Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives: An Interview with Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Part Two)

A reader asked me whether the book included a discussion of soap opera, which would seem to meet many criteria of vast narrative, but doesn't fall as squarely in the geek tradition as science fiction series like Doctor Who or superhero comics like Watchmen. Pat does include a brief note about his own experience watching soaps with his grandmother. What do you see as the relationship between "vast narratives" and the serial tradition more generally?

Soap opera is definitely a missed opportunity for us. We had intended to have at least one essay on the subject, but it fell by the wayside as our contributors came aboard and our word count ballooned. We had also intended to have more essays on more purely literary topics; as it stands, Bill McDonald's essay on Thomas Mann seems a little lonely in the middle of all that television. We had wanted at least an essay on Faulkner, probably one on Dickens, and some others. But it's exactly there that Third Person would have started to tip over into more traditional areas of literary history, theory, and narratology. We think one of the strengths of the series is the unexpected juxtaposition of very different fields and genres. So in the end, we opted more for the digital.

The serial tradition seems to us to be a huge and maybe indispensible part of most "vast narratives." Comic books and television especially follow very naturally from the serial tradition exemplified by Dickens. In all cases, the story unfolds in the public eye, as it were: David Copperfield appeared in monthly installments, as do most modern comic books; TV serials are generally weekly. In all cases there's ample opportunity for the public to respond to plot developments and offer feedback.

In David Copperfield, for instance, you have the strange character Miss Mowcher, who appears first as a rather sinister and repulsive figure, but when she reappears is pixie-ish, friendly, and plays a role in helping David. What had happened in the meantime is that the real-world analogue of Miss Mowcher (Catherine Dickens's foot doctor) had recognized herself in the installment and threatened to sue. And as we understand it, the characters of Ben on Lost and Helo on the new Battlestar Galactica were both intended to be short-term minor characters, but proved so popular with viewers that they were promoted to central recurring positions.

There are plenty of artistic problems that arise from serialized storytelling, one of the most serious of which is the potential for unbalancing the narrative. Writing an unserialized novel allows you to edit, revise and generally overhaul the story before the public sees it. To serialize a story forces you to go with your thoughts of the moment, which may change before you finish the story, whether because of new artistic ideas of your own or because of outside forces (TV cast changes, editorial shifts in direction, Miss Mowchers, etc.). The Wire is one of the strongest televised serials ever aired--arguably it's simply the best--and that show was blessed with a strong writing staff with long-term narrative plans, substantial freedom from editorial direction, and as far as we're aware, very few unplanned cast changes. David Simon and the other creators like to talk about Dickens in reference to the show, but The Wire is in fact much more narratively balanced and formal in structure than most of Dickens's novels.

At the same time, a lot of exciting art happens in exactly the improvisational space that seriality provides. The writing staff on David Milch's Deadwood seems to have, on a daily basis and under Milch's direction, group-improvised nearly all of the Deadwood scripts. The end result is a constantly surprising story that still somehow appears as a tightly-structured drama, even down to following, more often than not, the Aristotelian unities of time and place. (And we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that Sean O'Sullivan does great work discussing seriality both in his Third Person essay, and in his essay in David Lavery's collection Reading Deadwood.)

First Person experimented with placing a significant number of its essays on line and encouraging greater dialogue between the contributing authors. What did you learn from that experiment?

One thing we learned is that putting a book's contents online, which previously had mostly been done with monographs, could also work with edited collections. MIT Press was happy enough with the results that we followed this practice with Second Person and will do it again with Third Person. We'd like to see this practice expand in the world of academic publishing, since we now have some evidence that it doesn't make the economic model collapse (it's other things that are doing that, unfortunately, to some areas of academic publishing).

Another thing we learned is that, while blogs were already rising in prominence by the time we started working with Electronic Book Review on this portion of the project, the kind of conversation encouraged by something like EBR isn't obviated by the blogosphere. In general, blog conversation is pretty short-term. People tend to comment on the most recent post, or one that's still on the front page, and this is only in part because blog authors often turn off commenting for older posts, as an anti-spam measure. EBR, on the other hand, solicits and actively edits its "riposte" contributions (returning them to authors for expansion and revision, for example) and ends up fostering a kind of conversation that still moves more quickly than the letters section of a print journal, but with some greater deliberation and extension in time than generally happens on blogs. These different forms of online academic conversation end up complementing each other nicely.

As you note, comics have had a long history of managing complex narrative worlds. What lessons might comics have to offer the new digital entertainment media?

Digital media has already absorbed a lot of helpful lessons. In Third Person this can be seen in Matt Miller's chapter on City of Heroes and City of Villains, which goes into depth on how Cryptic translated comics tropes into workable MMO content.

The place to speculate might actually be the reverse of the question: what comics could take from contemporary digital media. We don't have any idea what a Comics Industry 2.0 would look like, but we suppose it's possible that DC and Marvel could take some of the pressure off themselves by integrating user-generated content of some sort; overseeing, funding and formalizing fan web sites, or who knows.

Every so often the industry does try something like this: back when we were growing up, there was a comic series called Dial "H" for Hero, in which a couple of kids had some sort of magic amulets that would turn them into different random superheroes when activated. The twist was that all of the names, costumes and powers of the heroes were reader-generated. Readers would send in letters with drawings and descriptions of superheroes they'd invented, and then those heroes would be integrated, with the appropriate credit, into later issues. This sounds extremely childish, and it was. There were no opportunities for readers to affect anything except the most replaceable elements of the story. (Although we do give DC credit for making it a boy-girl team, so that one of each pair of superheroes created would be female. Trying to build female readership is an ongoing problem for the big companies.) Later in the '80s, DC did give readers the opportunity to alter the narrative, when they ran the "A Death in Family" storyline in Batman. In this case, the Joker attacks, beats and blows up Jason Todd, the unlikeable second Robin, and DC established a 1-900 number which readers could call to vote on whether Todd lived or died. Well, they voted for him to die, and so he did, but the whole thing is regarded, rightly, as pretty distasteful, and they never bothered with anything like it again.

So the impulse toward interactivity exists in the industry, though it's never really gone anywhere. We suspect that some type of formalized interactivity will be a part of the comics industry going forward. What it will look like, we don't know.

More to Come

Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives: An Interview with Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Part One)

One of the first classes I will teach through my new position at USC will be Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment. I've already started lining up an amazing slate of guest speakers and have put together a tentative syllabus in the class. The primary textbook will be Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, which was edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Many of you who have been working with games studies classes may already know the first two volumes in the MIT Press series which Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin have edited. I've been lucky enough to be included in two of the three books in the series: my essay "Game Design as Narrative Architecture" was included in First Person and my student, Sam Ford, interviewed me about continuity and multiplicity in contemporary superhero comics for Third Person. So, I am certainly biased, but I have found this series to be consistently outstanding.

A real strength is its inclusiveness. By that I mean, both that the editors reach out far and wide to bring together an eclectic mix of contributors, including journalists, academics, and creative artists working across a range of media, and I also mean that they have a much broader span of topics and perspectives represented than in any other games studies collection I know. They clearly understand contemporary games as contributing something important to a much broader set of changes in the ways our culture creates entertainment and tells stories.

For my money, Third Person is the richest of the three books to date and a very valuable contribution to the growing body of critical perspectives we have on what I call "Transmedia Entertainment", Christy Dena calls "Cross-Platform Entertainment", Frank Rose calls "Deep Media," and they call "vast narratives." Each of us is referring to a different part of the elephant but we are all pointing to an inter-related set of trends which are profoundly impacting how stories get told and circulated in the contemporary media landscape. I found myself reading through this collection in huge gulps, scarcely coming up for air, excited to be able to incorporate some of these materials into my class, and certain they will be informing my own future writing in this space.

And I immediately reached out to Pat and Noah about being interviewed for this blog. In the exchange that follows, the two editors speak in a single voice, much as they do in the introduction to the books, but they also signal some of their own differing backgrounds and interests around this topic. The interview is intended to place the new book in the context of the series as a whole, as well as to foreground some of the key discoveries that emerge through their creative and imaginative juxtapositions of different examples of "vast narratives."

Can you explain the relationship between the three books in the series? How has your conception of digital storytelling shifted over the series?

First Person was originally conceived as an attempt to reflect and influence the direction of the field, at a particular moment, while also trying to do some work toward broadening interdisciplinary conversation (in the vein of Noah and Nick Montfort's historically-focused New Media Reader). As such, most of the essays grew out of papers and panel discussions from conferences, especially Digital Arts and Culture and SIGGRAPH. This is also why we used the multi-threaded structure--in order to preserve some of the back-and-forth of ideas characteristic of any emerging field. Unfortunately the book didn't come out as quickly as we hoped, and we were a little worried that it would become more of a history. But it turned out that many of the issues the field was concerned with at the time (e.g., the ludology/narratology stuff) remained, and still remain, things that people entering the field have to think through--so readers still find the book useful today.

That said, we learned an important lesson about the potential for delay, and about thinking of the long-term relevance of a project, so for Second Person we very consciously tried to commission a book that we didn't conceive of as trying to influence the conversation of a particular moment. Pat was working at Fantasy Flight Games when 1P was released, and had been thinking a lot about the relationship of stories to games, especially board games and tabletop RPGs. We both thought it would be an interesting area to explore, especially considering that there wasn't much out there, to our knowledge, that covered similar ground. So the idea was to explicitly draw connections between hobby games, digital media, and other similar performance structures (like improvisational theater) and meaning-making systems (like artificial intelligence research). It was much less "of the moment" than 1P and to our minds, that's when the series really started to take its shape.

Third Person wound up being something of a hybrid of the first two books. Like 2P, it addresses some underserved areas of game design and experience--such as Matt Kirschenbaum's essay on tabletop wargames--but again we're trying a bit to change the terms of the discussion, arguing for a broader conception of our topics. While 2P may have been one of the first books to integrate real discussion of tabletop and live performance games with computer games, its concept is one that goes down easily with most people in the field (we even got reviewed in Game Developer magazine). 3P is a bit of a challenge to digitally-oriented people who think about their field as "new"--or exclusively concerned with issues related to computational systems--because we believe people making digital work have something to learn from people doing television, comic books, novels and the other forms discussed in the book. And we also believe there's something to be learned in the opposite direction as well, and from continuing to connect projects from "high art" and commercial sources. We're very curious to see what the reception turns out to be for this volume, which we view as completing a kind of trilogy.

One striking feature of this series has been the intermingling of perspectives from creative artists and scholars. What do you think each brings to our understanding of these topics? Why do you think it is important to create a dialogue between theory and practice?

Broadly speaking, our scholarly essays often provide a big-picture view of a subject, providing context and analysis, and our artists' essays provide a more detail-oriented, granular view, usually of just a single work or small number of works. Inevitably these distinctions become pretty blurry; for example, we intended John Tynes's 2P essay to be strictly about the Delta Green design process, but he wound up providing a wide-ranging, highly analytical piece about game design philosophy--which is wonderful! Later, in 3P, we gave Delta Green co-creator Adam Scott Glancy the same mandate, and got something of the same result, with a history of the Delta Green property mixed in with wider ideas of narrative strategy.

This is one of the benefits of getting all these contributors side by side in the same series of books; you can see ideas from one person reflected in very different contexts, or, in the case of Delta Green, how the somewhat different design philosophies of two of the three Delta Green creators combined to create the property. This is then situated in the larger context created by the contributions of other creators and scholars, working in a variety of forms related to our themes, resulting in something far richer than one author could deliver.

Incidentally, one notable thing we've found about hobby games designers, is that they're very willing to talk about what goes into their design process, but they're seldom asked! That's a result of the anemic academic attention paid to the field. For literary critics, a novelist's or poet's design process, philosophy, and narrative strategies are all legitimate areas of study (even if "author studies" is now rather out of fashion). Even video game designers are getting some respect these days. But the hobby games industry is too small, it seems, to have merited much attention. This despite the fact that many current video game designers started in the hobby games field: Tynes, Greg Costikyan, Ken Rolston, Eric Goldberg, etc.

While a central focus of the books has been on digital media, especially games, you have always sought to define the topics broadly enough to be able to include work on other kinds of media. In the case of Third Person, these include science fiction novels, comic books, and television series. What do we learn by reading the digital in relation to these other storytelling tradition?

When we talk about "digital media" or "computational media," we're talking about something that is both media and part of a computational system (usually software). As we see it, the lessons digital projects can learn from non-digital projects are both in their aspects that are akin to traditional media (for example, how they handle stories and universes constructed by multiple authors) and in their systems (how they function--and how these operations shape audience experience). The articulation between the two, of course, is key.

We're certainly not the first people to note this. For example, it's been suggested (Noah remembers hearing it first from Australian media scholar Adrian Miles) that digital media creators often fret about a problem well known to soap opera authors: What to do with an audience who may miss unpredictable parts of the experience? Obviously the problem isn't exactly the same, because one case is organized around time (audiences may miss episodes or portions of episodes) and the other is organized by more varied interaction (e.g., selective navigation around a larger space). But there is a common authorial move that can be made in both instances: Finding ways to present any major narrative information in different ways in multiple contexts, so that the result isn't boring for those who see things encyclopedically and doesn't make those with less complete experiences feel they've lost the thread.

Of course, what the above formulation leaves out is that this problem doesn't have to be solved purely on the media authoring side, and perhaps isn't best solved there. Another approach is to design the computational system to ensure that the necessary narrative experiences are had, as appropriate for the path taken by any particular audience. This requires thinking through the authorial problem ("How do we present this in many different contexts?"). But ideally it also involves moving that authoring problem to the system level ("How can we design a component of this system that will appropriately deliver this narrative information in many different contexts, rather than having to write each permutation by hand?"). And, if successful, you don't have to solve the difficult authoring problem of keeping your audience from being bored because they're getting variations on the same narrative information over and over. Then you can use the attention they're giving you to present something more.

Obviously, this isn't easy to do. Computationally-driven forms of vast narrative are still rapidly evolving (at least on the research end of things). But the basic issues are ones that non-digital media have addressed in a rich variety of ways. Even the question of what kinds of experiences one might create in this "vast" space is one that we need to think about broadly--it's a mistake to think we already know the answer--and looking at non-digital work broadly is a part of that.

You write, "Today we are in the process of discovering what narrative potentials are opened by computation's vastness." Is that what gives urgency to this focus on "authoring and exploring vast narratives"?

Personally, that's an important part of our interest. But it's certainly not the only source of urgency. As the variety of chapters in the book chronicles, in part, we're currently seeing exciting creativity in many forms of vast narrative. One might argue that something enabled by computers--digital distribution--is part of the reason for this (e.g., television audiences and producers are perhaps more willing to invest in vast narrative projects when "missing an episode" is less of a concern). But we think of this as distinct from things enabled by computation (permutation, interaction, etc.), especially because some systems (such as tabletop games) carry out their computation through human effort, rather than electronically.

How are you defining "vast narratives"? What relationship do you see between this concept and what others are calling "transmedia storytelling," "deep media," or "crossplatform entertainment"?

Definition isn't a major focus of our project, but there are certain elements of vast narrative that especially attract our attention.

First, we're interested in what we call "narrative extent," which we think of as works that exceed the normal narrative patterns for works of a particular sort. So, for example, The Wire doesn't have that many episodes as police procedurals go (CSI has many more), but it attains unusual narrative extent by making the season--or arguably the entire run of five seasons--rather than the episode, the meaningful boundary.

Second, vast narrative is interesting to us in the many projects that confront issues of world and character continuity. Often this connects to practices of collaborative authorship--including those in which the authors work in a manner separated in time and space, and in many cases with unequal power (e.g., licensor and licensee).

Third, and connected to the previous, we're interested in large cross-media narrative projects, especially those in which one media form is not privileged over the others. So, for example, the universe of Doctor Who is canonically expanded by television, of course, but also by novels and audio plays. On the other end of the spectrum, Richard Grossman's Breeze Avenue project includes a 3-million-word, 4,000 volume novel, as well as forms as different as a website and a performance with an instrument constructed from 13 automobiles--all conceived as one project.

Fourth, the types of computational possibilities we've discussed a bit already, which are present not only in games (we have essays from prominent designers and interpreters of both computer and tabletop games) but also in electronic literature projects and the simulated spaces of virtual reality and virtual worlds.

Fifth, multiplayer/audience interaction is a way of expanding narrative experiences to vast dimensions that we've included in all three books--including alternate-reality, massively-multiplayer, and tabletop role-playing games. Here the possibilities for collaborative construction and performance are connected to those enabled by computational systems (game structures are fundamentally computational) but exceed them in a variety of ways.

Given all of this, it's probably fair to say that our interests are a superset of some of the other concepts you mention. For example, your writing on transmedia storytelling certainly informs our thinking about vast narrative--but something like a tabletop RPG campaign is "vast" for us without being "transmedia" for you.

Patrick Harrigan is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor. He has worked on new media projects with Improv Technologies, Weatherwood Company, and Wrecking Ball Productions, and as Marketing Director and Creative Developer for Fantasy Flight Games. He is the co-editor of The Art of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (2006, with Brian Wood), and the MIT Press volumes Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (2009), Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game (2004), all with Noah Wardrip-Fruin. He has also written a novel, Lost Clusters (2005).

Noah Wardrip-Fruin works as a digital media creator, critic, and technology researcher with a particular interest in fiction and playability. His projects have been presented by conferences, galleries, arts festivals, and the Whitney and Guggenheim museums. He is author of the forthcoming Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies(2009) and has edited four books, including Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), with Pat Harrigan, and The New Media Reader (2003), with Nick Montfort. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Expressive Intelligence Studio in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

My Secret Life as a Klingon (Part Two)

So, there's a second trip out to Hollywood, this time in order to try on the actual costumes, to make sure that they fit. And I got to wander around through the costume racks, taking note of references to a Cantina sequence and a Vulcan Tea Ceremony, among other things. I overheard the people working there chatting about what color lingerie the blue-skinned Orion girl should wear for the movie. (Pink really would have been a bad choice!) And I got fit for my costume. Now, by this point, I was starting to get a little anxious about how I am going to pull off a Klingon part when the other Klingons were a good foot taller than me, sometimes more, and most of them naturally had much broader builds. I was going to be the scrawniest Klingon in the Galaxy. They kept reassuring me that they would build me up through the padded costume, though I am fully aware that they are going to be using padded costumes for the other guys too, so we were locked into an armour race that I was never going to win.

That said, the costume they gave me was breathtaking. They had designed helmets for the extras to wear which have built in head-bumps so that they wouldn't have to spend hours in a make-up chair with each of us. I had a floor length great coat made out of a rubbery material designed to look like elephant skin or some alien equivalent. I have big shiny black boots.

Once I put all of this on and looked in the mirror, I felt Klingon down to the souls of my feet.

But there was one small problem: the pants they gave me were way too baggy and kept sliding down. There's a reason why I always wear suspenders and it's only partially a fashion statement. They took my measurements again and then promise me that they will take up the pants more so this won't be a problem on the set. After all, this is the whole reason why I've flown out to LA just to do a costume fitting and am about to fly back to teach class the following morning.

A week later, I met the other cast and crew of the film on the piers at Long Beach for what was going to be an all night long shoot at the secret location they have transformed into a Klingon prison compound. There was an army of us sitting there, waiting, eating the best array of junk food I've ever seen, and trying to cope with what promises to be a "hurry up and wait" kind of evening. There was a minor crisis when the casting director comes around to ask us to take off our jewelry and I realize that there's no way I can take off my wedding ring. It's not that I wasn't willing but after almost 30 years of marriage, my finger has grown around it, and it would take a jeweler's saw to cut it off me. Luckily, just as they were about to throw me off the set, I remembered that my character is supposed to be wearing heavy black gloves and so no one will ever see my ring finger, and they let it pass.

We were led back to the make-up tent, where I spent about half an hour in the chair, as they blacken the bottom part of my face and add a bristle goatee on top of my already scraggly looking beard. From here, we were supposed to wear robes and hoods so that the spoilers who were camped out around the location can't take our pictures. Once we got into costumes and make-up, we began to separate ourselves off by our races: the Klingons start to hang out with the Klingons, the Romulans with the Romulans, and then there are all of the other prisoners who represent an array of classic Trek races, including a guy in a really spectacular costume as a Salt Vampire.

Once everyone is in make-up, costume, and robe, we all wereloaded onto a bus and driven some distance away. As we steped off the bus, I set eyes on the set for the first time -- there were cameras on cranes and huge lighting units; there were synthetic boulders and giant fans blowing across the set; and there were massive fire pits in the ground which erupted into flames as the crew test the equipment. It's about this point that it occurs to me that Klingons are not known for their designer eye-wear and that I am very nearsighted. This was going to be the first and last chance I was going to get to see the set in focus. A few minutes later, someone circulated through and asked those of us who are visually impaired to remove our glasses.

You can ask me if J.J. Abrams was on the set that night and I couldn't tell you because I never saw him. I did hear the amplified voice of someone who was directing the scene coming down from on high. I never met the man, though people kept saying that I really should see if I could meet him, if he had specifically asked for me in the movie. It was clear some of the other extras in the scene were there because they had been hardcore fans of the series. Some bragged that they had also done extra work for Battlestar, Star Wars, and even Doctor Who, so some of these fans get around. By this point, there were persistent rumors that I speak fluent Klingon. I do not. I barely speak English and have no gift for foreign languages. And even before I get into conversations with anyone, they are already calling me "the Professor." I suppose that being a professor isn't something I do: it's who I am. In any case, it seemed that when people heard I had written a book on Star Trek, the only mental image they had was that I had written a book on the Klingon language.

They moved us out on the set and gave us our positions. We weren't told very much about what's happening in the scene. Everything is on a need-to-know basis. All we know is that we are Klingons who are guarding prisoners and that things are falling from the sky and exploding all around us. We were told that if we really got into our characters, we'd have a much stronger chance of ending up on screen in the final film, and there was a roving camera just trying to grab expressive closeups. We got no instruction on how to hold our weapons and as I look around, its clear that there's not exactly trained consistency in things like whether guards hold the gun barrel pointing down or up. Some of the guys had military training and we consult with them trying to at least understand human practices in this regard. I don't think I realized before how much extras really are improvising, creating their own characters, with very limited attention from the production staff. I find myself much more attentive watching extras in the backgrounds of shots having gone through this experience. But many of us had real fear that nit-picking fan boys were going to nail us for not holding our weapons the Klingon way!

And then they start staging a range of different vignettes -- at one point, I am trying to keep a group of increasingly unruly prisoners at bay using a disrupter rifle; at another point, I am on guard duty looking out over the prison complex. The most spectacular moment came when I was handed a torch (which are heavier than they look!) and told to lead a group across the compound as the wind blows down upon us and things are blowing up on other sides. Of course, being near sighted, I can't see more than a few feet ahead of me, so the group was zig-zagging like crazy as I try to avoid getting myself blown to bits or running into the blades of the giant fans. There was a real look of terror on my face for those sequences! I know I caused more than a little frustration for the assistant director who is trying to stage this little scene.

And, oh yes, my pants kept sliding lower and lower down my butt: at first, it was hip hop style but in one scene, I had to grab my waist to keep my pants from sliding off altogether. I suppose that the Klingon army like other military organizations is indifferent to matching guards with the right size uniforms. Periodically throughout the evening, I had to have a costume girl try yet again to stitch up the costume so it didn't slide off me. But they never seemed to fully solve the issue.

By this point, between my clumsiness with the guns, my near-sightedness, my slight size, and my baggy pants, I am starting to think of myself much more as a comic than a heroic figure. I am K'henry the Hapless! Fear my fumbles!

As the evening went along, everything starts to become more and more casual. The Salt Vampire is letting us feel his rubby tentacles and everyone seems to want to hold my disrupter. If at first we sorted ourselves by race, we start to just collapse in the green room between takes, indifferent to whoever is sitting next to us. If at first we take everything too seriously, a row of Klingons started singing "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story or doing the "Crank Dat Soulja Boy" dance.

At one point, they planted me on a rock to wait for instructions and forgot about me in the fog of war. I ended up dozing off in the wee hours of the morning and woke up vaguely disoriented, sitting in a Klingon prison compound, holding a disrupter in my hands.

At another point, they lined us all up in various action poses for photographs and we started to joke that we were posing for the action figures, and indeed, the set up reminded me of those little green army guys I played with as a kid.

Somehow, we all managed to stay more or less awake through the night, though I gradually started to feel a level of exhaustion I hadn't felt in decades. They loaded us on the buses, collected our costumes, and sent us along the way.

No, I didn't meet any members of the cast, though I did see some of the Romulans characters with tatooed faces and so I am starting to wonder if one of them was Nero. No, I never met J.J. Abrams. And No, I don't have any photographs of myself dressed as a Klingon. They didn't allow any cameras on the set because they didn't want any of us leaking images prematurely to the media.

I had been telling friends that I had played one of the classic alien races in the film: some imagined a Vulcan, some suggested a Ferengi, but for months, there were no reference to Klingons in the build up to the movie, there was no Klingon footage in the previews, and I got really anxious. I knew from the beginning that as an extra in a scene which involved more than 60 extras, my odds of ending up on screen were pretty small, and I had to keep lowering expectations from the students and staffs who imagined something bigger. I figured that once we had some footage of Klingons, I could start to tell people, but I didn't want to be the blogger who spilled the beans. Eventually, Abrams announced through the blogosphere that he was going to cut the Klingon sequence from the film: "There was a big Klingon subplot in this and we actually ended up having to pull it out because it confused the story in a way that I thought was very cool but unnecessary. So we have these beautiful designs that we're going to have to wait and do elsewhere I guess."

I've read various reasons for his decision, having to do with trying to streamline the character motivations, trying to avoid confusion about the current relationship between Klingons and the Federation for those viewers who only know some of the later Treks where the Klingons are our friends, and having to do with keeping the opening of the film crisp and taunt. It's pretty clear from the dialogue included more or less where the Klingon sequence would have gone. And I'm personally hoping we get to see this footage as a DVD extra.

My biggest disappointment is that we probably will never see Klingon action figures for this film. I had fantasies of getting a figurine of a Klingon in a floor-length elephantine coat holding either a torch or a disruptor.

So, now you have it, the saga of K'Henry the Hapless, the most scrawny Klingon in the Galaxy, and how he ended up on the cutting room floor.

My Secret Life as a Klingon (Part One)

Artist's Approximation created by Ivan Askwith

At long last, I can share with you, oh loyal reader, the utterly true, sometimes comical story of how I became a card-carrying Klingon in the new Star Trek film (well, almost). I've been itching to share this yarn for the past year and a half but had wanted to wait until the film was in the theaters and many of you would have had a chance to see it.

The adventure began with an unexpected e-mail: a Hollywood casting director wrote me to say that J.J. Abrams wanted to include me in the then upcoming Star Trek reboot. At first, to be honest, I thought it was a joke. I had no idea that J.J. Abrams knew who I was. We had not and still haven't ever had any direct contact with each other, though my mind starts to race trying to figure out the chain of events which might have led him to discover me. Might J.J. be a reader of this blog?

My loyal and trustworthy assistant, Amanda, did some followup and got on the phone with the Hollywood type to try to determine what would be involved in shooting "my" scene for the movie. Doing so would require me to take three trips to Los Angeles in a little under a month -- not a small demand given the number of long-standing commitments I had -- and I would need to do so on my own dime. What I was being offered was a chance to become an extra and in Hollywood, in some cases, as I would discover, extras are literally recruited off the streets, and all of them are paid only a minimal wage.

The idea of a full professor at MIT flying to Hollywood to appear as an extra was absurd, but given my life-long love of this particular media franchise, which had inspired two of my books and several more articles, not flying to LA to be an extra in a freaking Star Trek movie would have been equally absurd.

I had to do it, even though it meant postponing some significant meetings, ducking out early from academic conferences, and taking a series of red eye flights, not to mention spending several thousand dollars. I have often joked about boldly going where no humanities scholar has ever gone before and this was going to be a wild ride.

So, I flew out to Hollywood and made my way, straight from the airport, to the Paramount Studio backlots, dragging my suitcase behind me. I was greeted by the casting agent, and was then led along with an army of other people out to what literally amounted to a cattle call. I was lined up against the wall with about fifty or sixty other men as people with clipboards moved along the line, discarding some, shifting some to another wall, and otherwise sorting us out into smaller groups. I was trying to make sense of the patterns: along my wall were men who are for the most part bald and have ample facial hair. So far, I fit the category they were looking for.

But then I became acutely aware that I needed to strain my neck to see the tops of the other men's heads. Most of them looked like they were tall enough to play professional basketball and most of them were black. Indeed, by the time the sorting out process was done, I was the shortest, whitest guy left standing. They then took us one by one into a dressing room area to take our measurements and to get us to try on some costumes for size. I was fit with some heavy leather gloves, some pants which looked like they come from a military uniform, some tall black boots, and a helmet. I glanced down at a clipboard when the costumer wasn't looking and saw the notice, "Klingon Guard," and my heart beat a bit faster. It wasn't until the second trip out to Hollywood that the costumers confirmed that I was indeed going to be given a chance to play a Klingon part. (Indeed, some of the other extras only learned they were in a Star Trek movie when they arrived on the set for our actual shoot.)

Now, keep in mind that being a Klingon has been one of my life-long ambitions. When I was in high school, I went to the DeKalb County Honors Camp, where I majored in drama. I spent the summer in the company of some of the most wacky friends I ever had, doing skits and plays, and when we were not doing that, just cutting up in the hallways. One of the girls in our cohort was a hardcore Trek fan. At this point, I had watched the series as a casual viewer but I had not taken the plunge. But she decided she was going to adapt the script from David Gerrold's "Trouble with Tribbles" for the stage and we were all going to play parts. I met a guy, Edward McNalley (who is still one of my best friends) when he got pulled in from another group to play Spock. I was cast as the Klingon officer who sparks a bar fight with the Enterprise crew when he insults first its captain and then the ship itself. In getting ready to play the part, I started reading every book I could find on the series -- The Making of Star Trek, The World of Star Trek, Star Trek Lives, and of course, the James Blish novelizations of all of the episodes, even the photonovels and the viewmaster slides. That's how you kept up on a series back in the days before any of us had a VCR, though my wife still has audio tapes recorded through alligator clips attached to the television sound system, which she recorded when the series was first being aired. It was through all of this reading that I discovered not only Star Trek but also the fan culture around it.

Flash forward several decades to when I was doing research for Science Fiction Audiences, the book I wrote with John Tulloch. That's when I became a Klingon for a second time. I was trying to do research on Klingon fan culture as a contrast to the female fanzine writers, the GLBT actvists, and the MIT students who figured prominently in that study. In true participant observation fashion, I joined a Klingon role-playing group, seeking to better understand what it was like to walk that particular swagger. In many ways, this Klingon fandom was a branch of the men's movement which was taking shape around Robert Bly's Iron John. Most of those I met were working class men who were embracing a warrior mythology to work through anger and frustrations they had encountered in life. Both men and women involved struck me as experimenting with power and trying to reclaim aspects of masculinity which they saw as under threat elsewhere in the culture. In the end, my research on Klingons was a failed project which never found its way into the final book.

I never really could figure out how to perform Klingon masculinity in a convincing manner and I got lost in the role-play activity. I had been cast as a Klingon ambassador, which I took to be an oxymoron, and so I was proceeding by insulting and abusing the Federation ambassadors with whom I was interacting, much as my character in "Trouble with Tribbles" had intentionally picked a fight with the Enterprise crew. But the guy representing the Federation took it all too personally, could never grasp that I was playing a character, that we were operating in a magic circle, and eventually filed a protest against me, which led to the Klingon high council suggesting that I step down from my post. I guess I played too rough to be a Klingon, go figure.

Skip forward a few more years and I'm being profiled in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The photographer is scoping out my living room when he stumbles on my Bat'leth, a Klingon battle sword, which I have propped up against my fireplace. And he asks if I would be willing to pose with it for a photograph. As a long-time fan, I smell a trap. After all, I've written critically about the ways news coverage depicts fans in costumes with program-related trinkets as people who can't separate fantasy from reality. Even with the release of the new film, I am reading lots of prose about "rubber Vulcan ears" and the like, despite two decades of trying to dismantle those hurtful cliches. But I also relished the absurdity of appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education showing off my Klingon cutlery and so, once again, in for a penny, in for a pound.

So, given that history, I can't tell you the excitement I felt when I called my wife, a fellow lifelong Trekker, to tell her that I was about to become an official Klingon. She was jealous, of course; what wife wouldn't be? But she also was really supportive of this fantasy-fulfilling opportunity.

Next Time: Going on Set, Shooting the Scene, and How the Klingons Ended Up on the Cutting Room Floor.

Five Ways to Start a Conversation About the New Star Trek Film

Spoiler Warning: The following post assumes you saw the new Star Trek film this weekend. If you didn't, you probably shouldn't be reading this post. You should be heading to a multiplex. Cynthia and I went to see the new Star Trek film this weekend. We have managed to see every Star Trek film together as a couple on opening weekend since the film franchise lost with Star Trek: The Motionless Picture in 1979.

So, the two of us proceeded to spend the better part of the evening going through the film scene by scene armed with a lifetime of fan and critical perspectives on the franchise, trying to figure out what it signals about the future of Trek.

We certainly went into the film with high hopes but also with a certain sense of dread. J.J. Abrams has worked hard to demonstrate to the world that "this is not your father's Star Trek," and the problem is that we are, well, sorta, when you look at our birth certificates and all, part of 'your father''s generation. People like 'Your Father' and even more likely 'Your Mother' have kept Star Trek a viable franchise for more than four decades. None of us object to bringing in new souls for the faith or attracting younger followers but you don't have to write off the old fans to do so.

We certainly were not opposed to the recasting of cherished characters: quite the opposite, many of the franchises we care about -- Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, Cyrano, Hamlet, Sam Spade -- have been recast many times with differing results but always with new discoveries to be made. We certainly hoped that having someone other than William Shatner playing the part would rekindle our respect and affection for Kirk, as a character, for example, while we remained skeptical that a new actor could capture the complexity which Leonard Nimoy has achieved through his portrayal of Spock through the years. As a fan of the new Battlestar Galactica series, I'd be hypocritical if I objected to them rethinking the characters or revamping the worlds depicted on the series.

When Cynthia was asked what she thought upon walking out of the theater, she responded that it felt like a Star Trek movie precisely because there were things we loved and things we hated about it. It's been like that from the beginning and it will always be thus.

Rather than write a review of the film, though, I figured I'd throw out some discussion topics. After all, it's exam season around here and so the genre of essay questions comes readily to hand. The following are some of the things we've been debating since we saw the film:

1. For us, the coolest thing in the movie was the image of Vulcan educational practice, which is consistent with previous representations (most notably the scenes of Spock retooling himself in Star Trek III) but also gave us new insights. Vulcans seemingly learn in isolation yet immersed in a rich media landscape. Each climbs down into a well surrounded by screens which flash information, allowing them to progress at their own rate, dig deeper into those things which interest them, and at the same time, develop a certain degree of autonomy from other learners. There are no teachers, at least none represented in the segment we are shown here, but rather the individual learner engaging with a rich set of information appliances. In some ways, this is the future which many educators fear -- one where they have been displaced by the machine. In other ways, it is the future we hope for - one where there are no limits placed on the potentials of individual learners to advance.

But if learning is individualized, why do people come together into what can only be described as a school? Why not locate the learning pod in each home? Why have a structured school day?

In the midst of all of this well-considered if somewhat alien pedagogy, we are introduced to the issue of Spock's bullying by his classmates. The scene where he confronts the Bullies is oddly ritualized, as if he was reporting to them for today's insults and abuses, and as if they were testing his ability to develop the toughness and emotional control to push aside those insults. It's clear elsewhere that he faces a certain degree of prejudice as a result of his half-human/half-Vulcan background -- see the casual deployment of race as a handicap as he is admitted to the Vulcan Science Academy. But here, it is as if there is a system of ritualized bullying designed to test and toughen each student. What if bullying was incorporated into the pedagogical regime as it is more or less in several other educational systems on our planet? Certainly the content of the insults would be different in each case, but the logic of ritualized insults as a way of developing emotional control is not actually alien to the way Earth cultures operate.

2. I've read reviews which suggest that the Uhura in this film represents a progressive reworking of the character from classic Trek. I'm not convinced yet, even though I very much liked the actress who played the part. However limited her role might be ("hailing frequencies are open, Captain"), the original Uhura was defined first and foremost by her contributions as a member of the Enterprise Crew. Whatever subtext there was suggesting a Kirk/Uhura romance, it was just that -- a subtext -- left for fans to infer from a few telling moments in the trajectory of the series, among them, the first interracial kiss on American television -- albeit executed under mind control -- albeit an implied projection of one or both of the character's actual desires.

In the new film, Uhura asserts her professional competence but she never really demonstrates it. How does that make her different from many of the female professionals in classic Trek who are introduced in terms of their professional abilities and then reduced to being the girlfriend of the week for one of the primary characters? Here, more screen time is devoted to her but she's ultimately a love object in some kind of still to be explored romantic triangle between Kirk and Spock. Basically, she's been inserted into the story to discourage fans from writing slash stories, though most of us won't have any trouble figuring out how the exchange of women facilitates an expression of homosocial/homoerotic desire.

The classic definition of a Mary Sue is someone who is claimed to have extraordinary mental abilities, who manages to gain the romantic interests of multiple members of the crew, and who manages to have the information needed to save the ship. In way sense, then, is the new Uhura anything other than a Mary Sue figure in the body of an established character? Surely after forty plus years, Trek can imagine a more compelling female character.

3. I'm still trying to make sense of the implications of Kirk's absurdly rapid rise to command in this version of the story. In the past, we were allowed to admire Kirk for being the youngest Star Fleet captain in Federation history because there was some belief that he had managed to actually earn that rank. Here, he manages to gain command in large part because Captain Pike was an old family friend, and because he had one really successful mission. It's hard to imagine any military system on our planet which would promote someone to a command rank in the way depicted in the film. In doing so, it detracts from Kirk's accomplishments rather than making him seem more heroic. This is further compromised by the fact that we are also promoting all of his friends and letting them go around the universe on a ship together.

We could have imagined a series of several films which showed Kirk and his classmates moving up through the ranks, much as the story might be told by Patrick O'Brien or in the Hornblower series. We could see him learn through mentors, we could seem the partnerships form over time, we could watch the characters grow into themselves, make rookie mistakes, learn how to do the things we see in the older series, and so forth. In comics, we'd call this a Year One story and it's well trod space in the superhero genre at this point.

But there's an impatience here to give these characters everything we want for them without delays, without having to work for it. It's this sense of entitlement which makes this new Kirk as obnoxious as the William Shatner version. What it does do, however, is create a much flatter model for the command of the ship. If there is no age and experience difference between the various crew members, if Kirk is captain because Spock had a really bad day, then the characters are much closer to being equals than on the old version of the series.

This may be closer to our contemporary understanding of how good organizations work -- let's think of it as the Enterprise as a start-up company where a bunch of old college buddies decide they can pool their skills and work together to achieve their mutual dreams. This is not the model of how command worked in other Star Trek series, of course, and it certainly isn't the way military organizations work, but it is very much what I see as some of my students graduate and start to figure out their point of entry into the creative industries.

4. If the narrative makes it all look too easy for the characters, the narrational structure makes it much too easy for the viewers. There's a tendency not so much to ask questions as to hand us answers to the questions fans have been struggling with over the past four decades. So, for example, classic Trek was always carefully not to fully explain how Sarek and Amanda got together, allowing Vulcan restraint to prevent Sarek from fully articulating what he feels towards Spock's mother. As a consequence, there were countless fan fiction narratives trying to imagine how Sarek and Amanda got together -- Jean Lorrah, for my money, wrote the best of these narratives, though there were other great fan novels out there on precisely this theme. Yet, here, the question is asked and answered, overtly, in a single scene.

Ditto the issue of whether Vulcans are incapable of feeling emotion on some biological level or if they have simply developed mental discipline to bring their emotions under their control. Again, this question inspired decades of fan fiction writing and speculation and is here dispatched with a few short sentences.

The mystique that surrounded Spock from the start had to do with things he was feeling but could not express: he is a deeply divided character, one who broods about where he belongs and how he relates to the other Enterprise crewmembers. But this film makes it look ridiculously easy for him to get a girl friend and he is surprisingly comfortable necking with his pretty in the transporter room, an act that it is impossible to imagine Spock prime doing. The original Spock was a deeply private person. It isn't that the new film has made Spock Sexy. The old Spock was a whole lot sexier than the new Spock for all of his hidden depths and emotional uncertainties: the new Spock is just too easy all around and there's no real mystery there. He isn't sexy; he's having sex and that's not the same thing at all.

5. As a stand alone film, it's reasonably engaging: I like most of the cast and think they achieve good chemistry together. The pace is, as has been suggested, good, though most of the action scenes -- except for the free fall sequence -- seem pretty average. It's a flawed work but I'm certainly in for more adventures. My problem is that the film didn't give us much to anticipate for the sequel. In answering its mysteries so easily and not setting up new ones, there's just not that much room for speculation and anticipation.

This would work if it were the pilot episode of a new television series. I haven't loved any of the pilot episodes but they gave me enough reasons to like the characters that I kept watching. It usually takes a good number of episodes for the cast to jell with their characters, for the writers to figure out what they are doing, and for the audience to figure out what is distinctive about the new series. I think I need more momentum to get over the hump than a movie every few years and that's why television would have worked better to relaunch the franchise than a feature film is going to do.

Is this a space where transmedia storytelling practices can create a bridge between this film and the next? Is there other ways that they can allow us to have encounters with these characters as embodied by the new cast? If so, what strategies will be the most effective at strengthening what ever level of identification was created for this new film?

Finally, if there are new fans who are created through this relaunch of Star Trek, which is certainly what Abrams and company are claiming is their goals, what has the film left them to do? What are the gaps and kernels they will work with? It's clear enough what the cultural attractor here is but what is the cultural activator?

Then, again, there's nothing wrong with this film that couldn't have been improved by the addition of Klingons. I will explain later in the week.

What Is Learning in a Participatory Culture? (Part Two)

Today, I am running the second part of an essay written by Erin Reilly, the Research Director of the New Media Literacies Project (NML) in which she tells you more about our new learning library. If you have not yet checked out the learning library, you can find it here. And if you want to learn more about how it is starting to be deployed across a range of educational settings, check out the special issue of Threshold magazine about "Learning in a Participatory Culture."

Exploring New Media Literacies

My work on Zoey's Room was an ideal segue to applying practice to Project NML's research into how a participatory culture facilitates learning in the 21st century. Outside their classrooms, which largely still follow a top-down model of teachers dispensing knowledge, today's children learn by searching and gathering clusters of information as they move seamlessly between their physical and virtual spaces. Knowledge is acquired through multiple new tools and processes as kids accrue information that is visual, aural, musical, interactive, abstract, and concrete and then remix it into their own storehouse of knowledge. Describing how learning and pedagogy must change in this new cultural and multimedia context, the think tank New London Group argues that "literacy pedagogy now must account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies."

Indeed, they describe how "the proliferation of communications channels and media supports" sets up a need for "creating the learning conditions for full social participation." The media-literacy movement has effectively taken the lead among educators in this regard by teaching students to analyze the media they consume and to see themselves as both consumers and producers of media. However, even this learning often is relegated to electives or to after-school programs rather than being integrated across curricula. The new media literacies allow us to think in very different ways about the processes of learning, because they acknowledge a shift from the top-down model to one that invokes all voices and all means of thinking and creating to build new knowledge. For many educators, however, this raises issues of maintaining control, building trust, and providing an open-source culture of learning that allows students to share their own expertise in the classroom. At the same time, the mindsets and skill sets of the new media literacies are changing the discipline itself. In effect, we are teaching an outdated version of literacy if we do not address the sorts of practices that new media and new technologies support.

Invitation to Participate

Integrating the new media literacies into learning echoes the concept of syndesis presented by social anthropologist Robert Plant Armstrong in "What's Red, White, and Blue and Syndetic?" (1982). Syndesis is a process that strings together self-contained moments or increments of what Armstrong calls "presence" to form a whole. Syndesis has important applications to today's learning environment because it ensures that educators and students contribute to the body of knowledge being formed by the group. The end result is an environment that shares information in multiple formats that become similar only when the group pulls them together.

One major approach to the new learning paradigm at Project NML is the Learning Library , a new type of learning environment that embraces the characteristics of syndesis and participatory culture. The Learning Library is an activities-based model that aggregates media from the Web--such as a video, image, or audio file--and provides tools for users to integrate that media into a learning objective. Educators are encouraged to load their own media or draw on media by others that already exist in the Library to shape new learning challenges and to collaboratively build and share new collections based on particular themes. These challenges range from playing a physics game designed to experiment with problem-solving, to developing collaborative ways to bring innovation into the classroom, to learning about attribution while exploring issues involving copyright, public domain, fair use, and Creative Commons.

Project NML has seeded the Learning Library with its first collection of 30 learning "challenges" so that users can explore and practice applying the new media literacies to their classroom activities. One example from our first collection of challenges, called Expressing Characters, uses the new media literacy of transmedia navigation. In this activity, a student learns how plot can be extended across media by following the adventures of Claire Bennet, a character from the TV show Heroes. After exploring how Claire is already portrayed on television, in a graphic novel, and on MySpace, learners practice transmedia navigation by adapting and extending one of their own favorite characters into media forms in which the character does not currently exist. Bringing their own experiences to this challenge, students then load their creations into the Library, where they can be viewed and remixed into a different learning objective by others. By exploring and practicing the new media literacy skill of transmedia navigation, students learn to make meanings across different media types--not just in relation to print text. In this way, these new modes of communication are highlighting the need to teach new ways of expression and new methods of understanding the digital world.

Conclusion

A prime goal of Project NML is to understand what happens when multiple forms of media are fully integrated into processes of learning. The new media literacies build upon existing print literacy practices, making possible new literacy practices where, according to the New London Group, "the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, the behavioral, and so on." And these practices offer new resources and pathways for learning the disciplines.

Our students are already appropriating information from the Web and turning it into new knowledge. They are already learning from each other and participating in the learning of their peers. They already connect, create, collaborate, and circulate information through new media. The goal for us, as educators, is to find new ways to harness and leverage their interests and social competencies to establish a participatory learning environment. Teachers and administrators must learn to leverage this new learning paradigm to engage our students, and we encourage you to use the Learning Library and see if it works for your context.

Resources

Armstrong, Robert Plant. "What's Red, White, and Blue and Syndetic?" Journal of American Folklore, 1982.

Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning. MacArthur Foundation.

Jenkins, Henry et al. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century." MacArthur Foundation, October 2006. digitallearning.macfound.org

The New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." In Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis. Routledge, November 1999.

Erin Reilly is a recognized expert in the design and development of educational content powered by virtual learning and new media applications. As research director of MIT's Project New Media Literacies, Reilly helps conceptualize the vision of the program and develop a strategy for its implementation. Before joining MIT, Reilly co-created Zoey's Room, a national online community for 10- to 14-year-old girls, encouraging their creativity through science, technology, engineering, and math. In 2007, Reilly received a Cable's Leaders in Learning Award for her innovative approach to learning and was selected as one of the National School Boards Association's "20 to Watch" educators.

Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Zoey's Room.

What Is Learning in a Participatory Culture? (Part One)

The "Learning in a Participatory Culture" conference last weekend was hosted by Project New Media Literacies in part to showcase the work we've been doing over the past year with teachers who were field testing our curricular materials and in part to publicly launch our Learning Library. The Learning Library is intended as a multimedia activity center where people can come to learn more about the new media literacies, acquiring skills and testing them through challenges, and ultimately, producing and sharing content with other users. Much as the Media Lab's Scratch project has enabled hundreds of thousands of young people around the world to learn about coding by building, sharing, and remixing projects with each other, we hope that the Learning Library will provide young people and educators alike a chance to remix the materials of their culture in order to learn what they need to do to become full participants in the contemporary media landscape.

The library started with short documentary segments we produced on topics such as cosplay, wikipedia, graffiti, dj culture, and animation, but it was increasingly clear that if we were to put our theories into practice we needed to create a more robust system for active participation in the learning process. The result was the current learning library where the materials we produced -- and countless other sites of cultural production and participation which are already in the web -- become resources for challenges which require a mixture of exploration, experimentation, self reflection, and communication. We are now moving to work with existing organizations -- from the Organization for Transformative Works which produced segments on fan vidding to the Center for Social Media which has done segments on interviews and citizen journalism -- to produce their own materials which can form the basis for future challenges.

We are encouraging teachers to build challenges as class projects -- as I have already been doing through some of my classes this year. And we hope to see international content which can be shared with schools around the world -- we've been working to get some challenges not simply translated into Spanish but also rethought for a Latin American context. We are finding that teachers are using these challenges in a range of different ways: some are using the challenges themselves in order to get a better grasp on the new media literacy concepts and practices; some are taking the challenges directly into their classrooms; but many more are adapting them to different curricular contexts, taking their core principles to develop their own challenges, and in short, appropriating and remixing them for their own ends.

The challenges are designed to be modular -- to be able to fit into classroom and after school learning contexts or to be embraced by home schoolers and others for self learning. The challenges are designed to be flexible so they can be used in a range of disciplines with young people at different stages in development. Many of them are designed to have low-tech variants for those classrooms where there is no laptop per child since our emphasis is on the skills and mental models as much as on the tools and techniques of new media. I will be sharing more about the learning library in the weeks ahead and I am very much looking forward to hearing your reactions to this new center of media literarcy resources. So far, we've built more than 30 challenges and have produced almost a hundred videos which can serve the basis for future challenges. Check them out.

Below, I am sharing the beginning of an essay written about the library for Threshold magazine by Project NML's research director Erin Reilly. You may recall an interview with Reilly which I ran on this blog at the beginning of the process of developing the learning library. Check out the online edition of the special Threshold issue on Project New Media Literacies for other discussions of the challenges and opportunities for learning in a participatory culture.

What is Learning in a Participatory Culture?

by Erin Reilly

Educators are learning how to engage today's digital kids to share

and distribute knowledge within learning communities.

Today, we have endless possibilities for taking media into our own hands to connect with others in meaningful ways. We have new ways of working together to develop knowledge, and new ways to use media to shape how we present ourselves to others and learn from them. To connect and collaborate with each other to produce and circulate information in this new participatory culture, we have developed new tools such as game engines and new institutions such as YouTube and Facebook.

In the white paper, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," the Project New Media Literacies (Project NML) team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology addressed the need to engage learners in today's participatory culture. Young people are actively creating and circulating media content within social networks that extend from their circle of friends to those in the virtual world community. However, the team believes that young people also must learn to reflect upon their new media creations in ways that encourage the important learning skills of teamwork, leadership, problem solving, collaboration, communication, and creativity.

Our education system also is in the midst of this paradigm shift, where new methods, environments, and assessment models need to be acquired to keep pace with our increasingly networked culture. As the conversation about the digital divide shifts from questions of technological access to ones concerning participation, educators must work to ensure that every young person has access to the tools, skills, and experiences needed to join in this new participatory culture. Educators also have a chance to give students the cultural competencies and social skills they need in their future roles as 21st-century citizens and workers.

Formal schools have been slow to react to the emergence of the participatory culture, however, due to an exaggerated interpretation of the perils of social media and to a lack of understanding of the promises and affordances of a networked society. In their stead, after-school programs and informal learning communities are stepping in with programs and activities that demonstrate the learning potentials of participatory culture accelerated through social media. To help educators and learners become more proficient in adapting to today's rich media landscape, the white paper identified 11 social skills that we all must acquire if we are to be active participants in our own life-long learning. And since then, Project NML has expanded the original list to also include the skill of visualization. These social skills and cultural competencies--the new media literacies--shift the focus of traditional literacy, for example, from individual expression to also encompass community involvement. The new media literacies then can be understood as offering ways of thinking (mindsets--for example, "collective intelligence") and ways of doing (skill sets--for example, "transmedia navigation") that recruit the traditional literacies of reading and writing into new kinds of literacy practices.

Learning in Zoey's Room

The Digital Youth Project, a grantee of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, recently completed a three-year study of the learning and innovation that accompany young people's everyday engagements with new media. The goal of the study was to understand the ways youth use new media, focusing on how they play, communicate, and create, and how these interactions affect their friendships as well as their aspirations, interests, and passions. In its final report, the project team, led by anthropologist Mimi Ito, explained that children use digital tools and broadband media to "hang out" with friends, "mess around" with programs, and "geek out" as they dig deeper into subjects they love, from rock stars to rocket science. Beyond what they are learning in school, they are connecting socially and are being influenced by each other's knowledge. These informal mentors have effectively taken their place among the many sources influencing children's processes of knowledg-building and identity-forming.

I began to understand this new way of learning in 2001 when I co-created an online community for middle school girls called Zoey's Room. Armed with the knowledge that 93 percent of tweens and teens are using the Internet and that girls are the power users of social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube, we launched Zoey's Room as an interactive technology club for girls in Maine. The project quickly expanded into a national mentoring community that creatively engages girls in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) activities through peer-to-peer learning and mentoring by female employees at companies such as National Semiconductor and Microsoft who volunteer their STEM expertise.

Today, Zoey's Room is a social network and blended learning environment in which teens learn STEM subjects via online interaction and through offline practical applications of science and math challenges in after-school programs run by organizations like the YWCA. The collaborative environment allows girls to feel safe to explore and tinker, fail and try again, and rely on a group of peers and mentors who will circulate STEM material, support their learning, and build ongoing relationships. Learning occurs as girls move between the online community and their extended community of peers and mentors, who validate the results of their experiments. In short, Zoey's Room allows young women to "geek out" on their love for girlhood and STEM projects.

Zoey's Room's blend of the social aspects with a positive learning environment has demonstrated that access to a participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum. In a sampling of 100 Zoey's Room members in 2007, 46 percent participated via an after-school club and 54 percent participated on their own at home--showing that school is just one of the nodes in these students' learning eco-system. When these 100 girls answered very specific science, technology, engineering, and math questions we put to them in the survey, the majority of girls got 12 out of 13 of the answers right--proving that they actually learned terms, concepts, and principles of certain STEM topics by doing the various activities in the program.

•••

Erin Reilly is a recognized expert in the design and development of educational content powered by virtual learning and new media applications. As research director of MIT's Project New Media Literacies, Reilly helps conceptualize the vision of the program and develop a strategy for its implementation. Before joining MIT, Reilly co-created Zoey's Room, a national online community for 10- to 14-year-old girls, encouraging their creativity through science, technology, engineering, and math. In 2007, Reilly received a Cable's Leaders in Learning Award for her innovative approach to learning and was selected as one of the National School Boards Association's "20 to Watch" educators.

"Geeking Out" For Democracy (Part Two)

A close look at the recent presidential election shows that young people are more politically engaged now than at any point since the end of the Vietnam War era. 54.5 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 voted last November, constituting a larger proportion of the total electorate -- 18 percent -- then Putnam's bowlers, people 65-years-and-older (16 percent). The youth vote was a decisive factor in Obama's victories in several states, including Indiana, North Carolina, and possibly Florida. John Della Volpe, director of polling for the Harvard Institute of Politics, told U.S. News and World Reports that the desire to make the world a better place was "baked into the millennials' DNA" but "they just didn't believe they could do that by voting." Political scientist Lance Bennett has argued that unlike Putnam's bowlers, this generation's civic identities are not necessarily defined through notions of "duty" or through once-every-four-years rituals like voting; rather, he argues, they are drawn towards "consumerism, community volunteering, or transnational activism" as mechanisms through which to impact the larger society. The Obama campaign was able to create an ongoing relationship with these new voters, connecting across every available media platform. Log onto YouTube and Obama was there in political advertisements, news clips, comedy sketches, and music videos, some created by the campaign, some generated by his supporters. Pick up your mobile phone and Obama was there with text messages updating young voters daily. Go to Facebook and Obama was there, creating multiple ways for voters to affiliate with the campaign and each other. Pick up a video game controller and Obama was there, taking out advertisement space inside several popular games. Turn on your Tivo to watch a late night comedy news show and Obama and his people are there, recognizing that The Daily Show or Colbert are the places where young people go to learn more about current events. This new approach to politics came naturally to a candidate who has fought to be able to use his Blackberry and text-messaging as he enters the White House, who regularly listens to his iPod, who knows how to give a Vulcan salute, brags about reading Harry Potter books to his daughters, and who casually talks about catching up on news online. The Obama campaign asked young people to participate, gave them chances to express themselves, enabled them to connect with each other, and allowed them to feel some sense of emotional ownership over the political process.

What has all of this to do with schools? Alas, frequently, very little.

Let's imagine a learning ecology in which the youth acquires new information through all available channels and through every social encounter. The child learns through schools and after school programs; the child learns on their own through the home and family and through their social interactions with their peers. They learn through face to face encounters and through online communities. They learn through work and they learn through play. The skills they acquire through one space helps them master core content in another. Through the New Media Literacy project, we have been developing resources which can be deployed in the classroom, in afterschool programs, and in the home for self-learning, seeking a more integrated perspective on what it means to learn in a networked society. Yet, right now, most of our schools are closing their gates to those cultural practices and forms of informal learning that young people value outside the classroom and in the process, they may be abdicating their historic roles in fostering civic engagement.

In a 2003 report, CIRCLE and the Carnegie Corporation of New York sought to document and analyze "the civic mission of schools." Historically, schools had been a key institution in fostering a sense of civic engagement. While their parents were bowling, their children were getting involved in student governments, editing the student newspaper, and discussing public affairs in their civics classes. The Civic Mission of Schools reports: "Long term studies of Americans show that those who participate in extracurricular activities in high school remain more civically engaged than their contemporaries even decades later.... A long tradition of research suggests that giving students more opportunities to participate in the management of their own classrooms and schools builds their civic skills and attitudes.....Recent evidence indicates that simulations of voting, trials, legislative deliberation, and diplomacy in schools can lead to heightened political knowledge and interest." Yet, the committee that authored the report ended up sharply divided about how realistic it was to imagine schools, as they are currently constituted, giving young people greater opportunities to participate in school governance or freedom to share their values and beliefs with each other. Student journalism programs are being defunded and in many cases, the content of the student newspaper is more tightly regulated than ever before. Schools no longer offer opportunities for students to actively debate public affairs out of fear of a push-back from politically sensitive parents.

In reality, young people have much greater opportunities to learn these civic skills outside school, as they "hang out," "mess around," and "geek out" online. This may be why so many of them use social network sites as resources to expand their contact with their friends at school or why they feel such a greater sense of investment in their game guilds than in their student governments, or why they see YouTube as a better place to express themselves than the school literature magazine. Meanwhile, our schools are making it harder for teachers and students to integrate these materials into the classroom. Federal law has imposed mandatory filters on networked computers in schools and public libraries. There have been a series of attempts to pass legislation banning access to social network sites and blogging tools. Many teachers have told Project New Media Literacies that they can't access YouTube or other web 2.0 sites on their school computers. And the Student Press Law Center reports that a growing number of schools have taken disciplinary action against students because of things they've written on blogs published outside school hours, off school grounds, and through their own computers.

In other words, rather than promoting the skills and ethical responsibilities that will enable more meaningful participation in future civic life, many schools have sought to close down opportunities to engage with these new technologies and cultural practices. Of course, many young people, as the Digital Youth Project discovered, work around these restrictions (and in the process, find one more reason to disobey the adults in their lives). Yet, many other young people have no opportunities to engage with these virtual worlds, to enter these social networks, on their own. These school policies have amplified the already serious participation gap that separates information-haves and have-nots. Those students who have the richest online lives are being stripped of their best modes of learning as they pass into the schoolhouse and those who have limited experiences outside of classroom hours are being left further behind. And all of them are being told two things: that what they do in their online lives has nothing to do with the things they are learning in school; and that what they are learning in school has little or nothing of value to contribute to who they are once the bell rings.

One of the goals of Project New Media Literacies has been to bring this participatory culture into the classroom as a key first step towards fostering a more participatory democracy . This isn't a matter of making school more "entertaining" or dealing with wavering student attention. It has to do with modeling powerful new forms of civic life and learning, of helping young people acquire skills that they are going to need to enter the workplace, to participate in public policy debates, to express themselves creatively, and to change the world. As we are doing this work, we are bumping up, again and again, against constraints which make it impossible for even the most determined, dedicated, and informed teachers to bring many of these technologies and cultural practices into their classrooms. It isn't simply that young people know more about Facebook than their teachers; it is that for the past decade, schools have sought to insulate themselves from these sites of potential disruption and transformation, hermetically sealing themselves off from these social networks and from the mechanisms of participatory culture. The first we can overcome through better teacher training, but the second is going to require us to rethink basic school policies if schools are going to pursue their traditional civic missions in ways that enhance these new forms of citizenly engagement.

This article was written for Threshold Magazine's special issue on "Learning in a Participatory Culture." Read more about Project New Media Literacies here.

"Geeking Out" For Democracy (Part One)

On the eve of our conference at MIT on "Learning in a Participatory Culture," Cable in the Classroom has joined forces with Project New Media Literacies to edit a special issue of Threshold which centers on the work we've been doing and the vision behind it. Among the features are a wonderful graphic showing the new learning environment and how informal, individual, and school based learning can work together to reinforce the core social skills and cultural competencies we've been discussing; a transcribed conversation with Benjamin Stokes, Daniel T. Hickey, Barry Joseph, John Palfrey, and myself about the challenges and opportunities surrounding bringing new media into the classroom; James Bosco adopting a school reform perspective on these issues; and a range of pieces by the core researchers on our team describing what happened when we introduced some of our materials into schools or after school programs. If you wanted to attend the conference but just couldn't make it to Cambridge, you can follow along through the live webcasts of the event. Check here for details.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to be showcasing the work of Project New Media Literacies and introducing you to some of our curricular materials which are just now going public. Along the way, you will get a chance to read several pieces from the Threshold magazine, including one from our award-winning research director Erin Reilly, get some reflections from some of our students about how they learned about and through popular culture, and learn about how spreadability may impact education. Today and next time, I will be running the essay which I wrote for the magazine, which maps the ways I am starting to think about the relationship between participatory culture and participatory democracy.

And if that's not enough New Media Literacies thinking for you, check out this great podcast put together by Barry Joseph and others at Global Kids, one of our research partners, which includes a conversation between Mimi Ito and myself and an interview with Constance Steinkuehler.

"Geeking Out" For Democracy

by Henry Jenkins

In his book, Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam suggests that many members of the post-WWII generation discovered civic engagement at the local bowling alley. The bowling alley was a place where people gathered regularly not simply to play together, but talk about the personal and collective interests of the community, to form social ties and identify common interests. In a classic narrative of cultural decline, Putnam blames television for eroding these strong social ties, resulting in a world where people spent more time isolated in their homes and less time participating in shared activities with the larger community.

But what does civic engagement look like in the age of Facebook, YouTube, and World of Warcraft? All of these new platforms are reconnecting home-based media with larger communities, bridging between our public and private lives. All offer us a way to move from media consumption towards cultural participation.

During a recent visit in Santiago, I sat down with Chilean national Senator Fernando Flores Labra who believes that the guild structure in the massively multiplayer video game, World of Warcraft, offers an important training ground for the next generation of business and political leaders. (Guilds are affiliations of players who work together towards a common cause, such as battling the monsters or overcoming other enemies in the sword-and-sorcery realm depicted in the game.) The middle aged Labra, with his slicked back hair, his paunchy midsection, and his well-pressed suits, is probably not what you expect a World of Warcraft player to look like. Yet, he's someone who has spent, by his own estimate, "thousands of hours playing these games, with hundreds of people, of all ages, all over the world."

Labra recently invited leading business and political leaders to come together and learn more about such games, explaining: "I am convinced that these technologies can be excellent laboratories for learning the practices, skills and ethics required to succeed in today's global environment, where people are increasingly required to interact with people all over the world, but still have a hard time working with their colleagues in the office next door, never mind with their new colleagues, whom they have never met, on the other side of the world. If an organization is to survive and thrive in today's era of globalization, its leaders must ensure that members of their organization become experts in operational coordination among geographically and culturally diverse groups; build and cultivate trust among their various stakeholders, including their employees, their customers and their investors, all of whom may be culturally and geographically diverse; cultivate people that are able to act with leadership in an era of rapid and constant change."

Playing World of Warcraft requires the mobilization of a large number of participants and the coordination of efforts across a range of different skill groups. Experienced players find themselves logging into the game not simply because they want to play but because they feel an obligation to the other players. Participants often network outside the game space to coordinate their efforts and soon find themselves discussing a much broader range of topics (much like Putnam's bowlers). Participants develop and deploy tools which allow them to manage complex data sets and monitor their own performances. And the guild leadership, many of whom are still in their teens, learn to deal with their team member's complex motivations and sometimes conflicting personalities.

Whatever these folks are doing, they are not "bowling alone." If Putnam's correct, bowling was more than a game for post-war citizens, and World of Warcraft is more than a game for many students in your classrooms.

But let's take it a step further. Game guilds and other kinds of social networks are as central to what we mean by civic engagement in the 21st century as civic organizations were to the community life of the 20th century. If bowling helped connect citizens at the geographically local level, these new kinds of communities bring people together from diverse backgrounds, including adults and youths, and across geographically dispersed communities. Such dispersed social ties are valuable in a world where the average American moves once every four or five years, often across regions, and where many of us find ourselves needing to interact with colleagues around the planet.

I use the term "participatory culture" to describe the new kinds of social and creative activities which have emerged in a networked society. A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.

The work we are doing through the MacArthur Foundation's emerging Digital Media and Learning Initiative, a network of scholars, educators, and activists , starts from the premise that these new media platforms represent important sites of informal learning. The time young people spend, outside the classroom, engaging with these new forms of cultural experience foster real benefits in terms of their mastering of core social skills and cultural competencies (the New Media Literacies) they are going to be deploying for years to come. While much has been said about why 21st century skills are essential for the contemporary workplace, they are also valuable in preparing young people for future roles in the arts, politics, and community life. Learning how to navigate social networks or produce media may result in a sense of greater personal empowerment across all aspects of youth's lives.

In a recent report, documenting a multi-year, multi-site ethnographic study of young people's lives on and off line, the Digital Youth Project suggests three potential modes of engagement which shape young people's participation in these online communities. First, many young people go on line to "hang out" with friends they already know from schools and their neighborhoods. Second, they may "mess around" with programs, tools, and platforms, just to see what they can do. And third, they may "geek out" as fans, bloggers, and gamers, digging deep into an area of intense interest to them, moving beyond their local community to connect with others who share their passions. The Digital Youth Project argues that each of these modes encourages young people to master core technical competencies, yet they may also do some of the things that Putnam ascribed to the bowling leagues of the 1950s -- they strengthen social bonds, they create shared experiences, they encourage conversations, and they provide a starting point for other civic activities.

For the past few decades, we've increasingly talked about those people who have been most invested in public policy as "wonks," a term implying that our civic and political life has increasingly been left to the experts, something to be discussed in specialized language. When a policy wonk speaks, most of us come away very impressed by how much the wonk knows but also a little bit depressed about how little we know. It's a language which encourages us to entrust more control over our lives to Big Brother and Sister, but which has turned many of us off to the idea of getting involved. But what if more of us had the chance to "geek out" about politics? What if we could create points of entry where young people saw the affairs of government as vitally linked to the practices of their everyday lives? "Geeking out" is empowering; it motivates our participation and in a world of social networks, pushes us to find others who share our passions. If being a "wonk" is about what you know, being a "geek" involves an ongoing process of sharing information and working through problems with others. Being a political "geek" involves taking on greater responsibility for solving your own problems, working as a member of a larger community, whether one defined in geographic terms or through shared interests.

Maybe "geeking out" about politics is key to fostering a more participatory democracy, one whose success is measured not simply by increases in voting (which we've started to see over the past few election cycles) but also increased volunteerism (which shows up in survey after survey of younger Americans), increased awareness of current events, increased responsibility for each other, and increased participation in public debates about the directions our society is taking. "Geeking out" might mean we think about civic engagement as a life style rather than as a special event.

We still have a lot to learn about how someone moves from involvement in participatory culture towards greater engagement with participatory democracy. But so far, there are some promising results when organizations seek to mobilize our emerging roles as fans, bloggers, and gamers. Consider, for example, the case of the HP Alliance, an organization created by Andrew Slack, a 20-something activist and stand up comic, who saw the Harry Potter books as potential resources for mobilizing young people to make a difference in the world. Slack argues that J.K. Rowling's novels have taught a generation to read and write (through fan fiction) and now it has the potential to help many of those young people cross-over into participation in the public sphere. Creating what he describes as "Dumbledore's Army" for the real world, the HP Alliance uses the story of a young man who questioned authority, organized his classmates, and battled evil to get young people connected with a range of human rights organization. Slack works closely with Wizard Rock bands, who perform at fan conventions, record their music as mp3s, and distribute it via social network sites and podcasts. He works with the people who run Harry Potter fan websites and blogs to help spread the word to the larger fan community. So far, the HP Alliance has moved more than 100,000 people, many of them teens, to contribute to the struggles against genocide in Darfur or the battles for worker's rights at Wal-Mart or the campaign against Proposition 8 in California.

Many parents and educators grumble about this generation's lack of motivation or commitment, describing them as too busy playing computer games to get involved in their communities. For some teens, this may be sadly true. But, Global Kids, a New York organization, has been using Second Life to bring together youth leaders from around the world and to give them a playground through which they can imagine and stage solutions to real world problems. Global Kids, for example, used machinima -- a practice by which game engines are deployed to create real time digital animation -- to document the story of a child soldier in Uganda and circulate it via YouTube and other platforms to call attention to the plight of youth in the developing world. Much like the HP Alliance, Global Kids is modeling ways we can bridge between participatory culture and participatory democracy.

A New "Platform" for Games Research?: An Interview with Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort (Part Two)

Henry: Does Platform Studies necessarily limit the field to writers who can combine technological and cultural expertise, a rare mix given the long-standing separation between C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures"? Or should we imagine future books as emerging through collaborations between writers with different kinds of expertise?

Nick: We definitely will encourage collaborations of this sort, and we know that collaborators will need all the encouragement they can get. It's unusual and difficult for humanists to collaborate. When the technical and cultural analysis that you need to do is demanding, though, as it is in a platform study, it's great to have a partner working with you.

Personally, I prefer for my literary and research collaborations to be with similar "cross-cultural" people, such as Ian; I don't go looking for a collaborator to balance me by knowing about all of the technical matters or all of the cultural and humanistic ones. It is possible for collaborators on one side to cross the divide and find others, though. Single-authored books are fine as well, and it's okay with me if the single author leans toward one "culture" or the other, or even if the author isn't an academic.

Ian: I also think that this two culture problem is resolving itself to some extent. When I look at my students, I see a very different cohort than were my colleagues in graduate school. I see a fluency in matters of technology and culture that defies the expectations of individual fields. So in some ways, I see the Platform Studies series as an opportunity for this next generation of scholars as much as it is for the current one, perhaps even more so.

When you think about it, popular culture in general is also getting over the two culture problem. There are millions of people out there who know something about programming computers. As I've watched the press and the public react to Racing the Beam, it's clear to me that discussions of hardware design and game programming are actually quite welcome among a general readership.

Henry: What relationship do you see between "platform studies" and the "science, technology and society" field?

Nick: A productive one. We're very much hoping that people in STS will be interested in doing platform studies and in writing books in the series. Books in the series could, of course, make important contributions in STS as well as in digital media.

Ian: Indeed, STS already tends strongly toward the study of how science and technology underlies things. Platform studies has something in common with STS in this regard. But STS tends to focus on science's impact on politics and human culture rather than human creativity. This latter area has typically been the domain of the humanities and liberal arts. One way to understand platform studies is as a kind of membrane between computing, STS, and the humanities. We think there's plenty of productive work to be done when these fields come together.

Henry: Why did you decide to focus on the Atari Video Computer System as the central case study for this book?

Ian: We love the Atari VCS. It's a platform we remember playing games on and still do. In fact, the very idea for platform studies came out of conversations Nick and I had about the Atari. We found ourselves realizing that a programmer's negotiation between platform and creativity takes place in every kind of creative computing application.

Nick: Another factor was historical. While contributing to the cultural understanding of video games a great deal, game studies hasn't looked to its roots enough. A console as influential as the Atari VCS deserved scholarly and popular attention beyond mere retro nostalgia. We wanted to bring that sort of analysis to bear.

Ian: Finally, I've been using the Atari VCS for several years now in my classes, both as an example and as an exercise. I have my Introduction to Computational Media class program small games on the system as an exercise in constraint. I also taught a graduate seminar entirely devoted to the system. Moreover, I often make new games for the system, some of which I'll be releasing this spring. So overall, the Atari VCS is a system that has been and remains at the forefront of both of our creative and critical interests.

In fact, I've continued to do platform studies research on the Atari VCS beyond the book. A group of computer science capstone students under my direction just completed a wonderful update to the "Stella" Atari VCS emulator, adding effects to simulate the CRT television. These include color bleed, screen texture, afterimage -- all matters we discuss in the book. I have a webpage describing the project at http://www.bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator.shtml.

Henry: You focus the book around case studies of a number of specific Atari titles from Adventure and Pac-Man to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Can you say more about how these examples allowed you to map out the cultural impact and technical capacities of the Atari system?

Nick: The specific examples gave us the opportunity do what you can do with close readings: drill down into particular elements and see how they relate to a game, a platform and a culture. But we wouldn't have found the same insights if we had just picked a game, or six games from different platforms, and got to work. We used these games to see how programmers' understanding of the platform developed and how the situation of computer gaming changed, how people challenged and expanded the 1977 idea of gaming that was frozen into the Atari VCS when they put this wonderful machine together.

Ian: We also chose to focus on a specific period, the early years of the Atari VCS, so to speak, from 1977 to 1983. These games in particular allowed us to characterize that period, as programmers moved from their original understanding of this system -- one based on porting a few popular coin-op games -- to totally different and surprising ways of making games on it.

Henry: Platform Studies seems to align closely with other formalist approaches to games. Can it also be linked to cultural interpretation?

Nick: Formalist? Really? We were indeed very concerned with form and function in Racing the Beam, so I won't shun the label, but we tried to be equally attentive to the material situation of the Atari VCS and the cartridges and arcade games we discussed. For instance, we included an image of the Shark Jaws cabinet art so that the reader could look at the typography and decide whether Atari was attempting to refer to Speilberg's movie. We discuss the ramifications of using a cheaper cartridge interface in the VCS design, one that was missing a wire.

Ian: We should also remember the technical creativity that went into designing a system like the Atari VCS, or into programming games for it. The design of the graphics chip, for example, was motivated by a particular understanding of what it meant to play a game: two human players, side by side, each controlling a character on one side of the screen or another.

By the time David Crane created Pitfall! many years later, those understandings had changed. Pitfall! is a one-player game with a twenty minute clock. But it's also a wonderful mash-up of cultural influences: Tarzan, Indiana Jones, Heckle and Jeckle.

Nick: I'll admit that ours is a detailed analysis that focused on specifics (formal, material, technical) rather than being based around broad cultural questions: it's bottom-up rather than top-down. We're still trying to connect the specifics of the Atari VCS (and other platforms) to culture, though. The project is not only linked with, but part of, cultural interpretation.

Ian: I'd go even further; there's nothing particularly formalist about a platform studies approach, if formalism means a preference of material and structure over cultural reception and meaning. If anything, I think our approach offers a fusion of many influences, rather than an obstinate grip on a single one.

Henry: There is still a retro-gaming community which is deeply invested in some of these games. Why do you think these early titles still command such affection and nostalgia?

Ian: Some of the appeal is related to fond memories and retro-nostalgia, certainly. Millions of people had Ataris and enjoyed playing them. Just as the case with the Apple ][ or the Commodore 64 may have introduced someone to computing, so the Atari VCS might have introduced him or her to videogaming. So part of the appeal of returning to these games is one of returning to the roots of a pleasurable pastime.

Nick: That said, we resist appeals to nostalgia in the book and our discussions about it, not because nostalgia and retro aesthetics are bad, but because it would be a shame if people thought you could only look back at video games to be nostalgic. There are reasons for retro-gaming that go beyond nostalgia, too. It's driven, in part, by the appeal of elegance, by a desire to explore the contours of computing history with an awareness of what games are like now, and by the ability of systems like the Atari VCS to just be beautiful and produce really aesthetically powerful images and compelling gameplay.

Ian: It's also worth noting that there is a thriving community interested in new Atari games, many of whom congregate on the forums at AtariAge.com. For these fans and hobbyist creators, the Atari is a living platform, one that still has secrets left to reveal. So the machine can offer interest beyond retro-gaming as well.

Henry: What factors contributed to the decline of the Atari empire? How did that decline impact the future of the games industry and of game technology?

Nick: I think it takes a whole book on the complex corporate history of Atari to even start answering this question. Our book is focused on the platform rather than the company. Scott Cohen's Zap!: The Rise and Fall of Atari is a book about the company, and my feeling is that even that one doesn't really answer that question entirely. We're hoping that there will be more books on Atari overall before too long.

Ian: There are some reasons for Atari's decline that are connected specifically to the Atari VCS platform, though. It turned out to be incredibly flexible and productive, to support more types of game experience than its creators ever could have imagined. No doubt, Atari never imagined that third-party companies such as Activision would come along and make literally hundreds of games for the system by 1983, cutting in on their business model right at the most profitable point. But the system was flexible enough for that to happen, too.

Nick: That's why Nintendo did everything they could, by license and through technical means, to lock down the NES and to prevent this sort of thing from happening with it. The industry has been like that ever since.

Ian: As we point out in the book, this was a bittersweet solution. Nintendo cauterized the wound of retailer reticence, but it also introduced a walled garden. Nintendo (and later Sony and Microsoft) would get to decide what types of games were "valid" for distribution. Before 1983, the variety of games on the market was astounding. So, on the one hand, we're still trying to recover from the setback that was first-party licensing. But on the other hand, we might not have a games industry if it wasn't for Nintendo's adoption of that strategy.

Henry: Can you give us a sense of the future of the Platform Studies project? What other writers and topics can we expect to see? Are you still looking for contributors?

Nick: Yes, we're definitely looking for contributors, although we're pleased with the response we've had so far. We expect a variety of platforms to be covered -- not only game systems, but famous early individual computers, home computers from the 1980s, and software platforms such as Java. Some families of platforms will be discussed in books, for instance, arcade system boards. And although every book will focus on the platform level, we anticipate a wide variety of different methods and approaches to platforms. While getting into the specifics of a platform and how it works, people may use many different methodologies: sociological, psychoanalytic, ethnographic, or economic, for example.

Ian: In terms of specific projects, we have a number of proposals in various stages of completeness and review. It's probably a bit early to talk about them specifically, but I can say that all of the types of platforms Nick just mentioned are represented.

There are a few different types of book series; some offer another venue for work that is already being done, while others invite and maybe even encourage a new type of work to be done. I suspect that Platform Studies is of the latter sort, and we're gratified to see authors thinking of new projects they didn't even realize they wanted to pursue.

Henry: You both teach games studies within humanities studies in major technical institutions. How do the contexts in which you are working impact the approach you are taking here?

Ian: Certainly both Georgia Tech and MIT make positive assumptions about the importance of matters technical. Humanities and social science scholarship at our institutions thus often take up science and technology without having to justify the idea that such topics are valid objects of study.

Nick: I have to agree -- it's very nice that I don't have to go around MIT explaining why it's legitimate to study a computing system or that video games and digital creativity are an important part of culture.

Ian: Additionally, at Georgia Tech we have strong relationships between the college of liberal arts, the college of engineering, and the college of computing. I have many colleagues in these fields with whom I speak regularly. I have cross-listed my courses in their departments. We even have an undergraduate degree that is co-administered by liberal arts and computing. So there's already an ecosystem that cultures the technical pursuit of the humanities, and vice versa.

I also think technical institutes tend to favor intellectual experimentation in general. We often hear cliches about the "entrepreneurial" environment at technical institutes, a reference to their tendency to encourage the commercial realization of research. But that spirit also extends to the world of ideas, and scholars at a place like Georgia Tech are perhaps less likely to be criticized, ostracized, or denied tenure for pursuing unusual if forward-thinking research.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues. Bogost is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), and co-author (with Nick Montfort) of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press 2009). Bogost's videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally.

Nick Montfort is assistant professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction such as Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003).

A New "Platform" for Games Research?: An Interview with Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort (Part One)

Any time two of the leading video and computer game scholars -- Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech) and Nick Montfort (MIT) -- join forces to write a book, that's a significant event in my book. When the two of them lay down what amounts to a new paradigm for game studies as a field -- what they are calling "Platform Studies" -- and apply it systematically -- in this case, to the Atari system -- this is something which demands close attention to anyone interested in digital media. So, let me urge you to check out Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, released earlier this spring by MIT Press. In the interview that follows you will get a good sense of what the fuss is all about as the dynamic duo lay out their ideas for the future of games studies, essentially further raising the ante for anyone who wants to do serious work in the field. As someone who would fall far short of their ambitious bar for the ideal games scholar, I read this discussion with profoudly mixed feelings. I can't argue with their core claim that the field will benefit from the arrival of a generation of games scholars who know the underlying technologies -- the game systems -- as well as they know the games. I certainly believe that the opening up of a new paradigm in games studies will only benefit those of us who work with a range of other related methodologies. If I worry, it is because games studies as a field has moved forward through a series of all-or-nothing propositions: either you do this or you aren't really doing game studies. And my own sense is that fields of research grow best when they are expansive, sucking in everything in their path, and sorting out the pieces later.

That said, I have no reservations about what the authors accomplish in this rigorous, engaging, and ground-breaking book. However you think of games studies as an area of research, there will be things in this book which will provoke you and where Bogost and Montfort are concerned, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Henry: Racing the Beam represents the launch of a new publishing series based on what you are calling "Platform Studies." What is platform studies and why do you think it is an important new direction for games research?

Nick: Platform studies is an invitation to look at the lowest level of digital media -- the computing systems on which many sorts of programs run, including games. And specifically, it's an invitation to consider how those computing systems function in technical detail, how they constrain and enable creative production, and how they relate to culture.

Ian: It's important to note that platform studies isn't a particular approach; you can be more formalist or materialist, more anthropological or more of a computer scientist, in terms of how you consider a platform. No matter the case, you'll still be doing platform studies, as long as you consider the platform deeply. And, while platform studies is of great relevance to the study of video games, these studies can also be used to better understand digital art, electronic literature, and other sorts of computational cultural production that happens on the computer.

Nick: In games research in particular, the platform seems to have a much lower profile as we approach 2010 than it did in the late 1970s and 1980s. Games are developed for both PC and Xbox 360 fairly easily, and few scholars even bother to specify which version of a such game they're writing about, despite differences in interface, in how these games are burdened with DRM, and in the contexts of play (to name just a few factors). At the same time, there are these recent platforms that feature unusual interfaces and limited computational power, relative to the big iron consoles: Nintendo's Wii and DS and Apple's iPhone.

Ian: And let's not forget that games are being made in Flash and for other mobile phones. Now, developers are very acutely aware of what these platforms can do and of how important it is to consider the platform level. But their implicit understanding doesn't always make it into wider discussions, and that understanding doesn't always connect to cultural concerns and to the history of gaming and digital media.

Nick: So, we think that by looking thoroughly at platforms, we will, first, understand more about game consoles and other game platforms, and will be able to both make better use of the ones we have (by creating games that work well with platforms) and also develop better ones. Beyond that, we should be able to work toward a better understanding of the creative process and the contexts of creativity in gaming and digital media.

Henry: What do you think has been lost in game studies as a result of a lack of attention to the core underlying technologies behind different game systems?

Nick: For one thing, there are particular things about how games function, about the interfaces they present, and about how they appear visually and how they sound which make no sense (or which can be attributed to causes that aren't really plausible) unless you make the connection to platform. You can see these in every chapter of Racing the Beam and probably in every interesting Atari VCS game.

Ian: And more simply put, video games are computational media. They are played on computers, often very weird computers designed only to play video games. Isn't it reasonable to think that observing something about these computers, and the relationship between each of them and the games that they hosted, would lead to insights into the structure, meaning, or cultural significance of such works?

Here's an example from the book: the graphical adventure genre, represented by games like The Legend of Zelda, emerged from Warren Robinett's attempts to translate the text-based adventure game Colossal Cave onto the Atari VCS. The machine couldn't display text, of course, so Robinett chose to condense the many actions one can express with language into a few verbs that could be represented by movement and collision detection. The result laid the groundwork for a popular genre of games, and it was inspired largely by the way one person negotiated the native abilities of two very different computers.

Nick: More generally, the platform is a frozen concept of what gaming should be like: Should it come in a fake wood-grain box that looks like a stereo cabinet and fits in the living room along stereo components? Should it have two different pairs of controllers and difficulty switches so that younger and older siblings can play together with a handicap? Only if we look at the platform can we understand these concepts, and then go on to understand how the course of game development and specific games negotiate with the platform's concept.

Henry: Early on, there were debates about whether one needed to be a "gamer" to be able to contribute to games studies. Are we now facing a debate about whether you can study games if you can't read code or understand the technical schematics of a game system?

Nick: All sorts of people using all sorts of methods can make and have made contributions to game studies, and that includes non-ethnographers, non-lawyers, non-narratologists, and those without film studies backgrounds as well as people who can't read code or understand schematics. Games are a tremendous phenomenon, and it would be impossible for someone to have every skill and bit of background relevant to studying them. We're lucky that many different sorts of people are looking at games from so many perspectives.

That said, whether one identifies as a "gamer" is a rather different sort of issue than whether one understands how computational systems work. If your concern is for people's experience of the game -- how they play it, what meaning they assign to it, and how the experience relates to other game experiences -- then the methods that are most important to you will be the ones related to understanding players or interpreting the game yourself. But if you care about how games are made or how they work, it makes a lot of sense to know how to program (and how to understand programs) and to have learned at least the bare outlines of computer architecture.

Ian: Even if you want to thoroughly study something non-interactive, like cutscenes, won't you have to understand both codecs and the specifics of 3D graphics (ray tracing, texture mapping, etc.) to understand why certain choices were made in creating a cutscene? How can you really understand Geometry Wars without getting into the fact that vector graphics display hardware used to exist, and that the game is an attempt to recreate the appearance of those graphics on today's flat-panel raster displays? How could you begin to talk about the difference between two radically different and culturally relevant chess programs, Video Chess for the Atari VCS (which fit in 4K) and the world-dominating Deep Blue, without considering their underlying technical differences -- and going beyond noticing that one is enormously powerful and other minimal?

Nick: I certainly don't want to ban anyone from the field for not knowing about computing systems, but I also think it would be a disservice to give out game studies or digital media degrees at this point and not have this sort of essential technical background be part of the curriculum.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues. Bogost is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), and co-author (with Nick Montfort) of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press 2009). Bogost's videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally.

Nick Montfort is assistant professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction such as Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003).

How Susan Spread and What It Means

I've done four interviews over the past few days -- with the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Mainichi Shimbun (Japan) -- which in one way or another have touched on the dramatic story of Susan Boyle, the dowdy and musically gifted contestant on Britain's Got Talent who has become the new queen of both broadcast and participatory media.

What I've been telling all of them is that Boyle's success is perhaps the most spectacular example to date of spreadability in action, and indeed, since we've discovered a fair number of busy corporate types out there who don't feel like reading the eight installments of "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead," I figured I'd use this space to spell out again some core principles of spreadable media and show how the Boyle phenomenon illustrates how they work.

The statistics are moving so fast that it is impossible to keep track of them but here's the basic data points as reported on Monday by the Washington Post:

According to Visible Measures, which tracks videos from YouTube, MySpace and other video-sharing sites, all Boyle-oriented videos -- including clips of her television interviews and her recently released rendition of "Cry Me a River," recorded 10 years ago for a charity CD -- have generated a total of 85.2 million views. Nearly 20 million of those views came overnight.

The seven-minute video that was first posted on YouTube and then widely circulated online easily eclipsed more high-profile videos that have been around for months. Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin has clocked in 34.2 million views, said the folks at Visible Measures, while President Obama's victory speech on election night has generated 18.5 million views.

But it's not just in online video where Boyle, the unassuming woman from a tiny Scottish town, has dominated. Her Wikipedia entry has attracted nearly 500,000 page views since it was created last Sunday. Over the weekend, her Facebook fan page was flooded with comments, at some points adding hundreds of new members every few minutes. The page listed 150,000 members at 1 p.m. Friday. By last night there were more than a million.

By comparison, the 2008 Season finale for American Idol, one of the highest rated programs on American broadcast television, attracted almost 32 million viewers, or between a third and a half the number of people who had watched Susan's video as of Monday of this week. So, what's happening here?

Contrary to what you may have read, Susan Boyle didn't go "viral." She hasn't gained circulation through infection and contagion. The difference between "viral" and "spreadable" media has to do with the conscious agency of the consumers. In the viral model, nobody is in control. Things just go "viral." In the Spreadability model, things spread because people choose to spread them and we need to understand what motivates their decision and what facilitates the circulation.

While she originated on British broadcast television, her entry into the American market was shaped more by the conscious decisions of 87 plus million people who choose to pass her video along to friends, families, work mates, and fellow fans than by any decision by network executives to put her on the airwaves in the first place.

This is not to say that the original video was not professionally produced and edited in such a way as to maximize the emotional impact of what happened to her at that particular talent composition. This is not to say that our interest in the content wasn't shaped by our general familarity with the genre conventions of reality television (leading us to expect another William Hung kind of moment) or by our particular perceptions and investments in one Simon Cowell, whose boyish grin and sheepish expression represents the ultimate payoff for her spectacular performance (which we can appreciate because we've seen American Idol and know what a tough-minded SOB Simon can be). And that's not to say that the visibility of Susan Boyle hasn't been amplified as she's gotten interviewed on Good Morning America and spoofed on the Tonight Show, to cite two examples. We have to understand the Susan Boyle phenomenon as occurring at the intersection between broadcast media (or to use Amanda Lotz's term, television in the post-network era.) In other words, this is convergence culture at work.

The Susan Boyle phenomenon would not have played out the same way if there wasn't YouTube, if there weren't social networks, if there weren't Twitter. Indeed, the very similar video of Paul Potts making a similarly surprising success on the same program generated nowhere near the same level of circulation a year ago (though it may have also prepared the way for the public's interest in this story). What allowed the Susan Boyle video to travel so far so fast was that it could travel so far so fast.

For most of the people who saw it and decided to pass it along, they had a sense of discovery. They could anticipate that they were sharing the video with people who probably hadn't seen it already, precisely because the content was not yet being broadcast on commercial television. The fans found Susan Boyle before the networks did -- much like that old saw that by the time a trend makes it to the cover of Time Magazine, it's already over. There was an infrastructure in place -- across multiple communication systems -- which would allow anyone to share this content with anyone else who they thought would like to see it with minimal effort. We can send links. We can embed the content in our blogs.

The role of Twitter in all of this is most interesting. Twitter Twits did what Twitter Twits do best -- they tweeted alerts about an interesting bit of content and were able to embed micro-links so their followers could quickly access the content. I think of Twitter as like a swarm of bees that spread out in all directions, searching for interesting materials to share. When someone finds it, they come back to the hive, do a little honey dance, and send the swarm scampering behind them. This is how collective intelligence outsmarts the broadcast decision-makers: The Twitter Tribes can figure out what content the audience wants to see because the Twitter Tribes are the audience, making decisions in real time.

Equally important is that we had the agency to decide which content we wanted to pass along -- out of all of the possible video clips posted on YouTube last week or indeed, out of all of the many segments of media content which are circulating around us.

We believe that we can only understand what happened here by identify the choices which consumers made as they decided to pass along this content and not that content. The USA Today on Monday sought to identify a range of different motives which shaped the decisions to pass along this particular content: "Vindication . . . Surprise . . . Guilt . . . Shame . . . Psychology . . . Hope . . . Distraction . . . Empowerment . . . Authenticity . . . Spiritual Solace."

There's no need to identify a single cause for why people spread this content. Different people spread this content for different reasons. Hell, often, the same person spreads this content for different reasons. I sent the link via e-mail to my wife with a note saying "want to feel warm and fuzzy," to a close friend with a note suggesting "this will crack you up," and to my Twitter and Facebook mobs with the suggestion it illustrates something important about reality television because you wouldn't believe this if you saw it in a movie. My sharing of the video meant something different in each of these relationships. We can certainly identify a range of common reasons for why the emotional structure of this video might motivate people to circulate it.

Does the wide-spread circulation of reality television suggest the triviality of what constitutes public interests? I don't think we can answer that question without knowing what we are using Susan Boyle to talk about. Her meaning doesn't reside in the video itself -- we won't exhaust it no matter how many times with watch it. The meaning rests in the conversations that Susan Boyle enables us to have with each other. As it starts to circulate, the Susan Boyle video gets inserted into all kinds of ongoing conversations across a range of different communities, so that I've stumbled into prayer circles for Susan Boyle; I've found scientists talking about how someone with that body could produce such a sound; I've seen discussions amongst Karaoki singers about her techniques, and I've seen reality television fans trying to explain why her success would never be possible given the rules of American Idol which exclude someone her age from competing in the first place. Susan Boyle circulates because she's meaningful on many different levels and after a while, all of this has started to go meta so that we are spreading Susan's videos to talk about how fast they are being spread.

For many of the people who are spreading her videos, the transaction is understood through the lens of a gift economy. We share her because she allows us to make someone we care about have a somewhat better day. We share her because of what she allows us to say about ourselves, our world, and our relationships. I sent Susan to my wife as something like a Facebook Gift -- a short, quick, friendly gesture on a day when we weren't going to see each other until much later.

Yes, there were other groups who had other motives for getting me to pass along the content -- the producers of the programme and the network on which it aired, perhaps YouTube itself -- but their motives had very little to do with why I chose to share that video with people I cared about. So my circulation of the video needed to be negotiated between their interests and mine.

The fact that YouTube makes it easy to embed the content makes it easier for me to share it. The fact that Bit.ly allows me to reduce the length of the url allows me to tweet about it. And all of these technical innovations makes it that much easier for the video to spread, but at the end of the day, it also spreads because I and all the rest of us have become more literate about social networking, because we are linked to more people and have more regular contact with them, because we now often interact with each other through sharing meaningful bits of media content.

Keep in mind a fundamental fact: many of the 97 plus million people who downloaded the video are part of a surplus audience from the perspective of the people who produced and marketed Britain's Got Talent. Indeed, beyond a certain point, Susan Boyle's rapid visibility becomes a liability rather than an asset. Keep in mind that Boyle stars in a British program which does not get commercial distribution in the United States. I can't turn on a television network -- cable or broadcast -- and watch the next installment of Britain's Got Talent. I can't go on Hulu and download that content. And I can't at present go on iTunes and buy this content. Market demand is dramatically outpacing supply.

What I can do, though, is consume illegal downloads of the series via various torrents or fan distribution sites, which have the flexibility to get the content into circulation without having to negotiate international deals or work through protectionist policies which make it hard to bring international content into the American market. Even with Cowell's production company already having working relations with multiple American networks, my bet is that he can't get that show on the air quickly enough for Americans to be able to catch up with the Brits.

Sure, Simon Cowell has already signed her to a contract and talks about how ""there's every chance Susan Boyle will have the number one album in America" if she appears on Oprah . But the record can't go on sale fast enough to capitalize on this burst of public interest and by the time it reaches the market, there's a good chance that her 15 minutes of fame will have expired.

Wired tells us that even where the media producers might have made money from the spread of Sarah's video, they are so far choosing not to do so: "a Google spokeswoman responded to our e-mail and phone queries with some surprising news: "That video is not being monetized." We've contacted Sony (Simon Cowell's label) and FremantleMedia (the show's producer, owned by RTL Group not Sony as appeared in this update earlier) to try to determine why the $500,000 or more Boyle's video should have generated so far is apparently being left on the table -- despite the fact that both companies are confirmed revenue-sharing partners of YouTube." So, whatever calculations have gone into getting us to help spread this video, they don't make sense in terms of a simple and direct economic equation. This isn't about counting impressions and raking in the cash.

Keep in mind that what we've seen so far is her first appearance in a season long competition and the implication of this blockage becomes clear. I've argued here that piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers rather than moral failures on the part of consumers. It isn't that people will turn to illegal downloads because they want the content for free. My bet is that many of them would pay for this content but it is not legally being offered to them. We can compare this to the global interest generated by Ken Jenning's phenomenal run on Jeopardy: Jeopardy was already syndicated in markets around the world so when he generated buzz, he drew people back to the local broadcaster who was selling the content in their markets. They could tune in and see day by day whether he stayed in the game. Right now, everyone's still acting as if Susan Boyle was only one video but they will wake up tomorrow or the next day and discover that lots of those people want to see what happens to her next.

When many of us write about the global circulation of media, the American circulation of British reality television isn't necessarily what comes first to mind. Indeed, there's some kind of mental block in terms of understanding this content as international in the first place. Yet, there is already a strong fan base in the United States for British media content which had already been downloading and circulating Britain's Got Talent, even though no commercial producer had guessed that this series might generate this kind of American interest. And that fan base is now in a position where they may need to service Susan's growing audience.

Part of the reasons Americans like Susan Boyle is that she's so damned British. USA Today says her story is like "a Disney movie," but it isn't: it's like a British movie, like Calendar Girls or Billy Elliot or The Full Monty, one of those down to earth dramas where average Brits cut across class and taste boundaries and do something extraordinary. The mixture of gritty realism, portly stars, eccentricity, class consciousness and wild-eyed optimism is what draws many of us to British media in the first place.

We are used to talking about things that could only happen in America. Well, Susan Boyle is something that could only happen in Great Britain -- get used to it because the next one will be something that can only happen in India or Japan. When we talk about pop cosmopolitanism, we are most often talking about American teens doing cosplay or listening to K-Pop albums, not church ladies gathering to pray for the success of a British reality television contestant, but it is all part of the same process. We are reaching across borders in search of content, zones which were used to organize the distribution of content in the Broadcast era, but which are much more fluid in an age of participatory culture and social networks.

We live in a world where content can be accessed quickly from any part of the world assuming it somehow reaches our radar and where the collective intelligence of the participatory culture can identify content and spread the word rapidly when needed. Susan Boyle in that sense is a sign of bigger things to come -- content which wasn't designed for our market, content which wasn't timed for such rapid global circulation, gaining much greater visibility than ever before and networks and production companies having trouble keeping up with the rapidly escalating demand.

And as we discover we like someone like Susan Boyle, we seek out more information. Suddenly charity records she made years ago spring up videos on YouTube. Suddenly there's a flood of interest on Wikipedia about this previously unknown figure. And people are seeking out videos of Elaine Paige, the queen of British stage musicals, who Susan identified as her role model. Many Americans had never heard of Paige before so we can chart dramatic increases in downloads on her videos though they are dwarfed by the Susan Boyle original. Most of the thousands of comments posted on the Paige videos make unfortunate comparisons with Susan Boyle, suggesting that even though she has been a much bigger star historically, has a string of commercial successes, that for this week at least, Susan Boyle's got a more dedicated fan base. Just to give us a baseline, some of the Elaine Paige YouTube videos reach more than a million viewers, where-as the rest don't get over 100,000. My theory is that Susan Boyle's fan base have discovered some of them and not others, accounting for the huge gap in traffic.

Or consider the fact that Susan Boyle gained more than a million Facebook subscribers in less than a week at a time when Oprah and Ashton Kutcher have been battling it out to see who could be the first to get a million subscribers on Twitter. (Yes, Facebook has a much larger user base than Twitter but it's still an impressive accomplishment!) This is not to say that long-term Oprah could help Susan Boyle open up her record to a much larger audience, just that in this frenzy of interest, she doesn't need Oprah or any other old style broadcast celebrity to turn YouTube on its ear.

So, that's what Susan Boyle can teach us about Spreadability. So what happens next? Talk among yourselves. And while you are at it, spread the word.

Babylon 5's JMS Heads to MIT -- Buy Your Tickets Online

The annual Julius Schwartz Lecture, being held at MIT on May 22nd, now has tickets available for sale online. This year's speaker is J. Michael Straczynski (AKA JMS), best known for his role as the creator of the cult science fiction serial Babylon 5 and its various spin-off films and series. Straczynski wrote 92 out of the 110 Babylon 5 episodes, notably including an unbroken 59-episode run through all of the third and fourth seasons, and all but one episode of the fifth season. His television writing career spans from work on He-Man, She-Ra, and Real Ghostbusters through to The New Twilight Zone and Murder She Wrote. He followed up Babylon 5 with another really solid science fiction series, Jeremiah. In more recent years, he's enjoyed success as a screenwriter, most recently writing the script for The Changling, Clint Eastwood's period drama, and as a comic book writer, who both works on established superhero franchises, such as Spider-Man, Supreme Powers, Fantastic Four, and Thor, and creates his own original series, such as Rising Stars, Midnight Nation, The Twelve, The Book of Lost Souls, and Dream Police. He was one of the first television producers to actively engage his fan community online and has consistently explored the interface between digital media and other storytelling platforms. His work for The Twelve has been nominated for this year's Eisner Awards.

Tickets are also available in person at Hub Comics in Somerville and Comicopia in Boston's Kenmore Square.

Buy yours today, as they're expected to go fast.

Ghouls Just Want to Have Fun: Doug Gordon on the Zombeatles (Part Two)

Is there a connection to be drawn between the return of the Zombeatles and the publishing success of books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Can we expect other "classics" to go Zombie when they are no longer a living part of our culture?

There most certainly is a connection to be drawn between the return of the Zombeatles and the publishing success of books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. This is further evidence that the zombies are taking over. Zombies started by eating the stupid people first since they were the easiest to catch. As the stupid human food supply dwindled, zombies were forced to use more brainpower to hunt down the smart people. This "Smart People Diet" allowed the living dead to evolve in a Darwinian manner. Call it "natural selection" or perhaps "unnatural selection" would be more appropriate. Whatever you call it, it's clear that zombies are on the verge of taking over and establishing their own zombie-centric society, complete with their own zombified version of arts, entertainment and popular culture (of which The Zombeatles and books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are an integral part).

Yes, as zombies continue to take over, we can expect more classics to go zombie when they are no longer a living part of our culture. For example, it won't be too long before we such zombified classics as John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men And Zombies; Arthur Miller's Undeath of A Salesman; Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Undead and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (Maybe He's Been Waylaid by Zombies?).

And, of course, it goes without saying that Angus MacAbre ("Scotland's Funniest Zombie Comedian") is going to try to get his piece of the pie with his Monster Mashups for Zombies. This is the latest addition to Angus' phenomenally successful line of "For Zombies" instructional books. The series launched in the early '90s with three titles - Dummies For Zombies, Geniuses for Zombies, and Idiot Savants for Zombies. These books covered the best ways to eat dummies, geniuses and idiot savants and offered a wealth of information about the nutritional content of their respective brains.

Now Angus is extending the "For Zombies" brand with Monster Mashups for Zombies. It's the perfect study aid for the zombie student. Monster Mashups for Zombies are "CliffsNotes" meet the "For Dummies series," with a modern mashup twist because Angus has condensed not one, but two, classic works of literature into one flimsy book.

The debut title is On the Road to The Road, a literary mashup of Jack Kerouac's slacker bible, On The Road," and Cormac McCarthy's best-selling, critically-acclaimed The Road. It's the story of two young hipsters who hit the open road in search of kicks, only to be confronted by the post-apocalyptic downer of a father and son on a journey, while trying to

avoid cannibals and zombies. Okay, Angus has taken a bit of artistic licence by including zombies but, the way he sees it, it's not that much of a stretch ("Zombies are just basically cannibals with really bad skin"). Angus maintains that his Monster Mashups for Zombies titles will offer an easy and entertaining form of "one-hour smartenizing" that will have students away from the books and back getting blotto with their slackass friends in no time.

The zombie apocalypse will even infect public radio. Before you know it, the airwaves will be filled with the intellectually nutritious sounds of NZR, National Zombie Radio. Popular NZR programs will include: A Scary Home Companion"with Garrison Karloff; This American Unlife with Ira Gass; and the wacky news quiz program, Wait, Wait...Don't Eat My Brain. And, of course, there'll be no avoiding the undeadpan, autobiographical humor of zombie humorist David Zedaris, author of such droll best-sellers as Me Form Coherent Sentence Later

This Afternoon and When You Are Engulfed In Zombies.

Other reporters have learned that the Zombeatles want to develop a transmedia

franchise. Can you share some of your plans for future extensions of the Zombeatles?

I certainly can. The Zombeatles will be part of an exciting entertainment extravaganza called "Zombiepalooza." This postmodern vaudeville show will feature the Fab Gore performing their hits live and undead. It will also feature a screening of the film, The Zombeatles: All You Need Is Brains, and the undeadpan comedy stylings of Angus MacAbre ("Scotland's Funniest Zombie Comedian"), the host of All You Need Is Brains." People will be encouraged to come dressed as zombies and there will be interactive zombie prom and zombie fashion show elements. We've got a "Zombiepalooza" scheduled for Shank Hall in Milwaukee on Friday, July 10th. We're also working on taking the "Zombiepalooza" to Chicago and other locations to be announced.

We've also got plans for a Broadway musical revue called Zombeatlemania ("Not the Zombeatles, But An Incredible Simulation"); Ice Station Zombie: The Zombeatles On Ice; and a zombie-oriented children's TV/web series called Angus MacAbre's House of Angst (It's Dawn of the Dead meets Pee-wee's Playhouse.)

Angus MacAbre is planning on teaming up with Morgan Super Size Me Spurlock to produce a documentary in which Angus will spend an entire month eating nobody but McDonald's employees and customers. The working title is Would You Like Thighs With That?

There are also plans for books (The Consumer's Guide to the Zomniverse by Angus MacAbre" and Angus MacAbre's Zomnibus, among them), comic books and such video games as Rock Band: The Zombeatles and Angus MacAbre's Radioactive Haggis.

We're also planning to tap into the lucrative (and tender) youth market with a TV series called Alaska Nebraska. This show will focus on the wacky misadventures of an average zombie teen girl who lives a double life. By day, she's a mild-mannered student but by night, she's a famous zombie pop singer named Alaska Nebraska. We figure this can't miss.

I hear you are contemplating a Zombie-owned and operated amusement park. Wouldn't this just become a tourist trap?

No, the tourist trap is just a very small part of "Angus MacAbre's MacAbreville." MacAbre

describes MacAbreville as "a dark version of Disneyland, but without the cloying corporate namby-pambiness. MacAbre says that in this age of heightened anxiety and extreme sports, the public needs an extreme theme park, or an "ex-theme park" for short.

MacAbreville features several intriguing "lands," such as "Hitchcockland" ("The suspensefulest place on Earth"). As the name indicates, Hitchcockland" features attractions and restaurants based on the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Visitors will line up for hours to experience "The Vertigo Bell Tower of Terror" and "The Birds: Voyage Across Bodega Bay."

Another MacAbreville land is "Tarantinotown," where a bloody, non-linear time is guaranteed for all. Based on the cinematic oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino, Tarantinotown will feature such popular eating spots as the Hawaiian fast-food joint "Big Kahuna Burger" and the 1950's-themed "Jack Rabbit Slim's."

One of the most popular MacAbreville attractions is the rollicking intellectual thrill ride, "Baristas of the Caribbean." What if Starbucks Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz opened several Starbucks coffeehouses on the Caribbean island of Haiti, where legend has it that living people can be turned into zombies through two special powders entering into the bloodstream, usually through a wound? And what if the malevolent Starbucks Haiti District Manager, Tor McAllister, turned his baristas into zombies so that they'd be willing to work extra-long shifts for extra-less money? And what if these zombie baristas started eating their customers? Well, then you'd have one of MacAbreville's most popular attractions, "Baristas of the Caribbean." Enjoy this satirical, splash-filled boat ride! Laugh at the Animatronic-Audio Zombie Baristas as they chow down on their Animatronic-Audio customers ("That pompous businessman yelling into his cell phone really got his just desserts, didn't he, Jessica?" "Actually, Gary, he just ended up as that barista's dessert!"). All this murderous mirth and mayhem takes place to the jaunty strains of the attraction's catchy worldbeat theme song - "Tall, Grande, Venti (A Barista's Life for Me)." In a clever albeit inevitable cross-promotional move, MacAbre has ensured that the Baristas of the Caribbean CD soundtrack can be purchased at your neighborhood Starbucks.

What relationship exists between fans of Zombie music and the "Deadheads"?

As far as I can tell, there's no relationship between fans of zombie music and "Deadheads" (Grateful Dead fans). However, "Undeadheads" (fans of legendary zombie jam band, The Ungrateful Undead) are a huge part of the zombie music scene. Many "Undeadheads" will travel to as many Ungrateful Undead shows as possible in as many different locations as possible (even such farflung locales as Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts and Transylvania). Many Undeadheads display a fanatical allegiance to the Undead; some go so far as to conduct entire conversations by quoting from such classic Undead songs as "Dire Werewolf" and "A Touch of Grey Matter."

Theodor Adorno and others from the Frankfurt School warned us decades ago that

the repetition of basic formulas in popular music would numb the audience, making them brainless followers of the culture industries. Is this how Zombie music was born? Or might we see Zombie music as simply the latest in a series of resistant subcultural communities who have asserted their own identities only to be coopted by major labels?

As you might imagine, Henry, there's a lot of debate about how zombie music was born.

Some do indeed subscribe to Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School's theory that the repetition of basic formulas in popular music would numb the audience, making them brainless followers of the culture industries. But there are also those zombie critics such as Greil Carcuss and the so-called Frankenberry School who believe that zombie music is the latest in a series of resistant subcultural communitites that have asserted their own identities, only to be co-opted (or "cannibalized," so to speak) by major labels. Now with the digital revolution in music distribution, the major zombie record labels have lost a lot of their influence and their ability to cannibalize has been dramatically compromised. Zombie musicians are now cannibalizing each other and, in a few extreme cases, themselves.

I was fascinated to learn that Zombies not only have developed their own popular culture but also their own cultural critics. Is there a possibility that we will see undead theorists one of these days and if so, what can you tell us about their thinking about contemporary music?

Yes, I think we're already seeing the emergence of undead cultural critics with the work of Greil Carcass. Carcass has established himself as the thinking zombie's undead cultural critic by placing undead contemporary music in a much broader cultural context, a context that includes film, literature and politics. I'm thinking especially of such seminal works as Mystery Brain in which Carcass draws parallels between zombie rock and the cultural archetypes to be found in such classic zombie literary works as Moby-Dick versus the Zombies and Bartleby, the Scrivener meets Ginger Nut, the Office Zombie.

You've shared with us something of Zombie music and comedy through the film. I

was left wondering about other forms of popular culture among Zombie-Americans.

Do Zombies like horror films and if so, what gives them a fright? What kinds of

reality television are being produced for zombie consumption?

Horror films are not as popular among zombies as you might expect them to be. Much like people, zombies consume movies primarily as a form of escapism, so horror films are a little too realistic and slice-of-life for them. Having said that, zombies are terrified of the big-screen adaptations of Richard Matheson's classic novel, I Am Legend - The Last Man On Earth (1964) and I Am Legend (2007). The idea of such a small human food supply strikes fear in the very hearts of the undead. Such small-cast Ingmar Bergman films as Scenes from A Marriage also scare zombies for the very same reasons.

There's all kinds of reality television being produced for zombie consumption, including Monster Chef (a horrifying version of Iron Chef featuring such ghoulish gourmets as "Zombie Chef," "Vampire Chef," "Werewolf Chef" and "Invisible Chef"); America's Got Zombies; So You Think You Can Shamble; Extreme Makeover: Haunted House Edition; and Is Your Brain Bigger Than A 5th Grader's?)

If any of my readers would like to contribute body parts to support the band, where would they send them?

They can send them to me via dougmgordon@gmail.com or directly to The Fab Gore at

beeftone@gmail.com. Thank you for your time, consideration and interest, Henry. And thank you for the very intelligent and very perceptive questions.

Doug Gordon is a producer for Wisconsin Public Radio's/Public Radio International's Peabody Award-winning program, "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." Originally from Canada, Gordon has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (Major: Creative Writing) and a Creative Communications diploma (Major: Journalism). When not trying to make public radio more entertaining, he can be found working on various creative, artsy multimedia projects.

Ghouls Just Want To Have Fun: Doug Gordon on The Zombeatles (Part One)

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you will have noticed that zombies are taking over the entertainment industry. Case in point, the Zombeatles. You can get a taste of their music in this highly popular YouTube video, "A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead." Some readers may find the band hard on their eyes and ears, but others will quickly fall under their spell.

The Zombeatles first caused a stir in Madison, Wisconsin, where I did my graduate work, so I've been hearing alerts about their appearances for some time, and figured it was time to do a shout out to them here. At first, I was horrified by the prospect of Zombies performing on State Street, but then I realized that this perspective was small-minded of me. Cultural Studies scholars have long been committed to lending their voices to those who are voiceless in our society and to helping our readers to understand phenomenon which may disturb or disrupt the operations of the dominant system. Clearly, learning to appreciate Zombie music (and tracing its roots back to the cultural experiences of Zombie-Americans) requires us to think outside the box. It has required much less flexibility on the part of the media industries who have proven all too eager to cater to the tastes of any significant consumer niche and who are constantly trying to dig up new talent to circulate through the global media marketplace.

A new documentary, All We Need is Brains, recounts the story of the rise of the Zombeatles in all of its gory details, sharing not only some hit songs, such as "I Want to Eat Your Hand," "Hey, Food," and "P.S. I Love Eating You." I had a chance to watch the film over the weekend and while it churned my stomack and made my blood curdle, it also opened my head to some new experiences I wouldn't have had otherwise. This may make me sound like a spinless intellectual but this film helped me to wrap my brain around the Zombeatles. Here's a preview of the documentary which is circulating on the web.

You can order your very own copy here. And if this music makes your heart skip a beat or two, you can also order their new album, Meat the Zombeatles. Neither is going to cost you an arm and a leg and it's safe to say that you won't ever hear anything like their music again.

Doug Gordon, a Wisconsin Public Radio producer, has emerged as the mouth of the Zombeatles and he agreed to share with us what's on his mind. He certainly provided me with a lot of information to sink my teeth into. So let's give him a hand for helping out here.

Can you give us a little background on the Zombeatles and how they impacted contemporary popular music?

Jaw Nlennon and Pall IcKartney met as art students in Pool of Liver, England back in 1957. They were bitten by some skiffle zombies. The skiffle zombies transmitted the "solanum" virus that creates zombies (as discussed in Max Brooks' book, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead") to Nlennon and IcKartney. These skiffle zombies were also suffering from "rockin' pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu" (or, as it's more colloquially known, "a bad case of loving you"); this infectious disease was also passed on to Nlennon and IcKartney when the skiffle zombies bit them.

The combination of these two diseases transformed Nlennon and IcKartney into music-loving zombies. They soon developed a voracious appetite for human brains and for writing and performing original songs about their voracious appetite for human brains. The old adage, "Write what you know," was clearly not lost on these unlively lads. They formed a zombie skiffle group called The Gory Men. Guitarist Gorge Harryson joined the combo a short time later. The band realized that they would probably be able to rock out a bit more if they had a drummer so they tried to recruit Eat Breast to pound the skins for them. Breast was reluctant to join The Gory Men because of their name, as he felt it was a little too "on the nose." So the band changed their name to The Zombeatles and Breast took his place behind the drum kit.

However, The Fab Gore's producer, Gorge Mortem, had reservations about Breast. Mortem thought that Breast couldn't keep up with the other Zombeatles; he couldn't eat enough brains. So Breast was dismissed and replaced by Dingo Scarr, the recently-deceased drummer for the popular zombie rock combo, Rory Sturm und Drang and the Curried Brains.

Angus MacAbre ("Scotland's Funniest Zombie Comedian") and legendary undead rock critic Fester Fangs (of Rolling Tombstone Magazine) first encountered the Zombeatles at The Cadavern Club in Pool of Liver. Fangs was instrumental in bringing The Fab Gore to public attention and MacAbre was instrumental in bringing the public's brains to The Fab Gore.

The Zombeatles' impact on popular music was immense and immeasurable. As Fester Fangs wrote: "The Fab Gore brought a certain frenetic frisson to rock and roll. Their songs about eating brains really dug deep into the heart of the public's collective brain (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphors). With such classic songs as "I Wanna Eat Your Hand" and "Ate Brains A Week," The Zombeatles performed a kind of figurative electroconvulsive therapy on both popular music and popular culture, which left the rest of the music industry looking brain-dead (pun pretty much unavoidable)." (from "Eat 'Em Raw: The Cannibalization of The Zombeatles," as reprinted in Psychopathic Reactions and Cerebral Cortex Guano: The Work of A Legendary Undead Rock Critic, edited by Greil Carcass).

Zombie music has long been an underground phenomenon. Why do you think it is surfacing now?

I think it's surfacing now because the "underground" can only stay under ground so long before the mass media and popular culture "dig it up" (so to speak) and it becomes part of the mainstream. I'm not saying that zombie music is part of the mainstream yet but I think it's well on its way. Take, for example, Angus MacAbre's blatant attempt to cash in on the success of the popular American indie rock band Vampire Weekend by forming his own band called Zombie Workweek. This is the kind of derivative cannibalization that the music industry is famous for.

Zombie music is just riding the zombie zeitgeist. As June Pulliam so eloquently put it in her essay, "The Zombie," which appears in Greenwood Press' Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares: "The zombie itself is a malleable symbol - representing everything from the horrors of slavery, white xenophobia, Cold War angst, the fear of death, and even apprehensions about consumer culture - and has become an icon of horror perhaps because it is quite literally a memento mori, reminding us that our belief that we can completely control our destiny, and perhaps through the right medical technology, even cheat death, is mere hubris."

Are the Zombeatles simply a revival band or do they bring their own fresh material?

The Zombeatles are a revival band only in the most literal sense of the word "revival" - that is to say that The Fab Gore breathed new life into popular music as only the living dead are capable of doing. The Zombeatles gave pop music a metaphorical Heimlich Maneuver; they transmogrified rock and roll from the bloated, maggot-ridden corpse it had become, replacing the figurative rigor mortis that had set in with a revolutionary, new, riboflavin-enhanced approach to rockin' and rollin'.

The Zombeatles influenced countless acts. Can you imagine The Zommonkees' recording their 1966 debut single, "Last Brain in Clarksville," without The Fab Gore paving the way with such classics as "Ate Brains A Week"? Not bloody likely. And who can deny the Fab Gore's influence on The Zomzombies' big hits "Thyme Is The Seasoning," "Smell Her Slow" and "She's Not Rare"? The Zombeatles even inspired a fictional parody band called The Zomrutles.

Your press materials suggest that the Zombeatles "went viral" after they were showcased by Rob Zombie as part of a Halloween promotion on YouTube. What happened next? How many people were infected? Could this viral spread have been prevented through sanitary measures?

It's like that old TV commercial for shampoo... "And they'll tell two friends. And they'll tell two friends. And so on. And so on." Friends kept telling friends about the Rob Zombie-endorsed Zombeatles' music video, "A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead." These friends told other friends. As of right now, 1,121,999 people (give or take a few) have been infected. This number is based on the fact that there have been 1,121, 999 viewings of the video on YouTube. Of course, some of these viewings could have actually been re-viewings by the same person(s). And there's no telling how many people that would apply to. I'm confident, though, that YouTube founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim are working on the cutting-edge technology that will allow us to determine this in the very near future. When I hear back from them, I'll definitely get back to you, Henry.

As for the question of whether or not this viral spread could have been prevented through sanitary measures, I really can't say for sure. All I know is that it's important to wash your hands immediately before and immediately after using YouTube.

Doug Gordon is a producer for Wisconsin Public Radio's/Public Radio International's Peabody Award-winning program, "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." Originally from Canada, Gordon has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (Major: Creative Writing) and a Creative Communications diploma (Major: Journalism). When not trying to make public radio more entertaining, he can be found working on various creative, artsy multimedia projects.

Getting Philosophical about Legend of Zelda: An Interview with Kristina Drzaic and Peter Rauch

Are video games philosophical texts? They certainly encourage players to make choices and explore what their consequences may be and in mapping those consequences, they can help us to see the world through certain moral and ethical lenses. The challenge, of course, is to encourage players to reflect on the logic shaping their actions and the game's responses, to move from playing the game to examining themselves and their decisions. A recent book, Luke Cuddy's The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy, sought to apply a range of philosophical concepts and debates to the long-standing Zelda video game series. A pair of my former students, Peter Rauch and Kristina Drzaic, both from our graduate class of 2007, contributed to the book and agreed to share some of their perspectives on the blog. I've had the pleasure to watch both of them grow as game theorists -- and in Kristina's case, as a designer who now works in the Australian games industry. Both of them did thesis projects for our program which centered around games: Kristina's dealt with game secrets and included a Zelda case study while Peter's dealt with the application of moral philosophy to game design. Their piece for the book, "Slave Morality and Master Swords", showed what happened when they mashed up their two projects -- not unlike combining chocolate and peanut butter to produce a new great taste sensation!

Here's what they had to say about the experience.

Why might Legend of Zelda be singled out for philosophical exploration? Is this book an acknowledgement of its long-standing commercial success or do you think it is a particularly "philosophical" game?

PR: I thought it was a bit strange, honestly. In working with Kristina to develop our ideas, though, I began to get a sense that the Zelda series is more than just the sum total of the individual games that make it up. It's also the Zelda brand, and the fan culture, the connections between the games, and the way they fit together in the minds of players. The fact that it's commercially successful is very important in the sense that commercial success ensures both the production of a large number of source texts and the gathering of a large fanbase that responds emotionally to the idea of a Zelda game. At a purely textual, narrative level, Zelda's built from some pretty standard genre conventions, and while they might not be original, they are pretty easily amenable to this kind of examination. Stories about heroes just seem to help people think about the nature of their world.

KD: That is an odd thing about exploring the Philosophy of Zelda. Peter and I both agree that the game series of Zelda is not, narratively speaking, a morass of intriguing philosophical questions. Every Zelda game has the same plot and In the Zelda world morality is fully black and white, good and evil. While replaying the same plot might sound boring, it isn't. Each game looks different, feels different, and behaves differently. Players keep coming back because the play itself is the attraction.

The act of play is where the philosophical questions become interesting. As you work your way through the game world you can subvert the seriousness, the story, and the philosophy itself through your play. In this way, Zelda is a good case study for how philosophical questions can function within a videogame; our book explores the experience of the player vs. the reality of the game.

The contributions to this book have branched out in many different directions. While Peter and I looked at how players of a game can subvert an intended game design and message, other contributors explored death, identity, time, art, utopia and so on.

In the essay, you describe some of your own pleasures in the game, yet I assume you both have separate and distinct personal histories as Zelda players. What can you tell us about your relationship to this game?

KD: As a kid I had an Apple computer for gaming, not a Nintendo console and so I missed out on the early Zelda games. My sole exposure to Zelda was through the Zelda television show.

If I remember correctly, I thought that if a game warranted its own TV show that game must be absolutely, positively the best game ever. Oh yes, if it is forbidden it must be better.

A few years later I tasted the forbidden fruit; My family got an N64 and I finally finally played the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The game reached far beyond any imagined expectations, (and happily it was far better than the completely cheesy tv show I loved at age 7.) This game is special: it revolutionized game storytelling and had a sense of world depth that games today still struggle to match. At the time of its release I played the game three times in a row, felt moved to create a Zelda fansite and spread legends about secrets within the game itself. No game before or after has ever been this amazing to me.

Most importantly this game shapes how I play and design games today. When you explore a Zelda world you find the world rewards you for being curious. What could be better than a game that encourages the participant to question and explore the world that surrounds them?

PR: I was five and my brother was seven when the NES launched in the states, so I kinda grew up with the Nintendo brand. We got Zelda for Christmas, and played it to death--I actually discovered the "second quest" cheat before the magazines made it famous, but none of my friends ever believed me. Bastards.

Anyway, Zelda was pretty much the only thing in its genre for years, and each successive game seemed to get better. I fell out of contact with the series when I started undergrad, but I'm getting caught up now. It's a weird feeling revisiting a series that kept improving while you weren't playing it. Somewhere between coming home, and coming home to find that your house has been remodeled.

Your essay begins with a discussion of a gliche in the programming of Ocarina of Time which allows the character to defy the laws of physics in this fictional world. How can we understand the pleasure players take in exploiting this cheat in the system? How do we relate this pleasure to traditional understandings of what it means to identify with a character?

KD: Defying the laws of a game is an illicit pleasure. In the case of flying, the glitch play meant being able to explore the space in a new way and see incomplete construction and the game world's edge. The experience of flying in Zelda was like gaining access to the Disneyland Magic Kingdom underbelly or peeking behind the stage of a play. In flying through the air and playing with glitches you get to see things that are not meant for your eyes. It destroys the fiction but it also gives you, as a player, great freedom and mastery over the space.

Glitches of course, never help players "win" a game. They are deterimental, they might end in a game crash, but it is always intriguing to see a game break and wonder what rule is broken and how it changes the space you inhabit.

PR: Playing with glitches is something I generally don't try to do; my whole approach to games is about "reading" the rules and looking for that one

optimal path they point to. One of the fun things about working with Kristina is that we take such different things from the same games. That's kind of the essay in microcosm, actually.

You evoke Roger Callois's classic distinction between Ludus and Paidia here to explain the experience of playing this video game. Can you explain what you mean by these two terms and describe the different modes of game play experience they evoke for you?

PR: I know videogame studies (or whatever we're calling it this week) is a relatively new field, and I can't make a universal generalization analogous to how lit students feel when they have to read Important Canonical Text X for the first time. Still, in talking about Callois with classmates and friends, it always seems to devolve into a nitpicky discussion about whether or not it makes sense to completely separate improvisation and freedom from rules and restrictions in terms of play. In practice, it's hard to identify any actual case which has only one, and it'd be pretty silly to try to

derive some sort of ludus/paidia ratio from a given text. Gonzalo Frasca helped out by suggesting a cleaner distinction in which ludus games pointed the player toward a desired end condition and paidia games did not, and even though game designers are busily trying to break down that distinction, it's still pretty useful for describing games on a case-by-case basis.

Conveniently, Frasca's distinction also works well for looking at different play styles within a given text, which is pretty much where Kristina and I ended up going.

You close the essay with some speculations about Nietsche's Beyond Good and Evil as a way to understand the different constraints and demands games place on gamers. How do you get from Zelda to the ramblings of "mad anti-semitic Germans"?

PR: First of all, if there are Nietzscheans reading this who are upset by the term "mad anti-semitic Germans"--or mad anti-semitic Germans who resent being lumped in with Nietzsche--I sincerely apologize, and hope you'll still buy the book. That said, two things academic gamers, at least those in my neck of the woods, can't seem to stop talking about are narrative/fiction and vague ideas of "meaningful" play. I've always operated under the assumption that, to the extent a game can deal with meaning, moral or otherwise, it does so primarily at a narrative level. Granted, non-narrative games don't exist, so it might be a bit of a straw man.

Still, while rule systems can be used to refer to or play with ideas about morality, the ideas cannot be spontaneously generated from the rule system. What I found in thinking about Zelda that led me to apply Nietzsche was that when you stripped out all the "musts" and "shoulds" the player faces in trying to play a game "correctly," i.e. to its completion, all you have left is "can." At that point, the player can either put down the controller and do something more meaningful with his or her life -- not something I'd generally recommend -- or start generating their own "shoulds."

The hell with what Link wants to do, I want to throw explosives at chickens for half an hour. In Zelda, it's not possible to do traditionally "good" or "bad" things without interacting with the authorial narrative, because the narrative gives those actions their moral meaning. When that's out, it becomes a game about taking this avatar with an extremely limited set of actions and trying to make him do things the designers didn't want him to do.

How did you come to write this essay together? How does it merge ideas you've been working on separately for your thesis projects in Comparative Media Studies?

KD: Oddly it was not nearly as daunting a task as Peter and I first envisioned. My thesis, Oh No I'm Toast! Mastering Videogame Secrets explored the pleasure of playing a game the wrong way, and this kind of subversion means for a player. I'd even used Zelda as an example.

Peter's thesis, Playing with Good and Evil: Videogames and Moral Philosophy, provided the other half of our analysis; how does the act of player subversion complicate the relationship between player and avatar? We decided to keep things simple: start out explaining how players might play a game in a variety of ways, for the game, against the game, and breaking the game. Then we used Peter's framework to explore what this meant philosophically in terms of a player/avatar relationship. Even though Peter wrote from Boston and I from Australia the essay wove itself together like magic. Google Docs helped.

One might say it all came together as a kind of symbiotic beast.

PR: I think of it as more of a chimera, myself, but I suppose "symbiotic beast" works well. I think I've got a black spider-suit somewhere in the back of my closet.

Kristina Drzaic is a game writer, game designer, a filmmaker and a contributor to The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am. Kristina earned her Masters Degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT where she designed games with the Education Arcade and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. She also holds a BA from the Unversity of Notre Dame. Kristina currently lives in the Land of Oz designing an secret game with 2K Games Australia. You can follow Kristina on twitter at http://twitter.com/poniesponies

Peter Rauch is a graduate of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where he studied the intersection of videogames, narrative, and moral philosophy. "Slave Morality and Master Swords" is his first print publication. He is currently at work on a number of projects in and out of academia.

Reinventing the Television Studies Textbook: An Interview with Jason Mittell (Part Two)

As you wrote the book, you clearly struggled with the issue of how to balance the classic examples in the field, many of which reflect the successive generations of television scholarship, with the need for contemporary examples which are relevant to the current generation of students. How did you resolve that issue?

I hope I resolved it! The book was based on my own course (also entitled "Television and American Culture") which has evolved over the past decade. I initially began teaching the course as a chronological history of broadcasting, starting with radio, moving through network television, and ending up in the convergent present - there are good textbooks to frame such a historical narrative. But I found that students taking the only television-centered course in the curriculum were itching to talk about the contemporary context - while I would highlight how early radio frames our understanding of 1990s internet, or 1950s single-sponsorship helps explain contemporary product placement, I found that the course wasn't working well to either capture the historical or the contemporary, and needed to be restructured.

When I shifted to a topical format that mirrors the structure of the book, I found that historical examples could work well to help explain what students think they know about the present. Thus it's essential to understand All in the Family to grasp South Park or Chappelle's Show, or the 1950s quiz show cycle to contextualize the 2000s reality boom. While the book is not a substitute for a television history text or course, I hope it's complementary to such histories, and lends itself to various teaching contexts. If a curriculum has only one TV-centric course (like at Middlebury), the book can frame the medium while introducing its history; if there are other courses in television history, the references should build on that exposure and knowledge to deepen students' understanding. And the book hopefully stands alone outside the teaching context, serving as an introduction to the academic study of television for readers of all ages with an intellectual interest in media. Or at least that's what I was aiming for.

A current debate in television studies centers around our tendency to focus on hip programs with self-reflective elements or on ensemble cast dramas to the exclusion of other genres and formats which often have much higher viewership. How did you confront this challenge in designing your textbook?

When choosing examples and areas to cover, my first imperative was to pick examples that spoke to students and encouraged them to look deeper into the shows that they know and enjoy. So while using programs like South Park, The Simpsons, Lost, and The Daily Show as examples does cater to my own tastes, it is really motivated by student interest - I have found that students get really excited when I tell them about my research on The Wire and Lost, much more than my work on Dragnet! Contemporary programs that get high ratings, like Two and a Half Men and NCIS, are not on the radar of most undergraduates, and thus fall short as pedagogical examples.

Additionally, I have no doubt that the historical significance of the more groundbreaking and "hip" shows will be more long-lasting than many of today's conventional hits, and thus tackling innovations is a better long-term strategy than looking at today's typical television. For example, John Fiske's examination of Hart to Hart in Television Culture is a great analysis, but virtually incomprehensible to readers today who have never heard of the show. Todd Gitlin's account of Hill Street Blues from the same era is much more readable and relevant because that more innovative show has lingered in consciousness and curricula.

That being said, I made a conscious effort to include sections on reality television, game shows, talk shows, soap operas, the news, and educational television. The world of television programming is so vast and expansive that it's impossible to be comprehensive. I didn't attempt to account for every genre and programming trend, but hopefully readers won't come away with the common misconception that important or interesting television only airs in primetime on networks or premium cable.

I was struck looking at the references in your book by how much television studies has expanded and matured as a field over the past decade. How did the current state of this field impact the decisions you made in creating this book?

The primary job of a textbook is to synthesize the field into an introductory framework; given the growth of television studies in recent years, this was both exciting and daunting. I didn't want to structure the book by methodology or theoretical approach, which is an organization that some other television textbooks use, so I mapped out the key elements of television and looked for scholarship addressing those core aspects. It also feels like the field has moved away from theoretical modeling and more toward an applied mode - take the approaches to the medium developed in previous eras, and provide detailed historical and analytical accounts of a wide range of examples and moments. Thus it was a rich vein of scholarship to mine.

It was interesting to see what facets of television have not gotten much scholarly attention, and frame the book to invite further investigation. One large area that seems to have been underexplored in recent years is advertising - besides a few specific case studies (like your own work on American Idol) and the typical broad jeremiads against commercialism, I found a lack of culturally-oriented accounts of the contemporary advertising environment, which is undergoing such rapid transformation. This is certainly a fertile area for any graduate students looking for a new project!

There were two smaller areas that seem to have been outside the main thrust of television studies, but I strategically included to inspire more research: copyright and media literacy. Both of these realms are inspiring a tremendous amount of activism and scholarship in other fields, but they have not been addressed by American television scholars as much as I would hope (I do think media literacy education is more central to British television scholarship). Again, I hope the brief sections on these areas will encourage further research.

Others have argued that there has been much more work on the ideological and economic dimensions of television, especially in regard to television audiences, than to the aesthetic dimensions. What challenges did you find in writing the chapters that deal with more formal issues?

A good indicator is that Chapter 5, "Making Meanings" (about the formal dimensions of the television text) is the only one without any endnotes! Not to suggest that there is no scholarship in this area, but it certainly has been less explored than issues of industry, reception, and representation. Most of the core scholarship on the formal elements of television is quite dated today, dealing with examples and modes of production that are less central to contemporary television. In some ways, scholars have been reluctant to return to questions of form and aesthetics due to the politicization of the field (which I've written about elsewhere concerning Lost). But I also think it's because there hasn't been a recent tradition to build on, and the comparable scholarship from the 1970s is hard to update. So I hope these chapters help lay things out enough to encourage scholars to build on this foundation.

Chapter 5 was in many ways the most difficult to write because of the vast number of terms and ideas that need to be laid out. I was trying to distill a vast formal vocabulary and framework into a succinct chapter, accounting for the variety of television styles spanning fiction and non-fiction, live and recorded onto various media. This is compounded by the fact that the majority of American high school graduates have not been exposed to any formal media education - while we can assume that a college-bound student has at least been exposed to some basic concepts of literary style, there are no guarantees that anybody has been taught the basics of editing and camerawork. Students do know a lot as savvy media consumers or self-taught producers, but the lack of consistent terminology and conceptual framework means that an introductory media course has to cover a lot of ground. So the sections on form and aesthetics is a large "brain dump" of material, that will hopefully be clear enough to provide a solid foundation for students to engage in their own analyses of television programming.

You provide a good deal of original research and analysis in this book. What do you see as the relationship between this textbook and your other scholarly projects, such as you work on genre theory and television, or your analysis of complexity in contemporary television narrative?

When I started the textbook project, my Genre & Television book had recently been released and I was starting to build my narrative project. I conceived as the two modes of writing as distinct - the textbook would be synthesizing other people's research, and the narrative book would be my own ideas more in line with my first book. But as I got deeper into the textbook, I found that these two modes of writing were far less distinct from one another than I had thought. The textbook does build on others' works more fully, but I'm still framing arguments, selecting examples and evidence, and guiding readers through a narrative. I also became enamored of a more accessible writing style - while I've always tried to write with a minimum of jargon or density, looking back on early publications shows how much my writing style has changed (hopefully for the better!). So I anticipate that even though the ideas will be less synthetic, I hope that the tone and style of my narrative work is more like the textbook than my earlier scholarship.

The other key influence on my writing has been blogging. I'm sure I don't have to tell you how gratifying it is to be able to put up an essay in progress and see the hits accumulate, knowing that people are reading your work, engaging with it, and offering feedback. The textbook has been out in print for a little over a month now, and I feel like it's less public than it was when I was posting chapter sections on my blog - reading a book is so private and detached from the author. I hope the textbook's website becomes a place of more active engagement and community once it is adopted and used in classes, but that's still an unchartered model. In planning my book on narrative, I'm striving to find ways to capture the engagement and immediacy of blogging, even while achieving the more archival mode of book publishing - but that's a topic for another interview.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of American Studies and Film & Media

Culture, and Chair of Film & Media Culture, at Middlebury College. He is the

author of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American

Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television & American Culture (Oxford UP,

2009), numerous essays in journals and anthologies, and the blog Just TV. He

is currently writing a digital book on narrative complexity in contemporary

American television.

Upcoming Conference -- Learning in a Participatory Culture

I've often written in this blog about the work we have been doing through Project NML developing curricular materials for in school and after school use to support the New Media Literacies. We will be hosting an event to showcase this work coming up next month and I wanted to encourage you to register and attend. At NML's May 2nd conference, we will share our new web-based learning environment, the Learning Library, and host a series of conversations and workshops about the integration and implementation of the new media literacies across disciplines. Workshops include "The Complexities of Copyright: Shepard Fairey v. the AP," "Mapping in Participatory Culture: Boundaries," "Using Wikipedia in the Classroom" and many others. Henry Jenkins' closing remarks will address the future of NML and participatory democracy.

Panelists at this conference will include members of the NML team, educators who have been working with NML materials in the field, and educational researchers. The conference is designed to engage anyone with an interest in the future of education, especially high school teachers and after school coordinators. The format itself will be participatory - we hope that attendees will join the conversation, and leave the conference equipped with new ideas and strategies.

Learning in a Participatory Culture will take place at MIT, Cambridge MA, from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm.

Registration for this one-day conference is $35.00, breakfast and lunch included.

Registration is now open. For more, check out Project NML homepage.

Reinventing the Television Studies Textbook: An Interview with Jason Mittell (Part One)

I can think of very few examples of textbooks that have made original contributions to scholarship in media studies: Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art and Film History books may be the notable exception. I generally prefer not to use textbooks in my classes, exposing my students to cutting edge articles from books and journals, and increasingly to blog posts from key public intellectuals. Most textbooks homogenize and generalize, lacking the particularity and pointedness of other kinds of academic writing. They try to appeal to everyone, try to include everything that matters, and in the process, they mask the criteria which shape their construction of the field. For these reasons, I was more than a little surprised to learn that Jason Mittell, who I consider to be one of the top thinkers in television studies, was tackling the task of writing a textbook for this field. Mittell has been working on late on the issue of complexity in television narrative, having already contributed to our understanding of genre and television. We share a common intellectual background -- both being alums of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Communications Arts Program. Mittell is involved in our Convergence Culture Consortium and recently posted some interesting thoughts on his Just TV blog which compliments my focus on "spreadability" with what he calls "drillability." You can learn more about Television and American Culture here.

I had a chance to read some of this textbook project in draft form and was excited by what I saw, so as soon as I heard Television and American Culture was being released, I contact Mittell to do an interview for this blog.

Let me be clear: Mittell has done what I would not have thought possible, creating a compelling, up-to-date wide-reaching, nuanced, readable, and engaging introduction to television studies, a textbook which does what we want a good textbook to do but doesn't read at all like a textbook. As you will see, I wanted to get the genre theorist Mittell to reflect on textbooks as a genre and on the ways he chose to reinvent that genre through this project. In talking about Television Studies textbooks, Mittell also offers some reflections on why we should study TV and what the current state of the field looks like.

You open the book with a consideration of the Janet Jackson flap at the Super Bowl. What does this incident teach us about the range of different ways television functions in relation to American culture?

This was the first section I wrote during the book proposal process. I knew that the book's core model would be to show how television, like all media, can be understood as spanning a number of facets that are often treated separately - this was based on the "circuit of culture" model emerging out of British cultural studies in the 1990s. For television, the six facets that I identified are commercial industry, democratic institution, textual form, site of cultural representation, part of everyday life, and technological medium - the first draft of the book actually had only six (very long!) chapters, each covering one of these facets.

In drafting the book's introduction, I needed to come up with an example that would literally sell the book - to publishers looking at the proposal, to faculty reviewing the book for adoption, and to students on the core concepts and engaging tone to keep them reading. This was in late 2004, so the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" was still a current event, with ongoing legislative and judicial processes. It struck me as a perfect example to demonstrate this circuit of television in action, comprising the full scope of issues within an example that was very easy to write about - you don't need to see the clip to understand the case study, while many other examples that I could have used required more familiarity with a program, channel, genre, etc. The only problem is that the writing process took long enough that what started as a hot-button contemporary example reads a bit dated for today's students - and in a few years, it will be old news. So I'm keeping an eye out for a newer example to plug-in for the book's revised edition.

Many textbooks strive for a "neutral" voice which balances out competing perspectives in the field. You do lay out competing arguments here, but as you note in your introduction, you also take sides, constructing your own arguments about key contemporary trends and programs. How do you see your book relating to the genre expectations surrounding the "textbook"?

When I decided to tackle a textbook, I spent some time reading through a number of textbooks on the market, both within media studies and other fields. What struck me most was how disengaging and dull the majority of them were. Even when they were written by authors who can be lively and compelling writers in their other scholarship, the genre of the textbook seemed to follow the edict of a lot of network television: provide least objectionable content. They present material in a seemingly objective, overly-simplified manner, and write without passion or personality.

I had no interest in writing such a book. And my experiences as a teacher suggests that forcing neutrality, oversimplification, and disengagement results in bad pedagogy and bored students. While I want students to grasp material such as the differences between broadcast networks and cable channels, that's not the core of education to me - instead, they should be thinking about the significance of these systems more than simply recalling them. So I made it clear to interested publishers that I wanted to write a textbook with a more engaging voice and distinct argumentation - to quote my proposal, "By explicitly offering arguments and challenging assumptions, the book will be designed to engage students and force them to question their own positions, rather than the more typical textbook goal of recalling factual information." Oxford University Press fully embraced this approach, encouraging me to write the book for a sophisticated and engaged reader, not the typical textbook model.

This approach is certainly forged by my experiences teaching at a top-flight liberal arts college like Middlebury. I work with students who are taking my course as part of a broader liberal arts curriculum, not a pre-professional track that typifies a lot of Communications departments. To fit into an institution like Middlebury College, I need to make the study of television an intellectually-engaging and interdisciplinary endeavor - I wrote this book in many ways to spread that approach of "television studies as a liberal art" more broadly to other types of institutions. I'm optimistic that a lot of faculty will find my book more engaging to teach because it "talks up" to students, rather than assumes that they need to be distracted by glossy photos and random sidebars. We'll have to see how it's received by both faculty and students, but I wrote the book that I want to teach from (or would have wanted to read as an undergraduate 20 years ago).

The cover of your book shows contemporary television projected across a range of different screens, some of which look like the boxes we've used for years, and

some represent mobile phones, computers, and other emerging platforms. Does the cover of the book signal the obsolescence of its content? At what point as we

explode the range of distribution options, does television cease to be television as a specific medium and begin to blur over into all of the other media around it?

When I started working on this book in 2004, YouTube didn't exist, iPods had no video capabilities, and networks had only just begun to experiment with putting their programs online. By the time the book came out in 2009, the idea of television as defined by the box in your living room had lost its centrality. And there's no doubt that the last five years are not the end of this core technological shift - honestly, I don't know what "television" will mean in another five years. But I'm certain that the history of the medium and its industrial and regulatory systems will still matter - whatever technological ecosystem we'll be living in during the 2010s and beyond, some remnant of television will matter, just as the lingering presence and influence of print, theater, cinema, and radio still matter today.

The cover was designed to signal the book's engagement with technologies and programming of the past, present, and future. I suggested the idea of "lots of different shows on a variety of devices" to Oxford, and they came up with a design that I really love. But I'm sure in another decade, it will look like a dinosaur! Of course, the very idea of publishing a "textbook" might be arcane by then as well, so clearly I've embarked on a project with a potentially short half-life for both content and form.

You could argue that many of the topics you deal with here - convergence, digitalization, globalization, branding, shifts in audience measurement - are impacting all media. What do you see as the relationship between television studies and a more generalized media studies? Can we read the title of your blog, "JustTV," as a statement of sorts about how you position yourself in the space between television and media studies?

I see television studies as both on the forefront of media studies, and in danger of being forgotten. In many ways, television studies has led the charge for a humanistic model of media studies, and it has really set the model for a mode of scholarship that is both theoretically sophisticated and accessibly written, socially engaged yet historically grounded. This is probably in large part due to the luck of the draw in its intellectual history, as the field came of age after the peak of high theory in film & literary studies, and was in the right place at the right time to introduce the British cultural studies model to America, in large part through the work of our mutual mentor John Fiske. When I look at the best of media scholarship today, whether it's about videogames, popular music, or transmedia narrative, I see the influence of television studies of the past two decades and the model it helped establish.

But the danger of convergence is an assumption that all media are the same. This is certainly a lesson that the industry has faced repeatedly, as with ill-fated devices like WebTV, and I've seen similar scholarly missteps when academics trained in literature or film try to study a different medium as if it were simply another textual form (I won't name names here...). Specific aspects of television, from regulation to ratings, help shape the medium to an extent that you can't simply disregard the industrial systems and viewer practices that are unique to television. So my fear is that as television becomes more diffused - either through technological transformation or dilution across media - media scholars will neglect the specific practices and systems that shape our understanding of the medium. The specific lessons and facets of television studies shouldn't be lost as the boundaries of the medium blurs.

As for the name of my blog, Just TV refers both to the dismissive reflex common to academics viewing television, and an attempt to delineate the blog's scope. I do embrace broader issues in media studies, such as gaming, fair use, fandom, etc., but try to tie it to the specificities of television whenever possible. I hope that work like mine and many of my TV-centric peers helps legitimize the medium in the eyes of academia, just as the programming itself is becoming more accepted and embraced by scholars across disciplines. But I'm reminded of a wonderful talk that Charlotte Brunsdon gave at Society for Cinema and Media Studies a few years ago - she warned that "poor old television" might get lost in the transition from cinema studies to a digital-centric media studies, and called for scholarly spaces that still privilege television. Hopefully Just TV fits that bill.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of American Studies and Film & Media

Culture, and Chair of Film & Media Culture, at Middlebury College. He is the

author of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American

Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television & American Culture (Oxford UP,

2009), numerous essays in journals and anthologies, and the blog Just TV. He

is currently writing a digital book on narrative complexity in contemporary

American television.

Critical Information Studies For a Participatory Culture (Part Two)

One of the most productive things to come out of the University of Virginia conference was some rapproachment between political economy (which dominates the current media reform movement) and cultural studies (which has been much more closely associated with the participatory culture paradigm). The cliche is that political economy is all structure and no agency and cultural studies is all agency and no structure. We are, as Robert McChesney suggests, at a "critical juncture" because there are structures and constraints which could be locked down, resources that can be lost, and rich potentials which are fragile. In such a time, we need to look at both agency and structure and so we need to end the theoretical conflict in favor of identifying shared goals -- working together when we can, working separately but in parallel where our goals and tactics differ, but wasting little time on squabbles on the borders between fields. I learned more from conference participants about what steps had already been taken within the media reform movement to embrace some of these same principles. What follows might be described as a partial agenda for media reform from the perspective of participatory culture, one which looks at those factors which block the full achievement of my ideals of a more participatory society. "The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself": Right now, much of our public policy is being fueled by fear and anxiety about cultural change. There is a gender dimension to this politics of fear -- we fear our sons (through anxieties about media effects, school shootings, and video game violence) and for our daughters (through anxieties about sexual molestation through social networking sites or sexual exposure through content-sharing sights). Such fears surfaced in response to recent efforts by the Internet Safety Technical Taskforce to shift the terms of the debate about youth's digital access. The group dared to question the "sexual predator" myths which currently shape public policies, only to become the target of aggressive smears by sensationalistic news, cultural warriors, and political leaders, who have found fear-mongering a productive strategy for raising money, capturing eyeballs, and mobilizing voters. As Anne Collier (Netfamilynews) recently suggested, people can not meaningfully participate in these emerging social and cultural structures if they are worried about their physical well being or emotional safety, yet safety concerns should not be deployed to block access and restrict participation. Rather, there is a need for education which stresses ethical responsibility and civic awareness; trained teachers and librarians need to help young people to grasp the potentials and route around the risks of online communication. Before we can make progress on most of the other policy issues here, we need to develop strategies for decreasing the role of ignorance and fear in public debates about new media.

From Digital Divide to Participation Gap: For the past decade, there has been a concerted effort to wire schools and libraries as a means of overcoming the digital divide and insuring that every American child has access to networked computers. This ongoing struggle around technological access has brought about some real changes, but it has also revealed deeply cultural divides. The participation gap refers to these other social, cultural, and educational concerns which block full participation. Ellen Seiter, for example, has explored how inequalities in cultural capital undermine school-based programs for media education. Unequal access to free time outside of school and the workplace make it much harder for some to contribute content or participate in online communities than others. Much as the old "hidden curriculum" determined which young people did better in schools, the new "hidden curriculum" is shaping who feels empowered and entitled to participate.

Remaking Schools: The MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative has brought together hundreds of researchers around the country who are seeking to reinvent public institutions (schools, libraries, museums) to reflect this alternative understanding of participatory culture. Mimi Ito, Michael Carter, Peter Lyman, and Barrie Thorne's Digital Youth Initiative has undertaken a large scale ethnographic study of the many different sites (inside and outside schools, inside and outside homes) through which young people connect with the online world and the kinds of informal learning which occurs through their friendship-based and interest-driven networks. Their project maps a "learning ecology" based on participatory culture principles yet many of the most valuable practices -- especially those which involve young people linking through social networks or producing and sharing media -- are blocked by federal and local educational policies. While schools and libraries may represent the best sites for overcoming the participation gap, they are often the most limited in their ability to access some of the key platforms -- from Flickr and YouTube to Ning and Wikipedia-- where these new cultural practices are emerging. As these insights get translated into curriculum and pedagogical practices through schools, we need to avoid narrowing this emphasis onto 21st Century Skills which prepare young people for the workplace rather than the model of expressive citizenship suggested by the MacArthur Foundation's emphasis on New Media Literacies. The reliance on standardized testing is in some cases shutting down the potentials for intervention through education and in other cases restricting our understanding of these new skills to only those which can be tested and measured.

Rethinking Collective Intelligence: As writers like Yochai Benkler, Jane McGongel, Thomas Malone, Axel Bruns, and others have suggested, activities such as writing Wikipedia or solving Alternative Reality Games offer vivid examples of the ways that social networks may pool their resources, share their expertise, and solve problems more complex than any individual could imagine. O'Reilly's "Web 2.0" model, consciously or otherwise, blurs the line between Pierre Levy's notion of "collective intelligence" and James Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds." Levy's model is deliberative, depending on people forming communities to work together towards shared ends, and he sees it as a cornerstone for any future vision of democracy in the digital era; Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds" is aggregative, relying on a model of a market driven by individual consumer choices. Needless to say, the "wisdom of the crowds" model is proving much easier to assimilate into corporate logic since it still relies on the autonomous and isolated consumer rather than a recognition of the collective bargaining potential of networked publics. We need to continue to push for alternative platforms and practices which embrace and explore the potential of collective intelligence so that we better understand what kinds of ethical, pedagogical, and political principles must be in place before we can realize new forms of citizenly engagement.

Promoting Diversity: While expanding who has access to the means of cultural production and distribution has the potential to broaden the range of stories and ideas in circulation, other mechanisms are working to contain the diversity of the online world. As John McMurria has noted, the most visible content of many media-sharing sites tends to come from members of dominant groups, even as minority content continues to circulate within minority communities. Most models for user-moderation of content start from majoritarian principles with no commitment to diversity. Minority participation is intimidated through the hate speech which goes unregulated on the forums surrounding such sites. At the same time, writers like danah boyd and S. Craig Watkins are arguing that social networks act like gated communities, cementing existing social ties rather than broadening them. As people seek out "like minded individuals," social divisions in the real world are being mapped onto cyberspace, reinforcing cultural segregation along class and race lines. John Campbell has explored the ways that online affinity portrals, which claim to serve minority communities, serve the interests of advertisers for data mining and impression management more than they serve any identity politics agenda, further isolating minority participants from being able to speak to a more generalized audience. We might add to this more generalized concerns raised by Trebor Sholz and others about how social networks lock down our membership by making it hard to move our own data or friendship networks from one commercial site to another, suggesting that the segregation of cyberspace may be difficult to overcome.

Reasserting Fair Use: As writers like Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Jessica Litman, and others have suggested, struggles over intellectual property may be the most important legal battleground determining the future of participatory culture. While corporations are asserting a "crisis of copyright", seeking to police "digital "piracy," citizen groups are seeking to combat a "crisis of fair use" as the mechanisms of corporate copyright protection erode the ability of citizens to meaningfully quote from their culture. D.J. Spooky's Sound Unbound: Sampling Music and Culture brought together contemporary artists and media makers who saw remix and sample practices as central to their own artistic expression, undercutting the claim that such battles are being fought in the name of author's rights. The Center for Social Media has launched a series of "best practices" documents designed to help remix artists, documentary filmmakers, and media literacy teachers to identify and assert their fair use rights to build on the existing cultural reservoir. Sites like YouTomb are mapping the ways that web 2.0 platforms are responding to these corporate pressures, often by sending out "take down" notices to their contributors, which would stretch well beyond any existing legal understanding of copyright. And now, because these "take downs" are being automatically generated by the company itself, it is increasingly difficult for contributors to overturn them on the basis of fair use arguments. The Organization for Transformative Works has emerged from the fan world as a way of redefining fan practices as falling within the protections of fair use, creating a place where fans can turn when they receive cease and desist orders, while another grassroots organization, Tribute Is Not Theft, has been deploying YouTube itself as a platform to educate fellow contributors about their Fair Use rights and about the value of remix practices.

Critiquing Free Labor: Tziana Terranova was among the first academic critics to call attention to the "free labor" model which remains implicit in O'Reilly's discussion of "Web 2.0." As one joke puts it, "we produce all the content, they make all the money." Talk of an "architecture of participation" masks over the often conflicting interests of grassroots media producers and the commercial platforms they increasingly rely upon for the distribution of their works. The lack of revenue sharing, for example, has been charged with further undercutting the economic base for independent media production, with outsourcing creative labor at the expense of jobs for industry professionals, and commodifying yet not protecting long-standing grassroots practices of cultural production which were historically based on gift economy models. Some are responding with the development of alternative platforms for distribution based on other kinds of political or economic models, whether those which Witness is developing for distributing videos produced by human rights activists or those being developed by the Organization for Transformative Works to protect the rights of fan media makers. Initially, it has been a struggle even to get a recognition that the creation of "user-generated content" should be understood as a form of creative labor as opposed to simply a new form of consumption or an alternative kind of play. As such, the debates over "free labor" represent the most visible part of a larger effort of consumers and citizens to reassert some of their rights in the face of web 2.0 companies, including increased scrutiny over terms of service, growing concerns about issues of privacy and surveilance, and expanded understanding of the consequences of ceding control and ownership of personal data more generally.

Designing Civic Media: As the economic crisis deepens, American newspapers are folding, news media are tightening their budgets and reducing their coverage, and journalists are losing their jobs. While some have argued that we are moving from an age of informed citizens to one based on a more monitorial model, all of these discussions of civic engagement rest on having a source of reliable and meaningful information which can form the basis for our deliberations and collective actions. The idea that professional journalists will be replaced by a volunteer army of "citizen journalists" is profoundly misleading, even if citizens may deploy new technologies to serve other informational needs of their society. Talk about "citizen journalists" is like talk of "horseless carriages," an attempt to understand an emerging system by mapping it onto legacy technologies. American University's Center for Social Media, The Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, Harvard's Berkman Center, and MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, among others, are exploring alternative systems for the production and distribution of documentary, alternative resources which support community building and information sharing, and alternative tool sets which allow citizens to transform their society. Huma Yosuf's study of the use of civic media in Pakistan during the recent national emergency suggests that citizens can use these tools to work around censorship, to organize in the face of oppressive regimes, and to alert the outside world about what was happening in their country. Yet, in many cases, these alternative practices still rely on the raw materials provided by professional news coverage and thus we all need to be concerned about the health and independence of the news media.

Thinking Globally: The emergence of new platforms for media sharing and social networking represent alternative models for thinking about the politics of globalization. Throughout the Bush years, when the American super power embraced a unilateral perspective on world affairs, a growing number of American young people were consuming media produced from outside our national borders, often by deploying illegal or semi-legal channels of distribution which connected them directly with fans from other parts of the world. Activists who in the future may be engaged with the politics around poverty, AIDS, environmentalism, energy, or Human Rights, may have first connected around the trade of anime, Bollywood films, telanovelas, or K-Dramas. The practices surrounding the circulation of such materials can be eye-opening as participants discover the protectionist policies and practices which block timely access to international media.

Restructuring Activism: Many of the battles we are describing here are being fought by grassroots organizations framed according to new models of citizenship and activism which emerge from participatory culture. In his recent book, Dream:Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, Stephen Duncombe makes the case for a new model of social change which is playful and utopian, channels what we know as consumers as well as what we know as citizens, and embraces a more widely accessible language for discussing public policy. We can get a sense of what such a new model of activism might look like by examining movements like the HP Alliance which uses J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter franchise as a shared framework for discussing human rights and social justice issues or the Anonymous movement which deployed imagery from V for Vendetta to mobilize protests against the Church of Scientology. There's much we need to know about what this new kind of political discourse looks like, what its strengths and limits are, and whether it can effect meaningful change. How do we build a bridge between participatory culture and participatory democracy?

In each of these debates, there is a need for critical theory which asks hard questions of emerging cultural practices. There is also a need for critical utopianism which explores the value of emerging models and proposes alternatives to current practices. There is a need for theory which deals abstractly with these shifts in cultural logic and there's a need for interventions which test the value of that theory through practice. There is a need for academic scholarship which trains the next generation and there's a need for conversations which overcomes the isolation between the various groups which are struggling over these issues. There is a need for people who stand outside the system throwing rocks and there's a need for people who can move into the boardrooms and engage in conversation with those in power. It is too easy to draw false divisions between these various causes, too hard to identify the common ground. I am hoping that this conference will allow for meaningful exchanges around these shared concerns.

Sources

The following might be a basic reading list for those of you wanting to understand more about media policy and participatory culture. Most of these names will be familiar to regular readers of this blog, though a few of them have recently been added to my own reading list and will figure in future posts.

Benkler, Yochai (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bruns, Axel (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. London: Peter Lang.

boyd, dana (2008). Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics. PhD Dissertation. University of California-Berkeley, School of Information.

Campbell, John Edward (2008). Virtually Home: The Commodification of Community in Cyberspace. Dissertation in Communication at University of Pennsylvania.

Center for Social Media (2008). Code of Best Practices in Fair Use For Media Literacy Education.

Center for Social Media (2008). Code of Best Practices in Fair Use For Online Video.

Center for Social Media (2005). Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use.

Clark, Jessica and Pat Aufderheide (2009). Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics. Washington DC: Center for Social Media.

Collier, Anne (2009). "Social Media Literacy: The New Internet Safety," NetFamilyNews.

Duncombe, Stephen (2007). Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. New York: New Press.

Hyde, Lewis (2007). The Gift: Creativity and The Artist in the Modern World. New York: Vintage.

James, Carrie with Katie Davis, Andrea Flores, James M. Francis, Lindsey Pettingill, Margaret Rundle and Howard Gardner, "Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media."

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