The Getting of Wisdom or Orientation MIT Style

Sorry that the blog is getting very little of my attention this week. Yesterday is one of a small handful of days I have missed posting since I launched this blog sixteen months ago. But I have been very much in the business of orienting new students this week. This process takes over my life both at home (I am a housemaster in Senior House, an MIT dorm where we have no frosh and their parents arriving this week) and at the office (I am co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program). On the home front, Senior House welcomes new students by dropping thousands of bouncy balls from the roof of our building while "Go Ask Alice" blares from the sound system and strobe lights flash in their faces. It can be a vaguely out of body experience but it captures the unexpected quality of life in this dorm. I put a fair amount of time this weekend getting to know some of the new students and more importantly trying to calm down their anxious parents. One of the neighboring dorm has a pair of cutting shears at their front desk where students check in with the note, "use these to cut the cord." I know how painful it was for us to drive away and leave our son in a strange city for the first time, so I have great sympathy for such parents, but we also stress in our dorm that we as housemasters are not a second set of parents, that students are responsible for making their own decisions, and that most of the policies in the house originate from the community of student residents and are not imposed top down by administrators. One of our primary jobs is to try to insure that students have the space to make their own decisions, including make their own mistakes, within what has historically been a highly libertarian dorm culture.

Today, the new CMS graduate students arrive for a two day orientation process, designed to introduce them to both the academic and research side of the program. Today's focus is on the academic side. Each of our students is asked to use a medium or media of their choice to prepare a brief introduction of themselves to their fellow classmates. We very much want their first experience in the program to be one which bridges between theory and practices and encourages them to reflect on both the nature of identity (how to express who they are to someone who doesn't know them) and the nature of medium (how to creatively deploy the affordances of media to express some aspect of themselves). Students come with a wide array of different skills and experiences with media. Past presentations have included comic books, story boards, animated films, remix videos, chalk talks, costumed performances, power point presentations, sound mashups, and everything in between.

Another highlight of today's events will be our book discussion. Each year, we choose a recent book in the field of media studies (or a sampler of recent articles) which we ask all of the students to read over the summer. The books are selected because they embody key themes or topics which shape our instructional and research efforts for the coming year. The books become a shared reference point for our community -- in the weeks leading up to the student's arrival and in the weeks that follow.

This year, we selected Charles R. Acland (ed.), Residual Media. If you read my work earlier this summer on retrofuturism and Dean Motter, you will know that I have already found this book to be a useful intellectual resource myself. As a program which deals so often in the space of New Media, we felt this book set the right tone for our students. The new focus on Residual Media gives us a more layered and dynamic picture of the process of media change, helping us to focus on the ways that the emergence of new media impacts the entire ecology of existing media technologies and practices. When one medium becomes new, it typically means that another medium becomes... well, old. The writers in this collection draw on a range of different theoretical models for thinking about the concept of residual media and for offering models for understanding the process of media in transition (including McLuhan, Williams, Innis, Benjamin, and others). We like the broadly comparative approach the contributors take -- many of them discussing the range of media in place at a particular historical juncture -- as well as the mix of very different media discussed across the different contributions. The Comparative Media Studies emphasizes an approach which thinks across media, across historical periods, across disciplines, and across national borders, and we see Acland and his contributors to be very much exploring this same space.

In case you are interested, previous year's books have included Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's Remediation: Understanding New Media, Hamid Nafficy's Home, Exile, Homeland, Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins's Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, Marie-Laurie Ryan's Narrative Across Media:The Languages of Storytelling, and Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Each of these books makes a valuable contribution to the development of comparative perspectives in media studies. Taken as a whole, this list would represent a pretty good starter set of readings in our field.

Tomorrow, we will take our students on a tour of the various CMS research initiatives, before settling down for extended meetings within the research teams.

Orientation isn't all hard work, though: our students will also enjoy a retro evening at a local 50s themed bowling ally tonight and tomorrow we are getting a tour of Boston's newly finished Institute for Contemporary Art. I have to race off now to actually attend these sessions but I hope you've enjoyed this window into our orientation process. (It's the only thing I have on my mind this week in any case so I couldn't think of anything else to write about).

Two New Aca-Fen Blogs

The Blogging Bug seems to be taking root across the Aca-Fan universe. Today, I want to give a shout out to two recently launched blogs, both created by participants in this summer's Gender and Fan Culture conversations, both dealing with topics which will be of interest to a fair cross section of my readers. The first is Graphic Engine, which describes itself as a blog about "special effects, videogames, film and television." Graphic Engine reflects the ruminations and speculations of Bob Rehak, an assistant professor of film and media studies at Swarthmore College. I have known Rehak since he was a masters student at the University of North Carolina doing work on avatars, first person shooters, and psychoanalysis. He recently finished up a Ph.D in Communication and Culture at Indiana University, where his research centered around special effects. I had the pleasure of featuring some of his work on special effects, the Star Trek blueprints, and early fan culture as part of a panel I put together on Convergence and Science Fiction for last year's Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. (This panel also featured Beth Coleman on Machinima and A Scatter Darkly; Geoffrey Long on transmedia storytelling, negative capability, and the Hensons; and Robert Kozinets on Star Trek fan cinema and branding cultures). We've long known that there was a male technically oriented fandom around Star Trek whose history parallels that of the female fanzine community; I touched on some aspects of this fan culture in my chapter on Star Trek at MIT in Science Fiction Audiences, but Rehak's work really takes us deep inside that world.

The Star Trek research is part of a much larger reconsideration of the social and cultural history of special effects. His new blog seems first and foremost about the cultural dimensions of special effects -- including attention to the effects industry and its fans, as well as to the economic, technical, and aesthetic factors that shape the place of special effects in the contemporary media landscape. Consider, for example, this passage from an early post about watching the recent Harry Potter film in 3D IMAX:

I already knew that, as with Superman Returns, only a portion of Phoenix would be 3D. What surprised me was how explicitly this was made clear to spectators, both as a matter of publicity and in ad-hoc fashion. Warnings were taped on the ticket window: ONLY THE LAST 20 MINUTES OF HARRY POTTER ARE IN 3D. The man who tore my ticket told me the same thing, in a rote voice, as he handed me the yellow plastic glasses. As the lights went down, a recorded announcement reiterated the point a third time, except in a tone of awe and promise: "When you see the flashing icon at the bottom of the screen, put on your glasses, and prepare to enter the spectacular world of Harry Potter in an amazing action climax" was the gist of it.

All this tutoring, not just in the timing of the glasses, but the proper level of anticipation! Calibrating the audience's reactions, indeed their perceptions, stoking the excitement while warning us not to get too excited. It went hand-in-hand with the promos for the Imax format itself, playing before the film and describing the awesome fidelity and sensory intensification we were about to experience. It seemed odd that we needed such schooling; aren't 3D and giant-screen technologies about removing layers of mediation?

But of course that's naïve; the most basic theory of cinematic spectacle reminds us that special effects (and Imax 3D, like sound, color, widescreen, and other threshold bumps, is a kind of meta-special-effect, an envelope or delivery system for smaller, more textually specific clusters of effects) function both as enhancements of illusion's power and as a reminder of the technology involved in bringing the illusion to us. At the movies, we're perfectly capable of believing in what we see while also believing in (and celebrating) its constructed nature; this is as true of special effects as it is of the editing that strings together a story, or our perception of Albus Dumbledore as being simultaneously the headmaster of Hogwarts and a performance (of subtle strength, in this case) by Michael Gambon.

This early piece turns out to be simply the prelude to a series of posts which explores how Harry Potter (the book series) is being "transcoded" into a film franchise. Here, for example, he builds on some comments that Jason Mittell has made about the ways Deathly Hollows throws down a challenge to filmmakers:

One now reads Harry Potter with the movies in mind, accompanying the print with at least sporadic visual associations distilled from the films' contents. Many sequences in Deathly Hallows struck me as excessively cinematic, tilted toward some future storyboard: one minor instance comes early in the book, when characters encounter a roomful of colorful paper airplanes that are really interoffice memos in the Ministry of Magic. Maybe because I had just seen Order of the Phoenix, which memorably gives form to the Ministry and its darting airborne memos, the book's scene immediately "read" in cinematic terms. But would I have had this sensation even without seeing any of the movies? Is it possible that Rowling is just that good, that descriptive, a writer?

I'm not saying any of this is a bad thing; indeed, I'm excited to witness the gigantic syncopated rhythms of a vastly profitable and popular media system that coordinates its printed and filmic incarnations with the grace of those balletic paper airplanes. But I do think we need to carefully dissect the processes involved in the transcoding - in the visualization - and suggest that special visual effects are a central place to begin the investigation.

He has promised a forthcoming entry focused on how the cover art and chapter illustrations of Mary GrandPre "both set a visual agenda for the stories and mutate in step with the movies' casting decisions and production design." As a Potter fan, I look forward to reading more of Rehak's thoughts on the franchise, alongside other interesting posts which describe his encounter with the Enterprise model at the Smithsonian Institute, his thoughts about the career of makeup artist William Tuttle (who recently passed away), or reactions to Laura Mulvey's essay, "The Culmsy Sublime." Along the way, he includes some thoughts on the aesthetics and psychology of computer game design and on his preparations for teaching a film history class.

Stranger 109 explores the intersections of "gaming, culture, and technology," with a strong focus on the Machinima movement. Robert Jones, a Ph.D candidate at New York University, has launched the blog as an extension of his dissertation research. Jones describes his research project this way:

My research spans over numerous topics in the videogame world. As a cultural critic, I approach the ways in which games function in our daily lives: socially, politically and economically. My dissertation focuses specifically on how all these aspects converge on the videogame subculture known as Machinima. As an extension of both hacking and modding culture, machinima presents a unique form of transformative play and a new way of understanding gamers as cultural producers. With the expansion of what has become known as Web 2.0 Culture, we increasingly live in a world defined by tool sets that enable consumer production. As a decade old phenomenon, machinima's appropriation of videogame engines as filmmaking tool sets represents a precursor to this trend that offers a rich historical insight ripe for investigation. In addition, I am also very interested in how the videogame medium functions as a potential tool of political communication in either its traditional interactive game or machinima forms.

There is so much machinima being produced today that it is helpful to have someone like Jones spotlight interesting and innovative work and provide interviews with important creators working in this space. Jones takes seriously the potentials of games as a medium, as is suggested by his recent discussion of Danny Ladonne's controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG:

Despite gaming's new found acceptance within mainstream culture, it has yet to find a place of legitimacy as a means of serious expression. Whereas Bowling for Columbine was championed by many as an important reflection on the Littleton tragedy, SCMRPG was seen as trivializing the event. So the content of the game becomes completely irrelevant simply because it occurs within the context of a game. And this poses the biggest hurdle for games as political expression. If you have not had a chance to play through the game, I would recommend doing so. Play it not because it is enjoyable (because it most certainly is not), but because Ladonne consructs a text that forces the player to consider other possible explanations than Klebold and Harris were simply monsters. Whereas most of the negative responses suggest that the game celebrates the tragedy, playing through reveals a thoughtful engagement of what should only be considered as a complex issue.

Jones has adopted a stance which allows him to document and defend the ambitions of machinima and serious games producers alike, while also raising questions about the sometimes dubious creative decisions shaping the mainstream games industry. We see this later perspective in a very interesting recent post supporting the charges of racism which have been leveled against a recently released trailer for Resident Evil 5, depicting a white man's encounter with a primitive African tribe. So often, such debates pit cultural critics who know about the history of racial representations with fan defenders who know and respect genre conventions. But, because Jones writes as a fan, he knows how to use genre history to sharpen and nuance the criticisms leveled against the preview:

As one of the most well-respected franchises within the genre of Survival Horror, Resident Evil takes its roots in the cinematic tradition of the zombie films pioneered by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Released in 1968, the film provided a rather poignant critique of the racial tensions in the United States. Often overlooked as "monster movies," the racial allegories that played out in Romero's films called attention to the issues of black representation in film at the time. The films were unique in their use of African-American protagonists who become the heroes of the films, saving white people from the "white" zombies. Metaphorically, becoming a zombie embodies the internalization of racist ideologies. Part of the commentary made by Romero here is that as a single individual, racism is not too hard to fight. As with the zombies, the strength lies in numbers. So for Romero, the infection that one zombie passes onto its victims and transforms them into zombies demonstrates the danger of racism and how it works.

Fastforward 40 years and the racial landscape in the United States has improved tremendously; however, as Resident Evil 5's trailer and mixed response would indicate, we are far from any sort of Colors of Benetton racial utopia. Platt's main issue with the trailer is a valid one. It clearly recreates racial stereotypes of Africans as savage peoples who need to be saved from themselves by White men. So the tragic twist in this latest iteration of Resident Evil is that while the franchise borrows from a film genre rooted in social critiques of racism, it devolves into an even older genre of film notorious for its horrific depiction of Blackness as savage and Whiteness as rational: the colonial adventure films. Simba (1955), which depicts the Mau-Mau rebellion that took place in Kenya, embodies this genre and the way it portrays blacks as the dangerous 'other,' while valorizing the colonial attempt to provide salvation to these savage people. The images from the game seem to at least echo this from what I have seen.

While it may be unfair to pass judgement on RE5 based solely on the trailer, the issue of representation of African-Americans in gaming has been one that has gone long unexamined. So when fanboys attack Platt's concerns by saying that no one had any problem with the previous RE's because the zombies were largely white, they are missing the larger media history in which this game sits. Because African-Americans have largely been relegated to secondary roles in film, with considerably fewer roles in total, the few representations they do get often portray them in limited capacities, often depicted as the cause of the problem as in the case of Simba. Whites, on the other hand, benefit from a myriad of representations and are not necessarily hurt by any single negative depiction.

But what concerns me more about the RE5 trailer is that it fits within most of the games that we see come out each week in that we are once again provided a white hero to play, which to me is the biggest way that gaming further perpetuates the racial intolerance we continue to suffer from. As an African-American man, you get to be either an athlete or gangster in the vast majority of games. So like film once had to overcome the racial barrier, so too does gaming. Much of this comes out of the lack of material representation of people of color on the level of development. Since the average game designer is a white male of 32 years of age, the lack of racial diversity in playable characters is no surprise. Only once we had more Black directors did we see a change in the film landscape. As gaming continues to grow and become even more a part of Black culture can we even hope this trend will change.

I am constantly on the look out for other aca-fen blogs. Let us know what you are reading or writing these days.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part Two): Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills

And Matt's Half-dozen Questions: 1. To what extent are other cultural differences as significant as gender when thinking about the forces that act on fandom and fan studies? Should we be debating class identities and fandom here, for example?

CD: It seems clear to me that the significance of gender as a factor in fan experiences, fan identities, fan practices and fan communities depends a great deal on what we're discussing. For example, gender is crucial to a HPslash fan's experiences, identities, practices and communities in a way that's not necessarily true for a YouTube/MySpace-member who's a fan of The Decemberists. I'm not saying gender is ever irrelevant or even unimportant, but there are clearly degrees of importance. Or intensities, if you like. I think when we talk about "fandom" without acknowledging those differences we do it a disservice. Moreover, identity categories are far from the only factors that affect fandom. Taste, education and various types of literacy, for example, might be more important terms for thinking about what intensities matter to being part of some fandoms or fan communities than gender or class (and no I don't think taste, education and literacy can be reduced to class any more than to gender).

So I'm for being careful about what sort of fan practice we're talking about before we set up gender as the/a prime structuring principle. But even when gender is obviously crucial I still worry about being too structuralist about it. Let's say I belong to a particular HPslash-centric fan subcommunity - what and how gender matters to me, to what I produce, to that subcommunity, to its place in that fandom and relation to other fandoms is still a slippery and changeable thing. Gender will always be important, but not always in the same way, even just for me. Moreover, gender won't be important as something produced in "the world" and then responded to by me, my subcommunity, my fandom, but will be something we are helping to produce in not at all homogenous ways. If someone called me to account for exactly why I think gender is such an interesting way to approach fan communities it would be for the shifting slippery ways gender is produced by fan communities - sometimes as the grounds for their existence in the first place but in many other ways too. I could use the word dialectic here, as long as I get to mess with what it means.

When it comes to "fan studies" I think the question of how gender matters is very different and I think it's a serious mistake to confuse the two. Of course gender is a factor in all academic hierarchies, but I don't think the gendering of the academic hierarchy within fan studies is noticeably different than in most other areas of cultural/media studies. There are areas of "fan studies" where being a woman or being invested in gender as a conceptual tool are an advantage, and areas where they are not. I'm inclined to think it matters most as a methodological issue. Just trying to imagine how different my experience would be as a researcher if I presented myself as a man in any fandom I've studied is a little mind-boggling, not because of any enormous difference in how my work would be received - though I don't doubt there would be some difference, most of which would also come down to questions of method - but because of how I would be interacting with those fans. The fandoms I've studied have been dominated by women and intensely aware of and reflective on that dominance, so my being and presenting myself as a woman is a crucial element of how my research proceeds.

I think certain tendencies for women studying fan cultures may be becoming entrenched as primarily of interest to women and primarily about women, but I don't actually think those were shaped by the state of academic life per se but by the way the existing scholarship on fandoms/fans has been circulated. It seems almost a default now that working with fanfiction is to work in a particular type of "women's studies" that has always been perceived as academic work primarily done by women, and always positioned as slightly marginal because overly invested in its own identity politics. It's interesting to see the old debates about "women's studies" being played out in fan studies along lines that aren't all that radically different to how they used to be played out in "literary studies". I think that debate can still be interesting, but if we let the line between that discussion and the one about how gender matters to fans become too blurred then I think we lose the value of both.

MH: I agree that it remains important to think carefully and to an extent separately about the gendering in/of specific fandoms and the gendering in/of 'fan studies', insofar as this exists (since, as you point out, some of the work being done about fandom may often occur within or in relation to different academic subcommunities). And I feel that it would be (is?) a very real problem if certain types of work are becoming identified as primarily about, or primarily of interest to, women. Fanfic, whether it is slash or not, is something that has historically been of interest to those studying types of media fandom. My sense from lecturing and teaching on the subject is that actually, despite some mainstreaming of fan practices, the activity of creating fanfic - and most especially slash - is still viewed as somehow 'odd' or disreputable by both right-leaning and left-leaning students. It remains, in cultural common-sense or the cultural imaginary, something that students typically view with disdain, even those who are active fans in a variety of other ways. And this devaluing of fanfic is partly linked to gender lines - to the disparaging of feminised cultural sites and spaces - but it is also linked to what might be termed reactionary views on intellectual property, and to possibly even more ingrained concepts of 'originality' and 'authenticity' (as well as reactionary views of sexuality in some instances). To assume that any and all of these issues are primarily of interest only to women seems peculiar in the extreme. These are surely feminist-inflected (though not only that) concerns for any version of cultural studies and theory that remains interested in issues of cultural power - and for me, even if this is a 'game of greys' - I really liked your phrase to encapsulate that - then it's still a serious game, and it's still important to try to ascertain the different shades of grey involved.

I also agree that the importance of gender can't just be taken for granted, or assumed in advance, and hence that this remains an empirical question for fandoms and practitioners of fan studies. I guess my question was really trying to put a whole set of other cultural differences on the agenda, because one of my feelings about this debate has been, and still is, that where academic communities are potentially divided by a form of cultural difference (i.e. gender) then that difference can tend to become highly visible. Hence this whole 'boy'/'girl' thing. But at the same time, where other cultural differences may not be as prevalent as lines of division or tension within academia (I'd hazard the guess - and this is purely speculation - that the vast majority of those writing 'fan studies' are broadly "middle-class") then this academic sameness produces analytical silence. Why aren't we all up in arms about issues linked to class? That's really my question. Is it because we live in classless societies? Is it hell. And I'm still reading texts on fandom which mutter about a lack of work on ethnicity and fandom too - why? Relative cultural sameness in the academy producing yet more silence? Probably. Getting worked up about one specific axis of cultural difference - and I am absolutely not denying the importance of thinking about gendered differences - may nevertheless be an indirect and unintended outcome of the cultural identities at stake for those taking part in the debate. May be Henry and others will organise blog debates on 'fandom and class' or 'fandom and ethnicity' next time out, who knows. My sense is that along with the variant intensities (nice word!) of gender, we still need to dwell with equal time, energy, and intellect on other axes of difference and cultural identity.

2. Is the term 'fan' now more or less useful than it once was? Should we be studying specific types of self-identified 'fan communities', or groups of dedicated, passionate media users and consumers who may not even deploy the term 'fan' within their self understandings?

CD: Well I think "fan" still does mean, or at least it should still mean, "groups of dedicated, passionate media users and consumers". I don't know why the internal deployment of the label "fan" needs to be a criteria for understanding someone or some group or some site as "fans" in scholarly terms. If I try to think of reasons for jettisoning it I only come up with ones that reinforce some hierarchy of cultural activities whereby fan is popularly understood as undiscriminating and uninteresting.

There certainly are important distinctions to be made between fans who assemble in only loosely organised ways - occasionally exchanging value judgements over the latest bootlegged The Decemberists audiofile in the background of P2P sharing, for example - and those that participate in much more structured forms of assembly and identify themselves as forming a community. But I see no reason why the term fan isn't useful for the former: why it isn't still a term which identifies a history of relevant scholarship; why it doesn't work analytically to emphasise the significant difference of media use/consumption that is dedicated and passionate.

Clearly at least one of my questions is also trying to get to this issue. I think it does matter when people want to avoid calling such passionate and dedicated users/consumers/communities "fans". I want to know what's at stake in that disavowal for them.

MH: With this question, I was trying to get at the extent to which the cultural life and career of the term 'fan' may be ever more fragmentary at present. And it certainly appears to be a discourse which is structurally absent in some cultural arenas, and used with great variance across others. Plus numbers of scholars seem to have concluded that the term is highly problematic and thus requires careful contextualisation as a 'shifter' or a performative. It does also worry me that the term may be used to reinforce, within analysis, pro-fan cultural hierarchies - i.e. some types of dedicated and socially-organised communities are somehow more 'deserving' of the label "fan", whereas other, more loosely-organised 'consumers' may not be 'proper' fans, or may not be analysed as such. So with that in mind, I agree with you that the term may be useful across many different types of fan experience - and would add that, for me, not all of them would necessarily be communal or even group-oriented.

I also wonder if there is a industry question lurking here as well, given the sense that 'fans' - and not just fan communities - have increasingly become a target market for, say, TV producers, who have been carefully checking the buzz surrounding shows even before their launch, as well as monitoring the interpretations and responses of specific fan groups. 'Fandom' has become a cultural identity that is now self-reflexively engaged with by producers just as much as scholars. And this engagement (I'm tempted to say 'co-option') has also, I think, contributed to specific images and representations of fandom, whether it has been within the Star Trek franchise, or Buffy, or Doctor Who. Types of fandom remain 'good' and 'bad' objects for producers, meaning that specific forms of informational economy (and info-war) are being generated in the spaces between producers - duty-bound to protect the commercial value of 'their' product - and fans who frequently want 'spoilers' and behind-the-scenes information which could actually reduce or threaten (in the short-term) the commercial value of a programme 'brand'.

Fans may be specifically targeted, but they are also at one and the same time conceptualised by some producers as a specific type of threat to wider-scale commercial viability. These power struggles aren't so much about poaching (how the finished article of the show is 'read'), as about the temporality of information flows (who knows what and when about forthcoming series or episodes). So to the degree that media fandom has become something intently monitored by specific producers, it has also, in turn, become increasingly about the intense and almost real-time monitoring of production processes - the uncovering of information, the use of Agents' websites to uncover casting news, or writers' blogs to glean clues, or more generalised rumour-mongering. All of this can be the activity of a type of communal fandom, but it can also be fandom which focuses on sometimes-oppositional textual agency rather than textual poaching: on doing things with 'the text' (finding out about it in advance/speculating/learning minuscule details about its production), rather than reading it oppositionally. In fact, the final text may even be relatively and counter-intuitively unimportant: I've encountered Doctor Who fans who were greatly enthused by watching filming on the streets of Cardiff, and gleaning information about forthcoming episodes, but who then were far less interested in and about 'the text' by the time of its transmission. The fan 'excitement' or engagement surrounded the production process, and a sense of getting unusual access to the 'media world' (c.f. Nick Couldry's work in this area). So these might be other ways in which fandom is fragmenting and conceptually multiplying or moving in interesting directions which we can't always anticipate merely by thinking about community per se or somehow less-dedicated consumers.

Perhaps the crucial thing emerging here, for me, is that if the term 'fan' is still useful, it is now often useful in relation to a wider or longer-scale temporality of media production than previously. 'Fans' don't just arrive after a text/product is commercially 'out there'; they can pre-date, in a variety of complex ways, the official 'existence' of a text, and can inhabit a range of critical-oppositional and anticipatory-unfolding temporalities of 'fandom', even to the extent of not seeming to behave "like a fan" upon actual or eventual broadcast. Tulloch and Alvarado wrote about one of my beloved programmes as an "unfolding text" back in 1983 - "unfolding fandoms", with different hermeneutic and temporal horizons, now seem to have caught up with those sorts of production processes.

3. Why am I currently writing about Russell T Davies in a book about Doctor Who? Should I not be exploring a wider range of fandoms rather than writing as a scholar-fan who combines these hybrid identities, but only in line with specific taste cultures and gendered fan histories?

CD: As a general rule people don't ask specialists in other fields to shake off their taste cultures and gendered histories and field-specific knowledge and move on to, say, the Marquis de Sade rather than Jane Austen or the life cycle of fairy penguins rather than that of emperor penguins.

As long as your work is aware of that cultural and historical placement - and as long as you're not endlessly saying the same thing - then I don't see why changing to other objects where you will necessarily have less knowledge of the field is automatically a good thing. I think feeling compelled to move on to other examples is of a piece with other forms of accepting that fan studies are not valuable precisely because they give too much attention to things that lack some perceived innate value.

In fan studies, on the side of the supposed object and on the side of the tools and interlocutors we choose, we're just as subject to fashion as every other scholarly area of inquiry. It's fair to say that media and cultural studies--especially when it deals with popular culture--is perhaps more subject to fashion than other fields because fashion is part of its field. So there's also a certain need, I think, for there to be people in fan studies willing to take on longer projects, slower projects, and recurring projects.

MH: Yes, here lies the problem and the possibility of fashion-led scholarship. Just as temporalities of fandom may have shifted partly as a result of new media developments, so too have the temporalities of academia, certainly in my 'home' territory of the UK, shifted in response to practices of governmentality. Above all, the Research Assessment Exercise has led to a requirement to publish in a timely manner, but I'd say that academic publishers are also much more market-savvy than previously, and are happier to publish on 'hit' shows and 'buzzy' texts of the moments when they can see a fashion-led market, and a quick publishing hit which may not then be sustained. What is the life cycle of the typical academic book now, for example?

So the benefits of 'slow academia', like 'slow food', may need extolling. The US system seems to allow for this once tenure has been achieved, though the cost and pressure for younger scholars seems to almost entirely offset the gains that can be made once tenure has been acquired. And along with 'slow' academia would come, of course, not just "recurring" projects but more longitudinal projects on media fandom/communities/texts and so on.

My own current work on Doctor Who is partly a product of all these sorts of institutional and publishing forces and contexts. I may have lived all my life as a fan of the series, but I'm still required to actually, physically write the book in a space of eighteen months or so, so it can't really be 'slow academia'. And I've read of Russell T. Davies being described as the new 'poster-boy' for fan studies, so I'm certainly writing in a 'fashionable' area - a slightly strange experience for a Doctor Who scholar-fan, it has to be said! All of these things do bother me. Not that I lie awake at night often, but I do ponder (with a disorienting element of distaste stemming from my cult fan habitus, I suspect) the strangeness of being/becoming part of a TV SF academic 'bandwagon to the stars'.

And I do feel that by being part of this 'fashion' I may be contributing to the canonisation of some texts and some producers over others, hence failing to be more adequately inclusive. It's not the case that I therefore won't write about my own fan objects at all, but instead, I would very much argue for the value of moving on to other objects as well where I would have less investment. I don't see this as being an acceptance "that fan studies are not valuable" per se - merely that my studying one object over and above others, because it happens to be fashionable and to fit with my white-middle-class-Southern-England cultural identity, may be part of a problem. Or that this may be limited and limiting for fan studies, at the very least, if such work participates in a wider pattern of canon-formation. So I think we're probably in disagreement on the specifics of this, but hopefully you can see from this answer (and from my earlier answers to your questions) what I'm getting at here.

4. Do I actually think of myself as a 'fanboy'? If not, is my lack of attention to my gender part of a problem in fandom and/or fan studies?

CD: I'm not a fangirl. Calling myself a "fangirl" isn't just paying attention to gender it's a certain quite specific identity claim. It means different things in different contexts but in the areas of fan studies where I work to call yourself a fangirl is to identify a particular fan identity linked to quite particular practices. I don't do enough of the fangirl things in any fan community to lay claim to the term. So, not thinking of yourself as a fanboy is not the same as not paying attention to gender. In fact, calling people who work in fan studies fanboys/girls strikes me as insensitively claiming a kind of subcultural credibility that's not in the term and should have been long left behind by the scholarly practices of fan studies.

However, let's say you don't pay attention to the way gender impacts on your status as a fan. Well, while gender isn't the only thing to talk about in relation to fans and fandoms etc I would think that never thinking about it would be a shortcoming, simply because you will never have paid attention to one of the key elements of one's cultural life that might impact on the kinds of practices, identities etc you choose, prefer or do not specialise in. So I think in every cultural studies project one has to raise the question of how and where and in what ways gender matters - it's just that the answer to that does not always bring gender to the foreground of any project.

As I understand it, part of the inspiration for this series was the opinion of some women scholars in fan studies that the "does gender matter" question was not being asked carefully enough by the most visible figures in the field of fan studies and, in general, by many men working in the area of fan studies. I'm prepared to offer a qualified maybe on that, but that doesn't mean that I think it would be productive to incorporate a "gender" subheading in every project or publication.

MH: I agree that any such mechanistic approach would hardly be helpful. By asking this question, I was trying to suggest that gender, as it is experienced and discursively re-circulated, can be a fairly fluid and complex matter. So even if I do not claim the identity of a 'fanboy' (which in any case feels as if it is slightly more a part of US-centric media fandom discourses than my experiences of UK fandom, but don't hold me to that!) my fan practices may still be highly gendered in certain ways, as well as being articulated with my sexuality and so on. Not thinking of myself as a 'fanboy' may be less a dematerialisation of gender, and more a way of engaging with specific discourses of gender. As a geeky male scholar who has more than his share of obsessive tendencies (they're vocational, honest), I can hardly claim to adequately align myself with hegemonic masculinity. But at the same time, I do feel at some distance from the discourses of the 'fanboy'; this is a partial resistance to what has historically been a relatively feminised stereotype of non-hegemonic masculinity. Between the non-existent stereotype and the unattainable hegemony lies all that shiftiness of a problematic engagement with ideologically-loaded gender identities. And even while I am intellectually aware of the issues surrounding hegemonic masculinity, there's still a fraction of me that wishes I could attain its impossibilities. But then perhaps that's the most perniciously hegemonic part of gendered identities: that they always seem to be about aspiration, and about striving to be something unhelpfully other.

Not identifying as gendered in particular ways is a way of doing gender. But surely it is not necessarily a 'reactionary' way, though it may be. Or, again, it may be part of a 'game of greys' of the kind that I characteristically seem to want to see everywhere. So I'd be in favour of more self-reflexive analysis of gender in fan studies which is also counterfactual analysis, i.e. that we should seek to ponder the ways in which we don't 'do' gender, and the ways in which we perhaps seek to disavow certain gender identities in relation to our fandoms and our scholarly selves, in order to better illuminate gendered practices. For instance, it seems striking to me that there is a marked cultural identity for the 'fanboy' - i.e. there is something transgressive or at least culturally visible about this as a mode of not-quite-hegemonic but perhaps recuperative 'knowing' masculinity - yet there is not quite a comparable 'scholarboy'. Given that historically and culturally images of 'the academic' have been gendered as masculine, why are there not discourses of scholarboys and scholargirls as there are fanboys and fangirls? Because gender has been interrogated more routinely or successfully within fandom than within academia? Or because 'fanboy' and 'fangirl' are infantilising discourses linked to popular culture, and academia's gendered terms are far less boyish and girlish?

Above all, would I be a 'scholarboy' if such a cultural category existed? Or would I be a 'fanman' instead of a 'fanboy'? Language can very quickly be made counterfactually and neologistically strange, of course, but in these strangenesses I think we can see our own cultural 'reality' for the specific construction that it is.

5. What's the most exciting work I've read recently in 'fan studies', and why?

CD: Actually the best piece of fan studies I've read lately was a meta post by LJ user "executrix". Of course, like all such posts what was great about it was not her post in itself but her post plus the communal conversation it spawned. However, as I'm sure you mean scholarly publishing, I'm far less clear about that. I tend to approach scholarly publishing in fan studies alert to things I don't agree with as much as things I do, so I can't think of the last time since NASA/Trek I put down a piece of fan studies and thought, "Wow, that was exciting". That isn't because Penley's stuff is just better than everyone else but because it was the first piece of "fan studies" I ever read.

Now, when I'm excited about fan studies in that scholarly sense it's usually because I read something not fan studies and come away thinking about its usefulness for fan studies - one from last year would be Chris Hilliard's book To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. I left that book thinking that democracy, literacy and community bound together made a fascinating framework for thinking about some of the historical specificity of fandom as a big concept covering a whole lot fields.

I could talk about what I think is still most influential in fan studies, and for good reason, but in the spirit of "recently" I'll try something else. I can see by your replies to my questions that you're very keen on Alan McKee's piece in NYU's Fandom volume from this year, so let me respond by choosing the piece that I found most interesting in that text and I hope that will do as an answer to this question. I was really interested in Derek Johnson's piece on "Fan-tagonism" because it was a step away from the continuing emphasis on consensus in fan studies of fan communities/spaces. While it's still framing fans in terms of producer-consumer relationships I was convinced that that frame was necessary to do the work it was doing and I appreciated careful attention both to a particular fandom with a particular history that's internally crucial. The fandoms I've worked in are defined by spaces for assembly, by webs of voices and interest, and by internal discourses on the fandom or fan community itself as much as on the canon of the source text. Entering Buffy fandom means entering the history of Buffy fans, which is no more consensual or utopic than any other.

MH: I love your answer, because it brings home to me very precisely and very acutely that I did mean scholarly publishing. I'm aware of meta - somebody once forwarded me a meta discussion of Fan Cultures, which was far more insightfully engaged with it as a text than some published academic work I've read. There did seem to be some anti-academic sentiments expressed too, mind you - along the lines of "why do academics use twenty words when they could use two" - which didn't entirely fill me with unalloyed hope and joy, but such is life.

I also have a PhD student at the moment who's very interested in writing about meta, so no doubt I shall learn more about it through that creative process. But despite having read some very good challenges to the academic/non-academic division from a range of writers, I must confess that I tend to read and cite published academia rather than meta. Nor am I part of any self-consciously meta fan group, though I do participate in some fan communities that discuss academic work, and concepts of fandom, without this being dubbed meta.

I'd actually like to read more meta stuff, but I honestly don't feel as if I have the time. I hardly have enough time to read the academic work that I'd like to, along with the sorts of novels that I'm appreciating these days (I've got the new William Gibson, Spook Country, awaiting my attention, and I'm reading David Peace's stunning noirish crime fiction too at the moment, which puts me faintly in mind of the famous BBC TV serial Our Friends in the North, only with even more police corruption, and additional bleakness).

As for my own answer to my own question (rather than an apology for the question's assumptions) - I wanted to get at the emotions and the passions that run through our scholarship in fan studies as much as through our fandoms. Hence my hope that work in the field may be quite literally "exciting" for both of us. I shall certainly take a look at the Hilliard text you mention, and I agree that sometimes an occasional 'eureka' moment can be had while reading outside fan studies and hence finding something that can shed new light on a specific object of study.

I've read some very energising things 'in' fan studies recently such as book proposals for textbooks explicitly on 'fan studies' and manuscripts dealing with TV, new media and participatory audiences (both by female scholars) - so I have a sense of things in the pipeline from other writers that I'm looking out for (anticipatory academia?). And in terms of published material, I asked Derek Johnson to contribute to an issue of New Review of Film and TV Studies I was co-guest-editing with Glen Creeber, and I was very impressed with what he came up with - a really careful, critical reading of the newfound proximity between producers and fans, and how fandom is still very much disciplined and managed by producers in particular ways. That kind of work is important, I'd say, as it doesn't lose sight of the dimensions of cultural power operating on fandom that were absolutely there and theorised in the work of John Fiske and then in Henry's Textual Poachers. Obviously, there's also Liesbet Van Zoonen's work that I've referred to in answer to one of your questions, and the collection that Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson edited, which I liked a lot because there's a sense in which it is both about media fandom 'now' (i.e. my undergrad and postgrad students can quite closely relate to it), but yet also covers the history and development of media fandom in a way that surprisingly hadn't really been analysed as directly before. And, yes, I always find myself appreciating the work of the likes of Alan McKee and Will Brooker (Will's been doing great work putting what I termed 'cult geography' a while ago properly on the map of fan studies, and Alan's stuff is pretty much always inspiring to me). Also having recently read Fandom, I found Henry's Afterword to be the most provocative of contributions, as it just makes me want to say "yes, but what about the dimensions of cultural power shaping those particular discourses, and non-discourses, of fandom?" Henry's work has a lengthy history of provoking me - the best work of all isn't that about which you can immediately say 'that's right, I agree' or 'that's just plain wrong', but is instead that which stays with you for a long time as you struggle to articulate why it feels incomplete, or why it rubs you up the wrong way, or how and why it's messed up your own favoured theories, or how it's said something you wanted to say but hadn't managed to before. So, in the end, and after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, I tend to appreciate scholarship in fan studies that genuinely provokes me. Abercrombie and Longhurst's Audiences had that effect on me when I first read it, too.

On the whole, collections like Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006) and Fandom (2007) surely indicate a very healthy state of affairs for 'fan studies'. And whether or not I get to be involved in it, I'm looking forward to someone publishing the first book explicitly and specifically on 'Anti-fandom' after Jon Gray's great work in that area.

6. What, for me, is the most exciting thing I've become a 'fan' of recently, and why?

CD: I was stuck on a plane recently with a selection of movies that I'd either seen and not loved or couldn't stand more than fifteen minutes of and I watched an episode of the most recent Doctor Who series. And I really enjoyed it. It echoed with several elements of the Doctor Who series I watched as a child in really interesting ways and I could predict so many ways in which fans must be responding to the new series and see so many interesting questions to ask about it, and about fans of it, in relation to previous series. I can imagine watching the whole series, and I can imagine going back to watch the series (plural) in order, because the history of that seems kind of fascinating.

None of that makes me a fan of it though. Usually, to become a fan of something I have to stumble over it and kind of fall in love. That's true for popular culture, for more generally valued cultural forms, and for intellectual/scholarly work. I think my latest fan crush was probably The Colbert Report, and I'd count that because I've repeatedly tried to convince other people to give it a try. That apostolic mode is definitely one thing that signals being a fan for me. But then I can think of any amount of academic texts or writers that I'm more apostolic about than Stephen Colbert. I can't think of the last time I taught a course which didn't have its getting people past the superficial image of Foucault and seeing why it's really great moment. Also, sometimes my fandom is not at all apostolic - we definitely do different sorts of things with different types of fandom. I'm also an immense fan of The Decemberists right now, but it's all about the music and me - I don't think I've ever tried to convince anyone else to listen but I certainly use it to do music obsession as well as any fifteen-year old bedroom culture cliché.

Fandom is, for me, always a social network. I got to The Colbert Report via The Daily Show, but I got there because I had friends who were huge fans and I was excited to be able to watch it "live" with them while I was living in the States the year The Colbert Report began. And I got to The Decemberists via my son, who got there via some online friends and knew I would love them.

Recently I was teaching a course in which a student said to me that they didn't think "fan" had to have anything to do with a "community" and I think it does. It's just that community doesn't mean only one thing and the relationships between fan and community can be formed in many different ways. I don't go anywhere to be with other fans of The Decemberists, but my circulation of information about work by them is still intensely social and overlaps via things like "Detect Music Now" options with communities which are formed around being a fan. I don't know that one can actually be a lone fan.

When I was thirteen I was an enormous David Bowie fan. I didn't have posters on my wall - I wasn't allowed. I never saw him live - there was never a chance. There were no other Bowie fans in my school. The records were not what made me a fan. It was weekend television and struggling every night to find a radio station in a far away city that might play Bowie. It was social. I was aware of the place of other Bowie fans in my experience of Bowie fandom. The fact that they were out there not only mattered but mediated my experience of it. I think being a "fan" requires not only the mass distribution of culture but also the mass distribution of knowledge of others' consumption. It's not the fact of records that allowed for Adorno's hated Caruso fans, but the fact of records in a network of information about other people's consumption of Caruso.

MH: I know these last few questions of mine have moved away from directly being 'about' gender, but I wanted to try to get access to our fan experiences (whether of fan studies or the media outside scholarly publishing) and then see if gendered issues and debates were thrown up via that entry point.

Your answer here contains yet another beautiful turn of phrase (one for me to add to my 'game of greys') - 'mass distribution of knowledge of others' consumption'. I like that. Yes, more than 'mass media' or the 'culture industry', there's always the matter of what other people are doing with it all, and whether we want to join in.

One of my recent fan objects resonates very strongly with that notion, as I think my initial entry point was a kind of mediation of others' fandom (and not even a mediation that I can validate or corroborate). Basically, I read a piece of journalism - I very much enjoy reading decent cultural journalism, of the 'Sunday broadsheet supplements' variety - which suggested that a specific BBC TV series called simply Bodies had spawned immensely vocal fans, and that audiences who loved this particular show really, really loved it. It wasn't a programme that I had ever watched, nor had it really been a resounding industry success, nor did it belong to a genre that I'd ever had much interest in (medical/hospital drama). Furthermore, its creator and writer, Jed Mercurio, had previously been responsible for a piece of television science fiction largely felt in certain UK fan circles to be one of the worst efforts in recent decades, Invasion: Earth. (My memory of it was that it was pretty ropey, minus one episode which I think was largely told in flashback black-and-white, and which I remember as standing-out).

Despite these misgivings, I resolved to give Bodies a try on DVD, having enjoyed a large number of BBC serials of late such as Funland, Conviction, Sinchronicity and others. My decision to start watching it, and to invest time in it, was based almost solely on this one piece of cultural journalism saying that the series had immensely devoted fans. Not even really properly "mass distribution of knowledge" of others' consumption activities, then, just an inkling of an intrigue thanks to a suggestive newspaper filler-piece.

Bodies scares me. Its near-hypnotic incidental music becomes a rhythmic and repetitive, integral part of its massively uneasy pleasures; its writing is both deeply idealistic and terrifyingly cynical; all its characters seem fully realised and convincing, and Keith Allen will never, ever play a role as perfectly Allen-esque as this one. It does the whole 'life and death stakes' thing that hospital drama tends to do, but without ever flinching and looking away from the darkness that is shown to be at the heart of the UK's National Health System, with its government-led targets and its management statistics, and its patients who are sometimes, for some, the least important part of the whole process.

Bodies is more meaningfully 'political' than most Politics Programmes which feature guest politicians having cosy or ritually-interrogative chats with 'star' presenters just as much a part of the establishment as they are.

Bodies is the most intense piece of television I have watched for years. I felt churned up by watching it. The suspense that it generates is astounding, and really puts a fair bit of TV 'thriller' programming to shame. There aren't ticking clocks or crack military units or explosives or sleeper cells or tough-guy gangsters. There's just couples trying to have children, and people trying to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Out of this comes black comedy and blacker tragedy. There aren't quite clear heroes and villains - so tick the box for moral grey areas one last time - but more than that, there are some huge dramatic reversals that really make emotional sense rather than being obviously 'plotted'.

Something else I've started to enjoy is Heroes. But my enjoyment of this is intertextually coloured by having watched Bodies. Heroes does feel 'plotted' - terrific twists and cliffhangers arrive bang on schedule, but there seems to be a deep sense of cynicism embedded in its bag of tricks. It feels like a fantasy drama of reassurance, beginning with an iconic 'falling man' apparently plummeting to his death from a tall building, and who believes he is special, and who turns out to be special. This time, this falling man lives.

Despite being self-reflexive about its 'everyone wants to be special' superhero plotlines, Heroes still seemingly manages to offer this narrative pleasure to a potentially regressive extent. And it courts an international TV market by setting part of its narrative strands in Japan and India, while still being US-centred (cheerleaders weren't a major part of my cultural life growing up in the UK). Its thriller components feel contrived and, much as I hate to write it, even faintly juvenile when watched through the half-light of Bodies. May be it's just that I've never been a huge fan of superhero narratives and characters, though I very much enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable. But nobody is 'special' in Bodies; people just want to safely get in and out of hospital, and they want their children to be delivered safely. Nobody has special powers; staff simply try to do the work they are trained to do. And one Doctor who endangers patients through apparent incompetence is neither obviously misguided nor villainous; he too is trying to help, and trying to do his job. People die. Routinely. Their deaths are simply part of the performance statistics of the hospital. Nobody can regenerate.

When I thought long and hard about the opening episode of Heroes, I realised that I wanted it to be a drama where characters believed, in infantile terms, that they were 'special', only to be proven wrong. I wanted it to be a drama which didn't reassure its audience, and where superhero powers might not arrive, as expected, for our identificatory figures. Where nobody could guarantee their elevated status or narrative safety. I wanted a thriller that thrilled me by refusing to play by obvious set rules. Perhaps perversely, I actually wanted a version of Heroes where pretty Peter Petrelli died in episode one as a result of plunging to his doom. That would have been dramatic, scary, risk-taking TV. But may be I've got Bodies for that sort of thing. Either that, or I've been reading too much David Peace, and it's seriously disrupted my thought processes.

But still I'm watching Heroes avidly, and piling through the episodes, and I could very well be described as a 'fan', and I've read online fan discussions, and, oh, just the other day I thought idly to myself "may be I'll buy that SFX magazine special so I can read the episode guides and see which are the fan favourites." But I feel as if I'm a culturally-compliant fan, going along for the ride slightly against myself, watching because it's the sort of cultish genre show I "ought" to love, and because I know friends and family and colleagues will be watching. Part of me doesn't want to criticise the show, wants to validate it as a lovely bit of sophisticated pop culture, and yet another part of me really does think that it's deeply ideologically problematic and quite transparently a textual-formal outcome of the political economy of the TV marketplace.

But these tastes, and this wrestling with my own previous patterns of taste and my history as a media fan-consumer, are they gendered? I'm not at all sure that they are, though Bodies is very grisly, bloody stuff, and does perhaps partly appeal to me via my culturally 'masculinised' horror-fan-identity. May be my tastes in TV drama are in transition, away from 'cult' and genre material and towards more conventional 'social realist' and 'quality' tastes? Put like that, the change seems a rather tedious cliché: have I just been busy unwittingly internalising the taste formations of the canon-builders of TV Studies these past few years? I'm not sure, as I would still want to champion many versions and instances of cult TV over more obviously canonical TV, and I'm certainly still in love with Doctor Who. But recent UK efforts at self-conscious 'cult' status such as Cape Wrath (Meadowlands elsewhere, I think) have also left me cold. Weeks and weeks of 'eccentric' drama ending with a nonsensical conclusion, and featuring characters whose 'motivation' was telegraphed so baldly it was as if they'd been auto-generated in 'Screenwriting 101'.

I can think of one TV series I've recently enjoyed which did strike me as forcefully gendered, almost as if it had been designed by (a rather reactionary) gender committee: The Unit. I watched this because of its David Mamet pedigree, having enjoyed many of his plays and films, and counting myself as a Mamet fan, despite his work's sometimes hysterical maschismo. I would not usually bother with a militaristic TV drama, I have to say up front. Like Bodies, I ventured outside my genre comfort zones, this time to follow an acclaimed playwright rather than because I'd read about fan audiences. And though I enjoyed The Unit, especially an occasional episode written and directed by Mamet which became an almost formal exercise in suspense and misdirection, the show as a whole seemed by-the-numbers schizoid, as if purposefully designed to have 'masculine' plotlines with army blokes shooting stuff and blowing stuff up, running alongside 'feminine' storylines in which The Wives back on the military base occupied themselves having affairs or blowing the family's savings on bad investments. And it spent its series one finale ranting about how rubbish the French are, which you just couldn't and wouldn't get away with now in UK TV, but which seemed entirely acceptable in this apparently neo-con drama powered by little else beside gender stereotypes and national pride.

May be I just don't want to love texts like Cape Wrath that have been too obviously designed for me to love them, which would fit with the cultural identity of the wary (and 'masculinised') cult fan. And perhaps I'm also not quite part of the right national market or age-based demographic for Heroes, my ambivalent fandom of which could be less about gender, and a little more about my academic interests in cultural politics. What exactly are the academically 'progressive' and more celebratory readings of Heroes? And I'm certainly not about to uncritically applaud the straight-up gendered binaries of The Unit, which seems to have avoided being reactionary 'blokes' TV by being simultaneously reactionary in its depiction of both tough-guy 'masculine' and stepford-army-wife 'feminine' story strands. If equality means screwing over representations of men and women, then this programme format gets uncannily close to it. Having said all this, thinking about the media texts that I personally love right now, as well as those that I'm ambivalently fannish about, still seems like a useful way into debates over cultural tastes and identities.

There's no real conclusion here, of course. How could there be? But I would like to say how much I've enjoyed thinking and writing about all of this, and responding both to your questions and your elegant formulations. Cheers.

No, I can't imagine a conclusion either. But thank you. I've really enjoyed this and in reading and responding to your answers I've found some interesting new questions and inflections of old ones. Thanks very much to Henry too for setting up this series - it's a very generous use of the speaking position he's worked so hard on.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One): Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills

I think the format of these exchanges calls for us both to introduce ourselves to the blog's readers. So, we are Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, paired up for the purposes of this debate by Henry's magical 'fan studies and gender' discussion-partnering machine. Here's a bit more information about each of us, and how we came to be interested in fan studies: CD: I'm currently Chair of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. I first became interested in fan cultures while writing my first book, Girls (Columbia UP, 2002), which discussed scholarly and popular images of girls as fans and fans as girls. Since then I've written essays on fanfiction for Helleksen & Busse's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006) and Jane Glaubman's forthcoming collection on the Harry Potter fandom. While my forthcoming Modernist Cultural Studies (University Press of Florida, 2008) is more interested in the practices and ideas that made fan cultures possible than in fans themselves, Broadcast Yourself: Presence, Intimacy and Community Online - which I'm co-writing with Melissa Gregg at the University of Queensland - uses online fan practices as a key example for thinking about online culture today.

MH: I'm currently a Reader in Media & Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, and my first published book was Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002). This was based on my 1999 doctorate from Sussex University, which in turn came about in part because I'd been a fan of various media texts, especially Doctor Who, since the age of about three.

Most things I've done since the PhD have had some relationship to fandom and fan studies, especially my books The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum 2005) and How To Do Things With Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold 2005). I'm working on a number of books at present, and the next to be delivered will be Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-First Century (Tauris, 2008).

***

So, having set out that very brief bit of context, we've decided to offer 'six of one and half a dozen of the other' by virtue of each of us posing six questions that we wanted to ask of fandom and/or fan studies at this moment in time. These questions were deliberately designed to be as open as possible, and to spark discussion. They don't always refer directly to issues of gender, though they frequently give rise to reflections on that theme. Having each set six questions, we then let the other respond to them before taking the opportunity, in turn, to enter into a dialogue on the thoughts and arguments that had been thrown up. It would be fair to say that each of us has some hesitancy about being fully 'committed' in print, and for all posterity, to what we say here, and each of us wrote this material and responded to it under time pressures. But no doubt these things will have been true for almost all participants in this series, so in the final analysis, we can hardly claim any special indulgences or allowances.

Catherine's Six Questions:

1. What is at stake in the way that fan studies either directly or by default returns to assessing degrees of resistance (or, by inference, conformity)? The words for this may change, such as talking about fan creativity rather than resistance per se, but there continues to be a fan studies investment in laying claim to something that amounts to social value in hierarchical oppositional terms where the opposite of creative/resistant/whatever seems taken for granted. Are we still thinking Culture Industry, or is it something else?

MH: My sense is that this has started to shift a bit, as both my own Fan Cultures and Cornel Sandvoss's Fans have critiqued the 'resistance' paradigm, and of course Abercrombie and Longhurst were doing that long before either of us, in Audiences. And as Henry likes to point out from time to time, he was hardly without ambivalence in relation to what's been termed the 'Incorporation/Resistance Paradigm'. I think that this mode of thinking is very ingrained though, as it has formed a key part of cultural studies' sense of its own distinctive project and identity, the fact that it (and supposedly it alone) was able to read for 'resistance', or assess the cultural politics of primary texts and audiences' responsive, tertiary texts. Christine Scodari, for example, has strongly argued that fan studies should still very much be about this assessment and valorization of specific fan practices, viewing my position in Fan Cultures as an abdication of cultural studies' and fan studies' 'proper' responsibilities, I think. It is as if challenging the IRP is sometimes assumed to mean throwing out the baby, bathwater, and probably the whole bath with them.

But I continue to think that we need to find ways out of the "Culture Industry = Badness; Some 'resistant' fan activities = Goodness" binary. Because it does still seem to occasionally be about finding strangely clear lines of division - what I'd call a 'moral dualism' - as if post-structuralism never ever happened. Alan McKee's work has charted one useful pathway, to my way of thinking, by refusing to treat 'the Culture Industry' as that evil, old monolith, and instead starting from the idea that industry producers can have cultural politics and cultural theories too. And that these aren't just markers of 'academic' cultural distinction and identity versus 'the Industry'.

In any case, changes within 'the Culture Industry' itself, moving in the direction of convergence and digital interactivity, mean that some of our views of 'resistance' really need further updating and revision. Will Brooker wrote about this some time ago in a piece in IJCS reflecting on Dawson's Creek fans, whose online fan activities could sometimes be interpreted as being almost 'programmed', pre-structured or directly facilitated by 'the Industry'. But even if this means that some fan activities blur together 'resistant' and 'conformist' elements, I suppose there's still a reinscription of that binary "proper resistance" versus "co-opted resistance" lurking somewhere. It is such a tough pattern of thought to shift.

May be thinking about 'the Culture Industry' and thinking about fan 'resistance' (or not) shouldn't be so closely articulated. Uncoupling or de-articulating them might open a few more interesting pathways of scholarly thought: do some groups of fans 'resist' some of the normative identities linked to 'what it means to be a fan', for instance, within their own communities? Some fan communities may be de-Politicized, and others may not be, such that 'resistance' might be directed at targets other than 'the Culture Industry'. There may even be forms of fan 'resistance' to the 'textual poaching' of academics - with not all of this resistance to multiple Others being clearly progressive or reactionary. The real problem with articulating 'resistance' and 'Culture Industry' paradigms, for me, is that we end up with not only very one-dimensional and thin depictions of cultural heroes and villains, but also that we end up with equally one-dimensional representations of cultural power, rather than perceiving 'resistance' as happening internally, within both 'the Industry' and 'fan communities', and even 'in' the academy in a variety of ways. I tried to develop this sort of decentred Certeauian and multiple approach in an article for Social Semiotics in 2005, in fact, in a meta-theoretical sort of vein.

CD: Yes it's true that many people have now paid attention to the problems involved in assessing fan activities and identities in terms of resistance, and yet I feel as if resistance has been mostly displaced by less political synonyms for the same opposition. I guess that means that I agree there's something ingrained and thus very hard to shift about such a pattern of thought. Cultural studies does have a longstanding attachment to seeing something other than "the mass" in "the popular". But as it gets taken up in the terrain of fan studies (and cultural studies work on fans is pretty much as old as cultural studies itself) I feel as if "resistance" has remained such an attractive distraction from paying attention to the diversity of what goes on amongst fans that I'm constantly tripping over new forms of it.

Yes, I think the answer is to have something other than an oppositional understanding whereby we just reverse which side of the binary is good and which is bad, but I don't just want to play a game of greys either, where such an opposition is reinforced but there's good and bad to be found on either side. Nor do I want to reinforce that opposition by showing how the (still separated) sides speak to one another. Instead, I would like to pay attention to the ways in which fans don't need to have a project or even a focused antagonism or call to arms in order to do something interesting. In which their relation to cultural forms is not perceived through an opposition between producers and consumers/users. That obviously misrepresents a range of important things, but in order to try and shake off the ingrained response I feel it's a worthwhile experiment.

I like many of your questions here, therefore, it's just that I don't see them being asked very often except as an aside to more expected discussions of resistance. So in my experiment I'd like to do away with any and all talk of resistance or subversion when thinking about fans - just to see what happens. Nina Busse and I once had an exchange about fandom being "not_subversive" that even resulted in a community with that name, but it was mainly a place marker for academic conversation rather than a fan community. Since then I've tried just abandoning the resistance/conformity questions when talking about HP fanfiction communities and was a little surprised to find that fan audiences seem to understand and appreciate that a lot more than academic ones. Some fan communities have an investment in being "subversive", but even when they do they're marking that out as something that differs from most fans. I'm not saying fans are "conformist", or more conformist. I'm saying the question is not at all to the point at this time.

2. Can "fandoms" be thought of as dependent on particular artefacts in the way we usually talk about them? Is it enough to talk of "subcommunities" within a fandom to cover the diversity of attachment and practice? There's not a Harry Potter fandom - there is a web of Harry Potter fan communities, and it's a very distorted web as well - frayed at the edges and tangled up with different "fandoms" entirely. I don't mean there's no common ground at all - there's JKR's "canon" - but it's not consistently important or utilised.

MH: This 'subcommunities' point is vital, I'd say, because it draws attention to the fact that talk of singular fan 'communities' is itself a bit of an academic fiction. There may be fan interpretive communities, but again, we're very much dealing with a multi-dimensional (sub)cultural field cut across by varieties of fan identities and practices. And what counts as 'canon' can even be contested more-or-less strongly in some media fandoms. So what we seem to need is a vocabulary that acknowledges fan 'community' as meaningful, up to a point, but which doesn't foreclose the massive variation in fan practices happening under that sort of banner. Bacon-Smith wrote about fan "circles" in Enterprising Women, of course, with these "circles" sometimes being more-or-less loosely interconnected, and that's one of the values of ethnography - that it can illuminate these processes of (sub)cultural affiliation and dispersion in more adequate detail. And Bacon-Smith's work also illustrates that this isn't an issue tied to the growth of online fandoms - it was already there in the pre-Internet days. Perhaps some of the later work in fan studies has been too quick to use 'community' as a starting point for scholarship without interrogating the limits and blindspots associated with the very concept, or without trying to think it through more rigorously, or even without paying due attention to the specifics of Bacon-Smith's work. I'm still finding and reading new books on fandom which seem to start and end with positive assertions of fan 'community' support, and to be honest it frustrates me more than a little.

Certainly fandoms can be 'tangled' up with and between an intertextual range of objects; fans may follow the different work of certain showrunners, writers, or performers. So to even nominate a fandom as "belonging" to one show or individual can sometimes be problematic. Or fandoms may be co-incident, but of intertextually unrelated artefacts. This was one of the reasons why I tried to carry out a very small-scale autoethnography in Fan Cultures, and I know that some readers have been critical of that (in its execution, I think, rather than in principle). I wanted to try to start teasing out the complexities of how our various fandoms may intersect (or not), and how fandoms could work in concert to realise a cultural identity, or not. For instance, some fandoms may be linked to discourses of gender for the individual fan concerned, whilst others may be disarticulated from gender identity - and this is an empirical question for me, not one we can decide in advance. I've read outstanding autoethnographies written by some of my female students, where they analyse how specific fandoms enable their femininity to be realised in 'resistance' to cultural norms, whilst other fandoms are culturally-conventionally 'feminised', and others seem not to meaningfully intersect with gender discourses, in their cultural experience, perhaps primarily linking to discourses of national identity and Welshness instead. All of which means putting 'resistance' into a more fleshed-out context, as well as reflecting on the subject's 'repertoire' or 'cultural portfolio' of assorted fandoms.

We have a situation, to my way of thinking, where fan studies shows a potential tendency to reify fan 'community' as well as reifying and unhelpfully abstracting singular 'fandoms'. This may be a matter of convenience; question: "what are you studying?" - answer: "oh, Harry Potter fans", but it is still a foundational problem. We need to be much more precise about the parameters of our research sometimes, studying specific forums or fan groups, or normative and non-normative fan identities, or fandoms which intertextually (or historically) emerge out of, or morph into, others. I thought about this a little bit in a piece for American Behavioral Scientist in 2005, where I wrote about "cyclical" fandom - that some fans might sequentially move through different fan 'objects', nevertheless displaying patterns of taste and distinction in their multiple, diachronic fandoms. Just as we could ethnographically (or autoethnographically) analyse various synchronic fandoms, it may also be worthwhile to diachronically analyse peoples' self-reflexive 'projects of fan-self' (to creatively mangle a bit of Giddens). I make another small start on this in my second book The Pleasures of Horror, where rather than thinking about horror fan 'communities' per se, I try to link discourses of fandom to people's biographical senses of self.

All of this makes me think of another of Henry's longstanding complaints -if he doesn't mind me using that word - about the reception of Textual Poachers. Just as the book was reduced to being a totemic representative of the 'IRP' when it was actually more complex, so too was it frequently viewed as being 'about Star Trek fans', when it was actually about fans of intertextual networks of TV shows (what we'd probably now call 'cult TV' fans). So may be this 'reading for singular fan communities' is actually more of a problem in the interpretive reception and promulgation of fan studies than an issue 'in' fan studies itself (though I'm not very keen on the boundary line I seem to be rhetorically creating here). It is a matter of how readers get a handle on the subject - with many academics, who may not be specialists in the subject of media fandom, using the notion of fandom common-sensically to mean 'fans of X'. It's a short-hand, a map of the territory, which occasionally seems in danger of becoming the territory in-and-of itself. It's a tendency which empirical and theoretical approaches to media fandom themselves need to 'resist' (another kind of contextualised 'resistance'), I would argue. We need to insist on the fragmentary nature of fan 'communities', divided by their axes of (sub)cultural power, and on the usefulness of not reifying fandoms as 'singular', instead working to try to see them much more "in the round", as it were.

So I'm completely sympathetic to this question, really. Does it mean that 'fans' are 'not dependent' on particular artefacts? Perhaps. Perhaps media fandom has enough of a cultural history by this point in time, that it would make sense to view some 'fans' less in terms of their objects of fandom, and more so in terms of their fan-cultural competencies, which are the skills of doing 'being a fan', and which can be transferred across texts. Again, it strikes me that the concepts of a longer-term 'fan career' or 'fan socialisation' may be of value (with all the disclaimers and qualifications one would want to bring to those terms). Garry Crawford's work on sports fans has developed an intriguing model that media fan studies could benefit from applying, in my opinion (I make some use of it in my third book, How To Do Things With Cultural Theory). Rather than fandom being 'about' specific fan objects, it could then be viewed as a way of using, or relating to, objects. But that's already there in the literature in fan studies, to a very strong extent, I suppose.

CD: Two sentences in I wanted to interject and say *no, not subcultural*, but I'm glad I had to wait and let you make your point. (I'm pleasantly surprised to find that's a real plus about this format.) I do want to talk about subcommunities, but not as if they are subcultural. I'd love to find some other prefix like nested (but less derivative) or intersecting (but less two dimensional). As it is, subcommunities seems most recognisable for now. I do like the word community, both because it begins with the twin recognitions of shared space and shared interests and because there's a long history of debating what communities are and how they work that I think fan studies still has a lot to learn from. But I entirely agree "fan community" is in no way a synonym for "fandom" and that's its value even if it comes with a lot of baggage.

You're right too about the shortcomings of thinking about fan studies as dealing with specific fandoms rather than fans/fandoms in general, but that's a very slippery set of problems. On the one hand a fandom is not, in fact, a fandom; on the other, erasing the crucial differences between fandoms that give rise to both variation and change in fan practices is not something fan studies can afford. Hence, I think we're stuck with sub- until we find some less misleading term for the network of communities and other modes of assembly that attach to an apparently singular object.

I think your "some fans" that are "cyclical" fans in fact comprises an extremely substantial set of "fans". I can't think of a single field in which fans don't do that in very significant numbers--not even football fans and certainly not academic fans. With media fans I think that's actually the overwhelmingly dominant norm.

3. Why does fan fiction seem to be such a dividing line in fan studies - as if to do "fan studies" with fan fiction means something quite different than to do fan studies that, for example, talk to TV audiences about their investments and interpretations of a show? It does seem to me that some of the conversations on Henry's blog have marked that distinction out and, in turn, gendered it.

MH: I agree that this seems to have become one of the structuring binaries in the debate. I find it slightly strange, to be honest, and I'm not at all convinced that it is as powerfully gendered as some seem to think. Now, it could be fairly said that in my work I've not looked at fanfic. Does that mean that my work is unequivocally gendered as 'masculinist'? Or as not being about 'fan communities' (with all the misgivings I have about the easy use of that term)?

On the contrary, I'd say that the whole notion of doing an autoethnography is strongly indebted to broadly feminist perspectives, while my critique of 'fan community' work has revolved around wanting to analyse fan communities as Bourdieuian hierarchies and overlapping/decentred social structures - it hasn't been based on any straightforward "individual" fan versus "fan community" binary. I certainly do argue that we should theorise 'fans' who wouldn't tend to be part of socially-organised fandom (fan 'communities', as they've been called), but for me this has never been an either/or.

In fact, I saw it very much as a corrective to the prior tendencies of fan studies, which at the point when I wrote Fan Cultures (and did the doctoral work it was based on) were very much not managing to theorise 'lone fans', or fans operating outside of what I would still argue tends to be a more narrow - or specific - strata of fandom where the practice of writing fanfic is a central activity. For me, again, this was not an either/or; it was, in intention, a more inclusive model of fandom - not accepting that the 'real' fans or the 'resistant' fans or the 'creative' fans were necessarily always to be found in more visible, subcultural spaces (though some might be there; yet again, an empirical question). But I never argued that work shouldn't be done on these types of fans - I simply didn't do it myself because many others appeared to be doing it, and doing it very well. There was no need for me to address the same set of concerns and topics in my own work - to duplicate labour, if you like - when instead of that, I could seek to argue for an expansion of the range of empirical and theoretical approaches to media fandom. Expansion and co-existence. Not an either/or!

So, although I've not directly written about fanfic (though I have written some, badly, many years ago now, for a Doctor Who Appreciation Society fanzine), it continues to be something that I teach on, am interested in, and appreciate reading others' work on. It isn't something I feel obliged or compelled to write about, because other fan activities interest me - activities which when I wrote Fan Cultures hardly seemed to exist in the literature, such as fans' use of cult(ural) geography, and practices of fan tourism. I think that to argue (or even to imply) that everyone should be studying 'X' or 'Y' in fan studies is a bit of a problem. It's probably a version of what I termed the 'fallacy of internality' in Fan Cultures - the notion that each individual scholar's work has to 'say everything', whereas it's really more important that scholarship as a whole covers the widest possible range of relevant material, so that we can read Sandvoss on neutrosemy, or Bacon-Smith on fan circles, or Jenkins on convergence, or Driscoll on fanfic; we don't all need to be saying everything (or even, necessarily, defining 'fandom' in the same way; or arguing that fandom is 'really' about community or individuality).

So the argument that there's a gendering of work on fanfic, or that 'lone' fans versus 'community' fans translates into a gendered binary, for me that seems a bit muddled. Henry Jenkins and Will Brooker have done major work on forms of fanfic, along with Constance Penley and Camille Bacon-Smith. My own work is absolutely about fan community, and the uses and limits of that concept, even though I have chosen not to write about fanfic to date - because I wanted to widen the fan debate. But even if that narrative is overly selective, it still strikes me that to perceive these as gendered lines of division may be to take the contingent a little too quickly for a structured/structuring social fact. Numerically-speaking, more female scholars may write about fanfic (though even certain kinds of fanfic have been over-represented in the field), and some (some, not all) fanfic-centred communities may be gendered as feminine. We can take all of that as read, if you like. I can't see that it follows from this that the presence or absence of work on 'community' or 'fanfic' in any scholar's work is solely or determinatively gendered as feminine/masculine. This seems to be a monolithic reading - at best, a kind of structuralist-feminist conclusion, perhaps - which disallows the actual complexities of gender linked to a range of writers' work in fan studies. One problem with structuralist readings of all kinds is surely how they fix meaning in relation to key ideological binaries, then not considering how these binaries may be more-or-less fluid, deconstructed, or even internally incoherent within each of the terms in a binary.

So if I wouldn't want to take a strongly structuralist view of the supposed gendering of fan studies, I think a more post-structuralist view of the same may be useful. There are certainly discourses of masculinity appropriated in and by my academic self (which is only one cultural fraction of my self-identity). What I choose to write about - the fan objects I reflect on - are partly linked to cultural discourses of masculinity (which may not always be "hegemonic" masculinity, but may be in some contexts and in some ways). Writers in fan studies, I feel, almost invariably perform their gender in certain ways whilst ostensibly analysing specific fandoms or aspects of fan activity. But the little poststructuralist voice that speaks to me wants to say, "yes, but that doesn't produce monolithically gendered arguments, does it?" So, I can be interested in fanfic, and I might have written it atrociously, even while I haven't academically analysed it, for reasons that, as a cultural agent, I would argue were not discursively articulated with my performance of gender, but were instead about appropriating academic-communal discourses of 'originality' of topic or argument. (I wouldn't view this as strongly gendered, but I'm well aware this could be debated further).

Taking a poststructuralist stance on gender in/of fan studies, I think it is absolutely important for writers to seek to be self-reflexive, and to carefully consider why they are writing about what they are, and in the way that they are. It was this set of poststructuralist concerns that led me to attempt to write about fandoms I was not a participant in, as I felt that otherwise I was in danger of reproducing, within my academic work, aspects of my pre-academic cultural identity - my gendering, but also my classed identity. I was contributing to a 'canonisation' of certain fan tastes over others, and hence was implicitly helping to silence a range of fan voices rather than working to include a greater range and diversity of fandom within the multiple projects of fan studies.

So, as well as writing more about Doctor Who fans (because again, this wasn't an either/or; a virtue or a vice), I consciously decided to write pieces about Dawson's Creek fans (for the BFI collection Teen TV) and fans of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire (for the OUP book ITV Cultures), as well as then contributing a self-reflexive piece about academics' fan tastes to the 2007 NYU book Fandom. For me, the question isn't whether or not I'm writing about fanfic or 'community' per se; it's a question of which fandoms I'm writing about, and which precise fan activities within those fandoms, and why, and how, and ultimately whether or not that leads to a reproduction of one, narrow view of what it means to be a fan. And some of my work has done that, I would say; some of my work has definitely reproduced gendered norms and tastes within contemporary culture. Not only or necessarily or inevitably in relation to gendered fan-consumer tastes, but also in relation to levels of cultural capital. I just can't see this as something that's structurally a given, or happening behind the backs of the cultural agents who contribute to fan studies; it's something that can be reflected on, addressed, and which can also tend to be far more complex than simply being read off from specific presences/absences in somebody's work.

The question that I've increasingly been asking of my own work is this: does it broaden what we can theorise in relation to 'fandom'? This could mean trying to think about 'cyclical fandom' or multiple fandoms, or the divisions within fan communities, or fandom and autobiographical senses of self, or 'theory fandom' rather than fandom linked only to popular culture, or fandoms which have been under-explored in the literature, or types of fan who have been under-represented, or types of fan activity which have been less frequently investigated. Fan Cultures wanted to resist 'decisionist' narratives of resistant/complicit, good/bad in favour of suspending those moral dualisms. Given that the complete suspension of any and all moral dualisms whatsoever is probably a sense-making impossibility, and that therefore any such call or claim could only ever become self-contradictory (Scodari pointed his out quite neatly in her review of the book), I'd say that an inclusive ethic has become slightly more my concern as time's gone by: to strive to include views, versions, aspects, and empirical activities of fandom that have otherwise been excluded (sometimes by myself) in favour of the discursive and cultural reproductions of academia and its specific tastes/paradigms/schools. And I would also recognise, in line with my earlier work, that this cannot be singularly achieved; hence I would auto-critique some of my own work, and would fully expect others to find it limited in specific ways, or 'disappointing' to the extent that I don't evade the limitations of my own performative cultural identities.

CD: I'm entirely in favour - I'm sure I don't even need to say it by now - with paying attention to the specific fan practices that interest you. And so of course studying Doctor Who doesn't mean studying Doctor Who fan fiction. But I suppose it does leave a couple of questions unanswered.

First, where does one have to make a reference to the breadth of fan practices that make up a fandom? Can one write about Doctor Who without ever considering how significant fan fiction communities have been or are now within that field? At what point and in what way does that limitation on one's fandom "sample" need to be acknowledged? Fan fiction is more important to some fandoms than others, thinking in terms of numbers, in terms of perceived fan culture, and in terms of media visibility. I suspect this problem of acknowledging the limitations of one's slice of fandom is quite easily addressed.

But second, as fan communities often construct hierarchies within which fan fiction (sub)communities are sidelined and denigrated as the most fannish (in the sense of obsessive attachment and derivative deployment) of fans, where does not-doing-fan fiction turn into a similar sort of hierarchy? I ask that question already hearing an answer to it, in a way, because fan fiction is in the present tense so central to some parts of fan studies that it seems weird to picture it as marginal. And yet, when I pick up collections like Fandom I feel there's an obligatory fan fiction inclusion strategy at work, with the generality of fan studies doing something else less... what else if not less marginal?

Overall, no, you don't and no one should have to work on fan fiction, but perhaps it's useful to have this place to step back and ask what place does fan fiction have now in the schema of things published in fan studies. It's both foundational and yet somehow positioned as limited and specialised. For now I'm going to settle for saying that's... interesting.

4. Does it matter if one is invested in the fandom of the fans one studies? It's one of those recurring tropes of fan studies that the writer/critic stakes out their terrain in terms of attachment. This doesn't happen anything like as commonly in, for example, literary studies. Maybe it's obvious that this is about the role of ethnomethodology and ethnography in fan studies, but even where there are no human subjects to be "ethical" towards it seems to happen and so it strikes me as maybe more interesting than it looks. When people who study "fans" want to distance themselves from "fan studies" I think they're also making a statement relevant to this.

MH: I think my previous answer starts to hint at my emerging ambivalence about this question of investment or attachment. When I finished my PhD, and shortly thereafter, I was very much of the view that being a scholar-fan (a fan of what one is studying, or of the type one is studying) was a benefit rather than any kind of hindrance. This was undoubtedly partly the influence of Textual Poachers on me, but probably also the influence of dialogues and debates with the likes of Will Brooker's work. And I certainly have no interest or desire to retreat into what strikes me as a resolutely reactionary position (so, yes, here's another moral dualism that I cling to) - by which I mean the whole "scholar-fans can't be properly objective or distanced or critical" argument, which I continue to strongly think is simply arrant, modernist nonsense. Alex Doty dismantled that best, for me, in Flaming Classics, a book that lives up to its name. So, yes, I think it does matter, and very much, that writers are invested in the fandom of the fans they study.

However, I also increasingly think that this isn't enough in and of itself. Not if it leads to specific investments and attachments being overly reproduced in scholarship, where these tend to be attachments linked to specific taste cultures and levels of cultural capital. S. Elizabeth Bird critiqued this definitively, really, in her recent book on audiences for Routledge - pointing out that 'cult' and 'edgy' TV was getting lots of academic attention (and we could elaborate on this to suggest that fans of these sorts of shows also get more academic attention... plus they just-so-happen to share levels of cultural capital with many of the scholar-fans producing this work). By contrast, middlebrow TV or resolutely 'mainstream' TV, or shows targeting older audiences, weren't and aren't getting anywhere near as much academic attention, failing to be lit by the spotlight of scholarly buzz. So there are real limits to this process, I feel, and that's what my chapter in Fandom ended up being all about.

If we don't retreat from declarations of attachment - and I don't think that ethnomethodologically or ethically scholar-fans should; really, more should be made of this in pieces of work where it is relevant - then how do we avoid the pitfalls of cultural reproduction and canonisation? How do we avoid the problem of there being a journal of Buffy studies (cool, teen, hip, cult US TV), but not a journal of Heartbeat studies? (uncool, older, rural, mainstream, Sunday evening British TV). How do we avoid, as a scholarly community, producing a patchy and very skewed account of TV or the media which is perhaps linked less to our genderings and linked much more to our levels of cultural capital, as well as to generational identities?

I've already alluded to my own partial and non-solution: that it may be worthwhile for scholar-fans to deliberately seek to work on fandoms and shows that they are not invested in, while nevertheless bringing their knowledge of fandom and their expertise to the table. A variant version of this would be for academia to seek to recruit a wider range of participants and voices working on a wider range of scholar-fan tastes, but I'm verging on wishful thinking or idealism there, so I'll stick with a smaller-scale attempt at shifting the situation in this instance.

Of course, some writers on fandom may want to distance themselves from 'fan studies' altogether, as you say. If this means not reading up on the relevant literature, then that strikes me as somewhat foolhardy. If it means approaching fandom from a different disciplinary perspective, or through variant philosophies, then surely this can only work to challenge and strengthen fan studies. I had this sort of feeling while reading Steve Bailey's recent book on fandom. Though it was published in the same year as Cornel Sandvoss's Fans, it couldn't have been more different in terms of its intertextual affiliations (I've just recently reviewed the two side-by-side for the journal Popular Communication). Sandvoss's work is strongly linked to media sociology, and draws on fan studies as an historical area of media/cultural studies; by contrast, Bailey seems to be writing at one remove from the 'canon' of fan studies. Though for me this created a danger of 'reinventing the wheel', it also allowed Bailey's work to speak back to fan studies, if you like, and to start from unusual first principles. Types of 'rogue' knowledge can be very valuable and useful, once more acting as a kind of corrective to taken-for-granted or ossified assumptions/subject matters. Of course, not all rogue knowledges do this; some just spectacularly miss the point, otherwise there wouldn't be any value in building up one's awareness and knowledge of an academic field in the first place!

CD: I very much agree that the attachment to attachment in fan studies has resulted in quite overt negotiations of cultural capital through the fan texts one writes on. It's Buffy one year, Harry Potter the next; cult and edgy for some fan studies circles, "reclaiming" the massively popular for others.

I think where we might disagree is actually at the level of method. I've pretty much arrived at the point where I feel as if what's needed in fan studies is the kind of long slow careful ethnography that has become quite difficult to do in anthropological studies of lived communities as separate cultures. I want this now partly in order to see the importance of differences in attachment amongst fans - why for some fans a fan community is a way of life and for others it's some version of a bulletin board that one checks after a particularly good or bad episode. I'm aware that my position on this now has a great deal to do with the fact that I work exclusively with online fan communities and that it's a position I hold with reference to online culture as a whole and thus fan communities as a piece of that.

So while I can accept the value of rogue knowledges and, at the same time, feel the limitations of scholars who try to reinvent the wheel of fan studies, those questions feel less important to me than avoiding the drive-through mode of fan studies. Perhaps ironically, this does not mean I want more reflection on the position of the ethnographer in relation to fan communities. In fact, I want a lot less of that in order to avoid the self-referentiality that seems to pervade and dominate the field. I feel as if it is possible to do the necessary in terms of ethical clarification without turning one's ethnographic self into the coolest insider on the block.

5. Fan studies blur really easily into media studies and now new media studies. I know there is work that looks at fandom of "classic authors" etc but I do wonder if the difficulty of talking about my Foucault "fandom" as a fandom is not only about the presumed relationship to mass-produced popular culture that's set into the idea of "fan" now but also about the way fan studies is so often about studying the means of articulating fandom rather than its content. Academics both don't much want to look at academic attachments that way and would find themselves with an odd, if perhaps illuminating, focus if they tried. Maybe there's not a question there. Here's one - could academic reflection on its own institutionalised scholarly practices of research and citation perhaps learn a lot more than it has yet from fan studies. Something about community hubs and tiers, about canon (and fanon), about flaming and wanks... I could go on. Maybe it still isn't a question.

MH: Whether it is a question or not, it's certainly an area that needs more analysis and thought. Alan McKee has written playfully and productively about theory fans in Fandom, and I've written on the subject in How To Do Things With Cultural Theory, which I don't think has filtered into fan studies debates very much yet (and this is just one of the problems with there being an emerging 'canon' of fan studies books as well as canonical fandoms - when I look at some bibliographies underpinning articles on fandom, say, I'm rather struck by the impression that Fan Cultures has ended up in there because the writer thought their bibliography ought to be all "present and correct", and not because they've actually engaged with it in any meaningful sense. Similarly, I do wonder whether scholarly resources which might help particular arguments are neglected because they don't have an obvious 'fan' or 'fandom' in the title... this may also be partly to do with keyword-database-searching as a research strategy, and increased time pressures and an apparent rise in instrumental rationality... but now I suppose I'm sounding like a specifically gendered 'grumpy old man', so may be I'll shut up).

But basically, I absolutely agree with you, and have pretty much published along these lines. In Chapter Seven of HTDTWCT, as part of a section 'Exploring Theory Culture', I argue that work from fan studies can play a significant part in enabling us to theorise and think about academics' theory fandoms. I suggest that the reluctance to use this body of work in this way has been partly related to academia's need - and especially media studies' need - to culturally position itself as something Other to 'mere' fandom, and hence to legitimate itself as properly 'intellectual' and 'critical'. Of course, this cultural 'resistance' (again!) to discourses of fandom is also very much linked to the fact that 'fandom' is assumed to belong to the realm of pop culture, whereas academia is allegedly the application and understanding of 'Theory', itself thought of as an Other to popular culture. So the exnomination of 'theory fandom', I end up arguing, is one strategy aimed at authorising scholarly knowledge as being 'above' its objects of study. There are multiple Otherings and exclusions which this is based on, and these can be contested and deconstructed, which is what I set out to do. In essence, I take a poststructuralist position in relation to the binary of Theory/fandom, asking what happens if we no longer recognise this as an either/or. This involves extending and revisiting my autoethnography from Fan Cultures so that as well as self-reflexively analysing my pop-cultural investments in Doctor Who, say, I analyse my theory-cultural investments in the psychoanalysis of Donald Woods Winnicott (or, from DW to DWW). Alan McKee was quite right to criticise my first attempt at autoethnography for these particular silences and exclusions.

By recognising that 'theory fandom' may be a meaningful term, it is also possible to utilise further insights from poststructuralist feminism, arguing that forms of affect and embodiment have been written out of 'modernist' academia, and that even some versions of fan studies which have sought to challenge this (my own earlier work included) have nevertheless recuperated specific binaries of knowledge/affect underpinning academic 'authority'.

Another extension of fan studies work into unusual and productive areas, and one which aims to challenge the popular culture/high culture binary, is Liesbet Van Zoonen's Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. There's no obvious 'fans' or 'fandom' in this title either, but it really should be essential reading for anyone thinking about the cultural limits to discourses of fandom (which are also forms of cultural power, of course). Van Zoonen asks whether and how 'fandom' can be used as a concept to think about processes and practices of democracy. Can one be a 'Politics fan' as well as a 'theory fan', in other words. It is startling stuff; brilliant scholarship and innovative thought which pushes the reader to think differently about fandom, to broaden its range and scope, and to challenge its cultural definitions and discursive restrictions. I'm very nearly inspired to 'book envy' by it.

CD: I've read Alan's piece in Fandom, and yours. I think there certainly is a tendency for the newest work in fan studies to be less considered and less cited, but within cultural studies I'm sure we can see this as an unavoidable disciplinary phase. My students find you more readably relevant than fan studies that's fifteen years old and so I'm sure the canonical reference points are in transition.

Having said as much I hope it will not be too ungenerous to say that my difficulty with both yours and Alan's pieces in Fandom is the sense of a clear distinction between "academic" and "fan" that is not in the least undermined by talking about conflicts or negotiations between those two roles.

Let's take "meta" as an example, by which I'd want to refer to the broad range of ways in which fans self-consciously analyse their objects and their fan communities and circulate that as analysis. Paying attention to how those skills are learned academically, how academics working as fans can not only produce meta but then turn around and produce the same analysis as academic scholarship, and how debate generated by meta mirrors or even challenges academic debate, I think it's unhelpful to place academics as doing things (including thinking things) that fans do not. As one small example, I couldn't recall how many references to Foucault have been given to me by fans - sometimes with page numbered quotations, sometimes just as a general sense of things.

But yes absolutely with regard to everything else you're saying here. I think fandom has a lot to show academics about how they operate without really wanting to think about it too much - and I liked both your and Alan's pieces in Fandom for just that reason.

6. I'm rambling now, so a shorter attempt at # 6. Fan communities and the way they work are the most interesting part of fan studies to me when I think about fandoms academically. But if we attempt to study fans ethnographically, as communities, do we necessarily throw the objects they are fans of into the background, and does that matter? I guess this is question 2 asked in reverse.

MH: Hmmm, well, I think I've done more than my share of rambling in response to your excellent and thought-provoking questions. But I guess there is a possibility of work on community per se putting 'the text' (with all the provisos we need around that) into the background. Having said that, I'm not personally convinced that it happens much; writers examining fan communities tend to find that the values, meanings and 'poachings' made from fan texts inevitably seep into the performative fan identities constituting that community, whether it's Star Wars fans appropriating notions of rebellion, or Sopranos fans setting themselves up as the communal 'counsellor' or tough-guy. So the text/community opposition may be a weaker analytical division than first appearances would suggest.

I'm not sure that studying communities is "the most interesting part of fan studies" for personally me, though. I recognise that a lot of scholars are doing it well, and developing the theoretical depth of fan studies via community case-study work - I'm thinking here in particular of Rhiannon Bury's (2005) book and its excellent use of both 'heterotopia' (something a PhD student of mine is investigating at the moment in relation to online REM fans) and John Hartley's work on the audience as 'invisible fiction'. Academia can be a slow road sometimes, and I'm not sure Bury's work has fully found the wider readership it deserves, as of yet.

The notion of fan 'community' is philosophically and empirically intriguing to me, but I still don't feel that it goes anywhere near encompassing the diversity of types of fan experience. And bearing in mind Garry Crawford's timely warnings about the possibility of certain types of fan activity being implicitly (or otherwise) constructed as 'authentic' fandom - as 'real' fandom versus other implicitly inferior modes - for myself, I'd still rather explore other types of fandom which may be more 'mainstream', less subcultural, perhaps less spectacularly visible, and possibly gendered differently to some (not all) of the sometimes feminised spaces of socially-organised fandom. If, as Bury's study argues (2005:205), "there is no such entity as a fan" (and I argued the very same thing in the opening pages of Fan Cultures), then surely it falls to us to study the entire performative array of how and where discourses of fandom are both mobilised and exnominated? (And where this could far outstrip any sense of primarily studying fan communities, though fan community would be one cultural site where discourses of fandom would be intently performed and debated, and so would absolutely require careful study as part of what I view as a much wider project).

Actually, upon reflection, I think the most interesting part of fan studies for me at the moment is thinking about cultural sites and spaces where fandom could be used more widely as a discourse, but remains typically counterfactual - Politics (Van Zoonen), Theory (Hills; McKee; your questions here), and even social networking or Web 2.0 (see Henry's Afterword to the Fandom book, which for me just ends up posing the question of why fandom isn't being used as a discourse by certain cyber-gurus).

Where fandom supposedly 'isn't' is just as crucial a question of culture and power as studying where it self-evidently 'is.'

CD: Well, I actually don't have a lot to offer but agreement here. I don't think it happens much either, and I think the opposite is far more of a problem. Perhaps I was wanting to flag it as something to watch - a possible flaw in what I'm doing now. Because it would be ridiculous if, for example, Doctor Who turned into nothing more than a label for a space in which Doctor Who fans interacted. Looking at that sentence now perhaps it's not entirely ridiculous at all, but it certainly would miss the influence of the source text on fan practices.

I am most interested in communities when I think about fans, but I'm starting to suspect in the course of our exchange that what I mean by "community" is not necessarily what you do. I'm fascinated by the way in which fandom is experienced as a part of daily life, as an everyday layer of one's life with its own temporalities and modes of entanglement with everything else. Not as a bounded community, then, but as a set of mutable ideas and varying practices that are taken up by some as "community" and not by others. I want to explore the ways in which fandom is a terrain, a currency and a language for intimate knowledges of other people that comprise the experience of fandom.

Even for people who do no more than log onto discussion forums after a TV episode there's an everydayness to it and a specific place that the practice and the connections with others formed by it have in the fan's life. So I don't mean community in the sense of being a card-carrying Elvis fan club member, but community in the sense of a located community of interest to which people can have very different degrees of attachment. For me, because I otherwise work in communities no one doubts are communities (like country towns), I'm interested in how the patterns of investment and modes of belonging to fan communities are actually quite similar. In particular, of course, I'm interested in how the sense of community experienced through fandom might be shaped by the particularity of online platforms, but I don't think my questions are irrelevant to other kinds of fan culture.

The New Mr. Spock?

I am being forced to relive the 1960s as journalists seek ways to describe my work. Last year, Howard Rhinegold dubbed me "the 21st century McLuhan," a comment my publishers felt compelled to put on the front cover of Convergence Culture. And I've been hit again and again ever since with questions about my relationship to McLuhan. Short answer: McLuhan and I differ in our conceptual starting points. McLuhan starts from the communications technology to explain its potential impact on society (his famous "the medium is the message") where-as I tend to start from the culture and focus on how social agents redefine technologies through their uses. McLuhan was important to me, however, in so far as he paved the way for comparative perspectives on media (moving us beyond medium specific debates which had limited the discussion in my opinion) and in that regard, he ranks alongside Harold Innis and Ithiel DeSola Pool in terms of being a founding figure in Comparative Media Studies.

McLuhan also provides me with a role model: he was someone who was willing to talk with media corporations and policy makers alike in his efforts to shape his culture; he was deeply invested in the concept of media literacy; he was a public intellectual who saw the value of engaging with the news media and with the public in an attempt to make his ideas more widely accessible; he was the head of a center which brought together intellectuals across many different disciplines; and he was someone who constantly experimented with new media platforms, including newsletters, records, video, and photographi collages, in his effort to spread his ideas more widely. These are all goals I try to embrace in my own work, though so far, I haven't been interviewed in Playboy, been the subject of jokes of Laugh-In, or made a cameo appearance in a Woody Allen movie. :-)

This past week, the analogy shifted with Stephanie Olsen from ZDNet News calling me "The Internet's New Dr. Spock." I was initially bemused by the comparison, especially since most of what I had said during the interview about Spock had ended up on the cutting room floor. But I was even more amused by the fact that several people out there responding to the interview have confused Dr. Benjamin Spock, the leading child advice writer of the 20th century, with Mr. Spock, the Vulcan first officer on board the Enterprise on the classic Star Trek series. Talk about generational differences in perspective!

Here are some comments from the Talk Back section following the article:

....Doctor Spock?

I thought it was Mister Spock and Doctor McCoy??

***********************************************************************

Aye, Aye Scotty!

Reader post by: Commander_Spock

Story: The Internet's new Dr. Spock?

Prepare To Beam Us Up For This Debate!

On Board Enterprise Warp.

Commander_Spock

Of course humans are not the only ones to make such confusions. The ad words that cropped up spontaneously on one site which mirrored the article pointed consumers towards a range of Star Trek related products, including, no joke, rubber Spock ears.

Leonard Nemoy struggled his whole career with people who confused Dr. and Mr. Spock, a confusion which normally resulted in an arch of his eyebrow. As it happens, I have written extensively both about Mr. Spock, through my work on Star Trek fans, and about Dr. Spock, through an essay I published in the Children's Culture Reader.

For the purposes of identification as this discussion continues, this is a photograph of Mr. Spock from Star Trek:

And this is a photograph of Dr. Spock, the child rearing expert and anti-war protester:

As it happens, there is a NEW Mr. Spock, as Entertainment Weekly reported a few weeks ago: Zachary Quinto, the actor who plays Sylar on Heroes, was recently cast to play the young Mr. Spock in the next Star Trek film which is being produced by J. J. Abrams.

I have been having fun imagining what readers thought Stephanie Olsen meant when she compared me to Mr. Spock: Is it some kind of comment about my logical mind, my (hardly) stoic attitudes, my commitment to "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations," the fact that every seven years I go into Pon Farr, my lust for Jim Kirk, or some other aspect of the television character's personality which escapes me. Of course, I always fancy my job as going where no humanist has gone before, so there may be some resemblence to THAT Spock after all! :-)

It occurs to me reading such comments that it would be useful to spend a moment explaining who Dr. Spock was for a generation which may have grown up without his sage guidance or seems to have no clue who he was.

Wikipedia provides a pretty good summary of Benjamin Spock's life and work:

Benjamin McLane Spock (May 2, 1903 - March 15, 1998) was an American pediatrician whose book Baby and Child Care, published in 1946, is one of the biggest best-sellers of all time. Its revolutionary message to mothers was that "you know more than you think you do." Spock was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis to try to understand children's needs and family dynamics. His ideas about childcare influenced several generations of parents to be more flexible and affectionate with their children, and to treat them as individuals, whereas the previous conventional wisdom had been that child rearing should focus on building discipline, and that, e.g., babies should not be "spoiled" by picking them up when they cried.

I wrote an extensive discussion of Spock's work for my book, The Children's Culture Reader, and that essay is reproduced on line for anyone who'd like to read it. Essentially, this article argues that Spock was one of a generation of post-war children's advocates who began to reassess the power relations between adults and children and who also helped the society come to grips with Freud's discoveries about infantile sexuality. I argue in the essay that this post-war parenting advice prefigures and predates later discussions of adult sexuality in important ways:

The recognition of children's sexuality as a positive, rather than as a negative, force led to a close examination of how parents should respond to and facilitate children's erotic awakenings. Children, so often, in our culture become the bearers of our own utopian fantasies for a better world. In this case, the world which was being envisioned was a world without erotic inhibitions, a world which was open to sexual pleasure and free from guilt and negative self-images.

By looking closely at children, their bodies and their desires, permissiveness developed an ideology about sexuality which helped to prepare the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. First, sex was rendered "wholesome," natural, biologically necessary, and in the process, old superstitions and moral prohibitions were pushed aside. Second, sex was stripped of its ties to procreation, with the child's masturbatory exploration of its own body and its pursuit of pleasure assuming positive values in and of themselves. Third, healthy sensuality extended to the entire body and not simply the genitals. The child's polymorphous eroticism was to be retained in adult life as a new and more vivid form of sexual experience. Fourth, pleasure was seen as beneficial, necessary, and the body was depicted as knowing its own needs. The body doesn't lie; if it feels good, it can't be bad. Fifth, all aspects of life, especially learning and creativity, assumed an erotic dimension, as practices of re-direction and sublimation transformed sexual energies into other kinds of activities, and the desire to explore the world was understood as primarily sensual in origins. We know through our senses, and as a result, we should awaken our senses to the broadest possible range of experiences. Sexual frustration and perversion were seen as resulting from boredom and understimulation. Sixth, sexual openness within the domestic sphere was viewed as positive, including some "healthy" interplay between parents and children, yet sex was, by its design, a private act, which should be performed behind closed doors and held in check by public expectations. Morally charged concepts, such as "sin" or "guilt," were gradually displaced by socially-directed concepts, such as "privacy" and "propriety." Most of these conceptions of eroticism would become core tenants of the self-help books or liberation literature of the sexual revolution; they would become the common wisdom of a generation which sought to expand the place of recreational sex within American life and to prolong the period of childhood sexual experimentation into a richer, fuller erotic life as adults.

So, what does this have to do with my work on youth and digital media? Not a lot. I am a media scholar, not a pediatrician or child pyschologist. But for the baby boom generation, Spock functions as short hand for all advice literature for parents. In practice, Spock himself was deeply distrustful of mass media even though he himself used the media very effectively to get his advice out to parents. Subsequent children's advice writers have tended to say very little about media or reduce their advice to parents to what I call the "just say no to Nintendo" position. That is, good parenting comes through restricting access to media: keep it out of the children's bedrooms; limit the number of hours.

I would argue, however, that parents have a constructive role to play in actively shaping young people's relations to media, helping them learn skills which will allow them to meaningfully participate in the new media landscape and develop a healthy, ethical, creative, and intellectually engaged pattern of media use. As I wrote in Technology Review several years ago, media literacy begins at home and parents have an active role to play in insuring that children acquire the core social skills and cultural competencies needed to become full participants in the emerging media culture.

It is not even clear that there could be a Spock of the Internet Age. Spock's books emerged within the context of a consensus culture; they were being read at a period of mass migration in which the dominance of the extended family was breaking down as children moved away from their hometowns as they started their own families and thus needed a different form of advice than their parents had required. Spock's books were read by almost everyone in the society where-as today's market for advice literature is increasingly fragmented, responding to a multicultural society with many different definitions of what a family is and what values should shape the interactions between parents and children.

But if we look at what Spock said in his books, we might construct some core principles of what advice to parents would look like:

1. Spock felt that parents should remain calm and trust common sense to get them through most problems. In the case of the Internet, parents would do better to try to find analogies between what occurs online and other more traditional forms of activities. So, in what ways is hanging out in MySpace like the teen haunts of previous generations? In what ways is joining a guild in a multiplayer game like signing up for sports? In what ways is Live Journal like writing for the school newspaper? And so forth. These analogies would only get us so far but starting from an idea of radical difference may cause parents to freak out about every aspect of their teen's online lives rather than focusing on real points of conflict or weighing risks and benefits of certain activities.

2. Spock worked hard to insure popular access to the latest thinking of academic experts. We've already argued that he was a popularizer of Freud and psychoanalysis; he also helped to bridge between cultural anthropologists like Margaret Mead and the American public. He wanted to insure that parenting was governed by reason and reliable information rather than having parents strike out blindly. He wanted parents to see their jobs in a larger social and cultural context and that's something which could help contemporary parents find the right solutions for their own families.

3. Spock taught parents to respect their children and see them as citizens within a democratic society rather than subjects of a totalitarian regime. Permissive child rearing doctrines then and now got a bad reputation because people imagined children as becoming tyrants and parents as reluctant to set limits. But Spock, in fact, shifted back and forth over time in his advice trying to counter both the authoritarian impulses of parenting in the immediate post-war period and the excesses of totally permissive parenting which came in its wake. Respecting children, listening to their point of view, but also providing leadership and governance within the family was at the heart of the social ballance he advocated. And that ballance is totally off at the moment where the internet is concerned. Some parents remain ignorant and indifferent of what their children are doing online, while others employ all kinds of surveillance tools to snoop on their kids. The key is, as I said in the interview, to watch their backs and not snoop over their shoulders. Parents need to engage children and youth in a process of reflecting on their own ethical choices and educating them about the risks they face as they move into this unfamiliar space. And that means adopting an informed perspective on the online world rather than acting in ignorance or fear. Spock's advice literature helped another generation learn what it needed to know in order to confront the social transitions of the post-war society. A new Spock would need to give them the information they require to manage the cultural, economic, and technological transitions of our own era.

To borrow a line from Leonard Nimoy, I am not Spock. I suspect there never will be another Dr. Spock given the fragmentation of our culture. But we can all learn things from Spock's legacy which would help parents deal with some of the challenges they face right now.

The Power of "Collegial Pedagogy": An Interview with Youth Radio (Part Two)

What kinds of skills and knowledge are young people acquiring through their involvement with the production of youth radio? Response from Ayesha Walker, Online Project Associate. If you want to check out some of Walker's work for Youth Radio, try "Bathing Ape", Marketplace

and "From Blacksburg to Bay Area."

I unconfidently discovered radio my sophomore year of high school at El Cerrito's KECG station. I was determined to break through my introverted shell and find comfort behind

the microphone. Somehow in my senior year I was elected Director of Communications,

hosting my very own radio crew, playing my voice through every speaker in El Cerrito

high school. By the time my senior year came around, I fatefully stumbled across Youth

Radio. I studied all of the features and fell in love with web, photography and journalism.

As the new generation of technology users, today's young people are trained here at

Youth Radio in exactly what we need and want: proficiency through technologically

advanced equipment in media production. Therefore we advance in the skills that already

belong to us.

We learn to magnify our personality with confidence, creatively generating authentic

work through the components that YR offers:

News and commentaries: young people write stories for local and national radio,

iTunes, and our own website

Music: young people learn to produce their own music through industry standard

computer software and also program music shows featuring a range of artists and styles

for terrestrial and web radio

Web: young people learn to produce and design youthradio.org

Video: young people learn to create videos for outlets ranging from PBS to

Current TV to YouTube

After learning what we want, we learn what to do with the skills we've acquired through the program. We either move up or move out. Young people evolve into an essential part of staff, guiding other young people in the right direction. Or we find work outside Youth Radio, sometimes even outside converged media, using the professional skills gained here.

Youth Radio has helped shape the minds and personalities of many young people around the Bay Area, making the road to success much more visible.

Throughout my time here at Youth Radio, I've worked on a mob of commentaries. But there's one in particular I'm most proud of is called "Hood Sweet Hood." It hasn't aired on an outlet yet, but I'm proud of it because I feel I had the chance to clarify a few things that take place in the hood that most people outside of the ghetto wouldn't understand.

At Youth Radio, I've learned to swallow my people-fearing ways and express myself. I've learned to write creatively to a broad audience. By helping to maintain and produce youthradio.org, I've learned to take professional quality photographs, to network, and most importantly, to have fun. I've learned to think more deeply about my actions, whether it's buying from large corporations or just plain recycling. I've learned to speak properly on air. I've learned interviewing tactics--not from a book, even though I love books with all my mind, but from experience, which is the best teacher a student could ever have. Youth Radio has allowed me to sit in and help plan its future and my own.

And more on this question from Reina Gonzales, Youth Radio graduate and Associate

Producer. To sample Gonzales's work, see "Military Deserters in Canada."

I've been with Youth Radio since I was fifteen years old in a variety of roles. As a

student, I can say that the biggest impact Youth Radio had on me was that it gave me a

sense of direction. I learned what opportunities were out there for me and was then able

to decide what would bring me the most fulfillment.

As a peer teacher, I was surprised by how supportive and non- judgmental the students

were. In our weekly radio shows, I often saw the students struggle with writing or

on-air nerves, but in working together, they showed a sense of trust and mutual respect.

This was an experience completely opposite to the hostile environment I encountered in

high school.

As a youth reporter, I learned that writing ability on its own isn't enough to produce

media that matters. I had to develop a more holistic approach to the stories I worked

on--thinking about all the possible ways I could tell them and always trying to consider

different points of view.

As a radio and video producer, I've seen students learn to adapt to the always-changing

media landscape by using new technologies and producing their stories across formats.

They also think about new ways to market themselves and their work using social

networks--all of which suggests they're becoming just as good if not better than their

adult media professional counterparts.

What relationship does your group have with other youth radio producers around the world?

Response from Senior Producer Rebecca Martin and Producer Brett Myers, Youth Radio's National Network/Curating Youth Voices Initiative. To see some of the work of the Curating Youth Voices Initiative, see "Leaving the Mountains," NPR

Youth Radio has grown into a hub for local, national and international converged media

production. We carry out this work through collaborations and partnerships with youth

correspondents, youth media groups, and youth organizations across the country and

around the globe. In addition to our bureaus in DC, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, we have an

extensive network of youth media partners whom we work with to co-produce content for

national and international audiences on a regular basis.

The bureaus and youth media partners in the U.S. are part of a unified editorial

structure at Youth Radio designed to represent diverse youth experiences and respond to

national news and issues in a comprehensive way that reflects the American landscape.

This structure also insures that our content meets the highest journalistic standards.

Our extensive youth correspondent network links individual young people across the

country and around the globe with adult professional editors and producers, and youth

peer editors at our headquarters in Oakland, California, who work with them remotely to

bring their stories to national and international audiences on the radio and the web.

Over the years, we've worked with young reporters and commentators in Afghanistan,

South Africa, Palestine, Israel, Mexico, Cuba, France and India.

We actively participate in conferences that bring together youth media producers (and

founded the Youth in Radio conference with the National Federation of Community

Broadcasters); regularly host international journalists; and do our best to provide

technical assistance and advice to newcomers in the youth media field. One initiative

that formalizes the latter effort is Teach Youth Radio, a free, online curriculum

resource we offer in monthly installments designed to encourage educators inside and

outside classrooms to integrate youth media content and methods into their work.

When we met in Saint Louis, we had an interesting exchange about the value of individual

authorship as opposed to collective intelligence. I wondered if you might be willing to

share your perspective on this topic here.

Response from Lissa Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer

I was actually inspired to write a bit about this topic after we met at the 2007

National Media Education Conference in St. Louis. In your media literacy white paper,

you describe collective intelligence as a property of joint projects where "everyone

knows something, nobody knows everything, and what any one person knows can be tapped by the group as a whole."

This notion of collective intelligence resonates for me in lots of ways. My own personal

youth media practice and research have always centered on learning environments that

leverage collaborative thinking and making, and I often find myself trying to expose,

understand, and promote all the joint work that takes place behind all meaningful

productions, even those designated as "single author" works. Something I especially

love about the concept of collective intelligence is the way it embraces our fundamental

incompleteness outside the social contexts we make and re-make everyday.

That said, I'm wondering if there are ways that collective intelligence just might

sometimes work against youth producers...I find that some of the most important work we

do at Youth Radio, even within our hyper-collaborative production method, is to secure

individual on air credit for the organization and our youth reporters and artists. We

take those radio "back announces" (when the host credits the contributor you just

heard) extremely seriously. Sometimes young people can't afford to be anonymous

contributors, no matter how intelligent their collectives happen to be, if they are to

convert their media productions into concrete new opportunities in higher education

and/or living wage work.

When I raised this line of questioning with you in St. Louis, you offered a provocative

response that has stuck with me. You said it reminded you of the observation that

scholars started proclaiming the "death of the author" at the very moment when women

and people of color started getting traction in academic departments and publishing.

So I guess I hesitate to declare the death of the individual youth media maker at the very moment when young people need concrete, specific, and traceable acknowledgement of their work's value, not as a loosey-goosey self-esteem builder, but because that kind of recognition is sometimes necessary for them to leverage their work to transform the conditions of their lives.

Having said all this, I do realize that to some extent I'm conflating collective

authorship with collective intelligence. Collective intelligence isn't so much about

joint production as it is about shared knowledge, not so much about who deserves credit

for the outcome, but how various minds/bodies/imaginations inform and derive

"smarts" from the process. When I reflect on my own creative methods as both a

writer and producer, I can see how "intelligence" can be displaced from the people

in the room to the project underway, from separate minds to shared spaces that take

shape throughout the time it takes to complete a given piece of work. If that's true,

it makes me wonder what happens to that collective and perhaps temporary or contingent

intelligence once the group disbands or the project ends?

Which brings me to one final point. Our conversation in St. Louis also got

me thinking about how it can sometimes feel like projects never end anymore, as a result

of digital culture and its permanent, searchable, ongoing conversation, as dana boyd and

others have described. If youth media producers drop out of that conversation after

they've finished and broadcast/posted a final version of the story, they surrender the

right to keep shaping how the piece is received, interpreted, and re-purposed by other

producers. When Youth Radio stories air nationally, we often hear directly from

listeners, usually with admiration, but not always. Some especially controversial

stories from our recent archive include: when Brandon McFarland wrote about being

whooped as a child; when Cassandra Gonzalez described the first time her baby's

incarcerated father met his newborn daughter; when Clare Robbins talked about an

anti-racist group she joined for white people only. Stories like these get other people

talking, and our challenge as a media literacy organization and production company is to

teach young people that from now on, their work doesn't stop when they produce the

story; they need also to produce the conversation that (hopefully) continues in the

story's wake.

For further information, contact elisabeth soep

The Power of "Collegial Pedagogy": An Interview with Youth Radio (Part One)

When I spoke at the National Media Education Conference in Saint Louis earlier this summer, I was approached by Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep and Ayesha Walker. Soep is the Research Director and Senior Producer f and Walker is an Online Project Associate for an organization called Youth Radio, which defines its mission as: "to promote young people's intellectual, creative and professional growth through training and access to media and to produce the highest quality original media for local and national outlets." As it happens, Soep is a regular reader of this blog and as it happens, because I like to listen to NPR and PRI podcasts when I walk every day, I had heard several of the segments her team had produced. We immediately fell into an intense conversation about authorship in an age of collective intelligence and participatory culture and about what these shifts in the notion of participation and collaboration mean in the context of a program which is trying to "authorize" young people (that is, empower them to become authors.) That conversation convinced me that Soep and her gang had something to teach all of us about youth media production, the nature of radio as a medium, and the shifting construction of authorship in a digital age. And so I immediately asked her if I could do an interview with her and with the people who she is working with for my blog.

This is, in that sense, an unusual interview. Most of my interviews are with specific individuals; this is one of the few times we have done a collaborative interview. The answers which follow come from both youth and adult participants in the Youth Radio program. Such a process is the most appropriate way to capture what Soep calls "collegial pedagogy" -- which depends on shifting the power relations between children and adults. (She says more about this concept below so I don't want to pre-empt her comments.)

I have written here before about my reservations about the "digital natives/digital immigrants" terminology which has gained such circulation in recent years. When I first heard the terms, I thought they were powerful and I have since seen that power many times. They immediately give people a tool to think about something they are experiencing -- some kind of generational shift in the ways that young people and adults relate to these emerging technologies. But it is a power we should use selectively since these terms also distort many aspects of the phenomenon that they seek to describe. There are at least three major distortions involved:

1. The terms are ahistorical. They give rise to the myth that this is the FIRST generation where kids have known more about technology than their parents. I hear this claim again and again from people who should know better and it is simply not true. There have been a series of generation gaps surrounding technology across the past century or more and these gaps have had real impacts on the historical development of communications media. We can learn more about the present moment by looking to the past and using language which cuts us off from that larger history is profoundly unhelpful in understanding our present moment.

2. It collapses all young people into a so-called digital generation. David Buckingham, the British researcher, was the first to really help me understand the risks involved here. We could argue, as I did in Technology Review several years ago, after attending one of Buckingham's conferences, that there are two competing myths -- the Columbine Generation (which we hear much less often now, thankfully, which sees young people as at risk because of their "unique" access to technology) and the Digital Generation (which celebrates the positive transformations being brought about by young people's access to technology). We give up the myth of a Digital Generation at our own risk since it is the most powerful way to counter the Columbine Generation myth. But we also need to recognize the ways that it erases class boundaries in young people's access to and ability to participate in the new media landscape. The Digital Natives metaphor doesn't acknowledge either the digital divide (in young people's access to the technologies) or the participation gap (in young people's access to the social skills and cultural competencies needed to fully and meaningfully participate in the emerging digital culture.)

3. It ignores the degree that what's really powerful about most of the new forms of participatory culture of fans, bloggers, and gamers is that such affinity spaces allow young people and adults to interact with each other in new terms. These affinity spaces (to use James Paul Gee's term) bring together youth and adults who don't have fixed and hierarchical relationships (students/teachers, children/parents) on the basis of their shared interests. There are all kinds of anxieties about such relationships in the modern era (since any contact between youth and adults who are not members of their families bring with it a fear of child predators) but there is also something very constructive about many of these normal relations between children and adults. Even traditional forms of contact between adults and youth, such as Sunday school outings or Boy Scouts gatherings, have been tainted both by the fear and the reality of child molestation. And in any case, many of the older ways that youth and adults interacted outside of school and family -- whether through churches or youth organizations -- are facing declines in participation. Moreover, most of the traditional youth organizations were modeled on the same hierarchical relations that shape formal education. In an internet world, where people can meet first without such clear identity markers, young people and adults may at least sometimes interact without age being a major factor. In almost every case, the new participatory cultures are ones which have been built by youth and adults working together. We need to spend more time examining how and where such relationships occur and articulating their value. One of the things which interest me about Youth Radio is that they are pulling such interactions into a public service organization in very conscious ways and that's at the heart of what they are calling "collegial pedagogy." And like many related youth media projects, they involve youth speaking directly to adult and youth audiences about things that matter to them, encouraging us to take seriously young people's perspectives on the world.

The interview which follows not only explains but embodies those relationships. I would also encourage you to check out some of the links to the group's productions which are sprinkled throughout this interview: it will give you a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when we take seriously young people's perspectives on the world and help them get access to the means of cultural production and distribution.

How would you define the mission of Youth Radio? What are you trying to accomplish?

Response from Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer. You can learn more about Soep's perspective by checking out Lissa's blog.

Youth Radio is a youth development organization and independent media production company founded by Ellin O'Leary in 1992. Headquartered in Oakland, CA, we've got satellite bureaus and youth correspondents working across the U.S. and around the world producing and curating award-winning converged media content. Youth Radio stories and shows reach massive audiences through outlets including National Public Radio (with its 27 million weekly listeners), iTunes, Radio Bilingue, YouTube, and MySpace. Youth Radio promotes young people's intellectual, creative, and professional growth and citizenship and transforms the public discourse through media production.

Students come to Youth Radio primarily from the nations strapped, heavily tracked, re-segregating public schools. Most are low-income, digitally marginalized youths and young people of color. Our approach links deadline driven, production-based media education with programs that support personal and community health, engage active citizenship, and pave pathways to college and living wage jobs in the media and beyond.

Over the past several years, Youth Radio's teen reporters have examined the status of free speech in U.S. classrooms in an era of shrinking civil liberties. Our Reflections on Return series has documented the experiences of young troops coming home from the Iraq war. A Cape Town college student grappled with her father's participation as a police officer in the former apartheid state. One young man documented his experience of deportation, having been released from prison to a country he hadn't set foot in since he was two years old. A son reflected on his mother's struggle, and his own, with her AIDS diagnosis. Teens described the horror of running into their moms on MySpace.

Young people produce culture everyday. Through stories such as these, they put cultural production to work for themselves, their communities, and their audiences across our connected, divided world.

What roles do youth play in your production process? What roles do adults play?

Response from Lissa Soep, Research Director and Senior Producer

The answer depends on where young people are in the program. Within the first week of starting an introductory class, students go on the air for a live public affairs radio

show, which goes out via broadcast and online. In this phase of their Youth Radio

experience, they learn mainly from peers how to produce commentaries, news,

roundtables, public service announcements, original beats, music segments, blogs, and

videos. Recent program graduates--most teenagers themselves and some younger than their

own students--serve as the lead instructors, editors, and co-producers. Peer teachers

make the transition from students to educators with scaffolding from adults through

weekly professional development workshops on topics ranging from how to operate a flash

recorder, to how to navigate the uncertain ethics of today's digital culture.

After the 10-week introductory course work, young people move through another 10 weeks

of more advanced training in specialized areas (e.g., engineering, journalism, music

production, etc.) and eventually into paid internships in every department across the

organization. Here's where they start to collaborate in a different way with adults.

Take, for example, our professional newsroom. Young people facilitate weekly editorial

meetings where they pitch stories to peers and adult producers. Youth reporters then

work closely with adult media professionals on every stage of developing the story:

finding an angle, identifying characters and scenes, developing interview questions,

gathering "tape" (a term we still use all the time inside our fully digital studios)

and then devising an outline, composing a script, mixing the story, and delivering to an

outlet.

I call our newsroom methodology "collegial pedagogy" (Vivian Chavez and I have

written about this in a Harvard Ed Review article and we've got a chapter devoted to

it in our forthcoming book, Drop That Knowledge, with UC Press).

Collegial pedagogy is a deeply interdependent dynamic that's markedly different from most classroom scenarios. In collegial pedagogy, young people and adults co-create original work

neither could pull off alone, and over which neither stands as final judge, because the

work goes out to an audience no one--young or old--can fully predict or control. The

adult producer could not create the story without young people to identify topics worth

exploring, to host and record peer-to-peer conversations, and to experiment with novel

modes of expression and ways of using words, scene, and sound. At the same time, young

people could not create the story without adults to provide access to resources,

equipment, high- profile outlets, and institutional recognition, and to share the skills

and habits developed through years of experience as media professionals. Young people

offer a key substantive contribution that the adults cannot provide -- a certain kind

of access, understanding, experience, or analysis directly relevant to the project at

hand. They contribute insights and challenging perspectives to a mainstream media that

too often ignores the experience and intelligence of youth. And yet adults do not only

oversee or facilitate the learning experience surrounding a given media production

experiment; they actually join in the production process itself.

It can be tricky to work as an adult inside collegial pedagogy, tempting as it often is

to get so swept up in a project that you start to take over. It's a problem youth

media producer Debra Koffler from the Conscious Youth Media Crew has cleverly termed "adulteration" - a risk that seems inherent in creative collaborations where young

people and adults feel mutual passion, investment, and vulnerability. That's why

there's one policy that is absolutely non-negotiable at Youth Radio: young people

always have final editorial say over everything they create. The ultimate goal of

collegial pedagogy, after all, is for young people to develop the technical, creative,

and intellectual capacities they need to step away from adults. In our newsroom, they

increasingly work independently to create high quality products, while maturing into

journalists prepared to partner, from the other side of the pedagogical dynamic, with

students following in their footsteps.

What do you see as the continued value of broadcast radio as a medium in an era of blogs

and podcasts?

Response from Nishat Kurwa, Youth Radio graduate and News Director

The teenagers and young adults currently enrolled and working in our organization are bridging this gap between broadcast and digital outlets. They're key consumers and producers of converged media products, finding new music through social networking sites and seeing their online radio programs downloaded as podcasts hundreds of times a week. But there are still technological barriers to online radio and podcasts becoming their own listening formats of choice.

Even though they are increasingly using their cell phones and iPods for music downloads, they often have limited access to computers on which to stream online radio. And even when they do have home computers, that access engenders a very individual - even lonely - listening experience. Broadcast radio, on the other hand, creates a listenership community. Even a high school student graduating in the class of 2008, coming of age alongside MySpace and Sirius, will have made most of the new music discoveries of his or her lifetime during drive time terrestrial radio broadcasts. I'd be surprised if the power of this nostalgia didn't echo into the next generation of listeners.

Even though radio's "golden era" (which can plausibly refer to any period before the FCC's 1996 deregulation of the industry) offered far more musical diversity, it has something in common with the post-consolidation period. A favorite radio jock is crown prince or princess of the morning, determining the proverbial water cooler conversation: Are you going to the Art and Soul Festival Chuy mentioned? They're going to have a blood donation booth. Did you hear that crank call to the bakery? That interview with Mary J. Blige - I didn't know she was in town this weekend!

I also think that despite the surge of interest and influence in user-generated content and the move-away from top-down journalism, there's still a strong desire for traditional media producers' authority of experience and delivery. "I can't live without my radio!"

I noticed that you are making your broadcast content available via iTunes. How did that

come about and how successful do you think this approach has been at broadening who

listens to youth radio?

Response from Nishat Kurwa, Youth Radio graduate and News Director

As digital media/online radio and podcasts began to draw increasing audiences a few years back, Youth Radio approached Apple's iTunes as a potential outlet for our radio stories. We ended up with both a weekly podcast on iTunes and a 24-hour radio stream, found under iTunes "Public," "Urban," and "Eclectic" categories.

In addition to being another opportunity for our students to refine the improvisational live hosting and interviewing skills they learn in our classes, the radio stream has been an important free space for creative stories and uncensored music that might be difficult to place on our terrestrial broadcast outlets, given time constraints and FCC regulations.

Youth Radio has produced a variety of talk-format programs for weekly and monthly broadcast on San Francisco Bay Area commercial and public radio. However, most of that programming was dominated by public affairs content - roundtable discussions and interview segments responding to news events or exploring various aspects of youth culture. The iTunes stream presented an opportunity to run 24 hours of music-driven content. This programming is akin to the live radio format that draws many young people to Youth Radio in the first place. The fact that the stream is online and carried by a significant media company vastly expands the potential audience, with listeners in various national and international locations, represented as pushpins on the world map in our iTunes studio. And like our relationship with NPR, the recognition and marketing potential of the Apple brand provides valuable leverage as we seek new digital media outlets.

The iTunes stream also has great potential as a place for experimentation as audiences' appetites shift. For example, as YouTube came to prominence, one of our students shot and posted cell phone footage of the Oakland A's mascot hyphy dancing (an energetic hip hop genre originating in the Bay Area) and the clip has been viewed more than 400,000 times to date. We were inspired to start experimenting with this less highly produced aesthetic in our audio work, launching a content stream called "Youth Radio Raw." iTunes was the natural, (and frankly, only) place to debut this material.

There's been a general trend suggesting that contemporary youth are less likely than previous generations to seek out information from traditional news channels. What insights do you have about why young people might be turned off by news?

Response from Pendarvis "Dru" Harshaw, Youth Radio Reporter and Commentator For a sample of Dru's broadcasts, see "N-Bomb", NPRand "The Turf/The Village"

Readily available news. Everyone reports. How do you decide? The information age has reached the point where news is constantly flashing in our faces, from news tickers on

the sides of skyscrapers in major cities, to news flashes on your hand held communication tool that you use as a cell phone.

News is everywhere. So how credible is every source?

Many would say that laziness is the reason that my generation doesn't re the news. But

I say searching for credibility is where my generation's laziness comes into play. Instead of researching the origin of stories and the hard facts, we would rather take what is given as fact, or not take anything.

We have an urge to know about the news that directly relates to us. When I read the newspaper, I read about the sports team I like and the city side section to see if anyone I know died. I get on the internet and check my email and MySpace, and if something on Yahoo's web page catches my attention, it's because it directly relates to me...In turn, credibility has been substituted for relativity. That's why we do not read YOUR news, we read our news.

The difference between Youth Radio and MySpace or a YouTube or any new site which allows

a person to produce themselves is ... media literacy. Youth Radio does what MySpace

would hate us to do: Teach us why sites like MySpace work--the advertisements, the

conglomerates, and how all of this relates to them getting our money. Instead of

blindly posting our videos and pictures on a website owned by a round table of old

farts, Youth Radio teaches us the process of broadcasting, the mechanics of production,

and the influence of media --not from the mouth of an old fart, but from the mouths of

young people who have also gone through this program, young people who are literate in the power of media, and the power we have in producing the media.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eleven, Part Two): Nancy Baym and Aswin Punathambekar

Articulating Attachment NB: I think people are often better able to articulate what stories mean to them in terms of the text itself: which characters they identify with (or don't), what they think about plot turns, etc. With music, it's very hard to find words to explain one's connection outside of the role songs played in that moment of one's autobiography. I have loved music more than stories most of my life but I can explain narrative conventions with some degree of competence and can't even begin to describe things like the common rhythmic or chord structures in the music that moves me.

AP: This is an interesting point, and I would readily admit that if someone were to ask me why I enjoy A. R. Rahman's music or why a certain playback singer's voice moves me, I would have nothing much to say. And as I quickly realized when I began speaking with fans of A. R. Rahman, this question doesn't move the conversation much. What would get me and other Rahman fans talking is this: tell me about your conversations and experiences interacting with other Rahman fans online. Attachment, in other words, was defined in terms of belonging in a community.

It is very important to recognize that this relates to taste hierarchies and the ambivalent status of film music in Indian public culture. The question of high culture vs. low culture fandom that Jonathan Gray and Roberta Pearson brought up is very relevant here. Given that music directors and playback singers are often trained in classical music and the fact that film songs draw on classical music, fan discussions do revolve around this. In the Rahman fan community, there are fans who are well-versed in the technical (or "formal"?) dimensions of music and go to great lengths to explain them to other fans. Needless to say, this expertise becomes a form of value and these fans quickly become leaders within the community.

In fact, film music's middlebrow status allows elite youth to claim a fan identity and belong in a fan community partly because it is not associated with lower class, lower caste, and "political" fan communities that form around film stars in south India.

NB: That's interesting, I don't see much of this in the music fandoms I spend time in. In fact, I think it's pretty unusual to see any fans talking about the formal elements that make songs sound as they do. When I read Daniel Levitin's (author of This Is Your Brain on Music) claim that the appeal of pop music is in the timbre, I had no idea what "timbre" meant, and I'd bet that most pop music fans don't. Musicians can have those conversations, but fans that aren't musicians rarely can, and I think this is very different from narrative where fans can not just articulate narrative conventions, but are often using them to write their own fan fictions. There is no music fandom equivalent of fan fiction except fan fiction about musicians, but that's a total form shift.

But I think it makes perfect sense to extend a fandom approach to "high" culture, and to look at how 'high culture' sorts of discussion permeate 'low culture' fandoms. On my blog, for instance, I've written about wine fandom and how that doesn't normally get considered "fandom" but that people who are into wine act just like people who are into a TV show or movie -- they hold gatherings, they read supplementary materials, they go on pilgrimages to wineries, they wear winery t-shirts and baseball caps, they try to connect with others who are into the same things (there are now at least 3 online wine-based social networking sites). I knew so many people who made pilgrimages to see Wagner's Ring Trilogy performed in its entirety on consecutive nights by the Chicago Opera.

Communities of Sound

NB: Another way in which the text at stake raises very different questions with music is how the social relationships formed around music differ from those formed around narratives. I love your point above that attachment is "defined in terms of belonging in a community." Music has ties to location in ways stories don't -- as you know! Where narratives have the fan conventions that bring the hardcores together, music has live performance that is integral to its very being and gets everyone from the hardcores to the curious together in place. This is again a huge contrast to, say, the fan con which is only going to get the hardcores together in space. How does music's connection to place affect the fandom that forms around it?

AP: I'm really glad you raised the issue of place.

As I said earlier, fandom has been considered an important element of film culture primarily because film stars in south India have been successful at mobilizing fans along linguistic and regional lines.

Given that the Rahman fan community is first and foremost a community realized online, and that fans bring diverse stakes and affiliations to bear on their participation, mobilization along axes of caste or language is, at a basic level, rendered structurally impossible. For example, fans based in Malaysia, for whom participation in the Rahman fan community is part of a larger process of claiming a Tamil ethnic identity, share little in common with second-generation Indian-Americans for whom dancing to a remixed Rahman song at a club speaks to a very different set of concerns. Focusing our attention on the realm of film music thus allows us to challenge the romanticization of fan culture as subaltern politics. The realm of film music fandom forces us to acknowledge other ways of being a fan and modes of belonging in fan communities.

Of course, this does pose problems. For instance, members of the Rahman fan community appear unconcerned with questions of class and caste that have been central to fan-based political mobilizations. In the very first interview I conducted, the moderator of the group made it clear that the Rahman fan community shared nothing in common with "rowdy" fan associations and went on to remark: "we're online, not on the streets!"

NB: I think one has to really stretch the definition of "politics" to argue it's an important component of the fandoms in which I spend time, but place is core. One of the topics I've been intrigued by is the role of online fans and fan communities in taking music out of place. For instance, in the Swedish indie music scene, outside of MySpace (and arguably there to an extent) the work of exporting this cultural product is being taken on by (often unpaid) fans in America, England, France, and other countries. Songs that would never be heard outside of Sweden, and might not even get heard in Sweden, are getting international audiences through mp3 blogs and online webzines devoted to that (and the broader Scandinavian) scene. Online fandom is spreading music well beyond its locations of origin on an unprecedented scale, but their place-based nature remains an important component. In terms of the individualizing function of music fandom, being able to identify with a foreign music scene is great - I could frame myself as a big fan of local music (and I've done so at other points in life), but being a Kansan who strongly self-identifies as a Swedish indie fan has a lot more potential to start conversations and allows me a lot more potential to turn local friends on to bands they'd otherwise never hear. And on the other side of that, having an online community of people who are into bands as obscure as these are in America allows me to continuously find new music and to get in-depth expertise on the bands I fall in love with. Many fans in this particular fandom are far more likely to check out a new band if they are Swedish than not, regardless of where they live themselves.

Relationship Building

AP: Relationship building is definitely an interesting issue. Fans of A. R. Rahman have positioned themselves very clearly as a grassroots marketing team. Some of them have business degrees and work as consultants, a large number work in the IT industry, and they've taken it upon themselves to figure out new ways of distributing Rahman's music, tackling digital piracy and p2p sharing, and so on. Rahman, for his part, has acknowledged these fans' efforts and has begun collaborating with them on a range of projects.

In the Indian mediascape, these new kinds of relationships between fans and producers haven't received much attention. And it would be fair to say that producers are yet to figure out ways to tap into the vast space of participatory culture that has emerged online. Fans are being courted, but only because their serve as information hubs. As I see it, talent competitions on TV are the only site where fans are able to strike up conversations with music directors, playback singers, lyricists, and others in the industry.

NB: I see a lot of norms about sharing in music fan communities, most of which prohibit fan distribution of anything that can be purchased except in the context of mp3 blogs, which often operate with the tacit approval of labels. But as I say, fans are certainly acting as distributors and publicists.

Another element that's interesting here is the huge boom in online sites built to create social relationship amongst music listeners in the name of music discovery. There are new "Music 2.0" sites launching weekly. With music we have sites that are being built from the ground up to track everything people listen to and make personal connections and music recommendations based on that. That ability to track it all and create collective knowledge algorithmically seems to be operating at a whole other level with music. These sites raise so many questions about the roles of shared taste in relationships. Looking at Last.fm, whether or not a person shares musical taste is the core issue in whether or not someone will "friend" someone they don't already know, but how well does that predict whether they'll have anything else to talk about?

Boys and Girls

NB: Meanwhile, aren't we supposed to be representing some sort of gender divide? Or talking about gender?

AP: I should make it clear right away that the stakes here are very different. Given that fandom has been neglected for the most part by academics who have written on media in India, there is, at this point, little concern about who is writing about fandom. Having said that, I would like to point out that paying attention to the domain of music does create an opportunity to talk about gender and participatory culture.

So far, the spotlight has been on fan communities that meet at street corners, at teashops, or outside cinema halls. Participatory culture, then, has been circumscribed as that defined by working-class (often lower caste) male youth in visible, public spaces. Once again, turning our attention to film music presents a way forward. For both commercial and cultural-political reasons, every new medium - radio, state-owned television, satellite television (MTV-India, STAR, etc.) - has drawn on film music and developed innovative programs. These film music-based radio and television programs have had a large fan following, and women's participation in these sites has been very prominent and visible. I would argue that examining these sites of participatory culture is critical for opening up the discussion on gender and fandom surrounding Indian cinema.

NB: Pop music fandom is so blatantly gendered it barely seems worth laying out just how. Short version: girl fans want to sleep with the bands, boys want to be them. (I wrote a longer piece about this here.)

It seems like gender is being taken in a couple of ways in the discussions in this series thus far. First is a question of authority in the academy -- those studying 'female' ways of doing fandom feeling excluded by more 'masculine' scholars. This is something I just don't identify with at all, and I suspect there are several reasons. One is that I align myself with interpersonal and online communication as my primary research foci, and see fandom as an important and neglected context in which to explore them. The study of personal communication and relationships is gendered female to begin with, so perhaps my internet-based approach is considered techie and therefore gendered more masculine than the norm. I do feel some frustration at the failure of fandom research to adequately address the interpersonal relationships I think are at the core of fandom. Perhaps that is inherently gendered since looking at the fan/fan relationship gets us back to the study of personal relationships which, as I said is gendered female. But in terms of academic authority, I've never felt that my focus on fandom or the way I approach fandom has lessened that.

Gender has also been brought into the question of how people engage texts -- to crudely oversimplify the discussion, girls explore nuance and boys create with a more business sensibility? The idea that an interest in the production/economy of fandom is masculine is again something I have trouble identifying with. I see many gender issues in how men and women engage music and with what consequences, but less in how they are conceptualized (though this gets back to the shortage of fandom research in music to begin with -- there's some, just nowhere close to that around TV). Sometimes I wonder if music fandom is itself so very sexist that anything we'd encounter in the academy seems negligible in contrast!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eleven, Part One): Nancy Baym and Aswin Punathambekar

Who are we? Aswin Punathambekar: I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the Dept of Communication Arts (media and cultural studies) and will be joining the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan this fall term. My research and teaching revolve around globalization, culture industries, and public culture in contemporary India and the South Asian diaspora. These interests were shaped very strongly by my own experiences as an immigrant, and my participation in online fan communities began back in 1999 when I arrived in Athens, Georgia for graduate studies. I made the transition from fan to aca-fan in the Comparative Media Studies program and needless to say, was shaped strongly by Henry's work. Over the next few years, I hope to carve out a space for the study of participatory culture within the larger field of scholarship on Bollywood and other domains of south asian media.

Nancy Baym: I'm an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. I started studying fans when I became involved with the newsgroup rec.arts.tv.soaps in the early 1990s, a project that became my dissertation (I graduated from the University of Illinois in 1994) and which finally ended up as the book Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. At KU, I teach courses about personal relationships, the internet, and qualitative methodologies. So far this decade, most of my published work has centered on the topics of online interactions in personal relationships and qualitative methodological issues in internet research (a book co-edited with Annette Markham on this topics is forthcoming from Sage Publications). Recently, though, I've turned my attention

back to online fandom, with my blog called, oddly enough, Online Fandom

(www.onlinefandom.com) and a just-published article about Swedish independent music fans

(http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/baym/index.html). I'm also just finishing up data collection for a study about 'friending' on Last.fm.

AP: I approach fan communities surrounding films and film music as a particularly compelling site for examining relationships among cinema, consumption, and citizenship in contemporary Indian public culture. And the specific group that I've been interested in is one that has cohered around a music director (A. R. Rahman) who composes music for Hindi-language Bollywood films, regional language films (Tamil and Telugu), diasporic films (e.g. Deepa Mehta's trilogy - Fire, Earth, and Water), and international projects like Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams. This is an online fan community, and brings together hundreds of Rahman fans from around the world (www.arrahmanfans.com). While a majority of the participants are of Indian origin, a growing number of non-Indian fans have joined this group over the past few years (although they lurk for the most part).

Given the immense popularity of film stars in India and in a number of countries with large diasporic South Asian populations (Fiji, Guyana, U.S., U.K., Canada, etc.), and the large number of online and offline fan communities that have emerged around these stars, the question that comes up right away is: why do I choose to focus on a music director?

Raising this question leads me to a broader one: What new questions can we raise by shifting the focus away from films/TV shows/stars onto the realm of music?

NB: I like that your focus positions you as a bit of an outsider to what seems to be the dominant domain of contemporary fandom research, American and British television fans. I've done plenty of work about American TV fans in my 1990s analyses of soap opera fans on the internet, but have always come at fandom from the outside in that my interests are first and foremost about how people create the social structures that organize them into personal relationships and communities, and how they use the internet in these processes. So I would place myself within internet studies before fandom, and that brings with it some different assumptions and approaches.

Fandom is a fascinating context to look at these things, though, because fans are always at the leading edge of using the internet in creative ways, and because fandom is a site where interpersonal and mass communication merge, which is often one of the internet's defining qualities. Like you, my attention has turned in recent years to music fandom. I've been working on projects about the role of online fans in the export of Swedish independent music and also the nature of "friendship" in the "social music" site Last.fm. With a few exceptions, fan studies has little to say about music fandom and I'm not convinced it's the same beast (or menagerie) as other fandoms, so yeah, what new questions get raised by looking at music?

The Text

NB: One question is simply (or not) the nature of "the text." I find when I read much of current fandom studies, I have trouble making the connection between what they're talking about as 'text' with many of the phenomena that interest me. I wonder how well you think all that theory that's been built up around people engaging narrative fits music fandom? It's particularly interesting in your case since you are looking at music that is tied to a narrative in film.

AP: For more than a decade now, Indian cinema has served as a key site for academics to re-think and rework our understanding of narrative, spectatorship, and participatory culture. I certainly see my work as contributing to this larger body of work (for a good introduction, take a look at the opening essay by Bhrigupati Singh here [http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/525.htm]). And you're right in pointing out that film music complicates the boundaries and definitions of a "text."

As is well known, songs have been an integral part of commercial films since the early 1930s when sound was introduced. While songs serve a variety of narrative functions within the film, it is critical to recognize that film songs have a well-defined circuit of production, circulation and consumption that is both tied to yet independent of the films themselves.

Film songs are released 3-4 months before a film hits the theatres, and are tied closely to publicity/marketing strategies. Clips of songs serve as teasers on numerous television channels, songs are played endlessly on FM radio, they are available on music websites such as musicindiaonline.com and raaga.com, and they are also circulated as cell phone ringtones. Songs circulate in the public realm long after the film itself does and song compilations (playback singer, music director, time period, actor/actress, etc.) sell exceedingly well. There are a large number of television programs around film music, and over the past decade, talent shows have become immensely popular (,em>Indian Idol, for e.g.).

The commercial value of film music has also meant that music directors and playback singers have occupied a key role in the industry from the very beginning. Film songs, then, are associated with music directors and playback singers just as much as with actors/actresses lip-synching on the screen (Neepa Majumdar uses the term "aural stardom" to argue that we need to think about ways to conceptualize stardom in the absence of glamour and the "invisibility" of playback singers).

All of these elements shape discussions in a site like the Rahman fan community. The "text," to put it simply, is never limited to a specific film or even to A. R. Rahman. Now, it is not enough to merely point out that the film song as a "text" is very different when compared to a film or a television show, or that the music director or playback singer is a different kind of "star." In the context of this discussion, perhaps the more relevant question is: in what ways do fan practices surrounding film music differ from those that cohere around, say, a film star? And for me, this involves challenging the dominant narrative of fan-politics in the Indian context.

Fandom has been considered an important element of film culture primarily because of its explicitly political nature. In south India, male film stars mobilize their fan base to organize electoral campaigns and run for political office. Fan clubs are, quite often, grassroots political organizations (and almost entirely a male space). Online spaces like the Rahman fan community have been ignored for no reason other than their seemingly non-political nature. Focusing on music, then, opens up an opportunity to develop other stories of fan culture (more on this later in the discussion).

NB: I guess one piece of my answer would be that the three minute pop song as "text" challenges many of the notions ingrained in fandom study. What does it mean to fill in the blanks of a text that tells no story to begin with or - in contrast to film scores - has no connections to stories? There are concepts ("neutrosemy" seems to be an important one), that kind of get there, but I'm not sure that treating meaning making as the core fandom process works as well for music fandom as it does for narrative fandom. It seems that music is in many cases a much more direct emotional experience than narrative.

Again, I find myself shifting away from the dominant focus of fan studies - how do fans engage texts as collectives - and toward what I think are much more central issues in music fandom: how do people use music as a means of constructing their own identities and connecting with others? These are not untouched issues in fan studies, but they seem to get marginalized by what I'd consider a more literary/cultural studies approach that foregrounds what they do and don't do in engaging the text itself.

Certainly some music fans concern themselves with lyrics, but for all the years I've been following music as part of various fandoms, I can probably count on one hand the number of discussions about what the words to a song mean that really went anywhere. In most of the fandoms I follow, lyrical discussion never gets past "and the words are clever" or "the lyrics stink, but the hooks are so good you can overlook it" or "I guess their drummer's suicide really influenced these lyrics." These just aren't rich discussion topics. There's much more discussion of extra-textual issues like recording dates and information, discography construction, concert chronology construction, arranging trades or torrents of concert recordings, and so on. Even when you look at a site that is specifically discussing the songs, such as Pop Songs 07 where every REM song is being blogged, the discussion is mostly about the personal experiences people associated with a song rather than what Michael Stipe meant in those words or what key the song is written in. To an extent, that's meaning making, of course, but it's quite different from what I saw with soap fans.

Gone Fishing...

I am afraid I won't be able to write a full post today. I have been in Aspen, Colorado for the past few days at the Aspen Institute, which is hosting a roundtable discussion among industry leaders, policy makers, and academics on the topic of media and values. It is the hallmark of the Aspen Institute that they bring together people from all sides of a topic, sit them down at a table together, and create protocols which enable them to speak with and listen to each other in a way designed to generate meaningful compromises and productive results. The past few days we have been discussing such topics as the future of the local newspaper, the value of media literacy education, and the need for a better balance between fair use and copyright. Many of the sessions have been recorded to air later on C-Span. Ground Report is also streaming the sessions live via the web -- in case anyone has time tomorrow and wants to see this process in action. They have also said that they will make an archive of the webcast which can be downloaded later. As soon as I have more details on this, I will pass it along to my readers, since I think many of the conversations I've heard here will be very useful in teaching media policy and will be of interest to the general public. I also hope to write a fuller account of this experience shortly, though it is going to be impossible to distill down the essence of such rich and varied discussions.

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

Yesterday, I ran an excerpt from Comparative Media Studies graduate student Peter Rauch's thesis about ethics, morality, and games. Today, I run a second selection which explores some of the ethical and moral questions raised by the game, Fable. Fable is the brain child of British game designer Peter Molyneux, who ranks as one of the best theorists working in the games industry today. I was lucky enough to be able to sit down for an extensive public conversation with Peter Molyneux at the Education Arcade conference several years ago. Highlights of that conversation recently appeared in the first issue of the new Harvard Interactive Media Review, alongside articles by such game scholars and critics, as Ted Castranova, James Paul Gee, Eric Zimmerman, and Alice J. Robison. It is nothing short of astonishing to listen to Molyneux talk about a game that is still in production. He has a deep respect for the potentials of the medium and an enormous ambition for what he hopes to accomplish in any given project. His conversations are conceptually sophisticated and always full of surprises and challenges which overturn our expectations about what games can and cannot do. Molyneux's descriptions of his games in production are provocations that force other game designers to take stock of what they are doing with their time all day. Unfortunately, his games are often better in theory than in practice. The hard realities of the industrial process and the need to ship product often results in the need to cut features and as a result, by the time Fable shipped, it didn't include many of the things which had generated the most excitement and speculation within the gamer community. I think we can learn a great deal by listening to Molyneux talk about what he wants to do with his games; we may learn as much or more by examining what happens to such a vision when it gets shoved through a studio mode of production.

Fable and Other Moral Tales: A Study in Game Ethics

by Peter Rauch

A third-person adventure game, Fable occupies a well-worn genre. Its claim to originality developed from its treatment of morality. Like Black & White, Fable received a great deal of press during its long development time, and also like Black & White, it was perceived by many players that the creators' ambitious promises were not realized in the final game design. In practice, Fable is an unremarkable adventure game, and while many actions do have moral consequences, these consequences are predominantly superficial. However, a great potential for moral argument remains inherent in the design.

Fable is a world to be explored, with an ethical framework to be discovered through play. The narrative involves human-like characters that can lie, coerce and kill each other. Some of the actions of these characters are categorized as "good" or "evil" according to the beliefs of the designers, and the player is relatively unrestricted in choosing to perform them. Finally, the player's actions are acknowledged by the rest of the world, however imperfectly, in the sense that NPCs respond to the player's past actions, as well as the avatar's appearance. Fable possesses all the raw materials to create a convincing, semi-realistic world that is intentionally biased toward a specific worldview--to argue the validity of a moral philosophy. That this possibility was not realized, or not sufficiently realized, or not meaningfully realized, does not alter the game's potential. As such, Fable seems an ideal place to start when conceptualizing games that make meaningful arguments about morality.

[...]

The player begins Fable as a (male) child in a small, fantasy-medieval village in the land of Albion. Childhood functions, rather appropriately, as a tutorial, introducing the player to most of the basic play mechanics, as well as the game's moral engine and social system On the day in which the game begins, it is the protagonist's sister's birthday, and he needs money to buy her a gift. His father, eager to cultivate noble habits in the boy, offers the protagonist a coin for every good deed he does. The player is then presented with several conflicts demanding his or her intervention: each allows the player to make right or wrong choices, and the player is explicitly told the morality of his or her choices by a change in the protagonist's "alignment." The player can engage in these conflicts in any order; I have numbered them here only for convenience.

In the first conflict, a little girl tells the protagonist that her teddy bear has been taken. Elsewhere in town, the protagonist finds a little boy being threatened by a bully. The little boy is in possession of the teddy bear in question. The bully, the player learns through dialogue, is the little girl's older brother, and wants the teddy bear so he can destroy it. (How the little boy came to be in possession of the teddy bear in the first place, in such a way that its owner was unaware, is never fully explained.) The bully offers to pay the protagonist one coin to get the teddy bear from the little boy. Here, the player has two initial options: he or she can beat up the bully, or pummel his victim. If the player chooses the former, the bully will begin whining with the first blow, and eventually run away. In this case, the little boy thanks the protagonist and gives him the teddy bear, which can then be returned to the little girl. Both assaulting the bully and returning the bear to its owner are considered "good," and have a positive effect on the avatar's alignment. If the player chooses to assault the little boy instead, the boy will complain about this injustice and give the player the teddy bear in an attempt to stop the violence directed at him. At this point, the player faces another choice: to give the teddy bear to the bully, receiving a coin as reward, or take the teddy bear to the little girl, performing a good deed for which the protagonist's father with also pay him one coin. Attacking the boy is a "bad" action, as is giving the teddy bear to the bully--each gives the player two "evil" alignment points. Returning the bear to its owner is a "good" action, worth two "good" alignment points. Consequently, a player who hits the little boy and then returns the teddy bear to its owner will end up with the good and bad actions cancelling each other out, numerically, although the player can get an additional two "good" points by attacking the bully after the fact. No matter which course of actions the player chooses, the protagonist will end up with one coin.

In the second conflict, a woman complains of her philandering husband, and asks the protagonist to find out where he is and what he's doing. Sure enough, the player finds the man engaged in an amorous embrace with another woman--upon discovery, he offers the protagonist a coin to keep quiet. (The game warns the player that rumors travel fast in the village, and people will know he took the bribe.) If the player takes the bribe, he or she receives two "evil" points and gets the coin, although he or she can balance those points out by breaking his promise to the adulterous husband and telling his wife the truth. From a monetary perspective, this is the ideal solution, since the player gains two coins, one from the husband and one from the protagonist's father for doing a good deed.

In the third conflict, a merchant asks the protagonist to watch his barrels while he runs an errand in town. Some local boys urge the protagonist to break them and see what's inside. Honoring the merchant's wishes gets the player two "good" alignment points and a coin from the protagonist's father, while smashing all the barrels earns the player two "evil" alignment points and a coin from inside one of the barrels. Curiously, if the player can break all the barrels and get back to where the protagonist was supposed to be standing guard before the merchant returns, the merchant will thank him for watching the merchandise, and the player will receive two "good" alignment points and a coin from the protagonist's father, despite having broken his promise. Again, the "neutral" path, i.e. performing both good and evil deeds with no apparent logic connecting them, presents the fastest way to earn money, buy a gift for the protagonist's sister, and advance in the game.

At first glance, it would seem that these examples do not lend themselves to moral subtlety. Even in "real life," morality is taught to children first in broad strokes, and the morality of many fantasy worlds is similarly rendered in black-and-white. It makes perfect sense, from a design perspective, to deal with morality on a very simple level in the tutorial and flesh it out as the game continues. However, the Fable tutorial fails to accomplish even this, because of a poorly thought-out reward system that severely limits players' choice of action and defines morality in terms of discrete actions, regardless of motive or intent. In the conflict involving the teddy bear, no non-violent options exist: the player cannot attempt to reason with the bully or threaten him verbally. While it can be argued that some conflicts can only be solved through the judicious application of violence--Fable is an adventure game, after all, and much of the game is spent killing--few would argue that this is necessarily the case for conflicts involving children, and that beating up the bully is the best moral option available to the player. In addition, the "evil" alignment points given to the player for hitting the little boy can be cancelled out by attacking the bully, even though there is no logical reason to do so. Therefore, in Fable, random, illogical violence for the sake of violence is perceived as morally superior to violence as a means to an immoral end. Similarly, it could be argued that taking the adulterous husband's bribe and then telling his wife anyway is, morally, the worst option, since it could be interpreted to represent an amoral pursuit of profit. Finally, that the player can break the merchant's barrels without him realizing it, and be rewarded for it, simply makes very little sense.

The problems presented here are twofold. First, it seems that Fable's designers put very little effort into deciding why given actions are right or wrong. Actions are decided to be moral or immoral, but few clear principles seem to have been defined to guide these decisions, and those that do are not consistently applied. Second, the game as it currently exists can respond to play actions, but not player intent. The importance of intent in morality is hotly debated of course, and intent is coded into Fable by the designers. However, the player has no role in deciding this intent. Like the protagonists of many adventure games, Fable's hero is presented as a tabula rasa, and the player never hears him speak (dialogue choices are generally presented as a simple "yes" or "no"). A character who cannot speak cannot easily articulate his intent, but this intent does nonetheless exist at a narrative level.

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 site. We are in the process of making more of our thesis available online.

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?