Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics (Part One)

Earlier this summer, I shared with my regular readers some selected passages from this year's Comparative Media Studies thesis. Today and tomorrow, I wanted to share another sample of the kind of work being produced by our students. Peter Rauch came to CMS with a strong background in Philosophy; what he wanted from our program was the chance to employ those tools to think deeply about games, trying to explore in what sense it was appropriate to think of games as ethical and moral practices. In this section from his thesis, he walks us through his core framework for thinking about the ethical and moral dimensions of games. Next time, I will share a passage where he deploys this conceptual model to think about the game, Fable. Enjoy! Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics

by Peter Rauch

Many dictionaries consider morals and ethics to be synonymous, but in common usage, at least in American English, the two words can have a variety of subtly different meanings. My definitions are provisional, and while they can be used in general discussion, they are specifically tailored to be applied to the interpretation of videogames.

I define ethics as a discourse concerning what is correct and what is incorrect. What is ethical is dependent on a specific activity, determined entirely by an explicit, constructed system of rules, and cannot be questioned by the participants. I define morals as a discourse concerning what is right and what is wrong. Morality, unlike ethics, is not tied to a specific activity, but can be applied over multiple activities, and possibly all experience. Moral rules enjoy considerably more variance than ethical rules: because they are wider in scope, they are more nuanced, and subject to interpretation.

Ethical frameworks, while they might attempt to model moral behavior--as in the examples of ethical codes for doctors or lawyers--need not have any connection to morality at all. In chess, that players should try to capture their opponents' pieces is an ethical rule, not a moral one. It has no relevance to the world outside chess. This rule is also not subject to interpretation or argument. It is simply, factually, true. A player that makes no effort to capture the opponent's pieces is not playing chess. The same cannot be said of moral rules like "love your neighbor as yourself," Jesus' formulation of the "golden rule," nor can it be said of "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law," Kant's categorical imperative. These rules concern the very act of being human, but one does not cease to be human if he or she rejects or violates them. They are much less specific than the rule concerning the capturing of pieces in chess, and open to many more interpretations.

Morals and ethics exist independently of each other, and while they must each be internally consistent, it is possible for the two to explicitly contradict one another. Law is an ethical system that is constantly revised to prevent such conflicts. Torture, for example, is illegal under international law. Assuming one accepts the existence of international law, the legality of torture is not open to debate. The morality of torture, however, is fundamentally unconnected to its legality. Torture is not less moral now than it was before the Geneva Convention. Conversely, it would not become more moral if the U.N. were to repudiate the Geneva Convention tomorrow.

Any game that has a "win condition" has an ethical framework. This applies to all games, not just videogames. First and foremost, these games are possessed of an overriding ethical imperative: win. If the game has a win condition, a player who does not try to win is not playing the game. As Johann Huizinga notes in Homo Ludens, a player who does not try to win faces greater censure from society than a player who cheats in order to win (11). One interpretation of Huizinga's claim is that a player who cheats breaks only those rules concerning the means of play, whereas the player who throws the game violates the goals of play. The goal constitutes what players must do, while the rules offer only clarification on how the goal is to be accomplished--what actions are correct, and what actions are incorrect. A strategy or technique that helps a player win, while not explicitly violating any of the rules, is always ethical, in terms of the game in question. The ethical framework comprises both goal and means, and although the former is more fundamental to the game than the latter, they are both necessary for a game to function. The game's ethics, which determine how it should be played, are inextricably bound in the game's rules, which determine how it can be played.

I use the term "ethical" to denote imperatives that are dependent on the accepting of a role, as in the specific ethics of a given profession, and also in terms of play in general--playing a videogame ethically could be seen as the player's agreement to play the role allotted to her by the designers. Some degree of freedom is present, of course; were such freedom absent, it would not be play. However, just as an actor may be allowed to improvise, but must ultimately play his role to the author's conclusion, the player must play "in character" to play the game. If the player does not accept this role, she is not playing the game, but rather playing a game with a game.

This activity of "metaplay," in which the player designates goals unrelated or contrary to the game's internal ethics, has a wide variety of forms, some showing clear principles of ludus (adding or removing barriers to make the game easier or more difficult), others showing behaviors associated with paidia (exploration for its own sake), and still others being more difficult to determine (making machinima). Metaplay, at least in single-player games (where there are no social expectations of ethical play), is not "cheating" in the sense that the word is used in everyday speech. It simply means that the player in question is not, strictly speaking, playing the game.

In addition to the ethical frameworks inherent in any games, videogames can potentially add an unprecedented level of narrativity. This narrativity is achieved by mapping recognizable symbols onto the rule system. This mapping process allows for the suspension of disbelief necessary to involve the player emotionally in the gameworld.

The interaction of these symbols gives videogames the potential for rich narratives. However, if the narrative is not sufficiently integrated with the rule system, it will appear arbitrary, and fundamentally disconnected from the experience of play. This disconnect between narrative and rule systems is one of the central problems for the potential of videogames as a communicative medium, forcing a distinction between authorial narrative (the story written by the designers) and emergent narrative (the story enacted by the players). Even in the most non-linear games with the greatest potential for emergent narrative, the rule system and choice of symbols are selected by the designers, and as such the players' freedom of interpretation is inherently limited. In videogames, the author might be dead, as was famously suggested by Roland Barthes, but she is still the author, and she must not be confused with the reader. To make the transition from ethical imperatives to moral argument, the designers must fully embrace authorial status.

Narrative alone is not sufficient for morality, of course, since without a connection to the ethics, the gameplay and the narrative will operate independently of one another, as is often the case in games that rely extensively on cut-scenes. Moral imperatives can exist in a game only when the ethics can be interpreted and applied to the world in which the game is played, and this can only be achieved by connecting internal ethics to the external world through narrative. Most, if not all, of the game rules must be connected to recognizable symbols, and those symbols must have referents in reality.

Rules and a win condition are all that is necessary for an ethical framework, because ethics point inward to a specific activity. Conversely, because morality must gesture outward to the world at large, it cannot consist only of abstract symbols. For a game to have a moral framework, it must have an ethical framework, a narrative that can be connected in some way to what we speciously refer to as "real life," and a careful integration of the two. Specifically, the moral argument of the narrative must be connected to the win condition. It might be necessary, in making distinctions between what is right and what is expedient, to develop some new ideas as to what constitutes "winning." This will require a somewhat nuanced perspective on the avatar.

The avatar, in most games, is more than an extension of the player into the gameworld. Rather, the avatar is simultaneously an extension of the player and a different character that is not the player. I refer to this different character as the protagonist. Since the protagonist has only diegetic information, his motivation for interaction in the world must be entirely diegetic. The player, who has access to the game's non-diegetic information, will have additional goals, often involving tasks with no narrative meaning such as scoring points or unlocking content. Narratives, even videogame narratives, have a logic of their own, and even when the narrative fails to emotionally invest the player in the story, it can usually be assumed that the protagonist is quite involved. The narrative, even when viewed by players as epiphenomenal, is the entirety of the protagonist's reality.

[...]

1This term is not synonymous with "metagame," the term Henry Jenkins uses to describe the social context in which games are played ("Effects and Meanings" 214 )

Peter Rauch is a graduate of the Florida Atlantic University Honors College,

holding a B.A. in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a concentration in American

Studies. He has no major experiences, accomplishments or credentials, but is

nonetheless interested in politics, theology, and all manner of media texts,

from literature to videogames.

Rauch recently completed a Masters in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He is currently at work on a number of articles concerning the interplay of videogame texts and culture with philosophy, religion and politics. He lives in Cambridge with his partner Alana and cat Shazzer.

If you enjoyed this excerpt and would like to read more of Rauch's thesis, you can find it at the Comparative Media Studies website. We are in the process of making more of our thesis available online.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Ten, Part Two): Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson

"Bardies and Bachmaniacs" Fans vs. Elitist Bastards

JG: Roberta's chapter in Fandom is in our "high culture fandom" section, and is a polemic calling for more studies of "middlebrow" and "highbrow" fans. This was a section that I really wanted in the book, since I think that fan studies could really get a lot out of studying a broader range of fandoms. So we'll kick off this second part by discussing why we think it's time to go looking for such fandoms.

My first two degrees were in English and Postcolonial Lit, but when I moved into media and cultural studies, I was somewhat shocked to see that the field had apparently negotiated a binding divorce settlement with English Lit. English took the Lit, and media and cultural studies took audience studies, and a court had clearly enforced the lack of visitation rights quite firmly. I wonder though why we can't do more to examine the audiences, and in particular, the fans, of Lit. To run with my divorce analogy, it's as if I've now grown up with media and cultural studies, but would like to know a bit more about my birth father (I'll gender Lit male since high culture is often seen as the more proper and masculine, and popular culture as peripheral and feminine). This springs from no animosity to my mother - I love television - but I don't know why I need to choose between them. Why is it, do you think, Roberta, that the move to popular culture has often by nature enforced a separation from Lit, classical music, opera, and other elements of supposed "high culture"? We've used this conversation to discuss boundaries around fandom, and this one seems to me one of the big barriers, yet one that has limited how we think of fans, and of how popular culture works in general.

RP: Now there's a huge question. You and I have a Polonius-like tendency to ramble on a bit so as Hamlet's dad says (speaking of birth fathers) 'brief let me be.' I think there are two reasons for the divorce between lit crit and its high culture siblings, one ideological and the other structural. As with fan studies, cultural studies started as a polemic, an attack on all things high culture that were seen as complicit with dominant hegemony. Now even to suggest that high culture might be worthy of study is seen as treasonous. This, coupled with the weakening of high culture as the central repository of a culture's identity and knowledge, means that fewer scholars are ever exposed to high culture, but are saturated with the popular. I think today's young scholars simply feel uncomfortable studying high culture because then they'd have to consume it and they don't have either the intertextual frame or the proper register in which to do so. It would mean attending a concert where you weren't supposed to get to your feet, hold a lighter aloft and rock gently to the music.

This is of course a bit of a polemic itself, but you get the point. What really bothers me though, is how short sighted this is. We know full well that you can't study 'blackness' without studying 'whiteness' or 'femininity' without 'masculinity.' You have to interrogate the dominant that structures the subordinate. While high culture is no longer dominant it's still a structuring force in a marketplace that increasingly blurs the lines between high and low culture in terms of production and marketing, or at least that uses the same tactics of marketing with the one as with the other. There are lots of potentially fascinating case studies out there, such as Britain's Classic FM, or classical radio lite as opposed to the more traditional BBC Radio Three (which has itself just gone through another redraft to make it more 'accessible'). I get into cabs where the drivers are listening to Classic FM and always attempt to strike up a conversation about why. Then there's the weirdness of the traditional Last Night of the Proms in which classical music (and some not so classical) gets appropriated in an orgiastic nationalist frenzy. And of course Shakespeare's all over the place, something that the lit crit types are indeed writing about. But I think that many cultural studies scholars, among them the fan studies set, would prefer to cling to their stereotypes of high culture consumers as remote and elite because it makes life easier.

Unitary Fandoms vs. Multi-Fandoms

RP: You ask why you have to chose between the high and the low. Of course you don't and I suspect that many other people don't as well. Most people undoubtedly range across media and cultural forms, intense fans of some and casual consumers of others. I'd like to see fan studies address the issue of multiple or serial consumption, if you will.

JG: Yes, perhaps this lack of discussion of multiple or serial consumption has also helped keep high culture fandoms "under wraps." If I accounted for all of my fandoms, I'd have to get to some Lit, art, classical music, etc. sooner or later, and I suspect many of us would. Heck, somewhere down the road, this may even be a good way to ensure that Lit and so forth still are engaged with by "those young people today." Both in the academy and outside, fandoms often demand corresponding anti-fandoms (I'm glossing Vivi Theodoropoulou here, by the way), as is most evident in sports fandom: you could never really be a fan of both Arsenal and Man U, the Yankees and the Red Sox, etc., right? But why not? Of course, sports teams actually compete, but how about Star Wars fans who are asked to dislike Trek, or Pullman fans who feel the need to establish his "excellence" on the back of J.K. Rowling's "mediocrity"? And this goes for media more generally, since being a fan of television, for instance, is often assumed to require a suspicion of, if not outright anti-fandom of, Literature and other high culture. We're asked to pick our team, so to speak. However, if bridges and continuums between fandoms were established, this may be more possible, less problematic. Hard methodologically, but a worthy goal. (Matt Hills has a neat piece on "cyclical fandom," though, in American Behavioral Scientist, and I'm sure others have done some work on this too?)

And, of course, Girls vs. Boys

JG: To return to gender, there are some fascinating questions to be asked of high cultural fandoms, seeing that high cultural genres like Lit, Art, and classical music have historically been considerably more male-dominated than the still very male-dominated fields of popular culture. So we've seen, for instance, how female fans co-opt or read around romance, soap opera, science fiction, or teen dramas, but how does this happen when the object of fandom is Milton, or Wagner, or Brueghel? And so on.

RP: You're absolutely right about 'team picking', athough Pullman is simply better than Rowling and there's no question to me of Star Trek's superiority to Star Wars. I'm being a bit facetious here, but one of the reasons I dislike Star Wars so much, as well as Bored of the Rings, for that matter, is because I see them as very masculinist. All those endless battles and so few girls! And of course, Pullman's hero is a girl. So my choice of fandoms is gendered. And certainly my reading strategies in some of my other fandoms are gendered. I value the Holmes canon for the friendship between Holmes and Watson and read Patrick O'Brien for the friendship between Aubrey and Maturin, skipping all the technical naval stuff. Really interesting question, then, about gendered reading strategies around Milton, Wagner or Brueghel, maybe even a question that might inspire some within the fan studies community to look at high culture.

Not sure you're right, however, about high culture always being constructed as masculine. In American popular culture, I think high culture is often constructed as other, the realm of the female, the effeminate male, and even the evil foreigner. There are of course certain exceptions, like my beloved Captain Picard whose fondness for high culture makes him the consummate civilized European, but against him there are numerous suave, slightly sexually suspect males who revel in their art collections or listen to classical music. But of course popular culture too has been stigmatized as female. There are real complexities here that need to be explored, not only in terms of the contemporary but of the historical.

To wrap this up (for now), I think the central theme in our discussion has been about boundary blurring - between fans and academics, fans and producers, fans and non-fans, fans of high culture and fans of low culture and, getting back to the inspiration for this whole exercise, boys and girls. Personally I'm always more interested in blurred boundaries than in binary oppositions (despite having staked some claims above to one or the other sides of those boundaries). It would be great if these debates could set a new agenda for fan studies more sensitive to these blurrings.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Ten, Part One): Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson

PART ONE "Why We're Not 'Fans'"

JG: Roberta and I agreed to work together for this "Détente" since we're both in the peculiar position of being considered by many to be "in" fan studies, yet neither of us are really fans. Or, rather, we're not fans in the sense of the word as it is often used within fan studies, and so we thought it might be provocative to discuss why this is, and what sort of fans - if at all - we are. This discussion led to some testing of the boundaries of fan studies, and to discussion of some of its governing binaries.

Fans vs. Non-Fans

JG: To "out" myself, I've never written fanfic, I don't make fanvids or machinimaa, I have only posted on fansites a few times, I haven't been to a convention, I am not a member of any discernible fan group, I've told people that I would wear a proper Boba Fett costume if they got one for me, but otherwise I don't have fan-related clothing (save for a Simpsons tie bought for me by my parents), and I suck at most fan trivia games. As a kid, I played with Star Wars toys a lot, and was definitely a fan of Star Wars and The Muppet Show, but these days I don't conform to a common definition of "fan" within fan studies, since I'm not a member of a fan community per se. I don't have problems with those types of fandom ("some of my best friends are fans"), but that's just not me.

But I do have strong engagements with texts, and these fuel much of my more involved conversations with people, and a fair bit of my daily "thought time." So I want to call myself a fan. But I'm often made aware of a hard perimeter around "community-based" fandom that isn't so keen on letting the likes of me in. The problem is, though, that I don't just "like" Lost, Buffy, The Simpsons, The West Wing, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Michael Ondaatje, and William Shakespeare. I like other texts, like CSI, for instance, or Harry Potter: if they're there and I'm there, I'll bite. If I miss them, I don't mind. But mere affect or terms such as "follower" don't cut it for my fandoms. And some of my own work into audiences is driven by an interest in this big gap that often exists in ethnographic work between "audiences" (often pulled in at random, or the researcher's students) and "fans" in the community-based, "creative" sense that fan studies often dictates. Fan studies at times monopolizes both audience studies (in the media/cultural studies tradition, that is, not the alligator-clips-and-magic-dials sense) and affect, but that leaves a lot of us unrepresented. And we'll get to this in due time, but I'm not convinced that the "us" in that sentence is gendered.

RP: Since you've begun by 'outing' yourself as a non-fan, I should probably do the same. I suspect that on the fandom continuum I'm closer to being a fan than you are, but might not be considered as such by some within fan studies, who insist on community and production as paramount markers of the true fan. My longest standing fandom is Sherlock Holmes, which began when I was in early adolescence, peaked when I lived in New York City and became actively involved in local Sherlockian scion societies, and lapsed when I moved to my first job in Pennsylvania. When I moved to New York to do my doctorate at NYU, I became a member of the national female Sherlockian society, the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes. I'm still in touch with a core group of Sherlockians whom I count amongst my closest and dearest friends - my life would be immeasurably poorer without them. I was probably then a 'real' fan by any definition: I attended meetings, wore my scion badge and even wrote Sherlockian scholarship and pastiches (fanfic to the rest of you). I've even been published in the premiere Sherlockian publication, the Baker Street Journal, in an article that claimed that Holmes was Jewish. I delighted in the companionship of fellow enthusiasts but even then felt a bit uneasy about some of the over-enthusiasts. For whatever reason, however, I ceased any active affiliation with local groups after leaving New York.

Of course, I'm also by some definitions a Star Trek fan. I've been watching the show since TOS premiered in 1966 and it's been a constant thread in my life both in terms of consumption of texts and of my social life - many of my closest friends share an interest in Trek. One of these close friends is Maire Messenger-Davies with whom I'm now co-authoring my Star Trek book. Maire adamantly resists being called a fan and to some extent I share her reservations because I'm doing research on Trek within an academic context which I see as somewhat different from doing research as a fan (and I know there's a whole long debate there that we don't have time to get into). My resistance to the fan label probably stems from the fact that Trek is both the most high-profile and the most demonized of all fandoms, and it's still difficult in some circles to have academic credibility if you're working on it. I've been teased by numerous colleagues about this research.

In terms of outing, I have to admit that I don't really feel comfortable with the 'aca-fan' designation; it seems a too easy conflation of separate spheres of activity designed to get us off the guilt hook. At any rate, while for awhile I happily attended Sherlockian gatherings, I never went to Trek cons or to any SF cons. But, having started on the Trek book, I did go to an SF con in Cardiff. It was there that I saw for the first time grown-ups dressed in Starfleet uniforms, which made me quite uneasy. The next time I saw grown-ups in these uniforms was when I spent a few days wandering around the Paramount lot doing interviews and had the privilege of spending a night on the set of Star Trek: Nemesis. Didn't have a problem with that (other than discovering that the comm badges just velcro on and that Captain Picard's phaser is plastic), but that's probably because I'm personally more interested in producers than in fans. Having read the previous entries in the debate, that interest in producers seems to be one of the complaints of the 'fan-girl' contingent, who see it as a betrayal. That might be an issue we could take up. If I wanted to be polemical about it, I might say that it's a lot easier to study fans than it is to study producers, and that the focus on fandom has kept the field from really interrogating the processes of production, in the way that Henry and others are now beginning to. Obviously however, these areas aren't mutually exclusive.

Aca-Fans vs. Non-Aca-Fans

RP: Like you, I'd consider myself a fan of lots of things; some sport, some television, and lots of high culture - Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, etc. My most staunchly non-fan friend, William Uricchio, Henry's MIT colleague and staunch non-fan, thinks I'm a real fan. I have a 'fannish' disposition, he says, by which he means that I have a strong and continuing affective relationship to lots of stuff. So here I am betwixt and between - non-fan to fans and fan to non-fans. I don't think that anybody within the fan studies community would want to study me. That's fine because I don't like being studied - that's why I resist the conflation of academic and fan because it gives up the distance that academic implies. Perhaps we should call my part of this dialogue 'confessions of a non-aca-fan'. My position may be offensive to some but it certainly raises issues of the psychology of the individual (as Jeeves would say) which should perhaps be of greater import in fan studies.

This takes us back to where you started, Jonathan, raising definitions of fandom. My above reflections are all quite personal, but between us we can offer two 'auto-ethnographies' which are in some ways very similar and in others quite different -- a useful starting point for our interrogation. For example, you told me on the phone that you've never gotten any stick for researching The Simpsons. Why do think this is the case? What does this reflect about the 'mundane' world's perception of fandom, particularly amongst academics? And why don't you call yourself a Simpsons fan? And if you would call yourself one, how do you handle being a fan and a scholar? Are you an 'aca-fan'?

JG: I'd say, yes I'm a Simpsons fan, and yes I'm an aca-fan ... and as with you, the non-fans out there call me a fan too. And the aca-fan label in particular intrigues me because I'm part of a generation that grew up saturated in media, and while many of media studies' founders didn't watch much television or film [announcement: Roberta is blissfully not one of these people], writing books about things that in effect they didn't know enough about, I think that we need to insist on the acceptability of studying the mediasphere from inside, in part to normalize affective relationships. Someone very close to Neil Postman told me that he secretly loved some television (The Simpsons), and you can see occasional lapses in others' media-hating that are presented guiltily, and I'd like us to be able to move beyond the guilt into honesty.

That said, maybe if I'm not allowed to be a fan, I can't be an aca-fan either?

As for studying The Simpsons, I found it amusing how it was the exception for so many academics. But I'm also somewhat bothered by how it got let off the hook - yes, it's great stuff, but why should it and The Daily Show be the only fandoms to get a pass? (And let me interject that I'm not at all convinced that this is gendered: there are many many female fans of The Simpsons. Lisa is, after all, one of the best female characters in television history). I'm sure its non-serial structure allows many to see its fandom as less stereotypically "lost in the other world," and Simpsons fan groups are quite different in kind from other fan groups, given its non-seriality. Again, I doubt they'd be considered real fans by some in fan studies. But this points again (to me) to the exclusivity of the term "fan": I worry that we in media studies, and certainly society as a whole, aren't getting a full picture of what either fandom is or what it means to engage with television when Trek, Lost, and All My Children fans become metonymic of fandom as a whole. Of course, though, you've studied Star Trek (and Batman), so I'm interested in how you see the aca-fan/fan/non-fan rubric play out from that side of the barbed wire fencing.

RP: I absolutely agree with you about studying media from the inside and share your distaste for the Neil Postmans of this world. There's a whole American tradition of studying media, primarily television, in which you have to hate it to analyse it. That's the basic assumption of the very influential field of cultivation studies in mass comm., spearheaded by the very important, but ultimately unsatisfactory work of George Gerbner. The basic assumption of this approach is that television is bad for you - makes you stupid, makes you fearful. That's why the pioneering work of the first generation of fan studies, by people like Henry, is so important. It made it okay to like media content, and even to champion it. As many have subsequently pointed out, this polemical approach became a bit too celebratory and the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction. But we can't gainsay the accomplishments here. Nor can we so easily dismiss the concept of the 'aca-fan' as I am guilty of doing above. But my uneasiness stems from some lingering attachment to the concept of objectivity - is it possible to step far enough away from the object of study to be critical as well as analytical? You mention Batman above. I felt capable of studying this object because, aside from some nostalgia for my misspent youth, I no longer had a strong affective relationship with it. Star Trek is different, since it has been an important part of my identity for so long and I still worry that my book will end up as a paean to the industry.

Fans vs. Producers

RP: Speaking of the industry, I must admit that I have some sympathy for producers who are a bit dismissive of fans as a small segment of the audience. Many of the Star Trek producers I interviewed said that they couldn't cater simply to the fans, but had to think about the larger audience. Those who were fans even said that sometimes, for this reason, their own fandom could get in the way of what they were doing. And this takes us back to your original point about the definition of fandom and what we're actually studying. I again absolutely agree with you that we need to broaden our focus to include something other than hardcore fans as defined by hardcore fan studies. For this reason, my Star Trek book will have a chapter on audiences but not a chapter on fans (and not only because the world hardly needs any more about that particular fandom!).

JG: To me, an exciting development in recent fan and non-fan studies is the interest in fan relations with producers, since it holds the potential to break both the exclusivity of fandom as singular sphere, and the exclusivity of production as singular sphere. Kristina Busse has expressed concern about this shift, worried that the "fanboys" are getting excited about meeting the stars and producers, so to speak, and leaving the "scribbling women" once more in the margins. This certainly is a potential problem. But perhaps we might also see how fandom and production are much more closely wed. For instance, authorship has long been idealized as starkly new and original expression, when in fact it always begins with some form of fandom. If we could see television creators, for instance, as fans, this would wed production and consumption more convincingly. And if we could see how production requires fandom, at multiple levels (I think here of Terry O'Quinn actively posting on The Fuselage until he needed time away to work out his own idea of his character, an obvious sign that the fans were influencing his construction of John Locke), then fandom can't be ignored or shunned as much as it continues to be, both inside the academy and outside.

My own vision for fan studies is that it should invade mainstream media studies, exploding silly myths about production, text, and policy as being divorced from affect. Aswin Punathambekar's chapter in our collection, for instance, makes a great argument that Bollywood studies need to account for fans. Production cultures also need to account for fans, as Derek Kompare's recent work is saying. And so do legalities, as Rebecca Tushnet's work argues. I think some are wary of moving fan studies into the center since they're invested in fan studies being a cool kid's club on the side (and hey, we are the cool kids, right?), and they're (rightfully) concerned about who and what will be left behind, but at least a vanguard needs to be sent, since ultimately this is about more than just fans: it's about media studies as a whole. The field needs a broad, not exclusive fan studies, so let's give it one. To reintroduce gender to the discussion, if fan studies has always been seen as somewhat feminine and feminized, that's all the more reason why we need to establish more of a beachhead in the often painfully masculine and masculinized field of media and communication studies.

RP: You're right that fandom and production are closely wed, just as to some degree fandom and academia are closely wed (after all what are Shakespeare scholars but Bardies?). But closely wed doesn't mean co-extensive. They still remain different fields of cultural production. Moving from one side of the screen to the other necessarily gives the Brannon Braga's and Russell T. Davies's of the world a different perspective. They can't just indulge their fannish impulses but have to think about the larger audiences of non-fans, followers, enthusiasts, what have you. Both these guys had to recharge long-standing franchises and to do so they necessarily had to appeal to the core fan base through references that newbies wouldn't get. But they also had to attract the newbies and they couldn't do this by disappearing up their own metaverses. Braga failed miserably with Enterprise and Davies succeeded magnificently - he's made Dr. Who mandatory tea-time viewing for a whole new generation that previously didn't know Gallifrey from gadfly. Another danger of overly blurring these fields of cultural production is that the producers still ultimately have the power. O'Quinn can decide not to read fan posts precisely because he, together with the writers and the other production personnel, is given the final responsibility for deciding how to characterize/play John Locke.

That's why it's so important to study production, because without producers there would be no fans. But this does raise the issue of the starstruck fanboy, or perhaps fangirl in my case, even though I'd resist the label. I have to admit that for a life-long Star Trek fan wandering around the Paramount lot and seeing people in Starfleet uniforms was simply amazing and that Maire and I did spend a bit of time behaving like giggling teenagers. On the other hand, we had extensively prepared for each of our interviews and when the time came tried to behave like professional academics, if only out of respect for the very professional production personnel whom we were meeting. We also made it clear that, while we liked, even loved Trek, we weren't intending to write an uncritical celebration. So I guess I'm saying that it is indeed possible to be both fan and academic. You can have a hybrid identity that involves shifting between the two but you can't perform both simultaneously. Not sure whether being a boy or a girl makes any difference here.

You say that we need to establish a fan studies beachhead on the masculinised field of media and communications studies, but of course these guys have always studied audiences (cf. Gerbner above). If I can use another spatial metaphor, I think we need to establish a two way bridge between the two fields. Media and communications studies needs to acknowledge the important contributions of fan studies, particularly with regard to affect (and with regard to their own affect toward media texts). But fan studies needs to consider more general audiences. And this brings us back to where we started, seeking a broader definition of fan and fan studies. So over to you!

JG: This seems like a good place to end Part One, actually (though I'd mention quickly that Gerbner wasn't studying fans - he was pathologizing them). In Part Two, we can talk about high culture.

The Frodo Franchise: An Interview with Kristin Thompson (Part Three)

In many ways,Lord of the Rings turned out to be a watershed project in terms of the relations of movie producers to their fans. Why do you think Jackson was so successful in building partnerships with his fans? What do you see as the benefits of this relationship? What lessons do you think the film industry has taken away from this experience?

Tolkien's novel had a fairly large fan base already, though it could only form a relatively small portion of the world audience such an expensive film needed. The fact that existing fans and non-readers both needed to be appealed to forced New Line to create an innovative and carefully planned internet campaign. Obviously they were very successful, but they had a lot of help from fan websites.

Peter is quite amazing in his understanding of fans and his ability to communicate with them. Back in 1998, when New Line announced the production, Peter's decision (not approved by the studio) to do Q&A sessions online with the fans was brilliant. Many people who were aghast that a splatter-film director was making LOTR got won over. He was also the one who persuaded New Line to allow big sites like TheOneRing.net and Ain't It Cool News to have limited access to the filmmaking. The online "Production Diaries" that he created for King Kong took his approach a big step further. Other directors are now imitating him and going online to communicate with the fans.

Peter has often declared himself to be a fan who makes movies for other fans. I don't believe that's just a publicity ploy.

One hallmark of your book is that you treat the cultural productions of fans alongside those of the commercial producers as all part of the story of the Lord of the Rings films. Can you describe how you approached fan culture in this book? Do you consider yourself to be a LOTR fan? Why or why not?

From early on, when I was first trying to outline the chapters for the book, I knew that the internet campaign would be one of the main topics. I took a broad view of what "campaign" meant, and I included fan sites as well as the official and quasi-official ones. Ultimately I got so much cooperation from various webmasters that the internet chapter became too long, and I divided it in two: one dealing with the official sites and the fan sites that New Line cooperated with and the second dealing with wholly unofficial fan sites and fan activities.

Given how vast the internet is and how many LOTR sites there were, I coped with it by creating a typology of LOTR-related websites and doing case studies of each.

Since I couldn't interview anyone at New Line, I didn't have access to Gordon Paddison, who ran the official online campaign. He had, however, written up a long case study himself in a textbook called Internet Marketing (which no one writing about LOTR seems to know about). McKellen.com unexpectedly served as a sort of quasi-official site. Ian McKellen already had this site, and when he started adding LOTR content, New Line wasn't entirely happy, but they didn't try to stop him. I interviewed Ian and his webmaster Keith Stern, so that site gets a case study. I also interviewed three of the four co-founders of TheOneRing.net and Harry Knowles and Quint of Ain't It Cool News for other case studies.

For the second internet chapter, I interviewed one fan webmaster, Lilith of Sherwood, and got to know her fairly well. She lives in Chicago, but I couldn't really travel all over the world doing face-to-face interviews with all the fans I mention, so I depended on email for the rest.

To learn about fanfiction and fanart, I obviously visited archives, but I also joined Yahoo! groups. (Luckily for me LiveJournals and fanfilms were still largely a thing of the future, which helped make all this doable.) I would join a dozen or so, stay on each for a few months, and move on to others. I communicated via email with some of the moderators and contributors. I also attended one major fan convention, the One Ring Celebration (ORC) during its first year, 2005. All that allowed me to get a pretty good sense of fan creativity and interests, I believe.

Given that you have pioneered the study of fan culture, I know you've done comparable sorts of things. But I'm amazed that so few of the people in media studies who claim to be interested in reception have done much with the internet. I've just reviewed a couple of anthologies of essays on LOTR for the annual Tolkien Studies (Volume IV, which came out in May), and the approaches to fans reflected in them are largely condescending and very limited. Questionnaires and face-to-face interviews are used, which I think would yield a very artificial notion of how fans behave among themselves.

I have obviously been a fan of the books for years. Like many long-time fans, I was dubious about the films and went to Fellowship with a fear that I would hate it. And, like many others, I found that I enjoyed it. Indeed, at the end I was ready to sit through it again immediately. Not that I agreed with all the changes that were made in the script, and there were many, great and small. The writers themselves have said that no fan would approve every change. So, yes, I'm a fan of the films as well. I don't collect nearly all the products or go to fan conventions (except for the one I mentioned, when I was researching the book).

Objectively speaking as a historian, I should be able to do a case study like this one dealing with a film that I don't care for. Realistically, to keep one's enthusiasm and determination up for years, especially in the face of long delays and obstacles, one has to be able to live with a film for years, and that means you have to like it.

Much of your work on Hollywood cinema has emphasized "typical" films and norms. Yet, in this case, you are devoting an entire book to a single film/franchise, something you haven't done since your initial study of Ivan the Terrible. Do you see the Lord of the Rings films as "typical" or "exceptional"? What can you tell us about the place of

such an extended case study of the production process within your larger body of work on contemporary and classical filmmaking?

This book is quite different from what I've written before, it's true.

Still, as you suggest, it does fit into one thread running through my work. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema (written with David Bordwell and Janet Staiger), I examined the original formulation of classical guidelines for style and narrative that was done in the pre-1920 period. That book as a whole stopped its coverage in 1960, mainly because of industry changes rather than because we thought the classical approach to filmmaking ended.

Storytelling in the New Hollywood was my attempt to examine classical narrative principles as they continue to exist in modern American studio films. That covered the period from the 1970s to the 1990s.

In a sense, The Frodo Franchise follows on and comes up to contemporary Hollywood, even though I barely touch on the question of whether or not LOTR fits my model of narrative structure. But it is an attempt to talk about how industry pressures and the digital revolution have helped shape filmmaking, marketing, and merchandising.

I consider LOTR to be both exceptional and typical. The great Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovski (who from my grad-school days on has influenced my approach tremendously), wanted to write an essay to discuss the concept of delay, or "stairstep construction" as he termed it, in literary narratives. He chose Tristram Shandy as his case study. That's obviously a unique and eccentric work as novels go, but it also uses delay in a very obvious way; it's really the novel's dominant device. Shklovski chose it because of that, because it would be a very clear way of explaining what exists less obviously in all novels. So for him Tristram Shandy was both exceptional and typical.

I took a somewhat similar tack in Storytelling in the New Hollywood. I took films that were successful with the public and respected for their story structure by critics and filmmakers--like Back to the Future. They aren't typical films, but they use typical techniques so skillfully that they display the norms in an ideal way. That is, if we take norms to equal guidelines, then these are typical, because most filmmakers want to make movies that conform to good Hollywood practice. Most would aspire to make films as good as Back to the Future or Amadeus or Hannah and Her Sisters or Tootsie, so the techniques as displayed in those films are normative.

LOTR offers that sort of example, the ideal to which others aspire, but on the level of the franchise rather than the single film. It was not only a mega-hit theatrically, but it provided a model of an effective internet campaign (even though New Line was learning how to do that as they went along, and there were some missteps). Its licensed products were mostly successful, including the video games, products which have become increasingly central to franchises. The DVD supplements set a new standard, one which has not been surpassed. The fact that the film was made at a sophisticated set of facilities that had recently been built in a small producing nation had implications for the future of international filmmaking. Its method of financing, with 26 overseas distributors forced to help finance the film in exchange for the local rights, was an extreme case of how independent films (which LOTR is) are ordinarily financed.

In short, LOTR embodied almost everything that's new and important in Hollywood practice these days. People could read about it and get a pretty good sense of why things are the way they are in Hollywood today, and they could also find out a great deal about a film they love. It's an exceptional example because of its enormous success, but everything I discuss is done on a lesser scale for typical franchises.

Your book also features an extensive discussion of the games which have been developed around the LOTR films. Historically, we would have seen games simply as another form of licensed merchandise around the central film franchise. How central do you think the LOTR games are to our understanding of the franchise as a whole? What kind of creative collaboration emerged between the games company and the film producers?

For the LOTR franchise as a whole, the video games are a big factor. Studios pick up a significant amount of money by licensing tie-in games. It's not as big as one might expect, and I do debunk the persistent myth that on average games now earn more than films. Far from it. Still, games are also a way of extending the income beyond the end of the film and in keeping up interest in case the studio someday wants to make more films in the franchise.

Right now, the LOTR franchise is still alive, even though the films stopped coming out more than three years ago. It's considerably smaller, of course, but products continue to appear. Both Sideshow and Gentle Giant are making new collectible statuettes and busts, Topps continues its trading-card game, and the third CD set of Howard Shore's complete music is yet to be released (alongside a licensed tie-in book about the musical score). On a recent trip I checked some airline bookshops and found rows of the mass-paperback copies of the trilogy volumes with publicity photos from the film on their covers. In terms of income, though, the video games are at the moment the core of the franchise. Electronic Arts initially had the rights to base games on the films, and later it bought the book-based rights as well. Now they can go on making Middle-earth-based games as long as they want to (though the licenses would need to be renewed occasionally).

The collaboration between EA and the filmmakers was unusually close. For most films, very little material is provided to the game designers. In this case there was a person from EA in charge of requesting "assets" (sound clips, photos, helmets, whatever) to be sent to EA's studios. It's hard to remember that in those days actors, particularly stars, seldom did the voices for their game characters. Ian McKellen, Elijah Wood, a lot of the actors did one or more LOTR games. I was lucky enough to interview both the EA executive in charge of requesting assets and the Three Foot Six archivist in charge of filling those requests, so I got a good feel for the nuts and bolts of their procedures.

EA handles all its film-based games in the same way now, and I would imagine other big games companies do. So LOTR had a distinct influence in that area.

What insights might your research give into the breakdown of relations between Jackson and his production company? Given the credit given to Jackson to the series success, why are we unlikely to see a Jackson-produced version of The Hobbit any time soon?

Before responding, I should say that have no inside knowledge. I haven't tried to contact any of the people I interviewed back in 2003 and 2004, since I know they wouldn't be at liberty to tell me where things stand now. What I have had to say on this topic and will say here is educated speculation.

Since last October, I've been blogging at intervals of a few months, trying to piece together the hints that appear in interviews and trade-paper stories. Those entries give a more complete rundown than I could possibly do here (and I assume you'll link to them), so I'll be brief.

Editor's Note: Here are Links to the posts she mentions:

The Hobbit Film: New Developments

The Hobbit Film: Faint Signs of Movement

Once more on New Line, Peter Jackson, and The Hobbit

Cautious, that's c-a-u-t-i-o-u-s optimism concerning The Hobbit

Peter's lawsuit has gotten a high profile, of course, especially after Bob Shaye statement in January that Peter would never make The Hobbit while he runs New Line (which Shaye founded in 1967 and has been president or co-president of for its entire existence). But given the creative accounting of Hollywood studios when they're dishing out money to the people who own percentages of the receipts, lawsuits are not uncommon. New Line has dug in its heels about this one, but it also has reason to know that Peter is a very determined man and one of the few individuals who can afford lawyers of the same standing as those working for New Line).

As things stand right now (June 17), we're not likely to see a version of The Hobbit produced by Peter or anybody else soon. Pre-production and script-writing take forever these days, and those processes haven't started, as far as we know. Peter has one card up his sleeve, in that Weta Workshop designed Hobbiton and Rivendell and so on for LOTR, so it would make sense to continue with that company. And though the props and sets belong to New Line, they're in storage in New Zealand as far as I know.

The only director who has been rumored as a possible replacement for Peter, Sam Raimi, has said he would only direct The Hobbit with Peter's approval. New Line says they have the production rights until 1909. Presumably they only need to have launched a project by that time in order to retain the rights. To get a finished film out by then without undue rush would mean they should have started already.

MGM holds the distribution rights and will co-produce. They want Peter to direct. Michael Lynne, co-president of New Line, has recently said that he thinks the legal dispute can be worked out. Saul Zaentz, to whom the rights would revert in 1909, wants Peter to direct. Ian McKellen has strongly hinted he wouldn't play Gandalf again if Peter doesn't direct. Certainly the vast majority of the fans want Peter for The Hobbit. I suspect just about everyone except Shaye wants Peter to direct. His name attached (possibly even just as producer) would be worth at least many tens of millions of dollars. Unless New Line is hiding some terribly big sums of money that they owe Peter, settling with him makes sense. And if they are hiding money, it might well come out anyway if the case goes to court.

So I don't think I'm being wildly optimistic when I say that, knowing what we know now (I'm writing these replies in mid-July), there still seems to me a good chance that Peter will ultimately direct the film, or at least be asked to. Who knows, he might turn it down, though he was enthusiastic enough about it before the lawsuit business turned ugly. And if he were to produce and hand-pick the director, I expect the fans would settle for that. Still, I don't see any obvious reason why he couldn't direct. His Lovely Bones adaptation, which is a relatively modest project, is due out in late 2008, and despite many other possible projects, he hasn't committed to any specific one beyond Bones.

Of course all this could change tomorrow.

The Frodo Franchise: An Interview with Kristin Thompson (Part Two)

Yesterday, I began a three part interview with Kristin Thompson, noted film scholar and author of the new book, The Frodo Franchise: Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. For those of you who would like to learn more about Thompson and her work, here are some relevent links:

The publisher's website about the book.

Observations on Film Art, the blog which Thompson runs with David Bordwell.

What can you tell us about how the Lord of the Rings films were conceived?

According to Peter, it happened in the wake of his making The Frighteners. Although that film was not a success--in part due to a bad release date--it had a huge number of CGI shots for its day and allowed Weta Digital to build its computing power up considerably. Peter says that he was looking around for another effects-heavy film to make, and he and Fran came up with LOTR. It's quite a leap from a relatively modest ghost film to an epic trilogy, but that's basically what launched the project.

How was it possible for Peter Jackson, a then little known New Zealand filmmaker, to get control over such a large scale media franchise?

I go into the convoluted history of the filmmaking rights for LOTR in the book, and I don't want to give too much away. But basically Peter had a Miramax connection, because they distributed Heavenly Creatures in the U.S. Saul Zaentz, who owned the LOTR rights at the time Peter got interested, had a Miramax connection because they had rescued his English Patient project when Fox pulled the plug on it. It was far from a speedy process, but Miramax eventually bought the rights for Peter to make LOTR.

Eventually the project went from Miramax to New Line, which had relatively little choice but to take Peter as part of the package, for reasons that I'll leave for people to read in the book.

What long term impact has Jackson's success had upon the film industry in New Zealand? What does this suggest about the impact of globalization on media production?

When I made my first research trip to New Zealand in late 2003, the issue of how LOTR was affecting the country's own small film industry was a somewhat tense one. Some local filmmakers claimed that having a huge production like LOTR and perhaps other epics to follow (at this point the final decision to film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in New Zealand hadn't been made) would drive up the costs of labor and supplies. Another fear was that the industry would become too dependent on these big films coming in from outside the country, a flow which could dry up abruptly if the exchange rate changed or sophisticated post-production facilities were built in other small producing countries.

It was also not clear whether Film New Zealand, the agency that works to bring productions in from abroad would be funded adequately. The scheme for tax rebates for foreign productions hadn't been passed, and so on.

By my next trip, only about seven months later, it was a whole new situation. Film NZ was funded adequately, the Large Budget Screen Production Grant had been approved, and the mood was generally much more upbeat. The large pool of skilled labor left behind by LOTR was also recognized as an enormous asset.

It's a bit soon to gauge the long-term effects, but New Zealand's national feature-film production is probably healthier than it has ever been. Many of the Kiwi directors and other personnel who went abroad for work returned during the making of LOTR. Enough large-budget productions have decided to film in New Zealand and use its state-of-the-art post-production facilities that "Wellywood" seems well-established. I think James Cameron's decision to make much of Avatar in New Zealand was like the final stamp of approval. If one of the top effects-centered directors chooses Weta Digital, surely others will follow.

As to the impact on international media production, The Frodo Franchise ends with a discussion of the growth of these technically sophisticated filmmaking centers in small producing countries. A big complex is being built in South Africa, for example. I'm not sure that the films, commercials, and TV shows that will be made largely abroad will be all that much different from what we're familiar with. Did being animated in Korea for years affect The Simpsons?

On the other hand, I definitely think one reason why Peter had a relatively high level of control over the making of LOTR is that the production was happening in a country that's a 12-hour flight from Los Angeles. Some directors may opt to make their films in remote locations for precisely that reason.

Previously Hollywood studios sent filmmakers abroad for principal photography to save money. Now post-production work, even sophisticated special effects, can increasingly be done overseas for the same reason. The result may be that less of the work of actual filmmaking will be done in Hollywood, which, along with New York, will become more a center of film financing and distribution.

We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of fantasy films being produced in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter film franchise. Do you think the film industry has taken the right lessons from the success of these two series?

The industry has taken the lesson that fantasy sells--for now, anyway. Genres go in cycles, and sci-fi films seem to be in decline as fantasy films rise. The question is whether Hollywood executives will continue to make fantasies if a few of them fail. Eregon was a potential franchise that fizzled, despite the popularity of the book--but the critical consensus was that it was a pale imitation of LOTR. Will Hollywood blame the genre rather than the film? I suppose a lot is riding--certainly for New Line--on The Golden Compass. I think Phillip Pullman's trilogy is fantastic, but in a way even more difficult to adapt than LOTR. And even if it's a hit, there just aren't that many literary fantasies out there on that level. Still, there are two more Harry Potter films to come, and I just read that the third Chronicles of Narnia film is going into pre-production.

So fantasy might have staying power, as other genres have had. 2001 gave sci-fi films respectability, and Star Wars gave them popularity. Sci-fi films have been a prominent Hollywood product until very recently. The Godfather gave gangster films both respectability and popularity, and gangster films are still with us. Now thatLOTR, and to a lesser extent Harry Potter, have given fantasy respectability and popularity, it may also be a genre that remains important for decades.

We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of fantasy films being produced in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter film franchise. Do you think the film industry has taken the right lessons from the success of these two series?

The industry has taken the lesson that fantasy sells--for now, anyway. Genres go in cycles, and sci-fi films seem to be in decline as fantasy films rise. The question is whether Hollywood executives will continue to make fantasies if a few of them fail. Eregon was a potential franchise that fizzled, despite the popularity of the book--but the critical consensus was that it was a pale imitation of LOTR. Will Hollywood blame the genre rather than the film? I suppose a lot is riding--certainly for New Line--on The Golden Compass. I think Phillip Pullman's trilogy is fantastic, but in a way even more difficult to adapt than LOTR. And even if it's a hit, there just aren't that many literary fantasies out there on that level. Still, there are two more Harry Potter films to come, and I just read that the third Chronicles of Narnia film is going into pre-production.

So fantasy might have staying power, as other genres have had. 2001 gave sci-fi films respectability, and Star Wars gave them popularity. Sci-fi films have been a prominent Hollywood product until very recently. The Godfather gave gangster films both respectability and popularity, and gangster films are still with us. Now thatLOTR, and to a lesser extent Harry Potter, have given fantasy respectability and popularity, it may also be a genre that remains important for decades.

One of the accomplishments of LOTR is that it overcame critics perceptions that fantasy films were "overly reliant" on special effects and achieve recognition for its performances and scripts. Do you think critical hostility to special effects has been misplaced? Are digital effects simply one new technique among many by which filmmakers shape our experience of their work?

I think it's absurd to make sweeping claims about computer effects, whether for fantasy or other types of films. People still care about character, as witnessed by the huge popularity of Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series or of many of the characters in the Harry Potter films. If critics don't like a big fantasy film, they often focus the blame on the special effects, even though other techniques and the script may be equally to blame.

It would be interesting to turn the critical eye back on the critics and look at all the clichés they resort to. I've become distinctly cynical about popular press and TV coverage of films since researching my chapter on modern publicity methods--press junkets, electronic press kits, and the whole rise of infotainment. Critics devise a shared story that is easy to write. If an animated film flops, it's "Is there a glut of CGI animated films this season?" Never mind that four of the ten highest grossers of the year turn out to be CGI animated films. "Too much dependence on special effects" seems to be just one of those convenient tropes that critics have in their limited repertoire. It's a tired argument by now, but it's easier than actually thinking about a film on a tight deadline.

How do you think the emergence of digital effects is impacting film production today?

Digital technology as such is affecting films in subtle but pervasive ways. Mixing digital soundtracks allows a minute attention to details and the use of dozens, even of hundreds of tracks to create the finished product. The result, in some cases at least, is a new density and complexity of sound. Digital means are used in editing, design, storyboarding, and a whole variety of phases of filmmaking.

In terms of digital special effects, there is currently a sort of race to use the highest number of effects shots and the most complex technology. Large numbers of effects shots are touted in publicity. It has to end somewhere, since, as Variety recently pointed out, effects houses are being stretched and some films risk missing their release dates because their effects are being done up to the last possible minute.

And, while digital technology is a money-saver in some areas, CGI shots and things like color grading on digital intermediates have become some of the highest cost factors in filmmaking, alongside burgeoning stars' fees. If studios seriously want to cut budgets (which they so far talk about but don't do), rationing digital effects would be one key way to do it.

Critics have historically been disdainful of sequels or franchises, yet the general perception is that the three films here formed an integrated whole.

That's partly because LOTR was exceptional. Tolkien conceived his novel as a single book, and it was published in three volumes because the publishers thought it was the only way they could recoup their costs. (The editor thought that the book might well lose money anyway and yet went ahead and published it. Those were the days.) As I've mentioned, Peter approached the film in the same way, treating it as one continuous story. He even refused to have summary crawl titles at the beginnings of Films 2 and 3. Now, with DVDs, one could watch the films back to back, skipping the end credits and head logo and title, and they would flow together reasonably well. (The Two Towers would flow on quite nicely from Fellowship's ending, though the opening of Return, with its flashback to Gollum's downfall, would be a little jarring after Towers' end.)

That kind of coherence was possible because of Bob Shaye's decision to make the three parts simultaneously. They were shot out of continuity in one giant period of principal photography. Apart from the fairly evident growth in the number and complexity of the special effects from part to part, there's not much that would go against that feeling of the films being an integrated whole.

So far no studio has had the nerve to do the same thing. The first Pirates of the Caribbean ended with the filmmakers not knowing what would happen in part 3, for example. The Chronicles of Narnia series, New Line's His Dark Materials trilogy, and others all wait for the first film to succeed before moving on. Still, presumably films based on existing literature can have a sense of coherence somewhat comparable to LOTR. It will be very interesting to see what happens with The Golden Compass. Can New Line manage to create a unified trilogy, as Pullman's novels do? From the start they have modeled this new potential franchise on LOTR--except for making the first film separately.

What steps did the producers take to insure the integrity of the series as a whole? How central do you think this more integrated approach is to the public perception of this series?

One thing that I find remarkable about LOTR is how quickly these three long films were released--almost ten hours of effects-heavy film in a two-year period. When you think of the years it took Martin Scorsese to makeGangs of New York, with its many delays, Peter really achieved a feat. When the film was announced by New Line in August of 1998, the press release said, "The company may release the trilogy as a Christmas-summer Christmas event during the 2000-2001 calendar year." That was obviously a little too ambitious, and once the full scope of the project became apparent, the three-Christmas release was settled. Even that is ridiculously ambitious by the standard of modern Hollywood, and I can't think of another case where three release dates were announced at once and so early. (Return's release date was committed to about four years in advance!) How many directors could make those deadlines and create an epic set of films this polished?

(Of course the extended DVD versions contain a full 120 minutes of additional footage, much of which was shot during principal photography, so the whole thing is even more amazing.)

Again, compare this with the slower release of the Harry Potter films. Those are very ambitious films, but they're shorter than the installments of LOTR. I can't think of any series of comparable size that has come out that fast. The second and third Pirates of the Caribbean films were released a year apart, but that's largely because the producers imitated the LOTR production and shot them more or less at the same time.

So that's one reason I think LOTR was perceived as an integral film. The release dates were announced long in advance, and the parts came out at almost exactly the same time each year, mid-December. Knowing in advance that all three were coming probably played a big part in making fans not perceiving films two and three as sequels. Also, the extended-version DVDs of the first two films were timed to come out shortly before the next part's theatrical release, so the rush to watch them presumably made the three films flow together in an atypical way.

The regularity led to a sense of Christmas being LOTR time. During the 2004, 2005, and even the 2006 Christmas season, I read comments in the popular press about what a pity it was that no new LOTR installment was appearing. Earlier this year Entertainment Weekly, which assigns grades to trailers, gave the one for The Golden Compass a B+, remarking, "points off for so shamelessly trading on our Lord of the Rings nostalgia"--more than three years after the trilogy ended!

Another reason would be that in the publicity, Peter and others of the filmmakers stressed that this was one long film, so a lot of people presumably thought of it that way as well.

Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that the first two parts don't end on the traditional cliffhanger that one associates with serials. Both end with Frodo and Sam trudging along on their trip to Mordor, where we can glimpse Mt. Doom in the distance. Despite what critics might claim about LOTR being a succession of battles and action scenes, it's the journey of those two Hobbits that gives the narrative its shape. As so often happens in classical Hollywood films, goal orientation is a major unifying factor.

The trailers played up the journey aspect of the plot. The Fellowship one is most concerned with setting up the basic core story element, the destruction of the Ring, and it ends by simply saying, "The legend comes to life." But the Towers trailer ends, "The journey continues" and near the end of the Return trailer, we hear "The journey ends."

On the lack of cliffhangers. There's a promise of considerable action ahead in the first two films' endings, but Sam and Frodo aren't in imminent danger in either case. In the novel, Fellowship ends in the same way, with the hobbits in the Emyn Muil making their way toward Mordor. Tolkien's Towers, though, has one of the killer cliffhangers of all time. After following Frodo and Sam for the second half of the volume as they slowly progress toward Mordor, Tolkien ends with the aftermath of the Shelob episode with one terse, powerful sentence: "Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy." The filmmakers were no doubt right in moving that episode into the third part, but they lost a great moment.

Contrast that with the Harry Potter series, where there's a continuing goal across the seven books (though it develops and becomes focused slowly), but they are structured around the cycle of going to Hogwarts at the beginning and returning home at the end. They're more self-contained than LOTR. Spider-man has continuing elements, but a new villain or villains each time, while LOTR has Sauron from start to finish (and Saruman to link films one and two).

As a production, the film itself has a built-in unity, of course, and I think that shows in the final product. The same crew worked on all three parts, and bringing in Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe assured that all the design elements worked together seamlessly. One crucial factor was Howard Shore's music, which was conceived as a single piece with leitmotifs running through all three films. All in all, I think it would be hard to point to a single factor that would encourage people see these as three self-contained films. Again, that sets LOTR apart from other franchises, where for the most part the individual films are self-contained to a considerable degree. At the end of the X-Men films, for example, we know that tensions between the two mutant groups has the potential to lead to further conflicts and adventures, but we don't know what those will be.

The Frodo Franchise: An Interview with Kristin Thompson (Part One)

For those of you in and around film studies, Kristin Thompson requires no introduction. Her historical research and close formal readings of film have helped set the agenda for our field for the past several decades. For many of us, Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction, both co-authored with David Bordwell, represent a first introduction into core concepts in the field, yet both books are more than the usual textbook rehashing of familiar content, managing to be groundbreaking work in their own terms. Also with Bordwell and with Janet Staiger, she wrote the monumental Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, a book which became the focus of debate for the better part of a decade, pushing for a new paradigm which fused close stylistic analysis with institutional and cultural history. As a solo author, she has expanded upon that argument with Storytelling in the New Hollywood, a book which explores what does and does not change about the structure of narrative in contemporary films, and Breaking the Glass Armour, which is a book I push upon any CMS student whose thesis work requires close reading. Thompson, thus, is one of the most established scholars in our field. She is also, though she sometimes contests the word, a fan. When I was in graduate school in Madison, she took me to some of the meetings of the local Tolkien Society and introduced me to some of the leaders of the city's fan community. Her newest book, The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood, brought her roles as fan and scholar together. There are few books that take us as deeply into the thinking behind a major motion picture as this one does. Thompson seems to have talked to literally everyone involved with this production and distilled it all into the epic story of how one of the most important film franchises of recent years came to become the phenomenon it is today. This is so much more than a really literate Making Of book, though, given her ability to place what occurred on the set in New Zealand into a larger picture of global trends impacting the film industry. And, for once, what fans create -- their fan fiction, art, and online discussions -- are treated seriously and alongside what was generated by the Powers That Be. I have argued that two media franchises have transformed the relations between Hollywood and its fans: the first, Harry Potter, has been discussed here a lot lately, Lord of the Rings is the second, and Thompson helps to explain the strategies by which Peter Jackson won over skeptical fans and brought them into the center of the production process. For those interested in transmedia storytelling, there is also a lot to like about this book which takes us deep into the production of the LOTR computer games and the development of the DVD package, among other topics.

Today, I begin the first of a three part interview with Thompson about her experiences writing the book, about her relationship to fandom, and about the things Lord of the Ring might teach us about branded entertainment in our transmedia and transnational era.

Can you tell us something of your own personal stakes in this project?

What led you to do a book about the Lord of the Rings films in the first place?

Like so many people of the Baby Boomer generation, I had read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was in high school. The Ballantine editions came out in 1965, and I read them right away. So I was there when a book that had mainly been popular in the U.K. suddenly became a campus craze in the U. S.

I loved the books, of course, and I have re-read them at intervals thereafter. Being of a scholarly bent, I read some essays about the books, as well as a biography of Tolkien, the volume of his letters, and the various drafts that his son Christopher has published at intervals.

In fact, when the films were being made, I was in the early stages of writing an analytical study of The Hobbit and LOTR. I had amassed quite a few notes by the time the films started coming out. Writing literary criticism may sound odd for a film historian, but it isn't as implausible as it might seem. I've written a book on P. G. Wodehouse, and I have one published essay on The Hobbit that gets cited occasionally.

When New Line announced news of the film project in 1998, I, like many long-time fans of the books, was highly skeptical that an adaptation could do the books justice. Still, I had no doubts at all that the film was going to be hugely successful. (I won a $20 bet that Fellowship would gross more than $600 million internationally.) Still, I didn't pay much attention to the film until the spring of 2001.

That was when New Line showed a twenty-six minute preview of the film at Cannes, including much of the Mines of Moria segment. I read about the rapturous reception of the film and how it was changing people's doubts about LOTR into enthusiasm. That Cannes event fascinates me because it was such a dramatic turning point. For my book, I managed to interview ten people who were there in a wide variety of capacities, and there's a section on it in the opening chapter.

At that point I started clipping material related to the film from trade papers like Variety and pop magazines like Entertainment Weekly. I didn't have any idea what I might do with them.

Then Fellowship came out and was such a tremendous success. It was like the 1960s craze all over again, but now on a huge international scale. It was amazing to watch something that I had loved suddenly have this international reception.

Still, it didn't occur to me to write a book. It was really during 2002 when I started realizing that so many aspects of the franchise were cutting-edge and successful. New Line's official website attracted so much attention, the selling of all three parts of the film to international distributors was unprecedented, and so on. That was when I realized two things. First, one could learn a lot about how franchises work by studying all the main aspects of LOTR--not just the film, but the DVDs, the internet, and so on. (The videogames as well, of course, but the first one hadn't been released when I was pondering all this.) Second, LOTR was rapidly becoming one of the most important films ever made. Its impact on New Zealand, for one thing, affecting a whole country's economy and international image. The elaborate DVD supplements, the internet buzz. I decided that someone should try to capture all that before it slipped away and people's memories faded.

I should stress that writing the book was my own idea entirely. Neither New Line nor the filmmakers knew anything about it until I contacted them. I have no license or any other legal relationship to either group, and it's certainly not a tie-in book. It was a purely free-lance project, and I wrote it without having a publisher lined up.

Your project has depended on building close relationships with many of the key production people involved in the films and the related products (the game company, for example). Can you share with us some of the process by which you built these relationships? What has been involved in an academic getting inside the production process to this degree?

I knew from the start that I couldn't write the book I wanted to without interviewing many of those involved. So little of what happened was reported in print or on the internet, and most of its never would be. I also believed that I had to begin the interviewing process while the film was still being made. Once everyone had scattered, it would be impossible to talk to as many of them as I could in Wellington. My ideal would have been to go to Wellington while the main pick-up filming was going on during April to July of 2003.

I started out not knowing any of the people involved directly or indirectly with the films. My assumption was that I would have to get in touch with one of the key people. There were only three of them who seemed powerful enough to make the decision to cooperate with my project: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Barrie Osborne.

In late 2002 I was still wondering if I could manage that. Fortunately I happened to be at a film conference in Adelaide, Australia, and met a film editor named Annabelle Sheehan. She was familiar with my work, and she said she could put me in touch with Barrie. (Shortly after that Annabelle became an executive at a talent agency in Sydney, a company that represents, coincidentally, Cate Blanchett.)

I don't know exactly what she told him about me, but clearly she vouched for me as a serious, well-established scholar. That probably wouldn't impress a lot of Hollywood producers, but Barrie is a very smart and well-educated man. He went to Carlton College here in the Midwest, and I think he had some idea of what I was proposing. (I was always afraid that I'd be taken for someone like Peter Biskind, looking to dish the dirt on the production.) Barrie gave Annabelle permission to give me his email address. Once I had sent a description of the project to him, he said he was interested but would have to run the idea past Peter and New Line.

That happened in mid-January of 2003. My hope at that point was to go to Wellington during the time the cast was back for pick-ups and additional shooting, which would mean roughly April to July. Most of the main crew members would be reassembled at that point, so I figured getting a lot of interviews would be relatively easy.

Establishing contact with Barrie turned out to be the perfect first step. I have to admit, however, that I was very naive at the beginning. I figured that Barrie's interest would be enough to get me access to the filmmakers for interviews. It didn't occur to me that everyone involved had of course signed confidentiality agreements with New Line, which had to OK that sort of access. I gather those agreements were particularly strict for this film. Barrie said he'd need to clear it with Peter and with them before we could proceed.

I never heard that Peter OKed the project, though I assume he must have or it would never have gone forward.

I won't go into the lengthy negotiation process that I went through with New Line, but it lasted from February to August, scotching my chances of being in Wellington during pickups. In late August I got the word that New Line was probably going to cooperate. That was enough for me to decide to go to New Zealand if possible, and witness some of the post-production, tour the facilities, interview people, whatever. I contacted Barrie about it, and he said I could come down. I booked my flights, bought a really good digital audio recorder, and by the end of September I was in Wellington.

Those two moments--Barrie's decisions to cooperate and to let me come down before the film was finished--were the crucial points, and I must give Barrie enormous credit for trusting and supporting me. I doubt that the book would exist if I hadn't had that support.

I went to Wellington not having any interviews with filmmakers lined up, though people at various government agencies--Tourism New Zealand, Film New Zealand, the New Zealand Film Commission--had agreed to talk with me. Of course Return of the King was still being worked on, but by then that involved mainly the computer animation, the color grading, and the sound mixing. The designers and various other people I wanted to interview had moved on to other projects, but most of them were Kiwis, so I hoped they would be in the area and accessible.

Barrie assigned me a point person, Melissa Booth, the main publicist at that time. She and I sat down on my first day, and she was terrific. She picked up right away on what I needed and made up a list of people and made the first appointments for me. After that I had the contact information and mainly made the appointments myself. Basically, once Barrie had made it known that I was doing the book, virtually everyone involved in the filmmaking whom I wanted to interview cooperated and indeed were very friendly and open about the whole thing. I talked with Ngila Dickson (costume designer), Richard Taylor and two of his designers (Weta Workshop), Matt Aitken (in charge of model scanning at Weta Digital), and others.

One stroke of luck was that I ran into Michael Pellerin, producer/director of the supplements for the extended-edition DVDs. I interviewed him and watched him at work for an afternoon. Although Peter obviously didn't have time to be interviewed at that point, he did let me watch him supervising some of the final sound mixing on the Shelob sequence.

Despite the fact that I was there at the very end of the filmmaking, everything that was going on was fascinating to witness. They were even still doing some pickups, though not involving the stars. It was mainly orcs being filmed against a blue screen to be jigsawed into special-effects shots. I got a tour of the Stone Street Studios and stayed to watch about half an hour of the filming.

Everyone was trying frantically to finish Return by the deadline, and there was a sense of excitement--and a bit of panic--everywhere. The whole interviewing process went so well that my planned three-week stay was too short, and I added an extra week.

After that first visit, I returned to New Zealand for two more rounds of interviews. The next was in June of 2004, and things were much quieter. King Kong was in the writing and pre-production stage, and there was activity, but nothing like the frantic rush of the first time. Peter was working very hard, of course, but he managed to squeeze in an hour to talk with me. I also got to interview Philippa Boyens, Grant Major, some of the tech people, and so on. A third trip, in November/December 2004 was partly to finish up the round of interviews I had planned and to update with some of the people I had previously talked to.

I did many interviews elsewhere, of course--Peter's agent in LA, the producer-director of the making-ofs for cable TV, the Danish distributor of LOTR, Ian McKellen in London, etc. Basically the fact that Peter and the other filmmakers were cooperating was enough to convince them to talk with me. One thing that came through time after time was how excited all these people were that they had been involved in this unique enterprise. It was like an era coming to an end, and I think most of them were happy that someone was recording it for posterity.

At first I thought I would be able to interview heads of departments at New Line, but in the summer of 2004 they informed me that they had decided against it. I don't know why. Maybe they still thought of me as a sort of glorified journalist snooping around for secrets to do a Biskind-style hatchet job on them. I was disappointed about that at first, but now I think it was probably better this way. I got to talk with the filmmakers, but I never had to sign a confidentiality agreement with New Line--or with anyone. My relationship with my interviewees was always on the basis of trust, and all of them had the option of reading the drafts of chapters where I quoted them and requesting that I change passages. That didn't happen much, but I felt it was only fair to these people to make that offer--plus I hope it made them feel freer to say things without having to be overly cautious about violating their own confidentiality agreements.

I think it was really only after the first trip to New Zealand that I started trying to think of any comparable book that had appeared: a study of an entire film by a film historian, as opposed to a journalist. I couldn't think of any.

Now that the book is coming out, I can see why. I look back and think that getting the access I needed for my research was so close to impossible that I wonder if another such book can ever be written. The thing depended so much on some incredibly lucky coincidences, on dogged determination, on Kiwi friendliness and hospitality, and certainly on Barrie's support. That complex set of circumstances is so unlikely to come together again. I'm convinced that if I had tried to undertake a comparable project relating to one of the big franchises that are made in Hollywood or London, it wouldn't have gotten to square one.

On the other hand, if people in the industry read The Frodo Franchise, maybe some will recognize that it's really great publicity for them. I would like to think that it would inspire studio officials to give greater access to bona fide scholars. It would be somewhat like the studios' learning curve on how to deal with fans on the internet, I suppose.

What did you learn through this front-line perspective about how contemporary films are being produced that complimented or expanded what you had come to understand through other methodologies (close reading, studying the trade press and production manuals, etc.)?

The stages in production are so familiar that in a way I didn't learn an enormous amount about that side of things. Certainly I saw techniques being used that I had only written about. Peter Doyle, who was one of the inventors of the digital color-grading system used on LOTR and other films, sat down with me for 25 minutes and demonstrated how the grading had been achieved on a few shots from the trilogy. It's a surprisingly beautiful process to watch.

But I learned more about some of the activities around the filmmaking that have never been studied. Certain aspects of the publicity, for example. How do making-of films get onto cable stations? It happens all the time these days, but when I asked, nobody could tell me, and there's nothing written about it. I was quite curious about that and finally found out through some of the interviews. We all know about press junkets in general, but when did they start? When did they become as big and elaborate as they are now? Again, the history of press junkets hasn't been written, so I sat down with Roger Ebert, who has been in movie journalism during that entire period, and he gave me enormously helpful information.

So this was the first project I've done that depended really heavily upon interviews for material that couldn't be gotten any other way. It was also the first project where I used the internet. (My previous book was on Ernst Lubitsch's silent features, and despite the fact that lots of people think everything is now on the internet, it isn't. I didn't learn a single thing for that project on the internet.) In part it was a research tool, but the internet's relationship to LOTR is the topic of two chapters.

This project has involved vastly different sorts of research and topics than I had dealt with before. I think coping with the wide range of topics that the franchise entailed was possible due to that basic historical approach that you and I and all the other film graduate students all learn at the University of Wisconsin: start out by formulating your core topic as a small set of questions. Then you just have to figure out what you need to do to answer them.

Gender and Fan Studies (Round Nine, Part Two): Derek Kompare and Cynthia Walker

Fandom Meets The Powers That Be CW: You make a couple of interesting points, Derek, some of which I've been pondering myself. The first is the need to get away from the idea of a rigid binary. TPTB have never been a single entity. We know there are conflicts between the producers and the various levels of the big corporations that distribute their work. Indeed, that's how all of this began. Roddenberry needed allies against Paramount and enlisted SF fans for support. He wasn't the first producer to make that effort (a similar alliance occurred in MFU) nor certainly the last. You mention Joss Whedon who has "fannish" credentials and attitudes. I'm sure most Buffy fans will remember when, in the wake of Columbine, the WB network delayed the airing of an episode involving a would-be student sniper in the U.S. In response, Whedon famously recommended that Canadian fans "bootleg the puppy."

Other producers (Chris Carter and J. Michael Straczynski and yes, Ron Moore, come to mind) have also represented themselves as underdog producers battling the "suits." Personally, I find these alliances between various creative professionals and the fans (which can be complicated and angst-ridden for all parties involved) quite fascinating and, with the internet, more and more common. I used to feel encouraged by them. Lately, though, I've become more pessimistic.

DK: I'm more ambivalent and skeptical than pessimistic, I suppose. My default position is that TPTB will probably screw things up (to wit, Star Trek), so ambivalence must be an improvement, right? This is a rapidly changing media environment, after all, so there's much here that is legitimately "new," particularly as far as the networks and distributors are concerned. I was encouraged by the deals worked out for Battlestar Galactica and Lost, for example, which essentially protect each series from future exploitation by networks/studios, but still leave doors open for fannish creativity. Still, it's a very open question as to whether that creativity will be constrained under various rules and (God forbid) EULAs, or just left alone.

CW: Marketing is certainly a factor now that TPTB have realized that fandom can be utilized for viral marketing efforts. I don't think fans mind all that much being used to promote their favorite source texts. Heck, we ourselves proudly admit to "pimping." The real issues are power and control. Producers and marketers are accustomed to seeking control over audiences or, at least, being able to predict their behavior. By comparison, fandom must seem very scary in its diversity and unpredictability. Although one can probably argue that there are some similarities between fandom and Hollywood in that they are relatively small, highly networked communities, ultimately, they don't operate in quite the same way.

The incursion of Hollywood into fandom reminds me of the European explorers encountering the indigenous population in the New World for the first time. We're talking about a clash of civilizations here with very different economies and value systems. We might get past the first exchanges of beads for land use, but eventually, inevitably, there are going to be serious tensions as interests conflict.

Linking this to gender, my experience is that, in general, male fans have been much more open ---even welcoming ---to these incursions into Media Fandom than (again, in general) female fans. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I have some theories. Prime among them is that the kinds of activities that guy fans are involved with --- collecting memorabilia, assembling non-fiction information websites --- are more likely to be approved by TPTB than some of the activities, like writing fan fiction, that are dominated by women. Also, at least in my experience, I find my guy fan friends are much more competitive with each other in vying for the attention of TPTB, are more likely to have connections to the professional and/or Hollywood communities, and seem to have a stronger desire to see their passion for the source text legitimized.

For example, because of my dissertation work and my professional ties to Norman Felton (we've both been involved in promoting media literacy), I'm often one of the folks that TBTB will seek out when they're looking for a representative of MFU fandom. There are other fans who fill this role as well, but they are nearly all male. I'm often the lone female voice, which is odd considering that our fandom is mostly run by women fans and is majority female.

Fanboys/Fan Girls Revisited

DK: I think you're right about the broad differences of gender within and between fandoms. Lots of quantitative and qualitative work (including yours) has pretty much borne this out, after all. Still, there will always be exceptions, in almost every fandom. Unfortunately, my experiences (and those of my fan friends) inside and outside fandom have shown how gender is often policed from within. "Fanboys" at comic cons alienate female fans by drooling after scantily clad cosplayers, or mounting loud, pedantic arguments about canon. "Fangirls" at fic cons alienate male fans by talking in code or banning them from slashvid rooms (as one of my female fan friends reported witnessing at MediaWest

back in the 90s).

Here's where, I hope, the emergence of female writers and writer-producers in the industry might help change things. Not in an essentialist sense, but in a sense of maybe projecting a kind of "fangirlness" (or at least not presenting "fanboyness") as a distinct, viable category for broader dissemination. We have a few prominent women writers on key popular and cult shows as it is (e.g., Jane Espenson, Carol Mendelsohn, Marni Noxon, Shonda Rhimes, Amy Sherman-Palladino), but they're very much the minority in Hollywood (and every other TV-producing community in the world, for that matter, unfortunately). I don't think more women producers would necessarily change the fairly fundamental split between men and women over who wants access to TPTB, but it might at least present some other possibilities for engagement, within the source texts and in publicity.

CW: No, I don't either. I don't see evidence that women producers and writers are necessarily more open to engagement with fandom than male producers. Those who are most open to interactions with fans seem to be those who, regardless of gender, have some experience with and/or strong ties to the SF community. This makes sense since the SF community has a long history, dating back to the early 1930s, of pros and fans interacting together and even folks exchanging roles at various times. I understand something similar happens in the Romance community.

But getting back to the fanboy/fangirl dichotomy, I'd like to see us get past this binary as well, although I'm not sure we ever will entirely. Despite the fact that women and guys (in general) favor different fan activities and do appear to have different experiences, I think it's in their (our?) common interest to forge some sort of alliance. In the end, as fans/users/consumers/audiences, we're all in the same boat.

I made this point when the discussions in this forum touched on machinima, which struck me, despite its reliance on images rather than words, as a reworking activity very similar to writing fanfic. At the media conference I attended in New York in May, one of the machinima panelists explained to me how the gaming companies, which are relatively small, are really open to their players altering the games and offer open source code. I then asked him what would happen if the gamers created a message which was critical of the gaming company or which was contrary to what the company would really enjoy or approve. He admitted that this doesn't happen much. But one would expect that, inevitably, a machinima artist will come along who will create a more radical piece that's not something the gaming companies can approve or ignore. What happens then?

The conversation I had that day also made me wonder if male fans seem more content than women fans to 'color within the lines' because most popular culture is created by guys for guys and women have to alter it more severely for their own pleasure. Are women fans more radical in their approach or does it just appear that way?

For example, I notice that machinima features a lot of violence, shooting and blowing up stuff, which frankly, seemed to embarrass the panelists who felt a need to warn the audience about it. It seemed to me the equivalent to how we have to prepare mundane audiences to accept and understand the existence and use of sexuality (both in slash and het) in female-dominated fanfic. Of course, at least in American popular culture, violence is more acceptable than sex and how feature films are rated reflects this.

DK: I think you're absolutely right that particular media forms and genres have a kind of gendered existence not because there's anything intrinsically "male" about blowing stuff up, but because "blowing stuff up" has become a prominent signifier of a culturally promoted masculinity. When the economics of the gaming industry are factored in, as well as the design history of gaming software (i.e., variations on controlling visual space), and the culture of computer science education, it all favors particular codes and possibilities, and marginalizes others.

Still, does this make these men any less "creative"? I'm not sure. I keep thinking of those guys in Trek fandom in the 70s and 80s who would create these elaborate technical blueprints of Trek technology, some of which might never have actually been seen on-screen. Not my cup of tea, but pretty impressive nonetheless, and categorically not all that different from women writing fanfic. Now, once you get into the actual content of the creativity, and its relationships to the source texts and wider culture, then substantial differences emerge. But still, blueprints or fanfic or machinima or vidding are all creative acts inspired by particular sourcetexts and supported by fan communities.

A big question going forward is this: do we (as fans, or acafans) want to crash the gates? Do we want to affect change in the way media is conceived, produced, and distributed? Do we want our cultures and perspectives to be represented in the source texts themselves? Or would we rather keep them to ourselves, build our own communities, and keep them exclusive? Setting aside the issue of fear of the copyright police for a second, do we still want to maintain boundaries between fandom and the mainstream?

As you pointed out earlier, the gates are being crashed anyway, to an extent, by TPTB arriving on the shores of fandom, and producers (benevolently) shouting-out to the fans. Accordingly, as academics and fans, I think we need to keep picking at all of these categories, "men," "women," "fans," and "producers," and learn better to think in other terms as well (most notably class, race, generation, and culture). We can learn an awful lot from the histories of these categories and interactions (as our scholarly work has shown), but we should also attend carefully to their flux at this moment, and look for opportunities, such as the FanLib debate, or these great discussions, to build new identities and relationships and/or defend old ones.

CW: You said: "But still, blueprints or fanfic or machinima or vidding are all creative acts inspired by particular source texts and supported by fan communities." Yes, they are, and personally, I'd like to see folks stop privileging one over the other. Like you, a lot of my academic interest and work is in media studies and also in the related areas of media literacy and media ecology. I'm a big fan of Marshall McLuhan.

And one thing we understand in media studies is that each medium has its virtues and limitations. Film is different from television, and television is different from radio --- but not necessarily better. We choose a medium depending upon the message and the intended audience. One of the first exercises I assign my students is to talk about the class to three different audiences in three different ways. They can write a letter, send an email, text a message, make a phone call, have a face-to-face conversation, whatever --- and then report back. They are always amazed at how the choice of medium shapes, influences, enhances or limits the message. Some media, they discover, are more effective with some audiences than others.

I think it's the same with the creative activities of fandom. I don't think we can privilege creating machinima over fanfiction or the reverse. Posting episode guides, creating technical blueprints, putting together a fanvid or writing a story all have their place and contribute to the commonly shared culture of a fandom. Instead of dismissing activities which we don't understand or in which we don't participate, I'd like to see more cross-community and cross gender communication. After attending that machinima panel, I, myself, wanted to explore, if only as a viewer, that particular medium. I wanted to hear more from the machinima fans.

I'd like to see more guy fans pursue fanfiction, if not as writers at least as readers. And while slash may make some guys uncomfortable, well, those sexy figures based on comic book characters (remember the recent controversy over the depiction of Mary Jane washing Spidey's outfit?) make some of the women uncomfortable as well. Maybe, as academics, we can be bold enough to sit on panels together and explore what makes us uncomfortable, gender-wise, as well as what commonalities we share in our fan activities. I think more dialogue ---more open but respectful dialogue --- is a goal to pursue.

As far as your next bundle of questions --- ie: Do we want to affect change in the way media is conceived, produced, and distributed?... Or would we rather keep them to ourselves, build our own communities, and keep them exclusive? etc. ---those are tough questions and the answer may be different for each individual fan. Is it possible for fandom to do both? As far as maintaining boundaries, can we somehow interact but still keep a distance? (And am I being too greedy in wanting my cake and eating it too?)

Moving Forward

DK: I agree that dialogue in many varieties is necessary, and here I'd hope that people following this discussion would lead the way in doing this (fans, academics, and acafans). If men are uncertain about slash, maybe gen fic is a place to at least start. If women aren't so sure about Halo, maybe try the Final Fantasy series. The next time you assemble a panel for a conference, try to find a different perspective. Discomfort is part of the process, and can be interesting in itself.

I think greater visibility is important as well, even if it is a double-edged sword. I honestly had no idea that LiveJournal was a vibrant hive of fan activity until the MIT 5 conference in April, and I don't think it would have come on my radar without people like Kristina Busse pulling me in. If we're invited to something, or are at least made aware of it within our usual haunts (online or otherwise), then we're much more likely to check it out. That's how fandom works, after all!

As Matt Hills wrote, fans are fans of being fans, and migrate between passions and mediums. We all have interests that overlap with what we might consider our "primary" fan identities, but which stoke our passions in different ways. I don't mean moving from Stargate Atlantis to Smallville or from Amazing Spider-Man to Ultimate Spider-Man, but to gardening, or reggaeton, or college basketball, or whatever. Perhaps we could open up as we migrate, and connect these areas, rather than treat them as islands of engagement.

As for connecting fans and producers, that's going to be a trickier process, but one that's already happening in many different ways. Ideally, producers should be free to "walk the walk" of fandom, and not just declare themselves to be fans (Ron Moore's ecstatic and immediate blog post reaction to the Sopranos finale-his first blog post about anything, in months--was a rare instance of this). Realistically, though contracts and network lawyers will keep them on a leash, and carefully monitor any kind of potential or actual IP exchanges between fans and producers. There are some situations that shouldn't happen (producers really don't want to hear your episode pitch in a convention hallway), but there are others that should happen more often (gabbing at the hotel bar about how much you both love a completely different show that the producer never worked on). The latter, thankfully, goes on every year at the Gallifrey con in LA, and it sounds like it works that way in U.N.C.L.E fandom as well, from your description.

At our end, as fans and acafans, we'll just need to continue to monitor these interactions, critiquing as necessary, but also recognizing possible positive developments. I suppose my ideal situation would be that each "side," fans and producers, could still continue doing their own things without interruption or aggravation (neither side should be beholden to the other), but could still find some spaces for collaboration or at least sharing their texts and viewpoints.

CW: Well said. To sum up, I'd just like to reiterate four quick points we've sort of made already. One is, that in any one of these discussions and/or debates, the "sides" are not a simple dichotomy but multiple and complex, often between and among collective parties. The second is that these parties are composed of real people. For example, both TPTB and Fandom (with a capital F) are made up of individuals with varying perspectives and maybe that's where dialogues and relationships might begin ---between and among individuals who then network with others. Third, that perhaps we aca-fen might provide a bridge to further understanding and cultural negotiation, as critics do between professional artists and their audiences. And finally, this is a good moment in time to develop and advance the dialogue and to support initiatives like Net Neutrality, because the boundaries are becoming more permeable and the shape of the Internet environment is still in flux. Change will come whether we're ready for them or not. It's better to be ready.

Thanks for the conversation, Derek. I enjoyed it.

DK: Those four points are an excellent plan moving forward, and they can all happen now. I'd also emphasize your last point, about the future of the Internet. We (as in all of us) have common interests in maintaining and expanding the openness of this resource, so we need to monitor possible changes carefully, and be prepared to mobilize with others in order to preserve and improve it.

It's been a pleasure, Cynthia, and I look forward to continuing this discussion here and elsewhere.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Nine, Part One): Derek Kompare and Cynthia Walker

CW: Hi, I'm Cynthia Walker. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, where I teach a variety of courses including journalism, public relations, media literacy, film history, broadcast studies and scriptwriting. I have also been a professional journalist and critic for 35 years and currently, I cover professional regional theater for The Home News Tribune, a daily newspaper in Central New Jersey. I earned my MA in Media Studies from the New School in New York City, way back in the 1980s when such programs were few and far between, and received my Ph.D. in Communication from the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS) at Rutgers University. Before coming to St. Peter's, I served as assistant director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers, designing and piloting media education curriculum and professional development courses for middle schools in New Jersey.

I discovered media fandom in the mid-1980s, at a time when folks were just moving away from mimeographed newsletters to printed zines. I had loved the 1960s spy series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., since I first watched it at age 11. (You can find my essay on that experience here so I was excited to attend a Creation Con at which Robert Vaughn was a guest star in order to see him in person. There, I met Nan, who eventually became my good friend and fanfiction collaborator. She was the one who told me about fanzines and pointed me toward U.N.C.L.E. fandom. I began writing a collection of short stories and novels based on U.N.C.L.E. which eventually became a popular long-running consistent universe that's still being published and expanded, both in print zines and on the net. The rest, as they say, is history.

I guess because I've straddled boundaries and have found myself in both the creative/producer and audience positions, sometimes even simultaneously, I've always been fascinated by the interaction between various groups in the media process. My Ph.D. dissertation, A Dialogic Approach to Creativity in Mass Communication proposed a collaborative model of mass communication, using The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as a case study. What I tried to demonstrate through the model and a systematic unpacking of MFU as a cultural site, was my view that the ultimate meaning of a cultural text (re-conceptualized as a "work/text") is the result of the many dialogues that occur, often simultaneously, between and among the various collective parties involved in the mass communication process.

DK: I'm Derek Kompare, assistant professor of Cinema-Television in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. I've taught courses in recent years in media and culture, television history, television criticism, media globalization, and specific film and television genres (focusing on science fiction, and, this fall, crime television). I did my graduate study in the Comm Arts department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1990s, where I was trained in a variety of theoretical approaches (cultural studies, feminism, formalist film theory, political economy, post-structuralism) and research methods (primarily historiography and textual analysis).

Because of this range of theory and method, I've always been most interested in studying practices and processes of what could loosely be called "mediation," i.e., how particular media forms develop in particular historical, cultural, and industrial contexts. My 1999 dissertation traced the genesis of a particularly taken-for-granted form, the TV rerun, as an important vehicle for industrial exploitation and cultural significance in the late 20th century. In revising it for my book Rerun Nation (2005), I expanded its range backwards and forwards, connecting the development of copyright in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the formation of the DVD box set in the 21st. This experience reinforced for me how every cultural form has, to poach some Foucault, archaeologies of discourses, weaving throughout time and space. In other words, every cultural form comes from multiple, and often contentious, sources of power and signification.

I'm currently researching "television authorship" as a specific cultural form with its own "archaeologies." I don't wish to resurrect auteurism, but rather probe how versions of auteurist discourses have shaped television culture, and the television industry, over the past thirty years. Who gets to be a "television author"? What power, if any, does that category wield? How is it crafted and challenged over time and through different contexts?

This interest has led me back to where I came from, I suppose: fandom. Not fan studies, fandom. I had always been fascinated with film, TV, and genre fiction growing up, and pretty solidly self-identified as a "fan" around the age of 14. Indeed, as the intro to Rerun Nation makes clear, I was fascinated by TV reruns from even before then. My ur-texts in this regard are Doctor Who and Star Trek. Throughout high school and college, I joined organizations, subscribed to newsletters and zines, and attended my first cons. Middle-aged women, primarily, introduced me to the intricacies of fandom (Doctor Who in particular was dominated by women fans in the US at the time), and supplied me with APAs, fanfic (including slash), and fanvids well before I read Textual Poachers in grad school.

Still, although I considered myself a fan, and was actively familiar with several fandoms and forms till the late 90s (recruiting a few people into fandom along the way), I suppose I was never really immersed in it (more of a "wader"). I was an active reader, viewer, and commenter, but never actually wrote fanfic, nor planned cons, nor made it a central part of my life at that time (you can read some of my thoughts about this over on this reply on Kristina Busse's blog). Since then, I've been much more of a "tertiary fan," minimally active on one online forum (Outpost Gallifrey), attending the Gallifrey con in LA off and on, and maintaining contact with some of my original, 1980s fan friends.

The persistence of Doctor Who fandom in the 1990s, and its role in reviving the series on British TV in 2005 (along with the whole academic Buffy hurricane, demise of Star Trek, and unlikely revival of Battlestar Galactica), led me to think more about the conjunction of fans and "professional" modes of creative production. I saw existing models of fan studies as unable to move much beyond a binary construction of "fans" and "producers," that, to me, seemed a relic of a different age of media production and reception (the 1970s and 1980s), and instead approached the problem from the perspective of "mediation," not favoring, or assuming what "fans" and "producers" are, but looking at how those categories are being actively constructed and challenged.

And then Nina posted her response to MIT 5, and I realized I'd been missing (or had taken for granted, perhaps) the different constructions of these categories going on in different corners of fandom, and had been neglecting the issue of gender in particular (at least in fandom; ask me about Amy Sherman-Palladino!). And so now here I am, still hoping to complicate the binary of "fans" and "producers," but more interested in various fannish conceptions of these categories than I was a few months back.

Fans and Producers

CW: Although we're from different cohorts (some of those middle aged women were no doubt my friends), we do have similar backgrounds and interests. Star Trek, Dr. Who and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. are some of the oldest fandoms with long, multi-decade histories.

I do most certainly agree that the binary construction of fans and producers doesn't work any more, and my point in using a historic series like MFU as a case study was to show that probably it never did. It's like the old linear sender-message-receiver with a feedback loop that I still see being taught in introductory Communication courses. I don't know if the media process has really changed but certainly our conceptualization of it has.

I prefer to think of a cultural site like MFU as the result of a many creative dialogues between and among many parties (some of whom are collective) and these parties often change places. Thus, any party or parties might find themselves in the role of either writer or reader at any given point in time. Writers become readers and vice versa, just as producers become audiences and vice versa.

Another concept that interests me (and, I suspect, it interests you, too) is how the arrival of the Internet and digital technology is redefining what Josh Meyrowitz called "a sense of place." Fan efforts like fanfiction, machinima, the Star Trek New Voyages and the like on one side and commercial efforts like FanLib on the other seem to be blurring the line ---if there was, indeed, a line to begin with.

DK: I'm certain some of those women were at least known to you. That was one of the things that most impressed me at the time: that there were networks of fans sharing interests, copying zines and vids, hosting parties, and welcoming newbies, all over the world. Fandom continues to have this sense of "fan generations," as a fantastic family lineage, as people and texts and forms and such are continually "passed down" and revised over time.

I have to say as well that, while there certainly were some men in these fandoms (back in the 80s-early 90s), most of the organization, production, and action was done by women. I thus never really got socialized as a "fanboy," at least in the stereotypical, Kevin Smith-is-God sense of the term. It's interesting in this regard to note that Doctor Who fandom in the US has been predominately female, while in the UK it has long been overwhelmingly male (and hegemonically gay at that, at least over the past 15 years or so). It just shows how contexts, while not everything, are certainly pretty damn important.

Men Collect, Women Create?

CW: You mention that most of the organization, production and action was done by women. That was my perception as well. Ten years ago, I did a quantitative study of MFU fandom that I've shared with you. The response rate was very good, and I managed to capture at least a third or more of the entire fandom. There were two main findings. The first was that individual fans appeared to move along a continuum of involvement motivated by two factors: interest in the source text and community. The second finding was not one I expected at that time: that is, that men and women had different fan experiences. They might have the same level of interest in the source text (and in MFU, particularly, that interest was --- and remains ---very high and intense), but they took part in different activities. I know it's become a cliche that men collect, women create, but I must admit, that's exactly what I found. At that time, MFU fandom was about one- third male (I suspect that's still true today, although the percentage may be even a bit higher). The earliest active MFU fans were actually male, but the gender balance began to tip in the mid-to-late 1970s to female fans, who ran the fan organization, wrote, edited and published the first fan stories, organized the occasional cons (although the guys attended in respectable numbers) and eventually, set up and moderated the discussion lists. In our fandom, there is a contingent of prominent male fans who, through various means, acquired most of the actual props and collections of merchandise from the series. One is the author of a behind-the-scenes book, which, after over 20 years, is still in print. But with only one prominent exception and a few dabblers, almost all the fanfiction is written by women.

In addition to focusing on different fan activities, I also discovered that women fans simply had more fan friends ---a lot more. It's unclear whether they were more involved because they had more friends in fandom, or, they had more friends in fandom because they were more involved.

I'm planning to conduct the same study again this year to see what changes there have been in the fandom. I suspect there have been some, but I also expect that these two main findings will hold. Mind you, I don't expect that they necessarily can be generalized across individual fandoms, because each fandom, depending upon many factors including when it came into existence, has a character unique unto itself.

DK: As your U.N.C.L.E. work showed, contexts continually shift around texts, and the cultural life of any artifact is always going to entail different kinds of interests converging and, as you said, having "creative dialogues." In that case, the series has long been maintained by its fans and creators in concert (more or less), especially in lieu of wider distribution. I think every media fandom has these kinds of exchanges, actually, where discourses and categories bounce between and among fans and (for want of a better term) producers. This never happens the same way twice, and many (maybe most) of these exchanges are framed by the economic interests of the parent company (i.e., how can these fans generate some more revenue for us), but there are "dialogues," before, during, and after a series has run.

What some fans call the "source text" doesn't just appear out of the blue, after all, but is already the polysemic result of loads of writing, revising, meetings with executives, casting sessions, "tone meetings," editing sessions, and everything else. And that's just to get a pilot shot, let alone on the schedule. And even at this point, fans may already be being listened to. For example, if Bjo Trimble's first-person account of everyday life on the Star Trek set in 1966 is to be believed, fans were already ensconced into the lifeblood of the series from day one.

CW: Yes, and for that, we have Gene Roddenberry to thank who actively recruited audiences even before Star Trek was on the air. What folks may not realize is that he wasn't the first producer to reach out to active, dedicated audiences. The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which pre-dated Trek by two years, inspired an intense reaction by young people, those in high school and college. TV Guide called it "The Cult of Millions" and producer Norman Felton wrote a memo to NBC's vice president of programming that U.N.C.L.E. fans were reacting to the show in a way not quite seen before: "They talk about the program with other fans, and go beyond that: they proselytize, they want to convert non-viewers." There are actually a number of close connections between MFU and Trek. On the creative side, not only had Roddenberry worked for Norman Felton and MFU's other creator, Sam Rolfe, but the two series employed many of the same writers, directors, production crew members and actors. On the fan side, both series drew their first audiences from the science fiction community, and Bjo Trimble, the godmother of Trek fandom and David McDaniel, an SF fan who wrote the most popular pro-published U.N.C.L.E. novels and helped establish MFU fandom's first fan-run organization, were roommates for a time. In both Trek and MFU, the fans and the professional creators established ties to each other fairly early on.

DK: Today this happens as well, but the Internet has produced a new "sense of place," as you put it, in this regard. It's long been stated among online fans how the 'net is like a 24/7 con. It's also a 24/7 pitch session, gossip den, and critics' corner, where boundaries are blurred, and they can't keep you off the Paramount lot (or, metaphorically, playing with the prop room and the actors' trailers). Online, "producers" are the folks on the Lost writing staff who snoop around fan forums under pseudonyms. However, "producers" are also the folks online who start fanfic ezines, organize fanvid production, rally writers and readers, and host fanart shows.

Like you said, the line's not only blurred, it may not have even existed. That said, as the FanLib saga has indicated, some factions of The Powers That Be (TPTB) do want to (re)draw the line, on their terms, turning these dialogues into a purely economic market, with little to no understanding of fandom on its own terms. I will always argue that this isn't even remotely a universal stance of everyone in the Industry, but it is very much the official Party Line of (say) CBS, Disney, or Time Warner: fans are consumers and/or potential suppliers. Note that this is still (STILL!) the dominant construction of "The Fan" in mainstream media, as if to route any kind of creative act right back towards serving the brand.

CW: That reminds me of the story, which Engel repeated in his book, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek of George Lucas asking Roddenberry what to do about all the unauthorized fan activity surrounding Star Wars. Roddenberry said to do nothing, that the fans would make him rich.

DK: Interesting story about Roddenberry and Lucas. Both them and fandom were moving into uncharted waters at the time, so Roddenberry's advice makes sense. Still, it's significant that his advice was about how to "get rich," and that he was right! It would be interesting to analyze how this changed rapidly in the 1980s, as Paramount slowly wrested control of the franchise (and, to an extent, its relationship with its fans) from Roddenberry.

I'm interested in how these uses and conceptions of each category have developed since then, and especially over the past decade or so. How might dialogues between the shifting categories (as opposed to rigid binary) of "fans" and "producers" help move us to another context of creativity and collaboration?

The existence of fandom itself is a major change in this relationship, as "producers" now routinely claim some kind of "fan" credentials. I think this has come about mostly because of the changing status of television in general. People, including ostensible television writers, can admit a much greater affinity and interest in TV per se than they could have done 30 years ago. An interest in TV is more legitimate now than then; a "fannish" interest even more so, depending on the genre. Joss Whedon, to cite the most prominent example, has been the poster child of this phenomenon.

That said, as has come up at other times in these discussions, there's a significant difference between claiming to be a fan, and actually participating in fandom. However, I think this difference shouldn't be measured as much in material as in discursive terms (which always work back around to material terms, I suppose). Terms like "fan," "author," "creator," "artist," "visionary," "punk," "geek," etc. are strategically and tactically deployed by and around particular figures, and for particular audiences. There are major differences between being described as a "fan" in a New York Times interview, at a Santa Monica screenwriting seminar, in a network planning meeting, at a con panel, or in an LJ post (just to name a handful of venues). Each instance attaches a different meaning to the term "fan" (and every other descriptor), working to position the figure and the reader/viewer/audience in different ways.

Moreover, depending on the figure and their contractual obligations, the iterations of "fan" may be tightly policed. For example, the BBC forbids any of the primary production personnel (including cast) on Doctor Who from attending conventions or participating in any fan venue. At the same time, though, series writers like Paul Cornell and Rob Shearman are granted free rein, and have routinely gone to cons and interacted with fans online and in person for years (dating back to when they were "just" fans in the 1980s). To go back a while, even Ron Moore, back when he was just a guy on the TNG staff in 1990, was still able to schmooze with the fans and get geeked up about the narrative and relationship possibilities of the Enterprise-C crew (from "Yesterday's Enterprise").

Still, there's a sense among some fans that these people aren't really fans, and that whenever they claim to be, it's all PR. My response is that while PR is certainly real, it's not an all-purpose screen. Most of these folks do have fannish passions and perspectives; a few of them even share them openly. Granted, these perspectives may not always jibe with yours or mine, and their very definition of fandom might not match your or my experiences (i.e., most of them seem to be stereotypical "fanboys," and none of them seem to be stereotypical "fangirls"). But that's no reason to dismiss everything they do or say as mere blather from TPTB!

Answering Questions From a Snowman: The YouTube Debate and Its Aftermath

"I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman." -- Mitt Romney

I promised some reflections about the YouTube presidential debate almost a week ago but something has kept getting in the way. I almost decided to forget about it but in the past few days, the issue has resurfaced as the Republican candidates are doing a little dance about who will or will not participate in CNN's planned GOP YouTube debate in September. So far, only two Republican candidates have agreed to participate. I've been having fun challenging folks to guess which ones they are. The answer will be later in this post.

Some had predicted that the use of YouTube in a presidential debate was something of a gimmick or a cross-branding opportunity for CNN and Google. It was certainly both of those, but it may represent something more than that, a shift in the nature of public debates in the campaign process as profound in its way as the emergence of the Town Hall Debate format in the 1990s.

Let's consider the classic debate format where established journalists, sworn to some degree of political neutrality, ask candidates questions. This format has some strengths and some limitations. In theory, the questions asked are well informed because the people asking them are focused full time on following the campaign and the candidates and understand what topics are most likely to establish the contrast between the political figures on the stage. At the same time, the questions asked are likely to reflect an "inside the beltway" perspective -- that is, they reflect the world view of a specific political class which may or may not reflect the full range of issues that the American people want addressed.

The process maintains a certain aura around the political process: celebrity journalists ask questions of celebrity politicians in a world totally sealed off from the everyday experience of the voters. One consequence of this format is that the candidates tend to empty the questioner from the equation. One addresses the question; one ignores the person who asks the question.

This construct sounds more "rational" or "neutral" but it also makes it much easier for the candidate to reframe the question to suit their own purposes. There is no penalty for ignoring the motives behind the question because, in the end, the claim is that there are no motives behind the question. This has in the past gotten some political leaders in trouble. I am thinking, for example, of the famous moment while Michael Dukakis was asked how he would respond if his wife was raped and murdered and he offered a fairly bloodless critique of the death penalty as a matter of public policy. The questioner was trying to get at the human side of his perspective on the issue and he got criticized for being cold and calculating, yet the fact that he ignored the human dimensions of the question was in many ways a product of the presumed "neutrality" of the professional debate format.

In the 1990s, an alternative -- the town hall meeting debate -- emerged and Bill Clinton rose to the presidency in part on the basis of his understanding of the ways that this format changed the nature of political rhetoric. In the town hall meeting format, who asks the question -- and why they ask it -- is often as important as the question being asked. The questioner embodies a particular political perspective -- the concerned mother of a Iraqi serviceman, the parent of a sick child who can't get decent health care, the African-American concerned about race relations, and so forth. We can trace the roots of this strategy of embodiment back to, say, the ways presidents like to have human reference points in the audience during their State of the Union addresses -- Reagan was perhaps the first to deploy this strategy of using citizens as emblematic of the issues he was addressing or the policies he was supporting and in his hands, it became associated with the push towards individualism and volunteerism rather than governmental solutions. These were "individuals" who "made a difference."

What Clinton got was that in this newly embodied context, the ways the candidate addressed specific voters modeled the imagined interface between the candidate and the voters more generally. Think about that moment, for example, when George Bush looked at his watch during a Town Hall Meeting debate and this got read as emblematic of his disconnect from the voters. Contrast this with the ways that Clinton would walk to the edge of the stage, ask follow up questions to personalize or refine the question and link it more emphatically to the human dimensions of the issue, and then respond to it in a way which emphasized his empathy for the people involved. People might make fun of Clinton for saying "I feel your pain" a few times too many but this new empathic link between the candidate and the questioner shaped how voters felt about this particular candidate.

Clinton recognized early on the emerging paradigm of narrowcasting, using the town hall meeting in relation to specific audiences on specific cable outlets -- for example, African Americans on the Arsenio Hall show, young voters on MTV, or southern voters on the Nashville Network. In each case, he was able to signal his knowledge of specific issues and respect for specific challenges confronting this constituencies. People today remember Clinton playing the sax on late night television; they forget that it came at the end of almost an hour of thoughtful discussion of race and class in America in the wake of Rodney King and the LA Riots at a time when the mainstream media was only interested in asking him about his sex life. No candidate has ever been as effective at Clinton at responding to the particularities of the town hall meeting format but it has emerged as a standard part of the campaign process ever since and for good reason, because there is both symbolic and substantive importance to how well candidates interact with these diverse constituencies.

There are some core limits to this format. The questions come in a context which is deeply intimidating to non-professionals and thus it preserves an aura surrounding the candidates. Only certain kinds of questions get asked because only certain issues are appropriate to this format. The questions get asked with a certain degree of awe even when the voter is skeptical of the answers they are receiving.

So, this brings us to the YouTube format which seems significant in a number of levels. First, the people asking the questions are speaking from their own homes or from other spaces that they have chosen to embody the issues they want the candidates to address. The language is more informal, the questions are more personal, the tone is less reverent, and the result forces the political candidates to alter their established scripts. (And of course, let's not forget the role which CNN played in curating the set of questions presented. I was prepared to trash CNN for playing it safe but in fact, they chose some of the more provocative submissions here and these videos have emerged at the center of the controversy around the debate.)

here were moments early in the YouTube debate where the candidates were sticking to their sound bytes and talking points, despite the very different tone and context of this debate. More than anything else, this called attention to the gap between the ways everyday people speak and the lofty rhetoric of contemporary politics. What seemed relatively natural in a conversation between professionals felt truly disconnected from the YouTube participants. Then, as the evening went along, we saw the candidates one by one step out tentatively and then more assuredly onto thin ice, trying to find a new language by which to express their issues and to form a new relationship to the voters.

We certainly saw signs of the old townhall meeting format both in the style and tone of some of the more "serious minded" questions and in terms of the ways that the candidates were careful to address the person behind the question -- as in the constant salutes to the servicemen. But something else was also occurring, as when Joe Biden offered his relatively acerbic and unguarded perceptions of the gun lover who called his automatic weapon his "baby."

I was fascinated with the exchange about the minimum wage. One of the viewers asked the candidates whether they could and would live on minimum wage as president. Many of them were quick to agree to these terms -- my hopes that this might become a reality have been shattered by the fact that most of the mainstream media never even reported on this round of questions, focusing instead on the more conventional disagreement between Clinton and Obama about whether they would meet with foreign leaders. Chris Dodd won points for his honest response that he couldn't afford to support two college bound offspring on minimum wage, an answer that brought him closer to the level of the average middle class voter. And Obama carried the round by acknowledging that it would relatively easy for people who had money in the bank (not to mention free food and lodging) to live on mimimum wage and something different if you had no resources to fall back on.

By bringing the cameras into their homes, the voters were forcing the candidates to respond to the contexts in which they live. We saw this occur again and again -- not just the well publicized cases of the social workers in Darfur or the cancer patient who removed her wigs, but in the more subtle ways that we get a glimpse of the domestic spaces in the background of most of the videos. The result was a debate which felt closer to the lived experience of voters, which took on some of the informality, intimacy, and humor one associates with YouTube at its best.

To my mind, one of the most interesting aspects of the broadcast came when the candidates were asked to submit their own YouTube style videos. Here, we had a chance to see how the campaigns perceived the properties of this new participatory culture. Some of the candidates did embrace the new political language (notably Chris Dodd and John Edwards, who both had fun with public comments about their hair) or tried for a more down to earth style (as in Hillary Clinton's use of hand lettered and hand flipped signs, which unintentionally mirrored the style of one of the user-generated videos on the same program.) Many of the others simply recycled videos produced for broadcast media which came across as too polished for this new context. And Dennis Kucinich, the man who once brought a visual aid to a radio debate, seemed to confuse YouTube for a late night informercial. Oh, well. He demonstrates yet again that he is a nerd, perhaps even a dork, but not a geek.

All of this brings us to the issue of the snowman which seems to have caused Mitt Romney and many of the conservative pundits so much anxiety. Keep in mind that the snowman animation was used to frame a substantive question about global warming. In this case, then, it wasn't what was being asked but how it was being asked or who was asking it that posed a challenge to establishment sensibilities. The snowman spot was a spoof of the whole process of having the questioner embody the issue and the whole ways in which children as used as foils for political rhetoric, as figures for imagined or dreaded futures for the society at large.

But it also represented a shift away from embodying issues and towards dramatizing them. I was surprised we didn't see more or this -- more use of video montages or projected images in the background, illustrating the topics in a way that went beyond what could be done by a live person standing in an auditorium during a live debate. I suspect we will see more such videos in future debates because they show the full potential of this new format. Now, keep in mind that political leaders have never had any problem dramatizing issues during their own campaign advertisements -- even the use of personification or animation would not be that unusual in the history of political advertisements. Such images have long been seen as appropriate ways for campaigns to address voters, so why should they be seen as inappropriate as a means of voters to question candidates?

From the start, it had been predicted that Democrats would fare better in this new format than Republicans, just as historically they have fared better in the town hall meeting format. This format is consistent with the populist messages that are adopted by many Democratic politicians and the format itself seems to embody a particular conception of America which emerges from Identity politics (though, as my example of the way Reagan used something similar to focus on individual rather than governmental response, suggests that this is simply one of many ways that this format might be framed). So, is it any surprise that Romney and other GOP candidates are developing cold feet about appearing in this much more unpredictable format.

Not surprisingly, while Romney and Guiliani have been pulling back, McCain is pushing ahead. This approach is closer to the old "Straight Talk Express" bus that he used 8 years ago than anything he had embraced in this campaign cycle. Right now, the guy needs a miracle just to stay in a race and perhaps being willing to engage with the public via new media may represent the best way to set himself apart from the other frontrunners. The other GOP candidate embracing the format is Ron Paul, the former Libertarian Party candidate, and the Republican who so far seems to be have a much stronger base of support online than off, in part because the web offers more traction for low budget campaigns and anti-establishment figures.

Within the GOP, the debate about YouTube debates is shaping into a referendum about the role of web 2.0 in the political process. Here's how Time sums up the issues:

Patrick Ruffini, a G.O.P. online political strategist, wrote on his blog: "It's stuff like this that will set the G.O.P. back an election cycle or more on the Internet." Democratic consultants are rubbing their hands together at being able to portray their general election rivals as being -- as one put it to me -- "afraid of snowmen" or simply ignorant of techonologies that many Americans use on a daily basis. Indeed, Governor Romney today, in the context of evincing concern over Internet predators, supported that suspicion: "YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their web site. They had 29,000," he said, mistaking the debate co-sponsor for the social network MySpace, which has recently done a purge of sex offenders from its rolls.

Hmmm. MySpace, YouTube, what's the difference?

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first of a two part series from Ksenia Prassolova, who was until just a few weeks ago a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program. Prassolova was in this country on a Fullbright fellowship, pursuing research on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. She has now returned to Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad). In the first section, she described the context in which Russian-language fandom operates including consideration of issues of intellectual property, translation, and the relationship of fandom to other changes in Russian culture in the post-Cold War era. In this next section, she deals directly with various forms of fan creative expression and the picture she paints shows both strong parallels to western fan culture but also significant differences. For those of you who are just coming to the blog through links on one or another Harry Potter fan site, you might be interested to check out my own thoughts about Harry Potter fan culture from earlier this summer.

"Professor Snape's Dungeons"

Translation was also one of the channels for fan fiction to find its way into Russian Harry Potter fandom: in 2001 fandom was mostly discussing the available four novels and their Russian versions, but by 2002 it already was busy reading at least two competing translations of Cassandra Claire's then work in progress, The Draco Trilogy. 'People's Translation' were among the first sites to open a fan fiction section, which hosted both translated fic and the infamous Harry Potter and Phoenix from the Order - written by the author named Constance Ice, this work is considered to be the first honest-to-Merlin Harry Potter fan fiction written in the Russian language (yet some claim that this title belongs to Harry Potter and the Order of the Broom, a parody fic posted by an anonymous author at Harry Potter Research Institute).

Approximately at the same time, a number of Snape fans joined efforts and started an on-line role playing game, which went on for a number of years at a site called 'Professor Snape's Dungeons'. The game's central character, Severus Snape - a brooding, Byronic hero - was mostly busy saving the world at various points in history and all damsels in distress he could find along the way. In the end, Professor Snape (or S.S., as he is referred to throughout the game) 'rebuilds the Tower of Babylon and finds Light'. This massive on-line project featured not only the text itself, but also some skillful artwork, analytical materials and carefully-collected soundtrack. The project also clearly outgrew itself: in 2003 the game, complete with sounds and fanart, was privately published as a set of 3 multimedia disks, and 2005 marked the appearance of a very impressive velvet-bound volume, Liber Lux et Tenebrae.

The picture below shows the book (part I) in its dust cover, and a random artwork spread; a curious reader will also make out the characters' names, which, for some reason, were left in English.

There are three reasons I am mentioning this project here: firstly, it included most of the fandom's big names of then (and of now); secondly, it set another mark as far as the tradition of publishing fan fiction is concerned; and thirdly, long before the appearance of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince it established a very specific interpretation of the character of Severus Snape - the one that would gradually become all but canonic for a multitude of Russian Snape fans, even though they might have never heard of 'Professor Snape's Dungeons'.

The Shock of Slash

By 2003 fandom was already flourishing: it thrived on sites and forums; it was writing and translating fan fiction; it had its own version of the infamous Restricted Section; and it had discovered slash. As many other fannish concepts, the concept of slash came as is: through reading and translating of Western fan fiction and analytical materials. The new genre immediately acquired both dedicated followers and avid haters, and while it would be wrong to say that it split fandom in two, it did cause some distress along the way. Some people never caught up, and the general level of intolerance to slash and queer readings of the source text is still higher in Russian-language fandom than in English-language one. Intolerance in fandom comes from intolerance in society: until 1991, homosexuality had been a criminal offence; no wonder many still consider 'queer' offensive, the ban might have been lifted, but little has been done to promote tolerance and understanding. Slash in Russia is not taken for granted and in most cases requires a very open mind set from its readers, but in the end of the day, it does help to change personal attitude to queer people outside fandom, thus performing this huge educational function that might not be central to this genre as it is perceived by English-speaking fans.

It was not only slash that came into Russian-language fandom through translating fan fiction and participating in English-language communities: most of the terms (in/out of character, Mary Sue, hurt/comfort, etc.), popular pairings and pairing names (Pumpkin Pie; Snape/Hermione; Harry/Draco), clichés and ideas were also borrowed almost instantaneously. In October 2003, in the steps of Nimbus 2003, the first-ever Harry Potter fancon, the Institute of European Cultures at the Russian State Humanitarian University organized an unofficial academic Harry Potter event for adults, entitled Harry Potter and the Prisoner of the Philosopher's Chamber. No more than forty people gathered for the conference, most of them were presenters, only three people were presenting on the issues of fandom (the rest were deconstructing canon) and only two were not from Moscow. A very subdued and, at the same time, fascinating event, it still remains the only Harry Potter conference of its kind ever held in Russia. This past spring a number of Snape fans did gather in St. Petersburg to discuss their favorite character and present some few papers on the subject, but the event was not exactly advertised or open.

Russians And Global Fan Culture

While fan fiction and translation are thriving, and even vidding has recently become very popular, fanart is virtually non-existent in the Russian Harry Potter fandom. Those Russian-language artists who create something of interest prefer to participate in English-language communities for want of greater audience and appreciation: they may speak Russian or be physically located in Russia, but in reality they do not belong to this particular national fandom. Fans, on the other hand, troll foreign sites and communities for art they like and therefore do not really have the need for fanart that is produced 'domestically'. Since not everybody can speak English and thus navigate a foreign fanart site, since 'art belongs to people' and 'everything belongs to everybody on the Internet anyways', until very recently it has been a common practice to share your findings with your part of fandom; normally, the sharing would take the form of mass hotlinking, which brought the wrath of several well-known foreign artists on Russian fandom in general.

Russian fans are gradually catching up with essential netiquette, but sometimes still forget to ask when taking a fan fic for translation, for example: the most recent scandal involving translated fan fiction and Russian fans revolved around the 'table of proposed translations' that somebody had fished out off fanrus.com forums. A more detailed account of the run-in can be found here. It is fascinating how quickly Western fandom assumes the position of copyright holders whose rights have been violated and starts issuing C&D disclaimers in Russian against possible offenders. On the other side of the conflict, many of community moderators and site owners who cater to Russian-language fandom try to enforce the ask-first-translate-later and no-hotlinking rules to the best of their ability, and explain as clearly that 'grassroots communism' does not really apply to the way fandom operates on-line. In general, however, Russian fans still exercise more collective ownership towards the texts they are fannish about - be it canon or fan fiction: much as translation is a Pavlovian reaction to any text in foreign language (for a variety of reasons, including the language teaching methods practiced in Russia), taking and sharing with their own is a similar type of reaction to any text or piece of art that we are fascinated with; and in this respect translation is central to Russian fandom as it is the ultimate act of possession and making something one's own, domesticating it.

Potter-Mouthed Jokes

So far, the only popular fannish practice in Russian fandom that falls outside the pattern of translating, role-playing, or borrowing is telling various jokes about characters from canon: a practice that has deep historical roots, since jokes have always been an integral part of people's popular narrative in this country, and there is hardly a historical figure, popular character, or politician who hasn't made it into joke. In fact, it is considered that one has not become truly popular until there are jokes made about them. One of such popular Potter-related jokes takes on the connection between Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter:

"Frodo throws The One Ring into the flames. He exhales deeply and turns to go, as a bespectacled boy on a broomstick sweeps by, clutching something in his fist. 'Got' ya!' shouts Harry Potter with glee."

Another joke explores the complex relationship in the house of Malfoys, raising the theme of infidelity:

"'Narcissa, a couple of words'

'Yes, Lucius?'

'Avada Kedavra!'"

There are countless of other jokes: some original, some of them versions of older jokes with names substituted to fit new canon, some of them popularized sentences from various collections of quotes from badfics. Every fan fiction site nowadays hosts a collection of Potter-related jokes, those jokes are frequently exchanged between fans both on- and off-line constitute a powerful comic relief device: a number of Book Seven jokes are already circulating among the disappointed fans.

Parody is another 'specialty' of the Russian Harry Potter fandom and industry. In fan fiction, 'crack fics' (humorous stories exploring this or that fannish cliché) are a more common occurrence here than there are in the West, and source text parody is not unheard of: by some accounts, it was exactly the parody of the yet unwritten Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that became the first ever fan fiction written in Russian for this fandom. A more curious - and somewhat transcending fandom - case is presented when we look at the Harry Potter parodies that are published professionally in this country. There are several books written in the recent years that position themselves as 'anti-Harry Potter' or 'Harry Potter for Russians', yet there are only two whose authors claim parodies: the Porry Gatter series and Tanya Grotter.

The Strange Case of Tanya Grotter

Although Porry Gatter may not strike just everybody as particularly witty or funny, that it is a parody there can be no doubt; it is Tanya Grotter, first written in 2002 by Dmitry Yemetz and published by EKSMO publishing house that raised serious concerns of J.K. Rowling's representatives both in Russia and abroad. While there are numerous jokes in the text, Tanya Grotter does look more like a re-write, not unlike those by Volkov or Tolstoy: the first two Tanya Grotter books repeat the corresponding volumes of the original Harry Potter series verbatim, only the school of magic is located in Russia and the main character is a Russian girl. ROSMAN publishing house had initiated linguistic expertise of the text, which concluded that Tanya Grotter was a plagiarized version of Harry Potter, yet EKSMO dismissed all allegations, and no domestic legal action taken against them had ever been completed. EKSMO and Yemetz had to stand trial, however, when they made an attempt to translate the book and sell it abroad. The 2003 trial in the Netherlands ruled copyright infringement and banned the book from being sold outside Russia. Later Tanya Grotter books bore little resemblance to the original series, Yemetz continued in this stead for a couple of more years and eventually started a new series about a different character.

The story of Tanya Grotter doesn't end here: During the years this book has acquired a small fandom of its own - in parts, it overlaps with Harry Potter fandom (in a sense that a fan of Tanya Grotter is almost always a fan of Harry Potter as well, and the sites that cater for Harry Potter normally have a section dedicated to Tanya Grotter), in parts, it establishes its own presence, but it does exist and it does produce fantext. This past spring EKSMO publishing house had selected several of Tanya Grotter fan fics for publication and printed them in one bound volume that was released under the general umbrella of Tanya Grotter franchise. Whether or not the authors of fan fics were asked or informed about this is still unclear: when confronted about that during the Q&A session held in one of the stores, EKSMO representatives immediately proceeded to answering the other question. Moreover, the fics were published as is - that is, no editing had been done, out of context, and with no introduction save for small blurb (along the lines of 'fan fiction is fiction written by fans') on the cover. The book was thrashed by critics and not embraced by fans: a failure by all accounts, but a fine and interesting conclusion of a long-established tradition of published fan fiction in Russia.

Postscript

As I am writing this, the Russian Harry Potter fandom is still in uproar. The anticipation had been extremely charged and with the arrival of the final installment, tensions ran even higher. Some hated the new book, some denied its existence to the point of publicly burning their copy (this last movement raised a little wave of both approval and outrage of its own), yet most of us loved it. Many got their books lining up with other fans at midnight in bookstores across the world: I myself had extended my stay in the U.S. until July 22nd and invited my best friend so we could join the party and get the long-awaited copies. There was a feeling of 'being in this together', and in this respect - despite complicated translation games, the history of publishing the 'unpublishable', the 'art belongs to people' that still governs our attitude to all things fannish - we are not much different from all other Harry Potter fans across the world, not really. We would also like to join all other fans across the world and wish both J.K. Rowling and Harry a very happy birthday:

С Днем Рождения, Гарри и тетя Ро! Спасибо за книгу!

***

For more information on the history of Russian-language fandom in general, see fanhistory: it really is a fantastic resource for those who are curious about further details and want to know whether their fandom is represented in Russia. The site is in English.

I also encourage the members of other national fandom to take a look at the new project, fanlinguistics, and contribute to its development.

I would like to thank my speedy betas and everybody who has participated in this somewhat lengthy discussion of the mysterious ways of the Russian Harry Potter fandom. I would also like to thank Henry for this opportunity to talk about my fandom, and for his patience: this article should have seen light long ago.

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom (Part One)

In honor of J.K. Rowling's birthday, I will begin the week by running a two part series about Harry Potter fandom in Russia, written by Ksenia Prassolova, who was until just a few weeks ago a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program. Prassolova was in this country on a Fullbright fellowship, pursuing research on Harry Potter fan fiction as a literary phenomenon. She has now returned to Immanuel Kant State University of Russia (Kaliningrad), where she is completing her doctorate. It is perhaps fitting that the last time I saw Ksenia, we were both waiting in line together at the MIT COOP bookstore around midnight, waiting for the clerks to pass us our eagerly awaited copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. When I got my copy, I wandered off into the night in a daze and forgot to say goodbye. My wife and I took our his and hers copies back to Senior Haus with us and climbed into the hammock we have in our backyard, reading by flashlight as late into the night as we could muster, and then waking up at the first daylight to push on through. Our son was nice enough to bring us meals so we could shut out the entire world and just immerse ourselves into Rowling's world. And I am happy to say that we finished the books before the day was over.

Upon returning to Russia, Ksenia has sent me a long awaited series of blog posts describing what she calls Russian Language Harry Potter fandom. It's a fascinating account of what cultural theorists like to call glocalization -- suggesting that while Harry Potter is read around the world, local conditions of production and reception, including in this case especially issues around copyright and translation, shape how it gets read and in what contexts. Ksenia's first installment takes us through the history of Lord of the Rings fandom in her country which in many ways set the stage for what happened with the Potter books and then discusses the centrality of translation to sustaining and energizing the fan culture. (Of course, it helps that Ksenia's primary research background is in translation studies.) Next time, we will get deeper into fan fiction and other forms of fan cultural production in Russia.

'Oh, Those Russians!': The (Not So) Mysterious Ways of Russian-language Harry Potter Fandom

by Ksenia Prassolova

The first thing that should be said about Russian fandom is that it exists. It may come as a surprising and as a somewhat baffling statement, but not many people within English-language fandom realize that fandom is an international phenomenon, and even those who do understand the international part would still cling to the "exotic" image of Russia that doesn't really go together with something as native to the Western grassroots culture as fandom. Truth is, however, that ever since the Iron Curtain fell Russia has been doing its damnedest to catch up with the West: legally, politically, and culturally; new values were both imposed from the top and picked up eagerly by the young people who didn't exactly want to associate themselves with the Soviet past and had no romantic recollections of it.

Because both the concept of fandom and its practices were borrowed as is, what we now know as 'Russian fandom' is not, on a general level, that different from its American counterpart. Demographically, we share the same patterns: people of both sexes and of all ages discuss canon, those who are involved in writing fan fiction are mostly female (according to anecdotal accounts), and those who write slash are almost exclusively female. Most discussions and creative work used to concentrate on several sites and forums, but with mass migration to blogs Russians moved to livejournal.com and diary.ru (a Russian blogging facility). In fact, in Russia we rarely even call our fandom 'Russian', we call it 'Russian-language', because this implies that fandom is a universal concept that merely varies to a larger or lesser degree from one national 'incarnation' to another. Harry Potter fan fiction posted on hogwartsnet.ru is very similar to that posted on fanfiction.net - genres, clichés, slash and all; fanart is scarce, but fanvids created by Russians are pretty similar those created in the West; we do have ship wars just like everybody else and just like everybody else we were eager to find out whether Snape was good or evil.

I would be very far from truthful, though, if I said that there were absolutely no differences between the way fandom works in Russia and the way it works in the English-language community, borrowed concept or no. The differences are firmly in place and are due to a combination of historic, linguistic and cultural factors. In this post I will try to concentrate on the most notable of them. I will be mostly talking about the Harry Potter fandom, since this is the one I have first-hand knowledge of, yet one has to start somewhere, and in 'our' beginning there was Tolkien. The beginning, however, didn't happen until 1975.

Tolkien Apocrypha

Fandom-wise, Lord of the Rings was for Russians what Star Trek was for Americans. It also happened much later, and the gap between the emergence of canon and appearance of consolidated fannish activity around this canon was much wider in case of Lord of the Rings in Russia. This canon that started them all entered the Soviet scene gradually and in a most fascinating way. The first Russian translation of Lord of the Ringswas started in 1975 by A. Gruzberg, a linguist from Perm, and appeared in 1978; the entire trilogy was written by hand and was only available to friends and acquaintances of the translator. Later on it was transported to Leningrad, where it was published in Samizdat in 1981 (source). The first attempt at official translation followed shortly - in 1982 - and was comprised of two books, The Hobbit and The Fellowship, translated by by V. Muravjev and A.Kistjakovsky. This translation was abandoned, and the official Russian version of the trilogy was only published as late as 1990. By the time it happened the trilogy had already acquired a fair number of followers (those responsible for the non-official translations, for one) who would engage in a variety of fannish activities: from song and poetry writing to live action role playing games, which became extremely popular among the fans. In fact, the Hobbit Games of the beginning 1990-s were so well known that 'being fannish' is still associated with role-playing and Lord of the Rings in certain circles of fandom.

There are many reasons for Lord of the Rings to have become popular when it did in the Soviet Union and - later - the new Russian Federation. It was the only source of its kind available to Russians at that time: while the Soviet readers had enjoyed the long and rich tradition of science-fiction and gathered around what was known as KLFs (Clubs of Science-Fiction Readers), the genre of fantasy was relatively new. With it came new feelings and new attitude to the source text: I am not saying that the possibility of escapism was the only reason Tolkien's work became popular with Russian readers, but the bread lines of the late 80-s and early 90-s definitely were part of the equation. Apart from role-playing games, the fans of Tolkien would write verses and songs, learn Elven languages, and write what they called 'apocrypha': fan fiction that fell under the category of alternative history or alternative universe. By that time fan fiction had already been widely known abroad, and Western fandom started the colonization of the Internet, but international cross-fandom communication was scarce, and the name for this practice was re-invented rather than borrowed. The term 'fan fiction' has later been re-introduced into the Russian fandom, and there is now a lot of confusion as to whether 'apocrypha' are, in fact, fan fiction or fall into some specific category of fan writing. The debate continues, and no definite conclusion has been reached.

"Art Belongs to People"

An even more interesting question arises when we examine how those apocrypha/fan fiction works were distributed or, really, published before the Internet came along. Again, let us consider the history: the oft-cited quote of Vladimir Lenin's, "Art Belongs to People" pretty much determined the attitude to common cultural property in the Soviet Union. Communism in general (in its part where private property was dismissed) and that 'art belongs to people' motto in particular, became a convenient excuse for translating and/or re-writing ideologically safe yet culturally important content from the West. Two most notable examples of re-writing original content under the new name were Volkov's Wizard of the Emerald City trilogy, based on the Wizard of Oz, and Alexei Tolstoy's Buratino, based on Pinocchio (both published in 1936).

The interesting thing about the two was that although original creators were credited in the books and the tales were more translations than re-writes, their covers still bore those Russian authors' names. Many Russian kids, me included, first learned that there had been some Western original only long after reading the stories themselves, or never learned at all. In other, not as dire, cases the translators would get if not all, but at least as much credit as original creators. Thus, with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Russians would distinguish between 'Zakhoder's Alice', 'Nabokov's Anya' and 'Carroll's Alice in Wonderland', the latter being a common referral to a bunch of academic translations.

This mindset, in which culture was considered a common good for everybody to benefit from, held fast and strong even after the Soviet Union joined the Universal Copyright Convention 1793. Moreover, the 70-s and the 80-s brought the flourishing of 'Samizdat' - a non-official publishing and distribution network reserved for rare and censored literary and research content. Samizdat took many forms, from almost professional copying and binding to photographing pages and distributing the resulting pictures. Although Samizdat was a full-bodied publishing and distribution network for the underground, it was mostly used to deal with 'serious', 'original' content. Thus, while fans were able to write and share stories between themselves, they were - for the most part - unable to turn their individual networks into fanzine production because they simply didn't have the access to the necessary equipment. When the 90-s came, and suddenly the market was flooded with start-ups looking for profit, it was only logical that some fans sought to bring fan fiction to the printing press. Profit was, of course, as much of a consideration for those fans as the lack of an adequate fannish distribution network. By that time, the laws had been changed (and the new legislation had been adopted - almost verbatim - from the West), yet the values stayed, so the new publishing houses didn't think twice when presented with an opportunity to publish work based on popular sources.

The first fan fiction published in post-Soviet Russia was a collection of Sherlock Holmes inspired stories from the Novossibirsk society of Conan Doyle fans. This precedent, the lack of fannish distribution network, and a certain disregard for the new law lead to the appearance of a far more curious publication: Nick Perumov's Ring of Darkness - a novel-length fan fic set in the Lord of the Rings universe. Here is what Nick himself has to say on the process of publication:

"On October 16, 1991 , the contract on my book was signed with "Kavkazskaya biblioteka" publishing house. Royalties for my book amounted to a huge for that time sum of 75000 rubles, calculated according to the norms of Writers' Union . Many times I was asked one and the same question, how it could be possible for an unknown writer to be published without any connexions in the publishing house; be published in the period of total collapse and food cards. Now, ten years later I can't give the proper answer. I guess that such a phantastic affairs was possible due to the chaos and disturbance of early 1990s. Another favourable moment was in 1996, it was the First boom of the Russian fantastics. Anyways, "The Ring of Darkness" then caled "Pescending of Darkness" was published in "Kavkazskaya biblioteka". How it could have happend is another pair of shoes. " ( source)

It is interesting that while the content of Perumov's published fan fic is still a subject of fierce debate among Tolkien fans and followers, the legality of the publication is rarely questioned, and, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no legal action against Mr. Perumov or his publishing house(s); moreover, his Tolkien-based novels are still popular and are re-printed on a regular basis. The initial 1993 publication set another precedent, and other Lord of the Rings fan fiction shortly followed after The Ring of Darkness, most notable of them, of course, is Black Book of Arda - a Silmarillion-inspired alternative universe that tells the story of Arda from the point of view of its Evil.

As of the end of 1990-s Russian fans migrated to the Internet en masse. Shortly after that we finally caught up with Harry Potter, and then it was about translation all over again.

Potter Comes to Russia

First published in Britain in 1997, Harry Potter only appeared in Russian in 2000: Maria Spivak founded the 'Harry Potter Research Institute' (formerly located at www.harrypotter.ru) and posted the Russian translations of books one and two; Pauline started the 'People's Translation Project' and her team came up with their version of book one; and, finally, ROSMAN publishing house hired Igor Oransky to create the official version of the first book in Russian. Of all three translations, it was the official that was the sloppiest in its quality and latest in its arrival: by the time it was published fandom had already finished reading Spivak's rendition of Chamber of Secrets. Thus, two things happened in 2000: ROSMAN had lost the moment forever, and translation games began.

ROSMAN could not account for the relative unpopularity of Harry Potter in Russia (compared to the Potter-craze that took over the world, the success of this book in our country was modest at best) and kept changing translators: Oransky was dismissed after book one, and Marina Litvinova, a well-known Shakespearian scholar and a professional translator herself, was hired to work on books two through four. Of the three volumes she had translated, only The Prisoner of Azkaban did not receive annual mock award for the worst translation (Chamber of Secrets) or the worst editing job (Goblet of Fire). After it became known that Litvinova had not translated book four, but instead turned it into a seminar for her students (effectively letting her students translate it for her), a scandal broke out and ROSMAN was forced to change translators yet again. This time, Viktor Golyshev, Vladimir Bobkov, Leonid Motylev - all famous for their work as translators of sci-fi classics - were asked to do the job. They did a fine enough rendition of book five, but didn't linger for book six: to translate Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, ROSMAN invited Sergey Ilyin, who was best known for his fantastic work with Nabokov's texts and Maya Lakhuti - a very talented translator of children's literature. Again, this team did a good job and a decent translation, but by that time it had already been six books too late.

The People's Translation Project

In the meantime, fandom was eagerly looking for flaws in official versions and engaging in translation projects of their own. Inspired by Maria Spivak, the 'People's Translation Project', high regard for translators in our country and the nagging 'I can do that, too' feeling, fans started to create both individual (Fleur, Yuri Machkasov) and collective (Snitch, The Phoenix Team, Harry-Hermione.net, HP Christmas Forum) translation projects, and by the time Half-blood Prince was released in Russia in December 2005, there had already been nine (sic!) independent translations on the Web, some of them completed not a week after the July 16 release of the English version. When the final Harry Potter book leaked five days before the official release, a new translation project made it their goal to have the initial job done by July 21.They succeded, which sets a curious record: an amateur translation appears before official translators' names are announced. This is a new project, too, the one that has not been working on any of the previous Potter installments. We already know of at least four projects that are continuing their work, and of two projects that have just started with book seven, and it is safe to assume there will be more of them. Understandably, amateur translation is a widely discussed phenomenon, and two main questions arise in all discussions: that of legality and that of quality.

Under the provisions of article 19 (p.2) of Federal Copyright Law, translation is 'fair use' as long as it is done for educational purposes and the length - or amount - of the translation suits the immediate educational need. That is, I can use Harry Potter in classroom during my 'Theory and Practice of Translation' class, but I am not supposed to have my students translate the entire series. One can, however, justify translating the entire book for the purpose of self-education: in fact, I know of at least three individuals who did translate books five and six to learn English better, and succeeded. While you can, arguably, translate books one through seven and get away with it, you can not share the result of your work. As of 2003, representatives of J.K.Rowling have been sending out C&D letters to various translation-related sites, which always resulted in the removal of translations from public view. At this point, however, sending C&D letters is like trying to stop an avalanche: the amateur translation projects multiply against all odds. For a number of reasons (the poor quality of the official translation; its late arrival; the translation tradition in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia; a growing number of Russians with a fair command of foreign languages; etc.), translation has become one of the games fandom plays: it is now as integral part of what we do as fans as fan fiction, fan art, filking or creating fanvids. In fact, once the name of the project, 'people's translation' is now a name of the practice that spread across fandoms: it applies to any fan translation project, in which not one, but several individuals are doing a fast collaborative translation and editing work. Normally, there would be 10 to 20 people working on a translation, the same people would then beta-read and edit each other's work, then a draft version would be compiled, which goes to the final editing and proof-reading performed by one or two individuals - usually those who are in charge of the project. It is their job to ensure smooth communication on the forum, to find substitutes if one or more of the translators have dropped out, and to mediate conflicts; and whether the team produces quality results depends on the leader.

People engage in amateur translation for various reasons: some want to improve their English, some want to improve the overall quality of the Russian Potterverse, some find that translation is a good way to participate in fandom. Whatever the reason, the issue of the quality of the result is quite important. The thing that is important to understand here is that not all amateur translation is done by amateurs. Many of the fan translators I know are also professional translators in their non-fannish lives, so they, at least, know what they are doing. As shown by Oransky and Litvinova, it is not always that a professional translator will produce good results: one also needs dedication and fascination with the source, and fans do tend to have those aplenty, so when it does come down to amateurs doing the job, their lack of skill or knowledge is often compensated by extensive teamwork, networking and overflowing enthusiasm. The results vary from 'extremely unreadable' or 'unfinished' to 'way better than the official', and each non-English-reading fan often finds themselves supporting this or that amateur translation. The choice has to be made, for instance, when writing fan fiction - because names are translated differently - or when just discussing the source text: it is considered traditional in our fandom to stick with one or the other translation and defend it against the opponents when the time comes. Nowadays there is a growing number of people who prefer reading the original and are able to do that, but some of them, too, fall into temptation and either side with one project or start their own.

Most of those translation projects exist online and do not overstep the boundaries of fandom. To date, there are only two exceptions from this general rule: a translation of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince, made by the Snitch project, which was stolen from the translators, printed in Latvia and sold in Belarus a couple of months before the official Russian release; and a fan-made Russian version of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, printed, bound and distributed in Israel. The appearance of the latter is especially curious if one takes into account the fact that neither of Rowling's Comic Relief books has been translated officially: the only two existing versions available to Russian-language readers come from the People's Translation project and that unknown Israeli source. The pictures below show the comparison of the spread and cover of the fake (top) and real (bottom) editions of Half-blood Prince.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eight, Part Two): Abigail Derecho and Christian McCrea

Issue Three: Race, Nation, Sexual Orientation, and Fandom Derecho: In Round Three, Part One, Robin Reid wrote, "nobody's mentioning 'race,' ethnicity, sexuality, not even as an 'academic' project or area of analysis." I'd like to investigate these topics within fandom from an autobiographical perspective, but I hope that you'll jump in (and others will, too, in the Comments section) and contribute your own analyses, either autobiographical or not, of these issues.

I'm Filipino-American, first generation (though I usually call it Gen 1.5, b/c we moved to the U.S. when I was three years old), and from the start, my media fandom was informed by (inter)nationalism and race. The Philippines was a colony of the U.S. from 1898 through 1946, and U.S. media has long been extraordinarily popular and influential in Filipino culture. My older siblings were avid fans of Star Trek, The Big Valley, The Green Hornet, Wild, Wild West, and other syndicated U.S. TV shows for years before they stepped foot in the U.S. Star Trek was singled out by my family as our totem show, and I'm certain that for young Asian children, engaging deeply with an American TV show about long-distance travel, and a U.S.(S.) starship where there was assumed equality not only between races and sexes, but between humans and aliens, plus the fact that one of the featured characters was Asian (Sulu) and another was Asian-esque (Spock), factored into their enthusiasm for emigrating to America. Popular media was the first way that my three brothers and two sisters understood the U.S., and media continued to guide our decisions (we decided to move to L.A. because of Disneyland, of course) and to inform how we navigated U.S. society and culture. I grew up in a very racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood, and pop culture was my go-to resource when encountering difference (when you're six years old and you eat different foods than the kid next door and you can't pronounce each other's last names correctly and you don't understand the languages that your respective parents speak, all you've got is your Raiders of the Lost Ark Atari game, and that counts for a great deal). A lot of recent Filipino and Filipino-American media productions address (directly or indirectly) the huge role that American media plays in Filipino/American life, and U.S. sci-fi/fantasy in particular has deep roots in Fil/Am culture. I am eager to write a substantial piece on how American sci-fi influences the immigrant imaginary, both before and after immigration, because there's something deeply poetic and simultaneously troubling about how a media text like Star Trek can offer first-generation Americans so much hope and so many advantages, some of which turn out to be real, and some of which turn out to be cruelly illusory.

As for my experiences of race and sexual orientation in fandom: I must say that it's wonderful to enjoy fanfic that ships non-white/interracial (sometimes non-human/interspecies) pairings, just as it is to enjoy fic about same-sex ships. I've never read slash fic (amazing, I know, but true), but I am a fan of some fem-slash, and some of my favorite ships involve non-white characters. And why did I write that "it's wonderful to enjoy" such fics? Not only because experiencing pleasure from stories (or from anything) is terrific, but because, as a non-white person, I am asked so often to identify with white characters, to feel deeply for them and become attached to their psyches and emotions, that I think it is important for fan producers (whether white or not, whether in fic or vids or any other genre) to play around with diversity, and allow fans ample opportunity to cross-identify, and to find pleasure in those cross-identifications, occasionally in the way that I *have* to all the time. Because fan productions are where marginal characters and marginal or non-canonical pairings can get lots of play, plenty of "airtime," loads of attention, analysis, interpretation, dissection. And I think when I, a straight woman, find myself identifying with a female character who feels desire for another woman, that (for me) non-normative desire teaches me to be more humane, because I can be more sympathetic with lesbian desire irl. And I think when a white person finds himself or herself identifying with non-white characters, that can teach him or her to be more humane as well. I may be overestimating the power of both desire and identification to change people's deeply embedded knee-jerk beliefs about people who are not of their race or sexual orientation. But I want to make the point that fan productions are about play and emotional affect, and I think that irrational and subconscious biases about race, gender, nationality, and sexual orientation will more easily dissipated through play and affect than through official channels of education, or through any legal measure that censors speech. Fan productions have the power to liberate people from the prison of their "normal" desires. Fans' enthusiasm for concentrating on the abnormal and marginalized, their eagerness to develop the minor characters and to explore potential (but as-yet-unrealized) pairings, gives them a special and wonderful power, which I hope more and more fans use. Fan productions will not be sufficient to save the world from irrational prejudice, but they can possibly play a vital role in expanding the worldviews of individual consumers of their works.

McCrea: I come from a mixed-language background grew up in a number of different places - and I'm very much a subscriber to the notion that media fandom creates cross-cultural forms of communication by which people can inter-relate, as I had to negotiate different languages at an early age. To this day, I find a strange affinity with cartoons in languages I cannot understand; what is left is a supersurface of images, sights and experiences that have to be read physically before they can come in culturally. This has translated with a continuing fascination with say, music videos from the Middle East or European community television. All you have is aesthetics, until the language begins to sink in. So it was through these sliding layers of aesthetics that media gender became a bit unstuck for me early on; there was no one image of men or women by which to grow up around and reflect, but many across different culture and countries; there was the weird obsession of the English with the quasi-mythical Jimmy Somerville, the bizarre fixation of the French on Serge Gainsbourg and the Australian adoration of Paul Hogan. Culture was a costume play; nothing could be truly 'genuine' because everything seemed so cultural and staged early on. And so fandom was always underwritten by a search for not so much identity, but citizenship. The idea of a nostalgia without a origin-place (as I've talked about with reference to Jiwon Ahn's article on manga and anime) is very dear to me in that sense. This is not to suggest anything as severe as Brian Benben's character in the 90s show Dream On, who could only relate to the world through semblences to Gilda, Hogan's Heroes and Gilligan's Island. Moreso a deference to the situations of fandom in order to know where you were in the first place. Like many teenagers of the time, something clicked in me when I was first exposed to the hyperviolence of Manga Entertainment's first wave of video releases in the West - an event which is yet to be unpacked properly - although I have just began to read Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination by Anne Allison which looks spectacular in that regard.

I've never delved into the world of fan-fiction much, simply because my chosen fandoms probably don't inspire people to write - I came into science-fiction too late and the spectre of happening across slash fiction always chased me off the proverbial reserve. I spent some time going along to events such as live callback screenings such as those for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Blues Brothers or more recently, Showgirls and Starship Troopers, and found that this kind of hyperkinetic cross-text fandom was closer to how I saw and felt my way through media. Comic fandom is interesting in this regard, because so many of those who regularly read comics consider themselves able to participate, or are actively participating in the culture by writing, drawing, putting out zines, websites - to a large extent, being a comics fan (or say, RPG player) requires a depth participation model. A marginal but highly pertinent practice is Youtube Poop, which is highly condensed, lowest-common-denominator video mashups using lowest possible grade source material (full-motion video clips from bad video games and television spin-offs) until you're left with something that chases a notion of zero-sum fandom. A show, a feeling, but little else. Its now a cottage genre on Youtube, populated by a cadre of master poopers and a few dozen more wannabees (myself included). What I like about this type of fandom is that the anarchy of media sensations is immediately registerable.

Derecho: Before I riff on your excellent insights, I just want to clarify something about my earlier post. I'd like to state, for the record, that I am well aware that there is a lot of stereotyping, exoticizing and sexualizing of Otherness in fandom and fan productions; of course, as with all cultural creations, many authors infuse their works with bias and prejudice. And we all know that fan texts are not always resistant (as several participants in this discussion have already mentioned), but often reproduce existing social conditions. However, beyond the "many" and "often" are some very interesting opportunities for cross-identification and perspective-shifting in fandom.

I really enjoy your ideas of "culture as a costume play" and "nostalgia without an origin-place" b/c they are so counter (and complementary) to analyses like Paddy Scannell's, Jesús Martin-Barbero's, John Ellis's, and John Hartley's, which all emphasize mass media as the site of national identity. "Television is one of the prime sites upon which a given nation is constructed for its members," Hartley wrote 30 years ago, and Martin-Barbero (about 20 years ago) wrote about communication technologies allowing "a space of identification," providing "the experience of encounter and of solidarity" with fellow citizens. Of course, all of these ideas build on Anderson's notion of imagined communities (so widely accepted that I think the phrase no longer needs quotation marks). But what do we make of the international, cross-language, queer-identification fandoms? We who know fandom know that the idea that U.S. mass culture permeating other national cultures is not a one-way street; many nations' media are reaching other nations' audiences and finding fans. Witness the rise of Latin American telenovelas (Ugly Betty, and more to come next season) and BBC comedies and reality shows (Footballers' Wives, The Office, Pop Idol) being repackaged and "Americanized" - "glocalized," as Yeidy Rivero and others say - for U.S. networks. I'm intimidated even by the notion of a project that would attempt to quantify how much influence Japanese media has had on American youth culture in the last 20 years (although that project probably does exist and is being carried out successfully as I type this). Does this mean that media production is a new global currency, that "cultural capital" is rivaling other kinds of capital (and cultural capital definitely translates into financial capital, media products being of supreme importance to national export revenues)? And where does this currency market leave countries that are net-importers of media? It's interesting that the U.S. is no longer holding the only hypodermic needle, but does that mean we should throw out every aspect of the needle model because of that? India, Japan, China, Britain, and Colombia (and other Latin American nations) are now major exporters of media; are these nations affecting other national cultures in the same way that the U.S. did during its long reign of media supremacy? Are Indian or Japanese "values," dreamscapes, and hero-types becoming more broadly known and aspired-to? It would be very interesting if this were the case. However, I feel like a stronger argument could be made that the master currency is still American, that just as Hollywood Westerns adapted and translated Japanese samurai films and appropriated the values encoded therein, American media continues to filter in the messages from outside that it finds suitable, leaving American sensibilities for the most part unaffected by its touches with foreign productions. Even as I hypothesize a "filtering" process, however, I am not even sure how the mechanics of such "filtering" work. In the selection of which works get wide distribution? In the fact that the kung-fu and Hong Kong action movies that Americans can buy on DVD are the ones that Harvey Weinstein (as educated by Quentin Tarantino) likes? And if so, is that selectiveness so bad (I personally think Tarantino has excellent taste in kung-fu films)? Of course, the fact that much of the world's media now exists on pirate networks - and is therefore accessible outside of official mass distribution channels - allows those who become hard-core fans of any one national cinema to bypass any filtering done by their "home" nation, and access the types of texts they love much more directly and quickly, in far greater volume. So, once again, fannish interest - the drive of the collector, what Derrida calls "archive fever" - seems to open up spaces and experiences where more global sensibilities (more than average, anyway) can form.

McCrea: Great points, and this is the flipside to the piracy debate. Underneath all of this prevaricating about who owns what, there are genuinely massive shifts in media consumption occuring. As recently as last month, there were 40 people seeding a torrent file of Kenneth Anger films taken from various sources, and I wondered to myself who these 40 people were, on one hand sharing some amazing films with the world, on the other causing the legendary struggle of Anger to get recompense for his work to go on.

Media is a nation. I am a big fan of Hartley and Ellis myself and find myself still referring to them for precisely these passages about nationhood for a key point of technological change - the dawning of the VHS era. I'm lucky enough to have a bundle of old Sight and Sound issues from the late 70s and early 80s in which you can witness stories of technology overwhelm the stories of Britishness. A reader's letter in the first issue of 1979 mentions that film is 'an American technology built for the American mind' and as superstitious as that is, I find myself thinking about media technology's naturalism and own belonging-ness. One book I can highly recommend on this is the somewhat weird but utterly brilliant The Death of Cinema by Paolo Cherchi Usai, which details how cinema comes to chase an ideal image.

Language is still the viral path along which culture travels; here, Australian television is American television with a side-dish of local content. We even have our own public figures like Mark Philipoussis unable to get a show here shipped over there to make a reality television show to ship back to us as late night dross. And yet, locally made shows still dominate ratings if not the schedule, even if they are glocalised formulas.

Finally, with our friend Quentin, you are right - his film taste isn't so bad. It is however, somewhat concerning that films needs a 'Quentin Tarantino presents' sticker in order to be accessible or readable. The process is as you say, Derrida's archive fever, where his films (and those of Kevin Smith and the other nerd-gen directors) become nodes of references for films which then feed and harvest the cult energy. A re-release of the Sonny Chiba classic The Streetfighter featured a yellow and black background to capitalise on the popularity of Kill Bill, closing the circle of referentiality. Its here that you see fandom cross position descriptions with the curator and all kinds of re-internationalising take place.

Issue Four: The Problem of Intellectual Property

McCrea: I consider the continuing adherence to the term 'intellectual property' to be one of the most delirious elements of contemporary media scholarship. Whose property? Is there a deed involved? Why should I respect it; to whose benefit do I curtail the movements of my intellect? Even more disturbing is the subtle shift to use the term 'IP', which is not, I would argue, a mere abbreviation. It is the turning of a concept into linguistic voodoo - suddenly Harry Potter is not a universe, a realm, a world or a space - its somebody's IP. It belongs. It is owned. This runs counter to so much that media scholarship has been pointing to as the open, democratic states of fandom that we're faced with a media landscape that is so much more open than it was 20 years ago in many sense, but for some reason we have allowed corporate marketing terminology to permeate right through to the membrane of our work.

When Sara Andrews, a player of the online game/life destroyer World of Warcraft advertised for a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community in-game, the powers that be at Blizzard Games moved first to censure her (and later relented, it should be said) on the grounds that her discussion thereof breached the bounds of their intellectual property. It was merely shorthand for an unwillingness to accept diversity; play, but don't really play. Experiment, but only within the frame. Make friends, but only in character. This abuse of the very concept of a cultural product needs to become a discussion again, because it feels that while we have so much more access to so much more media, our ability to intervene in media along the lines of fandom, parody and social interaction may actually be less available than it was a generation ago. The largest tension is, as always, gender and sexuality subversion - read, but don't read too much. Of course there has been a great body of work since the early days of fandom on how we negotiate with those who produce mainstream culture, the owners of this property - but there is still a great deal left in order that people acting creatively with products that were advertised into their lives are permanently left alone. The freedom of interpretation seems so inalienable, but for a disturbing amount of people, especially those without the benefit of a Bill of Rights, it has to come second to the arcane needs of some nervous legal department whose own grasp of the culture they influence seems so often ill-informed.

Derecho: This is a huge issue, and Lessig and Boyle, and their articulations of "free culture" and "cultural environmentalism," have been critical for scholars (of both law and culture) who are interested in fighting media corporations' extraordinary expansion of the concept of copyright and Intellectual Property over the last 30 years. I'm sure the work of Creative Commons, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse are well-known enough to go without mentioning, but I mention them anyway b/c they offer some of the best resources for fans who receive Cease & Desist letters or just plain want to know what's already been written and done about incidents like the one you mention, where players/users/readers/viewers/consumers find their media interactions restricted, constrained, and otherwise censored (or at least threatened, as Andrews was, with censorship).

Your plea for fans to be "left permanently alone" summarizes in three words the structure of feeling of most active media users' discourse. I love your pointing out that the insidiously "subtle shift to use the term 'IP'" is "linguistic voodoo" - that reminds me of Marx's critique of words that name money, like "pounds," "dollars," "francs," as "cabbalistic signs," which gives an incredible power to the signifier (money, or in your example, the term "IP") and distracting people from thinking about the signified (value, or in your example, rightful possession). I would like to add one plea to yours; mine is directed at all of the terrific media scholars participating in, and reading, this discussion. Even though cultural scholars have written a lot of great arguments regarding, as you say, the "open, democratic states of fandom," and legal scholars have written a great deal about the necessity of better legal protections for media fans' "fair use" (or, conversely, less power given over to media corporations by Congressional Acts like the DMCA and the CTEA), media scholars and legal scholars need to talk more to each other. The work of Sida Vaidhyanathan and Andrew Ross has been really useful for demonstrating how "cross-overs" can happen, but more people need to build on their examples. It is absolutely critical that the next time a case as important as Eldred v. Ashcroft comes before the U.S. Supreme Court, the representative of fans/users/consumers is ready with a response to a statement like the one Justice Kennedy made to Lessig, which was basically that he didn't see how copyright extension "has impeded progress in science and the useful arts." Lessig has written that he feels that he missed his opportunity to win the Eldred case when he responded to Kennedy. His response was, "Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all." Lessig tried to redirect Kennedy's question, rather than giving (this is a quote from Lessig) "the right answer [which] was instead that there was an obvious and profound harm." It's the job of media scholars, much more so than lawyers, to clearly define what is at stake for culture and society when cultural productions are unfairly restricted. I hope that, over the next few years, our field manages to publish so many great and powerful arguments for media users to be "left permanently alone" that any lawyer handling an IP or copyright case will have those arguments on the tip of her tongue when going before a court.

McCrea: That is really the key issue; availability of public discourse. Recently, an Australian man called Hew Griffiths was extridited from his house in country NSW and thrown in an American jail, for the crimes of piracy through his group DrinkorDie. The charges claim that millions of dollars worth of software and media files were served from his computers and no doubt the powers that be will follow the criminal case with a civil one. There is one extraordinary element:

Hew Griffith is not American. He has never been to America. He has no relations in America. Most of the people downloading from his site were Australian. So how is it that the RIAA and MPAA were able to subvert the very notions of citizenry and sovereignty all the way from their star chambers deep underground in the US? How is it that no sane person stood up in the courtroom and pointed out that by alledging illegal downloads to have the same monetary value as a physical object you devour any notion of collective decency attached to the navigation of the media landscape?

The potential space of academics is as you suggest, to be the authority that helps protects fans from these outfits. It would be grand if we turned around to the RIAA and MPAA and quite sternly reminded them that they own and sell cultural products, but that is all. Their unwillingness to even properly recompense artists and producers of the income they illegally press gang out of radio stations through their SoundExchange program is just another recent example of their ghoulish, baroque concept of their rights over the media they sell. We should terrify them, and right now I doubt that any significant figure involved in letting billionaires sue the poor would consider an academic public figure any speedbump to their vampirism. And yet even children could work it out; all use is fair use unless you begin to make money out of it. Then you're a thief. Not before.

Fandom is a key staging ground for all of this, as its a type of fandom that is being sold and reinterpreted and another type that is being squashed. The type that articulates itself through a thousand official products is exalted while the creative, anarchic, sometimes weird acts of fans is thrown into the pits below. There is nothing subtle about that shift; its an ongoing degeneration of our media landscape - piracy issues and fandom regulation are dovetailing unpleasantly.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eight, Part One): Abigail Derecho and Christian McCrea

Introductions Abigail Derecho: I am currently completing a dissertation at Northwestern University in the Comparative Literary Studies department. I am a media studies scholar, specializing in digital culture, and therefore, while most Comp Lit grad students at NU have a home department in a national language/lit (German, French, Slavic, etc.), my home department is Radio/Television/Film. My dissertation is called "Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender, and Censorship in Early Digital Remix," and it focuses on two of the earliest remix genres and their origins in minority discourse. Digital sampling was innovated by African Americans, and online fan fiction was pioneered by women, between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. I examine how both remix genres were subjected to a great deal of censorship, both external and internal, very soon after they appeared, and I tie the censorship of remix to censorship discourses that circulated in U.S. culture and society at the same time that remix was being invented (the crack/gangs/guns panic that fueled anti-rap and other anti-music campaigns, the anti-pornography movement whose arguments were echoed in flame wars around explicitly sexual fan fiction). I will begin a tenure-track position at Columbia College Chicago, in the Cultural Studies program, this fall.

In addition to being an active fan and fan fiction author for many years, for the past two years I have been working on something called "Media Theater." I have written and produced two multimedia plays that are attempts to combine live performance with new media in ways that foreground how intricately multiple media are incorporated into the everyday lives of millions of people - how we perceive reality, how we form memories, how we learn to love and despise each other. Some of my fan fiction is accessible here. Some of my academic work, and information about my media theater productions, is accessible here. Also, I was fortunate enough to have an essay of mine, "Archontic Literature" (very kindly referenced in an earlier Round of this discussion by Catherine Tosenberger [Catherine, please e-mail me about your theory of "recursive" literature]) included in the terrific collection edited by K. Hellekson and K. Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. I'd like to express my gratitude to Kristina Busse and Henry Jenkins for organizing this important discussion, and for inviting me to take part, and thanks also to all the participants in this discussion (past and future), including those who have posted or will post comments, for making this such a productive and valuable exchange.

Christian McCrea: You may know me from such films as "Virtual Murder" (probably co-starring Micheal Nouri) and "The Second Life of Christian Lefebvre"....ahem. I am also in the twilight phase of a PhD dissertation, duly supervised by the very patient Angela Ndalianis in the Screen Studies department of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. My PhD is called "Playland: The Sensory Materialism of Computer and Videogames", which undertakes to form a critical account for the sometimes invisible but always vital relationship between the aesthetics of technologies and the cultural traces left by people using them. Using games as a point of first contact between the two, I am also deeply interested and invested in the cultures of technology, research into fan cultures, the poetics of technology, opportunities afforded by digital art and pranksterism, piracy and information control pressures, etc.

I have recently taken a position at Swinburne University of Technology here in Melbourne Australia, as a Lecturer In Games and Interactivity. The Swinburne Games program is the country's leading games school, and I will be working to expand the types of work students do into serious and critical games. I have published work on games and other media in a variety of academic fora, and also work as an writer and essayist for sites such as The Escapist, curatorial writer for the Australian Centre of the Moving Image and maintain a website, Wolves Evolve.

Issue One: Covering Women

Derecho: I'd like to address gender bias in the media industry, in "mainstream fan" writing about media, and in academic writing about media. I'll give an example of bias in each of these fields:

1) I saw Live Free or Die Hard recently. As a "die hard" fan of the first film in the series, I thought LFoDH was a thoughtful and exciting return to the elements that made Die Hard a classic. Leaving the theater, though, I realized that one of the key aspects of the film that made it pleasurable for me was the character Lucy - John McClane's now-grown daughter - who, whlie serving as a key plot point (the usual "damsel in distress"), did not have very much screen time. Another part of the film I liked was the new character Matt Farrell, the hacker-geek who becomes McClane's sidekick. And I read several critics' reviews pointing out that Matt is basically the fans' stand-in. Matt expresses the awe, fear, and affection for McClane that the audience feels, and for the most part he is "tagging along for the ride," just like the audience does. Matt also gets to have a little hint of a romantic spark with Lucy McClane, who is basically a younger female version of her father. So I thought, Huh, Matt is a stand-in for all fans, male and female, b/c both men and women fans are techies, like Matt (much of fandom taking place on the Internet), and both men and women fans love McClane and want to go along for the ride. But only male fans get to see themselves up on that screen in the persona/avatar of Matt Farrell, and they get to see their stand-in "get" (romantically) a McClane of his own (we women used to have Holly, John's wife, to identify with, but since Die Hard 3, she's been literally out of the picture). Women fans, otoh, have to do the usual queer identification, seeing our desires acted out by a young male character. And/or, we can see ourselves in Lucy, whose persona and story we would have to greatly develop/augment using our own imaginations (by ourselves, in conversation with other fans, or in fanfic) due to her underdevelopment in the film. Either way, women fans don't get very much consideration in this, or most, action films. It's clear that our dollars, our attention, and our interest are being courted, and that Lucy, Matt, and their incipient romantic involvement, are, at least in part, aimed at us. But while male audience members get huge chunks of meaty text thrown at them, stuff they can relate to and easily identify with, stuff that reminds them of their own libidinal desires and fantasies and offers them vicarious fulfillment of these wants and needs, women in the audience get scraps. We make the most out of these scraps -- that's what imagination and fan productions are for -- but the studios, for the most part, doesn't think to throw us more than these.

What troubles me about this long-standing situation is that women definitely go to, and love, action movies. Have we had an alternative in any given summer since Jaws and Star Wars? Either we love action blockbusters, or we don't go to the movies. So when I think about how women make the most of the few female characters and their supporting-role status in action films, I think we're doing a lot of work, and doing a great job creating a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of very little. All the female fan concentration on Arwen and Eowyn in the LoTR films, on Linda Hamilton's buff and awesome (but still supporting) character Sarah Connor in T2, on Rogue and Mystique and other X-Women, on Trinity in The Matrix, is about making the most of the tiny shout-outs to female audiences that big action movies - the biggest-grossing, and thus most important (for the industry) products generated by the motion picture industry today - give to their women and girl fans. Of course, lots of women don't care about whether there are well-written and significant women characters in a movie, they don't need that to have fun at a film. They are the lucky ones, since the movie industry is therefore giving them what they want and all they need. But the rest of us are grateful for the Alien series, for Keira Knightley's character in the PoTC movies, for Princess Leia, who is central to the plot of SW and always proactive (unlike her wimpy mother). If Disney, of all studios, knows enough about girl and women audience members to allow a character like Elizabeth Swann to develop and mature over the course of a trilogy, if Disney can allow a black woman to be a powerful goddess and can stand to have two women pirate captains (and one of them Chinese) in the council of pirates, then other studios and other producers can try just as hard. Jason Mittell, in Round One, Part One of this discussion, summarized what he called "the old saw about children's programming": "girls will consume work pitched at both genders, while the boys only concern themselves with boy-stuff." If this is true, then girls are by far the more valuable consumers of media (since they will be good customers of twice the volume of stuff as boys), and media corporations should take the wishes, proclivities, taste cultures, and interests of their best consumers into account.

2) In the latest issue of WIRED (July 2007), Optimus Prime, my favorite character from my favorite cartoon ever, Transformers, is on the cover. Here are some excerpts from the article about the new Transformers movie: "They started as toys for boys," "Boys ages 5 to 11 -- and it *was* boys -- faithfully tuned in week after week to watch the saga of these doughty bots," "For nearly two decades...sons of Prime waited for Papa Bot," "Thus [with Transformers] began the cyber-outsourcing of masculine heroism, a process that would eventually, inextricably, link Y chromosome to Xbox," "man-children of a certain age look to this Transformers movie...for redemption, as men." So, I, a hard-core fan of Transformers ever since I was a little girl, am excluded over and over again by this article. It's not just this one article or writer that concerns me, it's the way this environment of geeky, technologically-themed, toy-oriented pleasure is often assumed to be a 100% masculine domain. I don't think the statement "Girls like robot characters" would surprise anyone. Girls like all kinds of characters; they play video games; they watch sci-fi/action/adventure movies and TV, they read comic books. And then they grow up to be women media-studies scholars ;). But the mainstream press, written by non-academic fans, consistently associates certain media - and I don't just mean films, here, but technology of all sorts, from Blackberries to C++ to robots - with masculinity. What is sad about this is how much potential mass media has for serving as common ground between people of differing genders, races, ages, nationalities, sexual orientations, geographic locations, political affiliations. When I read, in the Transformers WIRED article, the writer's opinion that "Prime practically step-parented the latchkey kids of the mid-80s," I related to that. I remember that feeling of being home alone, just me and the TV, and those awesome giant robots, and how Optimus Prime taught me so much about what was right and wrong, what was courage and what was cowardice, when to show mercy and when to be strong. I thought, If I met that writer, he and I would have a lot to talk about, since we have some deep and important childhood experiences in common. But when the writer went on to define Prime as exclusively a role model for young boys, I stopped having that thought of common ground and mutually resonant experiences. Mass media fandom can and should be the grounds for discussions in which many, many people (masses of people, in fact) can participate. But there are gender-based, race-based, nationality-based, and sexuality-based assumptions and stereotypes that permeate media journalism which cuts such possibilities short.

3) Some recent media scholarship also shows these biases. Last year, a well-respected media studies professor from a prestigious U.S. university visited Northwestern, and I heard his paper on how a critically acclaimed television serial drama resembled an intricate and complex game, because certain plot elements repeated every season (though in different guises), and because the viewer had to keep track of everything that had happened in the past in order to fully comprehend each new episode. I asked him how his "game theory" regarding this television show differed from the basic structure of daytime drama (soap opera). He had no answer for me. Why? Because he had not considered that the aspects that he most enjoyed of an Emmy-winning, "quality" primetime cable television program were actually appropriated from cultural productions that have much less cultural capital in the world of media studies: soap operas. I very much agree with C. Lee Harrington's statement in Round Six, Part One: "I'm a huge fan of serialized primetime shows such as Lost, Heroes, 24, etc., but tend to roll my eyes at journalistic (and sometimes academic) accounts of how textually complicated they are....They are, of course, but multiply that complexity by 50 years and you might begin to approach Guiding Light!!" I would like to see, in accordance with some of Kristina's arguments in her review of MiT5, more male media studies scholars engaging with media analyses of women's genres and women's styles of media consumption/engagement/participation. Of course, many men in media studies do this already. But currently, male scholars can still ignore huge areas of women-oriented media scholarship without thinking or blinking - their ignorance is still very normal.

And to bring this back to the first example of gender bias I gave, that practiced by movie studios and media corporations: Daytime drama has undergone a serious decline in ratings over the past decade, and I attribute this mostly to network executives' lack of investment in, and lack of knowledge of, the soap genre. As a result, soap fans (of which I am one) have engaged in more heated battles, meaning mail/e-mail campaigns, phone campaigns, and massive flame wars online, over the last 10 years, than I have ever seen in any other fandoms. Soap fans fight TPTB (producers, writers, network execs) for story changes, and they fight with each other because they feel that no one is really getting the quality or kinds of storytelling that they want, so fan groups that have different interests are mutually regarded as "competition" for the networks' attention. So far, the networks haven't responded to fans' demands for improved (i.e., better-written) stories and for more respect for show history. The soaps continue to go down in quality, and viewers continue to tune out. Meanwhile, all of prime time has co-opted the technique of seriality which daytime dramas spent decades developing and enriching - all reality shows are soaps, most prime-time dramas are soaps or have some serial elements, and many prime-time sitcoms (Friends, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother) have multi-episode, sometimes multi-season story arcs. Millions of women fans spent years and years contributing to writers' knowledge of how to make seriality work. Their input and feedback, manifested in a multitude of activities from their mere viewership to their fannish activities, helped to build up that store of knowledge, helped to program those data banks. Not only do those fans get zero credit, but the soap-y shows that women now watch on prime-time - Prison Break, 24 - are much more geared towards male audiences and male interests than towards women audiences and women interests. Again (see my above point), it isn't that women can't or don't enjoy male-oriented programming. But women fans lost good soap operas, which were dramas dedicated to women's enjoyment, and we did not gain the equivalent in serial prime time.

McCrea: I'll expand in turn on the major points you've explored, Abigail; I think you've traced some of the most interesting elements of media culture for this discussion. First, action cinema, then Transformers and tech culture, then the gendering of media culture in academia and finally, television culture.

Action Cinema: Leading up to the release of Live Free or Die Hard (or bizarrely, Die Hard 4.0 for non-Americans), I was pondering some of the same issues - it was obvious that these younger characters had been supplanted to build a bridge between the necessary elements of Bruce Wills and large things being on fire and a more modern audience for whom things being on fire doesn't mean what it used to. I wonder if a similar committee process went into Terminator 3; "oh these aging men don't appeal to anybody anymore, but we need them for the brand - let's stick in a couple of young people." It all seems so neat and pat by comparison to the situation presented in the first Die Hard; trashy white-bread American thrashes European chap who has read a book or two. In the new iteration, it barely feels like the same 'man' is being pressed into the situations. So I wonder to whom precisely the film is directed, or to who the 'fan' is in the discourse of the Die Hard universe. I'm sure that for the marketing boffins involved, for whom the Die Hard IP (I term I want to come back to later), there was a sense of needing to create generational upheaval, and character multiplicity. This may not seem like the most obivous of connections, but I felt a similarity to Blade III: Trinity, where younger, hipper characters stood in for fans of the first films. Nor it is explicity new, as later films in the Death Wish and Dirty Harry series began to expand their fictions beyond the original frame to talk to fans more directly. Robocop 3, Aliens Vs. Predator and a few others are barely readable outside of this rearticulation-through-fandom. I think what you've identified is that this gendering - or repurposing of gender - is often the first port of call. In many instances, the role of women in driving narrative is complicated as the primary male characters age and give way to older generations.

Theories of and around action films that consider gender (and I'm thinking of the work of Yvonne Tasker and Robin Wood first but not exclusively) situate the crux of things in the appreciative look of the audience - and as you say, filmgoers looking for female characters in action films often have to make a great deal out of very little. Which is precisely where the most energetic forms of fanwork emerge. I used to call fan-produced media 'antimedia' because they act much like an antibody to the processes of the original text, but more interesting is this semiotic chase. Anime fans chase the unarticulated sexuality and imagery; Lord of the Rings fans chase the unexplored world detail - each fandom weaves according to the material its given. Which is why, returning to Die Hard, I almost felt I was watched a 'fan generation' film, a post-Tarantino and Peter Jackson - cinema that can never be formed without a knowing wink.(Henry Jenkins' article on Tarantino and digital cinema got me thinking here) Len Wiseman's other directorial work being Underworld, and Underworld: Evolution, you can see that he has been there to witness Hollywood's push to re-gender action cinema. But how successful are Lara Croft, Resident Evil, Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet as new approaches to gender? Since I'm not a fan of leaving rhetorical questions open, I'll just go right ahead and score them a D minus. And in each case, you can see similar patterns; films with strong female heroes aimed at a fannish audience (some more sexually precise than others), and then, non-existent fan interest. At least Red Sonja got a cult thing going.

Transformers: As a latch-key kid myself whose family moved a great deal, the common ground of toys and computer games was the first and most important bridge to building any friendship with other kids. The fact that I had a small number of Transformers with me meant that I could instantly communicate through that common reverie and instant nostalgia. There is a fantastic and little-read article by Jiwon Ahn on anime that uses the phrase "common nostalgia latent across boundaries". The upshot is that morning cartoons are not (or were not) so neatly divided across gender lines. I'm not sure how to navigate the terminology, but while Transformers is less gendered than some other series of the time (the farcical ultramasculity of Centurions: Power Extreme, GI Joe and M.A.S.K., for example, is stark), the inclusion of Arcee and Elita One in the Transformers universe hardly counts as a even distribution of archetypes. (side note: the "Female Transformers" page on Wikipedia is worth a visit.)

Media Culture and Academia: I was lucky enough to speak at MiT3 in 2003. I landed in Boston without a working credit card and so sat in my hostel's common room experiecing first-hand the wonders of late-night inner-city television as I pondered my fate. What had been romanticised my entire life, etched marvellously by the "I'd Buy That For A Dollar" guy in the first Robocop, was first and foremost an incredibly gendered experience. The undulation of girls, of both the regular and 'gone wild' persuasions, on and around Snoop Dogg, actually took up what seemed like hours for some baroque and indiscernable DVD purchasing scheme being advertised. In between, grimy-mustached salesmen demanded I bring in my used cars for "Caaaaysh!" What struck me about the kind of television being studied by the participants at MiT3 across the river, was that it was, by comparison, very safe. Buffy, Angel, etc were reaching a kind of critical mass and people spoke of them with a kind of reverence and awe - look at the progressive themes these shows offer, look at the kinds of people who invest so much in them. That kind of scholarship is still very very important, but I could not but wonder why the orgiastic hyper-sexualised world of Snoop Dogg didn't get a mention, or even Jackass for that matter. In the final keynote session, which was stunning and remarkable for many reasons, was a panel between a pair of experienced executives and Toby Miller. Someone asked a question about why the conference was so gendered; why the guests were men, why there was no discussion of gender power in so many of the panels, etc... (I know these questions can bore a lot of people but I always think its great to hear that discussion come up.) While the other panellists demurred a little, Toby Miller did something which I consider extraordinarily brave - he answered the question head on. His response was that, for the most part, televisions are assembled and moulded by women in Southeast Asia. They come to the West, on which all our shows and our fandoms are generated. Then, they are shipped back to the daughters of the women who assembled them, so they can pick diodes from the quarter-mile deep piles of electronic rubbish for just enough money to pay for their parent's healthcare. In a final session that had some strident questions, this was met with a kind of slow dawning applause - definitely a WWE-style "holy shit!" moment. His point was that way underneath even the most nuanced approach to the content of television, we still have to account for the materiality of culture.

Television Culture: Your analysis of the shifting relationships of producers and fans is absolutely spot-on. I think books like Convergence Culture by our friend Henry do a great job of highlighting all the key movements in these as-yet unformed forces; but its the type of shift in aesthetics that fills in the gaps and the outcomes of those shifts we will see first. I am a fan of 50s-60s-70s television, especially action and mystery serials from the UK like The Prisoner and The Avengers, from which my understanding of modern television is still deeply affected. There was then, and I think its visible again admist the web of ARGs, online polls, semi-official blogs, a deep insecurity on the part of television producers about how to keep an audience interested. Soaps have always been at the cutting-edge of audience relations, because changes can be brought on rapidly, characters changed to suit responses with no disruption to 'flow'. And soon, the soap model may be all that traditional television has left, now that the DVD virus is infecting so much else. I maintain that one of the most complex and least understood television forms is professional wrestling. Despite its visibility and notoriety, wrestling has garnered very little critical attention with the notable exceptions being thankfully of exceptional clarity and depth. The gendering of wrestling is absurd, carnivalesque, grotesque, implies horrifically regressive roles for women and all non-masculine figures - and is still leagues ahead in terms of sexual reference than the bulk of television. I certainly subscribe to the notion that wrestling constitutes a masculine melodrama - and the deaths of Owen Hart and Chris Benoit are necessarily included here - as the drama of the 'kayfabe' stage rotates and wheels in independent ways to the actual televisual frame. Sometimes we are allowed to peer behind the curtain, other times it is reinforced. However, melodrama isn't merely a gendering type of address, it is a pervasive method for the production of genre itself - under melodramatic sensibilities, all kinds of other spaces can open up. So when you scratch the surface (or the baby oil) of wrestling, you find legion upon legion of female fans, running websites, organising events and working throughout the industry. The type of experience you're talking about when Bull Nakano almost decapitates her opponent at Summerslam is obviously very different than an intelligently thought out drama series, but no less vital in the articulation of our appreciation of culture.

Derecho: Christian, it's a pleasure to read your thoughts on these matters. Our opinions overlap on many points, for instance, your (generous) grade of D minus for studios' attempts to build female-action-hero franchises. In a sense, those films are the exceptions that prove the rule: If *that's* what the industry produces when it greenlights movies that put female action heroines front-and-center, no wonder they do such a botched, half-assed job with the girl (I use this word purposefully) characters they throw in to male-action-hero films. I'm well aware, though, that female action heroine movies are built to attract male audiences, not to give female viewers opportunities for identification. There is a sense in which the placement of girl characters (love interests, damsels-in-distress) in male-oriented media function in a similar way to product placement. Corporate sponsors get a shot or two of their product; women get a few lines of dialogue from a female character; and the rest of the movie, which is most of the movie (the guy-kicking-ass part) is the "real" fiction, the core, authentic text. You mention T3 and Blade:Trinity, in addition to the new Die Hard, bringing in younger characters in order to create a bridge between older fans and newer audiences. One thing that is striking about all three franchises is that, while one of the younger characters added is a woman, none of the older characters are. In both the Terminator films and in DH, there was, at some point, a leading woman who was a peer or opposite of the leading man. Well, I know it's no surprise that in mainstream U.S. films, older women no longer even count as viable plot points - this just reinforces the fact that all the younger female characters in T3, B:T, and LFoDH, while I found all of them to be written as "strong," "tough," and "capable," are there specifically because of their hot bods.

It's interesting what you say about morning cartoons being not as neatly divided across gender lines. We should really ask Justine Cassell more about this, she's the expert on childhood play, gender, and technology. I know she has co-written on the subject with HJ, and her article (written with Meg Cramer) on "Moral Panics about Girls Online" might be interesting to you. I checked out the Female Transformers page on the main Wiki, and was struck by the fact that someone has tagged it with the infamous "fancruft" label, and therefore the page may be deleted in a couple of days. Of course, tons of stuff gets excoriated for being fancruft, but for some reason I was particularly peeved that this page, which simply lists the female Transformers, when and in which cartoon series they appeared, and their roles in various plotlines, as "not encyclopedic." The Wiki pages on the male Transformers are less well-organized by far than the Female Transformers page, but the ones about the males count as "encyclopedic"? Luckily, Teletraan-1 (the Transformers Wiki) has no such flags on their several pages regarding Female Transformers (individually and as a "species"). It always amazes me how fan communities have to continually splinter in more and more specifically focused groups, just in order to avoid being censored in some way. Just to enjoy the freedom to like what they like, fans create enclaves for themselves that are narrower and more exclusive all the time. How much can matter be broken down? Into a gazillion quarks? By the time we're all done, there will be more fandoms than quarks in this universe. I mean, multiverse :).

You end with sports and wrestling and female fandom, and it's great because it's very close to the point I made earlier about women and "guy" movies. Yes, women watch sports; many women love sports; many women are huge fans of sports. Sports, action films, much of primetime serial TV, and those commercials you saw (Snoop and his "orgiastic hypersexualized world,"), and Jackass (which you mentioned as having a relationship to the commercials - interesting!), all are performances of hypermasculinity. You used the term "carnavalesque." There is something beyond - in addition to - the repetition inherent in ritual, and the community element of being a fan of these displays, that attracts men and women. The emphatic enactment of hypersexuality is clearly a lure to both men and women. And so I am intrigued by your notion of wrestling as a "masculine melodrama," because I think there is something in that which could explain so much of how and why women are (learn to be?) fans of male-gendered media texts (which constitute the vast majority of all media texts). Perhaps girls and women learn to play with, and learn to extract pleasure from (it is both play and work), male-oriented media by constructing melodramatic narratives from, in, and around them. Perhaps this is the one "sop" that male-oriented media has learned to give to women: to give women the tools to read maleness and masculinity as equally melodramatic as any soap opera, even while insisting that it must be consistently male/masculine performances that women watch. And perhaps at some level (as you say, "under melodramatic sensibilities, all kinds of other spaces can open up"), women fans appreciate the fact that they can read these texts as yielding a kind of satisfaction classically associated with women (melodrama) at the same moment that the texts hyper-perform, over-perform, masculinity. For some fans, perhaps this is an appreciation of irony; for others, it might just be an appreciation for opposites uniting, the point at which men's love of violent spectacle and women's love of psychological and emotional drama touch.

Issue Two: The History of Remix Culture

Derecho: I'll begin this topic with my "soapbox" speech, a statement of one of the central claims of my dissertation: digital remix culture owes a substantial debt to minority discourse. Three genres of digital remix were pioneered between 1986 and 1996: digital music sampling, video game mods, and online fanfic. Of those three, the first was the invention of African American men (most of them were men, not all) and the third was the invention of white American women (most of them were white, most of them were women, not all). It's very important to me, and other feminist (male and female) media scholars as well, that the history of women's new media innovations does not get buried. In Round Two, Part One, Louisa Stein wrote that "female authorship and innovation in fan communities...were always heavily technologically engaged, from the use of multiple VCRs to facilitate the complex process of pre-digital vidding to the extremely belabored process of putting out zines pre-internet...Now that fandom has moved online, technological innovation...w/i the context of female communities continues to expand." It is vital that we media (especially digital media) scholars depict accurately the history of women media fans as not only highly competent, but inventive in their uses of a wide array of technological platforms and tools. There is nothing "belated" about women fans' involvement with technology; in fact, as Louisa and I argue, women fans were making good use of the most sophisticated tools at their disposal prior to the advent of digital culture, and as soon as new media became available (and Usenet was not even widely available), women thoroughly exploited its possibilities. For all who might think that posting X-Files fanfic to the ATXC board did not really constitute a technological innovation, I say this: the ATXC and its successor, the Ephemeral/Gossamer archival system, have proven over the last dozen years that a simple open-source PHP archive of HTML documents will outlast a lot of other hypermedia creations. While gamers hunt down emulators, fans of hypertext literature long for a working installation disk of Mac Classic OS, and digital historians cry over numerous broken links and four-year-old Flash animation that just never loads all the way, readers of online fan fiction sit back and enjoy the plain-and-simple HTML, reliably archived and presented in neat rows and columns for their pleasurable consumption for years to come. If that isn't technical genius, I don't know what is.

McCrea

: In the arena of games, the gendering of media is - still - perhaps the most pervasive and least addressed aspect of cultural influence. Just flicking through T.L. Taylor's Play Between Worlds highlights just how affronted producers of games can be when you point out that loaded imagery limits access. On the flipside, female game fandom has become a corporate product via funded clans such as the Frag Dolls. It is precisely at the point of production, or remix, that new ways of thinking about digital culture open up. There is a sense in Taylor's book, and I think its quite true, that the gendering of technology is not just particularly male, but more to the point, 'invisible-male'. For a producer of technology, remixer or otherwise inclined media activator who also happens to be a woman, there is still as of 2007, a persistent cloud of gender surprise. Gender surprise is something we could classify as a news-borne toxin by which part of the undertow of their work will have to be superscribed with 'its not just for girls anymore.' If this were limited to publicly-visible news reports or the like, this would be fine, but the toxin still exists across fields of art and academia as well, as I think you've highlighted in your earlier discussion of television viewing habits. Being a sort of self-proclaimed intellectual and political carbunkle, I have the inclination to say that part of the position description of a media academic or researcher is the continuing struggle to evolve the discourses in the public sphere - in other words, bring out the hammer when stupid things are said, and make a noise when something substantial arrives. So I really want to underline with a thick pen what you began with: "digital remix culture owes a substantial debt to minority discourse." Its worth printing out and nailing to the wall of every institution and academic hall that has any investment in technology. The only thing to add is that these aren't seperate issues - gender positioning, race vocalisation and technology - no matter how hard we may try to dehistoricize them like that; the energy and force by which remixes and all forms of contra-digital experimentation happen simply won't, can't, will never come from wealthy people getting wealthier. It's people that got cut out, cutting their way back in - cheaply, quickly, running across back fences and leaping across borders in ways that seem alien to anybody working within a strict system of cultural distribution. The reason I skipped between games and these thoughts is because its so visible there; when I played artist and curator Rebecca Cannon's machinima film The Buff and the Brutal to third year students in one of my courses, many of them responded with "well, its clearly just a feminist take on game culture". The operative word being 'just'; what an extraordinary position for students to be in; their access to game aesthetics being stitched to an assumption that all non-standard, non-white, non-male referents are protestative, 'just' exterior and minor. Talk about there being a lot of work left to do! The male-invisible subject reappears, and I don't think equipping the discussions of technology as phallocentric is enough; what we're staring at is the growth of a new generation whose reflections of technology may in fact be less equipped to concieve of equal gender and race access than our own. I think about this a lot, and I hope I'm dreadfully wrong. DJ Spooky's new essay and song coming out of the Venice Biannale is a great adjunct to this discussion.

Derecho: Word, word, and word to all of that. I appreciate a great deal of DJ Spooky's work, and thanks so much for the link to The Buff and the Brutal. I wish that Chinese-Austrian video artist Jun Yang's remix videos were more widely available, they are similar to Spooky's in that they are essays in which Yang narrates, over all these disparate clips, his experiences as a bicultural migrant consumer of (predominantly U.S.) media. One issue I run into when teaching and writing about digital remix is that often, race and gender are not explicitly foregrounded by the "non-standard, non-white, non-male" producers. I love works by "non-standard" remix artists that *don't* make the author's race, gender, or nation of origin immediately apparent, because that's a different kind of invisibility (maybe one that can even be interpreted as a critique of, or response to, the "invisible-white-male" kind) that disallows a kneejerk reaction like the one your students gave to Cannon's piece. On the other hand, the reason why I call it an "issue" in teaching and writing, is that with pieces that announce their authors as minorities, the reader can grab hold of something in that text right away - your students know at least to start their brains thinking about feminism. When I teach Shelley Jackson, Anne-Marie Schleiner, or Public Enemy, discussions of race and gender in digital culture spark to life right away. But when I show Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries's DAKOTA (a remix of Pound's Cantos), or DJ Qbert's Wave Twisters (this is a link to an article in Remix, not to the content from the CD or DVD), or Brian Kim Stefans' Vaneigem Series (a "detournement" of NYT articles using text from The Revolution of Everyday Life), it's harder to get learners to think and talk about how those works emerge from a female (in the case of [half of] YHCHI), Asian, or Asian American experience. Of course, it's way more rewarding, too - but it takes work to prevent the discussion from falling right away into a New Critical approach ("This isn't about race or gender or nationality, why bring those into it?").

MORE TO COME

Reconsidering the AFI's 100 Films: The Missing Half of the Equation

Many of you probably watched the American Film Institute's special several weeks ago during which they celebrated a hundred great American films. (Never mind that several of the films were by any definition I came up with actually British productions -- a mistake which the organization got called upon the last time they constructed such a list -- suggesting that if it is in the English language, Hollywood will lay claim to it and if it isn't, it has no business being part of the American film scene!) The list included many films which most of us would agree belong up there with the greats -- including some personal favorites of mine, such as Citizen Kane, Casablanca, It's A Wonderful Life, Gone With the Wind, and The Godfather, to cite just a few from the top levels of the list. Yet, several groups have raised significant questions about what's missing from this -- any film made by a female director.

Before you argue that women simply didn't direct any of the best 100 films made in this country, you might consider that the final selection was made for a ballot of 400 titles out of which the American Film Institute included only four films directed by women (Penny Marshall's Big, Amy Heckering's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation). As Mediascape's

Erin Hill and Brian Hu ask, "Does that mean that women are inferior directors? Hardly. Does that mean that women have been kept out of the director's chair? Yes and no." Hill and Hu helped to poll a group of several dozen film scholars and filmmakers to see if they could come up with a list of 100 great American films directed by women, hoping that such a list would help us to better understand the roles women directors have played across the history of the American cinema.

As they have done so, the first accommodation they needed to make was to extend the AFI's focus on feature-length mainstream fiction films to include a much broader range of genres and formats, reflecting the reality that women have historically been forced to work on the margins of the mainstream industry but have made innovative contributions to independent, experimental and documentary film production, for example. Even where we consider feature length fictional films, women have most often operated on the margins -- working on B-films (as in the case of Ida Lupino) or exploitation films (as in the case of Stephanie Rothman). Only as we get to the most recent films on the list do we get to large budget Hollywood productions (and that's why all three of the films which the AFI included by female directors have come out in the last two decades.) Here's a subset of the films which they identified (listed in chronological order):

* MABEL'S BUSY DAY (Mabel Normand, 1914)

* THE BLOT (Lois Weber, 1921)

* DANCE, GIRL, DANCE (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

* MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, 1943)

* OUTRAGE (Ida Lupino, 1950)

* THE COOL WORLD (Shirley Clarke, 1964)

* BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL (Doris Wishman, 1965)

* A NEW LEAF (Elaine May, 1971)

* TERMINAL ISLAND (Stephanie Rothman, 1973)

* HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)

* NEWS FROM HOME (Chantal Ackerman, 1977)

* GIRLFRIENDS (Claudia Weill, 1978)

* THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (Penelope Spheeris, 1981)

* DESERT HEARTS (Donna Deitch, 1985)

* DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (Susan Seidelman, 1985)

* WORKING GIRLS (Lizzie Borden, 1986)

* NEAR DARK (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

* SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989)

* A PLACE CALLED LOVELY (Sadie Benning, 1991)

* DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (Julie Dash, 1991)

* LITTLE MAN TATE (Jodie Foster, 1991)

* MISSISSIPPI MASALA (Mira Nair, 1991)

* A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN (Penny Marshall, 1992)

* MI VIDA LOCA (Allison Anders, 1993)

* GO FISH (Rose Troche, 1994)

* CLUELESS (Amy Heckerling, 1995)

* WATERMELON WOMAN (Cheryl Dunye, 1996)

* PRIVATE PARTS (Betty Thomas, 1997)

* FRIDA (Julie Taymor, 2002)

* AMERICAN SPLENDOR (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, 2003)

* MONSTER (Patty Jenkins, 2003)

* SHERRYBABY (Laurie Collyer, 2006)

* MARIE ANTOINETTE (Sofia Coppola, 2006)

You can see the rest of the list here. Several other patterns emerge: the list of women filmmakers also includes a much higher number of filmmakers of color and openly queer filmmakers than the list the American Film Institute produced for mass market consumption. (The AFI list, after all, is part of a special promotion designed to encourage people to rent and buy dvds of the selected films and only films currently available in dvd format are eligible for consideration. Many of these films, especially the earlier ones, have not yet gone into this kind of broader distribution.) Roughly a quarter of the selected films have been made since 1999, suggesting just how recently women have been able to exert a powerful and consistent presence in mainstream and independent cinema.

As someone who has written about Stephanie Rothman (The Velvet Vampire, Terminal Island, Working Girls), for example, in an essay included in my new book, The Wow Climax, I found her inclusion on the list raised some provocative questions for me. Here's how I sum up what's interesting about Rothman's work:

Rothman's politics are nowhere more utopian than when they deal with the erotic material that is at the heart of the exploitation film and this may explain why she chose to continue to work within these genres, even when she gained control over the mode of production at Dimension Pictures, the studio she co-founded with her writer-producer husband Charles Swartz. Rothman's engagement with the exploitation genres was a tactical one; she agrees to follow certain formulas and produce certain images, in order to gain access to systems of production, distribution, and exhibition. Working within the popular cinema, she will reach a broader audience than a political avant-garde filmmaker; Terminal Island can be found at my local Blockbuster, while Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames can not. The exploitation cinema demands that she work with certain exploitable elements, yet she finds ways to redefine those images to speak to alternative pleasures and politics. At the same time, the exploitation cinema holds progressive potentials, facilitating stories with strong female protagonists, stories of exploitation and resistance, victimization and empowerment. Rothman borrows these stories from Roger Corman and from the broader generic history of New World and she seeks to render these stories meaningful to women. She does not fully control the promotion and reception of her films; she can not fully prevent those images and stories from being used in a reactionary fashion. Yet, for these very reasons, their radical potential takes on new importance. The people who go to see Born in Flames probably already have a solid commitment to feminism; the people who go to see Terminal Island probably do not. If most of her feminist politics falls on deaf ears, some of it probably gets heard, and in being heard, creates an opening for change where none existed before.

The vexing complexities of this situation may account for why Pam Cook's persistent attempts to claim Rothman for feminism have not had the impact of her similar arguments on behalf of Dorothy Arzner. Arzner's oppositional and marginal position as a lesbian woman operating within the classical Hollywood system could be taken for granted. Arzner's radical difference, her disruption of the codes of classical cinema and her exposure of the mechanisms of female spectacle, can be read against a shared understanding of the classical Hollywood cinema as allowing only limited space for female expression. Rothman's "counter-cinema," on the other hand, occurs against the backdrop of a producer (Corman) and studio (New World) already associated with leftist politics and within genres already seen as outside dominant film practice. The exploitation cinema, paradoxically, displayed the most reactionary and patriarchal tendencies of the commercial cinema and at the same time, an already partially realized radical potential. Rothman can be seen, then, as working both within and in opposition to the exploitation film, a complex set of "negotiations" which allow no simple labeling of her films. Her cinema is "partially corrupt." This is its curse and that is its power.

Can we then reduce this "complex set of negotiations" between genre, studio, audience, and filmmaker to the standards of classic entertainment which define our expectations about what belongs on a list of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time? I am not certain.

The AFI list calls out for beloved films, yet it is hard to say that Rothman's work is beloved even among those of us who are its most enthusiastic supporters. She didn't seek to be loved; she sought to challenge and disrupt the conventions of the genres within which she worked.

The AFI List calls out for polished work but Rothman was given neither the time or the budget to achieve polished work: her exploitation films are ragged, bearing the marks of the painful compromises which shaped their production.

The AFI list calls out for accomplished works, but Rothman's films often have to be judged based on their potentials because she wasn't allowed to fully achieve what she set out to accomplish.

The AFI list prioritizes certain genres which are seen as prestigious and important but Rothman was never got to work in those genres.

The AFI list calls for films which had a wide impact on American culture but Rothman's films never received the distribution and promotion they would need to have a wide impact. The same can be said for many of the other filmmakers on this list.

All of this may sound like special pleading in the context of our usual list-making activities -- and perhaps it is -- but it is also a reflection of the struggles women filmmakers have faced in order to gain access to the means of production and distribution their male counterparts have taken for granted. All of these lists probably need to read alongside a copy of Joanna Russ's "How to Suppress Women's Writing," which spells out the diverse reasons critics have deployed to argue that women's creative work doesn't measure up to the standards of literary excellence which define the canon. But before you dismiss those critics, give yourself a gut check to see how you reacted to some of the films listed above. That immediate response -- "they don't belong here" -- suggests the need to reassess the criteria we deploy to evaluate "great films" and whether those "standards" are appropriate for accounting for the full range of interesting and important work in the history of the American cinema.

Another list was prepared by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, attempting to identify films by male and female directors that they felt should have been included on the AFI ballot. Their list is much more mainstream than the one prepared by Mediascape, seeking films by women filmmakers which would hold up under the same criteria as those which put the male directors on the original AFI list. If the Mediascape list has circulated almost entirely within an academic film context, the Alliance list has succeeded in getting national media attention, directing much needed interest onto the place of female directors in the history of American cinema. Both list raise questions that need to be considered if we are going to put the AFI List in its full context.

Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with Stephen Duncombe, author of the new book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. What follows is the second installment. I am being pressed for time this morning but hope to add a few comments to this post later today about last night's debate. You only briefly touch upon the rise of news comedy shows like The Daily Showand The Colbert Report. Do you see such programs as a positive force in American democracy? How do you respond to those who feel that the blurring

between news and politics trivializes the political process? What role does

comedy play in the kinds of popular politics you are advocating?

I love The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. As someone on the Left it is refreshing to see a progressive viewpoint expressed (even if only expressed ironically) in a way that makes me laugh and gives me pleasure. I also think that Stewart and Colbert's use of humor can be deeply subversive: they use ridicule to show how ridiculous "serious politics" is, much in the same way that Jonathan Swift's "modest" proposal in 1729 made the "rational" case for solving the problem of the poor in Ireland by eating them. The political process is already a joke, these guys are merely recognizing it for what it is.

In doing this they hold out the possibility of something else, that is, they create an opening for a discussion on what sort of a political process wouldn't be a joke. In doing this they're setting the stage for a very democratic sort of dialogue: one that asks questions rather than simply asserts the definitive truth. However, it's still unclear that ironic joking leads to the sort of popular response I'm hypothesizing above. It can, just as easily, lead into a resigned acceptance that all politics are just a joke and the best we can hope for it to get a good laugh out of it all. To paraphrase the philosopher Walter Benjamin: we can learn to find pleasure in our own destruction.

However, I think we need to take Stewart at his word: he's just an entertainer. It's really up to the rest of us to answer the questions he poses. Sometimes I think we ask too much of culture: we expect it to solve our political problems for us. I don't think it can do this. It can create openings, give us insight, provide us with tools, but the rest is a political process that counts on all of us.

You contrast the ways that FDR spoke to the American public with the ways that George W. Bush addresses us during his weekly radio-casts. What do you see as

the primary differences? Most contemporary politicians who attempt to

"explain" complex policy issues in the way FDR did get accused of being

"wonks." What steps do you think could be taken to create a new political

rhetoric which embraces the ideal of an informed public but doesn?t come

across as patronizing or pedantic?

The brilliance of FDR is that he and his New Deal administration, like King and his fellow organizers, recognized the necessity of spectacle in politics. Because of this they worked hard to re-imagine spectacle in a way that could fit progressive, democratic ends. The 1920s were an era much like our own in its worship of celebrity: a mediated world of movie stars on the silver screen and sports heroes in the new photo-tabloids. But instead of merely condemning this state of affairs, New Deal artists and administrators re-imagined it, using photographs sponsored by the Farm Securities Agency and murals painted by artists of the Works Progress Administration to recognize and display a different sort of American: the dust bowl farmer, the southern share cropper, the factory worker, the rootless migrant. By creating these counter-spectacles they tried to turn the public gaze from stars to everyday (albeit romanticized) people, essentially redefining "The People" in the popular imagination. Make no mistake, this was a deeply political move, as valorizing everyday people was essential for garnering political support for New Deal political and economic programs.

Roosevelt's "fireside chats" also put the lie to the myth that spectacle has to run against reason. Over thirty times during his presidency FDR addressed the American public on the radio. He would always begin these speeches with a warm "My friends." But what followed this simple greeting was a sophisticated explanation of the crises the country faced: the banking collapse, currency concerns, the judiciary, world war. This was propaganda. The speeches were scripted by playwrights who dramatized the case for the president's politics, and FDR spoke to people's fears and desires in a folksy, personalized language, but these fireside chats also took for granted that citizens could be reasoning beings with the ability to understand complex issues. In other words FDR believed that rationality and emotion could exist side by side.

I wish contemporary politicians would learn from this. Instead, we get the "man of reason" like John Kerry, or the "man of fantasy" aka George W. Bush. Politicians need to understand - in a way that I think many producers of pop culture already do - that you can speak to reason and fantasy simultaneously. It's an Enlightenment myth that truth is self-evident: that all you need to do is lay out the facts of your argument and immediately people will acknowledge and embrace it. What FDR and King understood is that the truth needs help. It needs stories told about it, works of art made of it, it needs to use symbols and be embedded in myths that people find meaningful. It needs to be yelled from the mountaintops. The truth needs help, but helping it along doesn't mean abandoning it.

You discuss the public desire for recognition as the flip side of their

relationship to celebrity culture. What lessons might progressives draw from

reality television about this desire for recognition?

If there are two things that those on the Left love to hate (while secretly enjoying) it's celebrity culture and reality TV. These play to the our most base political desires: celebration of an ersatz aristocracy and cutthroat competition; the driving fantasies of Feudalism and Capitalism respectively. True, true. But it's a mistake to write them off as just that, for they also manifest another popular dream: the desire to be seen. What do stars have that we don't? Wealth and beauty, yes, but also something more important: they are recognized. What is reality TV about? The chance for someone like us to be recognized.

What sort of a politics can be based in a recognition that we desperately what to be recognized? First off, policies that make it easier to be seen and heard. Community TV, micro radio, free internet access, net neutrality, and so on. If the populist Huey Long once called for a "chicken in every pot," in the mass mediated age our slogan ought to be "every person an image." But it goes deeper than this, for the popular desire is not just about being seen as an image on a screen. This, in some ways, is just a metaphor for a far deeper desire: being recognized for who we are and what we are, our opinions and our talents -- and this is the core of democracy.

The democracy we have today has little place for our opinions and talents. Our opinions show up as abstract polling data, and the only talents our political process asks for is our skill at forking over money to professional activists and campaigns or our dexterity in pulling a voting lever. This professionalization of politics, whereby democracy becomes the business of lobbyists, fund raisers, and image consultants, has fundamentally alienated the citizenry from their own democracy. It's no wonder that we turn to culture to find these dreams of recognition expressed.

This issue really gets to the core of my Dream. My book is about learning from popular culture and constructing ethical spectacles, but the lessons that I hope are learned will lead far further than making better advertisements or staging better protests for progressive political causes (though that wouldn't hurt). What I'm arguing for in my book is a reconfiguration of political thought, a sort of "dreampolitik" that recognizes that dreams and desires, ones that are currently manifested in pop culture, need to be an integral part of our democratic politics.

Manufacturing Dissent: An Interview with Stephen Duncombe (Part One)

Tonight, at 7 p.m. est, CNN will host a debate among the Democratic candidates for the presidency, aired live from South Carolina. There have already been several previous debates during which American citizens could get an early look at Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the other contenders for the nomination. What makes this debate interesting is that average citizens were invited to submit their questions for the debate via YouTube. Last week, I appeared on Talk of the Nation with David Bohrman, the guy from CNN who has been given the task to select the questions that actually reach the air, and Joshua Levy, a political blogger (TechPresident.com). We learned that there had been, at that point, more than 1500 questions submitted and that the CNN staff was shifting through them to decide which ones should be asked the candidates. You might want to take some time today to sample the kinds of questions submitted in their raw form. They reflect two of the dominant modes of production for YouTube. On the one hand, there are straight to camera confessionals -- often deadly serious, frequently deeply personal, made by people who embody the issues they are discussing. These videos reflect the ways that Americans are taught, via television, to speak to presidential candidates and more often than not, they reflect the same agenda that has shaped previous debates. The CNN spokesperson did say that there were certain topics, Darfur for example, which cropped up much more often among viewers than among professional journalists. But, for the most part, these questions reflect the prevailing tone and style of American political discourse. The second set are parodies and satires -- often bitingly irreverent, borrowing the language of popular culture to challenge the pomposity of the debate format. Sometimes, they spoof the very idea that citizens should be made to embody their questions -- as in this video where a guy dressed like a Viking asks a question about immigration or consider this question from a LA based "celebrity". Sometimes, they make fun of what kinds of questions deserved discussion in this format -- as in this video about alien invasions. Sometimes, they make use of borrowed footage -- as in this JibJab style segment featuring a George W. impersonator.

It is going to be interesting, then, to see what kinds of selections the network makes amongst all of this material: will they naturally go towards those that adopt the discourses of respectful citizens and identity politics? Will they ask more or less the same questions that we've heard in the previous debates, only this time spoken through the mouths of YouTube fans? Or will some of the more wacky segments make their way into the air? And if they do, how will the candidates react and how will the pundits respond? As I wrote last week, we are seeing a consistent insertion of the discourse of participatory culture into the political process this campaign season in an attempt to reach voters who would normally tune out debates and that's what makes this particular set of exchanges so interesting.

To help us get into the spirit of the YouTube debate, I am featuring today an interview with Stephen Duncombe, the author of an important new book about the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy which I have mentioned here several times already -- Dream:Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy. I have incorporated this paragraph from Duncombe's book in a number of talks I've given over the last few months and it is suggestive of the provocative nature of his argument:

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.

Duncombe's previous books, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture and The Cultural Resistance Reader, have been important contributions to our understanding of contemporary cultural politics, albeit aimed at academic readers primarily. Duncombe himself has been active in a number of key political movements in New York City, where he teaches, and describes some of those experiences in Dream. With this book, he has produced a text which will be read well beyond the academic realm and could provide us with a handbook for understanding why this current campaign is making such vivid and interesting use of a rhetoric informed by our experiences with participatory culture. Check out his website for more information on the book.

Throughout the book, you embrace a politics based on spectacle. How do you

define spectacle? What do you see as the defining characteristics of

progressive spectacle and how would it differ from more conservative forms of

spectacle?

I guess I'd define spectacle as a dream performed, or perhaps, a fantasy on display. Spectacle animates an abstraction and realizes what reality often times cannot represent. But I also like to use the term in a broader way: to describe a way of making an argument, not through appeals to reason and fact (though these certainly can, and should, be part of spectacle) but through stories and myth, imagination and fantasy. This definition covers what I call ethical spectacles, but also describes spectacles with less scruples: those engineered by the Nazis at Nuremberg, conjured up by creative directors on Madison Avenue or staged by Andrew Lloyd Webber on Broadway. So what separates my "ethical" spectacles from these? It's a complicated question and I spend about a third of my book exploring it, but if I had to sum up the core value of an ethical spectacle in one word it would be this: democracy.

Most spectacles are anti-democratic. They are about one-way communication flows and predictable responses. "They" engineer the look and feel and message of the spectacle and "we" - the spectators - respond in a predetermined fashion. If this type of spectacle is successful we give our consent or support: we march in lines and vote for the Party or buy a certain brand of toothpaste. But it is always someone else's dream. Ethical spectacle follows a different formula. It's a spectacle where the lines between those who create and those who spectate are blurred, one which is dreamt up, executed, and acted upon by its participants. This makes for a sloppy sort of spectacle, one where spectators are also actors, where the mechanics of the staging is obvious to all involved, and where meanings and outcomes are not predetermined, but isn't this also the definition of democracy?

There's also another key difference between the spectacle I'm advocating for and that which we are used to experiencing: reality. Most spectacle is using fantasy as a replacement for reality. Think of President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln. This was an attempt (imagineered by an ex-TV producer named Scott Sforza) to replace reality with fantasy: our president is a warrior prince, not a combat dodger; the war in Iraq is won, not just beginning. The approach I'm advocating for deals with reality differently, using spectacle to dramatize the real, not cover it over.

A great example of this is the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr's campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. He went into Birmingham knowing the violent, racist reputation of the chief of police. In fact, he counted on it. And "Bull" Connor acted out his part: jailing school kids, turning fire hoses on picketers, letting dogs loose on peaceful protesters, and so on, creating those iconic images of the civil rights movement, and publicizing to a world media the reality of racism in the United States. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Civil Rights Act passed the next year. It's also no coincidence that the footage of Top Gun W couldn't be used by the Republicans a year after the staged landing; the deadly reality of the continuing war had leaked through the staged fantasy. As the presidential namesake of the aircraft carrier that Bush landed on once said: "You can't fool all of the people all of the time."

Ethical spectacle fools no one. It is at its best when it is obvious what it is: just a spectacle. Like the architecture of Las Vegas or the campy performance of pro wrestling, one can also stage spectacles that don't pretend to be reality but wear their constructed nature on their sleeve. They are spectacles which present themselves as spectacles. As such, these dreams performed become, in their own way, real. Illusion may be a necessary part of politics but delusion need not be.

Your book poses some sharp criticisms of the kinds of political rhetoric which

has emerged from "mainstream" perspectives within the Democratic Party. For

example, you characterize progressive critics, such as Hillary Clinton or Joseph

Leiberman, who embrace a "culture war" rhetoric as playing into conservative

stereotypes of "well-mannered, well-dressed, liberal elites,"

"busybodies" and "condescending experts" who want to use the power of

government to enforce their tastes upon society. Why do you think Democratic

leaders have been so quick to embrace a form of politics which is so strongly

opposed to popular culture and what do you see of the benefits of shifting the

terms of the debate?

One of my friends, the activist David Solnit, once said: "all politics is theatre, just some of it is bad theatre." When it comes to popular culture, the Democrats seem clueless about their public image. Take Senator Hillary Clinton's press conference condemning Grand Theft Auto for example. Here she was, before an international media, playing out the Right's stereotype of the Left: a bunch of superior sounding, out-of-touch, elites telling the rest of us what's good for us, and then using government regulation to make sure we can't decide for ourselves. Karl Rove couldn't have asked for anything better (Nor could Rockstar Games since that press conference likely sold boku copies of GTA/SA as people hurried out for a taste of forbidden fruit).

Why the Dems are so clueless is a bit of a mystery. Part of it has to do with the history of Liberalism in this country which comes out of elite reform movements like Prohibition (a once progressive idea, along with eugenics!) as much as it arises out of labor and social movements (both of which are more interested in equality and justice than morality and culture). But this shying away from pop culture, I think, also has a lot to do with an abiding Enlightenment faith in the superiority of rationality and reason, and a deep suspicion of desire and fantasy - the very things, of course, which drive pop culture. This is a political problem since so much of politics is based in fantasy and desire and Liberals these days are simply not very skilled in operating on this terrain. This split between rationality and fantasy is also a false one, these forces don't inhabit separate spheres, they coexist and intermingle in all of us. It's the old, and tired, mind/body split. It's time to move on.

You describe popular culture as a "ready-made laboratory" for studying the

"dreams" of the American public. Why do you think progressive politics have

been so disdainful of popular culture? How do you respond to critics who might

argue that your arguments place too great a trust in market forces? You write,

for example, "If culture stays, and sells, it means that it somehow resonates

with the popular will. And anyone interested in democratic politics ignores such

enthusiasm at his or her peril."

The biggest problem with ignoring popular culture, politically speaking, is not that you turn off this or that group of fans (the Dems could alienate every single NASCAR fan in the entire country and still sweep the elections), but that you ignore this powerful indicator of people's dreams and desires. As the great political commentator Walter Lippmann once argued, politicians don't need to think much of popular culture, but they do need to think a lot about it.

I have a lot of problems living in a consumer capitalist culture, and my own cultural upbringing was in the decidedly anti-market world of punk rock, but even I recognize the value of appreciating popular culture in a society like ours. Unlike culture patronized by the aristocracy or funded by the state, commercial culture has to appeal to a wide enough audience to make it a profitable business. Yes, this appeal is not pure: marketing and star power can make any movie a hit the first weekend, but for that movie to still be selling the second and third it had better resonate with the popular will. So if you want to figure out what ideas and aspirations are resonating with the public a good place to start is with popular culture.

But, and this is a big but, the hit movie is not what we should be paying attention to -- we need to dig deeper. What we really need to explore are the dreams at the root of the hit movie. That movie is only one manifestation of our desires, and a commercially acceptable one at that, we need to think of others. Take a hit movie like the original Matrix. As a fan I can appreciate it as exciting entertainment, but as a politico I'm interested in what it says about us as a people: our striving for personal power and to be part of a rebellious community, our desire to stick it to the man and reveal the truth, (not to mention our love of cool toys and stylish outfits). Once you understand these forces you can do other things with them. Pop culture is just one expression of our dreams, a progressive political system that empowers people, builds community, fights power and reveals the truth -- might be another.<.blockquote>

So far, we are seeing some signs of a more playful style of activism is having

an impact on the upcoming presidential election. Witness the spoof of the Apple

1984 campaign, "Obama Girl", or for that matter, the video in which Hillary

and Bill spoof the Sopranos. What do you think this YouTube based politics

might suggest about the potentials or limits of a politics which draws its

images and language from popular culture?

I think you explore this far deeper, and far better, than I do Henry, but it seems to me that accessible media production technology, the semiotic tool box we've all built from our life-long immersion in pop culture, and the new distribution apparatus like YouTube, have immense political potential. MoveOn.org demonstrated this in their "Bush in 30 Seconds" campaign. They asked their audience to make an anti-Bush advertisement -- and received more than 1,500 of them, many of them better than anything a professional production house could create. This demonstrates the awesome power - and talent - of the "audience." This is, um, "poaching" at its best: political "fans" tapping into popular desire and, using pop culture language, delivering, a different message. At its worst this pop culture poaching leads to the Hillary Clinton Soprano's ad: using all the style of popular culture but ignoring the deep seated reasons that such a series was popular. Clinton's approach is just using pop culture a gimmick.

One of the things that interests me most about the explosion of media production is the multiplicity of messages and meanings that political campaigns have to contend with. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. Negative campaigning has existed since the beginning of American democracy (George Washington was accused of being the corrupter of a washerwoman's daughter), and the swiftboating of John Kerry was just a high-tech version. What is new this election cycle is the direct impact, not of opposing professional campaigns, but of political fans. We've already seen how fans of Barack Obama have used pop culture tropes to make him into a sex symbol and render Hillary Clinton as Big Sister. Political campaigns are just going to have to make peace with the fact that they can not control their message, and that the message is going to be determined, in part, by their fans. This means that "unacceptable" material is going to be part of the political discussion and decision making.

We can either bemoan this fact: the debasement of the political process and so on, or we can look for what might be more positive aspects. It could be argued that one of the things that's wrong with electoral politics today is that what is considered "expectable" is determined by professional pundits, big media and those who make large campaign contributions. Consequently, what is of interest to the majority of us is left out of the discussion. Certainly, Obama Girl isn't opening up a substantive political discussion of anything, but it's very existence, and its popularity, suggests that we, the people, want something else, something more, than the sanitized, pre-packaged, content-free politician packages we've gotten in the past.

There's no doubt that reducing serious politicians like Obama to a stud and Clinton to Big Sister debases politics, playing into old stereotypes about the sexuality of Black men and the controlling nature of professional women. But as the means of mediated spectacle production and distribution continue to be democratized, I have faith that what will develop is a sort of bell curve of meaning. There will be offensive and malicious media spectacles as outliers on either side, but the critical mass of the center will open up substantive issues of political interest to the majority of citizens. Isn't this how democracy is supposed to work? This is merely democracy in the age of the mediated image.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seven, Part Two): Kristina Busse and Cornel Sandvoss

COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL CTD.:

Kristina: Moreover, I worry that it'll be impossible to talk about the subcultural phenomenon that I would define as fandom if that term is already used for a much broader, less intense engagement.

Cornel: I would argue the answer already lies in what you are saying here though: if we want to talk about subcultural phenomena, let's call them precisely that: subcultures. On many occasions fan cultures and subcultures correspond, even become interchangeable, but there are clearly also fans and aspects of fandom that do not fit into a subcultural mold. So I fail to see the benefit in equating subculture and fan cultures a priori.

Kristina: I do understand that the psychological engagement with a text can be very intense, even in the absence of others to share that particular affect, that obsessional focus. Moreover, both community interaction and this affect exist on a continuum (changing between different people and even within a person over time). And I understand that it is important to study the individual and how emotional investment in a text gets created, played out, shared. I think it's important to look at the range of fannish engagement and affect, but why can't we do so with the community rather than the individual at the center? If I look at the lonely fan reading/watching/enjoying their text, I think of them as fannish because they're participating in an imagined community of other fans. [The best example in my area would be lurkers, who do not actively interact and are thus not part of the community per se, but who very clearly often think of themselves as part of the community--I guess we could think of it as parasocial relations with other fans?]

Cornel: If we speak about psychological categories such as affect, pleasure and fantasy, these are of course by definition constituted on the level of the individual. This doesn't mean that there cannot at least potentially be a communal context to the constitution of fan pleasures but ultimately it is manifested on an intrapersonal not interpersonal level.

Kristina: I don't want to sound like I want to forego the study of the individual fan in favor of a sole focus on the community, because that's not really what I'm saying here. What I'm worried about in terms of research focus is actually the fan academic parallel to what I'm worried about in terms of definitions of fandom: focusing on the more mainstream, more palatable fan may risk the erasure/ignoring of the less easily acceptable or explainable one.

Cornel: I understand and share your concern, but I just wonder what's more palatable here. Within the context of media and cultural studies, the study of the 'mainstream" (whatever that exactly may be) seems to me in fact much rarer and more adventurous as it appears to be often irreconcilable with dominant paradigms and ideological positions in the field. Where, for example, are those studies of Britney Spears fans, those of Hello and other celebrity gossip magazines or of Hollyoaks (a painful teen soap on British Channel 4 that lends itself rather less to forms of cultural appreciation than say, Dawson's Creek)? Or to hammer home the point, studies of fans of the various call-in quiz channels that have mushroomed in Europe in the past five years?

Kristina: Likewise, I fear that studies of the individual fan and his affect may eclipse those of fan communities, especially when the former may focus on male fans and the latter on females; especially when the affect in the former is individual and personal and in the latter is collective and communal (and, in collectivities that form around responses not valued by the dominant culture, may quite often become political as a result); especially when the former is done by male academics with status in the academy and the latter by females more likely to not have that status.

Cornel: I really don't see the need to compare or benefit in thinking about one eclipsing the other - this would imply a strange scarcity of spaces of academic debate. And I don't think this reflects any sort of structural and gendered power differences with higher education. I think we are hard pressed to find many people engaged in fan studies with any particular status in the academy in any case. And I know you are not suggesting it, but just to be categorical about this: I think it would more than insulting if anyone suggested that male scholars in our fields would disregard the work by female colleagues. Of course there are academic fashions which come and go in circles but I would suggest that we can't explain them in terms of gender, nor is work on fan communities being marginalized. On the contrary, I think following Henry's work, it still very much shapes the canon of the field.

Kristina: I'm only beginning to look into the role of affect and its potential political agency, but my friend Alexis Lothian, with whom I just finished writing an essay (together with Robin Reid) on slash as "queer female space," has been influencing my thinking on the social and political implications of shared/sharing affect. She argues, for example, "that communal articulations of affect, where reactions are shared and discussed, might be locations where the political implications of affect can get hashed out." In that vein, we are rethinking, for example, how "squee"--all too often seen as infantilizing--can actually be a site for embracing one's emotional responses, especially for women who've always prided themselves in their analytic abilities, maturity, etc. Especially when looking at fandom as a space for articulation of non-mainstream ideas and emotions, the role of affect intersects with the political. And I wonder whether it can be so on a purely personal level or whether subcultural characteristics are already communal and community-focused.

In particular, then, I am interested in the way affect functions in conjunction with others, either by sharing one's emotional investment in the text with the community or, even more interesting, I think, the way the community filters, increases, and shapes the text and the fannish affect. (In other words, watching a new episode for me gets affected by my knowledge that I will have others who may also have seen a particular moment and I will be able to share it. Moreover, it is in the analysis and talking and squeeing about it, in the rewriting and the iconing that the text itself becomes *more*, and it is via this shared discussion and shared emotional engagement that the text itself changes.]

Cornel: I don't disagree here....but let's come back to that when looking at texts.

HEIMAT

Kristina: One of the most often heard narratives in my corner of fandom (i.e., slash media fandom) is that of coming home. I like the way you've established the notion of Heimat in Fans, but I think I'd like to add that a sense of "coming home" quite often is intimately tied up with other fans (i.e., I feel like coming home often occurs in the finding of likeminded people--even if that community is totally imaginary). Moreover, I'd consider Heimat by definition a thing of some permanence, so that the narratives I've told and heard is by fans who are FIAWOL, who have found their tribe, so to speak and know they won't leave.

In my essay on the topic I linked to above, I connect being a fan to identity politics, and I think it could be useful to look at the debates in other areas that have had to face the theoretical and personal issues connected to identity politics. In the essay, I was mostly concerned with matters of inclusion and exclusion (are you a fan because you say you are/others say you are/what is gained and lost by declaring that identity/ etc.), but here I'm wondering whether the identity construction of being a fan may in and of itself create an affective space of belonging.

And I think it is that space that I may be vigorously protecting here. I fear that by expanding the terminology of fan to include virtually everyone (whether by including all sorts of fannish behavior as Jenkins does or by redefining it to focus on individual behavior so that most passionate textual engagements become "fannish"), the danger may be that 'real' fans are marginalized yet again. In other words, by focusing on what Rebecca Tushnet has called "normal-folks-with-benefits," I see my own more involved and more invested community fully overshadowed (as has happened with vidding vis a vis machinima) or be redefined as outcasts yet again. That latter fear is what I tried to describe in my short paper for Flow:

As media texts are more widely disseminated and construct their audiences in ever more fan-like ways at the same time as fannish activities become both more visible and more legitimate, the distinctions between creators and viewers, between casual viewers and fans is changing. It would be easy to see these changes as having the potential to create an idyllic convergence playground. The fannish community, however, would have to disavow those parts that do not please the owners of the media product (J.K. Rowling, George Lucas). Certain groups of fans can become legit if and only if they follow certain ideas, don't become too rebellious, too pornographic, don't read the text too much against the grain. That seems a price too high to pay. (source)

Cornel: I agree with your instance on fandom as a space worth defending from commercial interest - even if this might be ultimately a futile struggle. However, I would also add that Heimat is an ambivalent term. It is of course not only 'home', but an imagined space, a vision of belonging - ultimately a fantasy, if one that is indispensable in creating a necessary sense of security; and hence it is ultimately a fantasy that therefore, even if constructed in a communal context, is an inherent individual act of imagination. But what matters more - and here I would point to Dave Morley's recent work over the past decade in particular - home and Heimat are also always rooted in forms of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, of creating an (imagined) Other, which is excluded from the space we call home. And it the potential lack of engagement with the textual Other in fandom, which I am interested in Fans: The Mirror of Consumption.

FANTEXT

Kristina: The other term that really drives home to me just how different our approaches and goals are is the concept of the *fantext*. In fact, it was upon reading your definition of the fantext and comparing it to mine that it suddenly occurred to me why I felt like we disagreed at a most basic level even though I'd nod along when reading Fans most of the time. I think our object of study is ultimately different, or rather, the focus of what we find central is different: you are interested in the individual and his/her relationship to the text while I'm interested in individuals as members of a community and their relationship to that community.

In a way, then, the source text has shifted emphasis and moved into originary (in some cases, only catalyst) function whereas fan discourses and interaction are what continues to sustain the fannish investment and affect. And I'm beginning to wonder, if we're somehow looking at two related (and clearly intersecting) groups that nevertheless differ not only in modes of engagement but also objects of affect. A solitary fan, after all, remains attached to the source text itself only. A community may do so as well, but added to that are the investment in other fans, the shared affect with its increased feedback loop (i.e., shared squee tends to be louder).

At the most extreme end, then, is the fan I'm most interested in, who's ultimately more invested in the community than the source, the fan who defines herself as a slash fan rather than a show specific fan, the fan (like me?) who'll take the fanfic rather than the show on the island. It's those fans I've studied in my research on popslash where I've argued that it is the fan-fan interaction and friendships rather than the para-social interaction between fan and celebrity that is central in popslash fandom("I'm Jealous of the Fake Me"). As such, I view the community as a social network that encourages fans to explore their identities, desires, and sexualities, more so in relation with one another than with the star himself.

So, while I'm really interested in what you say about affect, to me the investment in the community must always be acknowledged (even if that community is virtual or the interaction wholly one-sided) alongside the involvement with the source text. [Because I'm not sure one would exist without the other, i.e., I'm not sure if we could conceive of fans if all we ever saw were individuals. Or, said differently, while a specific fan's engagement may only be in accessing web sites, reading spoilers, etc., someone who more than likely *is* more community connected created those web sites, found and shared those spoilers.]

Cornel: I am not sure I follow your conclusion in the last paragraph. I think you are right that we have focused on different segments of the fan spectrum, but I don't, for example, have a sole interest in atomised fans. Moreover, I think whatever the levels of communal engagement are in an individual's fandom, there are communalities that mean that the term 'fan' has conceptual currency across the spectrum and the process of reading, crucially, is one of them. This leads me to one what I see as a central challenge of contemporary fan studies and indeed audience studies as such (and this is a point on which I think we agree): the need to reconceptualise the notion of texts and textual boundaries in mediated communication. Slash and fan fic you mention are of course texts as well, whether we call them paratexts or give them a different term (indeed as you suggest they often replace the urtext as the focus of fans' reading. Jonathan, for example should be credited out for a range of insightful articles and chapters on how we can conceptualise and address (fan) texts in intertextual space of (mass) media consumption and I should mention others here such as Matt Hills, Chris Scodari, etc. In many ways I think reconceptualisng the text as object of fandom in the triangle of individual, its social networks and different media is the real challenge we face - gender of course shapes and informs this triangle but I don't think it is the single outstanding theme at heart of understanding contemporary fandom and fan cultures.

On that note, having opened with an unashamed plug, I will end with yet another one: It would be great to continue these insightful and lively discussions online as well as offline and I would like to use the opportunity to invite individual papers and panel proposals on this and related fields for the next conference of the International Communication Association in Montreal in May 2008 for which I am the programme planer for the Popular Communication Division. The number of sessions available to us will as always depends on the number of division members we have, so to all those who are ICA members already and those considering joining (you get not only cheaper conference registration but an awful lot of journals for your bucks!) please join the Popular Communication division or renew your division membership if you already are a member. Included in the annual fee of $8 is also a free online subscription of Popular Communication. I hope both the division and the journal will provide additional spaces for these debates - helping to makes sure that rather than feeling that different foci and traditions in the field of fan studies need to compete with each other, we create a forum in which different and diverging voices are heard.

Kristina: Thanks, Cornel, for responding in depth to what was, in effect, a monologue on my part (though hopefully engaging with your previous writing). I am very much looking forward to having a dialog with both you and the readers in the blog/LJ comments. I do want to complement your plug with another, however: many of us--be they grad students, independent scholars, or fan scholars not actually affiliated with academia at all--cannot afford conferences. What many of us have and are doing instead is use the Internet and its ability to connect and allow us to have these conversations and debates. In fact, to me these summer debates have been doing exactly that--connecting people, and I hope they'll continue to do so and that these unconnected spaces we've been inhabiting will continue to merge.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seven, Part One): Kristina Busse and Cornell Sandvoss

INTRODUCTION

Kristina:

I have a PhD in English from Tulane University and teach as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. I have been reading and writing on fan fiction since 1999 and have published a variety of essays on fan fiction and fan culture, including on Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction, popslash, and fandom as queer female space. I coedited with Karen Hellekson, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (McFarland 2006) and am currently coauthoring a book-length study with Louisa Stein on fan artifacts and new media. I write about fan fiction and fandom and fan communities incessantly on my fannish LiveJournal.

The fact that I am an independent scholar is, in many ways, central to my work, because I have specific and quite personal reasons to be interested in the line between professional and amateur, fan writing and pro writing, and the way these get defined in various communities. Despite my disciplinary training and record of publication, I am not paid for my work, which makes me an adjunct--in my academic work of teaching as well as research. In a way, then, my academic work functions like fan work: I do not receive any financial recompense nor does its ideal value (line in CV) contribute to my gaining material benefit.

So, I straddle the line between amateur and professional in a keener way than most. Also, my central mode of fannish engagement is through meta, the grass-roots version of academic criticism, where I am seen as an academic outsider by many fans. By contrast, I cannot quite partake in the proper academic channels and thus feel fannish outsider within academia. This ambiguous position makes me keenly aware of the way my academic work replicates the contested relationship to capitalism and professionalism that fan work (and the fans creating it) exemplifies.

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Cornel: Hello, I should briefly introduce myself as well at this point. I have published on fan audiences in a number of articles and three books, A Game of Two Halves (Routledge, 2003) which focuses solely on football (soccer) fandom - a possibly rather alien topic to most readers of this blog, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Polity Press, 2005) and more recently had the good fortune to be asked by Jonathan Gray and Lee Harrington to co-edit an anthology previously mentioned here and entitled Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2007) which features a wide range of, I think, important contributions by many scholars in the field. In fact Lee, Jonathan and I enjoyed the experience so much that we have gone on to follow in the footsteps of Sharon Mazzarella and Norma Pecora as the editors of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture. I mention this here as we initially thought that we might attract a greater number of papers dedicated to the study of fans and fan cultures given our own backgrounds, but this hasn't quite materialised yet. So please see this an invitation to all scholars out there to consider the journal as a potential publication outlet for their research in the field - needless to say, whichever side of this debate they are on (if indeed there are sides...)!

I am also Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Surrey (UK), but, like Kristina, I am a German exile. I'm not sure this actually matters at all - or rather hope it doesn't (though that is admittedly a rather German thing to say) other than in two respects: a.) in terms of the conceptual and theoretical foundations which in my case tend to draw fairly heavily on German literary, cultural and social theory such as the Frankfurt School and Constance School and b.) in giving us an outsider perspectives on many of the dominant Anglo-American (and let's add Australian) discourses in the field. There are of course always differences in personal taste and genre preferences but I am always struck at how certain instances of popular American television are assumed to be universally known and appreciated. I say this not to complain about a lack of intercultural awareness of fan scholars to whom English is their native language, but because it has shaped my interest and journey through the field. Over the years I have read many studies of fan cultures whose central texts I were and sometimes continue to be been unfamiliar with. This may be a rather heretical admission, but I have to out myself as someone who had read Matt Hills's or John Tulloch's work on Dr Who, long before I had ever seen a single episode. And just to offend the American crowd here as well, when reading the earlier rounds of this discussion, I had to google 'Firefly' - I simply had never seen it. I would like to plea that none of this is ignorance - indeed it would not deter me in the least from enthusiastically reading a study on, say, Firefly fans. But it does mean that my interest in this study and others is not one in particular fan audiences or cultures in and for themselves, but about what these studies tell us about the micro and macro conditions and parameters of (everyday) life in a mediated world and the interplay between structure and agency that takes place within such frames. Anyway, we can return to this kind of Sinnfrage of fan studies later, if you like.

Before we kick start this week's debate, I should say a word or two about the format, however. Owing to my own unavailability earlier this month (the usual excuses are other publication deadlines, exam boards, etc.) and the fact that Kristina was much more organised in writing up her thoughts an earlier stage (and is currently travelling in Europe) the following takes the shape of Kristina outlining her thoughts on the debate and my post hoc replies. Kristina is thus left with the power of agenda setting whereas I enjoyed the right of the last reply.

MALE AND FEMALE FANNISH BEHAVIOR:

Kristina: I feel on some level like we are the exemplar of what I've been shorthanding as the fanboy/fangirl split, and I think it might be useful to both articulate what those differences might be but also to complicate them once we've done so. One of the complaints I've heard most about trying to divvy up fan studies along gender lines (or even daring to suggest that gender might be an issue!) is that that there are too many exceptions to even try to establish categories or definitions. Moreover, I'll start by making a quite enormous collapse that we may have to discuss down the line, namely, I sketch behavior onto gender. In a way, when I personally talk about fanboys and fangirls, it's much less about actual biobodies than it is about certain ways of engaging with source texts and certain ways of theorizing and studying fans. And I may be totally wrong when actually looking at demographics!

But in my home, fannish behavior looks as follows: my husband watches Doctor Who quite passionately. He taped every episode when younger, bought all the tapes, and now owns all the DVDs. Most evenings more or less as long as I've known him, he will sit and watch a couple of episodes--in recent years with our kids. When my older one turned 4, he wanted a Doctor Who birthday party, and it was hard to explain to him that the doctor and Buzz Lightyear weren't quite the same *g* My husband also collects D&D material, less for playing and more as a collector's item. He certainly is quite invested in these texts, both emotionally and financially, but it is the texts and objects rather than other fans that are the center of his focus. Meanwhile, I started defining myself years ago as "a fan of fans," i.e., while I have fallen for a number of media texts over the years, most recently, Stargate Atlantis and Supernatural, my primary fannish engagement is the community and its products, my primary investment time and my primary reward friendships and fannish creative and intellectual artifacts. Or, said differently, when I answer the often voiced question of what I'd take on the proverbial island, it's always the fan creations, never the TV show.

Now, clearly the dynamic in our household is neither universal nor generalizable, but reading Textual Poachers and Fan Fiction and Fan Communities on the one hand and Fan Cultures and Fans on the other, I do begin to wonder whether my family's gendering is not that unusual after all. Now, fanfiction communities are particularly invested in community and fan-created artifacts, so that using that as my measuring stick might be unfair and methodologically problematic. After all, what about the many communities that are predominantly male? What about the lonely fangirl reading her favorite book over and over again all by herself? And even dividing it into a blunt collecting/analyzing versus creating might leave out entire communities of women who debate technical details and men who create emotionally involved works of art.

Cornel: Yes, I think these are very valid points. I actually struggle with the usefulness of introducing gender here as the key dividing line between fans and fan scholars alike and can only echo Will Brooker's earlier comments. I think there are two different questions: The first one is whether we can distinguish between types of either male and female fan behaviour or, secondly, between types of male and female approaches to the study of fandom. Both, in my eyes, are unsustainably essentialist suggestions which I outright reject. You already mentioned a few examples as far as fan behaviour is concerned and we could compile an almost endless list here: consider for example Vermorel and Vermorel's (1985) distinctly private fan fantasies written more often that not by female fans (or indeed fan girls given their age!); conversely, communal consumption contexts are at the heart of many distinctly male fan cultures in, say, sports fandom. Very much the same applies to the academic study of fans and fandom: if there are distinctly male and female approaches these would not correspond with respective foci on individual fans on the one hand and fan communities on the other - let's not forget that Henry has of course laid the foundations and established the canon in the study of fandom as an interpretive community. Even if there was a correlation between these positions and the gender of particular scholars, it would be a yet greater challenge to argue that this is not a coincidental correlation but grounded in quintessential gender differences.

In the earlier rounds of this discussion, the question of gender and fandom was linked to race by one contributor who remarked that however commendable it may be not wanting to distinguish on the grounds of race, it nevertheless constitutes a very real barrier in people's lives. This is of course true, and I think the analogy is interesting, but the conclusion is ultimately erroneous. Let's think this analogy through for and imagine we would suggest that there are forms of 'white' and 'black' fandom. This would be nothing short of utterly racist! However, this doesn't mean that race and ethnicity are not one of the many socio-demographic lines that structure given fan cultures, impact upon audiences' choices of objects of fandom and inform cultural and cultural hierarchies associated with fandom (remember Thornton's revealing documentation and analysis of the discrimination faced by black adolescent males in 1990s UK club culture). Equally, gender (alongside class and other vectors of social stratification) is one of various important social and cultural parameter that structure fandom, as it is indeed a faultline in the divisions of power in contemporary society and hence naturally constitutes a key concern of fan studies. Yet, this is a far cry from overburdening gender by making it the organising principle of a fundamental and essentialist dichotomy of fan audiences.

COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL:

Kristina: And yet I can't shake this (possibly mistaken) belief that there *is* a gendered tendency--if not in the fans then maybe in the academics? Given that you and I probably fit into both categories, it seems like we should maybe begin by defining our terms, because that's where for me the first (and possibly biggest) disconnect and differentiation takes place. You define *fandom* as "the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text" (8). In so doing, you clearly shift the emphasis from community to individual: "this focus on communities and tightly networked fans fails to conceptualize important aspects of the relationship between the modern self, identity and popular culture which forms my particular concern here" (5).

To me, on the other hand, the terms mean quite different things. Fandom, to me, requires a community and participation in that community--and possibly self identification with that community. [And I feel the need to insert here that when I talk about "community" I clearly do not think of it as a monolithic entity but rather as always a collection of different and differing, complex and contradictory communities, where fans may be members of many communities over time and even simultaneously.] I'll just cite myself here since I think my short essay Fandom-is-a-Way-of-Life versus Watercooler Discussion; or, The Geek Hierarchy as Fannish Identity Politics articulates my very objection:

I want to suggest that we distinguish between fan and fandom as well as acknowledge that there are different trajectories that combine into levels of fannishness. In other words, an intense emotional investment in a media text that is wholly singular may create a fan but does not make the individual part of a larger fandom, whereas a person enacting fannish behavior may not define him- or herself as a fan. It thus might be useful to consider the overlapping but not interdependent axes of investment and involvement as two factors that can define fannish engagement. Moreover, we need to consider models that can differentiate between people who are fans of a specific text, those that define themselves as fans per se, and those that are members of fandom.

Cornel: I actually don't agree that I shift the emphasis from communities to the individual. I tried to broaden our definition of what we call fandom and who we call fans, yet in doing so I do not exclude the established body of work focusing on fan communities which is in particular associated with what Jonathan, Lee and I have described as the 'first wave of fan studies'. Rather I, as have indeed others, included fields of audience studies which, to my mind, are also of importance and warrant further study. And I think there is a certain logic in accepting to recognise those people who call themselves fans - whether they meaningfully participate in interpretive communities or not - as fans, as indeed others who may shun the label but display very similar forms of textual attachment, communal engagement or textual activity.

I think while widely used, Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst's (Audiences, Sage 1998) highly useful taxonomy of different fan audiences deserves yet greater attention in this context, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic (from a UK vantage point that is). While Matt Hills has rightly pointed to some issues concerning the terminology Abercrombie and Longhurst employed, they provide a very useful map of the last field of popular audiences which helps us to juxtapose and position various studies of different fan groups and cultures meaningfully in relation to each other. In some of these studies, in particular those focusing on whom Abercrombie and Longhurst describe as 'enthusiasts', the emphasis will be very much on community, in others it won't. I think both are about fans, both are engaging in different forms of fandom, but at the same time, they are different forms of engagement with different social and cultural consequences. I think this only underlines the significance of studying fandom across the spectrum of audiences or popular media.

Kristina: On the other hand, there is also a spectrum between the individual fan who has a deep investment in the beloved text and the people with a more casual enjoyment, and it is that distinction that seems crucial to me. As a result, I do wonder whether just liking a show, following a sports team, or listening to a band isn't a type of activity that is so universal that the category of fan becomes emptied out. I don't want to border police and define who gets to be called a fan and who doesn't, but I fear that an all-too-inclusive definition would become useless for any study or categorization if the definition were so wide that noone would *not* be included. If fan simply denotes someone liking something, then there's really no need to create a separate category.

Cornel: I am not sure why the fact that many of us, maybe all, are fans in one form or another "empties out" the term. I would make a similar point here as in my discussion of Fiske's (1992) essay that moves towards a normative definition of fans: I can't see any benefit in using a definition that corresponds with pre-formulated expectations. Put more crudely than you are suggesting (but it illustrates the point), if we define fans as "good consumers', then naturally only "good consumers" are fans!

I think this is not so much a question of who is a fan but when we are a fan. Saying that most of us are fans doesn't mean we are all fans all the time, but rather that being a fan describes a particular segment of our engagement with media and those around us - an engagement that I would argue derives its significance not least from the fact that it spills over into other social and cultural fields, in the way the reading position of the fan is more and more evident (or maybe we just more and more realise it is) in other fields of cultural and political engagement (see Jonathan's essay in Fandom for example).

Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut, Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part series elaborating on comments I made to Mother Jones as part of their special Democracy 2.0 issue. Today, I take up a few more of the many implications of this interplay between participatory culture and participatory democracy. Democracy and the Participation Gap

While I remain firm in my belief that, as I explained here some months ago, the rise of participatory culture has the potential to renew participatory democracy, I remain concerned about the participation gap, those who lack the technical access, the cultural competencies, and the sense of empowerment needed to fully participate in this new political culture.

MJ: Are there elements about the use of technology that could make the political process less democratic?

HJ: If the central conversation about the election is only online, rather than through broadcast television, large numbers of people will simply not have access to what the candidates are saying. So, for some people, this campaign is going to be more accessible than ever before. They have access to more information; they can drill deeper; they can maintain regular contact with the campaign; they can interact with other supporters and so forth. For others, who have no access or limited access to the Internet, moving all this activity online suggests that they don't count, their voices don't matter. They have no access to the information to make reliable decisions. And it's not the campaigns who are doing that, so much as broadcast television, which is decreasing the coverage that it provides of the party conventions. It's local newspapers that are cutting back the number of pages devoted to candidates for office. Those are the things that make the use of new media less democratic, because they are falling back on the presence of the new media to justify cutting back on basic information sources that citizens who don't have online access would rely on to follow the political process....

Whenever we look towards new and emerging platforms as a resource for democracy, we must at the same time consider who is being left behind. And I do see dangers at a moment when mainstream media is cutting down on its news coverage of the presidential nominating process and much of the information is moving to cable or digital media. The people who are going to have to work hardest to get access to information and participate within the process are going to be those who have historically felt the most disenfranchised in the first place. The move towards digital campaigning may capture the imagination of many young voters but it may also exclude many low income participants.

Social Networks as Political Interfaces

My conversation with Mother Jones turned towards the use of social networking sites, another major innovation in this year's campaign:

HJ: I think some of it has to do with the use of MySpace by the Obama campaign, which is something that I don't think is necessarily being [deployed] by the other campaigns as effectively yet--[Obama's supporters show] an understanding of how you use social networking to reach young voters. It's not about bringing people to your site and keeping them there; it's about giving people the resources to take your message with them wherever they want to go. It's allowing people to befriend the Obama campaign via MySpace and the other social networking pages. It's really clever because it makes the social affiliation of the campaign much more visible, and it allows all those people to connect to each other and feel a sense of affiliation, as opposed to simply receiving a message from on high. That's why the anti-Hillary 1984 campaign commercial that circulated was so much more credible than the one that reacted to it, because there is a sense of the Clinton campaign speaking to us from a contained space as opposed to breaking free of that and creating a new relationship with the voters.

In many ways, the interfaces campaigns adopt model their idea about the relationship between political leaders and citizens. I have long felt that the most authoritarian candidates tend to have top-down structures built into their web presences, where-as those candidates who want to establish a more dialogic relationship are drawn towards community-building and networking capacities on their sites. Most of the media attention on the campaign's use of MySpace has focused exclusively on the direct links the campaign is creating with individual voters, but it is part of the nature of social networks that it is also enabling supporters to connect to each other without going through a central hub and it remains to be seen how this impacts the campaign. It's interesting to think about Hillary's use of campaign videos in this way. Supporters see these videos as the later day equivalent of the Fire Side Chat. I get the analogy. FDR used radio, then a relatively new political platform, to speak directly to Americans in their living rooms and adopted a frank, informal, and conversational tone appropriate to the nature of such an exchange. In many ways, Hillary Clinton is adopting that same tone in her confessional-style videos -- which would seem totally appropriate for an era of broadcasting but which now seem much too one-directional to work in a networked culture.

Credability, Partisanship, and Wiki-Politics

As the interview continued, Mother Jones asked me about issues of credibility given the ways that videos and other content now circulates well beyond its original context and given what I have said here about the likelihoods that many of the videos will attempt to mask their origins.

MJ: What effects is this going to ultimately have on how people filter the information that they're getting through this media? Eventually, will they simply disbelieve anything they see?

HJ: I think there's going to be skepticism and not cynicism. We should be skeptical of the sources of information that come to us via these grassroots channels. At the same time, we've seen these emerging knowledge cultures, these sort of large-scale grassroots communities that pull in information and debunk these things in very quick order. The turnaround is really fast, and for those people who are wired, that flow of information is surprisingly effective, what people are calling "collective intelligence," the ability of people to collectively pool their knowledge and share what they found. And I think that, actually, collective intelligence is a profoundly democratic process. It's social at its root, and it allows people to form communities around debating political issues and how the candidates are representing themselves to the public. It makes us less susceptible to negative campaign advertising than we've been before.

MJ: How sophisticated do you think online media consumers are at this stage? And to what degree are these collective intelligence systems currently up to the task of catching misleading information?

HJ: The answer to the first question is relatively sophisticated. If we make our political process more like Wikipedia, then I think we create the space that's needed for people to pull knowledge and form a consensus and weed through conflicting evidence. I think we're not quite there yet. I think the interesting thing is how much this next campaign cycle accelerates the process of people moving from playing with collective intelligence to deploying collective intelligence as a source of political power. I think that's what we're going to see unfolding in the next couple of years. And I don't know if we're ready for the task yet, but I think we're going to grow up pretty fast.

The reference to Wikipedia, here, picks up on something I said earlier in the conversation which is missing from the web transcript but was quoted in the print magazine:

The blogosphere has done a really bad job in general of finding a common space between disagreeing parties. It probably does contribute to the further partisanization of American politics. Wikipedia represents the alternative model, one where people from different political backgrounds could work together. But it depends on the willingness of the candidates and the campaigns to try to come up with a purple strategy as opposed to a red-vs-blue strategy.

Without idealizing Wikipedia, the group has developed a series of ethical norms about how to deal with conflicting views or competing claims which could be a good model for how people of good will but opposing perspective might work together to reshape the political process. We have created a climate in this country which makes it difficult if not impossible for either political party to govern because both are preoccupied with winning.

My reference here to a Purple strategy is a gesture towards a well publicized map produced in the aftermath of the last election which tried to represent the balance of votes in each state based on a blending of red and blue. No state is pure blue or red, despite our most common ways of depicting election results. In fact, many of the individual states are closely balanced. Showing them as purple states helps reveal some of the commonalities between different regions of the country rather than focusing purely on divisions. And so some political commentators have started to talk about "purple strategy" and you can see signs of this "purple strategy" emerging from candidates such as Obama in the Democratic Party or Hucklebee in the GOP. My fantasy was that campaigns might use wikis to try to identify points of consensus which could be used to broaden their political base, rather than deploying bloggers to try to draw blood from the opposing camp.

Interestingly, Mother Jones also spoke with Wikipedia visionary Jimmy Wales to get his perspective:

JW: One of the concerns people have had about blogs is that they are going to have a very divisive influence because people only read blogs that they agree with, and they won't get their news from the mainstream media, which are supposed to be neutral. But you see a couple of things happening. First, blogs are hardly the only form of new media. People come to Wikipedia all the time, which is quite clearly as neutral as anything can be, I think. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. At Wikipedia itself, we are now seeing a large volume of information being created that has been put through an extensive process of compromise, with people from very diverse viewpoints really hammering away at it to find some compromised view that everybody is satisfied with.

Also, you see people who are really active in reading blogs do end up reading opinions that they disagree with because bloggers get into arguments and link up back and forth and have those debates. So people do get exposed to alternative viewpoints, far more than they would if they had one source of information. I think it's pretty clear that people are getting better information than they used to.

I hope to write more about the use of new media in the campaign in the coming months.

A Valuable Resource

In parting, let me do a shout out to a very interesting project focused on the role of media in presidential campaigns, produced by Project Look Sharp. If you are an educator, you can download here a range of images, sound files, and videos going back across the entire history of the nation, which you can use in talking with your students about the political process. I was lucky enough to see a presentation by Chris Sperry from Project Look Sharp at the Alliance for a Media Literate America last month and being the political campaign buff that I was, had a grand time seeing the materials they had collected -- from images of 19th century street parades to the fireside chats, from Nixon's Checkers speech to Saturday Night Live spoofs of the presidential debates.

Democracy 2.0 (Director's Cut, Part One)

I am proud to be featured as one of the experts on new media and American politics featured in the August 2007 issue of Mother Jones, alongside such notaries as Howard Dean and his former campaign director Joe Trippi, A-list blogger Jerome Armstrong, digerati Esther Dyson, legal theorist Lawrence Lessig, conservative icon Grover Norquist, Moveon.org's Eli Pariser, Wikipedia visionary Jimmy Wales, and author David Weinberger (Everything is Miscelaneous). The magazine is taking inventory of the ways that new media tools and techniques are reshaping the campaign process, looking back at the 2004 campaign and forward to the current political season. Even if you read the printed edition of the magazine, you should check out their web edition which includes more extensive versions of the interviews quoted in their articles. I was bemused that the quotations from me they selected for use in the magazine emphasized some of the concerns I have about the current shape of online democracy, leaving me looking like one of the crankiest people they interviewed. I have to say that playing the part of a pessimist in a publication like Mother Jones is a most familiar position for me, given my reputation as a critical utopianist. But, I tend to spell out the positives and negatives in interviews -- most of the time, they go with my most wide-eyed comments and this time, they emphasize some of my worries. I thought I would share some of what I said here and offer a few more thoughts about the role which new media is playing in the presidential campaign so far. Some of it builds on ideas I first introduced in my Technology Review column, "Photoshop for Democracy," and developed more fully in the final chapters of Convergence Culture.

One thing to keep in mind: campaigns are often early adopters and adapters of new media technologies as they seek new interfaces with potential voters. The most innovative use of new and emerging technologies comes from insurgent or dark horse candidates who are trying to get their message out with limited funds and have less to lose from taking risks. If what they do seems to work, you will see it taken up in the next campaign cycle by more established and thus more tactically conservative candidates. So, for example, last go around, Howard Dean's campaign staff went for broke in their use of platforms like Meetup to organize face to face meetings with voters, of blogs to give voters a greater sense of access to the candidates and the campaigns, and the use of the web to raise money from smaller donors. By this election cycle, all of these tactics are taken for granted and they are being used by pretty much every candidate in the race. This go around, the newer tactics have to do with social network sites, such as Myspace, to create a stronger sense of affiliation with the campaign and the use of YouTube and other video sites to distribute content. Further out on the horizon might be the use of virtual worlds, such as Second Life, to allow candidates to "meet personally" with key leaders scattered around the country or the use of Wiki software to allow citizens to play a stronger role in shaping the candidate's platform and position papers. (So far, we are not seeing major candidates adopt these later approaches, but the campaign is young and anything can happen.)

Politics YouTube Style

All of this, however, frames this from the wrong angle though, since it keeps us focused on what the candidates and their campaign staff is doing, while as my response to this first question suggests a lot of what is most interesting in the campaigns is emerging bottom up -- from citizens taking media in their own hands.

MJ: What areas do you think are going to be the most ripe for experimentation and innovation?

HJ: I think a lot of it is not going to be through campaigns but through loosely affiliated organizations. We saw this last time with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Texans for Truth. Those are examples where the candidates lost control of their own campaigns to some degree, or at least maintained a level of plausible deniability. I think the most interesting work I saw during the last election cycle came out of True Majority, an organization that was using appropriation and transformation of popular culture to reach younger voters in a hipper way. I wrote about the role of what I call "Photoshop for Democracy," which is the use of Photoshop collages as a kind of grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons. What happens when you tap popular culture, you pull politics much closer to people's everyday lives. So, I'm very interested in the ways those kinds of new uses of media touch both campaigns and citizen groups and the uneasy relationship between the two. The positive side is that it gets more citizens involved; it develops a more playful language; it produces a more engaged electorate; it transforms the language of politics. The downside is that checks on negative campaigning break down completely, and that's what we saw the last time with the Swift Boat Veterans: They went lower faster than any campaign would have been able to do on their own.

A key phrase in this passage was "plausible deniability." I think the rise of citizen media makes it possible for campaigns to keep certain supporters at arms length, allowing them to do some of the dirty business of the campaign while allowing the candidate to deny any and all association. Candidates are required to verbally endorse all paid advertisements sponsored by their campaigns, where-as these are the kinds of spots they can deny. We don't know for sure what, if any, involvement the Obama campaign had, for example, in the distribution of the anti-Hillary mashup of the Apple 1984 campaign, though Mother Jones includes an interview with Phil de Vellis, its creator, who had this to say about the video:

MJ: I'm sure you are aware of the skepticism surrounding the situation-that people just don't believe that there was no campaign involvement. You lived with an Obama PR flack.

PD: I'm friends with people on every campaign. Politics is a really small world-it's really like junior high. The [Obama] campaign was not involved in it at all. As soon as they found out, I left the company. I think Obama's a great guy, and I think he's running a great campaign, but that doesn't make me officially part of the campaign. But am I connected on one of these trees that connects all the great rock bands-like the drummer of Pink Floyd is also in Supertramp. Yeah, there's some of that. But I have the capability to do that on my own and the ability to get it out there. I'm kind of a utility player. I can do it all. I can also just shut up and watch the fireworks go off and that's what I did.

MJ: In your response on Huffington Post, you said you wanted to express your feelings about the Democratic primary and also to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. And in light of what's happened recently with Obama's MySpace page, how does a campaign harness the power of that citizen without it getting completely out of control?

PD: They can't-the game really has changed. They can't exercise the same amount of control over the campaign. During the Dean campaign, nobody ever said, "Oh, look at what your crazy supporter did." Reporters were interested in the technology and never really read anything people were writing-and they were writing really crazy things. So I would say it's probably best to encourage supporters to go out there and be advocates and at some point, [candidates] are going to have to distance themselves if it's not what they intended.

I suspect we are going to be tracing story after story like this throughout the forthcoming campaign -- videos produced by supporters who may or may not have direct links to the campaign. Such videos will have the look and feel of those produced on the most grassroots level, even if some of them -- like the notorious Al Gore's Penguin Army -- turn out to be produced by top-flight agencies. In the past few months, we've seen some fascinating examples of how videos can function in the campaign -- from the sexy Obama Girl video to the videos being produced by Firefighters to challenge Rudy Guiliani's attempts to capitalize on his role in 9/11. (Could firefighters be the new Swift Boat Captains?) Interestingly enough, we are even seeing the idea of "fan parody" move from the fringes of the last campaign to the absolute center -- witness Bill and Hillary's participation in a video spoofing The Sopranos (which was itself a promotion for their do it yourself campaign theme song competition.) These videos are both interesting because of their style (the use of parody as a vehicle for mainstream political discourse) and because of the mode of their circulation (becoming something that supporters can actively spread across cyberspace). As I told Mother Jones, "The video's becoming the modern equivalent of the campaign button -- something you wear, you display on your blog to spread the message to your friends and neighbors."

Lawrence Lessig also discusses the role of parody, appropriation, and grassroots video production within the political process:

Lawrence Lessig: The campaigns are realizing that if last election was defined by Swift Boat, this election there will be a million Swift Boats. There will be content showing up that will be much more interesting and watched by many more people than what the campaigns are creating. That changes the way that presidential campaigns are defined, where they buy up as much of the speaking space as possible. No one yet knows how this is going to play out.

In the analog world, it wasn't really that anyone was stopping ordinary people from becoming political actors, it was that the costs of doing so were so much larger. The technology is unleashing a capacity for speaking that before was suppressed by economic constraint. Now people can speak in lots of ways they never before could have, because the economic opportunity was denied to them.

MJ: So what does that mean for the quality of the conversation? Not that it's a really high bar.

LL: If you look at the top 100 things on YouTube or Google it's not like it's compelling art. There's going to be a lot of questions about whether it's compelling politics either. We can still play ugly in lots of ways, but the traditional ways of playing ugly are sort of over. This medium is only a medium if people are interested, and we'll get as good as we deserve.