If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Five): Communities of Users

This is part five of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.

Communities of Users

Rethinking the Individual Consumer

So, does it make sense any more to speak about media audiences or for that matter, consumers in this brave new world of spreadable media? Probably not. Witness the profusion of new terms which seek to describe "those people formerly known as the audience." (Rosen, 2006) Some call them (us, really) "loyals," (Jenkins 2006) stressing the value of consumer commitment in an era of channel zapping. Some are calling them "media-actives," (Frank 2004 stressing a generational shift with young people expecting greater opportunities to reshape media content than their parents did. Some are calling them "prosumers," (Toffler 1980) suggesting that as consumers produce and circulate media, they are blurring the line between amateur and professional. Some are calling them "inspirational consumers" (Roberts 2005), "connectors" or "influencers," suggesting that some people play a more active role than others in shaping media flows.

Recently Facebook was struggling with definitions such as these. In an aim to separate the users from the businesses, Facebook created a new profile category called 'pages'. When relating with a business' page, instead of becoming a friend, in usual Facebook fashion, the user becomes a fan. Six months after Facebook launched this new category, the terms are already starting to become murkier, and now in the users profile it no longer says "Jane is a fan of" but "Jane's Pages", the term is more open yet also more ambiguous. Andrew Lockhart, at the Thinking Interactive blog, suggests that companies might want to allow the user to define what type of relationship they want to have, between, for instance, fan, advocate, friend, coworker. Such a move would also give businesses a better understanding of how these users want to engage with them. Sometimes we just want to buy things which are adequate to the purposes we want to use them for but not so vital to our sense of ourselves that we want to proclaim them to other people. The Facebook interface offered too limited a range of options for expressing our diverse affiliations with brands. Even where consumers actively seek to spread your content or advocate for your brand, they want to do it on their own terms and may be very particular about the kind of language they use to describe this relationship.

For some time now it was thought that the way to insure this success was by reaching the so-called "influencers", this term comes from Malcom Gladwell's (2000) book The Tipping Point. As Gladwell puts it, "What we are really saying is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." Gladwell's "influencer" model has become almost an article of faith in most discussions of viral media. The most widely quoted example is the comeback made by Hush Puppies shoes, according to Gladwell, due to their adoption by specific Williamsburg tastemakers. He bases his theory on Stanley Milgram's 'Six Degrees of Separation' study, where 160 Nebraskans were instructed to send a letter to a particular stockbroker in Boston by giving it to someone they thought was socially closer to that person. As is now widely known, it took roughly 6 people for each letter to reach its destination. When Gladwell analyzed the study he discovered that it was the same three friends of the stockbroker who provided the final link, and this is where the "influencers" theory comes from, determining that certain connectors are more important than others.

For the past seven years, network-theory scientist Duncan Watts (Dodds, Muhammad and Watts, 2003) has been studying these results and running other experiments of his own. After testing Miligram's theory with 61,000 people he confirmed the average length of the chain was in fact six links, but he did not find any evidence of "influencers". There were as many chances for a message to get passed by a "super-connected" person than by an average one. Messages move through society from one weakly connected individual to another. So the question now becomes, not how to reach the influencers, but how do individuals choose to behave in a networked society and what kinds of social structures best support the spread of content.

Yochai Benkler (2007) argues:

Human beings are and always have been diversely motivated beings. We act instrumentally, but also noninstrumentally. We act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and gratification and social connectedness.

This seemingly simple statement further more complicates the idea of a networked society and hinders attempts to predict the way communities of users will act. On the other hand, this more nuanced vision allows us to have a deeper understanding of the diverse online behaviors. For instance, there are countless explanation for why people might join a particular social network or make the decisions they do when they come there.

According to Benkler, this shift into a networked information culture does improves the practical capacities of individuals in that:

1. It improves their capacity to do for and by themselves.
2. It enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others.
3. It improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.

It is because of these empowered individuals, their new capacities, and their desire for social interactions that spreadable media is possible. If the technology was available, but society hadn't undergone any cultural changes, we would still be operating exclusively under a sticky model. Benkler has observed that this new society gives "individuals a significantly greater role in authoring their own lives, by enabling them to perceive a broader range of possibilities and by providing them a richer baseline against which to measure the choices they in fact make."

Consumers are choosing to be part of participatory culture in diverse and fluid ways. Forrester Research has developed a useful taxonomy of the types of participation that occur in networked environments; it starts with the most passive users and finishes with the most active participants that publish their own content at least once a month. It's important to note that while this ladder helps us visualize a complex process, users don't necessarily adhere permanently to these roles, and more than likely, behave in different manners within different communities. Moreover, seeing it as depicting a process of ever more intense engagement with media content may mask the degree to which it also describes an economy, with each rung of the ladder performing tasks which are needed to support those below and sometimes above them. So, even some one who is a lurker may provide a sense of empowerment to contributors by expanding the scale of the community and thus motivating them to put more effort into their work. Someone who is a critic may create value for creators but so may someone who collects what the creators create. And the interplay between these different kinds of cultural participants creates opportunities for communication to take place and thus for content to be transmitted.

Rethinking Communities

Such communities are also quite diverse in themselves. In fact, games scholar James Paul Gee (2004) has defined some of these groups as "affinity spaces," affinity that is, for a common endeavor. He argues that the romantic notions of community do not apply here as engaging with one another is a secondary objective, if it exists at all, in some cases, though it may be a primary objective in others. Gee is interested in the kinds of informal learning which takes place in the cultures of gamers, for example, which depend heavily on the sharing of knowledge towards common if sometimes contradictory goals. Such "affinity spaces" can provide greater motivation for the production and circulation of information, may offer a "hothouse" context where new ideas may emerge, may offer motivation for people to intensify their participation. We form non-exclusive relationships to these kinds of "affinity spaces": we may have multiple interests and thus we may engage with multiple different "affinity spaces" in the course of any given day. Older notions of community often started from assumptions of exclusive memberships, whereas this focus on social mobility and multiple commitments helps us to understand how content might spread quickly between different "affinity spaces" as members trade information from one site to another. Not all "affinity spaces" operate according to the same social dynamics. Lara Lee, from Jump Associates, has offered a promising typography for thinking about the social structures of different kinds of communities:

• Pools: Here people have loose associations with each other, but a strong association with a common endeavor or with the values of the community. Most brand communities are pools, so are most political organizations.
• Webs: Webs are organized through individual social connections, so the ties with each member are stronger and they operate in decentralized manner.
• Hubs: In a Hub, individuals form loose social associations around a central figure, as in the case of fan clubs. Hubs may form around brands but they are more likely to form around dynamic figures who embody the values of their company -- a figure like Microsoft's Bill Gates, say, or Virgin's Richard Branson. Such strategies only work when there is a clear connection between the brand's values and the personality of this central figure.

Each of these social structures may be valuable from the point of view of a brand or a media franchise. Hubs are most likely to be influenced through dominant figures, whereas the other two may be shaped by any member. Media content which supports shared activities is most apt to circulate through pools, while that which sustains social connections is most apt to be valued within webs.

Lee's taxonomy seek to understand what motivates our membership in particular kinds of shared social spaces. Others have sought to explain the different barriers to entry which shape alternative kinds of communities:

• Open: These spaces do not require any registration in order to participate. Users can leave anonymous posts, as is the case on some kinds of blogs or online forums. However, without some form of reputation system, the possibility of engaging in a common endeavor is more limited, resulting in short lived communal experiences. Members feel little or no strong emotional ties to such communities which they enter and exit on a whim. They may move through many such social spaces in the course of a single session online.
• Free registration: This is the most common way of implementing a space for a community exchange, it's present in the majority of social networks (the ones that operate by outside selection are the exception) and most blogs and message boards. This model has given sites like Amazon the necessary data to customize itself to its community's and individual user's needs. It's in these open and free communities where the spread of media is possible and successful.
• Purchase: These spaces function within the logic of a sticky model. They operate under the assumption that once you buy your way in, you will stay in. Evidently most of the content within these spaces is proprietary and its spread is limited. The transmission of desired content beyond its borders poses a threat to its subscription model, though closing off that content from wider circulation often makes it harder for potentially interested consumers to determine the value of what it has to offer. These spaces tend to be hubs with very little interaction between the users and it is this lack of strong social ties which has led to growing skepticism about so-called corporate communities.
• Outside Selection: These are closed spaces with gatekeeper. Their value is in their exclusivity and specificity, but due to their closed off nature, they don't encourage the spread of media, although they might generate buzz.

Although we've used the concept brand communities a couple of times, it's important to reiterate that communities aren't created, they are courted. Most brands will need to court a range of different communities and travel across pools, webs, and hubs if they want to reach the full range of desired consumers. To achieve that, they must embrace what filmmaker Lance Weiler calls "The Scattershot Approach." The idea is to be available for your users in whichever way and every way they deem appropriate, be it through a web site, widget, RSS feed or embeddable video, making the process of finding and communicating with you as easy and enjoyable as possible. That may be the strongest incentive for shifting from a sticky paradigm, which often is a one-size-fits-all model, towards a spreadable paradigm, which allows consumers with diverse interests to retrofit your content to serve their local needs and interest. Your job is to make it available to them in a form where they can deploy it and often to provide them with the tools or widgets required to make it accessible to others within their communities.

References

Benkler, Yochai (2007). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Networks Transform Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Dodds, Peter Sheridan, Muhammad, Roby and Watts, Duncan J. (2003) "An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks." Science, 301(8), pp. 827-829.

Domb, Ana. (2008) "Bringing Awesome to Self-Distribution," Convergence Culture Consortium Blog,

Frank, Betsy (2004). "Changing Media, Changing Audiences." Remarks at the MIT Communication Forum, Cambridge, MA. April 1.

Gee, James (2004). Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. New York: Routledge.

Gladwell, Malcolm (2000) The Tipping Point: How Little Things can make a Big Difference. Boston: Little Brown.

Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Lee, Lara. (2007) "Lara Lee on brand Community Pioneer Harley-Davidson." Boston University.

Lockhart, Andrew (2008). "The 9 Types of Brand Community Expanded." Thinking Interactive.

Roberts, Kevin (2005). Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands. New York:Powerhouse.

Rosen, Jay (2006). "The People Formerly Known as the Audience." PressThink, June 27.

Toffler, Alvin (1980). The Third Wave. New York: Morrow.

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Four): Thinking Through the Gift Economy

This is part four of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting. Lewis Hyde: Thinking Through the Gift Economy

Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983) represents perhaps the best guide on the ways that gift economies operate within the modern world. For that reason, we want to walk through some of his basic claims about the relations between commodity culture and the gift economy.

In a commodity culture, goods are traded as wages for labor or are purchased directly. Neither transaction shapes the circulation of materials within a gift economy: "A gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us." (p.xvi). Gifts depend on altruistic motivations; they circulate through acts of generosity and reciprocity. Their exchange is governed by social norms rather than contractual relations.

The circulation of gifts is socially rather than economically motivated: "Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved." Furthermore "when gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges." (p.xx) The circulation of goods is not simply symbolic of the social relations between participants; it helps to constitute them. Hyde identifies three core obligations which are shared among those who participate in a gift economy: "the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate." (p.xxi) Each of these acts help to break down boundaries between participants, reflecting a commitment to good relations and mutual welfare.

Gift economies are relatively dynamic in terms of the fluid circulation of goods while commodity cultures are relatively dynamic in terms of the fluid social relations between participants. As Hyde explains, a "clean" trade within a commodity culture "leaves people unconnected," (p.29) since it involves no future obligation between the buyer and seller. Under such conditions, "wealth will lose its motions and gather in isolated pools....Property is plagued by entropy and wealth can become scarce even as it increases." (p.29) The commodity, he suggests, moves towards wherever there is a profit to be made, while a gift moves "towards an empty space," towards resolving conflicts or expanding the social network. (p.29) By contrast, he writes, "To convert an idea into a commodity means, broadly speaking, to establish a boundary of some sort so that the idea cannot move from person to person without a toll or fee. Its benefit or usefulness must then be reckoned and paid for before it is allowed to cross the boundary." (p.105) In so far as the new media ecology depends on spreadability, it needs to embrace the fluidity of exchange which enables a gift economy rather than the stasis that emerges from commodity culture.

In a gift economy, 'status', 'prestige' or 'esteem' take the place of cash renumeration' as the primary drivers of cultural production and social transaction. Of course, even within a commodity culture, the production of cultural goods is rarely motivated entirely by profit. Artists also seek recognition for what they create; they seek to influence the culture; they seek to build reputations; they seek to express personal meanings. Only a complex set of negotiations within creative industries allow artist to serve both sets of goals at the same time. As Mark Deuze (2006) notes, anxieties about the free circulation of their output within a participatory culture are motivated both by a sense of losing artistic control and by the perceived economic threat to their livelihood.

Conversely, we seem to be seeing a series of misrecognitions between Web 2.0 companies and consumers as the companies misunderstand what motivates participation. On the one hand, consumers increasingly resent the ways that companies transform their labors of love into commodities which can be bought and sold for revenue. There is a growing recognition that profiting on freely given creative labor poses ethical challenges which are in the long run socially damaging to both the companies and the communities involved. On the other hand, many participants are frustrated when companies offer them financial compensations which are at odds with their understanding of the social transactions which are facilitated through the exchange of gifts. Fan communities, for example, have long-standing social taboos against "exploiting" other fans for personal gain, wanting to share their creative goods outside of commodity relations, rather than seeking rewards for what they produce. C3 research affiliate Abigail Derecho argues that the gift economy has gendered implications, with women traditionally associated with crafts in a gift economy and men associated with art within a commodity culture. Hyde would support this argument, suggesting that salaries tend to be lower within those professions which have historically been associated with the gift economy, not simply because they attract more women but also because they provide other kinds of social compensation.

Hyde sees commodity culture and the gift economy as alternative systems for measuring the merits of a transaction. He writes, "A commodity has value... A gift has worth." (p.78) By value, here, Hyde primarily means "exchange value," that is, the rate at which goods and services can be exchanged for money. Such exchanges are "measurable" and "quantifiable" because there are agreed upon measurements of value. By "worth," he means those qualities we associate with things that "you can't put a price on." Sometimes, we refer to what he is calling "worth" as sentimental value. It is not an estimate of what the thing costs but rather what it means to us. Worth is thus variable even among those who participate within the same community, even among those in the same family, hence the complex negotiations which occur around possessions when a beloved member of a family passes away. Worth can not be measured, though it can be negotiated, but in doing so, we have to take claims about worth at face value, since they have to do with internal emotional states.

Commodity culture and the gift economy are animated by different fantasies, which in turn shape the kinds of meanings which are going to be produced and transmitted around the exchange of goods. Hyde writes, "Because of the bonding power of gifts and the detached nature of commodity exchange, gifts have become associated with community and with being obliged to others, while commodities are associated with alienation and freedom" (p. 86). The values which shape exchanges in a commodity culture have to do with personal expression, freedom, social mobility, the escape from constraints and limitations, the enabling of new "possibilities". We sometimes refer to such fantasies as escapism or social experimentation; they are closely associated with the patterns of "transformation" and "plentitude" which Grant McCracken has documented. The fantasies which animate the exchange of gifts are often nostalgic, having to do with the reassertion of traditional values, the strengthening of social ties, the acceptance of mutual obligations, and the comfort of operating within familiar social patterns.

Because the exchange of goods within a gift economy brings with it social expectations, not all gifts can be accepted. In that sense, there are goods and services which literally can not be given away, because even in the absence of an explicit value proposition, consumers are wary of hidden obligations, unstated motives, or hidden interests which come smuggled inside the gift, much like the classic myth of the Trojan Horse. Hyde describes some circumstances where gifts are inappropriate: "On the simplest level, we are wary of gifts in any situation that calls for reckoning and discrimination....A gift, no matter how well intentioned, deflects objective judgement" (p.92). Even traditional societies, then, distinguish between gifts which facilitate generalized good will and bribes which are designed to distort or corrupt process of judgment. At the same time, the translation of gifts into commodities can be socially damaging. Hyde writes:

We do not deal in commodities when we wish to initiate or preserve ties of affection....Emotional connection tends to preclude quantitative evaluation....When a decision involves something that clearly cannot be priced, we refrain from submitting our actions to the calculus of cost-benefit analysis (p.85).

Both sets of category confusions represent potential pitfalls for companies seeking to negotiate the boundaries between commodity culture and the gift economy. That said, Hyde does believe it is possible for there to be valued and meaningful transactions between these two social systems:

The boundary can be permeable....Put generally, within certain limits what has been given us as a gift may be sold in the marketplace and what has been earned in the marketplace may be given as gift. Within certain limits, gift wealth can be rationalized and market wealth can be eroticized (p.357-358).

Hyde's use of the word, "erotic" here is especially evocative, meant to refer to the ways that the exchange of goods gains emotional intensity as it mediates between two or more participants. If "diamonds are a girl's best friend," as the old song goes, it is both because they have extreme value within a commodity culture and because they are emotionally meaningful within a gift economy.

We might understand spreadable media as content which passes between the commodity culture and the gift economy. Each of the above contrasts between the two social systems are helpful in understanding what kinds of terms might best facilitate exchanges between them. Each also helps us to identify historic sites of conflict or misunderstandings between the diversely motivated agents involved in the flow of content across the current mediascape. Many of these contradictions surfaced in the controversy which surrounded the launch of FanLib, a Web 2.0 company which sought to capitalize on the circulation of fan fiction. Fan fiction had been a part of the gift economy of the web for more than a decade, representing a cultural practice which dated back to Star Trek fandom in the 1960s. Seeing their stories as a "labor of love" which was designed to be shared with the community of others who shared their interests, fans have reluctantly charged money to recoup the costs of printing zines but there was a strong prohibition against any attempts to profit financially from the exchange of stories.

Some fans welcomed the emergence of digital distribution because it lowered the costs of sharing stories and thus pulled fan fiction fully into the gift economy. There was also a perception that the absence of financial profit helped to protect fans from prosecution for what might otherwise have been seen as an attempt to capitalize on the original producer's intellectual property. FanLib, however, sought to pull the production and circulation of fan fiction more fully into the commodity culture: they wanted to monetize on the traffic that fan stories drew to their sites, a step which provoked strong backlash from those most committed to fandom's gift economy. They showed little grasp of what motivated the activities of the gift economy: at various times, they sought to compensate fans either through a share of the revenue or through giving them access to the media producers, neither of which reflected the system of status and reputation which had emerged within fandom.

The threat that fan fiction might be commoditized motivated some fans to create the Organization of Transformative Works, which would, among other things, create an alternative web portal for distributing fan created works totally outside of commercial imperatives. Yet, despite the controversy, FanLib did attract a significant number of contributors. C3 researcher Xiaochang Li (2007) discovered that many of those posting on the site did not feel strong ties to the existing fan community and did not understand their cultural production in terms of "gifts" to fellow fans. These fans did not see a conflict between what motivated their creative expression and the logic of a commodity culture. That said, it was not clear that such fans were as valuable to FanLib or the rights holders because they were less "connected" to the larger fan community, were less likely therefore to draw other fans to the site or to help expand the potential markets for the series being depicted.

Value, Worth and the Transfer of Meaning

For a good to move from commodity culture to a gift economy, there has to be some point where value gets transformed into worth, where what has a price becomes priceless, where economic investment gives way to sentimental investment. If we do not understand how this occurs, we probably cannot understand what motivates consumers to "spread" advertising and other media content within their social networks. When people pass along branded content, they are not doing so as paid employees motivated by economic gain; they are doing so as members of social communities involved in activities which are meaningful to them on either an individual or social level. Symbolic goods stop circulating when they take on such economic value that there is no longer an incentive to give them to someone else or where their exchange fails to serve social goals within a particular community. In other words, symbolic goods cease their movement when they assume too much value or too little worth.

In Culture and Consumption, Grant McCracken (1988) brought together anthropological and marketing literature to offer an account of the way "meaning transfer" shapes the circulation of goods. McCracken starts from the premise that the circulation of goods is accompanied by the circulation of meaning: "Meaning is constantly flowing to and from its several locations in the social world, aided by the collective and individual efforts of designers, producers, advertisers, and consumers." Both designers and advertisers draw on meanings already in the culture around them as they seek to construct offerings that will be valued by their potential consumers. Advertising, as seen by McCracken, helps to move both the products and the cultural claims being made about the products into the life world of consumers. Once consumers have purchased the goods and bought into the symbolic meanings that surround them, they perform a series of rituals which are designed to integrate both goods and meanings into their everyday social experiences. In a later revision of this argument, McCracken (2005b) writes "Consumers turn to their goods not only as bundles of utility with which to serve functions and satisfy needs but also as bundles of meaning with which to fashion who they are and the world in which they live." (p.102)

McCracken (1988) identifies four different kinds of consumer rituals which help us to adapt acquired goods into symbolic resources:

• Exchange Rituals -- McCracken suggests that when we select a gift for someone else, we do so with an awareness of what makes this gift meaningful. A lover giving a gift seeks to symbolize something of their emotional investment in the relationship -- think about the difference between white and red roses, for example. A parent giving a gift to a child seeks to express and embody some of their hopes for the kind of person that the child will become -- think of the whole line of "Baby Einstein" products for example.
• Possession Rituals -- McCracken argues that consumers spend a great deal of time asserting their claim on goods which enter their lives from the outside. We like to "perform" our ownership of those goods through "cleaning, discussing, comparing, reflecting, showing off and even photographing many...possessions." At a higher level, he describes a process of "personalization" where goods are altered to better express the personality of their owners.
• Grooming Rituals -- McCracken claims that for some goods, meaning is perishable and certain practices need to be repeated in order to extract value and meaning from them. These practices often center around either practices of personal grooming or the grooming of the goods themselves.
• Divestment Rituals -- For McCracken, these rituals need to be performed when goods change hands -- first, to exorcise the imprint of the previous owner so that they may be more fully one's own and then later, to strip aside any emotional investments we have made into goods which we now must dispose or "regift" to others.

Each of these claims may be useful in thinking about how symbolic goods -- such as spreadable media content -- functions in the new world of social networks. But to do so, we need to recognize some core differences. First, for McCracken (1988), goods are "an opportunity to make culture material" (p.88). That is, goods attach symbolic meanings to physical objects. To draw on a now tired but useful distinction, goods are atoms. Yet, the kind of cultural goods we are discussing throughout this white paper are much more often virtual rather than physical, bytes and not atoms. They may still render visible the often implicit assumptions through which we organize our culture: "The consumer system supplies individuals with the cultural materials to realize their various and changing ideas of what it is to be a man or a woman, middle-aged or elderly, a parent, a citizen, or a professional" (p.88). We can see the widgets on our profile pages, the links on our blogs, the refinements on our avatars, as doing a similar kind of social work -- as giving expressive form to our values and performing certain kinds of social identities.

It matters, though, that material goods are limited: they can only exist in one place at one time and to give them to someone else is to give them up yourself. Virtual goods, however, can be shared because they can be infinitely replicated. I can have my "cupcake" on Facebook and eat it too, or more importantly, I can share it with you without having to give it up myself. It is clear that personalization may play as strong if not a stronger role in such a system -- as a means of distinguishing between countless copies of the same cultural good. Yet, we may have to spend less time with divestment rituals because the good we receive is no longer a good taken from the hands of another.

For McCracken (1988), there remains something arbitrary about the assignment of particular meanings to particular goods, with advertisers involved in a series of competing bids for interpretation. Yet in the case of spreadable meaning, what we are circulating is often not the material good but the advertisement itself. It is involved in the exchange of meaning from its conception, though the meanings may change through the process of consumption just as goods may be altered, repurposed, or redeployed by consumers through the processes of possession, grooming, and divestment rituals.

Second, for all of his reliance on anthropological theory, McCracken (1988) holds onto the idea of consumers as individuals who are motivated by personal desires and goals, "engaged in an ongoing enterprise of self-creation," rather than as parts of larger social networks and cultural communities. Indeed, his account of consumption in the North American context stresses all of the ways that identity is optional -- that we choose which social categories are operative and which are irrelevant to our presentation of ourselves. Going back to Hyde (1983), then, the fantasies he sees expressed through consumer goods are those we associate with commodity culture -- those having to do with freedom and individuality -- rather than those of the gift economy-- having to do with tradition and social cohesion.

As we think about why we pass along media content, though, we need to recognize that we are both expressive individuals and social beings, that we seek both to personalize content and to share it with others. We might understand how this process plays out by thinking about the ways social networks change the process of taste-making and gate-keeping which McCracken describes in this essay's discussion of fashion. For McCracken, what counts as fashion gets defined rhetorically through journalists who "serve as gatekeepers of a sort, reviewing aesthetic, social and cultural innovations as these first appear." These professional gatekeepers "winnow" down selections before these options even reach the population of early adopters. In a social network, however, this power of evaluation and "winnowing" is dispersed. Each member potentially assumes the role of grassroots intermediary, contributing to a collective process which evaluates and ranks cultural goods and thus speeds or retards their circulation.

References:

Deuze, Mark (2006). "Media Work and Institutional Logics," Deuzeblog, July 18.

Hyde, Lewis. (1983). The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage.

McCracken, Grant (1986). Culture and Consumption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Three): The Gift Economy and Commodity Culture

This is part three of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting. The Gift Economy and Commodity Culture

Spreadability and the Moral Economy

Consumers, both individually and collectively, exert agency in the spreadability model: they are not impregnated with media messages; they select material that matters to them from the much broader array of media content on offer. They do not simply pass along static content; they transform the content so that it better serves their own social and expressive needs. Content does not remain in fixed borders but rather it circulates in unpredicted and often unpredictible directions, not the product of top-down design but rather of a multitude of local decisions made by autonomous agents negotiating their way through diverse cultural spaces.

Consumers do not simply consume; they recommend content they like to their friends who recommend it to their friends who recommend it on down the line. They do not simply "buy" cultural goods; they "buy into" a cultural economy which respects and rewards their participation. Nothing spreads widely in the new digital economy unless it engages and serves the interests of both consumers and producers. Otherwise, the circulation gets blocked by one side or the other, either through corporations constructing road blocks (legal or technical) upon its spread or through consumers refusing to circulate content which fails to serve their interests. Nothing generates value in this new digital economy unless the transaction is seen as meaningful to all involved.

Too often, Web 2.0-era companies speak about creating communities around their products and services, rather than recognizing that they are more often courting existing communities with their own histories, agendas, hierarchies, traditions, and practices. So, rather than talking about the Saturn "community" as a "consumer tribe" (Cova, Kozinets, and Shankar, 2007), we might more productively analyze what the contemporary car company has done to capture the interests and win the loyalty of a hundred year plus history of motorist clubs. The first model implies that Saturn can set the terms for the consumers interactions with the brand. The second suggests the motorist culture created its own values and aspirations which Saturn has to address if it's car is to gain a central place in its social life.

The same is true of fandoms: we tend to discuss them in very limiting terms, often in relation to a single text as in "Trekkers" or "Potterheads," when in fact, fans tend to move nomadically from text to text in the course of their involvement within fan culture. They may be drawn into fandom by a given text but quickly their conversation broadens to include a range of other works also embraced by fellow fans and when their interest in a particular franchise ends, many will shift their fan loyalties to other programmes which satisfy similar needs and interests. As a rule, we are misled when we focus on what media does to people rather than trying to understand what people are doing with media and why. We start from the premise that consumers only help facilitate the circulation of media content when it is personally and socially meaningful to them, when it enables them to express some aspect of their own self-perception or enables valued transactions that strengthen their social ties with others.

Courting communities is tricky. Forcing communities to talk about a certain product is almost impossible. These obstacles were swiftly dealt with in the construction of the site "Being Girl" which belongs to the Tampax and Always brands. As Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff comment on their new book Groundswell:

Beingirl.com is not a community site about tampons. (Who would want to visit that?) It's about everything that young girls deal with. The site is very lightly branded and it's loaded with information about music, make-up, relationships and spaces for the girls to talk amongst themselves and with experts. Procter & Gamble had launched different versions of the sites in other parts of the world and also a Latina-geared version section of the US site called "Solo de Chikas: hot topic, cool musik and your place to speak out.

Tampax are courting a more specific community that is underrepresented in traditional marketing endeavors, undoubtedly hoping that this interest will entice the participants to become loyal Tampax/Always consumers. At the very least, though, P&G has opened a fluid communication channel with an elusive demographic. Bernoff and Li suspect that the site's success is due in part to the fact that P&G "solved the customers' problems instead of its own", the costumers were willing to share. Add subtle brand messages and free samples and P&G was able to become part of the dialogue from which it was previously excluded. A key takeaway here is that companies should figure out what existing communities are most likely to use their product and what they are doing with it; they should identify basic needs of that community and develop informational resources to support them.

Knowing that the community pre-exists the brand or franchises engagement with it means corporations need to legitimate their entrance into this space. In earlier white papers (Austin 2006), we have introduced the idea that participants in economic exchanges are governed by an implicit set of understandings about what is "right" and what is "legitimate" for each player to do. This is what social historian E.P. Thompson described as a "moral economy." The moral economy describes the set of social norms and mutual understandings which make it possible for two parties to do business with each other. In some cases, the moral economy holds in check the aggressive pursuit of short term self interest in favor of decisions which preserve long term social relations between participants. In a small scale economy, for example, a local dealer is unlikely to "cheat" a customer because they need to count on continued trade with this person over an extended period of time and thus need to build up their reputation within this community.

The measure of a moral economy is the degree to which participants trust each other to hold up their end of these implicit agreements. When there is a sudden and dramatic shift in the economic or technological infrastructure, as has occured with the introduction of digital media, it can create a crisis in the "moral economy," diminishing the level of trust within participating parties, and perhaps even wearing away the mechanisms which insure the legitimacy of economic exchanges. At such times, we can see all involved making bids for legitimation, that is proposing new models or frameworks through which parties may reach a new understanding of what should provide the basis for fair and meaningful interactions.

We can see, for example, notions of "file sharing" and "piracy" as two competing moral systems by which we might make sense of the circulation of media content, one put forth by consumers eager to legitimate their idea of the free exchange of content, the other put forth by the media industry eager to close off certain practices as "illegitimate" and damaging to their long term economic interests. The excessive rhetoric surrounding the circulation of music at the present time suggests just how far out of balance the moral understandings of producers and consumers have become. New technologies enable consumers to exert much greater impact on the circulation of media content than ever before but they also enable companies to police once private behavior as it takes on greater public dimensions. These shifts enable some to describe a crisis in copyright, others a crisis in fair use, and all sides to be more or less accurate in describing the tensions which have emerged.

Discussions of "viral media," or of what we are calling "spreadable" media, point to places where a new moral economy may be emerging. They allow us to map forms of audience participation which are seen as valuable to advertisers and media companies. Spreadable media represents an alternative framing of the free circulation of media content to the prevailing metaphor of "piracy."

Focusing on what we are calling here spreadability may thus offer us some tentative first steps towards renegotiating the social contract between media producers and consumers in a way which may be seen as legitimate and mutually rewarding to all involved. For this to occur, we need to understand that consumers and producers often follow different dictates, not simply because of competing economic interests, but because they have different motives, make different judgments about value, and follow different social obligations; in other words, they operate within separate and parallel economic orders. We might describe these two worlds as commodity culture and the gift economy. Certainly, most of us who have grown up in capitalist economies understand the set of expectations which shape the buying and selling of goods. Yet, we also operate in another social order which centers around the giving and accepting of gifts. One (commodity culture) places greater emphasis on economic motives, the other (gift economy) on social motives.

Something of the mismatch between these two worlds is suggested by Ian Condry (2004) in his discussion of file-sharing among music fans:

Unlike underwear or swimsuits, music falls into that category of things you are normally obligated to share with your dorm mates, family, and friends. Yet to date, people who share music files are primarily represented in media and business settings as selfish, improperly socialized people who simply want to get something -- the fruits of someone else's labor -- for free. In fact, if asked directly by a friend to share music, sharing is the only reasonable thing to do.

Within commodity culture, then, sharing music is economically damaging, whereas in the gift economy, the failure to share music is socially damaging. We are never going to resolve such conflicts until we develop a better model for thinking about the interface between the two.

Gift Giving and Reciprocity Online

In arguing that much of what goes on in cyberspace might be understood in terms of a gift economy, we are in fact making a claim which is at least as old as the web. Howard Rheingold's 1993 book The Virtual Community, for instance, mentions the gift economy as central to the relationships across the online world:

Reciprocity is a key element of any market-based culture, but the arrangement I'm describing feels to me more like a kind of gift economy in which people do things for one another out of a spirit of building something between them, rather than a spreadsheet-calculated quid pro quo. When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little extra something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions; different kinds of things become possible when this mind-set pervades. Conversely, people who have valuable things to add to the mix tend to keep their heads down and their ideas to themselves when a mercenary or hostile zeitgeist dominates an online community. In the virtual community I know best, elegantly presented knowledge is a valuable currency....Sometimes you give one person more information than you would give another person in response to the same query, simply because you recognize one of them to be more generous or funny or to-the-point or agreeable...A sociologist might say that my perceived helpfulness increased my pool of social capital. I can increase your knowledge capital and my social capital at the same time by telling you something that you need to know, and I could diminish the amount of my capital in the estimation of others by transgressing the group's social norms. The person I help might never be in a position to help me, but someone else might be.

Rheingold describes the gift economy operating in virtual worlds less in terms of a tit-for-tat exchange of value but rather as part of a larger reputation system in which one's contributions to the group are ultimately recognized and respected, even if there is no direct and explicit negotiation of worth at the time someone makes their contributions.

Richard Barbrook (1998), another early cybertheorist, argued that the gift economy trumped commodity culture in the world view of those who were the first to form online communities:

For most of its users, the Net is somewhere to work, play, love, learn and discuss with other people. Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money or politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas. When they go on-line, almost everyone spends most of their time participating within the gift economy rather than engaging in market competition. Because users receive much more information than they can ever give away, there is no popular clamour for imposing the equal exchange of the marketplace on the Net. Once again, the 'end of history' for capitalism appears to be communism.

Such values were built into the infrastructure of the web which was designed to facilitate the collaboration of scientists and researchers rather than to enable the metered access expected within a commodity culture.

In the world of the web, companies were relative late-comers, even though they now represent the dominant users of digital networks. As commercial values have spread into the web, they have had to negotiate with the older web ethos: there still remains great resistance to "spam," for example, as unwelcomed advertising, whereas commercials are taken more or less for granted in traditional broadcasting. Similarly, Stewart Brand (1995), another key thinker in the early history of web culture, evokes the idea of a gift economy to explain how companies create valued relations to their customers within this new cultural context. In short, Brand argues that for any company or business to succeed online they need to join the gift economy that defines online relations. "It means often giving away content." Online success is based on the build up of good will which companies can convert into economic transactions through other channels.

Many of these same assumptions about the ways that digital communities are shaped by the norms of a gift economy surfaced much more recently in danah boyd (2007)'s discussion of Facebook's introduction of a "gifting" function. Facebook gifts operate within each person's profile. Gift-giving is completely decentralized so people can choose gifts directly from their own profile page and pay Facebook through their account. Most gifts cost $1 and every once in a while Facebook offers a gift for free. Now the system is in place, manufacturing and reproduction costs are negligible, and, even though they work under a direct payment revenue model, Facebook adds value to the users' experience by letting them be in charge of distribution.

Features such as these are what make successful social networks different from a more complete contact directory. As boyd explains, the popularity and value of gifts on Facebook come from their somewhat intangible nature:

They do not have the same type of persistence as identity-driven purchases like clothing in (World of Warcraft). I think that it is precisely this ephemeralness that will make gifts popular. There are times for gift giving (predefined by society)...People write 'happy birthday' and send glitter for holidays...These expressions are not simply altruistic kindness. By publicly performing the holiday or birthday, the individual doing the expression looks good before her peers. It also prompts reciprocity so that one's own profile is then also filled with validating comments.

Yet despite their intangibility and ephemerality, Facebook's gift-driven economy is valuable, meaningful and crucial to the participation of many members of the network. In evoking the gift economy to talk about gifts which are bought and sold via Facebook, even as they are given freely to those in our social networks, boyd is acknowledging a permeability in the relations between commodity culture and the gift economy.

This should not be surprising: most of us purchase Christmas or birthday gifts at stores rather than making them ourselves and do not necessarily fear that their origins as commodities diminishes the sentiments that are expressed through their exchange. Whatever our myths may be about "gifts of the heart" and "labors of love," most of our gifts these days are manufactured and store bought. Yet, once we have made our purchases, the gift economy takes over and so to understand how digital goods circulate within and between social networks we need to develop a more nuanced understanding of how gift economies operate.

References

Austin, Alec. with Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, Ivan Askwith, and Sam Ford, (2006). Turning Pirates into Loyalists: The Moral Economy and an Alternative Response to File Sharing. Report Prepared for the Members of the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, Cambridge.

Barbrook, Richard (1998). "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy," First Monday, Vol. 3, No. 12 (December), accessed 30 March 2007.

Bernoff, Josh and Li, Charlene. (2008) Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press

boyd, danah (2007). "Facebook's Little Gifts." Apophenia. February 13.

Brand, Stewart (1995). "High Stakes in Cyberspace," Frontline, June 15.

Condry, Ian. (2004) "Cultures of Music Piracy: An Ethnographic Comparison of the US and Japan," International Journal of Cultural Studies 7, pp.343-363

Cova, Bernard, Robert Kozinets, and Avi Shankar (2007). Consumer Tribes. New York: Butterworth-Heinemann

Rheingold, Howard (1993) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Thompson, E.P. (1971) "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century." Past and Present, No. 50, pp.76-136.

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part Two): Sticky and Spreadable -- Two Paradigms

This is part two of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting. Sticky and Spreadable - Two Paradigms

From Viral to Spreadability

It is not hard to understand why the idea of both memes and the media virus would be attractive to marketers. If the right meme was deployed, theory suggests, it would successfully acquire people, reaching more and more possible consumers as goes. Similarly, Rushkoff's notion of "viral" circulation appeals to advertisers because it allows them to give up control over little more than the specific path of dissemination. In this scenario, they are cast as purposeful agent zeros, unleashing a message that spreads through its own volition, the instructions of replication imbedded in the DNA of the campaign.

But if the rising anxieties over brand equity, appropriation of content, miscommunication, lack of communication, and the ultimate value of viral campaigns is any indication, many advertisers are well aware that this model of "viral" media, which doesn't account for individual or social agency, does not accurately reflect the present media landscape. The idea of the "media virus" breaks down because people are making conscious choices about what media they are passing along and about the forms within which they are circulating it. As we saw in the discussion of the LOLcat meme above, the core message may be manipulated or turned against the original authors as it spreads across the internet. Consumers have shown a remarkable ability to turn advertising slogans and jingles against the companies that originated them. Fans have highjacked popular stories to express profoundly different interpretations than those of their authors.

Metaphors of "viral media" and "memes" emerged during a period of transition in the relationship between consumers and producers: first, this terminology reflected a shift away from the push-based model of the broadcast era towards the pull-based model of the early internet (characterized by talk of "stickiness"); second, the teminology maintained use value as we moved from an era of personalized media towards the increasingly communal practices associated with the rise of social networks and the emergence of what industry guru Tim O'Reilly (2005) identified as "the architecture of participation."

It is somewhat ironic that the idea of the media virus emerged at the same time as a shift towards greater acknowledgment of consumers as participants in meaning making within the networked media space. Shenja van der Graaf, in her 2003 article "Viral Experiences: Do You Trust Your Friends?" maintains "the main feature of viral marketing is that it heavily depends on interconnected peers. Viral Marketing is therefore inherently social" (van der Graaf, 2003, p.8). van der Graaf uses "viral" to describe a condition of movement and distribution of content that is linked to network behavior, and cites participation within a socially networked system as a central requirement of "viral" behavior.

Each step along this process made media companies more dependent upon the active engagement of their consumers and increased the urgency of understanding how and why cultural content circulates. Talk of "memes" and "media viruses" gave a false sense of security at a time when the old attention economy was in flux, resulting in widespread uncertainity about what might motivate consumer "engagement" in this new context. Such terms promised a pseudo-scientific model for thinking about consumer behavior, one which kept power firmly in the hands of media producers. In practice, they simply mystified the process, limiting the industry's ability to understand the complex factors which now shape the creation of value through the circulation of content within these new social networks.

We believe that the confusion wrapped surrounding the concepts of "memes" and "viruses" are not going to be easily resolved. As we have seen, the terms are at once too encompassing and too limiting; they introduce false assumptions about how culture operate; they distort the power relations between producers and consumers at a time when media companies and brands need to learn to respect the increasingly empowered roles which their users are playing in the circulation and production of meaning around their products. Given these limits, these words mislead more than they clarify and need to be retired. To put it bluntly, the viral is not only sick; it's pushing up the daisies.

For that reason, we are proposing an alternative terminology, one which we think allows us to construct a more effective model that might inform future strategies. Rather than speaking about "viral media," we prefer to think of media as spreadable. Spreadability as a concept describes how the properties of the media environment, texts, audiences, and business models work together to enable easy and widespread circulation of mutually meaningful content within a networked culture. Talking about spreadability invites us to ask four basic questions:

1. What aspects of the contemporary media environment support the spread of media across different communities?
2. How do consumers create value for themselves and for companies through their spread of media?
3. What properties of content make it more likely to be spread?
4. How do companies benefit from the spread of their content?

The concept of "spreadability" preserves much of what was useful about the earlier models -- the idea that the movement of messages from person to person, from community to community, over time increases their effectiveness, and expands their impact. It recognizes the ways that later theorists such as van der Graaf or Knoebel and Lankshear have revised the earliest, relatively static and passive conceptions of "memes" and "viruses" to reflect the realities of the new social web, while suggesting this emerging paradigm is so substantively different from the initial conceptualizations as to require a new terminology. This new "spreadable" model allows us to avoid metaphors of "infection" and "contamination" which over-estimate the power of media companies and underestimate the agency of consumers. In so far as these metaphors distort the actual factors shaping the spread of media content in a networked culture, they result in less than fully effective campaigns. In this emerging model, consumers play an active role in "spreading" content rather than being the passive carriers of viral media: their choices, their investments, their actions determine what gets valued in the new mediascape. Recentering the discussion on choices consumers make, rather than choices media companies make, forces advertising and entertainment companies to pay closer attention to consumer's motivations and thus to design content which better aligns with their interests; it will also allow companies to adopt policies which sustain rather than repress this desire to help circulate relevant material throughout their social networks.

While older models of "memes" and "media viruses" focused attention on how ideas replicate and propagate, a spreadability model assumes that value originates as much through the act of transformation as through direct circulation. Spreadability assumes a world where mass content gets repositioned as it enters into a range of different niche communities. When material is produced according to a one-size-fits-all model, it necessarily imperfectly fits the needs of any given group of consumers. As content spreads, then, it gets remade -- either literally through various forms of sampling and remixing -- or figuratively via its insertion into ongoing conversations and interactions.

Such repurposing doesn't necessarily blunt or distort the goals of the original communicator. Rather, it may allow the message to reach new constituencies where it would otherwise have gone unheard. C3 affiliated researcher Grant McCracken (2005) points towards such a model when he suggests that the word consumer should be replaced by a new term, multiplier, to reflect the fact consumers expand the potential meanings that get attached to a brand by inserting it into a range of unpredicted contexts of use.

There is something in the term that invites us to ask whether the product, brand, innovation, campaign does actually give the "multiplier" anything he can, er, multiply.... Furthermore, "multipiers" also bids us ask, down the road, whether indeed the product, brand, innovation actually produced anything in the world. Did the multipliers multiply it, or is it still just sitting there? Finally, the term multipler may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in fact out of our control. All we can do is to invite the multiplier to participate in the construction of the brand by putting it to work for their own purposes in their own world. When we called them "consumers" we could think of our creations as an end game and their responses as an end state. The term "multiplier" or something like it makes it clear that we depend on them to complete the work.

We might compare these brand "multipliers" to "lead users" (Von Hippel, 2006): lead users (Ford, 2006) enable user innovation, helping to find and fix flaws, identify new markets, or model new uses of manufactured goods once they have shipped to market; these "multipliers" perform some of this same work for cultural goods, taking them places and deploying them in ways that would not have been envisioned by the people who produced them. Some of those uses will be tangential to the goals of the media companies; some may generate alternative sources of profit; some may expand the potential audience for entertainment properties or open the brand message to new interpretations and uses.

Consumers in this model are not simply "hosts" or "carriers" of alien ideas, but rather grassroots advocates for materials which are personally and socially meaningful to them. They have filtered out content which they think has little relevance to their community, while focusing attention on material which they think has a special salience in this new context. Spreadability relies on the one true intelligent agent -- the human mind -- to cut through the clutter of a hyper-mediated culture and to facilitate the flow of valuable content across a fragmented marketplace. Under these conditions, media which remains fixed in its location and static in its form fails to generate sufficient public interest and thus drops out of these ongoing conversations.

Spreadable and Sticky -- Two Models of Media Contact

We can understand what we mean by spreadablity by way of a contrast with earlier notions of "stickiness." A review of the top ten hits on Google for "stickiness" offers us a fairly consistent sense of the word's current functional definition. The term "sticky" first and foremost refers to websites which "grab and hold the attention of your visitor" (Meredian, n.d.). Some writers argue that "(customers will) come back and buy more goods, get more advice, and see more ads" (Sanchez, n.d.). Most others measure stickiness in terms of how long the visitor stays on a single visit or how many different pages the visitors looks at in the course of their stay.

Stickiness reflected the assumptions of personalized media: its central unit is the individual consumer. As one writer explains, "Measuring stickiness means that you'll have to track what individuals do, not just mass movements on your site. So you'll have to have them register or place cookies on their computers if you really want to know that much detail." (Nemeth-Johannes, n.d.) And stickiness is associated with pre-structured interactivity rather than open-ended participation with games, quizzes, and polls seen as devices for attracting and holding the interests of consumers.

This emphasis on "stickiness" was closely associated with the ongoing discussion of "push vs. pull" technologies: stickiness reflects anxiety about attracting and holding viewer interest in a world where consumers have to actively seek out the content they desire. Under the stickiness model, value comes either through charging for access to information (through some kind of subscription or service fee), by selling merchandise to consumers through some kind of e-commerce catalog, or by selling the eyeballs of site visitors to some outside party, most often to advertisers.

Sites such as Amazon or eBay represent the triumph of this "stickiness" model -- both sites depend greatly on the return of highly committed and strongly motivated consumers and upon multiple transactions per visit. Yet, even these sites depend on word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied customers, who more often than not discuss their interactions in other contexts, thus helping "spread" the word to potential visitors. As early as 1996 Amazon launched its highly successful affiliate marketing program, which offers designated 'Associates' as much as ten percent in referral fees for purchases made by visitors they helped to attract to retailer's sites. Consumers are encouraged to link their homepages or blogs back to Amazon, providing incentives for them to help increase their community's awareness of the site's products and services.

This program reflects the core insight that different books would be of interest within different communities, that people were more likely to buy books when they were recommended by people they already trusted in other contexts, and that discussion of books emerged organically in the midst of a range of other conversations and interactions. The Associates program, thus, reflects the value which comes in "spreading" one's message across a range of niche communities rather than seeking simply to attract and hold the attention of site visitors.

Put schematically, we might map nine core distinctions between Stickiness and Spreadability:

1. Stickiness seeks to attract and hold the attention of site visitors; Spreadability seeks to motivate and facilitate the efforts of fans and enthusiasts to "spread" the word.
2. Stickiness depends on concentrating the attention of all interested parties on a specific site or through a specific channel; spreadability seeks to expand consumer awareness by dispersing the content across many potential points of contact.
3. Stickiness depends on creating a unified consumer experience as consumers enter into branded spaces; spreadability depends on creating a diversified experience as brands enter into the spaces where people already live and interact.
4. Stickiness depends on prestructured interactivity to shape visitor experiences; spreadability relies on open-ended participation as diversely motivated but deeply engaged consumers retrofit content to the contours of different niche communities.
5. Stickiness typically tracks the migrations of individual consumers within a site; Spreadability maps the flow of ideas through social networks.
6. Under stickiness, a sales force markets to consumers; under spreadability, grassroots intermediaries become advocates for brands.
7. Stickiness is a logical outgrowth of the shift from broadcasting's push model to the web's pull model; spreadability restores some aspects of the push model through relying on consumers to circulate the content within their own communities.
8. Under stickiness, producers, marketers, and consumers are separate and distinct roles; spreadability depends on increased collaboration across and even a blurring of the distinction between these roles.
9. Stickiness depends on a finite number of channels for communicating with consumers; spreadability takes for granted an almost infinite number of often localized and many times temporary networks through which media content circulates.

In short, for media companies to fully grasp the advantages of spreadability, they have to unlearn the lessons of "stickiness," lessons which may be less effective than they once seemed, as a consequence of the next phase of evolution in the media ecology.

Not surprisingly, many sites today struggle to balance between these two competing models, often resulting in disappointment. Consider, for example, the case of Sonific, an early experiment in adopting the spreadable media model within the music industry. In 2006, Sonific offered 'customizable, flexible, Flash-based music widgets' enabling users to stream one or more songs from the Sonific catalog to almost any webpage. Material from Sonfic's catalog could be included in nearly any web-based application -- from modest blogs to social network pages and slideshows. Users could customize playlists and embed music from the catalog into their sites.

Sonfic offered full-length-tracks as free, promotional streams, operating under the "You hear, you like, you buy," rule proposed by UCE Birmingham Professor Andrew Dubber. By early 2008 Sonific had licensed over 200,000 tracks and had 80,000 users, but as of May 1 the service has closed operations citing unworkable licensing with the major record labels.

It seems that the industry's major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward.

- Sonific's CEO Gerd Leonhard, 2008.

The service's demise is certainly due, in part at least, to the recording industry's resistance to a spreadable model, a model that would actually encourage music fans to distribute content through decentralized networks. The music industry's anxieties about piracy lead them to want to lock down content rather than encouraging consumers to shape its circulation. All of this suggests a moment of transition: old assumptions are going to be hard to displace. For some industries and for some purposes, the sticky model will maintain even as other sectors of the branded entertainment sector are moving towards a more spreadable model. In the short term, we argue that companies need to know what model they are choosing and why.

The focus on spreadable media requires greater attention be paid to the social relations between media producers and consumers. There are significant differences between what motivates consumers to spread content and what motivates producers to seek the circulation of their brands. These differences can be understood in terms of the contrast between commodity culture and the gift economy.

References

Ford, Sam, with Henry Jenkins, Grant McCracken, Parmesh Shahani, Ivan Askwith, Geoffrey Long and Ilya Vedrashko (2006). Fanning the Audience's Flames: Ten Ways to Embrace and Cultivate Fan Communities, Report Prepared for the Members of the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, Cambridge.

Knobel, Michele & Lankshear, Colin (2007). New Literacies: Everyday Practices & Classroom Learning. Open University Press

Leonhard, Gerd. "Sonific Goes Offline on May 1 2008", Sonific.

McCracken, Grant (2005). "'Consumers' or 'Multipliers': A New Language for Marketing?," This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, November 10.

Meredian Design (n.d.) "Make It Sticky, Make 'Em Stay,"

Nemeth-Johannes, Cindy (n.d.) "Making Sticky Websites," The ABCs of Small Business.

O'Reilly, Tim (2005). "What is Web 2.0?," September 30.

Sanchez, Marcos (n.d.) "Eight Ways to Sticky Sites." Fuse.

van der Graaf, Shenja. "Viral Experiences: Do You Trust Your Friends," (author version), in Sandeep Krishnamurthy (ed.). Contemporary Research in E-Marketing, University of Washington. ed.. Pennsylvania: Idea Publishing, pp.166-185

Von Hippel, Eric (2006). Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge: MIT Press.

If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part One): Media Viruses and Memes

Over the next eight posts, I am going to be serializing a white paper which was developed last year by the Convergence Culture Consortium on the topic of Spreadable media. This report was drafted by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.

I was able to share some of the key insights from this research during my opening remarks at the Futures of Entertainment conference last fall, where they have sparked considerable discussion within the branded entertainment sector. We are hoping that sharing this work in progress with you will spark further debate, allowing us to tap the collective intelligence of our readers. Green, Sam Ford, and I are developing this research into a book, which will further map how information circulates across the emerging media landscape.

Introduction: Media Viruses and Memes

Use of the terms "viral" and "memes" by those in the marketing, advertising and media industries may be creating more confusion than clarity. Both these terms rely on a biological metaphor to explain the way media content moves through cultures, a metaphor that confuses the actual power relations between producers, properties, brands, and consumers. Definitions of 'viral' media suffer from being both too limiting and too all-encompassing. The term has 'viral' has been used to describe so many related but ultimately distinct practices -- ranging from Word-of-Mouth marketing to video mash-ups and remixes posted to YouTube -- that just what counts as viral is unclear. It is invoked in discussions about buzz marketing and building brand recognition while also popping up in discussions about guerilla marketing, exploiting social networks, and mobilizing consumers and distributors. Needless, the concept of viral distribution is useful for understanding the emergence of a spreadable media landscape. Ultimately, however, viral media is a flawed way to think about distributing content through informal or adhoc networks of consumers.

Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication -- that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities. In focusing on the involuntary transmission of ideas by unaware consumers, these models allow advertisers and media producers to hold onto an inflated sense of their own power to shape the communication process, even as unruly behavior by consumers becomes a source of great anxiety within the media industry. A close look at particular examples of Internet "memes" or "viruses" highlight the ways they have mutated as they have traveled through an increasingly participatory culture.

Given these limitations, we are proposing an alternative model which we think better accounts for how and why media content circulates at the present time, the idea of spreadable media. A spreadable model emphasizes the activity of consumers -- or what Grant McCracken calls "multipliers" -- in shaping the circulation of media content, often expanding potential meanings and opening up brands to unanticipated new markets. Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of "memes," a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use. This notion of spreadability is intended as a contrast to older models of stickiness which emphasize centralized control over distribution and attempts to maintain 'purity' of message.

In this section, we will explore the roots of the concept of viral media, looking at the concept of the "media viruses" and its ties to the theory of the "meme." The reliance on a potent biological metaphor to describe the process of communication reflects a particular set of assumptions about the power relations between producers, texts, and consumers which may obscure the realities these terms seek to explain. The metaphor of "infection" reduces consumers to the involuntary "hosts" of media viruses, while holding onto the idea that media producers can design "killer" texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural "bloodstream." While attractive, such a notion doesn't reflect the complexity of cultural and communicative processes. A continued dependency on terms based in biological phenomena dramatically limits our ability to adequately describe media circulation as a complex system of social, technological, textual, and economic practices and relations.

In the following, we will outline the limits of these two analogies as part of making the case for the importance of adopting a new model for thinking about the grassroots circulation of content in the current media landscape. In the end, we are going to propose that these concepts be retired in favor of a new framework -- Spreadable Media.

Definitional Fuzziness

Consider what happened when a group of advertising executives sat down to discuss the concept of viral media, a conversation which demonstrates the confusion about what viral media might be, about what it is good for, and why it's worth thinking about. One panelist began by suggesting viral media referred to situations "where the marketing messaging was powerful enough that it spread through the population like a virus," a suggestion the properties of viral media lie in the message itself, or perhaps in those who crafted that message. The second, on the other hand, described viral media in terms of the activity of consumers: "Anything you think is cool enough to send to your friends, that's viral." Later in the same exchange, he suggested "Viral, just by definition, is something that gets passed around by people."

As the discussion continued, it became clearer and clearer that viral media, like art and pornography, lies in the eye of the beholder. No one knew for sure why any given message "turned viral," though there was lots of talk about "designing the DNA" of viral properties and being "organic" to the communities through which messages circulated. To some degree, it seemed the strength of a viral message depends on "how easy is it to pass", suggesting viralness has something to do with the technical properties of the medium, yet quickly we were also told that it had to do with whether the message fit into the ongoing conversations of the community: "If you're getting a ton of negative comments, maybe you're not talking about it in the right place."

By the end of the exchange, no one could sort out what was meant by "viral media" or what metrics should be deployed to measure its success. This kind of definitional fuzziness makes it increasingly difficult to approach the process analytically. Without certainty about what set of practices the term refers to, it is impossible to attempt to understand how and why such practices work.

As already noted, the reliance on a biological metaphor to explain the way communication takes place -- through practices of 'infection' -- represents the first dificulty with the notion of viral media. The attraction of the infection metaphor is two-fold:

1. It reduces consumers, often the most unpredictable variable in the sender-message-receiver frame, to involuntary "hosts" of media viruses;
2. While holding onto the idea that media producers can design "killer" texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural "bloodstream."

Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 book Media Virus may not have invented the term "viral media", but his ideas eloquently describe the way these texts are popularly held to behave. The media virus, Rushkoff argues, is a Trojan horse, that surreptitiously brings messages into our homes -- messages can be encoded into a form people are compelled to pass along and share, allowing the embedded meanings, buried inside like DNA, to "infect" and spread, like a pathogen. There is an implicit and often explicit proposition that this spread of ideas and messages can occur not only without the user's consent, but perhaps actively against it, requiring that people be duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling content. Douglas Rushkoff insists he is not using the term "as a metaphor. These media events are not like viruses. They are viruses . . . (such as) the common cold, and perhaps even AIDS" (Rushkoff, 9, emphasis his).

Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediaspace. The "protein shell" of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style or even a pop hero -- as long as it can catch our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed. Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the datastream in the form of ideological code -- not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call "memes" (Rushkoff, p.9-10).

The "hidden agenda" and "embedded meanings" Rushkoff mentions are the brand messages buried at the heart of viral videos, the promotional elements in videos featuring Mentos exploding out of soda bottles, or Gorillas playing the drumline of In the Air Tonight . The media virus proposition is that these marketing messages -- messages consumers may normally avoid, approach skeptically, or disregard altogether -- are hidden by the "protein shell" of compelling media properties. Nestled within interesting bits of content, these messages are snuck into the heads of consumers, or wilfully passed between them.

These messages, Rushkoff and others suggest, constitute "memes", conceived by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 as a sort of cultural version of the gene. Dawkins was looking for a way to explain cultural evolution, imagining it as a biological system. What genes are to genetics, he suggested, memes would be to culture. Like the gene, the meme is driven to self-create, and is possessed of three important characteristics:

1. Fidelity -- memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind;
2. Fecundity -- memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves;
3. Longevity -- memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.

The meme, then, is "a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds" (Brodie, 1996, p. 32). They are the ideas at the center of virally spread events, some coherent, self-replicating idea which moves from person-to-person, from mind-to-mind, duplicating itself as it goes.

Language seems to 'evolve' by non-genetic means and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation (Dawkins, 1976, p.189).

Dawkins remained vague about the granularity of this concept, seeing it as an all-purpose unit which could explain everything from politics to fashion. Each of these fields are comprised of good ideas, good ideas which, in order to survive, attach themselves to media virii -- funny, catchy, compelling bits of content -- as a vehicle to infect new minds with copies of themselves.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban Legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. (Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992, p.399)

Though imagined long before the rise of the Internet and the Web, the idea of the meme has been widely embraced as a way of talking about the rapid dispersion of informationn and the widespread circulation of concepts which characterize the digital era. It has been a particularly attractive way to think about the rise of Internet fads like the LOLcats or Soulja Boy, fads considered seemingly trivial or meangingless. The content which circulates in such a fashion is seen as simplistic, fragmentary, and essentially meaningless, though it may shape our beliefs and actions in significant ways. Wired magazine (Miller, 2007) recently summed it up as a culture of "media snacks":

We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips - in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture - and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive).

This description of snacks implies that they are without nutritional value, trivial or meaningless aspect of our culture, a time waste. And if this meaningless content is self-replicating then consumers are "irrational," and unable to escape their infection. Yet these models -- the idea of the meme and the media virus, of self-replicating ideas hidden in attractive, catchy content we are helpless to resist -- is a problematic way to understand cultural practices. We want to suggest that these materials travel through the web because they are meaningful to the people who spread them. At the most fundamental level, such an approach misunderstands the way content spreads, which is namely, through the active practices of people. As such, we would like to suggest:

1. That "memes" do not self-replicate;
2. That people are not "susceptible" to this viral media;
3. That viral media and Internet memes are not nutritionally bereft, meaningless 'snacks'.

The Problem of Agency

Central to the difficulties of both the meme and the media virus models is a particular confusion about the role people play in passing along media content. From the start, memetics has suffered from a confusion about the nature of agency. Unlike genetic features, culture is not in any meaningful sense self-replicating -- it relies on people to propel, develop and sustain it. The term 'culture' originates from metaphors of agriculture: the analogy was of cultivating the human mind much as one cultivates the land. Culture thus represents the assertion of human will and agency upon nature. As such, cultures are not something that happen to us, cultures are something we collectively create. Certainly any individual can be influenced by the culture which surrounds them, by the fashion, media, speech and ideas that fill their daily life, but individuals make their own contributions to their cultures through the choices which they make. The language of memetics, however, strips aside the concept of human agency.

Processes of cultural adaptation are more complex than the notion of meme circulation makes out. Indeed, theories for understanding cultural uptake must consider two factors not closely considered by memetics: human choice and the medium through which these ideas are circulated. Dawkins writes not about how "people acquire ideas" but about how "ideas acquire people." Every day humans create and circulate many more ideas than are actually likely to gain any deep traction within a culture. Over time, only a much smaller number of phrases, concepts, images, or stories survive. This winnowing down of cultural options is the product not of the strength of particular ideas but of many, many individual choices as people decide what ideas to reference, which to share with each other, decisions based on a range of different agendas and interests far beyond how compelling individual ideas may be. Few of the ideas get transmitted in anything like their original form: humans adapt, transform, rework them on the fly in response to a range of different local circumstances and personal needs. Stripping aside the human motives and choices that shape this process reveals little about the spread of these concepts.

By the same token, ideas circulate differently in and through different media. Some media allow for the more or less direct transmission of these ideas in something close to their original form -- as when a video gets replayed many times -- while others necessarily encourage much more rapid transformations -- as occurs when we play a game of "telephone" and each person passing along a message changes it in some way. So, it makes little sense to talk about "memes" as an all-purpose unit of thought without regard to the medium and processes of cultural transmission being described. Indeed, discussing the emergence of Internet memes, education researchers Michael Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2007) suggest Dawkins' notion of memetic 'fidelity' needs to be done away with altogether. Defining the Internet meme as the rapid uptake and spread of a particular idea, presented as a written text, image, language, "'move' or some unit of cultural "stuff", Knobel and Lankshear suggest adaptation is central to the propogation of memes:

Many of the online memes in this study were not passed on entirely 'intact' in that the meme 'vehicle' was changed, modified, mixed with other referential and expressive resources, and regularly given idiosyncratic spins by participants...A concept like 'replicability' therefore needs to include remixing as an important practice associated with many successful online memes, where remixing includes modifying, bricolaging, splicing, reordering, superimposing, etc., original and other images, sounds, films, music, talk, and so on. (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007, p.208-209)

Their argument is particularly revealing as a way to think about just what comprises the object at the heart of the Internet meme. The recent "LOLcat" Internet meme, built so heavily upon remixing and appropriation, is a good case study to illustrate the role of remixing in Internet memes. "LOLcats" are pictures of animals, most commonly cats, with digitally superimposed text for humorous effect. Officially referred to as "image macros," the pictures often feature "LOLspeak", a type of broken English that enhances the amusing tone of the juxtaposition. On websites such as icanhascheezburger.com, users are invited to upload their own "LOLcats" which are then shared throughout the web.

Over time, different contributors have stretched the "LOLcat" idea in many different directions which would not have been anticipated by the original posters -- including a whole strand of images centering around Walruses and buckets, the use of "LOLspeak" to translate religious texts (LOLbible) or represent complex theoretical arguments, the use of similar image macros to engage with Emo culture, philosophy (loltheorists), and dogs (LOLdogs, see: ihasahotdog.com).

So just what is the "meme" at the centre of this Internet meme? What is the idea that is replicated? More than the content of the pictures, the "meme" at the heart of this Internet phenomenon is the structure of the picture itself --the juxtaposition, broken English, and particularly the use of irreverent humor. Given the meme lies in the structure, however -- how to throw the pot rather than the pot itself -- then the very viability of the meme is dependent on the ability for the idea to be adapted in a variety of different ways. In this sense, then, it is somewhat hard to see how contained within this structure is a "message" waiting to occupy unsuspecting minds.

The re-use, remixing and adaptation of the LOLcat idea instead suggest that the spread and replication of this form of cultural production is not due to the especially compelling nature of the LOLcat idea but the fact it can be used to make meaning. A similar situation can be seen in the case of the "Crank Dat" song by Soulja Boy, which some have described as one of the most succesful Internet memes of 2007. Soulja Boy, originally an obscure amateur performer in Atlanta, produced a music video for his first song "Crank Dat", which he uploaded to video sharing sites such as YouTube. Soulja Boy then encouraged his fans to appropriate, remix, and reperform the song, spreading it through social networks, YouTube, and the blogosphere, in the hopes of gaining greater visibility for himself and his music.

Along the way, Crank Dat got performed countless times by very different communities -- from white suburban kids to black ballet dancers, from football teams to MIT graduate students. The video was used as the basis for "mash up" videos featuring characters as diverse as Winnie the Pooh and Dora the Explorer. People added their own steps, lyrics, themes, and images to the videos they made. As the song circulated, Soulja Boy's reputation grew -- he scored a record contract, and emerged as a top recording artist. -- in part as a consequence of his understanding of the mechanisms by which cultural content circulates within a participatory culture.

The success of "Crank Dat" cannot be explained as the slavish emulation of the dance by fans, as the self-replication of a "compelling" idea. Rather, "Crank Dat" spread the way dance crazes have always spread - through the processes of learning and adaptation by which people learn to dance. As CMS student Kevin Driscoll discusses, watching others dance to learn steps and refining these steps so they express local experience or variation are crucial to dance itself. Similarly, the adaptation of the LOLcat form to different situations -- theory, puppies, politicians -- constitute processes of meaning making, as people use tools at their disposal to explain the world around them.

Next Time: We will compare and contrast "stickiness" and "spreadability" as competing paradigms shaping the practices of web 2.0.

References

Brodie, Richard (1996). Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, Seattle: Integral Press

Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Knobel, Michele & Lankshear, Colin (2007). New Literacies: Everyday Practices &

Classroom Learning. Open University Press

McCracken, Grant (2005a). "'Consumers' or 'Multipliers': A New Language for

Marketing?," This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics,

November 10.

Miller, Nancy (2007). "Minifesto for a New Age," Wired, March.

Rushkoff, Douglas. (1994) Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York:

Ballantine.

Stephenson, Neil (1992). Snow Crash. New York: Bantam.

Computer Game Spaces: An Interview with Georgia Tech's Michael Nitsche (Part Two)

You also suggest that the design of games space has been heavily influenced by our shared understanding of cinematic conventions. Which aspects of film form exert an influence on the design of game worlds?

Video games, film, and television are all part of the moving image media family. They share many aspects, differ in many others and continuously add to each other's vocabulary through their shared origins. There are at least two connections that we have to take into account when we discuss game spaces and their visual representation.

On the one hand, a large number of games try to remediate cinematic visuals. There is no reason for a lens flare effect in Unreal Tournament because there are not physical optics involved. But the programmer included it. Neither is there any technical reason for suddenly increasing grainy imagery in sections of Fatal Frame. But the images are altered nevertheless. These are rendering effects applied to the game world in order to recreate cinematic visual effects and to achieve distinct dramatic impacts.

Most of the time, we have to read and understand a game world to interact meaningfully with it. That is why visualization is a very powerful form of expression in digital games and not necessarily subordinate to interactivity. Cinematic traditions are built into these games to direct our reading of the world. Because designers constantly develop new visual expressions for their games, we cannot pinpoint a single cinematic reference point for video games. The main visual traditions of 3D game cinematography (following camera, overhead view, first-person point of view and pre-defined viewing frames) have all connections to existent cinematic traditions but they have developed their own specifics over time.

The interactive following camera, for example, changes the way that the main character is visually situated in the game world and often becomes not only a visual but also a action controlling device when the hero is programmed to always run in the direction the player points the camera. Equally important is the question of montage of different viewpoints in video games. Film has developed multiple techniques of montage and games seem to gradually follow with some own concepts that are organized around their interactivity.

In many 3D games players not only control the virtual hero but have also taken on the role of virtual cameramen and editors. Maybe the most surprising fact is how seamlessly audience can accept this responsibility. The camera work in the newer Prince of Persia titles is highly developed and might be influenced by the player in the midst of equally complex game play situations. Nevertheless, players seem to readily adapt to that task. Nowadays, a player not only accepts the role of the virtual hero but also that of the "man with the movie camera." And this transition happened extremely smoothly overall. Maybe because of our familiarity with cinematic techniques.

This points to the second main connection between games and film: players have developed certain expectations towards the moving image. We have been educated by television conventions and cinematic visual storytelling and look at game through this expectation.

This allows players to understand the elegant intro sequences of the Half-Life games as descendents of the classic long opening shots that we have seen in Altman's The Player or Welles' Touch of Evil. Players bring this kind of media literacy to the game and can read it through their proficiency in film and TV visual storytelling. So we expect games to work a bit like movies because film and TV are essential sources of our visual literacy.

This is a two-way street, of course, and with the growing role of games as media for socialization the influences starts to shift. We can see that games start to educate our visual expectations and drive shots in television and cinema productions. So instead of a single influence I would argue for a growing shared ground that is based on the tradition of the moving image.

As you note, game designers rely on a range of spatial metaphors to discuss

their craft -- drawing parallels between games and gardens, sand boxes,

amusement parks, labyrinths, mazes, and arenas or talking about games as being

on "rails" or "tracks." Which of these analogies are most productive for

thinking about games space? Which do you think are confusing or misleading?

The book does not directly pick up the discussion of games as gardens or sand boxes - not because these metaphors are misleading but mainly because to me it seemed that a lot of detail is lost in such an approach. These are very useful approaches and often well applied in other works but a bit too large for the detailed analysis I had in mind. In my case, I tried to look into more precise spatial subcategories - like the path, the arena, or the labyrinth.

So instead of discussing the overall summary of a virtual space, which indeed might work and feel like a virtual garden, the focus is on details that might evoke this impression. I call these details evocative narrative elements and they work like spatialized hooks that affect the way the player experiences the game universe. They support the player to make sense of the virtual world and the situations in it and offers opportunities to connect and contextualize the events in relationship to each other. Finding a item important to the player, defeating an opponent or saving a friendly character, discovering the value of a certain item and overcoming threshold - all these can be evocative narrative elements that are situated in the game world.

However, how the player truly interconnects these hooks is up to her. Evocative narrative elements can add up to a fuller picture of a garden of a sandbox-like world, but in the end this depends very much on the player.

That is why I suggest a different metaphor in the end of the book, namely that of the kitchen. The kitchen caters for the growing role of players in the formation and re-usage of game environments. Following established recipes or gradually experimenting with new ones might be translated in the players' actions in innovative titles from Spore to Little Big Planet to Second Life or MetaPlace. And getting all the set up right might just about decide the fate of worlds like Sony's Home.

Michael Nitsche is an Assistant Professor at the School of Literature, Communication,

and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches courses on virtual

environments and digital moving images. Michael heads the Digital World and Image Group, which works the design, use, and production of virtual spaces, Machinima, and the borderlines between games, film, and performance. His work combines theoretical analysis and practical experiments and his collaborations include work with the National Film and Television School London, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Turner Broadcasting, Alcatel Lucent, and others. He is author of Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press, 2008), and has published on Game Studies, virtual worlds, digital performance, games and film, and machinima in numerous publications. In a former life he was co-author for a commercial videogame, professional Improv actor, and dramaturgist.

Computer Game Spaces: An Interview with Georgia Tech's Michael Nitsche (Part One)

For a while there, it looked like the debate between the ludologists (who focus on game play mechanics) and the narratologists (who focus on storytelling) was going to define the range of perspectives in games studies. As someone who was falsely labeled a narratologist for a bit, I found this model of the field constraining and distorting. Now, of course, we've seen an explosion of different perspectives in the academic study of computer and video games. One of the most promising approaches emphasizes the spatial dimensions of game design, a topic which was, in fact, the real focus of my own early writing on games (and not coincidentally a recurring focus of the work of Espen Aardseth, a card-carrying Ludologist), suggesting that space is not only the final frontier but also the common ground of many of the first generation of game scholars. Michael Nitsche, a games researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology (better known as Georgia Tech), has written a significant new book, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press, 2008) which sums up what we can learn about games by examining them as spatial systems. His writing is informed not only by work in games studies but also from media studies, performance studies, urban planning and architecture. As he discusses in the interview below, this work has been informed by his work with the Digital World and Image Group at Georgia Tech.

I had a chance to visit Nitsche and his colleagues down in Atlanta late last fall and came away tremendously impressed by the spirit of collaboration and exploration which exists within that particular academic community. The Georgia Tech folks are doing cutting edge work across many different research areas. I am lucky enough to have Michael's colleague, Ceila Pierce, presenting the opening colloquium this term, sharing her work on the construction of fictional ethnic identities within multiplayer game worlds.

Here and next time, Nitsche shares some thoughts about the theoretical stakes of thinking about games space.

You come to this book both as a game designer and as a game theorist. How have the two perspectives informed each other here? To what degree do you see your design work as a mode of experimentation with the basic building blocks of games as a medium? Can you describe for us some of the projects you've worked? How does work with games done in research centers differ from the kind of work which occurs within commercial games companies? What value do you think university-based game research brings to the evolution of games as a medium?

Most examples in the book are drawn from commercial video games but it does include a wide range of research projects, too - including some of my own practical experiments. We need these experimental game projects to fill in the gaps left by commercial titles.

Commercial video games have to make money and they often have to be streamlined and optimized to reach that target - university-based games research projects have all kinds of limitations but they thankfully do not have to sell. This allows us to explore some of the more complicated areas that commercial games have to avoid to stay afloat.

My own work has always been a mixture of theory and practice but I have to admit that I somehow lack a single direction in the experiments I have conducted. I have worked on educational virtual environments, procedural game spaces, virtual and mixed media performance spaces, augmented reality prototypes, and these days I start to experiment with location-based handheld applications. In my case these experiments are truly explorative. They start off with a relatively simple question and snowball into more and more challenging test beds. While a commercial game production has to streamline the design at that point and focus on the core, research projects remain free to explore. I like that - a lot.

At Georgia Tech we are used to testing theory and analysis in such an experimental set up. So, shortly after I joined the faculty here, I started the Digital World & Image Group. One of our first major projects was Charbitat, an experimental game that creates a 3D world around the virtual player depending on how you play the game. First, we focused on the question of procedural space generation and how to design for these new and dynamic worlds. But once we had the functional prototype up and running, we moved on to look into procedural quest generation, dynamic camera control and patterns to support spatial navigation in infinite worlds - all based on the original game prototype. Any commercial developer would have cut this additional research, which is why this kind of gradual experimental discovery is only possible in a non-commercial environment. This certainly does not mean that academics should tell developers how to create their games, but it shows that research projects can offer additional information because they are free to explore venues that are locked off by deadlines and budgets in commercial production.

Other areas are not covered by commercial games, yet. For example, I am very interested in game worlds as performance spaces where players do not play to achieve certain high scores but instead to express something effectively. Consequently, some of my projects deal with virtual puppetry or augmented reality performance spaces.

I also have done quite a lot of work in machinima. The industry might recognizes the promise in these areas but it is simply not clear how these ideas might work out in a viable single application. So here the university-based research project can break completely new ground.

Many accounts of game theory have emphasized the tension between ludological approaches, which focus on game play mechanics, and narratological approaches, which focus on story telling. Does a focus on game spaces give us a different way of thinking about the relations between these two approaches?

I believe it does. Space is certainly not the single answer to all of our problems but it surely predates play as well as narrative. We learn how to deal with space before we start to tell stories or play games. If we translate this into video games, space becomes a higher category, one that can include narrative qualities as well as ludic ones.

I started to look into expressive 3D game spaces around 1999, when I began my studies at the University of Cambridge's Department of Architecture. This was just around the time the debate about narratology and ludology heated up. We did a lot of work with video but I felt somewhat shielded from the divide because even in the darkest controversies nobody ever argued against the importance of space in games. From where I was standing, you had to ask whether there is really a substantial divide at all between ludology and narratology. For me, both become part of how we deal with spaces and are not opposites but complementary to each other.

In the book I talk about Story Maps, a form of imaginary map that we form in our mind as we play our way through a virtual environment. These maps are shaped by what we do in the game world as well as how the action it told through various forms of presentation in sound and image. Sure, there is a strong narrative element in these maps but they can only be created when the game is played. So I could never really fully see the divide because my work seemed to be right in the middle of this discussion without conflicting with either.

A key goal throughout the book has been to map the many different devices that shape the player's perception and experience of games space. What value is such a catalog to the game designer? What do you see as some of the under-developed opportunities in the creation of expressive game spaces?

Game Studies has covered a lot of ground and opened up a wide range of approaches, which is good. What I suggest is a combination of different fields. That is why the book references various disciplines from architecture to film, to drama and literature studies.

Game designers very often use these and other references already as they collect ideas and inspirations. They do this often intuitively and this book might help to stimulate this messy process and provide an additional perspective.

Any designer worth their salt is aware of the fundamental role of a video game such as Mario 64 for the way we design games today; this book offers an additional view at some details regarding these innovations specifically for 3D game worlds. It does not suggest a single solution or a unique missed opportunity but instead discusses a range of available options by looking at the underlying basics.

For example, the whole argument of the book is built on the idea that game worlds are not simply polygon masses arranged in a certain way in the engine. Instead, we should look into different layers where game spaces come to life. These include the play space in the living room of the player, as well as the fictional and mediated spaces generated by the presentation and the imagination of the player. The rule-based level is only one of five layers for game space analysis. The task, then, is to find the connections between the different layers. New interfaces such as the Wii remote or webcams are good examples for these connections. They put much more emphasis on the world in front of the screen. But what can we make of this expansion into the physical space? Among other things, the book invites us to think about ways these connections into the living room can be made more effectively.

Throughout the book, you draw heavily on ideas from architecture and urban planning. What do these fields have to contribute to games studies?

There are some obvious parallels, such as the relevance of urban planning for the design of free-roaming game worlds or the way architectural styles are copied in video games. However, I would argue that we have to look a bit deeper to identify more fundamental parallels.

One example for a more direct connection is the way we read large-scale environments no matter whether it is a real world like my hometown or a virtual one like an online world. We gradually form a cognitive map based on certain key features and navigate through the world based on this map. Architectural theorists like Alexander or Lynch have done extremely valuable work in precisely this area and a range of research projects has shown that the same ideas apply to virtual environments.

However, games offer different means to accentuate a players' development of a cognitive map. Designers have full control over the space and the possible actions in it and use it to dramatize the experience. That is why we also have to take theatrical spaces into account.

Most virtual worlds are designed not for a "live-like" experience but for overly dramatic ones. These game worlds would fall short if they would provide "only" realistically functioning virtual cities. Instead, they have to deliver virtual stages, full or extraordinary events and opportunities that are not available in real world designs. That is why we have to add these dramatic functions to the architectural ones and combine dramatic moments with cognitive maps.

Likewise, architecture is very helpful in the discussion of specific spatial structures, such as paths, arenas, or labyrinths. They clearly reflect and reference existent architectural structures but we have to add the game specific elements that usually enhance their dramatic impact. The labyrinths of Doom or Silent Hill are not just navigable virtual architectures but the actively put the player into a highly engaging dramatic situation.

The video game world tells the player where she is projecting her actions. It positions the player via spatial means and uses references to architecture and urban planning. At the same time, it is a dramatic positioning. Players do not enter a game world as a neutral observer or visiting tourists but as cops staged in the middle of a gang war, a superhero with the power to destroy or rescue Metropolis, a lost soul that only tries to escape and survive.

These options are embedded in the game world's architecture, its presentation, and its functionality. Urban planning, architecture and performance studies help us to balance and connect these features better.

Michael Nitsche is an Assistant Professor at the School of Literature, Communication,

and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches courses on virtual

environments and digital moving images. Michael heads the Digital World and Image Group, which works the design, use, and production of virtual spaces, Machinima, and the borderlines between games, film, and performance. His work combines theoretical analysis and practical experiments and his collaborations include work with the National Film and Television School London, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Turner Broadcasting, Alcatel Lucent, and others. He is author of Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press, 2008), and has published on Game Studies, virtual worlds, digital performance, games and film, and machinima in numerous publications. In a former life he was co-author for a commercial videogame, professional Improv actor, and dramaturgist.

Convergence and Disturbance: New Media, Networked Publics, and Pakistan

The above video is one of a large number posted via Youtube by students in Pakistan to share what was happening in their country during the 2007-2008 political emergency. During a time when the government was tightening its control over traditional media, citizen journalists took on vital functions in fostering public debate, insuring the spread of important information, monitoring elections, and helping the outside world understand what was happening.

Huma Yusuf, a recently graduate Comparative Media Studies student, has shared an important analysis of the role which grassroots media played during the crisis through the Center for Future Civic Media website. While in our program, Yusuf wrote a thesis, "Tactical Cities: Negotiating Violence in Karachi, Pakistan," which she hopes to turn into a book about how everyday citizens in her home city make sense of the everyday experience of political violence. A native of Pakistan and a professional journalist, Yusuf offers a significant third world perspective to our understanding of the impact of new media on the public sphere. There's a wealth of significant information, including links to key blogs and videos, contained in "Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007-February 2008)."

Yusuf's analysis was deeply informed by concepts she learned during her time in the Comparative Media Studies Program and her involvement with the Center for Future Civic Media, especially her understanding of the "hybrid" and "converged" media landscape which effected the flow of communications in her home land and her consideration of the ways that mobile technologies might be helping to close the participation gap, offering unique ways of bridging between the discourse of university students and the average man and woman in the street. In the post that follows, I want to flag some of her key findings in hopes that they intrigue you enough to check out the fuller report.

Yusuf offers this summary of the report's key findings:

This research finds that the Pakistani media landscape is multifaceted, comprising a combined--or alternating--use of different mainstream media sources, digital technologies, and new media platforms, depending on availability and security. Moreover, the study finds that the participation gap--the ability to meaningfully use digital technologies and new media--impacts participatory behavior and civic action far more than the digital divide, which is often overcome through the combined use of different technologies. The study also concludes that new media platforms are increasingly effective as tools for community organizing and information dissemination, that authoritarian regimes are quick to adapt digitally networked technologies to their own ends, and that news reporting in Pakistan is gravitating towards a hybrid model whereby old and new media platforms collaborate to keep the public informed.

Over the several month long crisis, the government sought to repress alternative channels of communication almost as fast as they emerged, yet activists and citizen journalists were able to exploit the proliferation of different communications channels to stay one step ahead of censorship:

As an increasing number of Pakistanis turned to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and SMS text messages as alternate media portals, the government clamped down on these sources. Between March 2007 and February 2008, cellphone networks were jammed, internet service providers were instructed to block the YouTube website, internet connectivity was limited or shut down, and blogging softwares were banned. Moreover, the authorities came to monitor the public's use of new media platforms: images of anti-government rallies posted to Flickr were used to identify and arrest protesters....

The only antidote to the government's control of digital and new media tools, this paper shows, was the widening of the networked public sphere to include Pakistanis in the diaspora and global media sources. For example, when the government blocked news channels and jammed cellular networks in November 2007, young Pakistanis across the globe continued to plan and organize protest rallies via the social networking site Facebook. Similarly, when university students demanding the restoration of an independent judiciary realized that security officials had prevented journalists from covering their protest, they submitted self-generated video clips and images to CNN's iReport, an online citizen journalism initiative. Indeed, as Pakistan's media landscape became a hybrid model in which professional and amateur journalists generated and disseminated news by whatever means possible, international mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the BBC, and the UK-based Channel 4 increasingly sought out hyperlocal reporting posted to local blogs, YouTube, and Facebook.

As students and other concerned citizens began to recognize the growing centrality of these grassroots modes of communication to public understanding of the crisis, they took on more and more responsibility, insuring detailed documentation, taking their cell phone cameras into the streets to record what was happening and sending it to the outside world as quickly as possible. Often, students inside Pakistan were working in concert with Pakistani students elsewhere to insure the smooth flow of information. Yusuf, for example, cites the efforts of Harvard undergraduate Samad Khurram, who helped mobilize protesters in Pakistan from his Cambridge dorm room by maintaining an important newsletter and mailing list.

In some cases, especially in regard to the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, citizen journalists played a key role in undermining official accounts:

Soon after Bhutto's death had been verified, its cause was contested. Eyewitnesses in Rawalpindi reported hearing gunshots before an explosion. Members of Bhutto's entourage and her colleagues in the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) claimed that the leader had been shot. In the immediate wake of the attack, a team of doctors examined her body and stated in a report that she had an open wound on her left temporal region. A day after the assassination, government officials claimed that Bhutto had died when her head hit the lever of the sunroof of her car as she ducked to avoid an assassin's bullets and/or in response to the sound of a blast caused by a suicide bomber. The question of whether Bhutto died of gunshot wounds or a head injury riveted the nation because the truth would have implications on allegations about lax security and government complicity in the assassination.

An important piece of evidence to help settle this debate came in the form of images and an amateur video generated by a PPP supporter at the rally where Bhutto was killed and subsequently circulated by a popular Karachi-based blogger. By making the footage and images available to the mainstream media and public at large, these citizen journalists sparked an accountability movement that eventually forced the Pakistani government to revisit its account of Bhutto's death.

The web also served ritual functions in the aftermath of Bhutto's death, providing a means for the country as a whole to mourn the passing of a popular leader:

New media platforms were also embraced by young Pakistanis looking to express and archive their grief at the news of Bhutto's passing. Hours after her death, YouTube was inundated with tributes to Bhutto that edited together images from her life to the soundtrack of spiritual music or the national anthem. Online memorial websites such as Respectance.com also became spaces for national mourning featuring biographies and images of Bhutto, testimonies from Pakistanis across the diaspora, and memories of interactions with her. Flickr was also used as a memorial site, as users uploaded their favorite images of the former prime minister, tagged them with prayers and appreciative titles, or contextualized them with commentary on her legacy. Other users uploaded images of flowers and gardens as gifts for the departed leader. The popular social networking site Facebook also became a venue for reactions to Bhutto's death and the news of her son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari's appointment as her successor. In the wake of Bhutto's death, over 400 Facebook groups commemorating her or showing solidarity with her politics emerged on the site.

Here, I am reminded of the ways digital media served similar functions for American students in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings or for that matter, although the web was at a different stage of its development, in the aftermath of 9/11.

When mainstream journalists were blocked from overseeing the elections in Pakistan, citizen journalists took on new responsibilities to monitor the polls and to spread the word about political violence:

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN), an independent coalition of non-governmental organizations, enlisted over 20,000 civilians to observe polling stations and pre-election campaigning in more than 250 election zones. Such recruitment was unprecedented in FAFEN's history. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, the executive director of the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency, another election monitoring group, said, "Never before has there been such large-scale mobilization for a Pakistani election.... The role civil society is playing has been a real positive."...

Mediated civic engagement was not restricted to activists, citizen journalists, and civilian monitors alone. On election day, average voters used SMS text messages to urge their friends, family, and colleagues to vote. One SMS that was widely circulated on the morning of the elections read: "With the elections, lets all light a flame of hope, that we will not let Pakistan be destroyed by people who are not part of us." Moreover, SMS text messages were used to counter widespread fear that there would be violence and bomb blasts at polling stations.

In the west, we often think of these tools -- Flickr, YouTube, text messaging -- primarily in terms of their place in our social and recreational lives. I've often argued that we are acquiring through our play and through our consumption of popular culture skills and knowledge which we will later deploy towards more serious ends in changing the world around us. I've also suggested that the recent presidential campaign pointed to many different ways that candidates and movements were building a bridge between participatory culture and participatory culture. In Yusuf's report on the Pakistan crisis, a somewhat different pattern emerges:

In Pakistan, however, access to information--rather than the desire to participate--has driven the adoption of new media platforms. When old media distribution channels were compromised, new media was harnessed to fill in the gaps and maintain a flow of news and information. As such, new media in Pakistan has helped old media survive. The result is a media amalgamation in which information is pushed to the public, promiscuously distributed across broadcast media, new media platforms, and various digital technologies to prevent being disrupted or corrupted by the authorities. Thanks to amateurs and activists, students and concerned civilians, a nugget of information can leap from local televised news broadcasts to YouTube to SMS text message to FM radio broadcasts to blog posts to international news reports--whatever it takes to go public.

It would be a mistake to conclude this paper with the impression that digital technologies and new media platforms are the exclusive preserve of educated and privileged activists and citizen journalists, used solely for information dissemination and community organizing. Indeed, some of the best uses of new media and digital technologies address highly localized issues and are emergent, ad hoc, and culturally specific. For example, the residents of Karachi occasionally create an ad hoc, networked public sphere using FM radio broadcasts, cellphones, and landline connections not only to negotiate urban violence, as they did during the Emergency, but also to navigate flash floods during the monsoon, negotiate bad traffic owing to construction, and monitor protest rallies through the city.

This shows how people empowered by creativity and a commitment to aiding their community can use old and new media technologies to make a difference, even on an ad hoc basis. The sheer pervasiveness of new media platforms and digital technologies in Pakistan is leading to a situation whereby not only the digital divide, but also the participation gap, is being narrowed in ways that are unpredictable and unfamiliar, yet highly sustainable because locally relevant.

Yusuf's conclusion suggests that the local conditions in Pakistan, especially in regard to mobile media, resulted in considerable experimentation and innovation -- born as much from desperation as from entrepreneurship -- in how new media tools can be deployed towards civic ends. One reason the Center for Future Civic Media commissioned Yusuf to prepare her report was our recognition that we might have much to learn about the deployment of networked publics in our own society through a better understanding of the techniques which have emerged in Pakistan.

The Many Lives of The Batman (Revisited): Multiplicity, Anime, and Manga

Writing in 1991, Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (the co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program) used the Batman as an example of the kinds of pressures being exerted on the superhero genre at a moment when older texts were continuing to circulate (and in fact, were recirculated in response to renewed interests in the characters), newer versions operated according to very different ideological and narratalogical principles, a range of auteur creators were being allowed to experiment with the character, and the character was assuming new shapes and forms to reflect the demands of different entertainment sectors and their consumers:

Whereas broad shifts in emphasis had occurred since 1939, these changes had been, for the most part, consecutive and consensual. Now, newly created Batmen, existing simultaneously with the older Batmen of the television series and comic reprints and back issues, all struggled for recognition and a share of the market. But the contradictions amongst them may threaten both the integrity of the commodity form and the coherence of the fans' lived experience of the character necessary to the Batman's continued success.

(See The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media)

The superhero comic, they suggest, may not be able to withstand "the tension between, on the one hand, the essential maintenance of a recognizable set of key character components and, on the other hand, the increasingly necessary centrifugal dispersion of those components."

Retrospectively, we can see Pearson and Uricchio as describing a moment of transition from continuity to multiplicity as the governing logic of the superhero comics realm. Rather than fragmenting or confusing the audience, this multiplicity of Batmen helped fans learn to live in a universe where there were diverse, competing images of their favorite characters and indeed, to appreciate the pleasures of seeing familiar fictions transformed in unpredicted ways. In an article which I previewed in draft form on the blog and which recently was published in Angela Ndalianis's The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, I describe the multiplicity paradigm at play in contemporary comics:

Under this new system, readers may consume multiple versions of the same franchise, each with different conceptions of the character, different understandings of their relationships with the secondary figures, different moral perspectives, exploring different moments in their lives, and so forth. So that in some storylines, Aunt May knows Spider-man's secret identity while in others she doesn't; in some Peter Parker is still a teen and in others, he is an adult science teacher; in some, he is married to Mary Jane and in others, they have broken up, and so forth. These different versions may be organized around their respective authors or demarked through other designations - Marvel's Ultimate or DC's All Star lines which represented attempts to reboot the continuity to allow points of entry for new readers for example.

We can see this principle of multiplicity at play in Batman: Gotham Knight, an anthology of animated short stories about the Caped Crusader, which was released last summer as a bridge between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I had a chance to watch the film during my Christmas break and given this blog's ongoing interest in transmedia storytelling, I thought I would share a few reflections.

There are clear connections between Gotham Knight and The Animatrix, which I discuss in Convergence Culture. These new animated shorts were released direct to dvd as the third in the line of DC Universe Original Animated Movies released by Warner Premiere and Warner Bros. Animation. Warner was also the distributor of the Animatrix, which was similarly released between The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded as part of the Wachowski Brothers' larger transmedia strategy. The studio seems to have learned a few lessons since The Animatrix, which are suggested by two key differences between the two productions.

First, the information communicated about the franchise through The Animatrix was crucial to our understanding of the Matrix films, helping to introduce new characters (The Kid) and motivate major plot shifts (the relations between the humans and the machines). The Wachowski Brothers took transmedia principles much further than their audience was ready to go and the result was confusion and disappointment in those who had paid to see the films at the box office but hadn't engaged with the anime, comics, or games extensions.

Gotham Knight is far more conservative in the ways that it seeks to integrate these shorts into the over-all flow of the revamped Batman film franchise -- too much so in my opinion because it's hard to understand in what sense these stories fit into the narrative structure of the film series and they certainly don't add any concrete information that helps us make sense of the plot of Dark Knight. They do include an encounter with the Scarecrow, who was a featured baddie in Batman Begins, as well as with villains, such as King Croc and Deadshot, who have so far not appeared in the film series. They do give us some additional insights into Batman's psyche (through flashbacks to events which occur within the timeline of his early life introduced in Batman Begins) and glimpses into his dealings with the secondary characters (Commissioner Gordon, Lucius Fox) who figure in the Batman film franchise.

Given the way Gotham Knight was marketed, there were no doubt fan expectations that these shorts might foreshadow developments in Dark Knight or even better, give us some inside dope which might add to our experience of the feature film. I am certain this video might have frustrated anyone who bought it with those hopes. Don't get me wrong -- each of these shorts is well made, engaging, and thoughtful. A lot depends on whether we think of transmedia storytelling as a structure of information (offering bits of data which add up to constitute a larger story world) or a structure of feeling (shaping how we feel about the characters and our appreciation of what makes them tick).

My favorite of the shorts, "Have I Got A Story For You," might be read as a paean to the new era of multiplicity as a series of skater punks describe, in very different terms, each of their encounters with the Batman as he does battle with the "man in black." Each pulls the Batman into a different genre -- in one, he is a shadowy figure who appears and disappears as though by magic; in another, he is a flying monster; and in another, he is a robot or cyborg. As they try to top each other's stories, we gradually realize that each has glimpsed a single moment in a much more extended conflict which culminates in a final showdown right before their astonished eyes, in which a fourth kid sees Batman as a very human figure who requires his help to overcome the bad guy. We can read this piece as a hint of the very different ways that the Batman will be depicted -- not only stylistically but also thematically -- across the rest of the shorts, each produced by a different creative team.

In terms of franchise building, the strongest of the shorts may be "Working Through Pain," which shows us a young Bruce Wayne as he seeks a better way to cope with the traumatic aftermath of the murder of his parents. Batman Begins had shown us one part of a trip around the world as the young man sought mentors who might further his training; this one shows two other stops in that personal journey -- one to a hospital in what looks like Africa as he tries to help a medical relief effort which lacks adequate supplies for the problems it is confronting; the other, told more extensively, takes us to India where a young woman teaches him how to "work through pain" and how to operate on the fringes of the social order.

Second, as with Animatrix, Gotham Knight hired artists from the Japanese anime tradition to work with a western media property in hopes of bringing a fresh look and perspective to the material. The Wachowski brothers chose artists who already were auteurs in Japan and gave them a relatively free hand to do with his characters what he chose. DC Comics went with younger animators, many of whom had worked on cult franchises (including Giant Robo, .Hack, Tekkonkinkreet) but who had yet to create their own feature films or television series, and he paired them with distinguished talent already associated with DC either through work on Batman comics or animated series.

The result is a blending of western style character development (contemporary American comics at their very best) with the visual style we associate with anime. As a fan of American comics, I was delighted, for example, to see the "Crossfire" segment, where Greg Rucka (one of my faves) returns to characters he helped to flesh out in the Gotham Central comics he co-authored with Ed Brubaker. Crispus Allen and Anna Ramirez are two beat cops debating the relationship of the Gotham police force to the caped crusader.

The making of video suggests that DC was drawn to the anime directors because of their skills at world building and indeed, the most spectacular elements of these films have to do with fleshing out Gotham City. Each short has a slightly different perspective on the city -- which emerges as a complex, fully realized urban environment, especially when we put all of these glimpses together. The various shorts take us to Arkham Asylum, through the sewers, along the skyline, along the water front, and through the nightclubs of the rich and powerful. There is also a recurring fascination with the technology associated with the hero and his challengers -- including "Field Test" which, as the title suggests, involves the protagonist trying out a high tech gadget which he concludes provides too much protection against the forces of evil. Perhaps most pervasively, the cartoons give us a sense of Batman's vulnerability and humanity: I am pretty sure we get to see Batman and/or Bruce Wayne bleeding in pretty much every segment here and thematically, many of them struggle with how he deals with the pain or human loss he confronts as he takes on the mask to battle crime.

As with The Animatrix, the Batman shorts allow a broad array of different experiments in visual expression: The Batman looks radically different from short to short as each artist is allowed to tell his story through their own stylistic lens. It is on the visual level, far more than on the narrative level, that the film satisfies the pop cosmopolitan's search for a Japanese perspective on the characters. What comes through here, then, is a complex melding of Eastern and Western modes of storytelling, which in turn does push and pull the Batman in some new directions I hadn't seen on the screen before.

It's interesting that we get this anime-inflected version of the Dark Knight at about the same time as designer Chip Kidd has published Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, which consists primarily of reprints from low budget and long forgotten manga produced by Jiro Kuwata for Shonen King following the success of the 1960s television series. Kidd reprints what he has been able to relocate of this original manga -- lots of interesting fragments -- alongside a collection of advertisements for Batman related toys released in Japan during this same giddy period. Kuwata confesses to having a very limited knowledge of the character and very little time to work.

The result is a series of stories which draw on the iconography of Batman, at least of the television series, with very few of the genre conventions. So, for example, the first story has Batman and Robin doing battle with Clayface (False Face on the television series) whose remarkable ability to transform his identity doesn't stop at the human form but allows him to magically transform himself into a terradactyl and a range of other giant monsters. Another story centers around a character with a near endless capacity to return from the dead. However fanciful the villains were on the Batman TV series, and however many times they seemed to survive what at the time looked like fatal accidents, they were still understood as having the limitations of any other mortal being. But here, Batman exists in a magical realm where anything can and will happen. This narrative flux goes alongside the stylistic transformation which occurs when Batman and Robin are being depicted through Manga conventions. Bat-Manga is a fascinating read for anyone interested in understanding globalization.

Desmond Wong and the Art of CarneyVale

I am gladly turning over my blog today to Geoffrey Long, a CMS alum who is currently the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, as we seek to showcase one of the lab's major success stories. As someone who has watched this game take shape from a simple concept into a full-fledged title, I am busting out of my buttons here. This is a real testament to the value of what GAMBIT is trying to achieve and the team which its director Philip Tan has pulled together. But it is also further validation of the idea that creative and innovative games, from Flow to Portal, can come from university- and school-based research and training programs.

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Thanks, Henry!

The Independent Games Festival recently announced the finalists for this year's Seamus McNally Grand Prize, and all of us here at GAMBIT were thrilled to find our game CarneyVale: Showtime included on the list. Showtime, which was developed by the GAMBIT Singapore Lab using XNA and is available for download now on Microsoft's Xbox LIVE community service, is the spiritual sequel to our summer 2007 prototype game Wiip. We sat down Desmond Wong, a recent graduate of Nanyang Polytechnic who was the lead artist for both Showtime and Wiip, to discuss how art was used to link the growing CarneyVale franchise together.

CarneyVale: Showtime

How was the art style chosen for Wiip?

During the concept stages of Wiip, the team was trying to settle on a suitable theme for a whipping game. We tried all sorts of ideas and eras ranging from cowboy western to jungle tribal. However, none of the themes had that special factor to them, they felt too overused and unoriginal. Eventually, the idea of being a ringmaster settled in. We knew it would be cool to be a raging ringmaster with a ferocious whip, and the idea of a mysterious circus quickly came into play.

My initial concepts for Wiip were very dark and creepy, with outlandish animals and clowns. Although interesting, we knew that we needed something cuter and more approachable. Fortunately, the team had another artist who drew really cute and wonderful things. We had her take a stab at the early concepts, and she came up with her own cuter renditions. Eventually, the final product ended up as something both cute and creepy at the same time, a perfect balance between the two.

Art trailer for Wiip

How did the art style change between Wiip and Showtime?

If Wiip was the growing child, then Showtime is the maturing teenager. For Showtime, the art style took a more circus city feel to it. It was literally a city with circus performances on its streets. With that, we could have all assortments of neon signs, glowing lights and bustling color. The genral rendering of the characters also took a more mature turn. instead of kiddy characters, the characters in Showtime are more proportionate and grown. The style of shading also changed, employing more tones of shade and detail.

Despite all the changes, the art style was generally kept to roughly the same feel. The bright and colorful characters and scenery were still present, and the quirky designs never disappeared. It was just an art style evolving as time went on.

Who or what would you cite as the inspirations behind CarneyVale's art style?

The biggest inspirations for the art style for Showtime were definitely Cirque du Soleil and Las Vegas. I remember the team watching video performances by the Cirque du Soleil troupe, and the costume designs just blew my mind away. Las Vegas was also a huge inspiration to the art style. Being a city circus, I looked to Las Vegas for its neon lights and signboards to give life to CarneyVale. I also used Las Vegas a lot when trying to merge a circus and city together. I would look at photos of that city, and imagine it with circus elements on it, and it would always work.

Artists such as Yoji Shinkawa also give me tons of inspiration. Famous for his work in the Metal Gear series, what I really like about his works is his ability to generate such a distinct style of his own. The way he paints and conceptualises his ideas are what I respect most about this particular artist.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=9c5941d9-8996-41e6-aaa1-e2c127bf19b2" target="_new" title="CarneyVale: Showtime trailer ">Video: CarneyVale: Showtime trailer </a>
The trailer for Showtime

How did you consciously use the art style to tie Wiip and Showtime together?

The colors were the main things. When I was working on Showtime, I made sure that my color palette contained all the colors I used with Wiip. This was mainly the reds and yellows, however, I made sure to inject new tones and colors to keep things fresh. I also made sure to include the familiar red and white curtains from Wiip in Showtime as well. This served as a link between the two games, and added a distinct circus vibe to the game as well.

The general details for the items in the world were also kept consistent to tie the two games together. For example, I employed a certain motif in Wiip that I reused on some of the props in Showtime to keep the world whole and seamless. Most importantly, the narrator for Showtime is the main character from Wiip. No better way to tie two games together than that.

What's your usual workflow like? How do you go about creating a piece of art for the game?

Usually I start with an idea. Ideas can come from anywhere. I got the idea for the Grabber prop by walking past those toy machines where you had to direct a hand to grab the toy you wanted. When I have a general idea down, I take it to the paper and pen. I sketch my ideas out and make sure to do as many variations of it as I can. I also find it very useful to get input from the people around me at this stage when the idea is still fresh and at its infant stage.

Around this point, I start choosing the best few concepts and proceed to creating art for the game. I use Photoshop to draw out and color the art, and once that is done, I export it out and get it ready to be put into the game. From here on, it's mostly seeing what works and what does not. For example, the launcher for the missile looked good on paper, but when it was put into the game, it was a little too big and bright. The good thing is that once the art is there, it's mostly just tweaking to strike the perfect balance between making it look good and work well too.

If you were to do a third game in the series, what new types of imagery would you like to explore?

Wiip took place inside a busy circus tent, and Showtime took place in a bustling city at night. For the third installment, I would really like to see how the game would look like in outer space. We initially wanted to bring Showtime into space for the last few performances, but scrapped the idea in the end. What I really want to try is actually put Slinky in a world where gravity is at its weakest. The image of Slinky doing a double back flip in slow motion while floating upwards is too good to throw away.

Being outer space, I could go crazy with the art style. There are just so many quirky things an artist can design when he isn't restricted. Imagine shooting through the stars on a flying comet as you are flung through rings of fire in front of a multi-colored nebula. It would be nothing short of legendary.

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The winner of the Independent Games Festival's Seamus McNally Grand Prize will be announced at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this March. Keep an eye on the GAMBIT Updates blog for more details.

Mapping Maps

This weekend, Project New Media Literacies will host an event which brings together educators and new media specialists to brainstorm about ways we can integrate new media technologies -- especially Google Earth, Google Maps, mobile phones and handhelds -- and new media literacies into the teaching of maps and cultural geography. As we get ready for this "ideation" workshop, I thought it was a good time to share an essay written last year by Colleen Kaman, one of the CMS graduate students, on the role which maps play in shaping her intellectual development. Kaman is now writing a thesis about new media and the human rights struggle in China. She is a researcher at the Center for Future Civic Media, where she is helping to draft a white paper outlining what we mean by "civic media" and where she blogs for the Center's website. Maps and National Geographic: of Stories Untold

by Colleen Kaman

One of my earliest memories of the world was the globe that my father brought home. It was almost certainly something he had come to own in exchange for dental work because he often accepted payment this way. I was six or seven and found it magnificent. It stood on a smooth wooden base, tall enough so that I could peer at eye-level while studying the shapes and colors and lines, trying to imagine what might exist in the faraway dots. I remember spinning the orb, glimpsing the spot my dad and I had marked to locate our hometown near Lake Michigan from the blur of countries and oceans. I loved to trace my finger along the horizontal Mercator lines and imagined that they were paths from here to there, wherever that might be. The blank spots on the map, bounded by the intersections between latitude and longitude but otherwise vacant of any suggestion of what might exist there, worried me a bit. I figured the lines might be a kind of rail that I might slip along, allowing me to circumnavigate the world without sliding off into the unknown. Those blank spaces were also a constant source of fascination - and the conflicting desire to understand what I was looking at and to be surprised by it.

Sometimes I spun the globe as hard as I could, waiting in anticipation for the foreign-sounding place my pointed finger would land when it finally came to a stop. I would find places with names like Helsinki, Zinder, Christchurch, or Tashkent. I studied the names, but the words meant very little since I hadn't even seen a picture of these places. So instead I would imagine what I might find there. Part of the excitement of looking at a map was staring for hours at the continents while letting my mind wander. After all the very nature of exploration was "an assertive action in the face of uncertain assumptions, often involving false starts, missteps, and surprises"(Turchi, p12). Perhaps it was this desire to explore that lead me to increasingly wonder what happened in all that empty space on the map? What stories weren't revealed?

By the time the globe disappeared from our house, almost certainly the victim of my mother 's harsh discouragement of my father's tendency to barter by eventually banning many of the items that arrived this way, I had discovered National Geographic magazines. They were the perfect combination of detachable foldout maps between the glossy images and fabulous stories of faraway people and places sparked my imagination. My parents enjoyed sharing visions of the future (for example, assuming we survived a Soviet attack, we might one day get all of our food in pill form) rather than tell stories about the family's history. Maybe this is why I became obsessed with finding places where history existed in the present. I found it in the pages of National Geographic. I thrilled at the images and texts about women in brightly colored dresses, men riding elephants down the streets of Bangkok, young boys racing water buffalo, and a tiger amid lush foliage, and a gaucho riding along the pampas of Argentina was like peering into a jumble of a world rich in narratives and histories. I saw the maps as the common language that we all spoke; it would take a few years and another experience for me to realize that maps could mean different things to different people.

I remember watching the 1984 Olympic games held in Sarajevo, at that time part of Yugoslavia, on television. I was eleven years old. I loved the gymnastics and skating the best but would watch all the events I could when I got home from school. I cheered for the U.S. athletes, especially against the Soviet or German teams. Still, I found the footage of this Socialist country enticing, and resolved that this would be the first foreign nation I would visit when I could. I took great pleasure in finding the places on the map where the Olympic athletes lived. I could better imagine their stories once I'd rooted national identity to place (Malkki, 1992) and touched the name of an athlete's hometown on the map with my fingers, seen how the words might nestle within the topography, see how far it was from the sea and from other borders. Sometimes a country stood on its own, geometric and stoutly sure of itself the way the state of Nebraska or Kansas looked. But usually they leaned or draped across one another in some fashion. In either case, the global map reflected a world of absolutes. There were no vague spaces or what Trinh Minh Ha has called 'bleeding boundaries' but rather as nations fixed in space and on a map "as a discrete spatial partitioning of territory ... in the fashion of the multicolored school atlas"(Malkki, 1992).

But increasingly, these borders seemed arbitrary. As I watched the East and West German athletes compete, I considered how the straightest, firmest lines of the national borders never seemed to hold the way the crooked lines of the rivers and arched topographies of mountain ranges did. I had seen old maps of the Roman, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires as well as depictions of the borders during the Second World War. I knew from school that the USSR had swallowed up numerous countries, including my father's ancestral home of Lithuania. I tried to imagine its faint outline on maps at the time and hoped for freedom for them. I'd been taught in school that the thick borderlines on the global map would tend to change only in favor of creating modern, post-ethnic democracies around the world. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution that same year only confirmed this worldview. What I never considered was that the clear lines of nationhood might fracture in other places, and the future might hold the dissolution of nation-states.

When I heard about the intense ethnic rivalries between numerous groups, including Bosnian Serbs and Croats Yugoslavia in late 1980s, I studied the world map in search of any fault lines that might explain how the country that had been a symbol of the late-twentieth century's hard fought willingness to overcome the ethnic divisions that had wrought such destruction during the first and second World Wars. I knew that in the past and as a place called the Balkans it had been prone to terrible ethnic divides, but on my map the nation called 'Yugoslavia' looked hale and whole. By 1989, National Geographic magazine published a map, the first that I remember seeing, that suggested the depth of the ethnic problems . This map's multiple colors clearly illustrates what Edward Tufte has called the "struggle between (the) maintenance of context and enforcement of comparison"(76). It represents the numerous fractures between different ethnic groups while continuing to imagine Yugoslav 'nationhood', this time in the lack of continuity within the national boundaries. Identity is still territorialized, now seen in terms of various colors (to label as well as for aesthetic reasons)(Tufte, 81) but now also as a cultural construct (although apparently one that doesn't extend beyond the borders). Malkki, quoting Akhil Gupta (1988), offers insight into this conceptualization of people and space in general as 'images of break, rupture, and disjunction. The recognition of cultures, societies, nations, all in the plural, is unproblematic exactly because there appears an unquestionable division, an intrinsic discontinuity, between cultures, between societies, etc.' At the risk of sounding callous or naive, one of the most personally heartbreaking moments of the war for me occurred with the destruction of the famed Mostar bridge (built1566) in 1993. It was the first time I really grasped that that the world was far more complex than the one I saw on my map - that it might look different to somebody else, or that the geo-political nature of a map might obscure culture, identity, and ideology.

I had a boyfriend in college who covered his room with photos from National Geographic magazine. For the most part, he used images of remote places around the world that had been pulled from issues dating from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, peppered with the occasional image from the beginning of the century. There was a certain romance to what he had created, to look at many images and places morphed into one 'world,' It also distilled National Geographic's parallel history with the field of Anthropology, the study that came of age in the Victorian Era of collecting curiosities and that famed anthropologist Clifford Geertz described as a "science born in Indian tribes, Pacific islands, and African lineages."

In the end, I refused to sleep in the room more than one night because I found the whole experience too creepy. As much as I liked many of the individual images, I also found the assemblage of photos effectively divorced the images from any sense of place or 'authentic' experience and cultural ties in favor of consumer-oriented tourist's gaze of what Arjun Appadurai (1988) calls 'natives' who 'are not only persons who are from certain places, and belong to those places, but they are also those who are somehow incarcerated, or confined, in those places.' Moreover, I now believe that these lines of nationhood were largely the imaginations of mid-twentieth-century geo-political elites and that they tend to fail in part because notions of nationhood and 'nativeness' rarely express themselves along lines as clear and as smooth as those found on a map of this sort. Such maps assume a national unity and 'rootedness' within the straight thick borders that flatten cultural, ethnic, territorial differences (Malkki, 1992) and construct space and place in a manner that reveal a Western expectation that "we live in singular cultural worlds (i.e. imagined communities)" - and that a choice has been made between one world and another (Robins, 2008). Despite this problematic aspect of National Geographic's magazine, the images and maps they contain embody but one type of meaningful visualization of the geography of knowledge in the world.

My definition of a map has once again broadened significantly in recent years. The geo-political variety no longer seems quite as interesting as it once it, but still I find the concept of 'mapping' intriguing and deeply meaningful. Recently, I was staying in Colombo, Sri Lanka, at an apartment that was about two blocks from the site of a bombing of a school that killed several children. It was a pretty street in a 'good' part of town and had every sign of being a safe place. A guard directed traffic. The air was fragrant with the smell of jasmine. Parents walked children dressed in crisp white uniforms home from school. Nothing about the place suggested violence. I looked at the location on a (local) map and still found no sign that this might have happened. I find myself thinking once again about narrative and about the multiplicity of attachments and meaning that people around the world form to places through living in, remembering, and imagining them. How might the resident of Colombo map this experience into all of the other meanings of place and identity? A map might not hold all of the answers but it remains a powerful tool to remember stories that might otherwise be forgotten.

Bibliography:

Cosgrove, Denis E. and Veronica della Dora (2005) "Mapping Global War: Los Angeles, the Pacific, and Charles Owens's Pictorial Cartography." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 (2).

Malkki, Liisa. (1992) "National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees." Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 1, [Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference] (Feb.), pp. 24-44.

Parameswaran, Radhika. (2002) "Local Culture in Global Media: Excavating Colonial and Material Discourses in National Geographic." Communication Theory 12 (3), 287-315.

Robins, Kevin. (2008) "Media and Cultural Diversity in Europe." (unpublished manuscript).

Tufte, Edward. (1990) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Graphics Press LLC, Cheshire, CT.

Turchi, Peter. (2004). Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. Trinity University Press. San Antonio, Texas.

Turkle, Sherri. (ed) (2007) Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

Going "Mad": Creating Fan Fiction 140 Characters at a Time

Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it's not going away. We're your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets cancelled we'll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don't treat us like criminals. -- WeAreSterlingCooper

This is a pretty good statement about the contradictions many fans are experiencing

as they try to interact with media producers in what we've been promised is a

new era of "interactive media". This was written by Bud Caddell, a strategist for

a New York based digital think-tank, Undercurrent, who is also a fan of the AMC

television drama, Mad Men, and "tweets" under the name of Bud Melman, a mailroom clerk at Sterling Cooper advertising. In short, he's an industry insider who is also a fan and someone who consults in advertising who in his spare time enjoys pretending to be a mail clerk at an advertising firm in the 1960s.

Got that? Good. Don't make me repeat myself.

Seriously, the fact that Caddell can be both an industry insider and a fan simply demonstrates the degree to which those lines are blurring from all sides in our contemporary convergence culture; the fact that his fantasies have something to do with his real world identity should also not be a shock to anyone who understands the

psycho-sociology of fandom. Some have argued that Caddell is not a "true

fan" because he's also a "marketer," but that's like saying one can't be both an academic and a fan at the same time. For the record, I'd also call myself a fan of Mad Men! We're all all multitudes within ourselves.

In his 'mundane' guise as Bud Caddell, media consultant, he's posted a fascinating account of how fan fiction emerged around Mad Man through the unlikely channel of Twitter and how this fandom, like so many others, faced legal challenge from the producers of the program they were hoping to help promote.

I am sure that I will lose cool points if I confess that the joys of Twitter have largely escaped me. Anyone who reads this blog knows that brevity is a virtue I do not possess and the idea of blogging at 140 characters at a time is not a hobby I plan to embrace anytime soon. I like to tell people that I am a marathon runner, not a sprinter, but the reality is I just don't know when to stop. But I've been following this story peripherally for a while and was glad to finally get a more detailed and systematic account of what happened. Caddell's account should be required reading for all fans and aca-fen but also for all brand executives and content producers.

As Caddell explains, sometime around the start of the second season of Mad Men, fans began to use the blog platform, Tumblr.com, to post a kind of advice

column, written in the voices of the program's characters, responding to questions from fans, capturing the twisted sexual and interpersonal politics of the early 1960s. Soon, some of these same fans migrated, in character, to Twitter. With a few days after Don Drapper (the ad man protagonist of the series) began tweeting, he had some 3000 subscribers to his update, and his Twitter feed was soon joined by others written by Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, Betty Draper, Roger Sterling, and a dozen or so other characters -- primary and secondary -- from the series.

We can think of these tweets as fan fiction in its most spared down form -- these tweets

represented attempts to get inside the heads (or inhabit the bodies) of fictional characters and see the represented events from their perspective. Francesca Coppa has made the provocative argument that fan fiction might be understood as much as a kind of theater performance as it is a prose genre. (See her essay in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet). So, lets think of what was going on here as a kind of performance art.

Initially, many assumed that the tweets were a new promotional device launched

by AMC and their digital advertising agency, Deep Focus. Deep Focus CEO

Ian Schaffer, after all, runs a blog which has enlightened things to say about social media and audience engagement around brands.

Caddell says that he himself initially believed the activity was a deft example of what brand guru Faris Yacob calls "transmedia planning" (Check out this blog post

where I account how the concept of "transmedia planning" has emerged in the brand realm in response to Convergence Culture's account of "transmedia storytelling.") Caddell created his own character, Bud Melman, so he could join the fun:

As an employee in the mailroom, he could have the curse and the good fortune of being invisible, which means I could tweet about what happened before or after the scene you saw on television.

Caddell, the industry insider became an unlikely fan advocate, when Twitter suspended the accounts of nine of the primary Mad Men characters, including Draper, Olson, and Joan Holloway, in response to a Digital Millennium Copyright Act "cease and

desist" notice from AMC's lawyers. Caddell created the website, WeAreSterlingCooper.com, (and the manifesto quoted above), in order to call attention

to this conflict between the fans and the network, not to mention to aggregate the various Mad Men feeds.

As an industry insider, Caddell notes, he was deeply confused by the industry's response to these practices. Mad Men's viewership had been declining sharply during the second season and there was every reason to think that these activities, small scale though they might be, were helping to generate fan interest and buzz again. The fans involved had offered to work with the series producers and promoters, seeking to better coordinate their efforts rather than creating brand confusion. As Caddell explains:

One element of entertainment and media that consumed me at the time as a marketer was the idea of what to offer fans to consume between commercial breaks, episodes and seasons. The twitter characters could provide other fans a way to play and interact between Sundays when the show aired. From a practical perspective, each single character by themselves was a novelty, but together they could weave an intricate web of conversations and events to follow.

Some sense of this potential was realized when Melman and some other fans staged a Twitter-based short story arc involving "a meeting at the Tom Tom Club for drinks and

shenanigans" just to show what could happen if they coordinated their efforts.

(Here, they start to sound more like the kinds of Role Play Game/Fan Fiction

writing activities that occurs in LiveJournalLand.)

So far, these overtures have had a chilly reception. Mark Deuze has suggested at

least two reasons why production companies get anxious around such activities:

the creative department's desire for creative control, the legal department's concerns about controlling copyright. Here, we can add a third: the promotional department's fears about losing control over their brand message. Of the three, the last is perhaps the most absurd, since in reality, these companies lost control a long time ago; the fans can do pretty much anything they want with these brands and with a high level of visibility and going after them is a bit like Brier Rabbit pummeling away at the tar baby. Yet, even pretty innovative companies are getting trapped in the internal politics around television production and promotion, incapable of forming meaningful partnerships with their most active and visible fans, and thus almost certain to start acting in ways that are going to leave them, to continue the metaphor, looking "stuck up".

As Caddell writes as a fan in the report's conclusions:

AMC saw most of us as stealing something that was theirs. When in reality, we were expressing our affinity for the characters and the show.

Shifting perspectives and writing as an industry insider, he concludes:

We shouldn't threaten fans with legal notices and we shouldn't isolate them. We should cultivate the relationships we're either lucky or gift to have and help them with their expression of their fandom. Brands should offer as much content in as many types to its audiences with the hopes that they feel to compelled to rearrange them and add novel elements to tell their own stories. We fight to insert ourselves in the conversations of real people, and that is exactly what happened with the Mad Men characters on Twitter. If we cling to this sense that we are the sole owner of creative work, we'll continue to isolate that work from the actual world and the human beings we work to affect.

Fans have consistently raced out ahead of content producers and brand executives in their understanding of the potential of "transmedia entertainment." They are testing new tools, moving into new communities, embracing new forms. Rather than seeking to silence or control them, creative agencies need to observe, document, and where-ever possible, join the game. Caddell's dual status allows him to quickly translate what he's learned as a fan into what his industry needs to learn. I just hope some of them are ready to read and take notes.

Thanks to Joshua Green for calling this report to my attention. Green, a CMS postdoc, and Madeline "Flourish" Klink, a CMS grad student, are listed as consultants on the report.

"We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part Two)

You describe a range of projects in the book including those involving youths and senior citizens. What generational differences, if any, did you observe in the ways they thought about their roles and responsibilities as journalists?

Young people are much more technologically adept in general. Older citizen journalists often get tangled up in the technology.

They approach issues differently. The youth have strongly held opinions and aren't afraid to express themselves, be they nationally or international in scope. The older generation tends to shy away from letting fly with their political opinions especially. They have sort of a been-there, done-that attitude in many cases. I'd love to see research on how the young, middle-aged and seniors differ in their approach to political expression, especially when it comes to writing.

Obviously subject matter differs wildly among the young and the old, who don't know Eminem from an enema.

The young tend to go at each other more, arguing and debating, sometimes getting personal, whereas the seniors have only occasional flare-ups that die down quickly. I suspect they do a lot of internalizing.

Both groups pride themselves on high ethical standards. The youth seem to be very cognizant of their audience, the fact that it is mostly other children or teenagers. No adult needs to monitor what they publish. Left to their own devices, they are quite careful.

The teen-aged editors (well, one was 12) who ran the Junior Journal seemed to think more about themes than do the seniors. Every issue would have a dozen stories on one particular theme. There would be 30 or 40 other stories as well. They were much better at outreach than the seniors who tend to do their own stories but seldom reach out to others to contribute stories or photos or artwork.

A lot of online chatter takes place among the youth as they prepare their editions, whereas the seniors do most of their communicating face-to-face. In both the Melrose and Rye groups there are still members who don't have computers. They type their stories and someone scans them, or they write their stories in longhand and someone retypes them. One woman has a computer but never looks at her email. Still, she writes regularly and knows everything going on in the town.

Can you describe your own transition from Editor of the Boston Globe to someone helping to facilitate community journalism? What did you have to unlearn as a professional in order to embrace citizen news reporting?

When I was Editor of the Globe, an online community project was started in a crime-ridden Boston neighborhood of about 5000 by an MIT grad student and his wife. They enlisted teenagers to operate the site, which was Mac-based. Users ranged in age from age 6 to 80. I was fascinated how they used the site to tell what was going on in the community, working out an arrangement with the police department whereby users of the site could easily report a street light or traffic that wasn't working. Using their website, they organized fairs and plays and other community activities that created healthy dialogue between old and young, something that hadn't been occurring. It was a private site, so the teens went door to door and got permission to provide an email link to those willing. The result was a map on the site where you could click on a particular address and get an email box to write the person who lived there. Communication was crackling throughout the community.

I was made a part of the community, so I decided I could salt the website with stories every day. Every morning I would select stories from the Globe that I thought were particularly germane to that community and feed an electronic copy into their system. Sometimes they were what I call reactive stories--happenings from City Hall or the police department or wherever. Sometimes they were how-to stories on raising children or tips on cooking for special holidays.

When I left the Globe, after almost 40 years, I stayed connected with a media group formed by the MIT Media Lab in the late 1980's called News in the Future. Most of the major newspapers were involved, along with some from other countries as well as television and radio entities. The projects the students and faculty came up with, large and small, were quite exciting. I had been chairman of the Globe's overall Planning Committee, so I knew the challenges coming down the pike. But to my amazement and frustration most of the media outlets ignored all the ideas, not the least of which was electronic paper and ink (Hearst being the exception).

Still, I thought community journalism was a plausible route to go with newpapers taking the lead to organize them and incorporate them. The only tricky part was figuring out a method of compensation. But that was a detail.

None of them seemed interested.

I didn't give up. I figured out another approach that would be a stepping stone. A lot of newspapers were part of a successful program called Newspaper in the Classroom. The held one-day training sessions with teachers on how to use newspapers as a teaching device in the classroom, then produced lesson plans and then delivered newspapers to the schools, charging a low bulk rate. So a pupil would learn math by learning about baseball box scores or stock tables, or about geography by tracking ongoing news stories, or...well, you get the idea.

Given how well that worked in developing the newspaper-reading habit, I suggested to newspapers that they publish high school newspapers on their websites. Boston.com, for instance, would have a schools subsection with all the Boston school newspapers and all the suburbs. No takers.

So I approached a newspaper sponsor from Italy and another from Brazil about ten years ago. They leaped at the idea. Three of us from MIT spent a day with 200 teachers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a while later Agencia Estado, a leading newspaper, opened its website to 100 schools in the region of Curitaba. The experiment worked well until a change of government apparently curtailed the program.

Meanwhile La Republicca in Italy advertised a similar program on kataweb.com.it. Today that one newspaper--about the size of the Boston Globe--carries 7400 school newspapers from junior high schools and high schools in 84 cities.

At about that point I gave up on US newspapers and started working with citizen groups for their sake not for the newspapers' sake.

Major adjustments for me were lack of resources and a rejection of hierarchy. The first is a continual problem. They don't need hardly anything in the way of financial resources but there aren't enough people to thoroughly cover a community, even the size Rye (5300 population). Operating as a flat organization can be time consuming at times, but I have learned to relish operating by consensus. Someone has to orchestrate the functioning of meetings. Melrose and Rye have solved that by rotating the person who chairs alphabetically.

I tend to be a stickler about conflict of interest, certain ethical concerns and style consistencies (is it 3 p.m. or 3 P.M.?; is it spring or Spring?; if nine is spelled out, why isn't twelve?, etc.). I've learned to look the other way when someone wants to write about the accomplishments of a volunteer group they belong to (although we insist they disclose their affiliation) or someone uses Photoshop to slightly alter a picture. But I am so swept up in the enthusiasm of the participants that I tend to honor the wisdom of the group over any personal journalistic prejudices I might harbor.

Americans are increasingly getting their news from national papers,

though there has also been a rise of micro-local news on the web. What happens to the middle ground between the two in this evolving informational system -- news that occurs on a state or regional level?

I am now climbing on my white horse. I am very angry with publishers and broadcast executives. And a few editors. They have abrogated their responsibilities by cutting staff to the bone (especially reporters) and by dumbing down the news (TV has been particularly guilty of this). I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but there are studies showing dramatic decreases in the numbers of reporters covering state houses. That trend started long before newspaper profit margins started narrowing.

Some fast measures need to be taken. Technology can play a role. Public legislative sessions at every level need to be televised. Techniques for searching video archives need improvement. Better reporter tools would help. And there need to be more collaborations among media outlets. It's ironic that Associated Press is apparently under siege at a time where that formula for coverage is more relevant now than ever. It's also ironic since newspaper websites from their inception have been replete with AP stories even though newspapers claimed they were devoting staff to generate web articles. It hardly every happened.

Only recently have the newspaper newsrooms and their websites begun to combine forces. Editors were reluctant to ask their reporters to write a quick web story on a breaking news story, then turn around and write a different story for the next morning's newspaper.

One answer is for citizens, whether they are journalists or not, to keep the pressure on state and regional governments to make records and meeting minutes available online in a timely fashion.

We typically think of news as valuable as a product -- the newspaper and the information it includes -- but many of your arguments about community journalism center on the value of participating in the process of identifying and generating the news. What do you see as the value of everyday people involving themselves in the process of reporting the news?

Somehow the activism of the Sixties petered out, and we became largely a nation of couch potatoes. Bowling Alone, the book by Prof. Robert Putnam captured that trend. Even now we go to local government meetings (Selectmen, Planning Boards, etc.) and no one shows up. However, average citizens are beginning to wake up to the fact that they don't know what's going on in their own hometowns. As taxes go up, they begin to take it personally. They want to know what's happening and may even want to get involved in a particular issue from time to time. Little by little they are becoming aware that their local newspapers are letting them down. They are becoming aware that their elected officials don't want them to know what's happing. Last week I received an off-the-record email from someone working in Town Hall, saying, "The only way I know what's going on is by reading your publication."

Clearly those who get involved in reporting the news learn more about "what's going on", convey what they have learned to readers and, we would hope, a better informed populace translates into better governance.

You reference James Carey's concept of news reading and writing as a ritual, suggesting "News is not information but drama." Can you elaborate on this claim? I've often argued that civic engagement is as much a structure of feeling as it is a structure of information. How does community journalism impact the ways people feel about their communities?

Everyone has his own metaphor, I suppose. Carey, who shared some of his thinking in the halls of MIT a few times, was especially thoughtful about the ritual. He used drama as his metaphor, which I thought was an improvement over my use of orchestra or orchestral arrangement when I was at the Globe. Perhaps I overdid it, because they gave me a framed baton at one point.

News has its ebbs and flows, and to some extent the readers' attention is affected by changes in patterns. Sometimes those shifts are caused by the news itself that is driven by inaugurations or Congress voting on a budget or weather or fires and shootings and the like. That's called reactive news. Then there is proactive news, where a decision is made to probe a specific area: the latest trends in education, the mobile lifestyle, how other invaders have extricated themselves from countries they occupied...

In either case--reactive coverage or proactive--the journalist, community or otherwise, is trying to read the audience; trying to inform, respond to their needs and interests, provide them with what they need to know and what they ought to know and maybe even entertain them.

Publications, online or otherwise, need to figure how to engage readers; how to draw on them. This is not done by running insipid contests: Vote yes if you think we should withdraw from Iraq by June; vote no if you think that is too early. Or, vote yes if you think actress X should have her children taken away from her, or no if you think she should keep them.

The receiving of news should not be strictly a cerebral activity. News should be tweaking the imagination, angering, frustrating, moving a person to sadness and joy. It should at the same time be molding a true depiction of the community you live in with all its flaws and all its richness. It is very much an emotional engagement.

Most of your projects are rooted in geographically local communities where people at least some of the time meet face to face and write about people they'll know. Is it possible to imagine community journalism operating on a global scale through online communities or would the process necessarily change without the face to face contact?

My experience is mostly centered on seven years working with youth between the ages of 10 and 18 from 91 countries.

Again, we come to the question of mission. Members of the Junior Journal wanted to reform the world. Not a bad mission. Plenty to work with.

The problems they addressed cut across geographic boundaries: war, environment, abuse, etc. It was fascinating to hear how these issues were handled in India and South Africa and Mexico and Russia and the United Arab Republic and China and Argentina and Australia and on and on.

What started as a group of 30 wound up with well over 300. Their only face-to-face contact was among the 30 originators for five days before they started their publication. The individual reporting aspect didn't seem to be that adversely affected. Recruiting of writers didn't seem to be a problem. But the inability to recruit and train editors proved to be the publication's downfall as little by little editors reached an age where they were too old and going off to college. If even a quarter of the group could have met for a few days once a year the Junior Journal would be humming today.

In short, even though they had no editor-in-chief and arrived at all major decisions by email consensus, the importance of a leadership group being in sync and understanding one another, even though they might argue a lot, was essential to survival.

But let me proffer another model. Perhaps we should call it a "confederacy" model. It could be all-volunteer or commercial. This would be a loosely connected set of community publishing groups with similar missions that operate independently within a state, region, country or world, but are tied together electronically. Perhaps they would use the same publishing software, although not necessarily. They would be able to use each other's stories. They would share a joint archive. Perhaps they could share a database of theme photographs and graphics. They might share a set of guidelines for issues of style, usage and publishing matters such as libel, copyright, etc. They could develop an internal, fully electronic help desk.

"Hello, desk? How do you handle photos of children under 12?"

"Waterloo: If the child is identifiable, we don't use the photo without permission of the parent or guardian.:

"Sarasota: If the photo is taken at a school, we consider permission from the headmaster as equivalent to parental permission (in loco parentis).

"Austen: We never run photos of children that show them in awkward situations."

Perhaps there could be a repository for investigative projects that other groups could use for hints on doing their own investigation. Even better, what if there were jointly reported stories?

I remember when working for United Press we often received or sent messages to all bureaus saying something like: "We are doing a story on the impact of the economic crunch on social service agencies. Please survey some of the agencies in your region for anecdotal information, making sure you touch base with small, medium and large agencies. Please send us a memo of not more than 2,000 words by next Friday."

Again, we ain't seen nothin' yet.

For more reflections on Couch Potatoes Sprout, see Ellen Hume's post about the book for the new Center for Future Civic Media blog.

John S. (Jack) Driscoll has been Editor-in-Residence at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1995. Previously he was at the Boston Globe newspaper for nearly 40 years, seven as Editor. He is the author of Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism.

"We Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Jack Driscoll on Community Journalism (Part One)

One of the pleasures of living and teaching at MIT for the past 20 years has been the chance to build ongoing relations with a fascinating cast of characters, many of whom have been regulars at the MIT Communication Forum events that are run by my colleague, David Thorburn. These events have attracted people from across the campus, from neighboring universities, and from the greater Cambridge area, many of whom have been coming regularly for a decade or more to listen to smart, citizenly discussions about democracy, new media, and public life. The Center for Future Civic Media partners regularly with the Communication Forum to host events, including ones this coming semester on Popular Culture and the Political Imagination and on Race and the 2008 Elections. I met Jack Driscoll at one or another of these events. Our paths have criss-crossed off and on through the years. And for the past year or so, he's been actively involved with our new Center for Future Civic Media, a joint CMS-Media Lab effort funded by the Knight Foundation. Jack's an amazing guy! He fully embodies the classic concept of a "gentleman of the press." He spent forty years of his life working with the Boston Globe -- that's a newspaper for those of you who only get your information on line -- and for seven of them, he was the editor. Many of his generation were confused, frustrated, even enraged by the growing competition digital media has posed to traditional forms of civic communication. But Jack was fascinated. He migrated to the MIT Media Lab where he's been working to help construct the future of what he calls "community journalism" first through the News of the Future group and now through our Civic Media center. He's been doing work on the ground with senior citizens in local communities in New Hampshire and with young people in a virtual community which spans the globe. He hasn't just built prototypes to demonstrate the potentials of new tools and technologies; he's helped to inspire and instruct, advise and mentor, and most importantly, sustain publications over extended periods of time.

Driscoll recently published a book, Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism, which shares some of his experiences and offers sage advice about how and why community journalism may become an important part of the contemporary newscape. What I love about the book is its emphasis on journalism as a practice and a process rather than simply a product, since it is clear that working on these publications is empowering to those who become involved, changing the ways they think about themselves and their communities.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to pick Jack's brain about community journalism and to be able to share his perspectives with you here. As you read this, you have to picture this ruddy faced man with gray hair, a sparkle in his eye, and a broad toothy smile. Jack represents what was best about the old style journalism and he represents a bridge to what may be most vital about the future of civic media.

You begin the book with the quotation, "now anyone with a computer is a newspaper." So this begs the question -- what is a "newspaper" and thus, what are the differences between individuals or communities publishing the news and the kind of work that has been performed by professional journalists.

The "computer-is-newspaper" analogy refers to each of them in their roles as vehicles for transmitting information to a wide audience. In the early days of the printing press there is evidence that citizens took advantage of the newspaper mechanism as a vehicle to spread their views in the form of flyers and pamphlets and then as periodicals that evolved into newspapers. When James Franklin started his weekly newspaper in 1721, he is said to have invited readers to contribute. One of those readers was his 16-year-old brother Benjamin, then a James's typesetter, who thought that was a pretty good idea, so pretty soon he started writing essays under the name of "Silence Dogood".

The flatbed press worked pretty well in those days, because the population was small and time was not of the essence. As the printing-press technology became more advanced, citizens played a lesser role, relegated to Letters to the Editor. Before email, we'd get more than 300 letters a day at the Boston Globe and print 10 or 12.

As time passed, citizens became receptacles for news and information. It was a one-way street. The computer changed all that.

Citizens have responded slowly for the most part, but we do have bloggers and we do have digital photos and video unfurled when there is a major news event, and we now have twittering.

The most lumbering form to arise is community journalism. Folks have the image of group publishing as being a really difficult process. The reason I wrote this book was to demystify the process. In short, it's not that difficult, it's rewarding and it's fun.

Without sounding like a Harvard Business School professor, "mission" is the key word in describing the difference between individual and group publishing. Bloggers come in a variety of forms: In some cases they are voicing strongly held opinions, in others they are aggregators or instructors; some are champions of causes. You like to think their mission is to elevate the level of discussion either on a broad range of topics or a specialized field. For the most part I think they are succeeding.

Community groups so far seem to be the product of a spirit of public service and frustration. The youth I worked with from around the world were bursting to have their voices heard. They were not happy with the way their world was being run, but the adults in their lives had pretty much kept a thumb on them. The Junior Journal was an outlet to let 'er rip. To their credit they didn't just pontificate. They did research and reporting. They had their own experiences to speak from. I remember one vivid story about a child soldier, age 12, who was used as a spy by his Sierra Leone unit, because he could slip in and out of enemy camps easily. When I asked how the writer could know so much detail, the editor responded, "Because he was the child soldier."

With adults there seems to be a feeling that their communities are not being covered in the media. Newspaper staff cutbacks have exacerbated the problem. It's not just the institutional news, but the stories about the fabric of the community, the personalities, the achievements of groups of individuals, the problems, the culture.

The Melrose SilverStringers have been around for 13 years but rarely write about their local government. They seem to leave that to the local weekly newspaper. Rye, N.H., on the other hand, tries to keep up with the local boards while at the same time writing about issues, trends and people. Community groups enhance the ability to cover issues, because of the variety of amateur interests in the group: the history buff, the energy enthusiast, the horticulturist, the climatologist, the expert cook, etc.

One member of the Rye group is a former operator of a small ski slope in the next state. There is absolutely no place to ski in Rye, a flat seacoast town, but he has a strong readership whether he is writing about Stowe, Vermont, or Vail, Colorado. He writes from experience, not just because of his business background but also because at age 80 he still skis. And lots of residents of Rye go skiing, too. So he has developed a following.

Community groups have found that the word "localized" refers to stories of high interest in their local community. Travel is one of those topics. An early Melrose story described a local couple's adventures traveling in the Northwest of the U.S. in an Airstream trailer. One of the highest number of hits in Rye was for a story about a trip to Quebec City. That was 18 months ago, and the story still is getting hits.

And so in community groups, if you have enough diversity, you can reflect the range of special interests of a city or town over time.

I'm deliberately sticking with the three communities featured in the book, but when we look at the spectrum of community groups now sprouting elsewhere, you see the local news/feature groups but you also see more and more communities of interest. A lot of them center around health and self-help issues. They tend to be experiential, and their stories react to the news about new treatments, new medications. Their mission is to share, hoping to improve the lives of others.

Finally, I would suggest that community groups tend to do more original reporting than bloggers. The best bloggers, like the best mainstream media columnists, tend to build their blogs around research and reporting; the good bloggers do a lot of research; then there are large numbers who simply are expressing their views with maybe a few links thrown in from time to time.

Can you explain the concept of "community journalism" as you outline it in the book? Do you see this as a specific kind of "citizen journalism"? What difference does it make that the projects you describe involve many people in a community working together as opposed to the model of the lone blogger?

The other day five of us were in the throes of publishing the January edition of Rye Reflections. It could be done by one person, but we divvy up the responsibilities and turn it into an enjoyable 60 or 90 minute exercise. That's community at work.

As we were finishing up, another member of our group wandered into the room we were working in at the Rye Public Library and was clearly excited. He wanted to tell us of an interview he had had that morning with a blind man who is well known in the town for his upbeat attitude and willingness to get out and about, with help. He shared that the man had spent a couple of hours before the 9 a.m. interview cutting wood outdoors. It was 5 degrees that day.

Someone in the group suggested he interview a longtime elected official who takes the blind man to the bank and the Post Office and the local coffee shop. Someone else suggested he talk to one of the regulars on the 10-seat van that takes seniors food shopping, because the blind man is known for entertaining the other passengers, often quoting poetry and telling stories. That's community helping to add dimensions to a story that one person might not scope out alone.

When the Junior Journal editors--of which there were 12, one for each month--planned their editions, they tried to come up with a theme each month that would resonate throughout their global community. Issues ranged from AIDs, war and peace, and protecting the environment; to children-specific issues such as child workers, child soldiers, suicide; to cultural issues such as wedding customs or celebrations of holidays. They did this as a collaboration, via email, with a certain amount of give-and-take involved as they shaped the idea and more give-and-take as they shaped individual stories with their reporters. Again, it is people working together to enhance the quality of what they are presenting.

And so in community journalism you get a collaborative effort, a sharing of wisdom and experience, that hones the final output. And, almost as a by-product, you experience a form of social networking in the process.

Then there is the critiquing process. It exhibits itself in the editing process but it tends to go beyond that as members develop trust in the group and learn to be open and honest about commenting on the works of others.

Media literacy? As community journalists they better understand the basics that go into creating a story, they become much more astute in analyzing the work of mainstream media.

In Rye we actually engage in community-building activities that have evolved rather than being imposed. At our weekly meetings we start off by going around the table and giving each person a chance to share whatever they wish. It might be about a family matter, an amusing experience, a comment on national politics. Like many periodicals, Rye Reflections prides itself on its recipes, so occasionally a writer will cook up one of her (occasionally his) creations and bring it to the meeting to share. An annual potluck dinner at the seashore has evolved with some members putting on a skit and it now looks as though there will be an annual end-of-year home gathering, because one couple in the group went to Sweden last year, raved about the glugg and invited the Rye "Surfers" to their house for a meeting followed by some goodies washed down with glugg (not too strong, I should add).

At one level you could say that community journalism proves that two minds are better than one. But there also is the diversity of minds that enriches the publication. It may show up in the form of liberal, conservative, libertarian or whatever; it may show up in knowledge about the history or ethos of a community; it may show up in the form specialities (gardening, climatology, sports, culture, etc.) or in the forms of photographic or videographic expertise...

When some of these special-interest members combine, you sometimes get fascinating results. Whoever thought that a massive email conflict among several members of the Junior Journal over Kashmir, would evolve into a marvelous article co-authored by a Pakistani girl and an Indian girl or that two writers, one an Israeli and the other Palestinian would call for cooler heads in the Middle East or that an article about a lesbian being harassed in school would be published, because a passionate online discussion over the incident resulted in a consensus that it was a story that needed to be heard.

Much of the book assumes that traditional journalism style, ethics, and

practices provide the best models for community practices. Yet, there are many other possible models for what community journalism might look like and the circumstances of producing community journalism is very different from a professional newsroom. What do you see as the advantages or disadvantages of modeling community journalism after established news practices?

I feel a little like the circus barker: "You ain't seen nuthin' yet."

Citizens haven't begun to tap the potential of community activity that will soon take on much more of an advocacy mantel, in my opinion. And, I'd guess, it'll take off in directions we haven't imagined.

The traditional approach has been adopted so far, because most average citizens prefer to walk before they run. They are tending to ape mainstream media. But the most important reason is because they seem themselves filling a vacuum that is coincident with the sudden rise of online computing. Most localized groups see themselves as supplementing traditional media, picking up the slack.

We've seen blogging take on a major role in politics, especially on the national level. Community sites won't be far behind. And not far behind that will be special-interest groups within local communities and regions.

Still, there are some advantages to the traditional model. It promotes diversity of interests and opinions. Much like academia. Participants tend to keep each other honest but at the same time learn from one another. The model will have longevity, whereas advocacy models will tend to either splinter over issues or die out as the issue becomes less cutting-edge.

The disadvantage is that checks-and-balances make story generation hard work. Stories need to reflect all sides. They need to stand up to peer review.

It's a busy world, it seems. More hectic than I remember my parents experiencing, even with ten children in the family. So there is a question as to how much time adults will be willing to spare for community journalism, whatever form it takes. (There are, of course, commercial forms appearing here and there. They, of course, tend to be traditional in approach.)

For teenagers, however, I see a lot of possibilities. I have a bias, but my experience tells me that online youth groups would function best outside of the school framework, which tends to stultify their creativity. They have a lot to offer, and the future is theirs. Libraries, girls and boys clubs, etc., would be ideal settings.

John S. (Jack) Driscoll has been Editor-in-Residence at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1995. Previously he was at the Boston Globe newspaper for nearly 40 years, seven as Editor. He is the author of Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism.

Reconsidering Family Photographs

Not so many years ago, I was visiting my parent's home in Atlanta. As we were sprawled around the living room, glancing through the Sunday papers, my mother let out a gasp, "It's like I've seen a ghost!" She passed the paper over to me and showed me a photograph, which I was pretty sure I had seen several times previously. It depicted Martin Luther King being led through the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta following one of his many arrests for civil disobedience. It was being reproduced this time in anticipation of a PBS special about King. "Yes, I've seen this picture of King before, Mom."

"No," she said, "it's Pap!" I looked more closely at the photograph, searched my memory, and realized that one of the deputies escorting King was my late grandfather. Needless to say, I was now as stunned as my mother by the discovery that my grandfather had been involved in King's arrest.

Now keep in mind that I never really knew "Pap," my mother's father, who had passed away in the late 1950s when I was a little over a year old. He was someone who lived for me primarily through old photographs -- including many that are included in my own yellowing baby book. He was the kindly looking man who had given me my first haircut, since he had spent much of his life running a barber shop in downtown Atlanta. There were pictures of him bouncing me on his knee as a newborn and there were snap shots of him receiving visitors from his hospital bed shortly before his death. There are even photographs showing the huge mound of flowers at his grave-side. Family legend is that half of the city passed through his barbershop and a goodly portion of his friends and associates had turned out for his last rites. From old family stories, I knew that he had helped to run the city's draft board during World War II and that his own oldest son had ended up in a POW camp in Germany. My father liked to tell a story about sitting in Pap's patrol car and having baby Henry reach up and pull the siren, creating a minor ruckus.

It was hard to reconcile these images and stories about my grandfather with the popular representations of King's captors and tormentors, hard to reconcile the photographs in my baby book with the all too familiar images of King's followers being knocked down by fire hoses or besieged by attack dogs. So, the new information passed over me with a wave of shock and shame. As a white southern male who grew up in the south during the civil rights era, I have always struggled with issues of liberal guilt, not sure about my ability to talk meaningfully about race, unsure how to acknowledge my own complicity in a system of white privilege. And here, suddenly, the issue was asserting itself with a new degree of urgency.

For me, this era of segregation was perhaps best summed up by two childhood memories, which suggested the transitions Atlanta underwent in the period of my childhood. When I was about five or six, my parents dropped me off at the Decatur Courthouse to attend a "Toys for Tots" performance of Peter and the Wolf. My parents were going to meet me outside after and I went in proud at being on my own for perhaps the first time in my life. After the concert, I wandered outside, eager to find them, and they were nowhere to be seen, having gotten turned around and exited the building in the wrong direction. Not particularly paniced, I must have decided that I should just try to walk home and so I headed out on my own, wandering through street after street for the better part of an hour, while my frantic parents turned the city upside down. What I remember from that day was wandering through an entire neighborhood without saying any white faces. Disoriented, I had moved into the black section of the still segregated city and for the first time, I experienced what it was like to be in a minority position. I was growing up in an almost entirely white world yet I hadn't realized it until that moment. I've always been fascinated by a Flannery O'Connor short story which described more or less the same experience -- a young child separated from his parents who finds himself encountering a world where there are no white faces.

When I was a child, my father had owned his own construction company and I spent a fair amount of time playing on building sites, collecting bottles for the deposit money. One day, I found myself playing with several other children my age who happened to be the offspring of black construction workers. What did we do? We were collecting big black blocks of tar with the stated plan of creating our own tar baby, inspired by a recent screening of Walt Disney's Song of the South. Once our parents learned of our creative project, there was a general awkwardness. Though both sets of parents had taken us to see the movie, there was an understanding, even then, that this was not an appropriate thing for little black and white children to be doing together. The Uncle Remus stories were too closely associated with a history of race and racism and the tar baby embodied sticky problems none of them knew how to talk with each other about. Even as a child I saw there was something wrong with this picture.

As I grew older, I would struggle with my identity as a white southerner. There were times in late elementary school when I would wear confederate flags on my belt buckle. Those flags were never intended as statements of racism, but rather as assertions of my own racial pride. My family had lived in Georgia for many generations. We had old photographs that showed my great-great-grandfather in his Confederate uniform. I had no "mother country" that I could trace my heritage back to and this was the source of some discomfort by the late 1960s and early 1970s when many of my classmates were proclaiming their ethnic pride. For me, the Confederacy had been that mythical past to which I could trace my roots -- not a living symbol of the current divisions between the races -- but over time, I came to realize that in embracing this symbol that I could cause a great deal of pain for others. Could I be proud of who I was and where I came from without it becoming an assertion of white supremacy?

Through the years, I've resented the ways that the south has been made into a kind of national scapegoat. As a southerner growing up when I did, I always knew I had to confront racism, one way or another, and decide where I stood. Atlanta might call itself "the city too busy to hate" but there was never any easy way to escape the burden of self reflection. Some of my friends growing up were racists and made no bones about it. Some of them have spent their lives battling the Klan or contributing to the Southern Poverty Law Center. But all of them understood that racism had something to do with who they were and how they related to the other people around them.

When I was in graduate school in the Mid-West, I was struck by the unthinking racism of many of my students. I remember that one fraternity at a big ten university held a "Martin Luther Koon" birthday party, where people had come in black face, played craps, and eating water melon and fried chicken. Some of my students went to the party, not sure what to expect, and some of them told me later that they hadn't really thought this could be hurtful to anyone. It was all a big dress up game to them, having grown up in the rural midwest and having had little exposure to actual African-Americans. They had never been forced to confront the implications of their own racism and so they imagined racism as something that happened in the south that had nothing to do with their lives. It isn't that I didn't know people growing up who would have held such a gathering but they would have known what they were doing. Being there would have been a conscious choice -- for better or not. Yet, having the image of a racist south has so often been used as a way to deflect that kind of self examination and thus to simplify the history of race in America.

And so, my first response to seeing the image of my grandfather arresting King was one of shame to see someone who was so beloved in my family history play such a controversial role in the history of the nation. I didn't want anyone to know about that connection. I didn't want to talk about it. I certainly didn't know how to talk about all of the feelings that this image brought up for me.

But, then something else occurred to me,and that was the possibility that this same photograph might be found in the family albums of King's grandchildren and that through this shared image and the history behind it, our lives were complexly intertwined.

When I had looked at the photograph before, my grandfather had been just one more faceless white southerner in the background of the photograph. Yet, now, he was pushed into the foreground in my consciousness. And the photograph became a way of thinking about the subjective experiences that at once connected and separated people of different races who came of age in the same city and in the same generation. There would always be a constant set of shifts between who was in the foreground and who was in the background depending on whose perspective was being brought to bear on this image. And indeed, I was reminded of photographs of my mother's childhood where black maids might be seen in the background of family portraits -- people who, in that classic southern formulation, were always seen as "part of the family" but who were the matriarchs of their own families with their own histories which no one in my mother's household could have told you.

We can not easily separate out these different subjective responses to these shared images. Given the degree to which black and white lives imposed on each other even in the most segregated days of the south, we would always be visible in the background of each other's photographs and always appear as shadowy, not fully understood figures in each other's narratives.

This sense of connection to this historical moment, of course, also changed the ways that I have come to read accounts of King's life and his political mission. King has always been an inspiration to me -- not the least through his capacity to imagine the possibility of social transformation and cultural change, his faith that a dark chapter of American history could give rise to something more hopeful. I have come to respect King's utopian imagination -- which comes through especially in the "I Have a Dream" speech. King used "hope" as a resource through which to frame a powerful critique of the limitations of his society. By imagining a world where white and black children could play together, he was able to embody the ways that his own society fell far short of those ideals and he and his followers were able to transform that critique into an agenda for change. He described a better way and inspired many to pursue it.

As I have read these historical accounts, I recognized that the whole politics of civil disobedience meant that King counted on white men of conscience who would be shocked into action when he provoked reaction and retaliation for his protests. The point of civil disobedience was to force the system to react and in doing so, to show its excesses and contradictions. In some cases, the white men who arrested King were cast as embodiments of racist traditions and practices whose rage was turned against them through a kind of political judo. In other cases, the goal was to provoke more thoughtful men to question the institutions and practices to which they had committed their lives by forcing them to play out the contradictions between their own sense of justice and what the system required them to do.

There were white southerners who actively supported King and his movement. King wrote in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail in 1963:

I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some-such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle---have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as "dirty n-word lovers." Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation.

I will never know what kind of person my grandfather was or how the experience of arresting King might have changed him. I like to imagine him as someone like Ralph McGill whose respect for basic human dignity made him question the society of which he was a part. I like to imagine that if he had lived much past that moment, he might have been part of the change which the south underwent during the early days of my childhood. I will never know what he was thinking that day, though I've studied the photograph trying to give meaning to his cryptic expressions, trying to read motives into the body language of a man whose personality is totally unknown to me, beyond the stories my mother used to tell about him. I wonder what it says that my mother never knew that her father had been one of those who had arrested King.

When Barack Obama spoke about the confusion and anguish that still surrounds the relations between white and black America in his campaign speech in response to the Wright controversy, I was touched. Here's what he said about his own grandmother:

I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

I understood what he meant. I can not "disown" my grandfather. In fact, the process of struggling to make sense of this photograph has strengthened my emotional connections to him. It has made him more real as a figure in my own personal narrative. I can't excuse him for what he did, even though, of course, like so many others, he was "just doing his job." I can't hide from who my grandfather was or what he did and I can't use my guilt and anxiety as an excuse not to speak up about race in America today.And I can't allow myself to feel good about myself as if somehow I had escaped that racist past into some post-racial society where "race no longer matters" just because I voted for Obama.

I cringe every time I hear a commentator talk about how voting for Obama allowed whites to feel better about themselves, knowing that on some levels, of course, it was true that I saw my vote as one step towards undoing what my grandfather had done so many years ago. I am reminded of the work Justin Lewis and Sutt Jhally did about Cosby, which described the "enlightened racism" they found in white responses to the series. Many of them felt that seeing Cosby and his family as "people like us" meant they had escaped racism, that they were no longer accountable for any legacy of harm and discrimination, and that race no longer caused any obstacles to advancement and thus no forms of affirmative action were required.

This week, we will watch the first African-American man (well, significantly, a mixed race man) become President of the United States. Some have described Obama as part of a "Joshua generation" of African-American leaders. King had seen into the promised land, like Moses, but was not able to lead his people there. Obama, the story goes, and his contemporaries were going to be able to build the new society and thus in some small way fulfill King's dream for a more just society. I wept when Obama clinched the presidency and I am sure I will weep when he takes the Oath of Office. But this, too, is too simple a response. There is still much we need to overcome.

The "Obama moment" requires us to take risks, to ask hard questions, to venture into uncomfortable territory, and to have an honest conversation about race in America. We can't wish race away but we have to re-examine the complex ways that our lives are intertwined and have impinged upon each other. We need to be having this conversation at all scales, large and small, local and global, online and off, and through many different channels of communication. The "Obama moment" offers us all a chance for redemption and transformation but it won't come easily.

Maybe it's time for more of us to take another look at our family photographs and see what's been hiding there all the time.

Loomings 2009: What Obama Might Have Learned from Moby-Dick

The following post was written by Wyn Kelley, a Melville scholar, who is collaborating with Project NML (New Media Literacies) on our teacher's strategy guide on "Reading in a Participatory Culture." The work we've been doing on Moby-Dick would not have been possible without Wyn's passion for the topic and her commitment to teaching. More than any one else, she helped me to see that there are fans of serious literature just as there are fans of popular culture and that we have much to learn from each other about how we engage with texts that really matter to us. She recently shared with me these interesting reflections on Obama's reading preferences and what they might tell us about his vision for the country. I wanted to share them with you -- along with my own best wishes on the dawning of a new era in American history. "Loomings 2009"

by Wyn Kelley

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States."

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL."

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

After September 11, 2001, some commentators wondered if Melville's phrases in the opening of Moby-Dick prophesied a twenty-first-century war in Afghanistan. This year, as we observe a new inauguration, his words about an election for the presidency might seem strangely apt as well. Few have considered, however, whether "WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL" matters to the government of the United States.

Now, apparently, it does. According to a statement on his homepage at Facebook, as well as in various interviews and profiles, incoming president Barack Obama's favorite books are Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. What does this information suggest about our new president?

Song of Solomon, the story of an African-American man searching for his identity, seems a likely inspiration for Obama's account of a (somewhat) similar quest, Dreams from My Father. But Moby-Dick? One would hardly associate Obama with Captain Ahab, a man of furious passion bent on revenge. Nor does he much resemble Ishmael. As verbally inclined as Melville's narrator, Obama nevertheless has assumed political leadership, whereas Ishmael prefers the role of observer.

Perhaps he is an island prince, like Queequeg? Yes, he comes from a distant Pacific island, but Obama has taken his place within American society as Queequeg never does. Does he, like Bulkington, have a soul that can "keep the open independence of her sea"? It may be too soon to tell.

One possible answer appears in Obama's book, Dreams from My Father. In contemplating an early failure when working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama describes himself as like "the first mate on a sinking ship" (166). Call me Starbuck?

Ishmael portrays Starbuck as a "long, earnest man." He admires his valor: "Looking into his eyes you seemed to see there the yet-lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life." Ishmael pays tribute to his "august dignity," which he associates with a "just Spirit of Equality, which has spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!"

Starbuck, however, goes down with the Pequod. Obama took the helm of what he saw as a sinking ship and steered it to Washington.

On further reflection, we might conclude that Obama is less like Melville's human characters and more like the whales, who maintain their equilibrium in widely diverse regions. "Oh, man!" says Ishmael, "model thyself after the whale! . . . Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. . . . [L]ike the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own." Perhaps our new president has the whale's "rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness" with which to endure the hazards of nature--or American politics.

Wyn Kelley teaches in the Literature Faculty at MIT and has published

extensively on Melville. Other projects include working with the New Media Literacies

group at MIT and the Melville Society Cultural Project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum

in New Bedford, MA.

Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: An Interview with Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, and Jill Denner (Part Two)

There's an emphasis throughout the book on user-generated content. One can argue that modding and other user-generated forms of content have made it easier for women to repurpose existing games to better meet their interests. Yet, one could also argue that this reliance on user-based solutions has marginalized female-interests into narrow niches rather than reshaping the design of commercial games. What do you see the gains and losses surrounding user-generated content?

CARRIE: I applaud tools to place modding and customization in the hands of more players. But these new tools will not stop advocates for girls to grow their technological comfort and expertise from wanting them to pursue the more difficult (and more powerful) advanced forms of customization through programming. Hopefully even when in-game toolsets for customization are available, it will still be possible to dig deeper and change the game even more.

JILL: The chapter I wrote with Shannon Campe describes the types of games made by 126 middle school girls, when they are given the tools and supports to design and program their own games. In fact, we found that girls' games were not highly gendered. Instead, many used humor to play with, explore, and challenge gender stereotypes. At the same time, they created games that addressed topics of great interest to them, such as fears about getting into trouble at home or school, and on moral decisions. These are topics that are relevant to many teens (male and female) but are completely absent from the most widely accessible games.

YASMIN: It's one of these unpredictable and interesting twists in the history of gaming that for once researchers interested in gender and games predated a paradigm shift in what you now call participatory culture. User-generated content carries with it the high and low: most of what is generated is not particularly compelling, if only for personal reasons, but then there are always a few examples that rise to the top. It's a gain because so many interesting developments are happening on the margins of gaming in discussion boards, machinima - this is what makes gaming an interesting experience. It's a loss if we see player-generated content as the answer to the gender issue. It's not. There is a place for professional design and production and consequently the people there need to become more cognizant about how inclusive or exclusive certain design decisions are.

All evidence suggests that adult women constitute the largest market for casual games. Has this market dominance led to any shifts in the decisions made by game designers serving this space? Does the book offer any insights into why more women play casual games than platform games?

CARRIE: Adult women tend to have less free time and the free time they have is available in shorter chunks of time. That makes games they can pick up and play in short blocks of time more possible and more appealing. Some casual games are available on platforms, but purchasing the console and getting it out and setting it up can be more than a casual commitment. Using the PC for games and the rest of life is in line with multitasking games and the rest of life.

Casual game companies are adopting approaches to acquire a sophisticated understanding of their market. Part of the beauty of online games is an ongoing connection with the player and continuous collection of play data. The game companies I am familiar with involve their most avid players and other volunteers as beta testers, and prior to beta, conduct frequent play tests before deciding the next game is ready to shift. Once a game company has a successful property, they start working with that audience to expand and improve. I don't see the market and the game company as being totally separate. Game design is becoming quite an intimate dialog.

YASMIN: This is really one of the areas deserving more attention research-wise; it just popped up when we started pulling together the book edition. To begin with the name alone 'casual' is of course a misnomer. It implies that these games are not as hardcore or serious as platform games because they don't require hundreds of hours of game play. Some however argue if you compile all the hours spend on casual games albeit distributed you end up with similar levels of involvement.

TL Taylor also made the observation that many of these word and puzzle formats found among casual games have a longstanding history of women playing them. So what we see is not the sudden emergence of the women gamer or a new genre but rather a continuation of traditional game play moving onto a new platform. It might be worthwhile to untangle all these different aspects ...

When we first edited our book, we were often asked why it mattered whether or not women played games. A decade later, what evidence has emerged which might offer a better response to this question?

CARRIE: I think games are still in the process of oozing into all walks of life. So the "one decade later" mark is not an end point but a stepping stone. There will be more change in the next ten years than there were in the last ten years. Games are sometimes and will increasingly be necessary for some jobs, and recommended for personal physical, emotional, and cognitive health. The Pew Foundation report on teens, gaming, and civic life reported that 99% of teens play games, and those who play more were more likely to be active in civic life.

I admit I am a blatant enthusiast, but games offer the curious mind a way to experience, learn, and play outside of the mundane constraints of the physical world. They are important for socialization and for maintaining and performing interpersonal relationships. They are part of participating in modern culture. Also, as games for health, games for learning, and games for social change continue to grow, playing games will be increasingly necessary.

JILL: The chapter by Elisabeth Hayes directly addresses this question. There has been a steady decline in student enrollment and graduation from computing majors in college, and a corresponding decline in the US IT workforce. Hayes argues that gaming can build IT expertise, which may potentially help to fill this gap.

YASMIN: There is one particular reason why it matters now more so than 10 years ago whether or not women and girls play games. This reason is tied to the current interest in games as promising learning and teaching tools. If we consider games effective tools and bring them into schools for that reason, then we better pay attention to their design so that everyone can learn with them. Then of course it matters what outside of school experiences you have because there is ample evidence that this impacts students' participation and success in the classroom.

The book offers some close consideration of the experiences of women working in the games industry. What factors might make this industry more challenging for women than for men to enter and maintain careers?

CARRIE: The huge barrier is programming. 95% of game programmers are male, and the proportion of females major in Computer science continues to decline. For the most part, those with a major voice in game design are the programmers and artists (also 85% male) who work on the game day after day. We either need to find ways to get more girls and young women interested in computer science, or else game development culture needs to open up roles for design consultants who don't come from the ranks of programmers and artists, but contribute in other ways.

JILL: The chapters by Mia Consalvo, and by Tracy Fullerton and her colleagues, describe how the culture of the gaming industry prevents women from entering and staying. Factors include crunch times that force employees to choose between home and work life for extended periods of time, and a devaluing of games that have social value.

The growing emphasis upon "serious games" and educational games raises new questions about gender, since it would be a tragedy if the use of games in the classroom made it that much harder for girls to learn and embrace Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math related subjects. What should educational game designers learn from the research presented in your book?

CARRIE: Part 4 of the book (changing girls, changing games) includes 3 chapters about science, math, engineering, and technology (SMET) games designed specifically for girls. The Click Urban Adventure is a mixed reality detective game in which teams of girls work together using science to solve a mystery. Kristin Hughes at Carnegie Mellon University used extensive formative research to understand some of the needs and desires of urban middle school girls in Pittsburgh. She was able to match narrative types, science tasks, tools and technologies, characters and personas to create a game very well suited to her audience. Her research showed the game was successful in generating a sense of agency and interest in SMET. Thus, games for learning do not, necessarily, exclude girls.

Caitlin Kelleher developed storytelling Alice, a tool for constructing animated stories, and for learning programming along the way. Her hunch that girls would be more interested in programming in order to build a story rather than programming to create a rudimentary game proved to be right on target. Middle school girls who used the Storytelling version of the ALICE programming software instead of the generic version learned more programming, were more delighted with the end product, and were more interested in going on to study programming.

Mary Flanagan created Rapunzel, a game in which players cooperate and compete to program dance moves. She and her team struggled to embed key activist social values within gameplay, such as sharing, cooperation, diversity, autonomy, self-esteem, and authorship.

Taken together these three projects shows that educational games certainly can be designed to appeal to girls. They reinforce the appeal of story and character and remind that games embody values whether designers intend them to or not.

The Heeter and Winn chapter reports on an experiment in which we found that rewarding speedy play interfered with girls' learning, whereas rewarding exploration slowed boys down and helped their learning but did not change girls play behavior positively or negatively. So the chapter does advise educational game designers to come up with ways to make a game "fun" other than including a time limit. As we teach in serious game design graduate classes, creating serious games is even harder than creating games. The audience is often forced to play and usually includes males and females. Learning outcomes, not just fun, must be considered. I am convinced we are all still learning how to make great games for learning. Making the experience good for all learners is part of the requirement.

A decade ago, the core question was whether we should design games specifically for girls or so-called "gender neutral" games to be played by boys and girls together. Is this still a burning question? If so, what new perspectives have emerged over the past decade?

CARRIE: That question makes me schizophrenic. In the collection of research citations on gender and gaming that I have been curating, the two most frequent tags are "gender stereotypes" and "what women want." The gender stereotype research tends to complain about girls and women are portrayed or conceptualized in stereotypical ways that ignore the wide diversity of female-ness. The what-do-women-want research reveals gendered desires and offers suggestions about how to create games to appeal to females.

From a design research perspective, Alan Cooper's proposition to "design for just one user" follows the tradition of designing products to "delight the few, please the many." That perspective implies that very best games for me would be designed for me. Some of what delights me also delights most humans. Some of what delights me would only appeal to a handful of other telecommuting, cat loving 52 year old new media professors. Even just satisfying one player would require many different Carrie-games, not just one. Each of us is more than our gender. The call for "games for girls" is a gross generalization. And yet, of course, some game designs are likely to be more appealing, overall, on average, to females and others to males. Schizophrenic. Sorry.

In her chapter, "Are Boy Games Even Necessary?", Nicole Lazzaro points out that designing for an extreme demographic reduces market size. An extreme male-typed game or an extreme female-typed game both leave out what players like most in most games. Games have changed enormously in the last decade, transitioning to become a mainstream medium and big business. With such an enlarged playing field, the answer from a business perspective is yes games for girls and games for boys and games for everyone. Gaming is large enough that it is beginning to resemble the magazine market. There can be very narrow market game franchises (paralleling the range of women's interest magazines from Vogue to Ms.) and more mainstream game franchises (paralleling Time or Newsweek).

Gender and gaming researchers tend to be more interested in empowering girls and women to engage with technology than they are with increasing game industry revenues. Betty Hayes' chapter points out that boys are more likely to engage in constructive, game-related activities such as modding, machinima, and creating fan web sites. These behaviors contribute to their IT expertise. Games for girls often do not include modding or recording, and therefore inhibit rather than facilitate tech expertise. Tracy Fullerton, Janine Fron, Celia Pearce, and Jackie Morie envision a "virtuous cycle" in which more women work in the game design industry, resulting in more games that appeal to girls, resulting in more girls becoming interested in becoming game designers. It doesn't matter whether the games are for girls, or gender neutral (ugh, that sounds so bland). We just want more appealing games.

My own research with colleagues Brian Magerko and Ben Medler at Georgia Tech and Brian and Jillian Winn at Michigan State University is moving in the direction of considering player type and motivation. We are working to develop and study adaptive games that express different game features depending upon what each individual player enjoys the most. Thus, instead of creating a game for girls, or a game for everyone, we create a game that can transform to become better for each individual player.

YASMIN: Can a game, or anything else for that matter, ever be 'gender-neutral'? And who decides? Game design can and should be more inclusive; one doesn't need to disrupt the narrative to offer more options for customization of characters or levels that are now common place for most games. That said, if we deal with younger players and school contexts, we need to be deliberate on what choices we offer in game designs to facilitate learning for various players.

In film studies, there has been extensive discussions of whether feminism has implications in terms of production processes and formal practices. Is there such a thing as a feminist approach to game design and if so, what would it look like?

YASMIN: A book chapter by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum suggests an approach on how designers can identify the values that impact their design decisions from the initial conceptions to prototyping and play testing. You can call this a feminist design approach, if you want, or just plain good design strategy that can help everyone design better games.

We pointed to the rise of game companies as sites of female entrepreneurship as one factor that might shift the gender content of games. Why do we still see so few games companies run by women?

CARRIE: It seems like that ought to have started to change by now. Soon, perhaps? A few years ago game industry professionals complained that innovation was stifled because the game industry giants controlled distribution channels. But the growth on online computer game and movement to open up access to consoles seem to have eased some of the roadblocks.

Also, the proportion of female programmers in the game industry was only 5% in 2005, and 13% artists. The industry retains an ethic of "you have to be there when decisions are made" and an expectation that only those who do the heavy lifting have earned a say at the game design table. I am hopeful that new roles will open up such as design consultant to permit much broader participation in game design.

Happily, the Serious Game Design MA program at my university has had close to 50-50 female/male ratio of students in the first two years we've offered it. From where I sit (in a San Francisco basement telecommuting to a Midwestern university), there is plenty of interest on the part of women, and some are intending to start companies. Hopefully this same experience is happening on a much wider scale.

Our book ended with a consideration of Female Gamers as offering an alternative perspective on the "girl's game movement." Your book includes an interview with Morgan Romine from Frag Dolls. Such groups continue to be highly controversial with both feminist supporters and detractors. How would you evaluate their contribution to the issues this book explores?

CARRIE: A writer at the Chicago Tribune called to interview me about the release of the last Lara Croft game, hoping, I think, that I would be outraged. My response was to say Angelina Jolie is really cool, and although Lara's dimensions are ridiculous I am enormously glad to have a strong albeit ridiculous female character be the basis of a game franchise. I've had fun discussion with some of my male undergrad students in a gender and games special topics course, talking about what it feels like to them to play her.

But you asked about Frag Dolls. My response is similar. I celebrate every game conference attendee they beat (male or female). What a nice counter-stereotypical impression they walk away with. I hate the violence of video games and it bothers me that anyone enjoys blowing people and things up, even in a game. I love their confidence and their energy. They are being exploited, but they are also getting paid to do something they really enjoy. It is the birthright of Frag Dolls and other young women to contradict interpret and express the next generation of feminism.

YASMIN: The Frag Dolls are also opening a whole new chapter on the professionalization of gaming that is happening in the US; it has been around in Asia for quite some time. TL Taylor, one of our book contributors, actually examines in her chapter the ramifications of this change in the gaming landscape. A group like the Frag Dolls is just the most visible signpost of this change. As gaming moves into mainstream entertainment and professions, it can and will not escape the gender issues present in other industries as well. Ten years ago, the observations in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat seemed to focus on a group on the margins of technology while in fact, they were telltale signs of things to come. The chapters in Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat discuss the complex and continuing story of women and technology now situated in the context of gaming.

A Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School

at Education, Yasmin Kafai leads research teams investigating learning opportunities in

virtual worlds, designing media-rich programming tools and communities together with

colleagues from MIT, USC and industry. In the early 90's at the Media Lab she was one

of the first researchers to engage hundred of children as game designers in schools to

learn about programming, mathematics and science. While at UCLA, she launched virtual epidemics in Whyville.net, a massive online world with millions of players age 8-16, to help teens learn about infectious disease. She also studied how urban youth create media art, games, and graphics in Scratch, a visual programming language developed together with MIT colleagues. Her research has been published in several books, among them Minds in Play" (1995), Constructionism in Practice (1996 edited with Mitchel Resnick), and the upcoming The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities (edited with Kylie Peppler and Robbin Chapman). She has studied in France, Germany and the United States and holds a doctorate from Harvard University.

Carrie Heeter is a professor of serious game design in the department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University. She is co-editor of Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives in Gender, Gaming, and Computing and creator of Investigaming.com, an online gateway to research about gender and gaming. Heeter's innovative software designs have won more than 50 awards, including Discover Magazine's Software Innovation of the Year. She has directed software development for 32 projects. Her research looks at the experience and design of meaningful play. Current work includes design of learning and brain games which adapt to fit player mindset and motivation and persuasive games where the designer goal is to engender more informed decision-making on complex socio-scientific issues. Heeter also serves as creative director for MSU Virtual University Design and Technology. For the last 12 years she has lived in San Francisco and telecommuted to MSU.

Jill Denner is a Senior Research Associate at Education, Training, Research Associates, a non-profit organization in California. She earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in 1995 from Teachers College, Columbia University. She studies gender equity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with a focus on Latinas, in partnership with youth, schools, and community-based organizations. She edited the book Latina Girls: Voices of Adolescent Strength in the US (2006, NYU Press) and is the founder of Girls Creating Games where she conducts research on learning and technology in the context of after school programs.

Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: An Interview with Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, and Jill Denner (Part One)

In 1997, Justine Cassell (then a Media Lab faculty, now at Northwestern) and I organized a conference, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, for the MIT Women's Studies Program. It was one of the first academic conferences I'd ever organized, but I had no idea what a big deal it was going to be at the time. We brought together feminists from academia and industry to talk about the emergence of the short-lived girl game movement and in the process, we tried to explore what it would mean to expand the female market for games. A year later, Justine and I published a book based on the conference through the MIT Press, which has since become a standard in the Games Studies Field. Now, history has repeated itself: Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun, seeking to understand what has changed over the past ten years, have organized a conference -- at UCLA -- and now a book for MIT Press, Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, which was released late last year.

Justine and I were invited to speak at the opening of the conference and wrote an essay for the book exploring our own shifts in understanding the issues of gender and computer games since the conference. There, we express our pride -- and mild discomfort -- at seeing ourselves transformed from junior scholars to senior statesmen thanks to the publication of this new book. Frankly, I'm more flattered than anything else to see a new generation of feminist gamers, game designers, and game scholars take up this banner and release an important new body of research around the still very timely topic of women and the games industry.

The book opens with reflections from several other veterans of our original event, among them Brenda Laurel and Cronelia Brunner, and continues to have essays which talk about women's experiences working in the games industry, the growth of casual games as a market which strongly attracts female interests, the gender implications of work in the space of serious and educational games, and interviews with female game designers and with the leader of UbiSoft's Frag Dolls, a female gamer guild.

I couldn't let the release of this important book go without a shout out on this blog, so I asked the editors if they would agree to an interview about the book and about what has or has not changed about gender and computer games over the past decade.

It's been more than ten years since Justine Cassell and I published From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. What motivated you to want to update that book?

JILL: The first book had such a large impact on those of us trying to understand the role of gender in gaming and in technology more broadly. It was helpful to have a mix of academic and industry perspectives, as well as voices from different sides of the "pink" games debate. But as you know, in the last ten years, gaming has changed a lot--it has moved from the margins to the mainstream. It is one of the fastest growing industries in the US. and games are no longer simply a source of entertainment for the most tech savvy. In fact, games are driving innovation in health, business, education, and beyond. New types of gaming experiences have led to greater participation by females, and new research has revealed a greater understanding of what, how, and why females play. But even though women and girls are playing games in increasing numbers, the gaming industry is still run by men, and women seem to be the primary group expressing concern about this. Thus, we felt it was important to follow the model of the first book, with updates from the field.

YASMIN: We actually met a conference where we observed (and participated in) a very prominent event, called "the gender panel", that can be found at nearly any conference featuring female presenters with a mostly female audience. We wondered why nothing had changed in the ten years since the first edition had come out. We knew the field and the business of gaming was booming and that more girls and women were playing games. We titled the book edition for a reason Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat to open up the gaming community to the fact that gender issues are not just about equality in numbers and not just about differences in interests. The contributions in the book provide a broader perspective of what we need and can pay attention to when we study and design games for rich experiences.

Many more women play games today than they did ten years ago. Indeed, recent data released by the Pew Center for the Internet and American Culture implies that the gender gap we were discussing has significantly narrowed. What factors have encouraged more girls and women to play games?

CARRIE: At almost every age category, males spend more time playing games than females do. The magnitude of the gaming gap increases as children become young adults. My own research with Jillian Winn found in college, males have more free time than females and that free time is available in larger blocks of time. Available free time is associated with time spent gaming.

This statement of the near universality of gaming masks large variation in how much and what kinds of games teens play. The Pew report also says that boys play significantly more than girls and notes many significant gender differences by game genre. Boys play for more time and they play more and more different genres of games than girls do. The study asked whether teens played each of 14 common game genres. Boys play more action, strategy, sports, adventure, first-person shooter, fighting, role-play, survival-horror, and multiplayer games. Girls play more puzzle games. There is no significant difference in amount of play of racing, rhythm, simulation or virtual worlds games.

But your question was, what factors encourage more girls and women to play. Hardware and software technology is vastly more capable. Just look at how much computers themselves have advanced in 10 years. In 1997 Apple promoted "the blazingly fast (240MHz) PowerBook 3400." Today's 2008 a MacBook Pro runs at 1066MHz. The game industry has also grown into a multibillion-dollar marketplace. Game companies are seeking larger and new markets, and games are targeting females, either as the primary market, or more often, as part of a larger audience.

Games are getting more interesting, visually rich, more sophisticated, more diverse, more targeted and more ubiquitous. Games are a cultural medium. They are experiences to share and discuss. They are beautiful and surprising, funny and exciting.

YASMIN: The landscape of gaming in terms of genres and platforms has broadened over the last ten years. It has become socially acceptable to play games because a first generation of video game players has grown up and continues to play - all numbers indicate that indeed the gamer population is aging. In the last few years, we have seen a significant shift in who we consider a gamer: with the appearance of Wii older generations are gaming to stay fit both physically and mentally. Today, when we talk about gaming, we include all kinds of games from console games to FPS, sports, casual games, MMORPGS, and even virtual worlds that can have game components. We no longer play games only in arcades or basements but we play games everywhere. So it shouldn't come as such a big surprise that girls and women are playing games too.

Some claim that these shifts make gender a less urgent consideration in our understanding of games culture. Yet, you argue that "it is still critical to consider gender in order to understand and improve on the design, production, and play of games." Why? What issues have proven the most difficult to resolve?

CARRIE: Since we turned in the BBMK manuscript (in August, 2006), I have been developing an online gateway to research about gender and gaming. So far we have identified 362 citations dating back to 1982, including academic journals, conference presentations, books and book chapters as well as industry reports and web articles. The number of articles about gender and gaming has nearly doubled every five years since 1982. In other words, the topic is receiving more attention than ever.

Part of the reason for the fuss is the nature of the medium. We don't hear a lot about gender differences in movie going. Or books. Or web browsing. Or even toys, despite the extreme gender typing of a lot of toy advertising. I could offer excuses for each. Movies in the theater are a group activity, and Hollywood is better served by targeting as large an audience as possible. There are so many books and so many toys it is hard to worry about the overall category. Web sites tend to be functional and only a small subset target one or the other gender.

So why the continually increasing attention to gender and games? Electronic games emerged as a male medium, and typical game mechanics retain the original shooting, fighting, racing, and sports mechanics. The programmers who make electronic games are still overwhelmingly male. Somehow the medium still retains heavy traces of its origin. Lots of games still feel like they are more for boys than for girls, based on look and feel, story, and player actions. Perhaps if books had been invented by girls and only girls could write them. Might not books for boys still be a bit off target as the medium grows into its larger cultural market?

JILL: Several of the authors in our book talk about the fact that there are more similarities than differences in what, why, and how males and females play digital games. However, there seem to be great differences in how males and females experience the games they play. For example, in the chapters by Nick Yee and Holin Lin, we learn how the social context of gaming plays a significant role in a player's experience, and it appears that gender role stereotypes and discrimination are common across many settings and culture. In addition, the chapter by Elisabeth Hayes describes how different types of gaming experiences have the potential to increase IT capacity, but games that are more likely to be played by girls have fewer of the IT fluency building opportunities (e.g., modding).

YASMIN: I think in research and public media we have by far a much easier time to talk about differences in gender than about the construction or performance of gender. The story that girls don't play games in as large numbers as boys do or that they play different games is easily verifiable and accessible: who hasn't seen the difference in toy preferences and play first hand in their own family? It's much harder to sell the idea that gender is performed and thus more malleable. Theory and research-wise you have to be much more attuned to nuances and how they might play out in different situations.

Many critics of our original book assumed it would be primarily focused on the representations of women in games yet neither books spend much time dealing with games on this level. Why not?

CARRIE: Here too, a lot of the explanation goes back to the nature of the medium. Hollywood movies and TV shows are visual, linear and not interactive. Those media are all about representation. Games are so much more than representation. They involve player actions in the game, their interactions with other players, and sometimes customization of their avatar. And, as you ask in more detail later, what happens on the screen is only part of the game. The physical and social context and interpersonal dynamics with other players help define and shape the experience of playing a game.

The annoying aspects of the portrayal of women in games are not very different from all of the other mass media portrayals of women. It is not the most interesting aspect of gaming, and the portrayal emphasis on hypersexualized beautiful young bodies is so pervasive that the complaint is more about society than about games.

YASMIN: The focus on the representations of women in games and advertisements is often the most visible and thus most accessible entrance point into gender and games. I concur with Carrie that the representation in avatars is only one part of the complex equation of how gender comes into game play. But even these representations are culturally bound as for instance Mimi Ito's book chapter on gender dynamics in the Japanese media mix illustrates. In Japanese games male player characters often have features such as big eyes that would be considered part of feminized designs in Western games.

You write, "Today, in 2007, there has been a noticeable shift from pink or purple games to a more complex approach to gender as situated, constructed, and flexible." What would be some compelling examples of this more "complex approach" to gender and game design?

CARRIE: I think researchers studying and theorizing about gender and gaming are the ones who are approaching gender as situated, constructed, and flexible. Game designers are learning to think more broadly about player motivations. Nicole Lazzaro's chapter, "Are Boy Games Even Necessary," calls for moving away from demographic targeting, in which extreme preferences are targeted, in favor of more mainstream, designing for mainstream (male or female) players. My own work is moving to focus on player motivations and player types. Although some player types may turn out to be more prevalent among one gender, the emphasis is on the motivations sought, not the gender seeking those experiences.

JILL: The more complex approach can be found primarily in MMOs, or other types of games that allow players to create their own identity. Players can choose to take on distinctly feminine or masculine avatars, or an animal avatar that is not clearly male or female.

A Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School

at Education, Yasmin Kafai leads research teams investigating learning opportunities in

virtual worlds, designing media-rich programming tools and communities together with

colleagues from MIT, USC and industry. In the early 90's at the Media Lab she was one

of the first researchers to engage hundred of children as game designers in schools to

learn about programming, mathematics and science. While at UCLA, she launched virtual epidemics in Whyville.net, a massive online world with millions of players age 8-16, to help teens learn about infectious disease. She also studied how urban youth create media art, games, and graphics in Scratch, a visual programming language developed together with MIT colleagues. Her research has been published in several books, among them Minds in Play" (1995), Constructionism in Practice (1996 edited with Mitchel Resnick), and the upcoming The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities (edited with Kylie Peppler and Robbin Chapman). She has studied in France, Germany and the United States and holds a doctorate from Harvard University.

Carrie Heeter is a professor of serious game design in the department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University. She is co-editor of Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives in Gender, Gaming, and Computing and creator of Investigaming.com, an online gateway to research about gender and gaming. Heeter's innovative software designs have won more than 50 awards, including Discover Magazine's Software Innovation of the Year. She has directed software development for 32 projects. Her research looks at the experience and design of meaningful play. Current work includes design of learning and brain games which adapt to fit player mindset and motivation and persuasive games where the designer goal is to engender more informed decision-making on complex socio-scientific issues. Heeter also serves as creative director for MSU Virtual University Design and Technology. For the last 12 years she has lived in San Francisco and telecommuted to MSU.

Jill Denner is a Senior Research Associate at Education, Training, Research

Associates, a non-profit organization in California. She earned her Ph.D. in

Developmental Psychology in 1995 from Teachers College, Columbia University.

She studies gender equity in science, technology, engineering, and

mathematics, with a focus on Latinas, in partnership with youth, schools,

and community-based organizations. She edited the book Latina Girls: Voices

of Adolescent Strength in the US (2006, NYU Press) and is the founder of

Girls Creating Games where she conducts research on learning and technology

in the context of after school programs.

How Brazil Is Reshaping the Futures of Entertainment

Regular readers of the blog know that appropriations of my images or ideas are like catnip to me -- nigh on impossible for me to resist! Indeed, as someone who works on appropriation as a new media literacy, participatory culture and now, spreadable media, I am always intrigued by the ways that media theory is itself appropriated and spread beyond academic circles. So, please, anyone who wants to play around with my image, go ahead, but if I find it, I reserve the right to re-post and analyze it on my blog.

I howled with delight when Mauricio Mota from Brazil's New Content shared this video he had produced during the final panel (on Global Flows, Global Deals) at the Futures of Entertainment conference we hosted last fall. Mota's co-conspirator in generating the video was Ricardo Justus, who also joined us at the November conference.

Mota helped to facilitate the translation of Convergence Culture into Portuguese and was my host during a trip to Brazil earlier last semester; he's been a key player in connecting the Convergence Culture Consortium to a range of Brazilian companies as we are seeking ways to better understand media development in what economists are starting to call the BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China), which represent some of the fastest developing high tech economies in the world. And he's part of a smart group of thinkers, who call themselves the Alchemists, who are doing cutting edge work on transmedia storytelling and branding.

Mota's video was intended to dramatize the connection between some of the ideas in Convergence Culture and the practices for promotion that have emerged in his native country. Specifically, the footage here comes from Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), released in 2007 and now one of the most commercially successful Brazilian films ever, despite having almost no conventional advertising or promotion. As Mota explained at the conference, a copy of the film was leaked to pirates while it was in the final stages of production and the pirates spread it across the countryside. It's been estimated that 11.5 million people watched the illegal copy of the film.

This is piracy on a scale which would wake most American media executives up in a cold sweat. But Mota's point is that it also insured an unprecidented level of visibility for the film. According to DataFolha, 77% of São Paulo residents knew about the movie, 180,000 people saw the film on its opening weekend in Sao Paulo and Rio, and by now, more than 2.5 million people have watched the film legally. (These statistics come from Wikipedia. Mota's estimates are even higher, suggesting that by the time the video had been further pirated via torrents in 15 countries around the world, it may have been seen illegally by 13 million and legally by more than 5 million people).

So, how do we read this story -- did the 13 million plus illegal views represent "lost revenue" to the company? Maybe some of them -- but it's also almost certainly the case that the legal box office returns would have been substantially lower if the pirated circulation of the film had not spread the word and heightened awareness about the title, while potentially lowering the cost of its promotion. Mota rightly sees this pattern as a paradox: loss of control may in this case have resulted in increased revenue and much greater cultural impact. In the process, Capitão Roberto Nascimento (the film's antihero) became something of a cult icon and was subject to all kinds of grassroots appropriations (as suggested by the sample from a fan vid which Mota includes at the end of his own mashup).

Mota's story about Tropa de Elite is a powerful illustration of the concept of spreadable media which ran through this year's Futures of Entertainment event. I developed some of the basic framework for thinking about Spreadable Media through my opening remarks at the conference.

we explored them further throughout the first morning of the conference, with a panel on Consumption, Value, and Worth.

Different forms of cooperation between producers and consumers, including the concept of the moral economy, were central to my conversation with Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks).

Later this month, the Convergence Culture Consortium will be releasing what we hope will be a significant white paper which critiques the concept of viral media and offers an alternative model, one which respects the agency and motives of consumers in actively shaping the circulation of media content through a networked society and one which seeks to better understand the interplay between consumer capitalism and the gift economy in shaping the new era of web 2.0. Watch this blog for more on "spreadable media" in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, I wanted to use this post to signal that the webcast versions of the Futures of Entertainment conference have gone up over at MIT's TechTV site and are available for all of you who were unable to attend the conference. In many ways, this was our best event so far in this series -- in part because of a good balance between academics and industry people on each panel. Some of the highlights for me: Kim Moses, the Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer, sharing her insights on our Making Audiences Matter session; a very animated discussion of Franchising, Extensions, and World Building, which brought together perspectives from the world of wrestling, soap operas, and cult movies; and an especially provocative series of exchanges about the relationships between the academy and industry. But every panel has something to recommend it and every panelist made at least one contribution that changed the way I thought about the contemporary media landscape.

Given the latest news of the legal battle which is brewing around Watchmen's release, the exchange which I had with Alex McDowell, the film's gift art director, and Georgia State University's Alicia Perren, has been generating a fair amount of interest out there in the blogosphere. Mcdowell just shared with me a very interesting statement issued by one of the film's producers, Lloyd Levin, about the legal struggles around the film's production and distribution. This is a story which we are all following here at CMS with baited breath.

A Media Literacy Exemption on the DMCA?: An Interview with Renee Hobbs

Today's blog post is a call to action. Renee Hobbs, a leading Media Literacy educator, has requested our help in changing the copy protection provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in a way that will further the goals of American media education. As Hobbs notes in the following interview, teachers often cite uncertainties about copyright and fair use as having a "chilling effect" on their efforts to bring media literacy skills into the classroom, even as there has been a growing public recognition that these 21st century competencies are vital in preparing young people for the new media landscape. One of the key areas for concern has to do with the legality of breaking copy protection codes on DVDs in order to insure greater access to clips for instructional use or for deployment in student projects.

Legal scholars have long noted that commercial producers are deploying copyright protection in ways which make it impossible for anyone to exercise their "fair use" rights over the materials and thus the code, to use Lawrence Lessig's famous distinction, restrict things which might well be protected under the current law.

But there are mechanisms for insuring exemptions from the DMCA provisions and Renee Hobbs has petitioned for an exception which would protect the rights of teachers to deploy copyrighted materials for teaching media literacy education, similar to the protections which already exist for me, as a Film Studies Professor, to break the code in order to make materials accessible to my students at the university level.

She's asking others who share her concern about these issues to send along supporting letters, which need to be received by February 2 2009 -- that is, the end of this month. (See details at the end of this post.)

The following interview with Hobbs outlines the argument and the process by which you can contribute your support. I'm drafting a letter of support myself and hope other readers of this blog will both write letters and help us spread the word about this worthy effort.

You recently completed a report for the MacArthur Foundation about the impact of copyright confusion on the field of media literacy education. How did you get involved?

I began teaching teachers about media literacy back in the 1980s, when VHS tapes were the latest technology--it was the age of dinosaurs, it now seems. I would bring in a handful of tapes which I had cued up, including excerpts from TV news, advertising, movies and popular television programming. I demonstrated a variety of instructional techniques that K-12 teachers could use to integrate critical analysis of mass media and popular culture into classes in English language arts, social studies, and health education. Today, because media literacy is mandated in nearly all state curriculum frameworks, often as part of 21st century skills education, I cross the country offering teacher workshops in states from Oregon to North Carolina. I now use my digital video recorder to record television programs and store clips on my computer's laptop.

But with every group of teachers I work with, there's a question that always comes up with an increasing spirit of trepidation: "Is it legal to use copyrighted material like this?"

"Of course," I say. Like many media literacy educators, I use copyrighted materials under the doctrine of fair use (Section 107 of the Copyright Law of 1976). Users have the right to use copyrighted materials without payment or permission, depending on the specific context and situation of the use.

It is ironic that, at a time when online digital technologies are enabling educators to create and share an ever-widening array of texts, sounds, still and moving images, music and graphic art, we are seeing a dramatic increase in the climate of fear among educators concerning the use of these resources for teaching and learning. And since fear reduces innovation, those of us who promote the use of digital media as tools for teaching and learning need to sit up and take notice.

In our 2007 report, The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy, we found that media literacy educators share certain values about the use of copyrighted material, including news, advertising, movies, music, videogames, and other aspects of mass media, digital media and popular culture. While they respect the rights of owners of intellectual property, they also believe that it is necessary to use copyrighted works freely for the purpose of strengthening students' critical thinking and communication skills.

However, some educators attempt studied ignorance, believing that increased knowledge about copyright would impede their work. Still others close the doors of the classroom and keep quiet about the use of copyrighted materials in order to avoid potential conflict. The most troubling thing we found was that teachers' lack of knowledge about copyright and fair use affects the quality of teaching and learning. It limits the distribution of curriculum materials and resources, thus affecting students' overall media literacy learning. Plus, most teachers we interviewed do not teach about the law of copyright and fair use because they themselves do not understand it. As a result, students do not learn that copyright is designed to protect both the rights of owners and users in order to promote creativity and innovation.

What factors have led to the confusion?

Many teachers receive misinformation informally from colleagues and supervisors. At some educational institutions, school policies are far more restrictive than the law mandates. Some teachers have tried to distribute their curriculum materials, but found publishers unreceptive due to copyright concerns because media literacy lessons inevitably quote from films, TV shows, advertising, popular culture, and online media.

One big problem is the widespread misunderstanding of the so-called "educational use guidelines," those negotiated agreements between media companies and some educational groups which present a list of hard-and-fast rules defining fair use. These guidelines are not the law. They do not define either the "safe harbors" or the "outer limits" of fair use. Relying on these guidelines actually hurts educators. Some legal scholars fear that if the educational community accepts these "educational use guidelines" in policy statements or in settling litigation, the concept of fair use will be weakened and narrowed, not strengthened. Columbia University legal scholar Kenneth Crews points out, "When the community actually use the guidelines and adhere to them, they are reshaping the normative understanding of the law," sacrificing the flexible nature of the doctrine of fair use.

What have you done to help educators better understand copyright and fair use?

With my colleagues Peter Jaszi of Washington College of Law at American University and Patricia Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media at American University, we worked with media literacy educators following the "best practices" model developed at American University in groundbreaking work with documentary filmmakers, who also depend on the doctrine of fair use. With support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, we brought together groups of educators (from higher education, K-12 settings and youth media organizations) in ten cities across the United States, including Chicago, Austin, Texas, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. After introducing educators to basic concepts in copyright law, we offered them various hypothetical scenarios for discussion, inviting them to reason through the process of determining when educators' or students' use of copyrighted materials was "fair" and "unfair" according to the doctrine of fair use.

The consensus principles that emerged from these discussions is reflected in the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which was adopted by several national membership organizations, including the National Association for Media Literacy Education. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) adopted the Code as an official policy in November, 2008. The Code identifies five principles, each with limitations, representing the community's own current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials. As stated in the Code, educators can, under some circumstances:

• Make copies of newspaper articles, TV shows, and other copyrighted works, and use them and keep them for educational use.
• Create curriculum materials and scholarship with copyrighted materials embedded.
• Share, sell, and distribute curriculum materials with copyrighted materials embedded.

Learners can, under some circumstances:

• Use copyrighted works in creating new material.
• Distribute their works digitally if they meet the transformativeness standard.

To help students learn, understand, and apply their legal rights under the doctrine of fair use, we created lesson plans for educators and learners as well as videos and two "Schoolhouse Rock" style music videos to illustrate key concepts in copyright law.

When students use reasoning and concepts like purpose, audience and point of view to determine if their use of copyrighted material is a fair use, they develop critical thinking skills and apply an understanding of copyright law, learning to respect the rights of both authors and users.

What is the DMCA and in what ways does it constrain classroom practices?

It is the acronym of the 1998 law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law makes it illegal to use software to "rip" or circumvent the encryption codes on commercially-produced DVDs. Because media literacy teachers and learners depend on film DVDs as a source of relevant quotations for use in both in classrooms and for student media production assignments, this law has an extremely negative impact on our work.

Although some teachers use multiple DVDs when showing clips in class, it's really inefficient and ineffective--it wastes valuable classroom time. DVD players are slow to load. Some DVDs automatically play trailers for other movies every time you play them. Some DVDs don't let you cue up which means you have to go through all the chapters to find the scene you want to use. For all these reasons, teachers want to be able to make a copy of the scenes they want to use so they can use them more effectively.

For example, teachers who want to sharpen comparison-contrast skills may want to analyze two different film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. To conduct a historical analysis of media professionalism, they may want to show and discuss a series of clips focused on the representation of newspaper editors using excerpts from All the President's Men, Absence of Malice and The Paper. They may want to show film clips in an academic conference presentation to illustrate certain nuances of pedagogy and instruction concerning the use of film in education.

However, the DVD encryption code effectively prevents media literacy teachers and learners from gaining access to media clips for various educational purposes. Under the current law, all these examples of "ripping" DVDs are illegal.

What steps are you taking to overturn those restrictions?

Every three years, the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress considers exemptions to the law for groups or individuals who can prove that the law substantially and adversely affects their ability to make lawful, non-infringing uses of copyrighted works. These exemptions last for three years. In 2006, Peter DeCherney, a professor of film at the University of Pennsylvania, got an exemption on behalf of film professors nationwide, enabling them to rip audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university's film or media studies department for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom. Sadly, this exemption does not apply to media literacy educators, who may be teaching in college English, history or fine arts classrooms, or in schools of education, or in K-12 settings, or in youth media or other non-profit organizations. It does not apply to students who may want to use film excerpts for class assignments.

How broadly or narrowly do you seek to define an exemption?

With the help of student attorneys at American University Washington College of Law, I have submitted a petition to the Library of Congress Copyright Office requesting an exemption for teachers to circumvent the technological protection measures of DVDs that illustrate and/or relate to contemporary social issues, when used for the purpose of teaching the process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and communicating messages in different forms of media. This petition also requests an exemption for students to use DVD clips for specific educational assignments, including student media productions. Student media production is an essential component of media literacy education.

Does current copy protection technology restrict practices that are reasonably construed as falling under the doctrine of fair use?

Yes--that's the primary criticism of the DMCA, and it's why the Library of Congress Copyright Office grants exemptions. The creation of compilations for educational use is legal under the doctrine of fair use. Whether a teacher is creating a compilation or a student is producing a video class assignment, the intended use is for "criticism" and "comment," two uses singled out for protection under the law.

Right now, DRM restrictions make it impossible for educators to make a "transformative" use of copyrighted material. Transformative work uses copyrighted materials, but adds something new, with a further purpose, or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning or message. Transformative uses are considered to be legal under the doctrine of fair use.

Media literacy educators' use of copyrighted materials is inherently transformative, because our uses of copyrighted content are not for the same intrinsic purpose as the one the copyright owner intended. For example, think back to that professor who uses a series of clips focused on the representation of newspaper editors using excerpts from All the President's Men, Absence of Malice and The Paper. The original purpose of these films was for commercial entertainment. The professor's purpose is educational, as the clips are used to heighten student awareness of how media representations of the newspaper industry have changed over time.

In general, media literacy educators use copyrighted content to (1) illustrate key concepts of media literacy, (2) to deconstruct and critically analyze media messages, (3) to recognize and examine specific production techniques employed in moving image media, (4) to explore economic, political, or social issues or the cultural values depicted in the representation, or (5) as part of the process of building skills and knowledge through the creation of student-produced works to demonstrate those ideas and techniques.

Why couldn't classroom teachers use older media, such as VHS, which are more open to manipulation?

The video home cassette (VHS) format is becoming less and less effective for 21st century students. Have you ever tried to make a compilation tape with VHS? It's clumsy and complicated--and the quality of the image is substantially degraded. Plus, it's no longer possible to find contemporary film works in VHS format, since it has been obsolete since 2006. Many teachers and students do not even have a VHS player/recorder in their homes. Since media literacy educators depend on making rich connections between the classroom and the culture, contemporary content is important in our work.

Why can't they use materials which are under Creative Commons license?

Teachers and learners can and do use materials which are available under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. But CC licenses do not substitute for or replace the need for the doctrine of fair use. Fair use explicitly protects users. It gives users the ability to use excerpts from any copyrighted work under some conditions. Fair use enables us to use excerpts even from dominant cultural texts in our culture, the ones which are massively popular and produced by huge media companies like Disney, Viacom and Time Warner.

In fact, fair use is the safety valve that prevents copyright law from being a form of private censorship. Without fair use, copyright law itself would probably be unconstitutional. The doctrine of fair use enables people to use all types of copyrighted materials without payment or permission when the private cost to the copyright holder is outweighed by the public benefit of the use.

How do educators claim fair use? You simply use copyrighted works after making an assessment of the particular context and situation of the specific use of the work. There's nothing formal or official to "do" to claim fair use. You do not have to ask permission or alert the copyright holder when considering the use of materials that are protected by fair use. But, if you choose, you may inquire about permissions and still claim fair use if your request is refused or ignored. In some cases, courts have found that asking permission and then being rejected has actually enhanced fair use claims.

What can readers do if they want to lend their support to your efforts?

Act soon. For a 30-day period, the Library of Congress Copyright Office invites comment on the petitions received regarding DMCA exemptions. Has the DMCA law substantially and adversely affected your ability to make lawful, non-infringing uses of copyrighted works for media literacy education? Share your story and make a difference. Comments can be submitted online and must be received by February 2, 2009 at 5 p.m. EST.

Renee Hobbs is a Professor in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media at Temple University's School of Communications and Theater where she founded the Media Education Lab. She is interested in all aspects of the intersections between media studies and education, with a particular interest in the pedagogy and practice of media literacy education in K-12 settings. She has created many multimedia curriculum materials, including My Pop Studio, an online play environment for girls 9 to 14. She is the author of Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English (2007, Teachers College Press).