digital content experience, a branded look and feel and an emphasis on events or flow programming, the "hustle" approach of CBS is almost the opposite. Unlike the other three networks, CBS has not had a recent clear brand-building campaign for its flow on the air or huge content successes. What is interesting about CBS, and why I called this the "hustle" model, is that it has been relatively aggressive in shopping out its content using a much more scattershot approach and without the anchoring site employed by ABC and NBC.

Whereas ABC and NBC have very strongly network branded sites to distribute its content for free online, CBS has taken a much different, two pronged approach more geared to distributing pieces of content along the lines of Bernard Miége's publishing model of cultural production, not Williams' concept of flow.

CBS does manage a content site where full episodes can be viewed free, but the site, Innertube, makes only passing reference to the network. The conundrum was well-described by brandchannel.com: " [w]hile the official Innertube URL is filed under the CBS brand (cbs.com/innertube) rather than its own URL (like cbsinnertube.com), the rest of the site experience actually promotes Innertube as the primary brand, with the CBS parent brand having more of a secondary role." Meanwhile, CBS recently announced a series of agreements to distribute its programming online with portals like MSN and AOL; it was also the first network to sign with the Internet TV site Joost, and is in talks with the NBC-FOX content distribution site. This scope would give CBS more internet distribution partners than any other major media company , yet the exact benefits of this strategy are still unclear, beyond its content becoming a semi-ubiquitous feature of legal video viewing sites.

CBS also garnered a great deal of attention at this year's upfront presentation from bloggers in particular when it announced that the complexly-plotted show Jericho was to be replaced with a reality program called 40 Kids. Although the network was almost universally maligned for taking this step, given its limited web presence as a content provider online, it may not be able to support a more complexly plotted show like this and fully engage the audience. CBS' model seems to be about producing content that is good for television but with limited potential for brand extension online (like CSI) , and capitalizing on it relatively quickly with on air ad revenues and multiple deals with third party content sites.

Conclusion: Three questions revisited

At the beginning of this essay, I posed three questions: is the primary role for a broadcast network as a content producer or advertising aggregation channel, if the consumer's relationship to the content is stronger than their relationship to the channel, and if a network can be branded, how can it be done successfully. I would like to conclude by attempting to answer each of these.

On the first question, a network can (and they are) both, but fundamentally a network is a communication mechanism, a mass medium. Advertising aggregation is the motor that runs both the production and broadcasting machines. Even if media is now "mass-less", the networks are the closest thing we now have to a common media experience across the United States, and maintaining that broad, general reach is its raison d'etre. Perhaps it is not the content but the selection and programming of content that networks can market and sell to advertisers.

On the second question, I would argue that consumers currently have a stronger relationship overall with network content than the network channel, but it does not have to be that way. I would point to the BBC, PBS, CityTv in Canada, and the Discovery Channel as examples of networks (albeit some on cable) that have managed to create a distinctive relationship with the people that watch them through advocacy, higher perceived quality, local involvement, and/or merchandizing and retail.

Both of these questions lead, of course into the final question: can and should a network be branded and if so, how? Based on the research, I believe that the first two parts of the answer are yes it can and yes it should. Developing a clear identity and meta-brand has several important advantages in today's market. It helps define the audience for advertisers, which helps bring in revenue, as well as setting the stage for developing a set of clear marketing messages to draw those viewers to a variety of media properties where they can engage with both the network meta brand and the content sub-brand. It also helps set the stage for loyal viewership that will bear with the network while it experiments with the occasional incongruent sub-brand to look for new revenue opportunities. True, the networks need to stay national, but that is not to say that they could not pursue a certain niche with broad appeal, somewhat like FOX's emphasis on reality programming.

The final question of how, is somewhat more difficult to answer. I would argue that, in the case of television networks, DVRs and content online are important considerations but that the vast majority of people gravitate back, or can be convinced to gravitate back to, live broadcast TV. True, the Nielsen ratings can be changed, but less ambiguity will help to capture more advertisers. The live broadcast TV "product" should be the core of any successful TV branding, not content or websites. In my mind, the flow strategy still works best; television is a live, audio and visual community experience that the web or DVR cannot duplicate, and networks offer familiarity and editorial know-how in the clutter of the "mass media" - even if it is not so "mass" anymore.

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Kissell, Rick. "Fox, CBS win season". Variety. 22 May 2007. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117965620.html?categoryid=14&cs=1. Last accessed 23 May 2007.

Kompare, Derek. "Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television". Television & New Media. Vol 7, No. 4, November 2006, p. 335-360.

Lin, Carolyn A.; Atkin, David J. and Abelman, Robert. "The Influence of Network Branding on Audience Affinity for Network Television". Journal of Advertising Research. Vol. 42, No. 3, May-June 2002. pp. 19-32.

Milberg, Sandra J.; Park, C. Whan; McCarthy, Michael S. "Managing Negative Feedback Effects Associated with Brand Extensions: The Impact of Alternative Branding Strategies." Journal of Consumer Psychology. Volume 6, No 2, 1997. p. 119-140.

San Martin, Nancy, "'Must See TV': Programming Identity on NBC Thursdays." Jancovich, Marc and Lyons, James, eds. Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 2003. pp.32-47.

Uricchio, William. "Television's Next Generation: Technology/Interface Culture/Flow". Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. p. 163-182.

Vlessing, Etan. "Report: Web TV won't challenge b'cast for some time", The Hollywood Reporter. 3 April 2007. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003566471. Last accessed 22 May 2007.

A native of Toronto, Canada, Eleanor Baird is entering her second year as an MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Before coming to Boston, Eleanor worked in media relations, consulting, and strategic planning in the public and private sectors. She holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Political Science and

History. This summer, Eleanor will be an intern with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Media Strategies department in Washington, DC.

Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media(Part One)

In the June 1 issue of Entertainment Weekly, Jeff Jensen asks the provocative question, "Are you killing TV?" The article starts with a discussion of how Heroes returned from a seven week hiatus to find that they had lost roughly 20 percent of their viewership, a jaw-breaking drop of 2.6 million viewers, from its September debut to its final few episodes of the season. Many other popular and cult series have experienced similar drops this season, including Jericho (as a result, the show was canceled), The Sopranos, Lost, The Shield, Desperate Housewives, and 24. The magazine offers a range of theories about why the networks are experiencing such dramatic drops in viewership including:

The competition of American Idol which whips out pretty much all other competition.

Creatively uneven seasons, which resulted in mis-steps and lulls in the dramatic pacing of some key series.

The shift towards daylight savings time three weeks earlier this year.

A loss of interest and attention due to the extended hiatuses (an experiment in having continuous blocks of programming followed by periods of downtime). The result of this factor has been the fact that Heroes is actually producing a second spin-off series, Heroes: Origins, which will be a placeholder or miniseries during the downtime between episodes of the original series.

Shifts in the mechanisms by which fans access television series, ranging from timeshifting to downloads and waiting for the boxed sets. EW reports that 1.7 million viwers of Heroes do not watch it during its regularly scheduled time and an additional 2 million viewers watch Lost on DVR within seven days of its original airing. These numbers do not include those watching legal or illegal downloads of the series. About a third of the viewers of Lost don't watch during the regular series but catch up with it on DVD exclusively. Major shifts are occurring in how networks measure their audiences in response to these shifts in when and how we are accessing their content but in the short term, these shifts may leave some cult shows vulnerable.

This debate about the viewership of cult television programs is part of a larger discussion about the fate of the networks in an era where methods of content distribution and access are shifting dramatically. Eleanor C. Baird, a Sloan MBA student, took my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods this term. She wrote a very solid analysis of the future of network television for the course, one which mixes modes of analysis common to business schools with those we teach through our media studies classes.

Switching Channels: Branding Network TV in an Era of Mass-less Media

by Eleanor C. Baird

No matter how hard they try to convince us otherwise, the big four U.S. broadcast networks are, at their core, a mass medium that fits awkwardly into our newly democratic and participatory media ecosystem. Their marketing strategy follows the widely outmoded "push" model of consumer promotions and advertising to draw viewers. Even as they become increasingly integrated into the media industry's value chain, broadcasters are challenged by new cultural norms of consumption and engagement that are combining with technological change to create a "perfect storm", an environment where they are creating more value, but scrambling to capture it.

What is happening? It is not that people are not watching network television or becoming engaged with the content anymore. New ways of consuming television content are challenging the old revenue generation models. Consumers are turning to DVDs, DVR, and digital alternatives on the web to fit more television viewing into their lives. Advertisers, enticed by the prospect of more affluent and targeted audiences on cable and online, are beginning to spend their budgets on content sponsorship along the long tail. Broadcast networks are consequently in the strange position of having a strong collection of sub-brands - the individual programs - under a relatively weak primary brand - the network itself.

TV and the big four may not be going anywhere for now, but the future is becoming less and less certain.

In this essay, I will explore how broadcast networks can respond to this changing and converging media environment by promoting themselves as distinct brands of television. To do so, I will address three questions. The first question is one of focus, if the primary role for a broadcast network in this environment is content production or advertising aggregation channel. The second question is one of consumer loyalties and identification, if the consumer's relationship to the content is stronger than their relationship to the channel through which they receive it. The third question is, can a channel such as a network be branded, and how can that be done successfully.

In order to answer these questions, I will begin by defining the broadcast networks and then analyze the major issues at play for them today - advertisers and audiences, content, channels, metrics, and digital distribution. Then, using Raymond Williams' concept of flow, as well as the writing of John Caldwell as a framework, I will address the macro issues of the role of the medium and the impact of branding, and then proceed to an analysis of the strategies of the four networks. The paper will conclude with some preliminary answers to the three questions based on my analysis.

What is a network?

Networks can refer to cable and broadcast channels, however, in this paper, the term is used to refer to the four major U.S. broadcast networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX. These four properties are linked by their intended mass appeal and accessibility, their advertising-based revenue model, "push" programming and promotion, center-affiliate operational model and reliance on the network-mediated model of content delivery, based on a set flow of programming. Another key commonality is their lack of a clear and consistent brand identity, in contrast to many of the more popular cable networks - including CNN, A&E, MTV, Discovery Channel - which have very clear value propositions.

With what I am calling the network-mediated flow model, there is an implicit contract between the consumer and the network to provide some editorial control over the content, to choose which programs to broadcast, when, and in what order to provide a unified viewing experience. This experience can stem from engagement with the brand, but also with a need for a completely passive viewing experience, something that sets this medium apart from the Internet, which is intrinsically interactive. Networks, with a relatively wide variety of programs airing on a particular night, are uniquely suited to appeal to those habitual and/or passive viewers.

Another defining feature of the network is that it uses a "hub-and-spoke" model of distribution; most content developed and chosen at the center then distributed by local affiliates. Although the interaction in the consumer's mind between the identity of the affiliate and the larger network are not heavily studied, keeping strong affiliates in major markets is a key priority for networks to secure viewers. A recent study also found that there was no evidence that a more media-rich environment weakened the branding of a network affiliate to the parent, meaning that the common use of new media did not affect the television stations association to the network.

Yet another shared characteristic among the networks is their strong reliance on metrics, particularly some form of the Nielsen ratings, to entice advertisers to purchase time on air.

Audiences and Advertisers - No more "monolithic blocks of eyeballs"

Audience attrition is not a new problem for the broadcast networks, but it is still worrying for net executives, advertisers, and media buyers. Five percent of the share of the lucrative adult 18-49 demographic has slipped away from the broadcast networks in the last year (from 15. to 14.3). FOX leads the broadcast networks in ratings for this demographic with just fewer than 5 million viewers, ahead of ABC and CBS. NBC is by far the weakest in this demographic, with just under three million viewers.

At the same time, ad-supported cable's share of advertising spend grew by 3% and continued to garner a higher rating (from 15.5 to 15.9). As early as 2004, Nielsen Media reported that cable owned a 52% share of the market in contrast to broadcast's 44%.

In other words, there is a discernable trend away from mass media advertising. Part of the problem is that advertisers are seeking out more specific demographics, diverting advertising budgets to more specialized and targeted media channels. According to Eric Schmitt of Forrester Research, "[m]onolithic blocks of eyeballs are gone...in their place is a perpetually shifting mosaic of audience micro-segments that forces marketers to play an endless game of audience hide-and-seek."

From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, advertisers spent more than $10B a year on cable advertising, which has drained an estimated $1B a year from network prime time. Looking forward, a recent study projects the trend to continue, with ad revenues growing more than 13% per year for "narrowcast" media and only three and a half percent per year for the mass media from 2003 to 2010. The same study estimates that, by 2010, marketers will spend 41% more on cable and nearly 18% more on Internet advertising than on network TV ads.

At the same time, advertisers are demanding more flexible and non-traditional options from networks in order to get their messages across in the era of TiVo and free content online. Options sought from the networks include a range of embedded devices, including onscreen banner ads, product placement, single-sponsor infomercials, entertainment programming, and virtual product placement to achieve product "presence" in the content, not just "placement". In the new terrain of interactive television, the players also are optimistic for making up some lost advertising revenue through e-commerce applications that enable viewers to buy products that, in the vein of The Truman Show, are featured in the television show, reducing the need for traditional 30-second spots.

Content, Channel and Keeping Score

VCRs and cable television began to appear in American households in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, networks have faced the disturbing realities of both competitive channels for advertising and opportunities for consumers to effectively remove and view TV texts from the channel altogether alongside opportunities to make money by selling content as a stand-alone product. Taken together, these developments set the stage for weaker identification with networks and the TV flow and stronger identification with self-directed content consumption that paved the way for TV on DVD and digital distribution.

Content ownership is part of the story; the more content the networks own, the more tempting the prospects of finding alternate ways of connecting viewers directly to content. Relaxation of the so-called fin-syn laws in the mid-1990s also led to a number of content deals between the conglomerates (AOL Time Warner-NBC, Disney-ABC, Fox, Viacom-CBS) and competing studios to capture as much value as possible. In 1995, networks owned the first-run and syndication rights for an average of 40% of their schedules, by 2000, 6 major networks owned or co-owned more than 50% of their new shows, while 3 had stake in more than 75% of them. This trend seems to have remained constant; for the 2007 season, the four broadcast networks, at least 42% of the new programs are produced in house or with a partner (see Appendix A).

In writing about the changing role of television and convergence, John Caldwell argues that the "real issue" has been syndication revenue, from cable in the 1980s and Internet in the 1990s, and that shows have consequently been designed with re-release in syndication in mind. Syndication is a lucrative way for producers to keep revenue flowing from older properties over time, similar to DVD, but still within the context of the television viewing experience.

TV is taken out of television with an affordable technology complimented by changing consumer expectations and viewing patterns. Digital video recorders (DVRs) like TiVo are becoming increasingly popular, and bringing a new and interesting twist to the question of network branding by splitting of content and channel. The frustrating issue for broadcast networks is that people with DVRs watch more of their programming, building a strong or at least passing affiliation with the sub-brands of individual shows, but they skip advertising. Research reported in BusinessWeek showed that DVR owners watch 20-30% more television, but bypass 70% of the advertising. NBC currently has two of the top five shows in the Nielsen rating "live-plus-seven" group of 18 to 49 year olds, the group that either watches the program live on television or uses a PVR to record and watch it within seven days of the broadcast. However, if live broadcast viewers only are included, the NBC shows barely make the top ten. Convincing advertisers to look beyond the traditional ratings is an upward struggle for any network, especially when those ratings are in decline across the board.

How big an issue is DVR adoption and use? One network executive estimated that time shifting viewers are resulting in lost revenue of as much as $600 million a year for a single broadcast network, or about $2.4 billion for all of them. On the plus side for the networks, these devices do enable some tracking of post-broadcast viewing, unlike playback using a VCR, which was almost impossible to measure. Adoption of DVRs has already lagged expectations reported in 2004 , however estimates for percentage of American households with a DVR by 2010 ranges from about half to about a third, up from only 16% in 2006.

Finally, taking the spilt of content and context even further, producers have also chosen to repackage television content completely distinctly from the format of television itself. Writing about the advent of television programming becoming commonly available on DVD, beginning with the X-Files in 2000, Derek Kompare argues that divorcing the content from the advertising enabled the content to "'transcend' television" and become a "multilayered textual experience" distinct from the medium. Although this generates revenue for the networks, it does little to strengthen their brand or capitalize on the strength of one show's sub-brand to promote another, potentially increasing profits.

A native of Toronto, Canada, Eleanor Baird is entering her second year as an MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Before coming to Boston, Eleanor worked in media relations, consulting, and strategic planning in the public and private sectors. She holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Political Science and

History. This summer, Eleanor will be an intern with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Media Strategies department in Washington, DC.

Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube

The following is adapted from remarks I made at the International Communications Association conference in San Francisco this past week. I was asked to be part of a plenary session organized by Fred Turner, "What's So Significant about Social Networking?: Web 2.0 and Its Critical Potential," which also featured Howard Rheingold, Beth Noveck, and Tiziana Terranova. We had ten minutes to speak so I took this as a challenge and offered nine big ideas about the place of YouTube in contemporary culture. Many of these ideas will be familiar to regular readers of this blog since most of them have evolved here over the past year, but I thought you might find them interesting distilled down in this form. (For those who may be joining us from the ICA crowd, I've included links back to the original posts from which these ideas have evolved.) 1. YouTube represents the kind of hybrid media space described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks -- a space where commercial, amateur, nonprofit, governmental, educational, and activist content co-exists and interacts in ever more complex ways. As such, it potentially represents a site of conflict and renegotiation between different forms of power. One interesting illustration of this is the emergence of Astroturf -- fake grassroots media -- through which very powerful groups attempt to mask themselves as powerless in order to gain greater credibility within participatory culture. In the past, these powerful interests would have been content to exert their control over broadcast and mass market media but now, they often have to mask their power in order to operate within network culture.

2. YouTube has emerged as the meeting point between a range of different grassroots communities involved in the production and circulation of media content. Much that is written about YouTube implies that the availability of Web 2.0 technologies has enabled the growth of participatory cultures. I would argue the opposite: that it was the emergence of participatory cultures of all kinds over the past several decades that has paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption, and diverse use of platforms like YouTube. But as these various fan communities, brand communities, and subcultures come together through this common portal, they are learning techniques and practices from each other, accelerating innovation within and across these different communities of practice. One might well ask whether the "You" in YouTube is singular or plural, given the fact that the same word functions for both in the English language. Is YouTube a site for personal expression, as is often claimed in news coverage, or for the expression of shared visions within common communities? I would argue that the most powerful content on YouTube comes from and is taken up by specific communities of practice and is thus in that sense a form of cultural collaboration.

3. YouTube represents a site where amateur curators assess the value of commercial content and re-present it for various niche communities of consumers. YouTube participants respond to the endless flow and multiple channels of mass media by making selections, choosing meaningful moments which then get added to a shared archive. Increasingly, we are finding clips that gain greater visibility through YouTube than they achieved via the broadcast and cable channels from which they originated. A classic example of this might be the Colbert appearance at the Washington Press Club Dinner. The media companies are uncertain how to deal with the curatorial functions of YouTube: seeing it as a form of viral marketing on some occasions and a threat to their control over their intellectual property on others. We can see this when Colbert and his staff encourage fans to remix his content the same week that Viacom seeks legal action to have Colbert clips removed from YouTube

4. YouTube's value depends heavily upon its deployment via other social networking sites -- with content gaining much greater visibility and circulation when promoted via blogs, Live Journal, MySpace, and the like. While some people come and surf YouTube, it's real breakthrough came in making it easy for people to spread its content across the web. In that regard, YouTube represents a shift away from an era of stickiness (where the goal was to attract and hold spectators on your site, like a roach motel) and towards an era where the highest value is in spreadability (a term which emphasizes the active agency of consumers in creating value and heightening awareness through their circulation of media content.)

5. YouTube operates, alongside Flickr, as an important site for citizen journalists, taking advantage of a world where most people have cameras embedded in their cellphones which they carry with them everywhere they go. We can see many examples of stories or images in the past year which would not have gotten media attention if someone hadn't thought to record them as they unfolded using readily accessible recording equiptment: George Allen's "macaca" comments, the tazering incident in the UCLA library, Michael Richards's racist outburst in the nightclub, even the footage of Sadam Hussein's execution, are a product of this powerful mixture of mobile technology and digital distribution.

6. YouTube may embody a particular opportunity for translating participatory culture into civic engagement. The ways that Apple's "1984" advertisement was appropriated and deployed by supporters of Obama and Clinton as part of the political debate suggests how central YouTube may become in the next presidential campaign. In many ways, YouTube may best embody the vision of a more popular political culture that Stephen Duncombe discusses in his new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy:

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.

Yet as we do so, we should also recognize that participatory culture is not always progressive. However low they may set the bar, the existing political parties do set limits on what they will say in the heat of the political debate and we should anticipate waves of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry as a general public, operating outside of those rules and norms, deploy participatory media to respond to a race which includes women, African-American, Hispanics, Mormans, Italian-Americans, Catholics, and the like as leading figures in a struggle for control over the White House.

7. YouTube helps us to see the shifts which are occurring in the cultural economy: the grassroots culture appropriates and remixes content from the mass media industry; the mass

media industry monitors trends and pulls innovations back into the system, amplifying them and spreading them to other populations. Yet as they do so, they often alter the social and economic relations which fueled this cultural production in the first place. We will see increasing debates about the relations between the gift economy of participatory culture and the commodity relations that characterize user-generated content. There is certainly a way that these sites can be seen as a way of economic exploitation as they outsource media production from highly paid and specialized creative workers to their amateur unpaid counterparts.

8. In the age of YouTube, social networking emerges as one of the important social skills and cultural competencies that young people need to acquire if they are going to become meaningful participants in the culture around them. We need to be concerned with the participation gap as much as we are concerned with the digital divide. The digital divide has to do with access to technology; the participation gap has to do with access to cultural experiences and the skills that people acquire through their participation within ongoing online communities and social networks.

9. YouTube teaches us that a participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse culture. As John McMuria has shown us, minorities are grossly under-represented -- at least among the most heavily viewed videos on YouTube, which still tend to come most often from white middle class males. If we want to see a more "democratic" culture, we need to explore what mechanisms might encouraged greater diversity in who participates, whose work gets seen, and what gets valued within the new participatory culture.

Chris Williams Responds to Our Questions about FanLib

As of a few minutes ago, I have received Chris Williams' response to the questions we collected here. I promised him that I would run his answers in full and I have accordingly made no changes here except to format this in a way that will make it readable on the blog. I should warn people that I am tied up with a conference this afternoon and this evening. I will put through comments from readers as quickly as I am able to do so but I may be off line for extended periods of time, so please be patient. As always, if you get an error message, send your comments directly to me and I will post them myself. THE ANSWERS

Dr. Jenkins,

Thank you for the opportunity to address the questions and share the unedited answers in full with your readers. I would like to apologize to the fan fiction community for creating confusion, being insensitive, sending some inappropriate communications, and acting in an unprofessional manner. I acknowledge that some of my answers below are repetitive but I wanted to make sure the answers are complete and in context for those readers that may only be interested in certain questions. Now to the answers...

BASIC BACKGROUND

What is your own background in fandom? Have you had a history of involvement in this community? More generally, are there people working for your company who come out of the fan fiction world and have an understanding of its traditions and practices?

I am a complete media junkie. I love stories and since 2003 I have involved over 100,000 people in online fan fiction events. Because of my involvement in these events I've definitely spent the most time with Harry Potter and L Word fan fiction. As you see from my response in the forums, I am not a great writer.

Several people in our small company come out of the fan fiction world. All of us are now involved in the community.

What led you to create this site? What first gave you the idea and why did you carry through with it? What are you hoping to achieve? What sold your investors that this was a good idea and that this was the right time to move forward?

I was deeply involved with the ongoing online revolution at Yahoo for a long time and I have always had a passion for film. In 2001, my friend and I had an idea, inspired by many people we knew with creative movie ideas, who didn't have the means or access to realize them. So we tried to create a collaborative event for fans to write an original script and produce a feature film from it. It quickly became apparent to us that online storytelling was about more than script writing: entertainment fans were also looking for venues to showcase their talent, and media companies were wrestling with how to best operate in a changing world. So we started by testing the waters with fans by running special online storytelling events and found that many of the participants loved fan fiction. We went to the media companies, talked to them about how they wanted to work with online communities and found that many wanted to connect with fan fiction readers and writers. FanLib started running special events in partnership with media companies and publishers in a moderated, controlled environment. These events were so successful with both fans and the media companies that we decided to create a venue for online storytelling based upon fan fiction.

In this broadly changing landscape FanLib (the company, not the website) is meant to be a positive agent of change for fans, media companies, and rights holders. I want FanLib.com (the website) to become a venue for fans who want to showcase and share their work, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in creative storytelling events.

Our investors recognize the tectonic shifts taking place in the digital/media/consumer/entertainment landscape. I won't fill space here with the facts and research about media convergence, user generated content (UGC) and personal media consumption and I certainly recognize fan fiction is not your "vanilla" UGC. I know you and your readers are very well aware of these modern media phenomena and changes that are occurring everywhere. Our investors believe FanLib can play an important role.

What is the basic value proposition you are making? Who is making money here? Why are the fans not being compensated for the work they produce? In what other ways might fans receive benefit from their participation in your site?

The value proposition for fans is a free venue where they can pursue their passion by creating, showcasing, reading, reviewing, sharing, archiving, discovering stories, and by participating in fun events in a community with similar interests. For those that are interested, they can also get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms through official special events we create with media companies, like we just did with the TV show Ghost Whisperer.

The value proposition for media companies and publishers is to connect, engage, and entertain fans of their media properties in a new online storytelling environment.

Right now, in the early stages, no one is profiting. We are on the leading edge of the changes, and this is an evolving model. Media companies pay us to create the special events that I've described and advertisers pay to sponsor them. Like many sites on the web, users don't pay us and we don't pay them. We want to introduce fans to online storytelling, where fan fiction plays an important role and where they can share in a particular experience provided at the website.

What does FanLib offer a fanfic writer that other ad-free sites run by people from within the fanfic community do not?

FanLib offers four things:

First, we provide a venue for people who want to showcase and share their stories, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun events.

Second, for people who want it, we provide the opportunity to be recognized and discovered by a wider audience and by our media partners. For example:

- FanLib has run two online storytelling events resulting in twelve winning authors being published in e-books distributed by HarperCollins.

- FanLib is currently running an event where authors have their parenting stories produced into short video episodes with major stars that are distributed on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and online. These videos have already been viewed over 2,800,000 times online, and we are only on the second episode with three more to go.

- FanLib launched the first ever collaboration between a television creator and their fans resulting in an original episode screenplay for The L Word. One of the winning authors secured literary representation as a result of the contest.

- FanLib has given away more than $50,000 in prizes to winning participants in our online storytelling events.

- FanLib has secured local and national press coverage for winning authors of FanLib events.

We have many more special fan events coming. You'll see us shortly announce and launch: a fan event with a major media company around one of the most popular fandoms, a collaborative feature film screenplay and movie, a partnership with a major talent management company to identify star writers from the FanLib.com community and create opportunities for them.

Third, we have highly responsive customer support.

Lastly, no other site - whether they have ads or not - offers all of the features listed below. Our beta site also actively solicits member feature requests and implements them.

Features:

+ Massively scalable, reliable archiving platform (backed up daily)

+ Easy submission creation and editing, including:

o WYSIWYG editing

o Import from another website

o File Upload with support for .doc, .txt, and .rtf formats

o Auto-save (i.e., your work is safe if your connection drops or computer crashes)

o "Make Private" option (your fic will be completely hidden from all but you)

o Add chapters over time

o Easily assign up to three fandoms to each submission

+ Advanced searching and filtering tools: Easy to add multiple criteria and build a filtered query with simple clicks

+ Featured Fanfics and Members: They will appear on the site homepage as well as at the top of searches

+ Syndication and Sharing Tools: Including RSS feeds, invites, and the ability to easily embed customized promotional badges on other sites

+ Customizable Member Profiles: You can build your profile with your fanfics, favorites, descriptions and feedback, deciding which elements will be public

+ Story Views:

o Paginated with bookmarking

o Single-page (printer-friendly) and ad-free

+ QuickLists (save a fic for later viewing)

+ Favorites

+ Subscriptions (see the latest from your favorite fandom or author)

+ Fandom FastFind: The ability to type a few characters from the name of a fandom, hit return and go directly to a page with only stories from that fandom

+ Tagging of fanfics

+ Customized Fanfic themes and images (with the ability to disable themes when browsing and searching)

+ Auto-Recommendations

+ Private messaging

+ Full Featured Message Boards

+ Content blocking based on age ratings (e.g., mature-rated submissions may be completely hidden)

+ Star Readers and Writers

+ Rate submissions (1-5 stars)

+ Leave multiple comments

+ Strong search engine optimizations

And, coming soon:

+ Email notifications

+ Multiple Author submissions

+ Banning individual members from leaving you comments

+ Ability to associate other media (e.g., video, more images)

+ Social networking tools

To our knowledge FanLib.com is the only site with ALL of these features. Our site is designed so that you don't have to use all these features - in fact it's also a great private archive.

Who is the target audience for the site? Did you do a market survey and identify who they wanted, and what is the demographic breakdown of that audience?

The site is for people who want to showcase and share stories, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun online events. Let's call that the "site mission". Our market research showed that the site mission has great potential in a surprisingly broad demographic range. So the site design was not principally driven by a specific demographic, it was much broader than that and was designed for those people who like to use the new online tools and services. Obviously, anyone can use the site and we recognize that it is definitely not what the traditional fan fiction community is used to. Many of the features are a result of requests specifically from our ongoing beta test.

COPYRIGHT ISSUES

What rights is your site claiming over the fiction that gets posted there? What rights remain with the authors? Can fans post the same stories on other sites, for example, or are you claiming an exclusive right to the material? Fans note that the original terms of service implied you had the rights to edit the material or republish it in other places. Is this true?

FanLib.com members do not give up any ownership rights when they use the website. Neither do they acquire any additional ownership rights to characters and settings owned by someone else. FanLib does not own any rights to a member's content; the members only authorize us to share it on our own website and allow other members to make use of it for their own noncommercial purposes. By submitting a story on FanLib.com, they do not give up any rights to post it on any other website. FanLib imposes no restrictions on what you do with your content outside our website. The old beta terms of service (TOS) did have the word "edit," which caused a lot of confusion and has been removed. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects many of the comments from the fan fiction community.

Fanfic remains in a legal gray area because there has yet to be a precedent set stating that it is or is not, legal. Many fans worry that FanLib changes the terms by which fan fiction is being produced and circulated by charging money and pushing it further into the public eye and that this increases the risk of legal action against it. A court battle could adversely impact the entire fan community by basing case law on the most commercial rather than the least commercial forms of the practice. How might you respond to this concern? What risk analysis have you done here?

We have done an extensive risk analysis and are comfortable with supporting fan fiction through our website. As some of our members have already acknowledged, the landscape is changing. Fan fiction is already on the radar of media companies and publishers. For example, Lucasfilm, which has traditionally been conservative about fan-generated content, has even added, this year for the first time, a fan fiction category to their annual "Official Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge," and NBC has invited fans to submit their theories around the TV show Heroes.

We want to be positive agents in this change by working with fans, media companies and rights holders. We are going to do whatever is feasible to assure people that posting on FanLib.com does not somehow add to their liability. Our goal is build a great venue, open to everyone, that allows people to showcase their work, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun events. We think that by building a collaborative model, we will positively impact the fan community and will avoid needless litigation. We believe that we will be seen as an online community that goes to great lengths to protect everyone's rights in a positive, collaborative way. For those members or prospective members who are worried, I encourage them to look at our new TOS, which we feel are very fan-friendly. FanLib.com is a free service for users, and we do not charge fans to read or post fan fiction.

Statements in the original FAQ and comments from FanLib representatives that "we assume fanfiction is legal fair use" and "it's not in the copyright holder's interest to sue" have many fan authors concerned. In some cases, you are publishing stories in universes where there have been explicit statements made by creators that they do not consider fan fiction to be fair use. Have you researched the individual fandoms involved or are you treating them each the same?

First, I want to apologize for our poorly written FAQ and our old beta terms of service (TOS), all of which resulted in an understandable uproar in the fan fiction community. We have posted a new FAQ [http://www.fanlib.com/cms.do?page=faq.html] and new terms of service (TOS) [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do]

Our policy is to not accept submissions in fandoms for which the right holders have explicitly stated they do not consider fan fiction to be fair use. Since we don't actively police the site, as stated in our TOS, we will remove any such stories that come to our attention.

Yes, we have researched the individual fandoms, and no, we are not treating them all the same.

Your previous efforts around The L Word and The Ghostwhisperer involved working directly with production companies to authorize certain kinds of fan fiction. Why have you shifted strategies with this new initiative? And can you reconcile the two models?

The premise of this question is 100% false. We have not shifted strategies. As noted above, fan fiction is already on the radar of media companies and publishers and being pushed into the public eye. We want to be a positive agent in this changing environment by collaborating with fans, media companies and rights holders. We've already experienced significant success on this front through our series of special storytelling events, and we intend to build on that success with the FanLib.com venue where all the parties can participate in fan fiction. We believe we can help reconcile the two models, but changes are coming with or without us.

How is the site planning to deal with the (inevitable) first complaint from a copyright holder?

FanLib complies with the DMCA. Please see our http://www.fanlib.com/cms.do?page=dmca.htm> for more details.

Your TOS requires writers to "defend, indemnify and hold harmless FanLib" in the case of legal action. What efforts do you plan to take to inform writers about the risks they are taking? Many fans are concerned that your company will make all of the money here while leaving fans to take all the risks. How would you respond to this criticism?

Again, our old beta terms of service (TOS) was not a good expression of our intent. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects many of the comments from the fan fiction community, including this issue. Indemnification clauses are a standard part of most website TOS. For your convenience, here is the language from our new TOS:

"You agree to indemnify and hold harmless FanLib, its officers, directors, employees and agents, from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney fees) arising from any violation of the Terms. This indemnification obligation will survive these Terms and your use of the website for 12 months."

Our new FAQ also helps address some of these issues. [http://www.fanlib.com/cms.do?page=faq.html] This is an ongoing process, and we know there is more work to do.

So, how would I respond to this criticism? I would respond by asking if you truly think that the fans are the only ones taking the risks. To accomplish the mission I've described above and be positive agents of change for all parties involved requires enormous commitment, investment and substantial risk for us. To some extent we've tried to mitigate the risk for fans by being extremely flexible in our new TOS, but we'll never be able to make everyone happy and there are always some risks.

CONTENT ISSUES

FanLib allows adult content under an "ADULT" rating, but the Terms of Service say that the website must not be used to publish any material "obscene, vulgar, or indecent." Isn't there an inherent conflict there? What happens when a parent finds his-or-her child reading an ADULT-rated Harry Potter fic?

These words, which were included in our old beta TOS and caused understandable confusion, have now been removed. The new TOS has been posted at [http://www.fanlib.com/termsOfUse.do] and reflects the input of the fan fiction community, including this issue. Naturally, we will do whatever we must to abide by law.

First of all we know that in the past J.K. Rowling has expressed her disapproval for certain kinds of adult Harry Potter fan fiction. We don't presume to know her boundaries about what may be acceptable or unacceptable in a Harry Potter fic, but if she notifies us we will take down the story. As it relates to the situation where a parent finds his-or-her child reading ADULT-rated Harry Potter fic, I can't speak for the parent. What we've done on the site is completely hide all adult content so that the user must actively seek it out by changing filter settings with explicit warnings. This far exceeds what a lot of other sites do, and our process will continue to evolve.

In your marketing brochure --

http://www.my2centences.com/my2c_new/FanLib_info.pdf -- you assure the copyright holders that FanLib is "managed and moderated to the max," and that "as with a coloring book, all players must "stay within the lines." Can you explain what you mean by that statement? One of the reasons so many fans write fanfic is so that they can deliberately step out of the "lines" and do their own creative thing without any interference from the copyright holders.

I'd like to clear up some confusion around the FanLib brochure you're quoting from. First, it was produced three years ago - in 2004. Second, as a company, we have two distinct parts:

1. The beta site, FanLib.com (launched in March 2007); and

2. Official online storytelling events. In this second part, which we actually started years ago, we work with other companies and sponsors to create special online fan events. Each event is governed by its own clear rules and terms of service that are separate from those for the FanLib.com beta site referred to above. This is necessary because contests, sweepstakes, prizes etc. need their own rules and regulations. The brochure that people are referring to was written for potential companies and sponsors and relates only to these special events and not the FanLib.com beta site. At the time we published the brochure, our URL linked to a site that essentially described the events for companies and sponsors in more detail. These special events are managed and moderated and "missions" are provided so that players "stay within the lines." This brochure has NOTHING to do with fan fiction submitted on the FanLib.com site, where we provide a venue for anyone to be as creative as they want as long as they don't violate our policies. We totally understand that general fan fiction doesn't fit in the process described in the brochure, which is ONLY for certain special events we create.

I hope that addresses the confusion.

COMMUNITY RELATIONS ISSUES

Fans note that someone named "Naomi" was used to send out the original invitation letters to fan writers, but fans have been unable to find out who this person is. Is it a real person or a sock puppet? Why was a female name used for this purpose, when the board of directors for the company seems to be all male? Why has the initial advertising with its play on the Charles Atlas bodybuilding campaign adopted such a masculine metaphor for what has been and remains an overwhelmingly feminine cultural practice?

I acknowledge the way we sent out certain invitations was flawed. Our objective was to invite fan fiction authors to participate in our beta test and, if they chose to, join our beta team testing the site and providing feedback. As I hope you can appreciate, I am not going to publicly discuss personal details about our employees. We do not use sock puppets, no gender criteria were taken into account during the process and nobody at FanLib is pretending to be of a different gender.

The advertisement you mentioned was one of four that we tested during the beta, and we ran it on a site targeting a younger audience where it performed very well. We also put the ad in a general rotation on our beta site as a "house ad." In my considerable experience in online advertising unless you do some profile related targeting you're going to expose an ad to people for whom it isn't suitable. Because this ad was in a general rotation unfortunately this is what happened. We pulled the ad in order to be sensitive to some of the complaints. We are acutely aware that fandom is predominantly female, just like the users of the FanLib.com beta site, who seem to like its design and features.

Many fans feel that the company has done a poor job so far in community relations. What steps are you taking to turn this around? Are you rewriting the terms of service and FAQ based on the feedback you've received? Are you planning to develop an advisory board composed of members of the fanwriting community?

I'll be the first to admit we've done an awful job with community relations. I think the good news for us is that we have lots of feedback from the beta site and community, far more than we expected. As a result we have rewritten our terms of service and FAQ. We've taken some extraordinary steps to make our policies more fan-friendly and we are currently putting together final plans for a fan advisory board, which will be published on our beta site shortly.

What, if anything, do you think you can do to enhance the credability and responsiveness of FanLib to the people who have invested their energy into fan fiction in some cases for several decades?

First, I want to apologize for my own idiotic post across multiple blogs and for my offer to open a dialogue that I was unable to follow through on due to overwhelming community response. As a first step, based on the feedback from our current beta test, we have rewritten our terms of service and FAQ, revised some of our policies, and are creating a fan advisory board. We are in this for the long term to make FanLib.com a venue where anyone who wants to, can showcase and share their work, discover great stories, get closer to the talent behind their favorite fandoms and participate in fun storytelling events,

This last question is a bit awkward for both of us but it has come up a number of times and so I feel I need to ask it: Isn't it somewhat symptiomatic of FanLib's problems that the spokespeople are more willing to talk to a man with credentials rather than some of the female fan writers who have approached you?

I do think your question is a bit unfair, but I'll answer anyway. I am here because you hold dual citizenship in fandom and academia, you maintain credibility and integrity in both worlds, and you told me I you would get a fair hearing and you would share the unedited results of our interview in its entirety with those interested in the matter. Meanwhile, we've been listening to the many comments we've received from the community and taking action. For proof check out our new TOS and FAQ on our website.

We intend to continue the conversation with the fan fiction community through our developing fan advisory board and, as time permits, by responding to other inquiries, comments and requests that we receive from interested individuals - obviously, regardless of gender.

Thanks again for your willingness to be interviewed.

Thank you for the opportunity.

Cartoons -- Modern and Postmodern

Having spent much too much time this week setting up the Fan Boy/ Fan Girl Detante and getting involved in the debates surrounding FanLib, I hope I will be forgiven for a post which is mostly a series of interesting links that I have had stumbled on recently, all surrounding one of my favorite topics -- comics and animation. Modern

I recently had the pleasure of introducing CMS graduate student Andres Lombana to the astonishingly original cartoons which came out of UPA studios in the 1950s, including my personal favorite, Gerald McBoing Boing, or their highly stylized version of The Tell Tale Heart or their adaptation of James Thurber's The Unicorn in the Garden or the oft-neglected Christopher Crumpet and Family Circus or... Andres returned the favor by introducing me to a really interesting blog that author Amid Amidi has created around his book, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. The blog is a treasure trove of classic commercials and cartoons, often obscure early works by important animators, as well as storyboards, sketches, promotional materials, and the like, surrounded by interesting critical commentary. I strongly recommend this site to anyone who shares my interest in 50s animation or who is simply interested in understanding the intersection between modern art and popular culture.

Postmodern 1

Have you seen A Fair(y) Use Tale? It's a provocative video circulating on YouTube and where-ever else fine mash-up videos can be found which explains core concepts in American copyright law, including, of course, fair use, through the appropriation and re-contextualizing of segments from classic Disney movies. The film was produced by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. The video is being distributed by the Media Education Foundation. (I don't always like the films produced by the MEF, which often seem to be heavy-handed and pedantic and tend to demonize both media producers and consumers, but this seems like an especially valuable contribution to our teaching about the current copyright wars and came just in time to be a welcome relief from grading papers.)

As the closing moments of the film suggest, Disney as a company has been the big bad wolf of American copyright law, bullying everyone from local daycare centers to the Academy Awards which seeks to quote images from their films. Some have gone so far as to describe the current copyright statues as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because it essentially keeps expanding the period covered by copyright to insure that the rodent never falls into public domain. So, it seems only fair that Disney sounds and images be used to help the public understand its rights and responsibilities under current intellectual property law. That said, I'd watch this one now before the Cease and Desist letters start to fly.

Postmodern 2

The Apple vs. PC advertising campaign has become one of the most quoted themes in contemporary popular culture. Not since the "Whazzup" madness of a few years ago have we seen a commercial which provided such a rich and recurring template for grassroots appropriations. So, it is not surprising that fan boys are using it to comment on the ever-green debate about the relative merits of DC vs. Marvel superheroes. You can see the results in two very different videos making their rounds these days -- the first focuses on the two companies and their products, the second pits Batman against Spider-man, suggesting that Peter Parker has a way to go before he can match Bruce Wayne's record for pain and personal trauma.

Enjoy!

CMS and Media Lab Get Knight Grant to Start a Center for Future Civic Media

The John and James L. Knight Foundation announced today that the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Media Lab would receive a grant of $5 Million over the next four years to create and operate a Center for Future Civic Media (C4FCM). The money comes as part of a new initiative the foundation has launched to deploy new media technologies to foster greater civic engagement. Here are some excerpts from the press release announcing the award:

MIT, MTV, top young computer programmers and bloggers are among the 25 first-year winners of the Knight News Challenge, announced today at the Editor & Publisher/ Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show in Miami.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation funded the contest with $25 million over five years to help lead journalism into its digital future.

The first-year winners all proposed innovative ideas for using digital news and information to build and bind community in specific geographic areas.

* The Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology receive $5 million to create a Center for Future Civic Media to develop, test and study new forms of high-tech community news.

* Journalist/web developer Adrian Holovaty, creator of chicagocrime.org, receives $1.1 million to create a series of city-specific web sites devoted to public records and hyperlocal information.

* VillageSoup in Maine receives $885,000 to build free software to allow others to replicate the citizen journalism and community participation site VillageSoup.

* MTV receives $700,000 to establish a Knight Mobile Youth Journalist (Knight "MyJos") in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia to report weekly - on cell phones, and other media - on key issues including the environment, 2008 presidential election and sexual health.

* Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism receives $639,000 for nine full journalism scholarships for students with undergraduate degrees in computer science.

* The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University receives $552,000 to create an incubator where students will learn how to create and launch digital media products.

18 more winners receive prizes between $25,000 and $340,000. Nine bloggers will receive grants of $15,000 each to blog about topics ranging from GPS tracking devices to out-of-the-box community publishing solutions. All winners will maintain blogs about their projects.

Says Alberto Ibarguen, Knight Foundation's President and CEO: "We want to spur discovery of how digital platforms can be used to disseminate news and information on a timely basis within a defined geographic space, and thereby build and bind community. That's what newspapers and local television stations used to do in the 20th century, and it's something that our communities still need today. The contest was open--and will stay open next year--to anyone anywhere in the world because 'community' is something we all can define."

Background on the winning entries:

MIT

With its $5 million Knight News Challenge award to the Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Knight Foundation teams up with one of world's premier technological innovators. MIT will create a Center for Future Civic Media to test and investigate civic media in local communities. The center pairs the technological innovation of the Media Lab with the social and cultural expertise of the Comparative Media Studies Program.

"We are moving to a Fifth Estate where everyone is able to pool their knowledge, share experience and expertise, and speak truth to power," says Chris Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Cheek-sent-me-hi), MIT's director of the Computing Culture Research Group, who will lead the center as co-director, together with Henry Jenkins, co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. Says Jenkins: "We now have more than a decade's worth of research into the kinds of online communities which emerge within networked cultures. With this project, we seek to draw on that research to strengthen people's ties to their own local communities." The Center will develop new theories, techniques, technologies and practices that support and foster community news and civic engagement. "All good journalists worry about what the digital revolution is doing to the news citizens need to run their communities and their lives. Now, the awesome array of science and technology at MIT will focus on this question. From their experiments we expect to see a new generation of useful community news technology and technique," says Eric Newton, Knight Foundation's vice president/journalism program.

...The Knight News Challenge is open to anyone. Applications for the 2007 Knight News Challenge round can be submitted at www.newschallenge.org starting July 1. Application deadline will be Oct. 15.

I am personally looking forward to the partnership with the MIT Media Lab. I have joked through the years that I should have "outside reader, Media Lab" printed on my business cards because of all of the times I have served on thesis and dissertation committees within the Lab, starting within days of my arrival at MIT 16 years ago. I co-edited From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games with Justine Cassell when she was part of the Lab's faculty. But this will be the first formal research collaboration between the two groups.

It gives me a chance to work closely with Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Mitchell Resnick, two faculty members in the Lab, who I have known and respected for many years. Together, we are going to create a new research center which will host events designed to showcase the best practices among community leaders and educators working in the emerging field of civic media and transmit their perspectives via blogs and podcasts; we will be drawing on those insights to inform the design and deployment of a range of new technologies and practices which are designed to help people in communities learn more about their local governments, get to know their neighbors, and form new social relations; we will be taking those technologies and practices into the field to test them in communities across the country; and we will be running training programs to help spread these ideas even further.

By civic media, we don't simply mean citizen journalism, though clearly that is part of what Knight sees as our mandate. We mean all kinds of practices which bring community members together and give them a reason to interact with each other. We have ideas for projects that effect groups as diverse as high school journalists, senior citizens, and new immigrant populations.

We are very grateful for the support of the Knight Foundation which will give us a chance to put some of our ideas about civic media into action. We hope we can make a difference on the ground -- where people live -- and through these efforts, further realize the vision of "applied humanities" that has been a core ideal of the Comparative Media Studies Program since its inception.

There's a great deal more to tell about this new initiative and I will be sharing information here in the weeks and months ahead.

What MIT Students are Learning about Communicating Science to the Public

One of the truly remarkable things about teaching at MIT are how many of our best students are crossing over from the sciences or engineering programs to take classes in media studies. They hope to use what they learn in our courses to improve their capacity to communicate scientific ideas with the general public. Here are two examples:

For the past few years, the Comparative Media Studies Program has been partnering with Terrascope, a freshman year program run by faculty from Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Terrascope students spend the year focusing on one of the world's leading environmental problems, pooling together research, talking to experts, and taking a trip to the site to see for themselves the nature of the problem. Historically, they have learned to translate their findings not only into research papers but also into museum exhibits designed to communicate with the general public. A few years ago, Ari Epstein, a faculty member in the program, approached me to see if our students might be able to help them teach the Terrascope participants how to use radio as a medium to convey their ideas to an even larger public. This year, CMS Masters student Steve Schultze served as a teaching assistant in the class. This year's focus was on how New Orleans should deal with the consequences of Katrina. The result: "Nerds in New Orleans."

The other was a paper I received from one of the undergraduate students in my Media Systems and Texts class which manages to combine his passion for climate issues with some of the things we've been learning this term about YouTube and participatory culture. The issues are ones which I have addressed here before -- the controversy which emerged as Al Gore's Penguin Army was revealed to be astroturf, but the student connects this debate to the larger context of media coverage of global warming issues in a way only a MIT science geek could.

Analyzing the Role of Media in the Climate Change Debate Through the YouTube Video, "Al Gore's Penguin Army"

by Garrett Marino

Climate change, or long-term changes in average weather conditions, signifies an important issue impacting the contemporary media landscape. The two-minute YouTube video criticizing Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Penguin Army, now viewed over 500,000 times, offers a compelling example to analyze the role of media in the climate change debate. A framework of questions can be asked around this video, with the intent of progressively working outward to link media with broader cultural trends on climate change: What can be learned from this video? How does it critique An Inconvenient Truth? What were the motives and goals of the video's producer(s)? Why use YouTube to respond to the movie? How do the contents of the YouTube video fall within broader efforts to discredit climate change science? The information presented in An Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore's Penguin Army that individuals digest and the opinions developed through related media will arguably impact policy during the coming decades.

Released on May 24, 2006, the same release date for An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Penguin Army serves largely to discredit Al Gore and his movie. In the video, Al Gore is dressed in an outfit reminiscent of Batman's enemy Penguin, who could be described as a gentleman of crime. The crime being committed by Al Gore, according to the video, is his promotion of climate change science and dictating what people should do to combat this problem. The video opens with penguins assembling into an ice cave to listen to Gore's global warming slide show. On the wall of the ice cave, a sign depicts a part human, bear, and pig figure with a slash through it titled "Manbearpig." The poster references a South Park episode where Gore speaks at South Park Elementary about the Manbearpig, a monster who roams the Earth. Gore begins his talk and quickly the penguins lose interest at the illegible charts and fall asleep. Gore continues his discussion, apparently oblivious to his audience's indifference, and shows outrageous material, such as blaming the skinniness of Lindsey Lohan on global warming. At the end of the video, Gore says that "you must take action to stop global warming!," and immediately a list of "things you can do to stop global warming" appears, including "stop exhaling," "become vegetarian," "walk everywhere (no matter the distance)," and "take cold showers."

In addition to barraging the viewer with material despicable for a critique of a serious climate change movie, Al Gore's Penguin Army has no roots in reality throughout. The opening quote in the video supposedly quoting Newsweek editor Eleanor Clift as saying, "If you liked March of the Penguins, you'll love An Inconvenient Truth," was fabricated, although she did interview Gore a month before the film's release on April 28, 2006, the same date given in the video's quote (Clift).

Another misrepresentation in the video was the penguins themselves. They were all created to resemble Tux, a Linux mascot that does not accurately portray any known species of penguin. Even seemingly credible weather facts in Al Gore's slide show were also grossly exaggerated or untrue, such as "Coldest Day in NYC (January 2005)" and "Record rain in New England (May 2006)." In no day during January 2005 did the temperature at New York City's Central Park (the official site for National Weather Service observations since the 1800's) fall below 5 degrees Fahrenheit, while the all-time record low for NYC was minus 20 degrees set in February 1934. In May 2006, some areas such as Newburyport, Massachusetts did receive all-time May monthly rainfall records, but this record is far-surpassed by rains that occurred in 1936, 1938, and 1955.

Now that the video has been discredited, there needs to be an analysis of the motives and goals of the producer(s) of Al Gore's Penguin Army. The video's YouTube page shows the poster as a member by the name of "Toutsmith," who identifies himself as a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills. An email exchange between Toutsmith and the Wall Street Journal enabled the paper to originate the email to a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm whose clientele include Exxon Mobile Corp. When contacted by the Journal, DCI Group refused to say whether or not they had a role in the release of the anti-Gore video: "DCI Group does not disclose the names of its clients, nor do we discuss the work that we do on our clients' behalf," said Matt Triaca, DCI head of media relations. Despite their denial, DCI has a history of raising doubts about the science of global warming, placing skeptical scientists on talk-radio shows and paying them to write editorials. DCI client Exxon Mobile announced that they did not participate in the creation of the video and did not help release it, according to the Journal article.

Despite the denial of both DCI and Exxon Mobile, the motives behind the producer(s) of the video are clear: cast suspicion on climate change science and confuse the public, prevent people from seeing the movie, and make those who dislike Gore hate him even more. Digging back to the original response to the video, most people who replied believed climate change is real and people are largely responsible for it. There were a few, however, that took the opposite stance, as YouTube member Bear182 writes: "People get real...global warming has been around for millions of years...do your own research . . . Real scientific research is out there for anyone to find. This is all part of a natural cycle. Al Bore is a dummy duh." To quote Bear182 exactly, all typos remain, notably Gore's last name spelled as Bore. Bear182's remark represents the fundamental leap not yet taken by most climate change skeptics: they believe that global warming is occurring, and has occurred in the past, but are not yet willing to accept that humans cause it.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gores presents a trend known as the Keeling curve, a fact that should dispel the lingering myth that the climate change occurring now is part of some natural cycle. The Keeling curve, named after Dr. Charles David Keeling, depicts the nearly constant rise in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past fifty years. Incorporating these direct atmospheric measurements with various proxy records available from ice cores, scientists can recreate carbon dioxide concentrations over the previous tens of millions of years. The record indicates that in no point during the foreseeable past have carbon dioxide concentrations risen at such a fast rate, and if current trends were to continue, by the year 2100 carbon dioxide will exist in the atmosphere at levels unseen over the past 30 million years.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore makes this point vividly, by projecting the Keeling curve along with about the past million years of carbon dioxide concentration data on a large screen. He proceeds to raise himself on an automated escalator to near the top of the screen. He then projects the future century of predicted rises in carbon dioxide, and the million-year trend is startling: it appears as a nearly constant flat line with an upward spike at the end twenty feet tall.

Despite this overwhelming trend with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, videos like "Al Gore's Penguin Army" still surface and represent a critic that will not go away easily. An interesting difference between Al Gore's Penguin Army and previous anti-climate change propaganda was its release through YouTube. According to the YouTube web site, its founding mission was to become the place to watch and share videos on the web, enabling its users to become the broadcasters of the future. YouTube is less than two years old, but the site has already become a place to promote songs and upcoming movies to its nearly twenty million unique daily visitors. The Gore penguin movie also shows that YouTube and online video in general have become a large political experiment designed to change and confuse public opinion and alter the public's perception of the world.

Politics has migrated onto YouTube for several reasons. YouTube does not fully contextualize the circulated material on its site; the creator indicates the content of his or her video(s) through keywords and generic categories such as 'entertainment' and 'sports'. Also, the open-ended aspect of YouTube enables anyone to post content and remain anonymous. With amateur-looking animation able to capture people's interest without producers resorting to professional methods, astroturfing becomes even more widespread, as apparently the case with Al Gore's Penguin Army. Astroturfing is a term used to describe a disguise of a client's agenda as independent public reaction by one or a group of individuals. In this case, a large company can mask its power and use a technology associated with less powerful groups.

With the wide selection of material now uploaded and available through YouTube, it would be hard to come across a video like Al Gore's Penguin Army.

To further support the notion that the anti-Gore video was a product of astroturfing, from May to early August of 2006, when Google searchers typed "Al Gore" or "Global Warming," the first sponsored link on the side directed users to the video. The ads were removed only a few days after the Wall Street Journal contacted DCI Group in August 2006. Diana Adair, a Google spokeswoman, said to the Journal that they do not allow advertising text that "advocates against any individual, group or organization", and will not release the identity of any advertisers (Regalado). However, the Google policy does not apply to sites associated with ad links, the loophole that enabled the link to exist.

On the other side of the climate change debate, Al Gore's team has also employed the Internet. Paramount Classics, the distributor of An Inconvenient Truth, along with Gore's consent, created its own YouTube video titled, Al Gore's Terrifying Message, which depicts Al Gore talking to the robot from the cartoon show Futurama about global warming. This video has been even more popular than Al Gore's Penguin Army, registering 1.6 million views as of April 24, 2007 compared with Penguin's half million, an indicator that the pro-climate change camp is winning the media "war" surrounding this issue.

How do the contents of Al Gore's Penguin Army fall within the broader efforts throughout media to discredit global warming? Climate change skeptics typically cite and exaggerate unanswered questions in the science, and produce long lists of scientists who dispute global warming, without stating that the list only contains a few percent of the scientific community. Given, scientific consensus has not always proved to be accurate, e.g. with the Biblical version of Earth's history taken as fact before Darwin, or continental drift theory laughed at before the 1960's. However, climate change science is based on harder evidence than the supposed evidence in the past for a six thousand-year-old Earth or stationary plates on Earth. Science has progressed immensely since those periods, although given it is not perfect. Agreed, there are open issues in climate science, but with the climate changing, ignoring the threat until every question is settled is like refusing to run from an incoming tsunami along the east coast of the United States simply because no tsunami has hit that region in the past.

Television is another medium that at times also appears to be siding with the anti-climate change camp, discrediting global warming. For example, in December 2004, delegates gathered in Argentina to discuss ongoing problems with the Kyoto Treaty. The media, and particularly television, during this period only briefly mentioned this meeting, but jumped on covering Michael Crichton's then-new novel that dismissed global warming as a scheme cooked up by scientists looking for funding. A Crichton interview by John Stossel on the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 began with, "He's concluded [that global warming] is just another media-hyped foolish scare. And many scientists agree with him" (Linden 228).

Stossel's irresponsible reporting was exacerbated by an article that appeared the same week in Science, which reported that not one scientific paper published on climate change since 1993 challenged the issue that people are changing the climate. So where are these scientists that agree with Crichton? They exist in small numbers, but keep their ideas out of publication.

Entire corporations can also employ various media outlets to discredit global warming science. They thrive on public fear of the government playing a larger role in their lives during a future era of climate consciousness. Al Gore makes a compelling statement in his interview with Eleanor Clift of Newsweek:

The behavior of Exxon Mobil is disgraceful. They finance in whole or in part forty organizations that put out disinformation on global warming designed to confuse the American people. There has emerged in the last couple of decades a lobbying strategy that is based on trying to control perceptions. In some sense it's not new, but it's new in the sophistication and the amount of resources they devote to it. It's not new in the sense it's the same thing the tobacco industry did after the surgeon general's report of 1964, and that is a major part of the reason why the Bush administration doesn't do anything. The president put their chief guy in charge of environmental policy in the White House.

During the first years of the Bush administration, innumerable investigations mostly analyzed if people were to blame for climate change. Now that scientific consensus has converged, even the President has admitted that we are changing the climate. The next phase of the debate needs to focus exclusively on policy and its social, economic, and political impacts. The mainstream media needs to take a reality pill and direct their efforts to covering and promoting policy changes and not an unfounded debate.

The YouTube video Al Gore's Penguin Army served as a case study that provided the focus of this paper: the role of media in the climate change debate. Despite the negative role that media has contributed to confuse the public on the climate change issue, the messages of Al Gore and climate change scientists appear to be gradually gaining public awareness and acceptance. The country is on a tipping point beyond which, with the help of modern media, the problem will be faced seriously and politicians from both parties will begin offering solutions to combat climate change.

Bibliography

Burt, Christopher C. Extreme Weather: A Guide & Record Book. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Fleming, James R. Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998.

Linden, Eugene. The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Meyer, William B. Americans and Their Weather. New York: Oxford, 2000.

Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits. London: Verso, 1991..

From an early age, Garrett had a fascination with the weather and in understanding the

science behind weather and climate issues. While in high school, Garrett performed

research in fluid dynamics that earned him recognition, including a semifinalist in the

prestigious Intel Science Talent Search. After graduating from High Technology High

School in New Jersey in 2004, he entered MIT and immediately joined the Weather

Forecasting Team. Garrett recently created the Weather and Climate Club at MIT which

provides an opportunity for MIT students with interests in day-to-day weather and in

long-term climate issues to deepen their interest and to enrich their MIT educational

experience. Garrett is expected to graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Earth,

Atmospheric, and Planetary Science in June 2008. He then hopes to stay at MIT for

graduate work.

Transforming Fan Culture into User-Generated Content: The Case of FanLib

You say "User-Generated Content." We say "Fan Culture."

Let's call the whole thing off!

The differences between the ways corporations and fans understand the value of grassroots creativity has never been clearer than the battle lines which have been drawn this weekend over a new venture called FanLib.

FanLib -- "Where the Stories Continue"

I first learned about FanLib's latest plans about a week ago when Convergence Culture Consortium analyst Ivan Askwith reported on their efforts in our blog:

FanLib.com launched as hub for "fan fiction" writers. The idea is to provide a home for creators of one of the first "user generated" genres, fan stories written using popular movie and TV characters and storylines. Members can upload stories, embed promos and build communities around their favorite shows. FanLib, founded by Titanic producer Jon Landau, Jon Moonves and former Yahoo CMO Anil Singh, is also currently sponsoring the Ghost Whisperer Fan Finale Challenge on the site asking fans to write their own conclusion to the show's two-part finale.

Ivan concluded his post with some concerns about whether fans were going to eagerly embrace such a project:

Since fan fiction seems to be one of the last traditional forms of fan creativity that hasn't been widely coopted and encouraged (within specific, copyright-friendly parameters) by the entertainment industry...My offhand guess would be that fan fiction, unlike mashup videos, tribute songs, and so on, are harder to 'control', and leave a lot more room for individual fans to take characters, or narratives, in directions that producers and executives aren't comfortable with.

FanLib started promisingly enough, courting the producers of programs like The L Word and The Ghost Whisperer, and getting them to run official fan fiction contests. Fans would be able to write in these universes, safe in the knowledge that they would not receive Cease and Desist letters. They even worked with a book publisher to try to put together an anthology of amateur romance fiction.

But, FanLib didn't emerge bottom-up from the fan culture itself. It wasn't run by people who knew the world of fan fiction from the inside out. It was a business, pure and simple, run by a board of directors which was entirely composed of men. This last point is especially relevant when you consider that the overwhelming percentage of people who write fan fiction are women -- even if there has been some increase of male writers as fandom has gone on line. To give you a sense of scale, there were more than 700 people who attended the Harry Potter fan convention I wrote about yesterday -- most of them readers, many of them writers of fanfic set in J.K. Rowling's world. By my count, there weren't more than 20 men in the group. That's about 18 more men than would have been there if this was a fan fiction oriented convention 16 years ago when I wrote Textual Poachers! To suggest how out of touch with this community they were, their original ads featured the transformation of fandom from a 90 pound weakling to a more robust and muscular form, leaving many women to wonder if this implied a move towards a more masculine conception of the practice. The company later did produce a female spokesperson who expressed confusion about why gender was an issue here in the first place.

Historical Background

Keep in mind there's a history here of previous attempts by companies -- some affiliated with the production companies, some not -- to create a commercial space for the promotion of fan culture. Most of them have ended badly for the fans.

Consider, for example, this story in Salon in 2000 which describes a company called Fandom.com ("by fans, for fans") which asserted a claim to have trademarked the word, "fandom," and then tried to use its corporate control of the concept to try to shut down any amateurs who wanted to share their public via the web. Salon reported on a cease and desist letter that Fandom.com had sent out to a fan named Carol Burrell. As Salon reported at the time:

Fandom.com serves as an umbrella site for numerous "fandomains" -- formerly independent Web sites dedicated to popular, merchandise-friendly topics such as Star Wars, The X-Files and Lord of the Rings that now run under the Fandom.com banner. Each site contains the same structure and design, and there's a large copyright disclaimer placed at the bottom of every page....

The initial premise of Fandom.com was straightforward: to protect individual fan site owners from studio censorship (and sell a lot of nifty merchandise and advertising in the process) ....Fandom.com seemed to make sense -- by joining together the little guys, it would create an institution that could defend itself from the heavy hitters. But Fandom.com's letter to Burrell appeared to indicate something entirely different. Fandom.com was accusing Burrell of trademark violation -- a fact that was ironic on at least two levels. First: Fandom.com may not even own a trademark for the word "fandom." Second: A company whose individual sites flourished by pushing copyright laws to the legal limit was now turning around and itself playing the role of intellectual property bully.

Which leads to the question currently raging in the fan community: Who will protect the fans from Fandom?

Or consider another such effort which Lucasfilm created to "protect" Star Wars fans, one which was described in more detail in Convergence Culture:

In 2000, Lucasfilm offered Star Wars fans free Web space and unique content for their sites, but only under the condition that whatever they created would become the studio's intellectual property. As the official notice launching this new "Homestead," explained, "To encourage the on-going excitement, creativity, and interaction of our dedicated fans in the online Star Wars community, Lucas Online is pleased to offer for the first time an official home for fans to celebrate their love of Star Wars on the World Wide Web." Historically, fan fiction had proven to be a point of entry into commercial publication for at least some amateurs, who were able to sell their novels to the professional book series centering around the various franchises. If Lucasfilm, Ltd. claimed to own such rights, they could publish them without compensation and they could also remove them without permission or warning.

Elizabeth Durack was one of the more outspoken leaders of an campaign urging her fellow Star Wars fans not to participate in these new arrangements: "That's the genius of Lucasfilm's offering fans web space -- it lets them both look amazingly generous and be even more controlling than before....Lucasfilm doesn't hate fans, and they don't hate fan websites. They can indeed see how they benefit from the free publicity they represent -- and who doesn't like being adored? This move underscores that as much as anything. But they're also scared, and that makes them hurt the people who love them."

As far as long-time fans were concerned, the announcement that FanLib was going to create a commercial portal to support the publication of fan fiction was read as more of the same. Under the circumstances, there was going to be healthy skepticism within the fan writing community no matter how the company approached them, but so far, the company has approached the fans in all of the wrong ways.

What Went Wrong

There's an excellent summary of the issues surrounding this venture written by a fan. I don't want to repeat all of the details here. But here's how Icarussancalian summarizes the company's initial pitch to the fan community:

The founders of FanLib.com saw no reason they couldn't cash in on the internet traffic. Formerly from Google, Chris Williams, the CEO and co-founder of FanLib, has an impressive resume. FanLib has corporate backing and $3 million of venture capital invested into the site.

"My colleagues and I want it to be the ultimate place for talented writers like you," Naomi of FanLib wrote to fan fiction writers. "In case you're wondering, FanLib's not new to fan fiction. Since 2001, they've been producing really cool web events with people like CBS, Showtime and HarperCollins to bring fan creativity into the big leagues."

FanLib did their homework. "We scouted for serious fan fiction authors on various sites and invited only a few hundred based on their writing and impact in the community," co-founder David Williams says, and fans agree that their search focused on popular writers. What's a "serious" fan fiction writer? A serious fan fiction writer could have anywhere from 30 to 100 stories, with upwards of 700 regular readers subscribed to their blogs or LiveJournal accounts. Currently, fan fiction writers do their own marketing through networking with other fans, posting in blogs, fan-run archives, and various fan fiction communities targeted to their readers.

Unfortunately, FanLib did little more than ask the writers to hand over the product.

FanLib's creators immediately ran into trouble with fans critical of FanLib's plans to turn profits on their freely provided fan fiction with no compensation to the authors, beyond t-shirts and prizes. Fan fiction writers were also unhappy at a clause where FanLib owned the rights to any fiction they posted...

This post also notes that FanLib was emphatically not going to take any legal risks on behalf of the fans here, leaving the writers libel for all legal actions that might be taken against them by any production companies that felt that fan fiction was in violation of their intellectual property rights. Fans were going to take all of the risks; the company was going to make all of the profits, all for the gift of providing a central portal where fans could go to read the "best" fan fiction as evaluated by a board of male corporate executives. (Taken at face value, the company was trying to "cherry pick" the top writers from the amateur realm. At worst, they were imposing their own aesthetic judgments on the community without any real regard for existing norms and hierarchies.)

To add insult to injury, the company surrounded itself with self congratulatory rhetoric about taking fan fiction into the "major leagues," which showed little grasp of why fans might prefer to operate in the more liberated zone of what Catherine Tossenberger, an aca-fan who spoke at Phoenix Rising this weekend, calls the "unpublishable." Or the producers talked about making fan fiction available to "mainstream audiences," which clearly implied that the hundreds of thousands of fan fiction writers and readers now were somehow not "mainstream." This is a debate which has long surrounded fan fiction. Some seek to legitimize it by arguing that it is a stepping stone or training ground for professional writers as if commercialization of creative expression was the highest possible step an author could take. Others -- myself among them -- have argued that fan fiction should be valued within the terms of the community which produces and reads it, that a fan writer who only writes for other fans may still be making a rich contribution to our culture which demands our respect.

FanLib had done its homework by the standards of the VC world: they had identified a potential market; they had developed a business plan; they had even identified potential contributors to the site; they had developed a board of directors. They simply hadn't really listen to, talked with, or respected the existing grassroots community which surrounded the production and distribution of fan fiction.

Fan Fury

Well, if they hadn't listened to fans before, they were starting to hear from them by this past weekend. Fans were rallying where-ever fans gathered, constructing arguments, deconstructing the company's FAQ, proposing alternative models for how this might be done right, writing letters to the managers, and trying to hold them accountable for their actions. You can get some sense of the intensity of their arguments by checking out some of the many posts found at Metafandom, a site where fans gather to discuss the politics and poetics of fan culture or as they would put it, just "wank."

As one reads these fan voices, one hears some of their deep ambivalence about the ways that the corporate embrace of "user-generated content" may be endangering the grassroots culture they have created for themselves. Here, for example, is almostnever:

This is the reason I have been involved recently in arguments about whether our community should accept the monetization of fan fiction. Because I think it's coming whether we accept it or not, and I'd rather it was fan-creators getting the benefit of the $$$, not some cutthroat entrepreneur who doesn't care about our community except as a market niche.

I don't think FanLib is the one that's going to change things, but I do see change coming. There's a lot of happytalk in the entertainment industry about the money to be made by bringing your audience in under your corporate wing, the better to do market research, sell to them, and make $$ from their conversations about your product.

But if, say, Paramount brings Star Trek fan fiction in-house, it wouldn't be smart for them to allow competition from fan-run archives and sites. If Star Trek fans' only choice was to post to a site like FanLib or get a C&D, then things could get lonely for Trek fans, if only from people dropping out of fandom or going underground to avoid the hassles.

These comments suggest two debates which are currently brewing in fandom:

1. the issue of whether amateur creators should be compensated for the work they contribute to for-profit sites like YouTube. This is an issue I've raised here before and won't discuss in depth now.

2. the concern that as companies construct a zone of tolerance over certain forms of fan activities, they will use them to police more aggressively those fan activities that they find offensive or potentially damaging to their brand. Fans have long asserted their rights to construct and share fantasies that may not be consistent with the ideological norms of media companies. In an argument which parallels debates in the queer community, they argue that as long as some of their fantasies are being policed, none of them have the freedom of expression which drew them into fan culture in the first place.

Angiepen, another fan, walked through a detailed critique of the site's terms of service, showing both the ways that they over-reached in asserting their rights to control and edit what fans produced and how they might threaten the uneasy zone of tolerance which surrounds fan fiction as far as at least some of the Powers That Be (the media companies and their executives) are concerned.

Almost everyone I meet in the media industry imagines we are moving towards a more participatory culture but the dispute surrounds the terms of participation. More and more media producers are adopting what I call the "collaborationist" model -- embracing fan creativity as a way of enhancing engagement with their properties. Others have adopted a stance of benign neglect -- willing to turn a blind eye to the proliferation of fan fiction online as long as people aren't making money from it.

As fans note, however, FanLib's efforts to commercialize fan fiction represented the worst case scenario: a highly publicized, for profit venture which left fan fiction writers even more exposed than they have before. Fans have long noted that there is no case law to determine what if any fan fiction constitutes fair use. They realize, however, that the "wrong case" could easily bring about the wrong kind of legal judgement on this entire space. Some, like AngiePen, went even further:

You know, this is probably just me being paranoid here but since the TOS prohibits any posting of material which violates someone else's copyright, they could in theory have set up this site to draw in as many fanfic writers as possible with the intention of turning around and smacking all of them for copyright violation, whether that means direct prosecution of people who are writing fics based on properties whose owners are represented on the FanLib board, or sending notification with names and e-mails and copies of stories to the copyright holders who are not associated with the site. I'm just saying.

How Not to Handle a Controversy

And so the debate continues. As icarusancalion notes in her summary, the company only made things worse for itself by responding to the criticism in ways which fans considered haphazard and patronizing and then trying to erase previous posts once they came under fire. For example, when fans systematically critiqued the FAQ for the site, the FAQ disappeared from public view, one hopes so that it could be reconsidered and rewritten but potentially to simply hide the history of the company's less than friendly interactions with fans. She quotes FanLib executive Chris William's post to the community as an example:

"hey everyone, I'm Chris one of the founders of FanLib. it's really late and i have been working on the site all day. I'm exhausted but i just realized what was going on here and all of the commentsts are making me sick. we're a small company with 10 emplyees who work 16 hours a day to try and make a great website. we're real people! with feelings and everything! we have been working on this and dreaming about it for a long time and you are just here to shit on it without giving us a chance. i care deeply about what you think but this is crazy. we're good people here and you make us sound like we're an evil corporation or the govt. sending your kids to war or something. we really are all about celebrating fan fiction and fan fiction readers and writers. im sorry this is so short and please excuse the fact that i am cutting and pasting this across a bunch of ljs but i gotta get some sleep."

Those of you in the media business will understand the frustration expressed in this post but it also can come across as sounding like the student who wants a good grade because they worked really hard on the assignment and not because of the results. Williams ignores the fact that a significant number of the fans involved in this dispute had worked for a decade or more, some for many decades, to generate a community around fan fiction and that's precisely why they didn't want outsiders moving in and trying to turn it into a revenue stream for their companies.

Alternative Models

As the conversation continued, fans began to come up with their own proposals for ways that they could achieve the value of this venture -- a central hub for fan fiction -- while keeping the cultural production under the control of the fan community itself. Here's part of one such proposal for "an archive of our own" by astolat which is starting to get some real traction among the fans I've spoken with the past few days:

We need a central archive of our own, something like animemusicvideos.org. Something that would NOT hide from google or any public mention, and would clearly state our case for the legality of our hobby up front, while not trying to make a profit off other people's IP and instead only making it easier for us to celebrate it, together, and create a welcoming space for new fans that has a sense of our history and our community behind it.

I think the necessary features would include:

* run BY fanfic readers FOR fanfic readers

* with no ads and solely donation-supported

* with a simple and highly searchable interface and browsable quicksearch pages

* allowing ANYTHING -- het, slash, RPF, chan, kink, highly adult -- with a registration process for reading adult-rated stories where once you register, you don't have to keep clicking through warnings every time you want to read

* allowing the poster to control her stories (ie, upload, delete, edit, tagging)

* allowing users to leave comments with the poster able to delete and ban particular users/IPs but not edit comment content (ie, lj style)

* code-wise able to support a huge archive of possibly millions of stories

* giving explicit credit to the original creators while clearly disclaiming any official status

It's not hard to see the contrast between what these fans want and what the company is offering them. Given the speed with which this debate has grown and the skills held collectively within the fan community, I wouldn't be surprised to see such a site emerge from this fray.

What's Wrong with the "User-Generated Content" Model?

I have focused here on the fan's side of the story. It is worth keeping in mind that there may be, almost certainly is, a considerable gap between the ways that FanLib's directors see their venture and the ways that it is being perceived within the fan community. If FanLib is smart, they will take seriously these complaints which come from people who are at the center of the existing fan communities and will be trying to rework their plans to respond to this feedback. It is not clear to me that they can avoid some fundamental problems in the ways that their business plan intersects with the grassroots communities which they claim they want to serve and which some fans fear they want to exploit.

I hope that other groups entering the space of what the industry likes to call "user-generated content" study this story closely and learn from FanLib's mistakes and missteps. Perception matters. Community relations are make or break. You can't serve a community if you don't understand their existing practices and their long-standing traditions.

Let's start with the concept of "user-generated content." The industry tends to see these users in isolation -- as individuals who want to express themselves, rather than as part of pre-existing communities with their own traditions of participatory culture. FanLib's rhetoric seems to be caught between these two conceptions of the "user," talking about fan traditions but dealing with fans as isolated individuals and not respecting the community as a whole.

Second, the industry tends to think of "content" as something which can be commodified and thus isolated from the social relations which surrounds its production and circulation. Yet, fan culture stresses the ways that this material emerges from a social network of fans who have their own aesthetics, politics, and genre expectations. And for many fans, the noncommercial nature of fan culture is one of its most important characteristics. These stories are a labor of love; they operate in a gift economy and are given freely to other fans who share their passion for these characters. Being free of the commercial constraints that surround the source texts, they gain new freedom to explore themes or experiment with structures and styles that could not be part of the "mainstream" versions of these worlds.

Of course, there are already a large number of fans who are deciding to participate in the FanLib site, for whom its services do seem to represent what the corporate world would call "added value," and we probably need to develop a better understanding of why they are making that choice. I don't mean my discussion here to suggest that fandoms speak with one voice on this or any other matter. I only want to suggest that FanLib is bucking long-standing convictions within the fan community when it seeks to move fan fiction into the commercial realm.

A Public Invitation

That said, I would welcome response from the executives at FanLib. I would love to conduct an interview with them on this site in which they actually responded to the fan criticisms of their ventures. So, Chris Williams, if you or anyone else at FanLib is reading this, get in touch.

Update: Chris Williams has accepted my invitation to be interviewed in the blog. We are still working out the details. In the meantime, I wanted to solicit from my readers questions you would like to see addressed in such an exchange. My goal is to allow him to tell his side of the story and to speak to the concerns which fans have raised. Either send me your questions via the comments section here or via e-mail at henry3@mit.edu. Thanks. As always, my spam filter can be a little wonky so if you are getting error messages, send your questions directly to me.

Everybody Loves Harry?

The following comments are reflections upon a really intense and delightful weekend spent at Phoenix Rising, a Harry Potter Conference held in New Orleans. Thanks to my hosts and to all of the other fans I met at the conference. I am sure that I will be having further reflections on what I learned this weekend in future posts.

Harry Potter in the Mainstream

Shortly after I arrived in New Orleans, I was interviewed on camera by a producer for Dateline. Among the many questions he asked me was whether we would ever see something like the Harry Potter phenomenon again in our lifetime. The question was relatively banal but for some reason, it caught me off guard, as I realized that according to many theories, we shouldn't be seeing anything like the Harry Potter phenomenon now. Harry Potter is a massive mass market success at a time when all of our conversations are focusing on the fragmentation of the media marketplace and the nichification of media production. There has been so much talk about the loss of common culture, about the ways that we are all moving towards specialized media, about the end of event based consumption, and so forth. Yet very little of it has reflected on the ways that Harry Potter has bucked all of these trends.

I got into my taxi from the airport and had the usual conversation you have with a taxi driver in a convention city. He asked where I came from and why I was in town -- as if following a script -- and then asked me what kind of conference I was attending. But when I told him I was going to a Harry Potter conference, his eyes brightened up, his voice grew more intense, and he told me how very very much he was waiting for the final novel to come out this summer. I checked into the hotel and went across the street for some late lunch and played out more or less the same conversation with the waitress. When she saw I had a conference program, she brought several of her friends around -- including some from the kitchen -- who wanted to flip through the program, who wanted to sneak across the street and attend a session or two, who wondered aloud who I thought might be killed in the final installment and whether or not Snape was an evil person. Some of them had stories of the lengths they had gone to celebrate their affection for and affiliation with these books. These folks weren't simply the readers of a best-selling book series; they had all of the passion and at least some of the expertise one associates with the most hardcore fans of any other media property, only they had no direct affiliation with any kind of fan culture or community.

I tried explaining this to the television producer, worried that the final documentary, when it airs later this summer, will fall prey to the usual stereotypes of crazed and obsessive fans, totally outside of the cultural mainstream. But statistically speaking, the people who are not fans of Harry Potter are outside of the mainstream. According to Wikipedia, the six books have so far sold 377 Million copies and been translated into more than 63 different languages. Harry Potter will be widely recognized by people all over the world, including many who have not read the books but watched the movies or simply read a newspaper over the past decade.

A fair number of those Muggles are very aware that the new novel is coming out in a matter of weeks and many of them will race out to the stores or put in an advanced order so that they will be sure to get a copy the moment it becomes available. More than 500,000 pre-orders had been placed at last count and those numbers are continuing to grow everyday. One can't help recall the stories of the mobs that swamped the docks awaiting the latest shipment of Dickens serials from London. And a fair number of them also know that the new film is coming out this summer and plan to wait in long lines to see it on opening day. Each of the films claims a place on the list of the top 20 money-earners of all time. All of this is part of the Harry Potter phenomenon which suggests the mainstream nature of its success. The conference brought together some of the people responsible for that mass market success including Electronic Arts' Danny Bilson who has helped to supervise the Harry Potter games.

Harry Potter as Niche Media

But in many other ways, the success of Harry Potter demonstrates the power of niche media. Start from the fact that this is a children's book, after all, and a fantasy, two genres which historically have attracted only niche readerships. Scholastic surely wouldn't have predicted this level of popular interest when it chose to publish the original novel. By traditional industry talk, much of Harry Potter's success came from so-called "surplus consumers" -- that is, consumers who fall outside of its target demographic. Traditionally, much of fan culture involves these kinds of surplus consumers -- female fans of male-targeted action adventure series, adult consumers of children's media, western consumers of Japanese popular culture, and so forth. Indeed, it is this attraction to works that are in some ways mismatched to our needs that encourages fans to rework and rewrite them.

At the same time, passion for the Harry Potter books has emerged as a generational marker, with many of those who attending the conference first becoming active within fan culture in their early teens. Some older fans have criticized my discussion of Harry Potter fandom in Convergence Culture for not giving them their due. I certainly would never imply that Harry Potter only attracts young fans -- indeed, much of the early coverage of the fan culture was fascinated by the fact that so many adults were becoming a fan of a children's franchise -- but I also think that the young age of so many of the participants in this global fan culture is a striking feature. I am used to going to fan cons where my wife and I are well within the average age bracket and here, the participants were much closer to my son's age.

Fan culture historically prides itself as being outside the mainstream. Catherine Tosenberger, a newly minted academic who specializes in the study of children's literature and whose dissertation dealt with erotic writing set in the Harry Potter realm, deployed the term, "unpublishable" in her discussion of fan fiction this weekend. She wanted to argue that much of fan fiction was "unpublishable" not in the negative sense that it is not worthy of being published but in the affirmative sense that it breaks the rules that set limits on what kinds of stories can be told within a commercially produced text: it experiments with new themes, it pushes the relationships in new directions, it adopts new forms, it embraces its own aesthetic, and it addresses audiences not considered commercially viable. In that sense, fan fiction represents the ultimate niche product -- one which emerges from a subculture, even if that subculture is now producing and circulating fan fiction on a scale which would have been unimaginable to those of us who first starting writing academic work on fan fiction almost two decades ago. The internet has increased the scale and expanded the distribution of fan produced content. Reading and writing fan fiction may not yet be a "mainstream" activity but it is starting to push the limits of our conception of what constitutes niche success. (By the way, one hallmark of this and other Harry Potter conventions is the healthy mixture of academic and fan experts, often on the same panel, and the eagerness with which fans soak up academic analysis of their culture and of the books.)

Wizard Rock?

Suzanne Scott, a Ph.D. candidate from the Critical Studies program at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, shared her analysis of a decisively more niche practice -- "wizard rock" -- which she read in relation to earlier Do-It-Yourself music movements and to subcultural theories more generally. Wizard Rock is a form of music which takes its themes and inspiration from J.K. Rowling's novels; it may take many different forms, musically, including hard rock, new wave and punk, folk, and Emo. Much of it has a satirical edge but one born of a deep affection for the material.

As Scott notes, we might see wizard rock as a fandom specific outgrowth of the much older practice of filk music within the science fiction and media fan world. Filk is a word that emerged from a typo in a fan convention program that turned "folk music" into "filk music," but it caught the fancy of many fans and took on a life of its own. Filk defined itself initially as folk music about the future (as compared to traditional folk which is often about the past) and later as folk music about mass culture content more generally.

When I wrote about Filk in Textual Poachers, I was describing a form of music which was most often performed live and was largely shaped by communal sing-alongs. In the 1980s, though, we were starting to see the emergence of some filk performers and composers who were developing a kind of celebrity within fan culture: there were small scale companies that produced and distributed their taps, primarily in con dealer's rooms or via the mails. Not surprisingly, these companies made the transition from tape to cd, once it became possible to produce and distribute such recordings at relatively low costs. I was pleased to see some of these filk songs show up on Napster and the other torrents and more recently, some of the classic filk songs started to appear at the Apple iMusic store so that fans of filk could download them onto their iPods. Wizard rock artists have been quick to realize the values of MySpace as a distribution channels, deploying social networks to spread their reputations to more and more of the Harry Potter fans worldwide. Some in the audience suggested that there were now more than 300 Wizard Rock groups with their own MySpace pages.

A number of the leading Wizard Rock bands -- Draco and the Malfoys, The Parselmouths, The Remus Lupins, and the Whomping Willows -- performed at a special Friday night concert in a classic Storyville nightclub along Bourbon Street. Not all of them were "good" by traditional industry standards -- they might approach the level of "unrecordable" to build on Tosenberger's apt concept -- but a sizable segment of the audience had memorized their song lyrics and were singing along and they were doing a healthy trade in t-shirts and cds.

By almost any definition, wizard rock is a niche media form, though as Scott suggested, it is not clear whether we want to read it as a resistant subculture in any traditional sense of the word. Their tendency to personify the "evil" characters from the books and to tell the story from their perspectives suggests a play with moral inversion which has long been part of fan culture and songs with titles like "Voldemort Can't Stop the Rock" build on the ways rock music has long cast itself as an oppositional practice. Many of the groups do adopt an anti-censorship stance which grows out of the long struggles to defend the books themselves whose place in the classroom and in libraries have consistently been challenged by cultural conservatives, as I document in Convergence Culture.

Ships that Pass in the Night

In another sense, Harry Potter fandom is composed of a series of niche audiences, each interpreting the books on their own terms. We see this for example in the intense battles which have sometimes surrounded the various "ships" (relationships) in the novels. Fans may often draw sharp battle lines between those who believe Harry should end up with Ginny or with Hermione, not to mention those who would root for Draco or Snape or ... Fan fiction websites may be divided according to the preferred relationships, though there are some general sites such as FictionAlley which runs fic of all denominations. J.K. Rowling herself stepped into the fray around the release of the last book when she suggested in an interview with The Leaky Cauldron, a leading Harry Potter news-site, that Harry and Ginny had been the "obvious" pairing from the start and many hurt fans of Harry/Hermione fiction wrote her angry letters. Fans talk about the OTP (One True Pairing), though many fans remain open to a good story told about any possible relationship in the books. There are subgenres of fan fiction, especially those which surround Harry Potter erotica, which may also sharply divide the fandom into smaller and smaller niche publics. (The less said about some of those feuds here, the better.)

In the past, it would not be hard to imagine each of these fan cultures taking shape and continuing to operate with little or no awareness of each other's existence -- a series of localized reading practices or small interpretive communities. But the world of the internet has pushed them into contact with each other and the organizers of conferences like this one have to think carefully about how to create a harmonious balance between fans with very different aesthetic and moral sensibilities. One of the most heavily attended events of the weekend was a debate about the moral character of Snape which pit fans with fundamentally different theological commitments against each other. As I spoke to some fans afterwards, they had converted to the other side based on what they saw as sound and unassailable arguments.

On the other hand, we could also argue that it was the web that made some of the smaller niches within Harry Potter fandom possible in the first place -- fans of less likely pairings or more obscure subgenres of fan fiction would not have found each other without access to the kinds of social networking tools available today and would not have sustained their work without access to LiveJournal and discussion forums. During my comments on the plenary panel, I reminded the audience of the state of fan culture in the 1980s when discussions of television shows took place at cons or through letterzines (zines which assembled letters of comments and distributed them every three or four months). We were once excited to read what a few other people thought of that television show we watched months before. Now, the web allows instant response and prolonged interactions with fans scattered around the world. Ideas emerge, get elaborated upon, get debated, even become widely accepted in a matter of days. And the rhythm of the Harry Potter books' publication allows new orthodoxies to set in and be overturned many times while everyone is waiting for the next book in the series to appear.

Harry Potter and the Media Revolution

Harry Potter fans have been early adopters and adapters of new media technology in their efforts to connect with each other. It was announced at the conference that one of the long standing Harry Potter fan groups was launching its own island on Second Life where fans could gather to discuss or enact aspects of the books. Several different groups were producing podcasts at this event. I was, for example, asked to perform the part of Dumbledore in Spellcast's radio theater production of The Three Trials of Severus Snape which was being recorded at the convention. These podcasters have close relations with Warner Brothers and Scholastic and some of them are sponsored by Borders, the book chain which has made a major investment in Harry Potter fan culture. Borders also sponsored the field Quidditch competition, another suggestion that Harry Potter straddles between mass and niche media. Indeed, fans cite Rowling's implicit and sometimes explicit support for her fan culture as one of the factors that has paved the way for the enormous explosion of grassroots creativity the series has inspired. This is a case of the perfect storm where an engaging and immersive text and a welcoming author has met a new generation of fans eager to exploit the emerging new media platforms that have become so much a part of their lives.

And there were signs to be seen that these fans are starting to recognize their potential power as political force. On my plenary panel, we spent some time discussing the Defense Against Dark Arts movement, a fan effort to stand up to Warner Brothers when they sent Cease and Desist orders to Harry Potter fan websites worldwide. As I explain in Convergence Culture, this may have been the first successful movement of fans to challenge the rather blanket copyright assertions of the major media producers and they were successful at getting the studio to stop and reassess its response to fan culture.

Indeed, when I speak to media executives today, they cite two examples of franchises which helped to alter their understanding of fan culture -- Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. (It is striking, of course, that mainstream journalists tend to stress the Lord of the Rings story, which keeps alive the myth of the powerful Fan Boy, and not the Harry Potter story, which would require them to pay much more attention to Fan Girls as a cultural and political force.)

Around the edges of this con, there were signs that at least some fans wanted to move beyond this victory to embrace a larger target. I sat on a panel which helped to explain to fans the stakes in the current debates around net neutrality and the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act; I also attended several panels where fan/lawyers were proposing reforms to current copyright legislation which would provide greater protection for grassroots creative expression. A team of fan vidders were taking to the streets of New Orleans to do interviews and produce a documentary designed to raise awareness of what still needs to be done to help the city recover from Katrina. Everywhere you turned there were debates about sexual politics, with fans that had been reading and writing slash (homoerotic fan fiction) finding themselves more and more involved in debates affecting the rights of sexual minorities.

Many fans just wanted to have a good time this weekend but others were arguing that they should exploit their skills as media producers and distributors and take advantage of their massive numbers to make a difference in society. One could argue that this vision of fandom as a political movement might reflect the ideological construction of the books themselves, which encourage us to stand up for what we believe in, to question authority, and to take strength in our own communities. It would be interesting, indeed, if the Harry Potter books turned out to have shaped the political beliefs of the next generation, much as they have shaped their cultural imaginations. I told the reporter that it was no accident that the success of the Harry Potter books has occurred primarily in a Post-9/11 world and that it has paralleled the success of Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life. Both books encourage us to see our lives in a larger context, to seek out and pursue a larger purpose than our own self interests.

So, can all of this happen again? Yes, but then it depends upon what level of the phenomenon we are talking about: the Harry Potter, which represents perhaps one of the last gasps of the old mass culture, or the Harry Potter, which represents the emergence of new forms of niche culture.

When Fan Boys and Fan Girls Meet...

There's an old joke that by the time a phenomenon gets the attention of one of the major national news magazines, it is probably already over. A few weeks ago, Time ran a story on the rising influence of "fan boy culture" and then this week, Entertainment Weekly used this same angle to talk about the success of the new Spider-Man movie. I've been so busy trying to wrap up the term that I haven't had a chance to comment before now. Time's article, in particular, was explicit about the gender-dimensions of its claims, titling the article, "Boys Who Like Toys," and opening with the following description:

He's one of the most powerful taste-makers in Hollywood, the guy behind the record-breaking success of 300, the hit status of NBC's Heroes and the reign of the Xbox 360 gaming console. He enjoys invitations to the Skywalker Ranch and hangs out with guys like Nicolas Cage and Quentin Tarantino at conventions. He's zealously loyal, notoriously finicky and often aggressive with those who dare to disagree with him.

Oh, and occasionally he likes to dress up as Spider-Man.

He is the fanboy, the typically geeky 16-to-34-year-old male (though there are some fangirls) whose slavish devotion to a pop-culture subject, like a comic-book character or a video game, drives him to blog, podcast, chat, share YouTube videos, go to comic-book conventions and, once in a while, see a movie on the subject of his obsession. And he's having his way with Hollywood.

Nope, there's no accident that all of the pronouns here are masculine. In part, this is because the article is focused on the San Diego Comic-Con, superhero comics, and their media spinoffs, not to mention a number of high profile fanboys -- Tarantino, Sam Raimi, Kevin Smith, and the like -- who are exerting power and influence within the Hollywood establishment. The article can't avoid the usually cliches -- coming back in the end to the idea that "fanboys" are "outsiders" who may not adequately predict box office revenues except in the case of those films which are already targeted at niche or cult audiences. The other governing myth here is that fans are fickle and unpredictable; that one can go crazy trying to understand their tastes or listening to their criticism.

Entertainment Weekly hits that second point especially hard. (Sorry but that article is only accessible to subscribers to the magazine and I bought my copy on the newstand, so no links.) EW writes about Spider-Man III:

The opening also proves the studio can successfully premiere a movie that was scrutinized and dissected on the Internet throughout its entire production, probably more so than any other film in history. Such is the new reality for filmmakers behind high-profile comic-book adaptations and blockbuster sequels, who increasing depend on the Net as a vital marketing tool -- but must also contend with fans who rabidly pick apart, analyze, and leak early peeks at upcoming projects online. "I'm at a loss to know how to deal with that," says Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi, "But it's the world we live in. I just have to adapt."

The article describes how studios have made their peace with the spoiling community, actively courting influential fans as grassroots intermediaries the way they once courted powerful gossip columnists in the Golden Age of Hollywood -- because they can help you if they like you and destroy you if they don't. EW calls it "befriending the enemy," a phrase which preserves the separation between consumers and producers, even as it describes the process by which that distinction is starting to break down.

It's interesting, though, that EW describes fan culture entirely in terms of the consumption and circulation of information about commercially produced works and has nothing to say about the things that fans themselves create through their appropriation of the raw materials that commercial culture provides them. At least Time wrote about fans who "blog, podcast, chat, share YouTube videos."

This media attention on "fan boy" culture comes at a moment of increasing debate within the aca-fan community about the gender dimensions of fan research. I wrote briefly about this topic a while back in response to some comments which got made at the Flow conference about the segregation of fan boy and fan girl scholars who are writing on similar topics but through different language, around different topics, and more often than not, on different panels. And I followed up a few days later with a second post on this topic. The discussion of topics such as the complexity of cult media narratives, transmedia storytelling, engagement, and convergence are being discussed seperately from long-standing work around fan fiction and fan culture more generally. There is some risk of taking up the industry's own atomistic conception of the fan rather than embracing the more collective vision represented by the concept of fandom. More generally, as I have written here before, phrases like "the architecture of participation" that surround web 2.0 suggest the degree to which network culture is really fan culture without the stigma.

At the same time, some of these shifts may reflect growing pains in the ways fan culture gets studied as more men begin to write about their own experiences and interests as fans. We certainly do not want to lose the important insights which feminist scholarship contributed to our early understanding of fan culture -- and indeed, the consciousness-raising tradition of feminist scholarship made it possible for us to write about our own experiences as fans. Yet, if fan studies is going to remain a viable area of research, we necessarily need to broaden the range of theoretical and methodological perspectives which get brought to bear upon it. We need to expand the range of fan cultures we study and the kinds of fan productivity we talk about.

It is also worth noting that this work is being produced in a larger context, one where at least some aspects of fan culture are gaining real visibility and influence, while others remain largely hidden from view. This is in part why I opened this post with a nod to Time and Entertainment Weekly, both of whom seem to understand the rise of fan influence in Hollywood along gender specific lines. Fan scholars may simply be reproducing, unconsciously in many cases, the dividing lines which structure the general culture's response to fan culture.

A heated and yet highly productive discussion of these issues has been raging over at Kristina Busse's blog, where her somewhat angry response to the discussions of these issues at the Media in Transition conference has so far generated 83 responses from a range of leading fan girl and fan boy academics. I can't begin to do justice to this multi-layered discussion here. If you haven't been following it yourself, you should check it out.

But I am concerned about the prospect that male and female scholars may be talking past each other rather than engaging with each other's work. The past few years have seen a range of new books on fan culture, including several important anthologies, that reflect the work of a new generation of fan scholars.

So, earlier this week, I wrote to nearly 30 of the key researchers in this field and ask them if they would be willing to participate in what I am jokingly calling "Fan Boy/Fan Girl Detante." Throughout the summer, this blog will be hosting a series of conversations among male and female researchers doing work on fan productivity, participatory culture, cult media, transmedia narratives, and so forth, designed to try to better understand the common ground and gender differences in the ways they are approaching their topic. Kristina and I have been working together to select researchers from a range of disciplines and national contexts, whose research spans not simply science fiction and fantasy, but also soap operas, Bollywood, popular music, games, and a range of other forms of media.

The entertainment industry loves big summer events: well, consider this to be a big summer event for those of us who are studying popular culture. While I will be spotlighting two scholars each week, many of the scholars have agreed to jump in both through the comments section here and through their own blogs to expand the conversation. I certainly hope that other fan researchers who have not been contacted about this first phase of the project will get in touch and let us know about the work they may be doing on these topics.

Earlier this week, Sibauchi, a media studies graduate student from South Korea, wrote to ask us about the value of fan studies. I am hoping that this series of exchanges will provide many valuable answers for Sibauchi and anyone else who wants to enter into this thriving area of research.

I am still hearing back from the scholars I contacted (so some of your favorite scholars may not be included here), but so far, the following folks who agreed to participate.

For the Red Team:

Nancy Baym, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of

Kansas

Rhiannon Bury, Assistant Professor, Women's Studies, University of Waterloo

Kristina Busse (PhD) Independent Scholar

Melissa Click, Assistant Professor, Communications, University of Missouri-Columbia

Francesca Coppa, Associate Professor, English, Muhlenberg College

Abigail Derecho, Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literary Studies and Radio/Television/Film,

Northwestern University

Catherine Driscoll, Chair, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies

Karen Hellekson, (Ph.D.) Independent Scholar

Lee Harrington, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Miami University in Ohio.

Deborah Kaplan, (M.A.) Independent Scholar

Anne Kustritz Ph.D. Candidate, American Culture, University of Michigan

Lisa Morimoto, Ph.D. Candidate, Indiana University

Roberta Pearson Chair, Institute of Film and Television Studies, University of Nottingham

Ksenia Prassolova Ph.D. Candidate, University of Kaliningrad

Julie Levin Russo Ph.D. Candidate, Brown

Robin Anne Reid, Professor, Department of Literature and Languages, Texas A&M

University-Commerce

Louisa Stein, Assistant Professor, San Diego

Rebecca Tushnet, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University Law Center

Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager disability and media technology blogger

Cynthia W. Walker Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, St. Peter's College

Editor's Note: I originally identified this as the Pink team but have changed it by popular demand.

For the Blue Team:

Will Brooker, Senior Lecturer, Film Studies, Kingston University

Sam Ford M.A. CMS, MIT

Jonathan Gray, Assistant Professor, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

Sean Griffin, Assistant Professor, Cinema-Television Studies, Southern Methodist University

Matt Hills Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies Cardiff University

Mark Jancovich, Professor, Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia

Derek Johnson, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Robert Jones, Ph.D. NYU

Dereck Kompare, Assistant Professor, Cinema-Television, Southern Methodist University

Robert Kozinets, Associate Professor, Marketing, York University

Christian McCrea, Lecturer in Games and Interactivity, Swinburne University

Jason Mittell, Assistant Professor, American Studies and Film & Media Culture, Middlebury

College

Martyn Pedler, Independent Scholar

Aswin Punathambekar, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Bob Rehak, Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies, Swarthmore College

All joking about Pink/Red and Blue teams, aside, my hope is that we will discover that there's more common ground and shared interest here than might first seem apparent to those reading this work in isolation. I hope we all learn things that will inform our work and pushes us in new directions. By pairing scholars on the basis of gender, we insure two things that are often missing from this discussion: we insure that gender remains central to the discussion throughout and we insure absolute equal numbers of male and female participants. I am personally hoping that one of the things which will come out of the discussion, however, is some challenge to the essentialism which can run through discussions of this kind. I don't think all of the work here is going to break down clearly into Red and Blue Teams at all.

I welcome further suggestions about people who should participate actively in this discussion. I note, for example, that while this list is very inclusive in terms of gender, it does not yet feel very inclusive in terms of race and ethnicity. I'd love to find some more scholars of color who would like to join this conversation and am very open to suggestions.

We will start the conversations here in a few weeks. I will post more details once they are known.

By the way, I am posting this tonight from my hotel room in New Orleans where I am attending Phoenix Rising, a major conference of fans and academics who love Harry Potter. I hope to write more about the conference in my post later in the day tomorrow. If you happen to be here at the conference, say hey! I'd love to meet you.

The Whiteness of the Whale (Revisited)

"I'm talking morning, day, night, afternoon, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick." -- Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino) explaining his unique interpretation of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" music video in Reservoir Dogs (1992) "Am I boring you?" -- Pip, lecturing his sister on Cytology, in Ricardo Pitz-Wiley's Moby Dick: Now and Then (2007)

Like many Americans of my generation, I read Moby Dick in high school. Well, it would be more accurate to say that I was supposed to read Moby Dick in high school. I was assigned the book for Mrs. Hopkins' Biblical Allusions class. We never actually discussed the book in class, as I recall, but rather, we were supposed to read the "Great American Epic" (as it says on the cover of my copy) by the end of the term and then spell out the ways that it built upon religious themes. I remember starting out the novel with high hopes. I had read the Classics Illustrated comic book and had a picture book which stressed the boy's own adventure elements of the story -- from Ishamel's first encounter with QueeQueg to the final destruction of the ship and the death of Captain Ahab. I knew this book was going to be full of blood and thunder.

What I hadn't anticipated was the "Whiteness of the Whale," the notorious Chapter 42, which is where my efforts to make it through the book ran aground. The book is full of the 19th century equivalent of a data dump, where Herman Melville tells us everything he knows about whales, whaling ships, whaling rigs, the melting of blubber, and in this case, the color of the beast. Today, we might describe this as a richly detailed world. When I was 16, it was just boring.

Somehow, I never got past that chapter.

I tried to bluff my way through the paper and Mrs. Hopkins, who was a Sunday School teacher at our church, called my bluff, leaving me with a big red C and with a note expressing her disappointment in my performance. The fact that I never got past the "Whiteness of the Whale" remains a black mark on my intellectual record down to the present day.

Well, I have taken a vow to read Moby Dick this summer and this time, I plan to eat the "Whiteness of the Whale" for breakfast. My decision to return to the scene of the crime and overcome my childhood trauma is the result of my recent encounters with a truly remarkable man -- Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the artistic director of The Mixed Magic Theater based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Last weekend, my wife and I drove out to Pawtucket to see a truly remarkable theatrical production -- Moby Dick: Then and Now -- which has awakened in me a tremendous hunger to dig deeper into the world of Melville's novel.

I first met Ricardo in the fall through the agency of Wyn Kelley, a colleague in the MIT Literature Section who is a leading expert on all things Melville. (Check out Wyn's essay about Moby Dick and digital media.) Ricardo had launched a remarkable project to get a group of incarcerated and at risk kids to read and rewrite Moby Dick for a contemporary audience. As Ricardo explained, he chose this novel because "everyone was already there," because the book included a multiracial cast of characters and thus offered an alternative vision of what America looked like in the 19th century. He claims that Moby Dick speaks to contemporary concerns even as it encouraged us to look back to the past and understand how we got to where we are today. He knew the book was going to be a challenge to these young men -- a kind of literary rite of passage -- but he also knew that he could inspire them to work through this material and something amazing would come out the other side.

The first time I met Ricardo, he was still fresh from the process of working through the novels with this first group of kids. He stood in my office, reciting lines from their script, in his deep resonant voice, and he spoke with absolute conviction that he was going to be able to translate their script into a theatrical experience. Ricardo wants to get thousands of people to read Moby Dick so that they can participate in conversations with young people about their experience of the novel. Those of you who attended the Media in Transition conference heard Ricardo speak about his vision for the play as part of our plenary session on Learning Through Remixing. If you weren't there, you should check out the podcast here.

For the past few months, CMS graduate student Debora Lui and Project nml staff members Anna Van Someren and Margaret Weigel have been documenting the process by which the Mixed Magic Theater brought this script to the stage, interviewing the cast and crew, and recording their creative process. When it is finished, this documentary will be a centerpiece to a curricular package we are constructing around Melville and remixing, in collaboration with Kelley. Basically, our curricular guide will start from the premise that Moby Dick might be understood as a kind of "mashup" of the Bible, Homer, and 19th Century American culture more generally.

Thinking about the "Great American Epic" as a mash-up helps to make sense of the ways that it mixes multiple genres of writing, suddenly stopping the adventure story for sermons, newspaper headlines, or lectures on cytology. Understanding Melville's work not through a lens of original creation but as part of a larger process of sampling and remixing stories and themes already in broader cultural circulation gives us a way to think about the poetics and politics of contemporary grassroots creativity. This idea about appropriation as a core literacy skill was a central concept in the white paper our team wrote for the MacArthur Foundation last fall.

The stage production, Moby Dick: Then and Now interweaves two versions of the story: an adult cast re-enacts the saga more or less as Melville wrote it while a youth cast stages a contemporary version which unfolds in parallel. In the contemporary version, Alba, the Asian-American female leader of a multiracial street gang which calls itself The One, seeks revenge for the death of her brother, Pip, and ventures, with her posse (Que, Stu, Daj, and Tasha), into the heart of the city in search of the "Great White." Where-as Melville's work dealt with the 19th century whaling trade, this new version deals with the consequences of our modern day drug wars. The juxtaposition -- old and new -- is aptly suggested by the Scarface t-shirt worn by one member of Alba's crue -- Ricardo has told me that in some ways, the themes of revenge and self destruction in the Al Pacino film spoke to his young students in much the same way that Moby Dick spoke to him. (Somehow, I pictured Mrs. Hopkins pursing her lips when he said it.)

There's a really amazing moment early in the production when Ishamel in the 19th century and Stu in the 20th century are both reading a newspaper report: "Grand contested election for the Presidency of the United States.... Bloody Battle in Afghanistan." The passage comes from the end of Chapter One in the original novel but as the program notes suggest, it could have come from the front page of a contemporary newspaper.

The adult version of the story contains its own insights into the book. While Ahab in many media versions can seem a one-dimensional character (a mad man relentlessly pursuing his vengeance and his own destruction to the ends of the earth, unapproachable and immovable in his goals), he is portrayed here as someone who struggles with self doubts, who hears the protests of his crew and feels the pleadings of the Rachel's captain, but can't turn back from the path he sees as his destiny. Around the edges, I saw the glimmers of a political allegory with emphasis placed on Ahab as a man who is lead by his guts and not by his intellect and Starbuck seen as a man whose sage caution gives way to timidity, speaking out against dangerous actions but unable to exert the will to stop them.

The visceral quality of the play was suggested from its opening moments -- when a feverish Ahab stabs blindly into the heart of a whale (which may be a creature of his own imagination) and Alba weeps over the body of her dead brother. From here, the company throws in everything from sea shanties to step dances, from hip hop to African drumming, as it tries to give us a sense of the interweaving of cultural traditions and multiracial identities that Pitz-Wiley sees as central to the story. Here, we are less interested in the "whiteness" of the whale than in the multiple hues of the crew, though in the contemporary saga, the play uses the "whiteness" to both address the cocaine trade and to suggest the complex of forces -- economic, legal, political, and cultural -- which link the war on drugs with violence and destruction in the inner city.

So, what has all of this to do with new media literacies? This is a question that Ricardo and I discuss each time we meet and each time, I think both of us come away with a deeper understanding of how we each think about the value of literacy. Ricardo reminds us that we can not divorce the new media literacies from very traditional notions of literacy. Ricardo wants to empower these young people to read challenging books and to become the authors of their own narratives. He doesn't want to see high culture as untouchable but rather wants to see it as something that can be sampled and remixed to more effectively address our own times. As we have watched him work with these young people, he again and again pushes them to dig deeper into the meaning of the words on the page and they have told our team how this project has transformed how they read. He has done so in part by taking seriously their own culture, listening to the power of their words, understanding how they use popular culture references to address some of the same key concerns as Melville and his readers confronted in their own time and through their own media. We hope to find a similar balance between respecting the past and embracing the contemporary as we frame our curricular guide about Moby Dick.

Ricardo knows something else -- he doesn't want to see these kids left behind as other students acquire new skills, access new knowledge, and learn to operate within a networked culture. He knows that his students are smart enough to confront these emerging literacies head on and he wants to make sure they get a chance to do so. Ricardo doesn't call it this but he's talking about what I have described as the Participation Gap. The Participation Gap pushes beyond a framing of the digital divide around issues of technical access and instead understands the challenge we confront in terms of access to cultural experiences and to the social skills which young people are acquiring through their informal participation in the online world. Ricardo has emerged as a strong advocate for the idea that these social skills and cultural competencies need to be accessible to every kid, no matter what their background.

As I listen to Ricardo, I know two things: first, that I owe Mrs. Hopkins -- and I owe myself -- a second shot at Moby Dick and second, that we owe Ricardo and his young people a renewed commitment to do our part to break down the participation gap. I hope some of my readers will join me in both pursuits.

Anatomy of A Game Secret (Part Two): Animal Crossing

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a selection taken from Kristina Drzaic's thesis on game secrets, during which she confessed to having invented a secret which has become part of the mythology surrounding the Zelda games. Today, she continues with a discussion and comparison to the way secrets operate in and around Animal Crossing. This passage is interesting in part because of the way she brings together an analysis of game mechanics with a discussion of the grassroots fan culture surrounding the game. In case you are wondering, I am finally starting to dig my way out from the term and hope to start making at least some of my own posts again soon.

You will recall in the beginning of this paper that I related my experience with a secret glitch and was toast. I noted at the time that it was simply a fun thing to do in the gamespace. Now that we have the necessary background information on what secrets are and what they do we can finally examine what was fun and meaningful in that interaction. Namely that glitches break the rules of a game allowing the player to remap the space in creative ways.

My experience with glitches in Ocarina is not solitary. A search on youtube.com for "Zelda Ocarina Glitch" yields well over one thousand hits. What is interesting is often users will use the language of design in describing their glitches.

One user 'btermini' writes of their video:

I came upe with this idea after doing my test of super mario 64 cartridge tilting glitch i remebed The Legend of zelda ocarina of time is built of the same engin as in super mario 64. so i did some tests....see for your self

What this user is saying is that he came up with this glitch from experiences with glitches in other games, he tested it out and it worked. Finally he invites players to try out the glitch and enjoy his design. What btermini did then is plan, design, and display his glitch. Other users often talk of authorship in terms of their glitches. User 'Banana555">Banana555' writes:

"**I Found this Glitch by Myself so I dunno if its been found, even though every glitch known to man has been found for OoT lol**

Interestingly many other users chastise him for attempting to claim ownership. User 'rkonbon' replies back:

"yeah, you didnt find this out, this is one of the oldest tricks in the book for OoT anyways."

What this shows is that these users see glitches as something designed by them and not gaming companies. These glitches are described as creative endeavors! For one final example the user 'Nam8Macs' posts "his" glitch the "Zelda Ocarina of Time Super Bounce Glitch" along with credits for editing, camera work, and gameplay. His glitch is not simply a secret game moment but also a production! He writes of his work:

"These Rooms are 100% real and have never before been found! i find it a privalage to be able to show you the secrets of Ocarina of Time =D"

What we can distill from this then is that players, in their engagement of glitches feel a sense of authorship and design control over the way they interact with and subvert the rules of the game. The intention of these gamers is to strive to redesign or warp the gamespace and then claim credit. They are the designers of the glitch. These players make their own secrets.

From Zelda: Ocarina of Time we have seen why players look for secrets and how glitches specifically subvert a space by breaking game rules. We have seen why players can be toast and are a-ok with not winning. What would a game look like that allows and accommodates players to remake a game as they see fit? We have seen that secrets are ways for players to personalize a videogame space and feel a sense of authorship. What happens when playing for secrets and being toast become the focus of play? To explore that let us look at Animal Crossing (2002) a game of secrets.

The premise of Animal Crossing is that the player moves to a village populated by animals with only the clothes on his or her back. A conniving raccoon named Tom Nook swindles the player into buying a house on a loan. The player is told to pay off one's mortgage (eventually) and to do so the player will have to devise ways to make money. Thus Animal Crossing draws on a secret-based form of gameplay in that the player is never told directly what to do in the space or how to make money, rather the game is open for exploration, design of game goals etc. Once a player pays off the house the game keeps going and in fact never ends. As such the player must devise their own game goals and find secrets in order to expand the playability of the game. Animal Crossing offers a variety of gameplay options that serve to significantly change the focus of the game.

Animal Crossing allows one to fundamentally change the space and mood of one's animal village through textual manipulation. For example, as a rule there is a keyword or two added to the end of each animal villager's orations. The cat 'Tangy' might say at one point "I love toast in the morning meow" However, when the player is given the option to change the characters speech a simple substitution of words can completely change the connotations of the previous phrase. For instance Tangy's previous phrase could become "I love toast in the morning idiot" effectively transforming Tangy from a simple cat to an aggressive character. By changing the meaning of a character with the game, the player is allowed to participate in a perceived subversion of game rules. Indeed this textual manipulation is not limited to character speech. Players can post signs, send letters, name the town and engage in other atmospheric manipulations. These mechanics, when used in this manner function like a game glitch. The player can inject nuances of character into the villagers that were not designed in the original game. This is a perfect example of how a game designer can design a secret and a player can take it and subvert it into a new type of game design.

This mode of secret interaction is carried over into the game function that controls the ability to design and modify the walls, floors, clothing and umbrellas of the villagers. This option gives the player the power to decide how the village looks and how the villagers portray themselves, which in turn allows a huge amount of individualization within a game. No Animal Crossing village looks like any other. For instance, gamers Filip and Zvonimir Sola transformed their village into an ethnically Croatian one. They made their animals wear Croatian colors, designed a Croatian flag, and made their animals speak Croatian phases, (certainly a modification the programmers never imagined.) In contrast, gamers Will, Neil, Nic and Dan Secor, in their village "E" caused all the animal villagers to wear naked human clothing. This modification effectively transformed the village into a nudist colony, another unsanctioned alteration within the game. The game itself does not suggest modifications to the game image, rather, it allows the characters the liberty to customize their own villages for their own pleasure. Further, Animal Crossing lacks clear game goals and spurs the player to develop their own. For example, here is a game goal design created by a user of the game:

1st: Player goes to the store to buy candy.

2nd: Player lacks the funds to buy candy.

3rd: Player writes a letter to the store expressing anger

4th: With the threats unacknowledged the player organizes a town riot against high candy prices.

While Nook cannot actually be hurt within the gamespace the creation of this gamestory shows that players can manipulate the game and its goals in order to engage in imaginative play. The player uses the ability to send letters to characters as well as the ability to post messages to the Animal Crossing community as a way in which to create their own game within the game. This player subverted the game structure and made their own secret!

Fundamentally, the creation of player made secrets sustains Animal Crossing as a game. In effect, the rule modifications function as self-created attractions. Game play is maintained through the attraction of secrets and the display inherent in perceived subversion. The game has no narrative and no end, instead the player jumps randomly from self-made attraction to attraction. In essence, Animal Crossing is an endless jolt of surprise or (if you will) a video game of player-generated secret attractions.

The franchise of Animal Crossing has since expanded. In 2005 a sequel, Animal Crossing: Wide World was released. While much of the gameplay remained the same in that players can still manipulate the game in a similar way as Wide World allows players across the world to connect and visit each other's villages via a wireless Internet connection. Now instead of the game being limited to four players as it was in the original Animal Crossing, players can play with an endless parade of visitors. One can imagine, however, given the subversive nature of play in Animal Crossing that this results in interesting behavior. Dean Tate admits to booby trapping his village. He remembers "I placed holes all around the village entrance and anyone who came in was caught!...Then I would laugh" There have also been cases of characters inflicting player designed graffiti on each other, chopping down each others trees and plants or in a positive case, engaging players engage in a wide-scale remodeling of a player's village. This behavior is simply the play of the game impressed onto others but what is significant about it is that players are thinking more specifically of their village design in how is interacts with visitors.

Behavior like this is explored by game writer Nadia Oxford in the article "Secret Lives: Beneath the Surface of Animal Crossing." In this article she chronicles her adventures in visiting the animal villages of a friends and documents the way they interacted with her. Of her first visit Oxford writes:

As soon as I entered the town, Friend No. 1 made his presence known by running tight circles around me while wearing a ninja mask...so I was wary until No. 1 calmed down and gave me a master sword, claiming it to be an idol from the original Church of Hyrule. We headed back to his house. He handed me plenty of other presents on the way, possibly to distract me from the state of his property, which might've been regarded by some as a call for help. Weeds and smashed fruit dotted the grass, and unfilled trenches blocked bridges.... It was time to leave. No. 1 urged me to stay a little longer and pray for prosperity and fertility at his master sword idol, but I declined.

Oxford writes of another friend:

Taking advantage of Animal Crossing's boundless opportunity for freedom of expression, No. 2 dressed as a male and spent a good part of my visit hitting on me. A sprite's orientation is their own business, but when a male who's actually a female makes a pass at you, you can't help but feel confused.

And finally:

Things were off to a great start when No. 3 met me at the town gate and began watering me. Apparently, I "needed nutrients." She then bestowed an owl clock on me, though whether through generosity or as a part of my newly prescribed diet, I'm still not sure.

What all these interactions between Oxford and her friends show is that if we look at the behavior of each friend (the friend who ran circles and urged her to pray, the friend who hit on her, and the friend who watered her) each player put on a show for their visitor assuming distinctive behavior and exchanging text which effectively shaped the way their town was viewed. In Wide World players build off the secrets they design and create a gameplay experience for another player.

As a game of secrets, Animal Crossing allows for the kind of play behavior that players strive for in their play with secrets and cheats. Warren Robinette wrote that his videogame secret in Adventure allows for players to reach the game's real conclusion: his name, his easter egg. Secrets today are about players reaching their own conclusion by designing and implementing their own secrets in a gamespace. Players have gained the ability to have some say into the nature of a given game design. Secrets then, while originally a place for designers to play with their designs has now become a place where players can create their own game within a larger gamespace. With the advent of online gaming across all technological platforms the manipulation of secrets has turned into a way for players to design for other players. Secrets have become player-generated game moments shared with other players the world over.

Anatomy of A Game Secret (Part One): Zelda's Sky Temple

I am continuing to salute the graduating Comparative Media Studies cohort of 2007. Kristina Drzaic tackled a really interesting critical challenge -- how does one write meaningfully about an element which, by her definition, is not a necessary or even self-evident aspect of the game's style, themes, narrative, or game play. She recognizes that the pursuit and discovery of secrets may be deeply pleasurable to those who play games: indeed, there is a robust economy in the trade of information -- both sold by companies and freely shared on the web -- which might help players to find secrets. As this passage from her thesis suggests, there is even enough interest that some people even go so far as to "fake" secrets simply for the bragging rights for discovering them. To try to understand secrets, she found herself looking at phenomenon in other media -- what has been written about, say, gags in slapstick comedy, attractions in early cinema, and excess in art cinema, but none offers a precise parallel to the place which secrets play in games. Throughout all of this, Kristina was clear on one thing -- secrets were central to the pleasure she took in playing games and thus should be open to analysis. In the end, those of us on her committee felt she nailed it, making an original contribution to our understanding of game aesthetics. We hope you will agree.

As she has worked on understanding secrets, she has been designing her own secrets for the game, Labrynth, which is being developed through the Education Arcade for Maryland Public Television. Kristina did much of the art direction on the game, doing character sketches and storyboards. The resulting game, when it is released, will be much shaped by her own particular sense of whimsy.

The following passage describes her own childhood experience at inventing a secret in Zelda which has become legendary in the game world and why she thinks people were so ready to accept her fabrication.

Anatomy of a Game Secret

by Kristina Dryziac

The year was 1998 and the game in which I became the toast was Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was at this moment in my life that I invented my own videogame secret. I was not a designer. Nor was I in the videogame business. I was sixteen years old, a single player and a fan. New to videogames at the time, I often frequented Zelda message boards and chat rooms for help with the game. Over the course of a few months I learned the space of the videogame, found all the recorded secrets, mastered Zelda and then I got bored.

The message boards I frequented were full of less experienced players than I, players looking for unknown content, players who were gullible. One of the most often discussed topics in the message board was where one might find and collect a part of a Zelda game, 'The Triforce.' Rumor had it that there was a space on a certain screen that implied that this Triforce could be collected. In a moment of juvenile and rather silly behavior I decided to tell people I had found this 'Triforce' and they could find it too. I announced that if one went into the most confusing dungeon in the game and leapt through the air to hit a particular wall in just the right way they would be able to find a hidden chest that contained, of all things, wings for your horse 'Epona.' The wings would attach to the horse and she would and fly up into the air and take you into a hidden sky temple. There you would find the Triforce in all its glory.

This was not true. Honestly I did not even think it was all that believable. However when I went to research this paper I found endless accounts of people still discussing the Triforce and the sky temple I invented. I even found fan-sites dedicated to the journey players made there, photo-shopped images of the Triforce as it was supposedly found within the game and message boards fighting over the validity of the temple's existence.

I was shocked.

What was it about my invented secret that caused such discussion that a small internet event in a fan community would still maintain vestiges of the discussion on the internet after eight years? What made this sky temple secret so believable as something that might be found within the game content? While all the factors involved here could potentially be overwhelming ranging from Mia Consalvo's gaming capital to the fan community makeup and more, I believe there are certain elements within the Zelda: Ocarina of Timetext itself that especially enable belief in this secret. I contend that examining what made my secret successful provides a window into the interaction between players and secrets and will allow us to look at the meaning of this interaction itself. I pose then that the credibility of my secret boils down to two factors within Zelda Ocarina of Time: narrative plot-holes and unresolved gameplay. Building on this I will demonstrate that the "Oh No I'm Toast" glitch moments within the game illustrate what players hope to achieve in their interactions with the secret.

To understand what this means we must look at the game itself. Zelda: Ocarina of Time debuted on the Nintendo 64 console in 1998. Widely regarded as one of the best games on the platform, Ocarina is a game that translates the Zelda franchise from its past history as a pixilated two-dimensional adventure game and re-imagines the Zelda world as a lively and realistic space. The world had forests to explore, lakes to dive in, ponies to ride and a variety of towns, cities and villages to explore. It was a whole new notion of what the Zelda franchise was about. To illustrate the change, Zelda went from looking like this:

Zelda: Links Awakening, 1993

To looking like this:

Zelda: Ocarina of Time, 1998

What this means for the Zelda franchise is that the player had gained greater freedom of movement. No longer confined to the tightly and cohesively two-dimensional maps of previous Zelda games, the new Zelda felt like a real world. As game reviewer Matt Casamassina gushed at the time:

Its a game that enables players to go anywhere and do just about anything in an immense 3D world. A world so vast that it takes literally minutes to walk across a tiny portion of it. It's huge...whether it be the title's endless secrets or enormous selection of characters, weapons, items, spells, and the like... there's always something new.

What we can take from this breathless statement are two important facts about the Ocarina gamespace, first, the game is chock full of content, both hidden and not and secondly, the game functions in such a way that the reviewer felt like he could do anything. These two elements tell us something important about the gamespace: namely that Zelda is a game of meaningful play.

In the book Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals we may recall that theorists Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman pose that the relationship between action/reaction is a foundational part of good game design and meaningful play. What this means is that, when players act in the world, the world should act back in an expected manner. This type of interaction is what fosters good game/player communication and allows the player to build meaning from the game. Players expect certain things about of the gamespace and the game itself has many rules that keep play cohesive. When there is a place in Zelda where a narrative is left unresolved or where a space in a game does not seem to have a point, rather than thinking the game is broken, players look for an expected reaction simply because they are expecting meaningful play. In my typology I noted that some secrets have the capacity to expand gameplay or expand narrative. Therefore when narrative or gameplay are left seemingly unresolved in Ocarina, players attempt to fill in the blanks by finding secrets. Let us look at some rules that guide the secrets of Ocarina:

Example 1: As a rule, every door in Zelda opens to reveal a room. Doors are never for decoration. Therefore, when a certain door in Kakariko village appears impossible to reach players look for a way to get around obstacles and enter the door and find the surprise (a secret potion shop)

Example 2: Players are told that butterflies often lead to fun surprises, If one runs around an area with a butterfly, often one falls down through the ground and into a grotto full of treasure.

Example 3: The fish guru tells players that there is a legendary Hylian Loach in the fishing hole but it is probably impossible to catch (being legendary and all.) Persistent and very lucky players will catch the loach even though it was said to be impossible.

What these examples show is that when players are told about something in the gamespace they expect there is a solution to finding it. This tells us why my false secret worked on players. If the game sets up expectations for a secret, then when one presents a method by which to obtain this secret that conforms to the ideas of meaningful play the secret becomes believable. Therefore the fact that Ocarina briefly refers to a sky temple and that there was a Triforce-shaped entry on a screen opens up the possibility of a hidden journey on a winged horse. In that sense, parts of my secret map to expectations the game sets up and, as such, seem probable. Players are led to believe, by the otherwise meaningful play the game engages in, that there must be a secret way to resolve the unfinished plot points or pieces of gameplay.

What we can draw from this however is a pattern of player experience. Players I have interviewed about their experience with this game cited that they wanted to find everything in the world and master the space. When places were found, the world changed, so effectively players, in their search for secrets, were trying to remap the world. Gamer Steven Busey reminisces "everything in Zelda changes when you find a secret so you want to find them all and then find all the changes...it makes the world grow." It is significant that Busey connects the growth of the gameworld to the flux in gamespace. He acknowledges that secrets are connected to the over all rules of the game world. Thus in playing with secrets one is modifying the rules of the game. These Rule modifications are taken a step further with the engagement of glitches in Zelda.

Kristina Drzaic

University of Notre Dame, BA Film, Television and Theater, 2005

As an undergraduate Drzaic pursued a major in film because she found the combination of narrative and image a compelling way to transmit ideas. She is interested in how media presents an image, how it sustains an audience, and what makes it memorable. During her undergraduate years Drzaic produced an award-winning film and numerous video shorts. Additionally her interests led her to write and publish an undergraduate thesis exploring how the un-winnable electronic game might sustain game play through the framework of early cinema history.

While at CMS Drzaic has continued her research on un-winnable games, game secrets and game-breaking. Drzaic led the winning team in the 2006 Sony IAP Workshop with a game focusing on the experience of being a National Geographic photographer. Currently she is engaged in designing mobile math games for the Education Arcade.

Playing with Stereotypes in Wresling and Animation: An Interview with Nick Sammond (Part Two)

Yesterday I ran the first part of an interview with media scholar Nicholas Sammond about the cultural politics of professional wrestling. In today's installment, we extend our discussion to deal with his new project -- a book in progress dealing with the connections between black-faced ministrels and the American animation tradition. For those interested in what he has to say below about Disney, you might want to check out his first book, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke University Press, 2005). Tell us a bit more about your new project which deals with animation and race. How can we understand cartoons as bound up with the history of racial stereotypes in American culture?

The new project is one that looks at the beginnings of American animation in the early 20th century, and how those beginnings are bound up with another American performance tradition that some would like to forget--blackface minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy was a tradition that stretched back to at least the early 19th century, in which white men covered their faces and hands with black makeup, put on curly-headed wigs, and acted as if they were African Americans. This was not complimentary: the African Americans they portrayed were stupid and lazy, the usual stereotypes of the poor, stupid Southern Negro, the watermelon-eating, chicken stealing, singing and dancing plantation stereotype. Spike Lee made a whole movie--Bamboozled--about this stereotype.

Now, if you look at some of our most famous cartoon characters--such as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse--you'll see that they have characteristics that the minstrel had: white gloves, wide eyes and a huge painted-on mouth, and a complete lack of respect for authority. (This was truer of early Mickey of the late 1920s and early 1930s than it was of later Mickey.)

What I am interested in is why those qualities of the minstrel were first used in creating trademark characters, and why, even after some of those explicit racial stereotypes became unacceptable to us, those markers of minstrelsy continued. It's important to make a distinction here, though. In the 1930s and 1940s in particular, there were some really racist stereotypes used in animation,particularly in relation to jazz music, which was called "jungle music" by some folks.

So, there were a whole range of associations of blackness with the jungle, with the plantation, with being primitive and close to nature, that had operated in blackface minstrelsy, but also showed up in other racist stereotypes. What interests me is that while those racist stereotypes eventually became widely unacceptable, and even though blackface minstrelsy became an unacceptable performance form, the idea of the minstrel continued in cartoon characters. And you can see it continuing long after in cartoons such as Animaniacs and the feature Space Jams, to name a couple.

But even though I see what I call "vestigial minstrels" like Bugs or Mickey as different from racist caricatures such as those I mentioned above, there is a connection. The minstrel character has always been part of a system of what Eric Lott has called "love and theft," or what Stuart Hall has called the "ambivalence of stereotype." Even though the act of a white man imitating a black man is both offensive and oppressive, and always was, there is an element of desire and envy built into it that we have to look at squarely.

What I am looking at, trying to understand as an historical phenomenon, is how the figure behind the minstrel--basically a slave or ex-slave--could be something that a white man, either a minstrel or an animator, could envy. And the very short answer to that is, I think, that they didn't envy the incredible oppression of the African Americans, but the modes of resistance to that oppression that they represented. And, references to the jungle and the plantation were about a fantasy of African Americans as being closer to nature than white people (just like "white men can't jump/dance..."), closer to the jungle or the cotton field.

Minstrelsy as a performance form became widespread and popular as the United States industrialized, and workers who were white or becoming white were moving from agricultural and craft labor to brutal, routinized industrial labor. The minstrel, who was performed as lazy, shiftless, and slyly resistant to work of any kind, was a fantasy of escape from the rigors of that new economy. Something similar is true for animation, which in the first couple of decades of the 20th century shifted from a artisanal and craft model to an industrial model of production (Donald Crafton has described this history beautifully). So, the minstrel figure--itself a dehumanizing stereotype--represents resistance to dehumanizing regimes of labor.

Now, that's obscene and wrong, but if we don't examine it closely, then it's a part of our history that we refuse to examine fully. An example of that might be Ted Turner's decision, a long time ago, to remove those racist Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons from circulation, to spare us the pain of looking at what our culture has produced. He made that decision when the mode of distribution was VHS. But now, with DVDs that contain commentaries and other interactive features, I think it might be possible to re-release them in a critical edition, to begin to confront that piece of our history in a constructive fashion.

Is this legacy something that still haunts contemporary animation? Is it possible to represent race in cartoons, which after all depend on high levels of stylization and simplification, without falling back on this vocabulary of racial stereotypes?

First off, I think this legacy still haunts many parts of our culture. Look at the recent Don Imus event. What was it that made McGuirk and him go after successful young black women, to refer to them as "nappy-headed hos"? Here were some women who were actually fulfilling the American dream: through hard work, determination, and talent, they were making a mark. I think it's reasonable to ask whether the attack on them was because that dream is still primarily conceived of as white property.

But more than that: we have to look at the reaction, too. Imus had been saying grossly inappropriate things for years, and a lot of quite famous people had played along with him. Suddenly, he's a sacrificial lamb for a set of social ills of which he is a symptom, not a cause. (The critic Gary Yonge said something very much like this in The Nation recently.) But if we treat him as a cause and not a symptom, then we don't have to look at endemic strains of racism built into the institutions of American society. What those guys did was offensive and wrong, and I have no problem with them being punished for it. But it's free speech that CBS and MSNBC had been making a lot of money off of for years, and if you don't look at that--at the profitability of racial (and gender and sexual) hostility and the willingness of large corporations to cash in on it--then you're really missing the larger picture.

So, to get back to animation. I think it's possible to produce animation that minimizes or avoids stereotypes. But that's not the same thing as producing those seven-minute stories (or Disney features) we call cartoons. There, I think you do get stereotyping because, as you point out, there is a visual economy that the stereotype provides. But this then raises a couple of issues.

First, what is the story story in which those images are deployed? We should ask whether it is possible to deploy stereotypes in stories that simultaneously challenge them. I think that might be possible, but it's very tricky. Consider, for instance, Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin. He believed that he was really trying to produce a hip, culturally progressive redeployment of stereotypes, in this case the Brer Rabbit stories (with Barry White starring, and apparently Bakshi has talked with Wu Tang Clan about a sequel). But the film met with controversy when it was released, and there was no consensus as to whether it was racist, or whether it challenged racial stereotypes through its story.

This brings us to the second point: what the stereotypes accomplish very much depends on what sort of skills we as viewers bring to seeing those stories, and what sort of space is available for discussing them after we've seen them. When Coonskin was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, a fierce debate apparently broke out. That's good. And the Committee on Racial Equality condemned it, while the NAACP very cautiously endorsed it as a satire. That's good: it leads to more discussion about the meaning and potential of stereotypes. So, for me, the question is not so much whether we can make cartoons without resorting to stereotypes, but whether we can use stereotypes in a productive fashion.

But this also brings me to an interesting issue of race and the production of animation. Many of us know that The Simpsons, for instance, has been produced in South Korea for years. A lot of TV animation, which has a very tight turnaround schedule, has been produced in South Korea. What I didn't realize till recently, though, is that a lot of production is moving to North Korea, Malaysia, and China, where labor is even cheaper. So, there is an issue of race and animation that has to do with the politics of its production as well as its politics of reception.

Animation as a profession is very much caught up in struggles over the exportation of labor that other industries in the U.S. are engaged in. I'm not making a nativist argument about American labor here. But I am saying that issues of race and labor in animation aren't limited to its images. When we consider the choices and direction the industry is taking--for instance, if we engage in a debate about drawn versus computer-generated animation--part of what we have to bear in mind is that, besides being issues of aesthetics, these are issues of industrial labor, too. And, as I've suggested, in some cases there is a relationship between the two.

What did you think of the news that Disney would be producing an African-American "Princess" in a future feature film set in New Orleans? As someone who has written about the history of Disney's construction of American childhood, what can you tell us about how such a project might fit within Disney's long term vision of American society? What challenges does Disney face if it wants to create a credible representation of African-American identity that doesn't fall back on the Minstrel stereotypes that shaped its previous minority characters?

You know, there's something funny here. I was reading around about this movie, The Frog Princess, and one of the articles on it, in a Baltimore newspaper, quoted the director of an all-girls school as saying that maybe the movie would allow young girls to ask, "Can I be like this Disney character?" That is, a princess. Which would suit Disney just fine, because the company has a huge line of princess-related goods and services to sell. Now, I imagine that what the director of the school meant was something like, "Wouldn't it be great if African American girls could dream of being princesses, too?" Or, "Wouldn't it be great if white girls imagined themselves as African American princesses?" Underneath that is a desire for girls to see themselves as powerful and capable, and to live in a color-blind society.

But woven into those ideas is Disney's skill at tapping into powerful social expectations and anxieties to sell its products. That is Disney's long-term vision of American society: as a market for its products. And one of the greatest anxieties that many people share in a highly competitive capitalist society is whether they and their children (if they have children) will be able to secure a good living for themselves--that they will have economic and social security.

You can read those concerns being circulated and laid at Disney's feet in the comments of the school director. Somehow, regardless of other economic, social, and institutional circumstances, seeing this film could be empowering for a little girl. Why? How?

Will the film feed into minstrel traditions? Given that it is set in New Orleans in the 1920s, and is supposed to be about jazz, I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Minstrelsy was built on the idea of white "researchers" going to the south to witness real black behavior on the plantation. Cartoon shorts like Tin Pan Alley Cats or Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs played on stereotypes of the 1930s and 40s that referred to jazz as "jungle music." According to the most current info, the film's villain is a voodoo priest (named "Dr. Duvalier"...as in Papa or Baby Doc?) and another character is a jazz singing alligator (straight out of the swamp?) named Louis, so the minstrel possibilities seem rich.

I don't think that means that Disney has racist intent. I think the company is playing on the contradictory desires of its viewing public. The American middle class--regardless of race--wants to believe that we live in a color-blind society in which anyone can get ahead if they try hard enough. If stereotypes are used in perpetuating this fantasy, this sort of thinking goes, the positive message of self-realization will outweigh any misconceptions...and after all they're only animated characters.

This would be a good example of the point that Spike Lee was trying to make in Bamboozled: in a society that thinks in racist terms without realizing it is doing so, it is impossible not to make popular art that perpetuates stereotypes.

Bringing this full circle, how would you compare the role which stereotypes (racial or otherwise) play in animation and in professional wrestling?

There were two ideas (among others) in your book on vaudeville, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, that I really liked: affective immediacy and an economy of signs. Affective immediacy is the idea that to be successful, bits in vaudeville had to hit you in the gut: they had to make you laugh, cry, gasp...right away. An economy of signs is simply the concept that in a format where you only have a couple of minutes to do your thing, you have to have ideas, signs, that read really clearly, quickly.

The cartoon short is about 7 minutes. A wrestling match is over fairly quickly, too. Both depend on stereotypes to have that punch, and to be legible. If one of those stereotypes causes pain, we ought to have a forum in which we can address that in a meaningful fashion. The problem is, we have forums for addressing stereotypes--online spaces and places, editorial pages--but not necessarily in a meaningful fashion. What we don't have is a political space in which we can call out the hurt behind the stereotype--the economic and social injuries that make stereotypes sting--and obtain real redress.

What animation and wrestling both permit is a chance to really feel stereotypes. What they also share is a space that is like the real world, that exists parallel to it, but is not the same as the real world. Potentially, and at their best, they become spaces in which ideas duke it out, and we have fun participating in the process.

Playing with Stereotypes in Wresling and Animation: An Interview with Nicholas Samond (Part One)

The topic of stereotypes have long been central to work in media literacy. School children are often taught that stereotypes are unambiguously bad and that we should strive for more "realistic" or "authentic" representations. Yet, there are many problems with this formulation, as Richard Dyer pointed out to us years and years ago, starting with the fact that it doesn't address the reasons why popular art so often relies on stereotypes, it doesn't really acknowledge the degree to which our pursuit of more respectible images may itself result simply in the construction of new and improved stereotypes, and it doesn't acknowledge the many ways that artists -- high and popular -- play with stereotypes to heighten the public's awareness of their constructed nature. Today and tomorrow, I will be talking with media historian Nicholas Sammond about the place of stereotypes in popular culture, primarily read through the lens of two of his favorite topics -- professional wrestling and American animation. I reached out to Sammond in part because of the interest here in wrestling in the wake of visits from Jim Ross and Mick Foley this term but also because of work that Project nml is doing on animation for its exemplar library. I am also trying to convince Nick that he should take up blogging as an outlet for his itch to do more as a public intellectual.

Here's a little background on Nick:

Nicholas Sammond is Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. His book, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke University Press, 2005), received the 2006 Katherine Singer Kovacs award from SCMS. He is also the editor of Steel Chair to the Head: the Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling (Duke University Press, 2005) and articles in such journals as Continuum, Television Quarterly, and Camera Obscura. Babes in Tomorrowland is a history of 20th century American childhood and its relation to popular media about and for children. Sammond's current work, tentatively titled "Biting the Invisible Hand," examines the place of blackface minstrelsy in the origins of American commercial animation.

One of the guest speakers who came to Sam Ford's class, Lee Benaka, said that he faced great skepticism in the publishing world as to whether any market at all would exist for a book looking seriously at pro wrestling, since it was presumed that wrestling fans and academic audiences were incompatible. Did you face any of this skepticism at any point during the process of putting this book together?

Yes and no. My publisher, Duke University Press, was very supportive of the book, even though they knew it would be tough to create a book that is both academically rigorous and accessible to a general audience. Wrestling fans are looking for smart work done on the topic, but I think they rightly mistrust material that seems pedantic or unnecessarily complicated. At the same time, academic power structures expect material that is complicated and pedantic (in the sense of teaching its readers about a topic).

So, it's hard to meet both goals. As the editor, I tried to address this by having some articles that would appeal to academics who wanted a more theoretical or analytical approach, and others for academics and fans who wanted a smart read on wrestling without the theoretical lingo. Reading the reviews of the book, it seems that some readers were satisfied with this approach and some weren't.

Interestingly, though, reviewers on wrestling web pages who critiqued the book for being too jargony were still sympathetic and supportive of it as a whole project, even if they felt there were parts of it that they felt alienated by. I think it points out an interesting problem in talking about pro wrestling. It has a very smart and engaged community of fans who also value the ethic of straightforward speech and action that are hallmarks of wrestling.

But they (we?) also appreciate the category of the smart mark, the person who doesn't care whether what they see is "real" as much as they do that it is genuine. The difference is, I think, that a genuine performance is sincere in its appreciation of the audience, even if it is playing with the boundary of what's performed and what's actually happening.

I hope that my book, even when it gets academic, is genuine in that sense of the word. Every essay, regardless of who it was addressing, was meant to treat pro wrestling seriously as a complex cultural form, and not to treat it as a symptom of social disorder or as unimportant. Everyone who wrote for the book did so because we appreciate wrestling.

Professional wrestling, as a populist phenomenon, is not easy to pin down in terms of its politics. The WWE in particular seems to rail against socially conservative censors as it also pokes fun at activist liberal detractors as well. At the same time, wrestling plays both with and against cultural stereotypes. How does wrestling's complicated politics explain its place in American culture?

First off, I have to say something about terms. The terms "liberal" and "conservative" are complicated. A few hundred years ago, they meant pretty much the opposite of what they do today. Liberals believed in free markets and a minimum of government interference (as much as there was a government in many places), while conservatives felt that the government had a vested interest in regulating civic and economic life. Now, those terms have become inverted. But more than that, at their worst, they've become meaningless shells, epithets that people use to insult each other without necessarily really thinking through what they are saying.

Populism has the potential to be a very progressive movement for the empowerment of working people to find a common ground on which to build a better society--as in the progressive politics of Fighting Bob LaFollette and the Grange Party--or it can be mixed with what seems more like potentially fascist demagoguery, as in the populism of the Kingfish, Huey Long. But what is good about populism is a belief in economic equality and fairness, and a recognition that working people are just fine as they are, as opposed to being inferiors who will only have social value if they become rich.

This sort of positive populism has been pushed to the margins in favor of a celebration of the privileges of the wealthy and the super-wealthy by the two ruling parties in American politics. George Bush, himself an heir to a tradition of wealth, power and corruption that dates back several generations, has feigned a populist attitude by learning to mispronounce a few words, wear cowboy boots, and swagger. He and the people he works for produce a sham populism that pretends that any of us can become rich and powerful if "the liberals" would only get out of the way and let us--while making sure that the rich don't actually have to compete on a level playing field with the rest of us, or perhaps more appropriately, while making sure that we feel more inclined to compete with each other over the scraps they leave than to work together for our mutual benefit.

But it's not just the Republicans who are engaged in this type of behavior. In the last election, the Democrats regained control of congress because of the popularity of people like Jim Webb, who talks the same sort of populism. John Edwards also plays that game: he's one of a number of multi-millionaires in politics (and some of the richest are actually Democrats) who claim to care about working people, but whose policies, when you look at them, don't do that much more than those of the Republicans. So, we get to choose between one empty performance and another.

I guess what I'm saying is that there is actually a vital populist tradition in the United States, one that is deeply invested in issues of equity and of respect for difference, that has gotten watered down in our current political climate. I think that the WWE, and the WCW before it, and many of the territorial operations back in the day, played with that sense of populism. If it sometimes trades in noxious stereotypes, and I think it does from time to time, that may be because the terms of populism that are available to us today have been so watered down.

Or, maybe the way to understand it is to say that because so many of us are being deprived of real politcal and economic partipation today--with more and more wealth and power going to fewer and fewer people--that the sting of what is politically incorrect in WWE performances is greater and more real. If we all have a stake in each other's well-being, and a respect for our differences, then jokes about those differences are not as damaging as they are when race, gender, class, and sexual identity are used as a means of keeping us apart from and hostile to each other.

What makes the WWE so interesting and important in this regard, I think, is that it is one of the few venues on television where people mention class and economic inequality in significant ways. You have workers rising up and getting in the face of their bosses, expressing not only their hostility to being oppressed, but also a certain solidarity that transcends differences (primarily of race, not so much of gender or sexuality), and I find that really refreshing. It's certainly not perfect.

At the end of the day, Vince is still on top, and in the offscreen world he's a billionaire (or almost one), and I honestly don't know why anyone needs that kind of money in a world where people are starving. (Even in a world where people aren't starving, I can't understand why someone would need that kind of money....) The most recent Wrestlemania is a good example of the potentials and problems of the populism of the WWE. Between the Donald raining cash on the audience in the leadup to it, and Battle of the Billionaires being waged by minions (but the resulting shaving being suffered by McMahon), you have a performance of struggles between the powerful, and a literalization of how workers are used by their bosses, which still manages to reinforce a social order with a few at the top and many below. But at least--at least--it allows us to witness the performance of conflicts that remain absolutely taboo in most other forms of popular entertainment in the U.S.

Now, some critics would describe this as nothing more than "bread and circuses," a distraction in the style of the Roman emperors in which the masses are mollified with spectacles put on by the elites, which keeps those masses from rising up against the powers that be. Paying to see the shaving of Vince's head (or going into it hoping to see the Donald's head shaved) takes the place of rising up and laying claim to his fortune (something which has been performed on WWE programming over the years). In this critique, witnessing the seeming debasement of the powerful keeps us from actually seizing their power.

While I think there's some truth in that critique, I also think it misses a larger point. Wrestlemania, if not the whole WWE franchise, is a facet of that larger debased populism I mentioned. It's of the same fabric as George Bush's aw-shucks act, or the Democratic Party's belief that if they can find a few more Jim Webbs they can lose their elite image. To me, the solution isn't to ask that the WWE clean up its act, but that we all work toward a more meaningful and useful political populism in our daily lives, and let entertainment be entertainment (while always demanding more of it).

That means pointing out that much of what our government does today is itself entertainment, not politics. If pro wrestling is "sports entertainment," then the struggles we witness in Washington are "politics entertainment." The struggles between the Republicans and Democrats for control of the government are a form of entertainment. The efforts of the "liberal media" to expose the petty indiscretions of individual politicians without really critiquing the larger political system are a form of entertainment. What we need, I think, is to create a populism that allows us to see past that cheap entertainment to what our real interests are.

As WWE increases its international business, and as its international popularity rivals or even surpasses its domestic popularity, how does that change the way the company looks at cultural stereotypes and "ethnic" characters?

I don't see that big a difference. What international audiences are buying is the "American" version. Just as hardcore fans in the U.S. have appreciated what is great about the Japanese scene, for instance, or fans of high flying have appreciated about lucha libre. The WWE management is smart enough to know that. They know that they have a clearly recognizable brand, one that works well, and they're sticking to it. What you see is what we've always seen with professional wrestling, even before Vince eliminated the competition: stereotypes become a way of condensing the passions that surround national and international events, of reducing those events to emotional emblems. What interests me about this is to see what shape the international fan community takes as we head into a truly global market.

We both share an interest in the roots of wrestling in 19th and early 20th century forms of popular performance.(See "Never Trust a Snake" in The Wow Climax for my take on this topic.) What aspects of this performance tradition do you see shaping contemporary wrestling?

Is it that they shaped contemporary wrestling, or are coming out of a common background? What I mean by that is, we all--and I include myself in this--try to see ourselves as modern by imagining history as quaint and outdated. One of the things that is really interesting about wrestling, to me, is that it represents a living performance tradition that has survived for over a hundred years (depending on what you include in the category "wrestling"). Of course, the technology that wrestling promoters use has changed drastically, and as Larry DeGaris points out in my book, the end of the territory system and the rise of the WWE monopoly have changed some of the fundamental work/performance practices of wrestling.

But there's also a lot of continuity with the past. Professional wrestling continues a tradition of what scholars and pundits have called "lowbrow" and illegitimate performance. It finds its tensions in inappropriate topics like race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and expresses them without the tidy resolution of the social order that you get on broadcast TV, or in most Hollywood movies. There is a lot that still offends me in WWE products. There are racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes that make me cringe, and I'd feel really sad if there are people out there in the fan community who take those representations to be real or ideal--representing the way the world is or should be.

But honestly, I think it is better than the alternative, which is the tidy middle-class, liberal (and here I mean "liberal" in the social sense, which includes a lot of so-called conservatives who fear ideas that embody conflict, and an idea of social life that suppresses difference) scenario in which you suppress the raw anger and desire that fuels those stereotypes, basically telling people not to think and feel what they think and feel rather than creating a space in which people can express their most fundamental understandings and misunderstandings about the way the world is without fear of being labeled as wholly corrupt.

It's the difference between being told that your thoughts are wrong and being told that you are wrong for having those thoughts. The first allows you to admit to having made a mistake; the second describes you as a mistake, which leaves you nowhere to go.

To me wrestling is part of a history in which people get to have that space to be messy and wrong, and to perhaps be convinced that their ideas (not their selves) are wrong, but in a spirit of laughter and play that brings us together rather than pulls us apart.

And the great and interesting thing is, a lot of those supposedly past forms aren't completely gone. There are neo-vaudevillians and neo-burlesque performers. There's a roller-derby revival. There are neo-circuses with freak and geek shows that find ways to empower their workers. And there are some great local pro wrestling venues that happen in lodge halls and flea market parking lots that are rowdy and messy and all over the place in their politics and their ideas.

The WWE may set the tone for the industry, but it's not the only game in town.

And what is interesting about this, I think, is that it is both contemporary and historical at the same time. The stereotypes of race, and gender, and sexual difference that marked the end of the 19th century aren't the ones we have now. We have new stereotypes to deal with.

What I think we need to develop is new ways of thinking about what those stereotypes mean. I think most people assume that stereotypes are bad, and false, and need to be eliminated--that we need to live in a world without stereotypes, where we all see each other exactly as we are. I don't know about you, but I don't know exactly what/who I am.

What makes stereotypes harmful is how they are used in systems of social power to oppress people. What is great about the stuff that you and I study is that we get to see instances in history in which people took the same stereotypes that people in power used to harm them and wove them into performances that celebrated difference and expressions of cultural uniqueness, both as what was great and also as what was sometimes quite silly. That's the history I think we need to see ourselves as still living in.