Here's the second part of Eitan Glinert's regular update of the Game Developers Conference. What I love about Eitan is his enthusiasm for alternative gaming -- whether serious games, games for the visually impaired, or indie games. He's one of those people who wants to continue to expand what the games sector looks like so that games achieve their full potential as a medium. Full disclosure requires that I acknowledge that I am on the board of advisors for his new game company, Fire Hose Games, and am really excited about some of the directions they are going.Walking the Walk
by Eitan Glinert
Welcome back to part 2 of the series on GDC 2009. While the last post covered some of the more interesting sessions from the Game Developer's Conference., today's post will focus on some of the more interesting people I had the pleasure of meeting. While you may not recognize all of their names (at least not yet), these are the guys and girls and who are doing new and exciting things in games. Perhaps unsurprisingly they are all independent developers and academics who are truly trailblazing new areas in gaming.
There are a large number of us who try very hard to make serious games that teach users real life skills in a fun way. Then there's Alex, who just does it on a regular basis. He's the brilliant mind behind Bridge Building Game (which eventually turned into Bridge Construction Set), a fantastically fun game in which you have to build suspension, draw, and railroad bridges over rivers and pits using real world physics. Alex isn't stopping there though, and is currently hard at work on a new game... set on the moon. The premise is pretty simple, you're an astronaut in a lunar lander, and you're trying to take off from the moon and rendevous with the lunar orbiter so you can return to Earth. The catch? Limited fuel, a moving target, and a nasty case of gravity. It's not enough to simply aim at the orbiter and go, you need to estimate where it will be, shoot ahead of it, and hope that you can meet up. The game sounds like a lot of fun, and will be available on Steam (hopefully soon!). The best part is that the game is just going to be part of a six pack of small, bite sized offerings, though I personally hope they all involve space, rockets, or bridges.
All games require user input to be played, otherwise they wouldn't be especially interactive. But what about games that require users for content? That's where Jane comes in. She's one of the leading Alternate Reality Game (ARG) developers out there, having helped on projects like World Without Oil, a fascinating game in which users collaborate to discuss what a hypothetical world in the midst of an oil crisis might be like, in an effort to help solve some of our oil usage problems with collective knowledge. Jane is at it again, helping Rachel Lyle and Jason Tester with a new ARG called Ruby's Bequest. Set in the present to near future, this ARG invites participants into the world of Deepwell, where a mysterious woman (Ruby) has recently passed away and has willed a large sum of money to the city provided the residents can start "caring" more. The game is one part mystery and one part collaboration, as users are asked to contribute and raise the "caring index". If it sounds weird, it's because it is - but that's how all innovative games seem at first. I strongly recommend checking out the website and poking around, I'm sure you'll enjoy it.
I wanted to talk about Matthew and Steve not because of a new game they have coming out, but rather because of their studio and what they've done (past tense). Flashbang is a small indie studio that's been around for 6 years making small PC games. Blurst is their new offshoot studio that does more advanced 3D browser based games, and has just been started up recently. What is really amazing about these guys is that they've been at this for so long and they've managed to maintain independence so they can keep making whatever they want, which is especially impressive when you consider that many of their more popular titles are free and have no ads! The games they make are fun as hell too, and way out there. With crazy titles like Off-road Velociraptor Safari,Minotaur China Shop, Jetpack Brontosaurs, andBlush, Matthew and Steve are certainly experts at creating memorable experiences. The games are all free, so I would definitely take a look!
Rob a smart ex-MIT guy who likes gears. A lot. So much so that he made a new
puzzle game all about them called Cogs. The game has the user moving around puzzle tiles to line up gears and make things... go. So you'll make flying things go, like rockets and balloons. You'll make music things go, like bells and chimes. The game seems incredibly addictive, and it's a good mental workout to figure out how all the gears line up. But perhaps most impressive in my opinion is how many variations Rob manages to get out of such a simple theme. I'm excited to grab it off Steam when it comes out soon, it should be a lot of fun!
That wraps up this year's GDC highlights! If you liked what you saw, please stop by our website on a regular basis to get more updates on interesting news in the video game world. You'll also be able to read about our game and the development process behind it. Hopefully it'll be a good read!
Last year, Eitan Glinert, former MIT student and currently the head of a Boston startup games company, Fire Hose Games, wrote his impressions of the innovation and diversity he saw at the Games Development Conference. He did such a great job that I asked him to write some follow up reflections at this year's event. Take it away, Eitan.
Hi Everyone! Henry, thanks for inviting me back for my annual round up of all the interesting things that happened this year at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC). For those of you who are reading my posts for the first time I'm Eitan, local Boston game nerd and developer. I used to be a grad student at MIT doing games research, and now I'm the founder and creative director of Fire Hose Games.
But enough about me, let's talk about games! This year I'll be doing two posts: Talking the Talk, and Walking the Walk. The first (today's post) will be all about interesting talks, lectures, rants, and totally inappropriate outbursts heard at the conference. The next post will be all about the amazing developers I was lucky enough to meet who are making things happen. So let's get started - what was awesome?
Usability, Motherfuckers!
Sure, it's a little self serving to talk about your own session first, but it was a damn good talk and I want you to hear about it. A lot of people out there can't play video games due to some sort of disability (this applies to computer systems in general). However, with a bit of extra thought and planning game developers can frequently make their titles work for many of these disabled groups, and in the process make their game more usable for everyone. This can even lead to increased sales, so spending money on making a game highly usable will often earn money! I covered a bunch of concrete tips for things that developers can do to make their games more usable, and pointed out examples of games that exemplify this behavior (like Half Life 2 and Peggle) and games that could do so much more (like Trespasser and Puzzle
Eric Zimmerman is a smart guy from New York who likes to make game developers think about how much more they could be doing. One of the neat ways he does this is with the annual Game Design Challenge, in which he goes "Iron Chef" on a panel of famous developers and asks them to propose a game with some sort of secret ingredient. This year the theme was "My First Time", and the panelists had to incorporate their own autobiographical first time having sex. Erin Robinson and Heather Kelley came up with a hilarious Wii title in which you start by point and click your way to make the first move with an especially awkward guy, and culminates with you counting the ceiling tiles in his room. Sulka Harro deviated a bit from the autobiographical nature and proposed a user generated game in which participants tell the world about their first time, like in post secret. Finally, Steve Meretzky was both hilarious and touching as he recounted how he was a late bloomer and it took coming to MIT to find other nerds that were sufficiently weird like him to finally meet girls, and proposed a Second Life text adventure in which users must navigate the isles of awkwardness in a three part act in which you finally, after a long time, get laid. The audience voted and Erin and Heather ultimately triumphed, who were rewarded with a deck of sex cards for their efforts. Lots of fun!
User Generated Content and the Soviet Space Program, 1978 -
1989
This was one of the weirder talks I saw, and that's really something after that sex panel. Chris Hecker started off by discussing user generated content in games, using Spore as an example. The talk was fairly straight forward, and Chris started walking through the "Sporepedia" to show examples of what people had come up with. Then the screen flashed, music started playing, and a slide with crazy spaceships was shown with the title "Russian Space Minute". Will Wright (famous for The Sims and SimCity) then gets up and proceeds to give a 15 minute presentation on the late years of the Russian space program, outlining in detail the counterpart to the US Space Shuttle and the design process that went into making it. He finished by showing how the space program fell apart with the demise of the Soviet Union, and then just as quickly as he started Will sat down and Chris Hecker got back up and continued discussing Spore. The whole experience was especially surreal, as Wright's appearance was completely unexpected and seemed to have nothing to do with anything. I later discovered that Will apparently likes to intersperse "Russian Space Minutes" into his talk because, well, he's Will Wright, and he decided to make a guest appearance in this talk because he couldn't in the next panel he was in, which was...
The (Positive) Future of Games
This star-studded panel featured Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, Lorne Lanning, Bing Gordon, and Ed Fries. Just like the panel moderator I'm not going to introduce these guys since they're super famous and you have easy access to google if you don't know. The talk centered around whether or not developers have an ethical responsibility to their users, and if they do how the games that are made can be beneficial to society. The talk was especially hilarious, and the inappropriate comments flew. Among my favorites?
Paraphrased: "We should try to make the worst game possible. Perhaps a game about 72 Victoria's Secret models, and they're in heaven, and the game is in Arabic." and "I would love to see a game like Second Life, but good." The panel was all over the place, but generally they did seem to agree that it was important to make games that were useful in some way, whether by making people think more about the consequences of their actions or by encouraging positive behavior. On a related note, I went to a roundtable at the end of the conference on positive impact in games which was headed up by Rusel DeMaria, the panel moderator. I was pleasantly
shocked to see how full the room was, there were many more developers there than I would have expected. Seems like a lot of people are taking this message to heart!
Constraints are your Friends
Perhaps not as flashy as the other talks, but a challenging discussion all the same. Dylan Fitterer (creator of Audio Surf) spoke about the path he took to success, starting with releasing a small game every week for over a year just to find his muse. The games were free, made him no money, and he didn't get much acclaim, but it did serve to get his mind working about what he really wanted to do. One of the games, Tune Racer, was not especially popular on the site but Dylan felt it was likely one of the more interesting titles he came out with, and eventually it morphed into Audio Surf. He pointed out that unlimited freedom often
leads to unlimited failure, as it is very difficult to figure out where to go next. Constraints, on the other hand, makes design much easier as it gives you bounds to work within. He gave the example of famous song writers like Kurt Cobain cuttings words out of newspapers to help write lyrics with the constraint of only using words and phrases they could find. It's an interesting point, but I personally think that doesn't apply to everyone - some people like having unbounded room to come up with ideas.
How can historical perspectives contribute to our understanding of the current
moment of media change?
AP: As our contributor (and former WB network executive) Jordan Levin notes in his essay, executives immersed in the media industries often face strong institutional and economic pressure to "think in the now." Similarly, at times it can be easy for scholars to get caught up in the proclamations by the press and industry that what is happening in the present is unlike anything that has ever taken place before.
Both Jennifer and I have studied and written about media industry history, and thus recognize that the more you know about these histories, the more similarities and parallels you can find between past practices, behaviors and assumptions and present-day activities. From our view, an historical perspective is crucial because it forces you to more profoundly consider what is in fact new, or the specific ways in which something is new. Certainly policy shifts, the rise of new technologies, media consolidation, and the growth of niche markets have dramatically altered how media are produced, distributed and consumed. Yet we think it is important to move past the broad generalizations that are often made in top down approaches to consider more precisely how and why these changes have taken place.
On the one hand, looking closely at media industry history can lead one to look at the present more closely, forcing one to question the latest marketing or journalistic claims about how "this new technology will change the way media is produced" or how "this new corporate strategy will reshape how media is consumed." We can see that, in fact, much of what we take to be so novel has been around for years (if not decades).
On the other hand, contemporary developments can also lead us to reexamine and rethink historical processes in a new light. In recent years, talk of the rise of "convergence" has led many media historians to look back at what were previously conceptualized as "distinct" media forms (not just film and television, but also comics, music, radio, magazines and newspapers). This has led some, including Christopher Anderson, Michele Hilmes and Tom Schatz, to reassess the relationships between these different media forms (and the companies producing and distributing them). Michele Hilmes, in particular, was one of the first to do this in her book, Hollywood and Broadcasting. Her essay in our collection builds upon many of the ideas she proposed earlier in her career, considering how recent developments might lead to new directions in media industries scholarship.
What role can the study of media industries play in the creation of media policy?
JH: I think one way media industry scholarship can play a significant role in the creation of media policy is in the framing (or reframing) of certain issues. Academics from many disciplines have used their work to affect how issues like competition, diversity, violence and intellectual property can be understood and framed in policy discourse (e.g., Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, Mara Einstein, Robert McChesney, Henry Jenkins, and Phil Napoli to name just a few). Scholars like John McMurria and Thomas Streeter have written about the power structures, discourse and ideologies that have guided policy making at the outset, offering additional historical examples of how humanistically-oriented research can contribute to policy analysis. While it has traditionally been social scientists that have been the most visible in policy-making circles, there are a few notable exceptions; I think it is in the best interests of humanities scholars to increase these numbers, make it a priority to network and take a more activist role in affecting the parameters or at least the considerations of policy. Only then will terms like "access" and "competition" have more nuanced definitions that incorporate the critical social, political and cultural issues which can otherwise disappear from the discussion.
What do you see as the most important disagreements that emerge between the contributors to the book?
JH: I wouldn't necessarily see them as disagreeing with each other per se, but I did note some hostility by many writers towards a certain reductive tradition of political economy that paints the industry in particularly broad strokes. This goes back to a general resistance toward a "monolithic" perspective on the media industries Alisa mentioned above.
The reason we did not see much direct disagreement is in part because each author was given a specific task: to outline one critical modality, methodology or historical trajectory of media industries research. The essays were not written or designed to be in conversation with one another as much as they were intended to help establish the various components and contours of what a field called "media industry studies" might look like.
As part of that collective project, the essays remained somewhat contained and focused instead of debating the relative merits of different approaches to industry study. Some authors wound up putting themselves into dialogue with one another unwittingly, such as those writing the essays on the Global (Michael Curtin), the Regional (Cristina Venegas) and the National (Nitin Govil). However, even in those essays, I found that rather than disagreement, the pieces offered new ways to think about these concepts in relation to one another. Venegas, for example, theorized transnational and local media flows in relation to Latin American cinema. While looking at trade relations, economic alliances, cultural policies and industrial histories, she presented the regional as a valuable theoretical tool but also discussed the region in relation to the global, the national, and the local. Similarly, Govil offered a complex discussion of how "thinking nationally" actually creates avenues for thinking globally and locally as well. While their considerations were different - Govil looked at piracy, diasporic media and cultural citizenship and Venegas looked at government policies, industry initiatives and market behavior across Latin America, for example - they were pursuing similarly expansive conceptual projects that are tremendously useful for scholars of national, regional and global media industries.
Jennifer, you are in the process of finishing a book on regulation and media
ownership issues. What do you think is the most common misunderstanding in
current discussions of media concentration?
JH: I think that the media reform movement has done a great deal to educate the public about this issue, but we have a long way to go. One of the most common misunderstandings might be over the ways in which media concentration is "regulated." The standards for regulating concentration and vertical integration in the various media industries are widely divergent. Historically, they have been unevenly applied by the FCC, the FTC, the Department of Justice and Congress. When it comes to policing the business of entertainment, there is no one-size-fits-all policy.
Regulation also operates much differently than common sense would dictate. Regulatory policy currently lags far behind reality - something the financial markets have just visibly (and painfully) demonstrated. This also applies to our increasingly converged media landscape. New technologies continue to combine various products and sites of engagement with policy into one very fraught wire; so, as a result of technological advancements, marketplace innovations, industrial consolidation and rapidly blurring boundaries between media and telecommunication, the standards and goals of regulation have become outdated. Old media are being used in new ways, content and carriers no longer conform to their original borders or boundaries - and that has presented us with a regulatory crisis that has yet to be fully addressed by policymakers.
This divide between the present regulatory philosophy and industrial reality is a consequence, indeed a legacy, of how media industries (broadcast and cable, for example) have been unevenly and separately regulated as technology has converged.
As a result, the government is driven more by the concerns of the market as opposed to the public interest or by a philosophy that is relevant to current conditions; the size and scope of mergers has put regulators in the back seat, following the lead of market activity rather than setting the boundaries. Consequently, the reality of regulation is one in which the industrial economy has outgrown the dimensions and arbiters of current policy. So, while most people think that regulators are out in front of the industries, right now they are hopelessly behind, applying outmoded policy to a marketplace that is, in many ways, setting its own rules.
Alisa, you're finishing up a book on Miramax. What does the rise and decline of
this company tell us about the way Hollywood is responding to a rapidly changing
media environment?
AP: My study of Miramax focuses on how and why this company was both a product of - and took advantage of - tremendous industrial and cultural changes that occurred during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The company was among the first to exploit the major studios' reorientation toward big budget event fare, effectively branding itself as the premier producer and distributor of niche-targeted "quality" product. The combination of savvy marketing, shrewd production and acquisition choices, and high-profile talent (not to mention lots of Disney money after 1993) all enabled Miramax to quickly rise to prominence.
However, as I explore in my book, to a large extent Miramax became a victim of its own success. By the late 1990s, the company's accomplishments had been widely emulated by a number of other companies, and, in an effort to remain competitive, Miramax began over-spending, over-diversifying and generally overestimating the market for certain types of niche-targeted material. The situation became further complicated by the tremendous changes taking place throughout the media industries on a much broader scale - changes that included the rapid rise of the Internet, the improving quality of fictional television series (e.g., The Sopranos, The Shield), the speedy diffusion of DVDs, and the growing availability of lower cost, higher quality digital production and postproduction technologies. All of these factors worked in tandem with a heightened emphasis by media conglomerates on developing material that could be easily exploited across as many of their platforms as possible. Cumulatively, by the early 2000s, there emerged a much different - and far less friendly - media landscape than that which was present when Miramax first grew to prominence. This landscape was much more difficult for indie companies to navigate effectively with their existing business models (a fact most recently borne out by the closure or downsizing of several different studio-based specialty divisions).
Studying Miramax (and indie subsidiaries more broadly) suggests the degree to which relatively self contained films - especially those lacking name talent and big budgets - face a challenging terrain in the contemporary industry. It seems quite likely that those types of media that cannot be easily imagined and exploited as multi-platform experiences are likely to face substantial challenges from now on. None of these developments, of course, seem to have had much of an impact on the number of people striving to make low-budget films for the theatrical market, dreaming that they may make the Next Big Thing. Yet the tale of the rise and fall of Miramax as an indie company can ultimately be viewed now as a cautionary one - a tale of the narrowing opportunities and possibilities for those seeking to make and release movies following a traditional theatrical distribution model. It remains to be seen how well low budget films will fare in the contemporary convergent media landscape, and what shape the next generation of independent cinema will take.
You explicitly focus this book around the audio-visual industries, yet as you
note, the concept of media industries is potentially much more expansive. What
would do we miss by focusing only on the audio-visual here? For example, can we
understand contemporary film practices without some grasp of developments in the
comic book industry?
AP: Choosing the proper scope proved to be one of the more challenging tasks in developing the book. There is no question that the media industries expand far beyond film, television and new media (the focal points of our collection). We chose the scope we did for a few key reasons: first, we thought that looking primarily at audio-visual media would offer a greater degree of coherence and specificity across the essays. Readers would not only be able to learn about concepts, but also about the operations of these industries in greater detail, from a variety of perspectives.
Second, we felt this approach would make the material more accessible for those undergraduate and graduate programs oriented toward film and television studies - programs that are often less likely to have extensive course offerings on the media industries than those based in communication departments, for instance. Third, this focus offered a means of differentiating our book from others already in print. The emphasis on audio-visual media enabled us to address a key tension in studying the media industries: namely, that these industries are at once distinct (in many respects, the film industry differs from the cable television industry, for example), and yet they also are and always have been deeply interdependent and interactive.
Thus, while focusing primarily on the audio-visual risks overlooking the important relationships and contributions of other industries such as comics, music and publishing to film, television and new media, were we also to examine all of those other industries as well, we would likely have a book both too general and unwieldy (not to mention several hundred pages longer!). We believe that the case studies offered by our contributors explore concepts that, though most directly applicable to audio-visual media, can also be extrapolated to other media as well.
It is worth adding that, on several occasions, our contributors do weave in examples from other media forms to make their points. Should we pursue a second edition of this book, one of our goals would be to further expand our discussion to other media. We see the current book as but an early step in what we hope to be a much more extensive conversation about what theories and methods are most productive when studying and writing about the media industries.
Jennifer Holt is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in film and television history, and media
industry studies. Her current research looks at regulatory policy in the age of
convergence. She has published articles in various journals and anthologies including
Film Quarterly, Quality Popular Television, Fifty Contemporary Film Authors and Media Ownership: Research and Regulation. Her forthcoming book Empires of Entertainment examines deregulation and the media industries between 1980-1996 and will be published by Rutgers University Press.
Alisa Perren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. Research specializations include media industry studies, television studies, and U.S. film and television history. Her forthcoming book, Indie, Inc. (under contract, University of Texas Press), traces the evolution of Miramax in the 1990s as it transitioned from independent company to studio subsidiary. Her work has appeared in a range of print and online publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, The Sage Handbook of Media Studies, The Television History Book, and Flow.
A while back, I gave the regular readers of this blog a "sneak preview" of an essay I was writing with Joshua Green on the "Moral Economy of Web 2.0." The essay has now appeared in print in an rich and diverse anthology, Media Industries: History, Theory and Methods, which was edited by Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren. It's contributors represent a who's who of contemporary research on how media industries operate and its content span the full spectrum of audio-visual media, including a full consideration of cutting-edge topics such as convergence and globalization. Since I thought this book would be of interest to many of you, I asked its editors to share some perspectives with us about the current state of research on Media Industries. For more information on this project, check out Alisa Perren's blog.
How would you characterize the current state of research on media industries?
JH: I would characterize it as a significant growth area and a landscape of great opportunity and energy at this time. The challenging economic conditions of late have placed the media industries under tremendous financial strain. When you factor in the dramatic technological developments that are impacting production and distribution, a new administration with a lot of policy defining left to do, as well as all of the changes in audience activity and "produsage," we find ourselves at a moment of transformation. Much of this is not news to many who track the industries regularly. Yet these conditions present new and interesting challenges for researchers and scholars of media industries because there are emerging business models to understand, different aspects of audience address and behavior to analyze, and a need for the perspective and contextualization that media industry historians, critics, and theorists have to offer.
As we hope our anthology demonstrates, there is a great deal of vital research being done on all aspects of the media industries right now - labor, economics, policy, technology, audiences, texts, trade, and more. We look forward to more of this work seeping outside the boundaries of academia (as some of it already has, yours included) and taking a more active role in shaping larger cultural and policy discourses about the media industries. Ideally, this collection will help contribute to the visibility of the important work already being done by our authors. It is worth noting that there is also significant work being done outside of the academy by journalists and activists that has been very influential on media industry research. Some of the most insightful and informative analysis of media industries can be found in the popular press, the blogosphere and trade publishing, where journalists and critics have generated a tremendous amount of momentum for our "field." I see this leads right to your next question...
So, let me ask the question you pose in the title of your introduction, "Does the world really need one more field of study"?
JH: I would argue (as we did in the intro) that indeed it does. With a more formalized "field of study" comes a more focused attention to the history and development of that field, to the many disciplinary traditions that comprise its foundation, and a more coherent cultivation of scholarly perspective on this type of work. In addition to having more established (and easily accessible) curricular materials and traditions to draw upon, having the benefit of conferences, journals and anthologies devoted to a field are key aspects to creating disciplinary expansion and growth. Most often, communal projects and institutional support only come when a field of study generates enough traction to warrant and inspire them, and so having the academic community (and beyond) thinking about media industry studies as a "field" would be enormously beneficial.
In the book, we don't suggest that we "invented" this field by any means...we just want to begin the process of identifying, historicizing and theorizing the vast range of industries, analytical tools, critical traditions and potential paths of inquiry that comprise what the field of media industry studies looks like to us, at this point. We hope that others will continue the conversation and expand it beyond what we were able to address in this one volume.
AP: Let me also add that we felt honored to have so many individuals involved with the book who we believed played a vital role in shaping work on the media industries during the last couple of decades - individuals such as John Hartley, Horace Newcomb, David Hesmondhalgh (all three of whom wrote compelling essays offering their perspective on what "media industry studies" should be. Complementing these perspectives are views from many newer scholars of the media industries, including moving image archivist Caroline Frick and media historian Cynthia Meyers. As Jennifer notes, we see this as but the start of a discussion, one that many others will add to in the near future.
What can the study of media industries add to our understanding of media texts?
AP: In many of the more humanistically-oriented areas of study, the text has remained a focal point of analysis. Part of this is a function of the roots of this type of work in film studies. Much of this work developed primarily in English departments that approached cinema primarily as self-contained texts that could be explicated in isolation.
Over the last few decades, work in cultural studies has helped to substantially broaden discussions of texts, demanding that scholars think more in terms of social, cultural, political, economic and industrial contexts. However, though early work by cultural studies figures such as Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson encouraged discussion of both production and consumption processes, the majority of such work over the years has tended to be focused far more heavily on the consumption side. Thus, an immense amount of scholarship has been generated that situates texts culturally, and thinks about what audiences do with media texts. Yet, until recently, far fewer scholars have looked at the cultural processes involved in actually making texts in the first place. That's one of the goals of our book: to add to the growing literature produced by scholars such as Amanda Lotz, Elana Levine, Serra Tinic, and John Caldwell, the latter of whom is a contributor to our collection. Their work underscores the need to consider the myriad institutional and cultural forces affecting how media are produced.
When we talk about production, we are not simply referring to individual actions taken by key "above-the-line" figures such as directors and writers. Rather, production must be thought of much more broadly. The potential impact of diverse individuals (both above and below-the-line), groups (ranging from labor unions to film commissions), and institutions (not simply production companies and conglomerates but also tech companies and government agencies) must be taken into consideration.
One of the primary goals of our book was to unite many of these diverse perspectives in one place, thereby initiating a more focused and coherent discussion about media industry scholarship. Ideally, by bringing wide-ranging perspectives from media studies, communication, cultural studies, sociology, telecommunication and anthropology together, we can begin to have a better sense of the multitude of ways that media texts are shaped by diverse factors. In addition, we can try to encourage a shift away from a view in which the only potentially politically progressive elements of media texts are those which are brought to them by active fans. A traditional political economic tradition often tends to view commercial media texts as inherently conservative products of a monolithic system. Our authors collectively underscore numerous ways such notions need to be further complicated.
Can we study media production meaningfully without an understanding of media
consumption?
AP: One thing we have learned in this age of convergence, and which you, Henry, have shown so effectively in your own work, is that we always need to keep in mind how cultural products are both produced and consumed. In part, the rise of a more participatory online media culture has helped us rethink older models that only considered production practices or media texts in isolation. In the past, such approaches might have been more viable for both the industry and scholars alike because feedback from audiences wasn't so immediately available. Thus it might take a weekend or two for word of mouth to circulate widely about a movie and affect it adversely at the box office. However, in an age when people can post responses to a movie or TV show on Facebook or Twitter as they watch it - and such responses, in turn, can lead to relatively direct economic consequences for the companies producing and distributing them - both executives and academics must recognize and explore the interrelated nature of production, text and consumption in more complex and nuanced ways than they have previously.
Jennifer Holt is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in film and television history, and media
industry studies. Her current research looks at regulatory policy in the age of
convergence. She has published articles in various journals and anthologies including
Film Quarterly, Quality Popular Television, Fifty Contemporary Film Authors and Media Ownership: Research and Regulation. Her forthcoming book Empires of Entertainment examines deregulation and the media industries between 1980-1996 and will be published by Rutgers University Press.
Alisa Perren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. Research specializations include media industry studies, television studies, and U.S. film and television history. Her forthcoming book, Indie, Inc. (under contract, University of Texas Press), traces the evolution of Miramax in the 1990s as it transitioned from independent company to studio subsidiary. Her work has appeared in a range of print and online publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, The Sage Handbook of Media Studies, The Television History Book, and Flow.
Today, we continue our discussion with Jessica Clark, co-author of Public Media 2.0, an important white paper recently issued by American University's Center for Social Media.
What does your research suggest about the relative roles of professional media producers and Pro-Am media makers in the new ecology of public media?
Professionally produced content is central to public media 2.0--right now, more people than ever are consuming and linking to newspapers and broadcast news sources. Some forms of public media are expensive to produce and difficult to make using only volunteer energy and resources: investigative journalism, long-form documentary, international coverage. Those should continue to be subsidized by taxpayers, by new business models for news, and by social entrepreneurs interested in supporting "double bottom line" projects.
What's different in this new ecology is the way in which publics are using content. They are adopting roles up and down the production chain --funding news and information through projects like Spot.us, collaborating in investigations on sites like Talking Points Memo, reporting directly via mobile phone from war zones using tools like Ushahidi , analyzing and critiquing news sources at sites like NewsTrust and disseminating relevant content through social networks, Twitter, Digg, and many other channels. This fundamentally challenges the agenda-setting powers of legacy media, making it much harder to create and maintain an artificial consensus, a "conventional wisdom."
Jay Rosen writes about this in a January Post on his PressThink blog titled "Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press."
In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized--meaning they were connected to BigMedia but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people
to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the echosphere of legitimate debate as defined by journalists doesn't match up with their own definition.
In the past there was nowhere for this kind of sentiment to go. Now it collects, solidifies and expresses itself online. Bloggers tap into it to gain a following and serve demand. Journalists call this the echo chamber, which is their way of downgrading it as a reliable source. But what's really happening is that the authority of the press to assume consensus, define deviance and set the terms for legitimate debate is weaker when people can connect horizontally around and about the news.
We can see this expansion of public dialogue in action via new tools for visualizing connections and authority online. One really fun tool is the Political Video Barometer, designed by Morningside Analytics. This shows the dissemination of online videos across the spectrum of the political blogosphere. Some of these videos are clips from mainstream media, some are produced by advocacy groups, some by individuals. Some are strident, some are artistic, some are snarky. The range of expression and debate is wider than we got used to seeing on TV, but now these new forms of communication are expanding the boundaries of legitimate public discourse.
You note that public media is "rarely loved," yet participatory culture is passion driven. How can you build the base of support for public media in the absence of the passions that fuel other kinds of fan culture?
Audiences are actually passionately loyal to public broadcasting, and for many it's the most trusted source for news. Politicians sometimes love it less, because it can generate controversy or cast a critical eye. The main problem is that many of the programs and stations haven't kept up with either technological changes or shifts in tone
over the last two decades. It's hard to make the case that public broadcasting, especially PBS, serves the whole country adequately--the programs tend to appeal to the very young and those approaching or enjoying retirement. Finding ways to connect with people's civic passions through new platforms and new voices will be paramount if
public media is to maintain a broad base of support as its core audiences age. The idea that the populace at large is apathetic is not only wrong, it's condescending; by opening up and innovating, public broadcasting can evolve into public media 2.0.
Does Public Media 2.0 rest on the assumption of a generalized public or do the same arguments apply to smaller scale niche audiences and social networks?
We think the concept of a generalized public is a fiction perpetrated by pollsters and demagogues. Not only are there very few issues that engage the entire adult population of a country, but in our framework, publics can form across national boundaries, and in places that don't yet have stable democratic governments. For example, online censorship is an issue that mobilizes a discrete but impassioned group of people around the world. The Global Voices Access Denied Map is an example of public media 2.0 dealing with that issue. Here's how they describe it:
The Access Denied Map will lead interested readers to content that enables them to support anti-censorship movements and keeps readers abreast of the filtering situation in various parts of the world. It will also facilitate collaboration between activists, allowing them to find each other, share tactics and strategies and experiences.
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So, public media 2.0 definitely applies to niche audiences and social networks. In our definition, we privilege debate over partisanship. The idea isn't to make media that attracts a group of like-minded users around an issue or a figure--what you note as "pools" or "hubss" in the terminology of Lara Lee from Jump Associates. It's to offer up high-quality content around an issue and provide contexts/platforms that allow people to grapple with it.
A public is also distinct from a "community," which might form casually through physical proximity or shared interests. Publics can rise out of communities, but are more pointed.
Your report defines public media around primarily political and civic functions, yet public broadcasting has tended to define its mission much more around cultural programming--in part because of the ideological climate around its funding process. Does the new media environment free media producers to embrace a more explicitly
political mission?
Right now what we're terming public media 2.0 is in its "first two minutes"--many projects are taking place outside of the context of federally funded outlets or production companies, which means they can be as political as is appropriate to the issues being tackled. In the future, separating the funding and production of content from that of online engagement will help to heat-shield public media 2.0 from political attacks. If publics themselves are producing, curating and discussing content, it's harder to unilaterally dismiss them as biased or hegemonic. Individual discussions and projects might draw fire from partisans, but the idea is to create contexts and platforms that allow users from across the political spectrum to access and engage with reliable information. The result will be more wide-ranging, honest and authentic interactions. Of course, there will be flame wars, commercial incursions, and propaganda in the mix. But those existed in the analog world too. We're still early in the process of negotiating new standards and rules for open media, but we'll get there.
A range of explicit policies will be needed to support public media 2.0. These range from infrastructure policies (net neutrality, universal broadband access), to support for content (via taxpayer funding and tax incentives), to copyright reforms (for instance,
making it easier to use copyrighted works when you can't find the author, or orphan works) and copyright education (for instance around the utility of fair use), and support for public engagement and media literacy.
Some forms of public media have historically been paternalistic-- giving people what they think is good for them rather than commercial culture's desire to give people who they desire. There are all kinds of problems for this framing, but in so far as this stereotype has some truth, how do we shift this mindset to embrace much greater public participation in framing issues and shaping content? Are most of the current public media producers ready to embrace the kind of relationship to the public you describe here?
We're seeing all kinds of interesting experiments within traditional public broadcasting, many of which we document in our white paper. There is also a long-running strain of participatory media in public media, as embodied in projects like StoryCorps or This I Believe. Sharing significant cultural and social experiences, crafting personal narratives, capturing reality in all of its bumpy, quirky texture-- these are all impulses intrinsic to oral history and documentary, practices central to legacy public media. The difference now is that people can participate directly in producing public media 2.0.
Jessica Clark is the research director of the Center for Social Media at American University, where she heads up the Future of Public Media project. She is currently working on a book about the evolution of the progressive media sector with Tracy Van Slyke of The Media Consortium. Together they edit a related blog, Build the Echo. She is also the editor-at-large for In These Times, an award-winning monthly magazine of progressive news, analysis and cultural reporting.
Amidst all of the dire talk these days about the fate of the American newspaper, the Center for Social Media at American University has issued an important white paper exploring the future of public media more generally. When most of us think about "public media" these days, we are most likely to be talking about Public Broadcasting, where the Public refers as much to Public Funding as it refers to any conception of the Public Sphere. The report, Public Media 2.0, embraces the affordances and practices of an era of participatory culture and social networks to identify strategies for public media which emphasize its capacity to attract and mobilize publics. This reframing of the issues shows ways that we can expand who produces and who consumes public media, taking advantage of new stakeholders -- independent media producers, engaged online communities -- who have not always felt well served by the increasingly conservative fair on offer from public broadcasting.
After several decades of getting caught in the crossfire of culture war politics, PBS and NPR sometimes seem a bit gun shy. The new report suggests ways that we can use emerging technologies and practices to enable a more rigorous discussion of public policy, one which bridges across generational gaps and racial divides a like. Public Media 2.0 imagines ways that civic discussions can engage people like my students who are much more likely to seek out information via The Daily Show than Washington Week in Review.
My hope is that this report will spark informed discussion across a range of different publics and in that spirit, I am presenting over the next two installments an interview with Jessica Clark, the director of the Future of Public Media Project and one of the two primary authors (along with Pat Aufderheide) of the report.
Can you share your definition of Public Media 2.0? How does it differ from what you are calling "legacy media"? What are the biggest factors shaping this change?
"Legacy media" is top-down, one-to-many media: print, television, radio, even static web pages. We're advancing a more dynamic, relevant definition of public media--one that's participatory, focused on informing and mobilizing publics around shared issues.
"Publics" can be a slippery term: we don't simply mean audiences, or the general populace (i.e. "the public interest"). Instead, it's a term based on the work of theorists like John Dewey and JÃrgen Habermas, who suggest that media are intrinsic to democracy itself. Publics are what keep the powers-that-be accountable--government, corporate or other--by investigating them, discussing them, and deliberating about how to deal with them. Publics are networks of people--often ad hoc, sometimes organized--with a shared civic purpose. Media content, tools and platforms are needed for publics to form, because face-to-face communication is too inefficient--especially now that we all operate within a global economy.
Typically, legacy public media have been contained in noncommercial zones within the commercially defined media system: public broadcasting, cable access, satellite TV set-asides. But in our white paper, we note, "The open digital environment holds out the promise of a new framework for creating and supporting public media--one that prioritizes the creation of publics, moving beyond representation and into direct participation.This is the kind of media that political philosophers have longed for." In other words, Web 2.0 platforms are fantastic vehicles for democratic communication and action. Voila: public media 2.0.
If you think of public broadcasting as the Pachelbel canon (again), Wayne's World and Antiques Road Show, then the concept of public media as an active process of forming, informing and organizing publics may seem like a completely different animal. But really, our definition isn't that far from the original goals for public broadcasting.
When he signed the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, Lyndon Johnson said "At its best, public television would help make our Nation a replica of the old Greek marketplace, where public affairs took place in view of all the citizens." We're seeing glimmers of that with the promises that the new administration has made about government transparency, but also in the work that bloggers and open government activists do to haul controversial documents out into the open and debate them online. (See the Sunlight Labs for examples).
Johnson also said "I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge--not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use." We've got that capacity now, and are continually adding both old and new content. The challenge is making sure that
citizens can retain access to that network, and learn how to use it creatively and responsibly.
What lessons can we take from the 2008 election in terms of understanding the public's desire for new forms of information and new modes of participation?
This election demonstrated both the power and the appeal of participatory, digital communication. A campaign is a very instrumental way to use Web 2.0 technology. Its goals are simple--get users to identify with the candidate, pony up cash, and turn out voters. Having such focused goals makes it easier to measure outcomes: dollars raised, districts won. But the campaign's outreach strategy had a qualitative impact too: an increased sense of hope and connection that's still translating now into widespread trust that Barack Obama can get us out of the fix we're in. For a number of reasons, Obama is very easy for people to relate to--he's equable, not entirely white or black, Midwestern (recently at least), he doesn't come from a privileged background, he's got a family that he clearly loves, and a sense of humor. But what's more, Web 2.0 tools allowed voters to relate to one another. Participatory platforms facilitate identification; as Kurt Vonnegut noted, "Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.' "
Public media 2.0 will allow for even richer, more complex interactions around a variety of issues and events--from the financial crisis to environmental issues to gay marriage and well beyond. Users are already crazy about participatory platforms--in the white paper we identify five rising habits around media: choice, curation, conversation, collaboration and creation. Applying those habits to the issues that they care about creates new possibilities for connection, coproduction and investigation. My hope is that the election served as training wheels; that we'll all learn to go faster and farther with participatory practices.
Under the Bush administration, several FCC chairmen have argued that the diversification of the media environment has rendered many traditional notions of public service media obsolete. Why do we need PBS when we have the History Channel, Discovery Channel, BBC America, Nickelodeon, etc? You seem to be making the case, though, that there are urgent needs for public media in this new media environment. How might you counter the diversity and plenitude arguments? What functions should public media play in this era of exploding media options?
The primary goal for public media should be to support the formation of publics around issues. Given the radically disruptive ways our familiar economic and information regimes are shifting, it's more important than ever that people have reliable sources for learning, communicating and innovating around shared problems. Traditional forms of public media--educational content, journalism, documentary films, current affairs commentary, performing arts--can all play a role in this process, whether they are produced by commercial or noncommercial outlets.
Scarcity of information is no longer the central problem. The pressing need now is for content and contexts that allow users to make sense of the multiple inputs. High-quality public media 2.0 projects set standards that make it clear where information is coming from, provide contexts for users to engage in civil discourse, and connect users with other relevant sources. They engage users directly in issues via interaction, problem solving, creation and imagination. Take World Without Oil, a multiplayer alternative reality game produced by the Independent Television Service (ITVS) that attracted almost 2,000 gamers from 40-plus countries. This is an example of the hybrid nature of public 2.0, in which content moves fluidly across noncommercial and commercial sites, across boundaries of professional and amateur producers, and from online to off. Participants submitted reactions to an eight-month energy crisis via privately owned social media sites, such as YouTube and Flickr--and made corresponding real-life changes, chronicled at the WWO Lives blog. As it turns out, many of the real-world reactions to the spike in oil prices mirrored the in-game reactions.
Wikipedia provides another model for public media 2.0. It sets a context for interaction--a familiar form, the encyclopedia article. It sets standards for participation--the "neutral point of view" policy, which states "All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources." Within those parameters, users debate the truths about contested issues. In the white paper, we write about the furor that erupted around Sarah Palin's entry when it was announced that she'd be John McCain's running mate. Someone involved with the campaign made a number of flattering changes to the Palin entry, and then others came in to correct them, setting off a firestorm of editing. In the past, this sort of debate would have been mediated by reporters and pundits. In this instance, it was hashed out by Wikipedia users directly, creating a coherent, crowdsourced entry and forming a public in the process.
What's the government's role in ensuring that public media 2.0 can continue to evolve and flourish? We argue that there are two clear needs: support for content, and national coordination that will ensure stable, robust platforms for engagement around media. This doesn't mean that there will be some Big Brother overseeing users' conversations around issues, or that the national platform will be controlled from inside the Beltway. What it means is that we can't depend on commercial sites like YouTube and Twitter to indefinitely provide platforms for public engagement. We see the current system of public broadcasting stations as a possible scaffolding for a national network that has deep local roots and inputs from a variety of media sources outside of traditional public broadcasting, including citizen media makers. But they would need to transform their agenda, which currently is focused on delivering a broadcasting signal filled mostly with syndicated content, into an agenda focused on engaging people where they live, work and meet around issues of public importance. Decoupling content creation from engagement gives publics more power to dynamically form around issues that they identify as important, rather than being forced to respond to the agendas set by reporters, editors and newsmakers. We think this will help to increase the diversity of content and conversations, and to make public media 2.0 vital.
Much research suggests that there's an age gap in terms of who consumes current public media (skewing older and older) but also in terms of who participates in the online world (skews younger). How might Public Media 2.0 be used to close the gap between these two demographics?
Younger people are already creating many forms of public media 2.0-- they just don't call it that yet. We're hoping that giving this constellation of practices a name and a focus will help to create pipelines, networks and hubs for future generations of public media makers. One good example of this is the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), which provides an interface between independent and citizen radio producers and traditional public stations. They recently convinced the FCC that the public deserved a stake in satellite radio, given the merger of XM and Sirius. Now, PRX is starting to program a 24-hour satellite channel with content that moves well beyond the stereotypical NPR sound that many of us have grown up with and often like to mock. (See the NPR Dancers).
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Another recent project that provides a segue between the old and new media worlds is Mojoco.org, a project of the National Black Programming Consortium, which is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. "Mojoco" is a short name for "Mobile Journalism Collective," and the project is designed to provide resources, tools and coproduction opportunities for "Mojos" interested in making new forms of public media.
Add these sorts of projects--explicitly tied to legacy public media forms--to the new kinds of content being created by citizen makers such as those working with The Uptake, Global Voices or Current. Each of these media projects has produced content that made its way onto legacy print or broadcast platforms. Soon these distinctions will become meaningless, as more and more viewers of all generations are consuming converged content on mobile devices. Public media 2.0 will be one of the many choices a media consumer has, and will become particularly relevant in times of crisis, or moments of local/national/ global decisionmaking.
Jessica Clark is the research director of the Center for Social Media at American University, where she heads up the Future of Public Media project. She is currently working on a book about the evolution of the progressive media sector with Tracy Van Slyke of The Media Consortium. Together they edit a related blog, Build the Echo. She is also the editor-at-large for In These Times, an award-winning monthly magazine of progressive news, analysis and cultural reporting.
DC: We've really been focusing on method, here, haven't we? I wonder if we might turn a bit toward the subject of fan history and what we might say about its timeline and function in American culture, something that you raised at the beginning of this discussion. I'm obviously focusing on fandom around music and you are focusing on fandom around literature --are we talking about the same thing?
I am most interested in whether the changing practices of and discourses around music audiences somehow correspond (in terms of chronology or sequence or content) with histories of audiencing other realms of culture: literature, theater sports, and film. What kind of "narrative arc" might you suggest for a history of fans in the U.S. and how do your letter-writers fit into that?
For me, the music loving points to the commodification of leisure in 19th century cities and people's attempts to figure out exactly how to consume musical experience and the powerful emotions such consumption sustained. One common move was to borrow practices and ideas from the "adjacent" cultural world of organized religion. Otherwise, there was an intense measurement of music's psychological effects and, socially, a vying for control over definitions of acceptable cultural participation. This origin history challenges the idea that music fandom appeared around the time of the phonograph and radio in the early 20th century (espoused by Fred & Judy Vermoral, for example) and were an outgrowth of diffuse and private consumption practices afforded by mass media. I can work this out in greater detail for you, of course, but it suggests, for me, new possibilities for understanding fandom as a wider cultural phenomenon.
BR: A study of one fan - interesting idea. It makes me think of Lynne Pearce's book on her most avid reading experiences; in it, she makes explicit comparison to her football fandom. It would be very worthwhile to head back a few more generations and see what historical sources could reveal about just one fan. This could reveal a lot about social permissions and pressures, as well as media new and newfangled at a given time.
It's in these areas I would probably expect to see correspondences between different sorts of fandoms, as broad forces of, say, enthusiasm, emerged and were "handled" in ways that might well fall into discernible patterns. We should talk more about this in 12 months or so!
Regarding mediation, I'm interested as a student of fan mail in how the U.S. post had developed in ways not seen in other countries, at that time. But I'm intrigued too by the possibility that the phonograph had impact on novel-reading insofar as it opened up new imaginative space relevant to the kind of reading that's so engrossing people speak of being "lost in a book." I'm thinking as well about media of the day such as magic-lantern shows, panoramas and tableaux vivants.
I have to add, though, that the issue of representation is really fraught in my project insofar as the focus of the debate around Ben-Hur, when it was new, was appropriate address of the Bible understood as God's perfect and sufficient Word. This specificity makes religion not an adjacent cultural world, for my fans and their detractors; instead, it's a huge and vital part of the Ben-Hur event. At the same time, this makes Ben-Hur a rich source of controversy about art understood as what an anti-Romantic called "spilt religion."
The issue, for those who haven't read Ben-Hur, is that the heftiest slice of its shock-value, back in the day, wasn't the chariot-race or the male-male love-turned-to-hate relationship implied by the Gore Vidal script for the Charlton Heston film. Rather it was that Jesus of Nazareth shows up as a character in a romance, that being the gaudiest and least esteemed of "serious" prose genres, at that time. This character only gets a few walk-ons. But some said he was the real hero of Ben-Hur because he's shown preaching, healing and finally being crucified, and those activities collude to save the titular hero from a bad end.
Who decides what sort of end is good or bad, what you want to say about Judah Ben-Hur's bloody revenge before he turns to Jesus's creed . . . struggles over these things are still ongoing. Summatively, fiction that can be misprised as a Bible supplement carries a heavy load.
How does this relate to your questions? The first point I'm making is that religious precepts, more than religious rhetoric or permissions, are right in there, integral to every judgment (and quip) about Ben-Hur. Does this make it tricky to work with fans' effusions? You bet. But it points up the merits of Colin Campbell's account of how Puritan fervor evolved over two centuries into self-congratulatory consumerism. That's not too far from commodifications of leisure. But with Campbell as a guide, I'd start my narrative arc at the Protestant push for universal vernacular literacy.
The second point I'm making is that in the Western world, at least, there's never been a piece of music that carried the cultural weight of the Bible. Lots of religious music, obviously, and some that's held sacred. But people who engage music can't hold up any one piece of music, or music in general, as the perfect and sufficient revealed music of God.
Here again, therefore, I would say we're working on different things, though now I believe the issue is different valences I'm too close to my research, and approach, to be sure how its valences might carry over, or be inherited from elsewhere. But talking to you has brought my attention more firmly to the music critic John Dwight as one of the first non-ministerial pundits, on the U.S. scene, to try to attain arts authority. I like this term better than "cultural authority" because it's more precise but also because when one works in the arts, or their histories, it can feel near-impossible to figure out what "culture" means, in a given sentence. Having mentioned Dwight, I'll add that Adam Max Tuchinsky's article on Transcendentalism made that group more coherent to me than they ever were before; his emphasis on jousting for power is relevant to the taste-shapers I study later in the 19th century and perhaps to your project, too.
Power-jousts structured my sense of my project, at the start. But a lot of that has given way to medial interests that foreground the citizen audience. This phrase really sings for me; it's got me gearing up to argue, for instance, that in a civic register, Ben-Hur has claims on the tag, Great American Novel. This idea circles me back, though, to wonder if Hermes is vaguely pluralist; for instance, with all she says about citizenship, she doesn't articulate a theory of the state. The reason I worry about vague pluralism is that that was the move of the critics who denied any political efficacy to their emphasis on good taste. These critics were later tagged "genteel." But that's only half the story because for scholars like Ian Hunter and Toby Miller, they were the "temperers" of the well-tempered self who structured citizenship via subjectivity.
Through, again, talking with you, I've been wondering if one of those critics' main initiatives was an aggregation of things that had been disparate under a new catch-word, fan. What was aggregated? Top of my head: avidities that went under names like bibliomania, dog (or horse) fancier, Bovarisme and quixotry, a person thought "mad" for certain sports or entertainments, fop and dandy, the wheeling craze, curio hunters, maybe even card sharks and bluestockings. These are, generally, labels that highlight engagement run amok. Not necessarily the same thing as aberrant audiencing, but intriguingly close, I'd say.
Not so incidentally, religious terms crop up in here so that along with gambling "hells" and speed "demons," we hear of autograph "fiends." I'm surmising that the reason the word fan was pasted onto all this ca. 1900 is that the genteel critics helped put a premium on the tempered citizen-subject as a subject for capitalist purposes of production, consumption and what Richard Ohmann calls the professional-managerial class. If so, that's additional reason to study quite critically what Fredric Jameson called "Reader's Digest culture" in terms of its capacity to aggregate groups big enough to raise the spectre of mobs, hordes and throngs.
The "tempering" project gets underway, as I see it, right after the Civil War, with help from people like John Dwight's one-time boss, George Ripley. Having said that, though, I revive my stand that media plays a role in fandoms, offering two reasons. First, books and newspapers had unmatched capacity to at least try to "mark" consumer/receiver positions as wholesome or wrongheaded, respectworthy or perilous. Second, efforts to mark in that way provided repeated stimuli as, of course, did reports of a concert or a race, a boxing match or a new book by a well-liked poet.
I think repeated stimulus is a central part of fandom, as I understand it. Stimulus can come from realms other than media if, say, a fan starts losing interest in her home-team until they hire a new forward and her enthusiasm revives. Media works quite hard, though, to stimulate new or ongoing interest, and so, I hold, to foster fandom. I don't want to bear down on this too hard because I can think of pre-media enthusiasms I'd be unwilling to characterize as fandoms: medieval bear-baiting, maybe.
The theoretical issue is whether fandom is possible in isolation: if it's a learned behavior or something intrinsically human. You see nudges in the second direction in some of the psychoanalytical analyses of fandom. By emphasizing media, I head away from them on the rule-of-thumb that many people don't become fans. I think this also helps me talk about how fandom is not the same as love, though they can share attributes. You've said you see less in media. But speaking of "marking," have you worked it back into your schema? Or maybe not; do tell; I need a rest!
DC: While we are both working on historical fandom, I think you are correct in saying that we do have different "valences," which I take to mean different clusters of cohering ideas. (I'm a little rusty in some of my critical theory terms and never really got a hold of this one!). You're circling a particular work, while I'm looking at the development of a behavior; you're interested in the dynamics of power and citizenship, while I'm more focused on the traces of specific individuals' experiential realities. [My generalizations may be off, here, I know--let me know!] At least in terms of fan history, however, I think you touch on a number of important overlapping areas of inquiry, even if we come at them in different ways. All have to do with the identifying some of the key forces involved in the emergence of "fandom" in the changing contexts of the American 19th century.
First, religion. I understand now how religion operates differently among the readership of Ben-Hur than with antebellum music lovers. While I've been thinking about religion as a separate but important source for discourse about music loving, your readers are wrestling directly with the religious implications of Ben-Hur. In talking to you, I have realized how much I have relied on my previous parsing of the religious and the non-religious among Springsteen fans in order to make sense of the world of antebellum music lovers, something that I need to seriously question. Overall, I think I still need to come to grips with the role of religion in everyday life in the 19th century, especially among the specific audience members I've been investigating.
I've done a lot of thinking and exploring of the ways in which the behaviors of Protestant church-going directly intersected and shaped people's concert-going, building on work like Jean Kilde's When Church Become Theater. But I've only begun to explore the relationship between the "self" and the development of capitalism through works like Colin Campbell's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and R. Laurence Moore's Selling God. A recent book review essay in American Quarterly, by Paul Pfister, about several books on "emotional capitalism," was one of the most exciting things I've read in a long time, simply because it has pointed me in fruitful directions for making better sense of how selfhood, religion, music, and consumption formed a new ecology of musicking in the 1850s.
Second, "jousting for power" and the role of "taste-shapers." You have thought far more deeply about this than I have. I've only wrestled in a limited way with the classic accounts of "the sacralization of culture" in Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow and John Kasson's Rudeness and Civility. In this project, I've been sympathetic to some of the critiques of their histories, by scholars like Nancy Newman, who wrote in a Ph.D. dissertation that asserted that his timeline of class separation was accurate for theater but not music; or William Weber, who wrote in Music and the Middle Class that "histories of Victorian society have taken the moralists of the time a great deal too seriously, simply because they were so vocal and articulate;" or Ralph P. Locke, who questioned Levine's dismissive attitude toward figures like John S. Dwight and marginalization of the role of amateur women patrons.
A lot of the discussion of power-jousts around music audiences actually revolves around the issue of silence, which is most interesting (especially with regard to religion) and whose meanings, I think, are sometimes a bit over-simplified as refined/not refined. At any rate, while interpretations about the "disciplining of spectatorship" accurately outline a significant shift in the social discourse of music listening in the nineteenth century, I would argue that important experiential details are lost in characterizing the shift as primarily from social heterogeneity to homogeneity, or from active to passive appreciation. It's a delicate argument to make, but again, it's one that makes sense from my "experience-near" perspective.
The last force we are both exploring is "the media" and its role in fandom. I very much like your characterization of the "new imaginative space" created by the phonograph and other media. However, I am hesitant to move in the direction of technology-determining-behavior. I'm not sure why, and I'm hoping it's not just knee-jerk humanism. I have to admit that much of my work on fandom has worked against the notion of "media manipulation," which I've always seen as a bit too reductive, both on the positive side (opening up new ways of doing things) and the negative side (forcing people to act or think in prescribed ways). Jonathan Sterne wrote a marvelous book in 2003 called The Audible Past in which he explored the various ways in which shifts in ideology and behavior in the 19th century made the invention of the phonograph (and recording in general) possible in the first place.
You cite the ways in which books and newspapers marked audience positions as desirable or not desirable, which I think is true. But I think they were tools not necessarily sources. Likewise, I'm less inclined to see the media as a source for the repeated stimulation found in fandom and more as an enhancement, or fulfillment, of people's already existing need for repeated stimulation. I'm coming from a different body of evidence, of course: In some of the early diaries I've read (1840-1850), the writers, having just had an intense experience of music, yearn to repeat that one-time event to the extent that they re-create events in their own words so that they can re-live them and linger over them again and again through reading. That is a form of mediation, I suppose. But it happens before the impact of commercial, mass media in the music world.
This is not to dismiss the role of, say, newspapers: very quickly, by the 1860s, music magazines and newspapers start to cover concerts and profile "star" performers, and scrap-booking takes over. Commercial sheet music, too, which was initially linked to specific concert events and given out by performers to audiences as souvenirs, come to serve the desire for repetition. At any rate, while the media provided new, convenient opportunities for repetition, there are desires and needs at work that makes those opportunities possible in the first place. I'm not sure that downplaying the primacy of media necessarily makes fandom intrinsically human or a kind of psychological universal, however--it may be instead that fandom is a mode of engagement and understanding that develops in response to a host of equally-important social and ideological shifts in the "enlightened," capitalistic, modern world: growing markets, ideologies of consumption, urban anonymity and the rise of individualism, etc.
In the end, I wonder if part of the problem of trying to come up with a comparative history of fandom is that "fandom" may not be a coherent historical phenomenon. As you suggest, fandom may indeed emerge in the genteel aggregation of diverse avidities in the second-half of the 19th century. If so, the legitimacy of the study of "fandom" as a single phenomenon is something to think long and hard about. The upshot may be that a history of fandom may not be about identifying homologous practices of "audiencing" but rather about the social and political processes that constructed that homology. Perhaps, though, there is room for both lines of inquiry. I am interested less in ideological apparatuses and power-jousts than in what might be called a "phenomenology of avidity." I'm guessing you may have different interests. Yet, here we are, conversing!
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BR: Yes, exactly: conversing is possible and, happily, it's proved most edifying to me. I hope anyone who reads through our back-and-forth has been edified, too. But at the very least, I've learned a lot from your input.
First and foremost, our converse has helped me sharpen my focus. Too, it's increased my sense of the analytical premises I've been relying on, and given me a sense of their research limits. Third, I'm persuaded that we're working in proximate but not overlapping areas that probably reflect training as much as interests, and of course tool-sets.
What you've just said, for instance, reveals to me certain "lit" antecedents that I want to both honor and struggle against. One of the ways I do that is, actually, to try to hear silences. But I think from what you've said that I will want to think again and more about media and mediation. I share your concern about techno-determinist pitfalls. That's kind of vexed, though, in terms of media's fully and necessarily human origins . . . about which I also need to think more. Which leaves me semi-certain that together we've sketched about 10 more years of work in which projects like ours will supply bricks and straw, from which others build narratives about the social and political processes embedded in homologies we've begun to uncover. Though maybe I should just speak for myself there!
On that note, I'm ready to head back to writing. It's been much fun, and very fruitful, conversing with you. Thanks for recommending several books I will now go read and for prodding me to take up positions on a few key gnarls. Would you like to sign us off with a final word?
DC: "Likewise" about sums it up for me, Barbara! It's been an immense pleasure learning about your research, thinking with you about our respective approaches, and, as you said, exploring our analytical premises.
I really enjoy dialogue like this. Study in the humanities too often emphasizes individual ownership of ideas ("What is the topic of your research?"), since that's really the only meaningful capital people have in hiring and promotion. You can see this emphasis clearly in the form of published writing that has the most weight and recognition for tenure committees: the single-authored essay or book.
I know we're not going to change the world, here, but I'm glad that we've had the opportunity to do something a little different. Wouldn't it be great if we could develop, more fully and meaningfully, new forms of dialogic narrative in academic research and writing? Perhaps the internet gives us a new tool for doing so. At any rate, I would like to thank Henry for generously providing a space for our conversation.
A little over a year ago, this blog hosted an extended series of conversations between male and female academics doing work around fan studies, cult media, transmedia storytelling, and related topics. The exchanges have become a repository for contemporary work in these areas, a place I regularly send people looking for speakers on panels, contributors to books, or simply resources to support their own research projects. Whatever did or did not get resolved in the space of gender politics, the conversations have helped to promote fan studies more generally. With that in mind, I remain open to further conversations involving researchers who were not featured during the last round but who have interesting things to say to each other.
BARBARA RYAN, of the National University of Singapore, is working on a book about the Ben-Hur event. She invited DANIEL CAVICCHI of the Rhode Island School of Design to discuss some of the issues involved in pushing fan studies back into the 19th century. She got in touch with Dan because of his work on 19th-century U.S. music fans.
BR: Dan, we might begin by mapping our respective routes to this conversation. I think of you as a fan studies scholar who decided to go back in time, while I think of myself as an historian of reading who is trying to learn from fan scholarship. Your first book, on Bruce Springsteen, includes extraordinary conversations with present-day fans. So that's a sociological approach -- if I can just say this in a simple way. Too simple? Anyway, my first book analyzes 19th-century print culture that tried to emphasize how that print was put to use. Something of a reception study, then, but a social history, too. Now, here we are looking at 19th-century U.S. fans, yours being fans of music and mine being fans of Ben-Hur. Is this a new line of inquiry or one we're joining, in progress?
One could say, I guess, that some histories of fandom already exist, that go back as far as we're trying to go. But I see big differences between fan scholarship and even excellent histories of, say, the Astor Place Riot of 1849 or demotic activity in and around Helen Jewett's murder and the trial of her alleged killer, somewhat earlier. We needn't get stuck on specific examples - except maybe to identify some great histories. The point I'm making is that in those histories, I'm aware of not getting a good sense of what was true, or vital, for people who made up the Astor Place mob, or who wore "Robinson caps" to show their support for the clerk accused of murdering Jewett. Obviously, you can't expect full documentation from all participants when you go back that far. And you sure can't do interviews! But the first consideration is: when it is, and when it isn't, right to speak of fandom(s). One way to proceed could be to examine media's role on the grounds that, ultimately, media creates fandom. Does it all come down then, if only in the U.S. setting, to steam-driven printing and cheaper paper, or/and to the profit motive that inspired what has been called "a riot of words" from about the 1840s?
DC: My initial interest in fandom was actually sparked by histories of reading, especially the work of Robert Darnton and Cathy Davidson. But you are correct to say that my primary approach to fandom until now has been rooted in the social sciences. My fieldwork with Springsteen fans, in particular, came out of my studies in ethnomusicology and anthropology in graduate school. After immersing myself in the theories of the cultural studies movement of the late 1980s/early 1990s, I wanted to recover what I thought cultural studies had erased: actual people. My historical study of music fans is similar. I've always loved cultural histories of audiences, but I've found that they often rely on journalistic sources. Given what I know about how contemporary journalism has distorted fan culture, I'm a little suspicious about journalistic accounts.
Instead, I've been trying do "historical anthropology," searching for people's own explanations and testimony about their fandom. It's true that you can't get full documentation and you can't do interviews, but you can find amazingly resonant experiential fragments from untapped sources, like diaries and novels. I'm quite interested in exploring whether those sources might lead one to a fuller "emic" or "experience-near" understanding--as they say in anthropology--of audience passion for theater, literature, music, and other cultural forms. In this regard, I've been much inspired by books like Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
Beyond method, though, which is something we should discuss further, I think there remains a need to more fully historicize the subject of fandom, which will both help us think about its definition and its personal, social, and political functions. I think it is true that there are, already, histories of fan-like behavior, but they are not necessarily intended as such. What historians of fandom might bring to the historical study of popular culture (and events like the Astor Place Riot or the Columbian Exposition, etc.) is a re-interpretation of the evidence and the historical events through the prism of fan studies. Like any of the micro-histories that seem to be popular these days (the history of walking, the history of salt, etc.), "fandom" is a concept that, when used as a focus, might reveal new layers of meaning that were not evident before.
Still, the danger is revisionism--mapping "fandom" onto people and events in the past without justification or with gross distortion. As you note, the key problem in all of this is whether or not we can even speak of "fandom" before 1900, when the word started to gain currency in print as a description of a people or an attitude. It depends on how you define fandom, of course. The narrower or more historically-specific the definition, the less able one will be able to identify it in other contexts and time periods. The broader or general the definition, the less useful it becomes as a description of a distinct phenomenon.
I tend not to think of fandom in terms of "media," actually, which is the luxury of someone who is not housed in a media or communications department. Instead, I tend to think of it as a degree of audiencing, a realm of marked cultural participation that is always relative to, and defined against, "normal" or unmarked cultural participation. These degrees of audiencing might manifest themselves in all sorts of ways in different historical and social contexts.
The "fandom" that scholars have studied thus far have had very much to do with mass-mediated forms of culture and have thus concerned modes of production and reception, commodification, the star system, the twists of encoding/decoding, etc. But I think there might be other modes of marked cultural participation--both in other cultures and in our own past--that might be legitimately brought into, or at least aligned with, "fan studies." Are there behaviors and values that we might identify in, say, music lovers of the 1840s, Ben Hur readers at the turn of the century and contemporary Lost fans today? At the moment, what I see uniting those instances of audiencing has mostly to do with the commodification of culture, which depends on a radical--and sometimes playfully manipulative--reworking of the relationships between performer and audience.
BR: You speak of the functions of fandom, and the possibility that historicization will reveal new things about fans and their activities. That's a motivation for my project, too. But the main thing I want to point out is that your word 'marked' will please many historians because in this field there's much discomfort about having to read minds rather than looking to the documentary record. That said, the Springsteen book includes several vibrant discussions of your own fandom. I wonder if you feel you have a purchase on past fans and fandoms that reflects your experiences of being a Springsteen fan. Maybe more so when past fans or fandoms include music . . . or maybe not.
This raises a general question: is autoethnography still important when analysts move into historical fan studies? Could it help reveal, for instance, 'marks' on certain acts of cultural participation? This is on my mind because autoethnography isn't the norm among historians. I don't see it becoming a norm, either, due to the disciplinary freight on teasing out "how it really was then." I'd like to see autoethnography make headway among historians because I've become aware of how it sometimes helps me figure things out. I tend to agree, though, with Nick Couldry that we don't want autoethnography to become something every fan scholar must do, in print. I tend to agree because I read too much autoethnography -- even from some of its proponents -- that seems to me as uninformative as non-historians' accounts of change over time.
One way I was thinking I might introduce positionality into my Ben-Hur project is to do some ruminating in sidebars. I'm playing with this in a current draft because I think it might materialize for readers outside fan studies how fan scholarship can develop a richer historical field. Some days, this feels crazed: where do I call a halt? Other days, it seems that's the right way to feel about what it means to analyze something as big and amorphous as "culture."
But back to your remarks. It's interesting to hear that you turned to fan studies after reading Davidson and Darnton. They were helpful to me, too. But my first wake-ups came from books by Janice Radway and Barbara Herrnstein Smith. This will date me, but pop culture wasn't taught in my graduate program in 19th-century U.S. literature. I mean, not even best-sellers like Uncle Tom's Cabin on the grounds that they weren't literature. In that setting, Reading the Romance was pretty thrilling for me. Smith's Contingencies of Value is a different kind of project. But it did more than anything else to alert me to the value of historicizing . . . which is part of your project, too. I like your term "historical anthropologist." You see my eagerness to talk about methods!
DC: I like the word "marked," too! Though I must say that I was using it in the original Jakobsonian sense from linguistics, where it indicates the one side of a binary opposition that is aberrant and therefore significant. When we say "how tall are you?" instead of "how short are you?", we weight the opposition of tall and short by making tall "unmarked" and short "marked." That relational approach actually helps me understand fandom better than notions of "excess" or "resistance." (I'm being totally pedantic, I know...you can imagine how my family suffers).
But you are right about "marks" and their importance. I certainly understand the concern with creating an empirical (not empiricist) understanding of the history of fandom. If fandom is about emotional attachment, something that is largely experiential and outside the realm of official institutions and documentation, what evidence would exist from the past to show that it was developing or even existed?
In the opening to his book, Making American Audiences, Richard Butsch recounts an abandoned project on "the change from music making to music listening associated with the dispersion of the phonograph & radio." He admits, "After some preliminary explorations of dusty archives and old books, I concluded it would be difficult to document such private practices...." This is true, but I don't agree that the private practices of audience history are totally lost.
Instead, I've found inspiration in newer approaches to history--the history of the senses, especially, as practiced by Mark M. Smith, Richard Cullen Rath, Emily Ann Thompson and others. Sensory history does what I want to do with audiences--it builds on the innovations of social history in the 1960s to recover a past that was long thought lost. These scholars use the close study of materials, tastes, landscapes, visual imagery, and sounds--combined with biological science and detailed contextual mapping--to articulate ordinary people's sensations of the past.
Autoethnography is a part of this approach, though it isn't called that. One of the useful things that Richard Cullen Rath did in How Early America Sounded, for example, was visit a colonial-era Quaker meeting house and analyze his own experience of the acoustics in the structure as a way to begin making sense of how colonial Quakers might have experienced it. I, too, have visited King's Chapel in Boston for an afternoon organ concert in order to experience how the space might have resonated for 19th century music lovers.
Of course, there's a danger in this: there is no guarantee that my experience of a church in 2007 will be at all the same as someone in the same space in 1842. In fact, most historians of sound would say that our cultural understanding of sound is so different, so changed, that any comparison would be suspect. However, at the same time, the wood, the paint, the instruments, and the acoustics are the same. And I have historical diary accounts from people enthusing about hearing music in that space. It's a matter of taking one's own experience and weighing it with that of someone else, using the materiality of the space and the human body as a sort of constant.
If anything, I really see my approach as that of an historical ethnographer. Historical fieldwork is a little weird, since the implication is that I am conducting observation and interviews with the dead, but in many ways I really do see that as being true. In my research in archives, I am encountering all sorts of people and experiences--through diaries, images, even personal objects--and trying to make sense of those encounters.
The encounters contain the familiar but at the same time there are unexpected things that I don't understand: odd language or design, misplaced emphasis, or, as Robert Darnton pointed out in The Great Cat Massacre, jokes that aren't funny. As an anthropologist tries to make sense of his or her accumulation of encounters with the unexpected in the field, I am trying to do the same in historical research and build some meaning out of the enterprise. The difference is that I can't ask questions and receive answers; but I pursue questions and expect answers and, in general, value the paths opened up to me as I move from diary to diary, object to object. This is most definitely not traditional history, in that it sees the past as a "field" and derives meaning from the means, or process, of historical research rather than the ends. But I don't know how else to do it.
In the end, I have to say that I never thought I was doing auto-ethnography in Tramps Like Us; I just thought I was being a reflexive ethnographer. There's a difference: I'm sympathetic with the phenomenological premise behind the valuing of one's own experience but it seems to me that that approach works best (and is tested) only in tandem with the examination of the experiences of others. How do you see auto-ethnography informing your understanding of Ben Hur readers? What's the relationship between those sidebars and the text you are writing? In general, how do you approach making sense of the evidentiary fragments that inform your work--the letters from readers? How far can you go with that to create convincing or meaningful conclusions?
BR: On historical fieldwork, I remember when a friend in Classics expressed envy of my ability to go visit the home of a 20th-century writer who received fan mail. 'You're so lucky!' he kept saying; 'all I have is scraps of parchment and heaps of rubble.' I recall this because I think there's a point at which we can't speak, even metaphorically, about doing fieldwork in the past.
We can do research but its basis is distinct; I do wonder how that relates to the sorts of things scholars will be able now or later to identify as fandoms. This is just a brain-teaser, really. But it was thought until quite recently that fan mail wasn't a resource for historians of reading because so little has survived. When that turned out to be less true than had been assumed, the next objection was sampling: ok, this school said, now we have fan mail but it isn't representative of all readers. The clearest statement of this position, that I know, isn't at all aware of fan studies scholarship. But it wouldn't be strange if the scholar who took this stand, as recently as 2008, looked at fan studies scholarship, found nothing there about fan mail, and therefore fell back on common sense that, as so often, is hard on the non-normative role - here, that of avid enthusiasts. I haven't figured out why fan researchers who go to great lengths to find subjects to interview are so chary about fan mail. But I plan to do something about this oversight.
So that's me on my soapbox. Where this gets us is "sources untapped" . . . to misquote you . . . that exist to be tapped because of two State-funded institutions. One is libraries that undertake the fairly expensive job of preserving authors' papers but which do so under the lit history rubric of authors as artists. This institutionalization girds the idea, affirmed by the few historians of reading who examine fan mail, that this evidence of reception is best framed in terms of author-reader intimacy.
Backing up this affirmation is the other institution in the mix: the U.S. mail. I explore its impact with help from Friedrich Kittler's sense of "the semi-media monopoly of the post." Kittler is a controversial figure. But I think his radical historicization of media, during the period of most interest to me, helps nudge analysis of the Ben-Hur event toward art/civic topics probed by Couldry, Butsch, Joke Hermes and others.
Where, therefore, you're looking to historians of the senses -- a great initiative -- I'm looking to fan and audience studies that discuss crowds and publics, cohesion and pop culture. As you'd expect, I contextualize the handful of letters saved by the author of Ben-Hur (or someone near him) by looking at clippings scrapbooks commissioned by him or his wife, news articles about Ben-Hur's value as literature, and 19th-century reports of its soaring sales.
I think of my project as step-by-step charting of an event/uality 20th-century critics were happy to telescope into a flat narrative: after critics dissed Ben-Hur, "ordinary" Americans cherished it to best-seller status. My research reveals that that isn't sound chronicling. But we can't see that unless we take fans' letters seriously, probe them as thoroughly as we'd probe any other document, and pay close attention to each letter's date. I use the term 'event/uality' to emphasize that there was nothing inevitable about Ben-Hur's success, understood as an arts enactment of democratic citizenship.
Where do sidebars fit in? In my Introduction, I'm trying out two. The longer summarizes Ben-Hur's plot because it's been my experience that a lot of experts in 19th-century literature and culture haven't read this fan favorite. Usually, books like mine offer plot-summary in the body-text. But I think a sidebar signals more forcefully that I'm not going to analyze Ben-Hur; I'm interested instead in how specially avid readers shaped its event.
The second sidebar will tackle my relationship to Ben-Hur. I want to be up-front that I didn't read this book as a fan, or become a fan by reading it. But I want to clarify too that I'm embedded nonetheless in the Ben-Hur event as - I'll argue - are all my readers, whether they've read Ben-Hur or not. Do you see how these sidebars lace into each other? I hope that that will make them operationalize, for more readers, a sense of the literary politics exposed in Contingencies of Value.
The other thing to say about sidebars is that they'll give readers a chance to skip, or think about skipping, reflexive passages. Quite fun, isn't it, to have this chance to swap thoughts about work in progress? Thanks, Henry!
You mentioned unfunny jokes; in my case, this could be a lexical leap in an archived fan letter, or an illustration on a product sold along with the stage-show of Ben-Hur. Findings of both sorts helped me dig deeper into event/uality in ways that helped me range more widely. The illustration, in particular, led me down unexpected pathways. It's part of the reason, for instance, that just a few weeks ago, a book I'd picked up for leisure reading sprang into focus as more evidence of the global impact of the Ben-Hur event . . . which was, and remains, amazing to me: how far this novel reached, how many lives it touched - how many people it irritated! It was partly with a view to that amazement that I said earlier, where does research stop? But it's more central to my interest in fan mail that researchers devise methods resistant to what Raymond Williams called "the long dominative mode." It's been exciting for me to explore media studies that challenge the premises of literary history, a discipline that found its footing by, among other things, shooting down Ben-Hur and all who liked it.
Do you find similar put-downs or posturing in your project? I think you end before Americans heard reports of women standing on their chairs at open-air concerts, to get closer to Wagner's music. But you're seeing, I'm sure, concern about over-avid or rawly untutored reactions to Lind, Bull, Paderewski and so on. What space do you make for anti-fans? Do you feel you need to present a 'fair and balanced' account of those days, or that it's more valuable to focus on all that's currently unknown about receptors 'marked' as lacking or aberrant?
DC: You raise many issues about evidence, here, Barbara, that are worth considering in fan studies. Of course, evidence has always been an issue in the discipline of history--from basic questions of origin and access to standards for evaluation and interpretation. It is generally true that physical traces of the past tend to disappear and become increasingly scattered as time goes on, making the process of piecing together a coherent understanding of past events and experience more and more difficult. That difficulty arises from the principle of accumulation, that one can make conclusions only when enough of the evidence warrants a claim. Worry about conclusions occurs when the evidence is "thin."
However, debates in anthropology have taught me that what constitutes "enough evidence" is often defined by the subject being investigated. Not having enough evidence is often a problem when the goal is to build a general field theory about a past culture or time period; the generalization required at that level of analysis requires a great deal of support to be convincing. A solution to that problem, however, is to scale back and recognize that writing about a fragment, a very limited moment or experience, or even a single voice, can be as worthwhile in creating meaning. In my own work, I can spend months trying to learn as fully as I can about a single person I have encountered in archives--a young clerk and avid music listener trying to make his way in Philadelphia in 1849, the first winner of P.T. Barnum's ticket auction for Jenny Lind's 1850 concert in Boston, etc. At one point I contemplated writing a whole book about the latter! Would that have enabled me to still think through the emergence of music fandom in the United States? Yes, but in a very particular way that might prove unsatisfying to those looking for broader understandings of the sweep of culture and history.
I would emphasize in all this, though, that the one thing that fan studies has taught me is that while much evidence is lost, perhaps even more of it is ignored or overlooked, thanks to the politics of collective memory. In other words, there are traces of the past everywhere, if only someone were to interpret them as so. Maybe that's too literary, or radically postmodern, for a lot of historians. There is something subversive about researching popular fandom at state and private archives like the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, or the Boston Athaeneum. When I did so, I was mis-using the sources in those places, which were collected and preserved as antiquities or aesthetic treasures, by elites who likely disapproved of the activities I was seeking to value. I should say that I was supported by a competitive fellowship at one of these institutions, so there was nothing really under-handed about doing fan research there, but at the same time, the institutionalized understanding of "history" that shapes research practices at such archives is not set up for a quirky, left-field mining of the collections.
In my case, none of the finding aids so carefully prepared by past curators and archivists were useful for locating materials related to music audiences, or listening, or passionate engagement. Instead, it was a matter of experimenting with lots of open-ended searching in diaries and ephemera. I also started systematically perusing sources catalogued for other histories (religious debates, women's diaries, military history, etc.) and then reading them for what those sources might lend to a study of music loving.
It seems to me that your use of fan letters is similar: you are looking at something that has always existed but has been ignored by researchers or whose meaning has been narrowly prescribed by institutionalized frameworks of interpretation. As you suggest, by taking such letters seriously as historical documentation, we can see (or to be more accurate about it, create) a different history of Ben-Hur's reception.
I do agree that my very focus on music lovers is a way to bring them into a musicology (and a culture) that has spent much time denigrating fan behavior and demoting practices of audiencing to secondary status. I seek to recover such behavior, quite simply, because it's missing, and I think our understanding of American musical life suffers in its absence.
Does that lead me to avoid anti-fans in the research? Not really. The more work I've done on the emergence of music loving, the more I've learned that the binary opposition of fan and anti-fan is itself historical, developing in from the sacralization of high culture and the disciplining of public spectatorship described by Lawrence Levine, John Kasson, and others. After the turn of the century, you are either high or popular, good or bad, etc. In the antebellum period, the valuing of different kinds of audience participation is far more variable and complicated. "Music loving" could be exercised as a focus on the space of the concert hall and a focus on the "work;" an outer enthusiasm, a kind of communal sociability, and/or an internal intensity; and a means for circumventing, embracing, or strategically using the increasingly rigid frameworks of commercial entertainment. Preferred and less-preferred kinds of engagement are sorted out on an institutional and cultural level between 1850 and 1880, but the process is messy and confusing.
I'm not sure that I could focus only on marked receptors, if I tried, because the people I'm investigating are clearly working through the process of "marking" in the first place. In fact, I found myself seeing what I initially thought was elitist and dismissive "anti-fandom" (insisting on reverent silence in the concert hall, for example) as a complexly unfolding reform of previously established behaviors of passionate engagement. There is no doubt that in the context of urbanization and immigration in the mid-19th century that such revisions had ideological consequences that reinforced growing class divisions; I am less certain, however, that the motivations of the particular people who argued for such revisions were uniformly and/or simply about class prejudice. As in Tramps Like Us, I am wrestling a bit with the seeming contradictions of macro- and micro- interpretative frameworks.
I do have my own strategies in writing, of course. Your separating out, in sidebars, of the text of Ben-Hur and your own relationship to Ben-Hur from the event of Ben Hur is necessary for uninformed readers but also highlights the politics involved in your analysis. In my case, I am consciously resisting any privileging of "the work" in my analysis. In part, that absence is meant to re-orient (or perhaps disorient!) my readers so that they can think about music outside of the common frame of composer/text/performance that is so incredibly entrenched in both the academic study of music (musicology has never really experienced a postmodern crisis of definition) and in the music industry.
I am intensely uninterested in working out the lineages of styles or performers that typically occupy music history; instead my focus is resolutely on an alternative history of audience behaviors. I did go out and find some recordings of the operas that music lovers mentioned in their diaries, but I see such texts as only part of the many details that make up the event of reception.
In fact, initially, I prefer NOT knowing what symphony or song is being referenced by an auditor or an artifact--it makes it easier to avoid the work and focus solely on reception behaviors. It allows me, for a brief moment, to explore audiencing in a more open-ended way before my own musicological knowledge and associations narrow my thinking. That suspension of knowing also gets me psychologically closer to the "newness" of musical works that music lovers themselves were experiencing. Maybe it's all pretend, but I find, at least, that experimenting with how I am positioned in my own processes of research and of writing can be worth while.
What role have science fiction conventions played in fostering this amateur film
culture? Why has fan cinema been slower to emerge around other genres?
Science Fiction conventions are often run on a shoestring budget, so amateur films constitute free programming; at the same time, sci-fi fans are often attracted to technology-oriented hobbies--like filmmaking. Put them together and it's a tight fit. The modern pop culture and sci-fi conventions blossomed during the 1970s when 1960s sci-fi TV shows entered reruns, most famously Star Trek and Lost In Space. If you were a hobbyist filmmaker and you went to a convention, it was easy to see that a homemade sci-fi flick presenting new adventures of a beloved old franchise could find an appreciative audience at such an event.
Likewise--and I'm hardly the first to suggest this--men bond by 'doing,' so a group of male sci-fi fans getting together to explore their fandom through a group activity like filmmaking makes sense. Additionally, since many guys collect memorabilia as an expression of their fandom, a fan production provides a convenient way to rationalize some purchases: "Yes, Honey, I spent $700 on a Stormtrooper costume--but it's for my fan film!"
What place does the female fan practice of "vidding" hold in your account of fan
cinema?
To be honest, it's barely present in my book, which is not to imply that Vidding is insignificant. Rather, it's a very different art form, deserving its own in-depth exploration, such as the Vidding History project by the Organization of Transformative Works. I discussed Vids in passing a few times in the book, because to ignore them would be disingenuous; however, it would be presumptuous and insulting to that community for me as an outsider to attempt to tell Vidding's story.
The fan remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark has generated much greater visibility than any other fan film in my memory. How typical is that production of fan filmmaking practice in general and what brought that film to such a high level of public consciousness?
There's a lot of elements at play when it comes to the (relative) success of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. Primary among them is the fact that you can't see the film. Despite the fact that it has gained a high profile, it isn't readily available on the internet or home video; the only way to see it is to attend one of the scattered screenings held around the country each year by the filmmakers at non-profit cinemas and the like. By using the media to spread the word about the film--but not the film itself--the filmmakers have created a pent-up demand to see it...and fortunately, it is one of those rare cases where the movie actually beats audiences' expectations.
As far as fan filmmaking practice goes, the level of work that went into Raiders was unprecedented up to that point. For three pre-teens in the 1980s to spend seven years shooting a movie without any parental help is unusual enough; once you throw in the fact that they recreated all the major set-pieces of the original--Indiana Jones being chased by a boulder, getting dragged under a truck, fighting in a bar that's on fire, and so forth--it becomes astounding. Besides rooting for the kids--how are they going to pull off the next part?--I think many viewers relate to the film because everyone role-played as a child, whether it was "Cowboys & Indians," "Superheroes" or something else. These kids elevated that experience to the next level by videotaping it. At the same time, the sheer scope of what they achieved is inspiring--they had an impossible, idyllic dream as 11-year-olds and tenaciously made it happen, despite overwhelming odds. That's an experience anyone can get behind.
One of the things I talk about in Homemade Hollywood is how fan films are the offspring of scripted entertainment and Reality TV, and the Raiders adaptation is a great example of this, because you're seeing familiar scripted characters enacted by regular people in real-world settings without the perfect Hollywood sheen. When you see 13-year-old Chris Strompolos as Indy, trying to outrun a 100-lb. boulder made out of fiberglass or hanging off the front of a rolling truck, the look of terror on his face is undeniably real. It's a very analog, visceral experience to view the film and it sucks viewers in, because these days, that's something you often can't get from professional movies.
Ironically, Hollywood reacted to that analog, visceral experience by buying the life-rights to the filmmakers' story in a six-figure deal that made the front page of Variety. In a few years, you can expect to find a professional tribute movie about their amateur tribute movie about yet another movie at your local multiplex.
How has the web reshaped amateur film production, publicity, and distribution?
The web has certainly become the lifeline of the fan film community and has affected all the aspects you listed. Before the mid-Nineties mainstreaming of the internet, there were plenty of fan filmmakers out there, but they weren't aware of each other. In fact, the term "fan film" didn't exist because no one realized that this was a filmmaking movement instead of merely a few isolated movies mentioned in the back pages of enthusiast magazines like CineMagic.
In terms of production, sure, amateur filmmakers use the internet for obvious things like buying costumes or equipment (or, in some cases, pirating editing and effects software), but now they can build a virtual crew as well. For instance, the 2005 fan film, Star Wars: Revelations, was an ambitious, 40-minute effort covered by all the major news channels and downloaded over a million times in its first 48 hours on the web. Part of the appeal was its eye-popping special effects, which were created by a volunteer team of CGI enthusiasts around the world that used the web to recruit artists, exchange files and compile the finished effect shots.
The internet also provides varied levels of distribution, from simple YouTube clips to over-the-top efforts like Revelations, which was available in a variety of forms, from iPod-friendly MP4 files to a Bit Torrent package that that could be burned to DVD-Rs to create a two-disc set--one for the movie and one for the behind-the-scenes extras, naturally.
As for publicity, websites and the blogosphere are certainly the main forum for spreading the word about fan films today, because a simple link will get your work seen. I run a daily fan film blog called FanCinemaToday.com, and I get everything from illiterate emails ("Dude, U rite on my movie?") to professional-quality digital press kits. No press junkets or swag yet, but I can dream (just kidding). Like the films themselves, the publicity efforts range all over the map.
You describe a number of cases where studios have struggled with how to respond to fan films produced about their franchises. What factors have shaped their decisions in regard to fan cinema? How would you characterize the current perceptions in Hollywood towards fan films?
Hollywood has been fairly alarmed by them--and with good reason. While I'm an advocate of fan filmmaking, I think the studios are right to be concerned. If you owned a sleek Maserati and the 12-year-old next door took it for a joyride, you'd be furious even if it came through without a scratch. That's something like what's going on with the studios, because amateurs are basically hijacking these billion-dollar franchises and doing whatever they want with them.
Now, to be fair, 99.9 percent of all fan films are tributes in some form or another, they pose no real monetary threat to a studio's franchise and they don't impact the public consciousness when you compare the number of people who saw The Dark Knight last summer to 6,000 people watching Batman's Bad Day on YouTube. Studios realize this and I think that fuels the current take on such flicks--that they're relatively harmless. At the same time, going after fan filmmakers with IP lawsuits would be a waste of resources because they'd cost more than could be won, plus they'd be a PR nightmare similar to the travails that Warner Brothers experienced when it tried to shut down Harry Potter websites a few years ago.
On the other hand, the current state of things where most studios are looking the other way is going to end sooner or later. To make up an example, let's say you make a $20,000 fan film where Superman goes crazy because of Kryptonite and starts graphically killing babies with his X-ray vision. If it's a well-made film that grabs the eye of a cable news pundit on a slow news day, that could blow up into a serious problem and potentially damage the franchise.
A more likely scenario, however, is that studios will get involved with fan films simply because there's money to be made, whether it's through some form of licensing out characters to the filmmakers, or making the best flicks available on a studio-sanctioned X-Box channel for a buck apiece, or something else entirely.
Lucasfilm has taken an interesting approach to dealing with fan films with its annual Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. The contest is used to reach out to the fanbase, it appears to show fans great largesse because George Lucas is "allowing" them to make fan tribute movies, and yet it gives Lucasfilm indirect control over what material goes into such flicks, because if you're going to go through all the effort to make a Star Wars fan film, why wouldn't you follow the content guidelines so that you could enter it in the contest?
As you note, far fewer women than men have been involved in the production of
original fan films. Why do you think this pattern has emerged and are there
signs that more women are producing fan movies now than in previous decades?
There are lots of theories about this out there--for instance, that women are more interested in characters' internal lives--an aspect more easily explored through fan fiction--or the comment earlier that guys bond by 'doing' so they gravitate toward a group activity like film production.
I think one overlooked aspect is sheer momentum. Fan fiction took off in the 1960s and 70s with zines and quickly became an outlet for female fans. I suspect that since then, women looking to create new stories for a favorite franchise have looked at the fanfic community and said "That's where my peers are; I guess I'm going in that direction." It's self-perpetuating at this point.
Of course, I'm not a female fan filmmaker and never will be, so I can't speak from a place of authority. As a result, in Homemade Hollywood, I spent a chapter interviewing women filmmakers and a number of them spoke of women being uncomfortable with being in charge. One filmmaker who teaches film to girls noted that the idea of being a director never occurred to her students and when she suggested it, they couldn't envision themselves in that position at all.
With all that in mind, I don't see the current male-to-female amateur filmmaker ratio changing anytime soon. One thing I would like to see is more collaboration between the fanfic and fan film communities. Most fan films would benefit from better characterization and more fully rounded stories; who better to write them than fanfic authors? It's happened in a few cases--most noticeably the aforementioned Star Wars: Revelations--and I think both sides of the equation could benefit from it.
In the case of Star Trek, we are seeing increased collaboration between fans and some of those involved in the commercial franchise itself, including actors,
script writers, and technicians. What are the implications of this kind of collaboration for the future of fan cinema?
There are a number of high-profile fan efforts with sophisticated production values now, most noticeably Star Trek: Phase II, a fan series which sports a $100,000 Enterprise bridge set. They've been known to feature Trek alumni such as George Takei ("Sulu") and Walter Koenig ("Checkov") recreating their original roles, and have had original series writers script and sometimes direct their episodes
Quasi-pro efforts like Phase IIdo point the way towards a number of possibilities for fan films in the future beyond obvious things, such as that they may prove to be a "farm league" for tomorrow's professional casts and crews. For instance, fan productions may wind up being used by Hollywood to see if the time is right to bring back a shuttered franchise. Similarly, analyzing fan films based on properties that are still up-and-running may provide insight into what aspects resonate most with die-hard fans. Alternately, if fan films show a trend of including a specific characteristic not in the original--for example, many Star Trek fan films pointedly feature gay characters--they may provide insight into what would realign a troubled franchise with its fanbase.
And as noted before, studios are likely to eventually get involved with fan filmmakers simply because there's money being left on the table under the current arrangement of pretending they're not there. If fans are going to make an amateur production based on your IP, why not sell them a specialized set of rights, props, costumes, digital filmmaking "toolkits" customized to the franchise with trademark sounds, music and "greenscreenable" effects, and rent them space on a special website just for "official fan productions" based on your franchise? Once there are enough decent flicks, they can be repackaged as a TV special, a DVD, or some other product. There's a lot of way studios and fans can work together in a symbiotic fashion that would benefit all parties.
Getting into bed with the studios works for fan films primarily because most filmmakers in the hobby daydream of breaking into Hollywood; such a model would be far less successful if applied to other media like fan fiction, where similar efforts have failed.
Also, another concern is that high-end, high-profile fan productions are a lot of fun to watch, but they can be intimidating to potential fan filmmakers--"Why should I bother if that's what a fan film is supposed to be? I can't do that." Phase II, in particular, is far removed from the underground, "punk rock" aesthetic that has powered so many fan efforts throughout the years.
Ironically, that sheen of perfection is exactly what Hardware Wars parodied back in the 1970s, showing that a fan production didn't have to be perfect--much less made with professional help--to be enjoyable. Perhaps things are coming full-circle and we need a new low-rent flick like Hardware Wars to burst that bubble again. Who knows?
Clive Young is an author/lecturer covering the crossroads between high tech and popular culture. He is the author of the first book about fan films, Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind The Camera (Continuum, 2008). He is also senior editor for Pro Sound News and has written for MTV, VH1.com, American Songwriter and numerous other outlets; additionally, he is the author of Crank It Up, an exploration into the world of rock concert roadies. Young has lectured extensively on film and music at many universities, libraries and conventions, and lives in New York with his wife and daughter. Visit his website,
In the past few weeks, I've been struck again at the ways fandoms now often precede rather than follow the release of a major motion picture. (See my discussion in Convergence Culture of how a fan community grew up around Global Frequency -- a television pilot which never reached the air.) Fan filmmakers may immediately begin responding to, remixing, critiquing, and spoofing a film largely on the basis of its trailer. This is especially true when the film is based on a text which already has a cult following in another medium. Consider these two examples of fan films produced in reaction to Watchmen, which I ended up sharing with students in my Film Experience class this past week.
Or consider this example, produced in response to the trailer for J.J. Abrams's forthcoming Star Trek film which I ran across doing some spadework for a forthcoming talk looking at the evolution of Star Trek fan culture since the 1960s.
I devoted a chapter to Star Wars fan filmmakers in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. A while ago, I got contacted by Clive Young about doing an interview for a book he was doing on fan cinema. Late last year, his book, Home-Made Hollywood, appeared, offering a fascinating account which spans from a 1930s vintage amateur version of Our Gang through landmarks such as Hardware Wars and George Lucas in Love down to the present era when all kinds of fan films are surfacing on YouTube. The writing is lively; the storytelling engaging; and he's done spade work which, in some cases, urgently needed to be done if these chapters of the history of participatory culture were going to be preserved for future generations. As someone who has been researching fan culture off and on for more than twenty years, I learned something on almost every page. Young's blog continues to monitor new fan film productions as well as share other forgotten chapters of grassroots media making.
In the interview that follows, Young talks about the history of fan cinema, the politics of copyright regulation, and how fan film experiences shaped the development of a number of media industry professionals. Next time, he will dig deeper into the issue of why more fan parodies are made by men and how fan cinema relates to vidding, which he sees as a distinctive and separate tradition of fan media-making.
You begin the book with an acknowledgment of Hardware Wars, which you write "helped to inspire fans and non-pros to pick up a camera and pay tribute to their favorite movies." How significant do you think its influence was in terms of paving the way for contemporary fan cinema?
I think it's hard to overestimate the influence that Hardware Wars had in 1977, because it made a mark on so many different levels, introducing many of its impressionable, young Generation X viewers (the core Star Wars fanbase) to filmmaking, the possibility of exploring one's own creativity, and much like Mad Magazine a generation earlier, the concept of parody.
Key to its influence is the fact that it had widespread distribution. While to this day it is perceived as an underground phenomenon, Hardware Wars has been seen by millions of people in theaters, on home video, cable TV and through the internet, and is the highest-grossing short film of all-time.
Since the film was made by professionals for profit, it is not actually a fan film, but it is often mistaken for an amateur effort because it had a very homemade look by design. While that cheap aesthetic was a huge part of the flick's humor, in a time before "behind-the-scenes" DVD extras, it demystified filmmaking for its audience to some extent, because it focused on everyday objects, like a hubcap that was supposed to be the Death Star. These were things that anyone could find, and the filmmakers used them unapologetically, as if to say, 'Look, we all know this Imperial Destroyer is a steam iron--deal with it.'
By aggressively refusing to live up to Hollywood production values, Hardware Wars demonstrated that an amateur fan creator didn't need money to get an idea across, and that's a pretty subversive--and empowering--concept to imbue in a 10-year-old. That levels the playing field. The fact that the movie reveled in its low-tech juices was inspiring by example, giving amateurs permission to fail, because it illustrated that 'failure' on one level could be intriguing on another level.
In terms of parody, I think it was also rather instructive for its young audience, and I talk about that a bit in the book, because Star Wars as a cultural phenomenon was just getting started and there wasn't much in the way of a critical backlash to the original 1977 film--especially in the media aimed at young Generation X at the time. As a result, Hardware Wars' sly commentary on how the audience had swallowed George Lucas' creation whole was pretty radical. The short film's narrator mocks the stuff on-screen, but his lines poke at the fans, too: "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll kiss three bucks goodbye! Get in line now!" That challenges--perhaps forces--the fan to step back and assess his/her place in the big picture surrounding Star Wars, and cast a more subjective eye towards the film, fandom, and the economic machinery around both.
With all that in mind, its influence can be seen today, as there are more fan films about Star Wars than any other franchise, most fan films tend to be comedies, and most amateur Star Wars send-ups take a few shots at Lucas and his business style, even if they're loving tributes. Additionally, one of the most popular forms of fan film is "the pseudo-trailer," which Hardware Wars also pioneered--even though it's a 12-minute film. When the fan film boom of the late Nineties came along, the number of fan productions that were parodies or pseudo-trailers (or both) was staggering. By that point, Generation X was in its 20s with some disposable income and that newfangled Internet on hand; the result was that Star Wars fan films were some of the first examples of viral videos.
As you note, amateurs have been making films for as long as there has been
cinema. So, what is different about our current moment of participatory
culture?
The basic staples of amateur film production--home movie cameras and enough pizza to get your friends to be in your flick--have been in plentiful supply since the 1950s; what's different these days is the availability of low-cost, widespread distribution in the form of the internet, public access cable, DVD-Rs and so forth. Clearly the main conduit is the web, and the advent of sites like YouTube is fostering a growing mainstream awareness of amateur visual media among people who otherwise would never have been exposed to such material. Similar growth is occurring in other forms of participatory culture.
As more people discover amateur media, it's fair to expect that increasing numbers of people will at least dabble in expressing themselves through amateur-level creativity, regardless of whether it's written, aural or visual. Whether the resulting projects are any good is largely besides the point; the end result is that by aping professional productions, "regular" people become more media literate with a deeper understanding (perhaps not consciously but it's still there) of how and why certain forms work.
This in turn raises the bar for professional creators, because even if they deliberately aim for the lowest common denominator in their work, even that audience's level of sophistication will rise over time. This is not a bad thing.
You document, for example, an amateur film based on Our Gang which got some visibility in the 1920s. What does this story tell us about the potentials and
limits of amateur film production in the early history of Hollywood?
Amateur film production back then was largely a hobby of the rich, because cameras were rare and prohibitively expensive. Seeing one "in the wild" was unusual, so the anonymous creators of Anderson 'Our Gang,' the Our Gang film, were likely itinerant filmmakers working for the newsreel companies, who saw a financial opportunity to con a small town into believing they were making a real Our Gang flick. Home movie cameras didn't start making inroads into average households until the 1930s, and whatever momentum they gained was stopped cold by the outbreak of World War II. As a result, home movies didn't truly take root until the 1950s as suburban America settled in.
While the Our Gang film doesn't offer much information on the limits of amateur film production at the time, it's a great example of why fan films are valuable for film and cultural studies.
When we watch the official Our Gang movies--or James Bond, Star Trek or any long-running franchise--we see them through the eyes of people living in 2009. Our modern-day values and beliefs color how we experience and perceive those films, When you see a period fan film though, you're not simply watching a story; you're also getting insight into how people experienced the official movies back then.
For instance, when we think of the official Our Gang movies, it's typically, "Oh, cute kids getting into mischief," but Anderson 'Our Gang,' made in the deep South in 1926, was actually extremely racist and demonstrative against the disabled as well. The ways the filmmakers try to imitate the series reveals how they perceived the original and illustrates what aspects resonated with them, for better or worse.
There has been a certain degree of media attention of late on the death of
Forrest K. Ackerman. What role did he play in helping to support the production
of amateur horror films?
The 1950s and 60s saw the development of "Monster Kid" culture--a male, pre-teen slice of the population that was enamored with the movie monsters of the 1930 and 40s, due to the films regularly playing on afternoon and weekend TV. Ackerman, a life-long sci-fi and horror movie buff, edited a popular magazine for those kids at the time, called Famous Monsters of Filmland.
Many of his young readers were interested in making their own homemade monster fan films (although the genre didn't have the "fan film" appellation at the time), but information on special effects, makeup and so forth was hard to come by back then. Ackerman, however, wrote extensively in his magazine how readers could create their own explosions, models, masks and makeup effects. Additionally, if readers wrote in about their productions, he often ran photos and blurbs about them, providing a national platform of recognition for young filmmakers whose sphere of influence pretty much ended at their bedroom door. Some of the professional filmmakers today who credit Ackerman and his magazine as an important influence include Peter Jackson, Joe Dante, John Landis and Dennis Murren, among many others.
You identify a range of significant public figures, such as Hugh Hefner, who produced amateur fan films in their youth. How important were such activities in shaping their later development as media makers?
While making fan films is not strictly a youthful hobby, it's true that many of its participants try it out at a young age, often while they're at the 'gee, what do I want to do with my life?' stage. While all of them want to make their movies, I suspect that the underlying drive--especially at that time in life--stems from something deeper: A need to be heard.
Some discover that filmmaking is the perfect form for their vein of self-expression and they continue to pursue it--case in point? Eli Roth, the writer/director behind the Hostel "torture porn" movies that were box-office hits a few years ago. He started out filming homemade remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Pieces in his basement as a teenager, and clearly the experience must have resonated with him.
Hugh Hefner, too, made a horror film in his basement at age 16--a Frankenstein/vampire amalgam called Return From The Dead. While filmmaking struck a chord with him--years later, he became an executive producer of various films in the 1970s--I suspect he found that films weren't the right vehicle for communicating his ideas, and thus he went on to try his hand at other forms before founding Playboy 11 years later.
In both cases, however, amateur film production once again provides an opportunity to expand one's understanding of how media fits together; concepts of structural flow, editing, timing and so forth learned in a creative medium like film are often transferable to other media, such as writing or music.
Clive Young is an author/lecturer covering the crossroads between high tech and popular culture. He is the author of the first book about fan films, Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind The Camera (Continuum, 2008). He is also senior editor for Pro Sound News and has written for MTV, VH1.com, American Songwriter and numerous other outlets; additionally, he is the author of Crank It Up, an exploration into the world of rock concert roadies. Young has lectured extensively on film and music at many universities, libraries and conventions, and lives in New York with his wife and daughter. Visit his website,
I don't normally do this but given the number of blog readers who are regulars at South by South West, I figured I'd send out the word that I am here in Austin and am giving several talks on Monday. From 11:30-12:30, I am having a conversation with James Paul Gee and Warren Spector on "What Can We Learn from Games" and from 5-6, I will be talking about "Engagement 1.0: Understanding the History of Fan interactivity" with Abigail De Koznik (UC-Berkeley) and Ivan Askwith (Big Space Ship). From 1-1:30, I will also be doing a book signing. If you are around for the event, look me up and introduce yourselves.
So far, I am having a blast at SXSW, watching danah boyd talk about feminism and social networks and enjoying a panel on politics, technology, and popular culture which included the unlikely combination of Lawrence Lessig and Obama Girl.
Last time, I shared with you the story of Stacia Yeapanis, an artist whose videos deploy appropriated footage from television programs. She recently received a cease and desist notice when she posted her works on YouTube. More and more of us are receiving such notices for content which we might have believed fell under fair use. Such notices have a "chilling effect" on this emerging platform for participatory culture. Trying to understand these issues more fully I contacted some friends who are doing cutting edge work around fair use and user-generated content. Each of them shares their reactions to Stacia's story below.
Peter Jaszi:
Let me start by saying that I think that Ms. Yeapanis' fanvid "We Have a Right to Be Angry" has a lot going for it where copyright fair use is concerned. It creates "new meaning by juxtaposition," to borrow language from our "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use on Online Video" (p,9). And it also can be understood as "commenting on ... copyrighted material (p.5). The hardest aspect to defend would be the use of "Invincible" in its entirety, but even there the argument is pretty strong: the clips illustrate the song in ways that "help us to hear in a new way." And, in any event, the take-down notice to Youtube came from Fox, not Sony (or Pat Benatar).
But, that, of course, isn't the end of story. Ms. Yeapanis is right that were she to formally request a put-back, Fox might begin a lawsuit against her -- if it actually were inclined to press its claim. That's because Section 512(g) of the Copyright Act says that if a suit hasn't been filed within 10 business days of the so-called "counter notice," YouTube can put the video back up without losing its qualified immunity from liability for infringement.
Would Fox choose this course of action? It's hard to know, but there's reason to think that if she (and YouTube) were to stand up, Fox might sit down. Large, well-counseled copyright owners generally don't pursue claims that they might lose -- especially when the loss might be a adverse legal precedent. on an issue as volatile as fair use. And the law isn't as far behind the practice of remix culture as the post suggests. Jeff Koons may have lost his case back in 1990-91, but in 2006 he won a big fair use victory in the Second Circuit Court of appeals, in Blanch v. Koons. The case involved use of a cropped advertising photo in a collage, and the court decided that the case turned on whether the artist "had a genuine creative rationale for borrowing Blanch's image, rather than merely using it merely 'to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working something fresh up.'" In other words, they decided it was a "transformative" use.
Legal developments notwithstanding, we all can sympathize with Ms. Yeapanis' concern about the potential expense and incidental stress of becoming a fair use "test case" -- in the (perhaps unlikely) event that it ever came to that. Of course, were YouTube to restore the vid, and were Fox actually to sue, she'd still have the (admittedly somewhat humiliating) option of cooperating in yet another take-down to settle the matter. But, perhaps, in the meantime, she'd have been able to find a lawyer to take her case pro bono. There already are resources out there: the Fair Use Project at Stanford, volunteer lawyers for the arts organizations in many cities, EFF's lawyer referral service, a network of law school-based IP clinics around the country, and more. But if we take fair use seriously -- and we should -- we need to find more and better ways to support the risk-takers among us!
Peter Jaszi is faculty director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and professor of law at American University. He was co-editor of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (1994). Through the Center for Social Media, he has been helping to develop "best practices for fair use" for documentary filmmakers, DIY video producers, and media literacy educators.
Rebecca Tushnet:
I think the artist does a great job of articulating the issues and the connections between the art world and nontraditional communities making their own art, which also has a context that can take outsiders a while to grasp. One of the challenges we face is persuading intermediaries like YouTube to stand up for fair use more aggressively. The really interesting thing to me about this round of takedowns is that they often stem from automated searches by YT itself, not copyright owner complaints. YT is adopting screening technology to show its good faith in combating copyright infringement, but automated systems inherently risk catching what EFF calls fair use "dolphins" among the infringing "tuna." And because these aren't copyright-owner-initiated, the part of the DMCA that allows videomakers to file a counternotification and get the videos put back doesn't apply; YT has the discretion to simply say, we disagree with your fair use claim and we're keeping the video off.
The big lesson, I think, is this: Fair use is no longer predominantly a conversation with courts and occasional legislators. It is instead part of the structure of the internet; it has to be part of private institutions' design as well as formal law, or the formal law will become irrelevant.
Rebecca Tushnet is a law professor at Georgetown who specializes in intellectual property and a member of the board of the Organization for Transformative Works.
Kevin Driscoll:
When YouTube Product Manager David King announced the beta release of "content identification" tools on the Google blog in 2007, he reminded readers that submitting copyright infringement claims would remain as easy as "the click of a mouse." In the intervening year, the contributions of thousands upon thousands of users have been disabled on behalf of just a few industry stakeholders. When it comes to the application of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, a process that impacts citizens' ability to own and author their media environment, how easy is too easy?
Fanvidders were among the first communities to respond to YouTube's commitment to go "above and beyond" its legal obligations to copyright claimants. Faced with videos silenced and disabled for their transformative use of popular music, vidders like zcatz recorded glum farewell notes for their subscribers and set sail for friendlier sites like imeem and Vimeo.
Numerous other creative communities relying on YouTube's video sharing service have faced a similar decision: should they weather the uncertainty of life at YouTube or retreat to a niche service in the hope that there is security in (relative) obscurity.
Unlike the vidders, the Living Room Rock Gods (LRRG) have stuck with YouTube and channeled their frustration into the loose-knit resistance movement Tribute is not Theft. LRRG members like Pauliewanna recorded impassioned video blogs addressing the recording artists they idolize. They stress the role of learning and respect for intellectual property that pervades their community, confounding the stereotype of anti-copyright radicals flaunting the law.
"We're just trying to do what we love. [To] listen to your music, play it, share it with others, show them how it's done, see how they do it, compare notes. [...] Our primary reason is to share with other drummers. We just want you [...] to know that this is happening."
The Rock Gods' experience reveals an imbalance in YouTube's community support. While a handful of major stakeholders are provided special tools to automate identification and facilitate the pursuit of copyright infringement claims, the remaining majority of YouTube users are left confused and frustrated.
The diversity of material presented by YouTube's users presents a thrilling challenge to conventional understandings of ownership, authorship, and originality. Unfortunately, YouTube's existing architecture leaves little room for human intellect to confront and interrogate these delicious details. When I filed a counter-claim for one of my own disabled videos, I learned that YouTube no longer evaluates the accuracy of copyright claims made by its Content ID system:
[S]ince the identification of the claimed content was automated, we are unable to accept your counter-notification at this time.
In other words, YouTube's current policy denies my opportunity to file a counter-claim (as described in S.512(g)(3) of the DMCA) and privileges the judgement of software over that of a human observer.
YouTube is wise to be proactive in defense of copyright. Antagonizing extent media industries does little to resolve persistent tensions in digital culture. But if its effort to please the handful of major stakeholders fails to consider the fair use rights of informal media practitioners, YouTube will sacrifice the vibrant creative communities that made it worth visiting in the first place.
Kevin Driscoll is a masters student in the Comparative Media Studies Program working on a thesis dealing with hip hop culture, technology, and pedagogy. Kevin is a frequent collaborator with internet-based artist Claire Chanel and a hip-hop dj responsible for Gold Chain and Todo Mundo events.
Earlier this year, I received the following account of the experiences of Stacia Yeapanis, a young artist who straddles the art world and fandom: she produces videos which appropriate footage from popular television shows for the purposes of critical commentary and artworks which use as fannish television shows or deploys The Simsgame world as their raw materials.
Her videos, produced for art installations, very much resemble those produced by female fan vidders. As an experiment, she posted one of her vids on YouTube to see how people would respond and as a consequence, she found herself confronting the mechanisms by which corporate media regulates the production and circulation of participatory culture.
I found that her story raised important issues which I wanted to focus attention on through this blog. It came at a time when organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been raising concerns about YouTube policies to police content which push well beyond established norms in copyright protection and erode Fair Use rights of contributors. The EFF's Fred Von Lohmann posted some important critiques of YouTube's new practices in early February, including some recommendations which would have a big impact on the vidding world: "YouTube should fix the Content ID system. Now. The system should not remove videos unless there is a match between the video and audio tracks of a submitted fingerprint." While I have sometimes been critical of the EFF for adopting stances which undercut the Fair Use rights of fans, this time they are defending the rights of anyone to make transformative use of media content via videos.
Today, I am sharing her story and her video. On Friday, I will be sharing response to the stories from others who have been on the front lines of the struggles over fair use and grassroots expression. I'm hoping this will spark some further discussions in fandom, in the art world, and in the circles that shaping intellectual property law.
"Confessions of an Aca-Arta-Femi-Fan"
By Stacia Yeapanis
On December 1st, 2008, I received a takedown notice from YouTube in reference to my first fanvid "We Have a Right to Be Angry." Fox Broadcasting had blocked the video using an automated video ID system that identifies copyrighted content. After much anxiety, I removed my video on December 5th.
In "We Have a Right to be Angry" I appropriate footage from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, and Charmed. It is edited to "Invincible" sung by Pat Benatar. By uniting the fictional feminist icons of my adult life, Buffy, Xena, and the Halliwell sisters, with a real-life feminist icon from my childhood, Pat Benatar, I explore my own complicated position as a feminist in contemporary society. The women in the video vacillate between running, lying low, and fighting back. As these women from different TV shows pass a sword around, they share collective power that extends beyond the boundaries of their fictional universes. They are fighting cultural patriarchy on its own terms and they are doing it together.
During the 5 days between getting the notice and removing the video, I was extremely conflicted about what to do. As an appropriation artist, I already had a basic understanding of copyright law, and I believe my video falls under fair use. But I was only vaguely aware of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the takedown notice procedures. For example, YouTube did inform me that I had the option to dispute Fox's claim, but I didn't know how long I had to make this decision. If I took too long to consult an attorney, could the situation escalate to an official Cease and Desist letter? If I disputed based on the doctrine of fair use, would Fox back down or take me to court?
I watched my own fanvid over and over again. It seemed to have the answers. In light of the takedown notice, a new meaning that was floating beneath the surface emerged for me. The video was always about the struggle of any feminized (read: marginalized or disadvantaged) group. It was about aggression and injustice. It was about collective power that takes place on many fronts. But now it is also a metaphor for the struggle over meaning between producers and consumers. Mass media corporations are clinging to rigid ways of thinking about who controls meaning and how meaning is made. The feminist icons in my video are now also fighting outdated copyright laws that have begun to prevent the free flow of culture. Their swords are metaphors for fair use. I felt that if I didn't dispute, I would be letting Buffy and the others down. I wanted to fight with them.
At the same time I also began to worry about the difference between theory and practice. Theoretically, fanvids fall under fair use. Most legal scholars who are writing about fanvids in law reviews come to this conclusion, at least where the video is concerned. I would argue that even the uncut audio, which is more often assumed to be infringing, is transformed merely through juxtaposition with the video. But there don't seem to be any case precedents to this effect. Theoretically, appropriation art also falls under fair use. But as we learned from Rogers vs. Koons, conceptual art that rests on a foundation of postmodern theory does not fare well in court. Understanding appropriation art, like fanvids, it isn't a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of having specialized information and understanding how context affects meaning. The Art World is a subculture that is as misunderstood by non-members as Fandom is.
In all of my research since the takedown notice, I have yet to find any discussion online about the shared interests of the Contemporary Art World, Media Fandom and Media Scholarship. Professional appropriation artists seem to have flown under the radar, except in cases when the artist begins to make a lot of money. The few cases I know of (Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince) have all involved appropriation of printed images and only Koons actually had his day in court. (He lost.) At this stage in my research, I'm not aware of any cases involving appropriation art that uses video or audio. The distribution of contemporary art seems to still have the invisibility that fanvid distribution used to have before the advent of the Internet.
I have this suspicion that if I just show my work inside the traditional gallery system, I will be safer from litigation. But if I want to reach across the boundaries of the art world and blur the line between mass-media culture and fine art by posting my work on YouTube, I better watch out. It's almost as if the law is barring me from pursuing hybridity. And that's really the foundation of my practice. My work is a synthesis of conceptual art, already a synthesis of cultural theory and art, and fandom. I'm responding to the ironic appropriation art of the '80s and '90s by adding my sincere Fandom into the mix in order to question cultural hierarchy (i.e. the idea that "high" culture is better or more important than "low" culture). If I can't appropriate, then I can't make my work.
I removed the video from YouTube with the intention of arming myself. It was clear I wasn't quite ready for the big battle against the Big Bad. I want to be part of the movement for reform of copyright law, but there are two problems. One is financial. I don't have any money to go to court. Even if I were to win the case, the costs alone could have a devastating effect on my life. I am an emerging conceptual artist. That means I don't really get paid to make artwork at this point in my career. And two, I'm not sure if I could win. I fear that my hybrid position as artist/ fan and the fact that my art practice rests on conceptual, not visual, strategies would be detrimental to my case and to the cause.
In the next 5 years, maybe this fear will seem absurd. Maybe by then, the law will have stretched itself to make room for the various cultural developments of the last 40 years, namely, postmodern theory and the destabilization of cultural hierarchy through appropriation art, fanvids and other forms of remix culture. In the meantime, it would be beneficial to have more conversation about the parallel development of appropriation in the Art World and in Fandom. It seems pretty significant that fanvids and appropriation art have been developing simultaneously since the '70s and yet their creators seem utterly unaware of each other. There needs to be a stronger acknowledgement of the overlap in the cultural work we are all doing as scholars, artists, fans and lawyers. We are all producers and consumers of our culture. We are all warriors, slayers and witches.
Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based emerging artist and a media fan. Using strategies of accumulation, collection, appropriation and juxtaposition, she explores the emotional, political, and philosophical significance of various forms of cultural participation. By creating hybrid works that employ the histories and languages of both "Low" Culture and "High" Culture, she reveals the cultural and personal spaces where these binaries overlap. Yeapanis currently uses embroidery, video and photography to explore how individuals create meaning from mass media products.
Henry Jenkins: I do think that the concept of networked publics has a great deal to offer us in terms of identifying a way of addressing some of the concerns you raise here, but I also think you need to go into that realm with your eyes wide open. So much has been written about the democratic potential of an era of social networks and collective intelligence, yet the challenge you pose here is one which might push our current understanding of this potential to the breaking point. Anna Everett's Digital Diaspora: A Race For Cyberspace (2009) gives us a number of case studies of minority activists and community leaders who have deployed digital tools as a means of promoting social change and racial justice.
We may have to struggle to achieve through digital tools what was accomplished by a previous generation of the readers, writers, and editors of the African-American press. Part of the challenge has to do with the ways that our current framing of participatory culture values freedom over equality or diversity. Part of the challenge has to do with the challenges of expanding access to the digital world and empowering citizens of all ages and class backgrounds to become full participant in this emerging cyber-society. Some of this has to do with the challenges of the interface between the digital world and the realm of our face to face interactions.
There are certainly limits to the potential which cyberspace offers for representing and empowering minority expression. Consider, for example, a site like YouTube. On the one hand, it is an open platform which allows all kinds of groups to submit content and circulate it within little or no gatekeeping unless, of course, you use obscene language or deploy copyrighted materials you don't own or otherwise violate the terms of service. For examples of what happens then, check out YouTomb, which keeps a running record of the various ways that speech gets regulated and contained through this platform which is owned by a company that once promised to do no evil. But more fundamentally, the site operates according to mechanisms of user-moderation which could not be more democratic in their conception: the public votes through its traffic (or in the case of other web 2.0 sites, through actual votes) to determine which content has the most merit with the result that content that attracts majority interest gets greater visibility. John McMurria did a post in Flow several years ago showing that the videos which got the highest visibility on YouTube were those by white adolescent males. I recently tried to discuss this issue with some technically oriented friends and they offered some predictible counter-arguments:
"Maybe white adolescent males represent the statistical majority of users on the site." Yes, that's likely the case, but then this only proves my point that there is a majoritarian bias built into the technology. John Stuart Mills told us a long time ago that the value of democratic institutions rests in the mechanisms they put in place to protect the rights of minorities at least as much as those that they create to insure majority rule. And in any case, we need to ask why this gap in participation exists rather than assuming that minority users simply aren't interested in producing and sharing videos.
"Yet minority content still circulates on these sites." True enough, and this goes back to the distinction I made in my earlier comments about the difference between "hush harbor" discourse within a minority community and discourse intended to reach a majority audience. Yet, unlike earlier kinds of "hush harbors," YouTube is highly porous with content fully accessible, for better or for worse, to those outside the core community, making it a risky site for fostering "black voice". That risk is personified by the comments posted on YouTube which are at best snarky and at worse hate speech. This brings us back to the Wright videos which were posted initially by those wanting to spread his message but got highjacked and decontextualized by other groups.
"Each user can set their filters anyway they want and thus can receive the content they desire." This falls back on a now aging rhetoric of "personalized media," which ignores the need to spread messages beyond your own community and overlooks the fact that digital communications exist in the shadow of still powerful forms of mass communications which insure that some messages reach everyone in society while others only reach those people who know how to find them. In that sense, the mechanisms that shape web 2.0 are forms of marginalization, not censorship, since they do not silence minority users, but their visibility depends on the whims of majority users.
Some will argue that YouTube was never intended as a platform for activism, critique, or pedagogy. It is simply a form of entertainment which allows more people to disperse content. And it is certainly the case that we have a much more diverse culture with YouTube in it than we would have in its absence. That's not to say, though, that those of us who care about participatory culture should not be critical in examining these new platforms as they emerge to make sure that they support as much diversity as possible. Nobody is talking about intentionally racist design, well, at least I'm not, yet in all technologies, there is a law of unintended consequences, which sometimes means that what you build gets picked up and used in ways you never imagined but may also mean that there may be hidden effects of the design which make it harder for some groups to deploy than others.
But let's look elsewhere to what would seem to be a much more promising venue. BlackPlanet.Com is an affinity portal which was established to serve the needs and interests of the African-American community. According to HitWise, it has the fourth highest traffic of all social network sites (following FaceBook and MySpace, etc.) and attracts a membership of more than 16.5 million users. We can compare that with your claim that specific black newspapers reached "hundreds of thousands" of readers and we have some sense of the potential impact of such a web portal. BlackPlanet reaches a larger segment of the black population of this country than ever read a black newspaper, so why is its political influence on the public sphere so much smaller?
I just got through reading a very strong dissertation written by an old friend, John Campbell, for UPenn: Campbell certainly finds on BlackPlanet and similar sites real potentials for community building and critical discussions, but also notes that they are run by companies which are pursuing their own economic interests that are not always aligned with the interests of their memberships. So, there is a push towards a greater focus on black celebrities or dating or personal improvement than there is on social critique and political debate.
Of course, the historic black newspapers were also commercial ventures and needed to make money in order to survive, but it is unlikely that they made that money by collecting and selling data on their user-bases, say. They would have been organizations which were at least as committed to their political causes as to their bottom line. And in your earlier examples, some of the most important sources of black critical perspectives came through publications that were sponsored by civil rights organizations and thus were funded more through political contributions than through advertising.
Even so, there would seem to be real potentials for sites like BlackPlanet to serve as mechanisms by which new forms of "freedom discourse" and alternative critical perspectives could emerge, if only because of the sheer number of users of color which are attracted there. Of course, we then have to confront the reality that there are significant class and race divides in terms of access to these digital technologies in the first place. There is of course the digital divide which has been discussed for the past twenty years. The digital divide has to do with limited access to the technologies. And we've responded to that concern through wiring schools and public libraries. But, then, as soon as they were wired, a series of moral panics have instigated more and more restrictions on how public-access computers can be used: mandatory filters which restrict certain kind of content (we ran into this recently because we discovered that many sites dealing with Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby-Dick, were being blocked on school library sites, because it used the word, "dick," hrrm, hrmm, in the title.), blocks on access to YouTube and other videosharing sites, and potential legislation always hanging over us that would block access to social networks (such as BlackPlanet) and blogging tools.
But at the end of the day, the obstacles are not simply technological: they are also social and cultural. This is what I mean by the participation gap. Some people feel welcomed into cyberspace and others feel excluded. Some have access to an informal network of folks who already know what they are doing online and can offer advice when you hit a wall, as happens to most of us on a regular basis, while those who know few who have spent time on line don't know where to turn for such advice, become frustrated, and walk away. The ability to participate still depends not only on having disposable income but also disposable time. And so forth. I would argue today that limited opportunities in the digital realm, in most areas of the country, have as much or more to do with this participation gap as with technical obstacles to access.
It must sound like I woke up in a really gloomy space this morning. Despite all of the above, I remain very optimistic about the ability of all kinds of minority groups to overcome some of these issues and to form powerful networked publics on line. I do believe that such new cultural institutions and practices can form the basis for strong critiques grounded in the "freedom discourse" tradition and that they can provide both opportunities for communication within and beyond the black community.
I would argue that as our world more and more embraces ideals of collective intelligence, as I discuss in Convergence Culture, then there is an absolute necessity to insure diversity of perspectives within the knowledge community. Collective intelligence starts from the premise that the more diverse the imputs, the more open the processes, the better the outcome. A society based on principles of collective intelligence can't just "celebrate diversity" every February, but needs to actively recruit and empower minority participants towards the common good. Yet, it is also clear that there need to be spaces where minorities can empower themselves through their own collective intelligence processes, identifying the best new ideas as well as the common interests and concerns of the community, without being swamped by other competing perspectives.
Some of this involves learning to deploy the tools and platforms that are already available. Some of this involves developing alternative institutions which reflect your own needs. And some of this involves the redesign of existing platforms to insure that they meet the needs of more diverse sets of users.
For the past few decades, there's been lots of talk that implies that digital platforms and tools are inevitably devices for democratization of our culture. Rather, they still need to be sites of critique and struggle if we are going to deploy them in ways that insures social justice.
The critique above is meant to help us to identify some of the key characteristics we might require if these platforms are going to support the formation of a counter-public where new critical discourses are to be formed and dispersed through black America. First, these platforms need to actively embrace diversity and not simply participation. We need to reject a tendency to talk about what the majority wants to see as if "the best content rises to the top." Instead, we need to think about alternative mechanisms which might insure that for any given topic, all of us have access to a diverse range of different perspectives.
We need to insure that we have platforms which support community use rather than individual expression, given how much the blogosphere can fragment rather than connect people.
We need to insure that at least some of the platforms get sponsored by groups who are not primarily motivated by economic interests but who also have political and social stakes in insuring access to the broadest number of people. (For example, we should be looking at how the construction trade unions you mention above might be supporting alternative platforms and institutions which might function as collective bargaining units within the digital realm.)
We need to couple the development of new tools with educational initiatives which help more Americans cross over the participation gap. And we have to insure that the platforms themselves are designed to entice and welcome new participants rather than remaining under the control of the most active and visible members of a community.
We need to develop hybrid systems which couple the spreading of content online with a social system which also spreads these same ideas and arguments to people who do not have access to the online world, just as in earlier times, "freedom discourse" was spread through oral as well as print-based channels. In so far as the digital networks are dominated by young people, we need to develop strategies which bring people together across generations, making sure that the wisdom of the old is coupled with the idealism and energy of the young. In so far as the current systems most often serve those who have the time and money to be able to use them, we need to create new social organizations which solicit and transmit the viewpoints of those who are locked by economic and cultural barriers from fully participating in those worlds.
For the forseeable future, we can't put all of our faith in digital media, because there are simply too many people who will be left behind. Rather, we have to focus more attention on understanding how information moves back and forth between digital and other channels of communication.
I'm hoping the conversation we've started here will inspire others to respond, suggesting alternative tools, platforms, and practices which may more fully achieve the goals you've identified here, pushing back or suggesting ways to work around the critiques we've offered of current institutions and policies. You've raised some core issues here which deserve a response.
Dayna Cunningham: Thank you for reminding me that we are talking about institutions and cultures and politics and that media are nothing more than tools within these contexts. We need social organizations, not just technology. Drat. I was hoping for a quick fix.
I saw a Washington Post poll, reported on Inauguration Day, of black and white Americans asking their views on the persistence of racism in the US. Only 44% of African Americans polled said that racism is still a major problem. A majority of blacks said it was not (whites, true to past patterns, in large majorities said that racism is no longer a major problem). However, a follow up question asked whether the respondents still witnessed or experienced racism in their daily lives and a significant majority of African Americans said that little had changed for them in their local communities and in their daily experience of racism. Most blacks reported continuing denials of service and jobs, less access to housing, and racialized police harassment.
Yet, the majority of blacks interviewed chose to say that racism is no longer a major problem. I think that shows a pretty sophisticated parsing of the moment--its huge symbolic significance and its limited practical reach. I think that black responses to the poll suggest that perhaps patriotism, the flag, the Capital building, the White House, and other icons that have been very fraught for African Americans for a very long time, have a more elastic meaning than they did before this election. See, Funkadelics, "Chocolate City" for a longer and more danceable discussion of the cultural possibilities of a black presidency. I believe that this moment is not just an artifact of a black person having been elected: Obama's personal integrity, intelligence, political stance and skillful communication have done a lot to create it. And while this is not always the substance of freedom discourse, it certainly sets a welcoming stage.
Thinking about that welcoming stage, and in the vein of the barbershop comment you mentioned, there have been mountains of micro-gestures since the Inauguration that have gotten a lot of air time (mainly phone conversations in my case) in the black community but appear largely to have gone unnoticed in the mainstream. Small as they are, I have to say that these gestures have evoked very strong positive reactions for me and, I imagine, for many other African Americans. Rev. Joseph Lowery began his benediction with "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the Negro National Anthem. He did not sing it. He simply spoke it as a prayer. He did not name it and the black audience at the Inauguration did not openly respond to it in the moment. Just a quiet reminder amongst the folks that this was Black President Day. Several friends sent me the links to it on You Tube. My heart leapt each time I heard it and I felt full of energy, optimism and even ambition. There was footage of the new President doing the Bump, a very popular dance in our college days. Perhaps I am over-thinking it, but these clips said to me that this man has shared cultural and social experiences that defined our coming of age as black people making our way as the first generation to integrate at some scale into elite white institutions. The quip was that he went home and played Parliament and the Funkadelics ("One Nation Under a Groove") in the (black) Inauguration after-party at the White House.
My black friends are also gleeful about the moment, replayed again and again in the press, when Biden is cutting up before the second swearing-in and Obama, deadpan, grabs his arm, turns him firmly in the direction of the podium and signals it is time to get to work. When I told a friend about it, a cultural linguist, he said, "thank you, that story is a gift." Another came from an unlikely source: Nancy Pelosi in her remarks first made reference to Malcolm X's "ballot or the bullet" before invoking King. Hmmm, interesting, that she began there.
Obviously these are each the smallest of gestures that could mean nothing. We can recall that Clinton, when first elected made a few choice micro-gestures: playing the saxophone, visiting black churches, showing obvious comfort in the company of blacks, even earning himself the now patently insulting moniker "first black president" in some circles--but in my view, he quickly squandered the trust and enthusiasm those signals generated when he failed to make a significant investment in urban policy, anti-poverty measures, civil rights laws and other matters important to blacks.
Yet, much in the same way that racism and degradation are often conveyed in tiny signals that over time crush the spirit, Obama's little moments, I think, so far are building hope and a sense that something might shift. They are creating space. I see a broad discourse now evolving, an Obama mythology celebrating his wisdom, principles, strength and resoluteness against the Republicans. His daily triumphs--one day against corporate greed, the next, his kids' Midwestern flintiness in the face of DC snow. I hear the stories again and again told by people hungry for strong humanist leadership and feeling relief as they begin taking stock of how bad things became under Bush. They speak of enjoying and sharing with friends the moments that are available on YouTube. I always participate in these happy exchanges, adding my own favorites--and of course I replay the savory moments on YouTube. This little ritual fixes the small daily victories in my mind and prepares me to continue the struggle another day.
The struggle. No surprise, as the Washington Post respondents testify, the real work of unwinding the racial privilege and disadvantage produced in the last several centuries continues and we need much more than symbols. The critical question for us, then, is can we fill this new space Obama is creating? Can we create or revive the practices, institutions, and discourses that you talk about, such that we might advance black freedom discourse, and through that, improve democracy? What might it actually look like to do so, and how might technology help?
Let's be specific. Everyone loves a good crisis (paraphrasing journalist, P. Sainath). The economic collapse and Obama stimulus package give us a chance to fix some of the more polarizing weaknesses of the New Deal which, with labor protections, mortgage and educational assistance, gave whites a powerful pathway back to the middle class and, by withholding these protections and benefits from black and brown, created new tools to entrench and racialize poverty. The stimulus will likely provide enough material aid to cities, where the majority of black and brown people live, to make some progress and Obama's powerful populist messaging inspires hope. At the same time, the money is coming fast and many of the current institutional arrangements, from community revitalization and workforce development protocols to banking practices to local government procurement policies will likely help reinforce the inequitable status quo.
Yet, a good chunk of the money to cities is infrastructure spending and, in an amazing turn, the Building Trades, once seen as among the most conservative and racially exclusive unions in the labor movement, have come to understand that the future of their unions as older white members begin retiring en masse in the next five years, is black and brown youth. They train 100,000 new workers a year and have made a commitment to open their doors to black and brown youth as the stimulus opens up the job market for their members. Finally, a lot some of the money is targeted for green infrastructure, an area so new that there may not be as much establishment in place to thwart opportunity.
What practices, institutions and discourses might help avoid the dangers and align the possibilities now arising to address poverty and exclusion in a fuller and deeper way? There are loads of community organizations in minority and white communities that will need to figure out right now how they will respond. What role could black freedom discourse and your idea of a "self-consciously multiracial and multicultural community of practice" have? How can the world of networked publics help here?
A customary black discourse about the dangers of this moment ("Remember, the New Deal threw us overboard") is entirely in keeping with the historic role of the freedom discourse to remind us that the best-laid plans can overlook or punish the vulnerable and despised. But historically the discourse coupled dire warnings with inspired hopes and perhaps the Obama presidency gives inspired hopes new grounding--not just in micro symbols but in a senior White House staff that includes black people who know the full, sad, history of the New Deal, lived the multi-generational consequences of its exclusions, and have the expertise and the authority to help avoid the same mistake. A Facebook network (my son created a page for me about a year ago and it remained completely inactive until last month when about 10 people my age sent me friend requests) like the one used to support Prop 8 in California could help build base support for their efforts, bringing pressure through on-line mobilization where they need it and pressuring them when they veer off.
But we need more to get this opportunity right. We have to figure out how to use new media to go beyond what, at its best, I think it currently does best for most people-- serving as an exchange for faith-sustaining or mobilizing stories.
We need vehicles to quickly transmit legislative developments and funding implications to networks of community organizations as the stimulus hits the states and cities.
We need technology-enabled learning environments to share lessons about implementing government funding programs and best practices in green building.
We need creative platforms for community groups to collectively discover overlooked local resources like brown fields that could be redeveloped, and then to collectively plan how to rebuild their neighborhoods.
And perhaps this is where your idea of consciously multiracial hush harbors comes in: we need spaces for older white workers to explore how they can find common identity and make common cause with the young black and brown turks coming into their hiring halls and apprenticeship programs.
I desperately hope that these ideas aren't just more of my ill-advised hope for a quick technology fix and that somewhere, better minds than mine are already at work on tools that can help these projects. What do you think?
Henry Jenkins: Thanks for this really rich provocation, Dayna. These are questions which we need to be discussing as a society and they should be central to our understanding of "civic media," "social media," whatever we want to call it.
As a media scholar, my first response to any request to develop new "tools" is to ask what we are really looking for. As I review your language in the closing paragraph, you variously call for "media technology," "new spaces," "tools and platforms," "venues and mechanisms." This range of terms suggests the degree to which it is not easy to separate out technological resources from the cultural practices which grow up around them.
So, the African American Press was powerful not because of specially made tools (the newspaper had a long history) but rather because of the institutions which emerged that allowed those tools to be used in a way that served a specific community, because of the editorial decisions made by Black journalists, editors, and readers which allowed newspapers to serve a particular kind of community (one defined along racial rather than purely geographic terms and thus in some senses a virtual community in our modern sense of the term), one which allowed for the emergence of a particular kind of discourse which took shape through news coverage, editorials, and letters to the editor, and so forth. Similarly, the black church wasn't so much a technology or a platform as a particular kind of social organization, a particular appropriation or articulation of religious oratory to serve historically specific needs of the black community.
At the risk of betraying my MIT heritage, my first response is to say that the issues you pose are least likely to be addressed on a purely technological level. These are fundamentally cultural, social, political, economic, and institutional problems and only secondarily issues of technology. It isn't as if what the world lacks is a hammer and then suddenly we can nail everything down.
It may be that what's required is getting existing tools into different hands or insuring that those who are apt to deploy them for certain communities have access to the skills and resources they need to turn them towards new purposes. So, rather than looking for new "tools," we should be looking for new practices, new institutions, and new discourses. And indeed, everything else here points us in that direction, starting with your emphasis on "black voice."
One of the challenges of achieving a "black public sphere" in the modern media landscape is precisely the porousness of contemporary communications. Most of the historic institutions and practices you discuss here were hiding in plain site. Historians have talked about the "hush harbor" tradition in black America -- going back to slavery days -- the need to find black-only spaces where communication could occur within the race. Both the black press and the black church as you discuss them here are in some senses "hush harbors" where blacks could communicate with blacks largely outside of the vision of white America.
Yes, in theory, as a white southerner growing up in Atlanta, I could have read the black Atlanta press. I certainly knew it existed. I may have even seen a copy or two. But it wasn't something that I would have regularly come into contact with. Watch a documentary series like Eyes on the Prize and one of the most powerful things you get is the sense that black camera crews working for black broadcasters captured very different voices and perspectives, saw the world through fundamentally different eyes than white camera crews working for "mainstream" broadcast networks. There was a sense that what was said in the black church stayed in the black community. What was said in the black barbershops and beauty parlors, to cite another important locale for framing black critique, stayed there. A black public sphere was possible because African America was in many very real ways a bounded community.
Now, let's compare this to what happened to Rev. Wright, whose sermons were directed at a predominantly but no longer exclusively black congregation, who would have understood them as part of this tradition of "freedom discourse." But in the modern media scape, messages are much harder to contain; they travel and spread everywhere. So, the Wright videos get inserted into a platform like YouTube, which embodies what Yochai Benkler (Wealth of Networks) might discuss as a shared space for differentially interested groups to conduct their communications business. The videos get picked up by bloggers and podcasters; they get broadcast and reframed on Fox News; they end up in the Washington Post; they get discussed on talk radio; they get referenced in political debates; they get reframed in political advertising; etc., etc., etc.
What Wright's comments might have meant in a black-only or black-dominanted discursive space is very different from what they meant once they got inserted into these other contexts. And that's the very nature of the modern media landscape: messages can't be locked down; they move fluidly from community to community. The black and white churches or barbershops were in different neighborhoods. Today, black-oriented and white-oriented websites are only a mouse click apart. In an odd way, the kind of autonomous black voice you are discussing may be a byproduct of segregation. Not that America today isn't in many ways still a deeply segregated society but segregation operates through different mechanisms, follows a different logic, and so this requires a new set of communication strategies and practices.
We need to distinguish between "black voice" as directed at a bounded black community ("the hush harbor" model) and black voice as directed at a mixed audience. Clearly someone like Frederic Douglas who you cite here was very adept at both kinds of communications. His historic impact had as much to do with his ability to form alliances and maintain relations with white journalists, activists, and literary figures and to speak to white audiences as it had to do with his ability to communicate within the black community. The same would be true of someone like Sojourner Truth, who got a large chunk of her support from those white middle class women involved in first wave feminism.
Implicit in your model here, though, is the idea that there needs to be a relatively independent space for communications within a racial minority where ideas can be formed, tested, debated, and refined, where communities can be mobilized, which may function outside of spaces which are primarily focused on communications across the races.
Is there no possibility that in the future "freedom discourse" will come through a self-consciously multi-racial and multi-cultural community of practice rather than within one defined through segregation? I am not talking about a "post-racial" society which seeks to imagine that racial categories (and the injustices attached to them) are no longer operative. But rather, some kind of communication space where people of mixed backgrounds come together to identify common interests as they work through our complex and troubling history of racial relations. I'm not sure we know yet what such a community looks like in practice, but does this theoretical possibility necessarily mean a loss of "black voice"? Can "black voice" only be defined in isolation? Maybe I'm just looking for a revived and retooled version of what Jesse Jackson used to call a "rainbow coalition".
Obama's strength has been his ability to communicate across the remaining racial divides in our society -- to speak a language which can gain acceptance from white, hispanic, and Asian-American voters even as it inspires high participation by black voters. Early on, there was some speculation that he might not be able to gain the support of the black community because he did not speak the language of the black church and the civil rights movement. In some ways, he does borrow their metaphors and cadence when he speaks, but as you note, he's had to distance himself from some of the spaces where black critique has historically been framed.
In one of the interviews after the election, Obama suggested that he was no longer able to go to his barbershop to get a haircut. The "mainstream" media treated this comment as an example of how the president-elect gets cut off from the practices of everyday life, ceases to be an "average American." But, given the historic role of the barbershop as a "hush harbor," it struck me that the comment could be read at a deeper level as suggesting his growing isolation from the black community and its critical practices and political discourses.
One is tempted to argue that African-Americans (and other minorities) enjoy greater opportunities to communicate beyond their own communities now than ever before. But we need to be careful in making that claim. Recent research suggests that there are far fewer minority characters on prime time network television shows this season than there were five years ago. There remains an enormous ratings gap between white and black Americans: the highest rating shows among black Americans often are among the lowest rated shows among white Americans. The exception, curiously enough, are reality television programs, like American Idol, which historically have had mixed race casts.
We've seen some increased visibility of black journalists and commentators throughout the 2008 campaign season -- and they may remain on the air throughout an Obama administration -- but we need to watch to make sure that they do not fade into the background again. But, if we follow your argument, even those figures who make it into the mainstream media are, at best, relaying critiques and discourses which originate within the black community and at worse, they are involved in a process of self-censorship which makes them an imperfect vehicle for those messages.
The paradox of race and media may be that black Americans have lost access to many of the institutions and practices which sustained them during an era of segregation without achieving the benefits promised by a more "integrated" media environment. And that makes this a moment of risk -- as well as opportunity -- for minority Americans.
I suspect we are over-stating the problem in some ways. There are certainly some serious constraints on minority participation in cyberspace but a world of networked publics also does offer some opportunities for younger African-Americans to deliberate together and form opinion, which we need to explore more fully here. But before I move in that direction, I want to throw this back to you to react to what I've written so far.
One of the most powerful sessions of my class on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement last fall came as a result of a visit from Dayna Cunningham from MIT's Community Innovators Lab shortly after the 2008 election. Cunningham challenged me and my students to think about whether new media tools and platforms might help address the erosion of the black public sphere. She argued that the structures that had sustained the black community during the Civil Rights era were collapsing without the emergence of new structures that would provide the basis for strong critiques of the operations of power and that might be used to hold Obama accountable to his own community. And she asked those of us who were trying to build tools or curriculum to support democratic citizenship to factor these concerns into our design and planning process.
Wanting to bring this exchange to a larger audience, I asked Cunningham if she would be willing to engage in a written conversation which I could share with the readers of this blog. Such conversations across disciplinary and racial borders are rare these days even as the election of the first African-American president mandates that all of us re-examine our country's racial politics from whatever vantage point we may see the world. This exchange took place over more than a month's time. I will be sharing it here in four installments, hoping that each piece may spark further reflection and conversation within the community of people invested in better understanding the future of media and its impact on our society. What follows ranges from the history of the black press and the black church to speculations about the design of democratic structures in cyberspace.
Dayna Cunningham: It was great to have the opportunity to talk to your Comparative Media Studies class and pose questions about how new media might help to address the paradox I have been grappling with: the US has elected its first black president at a time when black institutions are weak and black civil society is in deep disarray. What will happen to black voice now that we have this black president? By black voice I mean in particular the longstanding tradition of bottom-up critique of American culture, society and democracy by one of its most despised groups.
Let me start by saying that from where I stand, collective discourse, debate, dissent and demand are crucially necessary for building the political will to advance African Americans' equity claims. Black voice is critical to this process. I am focused here on that part of black voice that prioritizes political strategies and collective action. Thus, I use the terms "black voice" and "freedom discourse" interchangeably. Because our struggles are counter-majoritarian, because therefore, the "sensible" thing to do is to ignore them and go on with the existing frameworks that make these struggles invisible, it is critical for black people to be able to come together and make sense of their conditions, determine what they want to change and then to figure out how they will make change. This is very different activity from supporting a particular candidate or even a legislative agenda. Electoral and legislative campaigns by definition demand cultivation of the white electoral majority's opinions and carry inherent risk that they will censure claims or interests that are unpleasant to that majority. Without a prior agenda-setting discourse enabling African American communities to arrive at some collective decisions about their shared future, I can't imagine either innovation in support of, or accountability to, black concerns.
Black voice stems from the schizophrenic daily experience of being un-free in a society that claims freedom as its first principle. Black voice provides a unique, and I would argue, necessary, perspective on the failures of American democratic institutions. Frederick Douglass, asked to address an abolitionist group on the subject of Independence Day, captured it best when he chose to "see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave's point of view:"
[Y]our high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. . . .. The
rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your
fathers, is shared by you, not by me. . ... This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.
You may rejoice, I must mourn. . ."
Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" July 5, 1852
Black voice has been shaped throughout its history by a vibrant and diverse intellectual and popular tradition with wide-ranging debate about black conditions and freedom strategies. From Frederick Douglass's Abolitionist Movement in the mid-1800s, through the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and '70's, each successive wave of African American intellectual and political currents also was supported by organization in the black community that enabled discourse, agenda-setting and collective action. All of these elements were critical to the unfolding of black freedom movements. The multiple intellectual, political and cultural sub-currents that emerged from these movements also led to the formation of a diversity of local organizations and efforts.
Black voice cannot be separated from the black church and its prophetic tradition--an unsparing, scripturally-grounded moral judgment against the immoral exercise of power and a calling to account of the government and powerful institutions for mistreating the powerless. From Douglass, who compared the US to "a nation whose crimes. . . were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin!" to King, who declared, "America is going to hell if we don't use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life," the African American hope for freedom is bound up with God's love of justice and there is little separation between the struggle for justice and the preaching of the word.
The African American press also played a crucial role in popularizing and deepening black freedom discourse and in inspiring collective black political action. The nation's first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal began in 1827 with the declaration: 'We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.'' The Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier were among the largest national black newspapers, reaching circulation in the hundreds of thousands. The Defender was read extensively in the South, smuggled across the Mason/ Dixon line by black Pullman porters and entertainers, passed from person to person, and read aloud in barbershops and churches. Both the Defender and the Courier engaged in explicit and effective political campaigns such as the Defender's support of the Great Migration that saw the exodus of over 100,000 people from the South to Chicago, and the Courier's "Double V for Victory" campaign, joined by most of the other major black newspapers and advocating an end to racial repression in the US as the US fought fascism overseas.
In addition to the general circulation papers, many black political organizations had their own organs--the NAACP's Crisis Magazine, first published by WEB Dubois; Marcus Garvey's Negro World, and during the black power movement in the 1960s and '70s, black nationalist, Pan- Africanist or socialist papers. These publications at times reached circulation in the hundreds of thousands with polemics about the relative advantages of various ideologies for addressing the conditions of African Americans and featuring sharp political debates on critical issues from segregation and joblessness, police brutality and education system failures to southern African freedom movements, and the war in Vietnam.
The great diversity and pervasiveness of black freedom discourse throughout helps to explain the generally progressive bent of African American politics today. However, I would argue that today, black politics has largely been reduced to the electoral and legislative spheres; African American media too often promote black celebrity and individual advancement, and along with much of the black civic infrastructure, rarely focus on freedom discourse as a means of exploring strategies for collective political action and accountability to black interests. Perhaps only the Church has survived as an independent space for black voice--and even the Church is sometimes compromised by "prosperity gospel" preachers who have little time for freedom discourse . Moreover, the uproar over Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, (whose preaching that the US risked damnation as a result of its role in the Gulf War was not unlike King's prophesizing that America would be damned for its failure to address poverty, or for that matter, King's condemnation of the US role in Vietnam) silenced even the progressive black Church for the duration of this election. While every white Democratic presidential hopeful in memory has, as a matter of course, cultivated highly visible relationships with black clergy, Obama, was forced to renounce his ties. More than an attempt to alienate whites and to cut Obama off from his core base, many African Americans saw this as an effort to de-legitimate black voice.
Has Obama's election signaled the dawn of a post-racial moment in which black voice no longer is relevant or necessary? Not likely. African American progress has ground to a halt since the early 1970s, coinciding with a series of policy assaults that shifted massive state and federal resources from increasingly-black cities to suburbs. These policy assaults, cutting social advancement while criminalizing poverty, occurred during Democratic as well as Republican administrations and at all levels of government regardless of the presence of black elected officials. Black elected officials continue to be isolated on major policy issues of concern to black communities within federal and state legislatures. These conditions and political dilemmas are structural in our majoritarian polity and are unlikely to change significantly with the election of a black president. The majority of whites did not support Obama (according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, McCain/Palin carried the white popular vote nationally, 55-43 percent). They are even less likely to support the kinds of radical policy interventions needed to reverse the last thirty years' conscious and systematic disinvestment in black communities. Without a revivified black freedom discourse and politically energized black public that articulate and press for accountability to its
legitimate claims and join forces with immigrants and other dispossessed groups also struggling for a foothold of inclusion in US society, such interventions will never happen.
Has Obama's campaign, now being institutionalized as an ongoing organization, with its highly effective organization, social networking, face-to-face outreach, and vast fundraising capabilities, rendered black civic space obsolete? Can it substitute for black black freedome discourse? If not the Obama post-election process, where will the new spaces for black freedom discourse exist?
I would argue that though it will create rich opportunities for people to gain political experience and to engage in important forms of collective action, the Obama post-election process is unlikely to be a sound substitute for the political process of black freedom discourse. Like the campaign, singularly focused on electing the candidate, an ongoing effort to support his presidential initiatives is unlikely to be structured to invite discourse, debate, dissent or demand. How would it provide opportunities for people to hear a range of policy proposals and decide which ones they prefer? How would it enable debate? How would it give access to deeply marginalized black voices--gang-involved kids, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, undocumented immigrants, HIV/AIDS survivors? What if important sectors of black communities fundamentally disagree with the first black president on issues of great urgency and concern to them? What if Pres. Obama wants to do the right thing but needs public pressure to accede?
The need for a 21st century freedom discourse is paramount. The Obama campaign proved that the connection of media technology and organizing holds much promise for constructing electoral movements. Now, how can that technology help us construct new spaces for black and other subaltern voice? Which tools and platforms will help collective deliberation and debate, not just aggregate or pass on information? What venues and mechanisms will aid formation of political identities of dispersed and despised groups? How can these groups find opportunities for speech back to the majority? On these questions, Henry, I look to you and your colleagues for help.
Dayna L. Cunningham is Executive Director of the Community Innovators Lab at MIT. CoLab is a center of research and practice within the MIT Department of Urban Planning. Combining on-the-ground planning and development expertise of DUSP faculty and students with local community knowledge, CoLab helps community residents and leaders create innovative experiments and living examples that address urban sustainability challenges. In 2006-2007, Cunningham directed the ELIAS Project, an MIT-based collaboration between business, ngos and government that seeks to use processes of profound innovation to advance economic, social and environmental sustainability.
Cunningham was an Associate Director at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1997-2004. At Rockefeller she funded initiatives that examined the relationship between democracy and race, changing racial dynamics and new conceptions of race in the U.S., as well as innovation in the area of civil rights legal work. From 2004-2006 she was associated with Public Interest Projects, a non-profit project management and philanthropic consulting firm based in New York City, where she managed foundation collaboratives on social justice issues.
Before coming to the Rockefeller Foundation, Cunningham worked as a voting rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, litigating cases in Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere in the South, and briefly as an officer for the New York City Program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Cunningham is a 2004 graduate of the Sloan Fellows MBA program of the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and a juris doctor degree from New York University School of Law.
This is part eight 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.
Conclusion: The Value of Spreadable Media
So far this white paper has:
criticized the vagueness of existing models of "viral media" or "memes"
outlined the differences between sticky and spreadable media.
identified those factors which have led to the rise of spreadable media
shown why spreadable media involves a collaboration between the gift economy and commodity culture.
discussed a range of different kinds of communities that are shaping the spread of media
pointed towards some properties shared by the most spreadable media content.
In this concluding section, we will return to the core question from the perspective of our clients: Is it a good idea to allow or enable my consumers to spread my brand message or my copyrighted content? We enter this discussion with some modesty. The situation we have described here is in flux. New examples of spreadable content, new business plans, and new policies regarding intellectual property are announced each day and so far, the verdict is still out. There's a lot we do not yet know about spreadable media's benefits and risks from a corporate perspective. In this transitional moment, we advise companies to proceed with caution but fear that those who remain totally outside this space may be running greater risks than those who make at least some modest steps towards embracing spreadability.
Certainly, one can point to some great success stories from companies who have been early to embrace this spreadable model. One such case is the Dove Evolution campaign that was released online with a 75 second clip showing an "ordinary" woman's painful transformation into an "object of desire". The ad boosted sales, received over 5 million views and cost nothing to distribute online. Dove also released another version of the spot on television during the Super bowl. Placing the ad cost the company $2.5 million and it received 2.5 million views. Granted, broadcast television provided them with an opportunity to reach a large number of viewers in a very short period of time, but the online version reached almost twice as many people at a fraction of the cost. One take-away here is that television may remain a stronger venue for "just in time" information, while the slower circulation of information online may ultimately result in much deeper saturation within the culture.
Or consider the success of the Cadbury Gorilla advertisement which we've cited several times already. In 8 weeks the ad received 5 million views, positioning Cadbury to grow 30% above the industry average that same year, increase it's sales by 7% and most importantly, detach itself from the chocolate recall-salmonella scandal that had greatly impacted the company's image in the UK.
Such success stories have inspired other companies to develop so-called "viral" marketing strategies, some of which have succeeded, many of which have not. The decentralized nature of the process, the lack of control over the flow of content means that there are no guarantees that such content will reach their desired market segments or for that matter, that they will circulate anywhere. If you want to guarantee the number of eyeballs which consume your message, nothing is going to replace traditional broadcasting methods anytime soon. Lowering the transaction costs, however, make it possible for companies to minimize their risks in trying out such strategies as an add-on to existing marketing approaches.
So what is spreadable media good for?
To generate active commitment from the audience,
To empower them and make them an integral part of your product's success,
To benefit from online word-of-mouth
To reach niche, highly interconnected audiences,
but most of all, to communicate with audiences where they already are, and in a way that they value.
Each of these factors suggest that such an approach may yield longer term rather than shorter term benefits:
Spreadability may help to expand and intensify consumer awareness of a new and emerging brand or transform their perceptions of an existing brand, re-affirming its central place in their lives.
Spreadability may expand the range of potential markets for a brand by introducing it, at low costs and low risks, to niches that previously were not part of its market.
Spreadability may intensify consumer loyalty by increasing emotional attachment to the brand or media franchise.
Spreadability may expand the shelf life of existing media content by creating new ways of interacting with it (as occurs, say, around the modding of games or the archiving of classic television content on YouTube) and it may even rebuild or reshape the market for a dormant brand, as suggested by Robert Kozinets writing on "retro-brands."
All told, those companies which have the most to gain from this approach are those who have the least to lose from abandoning traditional broadcasting models, those which have:
lower promotional budgets
who want to reach niche markets
who want to distribute so-called "Long Tail" content
who want to build strong emotional connections with their consumers.
Those who have the most to lose are those companies which:
have well established brand messages
have messages that are predictably delivered through broadcast channels
who are concerned about a loss of control over their intellectual property
who have reason to fear backlash from their consumers.
Even here, remaining outside of the spreadable model altogether may cut them off from younger and more digitally connected consumers who spend less time consuming traditional broadcast content or who are increasingly suspicious of top-down advertising campaigns.
Such considerations intensify when we move from brand messages, which one wants to circulate freely, towards content, which is expected to generate revenue. Right now, spreadability has proven more effective at generating buzz and awareness than as a revenue generator, though this may be changing. Consider, for example, the mobile sector. As many as 20 percent of mobile subscribers are listening to music on their mobile devices (Minney, 2008) with similar increases occurring with other media such as games and video. There is also a strong rise in mobile media sharing, either directly phone-to-phone or pc-to-phone, in either case mobile consumers are already embracing spreadable media by default and companies are discovering that there is money to be made by facilitating their activities.
So far, only a few companies are taking advantage of a potential Mobile Web 2.0, according to Sumit Agarwal, a product manager in Google's mobile division:
We're really at mobile Web 0.5, to be completely honest, the real thing about Web 2.0 is people introducing applications to each other. True viral applications, something sent from one person to another, will absolutely be a big part of mobile. (Salz, 2007)
One such company, MoConDi Ltd. announced in September of 2007 that its Italian based service, MeYou, had reached more than 800,000 registered users. By January 2008, that number had doubled. MeYou is a mobile phone application which supports distribution of a mobile content to end users. These users can then recommend content to additional users and receive credits for doing so. Users receive MMS recommendations which contain a message and download link for the content and a link to install the MeYou application. In this case, they are using the same marketing strategy that launched Hotmail in the 90s.
MeYou has implemented a hybrid model between the sticky and spreadable models, between content distribution and marketing. As such, users will receive certain content directly from MeYou or from their friends for free, but other content requires for direct payment. Users can still share such by sending the application for which the receiver has to then purchase the activation code. This model is particularly successful with games where after the applications are activated, users can play against each other, creating strong social incentives to expand its reach. MeYou works mostly with ringtones, images, videos, animations and games. Through its parent company, MoConDi generate mobile branded content and distribution strategies for other businesses. According to MeYou's public information 60% of users purchase content and 64% of users send recommendations with 24% of recommendations resulting in purchases.
We might contrast the relative success which MoConDi has enjoyed through enfranchising its consumers to spread content with the backlash which has come as a result of the tendency of major media companies to brand grassroots circulation as "piracy." For quite some time, Sony-BMG and all other music majors have opted for issuing take-down notices when content to which they hold rights to is posted on YouTube. It now seems that Sony-BMG is finding a way to move away from that prohibitionist model and is embracing a profit sharing, win-win philosophy based on building stronger collaborations with their fans. They have opted for inserting a link to the content's original site on the video post and eliminating its capacity to be embedded. So, on one end they've limited the spread of their content in favor of increasing the stickiness of their own site. But they also are allowing fans to share music and YouTube to make a profit. In the process, Sony-BMG is increasing the traffic to and visibility of its official sites, but most importantly, the company is no longer treating fans and potential consumers as criminals.
Such an approach is spreading across other industries and throughout other mediums. Peer-to-peer technologies have dealt with a bad reputation for years -- since the days of the Napster trials, P2P's original idea, to enable user share big files, has been demonized. The entertainment industry has pegged it as a tool for piracy. And recently, ISPs have blamed it for clogging their networks. Nevertheless P2P is the perfect example to illustrate some of the models of resource-lite, user-led, pull distribution that benefit from a spreadable mentality. Here company and user/distributors are building a completely new relationship where the company trusts the user with the safekeeping of its content. In spite of the bad reputation and lack of control, the same entertainment industry that one day attacked it, has now found, both in the bit torrent technology and in P2P, a powerful ally. NBC is working with Pando Networks, a P2P content-delivery-technology company, to revamp its NBC Direct service (Weprin, 2008). BBC and Showtime, amongst others, are now working with the bit torrent distribution platform Vuze. And Fox, Lions Gate and MTV are all working with the original BitTorrent company.
Media scholar Mark Pesce (2005) argues that many mainstream British and American television series are enjoying commercial success in international markets because -- and not in spite of -- their massive online circulations. Pesce argues that illegal downloads helped to promote the content, closing the temporal gap between domestic and foreign distribution, and increasing consumer interest. Pesce argues that what he calls Hyperdistribution is here to stay.
The clock can't be turned back, BitTorrent can't be un-invented. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be. In the new, "flat world," where any programme produced anywhere in the world is immediately available everywhere in the world, the only sustainable edge comes from entrepreneurship and innovation.
Pesce's plea for innovation is made that more urgent by the fact that, according to a study performed in 17 countries, 29% of active technology users regularly write comments and blogs, 27% share free music and 28% access social networking sites.
Clearly, a significant portion of the public is embracing those technologies and cultural practices which support spreadable media. They want to play active roles in helping to shape the flow of media within their own social communities. This is part of what Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff are calling the "groundswell", which is being fueled by the combined force of "people's desires to connect, new interactive technologies and online economics". They describe the groundswell as a movement that can't be stopped but must be joined in order to retain currency. It has changed the power relation between companies and consumers, and, in embracing the groundswell and the spreadable media model, companies are also redefining their relationships and their sense of self. This is might be a painful process, but at the end there will be more to be gained than lost. By ceding this power to its consumers companies are loosing much of the control over their distribution, but they are gaining the value of each user's personal ties.
We may not yet have reached the point where "If it doesn't spread, it's dead," but that time is coming and companies need to be rethinking their business models now in anticipation of these shifts which will even more fundamentally alter the media landscape.
Whew! That's it folks! This is very much a work in progress -- a sketch for a book we are just starting to write. There will be many more dimensions of the argument, not to mention concrete examples, developed in the book, so stay tuned. It's been fun watching news of "spreadable media" get spread by the Twitter community and more recently through the Blogosphere. We are just starting to get substantive responses after watching a first round of "look heres" which were designed to direct people's attention to this discussion as some place where something interesting was happening. I do hope you've found it interesting and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you make from these ideas. As our model suggests, you will continue to talk about bits and pieces of these posts if they generate worth for you in your social interactions or if they create value in your professional life. You in turn will generate both value and worth for us -- in terms of generating new insights as you talk about and apply these concepts and in terms of expanding the community of people who are talking about these ideas and thus broadening the market for the book when it appears. We've done our bit here, so I hope I can count on you to do yours. :-)
This is part seven 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.Spreadability: Aesthetic and Structural Strategies
Cadbury's "Gorilla" spot -- an ad featuring nothing but a life-size Cadbury-purple Gorilla belting out the drumline to Phil Collins classic "Something in the Air Tonight" -- didn't spread just because it was "producerly." It was also incredibly amusing. There is still truth in the notion that good, compelling content remains a crucial factor in the spreadability media. If a "producerly" openness is required in order for content to be adopted into the gift economy, not all gifts are equally valuable, and thus not all content is equally spreadable. Producerly engagement encourages individuals to take on content as their own and invest their own identity in it, making it a potential tool of communication. But, in thinking back to what we outlined as some of the key motivations for spreading content, we must remember that in order to become spreadable, the content has to be able to create worth. In other words, openness and an abundance of meanings and uses may make some advertising material a potential gift, but it has to be able to communicate something that is socially meaningful before someone will give it.
Humor
If one looks at the videos that have spread most successfully, a clear pattern begins to emerge: a lot of them, like "Gorilla," are really, really funny. The success of humor should come as no surprise -- we intuitively understand that sharing funny anecdotes or cracking jokes that everyone gets is an easy way to build camaraderie and put people at ease in formal situations. Conversely, making a joke that people don't understand is a fast way to inject awkwardness into any situation and induce a sense of alienation in those left out of the punch-line. Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1991) has noted the very thin line which separates a joke from an insult: a joke expresses something the community is ready to hear; an insult expresses something it doesn't want to talk about. The act of recognizing a joke is an act of exchanging judgments about the world and thus the spread of jokes can strengthen social ties.
Humor, therefore, has the ability to define "insiders" and "outsiders" within a community: insiders may take pleasure in making fun of outsiders. Consider how jokes form around rivalries between colleges or companies: MIT folks don't really imagine that folks at Harvard are foolish but making Harvard jokes signals that we are all part of the same community and close ranks against those "up the river." But tell the joke in the wrong time or place and we can damage social relations, insulting those we sought to include, alienate those we sought to bring close to us. Humor, thus, is not simply a matter of taste: it is a vehicle by which we articulate and validate our tastes.
If we look more closely at the spread of videos, we can identify two extremely popular forms -- parody (often in partnership with certain elements of nostalgia, usually ironic) and humor that uses absurdity or shock/surprise. To be clear, these categories are by no means mutually exclusive, and successful videos quite frequently use a blend of both for added effect. Cadbury's "Gorilla" is a prime instance in which parody, nostalgia, and absurdity are blended in order to create an provocative and spreadable ad. To be fair, parody in general always has elements of absurdity, since its humor relies on the intrusion of unexpected elements into an "normal" or common situation. In "Gorilla," however, the dominant form at work is absurdity. This is established from the very beginning, by starting with a close-up of the gorilla, and pulling out to reveal the drum kit. The opening moment is one of surprise, emphasized with a sudden rise in the music, upending our expectations of what we would see following a series of shots of a gorilla's face. The strangeness of the set-up itself becomes the punch line, rather than forcing any complex interpretations or outside references as is more common in direct parodies.
This worked beautifully for Cadbury, resulting in a slew of remixes and mash-ups that helped promote the original and turn Cadbury into a sort of cultural benchmark in its own right. One user interpreted the video to be melodramatic and "cheesy," and thus created a response called "A glass and a half full of cheesiness" which redid the video using the over-the-top 80s ballad "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Another remix plays up the fact that the drummer is a gorilla, using "Welcome to the Jungle." Still more use artists ranging from Nirvana to 50 cent, the latter song not even having much by way of a traditional drum beat. Further spoofs went on to re-shoot the video with other unexpected drummers, from a tiny stuffed monkey, which plays off the fake primate aspect, to a model in her bra, which does a riff off of the strap line "a glass and a half full of joy," replacing it with "two cups full of joy." Both by depriving the video of a specific message and engaging forms that are primed for participation, "Gorilla" serves as an exemplar of a "producerly" text that spreads as more and more people have a go at remaking it for their own comic effects. Its absurdity creates gaps "wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them" (Fiske, 1989, p.104).
Parody's Promises and Perils
Another thing that "Gorilla" does well is provide different levels of engagement -- the video works whether or not you get the Phil Collins references. However, this is not always the case with humor. The strength of parody as spreadable media is the fact that it is a predominantly participatory form. That is to say, for something to be recognizable as parody requires certain cultural knowledge on the part of the viewer. This is precisely what makes parody valuable for spread -- it can express shared frameworks of reference within a community and, especially when it plays on nostalgic references, a shared history as well, thus marking those inside as those who "get" the joke. But as we mentioned briefly, this has the potential to alienate as well, and unless advertisers want the spread of their content to be siloed exclusively within small niches, they must be careful to build different levels of "insider" knowledge.
Two instances of well-executed parodies are the efforts by Coca-Cola and Toyota in addressing the gaming community, a large, but undeniably specialized interest group.
Though the message is almost painfully sincere, the spot works because of the combination of a broad message (turn bad things good by giving back, part of their "mycokerewards.com" campaign) and very specific details about the game world it was parodying. The narrative works whether or not the viewer knows anything about Grand Theft Auto, but if the countless mentions of the game in the YouTube comments were any indication, the fact that it spoofed the popular game inspired many to help spread the word. Those who "got" the video game elements, especially the more subtle ones like the fact that the character is able to pull a seemingly endless supply of random objects out of nowhere, were able to share and discuss their knowledge, as well as make further "in" jokes ("I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek of Grand Theft Auto: San Francisco").
Even beyond the different levels of gaming knowledge, there is yet another layer of cultural references -- the song used in the spot, 'You Give A Little', is from 1976 musical called Bugsy Malone, itself a parody of cinema representations of 1930s gangsters. In the comments, fans of the film lobbied to see the musical released on DVD and responded to one another, declaring their alliance to that particular fan group.
Yet another recent success was the Toyota World of Warcraft commercial. What made this one different from the previous spot (which, for all its infamy, did not reach nearly the same level of online circulation) or even the Grand Theft Auto spoof, is that it not only utilizes details and aesthetics of World of Warcraft, but refers to a very specific event in the online gaming culture's history. The 30-second spot features a group of warriors standing around planning and arming for an attack, when all of a sudden one of them goes rogue, transforms into a truck, and goes rushing off into battle.
This is a direct reference to the Leeroy Jenkins incident that became so widespread as a cultural reference that it was featured as a question on Jeopardy. Within the World of Warcraft community, the Leeroy Jenkins incident was so well-known that an add-on was created so players could "invoke the power of Leeroy Jenkins" and a play a sound-clip from the original battle video. The key to this parody was how it managed to remain faithful to the cultural cues of the game and the incident -- the deadpan, matter-of-fact voices of the players, the crazy, over-the-top aggro yelling of the "Leeroy" character, who at one point utters one of the lines from the original Leeroy Jenkins video.
There is also an additional layer of self-reflexivity, when one of the World of Warcraft players responds with an exasperated "No way. There's no trucks in Worlds of Warcraft!" All of these things work as winking invitations to those involved in World of Warcraft to get in on the joke, and as over-the-top as it is, the spot is never more over-the-top than the original, carefully avoiding coming off as a mockery. Companies must be careful, however, that in trying to address a wider audience with different levels of shared cultural knowledge that they do not make the parody itself so broad and lacking in culturally specific details that the spoof comes across as mocking, lazy, or disingenuous.
Additionally, it should be noted that the form alone will not do all the work. Take, for instance, the Mini Cooper film series "Hammer & Coop," which, despite being designed to "go viral" as a parody of 70s and 80s cop shows (Starsky & Hutch and Knight Rider), got no where near the attention of the most successful spreadable media. Despite some impressive numbers boasted by the advertising firm behind the series, the YouTube view numbers flatten out in the tens of thousands, instead of millions. As a parody, it lacked a clear interest community due to the broadness of execution. While it parodied the general aesthetic and the dominant tropes of the 70s and 80s cop genre, it failed to draw clear attention to any specifics, and in fact relied on references to other parodies of the genre at times by making the protagonist resemble Ben Stiller's character from the recent Starsky & Hutch remake. Though by no means a failure, the video's limited circulation when compared with the Coke, Cadbury, and Toyota ads, suggests that it is not only the parody form, but the quality and subtlety of execution that matters.
Information Seeking
Another characteristic of popular "viral" content is some level of ambiguity or confusion that encourages people to seek out further information. This act encourages the sharing of content as people enlist their network to help with the problem solving, an act typically known as "collective intelligence" or "crowd sourcing." In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins (2006) argues that a successful media franchise is not only a cultural attractor, drawing like minded people together to form an audience, but also a cultural activator, giving that community something to do. Figuring out such spots offer many different communities something to do and thus a reason to continue to engage with its content. Often, these spots force us to look twice because we can't believe, or understand, what it is we are seeing. We need to verify their authenticity, intent, or simply figure out how it was accomplished.
The Cadbury Gorilla spot, for instance, did this to a certain extent, with some discussion surrounding just who was in the Gorilla suit -- Phil Collins himself was cited as a possibility -- and, to a lesser extent, whether or not the Gorilla was real. The VW Polo also engaged this kind of participation , provoking questions of whether or not the ad was "real" or in any way affiliated with Volkswagen. With Volkswagen's denial of any connection to the commercial, people became wrapped up in a search for the origins of the ad, locating information on the creators, the director, and even the budget as clues to whether or not it was a publicity stunt.
Yet another interesting instance of this logic is the "homemade" Ford Mondeo "Desire" video. The ad itself is a whimsical, if somewhat ambiguous, television spot composed of a series of still and near-still shots of cars lifting off the streets of London attached to colorful bunches of helium balloons. The video was uploaded to YouTube and received a few hundred thousand hits, a decent, if unremarkable, showing. What makes the Ford Mondeo case so interesting is that almost six months after the original ad went up on YouTube, a video appeared of two guys from New Zealand tying balloons to a car until it lifted off. The video, posted by a user by the name of homeschooled2, claimed to be a "homemade" version of the Ford ad. It received far greater viral circulation than the original, clocking in over a million YouTube views and thousands of comments, as well as news media coverage, as people tried to prove whether or not what happened the video was physically possible.
Two days after the initial "homemade" video went up, homeschooled2 posted a couple of "making of" follow-up videos that showed that the video was made with aid of a crane and some clever digital editing effects, with acknowledgment of help from the "team from Ford" in the video description. Leaving the nature and extent of Ford's involvement ambiguous, the "making of" videos forced us to consider whether Ford had orchestrated the whole thing, making the original ad with the addition of a viral campaign in mind. Many of the comments surrounding the "homemade" ad were focused on determining whether it was "for real." Even after the follow-up videos that revealed both the crane and the Ford involvement were posted, clearly linked from the original, discussion continued along these lines, suggesting that it was not the answer to the question of authenticity that was the point, but the process of questioning. What is finally at stake is not knowing, but seeking answers. The "homemade" video thus spread by opening itself to this search for authenticity.
This search for authenticity, origins, or purpose can be seen as yet another way of actively constructing the meaning of content, another type of gap that encourages producerly engagement. Here, it is the process of uncovering the "truth" that is more important that what is found. Whether the VW ad is proven to be an intentional stunt or an accidental leak, whether Ford had planned the "homemade" ad from the beginning or not, whether it really is Phil Collins in the gorilla suit, the debate, allows individuals to create and justify their interpretations by asserting control over what information they have about the ad.
Unfinished Content
In all of the previous examples, the "gaps" are in the meaning of the content, whether due to general ambiguity within or hidden information surrounding the ad. Burger King's Subservient Chicken interactive video site, launched in 2004, literally engaged users in the creation of the video's content. Visitors to the site saw a video window with a man in a chicken suit standing in a room. Below, there is a text input box with the words "Get chicken just the way you like it. Type command here." Once a command is typed, it triggers a video of the man in the chicken suit performing the command. There are nearly 300 different clips in all, each set to respond to a variety of similar commands ranging from "jump" to "lay egg" to "moonwalk." Commands that the chicken doesn't understand might result in a clip expressing confusion or boredom, while commands deemed inappropriate, such as those that are sexually explicit, result in a clip of the chicken wagging his finger in disapproval. All of the video clips fit within an amateur video aesthetic, with a single, low resolution camera, pointing head on not unlike a webcam mounted atop a computer.
Unlike other so-called "interactive" video campaigns, such as the Guinness domino website in which a user solves a series of puzzles to reveal parts of the finished video, the Subservient Chicken site creates a more dynamic interaction, engaging the user in a process of actually creating the video. The site does nothing until a command has been entered. That is, the particular video (or series of clips) that is viewed, the actual output, is controlled and triggered entirely by the user. Whereas the Guinness campaign is a matter of engaging with content that is only retrieved interactively, giving up control to the participant only at the level of access, Subservient Chicken gives up control at the level of creation. Though the videos are pre-made, the content itself fundamentally incomplete. Not only is there no meaning, but there is also no action, no finished content until the user enters a command. Thus, by creating a partial work, an archive of incomplete, component parts, the Subservient Chicken campaign offered the user agency that went beyond just access and choice, but tangible participation in the work's creation.
Subservient Chicken becomes producerly by explicitly engaging the user in the creative process. It also triggers an information-gathering urge, much like the Mondeo or VW Polo ads. Users debate how its mechanism works as much as they reinterpreted its meaning or questioned its authenticity. Gamers often seek to test the limits of a game to see how much actual control and agency they can exert. Here, users wanted to push against the limits of the ad to see what flaws they could locate in its execution. Websites soon appeared when catalogued the various commands and their responses. People worked together to test the limits of application and in the process, spread the video to other interested parties, trying to expand the ranks of the puzzle solvers. According to Axel Bruns (2007), some of the key characteristics of "produsage" -- the "hybrid, user-and-producer position" occupied by participants in user-led spaces such as Wikipedia and YouTube -- include that content is "continually under development" and highly collaborative. Working together, they hoped to outsmart the original producers or at least figure out how it all worked and thereby "beat the system."
Nostalgia and Community
Earlier, we noted that commodity culture and the gift economy operate on the basis of very different sets of fantasy. We turn towards commodity culture when we seek to express our individuality, when we want to break free of social constraints, when we want to enjoy opportunities for upward mobility or shift our status and identity. The fantasies which shape the gift economy have more to do with social connectivity and especially with reaffirming existing values and preserving and promoting cultural traditions. The fantasies of a commodity culture are those of transformation while those of a gift economy are often deeply nostalgic.
When materials move from one sphere to the other, they often get reworked to reflect the values and fantasies associated with their current context. Jenkins (1992), for example, argues fan media production and circulation often centers around themes of romance, friendship, and community. These values shape the decisions fans make at every level, starting with the choice of films and television programs which seem to offer the best opportunities to explore these concepts. When fans rework program content through vidding (a genre of fan music videos) or fan fiction, they tend to draw attention to those situations where such relationships are most vividly expressed. A fan music video for Heroes, for example, centers around moments when two or more of the characters are interacting, even though the structure of the original program kept these characters apart for the better part of a season. The selected music further emphasizes the social bonds within the community and the emotional links these characters feel towards each other.
These themes surface most often in fan made media because, consciously or not, these works allow fans to explore the nature of the social bonds and emotional commitments that draw them together as a subculture. Fan-made media is media that is shared with others with common passions and often its exchange can be understood as a marker of friendship or at least sisterhood. In some cases, fans produces stories or videos to give to other fans explicitly as gifts. But in many other cases, they understand their works as a contribution to the ongoing life of their community. The community tends to nurture writers and artists, seeing each member as potentially making a creative contribution, but they value more strongly those whose works reflect the core themes of fan culture more generally.
Other content which is commonly "spread" within the gift economy has an explicitly nostalgic tone. For many baby boomers, there is enormous pleasure in watching older commercials or segments from children's programs of their childhood. This is a generation which is using eBay to repurchase all the old toys, comics, collector cards, and other stuff that their parents threw away when they went to college. The exchange of these retro or nostalgic texts helps to spark the exchange of memories, which are often bound up to personal and collective histories of consumption and spectatorship. Robert Kozinets (Brown, Kozinets, and Sherry, 2003) has explored how such "retromarketing" practices have helped to revitalized older brands, giving them greater currency in the contemporary marketplace. As Kozinets and his collaborators explain:
Long abandoned brands, such as Aladdin (lunchboxes), Beemans (gum) and Chuck Taylors (shoes), have been adroitly reanimated and successfully relaunched. Ancient commercials are being re-broadcast (Ovaltine, Alka-Seltzer) or brilliantly updated (Britney Spears sings "Come Alive" for Pepsi). On the Internet, sites devoted to marketing a variety of retro merchandise--from candy (nostalgiccandy.com) to fabric (reprodepotfabrics.com), games (allretrogames.com) to home furnishings (modfurnishings.com)--have popped up. Retro styling is de rigueur in countless product categories, ranging from cameras and colognes to telephones and trainers. Even automobiles and detergents, long the apotheosis of marketing's new-and-improved, washes-whiter, we-have-the-technology worldview, are getting in on the retroactive act, as the success of the Chrysler P.T Cruiser and Color Protection Tide daily remind us.
In many cases, the release of these retro products sparks enormous conversation wherever there are consumers old enough to have fond memories of their hay day. In other cases, online discussions of long retired brands has led to a greater appreciation of their potential within parent companies, as in the case of Quaker Oats' Quisp cereal, which had been introduced in 1965, entered the popular imagination thanks to an inventive ad campaign created by Rocky and Bullwinkle's Jay Ward and Bill Scott, and finally disappeared from national circulation in 1977, though it remained available in some regions of the country. Internet discussions and eBay transactions sparked growing consumer awareness of the brand, helping to pave the way for more aggressive marketing effort by Quaker, including the development and online sale of a gourmet sized package of the crunchy sugary cereal.
While online fans contest the authenticity of the re-issued product, they also share personal memories of their childhood enjoyment of the product and in the process, spread the news of its reissue to others in their social circles. In discussing the values which shape successful retro-brands, Kozinets and colleagues describe something very close to the animating fantasies of the gift economy:
Utopianism is perhaps the hallmark of the retro-brand. The brand must be capable of mobilizing an Elysian vision, of engendering a longing for an idealized past that is satisfied through consumption....Solidarity is an important unifying quality of the retro-brand. Whether as extreme as a cargo cult or as moderate as fictive kinship, the brand must inspire among its users the sense of belonging to a community.
References:
Brown, Stephen, Robert V. Kozinets, and John F. Sherry, Jr. (2003). "Sell Me the Old, Old Story: Retromarketing Management and the Art of Brand Revival," Journal of Consumer Behavior, June, 2. pp.85-98.
Douglas, Mary (1991) "Jokes," in Rethinking Popular Culture, Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.291-311.
Fiske, John. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
This is part six 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.
Spreadable Content
Thus far, we have examined some of the technological and social conditions that allow for media to spread, but it remains clear that not all media content and materials are equally spreadable. Nor it is simply a matter of "good" or "interesting" content -- we do not pass on every bit of interesting information or every clever video. Content is spread based not on an individual evaluation of worth, but on a perceived social value within community or group.
Not all good content is good for sharing. In a gift economy, the gifts we share say something about our perceptions of the person we are passing them to as much as they express our own tastes and interests. Most importantly, the exchange of gifts serves to reinforce relations within the community and a badly chosen or ill-considered gift can cause hard feelings. Above all, we don't circulate gifts because advertisers ask us to do so -- and ideally, we'd like to minimize the hard sell contained in such gifts. We might well give someone a shirt with a designer label or even a T-Shirt which promoted a favorite film, but we are unlikely to stuff a catalog in the gift box in hopes that our friend will go back and buy more from the same company.
So, if we want to predict what content will "spread," we have to develop a fuller understanding of the ways that the circulation of information may strengthen or damage social relations. We must first come to understand what function the circulation of content and information serves within a social network -- that is, what is the relationship of the community to the materials that it circulates? From there, we can determine the necessary characteristics that advertising content must exhibit in order to have potential for use within a gift economy. We can then begin to draw out aesthetic and structural forms that lend themselves particularly well to this process.
What makes content worth spreading
There's a lot we can learn about how content circulates online by examining the existing literature on how rumors spread in face-to-face communities. Patricia A Turner (1994) has studied the circulation of rumors within the African American community. Turner makes the distinction between rumors, which are informal and temporary constellations of information, and contemporary legends, which are "more solidified rumors" (Turner 1994, p. 5) and maintain a reasonable consistency in narrative content as they are passed. Her description of such rumors bear a striking resemblance to what we've come to think of as Word of Mouth advertising -- testimonial accounts about a product or service -- and the circulation of advertising content itself that now most often characterizes "viral" media.
Many of Turner's cases center upon commercial products and corporations. In particular, the rumor that a number of different companies were owned by the Ku Klux Klan remained one of the most persistent and widespread in the African-American community during the period of her research. Various companies were implicated in such rumors, ranging from food and consumable products (Church's Chicken, Marlboro cigarettes) to clothing companies (Troop). Some were private enterprises and others public and none had any explicitly racist policies outside of marketing predominantly to African American populations. Church's chicken, for instance, managed to rally the support of the NAACP president at the time (Turner, 1994, p.96).
These rumors inflicted serious damage on these brands, resulting in "severe financial losses": Church's was forced to sell and Troop went bankrupt. (Turner, 1994, p.96). No sooner did one company collapse under the weight of the community's suspicions than new rumors of KKK associations were directed against other, similar companies. Though such claims may not have had much basis in fact, the accusations, Turner tells us, were far from random. In fact, the companies were linked by:
certain key elements . . . Namely, white-owned firms (with) . . . advertising directed solely at black consumers, that established nationwide franchises selling popular but nonessential commodities in primarily black neighborhoods (Turner, 1994, p.97).
Thus, what perpetuated the circulation of rumors about these companies had to do with what their products represented for their consumers. As Turner explains later in describing an instance in which the Church's Chicken rumor was successfully passed:
By sharing (the story) with my informant, (the person telling the story) was solidifying the bonds between them and, in a sense, bolstering their identity as potential victims of racist activity; in addition, a spotlight was trained on the potential aggressors, for one must never forget who the enemy is. My informant accepted the rumor because it functioned as a metaphor for the struggle he was facing in his attempt to establish himself as a man in American society (Turner, 1994, p.106-107)
By circulating the story, community members are able affirm their commonality and draw clear lines of who is friend and who is foe, express the shared concerns of that group (racism and discriminatory treatment) and bring their anxieties under control by responding to a symbolic embodiment of their concerns. These rumors reflect the reality of a world where racism often no longer takes the direct form of a KKK rally but may be implicit, tacit, and thus hard to locate or overcome. They are responding to what other social critics have called "enlightened racism" -- that is, racism which is recognized by its affects but not by its goals. Though clearly specific to this particular community, the example here offers valuable insight into the social factors that motivate sharing information and content within communities in general:
To bolster camaraderie and articulate the (presumably shared) experiences and values that identify oneself as belong to a particular community ("bolstering their identity")
To gather information and explain difficult to understand events or circumstances.
To establish the boundaries of an "in-group".
These same factors may come into play when fans advocate for a franchise or consumers promote a brand.
They are doing so because the brand express something about themselves or their community.
They are doing so because the brand message serves some valued social function.
They are doing so because the entertainment content gives expressive form to some deeply held perception or feeling about the world.
They are doing so because individual responses to such content helps them determine who does or does not belong in their community.
If the same content is passed between multiple communities, it is because that content serves relevant functions for each of those communities, not because it serves some lowest common denominator or universal function. Consider, for example, the campaign commercials produced by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Starting as a dark horse with limited cash on hand, Huckabee sought to insure his content would spread to multiple communities of potential supporters. One such spot featured action star Chuck Norris. After an initially limited television buy, this spot spread through YouTube and ultimately became the focus for news coverage as a consequence.
What made Norris an inspired choice for such a spot was that his name recognition worked well in several radically different social networks. On the one hand, Norris had increasingly become a recurring reference point for jokes on late night comedy shows and had become a camp icon, inspiring sites such as Chuck Norris Facts. Here, deploying Chuck Norris showed that Huckabee was cool, that he understood and embraced some aspects of contemporary popular culture, and as a consequence, the spot helped to defer anxieties which might surround his status as a Baptist Minister, allowing him to escape the cultural war discourse that surrounded previous evangelical candidates.
On the other hand, Norris himself had a solid base of support among evangelical Christians. He writes a weekly column for the conservative news service WorldNetDaily on which he announced that were he to be president he would "Tattoo an American flag with the words, 'In God we trust,' on the forehead of every atheist." Norris is an outspoken Christian and has actually written several books on the subject. The Norris/Huckabee spots, thus, managed to speak to two very different communities, religious conservatives and an internet savvy young audience. Both saw something that spoke to them and many decided that it was content worth spreading.
To give a more immediate example, we might think of the way the VW Polo spoof ad was circulated. The spot itself featured a man of in determinant but Arabic descent pulling up alongside a cafe in a VW Polo. After muttering a few indistinguishable words, he presses his thumb down on a detonator, at which point we cut to an exterior shot that shows the Polo containing the entire explosion. The spot was never intended as a legitimate advert for VW, but rather part of a show reel that was leaked onto the web.
First, the spot was commented upon and passed among a number of different niche groups online, used as a way to express a number of different sentiments, but all with the purpose of articulating some form of value system or viewpoint. There were a number of blogs that posted the video in the spirit in which it was probably intended, citing its strength as an advertisement for being memorable and one discussion board post framed it with the saying that "anything worth taking seriously is worth making fun of," aligning the video with the humor tactics of popular media like The Daily Show.
But a quick look at the trackbacks to one of the early posts on the blog Whizbang, which range from "disgusting" to "humor to the rescue," suggest that as the video spread more widely, it generated a wider range of interpretations of its message. Some blogs used it as a sort of war rally, with comments such as "perhaps we should start issuing (the Polo) to British forces" and "If only we could ship an entire fleet of these things to the Islamofascists world-wide." On the other side, it was framed as offensive and tasteless; It was pointed out on the Snopes.com article that the man in the commercial not only had a "distinctive middle eastern appearance," but was also wearing a checkered keffiyeh that was reminiscent of Yasser Arafat, suggesting a pointed political message at work.
One blog that specializes in media surrounding the Middle East juxtaposed a description of the video against an article about a poll which "highlights anti-Israeli feeling in Germany", while another site listed the video as the number one most racist commercial, even beating out ads from white supremacy organizations. The commercial was spread through a number of different interest communities with a range of opinions, but what they all have in common was that each used the ad to articulate specific values and agendas. The blog about racist commercials, for instance, was able to express anxiety over a long-standing pattern of negative stereotyping of various minorities. Other blogs that took a pro-war stance were able to use their attitude towards the situation portrayed in the video to create us/them distinctions on both a national level ("we" versus the "Islamofascists") and an ideological one, implicitly drawing a line between those who support the message and those who find the message offensive.
As we have seen, not all of these communities are as clearly defined as the African-American community Turner studied. Some communities may be pools, organized around shared interests, ranging from politics to pet care. Some may be webs, organized through the crisscrossing social affiliations of them members. And some may be hubs, structured around a central personality and their friends and followers. In some cases, the motives which shape the groups activities are clearly articulated and there is an ongoing conversation about what it means to be a member of such a community. They may be very aware of their shared agenda and have a critical perspective on what kinds of values shape their transactions. They may also have a vivid conception of the borders of their community and may aggressively police them against those who do not share their views.
They may have ambivalent or even hostile feelings about the circulation of meaningful content beyond the borders of their own community. Heather Hendershot (2004), for example, has documented the complex set of social negotiations which occur around the production and distribution of Christian music. She finds that this music is perceived as serving two very different goals -- reaffirming the shared values within Christian communities and serving as a vehicle for "witnessing" to those who have not yet accept Christ. Yet, as artists sought to insure their spread beyond the borders of the self-defined Christian community and thus reach potential new members, they often had to downplay those messages which signaled their membership, a process which often provoked ire from their most hardcore fans. The strategies which insured their circulation in the cultural mainstream might cause them to lose the support of their initial niche market.
Hendershot documents how different artists reconcile these contradictory pushes and pulls on their performance, making peace with the decision to remain within or move beyond their initial base of support. In each of these cases, though, the same core principle holds: the sharing of content with others is fundamentally an act of communication within and beyond cultural communities. When advertising spreads, it is because the community has embraced it as a resource for expressing its shared beliefs or pursuing its mutual interests. Community members have embraced the content because it allows them to say something that matters to them, often something about their relations to other community members. In that sense, it has acquired worth. But the worth of an advertisement may and often does differ from one community to another.
Spreadable Texts
As this circulation occurs, the original producer no longer is able to determine what a particular piece of content means because they are no longer able to control the context within which it is seen. Meanings proliferate as people pass the video on, inserting it into a variety of different conversations. Like an elaborate game of telephone, the message morphs and mutates as each successive viewer sees not the original intent, but the interpretations just prior to their own.
This kind of intervention, however, is not only the product of circulation, it is also the required precondition: content will spread only when it can serve the particular communicative purposes of a given community or group, and only community members can determine what those might be. Corporations cannot artificially build communities around their brands and products, but rather must allow their brands to be taken up by pre-existing communities by creating content that supports and sustains this kind of expressive appropriation. In other words, in the spreadable media landscape, companies must find ways not simply to motivate consumers to talk about their brands but also enable them to talk through their brands.
This is, of course, not a novel concept. Advertising, as Grant McCracken (1998) notes, has always been a tool for mapping generalized cultural meanings onto specific brands and those brands must be meaningfully inserted into the life-world of their consumers. Advertising may convince us that particular products may become good gifts because they convey shared values. Yet, in the spreadable media content, the advertisement may itself become a gift which we pass along to others we care about. As they do so, they remake the advertisement -- sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively -- to reflect their perceptions of themselves and of the people to whom they are giving it.
Right now, many companies fear this loss of centralized control over the circulation and interpretation of their brand messages. They want to hold onto the idea that a brand may carry a highly restricted range of meanings. But in doing so, they run the risk of removing the value of the brand as a vehicle for social and personal expression. They produce commodities which we can not consume and in the long run, they will become products we will not buy. So, the challenge is how to rethink advertising strategies to generate brand messages that support these processes of personalization and localization.
How to Make Content "Spreadable"
If sharing and spreading content is a sign of its popularity, then to understand what makes videos spread, we must first figure it out what it means for media to be "popular." In Understanding Popular Culture, media and communications scholar John Fiske (1989), draws a distinction between mass culture, that is culture which is mass produced and distributed, and popular culture, that is culture which has been meaningfully integrated into the everyday lives of consumers. This act of turning mass media into popular media involves "the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures" (Fiske, 1989, p.23).
We must be careful here not to confuse messages with meanings. For the purposes of this discussion, messages refer to specific ideas that can be encoded into a media text by its creators, while meanings are the active interpretations of the audience, which may or may not align with the intended message. To return again to our previous example, in the VW Polo ad spoof, the intended message was that the creators were witty, creative, and irreverent. The meanings that were drawn from it were varied, ranging from patriotic to racist. Messages are encoded into a text; meanings are decoded from the text.
Fiske argues we produce culture when we integrate products and texts into our everyday life. When we hear a song in a music video, it is part of mass culture. When we sing it in the shower, we turn it into popular culture. When it is under the control of its producers, it is mass culture. When it is under the control of its consumers, it is popular culture. Fiske, thus, puts strong emphasis on the act of interpretation which occurs as a text gets embraced by consumers. He argues a text becomes part of popular culture when consumers recognize and embrace its potential as a vehicle for expressing their own meanings. To read this through the lens of the gift economy, it is at that moment when the commodity becomes a gift and when its worth gets recognized.
Cultural products or commodities, like videos, are simply what Fiske calls the "raw material" for the production of popular culture. What makes culture popular, both widely accepted by and belonging to the public, is the ability of people to use it to express, define, and understand their social and cultural relationships. To bring this to "viral video", the video itself can be seen as a cultural commodity, but its user-controlled circulation transforms it into a cultural resource. In other words, we cannot think of popular culture as a top-down process of mass marketing, but a bottom-up process of creative interaction with cultural commodities, a relationship with media that is neither simply consumption nor production, but an active negotiation between the two.
Producerly Texts: Cultural Commodities that become Cultural Resources
To imagine this simply, a video will become popular if it allows to consumers to participate in the production of meaning and is transformed into a cultural resource through which they communicate something that matters to other members of their community. This sharing of texts and meanings becomes the basis for social affiliations and often re-articulates or reconfirms the group's shared values. Fiske argues that some texts are more apt to produce new meanings than others. He calls such texts producerly, arguing that a producerly text:
offers itself up to popular production . . . it has loose ends that escape its control, its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them, its gaps are wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them -- it is, in a very real sense, beyond its own control" (Fiske, 1989, p.104).
In other words, a media product doesn't have to give up having a clearly defined message, but in so far as it limits its potential meanings, it also limits its potential circulation. Propaganda is not producerly because it sets too rigid a set of limits over its interpretation. A text which articulated an overly confusing or completely incomprehensible message might also not be producerly because it would not offer sufficient resources for consumers. The VW Polo ad, on the other hand, was highly producerly; It had an intent and a set of preferred meanings, but in the end it was left ambiguous enough, with enough open-ended details, that it could be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on the contexts into which it was spread and the ways it was deployed by consumers within localized conversations. A producerly video then is one that can be enjoyed and accessed on multiple levels. It can be taken at face value, but also leaves openings for deeper, more active interpretation.
Fiske's notion of the "producerly" introduces the general guiding principle for transforming cultural commodities into cultural resources: open, loose ends and gaps that allow the viewer to introduce their own background and experiences. Such openness allows them to convey something of themselves as they pass the content along, transforming the video into a resource for self-expression. While the media industries cannot themselves produce cultural resources, they can produce cultural commodities that are primed to be used as cultural resources. Such materials only become gifts when we choose to give them to someone else.
Advertising as "Producerly" Cultural Commodities
Such texts must be producerly, must be open to multiple interpretations and use, before they are spread. The tight control over the message doesn't just break down through the video's circulation. The loss of the producer's control over meaning is a precondition for the video's circulation. When people feel that they can have a stake in the content, when it can be used to represent themselves and their views somehow, they are inclined to share a video with others. We must keep in mind, however, that a commercial is not just any type of video. More so that general art or entertainment, commercials have an explicit functional purpose -- to help position material goods within a cultural context.
Publicity and advertising is used, for instance, to ensure that a particular brand of designer sunglasses evokes a sense of "coolness" within a particular niche of consumers. Historically, this has required much tighter control over their potential messages and thus the idea that consumers may appropriate and rework brand messages may generate a high degree of anxiety. Media producers worry about losing control. The reality is that they have already lost control; consumers can take their brands and do with them whatever they want. And the more producers do to reign in this grassroots creativity, the more they will take away the "worth" of their goods and devalue their content in the eyes of those consumers.
Therefore, in order to become cultural commodities that can be made "producerly," ads must sacrifice some of their functional purpose. We don't post and share clips just because of what we have to say about the ad, but also because of what it might have to say about us, so the ad must be capable of users express something beyond their affinity for the product it promotes. Only when commercials have enough ambiguity in meaning that they give up control of their promotional function can they develop the gaps and spaces to becomes producerly. When that happens, instead of giving meaning to a pair of sunglasses, the ad itself becomes a cultural commodity not unlike a pair of designer sunglasses that we can "wear."
We can post the video or the widget on our social network sites, say, and in so doing, signal something about ourselves. But in such a context, the brand messages does not entirely disappear. Each new viewer encounters it afresh and is reminded of the brand and its potential meanings for them. Users remain aware of the advertisement's sources and goals and thus they become part of the process by which meaning transfer occurs. We might consider, for example, what happens when the template created by the PC vs. Mac advertising campaign gets used as the basis for parody videos which apply its images to distinguish between other kinds of products, say, between Nintendo and Sony Playstation, between DC and Marvel, or between Republicans and Democrats. When we see these other uses of the template, we still recall, on some level, its original function as a way of promoting Apple. The repurposing allows the brand iconography to spread to new contexts, even as it offers us a way back to its original source.
References:
Fiske, John. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge.
Hendershot, Heather (2004). Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McCracken, Grant (1988) Culture and Consumption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
