Exploiting Feminism: An Interview with Stephanie Rothman (Part One)

The Viennale (the Vienna International Film Festival) will be organizing a special tribute this year to filmmaker Stephanie Rothman. They will be showing a range of Rothman's works, including Group Marriage (1973), Terminal Island (1973), The Student Nurses (1970), The Velvet Vampire (1971), and The Working Girls (1974). Here's what they have to say about her work on the festival's website:

In the mid-1960s the young director Stephanie Rothman started to work as the first and only woman at the time at Roger Corman's "New World Pictures".

Rothman launched an impressive and highly successful debut with The Student Nurses in 1970, the story of a group of attractive nurses told in a previously unknown, ironic and intelligent combination of sexploitation and social criticism, nudity and a feminist brand of "girls and guns".

In the mid-1970s Rothman made her last film and then fell into oblivion - and with her one of the most headstrong and interesting women of American cinema of the 1960s and 70s.

Because I had written an essay about Rothman, which appears in The Wow Climax, I was invited by the festival's director to do an interview with her for the festival program. They have been nice enough to allow me to reproduce the interview here for my regular readers. Here, Rothman provides some interesting background on what it was like to work for Corman in the 1970s and about the claims made for her work by feminist critics.

If you want to get a taste for how Rothman's films were marketed, you can check out the trailer for The Velvet Vampire over at YouTube.

Roger Corman was an early mentor for you. What did you learn from your work with Corman?

Roger Corman was not an early mentor, he was the only mentor I ever had. It was he who first offered me work as a filmmaker and I will always be grateful to him for that. He hired me in the fall of 1964, when it was rare for anyone who did not have family connections to find employment in the film industry, in or outside of the jurisdiction of the labor unions. It was even rarer for a woman to be hired. It was traditional to exclude us from nearly all types of work behind the camera.

I met Roger because I was the first woman to ever win the Directors Guild of America Fellowship, which was awarded annually to the director of a student film. He hired me as his assistant and put me to work immediately on low-budget independent films that he was personally financing, or that he had bought completed but that still needed further improvement. I did everything: write new scenes, scout locations, cast actors, direct new sequences and edit final cuts. It was a busy, exhilarating time.

Roger did not teach me these skills, I learned them in film school. But he did share his greater experience with me, giving me useful criticism and, equally important, information on how to efficiently organize work on the set so that a film could be shot on schedule. The schedules he set were much shorter than those of the major studios. Since it was his own money he was using, Roger did not want a film to go either over schedule or over budget.

He also taught me a valuable lesson in psychology: he encouraged me, often expressing his confidence in my abilities, and I therefore tried to do the best work for him that I could. It worked to my advantage too, because less than a year after I began working for him, in the fall of 1965, he financed It's A Bikini World, the first full-length theatrical feature film that I co-wrote and directed.

Corman had a number of women working for his company in those days. Was there a gender divide behind the scenes or did the male and female directors, both of whom were emerging from the film schools for the most part, support each other's work?

There were no women hired by him to work in production, while I was directing. I was the first woman he ever hired to direct, and the very small number of women who directed films for him after me, made them long after I was gone.

There was no gender divide and no mutual support when I worked there, because directors met each other infrequently and it was usually in the process of passing each other coming in or out of meetings with Roger. We were all involved in our own projects and there were no shared working spaces, such as offices or sound stages. Furthermore, our backgrounds and areas of interest, judging by our films, were different.

Many of those who worked with Corman describe a kind of compromise--work within exploitation formulas and in return gain a certain degree of ideological and creative control over your work. How do you think that balance between genre constraints and creative freedom influenced your work?

In 1970, Roger started his own production and distribution company, New World Pictures. He invited me to direct the first picture to be made there. It was called The Student Nurses. My husband, Charles Swartz, co-produced and co-wrote the story with me. We made it while Roger was out of the country, directing a film of his own, Von Richthofen and Brown, so we were free to develop the story of the nurses as we wished, as long as there was enough nudity and violence distributed throughout it. Please notice, I did not say sex, I said nudity. This freedom, once I paid my debt to the requirements of the genre, allowed me to address what interested me--and continues to interest me today-- political and social conflicts and the changes they produce. It allowed me to have a dramatized discussion about issues that were then being ignored in big-budget major studio films: for example, a discussion about the economic problems of poor Mexican immigrants--who were and still are America's largest immigrant population-- and their unhappy, restive children; and a discussion about a woman's right to have a safe and legal abortion when, at the time, abortion was still illegal in America. I have always wondered why the major studios were not making films about these topics. What kind of constraints were at work on them? My guess is that is was nothing but the over-privileged lives, limited curiosity and narrow minds of the men, and in those days they were always men, who decided which films would be made.

But, to return to your question: How do I think the balance between genre constraints and creative freedom influenced my work? There was always a struggle in my mind between the two. I would have covered the same topics, but made the films very differently, if I had not had these constraints. I knew it then. But I tried not to be discouraged and, as I said in answer to an earlier question in this interview, I tried to do the best I could.

The Student Nurses was very successful. Some critics welcomed its unapologetic feminism. It made a lot of money for Roger and he wanted me to make a sequel to it, but I wasn't interested. I had said all I wanted to about student nurses, and so he hired a series of male directors to make the sequels.

I never watched them, so I cannot say if they contained any feminist ideas. But the lesson Roger derived from my film's success was that you could make exploitation films whose narratives included contentious social issues, including feminism, and he consequently encouraged his directors to do it.

What did it mean to you to be working within the exploitation genre? Were there aspects of that formula that created discomfort for you? Were there special opportunities you saw there?

I was never happy making exploitation films. I did it because it was the only way I could work. While I do not object to violence or nudity in principle, the reason audiences came to see these low-budget films without stars was because they delivered scenes that you could not see in major studio films or more supposedly ambitious independent American films. (Today, of course, you can see these scenes and more, but we are talking about standards operative in the mid-nineteen sixties to seventies when I was working.) Exploitation films required multiple nude scenes and crude, frequent violence. My struggle was to try to dramatically justify such scenes and to make them transgressive, but not repulsive. I tried to control this through the style in which I shot scenes. That was one of my greatest pleasures, determining how my style of shooting could enhance the content of a scene. Comedy was another method of control I used. I have always enjoyed writing and directing comedy-- I was, in fact, more comfortable working in a comic idiom than a dramatic one--and so I also used comedy to modulate a scene's tone. Visual style and comic invention were my personal salvation or, as you put it in your question, the "special opportunity" to escape what troubled me about the exploitation genre.

Porn 2.0

I am a regular listener and sometimes guest on NPR's On the Media, which does a great job of covering new developments in news and civic media. One recent segment, featuring an interview with Regina Lynn, the sex and technology correspondent for Wired.com, caught my attention. The segment started with the oft-repeated claims that pornographers might be regarded as lead users of any new communications technologies, being among the first to test its capacities as they attempt to construct a new interface with consumers. We might add that pornography is at the center of the controversy surrounding any new media as the public adjusts to the larger shifts in the ways an emerging medium shapes our relations to time and space or transforms the borders between public and private.

The Medium Is the Message?

Indeed, I have long used pornography as an example to explain Marshall McLuhan's famous line, "the medium is the message," suggesting that the evolution of pornography can show us how different media can change our relationship to the same (very) basic content.

The word, pornography, originally referred to the writing of prostitutes. Prostitutes were among the first women to learn to write so that they could record their sexual experiences and pass them along to their johns, who would use these handwritten manuscripts to remember and relive their encounters. With the rise of print, these accounts could be mass produced and distributed, allowing people to vicariously experience the sexual encounters of others and creating a celebrity culture around particular authors. With the lowering of the costs of print, these stories circulated even further, reaching the lowest segments of society (indeed, becoming associated with the poorest of the poor and sometimes speaking from and to their perspectives.) Several historians have described how this cheap porn (especially representations of the imagined sexual proclivities of the elite classes) helped to spark revolutionary zeal in the working classes. Having read vivid fantasies which treated the Queen as if she were a common prostitute, these tales encouraged them to see the royal body not as untouchable but as debased.

Jump forward in time and consider what happens to pornography with the rise of photography: the movement from text to images, the ability to look "directly" as the naked bodies of total strangers or to record and preserve your own nude body or that of your loved ones (thus changing people's sense of their own sexual agency or allowing them to preserve the bodies of their youth from the impact of aging.) Or consider what happens with the addition of movement to the pornographic image -- or for that matter, the different relationship between public and private created around the male-only or male-mostly spaces where early pornographic films are consumed. Or consider what happens with the addition of video, whether as a tool of production (again, furthering the evolution of amateur pornography or lowering costs in a way which allowed new groups to enter the space) or consumption (enabling people to consume moving images in the privacy of their homes and thus paving the way for a couples market around porn). And more recently still, there has been the addition of digital porn (which has lowered even further the risks of being caught accessing or consuming erotic images).

For a good documentary series which traces the connections between pornography and media history (produced by the BBC no less), check out The Secret History of Civilization.

Porn and Disruptive Technologies

The On the Media segment took all of this back story as given and wanted to explore what is happening to pornography in the era of Web 2.0. Here's how Lynn describes how web 2.0 software (based on social networks and user-generated or manipulated content) might reshape our relationship with pornography:

Anything from rating the content, allowing users to take existing content and mash it up and create new movies and things, contests - you know, everybody make a minute-and-a-half porn movie out of all of this material. They add a bit of play and a bit of game and just a lot of interaction into it. I mean, it's basically taking porn and making it relationships.

But, in fact, she argues, the porn industry has been very slow to move in this direction:

For the main industry, it's really hard to incorporate that because you've got to think a whole new way. You have to think of your users with respect and as sort of partners in the whole experience versus sheep that you're fleecing.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I was just wondering if there's something about the culture of porn that sort of works against community-building. I mean, I guess we always think of consumers of adult content as preferring anonymity and solitude.

REGINA LYNN: You can have community and a certain level of anonymity, because you're not out there with your Social Security number on the site. You're out there with your handle and your online self.

As they talk about the challenges of enabling a new kind of relationship between consumers and porn content, Gladstone and Lynn discuss a range of economic, creative, social, and legal obstacles, powerfully illustrating the ways that existing culture re-asserts itself in the face of potentially disruptive technologies. What emerges here is not the typical account of the porn industry as transgressive or experimental but also as deeply conservative, unwilling to change encrusted practices, and in that regard, no different from any other sector of our society (education or government, say).

When Women Make Porn...

A second interesting set of observations in the interview, however, suggests that gender constitutes a significant factor shaping the relationship between content producers and consumers:

If you want to build community in adult spaces, look to the women. The independent websites that women put together where they are the performers and they do the whole thing on their own as maybe their home-based business are all based on community and have been for more than 10 years - talking to their fans, talking to the visitors, building relationships with the fans, who then bring in other people and who then stick around. I know one Webcam performer who has had the same members for seven or eight years.

Here, Lynn's comments closely parallel some of the cliches about male and female fans which have run through our ongoing discussions about Gender and Fan Culture: the male fan as socially isolated, the female fan as relationship-oriented.

Porn and the Generation Gap

A third interesting idea to emerge from the interview has to do with an emerging generational divide in expectations about our relationship to porn, which parallels similarly claims being made elsewhere about the so-called "digital natives" and "digital immigrants":

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do porn sites really suffer or pay a penalty for being slow to adapt to this new evolving online world?

REGINA LYNN: I think they will. If you think of today's 12-to-17-year-olds who have not yet looked at porn, when they turn 18 and they look at their very first adult content, this is a generation who is so used to having complete participation and control in their media that if the adult industry continues to just sort of put out content that's intended to be watched passively, they're going to lose this entire generation.

Hmm. The biggest problem with this argument is that it takes as given the legal fiction that teens do not consume pornography. But if most current research is accurate, most teens have at least some contact with pornographic images on the internet and many of them become avid consumers well before they reach legal age. (Most teens of my generation were reduced to examining ancient back issues of Playboy salvaged from their father's underwear drawers, thus learning about sex and hyprocrisy at the same time.) We can argue that porn may not satisfy their expectations for interactivity, immersion, and participation, but it probably isn't true that they are going to encounter it first in adulthood and be bored then. They may simply become the primary purchaser of porn when they turn 18.

User-Generated Porn

Unfortunately, the interview ignores the fact that there is and has always been a large sector involved in user-generated porn content -- and I am not just talking about erotic fiction (whether produced by the fan community or the large number of women's erotic writing groups that emerged from Second and Third Wave feminism).

Consider redclouds.com (for hardcore content) and voyeur.com (for nudity without explicit sex), which every day publish sets of amateur produced pornographic photographs. (I am not linking to such sites or using sexually charged language here out of concern that my blog may get filtered from schools and public libraries. But you won't have trouble finding such sites on your own if you are so determined.)

The rise of digital cameras makes it easy for people to produce and share such images, uploading them to the web. The cameras built into mobile phones has helped to increase the number of images which get quickly snapped in public places, such as images of women flashing in shopping malls or parking lots. Indeed, these sites have whole areas devoted to such exhibitionist images (with extra value attached to those where there are bystanders caught by surprised by the spontaneous erotic spectacle). Of course, the wide spread availability of Photoshop and other digital manipulation tools makes it a real challenge to distinguish those pictures actually taken in public spaces from those which are digital composites, exhibitionistic fantasies, created in the safety of domestic space. As cell phone cameras become so commonplace and taking pictures becomes harder to distinguish from other uses of these same technologies, there has also been a troubling increase in photographs shot without the awareness of the subject so shots taken of strangers sunbathing on nude beaches or in their own backyards become another large theme for such sites.

Like many other web 2.0 enterprises, the site stimulates productivity by running contests, soliciting certain kinds of images, and deploying viewers to rank the results, all in the name of what are, at the end of the day, fairly modest cash prizes. More recently, voyeur.com launched a Wiki, which defines various sexual acts, and encourages readers to submit illustrations to support the evolving definitions.

Pornography is often criticized for the commodification of sexual experience -- but these porn 2.0 sites complicate this argument. Certainly, the owners of such sites use them to generate revenue (the same problem many of us have with the economics of other web 2.0 practices) but the photographers and models don't get paid unless they win contests. Many of them see the photographs in the context of gift exchange -- sharing themselves with others in their community or posing for and taking pictures as tokens of sexual and romantic feelings within a relationship. These sites may function as social networks through which photographers and models can find each other, getting together to take new pictures, and often documenting such occasions with collective images which in turn get shared back to the group as a whole.

Another common criticism of pornography is the objectification of women. this issue doesn't go away in porn 2.0 but it gets more complicated as women take greater control over the production and circulation of their images. The images often run with tags from their creators and models, describing what they felt or why they created these images, and thus reintroducing subjectivity into the equation. Certain amateur models create their own fan followings, correspond directly with their fans, and creating images based on requests from the community. All of this brings pornography back into the realm of social relations as compared to the anonymous images that circulate in commercial pornography.

User-generated porn also has broadened the range of bodies which might be seen as sexually attractive. While such sites often give special recognition to women who fall within the same physical range as dominates commercial pornography, there is tolerance and even enthusiasm for women who don't match those norms. The participants are overwhelming white (and non-white models tend to be exoticized) but the site embraces women who are plump or even overweight, who may be considerably more mature than you are apt to find in men's magazines. On these sites, women often assert their rights as models to feel sexy even if nobody wants to look at their pictures. Indeed, this sense of self determination in sexual representation becomes a central theme of the goth and post-feminist Suicide Girls website. The Boston Phoenix wrote about this group of women as "the naked sorority," a phrase which captures the very different emotional, political, and social context within which they operate from what we have traditionally understood as the porn industry.

All of this points to some of the claims which people have made about web 2.0: that it will result in a diversification of the culture as more people share content, that it will enable people to feel more personal stakes in the culture that they consume, and that it will add an important social dimension to the circulation of media content. Once again, using porn as a base line, we can see how shifts in media impact the culture that surrounds us.

I don't mean to white wash this process. Nothing about this is going to be reassuring if you see the production and circulation of pornographic images as itself a deeply problematic practice. There are still very real questions about consent surrounding these images, especially those which are taken of unwilling strangers, and there are certainly questions about how aggressively these sites police for under-aged participants. Whatever the context of their production, these images still circulate in a culture defined by the sexual exploitation of women and thus they can be read in those terms even when, in the case of Suicide Girls, there is an explicitly feminist project surrounding the site.

Yet, I think we can learn a fair amount about the ways that web 2.0 technologies are impacting our culture by examining how they function within the shadow culture/economy of porn.

For those of you who would like to read more of Regina Lynn's thoughts on this topic, you can read the article which inspired the On the Media interview here.

If You Attended the Forrester Consumer Forum...

I spoke on Friday to the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago and promised the crowd that I would use my blog to provide some links for further reading on some of the topics I presented. First, let me provide a pointer to our upcoming Futures of Entertainment conference. This event is run with a talk show format and is designed to bring together cutting edge thinking from across many different media sectors. Many of the issues I raised in my remarks -- including the discussion of how to value fan contributions or how to build communities around media properties -- will be discussed in depth at this event.

Second, I wanted to suggest that you check out our Convergence Culture Consortium blog. Every day, our students and staff share their thinking about the trends that are impacting the world of branded entertainment. For example, this week's posts analyze:

Soulja Boy and the Crank This phenomenon

Radiohead and the Digital Distribution of Music

New Metrics for Evaluating Audience Engagement

Television on the Web

For more information on the ideas presented in the talk:

Check out this podcast of a recent talk given at MIT by Andrew Slack of the Harry Potter Alliance.

This post deals with the connection between Robot Chicken and action figure fan cinema.

This post deals with the controversy surrounding FanLib and the conflict between user-generated content and the gift economy that shapes participatory culture.

This post deals with how Four Eyed Monsters has used new media to rally audience support.

This post deals with Wizard Rock and Harry Potter as niche media..

This post deals with Colbert and the politics of spreadable media.

The line from the talk which seems to be most reported by other bloggers was the suggestion that any technology which enables us to share cute cat pictures can also be used to bring down governments or corporations. I wish I had come up with the line, but I cited it back to Ethan Zuckerman's comments at a recent MIT Communications Forum on Civic Media. Here, you can find a podcast of the event.

Here are a few other posts that might interest you:

Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube

Transmedia Storytelling 101

Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape

Fan Activism in a Networked Culture

So What Happened to Star Wars Galaxies?

Oreos, "Wal-mart Time", and User-Generated Advertising

And of course, there is no substitute for reading my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Great meeting you all. I hope you stick around and enjoy our ongoing discussions of convergence and participatory culture.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Nineteen, Part Two): Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and David Surman

Mastery and Expertise DS: There are so many overlaps between film and game fandom Lori, which I sense both domains are subject to some of the same conceptualizations. In my own experience, it was the depth of the fandom that brought new knowledge to bear in the pre-internet days. I remember, in particular in games culture, how anecdote and fuzzily understood Japanese names would circulate among our group, as a form of ill defined knowledge, which nonetheless enabled us to evidence our commitment to the medium. At a time when US and European game adaptations would feature designers and developers in the end credits using arcade-style acronyms, such as 'Maki1000', I remember the particular case of Yuzo Koshiro, the musician behind the Streets of Rage Series (Burning Knuckle in Japan), and other Sega games throughout the early-to-mid nineties. Koshiro was distinct in that his name was featured on the attract screen of the arcade machines for the Streets of Rage games. Knowing the name of a particular person within a Japanese games production, and being able to associate it explicitly with good practice (the music was particularly good!) meant that, certainly within my own limited childhood experience, there was a palpable sense of connoisseurship and expertise that emerged from what today I objectify as fandom. The 'scars' of Americanization were no longer naturalized into the mediascape we had become accustomed to. Our commitment to complexity, with its associated passion for knowledge concerning origins, authenticities, modes of production, was profound, and manifested in ways exactly reminiscent of what you describe in the language play in women's HK film fandom.

There was a discernable sense of a 'private contract', much like what Anderson calls 'communities of the imaginary', at the point these unknown authors acquired names and faces. I felt a powerful sense of authority that came from the absolute ignorance of my parents, whose views of Japan and Asia still chimed with wartime anecdote and tragedy. We felt like a collective of codebreakers, learning languages, both Japanese and those of semiotic media literacies, in the course of resolving the burning questions that arose from games as subculture. I think that the contemporary relationship to authorship in videogames is still inflected by the revelations of the nineties.

As a teenager, the gender and transnational dimension emerged in the ambiguity surrounding Japanese names to provincial British kids like us. Is it a boy's name or a girl's? From that ambiguity rolled out other questions (certainly compounded by my own questions surrounding sexuality), as a young aspiring artist; for instance, do girls make/like these violent beat-'em-up games? And likewise, are there boys out there designing characters with the sexual charge and ambiguity like Prince Ali in the Sega roleplay game Beyond Oasis, imagining new paradigms of male beauty and power which stepped outside the hyper-masculine fantasies of the British and American teen culture I had been exposed to until that time?

LHM: What you write reminds me of what my partner says about his own mid/late '80s anime fandom. He's Japanese-American, and says that he had a particular (and peculiar!) credibility among American anime fans at the time because he 'looked' the part of a Japanese person AND had some cultural knowledge to impart as well. This emphasis on cultural specificity (in contrast to, say, authenticity) seems to be a contrary impulse to what Iwabuchi describes as "odorless" transnational popular culture; fans' knowledge of the originating culture may be incomplete and even wholly 'inauthentic', but - particularly within the fandom itself - it still holds considerable cultural capital.

This seems especially the case with Anglo-American interest in yaoi fan fiction; slash writers have moved into yaoi fiction and make a distinction between the two (one that I don't wholly understand, but which seems to be based at least in part on yaoi's emphasis on 'beautiful boys'), but this is as far as their appropriation of the Japanese practice goes. For many such writers, the term 'yaoi' seems to have taken on a life of its own, independent of its Japanese origins. We might ask if the same is true within other Asian (eg: Korean) yaoi-style works, given the very different role played by Japan, as a nation, within those contexts.

Indeed, this is one problem with the monolithic characterization of transnational media fandom that you describe above: if our conversations are confined to comparisons of "Western" and, in this case, "Japanese" media and fans (with each being described in terms of the other), we are left not only with a limited understanding of how media circulates and is used by such fans, but also with narrowly defined points of origin and destination.

Soft Power and Shallow Consumption

DS: I want to return to the specifics of the transnational relation in my fandom in academic terms, but first describe an anecdote from my teaching that certainly supports my ideas. At Newport we run Japanese lessons as part of our community-learning program, and every year a large cohort of undergraduate games design and animation students sign up, passionate about anime, games and Japanese popular culture in general. As an evening class, it doesn't compete with their core study, and the class is almost always three quarters constituted by my students, with the remainder members of the general public interested in learning a new language. After a number of sessions, the numbers start to drop off radically, most after the first. We are left with a committed core that will go on to finish the complimentary program (it is interesting to note that those who generally remain are young women). While there are numerous explanations, including their study workload, and the first year undergraduate experience in particular, I have often thought about the particular relationship between fan knowledge and fandom generally, which in many cases brought them to undergraduate studies in these areas, and the acquisition of orthodox knowledge (such as learning the language) in these areas.

It reminds me of suggestions Koichi Iwabuchi was making in the mid nineties about transnational multiculturalism, in the particular case of relations between 'Japan' - and its constructed 'Japaneseness' - and the 'West'. He frames the discussion in terms of Self and Other, and discusses the construction of Japaneseness both by the orientalizing rhetorics of the West, and Japan's self-orientalizing position in relation to its perceived 'others', in particular America and its Asian neighbours. He writes that the West from Japan's view had been '...discursively created in a quite systematic way...' and that most importantly, '...what had mattered was the ideas of the West that the Japanese had created for the purposes of self-definition. The real West was irrelevant.' Much of what I see in the contemporary fandom for Japanese games, film and anime chimes with Iwabuchi's suggestion, albeit from the inverse position. The pattern of their consumption and the scope of their connoisseurship have much more to do with their own identity politics than with any substantive enquiry into another culture. The new mobility and accessibility of Japanese popular culture provides new imaginary negotiations with archetypes of gender, class and power which are highly attractive to contemporary young people, insofar as they act as a means to configure selfhood, and as a source of information from which cultural capital can be drawn and parlayed between sympathetic peers. I think that sometimes this solipsism is written out of the account of transnational media fandom, the idea that something so global can have such domestic drivers.

LHM: I have to say, I'm very intrigued by the fact that the majority of remaining students in your language curriculum are women. When I was a Japanese language teacher back in the late 80s, the bulk of our students were men, drawn to Japanese language study by tall tales of all the money to be made in Japan's then-booming economy. The parallels between this shift from Japanese business to cultural attractiveness, and from male to female students, seems worthy of study in its own right!

I both agree and disagree with last point above; or, rather, I think it's something that's less an "either/or" than "both/and" situation. I agree with you that while we've moved away from early work on Western anime fans, in which they are characterized as almost wholly divorced from any awareness of, or interest in, Japan, we have yet to fully integrate our understandings of what the specific "domestic drivers" of transnational media fandom might be in the conversation. Are there aspects of specific transnational media that resonate with specific fandom practices in the target country (slash and yaoi again come to mind here)? Particularly in the case of such apparently different countries as, for example, Japan and the United States, the question of what exactly it is about anime texts (and its modes of production and distribution) that is so attractive to transnational fans is one that had yet to be fully interrogated.

Yet the word "substantive" is a sticking point for me, insofar as it seems to ask fans to justify their interest in non-native popular culture - something that we simply don't ask of fans of domestic media. Failing this, critics such as Iwabuchi tend to dismiss what transformative work the fandom might perform, and yet my own experience and that of the women I've interviewed suggests that, for at least some fans, this work does in fact occur. This would probably be your "committed core" of language students; they may not represent the mainstream of anime fans (and not all of them may even be fans), but that even a few take a very personal interest and parlay it into something that exceeds their fandom suggests that, at the very least, the question of what constitutes "substantive" interest in the cultures of other nations needs to be revisited.

DS: I think you are right in the sense those who go the distance are transformed by their engagement with the subject, though the degree to which this relates to their capacity as fans or as learners is a conversation in itself. To come back to your point about the play of language, in the Q&A session at a conference a few years ago I heard Western anime and game fandom being described as an 'infinitely shallow pool', in which fans circulated information about the latest series of gameworld which incredible rapidity and energy, but that any single encounter with that media was not defined with particular depth. The anecdote of kids torrenting hours and hours of Naruto, Inuyasha and the like, but never getting round to watch it, constructed this contemporary archetype of the cable-internet-fuelled frenzied collector. While I don't find this sort of illustration particularly illuminating, writers like Thomas Lamarre have observed that contemporary otaku spectatorship can be understood as a process of 'scanning' a series, or vinyl figure, or manga, for affirmative traces of textual tropes, which chime with established genre and representation conceits, understood by the fan community. Extending from this, fans knowledge of the Japanese language follow its yoked association with signification important to the currency of fandom. And so, to return to that first Japanese lesson filled with my students, they will certainly know the word for cat, neko, since feline-eared characters are a mainstay in the manga/anime/cosplay world. The language of anime is the currency, not Japanese per se. Language and world are intimately bound in this fandom; is the labour intensive investment in learning conversational Japanese measured against its use within the fan community, when the rhetoric of fandom legitimates and even celebrates what to orthodox eyes is 'partial knowledge', but which, in the case of fan subculture, constitutes a world of signs all of its own.

So, in contrast to the picture you posed of conversations across borders, I think transnational fandom in animation and games is not so much the cosmopolitan conversation it might have been portrayed as previously. I think that the majority of young people in this country who actively hunt out Japanese manga/anime/games/film do so with a view to pursuing a passion (albeit an increasingly mainstream one) that provides them with a means to re-imagine themselves outside of the relative confines of their domestic experience. I am trying to speak from the perhaps mythic position of a 'general fan', and I think such a thing exists, since commercial culture is now configured so absolutely to provide consumers with a means to invest in an experience of fandom as much as a text in itself. The organization of comic book, music and media stores are optimized to create the sensibility of the collector, and with manga imports, invariably the pricing and sale pitching compound this effect. Rarefied media are no longer the golden chalice they once were, where transnational media relations were evidenced in import/export flows. Transnational dimensions to contemporary media are found in its production of meaning through narrative and representational cues, which assume unforeseen levels of literacy in a wide variety of territories, along with the serialization and multimedia distribution of franchised intellectual properties. In this space, fan endeavour is characterized by a systemic filtering of proliferating media around a core text. Finding the good stuff assumes that you know the bad when you see it, and implicit to this assumption, is that almost any franchise will not exist as a single series, film or manga, but will spawn unforeseen ancillary media texts claiming to extend its scope.

The face of popular culture is merging into one, with transnational flows moving with a frightening intensity. When I was a teen Japanese popular culture was monolithic and exotic, now kids have Korean Chinese and their own homegrown media, which has followed the Japanese mould. But still, most interesting to me are the generic realities of Japanese culture that are coded as gendered. Shojo and Shonen, girls and boys genres, and beyond that Seinen, Bishonen, Yaoi. The specification of genres featuring action stories for boys, or stories of beautiful boys for girls in Japan, or for British queer teenagers who revel in the Bowie-like anti-heroes, I think the enduring influence on fandom that has come from transnationalism has been the complication of archetypal gender roles. While the people I speak to consider themselves fans, they choose to operate in shallower waters than the first generation of fans that aimed for the stars, and they nonetheless return to the enduring influence, through games/manga/anime of these new subjectivities, and for instance the subversive power of explicitly queered male heroism. Its amazing to me how the image of young men nowadays, through bands like Fallout Boy/AFI/Lost Prophets, draw on the image culture of imported anime from the eighties and nineties. Not quite dandyism, since a certain sobriety is key, the hair and the attention to detail is suffused with anime influences, and the gender play most explicitly betrays this heritage. Through Japanese performers like Gackt whose influence can be traced in the contemporary 'scenester' and 'emo' aesthetics, the softening of male aesthetics is perhaps the most enduring evidence of how fandom went mainstream here in the UK.

Wrapping Up

LHM: Given the really nascent state of writing on gendered (and gendering in) media fandom in the transnational context, I feel like we've only been able to begin to think through some of the issues at work here. We seem to be performing a dance around issues of in/authenticity, transcultural and transsexual masquerade, and carnivalesque language play that I'd love to see picked up and discussed more in the comments. Thanks for a rigorous and thought-provoking discussion, David.

DS: Yeah, writing late in the gender and fandom series has meant so much ground has been covered, I have found myself drawing a lot on my own experiences. I think that the potential for a further discussion on issues of authenticity in fandom is huge, since it plays such a decisive role in the structure and hierarchy of communities. As you say, it would be good to take it further in the comments. It's been great fun Lori.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Nineteen, Part One): Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and David Surman

Introduction LHM: I'm Lori Hitchcock Morimoto, and my academically sanctioned biography states that I'm a PhD candidate at Indiana University, working on a dissertation that examines Japanese female fans of Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Normally, I would not include the information that I just now plopped my daughter in front of an episode of Dora the Explorer in order to buy some time to write, but that information - as well as the fact that I'm presently seven months pregnant - turns out to be relevant to the ways in which I'm thinking about female fandom in my dissertation, as well as the ways I'm thinking about academia in my own life. In essence, I'm interested in unruly fans (and unruly academics).

My own fan experiences, like those of the women about whom I'm writing, are very much a product of personal transnationalism. I spent my formative years living in Hong Kong; there, I was a fan of Hollywood blockbusters and took every opportunity to fill Chinese embroidered scrapbooks with movie stills culled from the Japanese movie magazines Screen and Roadshow. Later, I paradoxically 'discovered' the unique pleasures of Hong Kong cinema in Japan, and, as a fan, I've invested my fair share of hard-earned cash in star and movie memorabilia, quaked with excitement upon realizing that the Hong Kong restaurant I happened to visit was the backdrop of a favorite scene in Peter Chan's He's a Woman, She's a Man, and shaken Leslie Cheung's hand at a concert in Osaka. This is all by way of saying that fandom, for me, has been - first and foremost - a very personal and highly affective experience. As with many of the female fans I've talked with over the years, it stems from passion - for a narrative, for a genre, for a star. The fans with whom I identify are messy - to borrow from Martti Lahti and Melanie Nash, we're "those girls": the ones who exceed predetermined parameters of fan/star interaction, who allow our lives and our fandom to commingle to an unseemly degree.

DS: My name is David Surman, and I am founding Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Design at the University of Wales, Newport. Fandom brought me to university, where I studied animation, with a view to working in the games industry. I was chaperoned through childhood by a Sega Mega Drive, and as a teenager I was consumed by an expanded passion for Japanese animation, games and popular culture; I guess I would qualify as one of the first wave of UK game otaku. I was caught up in the cloud of excitement around anime and manga generated by Jonathan Clements and Helen MacCarthy in magazines like Manga Max and Manga Mania, at a time when British and American animation was a dust bowl. Even though retailers sold the limited number of titles available at mercenary prices, over the years I acquired numerous videos with my meager allowance. I came to them knowing something of the controversy but nothing of the pedigree in anime.

My own media mixing put Kaneda and Tetsuo headlong along the same highway as the Gunstar Heroes and Joe Musashi on horseback. Videogames, manga and anime became the counterpoint to boredom at school, and university provided me with an opportunity to deepen those interests in an almost-legitimate way. No sooner had I got there, my interests began to broaden, through a patchwork exposure to film studies and classic film and animation. I found a passion for European experimental and North American limited animation, and these in turn deepened my appreciation of anime. My masters and PhD work followed the path set during the degree; I have sought to bring film studies methods to bear on transnational videogame and animation cultures. I guess, in this process, I have been examining my own fandom. I don't think that my experience is in many ways idiosyncratic; it always amazes me how many of my students share biographical details, motivations, dreams and desires, having spent their childhood committed to the same mediums as me.

In several recent essays I have vainly vindicated my own abstruse feelings about games fandom. My film studies prejudices come to the fore in the essays on Fable in the Animated Worlds anthology, and on StreetFighter in Videogame/Player/Text. Until relatively recently game studies have tended to focus on matching the sociology of play to the dynamics of gameplay. Along with a few other guilty parties, some of whom have contributed to this gender and fandom series, I am interested in the relationship between game aesthetics and fandom, though I suspect aesthetics is sometimes too weighty a term. Game art, images, advertisements and merchandise fascinate me, in particular when they betray particular cultural and generic assumptions about gender and games.

The 'Messiness' of Transnational Fan Culture

Whenever I think, "what am I doing?," I remind myself of what I consider one of the great fan studies texts, Barthes' The Language of Fashion. His summary exclamation, 'The most seemingly utilitarian of objects - food, clothes, shelter - and especially those based on language such as literature (whether good or bad literature), press stories, advertising etc., invite semiological analysis.'

I have tended to work with an emphasis on close analysis within the systems of games representation. Like Barthes I guess, the sum of my interests in games, animation and fandom pass through another lens, sexuality, which shapes my thinking, and my consumption of images and play experiences. I think I qualify as one of your messy fans, Lori. In my recent work I have become interested in female transnational/transmedia character archetypes (phew!), as loci for fan investment, authorial refinement, and cultural commentary.

LHM: Actually, I'm intrigued by your parenthetical "phew!" there at the end of your self-introduction, since it really is a mouthful but, at the same time, something that's part and parcel of contemporary globalized (or transnational or transcultural), gendered fandom. Since we've both written on media fandoms in a transnational context, I think this is something we might be able to talk to in addition to issues of gender. In my own work, I've found that the sheer amount of exposition necessary to bring a more general audience up to speed in terms of the specific culture(s) I'm talking about often acts as a barrier to discussing those cultures in terms of broader issues of fandom. In an English-speaking Western conference setting, for example, comparatively little background information is needed for speakers and audience members alike to engage in fairly high-level theoretical discussions of, say, Doctor Who or Lord of the Rings fandom. But in the case of characters like Kaneda and Tetsuo (who I was pleased - and mortified, but only because it dates me - to recognize), theoretical discussion often seems to take a back seat to exposition. My feeling is that, as a result, such discussion tends to get ghettoized or relegated to 'specialties' within academic discourse on fan cultures.

DS: Specialties indeed; your description of the challenge facing new territories of media research chimes exactly with my experience over the past 5 years or so, as games in particular have entered the mainstream as a object worthy of intense scrutiny. The stellar growth of the games and animation research fields has not been matched by moderate methodology, and there is still a substantial problem regarding the sensitivity with which scholars and critics figure transnational relations, and even the principle of national identity, in their research questions.

For me, one of the crucial issues in fan critique is the discrepancy between the needs of industry, journalistic, academic and general fan opinion, in relation to the expression their views on subjects, for instance national identity, and oriental/occidental constructions. I recently commented on this issue on the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) listserv. Distinctions between East and West require sensitive disentangling in academic thought, and such demands aren't generally expected of those in other domains.

I think it is absolutely crucial in this sort of comparative discussion that the category of the 'West' is not positioned as a coherent singularity, where narrative/generic/ideological operations can be thought relative to opposing and equally pejorative notions of 'Japan', which is somehow taken out of its Asia-Pacific context. The conceit of 'Japan' juxtaposed against a singular 'West' depends on outmoded assumptions about the dynamic topography of transnational media relations. It seems essential to figure into aca-fan thinking the internal complexities within Western media culture, and to further measure those against a similarly nuanced discussion of Asia-Pacific media culture, within which Japan is placed. The uncomplicated singular construction of 'Japan' as a media producer recurs time and again in animation and game scholarship, and it's not useful, especially when justified in relation to an equally mythic West. Woeful industry, journo and fan conceptualizations of East and West should be left for them to ruminate. A discussion of transnational media relations needs to proceed from a more nuanced set of assumptions, am I right? You wouldn't get away with it in any other field...

LHM: It's the challenge of articulating heretofore discrete fields of inquiry - area studies, in particular - with disciplines that have only just begun to confront your "dynamic topography of transnational media relations." These days, it's become more difficult to talk about fandoms within the American television mediascape without at least a passing knowledge of shows such as Torchwood or Naruto (or even Are You Being Served? - and I'd love to see a paper that really delved into the apparently bottomless popularity of that dinosaur in the U.S.!), yet because of those persisting notions of national coherence that you describe above, we seem to have a hard time breaking out of a framework that emphasizes cross-cultural exchange at the broadest national (or regional) level. At the risk of appearing sycophantic, given the forum for this conversation, I would mention that recent work by Matt Hills and Henry Jenkins emphasizing "semiotic solidarity" and "pop cosmopolitanism," respectively, offers a means of making sense of transnational fan networks that takes us outside traditional notions of the individual and the nation.

Of course, once gender enters the conversation, we're confronted with an even more complex nexus of identity construction. These days, we're relatively comfortable talking about 'otaku' in the context of transnational fan cultures centering on anime, but it's generally a foregone conclusion that, in the Japanese case, 'otaku' are men and, thus, comfortably "Japanese." When the discursive construct "Japanese woman" is introduced to the conversation - along with centuries' worth of baggage about her ostensible subservience and cultural/political disenfranchisement - discussion about what role Japanese female fans might play in furthering our understanding of how fan cultures work across national borders gets shelved in favor of trying to understand the women themselves. Scholars such as Brian Larkin have written exceptional work introducing non-Western media fans to discussions of how transnational media are consumed across borders, but these fans are almost exclusively male; the conversation about non-Western women and media consumption seems to be stalled in debates about resistance and subversion - debates that the mainstream of fandom studies has called into question. And given the contested value of any kind of "cosmopolitanism" in fostering mutual empathy among media consumers within a framework that privileges resistance and, in particular, cultural authenticity, it becomes all the more difficult to break out of old models of national identity in attempting to make sense of globalized patterns of media consumption on the part of non-Western female fans.

Performing the National

DS: I remember reading Volker Grassmuck's early work on otaku culture, and being amazed when his first interviewee was a female game otaku. I think problems associated with women's fandom emerge from a complex historical construction of women's work, play, recreation and entertainment. Early games culture was profoundly male dominated, with only a few women of exceptional resilience able to stand the grunts and smells of the old arcades! I guess a comparative analysis of women's recreation between different cultural spaces would no doubt shed new light on how we conceive the operations of fandom. Like Lawrence Grossberg suggested, I think we need to bring it these sorts of issues closer to home if we are to see rich new avenues opening up. William Gibson has drawn some interesting parallels between British and Japanese culture, mutually juxtaposed against American culture, he writes that '...the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures.' Gibson has certainly contributed to the conceited picture of 'Japan' through his science fiction novels, but his statements in the Guardian are useful for illustrating the point that comparative analysis is best researched in discussions taking place closer to home than antiquated notions of East and West.

Making the effort to proceed from complicated beginnings might mean that, in the long run, we say much more sustainable and durable things about the subject in question, in this case gender and fandom. Work like Andrew Higson's early essay 'The Concept of National Cinema' in Screen from 1989 give a really sound explanation of why we can't permit brutish and uncomplicated discourse on the scale of transnational relations. A few lines are pretty useful:

'To claim a national cinema is first of all to specify a coherence and a unity; it is to proclaim a unique identity and a stable set of meanings. The process of identification is thus invariably a hegemonising, mythologising process, involved both in the production and assignation of a particular set of meanings, and an attempt to prevent the potential proliferation of other meanings.'

My question would be, to what extend does English-speaking fan film/animation/game criticism need a represented Japanese mode of production to perform a particular set of codes (and by extension narrative and ideological functions), against which it can define itself within a particular set of its own traditions? In increasingly globalised and mutually intelligible film/animation/games production cultures, where different production traditions rub shoulders in elective spaces such as the Tokyo Game Show or cable television channels, are such national/occidental/oriental discourses evoked out of 'fear of cultural contamination', as Iwabuchi would suggest?

Does the need for a coherent Western fan tradition (see responses to Dr Who, LOTR) arise from the new transparency of transnational games culture? Is that need for coherence the driver rather than the cause? In this case, do differing national fan subjectivities exist as a textuality of sorts in themselves, which compete within commodified fan culture as a form of generic reconciliation (the fight for shelf space in retail comic book stores for instance).

LHM: This last question is very intriguing, and it gets me thinking about the ways in which fans perform both their own, as well as target, national identities within the context of, for lack of a better term, non-native fandoms. For example, one female writer of Torchwood and Doctor Who fanfiction who I know from my own X-Files fanfiction writing days assumes what might be described as a stereotypically British personae when talking about these particular shows on LiveJournal: exclamations of "La!" and observations that "I'm so knackered" seem to express a kind of delight in - rather than fear of - cultural difference. The beauty of one of her exclamations - "He's lovely!" - is especially nice insofar as it refers to a Japanese anime character; this isn't the rigid Anglophilia of the PBS crowd but, rather, a messy and decidedly incoherent revelery in transnational fandom.

Equally, this kind of playfulness is at work in the Japanese female fandom of Hong Kong cinema, again manifesting itself in language. In this case, similarities between written Japanese and Chinese, which have typically been used to demonstrate discrete cultural affinities (often in the aid of arguments for the cultural "Asianization" of East Asia), become a site of excessive intra-fandom communication. For example, stars are referred to not only by their Anglicized stage names (ie: Jacky Cheung), but also by their Chinese given names (Cheung Hok-yau) and - most notably - Japanized versions of their Chinese names (Cho Gakuyu), which, in spoken Japanese, are intelligible only to other Japanese fans of Chinese stars. Japanese fans of East Asian popular culture have been used to illustrate Japan's rediscovered Asian belonging on the part of political and cultural elites, but such arguments are grounded in the maintenance of coherent borders between Japan and its East Asian neighbors. In contrast, this kind of play exceeds conventional understandings of linguistic and cultural coherence, and it emerges not from a perceived need to communicate across borders, but from the sheer pleasure and intimacy it fosters between both fellow fans and those fans and the stars they admire.

Given that this kind of transcultural play is especially evident in recent role-playing fanfiction (eg: Milliways bar on LiveJournal - http://community.livejournal.com/milliways_bar/), I wonder if this sort of thing is at work in transnational gaming culture, as well?

Spacewars and Beyond: How the Tech Model Railroad Club Changed the World

"Games lubricate the body and the mind." --Benjamin Franklin

I spoke a few weeks ago at the opening of From Spacewars to MMORPGS, an exhibit on the history of video games which was organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. What follows are some of the notes we pulled together on the history of video games in Boston. I should note that this takes a very MIT-centric view of the Boston games scene and someone from another university might foreground different moments or groups in telling the story. Giving the talk in this context was nerve wracking because there were so many people in the audience who had helped to shape the evolution of games in Boston and there is no way to reference every significant player in the history here.

In the beginning, as the title of the exhibit suggests, there was SpaceWar!, one of the first interactive computer games, built in the early 1960s by the Tech Model Railroad Club, which was at the time housed in MIT's building 20. Building 20 is a legendary space here at MIT: built during World War II as temporary housing for the Rad Lab, the group which helped develop and perfect radar technology, it survived well into my time at MIT in the 1990s. It was on the site of the new Strata Center (Frank Gehry) and housed a number of key media research initiatives through the years. The Tech Model Railroad Club consisted of people who liked to tinker with technology and they were housed at the heart of the military-industrial complex. A 1959 Dictionary of TMRC language shows them using words like "foo," "Kludge," and "hack" which very much describes their relationship to technology. The club developed a highly complex railroad system with hundreds of relays and had started to turn their attention to recreational computing, playing around with the PDP-1 computer in the MIT AI Lab during off hours. Space Wars was developed by three friends, J.M. Graetz, Steve "Slug" Russell, Wayne Wiitanen, who became known as the "Hingham Institute," because they lived together on Hingham Street in Cambridge and consumed pulpy science fiction stories and Japanese monster movies. They later said they built the game for three reasons:

• show off the limits of a computer's resources

• be interesting. each run is different.

• invite audience participation.

It seems significant that the first computer game was already a mod of the existing computer hardware if not of existing software. It was built by people interested in simulating real world environments -- and in that sense, we might draw a line from the model railroad to more recent simulation games, from Railroad Tycoon to SimCity. And it was built outside of a commercial context -- for the sheer pleasure of play. Spacewars later shipped with the PDP-1 computer so that DEC representatives could use it as a final test of the computing power at an install site. From there forward, computer games have been on the cutting edge of computing. I've argued that computer games are to the PC what NASA was to the mainframe computer -- a shared vision involving the work of hundreds of researchers trying to push forward the capacity of the equipment. The modern computer would not have its current graphics capacity, processing power, and reaction speed, nor would the PC have penetrated into the domestic market as quickly as it has, without games to constantly raise higher expectations about what computers might do.

MIT intervenes into the history of computer games a second time in the late 1970s with the launch of Infocom, a company founded by MIT staff and students, led by Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Albert Vezza, and Joel Berez. Infocom is closely associated with the rise of interactive fiction and text-based adventure games, building on the foundations set by Zork, which had been created by MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science in 1977. Infocom exploited the Zork interpretor which could understand complete phrases (e.g. "look at the apple") versus the canned commands (e.g. "look") of earlier IF games. When Zork was released commercially in 1980 for TRS-80, it sold more than 1 million copies. Infocom helped to broaden the potential market for games by selling their titles through bookstores as well as computer stores. These games, which valued storytelling over graphics, retain a strong cult following down to the present day.

A third period in the history of games in Boston centers around Looking Glass Studios, a company created in the early 1990s after the merger of Lerner Research and Blue Sky Productions. Looking Glass moved to Cambridge in 1994 and recruited heavily from MIT, absorbing Intermetrics in 1997, a NASA software developer founded by veterans of MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory (now the Draper Lab). Looking Glass originally worked on flight simulators and driving games, moving on to other fields soon after. Until their closure in 2000, they were responsible for games that were beloved cult hits with both game fans and many game developers and for originating many design and technical innovations that would have long-lasting effects on video game development. Many of those associated with Looking Glass, Paul Neurath, Ned Lerner, Warren Spector, Ken Levine,Doug Church, Marc LeBlanc, Sean Barrett, have developed a reputation for pushing forward the art of game design and for being leading thinkers and theorists within the games industry. Marc LeBlanc has talked about the group's "MIT-style ambition" to push forward the art of interactive storytelling, including developing and refining the First-Person interface and creating the genre of stealth games (Thief and its sequels). Today, they are perhaps most famous for System Shock 1 and 2, which took the first person shooter genre to greater complexity, interweaving story and game play in a particularly sophisticated manner. The recent success of Bioshock, created by Irrational Games, a company founded by former Looking Glass employee Ken Levine, has been described as a spiritual sequel to the Systems Shock titles. After the company split apart, the employees went to many studios across the nation including Ion Storm, Harmonix, Irrational, Bethesda Softworks, Mad Doc, Junction Point [Warren Spector's newest venture, recently acquired by Disney) and Electronic Arts (Doug Church at EALA). Former Looking Glass employees have also contributed heavily to Independent Games movement, helping to found the Indie Game Jam and establishing numerous companies under various publishing methods.

Boston today is characterized by a broad array of cutting edge games companies, including:

the previously mentioned Irrational, which was recently purchased by 2K, the owners of Rockstar, and recently renamed

Mad Doc Software, creators of Empire Earth 2 and Star Trek: Legacy, a company highly regarded for complexity and good AI.

*Turbine Inc, publisher of a number of successful Multiplayer ventures, including Asheron's Call 1 and 2, and more recently, Dungeons and Dragons Online and The Lord of the Rings Online.

But if we want to tell the story through an MIT lens, we'd want to focus on Harmonix, creators of the highly successful Guitar Hero games (which I can tell you are faves where-ever MIT grad or undergrad students gather.) Harmonix was founded in 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy who met while at the Media Lab at MIT. The company was built on the premise that the experience of performing music could become accessible to those who would otherwise have trouble learning a traditional instrument. At the time of the founding, Japanese music games were taking off, such as Parappa the Rapper and Dance Dance Revolution. They began to produce titles such as Frequency and Amplitudethat allowed users to create music in the games using the console controller.

In 2005, Harmonix released Guitar Hero. The game featured similar gameplay elements to FreQuency and Amplitude, in which the goal is for the player to hit color-coded buttons to the rhythm of passing button sequences. However, Guitar Hero utilized a five-button, guitar-shaped controller, designed uniquely for the game and became a huge success, both critically and commercially. MTV Networks, a subsidiary of Viacom, became the owner of Harmonix in September 2006. Harmonix has been closely involved with Boston's independent music scene.

Well, that brings us up to the present, but we'd like to think that MIT has something to contribute to the future of games as well. Take for example our new GAMBIT lab, launched this summer, as a collaboration between Comparative Media Studies and Computer Science and the AI Lab inside MIT and nine colleges, universities, and polytechnics in Singapore, funded by the Singapore Media Development Authority and the National Research Foundation. Last summer, teams of students from both MIT and Singapore worked together to do cutting edge research that would be hard to complete within product-driven processes at most games companies, translating their innovative ideas into playable if short duration games, which are now being shown at games festivals in the United States and Singapore. We hope that GAMBIT will be an incubator space for new game titles which will generate interest within the games industry and among games players. The challenge we pose to these students is to constantly stretch the limits of what games can do as a medium of expression, to try things which might fail but which also might yield spectacular results.

To help inspire these students, we have etched the image of the original Space Wars games into glass at the entrance to our laboratory space, reminding all who pass through our doors of the role which MIT has played in shaping the development of recreational computing. If you want to get a taste of the atmosphere in GAMBIT this summer, check out this short documentary created by Neil Grigsby, one of the CMS graduate students who helped lead the rapid prototype and iterative design process this past summer.

You might also like to check out this visualization of the historic evolution of the Boston games Industry (Code by Darius Kazemi, data by Kent Quirk and the Boston Postmortem).

Thanks to Philip Tan, Matt Weise, Michael Danziger, Joshua Diaz, Kevin Driscoll, and Jason Rockwell for their help in pulling together this information.

"Vernacular Creativity": An Interview with Jean Burgess (Part Two)

Some critics of the idea of participatory culture have argued that only a small percentage of people want to generate or share content with other people. Even advocates such as Bradley Horowitz have argued for a pyramid of participation in which a small group at top become creators while others help to circulate and critique what they create. Should we then accept that the new participatory culture is only modestly more democratic than what has come before? What do you see as the implications of these inequalities in participation? What does your research suggests about the steps which need to take place before someone begins to participate in these expressive cultures?

Absolutely, these issues are vitally important. If participatory culture is a site of cultural citizenship, but the most active participants are already a privileged elite, then we have a problem ­ a problem for democracy. You refer to this as the participation gap instead of the digital divide and reframing the problem this way is an incredibly important intervention. The unevenness of participation is not a consequence of lack of access to the hardware and software and internet connections, but a consequence of uneven motivations and literacies.

The digital storytelling movement is an explicit attempt to intervene in these issues creating situations where ordinary people can work with more experienced media producers to create considered works based on their own life narratives. Just a note for readers who may not have come across the Digital Storytelling movement before: the form of Digital Storytelling I talk about in my work is a specific tradition based around the production of digital stories in intensive collaborative workshops. The outcome is a short autobiographical narrative recorded as a voiceover, combined with photographic images (often sourced from the participants own photo albums) and edited into a short movie. For examples, have a look at the Centre for Digital Storytelling (www.storycenter.org), the BBC¹s Capture Wales digital storytelling project (http://bbc.co.uk/capturewales) and one of our projects

here at QUT, the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project (http://www.kgurbanvillage.com.au/sharing/digital/index.shtm).

In comparison to Web 2.0 platforms for amateur creativity like YouTube or Flickr which rely on autonomous participation and peer learning rather than top-down training, digital storytelling works to broaden participation by connecting everyday vernacular experiences and practices (like oral storytelling) with professional expertise and institutional support. Common to all branches of this tradition is an ethic of participation: one of the core aims is to provide people who are not necessarily expert users with an opportunity to produce an aesthetically coherent and interesting broadcast quality work that communicates effectively with a wider, public audience.

But digital storytelling is mainly focused at the production end -- the creation of artefacts, albeit in an intensely social workshop setting. Much of what is so interesting in new media contexts does happen on the web, though, and those who are able to participate most effectively in those spaces are highly skilled in new and emerging literacies. In particular, I talk about network literacy -- understanding that participation in blogging, or vlogging, or in the Flickr community, or whatever, is not just about creating something great and broadcasting it ­ it's also about being part of social networks. In fact, the social and cultural value that is generated by these online creative communities is very much a product of both social networking and creative practice, in a convergent relationship. It¹s not just great content, and it¹s not just connectedness, and it's not just findability and relevance, it¹s all of those things. That's what Flickr's interestingness algorithm, as a way of re-presenting the most valuable images on the network, is all about. So the point is that ongoing, engaged participation in creative communities is just as vital for effective participation as the creative competencies and aesthetic literacies particular to your chosen artform, whether that's photography, music, vlogging, or whatever. And at the same time, those who want to learn more about photographic techniques, say, couldn¹t do better than to actively participate in a social network that¹s organised around photography, like Flickr.

There has been a growing body of criticism focused on the discourse of web 2.0 and its concept of user-generated content from the perspective of creative labor theory. Flickr has been seen as emblematic of this new creative economy. How does the corporate construction of user-generated content differ from or resemble your concept of vernacular creativity?

Let me say to begin with that I don't like the term user-generated content very much at all. First we're masses and now we're generators? Users isn't great either, but it's hard to think of a better term for the relationship it describes. I tried to use vernacular creativity as much as possible because it focuses on the practices of users in relation to their own lives; not as the sources of content in relation to online enterprises.

But to move on, I'm not really an expert in labour theory, but the debate around user-led content creation in relation to labour is really interesting because of how much it says about the unexamined assumptions of the left, more than anything else. I have to say here that some of the most interesting discussions of new labour theory in relation to network culture have been happening on the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing list lately (https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-August/002698.html), and my colleague Melissa Gregg (http://homecookedtheory.com) is one of many

people doing very interesting work on affective labour in relation to new media technologies. I'm not talking about discussions that occur at that level, but the knee-jerk responses that frame almost any participation in commercial online spaces as just free labour. That kind of statement reveals how much of our thinking is still structured around the competing dynamics of oppression and resistance, not to mention industrial models of the economy, and doesn't allow for the idea that we may be seeing the emergence of newly configured, dynamic and volatile economic and power relations between the media ÂŒindustry and ordinary consumer-citizens, which may afford new forms of agency and opportunities for human flourishing as much as they do new forms of labour.

Of course, mainstream technophilic commentators like Wired and so on are

just as guilty ­ the hype around the idea of crowdsourcing as a source of free or cheap labour was not only pretty insulting to the agency of users, but pretty unimaginative, I thought. I think too much focus on the idea of free labour might obscure some of the most interesting and challenging problems around user-generated content. For example, considering that there

is no alternative at scale, at least right now, to the big commercial social network services and platforms, like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and so on; what about the challenge of getting the interests of the service or platform provider and their user community to align in a way that maximises the public good they produce as side effects? Is it possible to show that this care for social and cultural value is essential for the commercial success of the platform provider as much as it is for the interests of the community? And where do commercial imperatives create barriers to the public good? Flickr is really interesting in this respect because they have very

open feedback channels between the user community and the company ­ for better or worse! The moments where that cosy, we're all in this together relationship between service provider and user community appears to break down is the moment where any hidden problems in the relationship come to the surface (think of Flickr's recent issues around localisation and censorship, for example), and at least in theory they can be explicitly discussed and even transformed for the better. Or not!

You describe your stance as one of critical optimism. What did you learn in your research which left you more optimistic? What did your research show that forced you to become more critical of the prevailing rhetoric about a DIY revolution?

When I was first planning the research project that eventually became my PhD, back in 2003, a lot of the hype about amateur creativity seemed to be saying that ordinary people were overthrowing the expertise of the media industries and creative professionals within them ­ and for some people that was seen as a great thing, a revolution; for others, it has been seen as a very dangerous thing. And by the way, it seems little has changed, if Andrew Keen's impact on public discourse is anything to go by.

I didn¹t like that overblown revolutionary and/or apocalyptic rhetoric, because it seemed to be making a grave and ahistorical mistake--we always, always have to be very careful about what is actually 'new' about 'new media'. And I was just intuitively convinced there was something more subtle and interesting going on. I also wanted to get away from that amateur-professional dichotomy and think about the actual practices and social uses of user-led content creation, in their own terms, without serving a polemical agenda.

The main thing I wanted to explore and understand was the extent to which both lower barriers to production, especially because of cheaper and more available technologies like digital cameras, in tandem with networked mediation, especially online, might be amplifying those ordinary, everyday creative practices so that they might contribute to a more democratic cultural public sphere. I guess I was optimistic in that I went looking for evidence that might support that hope, and not defeat it.

But this is happening very imperfectly, of course, and it¹s not yet clear whether the mass popularisation of participatory media platforms will improve matters or not. The encounters that occur in the most populous, democratic media platforms, like YouTube, are not always a pretty sight. Just as much as YouTube supports the self-representation of minorities or the popularisation of evolutionary science, for example, it also supports hate¹ speech and religious fundamentalism. It isn¹t clear yet how the cultural normalisation of spaces like YouTube will turn out.

I found that the spaces that were most rich in examples of vernacular creativity were at the same time constrained in certain ways, and each context was shaped towards forms of participation that served the interests of the service providers as much as they serve the interests of the participants. So in Flickr, the most active, intensive forms of participation seem to be taken up mainly by already-literate bloggers, gamers, and internet junkies. In the digital storytelling movement, there is a certain kind of polite authenticity that is valued, and the workshops are incredibly resource-intensive, so that they aren't open to the ongoing, everyday participation that something like blogging is. There are always constraints and compromises, no matter how open a platform appears to be. So, I suppose, that's the 'critical' part.

Jean Burgess is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. She works within the Federation Fellowship program 'Uses of Multimedia', led by Professor John Hartley, and her research interests are in cultural studies, media history and the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, especially issues of cultural participation and new media literacy. With Joshua Green (MIT), she is undertaking a major project called The Uses of YouTube, which combines large-scale content analysis with fine-grained qualitative methods. She is co-author of The Cultural Studies Companion (with John Banks, John Hartley, and Kelly McWilliam, to be published by Palgrave, 2008/9), Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Cultural

Studies and co-editor of "ÂŒCounter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies" (2006, Continuum 20.2). As part of her research, Jean has regularly worked as a facilitator in community-based digital storytelling projects. Before entering academia, Jean worked for 10 years as a classical flutist, music educator, and occasional composer-producer.

"Vernacular Creativity": An Interview with Jean Burgess (Part One)

I recently had the privilege of being an outside examiner on a dissertation produced by Jean Burgess, a PhD candidate in the Creative Industries program at Queensland University of Technology on the topic of "vernacular creativity." I've long considered QUT's Creative Industries program to be a sibling of our own efforts in the Convergence Culture Consortium. Indeed, Joshua Green, who currently heads the C3 research team, is a post-doc who came to us from QUT. And we've seen a steady stream of visitors through the years (John Hartley, Alan McKee, John Banks, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess, among others) from down under. Burgess is now collaborating with Joshua Green, Sam Ford, and others on the C3 team on research centering on YouTube. I was quite taken by what Burgess had to say about "vernacular creativity" and its relationship with participatory culture, media literacy, and civic engagement. She talks about these concepts in the following interview:

Your dissertation focused on what you call vernacular creativity. Can you give us a sense of what this concept means for you?

I used the concept to talk about everyday creative practices like storytelling, family photographing, scrapbooking, journaling and so on that pre-exist the digital age and yet are co-evolving with digital technologies and networks in really interesting ways. So the documentation of everyday life and the public sharing of that documentation, as in sharing photos on Flickr, or autobiographical blogging; these are forms of vernacular creativity, remediated in digital contexts. These are also cultural practices that perhaps we don't normally think of as creative, because we've become so used to thinking of creativity as a special property of genius-like individuals, rather than as a general human -- some would say -- evolutionary process. I found the term really useful for focusing on the fact that there is much about the current explosion of amateur content creation online that has a long history, that isn¹t particularly revolutionary, and that relates to specific local contexts and identities. Vernacular creativity is ordinary.

But ordinary doesn't mean generic or boring, not necessarily anyway. Each example of vernacular creativity is also a representation of a specific life, a specific time, a specific place. Because of this specificity, the ordinariness of vernacular creativity doesn't necessarily equate to uninterestingness. The practices and artefacts of vernacular creativity are of course very rich and meaningful in relation to the social contexts in which they're created, communicated, and disseminated: think of your own family photo album, and then a complete stranger's family photo album from the 1960s that you stumble across in the back of a junk shop in a different country, for example. Both ordinary at the point of origin, both full of meanings and stories, but in different ways. The point is, culture doesn¹t have to be sublime or spectacular to be useful or significant or interesting to someone, somewhere. But what I find most interesting about vernacular creativity in the context of the new media generally and the Internet particularly is the potential to scale that immediate social context add up to social connectivity, and conversation, to individualistic self-expression. The two major case studies I explored in the thesis - the Flickr photosharing network, and the Digital Storytelling movement -- each demonstrate how that might work out in practice, but in very different ways.

How might a focus on participation and creativity, rather than resistance, change the agenda for cultural studies?

The focus on cultural participation as a positive thing is entirely compatible with a long tradition in cultural studies that was concerned with empowerment and social inclusion through self-representation and education. I think this is an agenda that has always been there, but perhaps was overshadowed by an alternative relationship to power - resistance, even as resistance was located in the everyday. The important thing for me is that a focus on participation shifts the questions that we need to ask about the cultural politics of media slightly sideways from being only about power, exploitation and resistance to questions of voice, cultural inclusion, and so on and those questions seem to me to offer more hope for pragmatic interventions.

Symbolic creativity and agency in relation to media, particularly, has a long history in cultural studies. Henry, you would know better than anyone that fans were very important for earlier investigations into participatory media because they showed how creativity and agency were possible even within the media landscape of the broadcast era. At that stage, fans weren't really understood as ordinary citizens, but rather as pretty extraordinary, intensively engaged media consumers. But at least the creative practices of fans demonstrated that there might be empowering uses of popular culture, and that audiences for broadcast culture were not -- or at least not all -- passive. And I also don¹t need to tell you or many of your readers that creative fan practices in new media contexts has often led the way for more mainstream forms of participation.

I thought it was time to consider the extent to which people who may have a much less intense relationship with mass media and popular culture than fans, might also be participating in culture through their own creative efforts.

What links do you draw between empowering people to create and share what they create with others online and the development of conceptions of citizenship and civic engagement?

Most of the time, when we hear terms like citizenship and civic engagement, we think of participation in the processes of formal politics ­ democratic deliberation, elections, and so on. These forms of participation are thought of as separate from everyday life, consumption, popular culture, and pleasure. But I think some of the most interesting forms of civic engagement occur where the everyday and popular collide with the political -- look how much there is going on in the Obama Girl video, for example. So as a way of getting at those ideas, the term I use most of the time is cultural citizenship, which is a way of talking about the ways in which cultural participation and citizenship might be the same thing, in certain circumstances.

So one of the core concepts I work with in the thesis is this idea of cultural citizenship¹. It¹s used in several different ways by different theorists, but what I mean by it is that culture is the means by which we, as individual citizens and communities, experience what the world is like, how we fit in it, and importantly, how we relate to others who are different from us at the same time as we seek out opportunities for belonging. Where participatory media opens up space for us, as ordinary citizens, to speak and represent ourselves and our ways of being in the world, and to encounter difference, then it¹s also a space for the everyday practice of cultural citizenship ­ in that context, everyday creativity is civic engagement, in a sense. This idea -- that networked individualism in participatory media might actually be good for society in some way -- really seems counter-intuitive to those who have been convinced by people like Robert Putnam, who argues that the increased privatization and commodification of social life weakens the social fabric, e.g. of neighbourhoods.

One of the things my research emphasised in relation to Flickr was that cultural citizenship was not only constituted online, but through the articulation of the online social network with everyday, local experience. A lot of my research focused on the Brisbanites group within Flickr, and there¹s a good illustration of this from an apparently insignificant event that occurred there. At one stage last year, an Italian user known on the network as Pizzodesevo, who had lived in various cities around Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, started posting scans of old slides taken in the 50s to the group. Other group members showed interest in the photographs by leaving comments that ranged from expressing appreciation to offering technical advice about scanning, to discussion of the locations of the photographs and how much they had changed in the past 46 years. What was really interesting to me was that the connections made between users as part of this discussion resulted in one Brisbane-based member of the Brisbanite groups spontaneously creating a kind of game around the images: he began going out specifically to capture images of the same locations as in the old slides, and uploading them to his own Flickr photostream. Pizzodesevo then combined some of these new images side by side with the old ones in a series of double images. The simple act of combining them revealed some of the dramatic changes to the Brisbane cityscape that have occurred over the past few decades. This led in turn to more discussion about the ways in which the city has changed, blended with nostalgia for a past that many of the discussants had never experienced themselves. So there on a microscopic level you have vernacular creativity, remediation, social networking, and civic engagement threaded back and forth and adding up to something much more than just sharing photos.

Joke Hermes refers to the texts and practices of popular culture as providing some of the "wool from which the social tapestry is knit." I think of each of these apparently insignificant moments of participation in online social networks and creative communities as being very much like that "where they start to knit together," you see how the everyday individual practices of vernacular creativity could add up to something beyond the individual level. It's in making those forms of personal expression available as part of public culture -- however small the public turns out to be -- that the digital remediation of vernacular creativity starts to look like it has real potential for propagating cosmopolitan forms of cultural citizenship, albeit at a modest scale.

Jean Burgess is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. She works within the Federation Fellowship program 'Uses of Multimedia', led by Professor John Hartley, and her research interests are in cultural studies, media history and the social and cultural implications of new media technologies, especially issues of cultural participation and new media literacy. With Joshua Green (MIT), she is undertaking a major project called The Uses of YouTube, which combines large-scale content analysis with fine-grained qualitative methods. She is co-author of The Cultural Studies Companion (with John Banks, John Hartley, and Kelly McWilliam, to be published by Palgrave, 2008/9), Reviews Editor of the International Journal of Cultural

Studies and co-editor of "ÂŒCounter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies" (2006, Continuum 20.2). As part of her research, Jean has regularly worked as a facilitator in community-based digital storytelling projects. Before entering academia, Jean worked for 10 years as a classical flutist, music educator, and occasional composer-producer.

CMS and Home Inc. Host Media Literacy Event

2007 Media Literacy Conference October 27th, 8:00 AM - 4:00 PM

Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture

HOME, Inc., and MIT's Comparative Media Studies, partner on a one-day conference on Media Literacy. The event is scheduled for October 27th and will take place at the MIT Campus: Building E51. It has been two years since we had our wonderful conference, Media Literacy, Building Critical Thinking Skills In Our Media Age at MIT.

Since fall of 2005 so many things have changed. The cell phone has cameras and people are sharing videos over the Internet on YouTube and MySpace. Music and video games are omnipresent, and virtual worlds on the Internet, such as Second Life are being co-opted by large business and educators, who are discovering whole new avenues for teaching, learning and commerce.

The conference theme "Creating and Learning in a Media Saturated Culture" will showcase the innovative work of classroom teachers, highlighting new pedagogical practices that support school reform and after school enrichment. We will explore after school learning through new platforms and technologies such as Second Life, and examine the research that is shaping the field.

Educational decision makers, curriculum developers, after-school program coordinators, superintendents, instructors and community leaders are all welcome to attend and participate in relevant panel discussions and breakout sessions. The conference will include two plenary sessions and eight breakout sessions covering topics relating to "in-school" and "after school" media literacy program development. Teachers from the Boston Public School's U.S. Department of Education funded media literacy and health projects will be highlighted with video presentations, sample curricula, professional development strategies and more. Discussion on best practices in Media Literacy curriculum, integration of replicable programs into K-12 or after school settings, along with a workshop on developing technology grant proposals, will provide helpful insight that will enable attendees to take the next steps toward school reform.

A keynote address will be given by Henry Jenkins, who is the Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006).

Other scheduled speakers include:

Rafi Santo and Global Kids, "Virtual Worlds, Real Skills"

Renee Hobbs, Temple University, "Meeting The Challenge of Teaching and Learning With Media in Schools"

Anna Van Somerin and Deb Lui, "Moby Dick Remixed: Appropriation As a New Media Literacy"

If you require any additional information on this event please contact us at, 978-395-5068 or by email at medialitconf@homeinc.org

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eighteen, Part Two): Julie Levin Russo and Hector Postigo

Technology and Control HP: One of the things we talked about during our meeting in Providence was how new media technologies, especially the internet, can potentiate changing conditions and relations vis a vis consumers and producers? I've sort of touched on this a bit above with my comments about how the web allows for mass broadcast of previously isolated products. So I think user production and fan contributions and their value (i.e their exploitability) are a function of the medium. Fan fiction for example, has been around for some time and their communities have been able to coalesce and remain together over time thanks to zines and fan cons and other social/communication enterprises. I think that the web adds an element of mass broadcast to fan production such that we are talking about fan products as content; as part of the commoditized information flowing out of the pipe. So I don't think we can any longer ignore the political economy of fandom. One of the interesting points that comes of all this is the question of control. If all this production is entering into some sort of relation with capital how is it controlled? The relations we discussed above are social relations but they happen through a technology so we could ask ourselves to what extent does the technology of the internet shape/is shaped by the productive relationships?

JLR: I'm so glad you asked! Control is a fruitful concept for articulating the economy with technology because, as the story of late capitalism goes, a new configuration of control is now coming to the fore: one which is just as horizontal, localized, and networked as the field of production on which it operates. Rather than enforcing prohibitions, it organizes possibilities and enables free movement within them -- often mobilizing technology to do so. In Protocol, Alex Galloway suggests that today we commonly experience hybrid grids of control, and offers the anatomy of the internet an as example: it combines the top-down architecture of DNS with the distributed architecture of TCP/IP. I often notice an analogous strategy at work in proprietary fan-driven content initiatives, where the confining threat of legal muscle is overlaid on a structured platform for creative license, striking a compromise that (when it's successful) is tolerable to both sides. What's clear is that, at this point, if we're looking out for hierarchical, centralized diagrams of power, we're going to sail right over the terrain of struggle. Web 2.0 is seductive in its user-centric mentality, but in exchange for the convenience and scale of social media we accept (literally, by ticking the box on the TOS) its given parameters, both technological and economic. Recently fandom is beginning to wise up to this dynamic and work towards building an infrastructure that is user designed, owned, and operated.

HP: I like the idea of alternative infrastructures that resist the commercial iterations of things like Web 2.0 driven social enterprises. I wonder to what degree power in this system of sociability/production/distribution is dependent on technological know-how. Will only those that can design infrastructure be able to challenge protocol with a counter-protocol? I would take a lesson from Langdon Winner and say that not all of us have to be technologist but it's in all our best interests to be concerned with the technological structures that consistently arise around us. We walk around in a state of what he calls "technological somnambulism" where before we know it we are moving through systems (social and technological) that were not democratically designed nor designed with the interest of democracy in mind. To what degree is this happening in participatory culture...to what degree has protocol taken shape around us without our input and without consideration to the values that users/fans/etc hold dear?

To get to the question of gender and technology it seems that these are not only pressing questions for participatory culture but also questions about how technologies embody gendered/sexist assumptions of what it means to produce in the digital world. Pointing to the troubling trend, when a technologies or professions become populated by women the economic rewards for the work decrease...the idea may be related to class too as for example when we say that a technology "is so easy to use anybody can do it" what we mean is that it's lost its elite status because not only college educated white men can use it but also everyone else of any class, educational background, and gender. In the logic of supply and demand of course this would dictate that the supply is increased and thus the value is decreased but I don't think this maps out in the area of cultural productions where conversations, reconstructions, and networks create value...in these cases the fact that anybody can do actually adds value but the elitist rhetoric holds it back when viewed from a market perspective.

JLR: Interestingly, this gendered revaluation can also move in the opposite direction: some occupations, such as film editing and computer programming, were initially understood as repetitive, detail-oriented labor that was thus feminized and performed primarily by women, and then later masculinized into elite technical skills. And while one sentence isn't much of a corrective to the white- and US-centric slant of this project, I'd like to note that there's a global dimension of inequality here too, as devalued forms of work are often relegated to the world's as well as the nation's "second-class" citizens.

One cause for optimism in the localized case of media fandom is that it's always been full of geeks -- women with highly-developed expertise in digital technologies -- and thus surfed the first wave of innovation throughout its decades-long history (thanks to Francesca Coppa for reminding us of this). Moreover, fandom is collaborative, so it's not necessary for us to be cultivating a counter-protocol on an individual basis when we collectively have a resevoir of competences to share. In any case, these are all good examples of the myriad ways technology intersects and intertwines with power, gesturing toward the merits of exploring, within our academic work, the particularities of its role in fan practice and fan/industry relations.

Ownership and Desire

HP: From the small clip I saw of your work it looks like you are looking at the content produced by fans and how readings of a text (TV show) inform fan production and how that production does or does not mesh with what we assume are the goals of the industry. In my experience with video games, I have not played close attention to content just its volume (i.e. how much of it there actual is). I would posit that the substance of the content (what it is actually is about) is in the aggregate less of a concern to media companies than the whole productive field. Which is to say that so long as the whole of the content has substance that can help meet the demands of selling that product then the media companies do (or should) live with the content that in substance is not "mainstream" that from a bottom line perspective this content does one of two things for the content owners. #1 Nothing or #2 something profitable. #2 is interesting to me because it says that in some way all content is profitable and this is why. Of all the content that is produced by fans some will be quite good, some may even bring some attention to the original work which then helps the media companies, some will be bad (poor quality which does nothing for the company) some will have readings that the company may object to. If the whole field of fan production is seen as a testing ground, a free market-research domain, then companies can't really loose. If they notice that everyone seems to like a particular reading then that is an intimation that perhaps that reading ought to be explored, packaged, resold. I think this claim runs into trouble when there are critical messages in fan created content such that they critique the media company where it would be believed that the content will actually be bad for the bottom line. This is all well and good for content owners but what about the fans. It seems problematic especially if the critical force of some content rests in part on marginal status.

JLR: In terms of content, I think there are some legitimate concerns among fans about the suppression of work that falls at the more extreme end of the continuum of "non-mainstream" readings. In these exceptional cases, there can be a #3: something perceived as detrimental to the value of the property or service. One recent and very visible example is LiveJournal's mass suspension of journals and communities accused of hosting "pornographic" works about underage Harry Potter characters, supposedly in violation of LJ's TOS. I'd argue that this is an instance where the substance of fan creations threatened the ideological underpinnings of the dominant system, albeit an oblique threat filtered through a series of legal and institutional mediations. The specter of such a crackdown hovers over the rich cosmos of derivative smut, the majority of which is currently situated within commercial social media platforms with official bans on "inappropriate content" (which they can interpret and enforce at will).

I wouldn't claim, though, that fan activities resist commodification simply by virtue of being slashy or critical -- the commercial media are becoming ever-more adept at self-reflexively absorbing such orientations. For the most part I agree with you that the salient conditions are structural and largely independent of the content of fanworks. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm saying that femslash challenges capitalism because it's about lesbians! However, I do think we can view queer fan production as form and not just as content. The widespread notion of "subtext" implies an open, plural, and dehierarchized model of textuality wherein diffuse and collective creative labor isn't easily contained by top-down intention and authority. I realize I'm risking a dubious move here, collapsing embodied queer sexuality into metaphorically queer textuality, but I'm committed to making this metaphor work convincingly in my project. Given the centrality of the mechanics of desire to the economic system, I don't think it's a coincidence that the representation of desire becomes particularly unruly. Considering that the value of media properties inheres in the libidinal labor of their consumers, corporate "ownership" is held in place primarily by the external fiat of intellectual property law. I think this is a foundational contradiction that fandom can productively stress.

HP: I find this last paragraph very interesting. It sounds like you are drawing a parallel between the drive to inspire a desire for a given commodity and the "unruly" representations of desire in fan production. ("Given the centrality of the mechanics of desire to the economic system, I don't think it's a coincidence that the representation of desire becomes particularly unruly"). Equally interesting is the claim that desiring the commodity gives it value (actually the interesting part is the consequences you imply). That this desire (wanting) is labor in itself that justifies a claim of ownership by fan communities (You statement that IP is a fiat that holds owners claims in place leads me to this interpretation...correct me if I'm wrong). I like both of these because they really de-center the rhetoric of IP that has governed western rationale for property ownership: the "mixing of labor" argument put forth by Locke. In your interpretation it is the mixing of desire (ironically constructed by capital to drive consumption) with the raw material of popular culture industry products that legitimizes ownership. You don't outright say this but I think you imply it. Also the first sentence I quoted above suggests that consumption driven by desire leads in some instances to re-writings inspired by desire. The link between the two can further be stretched to articulate with Jenkins' recent arguments for a moral economy of fan production and ownership...if we count desire as a valid "mixing of labor" argument (where labor is now desire) then the moral hold on property (which is in part the foundation of IP at least in political philosophical terms) is shaken. NEATO!

To further think about how your thoughts might de-center other lines of rationalizing about how IP gets legitimized through moral/philosophy rhetoric we might consider the notion that creative works are part of the self. Thus in the European tradition authors' rights tend to be stronger in terms of the control authors have over their IP because in a sense it is extension of the self. It would seem that desire as a vehicle for extending the self into the production of fan re-writings, for example, would create competing claims about self. In other words, authors' claims of moral ownership over a particular piece of IP rooted in arguments of the self conflicts with fans' claims of ownership over a re-writing based on the same arguments. In this sense it would seem that the claims of self from fans would be secondary to the claims of self by original authors. However, the scholarship of legal scholars like James Boyle suggests that in a cultural commons the original author is a myth. This has interesting consequences for any totalizing claims over IP.

JLR: First of all, thank you for this elaboration of my ideas! I'm still in the early stages of trying to articulate this thesis, and it's exciting that you can amplify it in ways that make sense. I'm pretty rusty on Locke and much subsequent political and legal theory, but I think you've captured the contradictions I'm getting at here. I love that you come around to the relation between creativity and selfhood -- of course the IP regime depends on a unified and bounded model of subjectivity wherein "original" artistic production emanates ex nihilo from individual interiority (which, as you mentioned in pt. 1, tends to be inflected as male/white/bourgeois). Working psychoanalytically, I'd go beyond competing selves to argue that any of the selves involved is internally conflicting, fragmented, and intertextual, further compromising the claim of "ownership" over expression.

Nonetheless, intellectual property law is held in place by institutional power (the tangible threat of debilitating lawsuits [Fair Use doctrine has been called "the right to be sued"] and the intensifying alliance between legislative and corporate sectors in extensions of copyright), often very successfully despite this conceptual incoherence (which grows ever more insistent as consumption and production blur together). What I find valuable about analyses of concentrated "moral economies," though, is that they can highlight the equally central role of discourse in this process. Copyright, which undergirds the economics of who can make money from what kinds of artistic labor, can't operate only by force -- its legitimacy requires an ongoing ideological negotiation (this should sound Gramscian). This is one example of how work -- both academic work and fan work -- that engages at the level of discourse is crucial. I hope that this series of "debates" can, at best, be an intervention on that very real terrain.

HP: I agree with your last paragraph. It seems that the discourse has been dominated by rhetoric that dominates IP law and policy. Such things as copyright as incentive, the balance between the public and the authors and the construction of users as pirates all tend to skew how we percieve the limits of use. The problem of course is that these are powerful tropes in US society and so alternative discourse is needed to challenge them. Well I think that wraps it up for me. Thanks go out to Henry for giving us the forum and thank you for engaging in these topics with me. Hopefully we can meet for tea again!

JLR: The communities that we work on and within, modders/hackers and fan producers, have certainly been dynamic channels for alternative economies, discursive and otherwise. So my optimism hasn't been disciplined out of me yet! I'd like to thank you, Henry, and the rest of the participants for this opportunity to ruminate and hold forth on some of the issues I'm passionate about. It's been a pleasure conversing with you, and very fruitful for my own process. Look me up when you're next in town!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eighteen, Part One): Julie Levin Russo and Hector Postigo

Introductions Due to some serendipitous travel plans, we had the opportunity to meet IRL two weeks ago to kick off the conversation below. It was a pleasure to find that we have quite compatible preoccupations and positions when it comes to fandom and convergence -- good matchmaking, Henry! However, in addition to applying our viewpoints to different specific artifacts, we're coming from different disciplinary orientations, which we'll attempt to detail below. One bent we definitely share is a commitment to political economy, so that will be the primary focus of this installment. And BTW, we chose to compose this post in a wiki page, and we wonder what effect that has, if any, on the shape of the discourse.

Julie Levin Russo: I'm a doctoral candidate in the Department of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University. My interests span the intersections of technologies of representation, sexuality, and politics, and in grad school I've worked on topics such as media epistemology, cyberporn, and "privacy." My dissertation project, entitled "Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Lesbian Fan Communities," focuses on femslash fandom, taking it as an occasion to explore the larger negotiations and stakes of the struggle between unbridled participation and capitalist reincorporation in today's convergent mediasphere. In terms of my methodological approach, I'm situated squarely in post-structuralist theory and the humanities, and my deliberate and perhaps dubious approach to the gender axis is to tacitly assume that queer female labor can serve as an exemplar of broader transformations in media consumption. The body of my diss consists of three localized analyses of series-specific interpretive communities (Battlestar Galactica, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The L Word), discussing each across three intertwined registers: screen texts (television programs, though acknowledging their increasingly fluid borders), metatexts (ancillary online materials disseminated by TPTB), and fan texts (specifically, lesbian readings and writings). As is the custom in my discipline, I don't presume to offer a comprehensive and/or empirical picture of a field of practice, but rather hope to lay out three frameworks for diagnosing the nexus of convergence and desire: technologies of reproduction, politics of representation, and commodification of identity. My structuring question is: what aspects of fan production contradict or challenge systems of domination (capitalist and otherwise)? You can follow my diss as a WIP at my academic LJ -- I'm tremendously indebted to discourse with LiveJournal's community of acafangirls for any insights therein.

As a fan, I'm a bit of an anomaly in that I participate exclusively in the femslash community, which is a minuscule (some would say marginal) enclave within media fandom at large. I'm a devoted writer and organizer, and while I try to maintain plausible deniability in the professional sphere, my fic is not difficult for interested parties to find. Excepting an avid swath of multifannish d(r)abbling, most of my work has been based in Star Trek: Voyager (beginning on a newsgroup/elist in the late 1990's) and Battlestar Galactica (which has essentially taken over my life since mid-2005) -- perhaps a testament to my utter helplessness before the combo of female leaders and female cyborgs. As the first fandom I've been immersed in almost since its inception, BSG femslash has been a particularly rich and rewarding experience for me, including mentoring and infrastructure-building (not to mention my metafannish vlogging and speaking).

Hector Postigo: I'm an assistant professor of new media studies in the Communication Dept. at the University of Utah. My research focuses on new media and society and I'm currently pursuing two lines of research. The first line is a study of social movements and their use of information communication technologies. Recent research in this area has centered on analyzing the digital rights movement's user-centered fair use campaign and the movement's deployment of hacking as a tactic in its extra-institutional repertoire of action. The second line of research focuses on value production on the internet. I was on of the first researchers to study video game fan communities that make valuable modifications to popular PC games (modders) and to study AOL's volunteer communities. My research on both these groups suggests that a large amount of their "invisible" labor contributes to the value produced in digital networks such as the World Wide Web. I've taught courses on the internet and society, information communication technology, and the new economy. Some of my publications can be found here. These are related to modders and their work on video games and AOL volunteers. I come to fan studies primarily as an observer of the productive processes that are the result of various fan community associations. I'm really excited to meld both my macro approach to a political economy of fan work with Julie's ground level understanding of these communities.

Labor and Value in Late Capitalism

HP: I've been working for some time trying to figure out value of modder productions from an economic perspective. I've started with some admittedly simple questions. From my perspective media corporations are motivated by return on revenue first and foremost so when I first started looking at fan production I asked myself 2 questions. 1. Why would anyone want to spend all of their free time making something for which they will get no money for and 2) why would media companies encourage this? Now I admit these are very simplistic questions. #1 assumes that people do things only for money and it also assumes that money is the only reward and that community, reputation, pleasure, and the gift economy have nothing to do with it. # 2 assumes that that the popular culture industry has only one internal logic "make money" but we know that institutions have all kinds of heterogeneity and that nothing is monolithic... The last thing that all this assumes is a very materialist Marxist perspective. #2 presupposes that at some point the media companies surrender control and that that surrender is calculated and that fans become cogs in some sort of post-industrial "social factory." We know that things are way more complex. Fans are active readers and their communities have internal logics, norms, and practices that are oppositional, conspiratorial, and/or neutral to the workings of popular culture and its industry. Fans are both insiders and outsiders in that respect. Regardless, one unwavering fact remains, at least from my experience in video games, fans like to contribute and video game companies for the most part encourage it.

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JLR: It seems the first thing you've done is debunk your own questions -- I'm with you so far. In order to launch our conversation from some common theoretical ground, I'd like to refer to Tiziana Terranova's work, which we're both very fond of. Her chapter "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy" was first published in Social Text (2000: Vol. 18, No. 2), revised for her book Network Cultures, and also appears in the downloadable volume The Politics of Information (I'm citing from this version). Her definition of the "digital economy" can offer a useful framework for the issues you raise above (and for fan studies at large):

It is about specific forms of production... but is also about forms of labor we do not immediately recognize as such... These types of cultural and technical labor are not produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion... However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect... Rather than capital 'incorporating' from the outside the authentic fruits of the collective imagination, it seems more reasonable to think of cultural flows as originating within a field that is always already capitalism. (104)

So first of all, she's proposing that we scrap this binary of money/not-money as the benchmark of capitalism. You could say better than I to what degree the entertainment industry has been able to institutionalize this perspective so far, but certainly new rubrics like "engagement marketing" suggest that it's beginning to move in the direction of consciously valuing and promoting activities that aren't directly monetizable. On one hand, we could read this pessimistically: I think a lot of us, myself included, are seduced by the vision of fandom as a "gift economy" or otherwise alternative system of exchange that resists or at least stands partially outside of capitalism. Terronova argues that this fantasy effaces the centrality of such non-waged labor to the post-industrial economy. There's a danger, as you point out, for this position to reduce to "fans are dupes" -- that is, if we're allowing the industry to expropriate the profits of our work, it must be because we're too naive to realize it. But that's an oversimplification ("Free labor," Terranova writes, "is not necessarily exploited labor" [112]). Both sides (insofar as we can still distinguish fans from TPTB) are interdependent, and both sides are capable of being equally calculating.

And on the other hand, I think there's a more optimistic way to view this interpretation: Terronova indicates that, rather than requiring a practice external to capitalism to constitute opposition (a tall order indeed), there are resistances immanent to the system -- I hope I can clarify this formation below. The key point here is that we're transitioning from a schema where work (waged labor) was considered distinct from leisure to a schema where work (waged or not) and leisure become increasingly coextensive and desire and the rest of the affective spectrum become a central productive force.

I admit to knowing almost nothing about gamers (and other communities of grassroots production outside of media fandom), and we agreed that a comparative study was not the most interesting direction for this dialogue. That said, the unique intensity of the collaboration between modders and game companies is inspiring, but I do think it's telling that this detente occurred within an almost exclusively male zone. The gendering of the permittedness and legitimacy of fan practices has come up many times in this series, and the selective valuation and compensation of affective labor along gender (and other) lines is a dynamic Terranova too acknowledges (as do you in the work you sent along to me). This further complicates the already tangled question you raised in #1 above about why (beyond the reductive "false consciousness" explanation) we (women in particular) continue to participate in this regimen. The more idealistic answer is that it's because the power formation isn't monolithic, and while our work remains complicit in some ways it interrogates and challenges it in others.

HP: I wouldn't say I debunk the questions so much as acknowledge that they are oversimplified approaches to getting at the nature of complex labor relations in this post-industrial world of production. I purposefully cite Terranova's use of the social factory a condition in which cultural production is incorporated into labor relations. Community, friendship, fandom, and their products (intangible and tangible goods that are the outcome of social relations as well as the "sweat of the brow") are commoditized. The question for me when I've looked at Terranova's paper/chapter has always been, "how are "the fruits of the collective imagination...originating within a field that is always already capitalism,''" exactly incorporated? I think that her quote above is grounded in her understanding that "Free labor is not necessarily, exploited labor" (which you cite above). I don't know if these processes were always part of capitalism...honestly I have to think about whether I agree that cultural production is always labor (even if it is not exploited) just because it happens within a capitalist system, ideology, potentiality...I think incorporation is key. It's almost as if everything we do is labor it's just that capitalism hasn't figured out a way to exploit all of it yet. I can see the value of that line of thinking since it helps us draw connections between cultural practices and the furtherance of the capitalist logic but can't we imagine some practice that is not ultimately exploitable? I hope so. In the spirit of drawing some boundaries and pinpointing when a cultural practice becomes exploitable I'll hazard a technological deterministic stance. I'll argue that the internet has created the means for establishing a categorical difference between the way cultural products were (maybe) part of capitalism prior to their ability to be placed on line, to a condition in which they are massively available, massively (re)produced and massively broadcast by a medium that literally creates the structure by which that culture can be exploited. From this perspective it wasn't until distribution of fan content for example, became wide spread that value became practically exploitable (even though the content was always valuable). I think Terranova starts to get at this when she discusses the differences in audience produced content on television versus the user created content on the internet (pg. 94-97 -- I'm using the book).

I also shy away from thinking that we ought to "scrap this binary of money/not-money as the benchmark of capitalism." I've spent long hours trying to discern the process by which all those mods, maps, skins, and other forms of modder generated content for PC video games actually translate into a bottom line. The fact that I don't have a definitive answer partly would validate your point and cause me to think that maybe I should stop thinking along those lines but yet something in me resists. The reason why I think this is because there is a practice on the part of video game companies of encouraging modders. For example, video game companies take risks with their very valuable intellectual property (yes even though it is protected by the all pervasive EULA), and that investment at the very least is perceived to be paying dividends. Perhaps the dividends take the form of hard-core gamer loyalty which ensures future customers for a game, perhaps modder productions prolong the life of the game and ensure fans won't drift away or perhaps by allowing for a creative space that admittedly is very crowded, game companies encourage an "incubator lab" for novel ideas for games. So for example, while number of mods that get "adopted" by the video game company and distributed are few, that small percentage of marketable product is a tolerable return because the company invested a comparatively small amount (an SDK, maybe access to the source code, and so on) to encourage a vibrant development community that takes risks, explores different content and potentially can yield a tested game variant proven to be loved by its community. Given all this I have difficulty believing that game companies are ultimately not dealing in and encouraging a commodity that will ultimately reduce itself to profit. The labor relation is still there it's just inside a host of layers that are unstructured.

JLR: Much of this is very close to how I (or Terranova) would look at it -- "the labor relation is still there it's just inside a host of layers that are unstructured" is a very elegant description of the diffuse nebula of cultural production. But I'd like to note that the entertainment industry is not equal to "capitalism." Capitalism is a set of structural conditions within which both producers and consumers must operate. Though corporations are still motivated in every explicit sense by financial profit, it doesn't necessarily follow that money is the sole operator of the system at large -- and your example bears this out, since most of what modders do falls outside of the company's "tolerable return." So then, as you suggest, once of the crucial ideological processes of capitalism is to make it appear tautologically as if activities that make money are more valuable in legitimate ways than activities that don't. Which is where a whole host of inequalities such as gender enter the picture.

Let me engage your question: "how are 'the fruits of the collective imagination... originating within a field that is always already capitalism,' exactly incorporated?" The first thing I'd point out is that other participants in this series, as well as Terronova herself, have cautioned against modeling the relationship between cultural laborers and the culture industry in terms of "incorporation." Now, I do think there are good reasons to deploy this concept strategically, namely that it highlights the different kinds and degrees of power enjoyed by corporations and fans, and thus offers a clear basis for resisting the troubling trends within this landscape. But another way of looking at it is through the concept of immanence, which is a buzzword in a lot of theorizing about late capitalism (tracing Terranova back through the Italian Autonomists to Deleuze+Guattari). This is a flat rather than stratified model of power and control which suggests that various contradictory positions can be coextensive. So for our example of fan production, the way I'd look at it is not so much that our free labor is "exploited" when it's channelled into the industry's financial economy, but rather that aspects of our free labor are always flowing into the dominant economy while other aspects are always flowing around and in excess of it. So the political project is not so much to protect the autonomy of fan communities from TPTB in a binary sense as to deflect the channelling and increase the excess.

That said, the question of precisely what the mechanism of these flows are is a fair one (the theoretical abstraction is what drives people nuts, right?). I think you're on the money to point to digital technologies as a crucial site for grappling with this issue more concretely. There's a leveling or disintermediation that happens here which aligns with the horizontal model I described: as you point out, the immaterial, instantaneous, non-rivalrous characteristics of digital media make it more practicable than ever before for the industry to mobilize fan labor in literal and direct ways (i.e. "user-generated content"). On the flipside, though, they also make it more practicable than ever before for fans to "exploit" corporate products directly (i.e. now that TV is going digital, a vast repository of it is available to me, freely and illegally, to use and manipulate as I see fit). I'm agreeing with you that technology and convergence make cultural labor more palpable and its value more immediate. In this context, the local variations in code, interface, and framing matter: one could compare how fan media could and does play out on YouTube vs. imeem vs. blip.tv vs. Revver, for example, because each of these instantiates a different set of possibilities and powers (within the given system -- of course, all of them are still ultimately for-profit services).

Finally, you ask, "can't we imagine some practice that is not ultimately exploitable?" I hope we can too, and I've groused about this before. But I've been forced to admit that the call for some "outside" position isn't ultimately so realistic or useful. I'd counter that the most productive positions at this point are hybrid ones that collude in some ways and resist in others -- and luckily a LOT of us find ourselves in this situation. I'd like to map out the PARTS of practices that aren't exploitable, that remain to gum up the cogs of capitalism.

HP: I not sure if I want to abandon the term incorporation even though as you note Terranova and others don't necessarily prefer it (interestingly she uses the term in scare quotes but uses it nonetheless). Maybe my understanding of incorporation is not what others are thinking or maybe there are layers which need to be teased out. I think there is the possibility to draw some boundaries between certain kinds of incorporation so that both a coextensive model and one that give a clear delineation of when/how content becomes effectively part of the labor relation. Ideological incorporation is one way to look at it I think. One can have content that is commoditized yet ideologically is still resistive....but I think the way I'm thinking about is economic incorporation (as in making the cultural production part of some direct/indirect labor relationship...waged or not). So my point is that once means are found to extract profit from a process/product it is incorporated into the relations governed by labor...the logic kicks in...there is no avoiding it really...you produce something...post it on line...I figure a way to squeeze a buck out if it and its part of the system...market alienable...questions of ownership, fair compensation and exploitation all come from this...despite the cautions I wonder whether immanence serves to improve our understanding of the processes that allow/disallow exploitation, incorporation or channeling? To say that "aspects of our free labor are always flowing into the dominant economy while other aspects are always flowing around and in excess of it," sounds theoretically interesting but how does it really work at the moment when it's exploited? If I imagine the field of all that is produced by fans and we feel that most of it is "in excess" or "around" why is that? Is it beyond exploitation? Why? Because of material constraints or content or something else? And I should be clear that when I say exploitation I'm mean a process by which the product becomes market alienable...some one can sell it...I guess for me that is incorporation.

Your point that the very same technologies that facilitate exploitability are also the ones that facilitate participatory culture is right on and I think points to a paradox in the way these technologies are used. On the one hand there is a strong drive to create technologies that lower the barrier to entry into a participatory culture (web 2.0 techs and such) while at the same time there is a drive to develop technologies that prevent or "lock up" the content (such as DRM). In the field of all this technological development, one question I like to ask is: What technologies are users themselves developing to allow for increased participatory culture? It seems that many of the technologies that are immediately associated with increased participatory culture on the Web are developed with market interests in mind. So I like to think of hackers as a great population of user/developers that are both insiders but also outsiders and thus have developed some really useful technology to facilitate participatory culture from the perspective of users not necessarily from the perspective of a market mindset. The anti-DRM technologies like HYMN, JHYMN, QTFairUse and even DeCSS come to mind.

I think your point about the gendered nature of modder and video game company relationship is right on. I think the problem is part of a wider issue in how we talk about what is valuable labor, and who gets to do it and part of a broader class issue as well. The rhetoric of the "professional" for example validates the work of programmers as worthy of a wage but not of amateur programmers (except within less then fairly compensated structures of crowdsourcing for example). When I looked at AOL volunteers I wanted to unpack the ideological baggage associated with the word volunteer and how that constructed the worker in a gendered fashion, disempowering claims for understanding what they were doing as work. I think rewriting texts to challenge and interrogate them is important I'd love to hear more on that from you though. Is the reason that you continue to participate an idealistic project or are there other reasons?

JLR: In the case of media fandom, acafans have pointed out that there's a gendered logic to intellectual property law, which functions to limit which instances of cultural labor can be waged. Notions of "originality" favor forms of production that are practiced disproportionately by men (this has come up elsewhere in the series, if I recall). Traditionally "feminine" labor, often associated with consumption and desire, is classed as "derivative" and thus of lesser worth (financial and otherwise). Now, I'm particularly interested in the centrality of desire to capitalism. Yes, one could trace this back to Marx's commodity fetishism; to put it most simply: you have to desire something to want to consume it. I like to call the work we do to make products meaningful to us libidinal labor (my roomie chimes in to say I'm just renaming cathexis). It becomes increasingly important in post-industrial capitalism because commodities themselves are increasingly immaterial ("brands" rather than widgets). Your point that we need to retain some of the financial specificity of terms like "incorporation" and "labor" is well taken, but I'm still not convinced that even this economic register of the "process by which the product becomes market alienable" is clearly bounded these days -- witness the retooling of the Nielsen rubrics in a rather frantic effort to fix engagement in some monetizable metric, for example.

So as for the impetus behind my own activities as a fan, fic ("rewriting texts to challenge and interrogate them," as you graciously put it) just materializes the labor ALL media consumers do. I realize I'm sidestepping the debates about how to taxonomize the diversity of fan activities, here, but I do believe there's a common ground in the axiomatic "active audience" framework. This is the sense in which my fan work sustains the industry (even though they're not profiting from it directly, even though it may be critical in content), because it elaborates and regenerates the desire that gives their texts economic value. But I am an idealist (don't tell my advisors!) and I also trust that there's more to it than that. This is where the question of what's "excessive" comes in. Desire is never going to be fully contained within the capitalist box, and that remainder stresses the ideologies (legal, economic, heteronormative) that hold the system in place -- though I'm not yet prepared to answer your reasonable query as to how, concretely, this operates. I think a lot of us feel like we can assert our ownership over these bright shiny objects by artistically reworking them, and given the instability of ownership right now that's not necessarily a delusion.

We run into a dilemma, though, when trying to prescribe the concrete (re)configuration of the relationship between fans and industry. Despite the fact that fan production is always integrated with capitalism, I do think that the partial disaffiliation of our communities from corporations and commercialism is valuable (as I said, the industry is not equivalent to capitalism writ large). I'm tempted to dub creative fans hermeneutic hackers, because our textual tinkering seems to fit your definition of "insiders but also outsiders [who] have developed some really useful technology to facilitate participatory culture" ;). At the same time, given the inequalities that circumscribe our unwaged activities, there's a certain class privilege implicit in celebrating non-monetary craft and exchange (I'm not the first to bring this up). Anne Kustritz emphasized that poor fans can and do take part in our "gift" economy, but nonetheless I wouldn't want to imply that it's "wrong" to want to be recognized and compensated in the dominant culture's financial terms for one's labor. What I hope is that these paths aren't mutually exclusive, and both can coexist within the diversifying and intensifying network of fan engagement. The choice between being marginalized and being assimilated wouldn't be a pleasant one.

HP: One thing I'd like to bring up before we wrap up this section is the idea of ownership. I think (related to your point over masculinized nature of IP) is that the very rhetoric of ownership seems to have a logic which privileges one gender over an other. The most obvious case is the differential privileges that historically have existed in the law which permitted men to be property owners over things and people. More subtley is the idea that "man" needs property to become a full human being which is rooted in Locke's arguments for property which can be (a bit simplistically I admit) reduced to "I own therefore I am." Thus by this logic all structure (legal, economic, social) that permits ownership helps fulfill the mandate to be a full human being. This of course is troublesome for gift economies and free things (like love, care-giving, libidinal labor or passionate labor as I've heard it called before etc).

JLR: Word! I'd love to delve further into the ideological underpinnings of humanistic notions like "originality" on which IP law rests, but I think that's beyond the scope of this blog post. So onwards...

What Is Civic Media?

An MIT Communications Forum event, on September 20, represented the formal launch of the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a joint effort of the Comparative Media Studies Program and the MIT Media Lab and funded by the Knight Foundation. The event featured Beth Noveck (NYU Law School), Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center, Harvard, and the Global Voices Project), Chris Csikszentmihalyi (MIT Media Lab), and yours truly. You can find a webcast of this event here. This was the first of a series of Forums focused on the ways media can be deployed at the local level to foster greater civic engagement. This event's focus was largely definitional -- trying to map out what we mean by civic media and comparing notes with researchers from other institutions who have a long history of work in this area. An event later this term, featuring Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech) and Mario Armstrong (The Urban Games Academy), will feature of games and civic engagement.

Earlier in the week, I had posted a preview of my remarks on the Center's new blog site. As I did so, I was trying to dispel two common misperceptions of the new center: because it is associated with the Knight foundation, many assume it is exclusively concerned with citizen journalism and because it is associated with the MIT Media Lab, many assume it is exclusively concerned with developing new media technologies. In both cases, this is partially right -- we are very interested in the role of citizen journalists and the future of news more generally and we are interested in developing new tools which activists, governments, journalists, and citizens can use in their everyday lives. But our notion of civic media is broader than journalism and we are interested not simply in designing and deploying new technologies but also thinking about the social contexts within which they operate and the cultural protocols that grow up around their use. Here's part of what I had to say:

Civic media, as I use the term, refers to any use of any medium which fosters or enhances civic engagement. I intend this definition to be as broad and inclusive as possible. Civic media includes but extends well beyond the concept of citizen journalism which is so much in fashion at the moment.

Lisa Gitelman has suggested that a medium should be understood both as a technological platform (a channel of communication) and the social and cultural protocols which grow up around it. As we think about future civic media, we are not simply designing tools or devices which might be deployed to support and sustain citizenship; we are also talking about the practices that grow up around those devices, practices that shape how they get used and how they are understood by the people who use them.

What constitutes a civic use of media? Well, certainly, we have classically considered newspapers to constitute a form of civic media, given the centrality of the concept of the informed citizen to the ideals of a democratic society. Yet, I would argue that even in classic accounts, the concept goes further than this.

So, let's consider, for example, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, where the image of the 1950s and 1960s bowling league embodies the Harvard professor's ideals of civic engagement. In what sense might bowling become a civic act? Putnam suggests it represents a commitment which citizens made to their neighbors, that they would come together socially at regular moments to play and that around the sport, a range of other significant conversations would occur which help sustain their investments within their community. Some of those conversations would contain news of civic importance, many of them would be personal gossip, but the key point was that the conversations occurred on multiple levels and thus helped to knit strong social ties.

Putnam contrasts the public sociability of bowling with our retreat into private space in response to the emergence of television. Here, Putnam confuses two arguments-the domestic consumption of television as a medium and concerns about the centrality of entertainment, rather than news, as its primary content of this medium. For me, his argument breaks down partially on both levels.

First, television is not inherently an isolating medium. We need look no further than the accounts of its introduction which suggests that installing the television set was an intensely social occasion in the 1950s with friends and family gathering to watch those first fuzzy and flickering images. Or we might account for the ways that television is consumed collectively in much of the developing world where people gather at the center of the village and hold important exchanges around broadcasts. So, in other words, television was consumed more socially at a moment of time when there was already a much greater investment in civic engagement or in cultures which have a more communal lifestyle (though even then, it was the newness of the technology which lead to the unusual experience of bringing the whole neighborhood into one's private domestic space). The shift towards more private consumption doesn't have to do with the intrinsic properties of the medium but rather has to do with the ways the medium gets used in a specific historical and cultural context.

But, second, it seems odd for Putnam to suggest that television can only be used for civic purposes when it is conveying news and information, given the fact that he uses bowling as his exemplar of civic participation. In this case, it is not the informational content of bowling but the emotional context in which it is consumed that enhances civic engagement.The conversations held around the game play helped to forge people into a community. And thus, there's no intrinsic reason why a predominantly entertainment or recreational medium might not enhance civic engagement almost as much as one focused on news and information. Whatever people are doing when they form guilds within a multiplayer game, it isn't bowling alone.

We might for a moment move beyond Putnam and consider another classic writer on this theme, Benedict Anderson. Anderson writes in his book, Imagined Communities, about the role which the London Times played in creating a shared sense of identity and fraternity across at least segments of the British empire. He argues that nations are imagined in the sense that we are invited to feel solidarity with people who we may never meet face to face-indeed, we will meet relatively few members of a nation even in the course of our entire lifetime and in the case of the British empire, he's describing how a concept of national culture was extended across the planet (although clearly unequally-understood differently by those who ruled and those who submitted to their rule.) Some of this had to do with the exchange of news and information, some of it had to do with the sense of a shared agenda, some of it had to do with the rituals which re-enforced that sense of social connection. Marshall McLuhan compared reading the newspaper to our morning baths-suggesting that its ritual functions were as important as its informational ones.

This sense of the civic, then, is at once real and virtual, created through media and experienced through face to face contact, sparked by shared activities and by exchanged information. This sense of civic engagement manifests itself through democratic participations (voting, for example) but it also gets displayed through the microprocesses of everyday life-through countless social rituals and seemingly meaningless everyday interactions with some subset of the larger group of people with whom we feel some sense of social connection.

As we think about civic media, then, we need to think about all of the mechanisms that generate that "structure of feeling" of belonging to a community and working together to insure its long term viability. Read side by side, Putnam and Anderson tell us that civic engagement involves the interweaving of weak and strong social ties.

So, what medium can foster civic engagement? All media can do so, depending on their use and the investments we make in other users. Jean Burgess has studied, for example, the local camera culture which grew up in Australia around the use of Flickr. Photography, she argued, is at least partially a local medium-we take pictures of real places while we are standing in front of them-even if the images circulate within digital networks. Flickr function as a social network, helping photographers in the same area find each other. They held meetups to take pictures together and this shared activity led to other conversations and other kinds of social contact. Taking pictures focused their attention on their immediate geographic surroundings, though they looked at them through a range of conceptual lens. They began to feel a greater sense of emotional bonds with other photographers who took pictures of that same area and in some cases, their photography increased their awareness of-and then became a vehicle they used to increase other people's awareness of-local problems and concerns.

We can read this story in two ways: the first emphasizes the affordances of the Flickr technology which enabled us to determine the location of the photographs and to identify the contact coordinates of the photographers; the second emphasizes the social processes-the ways that people organized themselves around the shared rather than individual production and circulation of images, the emergence of the meetup in the context of a networked culture.

My vision for this center, then, is one which combines understandings of technologies and of the social contexts within which they are used. If some writers, like Putnam, blame media for the breakdown of civic engagement, others, like Anderson, suggest that the rituals of shared media consumption can foster social connections and thus spark citizenly participations. Working together, we will produce both technologies and social practices, test them in the field, and publicize best practices. As we do so, we need to think about what might constitute today's equivalent of reading the London Times and today's equivalent of the Bowling League.

If you are interested in civic media, you should check out our blog. Here, smart researchers from CMS or the Media Lab will share their ideas about civic media. Although we've only been up a short while, you can already get a sense of the diversity of content the blog will offer -- from interviews with leading thinkers about civic media (including, so far, Ellen Hume and Ethan Zuckerman). In the future, we will also run reports on efforts in communities across the country and reports on existing and emerging technologies that might be deployed for civic purposes. We welcome tips about existing programs doing interesting work in this area.

Announcing Futures of Entertainment

Many readers attended last year's Futures of Entertainment conference, which brought together leading figures from film, television, games and virtual worlds, advertising, comics, and other media industries for an indepth discussion of some of the trends impacting our contemporary mediascape. If you missed this event,you can check out the podcasts here and read a report on it written by Jesse Walker for Reason online here. Well, we were so excited by the quality of last year's event that we decided to host a second Futures of Entertainment conference with new topics and a new cast of characters. The event is sponsored by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Convergence Culture Consortium. Here's some of the details:

The logics of convergence culture are quickly becoming ubiquitous within the media world. Audiences are being encouraged to participate in a wider range of sites. Transmedia principles are being adopted by content producers in a broad range of fields. 'Engagement' is being discussed as crucial to measurements of success.

Futures of Entertainment 2 brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications.

Co-hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Futures of Entertainment 2 (FoE2) takes place Friday, Nov. 16, and Saturday, Nov. 17, at the Bartos Theater, in the Wiesner Building at MIT.

This year's conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, audience measurement, cultural labor, fan relations, and mobile platform development.

The conference works around a talk-show style model with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. This is not simply another industry gathering. The goal is not a

pitch or even a pre-prepaired presentation -- just serious conversations about the

future of entertainment.

Speakers featured at FoE2 include:

Mobile Media: Marc Davis, Yahoo!; Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting; Francesco Cara, Nokia

Beyond the launch of shiny new devices, the mobile market has been dominated by data services and re-formatted content. Wifi connections and the expansion of 3G phone networks enable pushing more data to wireless devices faster, yet we still seem to be waiting for the arrival of mobile's "killer app". This panel muses on the future of mobile services as devices for convergence culture. What role can mobile services play in remix culture? What makes successful mobile gaming work? What are the stumbling blocks to making the technological promise of convergence devices match the realities of the market? Is podcasting the first and last genre of content? What is the significance of geotagging and place-awareness?

Metrics and Measurement: Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group; Stacey Lynn Schulman, HI: Human Insight; and Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City

As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can "count" engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?

Fan Labor: Mark Deuze, Indiana University; Catherine Tosenberger, University of

Florida; Jordan Greenhall, DivX; Elizabeth Osder, Buzznet; Raph Koster, Areae Inc.

There is growing anxiety about the way labor is compensated in Web 2.0. The accepted model -- trading content in exchange for connectivity or experience -- is starting to strain, particularly as the commodity culture of user-generated content confronts the gift economy which has long characterized the participatory fan cultures of the web. The incentives which work to encourage participation in some spaces are alienating other groups and many are wondering what kinds of revenue sharing should or could exist when companies turn a profit based on the unpaid labor of their consumers. What do we know now about the "architecture of participation" (to borrow Kevin O'Reilly's formulation) that we didn't know a year ago? What have been the classic mistakes which Web 2.0 companies have made in their interactions with their customers? What do we gain by applying a theory of labor to think about the invisible work performed by fans and other consumers within the new media economy?

Advertising and Convergence Culture: Mike Rubenstein, The Barbarian Group; Baba Shetty, Hill/Holliday; Tina Wells, Buzz Marketing Group; Faris Yakob, Naked Communications; Bill Fox, Fidelity Investments

Migratory audiences and declining channel loyalty are seen as two key challenges convergence culture poses to the advertising industry. At the same time, campaigns that respond by capitalizing on the creativity of audiences prompt questions about the continuing role for creatives. This panel looks at the unfolding role for advertisers within convergence culture, looking at questions about the nature of agencies, transmedia planning and the increasing circulation of advertising as entertainment content. Does the agency structure need to be rethought? What are the implications of breaking down the distinction between content and advertising? What are effective ways to collaborate with creative audiences? How is convergence culture changing the value of different advertising sites?

Cult Media: Danny Bilson, transmedia creator; Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner; Jesse

Alexander, Heroes; and Gordon Tichell, Walden Media

Cult properties have become mass entertainment. Marvel's success bringing comic book characters to the big screen and the resurgence of the space opera suggest niche properties may no longer mean marginalized audience appeal. This panel explores the politics, pitfalls, and potentials of exploiting niches and mainstreaming once marginalized properties. How do you stay true to the few but build properties attractive to the many? What role do fans play in developing cult properties for success? Is it profitable to build a franchise on the intense interest of the few and rely on Long Tail economics? Are smaller audiences viable in the short term, or do we need to rethink the length of time for a reasonable return?

Opening Remarks by Henry Jenkins, MIT; Joshua Green, MIT; Jonathan Gray, Fordham

University; Lee Harrington, Miami University; and Jason Mittell, Middlebury College.

With fewer than 200 seats open for the conference, FoE2 emphasizes discussion amongst

panelists and interaction with the audience. Please note: While we were able to provide the conference free last year, there is a registration fee this year designed to help us recover our costs for the event. So please register early due to the limited seating.

Drawing a mixed academic and industry crowd, the conference boasts broad coverage of

the new media and entertainment space, and deep engagement across industry and

disciplinary boundaries.

It provides a unique opportunity to partake in a focussed discussion on the issues

affecting the contemporary media landscape.

The Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) is a research consortium at MIT exploring

shifts in the media industries from an audience- centered perspective. Corporate

partners with the Consortium are Fidelity Investments, GSD&M Idea City, MTV Networks,

Turner Broadcasting, and Yahoo! Their Web site is available at http://

www.convergenceculture.org.

The Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT (CMS) is a graduate and undergraduate

interdisciplinary program centered in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social

Sciences. For more information on CMS, their Web site is available here.

The Wiesner Building is located at 20 Ames Street, Building E15, in Cambridge, Mass.

For more information on the conference, contact Sam Ford, Project Manager for the

Convergence Culture Consortium, at samford@mit.edu.

There will be a special pre-conference event on thursday Nov.15, hosted by the MIT Communications Forum. (You do not have to be registered for the conference to attend this session):

nbc's heroes: "appointment tv" to "engagement tv"?

Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007

5 - 7 p.m.

Bartos Theater

Abstract

The fragmenting audiences and proliferating channels of contemporary television are changing how programs are made and how they appeal to viewers and advertisers. Some media and advertising spokesmen are arguing that smaller, more engaged audiences are more valuable than the passive viewers of the Broadcast Era. They focus on the number of viewers who engage with the program and its extensions -- web sites, podcasts, digital comics, games, and so forth. What steps are networks taking to prolong and enlarge the viewer's experience of a weekly series? How are networks and production companies adapting to and deploying digital technologies and the Internet? And what challenges are involved in creating a series in which individual episodes are only part of an imagined world that can be accessed on a range of devices and that appeals to gamers, fans of comics, lovers of message boards or threaded discussions, digital surfers of all sorts? In this Forum, Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshow, producers from the NBC series Heroes will discuss their hit show as well as the nature of network programming, the ways in which audiences are measured, the extension of television content across multiple media channels, and the value that producers place on the most active segments of their audience.

I hope to see many of my regular readers in Cambridge for these exciting events.

Attention: Prospective CMS graduate students

Tired of just reading about the exciting adventures we have out here in CMS-Land. If you can draw those pictures on the back of matchbooks, you should go to cartooning school. If you can analyze media, you should come to Comparative Media Studies. But seriously -- a high percentage of this year's crop of entering students discovered our program through this blog. So, I figure there must be some folks out there thinking about applying. If you'd like to know more about our program, here's some details about our forthcoming information sessions for prospective students:

The Comparative Media Studies Masters Program In-House information sessions are held periodically throughout the term in room 14N-417 at MIT (unless otherwise noted below). This is an opportunity to sit down with our directors, Henry Jenkins and William Uricchio, and ask any questions that you may have about the masters program here.

Please RSVP if interested in attending. Email Generoso Fierro (generoso AT mit DOT edu) with any questions.

Upcoming On-Site Information Sessions

Tuesday, October 16, 9 am to 3 pm

* introduction to CMS by Henry Jenkins

* attendance at Henry Jenkins' class, CMS.790

* break for lunch

* open house at GAMBIT to talk to Research Assistants for the various Research Projects

Tuesday, November 13, 9 am to 3pm (as above)

Upcoming Online Information Sessions

We also hold on-line information sessions a few times a semester. Visit this page on the day of the scheduled session to log into our webchat.

Tuesday, October 23, 8 to 10 am (Asia)

* chat session with Henry Jenkins and other members of the CMS community

Monday, December 3, 2 to 4pm (Europe)

* chat session with Henry Jenkins and other members of the CMS community

I Was a Teenage Terrorist: The Star Simpson Story

A little over a week ago, the MIT campus found itself in the midst of a firestorm of media coverage surrounding an MIT student who was arrested at Boston's Logan Airport wearing a "device" which reporters and police have been calling a "fake" or "hoax bomb." This story cut close to home because the student in question, Star Simpson, had lived for a time in East Campus, a dorm which is right next door to Senior House (where I live). During the course of that first weekend, I had people on all sides of the controversy wanting me to make a public statement to students about what happened, each convinced that I would side with them. I have been reluctant to do so -- not wanting anything I said here to get absorbed into the media circus surrounding this case. My own sense is that both the government officials and the MIT administration issued statements prematurely without really understanding what went on and why and that the result was to inflame the news media.

To get a sense of how this story got covered by television news, you might check out this video produced by one MIT student and circulated on YouTube. The clips here suggest the glee with which reporters linked MIT, terrorism, bombs, and machine guns together to produce a story calculated to hit the hot buttons of their listeners. Joshua Glenn over at Boston.com provided a useful overview of some of the conflicting claims being made about this student. Here's a sample:

"Bringing a fake bomb into Logan Airport gives new meaning to the term sophomoric behavior."

Maybe Star Anna Simpson thought she could saunter through Logan and return to Cambridge with a helluva tale about how no one said a word to her. Or maybe she thought a half-dozen machine guns would do wonders for her Web site profile."

"It was stupid of her to do it, but let's not get hysterical. Give her community service and let's be done with this before we make a mockery of ourselves again."

"Simpson appears to be a classic case of book-smart but not social-smart."

The initial reports suggested a student whose behavior in the words of the official MIT statement was "reckless." Many of those in the know here initially assumed that this was some kind of "hack" (an MIT term for practical joke) which was in bad taste and which might have had fatal results. A very different story emerged when you considered some of the reports produced by web-based reporters and circulated through sites like Boing Boing and the Machinist. Here, Star Simpson comes across as a more typical MIT student, who was very much into a low tech aesthetic, making devices from found materials. Indeed, these reports are far more consistent with what I have been hearing from students who knew Star Simpson and they are consistent with the culture of East Campus, the dorm where she used to live, which has a long-standing tradition of do-it-yourself technology and construction projects. The so-called "hoax bomb" turns out to be a name tag featuring a star logo (for her name) made out of lite brites.

Many of us immediately linked the official responses to this lite-brite name badge back to what is now recognized as a over-reaction to a series of similarly low tech signs for The Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force last January, an incident still produces divergent responses depending on which side of a generational divide you fall. In both cases, the city responded to its own hysteria by charging the people involved with producing a "hoax bomb." Surely, the issue of intentionality is involved here. One has to consciously seek to deceive someone in order to be involved in committing a hoax, which doesn't seem to have been the case in either incident. My own theory is that it is much easier to accept that someone has made a fool of you than to acknowledge that you have made a fool of yourself within incidents which center around misunderstandings or misinterpretations of visual evidence.

If you look at the pictures of the device, it takes a big stretch of the imagination to view what she was wearing as resembling any kind of functioning weapon. Trust me -- if a MIT student wanted to create something which could be confused for a bomb, they could do so with a high degree of accuracy. This doesn't come anywhere close, witness the fact that she has reportedly worn this thing on our campus many times and no one has confused it for a bomb. It might never have crossed her mind that anyone could confuse this for a bomb -- in part because

our students have a more intimate understanding of how technology works than the average airport security guard does.

Some of my friends in the MIT administration have urged me to use my influence with students to warn them that it is not appropriate to play games or do hacks at the Logan Airport, which, after all, needs to be on hyper-alert because it was the site where the airplanes took off on 9/11. So let me be clear: I don't think it would be appropriate for any student to intentionally seek to deceive an airport official into believing that they were wearing a bomb or carrying a weapon. The news media has compared the incident to making jokes about bombs or guns in the security line at the airport. I certainly agree that such behavior would be grossly inappropriate and dangerous, but is that really what happened here? Star Simpson may have been guilty of nothing more than wearing a name badge that security guards mistook for a bomb.

So, how do I help students to predict what security guards are apt to mistake for a bomb? Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but under our constitutional system, it has to be theoretically possible to predict what would constitute criminal behavior.

So, given the two incidents, it would seem that the police have a strong anxiety about lite-brites. Police have also found it suspicious that Simpson was playing with Playdough in the airport. Would Playdough by itself be sufficient to trigger a police response? If so, we should probably be warning parents of small children.

Some have stressed the anxiety created by the circuit board. But many of our students carry around notebooks made from recycled circuit boards which are sold in college bookstores around the country. Should I tell them not to carry such devices to the airport?

The news media made much of the fact that this device lite up and was powered by a battery. This left me concerned since my late mother used to wear a broach to holiday parties which looked like a Christmas tree, lite up, and was battery powered. A star is not that removed from a Christmas tree, after all. Would such a device have been read as a bomb in the current climate? Or would the fact that it was being worn by a seventy something church lady have led to a different response?

My assumption is that if Star had worn a similarly mass produced, high tech device with the same features and functions, it would not have provoked concern from airport officials. It was the low tech, DIY nature of her name tag, perhaps more than anything else, which sparked the reactions of the airport security force, perhaps because the actual terrorists make use of similarly low tech devices. Yet, many at MIT have embraced low tech in part as a reaction to the cult of high tech which is so often associated with our institution, seeking a return to basic materials, hand crafting, simple and appropriate technologies, and so forth.

So, what is it that I warn my students against carrying to the airport?

Please don't think I am making light of this situation. This is not a joking matter. Students should err on the side of caution. As citizens, we should be concerned that airport security take every reasonable precaution to insure the safety of passengers, but we should also be concerned by some of the almost lethal misunderstandings we are hearing about these days.

One of the things that struck me in the news coverage of the incident was the frequency with which reporters described the security force as "taking no chances" in their response to Star. Media scholars have noted the ways that seemingly objective terms can create bias in news coverage. For example often, in covering strikes, management makes "offers" and labor makes "demands," even though both are involved in a process of back and forth negotiation. This language slants our perspective on which is the "reasonable" party and provides a script through which we make sense of labor politics.

In this case, the police "took no chances" if you assume that Star was either wearing a bomb or trying to trick someone into believing she was armed.

But if we consider that police pulled machine guns on an unarmed 19 year old in a public place, then we might think that they took a fair number of chances. I personally read the incident against the backdrop of a growing number of recent reports of students being tasered by campus police or for that matter, news stories which suggest campus police are now increasingly carrying weapons in reaction to the Virginia Tech incident. To me, this suggests that police are "taking chances" on a regular basis, especially given their apparent inability to make meaningful distinctions in responding to unfamiliar technologies or icons.

The news media -- and perhaps the police -- expressed initially confusion about the words on her black hoodie, "Socket To Me / COURSE VI.""; these phrases referred to her electrical engineering major (majors go by numbers in the MIT context) but were read with sinister associations by at least some of the initial news reports. How many of us wear equally cryptic symbols on our T-shirts, unawares, when we go to the airport? I certainly saw plenty of shirts I didn't fully understand when I passed through Logan just last night returning from a speaking gig.

Another thing that struck me looking back on this incident was the difference in the ways the mainstream media and the blogsophere sought to cover this story. The mainstream media sent reporters to the MIT campus who beseiged anyone walking in or out of the East Campus dorm. Keep in mind that the dorm has several hundred residents, most of whom didn't know Star Simpson. I lived across the street from her and to the best of my knowledge have never met her. The blog reporters tapped social network sites -- followed her Facebook links, tracked down her home page, and understood something of the cultural context within which she produced the name tag. We shouldn't be surprised that those immersed in new media understood how to locate and interpret the kinds of traces any college age student leaves on line, where-as the mainstream news reporters were following tried and true but also hit or miss methods which were unlikely to give them any real insight into who this student was.

If the mainstream news media showed limited media literacy skills in their handling of this particular story, I was proud of the ways that the incident got discussed within the context of MIT dorm discussion lists. Students showed initial skepticism of the sensational reporting they were seeing, especially when it was clear that the reporters showed so little understanding of their culture and their lives. They shared and dissected news reports. They sought out alternative information on their own, pooling knowledge to try to understand what took place and why. While the temptation was to rally around an accused fellow student (and that's where most of them ended up), there were some who were willing to play devil's advocate and question the evidence to make sure that they were not guilty of the same kinds of rush to judgment that they were seeing all around them. This was a classic example of collective intelligence at work.

I don't know for sure what happened that day at Logan Airport. There are some nagging details that don't quite add up no matter how I look at the story. But it is pretty clear that there was a significant misunderstanding involved here, that the news media didn't consider alternative framings of the incident and that they were more invested in frightening the public than in finding out what actually occurred.

The title of this post suggests the kind of mental drama that many of those involved in the incident were following -- the Movie of the Week sagas which might pit a mislead American youth against heroic airport guards fighting to protect our homeland security, perhaps even the cold war dramas about communists in our midst. I just hope we have room in our heads to consider other possibilities.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seventeen, Part Two): Melissa Click and Joshua Green

MC: How do we proceed in fan studies--what do we agree belongs in this category, and what should be left out? There seems to be an agreement (if only a reluctant one) among folks in this discussion on the idea that the category "fan" should be broadened. Concern has been expressed, however, that if we make it too broad, it will lose its meaning. Could we begin to try to nail it down by suggesting the ways "audience" and "fans" might be different?

JG: I'm really interested in this question as I think complicating the term "fan", and its use, can help us to start to understand how ideas about the audience itself is being transformed by the participatory moment that has arisen. This discussion has offered up a good range of ways to account for fandom that run the gamut from structures of feeling to productive consumption via a spectrum of viewing intensity (and the comments even offered up "fanatic" at one point). Theoretically pragmatic personally, I drew a lot from Anne Kustritz and Derek Johnson's deconstruction of fans as an object of study that can be generalized about, challenging the notion of the fan as necessarily determined by community, socialization, productivity, consumption, engagement, or outsider status. Their ultimate conclusion seemed to be that the fan as an object of study needs to be understood as a multiplicitous social construction and contextualized within historical and cultural specificity. That said, they also draw upon the notion of the fan as a sort of cultural logic used to describe particular categories of consumption for the purposes of patrolling 'normal' behavior. This is a classic position for the fan, historically positioned as atypical or anomalous in ways that permit the delimitation of acceptable media consumption and engagement habits.

In the current moment, however, where non-fan audiences (apologies for the clunky language) are bring increasingly described if not constructed through discourses of production, the fan seems to have been drawn back in somewhat from the edge. As the television industry, especially, attempts to make sense of the impact of inviting viewers to participate, losing control over the contexts of consumption, and realigns itself in an environment that seems likely to privilege multiple separate opportunities to view content, certain elements of the fandom look very tantalizing as models of audience practice worth encouraging. Of course, this is not unproblematic, and the industry seems mostly interested in promoting the depth of engagement and what I would characterize as the structures of feeling of fan engagement and hopefully not having to deal with the politics of ownership and production that emerge from fandom. But the fan as a model of a passionate consumer, a loyal consumer, a willing participant, a word-of-mouth marketer (or what Sam Ford regularly refers to as a proselytizer), an active participant in expansive storyworlds, and even a producer of additional textual elements (whatever sanctioned or tolerated form they might take), seems to be having an impact on the model of 'regular' audienceship, particularly as the behaviors once considered anomalous (such as archiving content, to pick up on Derek's own example) are wrapped into revenue models or normalized through cultural practice.

MC: I should confess (in case it's not yet obvious) that I'm in agreement with the folks who keep saying that they think there's something useful in studying audience members who do not behave as fans have typically been defined--as communal producers of materials that "rewrite" media texts. I support this perspective because it speaks to my experiences as a fan--and I find it useful in terms of understanding the activity I have seen in my study of Martha Stewart fans.

JG: Just quickly, I have to agree. I think understanding fans however defined is a useful activity to get at particular modes of consumption, but I do wonder sometimes if studies of particular genres that engage regularly with fan audiences (as opposed to studies of fan practice) over-represent the degree of fan consumers in a way that risks generalizing from the margins. I'm personally much more interested in the way cult properties, say, exist amongst a broader range of cultural and audience practices than I am the passionate investment of some audiences in these properties. This is not to belittle that work, but if we wind back the clock a little to consider the cottage industry that emerged around Buffy, I think much good work was either undiscovered or uncompleted because of the firm grasp cult and fan studies placed on the text.

MC: In my analysis of Stewart's fans, I found Jonathan Gray's ideas in "New Audiences, New Textualities" (International Journal of Cultural Studies 6.1) to be really helpful--and think they are potentially really useful here (I have received no compensation for this endorsement). Jonathan writes about two categories of fans he thinks have been overlooked: anti-fans and non-fans. His discussion of anti-fans reminds us that there's a possibility that folks who are thoroughly engaged with a text--consumptively and/or creatively--don't always feel/act passionately because they like the text, its stories and its characters. So, anti-fans "strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel." I found this kind of hatred of Stewart and her texts in my work, and found that some of the haters knew more about Stewart than those who claimed to adore her. So, for me, the reminder here is that there's a possibility for many different kinds of involvement with a text--and maybe we haven't thoroughly examined that yet. I think there's a lot of value in exploring the terrain of "fan."

And that's of course one of the threads in this blog extravaganza. One of the responses to that call, as we all know, is how to explore a range of fan identities while still being able to talk about "fans" and "fandom" as meaningful terms. For me, that's where non-fans come in.

Non-fans aren't really fans at all--and if we're going to retain the value of "fans" I think we have to define the term against something, and for me, that's the larger audience. Jonathan describes non-fans as "those viewers or readers who do view or read a text, but not with any intense involvement." These folks do have favorite programs, but "spend the rest of their television time grazing, channel-surfing, viewing with half-interest, tuning in and out, talking while watching and so on." Because these viewers are "the comfortable majority"--the TV audience--we should be able to use these folks to show how fans and the audience exhibit different identities, feelings and actions in relation to a text. This assumes in advance, of course, that there is in fact a difference. We'll have to do a bit of work to figure this out. In fact, Jonathan suggests (and I agree) that fans studies are in some ways more convenient than audience studies because fans of a text are much easier to identify than the audience for a text--plus they know the text more intimately and are more likely to make for more interesting interviews.

So, the push to widen the scope of fan studies is in a way a push to help us get a better view of the audience--and this is probably why it feels a bit like "fans" could be diluted in the process. But, if, once we've done some of this exploration, we can look at all we've found and have a better sense of what's really going on out there, I'm guessing we will have a way to talk about who's in a text's audience and who's a fan of a text. We have to remember to do that last step!

JG: At the risk of this sounding like a love-in, once again I have to agree. I think Jonathan's work on the anti-fan complicates our understandings of consumption muchly in valuable ways. If nothing else, the proposition of the anti-fan as something other than the fan-with-a-goatee works to break the binary of engagement that can too easily be (sloppily) applied to the fan/not-fan model of audienceship. I'm not entirely sure why you think this in some way dilutes 'fans' in the process. Doesn't it strengthen the idea of the fan as an object (however constructed) by enriching the models for engagement that circulate around the term?

MC: Good clarification question. I wouldn't argue per se that I think understanding fans as "multiplicitous social constructions" contextualized by the historical and cultural moments in which they were expressed will dilute the term "fan." I was voicing what I believe others have expressed in this dialogue. And I agree to a certain point that if everyone can be a fan, there's a possibility that then no one is not a fan--and that could lead to the term having less value or utility. Though I'm not sure that opening the term to new expressions necessarily means making everyone a fan....

PS: "fan-with-a-goatee" is fabulously funny.

JG: Not only a goatee, but driving a truck ominously across the desert! Okay, so here is my concern with where this is going, I can see two tensions in this overall discussion. One is about a desire to expand and increase the range of opinions and to have certain bodies of work and spheres of practice (and practitioners) recognized outside of what might be a marginal realm of participation. In this spirit, questions about what a fan might be and what fan studies might be constituted by are being posed with a hope to expand the functional definition and to generally share the love. The other tension, and there seems to be a defensive edge to this, is a desire from certain quarters it seems to quarantine off as 'proper' certain modes of studying fandom and of defining fans.

As I suggested earlier, I think one of the ways for us as a group, if we decide that we might comprise a like-minded body invested in putting on our "Gramscian hats" and moving this realm of discussion forward is to work out a way to support both these tendencies. Despite the fact I've placed these two positions in tension, I do think a fruitful way to advance this field of enquiry is to try and be aware of and promote specialization as well to make attempts to broaden the range of perspectives regularly brought to various tables. Does this sound like a pipe-dream or a recipe for trouble?

MC: Both--brilliant!

It seems to me that related to the topic of who counts as a fan is what kinds of media texts we are focused on as scholars. Certainly the distinction has been made that some folks are more interested in studying the texts produced by fans in relation to the "original" media text (and/or the communities in which they circulate), but some folks are interested in fans' relationships to the "original" media texts themselves. In either case, though, it seems that we're drawn into examining the kinds of fans that we do, at least in part, based on our own relationships to the "original" text. There a number of media texts that many folks here seem to reference repeatedly as being the important ones in terms of studying fans: Doctor Who, Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. But what happens when we examine fans of texts quite different from these? What kinds of fandom might we see then?

JG: I think sometimes the fandom we see is not recognised as fandom as such. I have spent a great deal of time looking at television branding and identity spots, which I absolutely love. Fans of these artifacts seem to be more regularly constructed as archivists than fans, in part, I suspect due to the nature of the text itself, though admittedly it also has much to do with the way they practice, perform, or engage in their fandom. Many of the fans of this content actively position themselves as archivists, often aping the language, structure and form of cultural institutions as they set up online galleries of this content categorized by channel, station, country, or season. Some of these fans historicise this content, positioning it within larger pro-am projects of media history that record national broadcasting systems or the work of particular stations. I don't think they write fanfic about television idents, though I can imagine a few possible adventures the Peacock could have on the way to letting us know NBC is broadcasting "The Place to Be." I do know there are groups in the UK particularly who mash-up existing idents and create their own, sometimes for fictitious stations and sometimes as replacements or 'what ifs' for existing stations.

The question that comes to my mind, then, is whether there is a meaningful distinction between considering this as fan practice and considering it as archival practice. I'm not suggesting they're necessarily exclusive categories, and I realise the latter is an activity most probably motivated by the former. But I do wonder whether these consumers would ever self-identify as 'fans' of these properties or this genre? And is that even important to the recognition of a category of fandom that might describe this behavior?

Certainly, I think the archival mode adopted by many of these fans (and the more I think about it, the more I'm sure they are actually fans) is related to the short form nature of the content and its intimate ties to both its historical context and its origin. It seems to make some systematic or structural sense to adopt an approach that ties idents to their era of production, especially as this is a genre of content that is regularly updated, often by iteration, so comparison and contrast is a meaningful way to engage with the content. So too, the place specificity of this content, particularly where idents come from individual stations rather than networks or national broadcasters, makes the construction of an archive a particularly meaningful way to engage with the significance of the text.

Constructing an archive, however, also easily enables a form of display that demonstrates your wiliness or dedication to the task. Idents are essentially disposable television content. Not programming, not advertising, they're content that may not last very long and which is regularly overlooked by most viewers. This certainly is not true in the case of the BBC, which quite gloriously has public launches for new ident campaigns, but especially in the US and in the case of the commercial networks in Australia, idents are programming that often doesn't warrant a second glance. While the DVR has made obtaining copies of more recent idents easier, older idents, particularly those from the 1970s and 1980s can be especially difficult to come by. The fan archive, then, would seem a particularly sensible way to publicly demonstrate your prowess as a television ident fan, as much as other productive modes of fandom might demonstrate textual mastery or inventiveness with the property (please don't slam me fan fic people - I know it's more complex than that).

MC: Joshua, that's a fabulous example for what I was trying to say. Thanks!

JG: You're welcome.

MC: Alan McKee's comment about his anger with Adorno's and Habermas' scorn of non-academics' interest in popular culture resonated with me, and I wondered if we are making a similar mistake by assuming that only folks who relate to texts in particular ways are worthy of being called "fans" without really exploring the issue. While I appreciate and respect the reasons why the fan-fic scholars want to hold on to their definition of "fan," I think that until we've ventured out into mainstream territory to find out what's going on out there, we can't really speculate.

There was an article by Susan Douglas in The Nation (25 August 1997) that has always stuck with me. Douglas relays her feelings about her pre-teen daughter enjoying the Spice Girls. She discusses her own reactions to the group's lyrics and images (many of which are negative) and then takes a step back to consider how her daughter and her friends might read/use The Spice Girls. What she concludes, of course, is that her own evaluation of the group matters much less than what the group means to her daughter and her friends.

Jonathan Gray joked that "we are the cool kids, right?" While it was clearly meant as a joke, I think there's a reason to take this comment more seriously. Much like the fans we study, we make judgments about what texts are worth our time and attention. This was never more clear to me than it was at Flow, when I (admittedly out of the loop because of the aforementioned baby) sat through conversations that referenced programs I had barely even heard of--and because of my lack of knowledge about the "cool shows," I kept quiet (and just as an aside, the repeated references to the "cool shows" could work to exclude others from a range of important discussions--here and elsewhere).

JG: And some of the cultural biases that appeared at Flow were interrogated there and elsewhere subsequently (not all, I know). I have to ask, however, isn't that somewhat the nature of academic practice? And isn't it useful sometimes to be the one who doesn't get it, or doesn't know what the text is, in order to either prod or interrogate the perceived significance of texts or to take an alternative track? Am I missing a point here?

MC: Maybe we're talking on two different planes? Sure, that's the nature of academic practice, but I guess I wanted to challenge that a bit. My point is that it sometimes feels like we tend to focus on particular texts to the exclusion of others--and while that may be "normal" (especially given the ebb and flow of TV texts in the context of the industry), I think it keeps us from looking at the range of texts out there (just like we've been talking about the current limits of "fan"), and looking at a limited range of texts (I think) will inevitably limit the range of fans and fan practices we see. And btw, thanks for suggesting "not getting it" is a useful position--now I feel "cool" instead of out of the loop.

So, in this discussion, many folks have called for more of a focus on the mainstream--and I guess here I'd like to underscore that. Will Brooker suggested that:

if we just concentrated on those people who fit the type of "fan" [meaning the productive and communal fan] ... we might just end up studying an unrepresentative group at the margins of a broad range of behaviour, much of which is less recognizable, less immediately visible, less striking, perhaps less exciting.

My point, is this: if we don't explore what else is out there, there's potentially a whole range of fan identification and participation that we could be missing--and since we are "the cool kids" shouldn't we be doing that important work to find out what's there?

JG: To finish on a note that's underscored this discussion, I think I agree. Melissa, it's been a pleasure.

MC: The pleasure was all mine. Take care!

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Seventeen, Part One): Melissa Click and Joshua Green

MC: Hi, I'm Melissa Click and I'm completing my dissertation on Martha Stewart fans (at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst), teaching at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and am just catching up on my sleep after the wonderfully overwhelming experience of having my first child. Having one foot in the East Coast and the other foot in the Mid-West, being in the midst of completing my Ph.D. while developing my professional identity as a scholar, and trying to figure out how to balance my work life and newly changed homelife, means that I'm still catching up on my TV viewing (I heart Tivo), I don't usually blog, and I'm a bit more behind on academic reading than I'd prefer. As a scholar writing about Martha Stewart fans, I have argued that the women and men I interviewed were not simply audience members, they are fans (and anti-fans, for that matter). However, the types of fandom they demonstrated were different than many of the types of fandom discussed here: they didn't write Martha fan-fic, create Martha fan-vids, etc. My interest in their fandom overlapped with my own interest in/repulsion by Stewart's texts, and my allegiance with their behaviors as fans--my expressions of fandom mirror the behaviors gendered "masculine" in this discussion.

JG: Hello all, my name is Joshua Green. I'm a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT where I also run the Convergence Culture Consortium. At the Consortium we do a lot of work about the changing patterns of relationships between media producers - big and small, professional and amateur - media content and various audience formulations. We work with some "big media" companies (though not exclusively) to come to understand the changing environment in which their content circulates and the changing logics of the media space when you factor in participatory culture and the changing constitution of the audience experience.

Before I transplanted from Australia to the States, I was working on the recent history Australian television, particularly looking at the way the Australian television system resolved the presence of international, and specifically American, programming with discourses of nationalism. My (I suppose still recently completed) dissertation looked at the way Dawson's Creek was nationalized by industrial promotional strategies and received by a range of Australian viewers. I'm currently really, very interested in the ways we can understand the constitution and composition of television audiences as they're imagined more and more as media producers, or at least, as the role of media production is increasingly prescribed for those we used to understand as audiences.

MC: I'm not convinced that folks have really addressed one of the key issues that began this conversation: the perception that male interests and approaches are structuring publishing, conference participation, and the field in general. I'd like to pull us back to the pre-détente discussions that created the discussion in which we're now participating. Specifically, how can we begin to encourage ties between male and female scholars, and create more of a community in the field of fan studies? Everyone seems to agree that we can benefit from each other's work--but how can we begin to encourage that cross-pollination (or what Derek Johnson called "broad citation?").

JG: I think returning to this question is important, though I would like to point out that one of the things I have enjoyed most about this discussion on the whole is the diversity of ways people have responded to the "provocation." Some of the discussions around this topic have brought to the fore a range of important questions affecting not only fan studies but media and cultural studies practice itself. Prominent in this regard is the fervor with which this discussion has interrogated how we understand fandom itself. This diversity of topics is particularly appealing as I don't consider myself someone working 'in' fan studies. I'm not sure I've ever been a 'fan' of any distinct media property, certainly not in the productive way that has been defended by some discussants as signaling something unique about particular patterns of engagement or structures of feeling towards media properties. Likewise, while perhaps daily I come into contact with some of the practices, strategies, or politics of fandom, I don't consider myself necessarily studying fandom. That said, one of the strengths of this discussion is the role those of us who don't fall into the 'fan studies' camp have played in contributing to the debate. At a somewhat crude level then, perhaps this practice of pairing respondents has at least gestured toward a way to achieve this cross-pollination.

MC: Agreed. I think that a lot of good stuff has come out of this dialogue--making much more complex a lot of the issues that initially provoked the discussion. However, one of the really important points that I think the Busse camp (sorry, I can't do the boy/girl thing, though I'm not convinced the shorthand I'm introducing is much better) made in the pre-detente conversation had to do with how male and female fan scholars seemed to attend different conference sessions, use a different language, and adopt different methods. To me, this is where I do feel the gendered divide in the field (though I'll complicate that in a minute). This point has been alluded to numerous times in this discussion; many folks have expressed that they feel left out, or misunderstood, and I'm sure many more have felt this without expressing it (I have)--so *something's* going on here that I think we need to address.

I really appreciate Derek Johnson's acknowledgement that at conferences he'd attended panels in many of the ways Busse suggested (and I'm sure many folks had this realization--I did, too). I believe Derek when he says he'll try to rethink that in the future--and think we all should. But I'd like to see us be consciously pro-active before we get to conferences to try to make our panels relevant for a number of different camps--and to promote cross-pollination.

JG: If we're going to go back to the beginning, I'm going to be especially (and perhaps foolishly) honest here, and acknowledge my own implication in some of the catalytic events of this discussion. I have a fairly certain sense I was a direct participant in some of the panels (and one in particular) that prompted some of the comments that initially brought this issue to the fore. I'm not sure if I would say I was shocked, but I certainly want to own up to being surprised by the responses some of these panels prompted. Perhaps I'm not as alive to the gendered distinctions that do exist within the field (and there subsequent implications in terms of power), and I think the first discussion in this series between Karen Hellekson and Jason Mittell usefully laid out some of the ways in which "the field" might replicate larger gendered distinctions with regards to topics of discussion, modes of practice, academic and market activities. That said, I have to admit a sense of disappointment with the sometimes pessimistic tone present in some of the discussions featured as part of this series. I accept that there are substantial and entrenched issues of both equality and practice that need to be addressed, but more than once in the course of this debate I've been left with the sense these issues are intractable.

I wonder, then, if the response to some of these questions regarding exclusion has been to argue for the specificity of certain (gendered? topic determined?) fields of inquiry. Specificity brings with it its own form of exclusion, and the criteria upon which this specificity is patrolled is central to the questions under consideration. I'll admit I'm thinking out loud here, and I may well disagree with this proposition further down the track, but there is a part of me that thinks that some degree of specificity and exclusion is inherent to the art. I'm not sure, all up, whether I necessarily disagree with this proposition, as I'm not sure I have a problem with specificity, particularly in terms of academic practice, when it results from issues of subject knowledge. That said, I agree there are substantial matters that need to be addressed with regard to how we, as academics working from a range of different positions and working within a "field" that seems in some ways both pre-destined and necessarily "inter-disciplinary", interact in order to ensure "subject specificity" or "topic knowledge" doesn't privilege certain biases. All of which seems to bring us back to the germinal difficulties that led us down this path. A useful response, then, and perhaps the only one that seems tenable, is for us to regularly interrogate the way the forms of knowledge we produce, and the ways we communicate such, result in regimes of privilege.

MC: I agree that the specificity in our work does create a certain kind of exclusion (that I would agree is not necessarily a bad thing), and I agree that we should regularly interrogate our work and the way it's communicated. But how do we make sure we don't forget to do that?

I think that's what was going on a bit at Flow, especially at the Watching Television Off-Television roundtable (including Jonathan Gray, Henry Jenkins, Jason Mittell, Will Brooker, Joel Greenberg, Kevin Sandler, Derek Johnson, Daniel Chamberlain). I think feminist (and mostly female) scholars in the audience expressed frustration that approaches and conclusions were perceived to lack fruitful overlap with work women do and have done--and I think there was also a frustration that the panel (obviously full of fabulous scholars) drew a large audience due to the perceived importance of the scholars and topics while panels that were mostly women drew smaller audiences. I do think we need to talk about that.... But I also want to say that during and after my panel of mostly women at Flow, I felt excluded because my work was not on fans proper (in fact, it could have been that I still in the baby haze that has just recently lifted, by no means would I suggest that was my best work). So, I think that exclusion does cross gender boundaries--and like Jonathan and Kristina have both said, when panels end, we do tend to hang out with our friends.

That said, I think there's a pattern in which women seem to be the ones continually reminding folks that gender should be one of the foundations of all work--not just women's scholarship. So, much like my fabulous partner who does his best to split evenly our household chores often has to be reminded by me to do x, y, or z (reifiying that I'm charge of everything household), I think there's a way in which the burden of bringing up these issues has fallen on women's shoulders (perhaps in part because many of us feel regularly structured by gender divides) because they are perceived as women's issues. Hopefully that makes sense...?

JG: I think all of that makes sense, Melissa, and the fact the burden falls the way it does has to do with larger issues that people much smarter than me have discussed elsewhere during this debate. But let's talk about the panel at Flow for a second. I am aware of the concerns regarding the boundaries to participation being regulated along gender lines. Likewise, I can understand the consternation about the fact a "panel of boys" and a "panel of girls", both featuring speakers who in other instances may have sat on panels together, were placed head-to-head at Flow. I'm not convinced, however, that to point to that particular incident as evidence of a marginalization of female academic practice necessarily does anyone a service. While I think some good has come out of that moment, there was a particularly sour taste left all round, I think, with regard to the way the issue was raised which seemed sometimes to suggest an intent to exclude, or if you like tinfoil headwear, marginalize.

MC: Clearly the sour taste is shared by many--and nobody enjoys it. I think we all know we're all good people and that no one would hurt or exclude anyone else on purpose, but the fact remains that there are patterns there. Perhaps everyone is tired of talking about it (and if so, forgive me), but I think we need to make positive things come out of these confrontations and uncomfortable situations. I love Stuart Hall's description of the push to put gender on the table in early cultural studies projects as the CCCS. I'll paraphrase because I lent out my book with that particular article in it, but he suggests that feminists broke in during the night and crapped on the table of cultural studies. I love that because it suggests how shocking and violent the push felt--but look at how the field grew from that push. I'm not trying to compare this current situation to that, but I do want to stress that I've seen lots of great stuff come out of this dialogue, and I feel so much smarter for having read it--and I'm so glad to be a participant in it. I'm not, however, entirely satisfied by how this more direct stuff (that I think has more to do how we do our work and where our work takes place than it does with the content of our work), and in these last few weeks I'd like to see it more directly addressed. But I'll be quiet if no one else wants to talk about it....

My apologies in advance to those folks who will (rightfully) say that conferences privilege academics--they do. They are, however, an important component of the work that many of us do, despite the fact that our annual travel funds rarely cover even the costs of one trip to one conference. So critiquing conferences as a space of privilege shouldn't lead us to say that the work done there isn't useful or relevant (even fans have conventions, right, so something useful must be going on in these spaces?!). So, the deadlines for Console-ing Passions and the International Communication Association are upcoming. I'd happily volunteer to organize some panel proposals that would address some of the topics we've been discussing here--panels that would include male and female scholars and include folks studying fans with traditional and untraditional frameworks. If you're interested, please let me know.

I agree with Deborah Kaplan's suggestion that "surely a blog post gives a level of exposure unmatchable by presenting a paper to a room containing 16 overtired academics at an MLA conference," but it's become increasingly clear to me that while we started out with a robust conversation in this space, there are mainly "regulars" writing and responding, and in the recent weeks, responses have petered out. So maybe picking up the discussion in another forum would be useful?

What else can we do?

JG: I think you touch on a really important issue here, Melissa; that is, how is it that we can ensure we effectively make spaces of academic privilege accessible while preserving the value of these sites. I think this is the other side of your proposition that critiquing these spaces shouldn't result in a devaluing of the work that is done here at the expense of work completed elsewhere. I'm not sure the intention of the debate thus far has necessarily been to critique these spaces as producing knowledge that isn't useful or relevant, but rather to point perhaps to the inadequacies of traditional academic practice to both engage the range of scholars producing knowledge within the discipline of 'fan studies' (or should that be "about fans"?), and to actively capture the diversity of knowledge that is being produced about the topic. Certainly Francesca Coppa's intervention in this debate describes the politics inherent in the perceived necessity to create spaces outside of what has been formally recognized as 'academia'. That these are spaces where useful work is produced that should or could be included in studies published via more formal academic channels does not seem such a controversial contention.

In doing so, I think you point to one of the most practical and apparent responses to this debate - namely, to try and move this debate or at least the issues it has raised, to a range of different sites. In this regard, I think it is important to work via "micropractices" (to invoke Jason Mittell again) to attempt to open up the spaces we can influence to a wider range of content. Again, there is nothing controversial about this proposition, but I raise it to suggest an answer to your "what else can we do" question. I'm not sure the solution is necessarily striving for a gender balance on panels or a flocking to particular publishing sites. While I think these options are useful and important, I think it is equally important to encourage discussion across platforms, to support the development of a range of areas of specialization and to keep these in touch with each other - in short, to attempt to move the discussion beyond this forum and beyond this moment. In doing so, I think the questions Jason poses, "what is the relationship between the fan viewer and non-fan viewer? When we study fan practices, are we looking at people who consume differently in degree, or in kind?", are useful as points not so much of common enquiry but to begin to frame continued discussion.

The Fall Season Approaches: Pimp Your New Favorites

Last Fall, I asked readers of this blog to "pimp their favorite television show," and we had a truly inspiring set of responses. Indeed, I discovered Supernatural through a groundswell of responses I received here and it has emerged as one of my very favorite programs and belatedly, this summer, I finally have started to catch up with Battlestar Galactica (I'm now half way through Season 2), another series which was a favorite among readers of this blog. Well, this year, I want to start the process earlier. Many of us are checking out the new fall line-up which is starting in earnest this week. So I thought I'd invite you to share with other blog readers your impressions of the new series.

There are a lot of fannish shows on this year, no doubt influenced by the success of Heroes, but most of them look very much like fannish shows we've seen before: the return of Highlander (New Amsterdam), Forever Night (Moonlight), Quantum Leap (Journeyman), and Alias (Bionic Woman). I've been hearing great things about Pushing Daisies but I haven't managed to get my hands on the pilot for it yet.

So far, I've seen about 20 of the series that will be introduced this season, including some which will not reach the air until mid-season. There are a number of series which I liked well enough to set up my Tivo to record and some that I will watch again if the word of mouth picks up. Of the new series, by far, the favorite in my household is Journeyman, a series which isn't getting much buzz yet. Of course my wife, son, and I are died in the wool Quantum Leap fans so it makes sense we'd want to give this series a close look but I've seen lots of other time travel series which lack the character focus that made Leap so successful in years past. Journeyman is probably my top bet on which new series will be a favorite with the fan community -- though I'm not making any bets on how it will fare with the general viewership. It falls right after Heroes which may help it but the tone is so different even if from a network executive's perspective it probably looks like it falls in the same genre. It has a nice balance between long-term serial developments and self-contained episodic narratives, more like Supernatural than Heroes in that regard. And the performances are good enough that I didn't think about who the actor was until later, even though I've really enjoyed watching Rome in the past. Give it a look!

To help set this discussion in motion and to give a shout out to some fellow Aca-Fen, I wanted to let you know about The Extratextuals, a new blog started by Ivan Askwith, Jonathan Gray, and Derek Johnson -- are teaming up to produce a new blog called The Extratextuals. All three of these guys have made guest appearance in this blog from time to time so they should be no stranger to my readers.

Here's how Askwith, a former CMS student now working for Big Space Ship in NYC, describes the blog's goals:

Our blog will focus primarily on the extratextuals that surround the media. By this, we mean everything but the show itself: previews, merchandising, industry buzz, branding, interviews, posters, spatial context, temporal context, related websites, ARGs, spinoffs, spoilers, schedules, bonus materials, transmedia extras, games, YouTube clips, etc. But we're interested in these things not to be arcane or eccentric; rather, we believe that the extratextuals often make the show what it is. Hence this blog is about the mediation of media.

Gray had a chance to see previews of the new fall series, screened at the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) in New York City, and offers his views about them at the blog. Since I've had a chance to see the pilots of many of these same series, I figured this would give me a good chance to share some of my own responses as well. So, here are some of Gray's thoughts followed by my reactions.

First, here's what Gray has to say about Journeyman:

How it was probably pitched: The Littlest Hobo meets The Time-Traveler's Wife

Okay, so he's not a German Shepherd, as was Canadian TV's The Littlest Hobo (non-Canadians: imagine a roaming Lassie), but our hero's task, as he learns throughout the episode, is to go through time and ensure that the cosmic order works the way it would like to. Kind of Quantum Leapy, in that he often doesn't know what he's meant to do, and must simply follow instinct. Yet no entering of other people's bodies occurs; indeed, this pilot episode keeps him in a San Francisco in which his earlier self is living out his life, so if you're a Kevin McKidd fan (from Rome), you get two of him... It's gimmicky in premise, but smartly done, with nice dramatic elements, and a fine performance by McKidd (though his American accent needs a little work). The neat twist is that his former girlfriend, who he believes to have died in a plane crash, turns out to be a Journey(wo)man too. By the end of the pilot, he has no knowledge of why he is a Journeyman, who chose him, who directs his jumps, and so forth, so though a mystery-a-week program, the pilot builds in prospects for serial development and revelation. If it goes that way, I'll be interested. As it is, it's nothing super special, but still good television.... McKidd's character's confusion is effectively evoked, and in general the show was more demanding of its viewer's attention than I might've expected. Smart stuff.

Another series which has started to generate interest amongst my friends and acquaintances is K-Ville. Check out what Grant McCracken wrote about K-Ville the other day.

And here's what Gray has to say:

K-Ville

How it was probably pitched: NYPD Blue in New Orleans.

Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, it's a procedural, starring, as the FOX exec who introduced the shows offered, an "in your face" cop, and another who is "a guy looking for a new start, like the city itself." Sounds cliché, right? And it begins that way, as my notes to myself include the words "preachy" and "patronizing." But it softens up along the way. It also started to grab me a bit. This is a sad show at times; for instance, when Anderson's wife explains that she moved to Houston for their daughter's sake because the daughter still cries every time it rains, there's a degree of poignancy and power to the line....At a macro level, the show has a lot that it wants to achieve, some of that important and valuable. How it balances this with the day-to-day procedural is where it will live or die; the pilot concentrated its energies on the macro, thereby letting the procedural fall by the wayside, but whether the show continues to botch its procedural element once it's set the scene will be telling... The Wire it is not, and at the moment a good procedural it is not, but it has some small potential.

From my perspective, the pilot suffers from a split personality as if the producers and the networks are still at war over the series indentity. What I wanted to see, as Gray's last bit suggests, was The Wire set in Post-Katrina New Orleans or maybe Hill Street Blues. At times, the series comes close to achieving this -- filmed on location, deploying many location-specific details, showing us some of the devastation you experience if you drive outside the tourist areas in the city, and sharing some of the reality as it is being experienced on the ground. These images were particularly powerful to me because I had a chance to drive through some of the devastated areas when I was in New Orleans earlier this summer for Phoenix Rising. It was the closest thing to a suburban ghost town I ever expected to see. I haven't been able to put the experience into words which is why I haven't really written about it here. At places, this series brought me back to what I saw and felt when I visited some of these communities, including driving past the headquarters for the production, which really is in one of the gutted areas. Unfortunately, the series seems to also be pulled towards larger-than-life Buddy cop show cliches -- something closer to the recent remake of Miami Vice than to The Wire -- and I fear that's where the networks are going to force it to go. I will give it a second look but I haven't made up my mind about it yet.

Gray writes about Big Shots:

How it was probably pitched: Desperate Housewives for men

I'm not sure Big Shots' creators really thought through what they wanted the show to do. On one hand, it's about guys. Not just guys, but guys: the references to penises, checking out women, and the number of scenes involving golf announce the show's raw guyness. On the other hand, its generic format is that of the tawdry evening soap. Granted, I don't see the Nielsen data that ABC does, but I'd presume we have two different demos in tawdry evening soap watchers and penis-&-golf worshippers? Yet its lead-in is Grey's Anatomy, so someone's giving it the sweetheart treatment, and perhaps they think Grey's young female audience want more golf in their lives? I'm dubious. Anyways, all four guys play golf, talk about penises, watch women a lot, and talk about how hard life is being millionaire CEOs.

Again, Gray hits on some of my core concerns with this series. This is the season of social network series -- if we include Big Shots, The Cashmere Mafia, Gossip Girl, The Women's Murder Club, Carpoolers -- each of which deal with groups of friends whose lives are hopelessly intertwined and who connect to each other through a variety of different hardware interfaces, not to mention regular face-to-face communications. Of these, I liked The Cashmere Mafia the best (though my wife thinks I just have a thing for Lucy Liu). And The Women's Murder Club has possibilities -- good cast, not the most inspiring pilot. The men in my family -- my son and I -- squirmed through Big Shots, finding it uncomfortable to watch even though we'd liked many of the cast members in other things, where-as my wife found it amusing. Talking to the students taking our class on network television this term, the gender divide seems pretty consistent: even though it's a series about men, it seems to appeal much more to women. So, that may be the way it is resolving the contradictions that Jonathan identifies here.

Here's what Gray had to say about Big Bang Theory

How it was probably pitched: Beauty and the Geek, the sitcom

If Judd Apatow and a few others have ushered in an era of Geek Chic, nobody seems to have told the writers of this show. In a bizarre way, the show's pathologization of geeks is actually quite impressive, though, and to prove it, try this exercise: try to write a 22 minute script, filling it with as many stereotypes of geeks as possible. Get someone else to count the references. Then get them to watch the pilot of Big Bang Theory, and compare the counts. I bet you'll lose the competition. Important to this exercise, though, is that you should not watch the show yourself, and that you should probably dislike the person required to watch it... N Ultimately, I predict the writers' eagerness to spew stereotypes will get the best of them: surely the Trekker jokes, endless references to MIT (I counted 4 this time), and jokes about math will run out fast.

Okay, I expected to hate Big Bang Theory. I have a very high level of sensitivity to fan stereotypes. But this struck me as much closer to Galaxy Quest than to Trekkies -- that is, the humor comes from the inside rather than the outside. They certainly got all of their science fiction references right and best I can tell from consulting with local experts here, they got their math and science references right too. I frankly laughed harder at this sitcom than any I've seen since Friends. Yes, the stereotypes are broad -- not unusual for a pilot -- and yes, there are plenty of cliches, but there's also a real affection for the characters and a real wit in the ways they deploy the stereotypes which leaves me with some hope for the series. Of course, last year, I thought that Studio 60 on Sunset Strip had a great pilot and then it fell apart almost immediately thereafter. For what it's worth, MIT students who have seen the pilot didn't find it as funny as I did.

Here's Gray on Gossip Girl

How it was probably pitched: (1) product placement for Sidekicks; (2) The OC in the Upper East

Move The OC to New York, put school uniforms on everyone, give everyone Sidekicks that they use every few seconds, add a highly annoying voiceover and you have Gossip Girl. Veronica Mars fans will know that their beloved Kristen Bell does the voiceovers, but I'm sorry to say that this is by far the worst part of the show, a juvenile, silly, forced, even moronic addition. If anything sinks this show, it'll be the voiceover. Otherwise, though, it shows all the signs of succeeding - emaciated actresses, a guy who the show wants us to believe is regarded as a loser at school, yet who is quite handsome, parents who have their own secrets and vices, a passable performance by Blake Lively at its center, buckets of salacious gossip seemingly imported fresh from The Hills, conspicuous consumption, lavish parties, broken hearts, feuding friends, dangerous rich boys, decadence aplenty, characters who are either Evil or Good, oodles of current singles playing in the background (and yes, I believe "oodles" is the correct plural for pop music), and so forth.

Hmmm. To me, this show was much closer to what Cruel Intentions would have been like if it were produced for the CW network -- a dark dark view of adolescent society as over-stated as any teenage drama queen's self perceptions, without a drop of human warmth or any real humor. I agree with Jonathon that the voice-over may be what really sinks it (even though I am a VM fan) but I don't agree with him that there's much to redeem it for me otherwise.

Some other Series I saw and liked (at least as far as one can tell from the pilot):

The Sarah Connor Chronicles (due midseason) -- once you get over the shock of seeing familiar characters played by unfamiliar actors, the series takes over and finds its own footing. Great chemistry between some of the characters, surprisingly intense action scenes for prime time television.

Life is Wild -- OK, this one probably falls squarely in the guilty pleasure category, but I enjoyed it enough that I will probably watch more. It's a totally formulaic family drama set in Africa but I grew up on Daktari and Born Free, not to mention Johnny Quest and American Cowboy in Africa, and it was a kind of comfort food return to childhood favorites. I suspect my response here is idiosyncratic but if you are of the same generation as I am, you might want to give it a look.

Caveman -- I liked it better than I expected from what has been described as a half hour sitcom spun off from an advertising campaign for auto insurance. I don't think the idea has legs; I don't expect to be watching this series a year from now, but they managed to get some engaging social satire of our current attitudes towards class and race out of the caveman gimmick. So catch it while it lasts.

Samantha Who -- Smart enough that I will turn it on for another episode, not engaging enough that it's likely to find a permanent spot on my Tivo.

Bionic Woman -- this one has possibilities, but I feel like I've seen it before. It's not on the level of Alias or La Femme Nikita, even though it wants very hard to be. It's probably closer to Dark Angel, but the fact that we can position it so squarely within this genre tradition doesn't bode well for its originality. It could get stronger, though, as it goes along, so I am not giving up hope for this one just yet.

The Return of Jezebel Jones -- I am surprised how many of the sitcoms this season captured my interest. I haven't really been a sitcom viewer in recent years. But I liked the interplay here between the mismatched sisters, played by Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose. Nothing really remarkable, but some spark which makes me want to root for it.

Series I didn't like:

Carpoolers -- painfully bad!

Miss/Guided -- Truth in Advertising.

Viva Laughlin -- This is being pushed as being a quirky new series -- a musical in the spirit of The Singing Detective or Pennies From Heaven. It owes much more to the late and unlamented Cop Rock. It just didn't work for me.

Life -- A story about a cop who returns to the beat after a decade or more in jail for a crime he didn't commit. I wanted to like this one but found the central performance flat and uninteresting.

There's much more television out there to be watched. So let's try to pool our knowledge here. What shows are you most looking forward to seeing? Which shows sparked a twinkle of fannish enthusiasm from you?

Was Herman Melville a Proto-Fan?

Earlier this year, I proclaimed my ambitions to re-read (perhaps more accurately, read) Moby Dick this summer, having done a rather poor job of tackling this novel as a high school student. I am now a hundred pages from the end. What had inspired my own personal pursuit of the Great White Whale was my involvement through Project nml with Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, the artistic director of The Mixed Magic Theater based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Ricardo has been working to get young people more engaged in Melville's classic story by encouraging them to rewrite it in a more contemporary setting. The result was Moby Dick: Then and Now, a remarkable stage performance which our team (especially Deb Liu) has been documenting. This fall, we will be working to create a teacher's guide for Moby Dick based on the idea of learning through remixing.

In anticipation of work this fall with Wyn Kelly, my colleague from the MIT Literature Section and a leading Melville expert, I returned to the scene of the crime -- reading the novel in the battered Bantam classics edition that I had failed to complete in high school. I must say that reading Moby Dick through the lens of remix culture has taught me a new way to experience this remarkable and idiosyncratic work: rather than cursing the various digressions from the core adventure saga, I have found myself reading them with renewed attention.

Moby Dick, I am discovering, absorbs all of the genres of writing and speaking of its own times, sucking up stories and cultures, juxtaposing them with each other in fresh and unanticipated ways. The abrupt shifts in language, the desire to record every detail of life on board the ship, to catalog every piece of equipment, to dissect the whale from skin to bones, to trace stories across every possible mode of representation and to question all existing accounts of the Whale, these all become part of the work's encyclopedic drive.

Somewhere around page 400, I came to another realization. We might see Melville as adopting a range of interpretive strategies and modes of reading which would be recognizable to contemporary fan culture. What if we looked at Melville as a fan of whales and whaling lore. After all, only a true fan would be so obsessed with every detail and would chase the damned "fish" all around the planet the way Melville does.

Speculating

Here is one of the many passages in the book where Melville examines the story of Jonah:

One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this:- He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head- a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very small. But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless

.-- Moby Dick, Chapter 83

In this case, he is describing a process of speculation through which his fellow whaling fans -- the old sag-Harbor whalesman and Bishop Jebb -- try to make sense of contradictions in the source text, extending beyond the information given in order to try to reconcile what they know of whales in the real world with what the story tells them about Jonah's encounter with the Leviathan. Any one who has been in fandom for very long recognizes this conversation -- you take an element which doesn't quite work and rather than discarding it, you keep speculating around it trying to figure out under what circumstances it might make sense. Fans often describe such creative work as "repairing the damage" created by a distracted artist who didn't think through all of the implications of their own story and such speculation clearly leads step by step towards a whole scale rewriting of the narrative to better satisfy the fan's own fantasies and interests. What emerges is a kind of proto-fan fiction.

What if we imagined Jonah inside the Whale's mouth rather than fully swallowed -- maybe even inside his tooth? Ah, but we've already figured out that the Leviathan must have been a Right Whale, and not wanting to discard all of that earlier fannish labor, we want to preserve that theory and so we have to discard this new layer of speculation.

Nitpicking

In this case, the speculations also constitute a form of nitpicking. As I've discussed nitpicking here in the past, it involves a fan reading the text in relation to another body of knowledge. The example I used a while back was a site where doctors and medical students "nitpicked" House. Such nitpicking comes through most vividly when Melville takes on previous representations of the whale. Here, we see Melville boldly assert his superior knowledge and his desire to "set the record straight," both motives I recognize from myself and other contemporary fans:

I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whaleship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 55

But, before he can do so, he must clear away previous representations, in this case, focus on the anatomical inaccuracies created by artists who have had no direct experience of the living beast:

These manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young suckling whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 55

I am reminded of a recurring feature on Sequential Tart, a long-standing webzine by and for female comics fans, which regularly posts and critiques unlikely depictions of the female body in various superhero comics. Here, for example, is an excerpt from one tutorial on "Bizarre Breasts":

Bizarre proportions are nothing new to comics; be it the desire to cater to the cheesecake crowd or simply the preference of the artist, distorted anatomy has become commonplace. The fact that "professional" artists may utilize distortions in published works is a bit disappointing, but frankly, if they've gotten the job the odds are they aren't going to feel the need to change their style. That's fine, the world needs laughter. However, what does bother me is the possibility -- hell, the reality -- that amateur artists are copying this exaggerated anatomy and making these mistakes their own. So, in hopes of reaching those for whom this advice may actually have some impact, I have utilized my meager knowledge of anatomy and admittedly unpolished art skills to bring the world a brief tutorial on one of the comic artists' greatest challenges: the breast.

I don't want to push the parallels here too far but it seems to me that they are both fascinated with showing the absurd and inaccurate representation of anatomy which comes from artists who don't really understand the first thing about the subjects they are trying to depict.

Cataloging and Collecting

Melville, like modern day fans, refuses to restrict himself to a single text or even a single mode of representation. As he explains, "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method." (Chapter 82) And indeed, some of the most productive modes of fan interpretation involve rampant interdisciplinarity and free association, creating unexpected juxtapositions of texts, tracing real and imagined allusions to other works, or simply doing the kind of "connect the dots" activity that is expected of readers of transmedia stories. Melville reads everything he can get his hands on -- ancient books, religious texts, paintings, scrimshaw, currency, tavern signs, even the stars in the sky, as he tries to find every available reference to his object of fascination. He exhibits here the fan's fascination with cataloging and collecting:

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 82

I particularly like that last bit about becoming part of a "fraternity" of others who share his passions and knowledge for this touches about as well as anything I've read on the social bonds which link fan communities together. Doesn't this sound like someone trying to pimp his fandom?

Appropriation and Transformation

So far, I have shown Melville to be in many ways a classic fan boy -- trying to master a complex body of knowledge and show off to his fellow fans by nitpicking less satisfying works. Nothing we've described so far would be out of place on a contemporary discussion list -- although this last passage suggests that he sees his fandom in terms of his relationships with other fans and not just as a personal quest towards knowledge. Yet, there are brief passages in these sections of the novel that he may also be more openly rewriting classic stories to better satisfy his own fancies and that act of rewriting pushes him closer to contemporary fanfic practices. Consider, for example, how Melville manhandles the canon in his retelling of the story of St. George and the Dragon:

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda- indeed, by some supposed to be indirectly derived from it- is that famous story of St. George and the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of the sea," said Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale; in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists; and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse; bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honorable company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowers we are much better entitled to St. George's decoration than they.

-- Moby Dick, Chapter 82

Fans might describe what Melville does here with St. George as a kind of Alternate Universe story: what if St. George had been a sea-faring rather than land-loving man? Indeed, we can see him here as involved in a struggle with another fan community over which one of them "correctly" captures what is interesting about this character and his adventures. Why should we not be surprised that Melville was involved in a battle with another "ship"! :-)

But like many later fans, Melville also struggles with how much fidelity the fan writer owes to the original. The author discusses the ways that multiple whalers approaching the same creature determine who can assert ownership over it, declaring some whales to be "fast-fish," that is, already harpooned and bound by a particular ship, and others to be "loose-fish," that is, free of any binds or constraints and thus subject to being grabbed by whichever ship approaches them first. Melville, then, extends this metaphor to talk about the work of the imagination: "What are you, reader, but a Loose-fish and a Fast-fish, too?" (Chapter 89) In other words, Melville is exploring to what degree we get hooked into a story and thus get captured by its authors and to what degree our imagination remains unmoored, capable of taking the story where-ever we want it to go. In a sense, that's exactly what fans are trying to make sense of when they debate how much they need to follow canon and to what degree they can construct their own fanon.

Read in this way, we can see Moby Dick, often described as the Great American Novel, as a piece of fan fiction which grows out of Melville's fascination for the whale and his mastery over whaling lore. Drawing on a range of stories, responding to competing representations, Melville constructs his own original fiction, which he asserts better captures what fascinates him about man's eternal struggle against the natural order.

Melville was one of us. Pretty cool, huh?

"I'm So Hot My Husband Can't Get Fire Insurance": Interview with Grant Hayter-Menzies (Part Two)

Last week, I shared with you my enthusiasm for the opening sequence of So Long Letty, the film through which I first became aware of the remarkable stage, screen, and radio performer, Charlotte Greenwood. My feelings towards the film's conclusion was more ambivalent. Most of the comedian comedies of the period, those featuring male performers, end on moments of maximum disruption -- on a final anarchistic burst of energy that sometimes literally brings the house down. Think about the final moments from some of the Marx Brothers vehicles of this period. So Long Letty, on the other hand, ends on a moment of over-stated domesticity. Here's what I wrote about it in What Made Pistachio Nuts?:

So Long Letty ends with a dinner party, one contrasting sharply in its formality and sobriety to the wild party Letty threw just a few scenes before. The entire cast has gathered around the table with Uncle Claude seated at its head, smiling benevolently at his gathered relatives and friends. The prune-faced patriarch has at last been shown proper respect by the once-terrible woman. The young granddaughters announce their engagement to two men they met only a few scenes before; the uncle looks upon it all with approval. He even invites his now much-beloved niece to act as a chaperon for his granddaughter's impending trip to Europe, though she refuses in order to remain at her husband's side. All lift glasses and join in a reprise of "So Long Letty," a slow sentimental ballad strikingly different from the more jazzy numbers associated with Greenwood. Letty has accommodated herself to the demands of her husband and her uncle, having learned quite literally to sing a different tune.

A highly unsatisfying resolution, the exaggerated domesticity of this concluding scene and the abruptness with which it was obtained weakens its ability to restrain Letty's subversiveness. Letty seems to be robbed of a victory over her husband and uncle that generic conventions suggest she richly deserves... In the film's final scenes, however, Greenwood's performance still pushes against domestic containment. It is Letty, not the uncle, who presides over the table, offering toasts and dominating the dinner discourse. When the Uncle urges her to accompany his nieces to Europe, she initially babbles about 'mud packs in Paris,' before dutifully rejecting the offer. Her hesitation suggests that she retains the desires that had earlier led to her rebelliousness. When Letty joins in the chorus, she does so with the loud voice and broad gestures that have accompanied the other musical numbers, even as she sings about her own capitulation to male demands,"So Long Letty." Moreover, Uncle Claude seems looser, more lively here, as if he has been revitalized through his encounters with Letty; the capitulation may not have been entirely one-sided. Finally, it is significant, given the alignment of narrative with masculinity and performance with femininity, that the film ends on a note of performance, the singing of "So Long Letty," which simultaneously creates a narrative unity between the opposing terms. The song reconciles, if imperfectly, narrative and performance just as it reconciles, if imperfectly, male restraint and female pleasure. Even Uncle Claude, the motor of the narrative action, now joyfully joins the musical performance.

Grant Hayter-Menzies, the author of the recently released Charlotte Greenwood: The Life and Career of The Comic Star of Vaudeville, Radio and Film, offers a somewhat different take on the film's ending, which he repeats in the interview below. (I wish that the sequencewas up on YouTube so I could share it with you to make your own judgment.) To some degree, the differences in our interpretation are ones of emphasis. My analysis of the scene suggests some ways that Letty continues to assert a strong presence on the level of performance even if the narrative shows her seeming acceptance of male demands. I was reading the scene through a focus on genre, while Hayter-Menzies reads it in the larger context of Greenwood's career. This is one of the ways that his book helped me to place this film inside the body of her work in new ways.

As this interview also suggests, the book sheds light on many other important entertainment personalities. Here, I am especially interested in her work with Eddie Cantor (see this clip from Palmy Days to see how well the chemistry clicked between them).

Pulling this post together, I have been pleasantly surprised by how much Greenwood material is out there on the web -- especially on YouTube. Collectors are making obscure clips more readily available to the public. I had to trek to the archives to see some of these performances; you can at least sample them in your own homes. You can also sample performances by some of the other female clowns I wrote about in my book -- see for example this segment of Winnie Lightner . Unfortunately, I had no such luck finding any of the comic performances of Lupe Velez, another female clown, whose work I discuss in The Wow Climax.

You and I have some disagreement about the ending of the film version of So Long Letty. I have tended to see it as the capitulation of a powerful, free spirited woman to patriarchal authority, where-as you see Letty as manipulating things to the very end. Can you share your perspective on the film's ending?

I believe Charlotte's 1929 Letty is a woman of infinite resourcefulness, who far from being a disturber of the peace, actually is in control of the chaos she creates. This was a characterization Charlotte excelled at and would play, at various strengths, throughout her stage and screen career. The maternal instinct which glows in the role of Aunt Eller was, in Charlotte's youth, sort of like the Lucy personality from The Peanuts: she was the bossy big girl who in having her way created chaos for other people, but who was herding the sheep in the direction she wanted even as she was scaring them. The scene where Letty tells Uncle Claude that she is actually pregnant--answering his greatest wish--seems to me to be the final charm from Letty's big bag of tricks. She knows that there is no other way to repair the mess things are in except to meet Uncle Claude on his own terms, in his own language--telling him what he wants to hear, which is not a form of capitulation but of control. And for this reason I believe Letty, who presides over the celebratory dinner at the end of the film, is still very much in charge--a wiser Letty, if you will, but in no way a diminished one.

Greenwood worked with Eddie Cantor several times in the course of her career. What can you tell us about their relationship? What accounts for the chemistry they displayed on screen together?

Charlotte and Eddie Cantor were, as I've pointed out, two of the twentieth century's most popular comedians, but both had originally had no intention of going in the way of comedy. Cantor wanted to be a serious singer, as did Charlotte. Both came to comedy by accident, and both went with comedy because it was what gave them the greatest success. I believe this is part of what made for such a charming screen partnership. Charlotte also loved Cantor's family life, which was quite normal (he and his wife produced all girls), where he was the father, their children had a home-keeping mother, they ate dinner together every night, and so forth. That totally drew Charlotte's admiration and respect.

Greenwood worked with Buster Keaton on Bedroom, Parlor and Bath, at a moment when his career was undergoing rapid decline and the silent clown was giving

way to alcoholism. What do we know about Greenwood's perspectives on working

with Keaton during this period?

I wish I could say that I found something in Charlotte's memoirs that would shed new light on what it was like working with a great comic of the silents in decline in the talkies. But Charlotte was not particularly interested in film work (she abandoned Hollywood at the height of her fame, in 1933, for the London stage), and other than a few anecdotes about working with Keaton, or with Bert Lahr or Eddie Cantor, she does not give much space to her film work. She does record how in the big lovemaking scene with Keaton in Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, they made such violence together she ended up with a bloody mouth and he with a black eye. Beyond that, what happened before the cameras was not a big deal to her. The only actor she was paired with that she writes of wanting to work with again was Jack Oakie--and they never worked together again after making Shirley Temple's final Fox film together, Young People (1940).

Greenwood was a physically adept performer. How did her embrace of women's athleticism become part of the promotion for her performances? What do we know about her attitudes towards feminism more generally?

Excellent question about feminism and athleticism, because Charlotte seemed to believe they went hand in hand--she strongly supported women's rights as well as the rights of women performers (she was one of the charter members of Actors' Equity in 1913), and she had nothing but disgust for men who two-timed or took advantage of women who loved them. (She had been hurt badly by the adultery of her first husband, Cyril Ring, to the point of never writing a single word about him or their marriage in her memoirs.) And Charlotte believed that part of a woman's strength was that she must keep herself physically fit, ready for whatever any man could throw at her. I include at the end of the book an exercise regimen Charlotte intended to be part of her memoirs, had they been published, the upshot of which is that the body be kept limber--no need to explain why this particular comic dancer needed an elastic body!

Greenwood was a deeply religious woman. How did she reconcile her beliefs with being part of the entertainment industry at a time when actresses did not enjoy a high degree of social respectibility?

Like her good friend Billie Burke, whose biography I am now writing, Charlotte was able to be religious, or at least deeply devoted to a religious belief, and still swim well in the "sinful" waters of Hollywood or New York, and I think, again, it had to do with the essentially nonjudgmental atmosphere of their early theatre training. Charlotte writes of being done her first kind service, as an awkward fifteen year old who had tripped in a hotel lobby, spilling her luggage and a potted plant, by the star Eva Tanguay, who did not laugh at her lying there on the floor but helped her up, at the same time remarking on her beautiful eyes. Everyone else--everyone out in the ordinary world, that is--had always laughed and jeered at this gangly girl. That meeting with Tanguay, Charlotte says, was when she knew that theatre people were her people, that they would never laugh at her but would always be there to support and help, and that ideal never died--even as she was herself always there for young performers, to help and advise and nurture, as she did with Shirley Jones in Oklahoma!

Part of Charlotte's high regard for the theatre was that what made all those people out there happy must be something almost sacred, which to her it was, even when prancing through the homoerotic antics of Porter's Out of This World or singing risqué songs in her Letty plays or doing "Her Morning Bath" routine on vaudeville, which essentially was a sort of threatened but never achieved striptease routine. These made happy the people who had paid good money to come see her perform, and Charlotte always saw this as a great privilege on her part. She never took her audiences for granted. So she did not judge, as far as I can see, what it was they laughed at, or what she said, sang or pantomimed to give them that pleasure.

Why do you think Greenwood has largely disappeared from popular memory when many

of her contemporaries -- Fanny Brice or Ethel Merman, say -- still exert such a

vivid influence on the public imagination?

Fanny Brice had the immortalizing good fortune of being a Ziegfeld Follies star, as well as being the subject of several films and television productions detailing her roller-coaster love life. Merman kept going strong well past middle age, even turning out a disco album, and starred in some major hits. Charlotte made comparatively few films, had few monumental hits on Broadway, had a very specialized set of gimmicks, and only really did what she wanted to--she had made a lot of money in the 1920's and invested it well. Much of her best work, per the critics, was on stage, where even the greatest performances evaporate as soon as the show is over. One of my most abiding intentions in writing this book was to breathe life back into that vanished world of Charlotte's stage work--that world where she was happiest, where she was able to be the actress and not always the clown.