Editing Interfiction 2: An Interview with Delia Sherman

Last week, I shared with you the introduction I wrote for Interfiction 2, a collection of interstitial literature. The piece offered some reflections on the value and limits of genre categories in shaping our relationship with popular fictions. Today, I am offering an interview with the editor of that collection -- Delia Sherman, who is best known as a fantasy author, but who has been consistently pushing to create a space for diversity, experimentation, and innovation within popular literature. I have considered Delia and her oft-time partner in crime Ellen Kushner good friends for a long time so it is a great pleasure to be able to share her thoughts and her current project with my readers. Next time, I will share some thoughts from some of the contributors to the collection, rounding out my multi-part focus on the concept of "interstitial art."
How would you define "interstitial art"?

DELIA: For me, interstitial art is anything that frustrates genre expectations, turns my ideas of genre on their heads, and teaches me how it works as I interact with it. It's art that is hard to categorize easily, hard to describe, impossible to generate an accurate elevator pitch for.

Does the interstitial primarily refer to works which cross genres or might they also cross media or cultural hiearchies (high, popular) or audiences?

DELIA: Because the IAF started with a bunch of writers talking about cross-genre fiction, that's where our discussion of interstitiality necessarily started. Now, as more artists from different communities and disciplines join the conversation, it's perfectly obvious that you can't talk about crossing artistic boundaries without talking about crossing media, cultural hierarchies, and even media platforms. Jewelry that responds to and comments on fiction [currently available in the Interfictions Auction: http://iafauctions.com/]; websites that bridge information, entertainment, art, and networking; performances that blend music and art and words and movement in unexpected ways (or even unexpected venues)--these are interstitial, too.

What are your goals for the Interfictions collection?

DELIA: We began Interfictions simply as a concrete answer to the question, "What do you mean by interstitial fiction?"--and as an outlet for authors who had been writing fiction that was too popular for literary markets, too literary for popular markets, or simply too odd to find a comfortable home in any genre. What we hoped (and continue to hope) is that the stories we publish will provide a sense of the directions in which short fiction is developing, giving readers and academics and writers new texts to discuss, analyze, and be inspired by.

What do you see as the limitations of the current market for popular fiction?

DELIA: Historically, hard times tend to foster conservatism in the arts. And the uncertainty of how the internet is going to impact the publishing and music industries is making it even worse. If a big company doesn't know how to market something, they won't buy it. Which leads to endless iterations of teen vampire romances, mystical conspiracy thrillers, heroic fantasies, and chick lit novels with pink covers. It also leads to worthy fiction that is none of these things being packaged as if it were, which leads to puzzled and often hostile reviews, and to readers who don't know where to look for the kind of fiction they like--especially if they like fiction that doesn't hew to the most popular forms and conventions. In this market, Shakespeare probably wouldn't be able to get a play produced, nor Franz Kafka sell a story to a major magazine.

What roles does the Interstitial Arts Foundation play in promoting the concept of interfiction?

DELIA: We make it available, of course. And we call attention to the fact that these stories are different, a fact that other markets might prefer to elide in the hopes that nobody notices. And I hope that we open a conversation among our readers, in which they argue with our choices and definitions, and go on to make their own, and even create stories that are completely different again, which maybe they'll send to whoever is editing Interfictions at that time, taking the conversation to the next step.

How were you able to locate authors who wanted to produce interstitial works?

DELIA: We put the word out on every writing list-serve we knew about. We wrote authors whose works we thought tended to the interstitial, and asked them to spread the word. We mentioned it to writers we met at conferences, random parties, cafes, and the subway. We blogged on social networking sites, like Live Journal and FaceBook, and asked our readers to spread the word. We got a lot of highly literary fantasy, SF, horror, and one Western. But we also got more genuinely strange and self-defining work than I would have believed-- that is, if I hadn't already edited the first Interfictions anthology in 2007 and seen then that there was a lot of it out there. And of course, people knowing about the first anthology helped the second one.

You faced a challenge in designing a cover for a book of fiction which defies most categories. How did you develop the cover art and what does it communicate about the book's project?

DELIA: We didn't develop the cover art. We discovered it. One of our board members suggested that we start a Flickr pool where any artist could post work to be considered for the cover. We got lots of beautiful, if not especially interstitial, photographs, a certain number of definitely interstitial pieces that were too busy, too dark, too three-dimensional, or too distracting to make good cover art, and a solid handful of pieces that fit our purposes perfectly. The piece we ended up choosing (after many emails and discussions with the Cover Committee) is by Alex Myers. It's part of a series painted in gouache on torn-apart cereal boxes, destined to degrade with the cardboard, which struck us as being kind of interstitial in and of itself. The image references popular culture, advertising, science, and politics, and (coincidentally) seems to echo themes and images of several of the stories we'd already bought. And it has a natural space for a title, even though it wasn't painted as a cover. All of which makes it an ideal introduction to the kind of fiction it is introducing to the world: unexpected, puzzling, beautifully executed, appealing (to the kind of audience it appeals to, of course), and finally, evanescent. Because the interstitial story of today is very likely to be the genre-establishing seminal work of next year, as Terri Windling's punk elf Bordertown anthologies back in the 80's planted the seeds of the current Urban Fantasy craze.

Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo, Japan, and brought up in New York City. She has spent a lot of time in schools of one kind or another: Vassar College for undergrad, then Brown University where she earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. While she was writing her dissertation, she started teaching, first at Boston University, where she taught Freshman Composition and Fantasy as Literature, and then at Northeastern University, where she was a Lecturer in Composition. She also worked in a bookstore for a while, and her short fiction appeared in WeirdBook and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

While she was still teaching, she wrote her first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror, which led to a 1990 nomination for the Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer. Her second novel, the historical The Porcelain Dove, was listed in The New York Times Notable Books, and won the Mythopoeic Award in 1994.

Delia also publishes short fiction for adults, most recently in Realms of Fantasy and Poe. Her short stories for younger readers have appeared in numerous anthologies. "CATNYP," a story of a magical New York Between, inspired her first novel for children, Changeling. The sequel, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen followed in 2009. The Freedom Maze, a time-travel fantasy set in Louisiana, will be published by Big Mouth Press in 2010.

As an editor of books and anthologies, Delia's continuing quest is to get more of the kind of fantasy she likes out to readers. She has worked as a contributing editor for Tor Books and has co-edited the fantasy anthology The Horns of Elfland with Ellen Kushner and Donald G. Keller, as well as The Essential Bordertown with Terri Windling. She had co-edited two anthologies of Interstitial fiction: Interficitons 1, with Theodora Goss, and Interfictions 2, with Christopher Barzak.

Delia lives with fellow author and fantasist Ellen Kushner in a rambling apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City.

On the Pleasures of Not Belonging, or Notes on Interstitial Art (Part Two)

Most current academic thinking dismisses the idea that genres are stable and essential categories, that we can determine what genre a work belongs to once and for all, and that doing so tells us all we need to know about the example in question. Instead, this new scholarship talks about what genres do rather than what genres are and describes the processes by which works get classified and reclassified over time.

When these categories are deployed as a system for regulating the production and distribution of culture, The publishing industry is misusing genre theory. As music critic Simon Frith notes, "genre maps change according to who they're for... A committed music fan will soon find, for example, that she's interested in sounds that fit into several categories at once and that different shops therefore shelve the same record under different labels.... It's as if a silent conversation is going on between the consumer, who knows roughly what she wants, and the shopkeeper, who is laboriously working out the pattern of shifting demands. What's certain is that I, like most other consumers, would feel quite lost to go to the store one day and find the labels gone – just a floor of CDS, arranged alphabetically."

So, for Frith, genre categories have some temporary use value in helping consumers find the music they want to hear. But those categories are also subject to recall and modification without notice and are often deployed in idiosyncratic ways, reflecting the personalities of the owners of different record shops or even the whims of the clerks who shelve particular titles. If you print the genres on the book jacket, you automatically limit their shelf life by restricting your ability to shuffle the pieces to reflect changing tastes and perceptions. The result will be as much bad business as bad art.

Of course, on the consumption side, we all adopt very idiosyncratic systems for shelving our books anyway: that's the pleasure of reading someone else's bookshelves as a map of their mind, displaying what things interest them and the perceived relationships between the parts.

You might think that this "shelving" metaphor for thinking about the cultural work of genres would break down quickly in a world where fewer and fewer books are purchased in brick-and-mortar bookshops and more and more of them are being bought online, where listings can be easily reconfigured, where the same book can be listed in an infinite number of categories.

Paradoxically, though, genres have had a tighter hold on our imagination in recent years as the range of cultural choice has broadened and audiences have fragmented. Film historian Rick Altman tells us that far from imposing rigid boundaries between genres, the old studio system depended on the idea that the same film could appeal to multiple audience segments at a time when pretty much everyone in the country went to the movies once or twice a week. Hollywood films rarely fit into some narrowly composed category: the same film had to appeal to men as well as women, the young as well as the old, by signaling different entertainment elements ("Comedy. Romance. Action. Exotic Locales. Singing. Dancing....")

Over the course of the 20th century, however, genre categories have become ever more specialized as media industries refine techniques for monitoring and targeting particular clusters of consumers. These more rigid and precise subgenres are the product of a more general tendency towards what anthropologist Grant McCracken calls "specification." Subcultures break down into smaller subcultures, niches become smaller niches in an eternal dance between our desire to differentiate ourselves from and affiliate ourselves with others who share our tastes. There are more different categories of books, records, and films than ever before; all that diversity produces an anxiety that is being met by more aggressive policing of boundaries. Using more sophisticated tools, media consumers are trying to find the "perfect choice," rather than taking for granted that a work designed for a general audience is going to contain some things we like and some things we don't.

And where the market doesn't impose such specifications, we add them ourselves. Catherine Tosenberger has argued that the best fan fiction is "unpublishable" in the sense that it operates across the genre categories, aesthetic norms, and ideological constraints that shape commercial publishing. Fans self-publish in order to step outside those filters. Yet, the fan community also imposes its own categories, which help readers find the "right story" through author's notes that tell us, for example, which "ships" (relationships between specified pairs of characters) are being explored, offer a rough sense of their sexual explicitness or emotional tone, warn us about vexing themes, and so forth. And if you read the letters of comment, there's enormous anger directed at any writer who asks a reader to read a story that doesn't deliver what was promised and, even worse, gives them something they didn't ask for.

All of this focus on using genres to classify and shelve works assumes that we know where one genre ends and another begins and that genre works stay where we put them. Genres may be optical illusions, which come and go like mirages, depending on the ways we look at the texts in question.

In one formulation, genre classifications offer reading hypothesis: we start a book with the assumption that it will follow a certain path; we read it "as" a mystery or as a romance or as a fantasy, and as we do so, we look for those elements that match our expectations: depending on our starting point, we may notice some things or ignore them, make certain predictions or avoid them, value or reject certain elements, form or dismiss certain interpretations. Start from a different hypothesis and you will have a different experience.

Some critics are rereading familiar texts through alternative logics: so, for example, queer cultural critic Alex Doty has made the case for The Wizard of Oz as a power struggle between butch and femme lesbians, Jason Mittell has read the HBO series The Wire as a video game, and Linda Williams reads pornography in relation to Hollywood musicals. Might we see such essays as interstitial criticism?

For some readers, there is a certain pleasure in playing a game where all the parts match our templates (much as a sparrow feels more like a bird than an ostrich does). For other readers, there may be a pleasure in the unanticipated or the indeterminate. Let's hear it for the duck-billed platypus!

Tzvetan Todorov has talked about the "fantastic" as playing with this uncertainty about classification. For instance, most ghost stories create a special pleasure from our uncertainty about whether we are supposed to believe there really are ghosts or whether we are to come up with a natural, logical, real-world explanation for the events. The pleasure, he says, is in toggling between multiple interpretations, not knowing what kind of story we are reading: there was a ghost; the narrator was crazy; or in the Scooby-Doo version, it was all a scheme by the guy who runs the old amusement park.

Even when we kinda knew where the ghost story was going, the process of hiding and unveiling can be as much darn fun as a good old fashion striptease. What if we were to imagine the interstitial as another kind of indeterminacy, one that flits between genres in the same way that the fantastic flickers between levels of reality. Maybe this is what Heinz Insu Fenkel is getting at when he writes, "Interstitial works make the reader (or listener, or viewer) more perceptive and more attentive; in doing so, they make the reader's world larger, more interesting, more meaningful, and perhaps even more comprehensible. The reader, who has been seeing black-and-white, suddenly begins not only to see color, but to learn how to see other colors."

Just as there are systems of cultural production where audiences express confusion if a work straddles genres, there are others where artists thrive upon and audiences anticipate mixing and matching genre elements. Take for example the so-called "masala films" that come out of the Bollywood film industry in India and are popular across Asia, Africa, and increasingly the west. The same film might move between historical and contemporary settings, might mix comedy and melodrama, might follow an intense (and disturbing) action sequence with a musical number, might mix the most sudsy romance with social uplift and political reform, and might acknowledge both Hindu and Islamic traditions. The descriptor "masala" refers to a mixture of spices used in Indian cooking. Just as one would be disappointed if an Indian dish only contained one spice, the Bollywood spectator would be disappointed if a Hindi film contained only one genre.

We are seeing greater cultural churn as more and more works move across national borders, get picked up by new artists and audiences, get combined in new ways, paving the way for nouvelle culture in the same way that the global availability of spices and ingredients has led many of our best chiefs to experiment with radical departures from and reinventions of traditional cuisines. The anthropologist Renato Rosaldo has contrasted a classic understanding of cultures as so many exhibits in an ethnographic museum with a more contemporary notion of cultures as garage sales, where people push, pull, and paw over other people's used stuff before taking it home, trying it on for size, and altering it to suit their needs.

Many young American consumers are using the web in search of Korean dramas, Japanese anime, Latin American telenovelas, or Bollywood films, anything that takes them outside the parochialism of their own culture. The result really does defy any classification: look at something like Tears of the Black Tiger which starts as a classic Thai novel, throws in a little opera, adds a much more intense color palette, and tells the man's story as a western and the woman's story as a '50s style melodrama to suggest that the two protagonists are living in different worlds.

Globalization is simply one of a number of forces which are breaking down the tyranny of genre classifications and paving the way for experimentation within popular storytelling. In his book Everything Bad is Good For You, Steven Johnson makes the argument that the most popular forms of entertainment today are popular because they make demands on our attention and cognition. For example, a television show like Lost, one of the top ratings successes of the past decade, demonstrates a level of complexity that would have been unimaginable on American television a few decades ago; with its large scale ensemble casts of characters, its flashes forwards and backwards in time, its complex sets of puzzles and enigmas, its moral ambiguities and shifting alliances, but also its uncertain and unpredictable relationship to existing television genres.

If we knew what the operative genre model was, we might figure out what's really happening on the island, but without such a clear mapping, we remain pleasurably lost. Such dramas thrive in part because they support robust internet communities where readers gather online to compare notes, debate interpretations, trace references, and otherwise have fun talking with each other. Its interstitial qualities are essential to Lost's success, even as they account for why other viewers got frustrated and gave up on the series convinced that it was never going to add up to anything anyway.

Lost illustrates another tendency in contemporary popular culture towards what I call transmedia storytelling. Lost is not simply a story or even a television series; Lost is a world that can support many different characters and many different stories that unfold across multiple media platforms. As these stories move across media platforms, Lost also often moves across genres: not unlike early novels, which might be constituted through mock letters, journals, and diaries, these new stories may mock e-mail correspondence, interviews, documents, websites, news magazine stories, advertisements, computer games, puzzles, cyphers, and a range of other materials which help make its world feel more real to the reader. These transmedia works will add a whole new meaning to the concept of interstitial arts.

So, to borrow from Charles Dickens (who borrowed from everyone else in his own time), this is the best of times and the worst of times for the interstitial arts. In such a world, the interstitial thrives and it withers. It finds receptive audiences and harsh critics. It gratifies and grates. It inspires and confuses. Above all, it gives us something to talk about. It opens us up to a world where nothing is what it seems and where little belongs, at least in the narrow sense of the term. We're going Out There!

What happens next is in your hands. Read. Enjoy. Debate. Tell your friends. But also create. Write. Appropriate. Remix. Transform. Just leave your cookie cutters and jelly molds at home. We can figure out what shelf this belongs on later.

Bibliography

Ellen Kushner, "The Interstitial Arts Foundation: An Introduction," in Nebula Awards® Showcase 2005, edited by Jack Dann (ROC/PenguinPutnam, March 2005), http://www.interstitialarts.org/essays/kushner_iaf_an_introduction.php

Delia Sherman, "An Introduction to Interstitial Arts: Life on the Border," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/intro_toIA.html

Susan Stinson, "Cracks," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflectionStinson.html

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (University of Texas, 1982).

Heinz Insu Fenkl, "The Interstitial DMZ," http://www.interstitialarts.org/why/the_interstitial_dmz_1.html

Barth Anderson, "The Prickly, Tricky, Ornery Multiverse of Interstitial Art," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflectionAnderson.html

Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Harvard University Press, 1998).

Rick Altman, Film/Genre (British Film Institute, 1999).

Grant McCracken, Plenitude 2.0: Culture by Commotion (Periph: Fluide, 1998).

Catherine Tossenberger, Potterotics: Harry Potter Fan Fiction on the Internet, Dissertation, University of Florida, 2007.

Alex Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000).

Jason Mittell, "All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic," in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (MIT Press, 2009).

Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (University of California Press, 1999).

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cornell University Press, 1975).

Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Reworking of Social Analysis (Beacon Press, 1993).

Charles Vess, "Interstitial Visual Arts: An Impossible Marriage of Materials," http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/marriage_of_materials.html

Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You (Riverhead, 2006).

Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton University Press, 1988).

John Caughie, Theories of Authorship: A Reader (Routledge, 1981).

Peter J. Rabinowitz, "The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy," Critical Inquiry, March 1985.

On the Pleasures of Not Belonging, or Notes on Interstitial Art (Part One)

Last January, I wrote the following essay to run as the foreword for a recently published collection of short fiction -- Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing -- which was edited by an old friend, Delia Sherman. The essay offers my explanation of what we mean by "interstitial writing" and my exploration of the deforming and informing value of genre in contemporary storytelling. Over the next installments, I will also be featuring an interview with Delia about her goals for the book and an interview with some of the contributors about their relationship to the genre conventions of popular fiction. I am hoping that this series of posts will serve to introduce readers of this blog to the work of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, a really wonderful group of writers and thinkers, who are on the frontiers of contemporary popular fiction. This pendant, inspired by my introductory essay, was produced by artist Mia Nutick as part of an auction being organized around the book. For more, see http://iafauctions.com/

On the Pleasures of Not Belonging

Henry Jenkins, 2009

(Note: The following essay appeared as the introduction to Interfictions 2, the recently-released anthology of interstitial fiction from the Interstitial Arts Foundation.)

"Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."

– Groucho Marx

Let's start with some basic premises:

1. I do not belong in this book.
2. The contributors also do not belong.
3. You, like Groucho Marx, wouldn't want to belong even if you could. Otherwise, you probably wouldn't have picked up this book in the first place.

Let me explain. The editors of most anthologies seek stories which "fit" within prescribed themes, genres, and topics; the editors of this book have gone the opposite direction – seeking stories that don't fit anywhere else, stories that are as different from each other as possible. And that's really cool if the interstitial is the kind of thing you are into.

At the heart of the interstitial arts movement (too formal), community (too exclusive), idea (too idealistic?), there is the simple search for stories that don't rest comfortably in the cubbyholes we traditionally use to organize our cultural experiences. As Ellen Kushner puts it, "We're living in an age of category, of ghettoization – the Balkanization of Art! We should do something." That "something" is, among the other projects of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, the book you now hold in your hands.

Asked to define interstitial arts, many writers fall back on spatial metaphors, talking about "the wilderness between genres" (Delia Sherman), "art that falls between the cracks" (Susan Simpson), or "a chink in a fence, a gap in the clouds, a DMZ between nations at war" (Heinz Insu Fenkel). Underlying these spatial metaphors is the fantasy of artists and writers crawling out from the boxes which so many (their publishers, agents, readers, marketers, the adolescent with the piercings who works at the local Borders) want to trap them inside. Such efforts to define art also deform the imagination, not simply of authors, but also of their readers.

All genre categories presume ideal readers, people who know the conventions and secret codes, people who read them in the "right way." Many of us – female fans of male action shows, adult fans of children's books, male fans of soap operas – read and enjoy things we aren't supposed to and we read them for our own reasons, not those proposed by marketers. We don't like people snatching books from our hands and telling us we aren't supposed to be reading them.

One of the reasons I don't belong in this book is that I'm an academic, not a creative artist, and let's face it, historically, academics have been the teachers and enforcers of genre rules. The minute I tell you that I have spent the last twenty years in a Literature department, you immediately flash on a chalkboard outline of Aristotle's Poetics or a red pen correcting your muddled essay on the four-act structure. Throughout the twentieth century, many of us academic types were engaged in a prolonged project of categorizing and classifying the creative process, transforming it to satisfy our needs to generate lecture notes, issue paper topics, and grade exam questions. After all, academics are trapped in our own imposed categories ("disciplines" rather than "genres") which often constrain what we can see, what we can say, and who we can say it to. Academics are "disciplined" through our education, our hiring process, our need to 'publish or perish', and our tenure and promotion reviews. Most academics read or think little outside their field of study. As Will Rogers explained, "there's nothing so foolish as an educated man once you take him out of the field he was educated in."

I may gain a little sympathy from you, dear reader, if I note that for those twenty years, I was a cuckoo's egg – a media and popular culture scholar in a literature department – and that I am finally flying the coop, taking up an interdisciplinary position at a different institution, because I could never figure out the rules shaping my literature colleagues' behavior.

Many literature professors may hold "genre fiction" in contempt as "rule driven" or "formula-based" yet they ruthlessly enforce their own genre conventions: look at how science fiction gets taught, keeping only those authors already in the canon (Mary Shelly, H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon), adding a few more who look like what we call "literature" (William Gibson, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick), and then, running like hell as far as possible from any writer whose work still smells of "pulp fiction." Here, "literature" is simply another genre or cluster of genres (the academic mid-life crisis, the coming of age story, the identity politics narrative), one defined every bit as narrowly as the category of films which might get considered for a Best Picture nomination. I never had much patience with the criteria by which my colleagues decided which works belonged in the classroom and which didn't.

What I love about the folks who have embraced interstitial arts is that some of them do comics, some publish romances, some compose music, some write fantasy or science fiction, but all of them are perfectly comfortable thinking about things other than their areas of specialization. In that sense, I do very much belong in this collection as a kindred spirit, a fellow traveler, both phrases that signal someone who does and does not fit into some larger movement. Maybe we can go to each other's un-birthday parties and not belong together.

To be sure, academics are not, as Buffy would put it, "the big bad." We may have gotten inside your head but with a little mental discipline, you can shove us right back out again. Most interstitial artists ritually burned their old course notebooks years ago. They started to write the stories they wanted to be able to read, only to be told by their publisher that their book would sell much more quickly if it could be positioned into this publishing category for this intended audience and to achieve that you just need to cut back on this, expand on that, and add a little more of this other thing. I often picture James Stewart in Vertigo gradually redressing, restyling, and redesigning Kim Novak's entire identity, all the while creepily asserting that it really shouldn't make that much difference to her. That's the process those of us who sympathize with the concept of interstitial arts are trying to battle back into submission or at least push back long enough so that we can demonstrate that there are readers out there, a few of us, who want the stuff that doesn't really fit into fixed genres, though it may bear some faint family resemblance to several of them at once. Viva the mutts and the mongrels! Long live the horses of a different color!

So, you are now about to enter the Twilight Zone, where nothing your freshmen literature teacher taught you applies, where we eat with the wrong forks and wear white shoes after Labor Day. But it doesn't mean that academic genre theory has nothing to contribute to our efforts as readers and writers to step across the ice floes and navigate the shifting sands of the interstitial. For the next few pages, I will be proposing a more contemporary account of how genre works in an era where so many of us are mixing and matching our preferences and defying established categories. The work of genre is changing as we speak – in some ways becoming more constraining, in others more liberating – and genre theorists are rethinking old assumptions to reflect the flux in the way culture operates.

To start with Genre Theory 101, all creative expression involves an unstable balance between invention and convention. If a work is pure invention, it will be incomprehensible – like writing a novel without using any recognizable language. Don't worry: a work that is pure invention is only a theoretical possibility. None of us, in the end, is all that original; we borrow (often undigested) bits and pieces from the already written and the already read; we all construct new works through appropriation and transformation of existing materials. As Michel Bakhtin explains, we don't take our words out of the dictionary; we rip them from other people's mouths and they come to us covered with the saliva of where they've already been spoken before. Sharing stories is swapping spit.

However, If a work is pure convention, it will bore everyone. While most of us feel gratified when a work sometimes meets our expectations and most of us feel somewhat frustrated when a work fails to deliver those particular pleasures we associate with a favored formula, none of us wants to read a book that is predictable down to the last detail. All artists fall naturally somewhere on the continuum, in some ways following the dictates of their genres, in other ways breaking with them. And most readers pick up a new book or video expecting to be surprised (by invention) and gratified (by convention).

As they seek to satisfy our desires for surprise and gratification, genre conventions are both constraints (like strait jackets) and enabling mechanisms (like life vests). They are constraints in so far as they foreclose certain creative possibilities, and they are enabling mechanisms in so far as they allow us to focus the reader's attention on novel elements. In the Russian formalist tradition that shaped my own early graduate education, we didn't speak of "rules"; we spoke of "norms," with the understanding that a work only achieved its fullest potential when it, in some way, "defamiliarized" our normal ways of seeing the world and ordering our experience. Or in another familiar paradigm, the auteur critics embraced those filmmakers who were "at war with their materials," that is, who followed the expectations of genre just enough to continue to be employed by the Hollywood studio system but also sought to impose their own distinctive personality by breaking as many of those rules as possible.

Now, let's consider how some of the writers featured on the Interstitial Arts Foundation website are confronting these competing pulls towards convention and invention as they think about their work. Some are seeking to break with the conventions of genre more dramatically than others; they each lay claim to different positions on the continuum between convention and invention.

Here, for example, is Barth Anderson: "If the work comforts, satisfies, or generally meets the expectations that viewers might carry of a genre in question, then the work is genre. This might even apply to works attempting to redefine genre or works which introduce alien elements and disciplines into the genre mix... Interstitial art should be prickly, tricky, ornery. It should defy expectations, work against them, and in so doing, maintain a relationship to one or more genres, albeit contentiously.... Interstitial art is often upsetting. It rocks worldviews, political assumptions, sacred cows, as well as bookstore shelves." Anderson values surprise and sees genre primarily as a constraint.

Susan Stinson, by contrast, sees the artist as moving between the pleasures of operating within genres and the freedom of escaping their borders: "The gifts of being in a genre – reading the same essays and stories; seeking out the same mentors; publishing with the same magazines and presses; writing books that share shelf space; gathering at workshops, retreats, and conferences often enough to know each other – create a common language... I've felt both embraced and constricted by the conventions of those worlds.... The interstitial idea of thriving in cracks and crevices feels like [another] kind of home. Nurturing active, creative, receptive, demanding relationships and institutions that welcome genre-bending and respect a wide range of sources, traditions, and affinities sounds so good that it scares me. The expanded possibilities for joy are worth the risks." Stinson acknowledges the gratifications of consuming genre entertainment and understands genre formulas as both enabling mechanisms and constraints.

Anderson speaks about the interstitial as "prickly, tricky, ornery," while Stinson sees it as welcoming, "nurturing," joyous, and "receptive." One stresses radical breaks from the genre system, while the other is negotiating a space for singular passions within the system.

MORE TO COME

How Do You Sell an Artsy Board Game?

Part of the pleasure of relocating to the University of Southern California has been the chance to meet a whole new cast of characters, to discover just how intellectually diverse and interesting the students are here -- especially when you factor in that my classes attract students from across the two schools, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and the School of Cinematic Art --- where I have an appointment. It has always been my pleasure to help introduce some of my students to my readers and give you a glimpse of the kind of conversations that take place in my classroom. A few weeks ago, James Taylor, a student in my Transmedia Entertainment class, booked time during my office hours and came in bearing a beautifully crafted box, proceeded to unpack a game board and pieces, and asked if I wanted to play. We had a great conversation about his project -- The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands -- and the thinking behind his design. What I got a glimpse into was someone who was turning the oft-neglected and modest craft of designing board games into an expressive artform. The game was one which encouraged us to reflect on the nature of play, of representation, and of gender. It was a delightful and engaging provocation, and I wanted to share it with you now. I got even more interested when I asked him what he planned to do with his game and he described the process by which he was putting the game onto the market via a microfinancing website. I thought even those of you who are not into games might enjoy learning more about the new kinds of entrepreneurship which are emerging within a networked culture.

Microfinance and the Market for Independent Board Games

by James Taylor

The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands is a fantastical board game with a rich history, an unusual narrative, and surreal Victorian-style artwork. It is a board game that sits comfortably at the intersection of art, logic and literature. It pushes boundaries and opens critical discussions in each of these realms: the board art needs to stand on it's own, but also remain subservient to the game play; the story provokes questions of gender, desire, master-servant relationships, reliable narration, and the permutations of the game over a questionable 200 year history; and the game itself has a rule set that structures a peculiar mode of courtship.

Yet, can a small, provocative game ever make it in the (somewhat stalled) American board game industry? Is there a market for small, art-house board games?

How the Game Works -

"The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands (TGSSI) is an absurd logic puzzle about crossing bridges. The bridges determine how many people can cross. The gentlemen are each trying to strain the group in order to converse with Lady Ashley alone."

It is worth noting that the game is based on an old riddle. In the riddle, a farmer is trying to cross a river in a canoe with a fox, a chicken and a sack of corn. He can only take one at a time so he has to carefully plan his trips back and forth, without ever leaving the fox with the chicken, or the chicken with the sack of corn. TGSSI is a two-player game with a similar feel. Each of the gentlemen characters is trying to speak with the lady Ashley alone, and must use the bridges to constantly separate and recombine the group. A mathematician friend of ours calculated about 300,000 possible arrangements for the pieces on the board.

Matters of Academic Interest -

Art & the Dilemma of Perspective -

After refining the rules for several months, I met with the board artist, Dan Gray. We knew we wanted a top-down view of the islands, because that's what's best for the game-play. But we quickly found that a matter-of-fact, top-down view of the islands wasn't visually interesting - we were losing a lot of the detail and character of the locations by only showing them from above. After some thought, we decided it would be best to take a lesson from the cubists, and crack the perspective in order to accommodate the top-down play-view, while also managing to include the buildings, monuments, and ruins of the islands at mixed angles. The scale of the locations is also mixed. (For example, the octopus is bigger than the cathedral and the boat is larger than the volcano.) The result is a gameboard with a rather warped perspective. It is a top-down vantage point of the islands as though seen through a piece of wavy, distorted glass, and this distortion for the board would later serve as the inspiration for the themes of distortion that run throughout the narrative.

Making the Game British -

There were two reasons for making the game British. Looking back, it now seems like an obvious choice because of the high level of politeness built into the rule structure (the group typically moves together as a matter of decorum because it would be impolite for a character to walk off in a different direction), but there was another reason as well that had more to do with the objective. The core mechanic of the game is about stepping aside with a lady - and this is an objective that can be read the wrong way, to say the least. In light of this complication, we insisted on the word "Gentlemen" in the title, to squash any accusations of underhanded intentions. Given the high-level of social decorum, and the word "Gentlemen" in the title, the game just seemed British, so we decided to run with it.

Questions of Gender and the Focus of Desire -

At first glance, the game appears to be a simple, perhaps ridiculous, love story in which two men are competing for the attentions of Lady Ashley. Simple enough. But questions of sexism are distributed, alleviated and then further compounded throughout all of the materials of the game. The representations of gender are contradictory because these questions are mixed with questions of the reliability of the character descriptions and the permutations of the game over it's 200 year history. Whether the game is played in a male-centric universe is a fertile ground for debate.

Soon after opening the box, a player will discover that no one controls the female characters. The rules state: "the Ladies move on their own turn and move independently of the group." The phrasing (deliberately) implies that the girls are aloof and disinterested, that they do not care about this and have other places to be. But the problem of gender is unavoidable: if no one controls the Lady characters, then they do not have creative agency. Instead, they move along a set path. The question of gender in the rules sends the players outwards to explore the character booklet.

According to the narrative materials of the game, it was invented by two wealthy (and perhaps mildly insane) gentlemen living on an island. They devised the rule set. This means that we are not looking at the "official rules" of a courtship, by any means, but rather we are looking at what two gentlemen, in their paired delusion, imagined those rules to be. The gentlemen characters are ridiculous enough that it's hard to take them seriously. If they weren't getting gender right, then, well, nor were they very adept at anything else. Jules is a manufacturer of distorted glass and Hodge's "maps might find their best place in a childrens' coloring book." Again, the theme of distortion (originating with the game board art) runs deep throughout the narrative and the game.

A more nuanced look at gender and desire reveals even more. At the end of the character booklet, Jules suggests to Hodge that they should save themselves the "legwork" of chasing after her. He suggests that Hodge "draw up a map of these islands" so that they may resume in the "cool shade of representation." The implication here is that Hodge (the cartographer) drew up a map to serve as the game board, and that Jules (the manufacturer of distorted glass) provided the melted marbles for the pieces. The final image in the character booklet shows them playing the board game. At this stage, Lady Ashley is nowhere to be found. She has been pushed out of the frame and nearly out of the scope of the game. In the image, it is as if the two gentlemen are content to compete with each other over her as an imagined trophy and this might have been the case all along. Is Lady Ashley simply a cipher in order for the 2 gentlemen to keep score with each other? Or rather, is she a canvas on which to paint their affections for one another? Once they reach the stage of playing out the courtship as a board game, one gets the sense that the game is less and less about her.

To determine if the game is in fact sexist - if the world is in fact a male-centric universe - we can find more information in the descriptions of the characters. As we know, Lady Ashley is described as an absent-minded wanderer. This is not a particularly empowering, or redemptive view of the female character, but it's hard to say whether the narrator's description is at all reliable. On a page of direct quotations, Lady Ashley states: "I simply find it odd, that not one person on these islands has asked me even a single question ... Yet clearly I am in the middle of something..." So if we can trust this quotation, and if no one has asked her a single question, then how can we possibly believe the narrator's three-paragraph description? Especially when there is evidence that contradicts even his basic description. A publisher's footnote from a 1925 version of the game reads:

According to the partial memoirs of J.T. Trotwood, there was indeed a Lady Ashley who briefly visited these isles. In reality she was a naturalist commissioned by the British Royal Society to collect flower specimens.

This is a more empowering view of her, but without a firm grounding in truth, one can simply not say who (between the narrator and the gentlemen and the multiple editors) is providing trustworthy information. If in fact there was a Lady Ashley to visit these islands, her true identity might be lost forever under a history of unreliable male narration. While gender remains an issue, perhaps it is easiest to allay the concerns of sexism by discounting the men. The epitaph introducing the game seems to speak on Lady Ashley's behalf. It reads,

"When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools."

The Layers of Story -

Owing to the loose "facts" of the game, it is quite difficult to determine the exact history, or even to count the number of diegetic layers. However, a rough estimate turns up between six and eight layers of story. We start with the original competition on these islands that was played (on foot ) by crossing bridges to speak with the lady. Because it is hard to say if there was ever a woman on these islands, the second diegetic layer is possibly what Jules and Hodge imagined in order to occupy their time. We know that at some point, the gentlemen decided to sit down and create a representation of the game, at which point Hodge drew up a map of the islands and Jules provided the pieces. Later on, the game and several historical documents from these islands were discovered, and the game was brought back to England and published by Edward B. Tickert. 100 years later I myself played a beat-up, depleted copy of the game in a pub in England and decided to seek out more information (which makes me perhaps the 4th or 5th diegetic layer.) Long-story short, I acquired the rights to republish the game. The players who buy the game are acting out the roles of Jules and Hodge as they play, well, the characters Jules and Hodge in the game. Finally, if I pass the game to a larger publisher, they will create yet a seventh layer of editorial commentary; and if we include essays and comments about the game to be included in the box...then the public discourse becomes yet another layer.

The game's history relies on an elaborate, interlocking web of historical documentation surrounding different episodes in the game's discovery and development. The layers of the game create the following epistemological paradox: one can only sort through the facts of the game's history by referring to other questionable facts of the game's history.

Much like Freud's dreams, every element followed will lead to another significant element in a vast web of significance.

Going Transmedia -

There is a nice array of transmedia elements surrounding the game. Perhaps most noteworthy is the upcoming documentary, in which several historians and professors discuss the origins of the game and it's 200 year history. We wanted to build up a rich environment of critical discourse surrounding the game. We wanted to tease out the details of this absurd British colony in the midst of which the game was created. In essence, we wanted to take a simple game and discuss it not only as a historical artifact, but also as a game based on a real events. The fun in the short documentary is in taking a fantastical game and discussing it as a very real representation of an antiquated courtship. It's an anthropological approach to a strange, fictional culture.

The documentary about the islands gestures toward the game, while the game raises questions that demand further exploration in the documentary. Both of them point to other media properties. Kim Moses (co-producer of The Ghost-Whisperer TV series on CBS) describes this type of cross-referencing media as an Infinity Loop.

Marketing, Micro-funding & KickStarter.com -

Basically, on our financial budget, it doesn't make sense to print 500 copies of the game unless we know we have 500 buyers.

We have chosen to assess the level of public and investor interest in The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands by posting it to a microfunding site called Kickstarter.com. On this site, people can preorder the game, or become benefactors. If there is enough interest in the game from the public, then we will move forward and print the first 500 copies.

According to the website, "Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers..." They advertise their website as a way for project creators to "pool" their social networks and turn them into an micro-investment community. It is highly encouraged on the site to offer incentives for different levels of investment.

Another unique aspect of kickstarter is that it is all or nothing. People who post projects set a funding goal for the project. If the goal is met in the two-month time period, everyone who contributed is charged the amount that they pledged. But f the goal is not met, no one is charged, and the project receives no money to move forward. The website offers three reasons for it's sink or swim approach:

1. It's less risk for everyone this way. If you need $5,000, it can suck to have $2,000 and a bunch of people who expect you to be able to complete a $5,000 project.

2. It allows people to test concepts (or conditionally sell stuff) without risk. If you don't receive the support you want, you're not compelled to follow through.

3. It motivates. If you want to see a project come to life, it helps to spread the word.

The site encourages creative marketing, and necessitates spreading the link to the site as far as possible. Here are the things they encourage potential project creators to consider:

1. How will you tell people about your project? The key to a successful project is asking your networks, audience, friends and family for help. Kickstarter is a tool that can turn your networks into your patrons; it is not a source of funding on its own.

2. Rewards are very important. Offer something of real value for a fair price. And more experiential rewards, things that loop backers into the story, are incredibly powerful. Most of the successful projects include them -- take a look around the site and you'll see some great examples. PS: Three or four reasonably priced rewards seems to work quite well (think of it as S, M, L, XL).

3. Include a video. It's more personal.

4. Be clear and specific about your project's goal.

5. And finally, when it comes to your funding goal, raise as little as you'll need to move forward. Projects can raise more, but never less.

In order to preserve the integrity (and strangeness) of The Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands (TGSSI), we have found this micro-investment site to be the best approach. We are selling a fantastical board game with a deep, rich story across multiple platforms. Moreover we are selling it in a country that has slim-to-no independent market for board games.

It seems that the game could find it's home in high-school or college classrooms, but one can't help but notice that studying games is not a common practice in our education system. But why is that? Perhaps this last question is better left to someone more qualified to answer it.

James Taylor is graduate student in Interactive Media at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Resisting the current of digital media, he has chosen to work primarily with board games. You can order the game here.

Counting on Twitter: Harvard's Web Ecology Project (Part Two)

Last time, I shared with you some of the work being done by Harvard University's Web Ecology Project, specifically focusing on the use of Twitter in the aftermath of the Iran Elections and around the death of Michael Jackson. Through qualitative and quantitative research, the team is seeking to develop a better understanding of the flow of ideas through the social networking world and how different participants exert influence on Twitter. My respondent last time was Dharmishta Rood, who I worked with when I was back at MIT. Today, I am showcasing the research being conducted by three other researchers on the Web Ecology team -- Erhardt Graeff, Tim Hwang and Alex Leavitt. I asked them each to share some of their current research and explain why they think it can contribute to our understanding of the new media environment. For more on the Web Ecologies Project, check out Alex Leavitt's recent post on the Convergence Culture Consortium Blog. Erhardt Graeff: One of our hopes for Web Ecology is a fusion of quantitative and qualitative approaches to studying social media phenomena. Our goal of constructing a scientific framework for tackling quantifiable data online is only possible when we recognize the cultural contexts. In Web Ecology, we see the formalization of these contexts as web ecosystems such as LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter.

Inspired by the ethnographic work of a number of researchers, including danah boyd, Mimi Ito, and Keith Hampton on Netville, we are beginning to profile individual social media networks. We call the outputs of our research "Web Ecosystem Profiles". The goal of each profile is to characterize the cultural landscape of a web ecosystem. As you might expect, much of this is done through participant observation.

Of course, the boundaries of each ecosystem are negotiable as in any study of a community. More importantly, a web ecosystem's state is in constant flux with users joining and leaving, new features being introduced, and memes propagating the network. Thus, Web Ecosystem Profiles must be dynamic documents. And to guide our work, we rely on a few of the central tenets of Web Ecology, first laid out in Reimagining Internet Studies:

• Interdependence: code and users are part of an inseparable aggregate web phenomenon;

• Boundedness: the web is constrained by various forces and configurations;

• Significance: content on the web retains inherent value.

Here is an abbreviated version of the outline we are currently using to build profiles. The full version is on our wiki (requires registration):

• Introductory Overview of the Ecosystem

• Common language for discussing components of the ecosystem

• "Typical" reasons that users register / access the ecosystem

• Technical affordances / Constraints of the ecosystem

• Requirements of site usage

• Landmarks of the ecosystem's evolution (e.g. eternal septembers, jumping the shark)

• Defined user cohorts

• Ecosystem-specific lexicon

• Phenomenology of 'Typical' Sessions in an Ecosystem

• Describe general experience of using the site

• Key use cases

• Possibilities for Quantitative Analysis

• Introduce available APIs

• List of atomized site components / activity that could be quantified (e.g. tweets, likes)

• Documentation of successful and unsuccessful approaches to this ecosystem

The last section is unique to the quantitative research Web Ecology hopes to undertake. On Twitter, this is easy because they provide a very open API, with decent documentation, and also the forms of interaction are easily quantified. For Twitter, a web ecosystem profile is particularly useful to help formalize the documentation of unconventional use cases (see excellent examples in danah boyd's draft of "Tweet, Tweet, Retweet"). Charting all the different ways users retweet can enable a better quantitative study of retweeting behavior by ensuring that we: 1) catch all of the various forms of retweets and 2) understand what the different forms might signify.

A more straightforward use of a Web Ecosystem Profile is when a social network has not been explored by many researchers. A few weeks ago, fellow Web Ecologist Seth Woodworth started to use the profile framework to document aspects of LibraryThing, which no one else in our community was using at the time. Did you know that the key demonym in the community is a "thingabrarian", or that one unconventional practice is the creation of fakester libraries for popular, dead authors?

Web Ecosystem Profiling is at a very early stage of preparation. But we believe the need for a peer-produceable way to continually document the contexts of social media phenomena is obvious and immediate. Hopefully, a larger community of researchers are willing to contribute and offer feedback.

Tim Hwang: The Era of Social Media has gifted us with two Big Ironies. First, there's the Big Irony of Business, where extensive practical experience with communities online hasn't successfully translated to the emergence of a science (or even a cluster of useful, concrete reliable methods) around building vibrant social spaces on the web. Second, there's also the Big Irony of Academia, where massive amounts of data, talent, and research on the dynamics of social networks fails to make it into informing the day-to-day practice of businesses (or, indeed, the popular discourse).

In both worlds, the irony is the same: we do in some sense have the key information right in front of us (either in terms of practical experience or reams of qualitative and quantitative research), but a notable lack of ability to convert it into specific, actionable knowledge.

Indeed, this has led us to kind of a sorry state, where good people -- some seriously sharp, brilliant people -- can spend hours talking about the really beautiful research about the social nature of the web. But when the key questions come down the pipe, "So what can I do to foster a community?," "So what factors are responsible for promoting the propagation of culture?," most folks are reduced to wandering generalities and the mantra-like suggestion that the person in question should really consider starting a Twitter account. Where we should be sifting through the available data and offering specific ideas, we've largely only got vague philosophies and anecdotes. Depressingly, the Emperor has no clothes. At the point we're sitting, he's not even really the Emperor, either.

And perhaps most scarily, there's a kind of superstition I feel that's starting to circle around the research, a suspicion that the whole idea of digging deep with data and getting scientific with our prescriptions is, in fact, a largely misguided idea. Social media expert Chris Brogan recently wrote about the quantitative side of things:

I'm writing this from a conference full of researches [sic]. They are all talking passionately about numbers, and I get this. I understand that they're passionate about exacting a science out of the crazy data of human passion. And yet, part of me thinks that numbers often serve us as little life rafts. [...]

We cling to numbers. In business, we use numbers as our primary gauges. But in relationships, we don't. Right? Do you count who hosted the holiday party and do you measure just how delicious the meal was on a chart? (If you do, I take it you like sleeping on couches.)

And he's dead on. But about the wrong point. It's true: you're are in fact a serious jerkface if you behave in the robotic way he's talking about. But we probably wouldn't , for example, blame the host for meticulously keeping track of what people liked and didn't like -- and using it to plan the menu for the next holiday party. This is a simple way of saying that, rigorous exploration isn't bad when it improves our results in a real way. And so, the responsibility for the flaw in Chris' voiced skepticism doesn't fall on him at all. I think it's a natural response to the failure of the research to actually step up to the plate and deliver some implementable knowledge beyond the generalities. If all of our experience and hard data can't come to anything practical, it's easy to believe that it might not be a worthwhile approach to rely on.

So how do we finally step up to the plate? And, before we get to that: how did we get here?

Largely, I'm willing to argue that the Big Ironies have emerged because there's no good space where people can playtest, experiment, and rapidly iterate on a variety of strategies, particularly where influencing the social space online is concerned. There's no good place to measure success, or even compare various approaches against one another to assess their usefulness. There's no way to prove that your methods and data mining can actually produce repeated success. Without that kind of lab, it's tough to take insights from both the research and business world, and try them again and again. Without trying and trying again, we never get to know how information might actually be transformed into useful, applied knowledge.

One of the big projects of the web ecology community has been to see if there's a way of providing that exact environment. Specifically, we've been talking about the concept of competitive games, and the fact that they provide the ideal social structure that we're looking for. Games create repeatable scenarios, allowing us to identify and test a given situation over and over again. Competitive games require measurable goals, and a structured way of assessing success. Finally (and, perhaps best of all) games are good experimental zones, places to try out tactics and strategies on low stakes.

Add the involvement of real people and social structures to take it out of an abstracted lab scenario, and you've gotten to an experiment that we're starting to undertake, something we call social wargaming.

The general premise is simple: beginning with a "battlefield" population of users (who are unaware that a game is going on -- indeed, revealing the existence of the game is against the rules of the game), teams compete to effect specific changes in their behavior. This goes from as simple as getting a social network to pass around a piece of content, to as complex as attempting to bridge the structural gaps between two unconnected clusters of users. We're starting out with single platforms, but the eventual idea is to level up to testing the ability of teams to create certain effects across various networks, and in the social ecosystem of the web as a whole.

The open, implicit challenge is equally simple, though perhaps provocative to the point of being considered trolling: if you're really so good at understanding what culture and community online is all about, if you're really so good at "engaging communities" and being a "trust agent," why not put the money where the mouth is and see if you can't straight up just do it?

The first iteration of this game, entitled "Triangles," builds around this premise. Essentially, teams are given a "terrain" of contested target users to study on Twitter that are connected in some way. The competition is for them to start fresh with an "ego account," which will compete with other groups to create as many tightly linked triangles of connection between their account and two other target users in a short period of time. Over a series of games, we can also change up the terrain and rules to ask other questions -- what tactics work best when trying to build new connections in an already tightly interconnected social group? Can robots achieve the same results as humans in fostering certain types of behavior?

The rules in more depth are available here (Social_Wargaming_Triangles.txt,) and we're actively looking for participants who want to play a role in this. First round begins November 20th, and will be running during the first week of December. Definitely drop an e-mail to tim@webecologyproject.org, if you'd like to be involved. And, with any hope, we're hoping that the outcome of this gaming will be something in actuality quite different that just mere entertainment: experiments towards forging an applied science of cultural and community spaces online.

Alex Leavitt: A primary goal of the Web Ecology Project aims to analyze how the relationship between social networking platforms and its users affects and is affected by the cultural practices of online communication and community building. To approach this goal, we had striven to establish a set of first principles for the Web on which to base our future research. Our analyses of influence on the Web usually started with these first principles. For example, the smallest units of communication might be a page view or a click. Using these measurements, how could we make declarative statements about how people interacted in mediated spaces like Twitter (which structure communication based on how the programmers design the platform)?

However, designing first principles proved a bit difficult, and when I wrote "The Influentials" I realized that we would have to shape sets of "elementary particles" (like chemical atoms and molecules) per each system. Basically, because each platform controls the possible modes of communication, first principles for Facebook are inherently different than those of Google Reader, for example. For Twitter, the platform analyzed in "The Influentials," these elements begin with the ordinary tweet, out of which we see related particles, like replies, retweets, and mentions.

For the elements on Twitter, I established an operational definition of influence (meaning that our analysis is ultimately separated from any theories of influence previously researched in academic circles). Tweets became actions on which replies, retweets, and mentions were enacted. Thus, we organized our arguments around influence as those messages sustaining a large amount of responses.

The focus on response is key to our results. The Web Ecology Project has attempted to respond to extremely generalized analyses of social media phenomenon, particularly with large amounts of quantitative evidence to support our claims. In "The Influentials," we wanted to criticize those analyses of influence that had primarily focused on follower counts, which of course are important; however, if a user has 10,000 followers and none of them respond to the user, then can we claim that this user is influential? Of course, we couldn't ignore follower counts, so we included equations and calculated graphs that accounted for both responses and numbers of followers, to weigh users that had smaller follower networks.

Probably the more interesting aspect of our initial analysis of influence of Twitter lay in our categorization of the cultural practices that lay underneath these interactions between popular users on Twitter and their followers. We split the ten users into three groups: celebrities, news outlets, and social media analysts. For the most part, the trends show that the members of these groups act fairly similarly (with discrepancies, of course, usually based on the number of followers).

The under-appreciated piece of our research ended up being our visualizations. We generated a colorful graph that illustrates the density of tweets and responses for each user in our report. It's intriguing to analyze our statistics visually, because you can occasionally pick out exceptional instances of response explosions. Although in our visualization our code could not parse out which responses corresponded to which original tweet, we can suppose that most of the wild groups of responses that follow occasional tweets are immediate responses that eventually ebb away.

To move beyond this initial, basic analysis of influence on Twitter, we would like to look closer at the networks of followers behind these mega-users. Looking at hypothetical extremes hints at the problems we might foresee in future research: If a user has a follower network that responds at an ordinary rate, but each of those users have extremely active responding networks (ie., the original user's secondary follower network), then that certainly affects how we might provide ratings or levels of influence for specific users.

Erhardt Graeff is a Lead Researcher and Developer for the Web Ecology Project, and also a social scientist and entrepreneur with an MPhil in Modern Society and Global Transformations from Cambridge University and a couple of bachelor's degrees from RIT. In addition to researching social media, he has studied rural internet use and social capital, digital divides, e-government, networked public spheres, and new media literacy. Beyond the Web Ecology Project, Erhardt is the Director of Technology and Strategy for BetterGrads, a startup aimed at preparing high school students for college life, and is a research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, studying OER and the political economy of the textbook industry.

Tim Hwang is the Director of the Web Ecology Project and an analyst with The Barbarian Group -- where he works on issues of group dynamics and web influence. He is interested in building a science around measuring the system-wide flows of content and patterns of community formation online. He is also the founder of ROFLCon, a series of conferences celebrating and examining internet culture and celebrity. He currently Twitters @timhwang, blogs at BrosephStalin, and is in the process of watching every homemade flamethrower video on YouTube.

Alex Leavitt is a Lead Researcher for the Web Ecology Project. His interests include geographical, linguistic, and transnational subcultures; the hybridization of popular culture and online humor; and the emergent cultural practices of (un)controlled online social networks. Alex also works as a research specialist with the Convergence Culture Consortium in the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT, and has previously worked with the Digital Natives Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard Law School). In addition to his weekly articles on the Convergence Culture blog, Alex writes long-form about Japanese popular culture at The Department of Alchemy and short-form on Twitter (@alexleavitt).

Counting on Twitter: Harvard's Web Ecology Project (Part One)

Anyone who has read my blog long knows that I am not big on counting things. Some of it is that I have math anxiety -- a serious vulnerability for someone who spent the first 20 years of his career at MIT! Some of it is that I think people often act as if counting things is the same thing as analyzing things or that the only things that count are things that came be counted. I often wage a one-man struggle against the push to quantify the universe -- perhaps as if (arbitrary science fiction reference warning) the world would end if we could just capture all of the billions of names of God. That said, I am finding myself mellow more than a little now that I am at USC, am watching my former graduate students struggle to grasp quantitative methods, and getting to know some of my office mates and colleagues who count things for a living. And there is a particularly value in trying to understand the scale on which certain changes in our communication environment are occurring -- at least to capture some order of their magnitude. And that's why I have been following with some interest the emergence of a research team at Harvard focused on understanding Twitter and its place in the "web ecology." Many members of the team are graduate students I worked with in a range of capacities during my time at MIT and have come to value their insights into digital media. Their data is already helping me to reframe some of the thinking I am doing about spreadable media and knowing how many people come to this blog now through my tweets, my bet is that you will find what they are doing interesting as well. In this first installment, the responses come from Dharmishta Rood, who I met through the Knight news challenge a few years ago and who took several of my classes during my final year at MIT. I featured one of her essays on the blog last spring. Next time, she will be joined by some other members of the research team.

What do you mean by web ecology? What does the name of your group tell us about the assumptions guiding your research?

We summarize our research by the statement that Web Ecology studies the relationship of the nature of data and the behavior of actors on the internet.

Web Ecology as a field, rather than focusing on the Internet from various fields such as Sociology, Humanities, Business or Media Studies, focuses on the Web itself, combining methodologies from multiple, often interrelated disciplines, to decipher activity online both quantitatively and qualitatively. In our personal research practices we frequently use large-scale data mining to inform our research questions and to further our understanding about the cultures and communities evident online. In addition to providing quantitative analysis about the social layer of the web, we see our role as Web Ecologists to provide tools for other Web Ecologists in an open manner for the community of researchers. We also see the advantageous position of this type of resarch for businesses interested in marketing and online presence.

What can you tell us about the core methodology you are applying to understanding how Twitter works?

We try to break down Twitter into quantifiable interactions. We understand that there are many factors outside of Twitter--both time specific, such as breaking news, the hour of a TV show or a holiday, but also new trends and information being spread throughout the web. We try to look at all of it within the ecosystem of Twitter itself. At Web Ecology we try to look at what we can measure--namely retweets, mentions, @replies, #hashtags and common keywords within the sea of tweets.

We understand that the web is constrained by various forces and configurations. Rather than a utopian or deterministic perspective, Web Ecology recognizes that the web is not limitless or truly divorceable from various geographic, social, historical, and other realities.

Web Ecology endorses the systematic creation and testing of models, which leads us to a heavily quantitative approach, that can then be paired with a qualitatitive exploration of these findings. We also don't overlook Internet phenomena as transient cultural fads--we see cultural creation on the Internet as impartially as possible, and also that code and users are part of an inseparable aggregate web phenomenon.

Some of your earliest results dealt with the role of Twitter in the aftermath of the Iran elections. What kinds of data emerged from your investigation? What did that tell us we didn't already know about the twitter traffic surrounding these events?

Our report cites much of the popular media that both creates the term yet also criticizes the hasty declaration of a "Twitter Revolution" in Iran.

Using 12 keywords and hashtags, we found that 58% of relevant twitter conversation did NOT contain the common hashtag #iranelection. This allowed us to get a much more comprehensive overview of the Twittersphere during the Iranian election.

One of the most interesting findings to emerge out of the report were these two facts in conjunction: The top 10% of users in our study account for 65.5% of total tweets and one in four tweets were retweet of another user's content, showing that the users who tweet the most are not always the most influential.

You've also looked at the Twitter traffic following Michael Jackson's death. What similarities and differences did you find in the discussion surrounding these two events?

Similarly to the Iran election, with Michael Jackson's death on Twitter there were many keywords. One of the most interesting findings was the trajectory of each event over the Twittersphere. In the case of Michael Jackson's death, there were over 279,000 tweets within the first hour of mainstream news reports of Jackson's death, whereas with the Iranian election, there were 2,024,166 tweets total (over eighteen days), but never more than 17,500 tweets in any given hour. These tweets fluctuated during times of unrest.

Since the excitement on twitter decreased over time, especially after the first hour, the type of content was inherently very different. We spent time hand-coding tweets (in the Social Science sense, having individuals read and analyze the tweets according to certain metrics) rather than strictly doing data analysis. The Michael Jackson report sought to understand sentiment on Twitter, rather than the trajectory of a real-time event spanning many days.

How important is retweeting to the ecology of the web?

Within twitter specifically, retweeting is only one of the many ways people can interact with content. It becomes important when new audiences see content from users they do not follow, but another important feature of Twitter is search. Users following a particular topic of interest can come across new content to consume and share.

What do you think Twitter is doing that is different from other kinds of social networks?

Twitter allows users to follow one another asymmetrically, meaning that users do not have to follow those that follow them. From this an interesting dynamic emerges wherein follower counts are meaningful in a separate way than the number and type of people a user follows. A user is often valued more for the amount of followers--an account with immensely more users they are following than follow them is likely spam, whereas a user like Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) only follows ~300 users but has almost 4,000,000 followers.

Twitter, as it's been deemed many times over is a "micro blogging service," meaning the updates contain news and information like blogs, but with many fewer characters. This micro-update style is now a relevant part of other social networks, both during and after the increase of Twitter's userbase.

Dharmishta Rood is Director of Research Relations at the Web Ecology Project and a recent graduate Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Her work deals with large scale and interpersonal communication systems like social networks and news. These types of platforms allow users to generate and consume information in ways that further social connections and learning. She is a 2008 Knight News Challenge winner for Populous Project, a free and open-source platform for online news, holds a degree in Design | Media Arts from UCLA and is a Fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media. She tweets @dharmishta and blogs at dharmishta.com.

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Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television (Part Two)

Circular Nexus of Screens Why does Click Click Ranger need this complicate maneuver over multiple forms of screens, and for what purpose? In order to dissect the discursive logic behind this nexus of screens, we need to understand the current configuration of these screens in Korea.

Mobile Phones: The prodigy of Korean IT mythology.

Click Click Ranger's experiment of incorporating the mobile phone into a television show directly corresponds to the recent development of Korea's mobile phone industry in the convergent media paradigm. Since ETRI and the consortium of corporations launched the world's first commercial CDMA mobile phone service in 1996, Korea has been a step ahead in exploring CDMA based technological innovations and the latest mobile media services including mobile TV (DMB: Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) and Wibro (the first wireless high-speed broadband). Following SK telecom (the major wireless network provider in Korea)'s 3G mobile content service June in 2002, Korean wireless companies have explored the diverse forms of mobile multimedia content. I conveniently categorize content for mobile phone into two types: "migrated mobile content" which refers to repurposed and repackaged content from conventional media and "original mobile content" that is initially produced for mobile screen devices such as mobile cinema and mobile drama)(Ok, 2008). In the midst of industrial effort to find the 'right' content for mobile screen, these new hybrid forms of moving images explore the aesthetics of convergence that continues and at the same time disrupts the conventions of existing media forms. Mobile TV has expanded the horizon of the mobile screen by combining mobile telecommunication technology and broadcasting.

While mobile phone content service and Mobile TV serve as extended venues for conventional media, the conventional media have also tried to incorporate mobile screen technologies into their formats in many different ways. Overall, the most heated concern for both parties is how to develop 'new' content that fit the condition of media convergence, which is often expressed as a 'media big bang' and 'content war' in popular media in Korea (Kim & Lee, 2005). Click Click Ranger is an early attempt to tackle this challenge on the television network side, which continued to the fever of UCC (User Created Content). Following Click Click Ranger, other television networks and popular media organizations launched similar programs such as SBS's "Uporter" system. Literally, "Uporter" means "ubiquitous reporter" and it mobilizes citizens to capture news on the street with their digital camera or mobile phone camera, which are then selectively shown through regular News shows on SBS.

Click Click Ranger's use of mobile phone imaging directs attention to the multifaceted nature of the mobile phone. Notably, MSM (multimedia short message) which allows users to attach pictures or short video clips to a mobile phone message is generally discussed as a private communication tool or a vehicle to expand private space with the combined practice of blogging. Although the formation of shared 'community'- whether it is exclusive or relatively open to the general public- has also been discussed, the prevailing assumption is on the practice of 'private imaging' among individuals. Compared to this model of private imaging, Click Click Ranger's adoption of mobile phone imaging is closer to and continues the practice of "citizen journalism" only with changed technologies- from the (video) camera and to the mobile phone-. Hence, while being true to the technological premise of the medium that provides 'personal mobility' (for the mobile rangers and citizen reporters), their mobile phone imaging resides in and further serves to reinstate the value of the public. Most of all, it is the particular use of the outdoor screen with the mobile screen that distinguishes Click Click Ranger from other home-video shows or citizen reports programs and enables it to construct a broader discourse of the 'public space' out of mobile screen usage in Korea.

Outdoor Screens

City Hall Square during World Cup Soccer in 2002

Okay. Click Click Ranger was able to find a way to connect the mobile phone to the television. Now, what makes this nexus of screens unique is the presence of the large LED screen as an integral part of the television show. Simply put, in Click Click Ranger, the large LED Screen technically functions as an additional outdoor TV to broadcast its program. Although the use of the mobile screen is also equally unconventional, the potential of mobile phones as screen media has already been explored in diverse ways. Yet the large LED screen, in spite of its ubiquity in urban landscapes of the global metropolis, has received little attention in the conventional media industry other than in the outdoor advertising business. Becoming one of the latest form of screen media, the Large LED screen not only succeeds the function of the commercial or public advertising that outdoor billboards once fulfilled but also continues the visual pleasure of the urban spectacle. Since 2000, the LED screen in Korea was moved from the category of 'outdoor advertising' to the 'LED display screen broadcasting,' becoming one of the 'broadcasting-telecommunication convergent media' that would be governed under the new broadcasting laws.

Compared to the traditional TV at home, the experience of outdoor TV is deeply conditioned by the material condition of place, as TV screen is usually an implemented part of the architectural surroundings. That is, the location where outdoor TV displays, whether it be waiting room, subway/train station or rooftop of building, tends to predetermine the content and flow of content on outdoor TV screens. At the same time, the meaning of place is also rendered by the viewer's activity of watching TV: If in Seoul, the subway station might turn into a living room momentarily for the passengers who enjoy entertainment show clips on ubiquitous screen panels installed inside the train and/or waiting area, beyond its practical functions. In Click Click Ranger, it is the symbolic meaning of 'public space' (as in the location of Seoul City Hall) that the commercial LED screen in City Hall Plaza embodies and that Click Click Ranger systematically appropriates and reproduces. Then, why is the location of Seoul City Hall Plaza crucial for linking up-to-date screen technologies?

Physically located at the busy intersection of the political and economic center of the downtown Seoul, the Seoul City Hall Plaza has served as a central place for many important national events. By running the show on the rooftop of city hall building following the fashion of 'live news report on spot,' Click Click Ranger successfully appropriates the sense of 'liveness' and intentionally adds 'moral weight - news-worthy-ness-' to the clips. This simulated urgency and liveness that supports the show's goal of being connected to everyday realities of Korea is intensified on the symbolic level since for Koreans the Seoul City Hall Plaza is the emblematic center for national identity as manifested during the World Cup Soccer tournament in 2002.

The image of the Seoul City Hall above illustrates the scene of World Cup Soccer frenzy during which, with the unexpected achievement of the Korean national team going on to the semi-final, crowds gathering in front of the large electronic screens to cheer reached the point of becoming a nation-wide ritual. The intensity and enthusiasm represented by the image of the 'wave of Red Devils' (the official name of Korean team supporters as well as the icon of 2002 World Cup) left an unforgettable impression on Korean popular imaginary. In fact, many Korean scholars agreed that World Cup Soccer frenzy in 2002 does not simply reflect interest in a national sports match but rather represents a demarcating historical moment in Korean society- a culminating point to celebrate regained national pride and strength after the collapse of the economy in 1997. More interestingly, the 2002 World Cup syndrome parallels the increasing self-awareness of Korea's position as a world- leading player in the global information technology industry.

It is not a mere coincidence that the 'mobile phone' and the 'screen' were two of the primary export products of Korea at the time. Led by the semi-conductor chip, various sorts of screens (PDP, LCD/LED screens, computer screens, and the traditional electronic screens) and mobile phones ranked among top three export products in 2005 (Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, 2005). The first pivotal moment when large LED screens came into the public media awareness in Korea was also around the World Cup Soccer in 2002, when it served as a key display venue for broadcasting the Korean national team's matches in public places. The large LED screen that Click Click Ranger deploys is one of the several LED screens that drew large crowds around Seoul City Hall Plaza. In its pilot episode, Click Click Ranger explicitly delivers this intertwined discourse of the screen and the nation. The show dwelled on the significance of City Hall Plaza by inserting clips of City Hall Plaza scenes during World Cup Soccer 2002 and charts with the statistics of mobile phone exports sales. In this way, the culturally accumulated meaning of the particular place of Seoul City Hall Plaza- a center of the civil and nationalistic ideology- enhance Click Click Ranger's attempt to replicate the sense of 'liveness' of live broadcasting and foreground the 'collective' meaning of being networked.

All Together: Networked Public in Wired Korea

Overall, Click Click Ranger represents multilayered meanings of the physical and the discursive movements of images within current Korea: images migrate from the 'micro' screen to the 'macro' screen, from private space to public space and as a result, individuals are assumed to occupy the position of citizens. For instance, in Mobile Ranger, the implication of 'private imaging' constantly changes as it travels across diverse screens: from private imaging to public exhibition on outdoor screen, and back to the private viewing on Mobile TV. In this circulation, mobile phones and Mobile TV, which represent personal screen devices, are mobilized into the formation of 'public space' by conventional media. By creating public space within the domain of private space, Mobile Ranger inevitably questions the fixity of the boundary between private and public space which is considered to be contingent on the specificity of media. When the show is eventually broadcast in mobile TV, the flexibility of the public and private space becomes more intensified. Due to the mobility given to the viewer, the previously established and spatially fixed 'public' dimension of the outdoor screen in city hall square is disrupted as the diverse viewing situations of individual Mobile TV viewers multiply the meanings of space for themselves.

In the end, Click Click Ranger's complicated exhibition process does not simply aim to increase the pleasure of experiencing images, but to foreground the very technological competency of appropriating new technologies. The realization of the idea of 'connecting' these up-to-dated screen technologies symptomatically reveals the social discourse about the importance of 'networked public in wired Korea'. Considering that mobile technology becomes a source of national pride, the cultural use of mobile technology in Korea, especially mediated through the conventional media practices, often invites the individual to the formation of national identity. Not only doesClick Click Ranger resonate with the popular techno-nationalistic discourse around the mobile and new media technologies but it also reproduces it through its construction of imagined citizen within networked screens. In this way, mobile phone imaging meets television and the outdoor screen in City Hall Plaza and in this more or less blunt self-explanatory gesture, Click Click Ranger conjures up the mobile phone exactly at the center of the 'current' Korea.

Works Cited

de Certeau', Michael, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)

Kim, Taek-Hwan & Lee, Sang-Bok, Media Big Bang: Korea changes, (Seoul, Korea: Knowledge Supply Publishing Company, 2005)

Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, (NYU Press, 2007)

McCarthy, Anna, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, (Duke University Press, 2001)

Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, "Suchiro Bon IT 2005 ( IT 2005 by Statistics)," 29 December 2005.

Ok, Hye Ryoung, "Screens on the Move: Media Convergence and Mobile Culture in Korea," ph.d dissertation, Department of Critical Studies, School of Cinema-Television, University of California, 2008

HyeRyoung Ok is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, working for the Digital Media and Learning Hub. Currently she is carrying out research for the Public Participation Research Network led by Joe Kahne. As a cultural studies scholar, HyeRyoung looks at newly emerging transmedia culture from interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on the transition of cinematic tradition to digital media, mobile media culture, and transnational flow of cultural content, particularly in East Asian context.

Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television (Part One)

I am offering today's post as part of the ongoing conversation I've been having throughout the semester about transmedia storytelling practices. Below you will find the first of two installments written by HyeRyoung OK, a recently minted USC PhD, who I have met through my work with a new MacArthur Foundation Research Hub on Youth, New Media, and Public Participation. She has done some groundbreaking research on the deployment of transmedia practices in Korean television, projects which have gotten very little attention on this side of the world, but which have a lot to offer as an alternative model for how mobile technologies and public space can be deployed as part of a transmedia strategy. Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television

by HyeRyoung Ok

By now we all know that the mobile phone is not simply a phone anymore. Since its introduction, the mobile phone has evolved into something that constantly broadens and transforms its boundary. Indeed, it is one of the most convergent media devices available that materializes the paradigm of media convergence. In most countries where mobile technology is widely adopted, the mobile phone is rapidly becoming a new outlet for traditional media industries responding to the "visions of wireless phones becoming hand-held entertainment centers." Yet the mobile phone's entry into the existing media environment is not a natural and homogeneous process. Continuing, disrupting, and mixing existing media practices to a newer form, rather, it came to terms with conventional media in heterogeneous ways depending on the socio-culturally specific contexts.

Then, here comes the story of the mobile phone in Korea, the country recently known as "IT powerhouse" where the adventure of the mobile phone ever continues. The mobile phone in Korea is literally a focal point where technical, industrial, and cultural innovations to explore the 'newer' forms of media service converge (see my blog posts on general review of Korean IT practices). What is particularly unique about Korean mobile culture is the continuing emphasis on the potential of mobile phones as 'screen' media. It is not surprising phenomenon considering the weight of 'screen' related - all dimensions of hardware and software - industries in Korean society. I would like to illustrate how the mobile screen is positioned in the flux of these transmedia experiments across new and old media in a culturally specific way through the case of Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, an entertainment program on channel MBC in Korea.

Click Click Rangers: aka Mobile Rangers, is an interesting case that shows how the media content is designed to be produced/consumed based on the principle of "connecting" multiple forms of screens: mobile screen, television screen, and outdoor LED screen. Click Click Ranger is one of three sections in the popular Sunday prime time entertainment show, titled !: Exclamation Mark which was broadcast from December 2004 to August 2005 on channel MBC - one of three major television networks in Korea. In Click Click Ranger, the mobile screen is used in two significant ways: mobile phone imaging for moving image production and mobile TV for moving image circulation. Although it was short-lived, this show set up a model for employing mobile phone technology thematically as well as formally into the television program format and inspired other shows in competing networks. As a prototype, Click Click Ranger raises several interesting issues on the relation between new media technology, the existing media conventions, and culture. Taking Click Click Ranger as a starting point, let's begin to explore how Korean television mediates the mobile screen as part of the larger outdoor screen culture and thus complicates the issue of 'convergence of spaces.

Click Click Ranger (aka Mobile Ranger): Capture Korea's Today

Click Click Ranger's catchphrase of "Capture Korea's today" literally and symbolically sums up the goal and the structure of the show: To report the present realities of Korea. In terms of content, Click Click Ranger presents several short video clips of anonymous do-gooders and misbehaviors on the street in a fashion similar to citizen reports. These clips are captured and sent by random citizens and "mobile rangers," a group of pre-selected young college students and volunteers (in total, 100 members). Technically, mobile rangers and anonymous participants capture videos on the street and send clips 'in real time' to the studio while the program is being pre-recorded. It is reported that ninety percent of participants use a mobile phone camera and send clips through the wireless internet on their mobile phone. Most interestingly, Click Click Ranger adopts a multi-screen format of display that tackles the paradigm of media convergence by manipulating the 'flow' of content across media (Jenkins, 2007). The clips captured by mobile phone camera and selected for showing on regular television are simultaneously broadcast on a large LED screen installed over Seoul City Hall Plaza. In fact, the program itself is shot on the rooftop of the city hall building, where two MCs run the show as if they were news reporters as is illustrated in the picture above. Hence, what the viewers on a regular television set at home actually watch are alternating shots between the outdoor screen display, the MCs, and small video clips in quick-time movie format. Later on, the program re-runs on Mobile TV, particularly on the channel BLUE of Satellite DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) service on the following Monday. Following this path, the clips of Click Click Ranger finish their journey from the street to multiple screens encompassing all hot spots ('hot screens') in the current mediascape of Korea as diagram below illustrates.

Creating the Public: Private Imaging and Public Exhibition

To the savvy viewers, who got used to all sorts of strategies to utilize the mobile phone for the television show by now, early attempt of Click Click Ranger may not look so fresh. What makes this show unique is the way in which it attempts to employ the mobile phone, an icon of personal media, in the service of constructing the 'public space' within a commercial entertainment. As a matter of fact, from the beginning, ! : Exclamation Mark has built a reputation for being a 'public value concerned entertainment' program. Previous and current sub-sections of the show have adopted 'human documentary' or 'news report' format in which show hosts visit and follow various people, with the goal of promoting the 'good civilian life and consciousness' in the fashion of a public service campaign. So far, its campaigns have been successful in generating issues in public discourse and have had real consequences in social life in Korea. Some of its famous campaigns include: "Let's read books," "Let's obey the traffic sign," "Let's eat Breakfast," "Street Lessons," "Open your Eyes (Donation/Transference of cornea for the blind)," "Asia Asia (Illegal worker's home visiting project)" and so on.

Partially, the show's strategy to foreground public good within entertainment content reflects the unique hybrid characteristic of its network, MBC: MBC is private but at the same time closer to a public broadcasting network. It runs as a private company but is in fact indirectly owned by the government (by KBS, a major public network) and under the direct control of the Commission of Television Broadcasting. This dominant discourse of the program not only circumscribes the content of the clips in Click Click Ranger but also affects its program format. Typical clips of Click Click Ranger would feature various incidents such as violation of minor civil laws, misdemeanors, or good samaritans who help weak, elderly people at the subway station and so on. In each episode, if the best citizen is chosen among the good samaritans, the show's host calls up the mobile ranger on the scene and runs to there to give the samaritan a reward-a golden badge.

(To be continued)

HyeRyoung Ok is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, working for the Digital Media and Learning Hub. Currently she is carrying out research for the Public Participation Research Network led by Joe Kahne. As a cultural studies scholar, HyeRyoung looks at newly emerging transmedia culture from interdisciplinary perspective, with a focus on the transition of cinematic tradition to digital media, mobile media culture, and transnational flow of cultural content, particularly in East Asian context.

Strange Overtures: Vodephone, Tchaikovsky, Ernie Kovacs and the "Wowness" of New Media

One of the great joys of our present moment is waking up to some delightful gift -- a compelling bit of media content -- sent to you by friends, family, or in this case, a former student (Eric Schmiedl). Several years ago, I wrote a blog post about the ways that YouTube has brought back many aspects of the vaudeville aesthetic that I discussed in my first book, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic: The video below is a great example -- an advertisement produced in New Zealand for Vodephone which offers us a spectacular technological performance, one which calls attention to the emerging properties of our media environment in several ways.

First, of course, the video demonstrates some of the expressive potentials of mobile phones, not to mention the prospects of using digital media to coordinate signals within a complex structure. This is a compelling example of technological virtuosity. My first response was to go "Wow" and in our modern age, "wowness" is a hard earned quality. Here's what I wrote about it in my recent book, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture::

Consider the singular beauty of the word 'Wow.' Think about the pleasure in forming that perfectly symmetrical phrase on your tongue. IOmagine the particular enthusiasm it expresses -- the sense of wonderment, astonishment, absolute engagement. A 'Wow' in something that has to be earned, and in the modern age we distribute standing ovations far too often when we are just being polite, but we have become too jaded to give a wow. The term takes on a certain irony, as if it can only be uttered in quotation marks.

This immediate, visceral response makes this the kind of content you want to "spread" to others in your social network. Eric forwarded it to me; I'm posting it on my blog and sending it out through my Twitter feed; and perhaps you will like it well enough that you will pass it along further. This is at the heart of what we are calling "spreadable media." And trust me, the folks at Vodephone are not going to be heartbroken at our circulation of their commercial message. They no doubt think this video has gone "viral" -- It didn't, god forbid. But a bunch of us did decide, for our own reasons, to keep it in constant and varied circulation.

One of the ways that Vodephone has found to extend our engagement with this video has been to create a "Making Of" segment which is in many ways just as fascinating as the original. That's the great thing about technological virtuosity -- we can admire it even when the magician invites us behind the red velvet curtain and shows us how he does his tricks. I am reminded of what the French media theorists Christian Metz wrote about "trucage" or what we Americans call "special effects." That they are "artifaces" that are not so much hidden as proclaimed. When we all watch Avatar in a few weeks, we are not going to simply be immersed into the world of the film; we are going to stand back and gasp at the spectacular breakthroughs in special effects which have been publicized around the making of the film. And this fascination with how they did it will in no way diminish, may in fact increase the emotional impact of what we are seeing.

This being the age of participatory culture and interactive media, Vodephone takes this a step further on the webpage they've constructed around this advertisement, which allows us to take the basic building blocks behind this spot and remix them towards our own ends. This thus completes the process of technological amazement -- allowing us to experience first hand the delights of expressing ourselves through ringtones.

When I first saw the Vodephone spot, though, I was reminded of a much earlier moment of technological virtuosity and the vaudeville aesthetic. Take a look and you will see why.

Ernie Kovacs was a spectacular visual comedian who worked in the early days of American television. Kovacs exploited for comic effect our heightened awareness of the visual properties of this new and emerging medium. Television was not yet ambient; we had not yet started to take the visuals (which, after all, are what separated television from radio) for granted. Kovacs counts on us not being able to take our eyes off the screen.

So, why do both of these artists draw upon Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1880 composition, 1812 Overture, as the basis for their spectacular performance. I suspect there are many reasons, starting with the fact that the 1812 Overture embodies the high art status we ascribe to classical music. New media seeking to gain recognition often signal their cultural ambitions by drawing on works which we already respect from older media traditions. They do Shakespeare or Mozart or Tchaikovsky. Second, these works at the same time poke fun at the cultural hierarchies they seek to transcend -- there's something really profoundly silly about the ways they are performing or illustrating the 1812 Overture in these segment. And finally, at least in the case of the Vodephone ad, they respect the complexity of this particular composition as a way of demonstrating their own mastery over the new technologies involved. The Vodephone ad would not be nearly as absorbing or engaging if the phones were playing Chopsticks or Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

So, if you want to learn more about our concept of spreadable media, check out the webinar which I will be conducting with Sam Ford and Joshua Green on Friday 6 November (from 12-1 pm EST). Registration is free!

Moving from "Sticky" to "Spreadable": The Antidote to "Viral Marketing" and the Broadcast Mentality

Based on years of researching how and why people spread news, popular culture, and marketing content online through the Convergence Culture Consortium for the past several years , our speakers are currently working on a book entitled Spreadable Media. This Webinar will look at what "spreadable media" means, why the concept of "stickiness" is inadequate for measuring success for brands and content producers online and ultimately why marketers and producers should spend more time creating "spreadable material" for audiences than trying to perfect "viral marketing." In this one-hour session, the speakers will share the ideas and strategy behind "spreadable media" and a variety of examples of best--and worst--practices online for both B2B and B2C campaigns.

This panel will address:

-- The concept of "stickiness" and why it cannot solely be used as a way to measure success online;

-- How and why viral marketing does not accurately describe how content spreads online;

-- Why a "broadcast mentality" does not work in a social media space;

-- The strategy companies should undertake when creating material for audiences to potentially spread online;

-- Companies that have learned difficult lessons and/or gotten the idea of "spreadable media" right;

-- Trends in popular culture/entertainment one which brands should keep a close eye;

-- How "spreadable media" might apply to B2B audiences.

Reflections on Cultural Politics: My Interview for Poli (Part Two)

Today, I am running the second part of the English language translation of an interview I did last year with Maxime Cervulle for Poli, a French magazine of media and cultural theory. Last time, the focus was on cultural politics and cybercitizenship. In this part, I turn my attention more fully to issues around Web 2.0. Enjoy and as always, let me know what you think.
In the current context, user-generated content faces new forms of media concentration, and new types of worrying alliances between governmental power and media conglomerates (for example in the Italian and French political context). Is this a paradoxical situation, or does "participatory culture" sometimes serve as a smoke screen for new economic and political configurations?

At the current moment, participatory culture, user-generated content, web 2.0, refer to a range of different corporate and grassroots practices, some of which are more tightly controlled than others. Certainly, as writers like Tzianna Terranova have suggested, user-generated content can become another word for "free labor", allowing for the outsourcing of expressive activity at considerable cost to those working in the creative industries. Certainly, as Trebor Sholtz and others have suggested, social networks seek to lock down our information, making it harder for us to port our data from space to space. As John Campbell has suggested, many of these sites invite us to trade privacy for access to powerful tools for producing and circulating media content, engaging in various forms of surveilance which may or may not be acknowledged to the users.

As I have suggested, a participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse culture. Indeed, sites like YouTube, which rely on user-moderation, often operate on majoritarian premises which place very little value on access to minority perspectives and in some cases, may be less diverse at their most visible levels than forms of public broadcasting which have a strong mandate for broad representation. So, we really do need to look all of these gift horses in the mouth and try to understand the paradoxes and contradictions of web 2.0 culture.

That said, the sheer proliferation of tools has made it much easier for grassroots communications to route around official censorship, whether corporate or governmental. For example, Huma Yusuf has studied the ways that a range of different media channels -- YouTube, SMS, Facebook, Flickr, among them -- were deployed by activists and citizen journalists to get word out about what was happening in Pakistan during the 2007-2008 state of national emergency. She argues that no sooner did the government seek to close off one channel, then activists rerouted towards a different platform. And when activists were

stiffled at the geographically local level, they were able to tap the participation of a larger diasporic community which remain strongly connected to Pakistan through these various participatory power.

The trick, in other words, is to see participatory culture as having some real potentials for grassroots empowerment even as we maintain a healthy skepticism towards

specific web 2.0 practices which restrain rather than enable meaningful participation.

Many of the European writers about web 2.0 raise important concerns that we all need to factor into our analysis, but they are also, in my opinion, too quick to dismiss any claims that these tools and platforms can be used to effect meaningful social, cultural, and political change. The evidence is all around us that even in their most corrupted forms, they offer significant new

opportunities for activism, for cultural experimentation, and for new kinds of knowledge production. This is at the heart of what some people are describing as Networked Publics. It's easy to characterize my perspective as utopian, which often occurs in European responses to my work, yet if this is the case, I am not a blind utopian. For me, a recognition of the progressive potentials of these technologies and practices provides a basis for critiquing the abuses and manipulations which block such a deployment.

Does the recent turn to "creative industries" (in cultural studies as well as in public policy ­ see UNESCO for example) mark an obsolescence of the notion of "cultural industries"? How does this new notion might help us map new terrains in the relationship between culture, economy and society?

The term, "culture industries," is so closely associated with the Frankfort School tradition that I'm afraid that it locks us into old theoretical models of how the entertainment industry operates. There is some danger that the term, "creative industries," may similarly be coopted, especially as it gets deployed through public policy advocates, into a particular neo-Liberal inflection which may blind us to some of the critical issues I've raised above.

Yet, in the short run, it seems to me that the emergence of a new vocabulary allows us to ask some important questions about shifts in the patterns of cultural production and distribution, changes in the way information gets produced and deployed, and the degree to which our whole economic system may be shifting from commodity capitalism to a service economy to a creative economy, which has significant implications for culture and for education.

As we've seen, the power relations created around mass media, which formed the basis for many of our cultural theories, have been altered through the expansion of social networks and the increased visibility and centrality of participatory culture.This is not to say that commercial interests do not exert a strong influence over the communication environment. Of course, they do, but their power is no where near as totalizing as those classical accounts would suggest. This is not to say that these commercial interests do not seek to shape the hearts and minds of their consumers, but they are adopting rather different models of persuasion which depend upon our active participation and which are subject to our collective critique.

So, the most powerful reason to shift from talking about "culture industries" to 'creative industries" is to signal that we need to question and challenge old assumptions and rethink old theories as we deal with some fundamental changes in the way media gets produced,circulated, and consumed in this era of convergence culture.

What do you mean by "creative economy"? Are you refering to the concept of "cognitive capitalism" ?

I was not familiar with the phrase, "cognitive capitalism," but I took the logical next step in an era of collective intelligence: I looked it up on Wikipedia, where there happens to be a particularly good summary of its core ideas. Here's part of what Wikipedia says: "The production of wealth is no longer based solely and exclusively on material production but is based increasingly on immaterial elements, in other words on raw materials that are intangible and difficult to measure and quantify, deriving directly from employment of the relational, affective and cerebral faculties of human beings." The Wikipedia entry stresses that these "immaterial elements" are getting translated into "intellectual property" and are thus generating rents

through copyright protections. So, based on this definition, then I would say there's a close relationship between the two concepts.

The "cognitive capitalist" model seems to adopt a largely critical stance on these developments, where-as most of those who use "creative economy" are celebrating the shifts. Both are describing a series of moves from commodity and industrial based modes of production towards a service based economy towards an economy based on brands and intellectual property. And there's no question that the struggles over intellectual property will be the core conflicts which will shape our cultural and political lives for the coming decades. The good news is that we are seeing considerable activism emerging around issues of fair use, net neutrality, privacy, and control over personal information and these groups are gaining some ground in institutional change and much more ground in terms of actual cultural practice. The general public today embraces a model of intellectual property which differs fundamentally with the stated goals and

interests of the corporate sector, as they are increasingly taking media into their own hands, and that is forcing legal and economic changes that have to acknowledge, incorporate, and respect the emerging power of participatory culture.

So, if the intellectual property industries represent a form of "cognitive capitalism," might we argue that Wikipedia itself represents a kind of "cognitive socialism?" After all, the content of the site is freely given by those who choose to participate; participates seek no material rewards but

rather are sharing knowledge for the common good; I was able to access that information without paying rents; and I was just able to deploy it in responding to your question. And that's precisely the challenge I would pose to the most critical accounts of these trends.

There is something different taking place here in social organization and political behavior in a world where information can become a source of power and wealth, where social networks allow for new forms of collaborations between groups and individuals, where information can circulate with little to no direct costs, and where much information is being provided for free from groups which are not motivated primarily on a commercial basis. Certainly, we need to be very aware of how commercial interests may feed upon and exploit this grassroots effort at the production of information. But we also need to recognize the alternative economy which is represented by the growth of these new social networks.

In some current work, I've been looking closely at Lewis Hyde's book, The Gift which talks about the ways that commodity capitalism intersects with the gift economy. I'm finding this as a very helpful starting point for understanding the tensions which are now defining our economic and legal systems. Many of the groups which have emerged on or moved to the web have historically operated not only according to different values than commodity culture but they have explicitly argued against making profits from the circulation of their work. This is certainly true of the female-centered fan culture which was the focus of my book, Textual Poachers, several decades ago. And the movement to the web has enabled them to lower costs of production and circulation even more, transforming their cultural goods into gifts which are freely bestowed on anyone who is interested. We can't romanticize this new "gift economy." We have to understands the strengths and limitations of its models. But we can't

ignore it as a counterforce on "cognitive capitalism" if we are to develop a full understanding of the new information landscape.

The model of "cognitive capitalism," at least as represented through Wikipedia, seems incomplete if it emphasizes only the mechanisms by which capitalism is reproducing itself in an era where intellectual property is king, and does not confront the alternative systems of production and distribution which are emerging from participatory culture. So, the wikipedia definition, based on the writings of Ed Emery, continues: "The subjection of the worker within the production process is no longer imposed in disciplinary fashion by direct command (foremen etc); most of the time it is introjected and developed through forms of conditioning and social control. Individualised contractual relations are the order of the day, and this tends to introduce individual competitiveness into people's working behaviours." Yet, we can also argue that

a networked society has enabled new forms of informal, noncommercialized collaboration and cooperation in which information is freely shared for the benefit of all.

Even as this new stage of capitalism you're refering to could completely remap power relations and economic opportunities in new and imprevisible ways, it also implies that unequal access to technologies, computation power or high-speed connection might result in unequal economic developments. What kind of "access politics" should be deployed?

I make a distinction between the digital divide, which has to do with access to the technology, and the participation gap, which has to do with access to skills, knowledge, and cultural/social capital. In many ways, the first is a problem which can be and is being addressed through the provision of access to networked computers via schools and public libraries. The second, on the other hand, is a much more difficult problem to confront.

The Participation Gap is an educational issue: how do we insure that every citizen has access to the social skills and cultural competencies required to be a full participant in the new media landscape? It is also a cultural issue: how do we insure that all have a sense of "empowerment" or "entitlement" which insures that they feel comfortable entering into these emerging networked

publics? And in some ways, it is an economic one, having as much to do with the distribution of time as it does with the distribution of wealth and power, though it is hard to separate the three. So, certain classes of people, because of the restructuring of work, have more flexible or disposable time through which they can interface with networked publics, while others have lives

structured by routinized labor and the demands to struggle to support their families which makes it much harder for them to enter the rhythmns and flows of digital communications.

The participation gap refers to all of these obstacles to full participation. In my case, the work I am doing with the MacArthur Foundation around new media literacies is intended to represent a model for the kinds of "access politics" required to confront the participation gap. It starts from the recognition that the informal forms of participation and social networking which are part of the

lives of many American young people are not available to all. These sites of informal learning are the new "hidden curriculum." Historically, educators note, those kids who have access to encyclopedias and opera records, dinner table conversations about politics and trips to the art museum, performed better, and were perceived to perform better, in schools than those young

people who lacked these experiences. These informal, domestic activities shaped their cultural capital as they entered institutional learning. Similarly, research shows that such kids are much more likely to go to public art institutions even if you lower economic barriers than those kids who lack this kind of cultural capital. Pierre Bourdieu's work is a great illustration of the relationship between education and these forms of cultural distinction and discrimination. So, we are trying to develop resources which help broaden access to the kinds of skills, competencies, and self perceptions which emerge through these informal online activities. We are doing so as part of a network of researchers, across a range of disciplines and institutions, working with

the MacArthur Foundation, to reshape the core institutions that impact young people's lives in response to the shifts in the cultural and informational environs.

Do new modes of knowledge production made possible by web 2.0 actually change the politics of knowledge? Can "collective intelligence" become a counter-hegemonic sphere or does it tends to reproduce -as you underlined with YouTube- majoritarian premises?

The first thing I'd stress is that the technologies in and of themselves guarantee nothing. What matters are the social practices, cultural norms, and institutions which emerge around these technologies. Too much early digital theory talked about the democratizing impact of new media without recognizing that those tools and platforms can be deployed towards many ends as they get inserted into different political, economic, and social contexts.

We can argue that there are a range of different models of collective intelligence shaping the digital realm at the present time. We might distinguish broadly between three different models: 1)An aggregative model which assumes that we can collect data based on the autonomous and anonymous decisions of "the crowd" and use it to gain insights into their collective behavior. This is the model which shapes Digg and to some degree, YouTube. 2)a curatorial model where grassroots intermediaries seek to represent their various constituencies and bring together information that they think is valuable. This is the model which shapes the blogosphere. 3)a deliberative model where many different voices come together, define problems, vet information, and find solutions which would be impossible for any individual to achieve. This is the model shaping Wikipedia or even more powerfully alternate universe games.

Of the three, the deliberative model offers the most democratic potentials, especially when it is tempered by ethical and political commitments to diversity. This is the model which Pierre Levy describes in his book, Collective Intelligence. Levy's account stresses the affirmative value placed on diversity in such a culture. The more diverse the community, the broader range of possible information and insights can inform the deliberative process.

So, the Wikipedians talk about "systemic bias" to reflect the kinds of gaps or excesses in their information which comes from the predominance of geeks and the limited participation of some other groups in their authoring community. Some topics get extensive treatment while others get neglected as long as some groups are over-represented and others under-represented in the process. Yet, Wikipedia's norms as a community stress the importance of insuring that as many

different points of view get represented. The group seeks to lower obstacles to more diverse participation and to make room for those viewpoints which might otherwise get silenced. This was seen as a way out of "edit wars" which would stall the project, but it also has the effect of creating a possitive value on broader representation and inclusiveness.

No such mechanism exists in YouTube, say, which does adopt a more majoritarian model. It isn't that minority perspectives can't be found on YouTube: the platform can be used by many groups who circulate its contents in their own communities through the curatorial processes of blogs and social network sites. But there's nothing that places a positive value on insuring that this diversity gains visibility at the highest levels on the site: you can come to Youtube and

not be exposed to views or content which operates outside the dominant perspectives of its user base (though keep in mind that those perspectives may or may not align with those which govern "mainstream" mass media and so YouTube may still represent a challenge to old style hegemony.)

We are at a moment where a lot of social experimentation is taking place around collective intelligence. We have lots of models to chose from and there's some key work for media scholars and theorists to be reflecting on the social mechanics and technical affordances of different sites to see which may best promote the democratization of knowledge production. There's plenty of room for healthy skepticism in this process as well as I hope, some space for the utopian imagination. But, we get nowhere if the theorists adopt a purely cynical and critical perspective, seeing it all as more of the same, as capitalism in new bottles, and thus failing to make meaningful distinctions between different social and cultural practices that are emerging in cyberspace.

Reflections on Cultural Politics: My Interview for Poli (Part One)

Earlier this fall, the French cultural theory magazine, Poli, ran an extensive interview with me conducted by Maxime Cervulle. The interview explored a range of topics surrounding the cultural politics of participatory culture and web 2.0, specifically addressing concerns raised by European intellectuals about some of the themes I explored in Convergence Culture. I saw it as an opportunity to identify points of contact as well as differences in how we thought about digital media and political/economic change. The readership of this interview was academic so the language deployed may be a bit more high-flying than I usually would run in this blog. But I felt it would be valuable to distribute an English language translation of the exchange. By prior arrangements with the magazine's editors, I've waited several months since it's appearance in France and am now sharing it with you. Many of the themes are ones which have surfaced on this blog before but some of the topics were new to me and opened up some interesting lines of thinking. The interview came back to my mind this past week because of a series of exchanges with USC students about the relationship between work in cultural studies, such as my own, which was influenced by the work of John Fiske, my graduate mentor, and work in political economy, which has tended to be far more critical of developments in digital media. When you first published Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture in 1992, the active audience you analyzed through the figure of the fan seemed to be quite a marginal phenomenon. With the development of interactive cultures, participative audiences seem now to have taken center stage. How does this 20 years reconfiguration of media audiences change the way we think the relationship between culture and audience?

When I began my career, some cultural and media scholars were prepared to acknowledge an "active," "resistant" or "participatory" audience as a theoretical possibility. When I first began to document fan practices, it was assumed that this was a "minority" practice, that fans were "exceptional" readers. Increasingly, in the era of YouTube and FaceBook, it becomes clearer that many more people than even I imagined might want to actively engage with media content, appropriating and reshaping it to better reflect their personal and shared interests.

Today, it is meaningless to write about the changing media scape without paying close attention to various forms of audience participation and the various business models which have emerged under the banner of "web 2.0" to capitalize on the desire of consumers to play a more visible and active role in shaping the production and circulation of media content. It is inconceivable to study YouTube without understanding the behavior of media consumers in a way that previous generations of film scholars might have dealt with cinema exclusively through the analysis of auteurs.

It doesn't mean that media creators and media industries don't matter. Of course,

they do and they exert much more power than the more wide-eyed cyberenthusiasts might acknowledge. Contrary to what you may have heard, we do not yet and probably never will live in a world without gatekeepers. We need to be paying close attention to the mechanisms by which media industries frame some kinds of audience participation as acceptable and others as unacceptable, even as they claim to expand the power of consumers and diversify the contents of our culture. We need to be attentive to the limits of participation even as we are excited about the broadening franchise which consumers do enjoy in this new convergence culture.

The fans I described in Textual Poachers were in many ways the shock troops of

this cultural transformation: they lived in virtual communities decades before the rest of us; they knew how to tap collective intelligence long before the general population had ever heard of this context; they were remixing video and circulating it amongst themselves decades before Youtube; they were writing their own stories and sharing them with each other before anyone termed the phrase "user-generated content."

And it is significant that much of this early fan practice was done by women who are increasingly being written out of the history of digital media. Fan women played an important role in helping their friends make the transition into the new media scape and they modeled what a more participatory culture might look like when it meant patching two vcrs together. We should not forget that history even as we are fascinating with the broadening of participation that is being enabled by the lowering costs and ease of use embodied in the latest digital platforms.

How can we move from consumer participation to citizen participation, from a participatory culture to a participatory democracy? Are the two connected?

I am just now launching a new project to explore this issue more closely, so I can only paint in broad outlines here. I am interested in better understanding the mechanisms within fan communities that enable and sustain participation and in particular, the ways fan communities educate their members in order to prepare them to take collective action. So, for example, I think there's a lot we can learn about new forms of activism by understanding how fan communities launch letter-writing campaigns to keep their favorite programs on the air or

to defend their appropriations of intellectual property in the face of threats from studio lawyers.

From there, we might look at some recently launched organizations which self-consciously fuse together the identities of fan and citizen. I am thinking about groups like the HP Alliance, which has mobilized Harry Potter fans in the global human rights movement, or The

Organization for Transformative Works, which has brought together fan professionals to develop a

more rigorous defense of Fair Use, or Global Kids which is using Second Life as a platform for kids to educate each other about issues impacting youth around the world.

Such organizations tap the playful fantasies and popular metaphors and grassroots infrastructure of the fan community and turn it towards the goal of transforming the society. In some cases, they are relying on a politics of volunteerism, sometimes governmental advocacy, but in every case, they have lowered the threshold for participation and engagement with political change. I am interested in how popular culture may offer a different set of metaphors for thinking about the political processes. Those of us who are academics forget how exclusionary and specialized much of political discourse can be. You really can't understand this policy wonk talk unless you are already initiated into the language of politics and governance.

So, these groups are modeling a new kind of political language. They are also sites where average people are acquiring core skills at social networking, media production, collaborative problem solving, which are being turned to political causes.

What do you think of the use by political leaders, such as Barrack Obama in the U.S, of the rhetoric of "citizen participation" and/or "citizen expertise"?

The Obama campaign is a powerful example of how politics might play out in convergence culture. For one thing, the Obama campaign understood the need to spread its message across every available media platform. They not only worked with established media -- television networks, newspapers -- but they also experimented with the use of games systems, mobile phones, social networks, and YouTube as vehicles through which they could reach out and connect with voters. They saw campaigning not as the one-time delivery of a pitch but the building of a long-term network which linked the voters to each other to form a community of support. They embraced popular appropriations and remixing of Obama's image so that people felt a great sense of possession over this man and his message. They adopted a "we" language which was highly compatible with their supporters lived experiences of social networks and collective intelligence.

In many ways, the Obama campaign was less a political movement and more a fandom. And that's why the McCain people so actively sought to pathologize the emotional investments which Obama's supporters made in the candidate and the campaign. There were a number of commercials ridiculing the candidate as a "celebrity" and his supporters as "fans," suggesting that they were spooked by the "enthusiasm gap" between the two candidates -- justly so, as it turns out, because Obama was drawing record crowds at his campaign stops and this translated into an extraordinarily diverse and far-reaching base of support. I am certain we are going to see similar tactics emerge in countries all over the world, because the Obama campaign so perfectly tapped the affordances and "structure of feeling" of the new participatory culture.

Since you are speaking of the "fan base" of Obama, and of the way he was sometimes seen as a "celebrity", I'd like to ask you how you understand the political and cultural meaning of celebrity culture ? Can "celebrities" still be understood as a "mode of displacement" - as Richard Dyer argued in Stars - displacing politics to the "private" sphere, and displacing collective issues to a singular experience ; or is there a new relationship to celebrity

emerging ?

Richard Dyer's work on Stars was enormously important in opening up a whole new model for the analysis of motion pictures, one which recognized that stars were a central organizing principle of the Hollywood entertainment system and that the meanings of stars needed to be constructed intertextually -- across a range of different texts and media. I've learned a tremendous amount from his work.

But it's also worth keeping mind he is describing how stars functioned in a very particular information environment. He's describing a time when the meanings of stars were largely if not entirely articulated top down through mainstream media -- either through the studio's publicity mechanisms or through the scandel sheets which existed in parallel and sometimes in opposition to the studios. The stars, themselves, were under contracts which severely restricted their ability to exert their own voices through the public sphere and which thus gave them very little say in how the public perceived them. And the public might construct alternative fantasies around these stars, as we now know through, for example, Dyer's account of how the gay community took up Judy Garland, but those meanings could not be easily spread from local communities to a larger public.

All of this has changed. Today's celebrities are, for better and for worse, free agents who have their own publicity machines which help to shape their images. Many of them follow older patterns with an emphasis on their private lives and much of the news media focuses on the same kinds of romantic, sexual, and substance abuse scandals that titilated readers decades ago. But other stars are speaking out about political issues, endorsing candidates, lobbying for legislation, and supporting activist efforts. We might, for example, cite the example of the Will.i.am video produced for Obama in response to his "Yes We Can" theme as work that emerged from celebrities working together and using their power of publicity to increase public awareness of civic concerns. Or we might point to the role which hip hop performers like Chuck D, Kanye West, or Russell Simmons have played in rallying opposition to the Bush administration. Even a celebrity who might seem totally apolitical and focused purely on the private sphere may be pulled into political debates, as occurred when Paris Hilton produced her own video responding to McCain's comparison between her and Obama. The video was partially humorous but it also gave her a platform to speak out about global warming.

At the same time, the public has a much greater ability to appropriate, remix, transform, and recirculate celebrity images than ever before, mobilizing them towards alternative fantasies or politics. Because celebrities are widely known, appropriations of their images circulate more widely and swiftly than more conventional kinds of political messages. Because they are mythic, larger than life figures, their meaning is always up for grabs. This phenomenon is not unique to the United States: film stars in India often cross over from Bollywood into politics, carrying with them mythic associations from their best known film roles, while in Mexico, Lucha Libre wrestlers can become powerful spokespeople for the underclass.

Transmedia Tacos? You Bet!

I recently asked the students in my Transmedia Entertainment and Storytelling class to write short analytic papers on examples of transmedia extensions. I ended up with papers on amusement park attractions, mobisodes, web sites, comic books, computer games, and a range of other media which have been used to expand our experience of popular media franchises. I was impressed across the board with my students's grasp of core transmedia concepts which have proven elusive in public discussion of the concept. Of these papers, this one by Benjamin Burroughs caught me by surprise, since it is exploring the way that transmedia tactics are moving from the entertainment industry to other sectors - in this case, the food industry. Here, Burroughs describes the ways that a local LA vendor has become the source of fascination for highly wired local residents, creating a mystique and perhaps even a mythology around the migrations of a taco truck. Indeed, as this paper suggests, I started to hear rumors of this truck before I even moved to LA, suggesting that the spread of this information extends well beyond the local community.

I would be curious to know whether readers can point to other examples where transmedia strategies are being deployed to create or promote local brands.

Transmedia Tacos: Hybridity, New Media, and Storytelling

By Benjamin Burroughs

The first way I ever heard about the legend of Kogi begins with two ever-present facets of my life, hunger and late nights. While deliberating on where to possibly satiate this beastly hunger at such an hour a group started talking about food and re-telling experiences of recent adventures in dining. This is where I was told about the Kogi myth.

Uncle John (no relation, a local Hawaiian title for esteemed family friend) told my wife and me about his first trip in tracking down an elusive Kogi kimchi taco. He explained that the truck stops at different areas and, despite being hesitant, he agreed to go with his friend to get this taco he heard so much about. He said when his friend took him to the spot there was a really long line. He waited in the line for a half an hour and then an hour and just as he was going to get a taco they ran out.

I was not only puzzled but stunned that an engineer like Uncle John was going to wait that long for just a taco. He said they go to a place and serve until they are out of meat. I found it silly to a certain degree but promptly looked at my wife as if to say, 'I got to get me one of those kim chi tacos' (and I don't even remotely like kim chi).

That began our first foray into searching out the 'Kogi dragon'. I googled the thing, read the website, looked up its twitter feed, jumped in the car and literally tracked its movement to a place in Little Tokyo not far from our apartment. Uncle John would no longer be the only privileged purveyor of information. When we arrived I was awed, a huge crowd of people--a diverse cross section of Los Angelenos had converged on this taco stand at just after 11 pm at night. We waited in that line for what seemed like hours (because it was!) and I tasted the forbidden elusive fruit for the first time. I hate kim chi and cilantro but oddly enough I really like these tacos, especially the short rib tacos and kim chi quesadillas. Seriously, you should go try some.

So what could be remotely transmedia about a taco? How can a taco be conceptualized as an integral part of the transmedia storytelling process? It's just a taco not a new medium, right?

We begin by diagramming some of the transmedia components that construct this particular transmedia franchise built around food before moving on to its theoretical justifications. What exactly is this Kogi I was hearing so much about? Kogi has not been around for very long. The company started with one truck last November and has since spawned what some have called a mobile eating revolution. Kogi has gone from one truck to many trucks, including a stationary sit-down restaurant. Awards have come pouring in, along with plenty of media coverage, as Kogi has been reported in every major newspaper from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times, even being listed as one of Jonathan Gold's 99 top LA eating experiences.

As we unpack the buzz surrounding this purported new media innovation, we hope to uncover through our own personal familiarity how this tiny truck stand is blazing a path for transmedia possibilities in food distribution and consumption. It is important to note that we are not looking at a mature transmedia franchise but are looking for where this my take us in an attempt to synchronize the transmedia model to more seamlessly sew together online and offline disjunctures as well as multiple media platforms.

Transmedia Mechanics

Kogi is first and foremost a truck and it is safe to understand the stand and its food content as the 'mothership'. Trucks are one of the oldest modes of food distribution and taco trucks have a particularly rich tradition. With a truck you can constantly be advertising and the truck can construct a unique dialogue with the consumer saying--look, we are one of you, we drive around to the same places and serve you food in your own locales. We are not different, abstract entities or identities but part of the community.

However this form of appeal has seemed limited, trucks as the primary form of food distribution as a business model have largely been untenable, especially in terms of franchising and expanding a company beyond a particular locality. Kogi's uses of new mediated technology and multiple platforms of this technology have attempted to bridge the gulf between the producer and consumer. No longer is the chef a distant 'other' in the back of a large restaurant but is now in close proximity and spatially there is the perception of closeness.

Taking the food to the streets takes on a form of renaissance--a return to a perhaps mythic, forgotten age when food was more interactive and participatory. The truck not only gives a sense of 'street cred' and raw authenticity associated particularly with Mexican taco stands (eating 'real' Mexican as opposed to Taco Bell, although Taco Bell has now gotten into the mobile taco stand game as well, mimicking the perceived success of these start-up franchises). Kogi also has a certain novelty about it because of its manipulation of new technology. Mobile food stands are not new to the cultural food landscape, but this recent re-articulation has been acclaimed as such because it is not just building a relationship with one community but enables a linkage to the cultural heartbeat of an entire city, even one as vast and diverse as Los Angeles.

If we understand transmedia as the reading of multiple texts that help to tell a larger story can we not see the truck as a text not only in its self promotion and banners but in its very form? The truck is speaking to an age of increased mobility, flexibility (flexible specialization), and fluidity in our culture. Can we not read the taco as a text that speaks to the hybridity of a culture and society where Korean kim chi and Latino tacos are representative of larger forces of cultural fusion?

Lastly, as we learned on the very first night of our taco pilgrimage, there is a sociality present in these long lines. These crowds identify and interact with each other, relating experiences with the food--what one should try, particular favorites, where else one could eat in a great blending and sense of communal participation inherent in any vibrant, lasting transmedia franchise. These sorts of informal media channels can and perhaps should be included to enlarge our understanding of transmedia. In our Kogi example this form of knowledge exchange and 'encyclopedia capacity' (Murray 1999) exists less in mediated spaces than other transmedia franchises but there is certainly potential for future transmedia food projects to explore more deeply how to connect consumers in the purely online context. Again, however, it seems important that we not de-value the informal gift exchanges of information that happen in specific communal contexts such as the public practice of waiting in line.

Tweets and Eats

This brings us to the next transmedia component: an online presence. So we have the taco and the stand and even the line as transmedia extensions but what ties these together is the utilization of new media technology. '

First you have the Kogibbq.com website run by the sister of one of the founding members, Aliiiice (this is how her screen name is presented on the blog). Interestingly enough, she lives in New York. She has her brother send her pictures of the food as she updates the community on what is going on with Kogi, portraying an interactive story of the growth and some of the inner workings of the company. She makes things very participatory, engaging the audience by allowing the community to help decide on the names of the new trucks, introducing the personalities of the staff, and explaining the stories behind new foods coming out. This is where Kogi adds a level of seriality (Haywood 1997).

Not only is seriality built into the food process, wanting to eat more after chowing down on a tasty morsel but Alliiice gives you the latest creation from chef Roy Choi so you have a reason to go back every week. People like what they have already eaten so when presented with a new concoction they are hooked into coming back. This is also the logic behind the majority of food advertising but such grand productions lack the intimacy and trust that Alliiice has massaged by being close to the community. She participates quite deeply with the readers of the blog, often commenting herself in the comments section of the blog in a very personal and 'real' manner.

What is most compelling however, is not only the intimacy, but the descriptions of the food. I have on more than one occasion sought out the truck because of what I had read. Sometimes the food is a one day special, so you are literally compelled by the pictures and descriptions to not miss the food served only on that particular day. I am currently thinking about needing to go and get the 'Ride or Die Sweet and Sour Chicken' I just read about.

These are essentially food stories, narratives that shape our encounter with the product and add layers of meaning to that experience. Recently this story was put on the website about a Cuban pressed pork dish. Alliiice writes:

"Once upon a time, there was a bun of Pan BLanco. A piLLow-soft, innocent loaf of angeLs' bread fresh from the warm confines of a simpLe baker's oven.

::SLiiiiiiiiiiiCE!!::

It was a quick and siLent death. Witnesses caught but the quick fLash of a cook's knife and two, snow-white ovaLettes faLLing away from the unforgiving bLade of the kitchen guiLLotine.

Two hands grabbed the symmetricaL, soft remains of Pan BLanco and shoved them face down on a redhot griLL. Fat sLices of juicy red summer tomatoes and spicy pork gathered 'round to mourn her death. But before they couLd pay their proper respects, the Hands of Death snatched her from her grave and sLathered her insides with fatty, unctuous gLobs of chiLi mayo."

It is hard not to get hungry just reading that. But this is not the only level of storytelling that is going on. The use of Twitter has moved these stories from static places online to dramatic emotion laden episodes that one can act out as adventures.

A series of youtube videos sprung up around the beginning of Kogi as part of its marketing strategy but also spontaneously as active audiences filmed and put on the web their own personal treks to find the Kogi tacos.

One of the first to do this was a local area DJ named akaider, the title was called "Chasing the Dragon (The Kogi BBQ Adventure)", who was later invited to start performing alongside some of the trucks stops in Little Tokyo in response to his video.

The twitter feeds make this very participatory. There is an emotional resonance when people are given a space to play and perform as audiences feel empowered to collect the information and connect the dots of where the truck will be at any given place and time. There is a certain degree of prestige in uncovering the buzz, but also great pleasure in sharing that gift in and through social exchanges.

This is mobile hypersocial technology (Ito 2008), as twitter allows for a conversation never before possible. Twitter feeds and tweets tell about the truck coming to an area, if it is stuck in traffic, if the cops made them move to a new area, or if they ran out of food for the day. People want to collect this information and have that 'insider' information on the next big eating thing. This knowledge is especially valued in eating circles as a form of status and coolness associated with the pooling of privileged information.

Transmedia Futures and Cosmopolitan Aesthetics

Food is compelling; it is an integral part of our lives. Although not being altogether obvious, it is not too far a stretch to contextualize the purchasing, eating, dining--the consumption practices of food as interwoven in the very fabric of our lives. Food is conducive to good stories. Food is universal and ubiquitous; we all eat (although economic and cultural stratification are prevalent and important processes beyond the scope of this paper). The consumption of food is often a highly public, commercial enterprise. Food consumption is a hypersocial activity.

Living in an age of convergence culture (Jenkins 2006) where consumers are the point of convergence, appropriators and re-mixers of form and meaning, how will this shape our relation to something as recurrent as eating? A convergence culture is participatory and demands for the reorganization of production.

Kogi is a small example of the new spectatorship that creative artists can maneuver to empower a deeper synergy between production and consumption (or future prosumption) as chefs and diners, food critics and passive consumers can all benefit from the increased connectivity and emotional resonance afforded through transmedia productions. What is going on is the sharing of privileged knowledge and information conveyed as a narrative construction.

Perhaps we really are what and how we eat. Kogi can be representative of larger shifts and cultural trends. It is a Korean and Latin fushion cooking driven by new mediated technologies and platforms that allow for increased sharing and participating. Transmedia has a certain cosmopolitan aesthetic and democratic participation that should be cultivated as we move further into the hybridity and diversity of a networked world.

Sources

Jennifer Haywood, " Mutual Friends: The Development of the Mass Serial," Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (University of Kentucky Press, 1997), pp. 21-51

Ito, Mizuko. 2008. "Networked Publics: Introduction." Pp. 1-14 in Networked Publics, edited by K. Varnelis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Henry Jenkins, "Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmeda Storytelling," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93-130.

Janet Murray, "Digital Environments are Encyclopedic," Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 83-90.

Ben Burroughs is currently completing a double degree Masters program from the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism and the London School of Economics and Political Science in Global Media and Communications. He has authored several publications including "Kissing Maccaca: Blogs, Narrative, and Political Discourse "(2007), and is hoping to pursue a PhD in the coming fall. His research interests include: civic transmedia, politics, emergent fandoms, and media anthropology. Ben is a former high school French teacher, who grew up on the North Shore of Oahu. He and his wife presently reside in Los Angeles.

Cordwainer Smith Imagined Convergence Culture (and Viral Media) in 1964

Science fiction writers do not so much invent the future as they inform it. I mean inform here in two ways - first, they give us the information we need to process issues in the present moment and to therefore anticipate some likely consequences of the choices we face as a society and second, having given a vivid picture of a possible future, they inspire scientists, policy makers, and others to reshape reality to conform to their depiction.

How many contemporary technological developments emerged from designers whose imagination was incited by some science fiction novel or television series? Without Star Trek, would we have flip phones? Without Snow Crash would we have had Second Life?

I have been pondering this relationship between science fiction and reality a lot this week having recent taught some short stories by Cordwainer Smith in my transmedia entertainment and storytelling class at USC.

If you just mumbled, "Cordwainer who?," you are not alone. Smith's works are rarely cited today. Smith wrote short stories rather than novels, scattered them across a range of publications, and published many of them after his death. Even hardcore science fiction fans may know him only for his first published story, "Scanners Live in Vane," which is included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology which is often deployed in science fiction classes. The New England Science Fiction Association collected and republished his stories several years ago as The Rediscovery of Man. Maybe it's time for the rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith.

When I first read "Scanners Live in Vain" some years ago, I was stunned. The writing is challenging and vaguely modernist, especially when compared to the hard edged realism and classicism of his 1950s era contemporaries like Robert Heinlein or Issac Asimov. He thrusts you into the world of the story without much preliminaries; he relished the strange and unfamiliar elements which are dealt with it ways that are at once defamiliarizing (in that they break from our world) and familiarizing (in that they treat these strange elements as if they were perfectly normal, even banal.) In many ways, the story's focus on the fusion of man and machine, which gets depicted with ambivalence rather than dread, helped pave the way for similar representations in the early cyberpunk movement.

As I've read more of his work, I've become fascinated with the ways that he prefigured science fictions fascination with media change - digital media primarily in the case of the Cyberpunks but something very close to what I call Convergence Culture in the case of Cordwainer Smith. Consider, for example, this passage from "The Dead Woman of Clown Town" which seems to anticipate the concept of viral media:

"A bad idea can spread like a mutated germ. If it is at all interesting, it can leap from one mind to another halfway across the universe before it has a stop put to it. Look at the ruinous fads and foolish fashions which have nuisanced mankind even in the ages of the highest orderliness."

Here, Smith tries to capture the perspective of a totalitarian regime which seeks to manipulate the flow of information in order to prevent a shift in public sentiment towards the underpeople, a permanent underculture which exists of half-human/half-animals. Smith warns after a particularly empassioned speech on human rights of the need to reframe what is being said lest it undermine the established order:

"The dog-girl was making points which had some verbal validity. If they were left in the form of mere words without proper context, they might affect heedless or impressionable minds."

Published in 1964, "Dead Woman of Clown Town," can be easily read as an allegory for the civil disobedience and nonviolent protest which shaped not only the then-contemporary protests of Martin Luther King, but also a range of protest movements across Asia during the struggle against colonialism. In the story, the human, Elaine, and the dog-girl, D'Joan, lead an army of underpeople on a march which brings them into the face of armed guards, who obligingly shoot them down or in D'Joan's case, torches her alive, forcing them to confront the brutal consequences of their own discriminatory policies.

Smith's depiction is particularly concerned with the psychological experience of subordination and oppression, using for example the figure of C'Mell, the cat-woman and professional "girly-girl" (escort) in "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" to deal with the ways that the enslaved must develop much greater knowledge of the dominant group than the other way around:

"She had a womanliness which was truer than that of any hominid woman. She knew the value of her trained smile, her splendidly kept red hair with its unimaginably soft texture, her lithe young figure with firm breasts and persuasive hips. She knew down to the last millimeter the effect which her legs had on hominid men. True humans kept few secrets from her. The men betrayed themselves by their unfulfillable desires, the women by their irrepressible jealousies. But she knew people best of all by not being one herself. She had to learn by imitation, and imitation is conscious. A thousand little things which ordinary women took for granted, or thought about just once in a whole lifetime, were subjects of acute and intelligent study. She was a girl by profession; she was human by assimilation; she was an inquisitive cat in her genetic nature....Sometimes it made her laugh to look at human women with their pointed-up noses and their proud airs, and to realize that she knew more about the men who belonged to the human women than the human women themselves ever did."

Key scenes occur at the moment when the human characters are forced to experience something of the subjective experience of the lower castes, as occurs when Elaine gets linked to D'Joan through telepathy, which is understood here as a kind of radicalization process, a shift in sympathy not unlike that experienced by many white liberals in the Civil Rights era who were motivated by the burning of black churches and the slaughter of black children to rethink a lifetime of segregationist practice.

Smith's interest in the concept of information war-fare and media as a resource for political transformation can be explained by his own fascinating life story. Here's some of the details as presented by Wikipedia:

Cordwainer Smith - pronounced CORDwainer[1] - was the pseudonym used by American author Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (July 11, 1913-August 6, 1966) for his science fiction works. Linebarger was also a noted East Asia scholar and expert in psychological warfare...

Linebarger was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father was Paul M. W. Linebarger, a lawyer and political activist with close ties to the leaders of the Chinese revolution of 1911. As a result of those connections, Linebarger's godfather was Sun Yat-sen, considered the father of Chinese nationalism. As a child, Linebarger was blinded in his right eye; the vision in his remaining eye was impaired by infection. When he later pursued his father's interest in China, Linebarger became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. His father moved his family to France and then Germany while Sun Yat-sen was struggling against contentious warlords in China. As a result, Linebarger was familiar with six languages by adulthood.

At the age of 23, he received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. From 1937 to 1946, Linebarger held a faculty appointment at Duke University, where he began producing highly regarded works on Far Eastern affairs. While retaining his professorship at Duke after the beginning of World War II, he began serving as a second lieutenant of the United States Army, where he was involved in the creation of the Office of War Information and the Operation Planning and Intelligence Board. He also helped organize the Army's first psychological warfare section. In 1943, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations. By the end of the war, he had risen to the rank of major....

In 1947, Linebarger moved to the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, where he served as Professor of Asiatic Studies. He used his experiences in the war to write the book Psychological Warfare (1948), which is regarded by many in the field as a classic text. He eventually rose to the rank of colonel in the reserves. He was recalled to advise the British forces in the Malayan Emergency and the U.S. Eighth Army in the Korean War. While he was known to call himself a "visitor to small wars", he refrained from becoming involved in Vietnam, but is known to have done undocumented work for the Central Intelligence Agency. He traveled extensively and became a member of the Foreign Policy Association, and was called upon to advise then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

In short, Smith was the consummate political insider both to global politics and to the emergence of what Eisenhower called "the military-industry complex." He brought to science fiction complex theories of communication, psychology, and political change and at the same time, grafted them onto story traditions he had absorbed from classical Chinese literature and he had learned through his global travels. Underlying his almost surreal stories, then, is a deeper understanding of the nature of power and how governments seek to shape the subjective experience of their populations.

Smith's relevance for a transmedia class is two-fold. First, Smith was a consummate world builder. All of his 32 short stories and his novel, Norstrilia, take place within a single timeline which spans more than 16000 years of future history and play out across the interconnected history of many different worlds. He depicts a future which emerges from Earth's past as our cultural traditions are revived, reproduced, forgotten, and reperformed until they have lost much of their meaning, becoming mere formalisms. In this world, he shows an acute understanding of how cultural change impacts the ways we treat each other and how we structure labor and governance. Here, for example, is a vivid passage from "The Story of Lost C'Mell," another key work in his depiction of the undermen:

"Ever since mankind had gone through the Rediscovery of Man, bringing back governments, money, newspapers, national languages, sickness and occassional death, there had been the problem of the underpeople -- people who were not human but merely humanly shaped from the stock of Earth animals. They could speak, sing, read, write, work, love and die; but they were not covered by human law, which simply defined them as 'homunculi' and gave them a legal status close to animals or robots. Real people from off-world were always called 'hominads.' Most of the underpeople did their jobs and accepted their half-slave status without question.... Human beings and hominids had lived so long in an affluent society that they did not know what it meant to be poor. But the lords of the Instrumentality had decreed that underpeople -- derived from animal stock -- should live under the economics of the Ancient World; they had to have their own kind of money to pay for their rooms, their food, their posessions and the education of their children. If they became bankrupt, they went to the poorhouse, where they were killed painlessly by means of gas. It was evident that humanity, having settled all of its own basic problems, was not quite ready to let Earth animals, no matter how much they might be changed, assume a full equality with man."

As this opening passage suggests, Smith treats his readers not as outsiders to whom such worlds must be explained but rather as insiders for whom these worlds are already well known. Consider the opening paragraph of "Dead Woman" which refers not only to some of Smith's other tales but also seeks to debunk existing representations of the events depicted in (yet fabricated for) his story:

"You already know the end -- the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C'Mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D'Joan. It is even less likely that you know the other story -- the one behind D'Joan. This story is sometimes mentioned, as the matter of the 'nameless witch,' which is absurd, because she really had a name. The name was 'Elaine,' an ancient and forbidden one."

Throughout the story, Smith offers many passages which refer outward from the current narration to discuss how the same story was told across many years, across many different media. Here are just a few examples:

"Much later, when people made songs about the strange case of the dog-girl D'Joan, the minstrels and singers had tried to imagine what Elaine felt like, and they had made up The Song of Elaine for her. It is not authentic, but it shows how Elaine looked at her own life before the strange case of D'Joan began to flow from Elaine's own actions."

"There are many famous painting of that scene. Most of the paintings show Elaine in rags with the distorted, suffering face of a witch. This is strictly unhistorical. She was wearing her everyday culottes, blouse and twin over-the-shoulder purses when she went in the other end of Clown Town. This was the usual dress on Fomalhaut III at that time...."

"On the actual stage the actors cannot do much with the scene of the interlude, where Joan was cooked in a single night from the size of a child five years old to the tallness of a miss fifteen or sixteen. The biological machine did work well, though at the risk of her life. It made her into a vital, robust yung person, without changing her mind at all. This is hard for any actress to portray. The storyboxes have the advantage. They can show the machine with all sorts of improvements -- flashing lights, bits of lightning, mysterious rays. Actually, it looked like a bathtub full of boiling brown jelly, completely covering Joan."

"This is the scene which we all remember, the first authentic picture tape of the entire incident."

"You all know about the trial, so there is no need to linger over it. There is another picture of San Shigonanda, the one from his conventional period, which shows it very plainly....This is all clear from the painting, and from the wonderful way that San Shigonanda has of forming them in informal ranks and letting the calm blue light of day shine down on their handsome, hopeless features. With the underpeople, the artist performs real wonders."

"And you have the real view-tapes, too, if you want to go to a museum. The reality is not as dramatic as the famous painting, but it has value of its own. The voice of Joan, dead these many centuries, is still strangely moving....The words of the trial, they too have survived. Many of them have became famous, all across the worlds."

"We know what the Lords Femtiosex and Limanono thought they were doing. They were maintaining established order and they were putting it on tape. The minds of men can live together only if the basic ideas are communicated. Nobody has, even now, found a way of recording telepathy directly into an instrument. We get pieces and snatches and wild jumbles, but we never get a satisfactory record of what one of the great ones was transmitting to another. The two male chiefs were trying to put on record all those things about the episode which would teahc careless people not to play with the lives of the underpeople. They were trying to make underpeople understand the rules and designs by virtue of which they had been transformed from animals into the highest servants of man. This would have been hard to do, given the bewildering events of the last few hours, even from one chief of the Instrumentality to another; for the general public, it was almost impossible."

Smith, thus, depicts a world where the most important stories flow across all available media franchises, get retold many times for many different audiences, with some details being encoded through cultural conventions and others distorted over time. Consider, for example, this description of a gesture which has become more cyptic as it has moved from real-world events to multiple media representations:

"The records show his appearance. He comes in at the right side of the scene, bows respectfully to the four Chiefs and lifts his right hand in the traditional sign for 'beg to interrupt,' an odd twist of the elevated hand which the actors had found it very difficult to copy when they tried to put the whole story of Joan and Elaine into a single drama. (In fact, he had no more idea that future ages would be studying his casual appearance than did the others. The whole episode was characterized by haste and precipitateness, in light of what we now know.)"

Smith's version, then, becomes not the point of origin for the story but rather a debunking of conventional versions.

Not only does he imagine the event as retold many times after they occur, Smith also depicts the events as predetermined because the figures have already become encrusted in mythology. A human intelligence embedded in a computer has run a range of simulations to try to determine how the underpeople can escape their brutal fate at the hands of the human, how they might avoid death. Out of all of the possibilities, she has discovered one which leads to the best possible outcome and she has sought to prepare her followers for that eventuality. Generations have named their children "D'Joan" and have rehearsed the particulars of their mythology so they can play the roles that are required of them. When Elaine, the witch, wonders into their warren by accident, she must be instructed in her expected role and actions, and must be continually reminded her function within the prescripted narrative whenever she seeks to exert free will. Like many of the other scenarios, this script results in the death of its key participants, yet it has the chance of forcing the issue upon the oppressors and forcing them to experience powerful emotions - the pangs of conscience and consciousness - which might lead ultimately to political change.

As we enter the climax of his story, Smith describes not only what happens but how it gets transmitted to subsequent generations, discussing what events were captured by cameras (and in some cases, from what angles) and describing which are preserved in archives, which have been subject to competing interpretations, and which have been restaged and commerated through paintings, video dramas, stage plays, songs, and prose. Such descriptions look forward to our own time when something isn't real until it has been transmitted through all available media channels:

"Fisi, in the pictures, stands back, his face sullen. In that particular frame of scenes, one can see some of the spectators going away. It was time for lunch and they had become hungry; they had no idea that they were going to miss the greatest atrocity in history, about which a thousand and more grand operas would be written."

Smith's writings, thus, anticipate our present transmedia moment and at the same time, offer a critical perspective on how stories flow across media. His own background as an expert on psychological warfare and as an adviser to the intelligence community allows him to anticipate how the spread of information can be manipulated by governments or shaped by dissent movements. In that sense, his references to alternative media presentation of his fictional events represents not simply a formal acknowlegement of the intertextual connections across all of his works but also as a critique of convergence, one written almost fifty years ago.

We might read Smith's fiction as a letter sent from his generation to ours. Too bad so few of us are reading his remarkable stories. Check them out.

To learn more about this remarkable writer, read Karen L. Helleckson's The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith.

He's BA-A-A-ACK!

My blog, begun at MIT some years ago, has now successfully relocated onto USC servers. And so I am now going to return to my normal blogging activities. As I do so, I wanted to use this first post to play catch up on a number of recent developments around projects that I am involved with, so today will feel like a series of announcements (many of which you already know if you are following me on Twitter).

New Media Literacies Conference

Project New Media Literacies is collaborating once again with the fine folks at Home Inc. to put together a conference, back at MIT, on new media literacy as a "21st century skill" on Oct. 24 2009. The key note speaker will be Alan November.

Here's his bio:

November is an international leader in education technology. He began his career as an oceanography teacher and dorm counselor at an island reform school for boys in Boston Harbor. He has been director of an alternative high school, computer coordinator, technology consultant, and university lecturer. He has helped schools, governments and industry leaders improve the quality of education through technology and was named one of the nation's fifteen most influential thinkers of the decade by Classroom Computer Learning Magazine. In 2001, he was listed as one of eight educators to provide leadership into the future by the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. In 2007 he was selected to speak at the Cisco Public Services Summit during the Nobel Prize Festivities in Stockholm, Sweden. His writing includes numerous articles and best-selling book, "Empowering Students with Technology". Alan was co-founder of the Stanford Institute for Educational Leadership Through Technology and is most proud of being selected as one of the original five national Christa McAuliffe Educators.

November will be speaking about "Digital Nation - Education in Transition to 21st Century Learning." Other participants will include Erin Reilly, the Research Director for Project New Media Literacies; Jenna McWilliams, formerly the curriculum development specialist on our team, now at Indiana University's Learning Sciences Program; Chris Sperry from Project Look Sharp; Home Inc's Alan Michel; Wheelock College's Susan Owusu and Bill Densmore from the Media Giraffe Project. I wish I was going to be there, since I've very much enjoyed participating in other events in this series, but I am committed elsewhere over those dates. Here's where you can go to register.

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Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference

The Convergence Culture Consortium is really kicking into high gear as it is getting ready for our Fourth Futures of Entertainment Conference, which is going to be held at MIT on November 20-21 2009. I am going to be the opening speaker of the first day which centers on issues of transmedia entertainment. Speakers already booked include:

* DAVID BAUSOLA - Co-founder of Ag8

* NANCY BAYM- University of Kansas

* BRIAN CLARK - Partner and CEO, GMD Studios

* STEPEHN DUNCOMBE - NYU

* DAN GOLDMAN - Illustrator of Shooting War (Grand Central Publishing [US] and Weidenfeld & Nicolson [UK])

* NOESSA HIGA - Visionaire Media

* JENNIFER HOLT - UC Santa Barbara

* VICTORIA JAYE - Acting Head of Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, BBC

* HENRY JENKINS-USC

* DEREK JOHNSON - University of North Texas

* BRIAN LARKIN - Milbank Barnard College

* JUYOUNG LEE - Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, ACE Metrix

* TRAPPER MARKELZ- VP Products, GamerDNA

* JASON MITTELL- Middlebury College

* AVNER RONEN - CEO & Co-founder, Boxee

* FRANK ROSE - Contributing Editor,Wired

* LORRAINE SAMMY - Racebending

* ANDREW SLACK - The Harry Potter Alliance

* DAVID SPITZ -Director of Business Development, WPP

* LOUISA STEIN - San Diego State University

* JORDAN WEISMAN - CEO and Founder, Smith & Tinker

* MARK ZAGORSKI- Chief Revenue Officer, eXelate Media

I am particularly excited about moderating a session on Transmedia Activism, which grows out of some current work I am doing on the ways we might bridge between participatory culture and public/civic participation. I hope to write more about this session and its underlying framework as we get closer to the event.

If you have come to our events in the past, you know how exciting Futures of Entertainment can be. If you have not, all of our previous sessions are now available as webcasts. Here, for example, is a conversation I had at FOE 3 with Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks.

We see the conference as a vital meeting ground between people working in the media industry and academics, both of whom are doing cutting edge thinking about current trends impacting the realms of entertainment. So, register now and help us spread the word.

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Diversifying Participation

I am also working with the MacArthur Foundation to help organize the "Diversifying Participation" conference which will be held Feb. 18-20 2010 at the University of California, San Diego. We've just announced our keynote speakers, both of whom will be well known to regular readers of this blog -- Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics), author of Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities, and S. Craig Watkins (University of Texas-Austin), author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. You can read my interview with Livingstone here and my interview with Watkins here. The conference is accepting proposals for panels (in all kinds of formats) through October 30 here.

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GAMBIT "Game of the Week"

GAMBIT, the MIT-Singapore Games Lab, is continuing to run a series of blog posts, showcasing the games which were produced during their summer program this summer. Each week, they showcase one game, including artwork, design materials, and comments from team members. If you have not had a chance to play this year's titles, you really should check them out. Several of them have already started to generate buzz across the games blogosphere and like previous titles, are certain to be competitive where-ever independent games are being shown. I had a chance to sit down with the Gambit team during a recent visit back to MIT and was as always impressed by their output, which is consistently breaking the mold in terms of the design of play mechanics, visuals, and sound. Their mandate is to stretch the limits of our understanding of what games can do. Each game serves a larger research question, but Philip Tan, the Lab's director, makes sure that the most important thing created on his watch is FUN!

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Understanding Superheroes

I will be speaking this coming Saturday (Oct. 24) at the University of Oregon as part of a conference and art exhibition they have organized around "Understanding Superheroes." It sounds funny to say that I am keynoting a superheroes conference -- like Aquaman couldn't make it! My topic will be "'Man Without Fear': David Mack and the Formal Limits of the Superhero Comic." While I have been writing and speaking about comics for a while, this will be the first time I've really dug deep into the formal conventions of superhero comics. My primary focus will be, as the title suggests, the work which Mack has done within the mainstream continuity of Marvel's Daredevil Franchise though more generally I will be exploring what happens when experimental and mainstream comics intersect each other. Other speakers at the conference include creative artists such as Danny Fingeroth, Kurt Busiek, Matt Fraction, and Gail Simone as well as scholars and critics such as Douglas Wolk, Charles Hatfield, Corey Creekmur, Jonathon Grey, and Matt Yockey. The conference was organized and the exhibit curated by Ben Saunders. I will be sharing my impressions of this event on my blog next week.

Gone But Not Forgotten, I Hope...

This blog is going to be shutting down temporarily starting Oct. 1 to allow for the transfer from an MIT to a USC server. We expected to be fully operational again in a few weeks time. During the down time, it is my belief that you will still be able to access old posts but will not be able to make new comments and I will not be able to update the blog's content. Sorry for any disappointment this may cause anyone, but it is part of the process of my move from East to West Coast. I will still be posting links and tips regularly to my Twitter followers. Otherwise, this will give you a chance to catch up on the rich backlog of material that we've accumulated around the blog over the past few years. See you soon.

PBS's Digital Nation: Another Great Resource For Teaching the New Media Literacies

Early last summer, I sat down with a production crew from PBS's Frontline at the Games for Change conference in New York City. They were producing web-based content for a new documentary, Digital Nation, which was intended to be a follow up to their Growing Up Digital documentary. To be honest, I had some concerns about the depiction of young people's online experiences in the earlier production. It seemed to me to be sensationalistic in its choice of topics, mostly depicting generational conflicts around the use of the web. In most cases, there was a bias towards the adult perspectives offered by parents and teachers over those advanced by young people, who often lacked a language through which to defend experiences which were clearly meaningful to them. In this case, the decision not to include academic experts worked against having a fair hearing for young people, since the adults were advancing arguments which were oft staged through other news outlets while the young people were trying to get grown-ups to reconsider entrenched biases. In many ways, the Digital Nations site is correcting this over-sight, providing a rich array of indepth interviews with some of the top thinkers about young people's online lives. I was very pleased to see extensive use made of my interview, talking about the value of multitasking in an era of information overflow, how collective intelligence may displace the ideal of the Renaissance Man, participatory culture, parents and video games, the myth of game addiction, the nature of virtual reality, what schools are misunderstanding about the new media literacies and why so many teachers are ding book culture at the expense of embracing new skills and experiences. (Unfortunately, the site's producers have made it extremely difficult if not impossible to embed clips from this site onto blogs, showing how much they still have to learn about how to communicate ideas through digital media. So I am not able to offer you clips directly here on the blog but have to rely on links to direct you back to the PBS site. Trust me, if the content wasn't so good, I wouldn't bother!)

I've already found the site a useful resource for teaching my graduate seminar on New Media Literacies, finding the short segments an ideal length to spark discussions and provide students access to key thinkers, sharing their ideas in their own words. I haven't watched every segment yet but here are some of the ones I would highlight:

Marc Prensky, who is widely credited with coining the terms, "digital natives" and "digital immigrants," sums up his perspective about how young people learn and process knowledge differently than previous generations, thanks to their time spent engaged with new media.

Second Life's Philip Rosedale on the ways that we are using virtual reality's contributions to human evolution.

danah boyd on our shifting understanding of privacy and young people's desires to control disclosure in the world of Facebook and other social networks and her critiques of the anxieties about internet safety being fostered by sensationalized news reports on "stranger danger."

Net Family New's Anne Collier talks about the challenges of parenting for the digital age.

James Paul Gee on the kinds of learning that take place through computer and video games and on the ways that schools are regulating youth's access to participatory culture.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on the responsibility schools carry to help close the "opportunity gap" surrounding digital literacy.

The Dumbest Generation's Mark Bauerlein on why digital media threatens traditional literacy skills and may leave us knowing less rather than more.

"Old School, New School," a documentary segment showing the very different ways teachers understanding what it means to read in an age of digital media.

These short segments are provocative; they ask hard questions and offer contradictory advice, and that's why they represent such a valuable resource for the classroom. I am using them to start discussion; you may use them as probes for writing; but the topics they raise are ones we need to be discussing with our students.

You might want to bring one of these segments into your class as the world pays its respect this week to "One Web Day" and calls attention to the need to diversify and expand opportunities for participation in the new media landscape.

Is Facebook a Gated Community?: An Interview With S. Craig Watkins (Part Two)

Today, I am sharing the second part of my interview with sociologist S. Craig Watkins about his recently released book The Young & The Digital. From the moment I read his manuscript, I knew that his chapter, "Digital Gates: How Race and Class Distinctions Are Shaping the Digital World" would be the one which generated a lot of the heat and the controversy here. Those of us who see the web as key to our vision of a more participatory culture have to be concerned with the obstacles which block many from full involvement. And those of us who celebrate the "virtual community" being achieved through digital media need to be especially concerned with the various forms of exclusion running through our online lives. Indeed, one could argue that for many, going digital involves a kind of "white flight" as they escape the "dangers" of their real world communities by seeking out other like-minded people in cyberspace. Watkins joins a growing number of writers who are asking in what ways our social networks online replicate -- for better and for worse -- our friendship networks offline, networks we know are shaped by continued segregation.

I was struck by a chart Watkins offers showing the language people use to describe and distinguish between Facebook and MySpace, language with long historical associations to our assumptions about race and class in the American context.

MySpace is described as "crowded, trashy, creepy, uneducated, immature, predators, crazy" while Facebook was praised as "selective, clean, trustworthy, educated, authentic, college, private." In other words, MySpace takes on values we associate with inner city slums, while Facebook is tied to the values one might associate with a gated community.

In this installment, I ask Watkins to reflect on these findings and how they might add another layer to our understanding of race in America; I also ask him to discuss the relationship between this new project on youth's digital lives and his earlier work on hip hop culture.

What challenges are educators facing as they try to teach the generation which has come of age in the era of web 2.0?

This is a fascinating question and, I believe, one of many that we are just beginning to reckon with as educators, researchers, and society. Part of my research included spending some time in the classroom and talking with teachers and school administrators.

What I soon discovered is that they are on the front lines of the move to digital. Teachers face a generation of students armed with more personal media than any other generation. Most teachers will tell you that the trend of permitting students to bring mobile phones, iPods, and other devices to school is a big mistake. Just think. The idea that I would have been permitted to bring a personal media device to school would have been out of the question. But it reveals how our values, behavior, and culture are shifting in the digital age.

The main concern among teachers is the degree of distraction these devices encourage in the classroom. It turns out that parents insist that their children carry mobile phones--easier to communicate and coordinate family schedules that are growing more challenging.

In The Young and the Digital I deal with some of the learning and educational challenges/opportunities posed by digital media. There are two kinds of technologies in today's classroom-- technologies that pull students away from the classroom, and technologies that pull students into the classroom. I give some examples of both.

But I am also interested in the social and behavioral challenges educators face in regards to technology. These include issues like citizenship, community, and helping students and educators make smart decisions regarding their engagement with digital media.

Most schools are being forced to deal with student conflicts that occur online and away from school. More and more, administrators are having to contend with issues like cyberbullying or the circulation of photos that reveal some sort of misconduct. These kinds of issues raise questions about privacy and authority (i.e., when is a student's behavior away from school an administrator's concern?) Their are no rule books or precedence for what is happening in the digital world and online lives students build.

I was surprised to learn that many principals are struggling not only with the online behaviors of students but of teachers also. A growing number of teachers and practically all recent college grads going into the profession maintain a personal profile. As you can imagine this raises many questions about the conduct of teachers away from school. Some teachers "friend" their students in places like MySpace and Facebook while others vehemently reject the idea. Like the rest of society schools and the people who run them are learning what it means to "be digital."

Building on work by danah boyd and others, you argue that Facebook has operated not unlike a "gated community" and may directly contribute to racial and class segregation in the online world. How can scholarship on race in the physical world help us to better understand how race operates in the virtual world? What steps should be taken to combat segregation in the online world?

It is easy to get caught up in the wonders of what scholars have variously referred to as "being digital," 'life behind the screen," or the "second self". But as the Web has become a more common experience it has also become a more local experience. That is, we use the World Wide Web to communicate most frequently with our friends, work colleagues, and acquaintances--that is, people we know, like, and trust. To use Putnam's language regarding social capital we use the Web to "bond" more than "bridge." This is certainly true with race.

When danah distributed her blog commentary about the class divisions in MySpace and Facebook, it struck me as a reasonable even predictable outcome, especially if you understand that what happens in our lives online is intimately connected to our lives offline. Some Web enthusiasts, however, were either surprised or annoyed by her claims.

But as your work and that of others show there is still a real "participation divide" that creates varying degrees of Internet engagement. No matter if we are talking about virtual worlds, mobile technologies, or social network sites race matters in the digital world. Most of the movers and shakers in the branding and marketing of the current generation Web show little, if any, interest in the social divisions that still mark the digital world. Mentioning the social divisions that are a part of the social Web is a kind of inconvenient truth. We learned a lot while studying young collegians embrace of Facebook. In reality, most of us use Facebook to connect to people that we know--we "friend" friends not strangers in our computer-mediated social networks. And who our friends are is usually influenced by race, class, education, and geography.

In examining the hundreds of surveys and one-on-one interviews we collected my grad assistant and I noticed a strong preference for Facebook among young white collegians and students more generally with a middle class orientation. It was more than a casual preference; it was also an intense rejection of MySpace. Our research found an interesting "racialization" of MySpace and Facebook among young people.

I began reading some of the research on the rise of gated communities in America and found some interesting parallels in the language used by residents living in physical world gated communities and young white collegians who preferred Facebook (a kind of virtual gated community) over MySpace. They both use words like "safe," "clean," "private," and "neat" to describe attachment to their communities. They both practice what cultural anthropologists call "gating," that is, the tendency to build physical/virtual, social, and cultural walls that are exclusive.

I also turned to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's work. I've used his work before to think about the kinds of cultural capital that young people accumulate, especially in the places that they create and inhabit, and how it works as a source of power, pleasure, and mobility. But in this case I was interested in what Bourdieu refers to as the "distinctions", that is, matters of taste, aesthetics, and values that middle class communities reproduce to maintain social and even physical separation between them and those that they view as below their own social status and class position.

When we began our work it was common to see college students switch from MySpace to Facebook. Among other things, the switch was also a bid for a social status upgrade, a move up the digital ladder. Today, middle class students in middle and high school are moving straight to Facebook. Social class distinctions like everything else in the digital age are trickling down to younger and younger users.

I was also intrigued by Bill Bishop's "Big Sort" argument. In short, Bishop argues that starting around the 1970s Americans underwent a massive social experiment that changed one of the most basic features of everyday life--where and with whom we live. The change in geography, Bishop maintains, is really a sorting by lifestyle. Racial and class segregation have been a fact of American life since the early 20th century (see Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's work on residential segregation). But Bishop argues that American neighborhoods are now being stratified along ideological and lifestyle lines--not simply "red" and "blue" states but even more carefully sorted and homogenous neighborhoods. There are some interesting parallels in the digital world.

I'm a trained sociologists so I find it quite natural and instructive to look at wider sociological trends to understand what is happening in the online world. I simply can not separate the two.

Finally, social network sites do not cause racial divisions or the desire for homogenous online communities. Insofar as what we do online is intimately connected to the lives we lead offline the fact that a kind of digital sorting is happening is not that terribly surprising. Still, it is striking that among a generation that played a key role in electing America's first Black president race plays a crucial role in their use of social network sites and who they bond with online.

Tell us about the group you call "Four Pack." What did they help you to understand about the social dimensions of gaming?

The four pack is a group of young gamers I got to know quite well while working on the book. I first met Derrick. I interviewed him about his use of social network sites. During our conversation it was clear that most of his media time is spent playing games. I asked Derrick to identify a handful of his peers to join a panel of gamers I wanted to put together. The idea was to get to know them and follow them for a period of time to learn more about their experiences with games. Several young men in Derrick's peer group responded to my inquiry and I eventually settled on four of them.

I affectionately began calling the group the "four-pack." I visited them in their residential hall and established a rapport with them that lasted about six months. The four-pack provided me with what amounts to a life-history of their engagement with interactive media. Every two weeks I issued them questions via email to address in the media journals that they agreed to keep. One week the diaries, for example, may have been devoted to games, and the next week, to television. The diaries were honest, rich in detail, and provided intimate access to a group of young men who embody the rising generation of gamers. Each of the diary entries were followed up with one-on-one conversations.

I learned a lot from the four-pack--their thoughts about addiction, virtual worlds, and the appeal of games. I witnessed up close what many game scholars and industry insiders refer to as "social gaming."

Gaming among the four-pack and their peers was mainly a social experience. Rarely, if ever, did they play games alone. Often games were a way to have fun and also spend time with friends. In their own unique way, each member of the four-pack talked a lot about games as both a social lubricant and a social glue. The former refers to how games can make it easier to strike up conversations with new acquaintances, while the latter is a reference to how games give established friends a fun way to grow closer to each other. Games, it turns out, are the common denominator in their strongest and most meaningful social ties.

Some of your earlier work dealt with hip hop culture. What similarities and differences do you see between the technological and social practices of the hip hop culture and that you've found in your work on digital youth culture?

I've spent all of my academic career studying young people's relationship to media industries and technologies. The work I'm doing on digital youth culture is greatly informed by my earlier work on hip hop culture.

As you know their has been a substantial change in the way scholars examine the cultural practices and identities young people produce. Hip hop, like digital culture, is participatory and performative. Hip hop, like the social media practices of youth today, has always been about young people expressing themselves, building community, while also finding places of leisure, pleasure, and empowerment.

In my last book, Hip Hop Matters, I wrote a chapter titled "The Digital Underground." It was really an attempt to understand how the Web has become the new town square in hip hop culture--the place to find relevant and urgent dialogue about a host of issues facing young hip hoppers. To engage a community of young hip hop enthusiasts about a host of important social issues today you don't turn on corporate radio or read a corporate run magazine. You go online.

The innovative use of technology has been a part of hip hop's story from the beginning. That's how everything from graffiti art to mix tapes has been produced bearing a striking resemblance to the DIY culture of social media today.

My work has maintained a steady focus on understanding the world young people create and inhabit. It's clear that if you want to understand that world today you have to dig deep into the digital practices, identities, and communities young people are building. Writing The Young and the Digital gave me an up-close look at this world. The book and the blog we will be building is an effort to share what we are learning.

S. Craig Watkins teaches in the departments of Radio-Television-Film and Sociology and the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

His new book, The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future (Beacon) explores young people's dynamic engagement with social media, online games, and mobile phones. Craig participated in the MacArthur Foundation Series on Youth, Digital Media and Learning. His work on this ground breaking project focuses on race, learning, and the growing culture of gaming. He has been invited to be a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford).

Currently, Craig is launching a new digital media research initiative that focuses on the use and evolution of social media platforms. For updates on these and other projects visit theyoungandthedigital.com.

Is Facebook a Gated Community?: An Interview With S. Craig Watkins (Part One)

Earlier this year, I was asked to write a blurb for `S. Craig Watkins's book, The Young & The Digital: What the Migration To Social-Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means For Our Future. The book was an eye-opener as Watkins brings a sociological perspective to the kinds of social lives young people are building for themselves through their deployment of a range of new technologies and emerging cultural practices. Here's what I ended up writing about the book:

Why does Facebook have the same appeal as gated communities? Is distraction more concerning than addiction? How do video games like World of Warcraft value friendship? Bracing yet reassuring, often surprising, and always substantive, Craig Watkins acts as an honest broker, testing the contradictory claims often made about young people's digital lives against sophisticated fieldwork.

I don't agree with everything the book says -- that's probably what "bracing" means here -- but it shook up some of my own preconceptions and has stayed with me since I first read it.

We are seeing an explosion of significant new books on young people's digital lives -- in part inspired by the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiatives, in part by the pervasiveness of digital culture all around us. I am trying to feature as many of these books and resources as they come out through the blog.

Watkins's book ranks among the best I've read on this topic. The Young & The Digital especially stands out for his close attention to the perspective of teachers as they grapple with the ways new media change how young people learn and to the perspective of young people who may not have the economic and social capital to fully participate in the digital and mobile realm inhabited by their more affluent and priviledged counterparts.

Watkins does not simply celebrate the "democratizing" impact of new media; he also looks at it as a space of social exclusions and in doing so, he calls attention to those factors which make it harder for some to participate more fully in the new media landscape. That's why I have chosen to highlight this interview as part of my contribution to this year's One Web Day with its theme -- "One Web. For All." And that's why I chose to include this book on the syllabus for the graduate course on New Media Literacies I am teaching at USC this fall.

In this installment, he takes on one of the senior figures in the sociological study of media, Robert Putnam, describing the ways that online participation may be paving the way for greater civic engagement, but he also ponders whether the online world may be making us "too social" for our own good, again striking a balance between utopian and dystopian arguments about the impact of digital media on young people's lives.

The Young and the Digital complicates in some important ways the arguments which Robert Putnam makes in Bowling Alone about the impact of electronic media on our social lives. Why did your field work lead you to reappraise Putnam's arguments?

The fieldwork did force me to reconsider some of the more enduring arguments about media and, especially, the well-traveled "Bowling Alone" thesis by Putnam. From the very beginning of the Web as an everyday tool, researchers have openly speculated about its influence in our social lives. Does the growing amount of time we spend in front of a screen make us more or less social, more or less interested in our friends, neighbors, and the world around us? Putnam's most compelling evidence regarding this questions is based on television. Among researchers who study TV as a leisure activity, the medium's greatest legacy is how it influences our connection, or lack thereof, to our neighbors, communities, and civic life. Putnam argues that TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, resulting in the erosion of social capital--a sense of neighborliness, mutual trust, and reciprocity that binds people and communities together. The big fear, of course, is that we will all retreat into our own media fortresses, forgoing any valuable social interaction with friends and acquaintances. While I understand the concern, the research evidence simply does not support it. This was certainly true in our research.

As we began talking with young people and combing through our survey results it became clear that their engagement with technology is first and foremost, a social activity. Conventional wisdom contends that time spent at home with TV is time spent away from friends and public life. But computer and mobile phone screens represent very different kinds of experiences than the ones traditionally offered by TV. Among the teens and young adults that we talk to, time spent in front of a computer or mobile screen is rarely, if ever, considered time spent alone. Screen time, increasingly, is time to connect with friends and acquaintances.

It's true, connecting via a mobile or Facebook is a different way of bonding, but, as I argue in the book, these practices are expressions of intimacy and community. We tend to get caught up on how much time young people spend with their computers and mobile phones. But what I came to understand is that their true interest is not in the technology per se, but rather the people and the relationships the technology provides access to.

Finally, I believe that young people's move online is also forcing us to reconsider another argument made by Putnam's regarding decreasing political participation. The final chapter of the book considers how young people's use of social and mobile media appears to be reversing some of the disturbing trends Putnam documents regarding a once decisive shift among Americans from political participation--for instance, attending political events, signing petitions, or writing an editor or politician. While establishing their support for President Obama, young people used Facebook, mobile phones, YouTube, and digital cameras to essentially redefine what electoral politics will look like in the future. Their use of digital media was social, communal, and in its own distinct way, political.

Throughout the book, you have a good deal to say about the ways digital media is reshaping young people's relations to traditional media (newspapers, television). What insight can you offer people working in the television industry about their prospects of attracting or holding the attention of younger Americans?

I'm glad you asked me about television. My interests in young people's engagement with the social Web is driven, in part, by a desire to understand the shift from television to screens that are more social, mobile, and personal. It's a historic shift and one that breaks from a more than fifty year cultural institution and experience--television as the first and most dominant screen in our lives.

Our research indicates that among persons ages thirty and under television is not the first or most preferred screen in their lives. They are just as likely to view their laptop or mobile phone as their "go to" screen. Young people still watch television but in ways that are quite distinct from previous generations--they watch it while media multitasking, on the go, and online. Moreover, kids are being socialized to engage TV in ways that are distinct from the generations that grew up in TV-centric households. These and other changes have forced a group of executives accustom to the dominance of TV in the household to rethink their business and programming models.

The television industry is diligently struggling to avoid what has happened to the pop music and newspaper industry. The TV business is struggling with what most of the corporate media world is struggling with and that is the question, "who will control content?" It's a hard lesson to learn but the rules of engagement really are changing.

It will be really interesting to see what network television looks like in about ten years. There is no doubt that it will look different but it will largely be outside forces--the ways our viewing and media behaviors shift--that will provoke change. Everything from rethinking the prime time schedule (NBC's decision to decrease scripted dramas and the impending Leno experiment) to the scaling back of the up-front presentations that once defined the industry's premium status among media buyers.

The biggest thing that the industry has to realize is that they can no longer control content or our viewing habits like they did in the past. It took a while but they began putting their shows online and making them available as downloads. Hulu-- a network response to the rise of YouTube--has shown signs of early success for long-format online video. But there is still a debate within the industry regarding this question of control. That is, should the network partners in Hulu make their content exclusive or, as some contend, make it available everywhere. I think it's clear that if network TV is to have a meaningful future it will have to permit its audience to not only access content across multiple platforms but also encourage audiences to shape and influence content, too.

You question the argument that digital media has had an anti-social impact on young people. Are there ways that these new media technologies and practices have made us "too social"?

I think so. Still, I realize that the idea of being "too social" is peculiar. Here is what I mean. The assertion that the Web and mobile phones are making us less social, caring, and involved with others is baffling when you consider the preponderance of evidence that actually compels a substantially different question: is today's "always-on" environment making us too social, too connected, and too involved in other people's lives?

In an "always on" world we are constantly communicating with each other via social network sites and mobile phones. It was interesting to learn that part of the initial appeal of Facebook among college students, for example, was the opportunity for constant status updates as well as the chance to gaze into the backstage world of friends and acquaintances. Young college students consistently made references to what they called, "e-stalking," that is the degree to which their peers frequently use social-network sites to track people's lives, activities, and relationships. Twitter and this idea of what Clive Thompson refers to as "ambient awareness" is another example of a technology that promotes a desire to be in constant connection with others.

In the digital age the idea of being out of touch or disconnected from family and friends is practically obsolete. No matter where we are--in class, at work, driving, or on vacation--the idea of being connected to our social networks is now a constant opportunity and, quite frankly, a constant challenge.

Rather than worrying about the likelihood of becoming anti-social I wonder if the reverse outcome--being too social--is a more legitimate concern. Talk to teachers in high school and you will learn that students are constantly connecting via their mobile phones while sitting in the classroom. Talk to university professors and there is a growing belief that students are constantly connecting with each other via platforms like Facebook while sitting in class. Again, it's the idea that we are using these emerging technologies in ways that are inventively social and dare I say excessively social.

S. Craig Watkins teaches in the departments of Radio-Television-Film and Sociology and the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

His new book, The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future (Beacon) explores young people's dynamic engagement with social media, online games, and mobile phones. Craig participated in the MacArthur Foundation Series on Youth, Digital Media and Learning. His work on this ground breaking project focuses on race, learning, and the growing culture of gaming. He has been invited to be a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford).

Currently, Craig is launching a new digital media research initiative that focuses on the use and evolution of social media platforms. For updates on these and other projects visit theyoungandthedigital.com.

Diversifying Participation

CALL FOR SESSION PROPOSALS FIRST ANNUAL DIGITAL MEDIA AND LEARNING CONFERENCE

CONFERENCE THEME: "DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION"

February 18 - 20, 2010

Cal IT2

University of California, San Diego

La Jolla, California

We are pleased to announce the first Digital Media and Learning Conference, an annual event sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. The conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice.

For this inaugural year, the theme will be "Diversifying Participation". Henry Jenkins is the Chair of the Digital Media and Learning Conference.

We invite submissions for session proposals that speak to the conference theme as well as to the field of digital media and learning more broadly. Those wishing to present work should look to propose or participate in a panel topic (see submission process outlined below).

DIVERSIFYING PARTICIPATION

A growing body of research has identified how young people's digital media use is tied to basic social and cultural competencies needed for full participation in contemporary society. We continue to develop an understanding of the impact of these experiences on learning, civic engagement, professional development, and ethical comprehension of the digital world.

Yet research has also suggested that young people's forms of participation with new media are incredibly diverse, and that risks, opportunities, and competencies are spread unevenly across the social and cultural landscape. Young people have differential access to online experiences, practices, and tools and this has a consequence in their developing sense of their own identities and their place in the world. In some cases, different forms of participation and access correspond with familiar cultural and social divides. In other cases, however, new media have introduced novel and unexpected kinds of social differences, subcultures, and identities.

It is far too simple to talk about this in terms of binaries such as "information haves and have nots" or "digital divides". There are many different kinds of obstacles to full participation, many different degrees of access to information, technologies, and online communities, and many different ways of processing those experiences. Participatory cultures surrounding digital media are characterized by a diversity that does not track automatically to high and low access or more or less sophisticated use. Rather, multiple forms of expertise, connoisseurship, identity, and practice are proliferating in online worlds, with complicated relationships to pre-existing categories such as socioeconomic status, gender, nationality, race, or ethnicity.

We encourage sessions that describe, document, and critically analyze different forms of participation and how they relate to various forms of social and cultural capital. We are interested in accounts of the challenges and obstacles which block or inhibit engagement to different forms of online participation. We also encourage session proposals that engage with successful intervention strategies and pedagogical processes enabling once marginalized groups to more fully exploit the opportunities for learning with digital media. Conversely, we are interested in hearing more about how marginal and subcultural communities find diverse uses of new and emerging technologies, pushing them in new directions and navigating a complicated relationship with "mainstream" forms of participation. Specifically, we seek to understand the following:

* What can research on more diverse communities contribute to our understanding of the learning ecologies surrounding new media?

* What are the technologies, practices, economic, and cultural divides that lead to segregation, "gated" information communities, and differential access?

* When and how do diversity and differentiation in participation promote social and cultural benefits and opportunities, and when do they create schisms that are less equitable or productive?

* What strategies have proven successful at broadening opportunities for participation, overcoming the many different kinds of segregation or exclusion which impact the online world, and empowering more diverse presences throughout cyberspace?

* Are there things occurring on the margins of the existing digital culture that might valuably be incorporated into more mainstream practices?

In addition to these questions directly addressing the conference theme, we welcome submissions that address innovative new directions in research and practice relating to digital media and participatory learning.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Submissions should be in the form of full session proposals. Proposed sessions may range from 1 to 2 hours in length and may include traditional paper presentations, hands-on workshops, design critiques, demos, pecha kucha, or roundtable discussions. We welcome and encourage submissions of innovative formats, but request that the proposals come in the form of session proposals rather than individual papers or presentations.

The goal of the event is to foster dialog and build connections. To that end, sessions should have at least three to four presenters and/or discussants. Session organizers should reserve substantial amounts of time for open discussion and exchange.

We have established an open wiki for potential participants to engage in session organizing. The wiki can be used to call for contributions to a briefly outlined session topic, to seek out partners to develop a topic together, to brainstorm about co-presenters, and any other functions potential participants find valuable. The wiki can be accessed at: http://dmlconference2010.wikidot.com/forum:start

Session organizers should submit proposals that consist of a title and a 200-word abstract (including proposed presentation topics and formats and the speakers and/or discussants). In addition, names and contact details for the session organizers and participants will be required. The submission system will be available at the end of September 2009.

Each individual will be limited to participation on no more than two panels at the conference. Participants will be expected to fund their own travel and accommodation. Registration for the conference will be free.

Conference Website: http://dmlcentral.net/conference

Conference Wiki: http://dmlconference2010.wikidot.com/forum:start

KEY DATES AND DEADLINES

Submission System Available: September 30, 2009

Deadline for Submissions: October 30, 2009

Notification of Acceptance: November 30, 2009

Registration System Opens: December 15, 2009

Conference Program Announced: December 15, 2009

Registration Deadline: January 15, 2010

Evening Reception: February 18, 2010

CONTACT INFORMATION

Digital Media and Learning Research Hub

UC Humanities Research Institute

University of California, Irvine

Email: dmlhub@hri.uci.edu

Over the next week, I am going to be focusing this blog on issues of digital inclusion, which is the theme of this year's One Web Day. A global event, One Web Day has been celebrated each year since 2006 on September 22. Bloggers all over the world are using their space to call attention to the value of the web in our everyday life and to some of the issues which are blocking full participation. This year's theme is "One Web. For All." So it seems particularly appropriate to be announcing this conference call in the midst of the blogosphere's growing focus on issues surrounding the "digital divide" and the "participation gap." For more on One Web Day, go to their homepage.

The Aesthetics of Transmedia: In Response to David Bordwell (Part Three)

This is the third and final segment of my response to David Bordwell's thoughtful analysis of some of the pitfalls and challenges associated with transmedia storytelling. Thanks to David for sparking what has been a fascinating exchange, one which has forced me to sharpen my thinking about certain key issues that I am working through for my class.

Bordwell writes:

Another drawback to shifting a story among platforms: art works gain strength by having firm boundaries. A movie's opening deserves to be treated as a distinct portal, a privileged point of access, a punctual moment at which we can take a breath and plunge into the story world. Likewise, the closing ought to be palpable, even if it's a diminuendo or an unresolved chord. The special thrill of beginning and ending can be vitiated if we come to see the first shots as just continuations of the webisode, and closing images as something to be stitched to more stuff unfolding online. There's a reason that pictures have frames.

Again, I'd argue that Bordwell is describing a specific kind of filmmaking, one that may gain very little from transmedia expansion. Yet, as I said earlier, the aesthetic properties of texts that lend themselves to transmedia experience are world-building (as we've been discussing) and seriality. By definition, a serial text is not self-contained. It resolves one chapter and immediately plants the book that will draw us into the next. It is, as Angela Ndalianis stresses in Neo-Baroque, a work which pushes beyond its frame. Now, to be clear, the cliffhangers which have shaped many classic serial forms do depend on an understanding of where one text stops and another begins. But we can see this as an art of chunking rather than framing. They know how to break the story down into meaningful chunks which are compelling emotionally within themselves but which gain greater urgency when read in relation to the other installments of the story. We still have a lot to learn about how to create meaningful chunks and link them together across media platforms. As such, I am watching more and more vintage serials to see how they balance between self-containment and openness.

This may be why transmedia seems so far to work best in relation to television, which is increasingly relying on seriality (and back story) to create a particular kind of aesthetic experience, and where it is applied to film, it seems to work best for franchises which will have a series of increasingly preplanned sequels. No one would take away the aesthetic pleasures of closure and containment, but there are also aesthetic pleasures in seriality, openness, and especially, for me, a pleasure in suddenly understanding how a bit of information consumed in one medium fits into the puzzle being laid out for us in a totally different platform.

So far, transmedia texts have been most compelling while they are mid-process and have tended to disappoint when they reached their conclusion. This phenomenon may tell us something about the degree to which they rely on open-ended and serialized structures rather than the kinds of closure which is the pleasure of a different kind of fiction. The anxious fan wants to know that the producers of Lost isn't making it up as they go along, though of course, on one level, every storyteller is making it up as they go along. The hope though is for a certain level of integrity and continuity between the pieces which allows us to find the coherent whole from which the many parts must have once broken adrift.

For me, though, I am also intrigued by the moment when the story is rich with possibilities, when fan speculations span out in many different directions, and when each of us has taken the parts as resources for constructing our own fictional world. I wrote about this almost 20 years ago in response to Twin Peaks: I was much more interested in the hundreds of complex theories about who killed Laura Palmer that invested fans constructed individually and collectively than I was in the official version which David Lynch and Mark Frost were forced to add under pressure from the networks.

Bordwell writes:

In between opening and closing, the order in which we get story information is crucial to our experience of the story world. Suspense, curiosity, surprise, and concern for characters--all are created by the sequencing of story action programmed into the movie. It's significant, I think, that proponents of hardcore multiplatform storytelling don't tend to describe the ups and downs of that experience across the narrative. The meanderings of multimedia browsing can't be described with the confidence we can ascribe to a film's developing organization. Facing multiple points of access, no two consumers are likely to encounter story information in the same order. If I start a novel at chapter one, and you start it at chapter ten, we simply haven't experienced the art work the same way.

Transmedia storytellers are becoming increasingly skilled at deciding when extensions should be rolled out in relation to the franchise's "mother ship." Some plot developments do require careful sequencing. There's a pleasure to be had in watching Robert Rodriquez's Shorts in making fun of a schoolboy who claims that sharks ate his homework in an early scene and then looping back in time to discover that he is telling the truth. Even though the plot of the film shifts around the story information so we see events out of sequence, there is still a larger rationale determining why we experience these events in a particular order.

The same may be said for the difference between materials released to the web before we encounter the film or television series, which often are designed to help us manage the complexity of an unfamiliar world or an ensemble-centered narrative, and those which come later in the unfolding of the franchise. Enter the Matrix comes at a particular juncture in the film series, while the multiplayer game based on The Matrix comes only after the film series was completed and the Wachowskis wanted to cede greater creative control back to the consumers to take the world in new directions. The Battlestar Galactica webisodes , "Face of the Enemy," which came on the eve of the final season went back in time to refocus us on the character of Felix Gaeta, who had been a secondary figure for most of the run, showing us the events from his point of view and revealing previously unknown aspects of his motivation, just in time to set us up for the character to play a much more central role in the series's final year. This is why transmedia "chunks" often tell us explicitly where they fit into the larger time line and why many of us prefer to read those chunks within a narrative sequence.

So, we may simply be over-stating the degree to which the dispersal of information is open-ended. Certainly, once the information moves beyond the borders of a single text, there's no control over what order the spectator encounters it. And it may not matter in which order we encounter certain aspects of the world building. But it may still be the case that the release and roll out of transmedia content is carefully timed and structured to construct a preferred reading sequence. Geoff Long has called for navigational tools that help viewers to find relevant content and to identify at what point it fits into the unfolding of the larger transmedia story. Given this, I believe that it would be possible to do a formalist reading of a transmedia narrative which mapped the functions of different bits of information and for me, that would go beyond simply a list of joints and citations. It would simply be a task of enormous complexity. Much as Roland Barthes could apply his methods to only a small segment of a Balzac story, Geoff Long has been able to apply the narrative analysis to only a short segment of Jim Henson's transmedia texts.

Bordwell writes:

Gap-filling isn't the only rationale for spreading the story across platforms, of course. Parallel worlds can be built, secondary characters can be promoted, the story can be presented through a minor character's eyes. If these ancillary stories become not parasitic but symbiotic, we expect them to engage us on their own terms, and this requires creativity of an extraordinarily high order.

Well, yes, and these are the functions of transmedia extensions which interest me the most -- and for that matter, the ones which spark the most excitement in the industry types who seem to grasp the concepts the best. It isn't simply about the narrative; it isn't simply about filling in gaps in the plot. "Gap-filling" seems to be a special case: the parlor trick that The Matrix franchises plays with the delivery of information from the doomed Osyrus which unfolds across three different media platforms. More often, transmedia is about back story which shifts our identifications and investments in characters and thus helps us to rewatch the scenes again with different emotional resonance. More often, it is about picking up on a detail seeded in the original film and using it as a point of entry into a different story or a portal into exploring another aspect of the world. And yes, to do this well is creativity of an extraordinarily high order, which is why most transmedia extensions disappoint; they fail to achieve their full potential. Transmedia is appealing to artists of a certain ambition who nevertheless want to work on popular genre entertainment rather than developing avant garde movies or art films. It appeals to intellectually engaged viewers who are more at home with popular culture than with gallery installations.

I'm curious to hear what other transmedia critics and creators are thinking about this exchange.