Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?: An Interview With David Hutchison (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of an interview with David Hutchison, author of Playing to Learn: Video Games in the Classroom. In the first part, he discussed his ideas about the place of games in education and about the value of teaching young people to think critically about the games they play. Today, he takes up the question of the place of game design activities in school and addresses some of the criticisms about the pedagogical uses of existing game titles. This part of the discussion is timely since Katie Salens, a major advocate for teaching young people how to think like game designers, will be speaking as part of the CMS colloquium series this week. Watch this blog for information about the podcast of this event. Some of your exercises are designed to get students to tackle design problems and to begin to make their own games. This is very much along the lines of the kinds of design literacy which Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens have been advocating. What do you see as the value of teaching students to think like designers?

I would say that several of the activities can be used as exercises that aim to get students to think like game designers, but it is the Afterword that highlights the important role that game design can play in schools, if only in a cursory way, given that game design is not the main focus of the book.

I like to think of students as moving from being consumers of media, to being critics of it, and then creators of it, so game design is the natural next step once a number of the investigative activities in the book have been completed.

The value comes from seeing students as something more than "students" in schools. What I mean here is that teachers should consider casting students in a variety of creative roles, such as "authors" and "scientists" as they study language arts and science for example. A sixth grade student who writes a story is an author and he or she should be honored as such, perhaps by having their story published, illustrated, bound, and placed in the school library for other students to borrow.

It is a similar process for video games. By seeing themselves as a team of game designers, a group of tenth grade students can work through the very same game development stages that professional designers go through: brainstorming a story idea, pitching that idea to others, writing a story, scenario, and dialog, collecting and designing assets, programming the gameplay, and testing and distributing the game.

The above process certainly sounds daunting and of course it takes a great deal of time and commitment to produce a video game, but the good news is that are now a number of terrific educational game engines that students and educators can choose to use. Several of them streamline the game development process, so that students can focus on creative learning activities, rather than the minutia of programming their game in a professional C+ game engine.

Many educators might agree that games can be powerful motivators of learning but they also may communicate a great deal of misinformation about the world, especially given the fact that most commercial games are built for entertainment rather than educational purposes. How would you respond to this critique?

Even misinformation provides teachers with an opportune teachable moment in my view, if only to correct that misinformation and investigate how it came to be.

Consider the example of Battlefield 2142, the multiplayer first-person shooter which is set in a post-apocalyptic world, in which the effects of global warming have reduced the habitable landmass on Earth to a fraction of what it is at present. The battle for control over what little habitable landmass remains is the basic premise that underlies the battles the player fights in the game.

Environmentalists and teachers may wish to take issue with the science that underlies the premise of this game, but the game itself provides teachers with a hook for getting students to consider the implications of dramatic climate change. Although there is now general agreement among scientists that climate change is occurring today and that humans are (at least in part) responsible for causing it, there are competing views among researchers as to the long-term effects of climate change on the planet - some of the changes may even be positive from a certain perspective.

What is represented in Battlefield 2142 may be an extreme view, but there are other dire predictions from climatology experts that teachers can reference as they talk about the issue of global warming with students.

Teachers can also reference the game as they discuss the ways in which the popular media represents scientific research more generally, as well as alarmist views of the future. A key question here may be the role that games, such as Battlefield 2142, potentially play in undermining serious research on climate change. My view is that the game highlights one of the most important social consequences of dramatic environmental change - the competition over increasingly scarce resources - which some environmental and military analysts - I think of Thomas Homer Dixon in particular - argue will lead to more wars in the coming years.

That's the premise of the game and it is represented, at least in a general way, in some of the futuristic military scenarios that see environmental change as a national security issue.

David Hutchison, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University (Ontario, Canada) where he teaches courses in educational foundations (history of education) and social studies.

David is the author of two books in the fields of environmental education and the philosophy of place. Growing Up Green: Education for Ecological Renewal was published in 1998. A Natural History of Place in Education was released in the spring of 2004.

For more information, check out his website at www.playingtolearn.org

Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?: An Interview With David Hutchison (Part One)

One of the many pleasures of running this blog is being able to introduce my readers to people who are doing cutting edge thinking about the many topics -- from fandom to serious games, from media literacy to civic media, from early sound comedy to transmedia storytelling -- that matter to me. Today, I want to introduce you to David Hutchison, the author of a recently released book, Playing to Learn: Video Games in the Classroom. Hutchison's book promises over 100 game activities appropriate for classroom use, a selection that spans across academic subjects (language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, history, geography, health & physical education, drama, music, visual arts, computers, and business) and grade levels (including both elementary and high school). Writers like James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, xx and David Shaffer, have made the conceptual argument for the pedagogical value of games; our own Education Arcade has been one of a number of academic research projects focused on designing, prototyping, and field testing games for instructional purposes; Hutchinson's focus is on what we can do in our schools right now, using projects already on the market, to tap student and teacher interests in games. In the course of the collection, the models many different conceptual approaches for thinking about games -- including many designed to foster core media literacy skills. The result is a book which will be valuable to classroom teachers or for that matter, parents who want to engage their children in meaningful conversations about the place of games in their lives and about how games structure the way we see the world.

I recently had a chance to interview Hutchison about his goals for this project and wanted to share his responses with you. In explaining the value of games for schools, I often say that "nobody is advocating bringing Grand Theft Auto into the classroom" and go on to point to a broader range of other titles which do seem more appropriate for school use. But Hutchinson makes a fairly compelling argument for why schools should be addressing Grand Theft Auto in the comments which follow. His arguments here is consistent with his perspective that just as traditional media literacy involves learning to think critically about mass media, games literacy has to include asking hard questions of this still emerging medium, questions concerning representations, ideology, and of course, commercial motives.

What motivated you to write this book? Why do you think teachers should be incorporating games more fully into their classroom activities?

I wrote this book in part because I enjoy playing video games myself and I am always looking for synergies between my play time and my work time as a teacher educator and university professor. So too, I was fairly surprised to see that a book like this hadn't yet been written given the long history of video games in American culture. I also couldn't find many video game-centered lesson plans on the Web which also surprised me.

I believe that video games should be referenced in the K-12 classroom for a variety of reasons. First, video games can provide teachers with an effective instructional "hook" since so many students are gamers in their out-of-school lives. Second, many (younger) teachers are also gamers. Through gaming, they have cultivated a knowledge base which can serve them well as part of their pedagogical toolset.

Despite this, most of the teacher-gamers I have spoken with over the last two years see a disconnect between their in-school teaching jobs and their out-of-school gaming activities. It strikes me as nonsensical that so many students and their teachers may be going home at night to play the same games, but then returning to the school the next day with no intention of ever sharing their mutual passion for video games.

I would also say that from a cultural point of view, I see some video games as harbingers of the future. They play with the "world" - past, present, and future - in ways that are impractical (sometimes impossible) in the real world. Some games purposefully bend the laws of physics in exploring new virtual gameplay ideas. Multiplayer video games (and the Internet more generally) experiment with new forms of social organization that go beyond our everyday ways of living.

All of this strikes me as pedagogically interesting and worth studying in K-12 schools.

Some previous books have focused on teaching about games, others on teaching through games, but your book seems to encompass both. What do you see as the advantages of each?

I would say that most of my book treats the "video game" as a cultural artifact that has a history, was created, is used in various ways, and is sometimes discarded for various reasons.

In this sense, I would say that the activities in the book are more focused on teaching using games. I have heard from a few video-games-in-education researchers who see the activities in this book as a good beginning point, but not necessarily the end point of where we need to go in integrating video games into education. To a certain extent, I would agree with this view.

For example, except for a couple of activities, the book does not focus on living life in a virtual community, such as Second Life or World of Warcraft. Educating students in Second Life strikes me as teaching through games. But so does learning about military tactics by playing America's Army. James Paul Gee's work gets to heart of how playing video games can transform the learning experience and even supplant traditional ways of teaching and learning in schools.

I would say that my book is more focused on traditional teaching and learning techniques in which the video game is studied as a cultural artifact, rather than "lived through" as an embodied pedagogical experience. Activities which ask students to write a video game review or analyze the leaderboard statistics for a driving game in math class, for example, are fairly approachable by most teachers. They essentially treat the video game as a manipulative that can be utilized as a pedagogical tool by teachers in a wide variety of subject areas.

Your introduction suggests that you see schools as "one of the last remaining formal institutions that can mediate popular culture by examining it closely, holding it to account, and even transforming it at times." What is it about schools which enable them to play this role? What about the argument that schools have historically declared war on popular culture and thus have shown themselves to be anything but objective arbiters of its merits?

This is a phrase that I have also used elsewhere, including my previous book which explores the history of the idea of "place" in education.

I am on purpose expressing something of a idealistic sentiment here that harkens back to the early 20th century promise of a democratic system of public schooling, as articulated most famously by John Dewey and, even earlier, Horace Mann. The basic notion here is that the public school is responsible to the state (which in turn represents the citizenry) and that one of the important roles of the public school is to balance out the decentralized and largely unregulated influence of other social institutions, such as the family, church, private sector, and popular culture. Dewey argued that through purposeful social inquiry guided by the principles of the scientific method, schools could foster in students a democratic impulse that strengthened the social and democratic commons - hence the notion of the "common school."

Today, public schools are bureaucratic institutions that are generally underfunded, used for political fodder by both the right and left, and tasked with an overwhelmingly complex job. Yet schools still remain the last bastion of mandated community involvement in child socialization. As parents and citizens, we count on this bastion to mediate, counter, and offset the unchecked influence of other less formal institutions, such as the peer group, family, and popular culture, by providing a corrective or compensatory measure to a student's education. This role is fraught with difficulty and it is often contested - which is appropriate in a democratic society.

Such corrective or compensatory measures may only sporadically be successful, indeed, sometimes they fail miserably, but I would say that the idealism that schools can continue to play this role is still in place in the eyes of many adults - why else would so many battles continue to be fought over the role and purpose of public schools in American society?

Many teachers might want to "protect" children from exposure to media violence, yet some of your activities ask students to pay close attention to controversial titles, such as Bully or Grand Theft Auto. What do you see as the value of teaching youth to adopt a critical perspective on such games? And what do you say to those who might argue that you are putting them at risk by asking them to engage with these works?

In writing the book, I set it as a goal for myself to incorporate the Grand Theft Auto series into at least one activity. (The "Hot Coffee" controversy was brewing around me as I began writing the book :) The GTA activity I chose tasks students with creating their own kid-friendly open-world game that doesn't include all the adult content we normally associate with games in this franchise.

I also wanted to encourage teachers to deal with controversial ideas related to video games. There are contributed discussion articles in the book that address debates related to video games and violence, video game addiction, gender bias in video games, and health and video games.

My sense is that the book could have been roundly criticized - and rightly so - if I had chosen not to deal with the many criticisms made of video games - for example, that they produce obese layabouts with no social contacts in the real world who are prone to violence and live in a fantasy world 

Discussing the above stereotypes in class is worthwhile in my view. Studying these stereotypes by having students conduct research to test their veracity is even better. There are also activities in the book that aim to help students effect personal lifestyle changes related to their video game playing habits, such as paying close attention to their posture and reducing the amount of time they spend playing video games each week.

It seems to me that there is disconnect between gamers and those critics - Jack Thompson is a popular strawman here - who look at games from outside and see little of value worth highlighting. Since many students are gamers when out-of-school, it makes sense that turning a critical eye toward video games and especially social, medical, and legal commentaries on video games are appropriate topics for study in schools.

David Hutchison, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Brock University (Ontario, Canada) where he teaches courses in educational foundations (history of education) and social studies.

David is the author of two books in the fields of environmental education and the philosophy of place. Growing Up Green: Education for Ecological Renewal was published in 1998. A Natural History of Place in Education was released in the spring of 2004.

Want to know more about CMS?

Trying to expand our communications with prospective international students (or for that matter, anyone else who would find it difficult to make it to campus to learn more about our program), CMS holds on-line information sessions a few times a semester. The first such session, timed to facilitate Asian participants, will be held this tuesday, October 23, 8 to 10 am.

The second session, timed to facilitate European participants, will be held Monday, December 3, 2 to 4pm.

We've tried for time slots that facilitate international contact but anyone who wants to participate in either session is more than welcome.

Visit the appropriate info session page on the day of the scheduled session to log into our webchat.

Gender and Fan Culture ( Round Twenty , Part Two): James Nadeau and Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager

James:This leads me to the next point: the relationship between the female protagonist and the monster. The monster both represents the repression and is a doorway to allowing the female figure to escape the social boundaries placed upon her. I am thinking here of Mel Brooks Young Frankenstein. Madeline Khan's character is the frigid girlfriend of the doctor who is transformed by her "relations" with the monster. It is an interesting exposure of the relationship trope. By making it humorous Brooks is actually revealing another aspect of the monster. By being "other" the monster also allows those possibly inclined to be different to join in being different. The monster is the gate way to deviance. And this is what I find fascinating because it makes the monster a transformative figure. Simply by being exposed to the monster one can gain access to monstrous attributes or become monsters. I think this is why the monster figure resonates with both queer and disability communities. It is the irrational fear that one will be transformed by interacting with a queer or disabled person. The idea that one's difference is contagious. This is what the monster does. It acts upon the erotic nature of the other that destabilizes normalcy, be it physical or sexual. Like you said it unleashes the repressed. Think about the alien monster in John W. Campbell, Jr's Who Goes there? (1938) which is the source for John Carpenter's well known film The Thing (1982) as well as two other films The Thing From Another World (1951) and Horror Express (1973). Here the monster itself is the transformer. It is an amorphous "thing" that replaces and consumes the human characters. Each molecule of the alien transforms and consumes. It is a literal metaphor for fear. The thing represents what each generation finds terrifying. It is a tabula rasa with which the viewer can project their fears onto. It operates as tool for them to confront or identify with whatever socio-cultural fears are present. In Carpenter's film the thing is an amorphous blob that undulates and shifts constantly. It is in a state of transformation until it becomes something it can hide within. It plays upon the fear of the passing deviant. The Thing is the one that looks like us but isn't. And once again, like with the vampire, it is the blood that tells. The blood is alive and sentient, it infects. And then there is the fact that the story is female free. So the film also comments on the mutability of identity in the face of single sex environments and the anxieties that that can provoke. This ultimately leads to testing the blood in order to identify who is human and therefore normal.

Kes:

The same is true of that other great contagion movie, Aliens, which had been released a few years after Carpenter's The Thing. One of the things I love about both these movies--and maybe it's something that as a blind fan I am just particularly focused on--is the way the space these characters move through becomes an extension of their inner psyches. Carpenter takes the cold isolation of this snowbound military base and Cameron takes the inhuman darkness of the space station but both spaces end up being very gothic threatening spaces. The viewer isn't just given a text or dialogue, but sound, motion, a sense of the process of moving through these intensely felt spaces. It's something that a purely textual or psychoanalytical interpretation of these horror movies can't really address--their sense of virtuality. This is where Deleuzian theory comes in and gives horror media such a radical spin: because horror media is often very focused on conveying that sense of the experience as a process, as something transformative in itself.

Yet that element of horror manifesting the inner space as external space is not limited to horror films. I watched Aliens with my husband, who is a game designer, a number of months back and he commented on how much that movie influenced the look of game interfaces. It's not just the look though: it's the sound, from the sound effects to the music to the use of voices. Horror media is still very much influenced by its roots in old radio shows, with a strong focus on creating a sense that the audience is actually occupying this other space with the monster. And I think that is one thing which, as this Wired article "Gore Is Less: Videogames Make Better Horror Than Hollywood" points out, links the horror film to video games.

James:

Definitely. Space plays a large role in the construction of horror and science fiction cinema. One way to look at this is in terms of Deleuze's theory of the any-space-whatever. For Delueze this moment arises in cinematic scenes where the viewer is destabilized and unsure of where he or she stands in space within the sphere of the film. The consistent use of close-up shots in the absence of expansive wide angle establishing shots serve to isolate the actor/character in the narrative creating a claustrophobic feeling in the viewer. Aliens is a perfect example of this. You can probably count on one hand the number of establishing shots that occur in this film and when they do they are noticeable in the way they pull you out of the taunt, tense feeling of the film. These shots are actually jarring in that they both establish a setting for the viewer and at the same time eliminate some of the effectiveness of the close-ups. To jump back to The Thing - the whiteness of the environment adds to the sense of the isolation of the camp. It is literally a blank space - indefinable. This works in concert with the anamorphic state of the thing. Neither of them is solid or identifiable. This destabilizes the viewer. They are in any space whatever.

Kes:

And I think it is that sense of destabilization which draws so many horror fans. Horror as a genre is more about ambiguity rather than certainty, and that leaves a lot of room for fans to bring personal interpretations to bear in thinking of how such narratives relate to their own identity. In particular, horror seems to be fascinated with complicating subjectivity, and this seems to connect it not only with the monster-woman/queer alignment we mentioned before but with those virtual or Deleuzan spaces we were just talking about.

In her book Deleuze and Horror (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) Anna Powell discusses how the subject-object binary is blurred in horror films by using sensation and affect to subsume the subject and show it melding with the external world. Some of the most vivid horror--and here I am thinking of Cronenberg's Videodrome and Moore's graphic novel From Hell--show humans being penetrated by their technology and/or their technological spaces. This kind of surreal technogothic is an entire subgenre in itself, and I think one of the reasons it emerged as such a powerful theme late in the 20th century was that our technologies, which in the 1950s had been framed as such an uncomplicated salvation for the human race, called into question our traditional definitions of both technology and the body, and the questions which arose proved to be particularly relevant to disabled and queer individuals. Previously there was this assumption that the perfect body was one which was whole, completely self-reliant, free of technological prosthetics, and at the peak of its intellectual and physical abilities; in other words, a definition many would read as masculine. How many of us fit that description now? From contacts to prescription drugs to pacemakers, many of us are wearing technology beneath our skin, and we're all a little nervous when we consider how it might change us both individually and as a species. It has already radicalized our definitions of what is an "able" body and what is a gendered body.

James:

I believe that has also changed the face of contemporary horror. Much of today's horror films are centered on the destruction of the body: Saw versions 1though 3, Hostel and the like. These are films that use the threat of physical destruction in numerous ways under the rubric of horror. Of course now these are considered their own genre within the horror genre; they are snuff horror films. So in light of the extreme technological evolution we see a return to fears about the body. The destabilization and dismemberment of the body has remerged as a means of striking fear in the audience. I say re-emerged because some of the horror films of the early seventies also played with this genre albeit not to the extent we see today.

Kes:

We can trace those dismemberment stories back to the science fiction of Maurice Renard, who wrote the story The Hands of Orlac in 1920, which would become the basis for the 1926 film by the same name and also the 1935 remake Mad Love which starred Peter Lorre. Again, there is an entire subgenre of horror narratives involving dismembered/possessed body parts, but my favorite is Clive Barker's The Body Politic (I think that was published in 1984), in which a man feels that his hands are somehow working against him, as if they aren't sure they want to be part of him any longer, and this becomes a metaphor for how people are encouraged to think of themselves as body parts, with media images focusing on specific areas--breasts for women, muscles for men--as if the part can define the whole. Of course the surgeries which Renard focused on in his story have now become an entire technology for reshaping and redefining the human body and the technology of medical augmentation meets the technology of media until we all feel a bit disassociated from our own body parts, to a degree that shows like Nip/Tuck basically pick up the monster theme by promising us that ultimate monstrous wish: to swap one's monster parts for somebody else's.

But let me move to a more positive aspect of media technologies, one which brings us back to those definitions of genre with which we began this discussion, namely, how new media has opened up production and distribution channels for fans. Not only can artists distribute their own radical visions through the technologies of the Internet and new media, but fans can locate and access all sorts of media that not so long ago was completely out of reach. From classic movies to indie shorts, from new fiction to fan sites, female and queer artists are finding encouragement, inspiration, and their own fans.

As a closing thought, I just want to point out that this is in turn calling into question traditional methods for data collection, such as assuming that there are no female slasher fans because the researcher didn't see many at a movie premiere. Female and queer fans are meeting up online, or at indie film festivals, or just waiting until the DVD comes out on Amazon, and I think this is another way in which new media appeals strongly to fans who previously may, like female and queer comics fans, have felt pushed out of the more public forms of media consumption and fan events.

Gender and Fan Culture ( Round Twenty , Part One): James Nadeau and Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager

Kes: I'm Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager, a 2006 graduate of the Comparative Media Studies master's program at MIT. I am a relative newcomer to fan studies, though I have been a lifelong fan of genre media, particularly SF and horror. My writing often explores the intersections of non-normative bodies and identity, with an emphasis on interpretations informed by both disability and queer studies (an intersection often referred to as crip studies). My thesis was on images of disability and technology in science fiction media, and I have also written about the theme of disability in Harry Potter fan fiction. I write about media, disability, and technology at my blog http://kestrell.livejournal.com.

James and I were grad students together in the CMS program at MIT, but since graduating, we continue to get together and discuss both theory and our favorite media, so our post here will probably convey that sense of this being an ongoing conversation between us.

James: I am James Nadeau, also a 2006 graduate of CMS. My own work is centered in visual art and technological evolution, specifically video and related technologies. My background is in critical studies, psychoanalytic and queer theory with a focus on Queer Cinema. I curate a monthly queer film and performance series at the Brattle Theatre here in Cambridge. On top of that I am a longtime comic book collector and science fiction fan. I am particularly interested in British post-apocalyptic graphic novels, mainly Judge Dredd, as well as Marvel produced superhero comics (pretty much why I landed at CMS). Like Kestrell I am fascinated by the possibilities that looking at horror and science fiction through the lens of queer and disability studies provides. Our conversations have centered on the similarities that both queerness and disability have when placed within the genre of horror and extreme science fiction. By extreme I mean the type of science fiction that operates as both horror and science fiction, be it from a gore or Lovecraft-ian "horror beyond the worlds" nature.

Kes:

I would like to open the conversation by exploring how genre becomes intertwined with gender through the process of defining what horror is. As a fan and a scholar, I have become increasingly intrigued by the representations of female and queer fans in horror fandom. Specifically, I am curious about what role gender plays in defining the horror genre itself and how deeply gender influences interpretations of horror, its purposes and its effects.

These questions were prompted by a pattern I noticed in how discussions of horror are often framed: In either an online or real-time discussion of horror, a panel of male writers and critics open the discussion by seeking to define "real" horror. One of the first things mentioned, usually with a laugh, is the dismissal of paranormal romance. Aside from the fact that paranormal romance is not a new genre (it can be traced at least as far back as the TV. shows Beauty and the Beast and Dark Shadows, both of which suffered from critical and marketing attitudes which devalued their female audiences), this dismissal is usually followed by adding more subgenres to the list of what isn't horror, with subgenres like gothics, ghost stories and even new horror such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream, etc. (refer to the work of Mark Jancovich

http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/pamphlets/pamphdets.asp?id=28 ).

This disavowal of specific subgenres and their female fans isn't limited to books or film, either: in horror comics fandom, the stereotype of a female fan is that of the gothy Sandman fan. No slight to Neil, but the linking of goth fashion and being female is another way in which I see female fans being portrayed as romantic and/or ridiculous, which comes close to reflecting the way the overly-sexualize and ridiculously romanticized has come to be associated with camp, another disavowed form of horror. There are films that are labeled camp which I am not even clear on why they are labeled camp: Bride of Frankenstein, for instance, which a number of horror producers such as Clive Barker, have listed as their favorite horror classic: why is that classified as camp? If,

as one definition of camp claims, camp is equated with being "effeminately homosexual," then I think we are seeing media being disparaged and disavowed not for its content, but for its audience, and that disparaged audience is identified as female and queer.

I can't help but feel that these attempts to restrict the definition of "real" horror are prompted, at least in part, by an inclination to define who the ideal reader/viewer is, and, for a lot of male

critics and scholars, that ideal reader/viewer is someone a lot like him. And yet you have artists like Alan Moore, Clive Barker, Angela Carter, and their works include elements of not just horror, but also fantasy, surrealism, the gothic, and yes, romance.

James:

I'd like to tackle a few of these points. First I think that you are correct in that camp is most often associated with queer culture. However, it is mainly thought of in terms of exaggerated behaviour verging on the ludicrous. To quote John Waters, camp is "the tragically ludicrous and the ludicrously tragic." It has been used on pop culture artifacts in this manner since Susan Sontag published her essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964. For Sontag camp was liberating. It is noteworthy for being both naïve (completely unaware of one's camp-ness is a requirement) but also it's extravagance. Bride of Frankenstein is thought of as camp because it is so over the top. One look at Elsa Lanchester's hairdo as the bride and you know there is something not quite right. As Sontag notes "Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much." I think that what we need to establish here is that for Clive Barker (for example), a gay man, having this as his favourite film is motivated by forces other than those that seek to feminize or demean. I would also say that Bride of Frankenstein is pretty commonly thought of as an example of camp even by those only marginally aware of what camp really is. But I think this is a good starting point to discuss the viewer. For the queer viewer of horror films where does camp fit in or does it even need to? There is a lot of classic (the twenties right through the sixties) Hollywood horror films that could be seen as campy by queer audiences. There is something decidedly fey in Max Schreck's performance in Murnau's Nosferatu. And do we even need to mention the homosocial Lost Boys or the lesbians in The Hunger? The vampire character itself has come to be known for outside normal sexual boundaries. And I agree with you that the vampire character is recognized as a romantic figure and it is consistently associated with the feminine. Is it this "feyness" or implied deviance that pushes it outside of the patriarchy and into deviance? I think that romanticism in horror and science fiction offers up an interesting opportunity to think about alternative identities within these narratives and how they relate to what audiences feel and desire outside of heteronormative paradigms. These films open our eyes to the possibilities that exist outside the hegemony of "the normal."

Kes:

I think your final sentence is very telling, and there seems to be a lot of evidence to support it around this time of year, when we seem to see a lot of these alternate identities, from the romanticized to the queer and campy, being literally tried on during the Halloween season. It's interesting that the mainstream seems to focus so much on the campy aspects of Halloween, from Elvira costumes to Dracula to drag: if camp is a combination of the overly-sexualized

and the naive, then it's okay to play with identity at Halloween as long as you maintain that element of camp, of emphasizing that it's all pretend, *really*.

Yet these exaggerated campy figures also seem to be a way of shedding the old worn out images of horror and replacing them with something that's still emotionally powerful and socially transgressive. Vampire fashions, or how the vampire is fashioned, may change, but each change seems to say something about the culture at that historical moment. Anne Rice's vampires may have come to be associated with the cliché of the overly romanticized erotic vampire, to such a degree that her stories have become *the* source for the stereotype of the Byronic emo boy which was often parodied in Joss Whedon's "new" vampire mythology of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, but looking back there was a lot more going on in Rice's story, such as a preoccupation with the metaphysical, the transcendental, and the historical. There also emerges this theme of families and communities that are based on blood but are oppositional to the nuclear family. At times the erotic seems as much a means for making emotional connections as it is reflective of the strictly sexual.

Perhaps what Rice's vampires did most explicitly, however, and I think this is something which Clive Barker's horror and fantasy has always done very explicitly, is allow the monster a voice. Once upon a time Robin Wood could write the following prohibition:

"...Dracula must never be allowed a voice, a discourse, a point of view: he must remain the unknowable, whom the narrative is about, but of whom it simultaneously

disowns all intimate knowledge..."

That kind of vampire, however, is kind of the old school vampire, and it began to lose its potency at the same time that the women's movement and the gay movement began to really be heard. Unfortunately, a lot of what female and queer artists wanted and needed to express was still considered taboo, is still considered taboo, by many of the critics and gate keepers who get to officially define art and fiction.

Helene Cixous managed to link this feminist and queer art with a kind of monstrous mythmaking in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa," in which she said

"Where is the...woman who...hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick?"

What horror of the '70s and '80s did--and I am going to return to my favorite trio of Clive Barker, Alan Moore, and Angela Carter-- what made it so transgressive, was it reclaimed that idea of the non-conforming body as a point of identity. It blurred the subjectivity between the female or male protagonist and the monster and it questioned how authority was physically located in the idea of the "perfect" most masculine, most normal, body. And from Carter's re-imagined Red Riding Hood to Moore's Swamp Thing to Barker's Nightbreed, identity as it related to gender, sexuality, and subjectivity intersected at the nexus of sexual relationships between women and monsters.

James:

There are a few things I want to respond to. To continue with the vampire exposition I agree that there is much more going on in Rice's books than a simple horror romance. She also touches upon the idea of creating a family as opposed to being born into one. This is a metaphor that resonates within the queer community. The notion of choosing one's family based not upon blood but upon social and physical difference in complete opposition to that nuclear family is something that the queer community has always done - out of a need for close social ties that have to replace those severed by identity. And of course the transformation can also be read as a coming out narrative - one that involves the severing of ties with one's former life (something unfortunately that is extremely common). I think these are some of the reasons that her books resonated with the queer community. Not to mention the transformative nature of the bloodletting and drinking. The fact that the vampiric traits are transmitted through the exchange of blood added another layer as her books gained popularity at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the US. I think that you are right as well in that the underlying erotic current of these relationships adds to their romantic nature. It also complicates it further with the inclusion of the "incest" or family taboo to these already "outsider" relationships.

Welcome to Idea Lab

Today, PBS and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced te launch of MediaShift Idea Lab Blog, a group blog featuring 36 wide-ranging innovators reinventing community news for the digital age. Each Idea Lab blogger won a grant in the Knight News Challenge to help fund a startup idea or to blog on a topic related to reshaping community news. The writers will use the Idea Lab to explain their projects, share intelligence and interact with the online community.

Here are some samples from the first round of posts on the blog:

From MTV's Ian V. Rowe:

More than any time in human history, young people have more tools at their avail to consume - and create - information on the issues that are most relevant to them. So to figure out exactly what MTV's approach would be to truly engage young people aged 18-30 during this Presidential election cycle in this new, Wild West era of self-publishing and self-organization, we first had to listen to what young people themselves said they wanted.

The results were simultaneously disheartening and hopeful, in the way only young people can express themselves about their future. The MTV/CBS News/New York Times Poll revealed that younger Americans have a bleak view about their own future and the direction the country is heading: 70 percent said the country was on the wrong track, while 48 percent said they feared that their generation would be worse off than their parents'. But the survey also found that this generation knows their power: 77 percent said they thought their votes would have a great bearing on who became the next president.

By any measure, the poll suggests that young Americans are anything but apathetic about the Presidential election. Fifty-eight percent said they were paying attention to the campaign. By contrast, at this point in the 2004 presidential campaign, only 35 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said they were paying a lot or some attention to the campaign. And these projected 2008 numbers followed actual record youth voter turnout: In 2006, 10 million 18-29 year-olds voted than in 2002 midterms (2 MM+ increase - largest youth turnout in at least 20 years in congressional elections.)

So clearly young people are ready to participate because they know how important the stakes are. Elections are no longer an abstract concept. Whatever their position on the decisions of the current Administration over the last seven years, it has become crystal clear to young people that who is elected as President matters and has consequences.

From Dori J. Maynard (Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education):

First, the Jena 6 story lived on the Internet. Bloggers, many of them black, members of list serves such as the National Association of Black Journalists and members of social networks like Facebook, used the Internet to spread the story before it took off with mainstream news organizations like CNN, The Washington Post, and NPR.

The fact that the "afro-sphere" has largely received credit for driving this story is important to keep in mind when we think about what is going on in cyberspace.

At a time when "the digital divide" is still code for "people-of-color-don't-have-access-or-know-

how-to-use-the-Internet," Jena 6 reminds us of the fallacy of that premise. African Americans used the web and alerted the world to what was going on in a small town and in a largely overlooked state.

True, there are still some significant hurdles for entry into a fully wired world. However, they are largely socio-economic. I once asked someone how many white homes in Appalachia have Internet access. Turned out not a lot. The digital divide is real. It's class, not race, that makes the difference.

The Jena 6 story also reminds us that while the Web may be a place where anyone with access and an idea can voice his or her opinion, it does not mean that every opinion gets the same amount of attention. Think of how quickly word spread about "Memo Gate" and how long it took the outside world to pay attention to Jena 6.

From Jay Rosen (New York University):

Not knowing what the model is, we go on. We go on with newspapers. We go on with Internet journalism, and the practice of reporting what happened. We go on with the ordeal of verification. We go on with the eyewitness account, and with the essential task of getting and talking about the news.

Reasons for my uncertainty about the newspaper in the combination we know it now were well stated recently by Doc Searls of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, who also writes about the Internet and keeps his own blog.

For metropolitian newspapers, whose problems I know best, it's not just the forced march to the Web and the decline in revenues from the printed product. It's not only that free content seems to be the standard online.

"The larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work," Searls writes, "and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding -- or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it."

So (class) why does Searls say that the advertising model may be broken too? Isn't there advertising to be won on the Web? There is, and it is coming on. But underneath that something else is going on. "Harder to see..."

While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I'm not saying advertising isn't effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we've long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

The inefficencies that created modern advertising are themselves under pressure from the Internet. That is what Searls argues, and I think we need to consider it. "The holy grail for advertisers isn't advertising at all," he writes, "because it's not about sellers hunting down buyers. In fact it's the reverse: buyers hunting for sellers. It's also for customers who remain customers because they enjoy meaningful and productive relationships with sellers -- on customers' terms and not just on vendors' alone."

Searls thinks sellers and buyers can increasingly get into information alignment without advertising and its miserable kill ratios in the battle to break through the noise and reach the few who are actually in the market.

From Gail Robinson (Gothan Gazette):

The staff of Gotham Gazette is counting down to the day later this fall when our first online game goes up on our site. It's been an interesting process getting us this far.

First, of course, we needed a concept. In some respects, this was the easy part as brainstorming sessions over the summer produced literally dozens of ideas. We'd like to do them all -- and we will do some of them in the next two years -- but we decided to do the first one on garbage. What to do with tons and tons of garbage has long been a thorny issue in New York City, one that never seems quite resolved. It's something New Yorkers care a lot about and it provides policy options that can be clearly presented in a game format.

Our game will have two parts. In the first, players will be residents deciding how to sort their trash.Should it all just go in the garbage can (or, since this is New York, into a big black plastic bag). Or should some be recycled. Maybe you're willing to put your empty water bottle aside for recycling, but what about an apple core? And can you do anything with a soiled diaper?

Once the player sorts his/her trash, they move to the next portion and play policymaker. What would you do with the city's garbage. Send it to a city landfill,ship it acorss state lines, convert it to energy? And what about the recyclables?

At the end of the game, players will learn how much money they have spent, how much room they have taken up in a landfill and other costs. And they will send us their plans so we can convey their ideas to City Hall.

Now we just have to make this idea a reality -- a process we are in the thick of now. More on that in another posting.

These represent only four of the many voices represented on this new blog. Civic media and citizen journalism takes many different forms and the community of researchers which the Knight Foundation is assembling are tackling the issue of civic engagement from many different angles. What they have in common is a belief that we can deploy the affordances of new media in ways that strengthen bonds within geographically local communities.

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

Yesterday, I shared the first part of an interview I did with feminist/exploitation filmmaker Stephanie Rothman. Today, I conclude the interview. But before I do, I wanted to share a few passages from my essay on Rothman which can be found in The Wow Climax. It sets up some of the issues we discuss below.

"I think films are a compromised and corrupted art form, a combination of business and art. And I think filmmakers who treat it completely as a business fail. A business-oriented film is too blatant. It must have something more. To me, films that succeed are those that are slightly corrupted, that attempt to be both business and art, knowing they can never be a full work of art and should never be a full work of business."

-- Roger Corman

Two women -- one white and blonde, the other black and wearing an Afro -- are harnessed to a plow, struggling to move forward through thick muck. Glistening sweat slides through their exposed cleavage and down their taunt, muscular thighs. Their expression is at once determined and humbled. They are dressed in tight cut-off jeans, halter tops tied off at the midriff, no bras and no shoes. Behind them, a man snarls, driving his human "cows."

This disturbing image is the core icon on the advertisements for Terminal Island. In the same ad, we see a stereotypical image of the black "buck," his broad chest bare, crushing a black woman's head into the dirt with his foot, "Welcome to Terminal Island, Baby!" The promotional campaign for an exploitation film characteristically reduces the movie to its most sensationalistic images, images that make its desired audience want to see more. Terminal Island is being "exploited" as a film where one can see beautiful women "put in their place" by powerful men.

Another image circulates around Terminal Island -- the only photograph I have been able to find of its director, Stephanie Rothman. Rothman, an attractive young woman with flowing black hair, is directing an early scene set in a television studio control-room. Her look is passionate, her expressive hands stretch wide, as she is delivering instructions to the actress who plays a documentary film maker in the movie. The actress bears more than a passing resemblance to Rothman herself. As a result, the image takes on a reflexive quality -- the woman director as artist producing an image of the woman director. The caption alongside this Omni magazine article reads: "Terminal Island is consistent with her other films in that it is about several men and women who unite, then live together as friends and lovers without sexual distinctions being made, or infighting and petty jealousies developing. Her ideal world is one of equality and harmony."

Omni identifies the elements in Terminal Island and the other Rothman films, such as Group Marriage (1972), The Velvet Vampire (1971) and The Working Girls (1973), which attracted feminist interest.

Omni's juxtaposition of these two images leaves unreconciled two contradictory accounts of the film's politics and its audience appeals. Images of women as chattel compete with images of women as artists. Appeals to fantasies of male control compete with appeals to fantasies of "equality and harmony." Any film which negotiates between these two competing discourses warrants closer consideration. Such films may help us to better understand the ideological fault-lines within the popular cinema.

As Christine Gledhill suggests, the political commitments of filmmakers often have to get "negotiated" through generic traditions for constructing stories and marketing appeals which sell those stories to demographically desirable audiences. Such "negotiations" produce ideological contradictions within the texts being sold, contradictions which, in turn, get "negotiated" by viewers seeking certain kinds of pleasures from going to the movies. In Rothman's case, a further series of "negotiations" occurred amongst feminist critics: after an initial flurry of articles advancing her case as a feminist filmmaker, references to Rothman all but disappeared. A generation of critics schooled in Screen theory and in Laura Mulvey's assault on "visual pleasure" found it difficult to resolve the ideological contradictions surrounding a feminist exploitation filmmaker. They stopped looking for signs of feminist resistance in such an unlikely place and recoiled with puritanical discomfort over her eroticized images. Rothman's Terminal Island suggests the complexity of the "negotiations" which occur between feminist politics and popular entertainment within the marginal commercial space of the exploitation cinema.

As more recent feminist critics have sought a more complex account of the pleasures of popular culture, a reconsideration of Rothman seems in order. Re-examining Rothman in the 1990s seems of critical importance, since the issues she poses are closely related to those raised by a whole range of contemporary Hollywood films which similarly seek to insert feminist politics into commercial genres (Aliens, Blue Steel, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma and Louise, A League of Their Own). Many of these films were either directed by veterans of the exploitation cinema or were strongly influenced by its legacy. To fully understand the complex ideological negotiations within these equally "corrupted" works, we need to reclaim both the progressive generic traditions upon which they build and the critical tools by which an earlier generation of feminist critics sought to interpret and evaluate those traditions. This essay examines what may be at stake for feminism in the exploitation cinema, using Rothman and Terminal Island as a point of entry. Rothman "exploits" the progressive potential already embedded within the exploitation genres to get her liberal feminist messages to a larger viewing public; Roger Corman's New World Pictures "exploits" the topicality of feminism in the early 1970s and the volatile emotions which surround it to attract an audience of men and women filmgoers. Emerging in this context of negotiation and exploitation, Terminal Island will be analyzed as a "partially corrupted" film, one which resists placement in a simple ideological category but which never-the-less shows the possibility of expressing resistant politics within mainstream genres...

Now the interview:

Your works were embraced by feminist film scholars such as Claire Johnson and Pam Cook. Were you aware of their celebration of your work and if so, how did it impact the ways you thought about your films.

I was unaware of their interest in my films until fairly recently. I met Pam Cook for the first time about seven years ago and it was only then that I read what she had written about me. It was around then I also learned that my films were initially in favor and then later fell out of favor with some feminist film scholars and critics. For this reason,I am very grateful to scholars like Pam Cook in the English speaking nations and Verena Mund in the German-speaking ones for taking a serious continuing interest in my work.

I am happy that people have observed the thread of feminism that runs through my films. When I was making them, the main thrust of the women's movement was to establish equality in the workplace and the family, through law and custom. Since then, a more far-reaching body of thought has developed, some of whose concerns my films don't address.

Feminist critic Pam Cook argued that one of the most progressive aspects of your films is the way you play with and encourage our awareness of the stereotypes which were the basic building blocks of the exploitation cinema. For example, the key characters in Terminal Island are introduced through a discussion of the casting of a documentary. How did you reconcile the exploitation genre's reliance on broad stereotypes with your apparent interest to provide a more complex understanding of women's experiences.

First, let me say that I wanted to provide a more complex understanding of the experiences of both women and men. Men are also stereotyped in some exploitation films. While there is a feminist viewpoint in my films, it was not intended to be the only one. I viewed this initial stereotyping of both sexes as an opportunity, a starting place, from which to surprise and intrigue the audience, as the characters behavior upended the audience's expectations.

The introduction of the characters in Terminal Island with their prisoner identification pictures, or mug shots, and a brief summary of their crimes, was deliberately done for another reason besides stereotyping: It was as an efficient narrative device for introducing a large number of characters, so that the audience would recognize them when the story switches to Terminal Island itself.

Perhaps the one stereotypical element in the film that I have never been comfortable with is some of the costuming and makeup of the women prisoners. One of the exploitation rules I had to follow strictly was that the women must always look very attractive and "sexy," which meant they couldn't look the way women really would as prisoners on an island with harsh living conditions. I have watched Terminal Island several times in recent years with audiences who have an interest in seeing revivals programs. When they first see the women prisoners on the island, there is sometimes laughter at their unrealistic appearance. I don't take any offense at this, because it just validates my own uneasiness with the message sent by the way the women look.

When you left Corman and started your own production company, Dimension Pictures, you continued to produce exploitation films, even though you had much greater creative control over your work. Can you share some of the economic, creative, perhaps even political factors that went into that choice?

I stopped working for Roger Corman because he did not pay me a living wage. In his opinion he didn't need to pay one to his directors, since he was giving them the chance to have their work seen widely, which might lead to more and better paid work, maybe even with a major studio. And for a very few, it did. For most, it did not. My work was seen, and I received a few offers, but only to make more exploitation films.

Dimension Pictures was a new company, partly financed by the same regional film distributors who distributed my earlier films. My husband and I were offered a minority share in the company and a living wage. In return, we were expected to make exploitation films that we co-wrote, he produced and I directed. But we did not have final approval over the subjects, advertising, or distribution plans for them. In no sense, did I have greater creative control over my own work while I was working there.

Exploitation cinema no longer exists today--except perhaps in terms of direct to video production. Yet many of the genres which dominated the exploitation cinema have become a part of the commercial mainstream. What do you see as the consequences of this loss of the b-film mode of production?

I say let the commercial mainstream have the exploitation genres. Today, I don't think filmmakers need to start the way I did, working within the restrictions of exploitation films, because the same financial and work place limitations no longer exist. I can't speak about other nations, but in America the following changes have occurred.

Due to new laws, motion picture and television unions have had to open up their apprenticeship programs; they can no longer discriminate by race, ethnicity, or sex. Today more attention is paid to the work of outstanding student filmmakers by artists' agents and film and television studios, and some of these students even find work as writers and directors soon after graduation.

Then there are the film festivals that have multiplied worldwide, and that are open to exhibiting unusual and adventurous independent films. Sources of financing and distribution can be found at these gatherings that were either nonexistent or difficult to find in my time.

Arguably the most revolutionary changes are the new advances in technology, which among other things have brought increasingly cheaper camera equipment and computer programs for editing and special effects. This benefits everyone, including filmmakers who work independently, by choice or necessity, outside the system.

Finally, there is also the future potential of the internet itself as a method of distribution, not just for major production and distribution companies, but for self distribution.

With all the options that exist today, if I were beginning my career as a filmmaker, I would not choose to make exploitation films.

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.