Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 -- A Syllabus

I'm back at my desk after what was far too short a break! MIT gave us all of January off to focus on our own research as well as to participate in their Independent Activities Period. USC's semester starts, gulp, today, so my rhythms felt all wrong through late December and early January. But here we are -- once more into the breech. Today, I am going to be teaching the first session of a graduate seminar on "Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0," and so I wanted to share the syllabus with my readers here, given the level of unexpected interest I received when I posted my syllabi last fall for the Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment and New Media Literacies classes. I am in a very happy place right now with my teaching -- starting over at USC is freeing me to form new kinds of classes which grow more from my own research interests rather than the institutional needs of sustaining an under-staffed program. I am thus developing classes around key concepts in my own work which are allowing me to introduce myself and my thinking to this new community. Surprisingly, given how central the study of fans has been to the trajectory of my research from graduate school forward, this is the first time I have ever taught a full class around this topic.

There are many ways you could conceptualize such a subject. A key choice I faced was between a course on fan culture, which would be centrally about what fans do and think, and a course in fan studies, which would map the emergence of and influence of a new academic field focused on the study of fandom and other forms of participatory culture. On the undergraduate level, I would have taken the first approach but on the graduate level, I opted for the second -- trying to map the evolution of a field of research centered around the study of fan communities and showing how it has spoken to a broader range of debates in media and cultural studies over the past two decades. As you will see, teaching a course right now, I found it impossible to separate out the discussion of fan culture from contemporary debates about web 2.0 and so I made that problematic, contradictory, and evolving relationship a key theme for the students to investigate. Do not misunderstand me -- I am not assuming an easy match between the three terms in my title. The shifting relations between those three terms is a central concern in the class.

I think it speaks to the richness of the space of fan research that I have included as many works as I have and I still feel inadequate because it is easy to identify gaps and omissions here -- key writers (many of them friends, some of them readers of this blog) that I could not include. Some of the topics I am focusing on are over-crowded with research and some are just emerging. I opted to cover a broader range of topics rather than focusing only on works which are canonical to the space of fan studies. All I can say is that I am sorry about the gaps but rest assured that this other work will surface in class discussion and no doubt play key roles in student papers.

I am hoping that in publishing this syllabus here, I can introduce some of the lesser known texts here (as well as the overall framework) to others teaching classes in this area and to researchers around the world who often write me trying to identify work on fan cultures. I'd love to hear from either groups here and happy to share more of what you are doing. Regular readers may anticipate more posts this semester in the fan studies space, just as last term saw more posts on transmedia topics.

COMM 620

Fandom, Participatory Culture and Web 2.0

Speaking at South by Southwest several years ago, I joked that "Web 2.0 was fandom without the stigma." By this, I meant that sites like YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, and Wikipedia have made visible a set of cultural practices and logics that had been taking root within fandom over the past hundred-plus years, expanding their cultural influence by broadening and diversifying participation. In many ways, these practices have been encoded into the business models shaping so-called Web 2.0 companies, which have in turn made them far more mainstream, have increased their visibility, and have incorporated them into commercial production and marketing practices. The result has been a blurring between the grassroots practices I call participatory culture and the commercial practices being called Web 2.0.

Fans have become some of the sharpest critics of Web 2.0, asking a series of important questions about how these companies operate, how they generate value for their participants, and what expectations participants should have around the content they provide and the social networks they entrust to these companies. Given this trajectory, a familiarity with fandom may provide an important key for understanding many new forms of cultural production and participation and, more generally, the logic through which social networks operate.

So, to define our three terms, at least provisionally, fandom refers to the social structures and cultural practices created by the most passionately engaged consumers of mass media properties; participatory culture refers more broadly to any kind of cultural production which starts at the grassroots level and which is open to broad participation; and Web 2.0 is a business model that sustains many web-based projects that rely on principles such as user-creation and moderation, social networking, and "crowdsourcing."

That said, the debates about Web 2.0 are only the most recent set of issues in cultural and media studies which have been shaped by the emergence of a field of research focused on fans and fandom. Fan studies:

• emerged from the Birmingham School's investigations of subcultures and resistance
• became quickly entwined with debates in Third Wave Feminism and queer studies
• has been a key space for understanding how taste and cultural discrimination operates
• has increasingly been a site of investigation for researchers trying to understand informal learning or emergent conceptions of the citizen/consumer
• has shaped legal discussions around appropriation, transformative work, and remix culture
• has become a useful window for understanding how globalization is reshaping our everyday lives.

This course will be structured around an investigation of the contribution of fan studies to cultural theory, framing each class session around a key debate and mixing writing explicitly about fans with other work asking questions about cultural change and the politics of everyday life.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• trace the history of fandom from the amateur press associations of the 19th Century to its modern manifestations
• describe the evolution of fan studies from the Birmingham School work on subcultures and media audiences to contemporary work on digital media
• discuss a range of theoretical framing and methodologies which have been used to explain the cultural, social, political, legal, and economic impact of fandom
• arbitrate the most common critiques surrounding the Web 2.0 business model
• situate fan practices in relation to broader trends toward social networks, online communities, and remix culture
• develop their own distinctive contribution to the field of fan studies, one which reflects their own theoretical and methodological commitments

Assignments:

• Students will be expected to post regular weekly comments reacting to the readings on the Blackboard site for the class. (20 percent)
• Students will write a short five-page autoethnography describing their own history as a fan of popular entertainment. You should explore whether or not you think of yourself as a fan, what kinds of fan practices you engage with, how you define a fan, how you became invested in the media franchises that have been part of your life, and how your feelings about being a fan might have adjusted over time. (15 percent) (Due on January 19)
• Students will develop an annotated bibliography which explores one of the theoretical debates that have been central to the field of fan studies. These might include those which we've identified for the class, or they might also include other topics more relevant to the student's own research. What are the key contributions of fan studies literature to this larger field of inquiry? What models from these theoretical traditions have informed work in fan studies? (20 Percent) (Due on Feb 23)
• Students will read Tim O'Reilly, "What is Web 2.0" [http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html] and Tim O'Reilly and John Batelle, "Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On" [http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/28/web2009_websquared-whitepaper.pdf and write a five-page response which discusses what you see as the most significant similarities and differences between fan practice (as we've read about it in the class) and the business model associated with Web 2.0. (15 percent) (Due on April 6)
• Students will write a 10-15 page essay on a topic of your own choosing (in consultation with the instructor) which you feel grows out of the subjects and issues we've been exploring throughout the class. The paper will ideally build on the annotated bibliography created for the earlier assignment. Students will do short 10 minute presentation of their findings during final exam week. (40 percent) (Due on Last Day of the Class.)

Books:

Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. (New York: New

York UP, 2006)

Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the

Internet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006)

Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, Fandom: Identities and Communities in A Mediated World. (New York: New York UP, 2007)

Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (New York: Polity, 2009)

Seth, Wimbledon Green (Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2005)

Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Data Base Animals (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009)

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

DAY 1

From Subculture to Fan Culture, From Fan Culture to Web 2.0

Screening: "Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media" (In-progress by Patricia Lange)

Recommended Reading:

Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, "Why Study Fans?" (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington)

Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, "Introduction: Works in Progress" (Hellekson and Busse)

DAY 2

Fan Studies and Cultural Resistance

Janice Radway "The Readers and Their Romances," Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984)

John Fiske, "The Cultural Economy of Fandom," in Lisa A. Lewis (ed.) The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Camille Bacon-Smith, "Identity and Risk" and "Suffering and Solace," Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992)

Constance Penley, "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture" in Cultural Studies (edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler)

Henry Jenkins, "It's Not a Fairy Tale Anymore!': Gender, Genre, Beauty and the Beast," Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Matt Hills, "Fan Cultures Between Community and 'Resistance'," Fan Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2002)

Recommended Reading:

Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, "Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism's Third Wave: 'I'm Not My Mother," Genders Online Journal 38, 2003

Henry Jenkins, "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching," (Jenkins)

John Tulloch, "Cult, Talk and Audiences," Watching Television Audiences: Cultural Theories and Methods (London: Arnold, 2000)

DAY 3

Tracing the History of Participatory Culture

Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensibility," The Great Cat Massacre And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic, 2009)

Paula Petrik. "The Youngest Fourth Estate: The Novelty Toy Printing Press and Adolescence, 1870-1886," in Elliot West and Paula Petrik (eds.) Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950. (Kansas City: U of Kansas P, 1992)

Andrew Ross, "Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum," Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991).

Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs, "Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun," in Lisa A. Lewis (ed.) The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Recommended Reading:

Susan J. Douglas, "Popular Culture and Populist Technology: The Amateur Operators, 1906-1912," Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

UP, 1989)

Chad Dell, "Lookit That Hunk of a Man': Subversive Pleasures, Female Fandom and

Professional Wrestling," in Cheryl Harris and Anne Alexander (eds.) Theorizing

Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1998).

DAY 4

Fans and Online Community

Henry Jenkins, "Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Look Stupid': alt.tv.twinpeaks, the

Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery" (Jenkins)

Sharon Marie Ross, "Fascinated With Fandom: Cautiously Aware Viewers of Xena and Buffy," Beyond the Box: Television and The Internet (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).

Rebecca Lucy Busker, "LiveJournal and the Shaping of Fan Discourse," Transformative Works and Cultures 1, 2008

Alan Wexelblat, "An Auteur in the Age of the Internet: JMS, Babylon 5, and The Net" in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.) Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).

DAY 5

Fandom and Queer Studies

Kristina Busse, "My Life is a WIP on My LJ: Slashing the Slasher and the Reality of Celebrity and Internet Performances" (Hellekson and Busse)

Eden Lacker, Barbara Lynn Lucas, and Robin Anne Reid, "Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words/Silence/Flesh" (Hellekson and Busse)

Richard Dyer, "Judy Garland and Gay Men," Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: McMillian, 1986)

Henry Jenkins, "Out of the Closet and Into the Universe" and "Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking" (Jenkins)

Recommended Reading:

Erica Rand, "Older Heads on Younger Bodies," Barbie's Queer Accessories (Durham: Duke UP, 1995).

Sean Griffin, "'You've Never Had a Friend Like Me': Target Marketing Disney to a Gay

Community," Tinker Bells and Evil Queens: The Disney Company From Inside Out (New York: New York UP, 2000).

DAY 6

Performing Fandom

Kurt Lancaster, "Welcome Aboard, Ambassador: Creating a Surrogate Performance with the Babylon Project," Interacting with Babylon 5 (Austin: U of Texas P, 2001)

Francesca Coppa, "Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance" (Hellekson and Busse)

Robert Drew, "Anyone Can Do It': Forging a Participatory Culture in Karaoke Bars," in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.) Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).

Sharon Mazer, "'Real' Wrestling, 'Real' Life" in Nicholas Sammond (ed.) Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasures and Pain of Professional Wrestling (Durham: Duke UP, 2005).

Cornel Sandvoss, "A Text Called Home: Fandom Between Performance and Place," Fans (Cambridge: Polity, 2005)

Recommended Reading:

Nick Couldry, "On the Set of The Sopranos: 'Inside' A Fan's Construction of Nearness" (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington)

DAY 7

Fan Aesthetics; Fan Taste

Abigail Derecho, "Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History and Several Theories of Fan Fiction"(Hellekson and Busse)

Catherine Driscoll, "One True Pairing: The Romance of Pornography and the Pornography of Romance" (Hellekson and Busse)

Sheenagh Pugh, "What Else and What If," The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (London: Seren, 2006)

Roberta Pearson, "Bachies, Bardies, Trekkies and Sherlockians" (Gray, Sandvoss, and

Harrington)

Jonathan Gray, "Anti-Fandom and the Moral Text: Television Without Pity and Textual

Dislike," American Behavioral Scientist 48(7), 806-22

Alan McKee, "Which is the Best Doctor Who Story?: A Case Study in Value Judgment Outside the Academies," Intensities 1, 2001

Recommended Reading:

Mafalda Stasi, "The Toy Soldiers from Leeds: The Slash Palimpsest" (Hellekson and Busse)

DAY 8

Vidders and Fan Filmmakers

Francesca Coppa, "Women, 'Star Trek' and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding," Transformative Works and Cultures 1, 2008.

Joshua Green and Jean Burgess, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (New York: Polity, 2009)

Louisa Ellen Stein, "This Dratted Thing: Fannish Storytelling Through New Media" (Hellekson and Busse)

DAY 9

Fans or Pirates?

Lawrence Lessig, "Two Economies: Commercial and Sharing," Remix: Making Art and

Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Ecology (New York: Penquin, 2008)

Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe and Lewis Kaye, "Your Second Life?: Goodwill and the Performance of Intellectual Property in Online Digital Gaming," Cultural Studies 20, 2006

J.D. Lasica, "Inside the Movie Underground," "When Personal and Mass Media Collide,"

"Remixing the Digital Future," Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons)

Hector Postigo, "Video Game Appropriation through Modifications: Attitudes Concerning

Intellectual Property among Modders and Fan," Convergence, 2008.

Recommended Reading:

Rebecca Tushnet, "Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and The Rights of the Author" (Gray,

Sandvoss, and Harrington)

DAY 10

Collectors

John Bloom, "Cardboard Patriarchy: Adult Baseball Card Collecting and the Nostalgia for a Presexual Past," in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.) Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).

Chuck Tyron, "The Rise of the Movie Geek: DVD Culture, Cinematic Knowledge, and The Home Viewer," Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence (Rutgers UP, 2009)

Seth, Wimbledon Green (New York: Drawn and Quarterly, 2005)

Mary DesJardin, "Ephemeral Culture/eBay Culture: Film Collectables and Fan Investments," Ken Hillis, Michael Petit, and Nathan Scott Epley (eds.), Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting and Desire (New York: Routledge, 2006)

DAY 11

Fan Labor, Moral Economy, and the Gift Economy

Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins, "The Moral Economy of Web 2.0: Audience Research and Convergence Culture," in Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (eds.) Media Industries: History, Theory and Method (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

Tiziana Terranova, "Free Labor," Producing Culture for the Digital Economy (Pluto, 2004)

Suzanne Scott, "Repackaging Fan Culture: The Regifting Economy of Ancillary Content

Models," Transformative Works and Cultures 3, 2009

Lewis Hyde, "The Bond" and "The Gift Community," The Gift: Creativity and The Artist in the Modern World (New York: Vintage, 2008)

Mark Andrejevic, "Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-Generated Labor," in Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds.) The YouTube Reader (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden)

DAY 12

Produsers and Lead Users

John Banks and Mark Deuze, "Co-Creative Labor," International Journal of Cultural Studies 12(5), 2009

Darren Brabham, "Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases," Convergence, 2008.

Axel Bruns, "The Key Characteristics of Produsage," Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (London: Peter Lang, 2008)

Sam Ford, "Fandemonium: A Tag Team Approach to Enabling and Mobilizing Fans,"

Convergence Culture Consortium White Paper, 2007

Recommended Reading:

Stephen Brown, "Harry Potter and the Fandom Menace," Bernard Cova, Robert Kozinets, and Avi Shankar (eds.) Consumer Tribes (Oxford and Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007)

Eric Von Hippel, "Development of Products by Lead Users," Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006)

DAY 13

Learning Through Fandom

Lauren Lewis, Rebecca Black, and Bill Tomlinson, "Let Everyone Play: An Educational

Perspective on Why Fan Fiction Is, or Should Be, Legal," International Journal of

Learning and Media 1(1), 2009

Patricia G. Lange and Mizuko Ito, "Creative Production," Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010)

Erica Rosenfeld Halverson and Richard Halverson, "Fantasy Baseball: The Case for Competitive Fandom," Games and Culture 3(3-4), 2008

Henry Jenkins, "How Many Star Fleet Officers Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb: Star Trek at MIT," Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Dr. Who and Star Trek (London: Routledge, 1995)

Jason Mittell, "Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and The Case of Lostpedia," Transformative Works and Cultures 3, 2009

DAY 14

Fan Activism

Steven Duncombe, Dream: Reimaginaing Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York: New Press, 2007)

Henry Jenkins, "How Dumbledore's Army is Transforming Our World: An Interview with HP Alliance's Andrew Slack," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July 23 2009

Derek Johnson, "Enfranchising the Consumer: Alternate Realities, Institutional Politics, and the Digital Public Sphere," Franchising Media Worlds: Content Networks and the Collaborative Production of Culture, diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009

Henry Jenkins, "How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution (Part One): An Interview with the Wu Ming Foundation", Confessions of an Aca-Fan, October 5 2006

DAY 15

Global Fans

Henry Jenkins, "Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in the Age of Media

Convergence" (Jenkins)

Nancy K. Baym and Robert Burnett (2009). "Amateur Experts: International Fan Labor in Swedish Independent Music." International Journal of Cultural Studies. 12(5): 1-17

Xiaochang Li, "New Contexts, New Audiences," Dis/Locating Audience: Transnational Media Flows and the Online Circulation of East Asian Television Drama, Unpublished Master's Thesis, Comparative Media Studies, MIT, 2009

Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan's Data Base Animals (Mineappolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009)

Aswin Punathambekar, "Between Rowdies and Rasikas: Rethinking Fan Activity in Indian Film Culture" (Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington)

Public Media, Public Education, and the Public Good: An Interview with Heather Chaplin (Part Two)

Editor's note: This is my last post of 2009. See you in the new year. I am going to take some time off with my family.
Much of your discussion centers around the impact of public media on public education. How would you describe the ideal learning environment for the 21st century and what blocks us from achieving that ideal?

One could write a book on that topic! Well, one of the intriguing things about creating a more intimate relationship between public media and public education is that public media is in possession of a national treasure of historical materials. Part of NPL would be assisting public media in digitizing that material and retooling it for teachers to use while teaching.

So imagine a science class where the teacher can pull out a segment from Nova on the spot to illustrate the answer to a particular question asked by a student. Or using a bit of an interview from a Jim Leher interview to make a political point. The examples could go on for ever. And, unlike the archives of corporate-owned media, these arches belong to the American public. We paid for them and we should take advantage of them.

There are also real opportunities for public media to be involved teaching kids media skills. Imagine a local PBS station also being a hub where kids could take classes on video editing, or putting together sound pieces, or making videogames. Part of public media 2.0 calls for local stations to take a greater role in serving their local communities directly.

In terms of the classroom of the future in general, I see digital media as a huge opportunity. I don't believe, however, that digital media tools replace things like smaller teacher-to-student ratios. And I do worry, on some level, about having so much of our lives mediated by machines. I see these digital media tools being used when appropriate to enhance the teaching experience and not as a replacement for teacher to student contact. For example, the idea of using 3-D models of molecules to teach science: that's probably just a better and more effective way of teaching what a molecule is than giving a lecture on one. Therefore, since it's something we can do, we should. On the other hand, discussing a great novel is probably best done by teacher-student discussion. That should go away. It's a matter of understanding the technology now at our disposal and making good choices of when to use it.

What blocks us from achieving these goals? A lot of things. The public school system in this country is messed up almost beyond belief and on every level. Bush's push towards more standardization certainly didn't help - it meant teachers teaching kids to pass certain standardized tests, and not teaching them to be critical thinkers, to be genuinely literate in the sense of being able to create meaning. Our schools are wildly underfunded, and even when money is available, the resistance to change is staggering. I asked one former state school superintendent what she'd do to fix the public education system in this country and she - a mild-looking women in a tweed suit - said she'd blow the whole thing up and start from scratch.

What's so scary is how high the stakes are. Democracy requires an educated citizenry. Without that, you regress to mob rule. Part of being free is knowing how to use your mind.

You are calling for improvements in the broadband infrastructure to bring richer media content into schools but schools are also seeking to police the flow of content into the classroom, blocking off access to social networking and media sharing sites, for example. How might we resolve this tension between the desire to broaden and to regulate access to information in the 21st century classroom?

Another excellent question and I wish I had the answer. It is true that schools and teachers fear the Internet desperately. In part, I think people fear the lack of control the vastness of the Internet implies, I think they fear the new, and I think on some level they simply fear and distrust new technology. People tend to think the things they didn't grow up with are somehow bad.

To me, however, it's like we've built a high-way system, said hey! our whole world is now going to be based on this new highway system - but we're not going to teach anyone to drive. It's sheer lunacy.

I think schools need to learn to teach kids how to use the Internet, not hide them from it. The reasons for this are too numerous - and too well elucidated by you, Henry!, to even go into right here. As to some sort of solution, I can't help but think the answer is working with teachers and parents.

We need to educate people as to what 21st century literacy will require - because being literate in the 21st century is going to be very different from being literate in the 20th century. You simply will not be literate in the future if you don't know how to handle the Internet in a meaningful way. I teach journalism, and I do several classes where everybody brings in their lap top and we do experiments on Internet research, for example. But then that's at the college level and I have freedom over what I get to teach. Again, I can't say enough how high I think the stakes are.

Think of the kid growing up in a small rural town that doesn't even have Internet access. How is that kid going to manage as an adult competing against kids who've been using the Internet since they were toddlers? If the schools don't take this on, children in rural and poor areas will suffer the most and will be left behind even more than they already are.

You argue that concerns about "station by-pass" have sometimes placed public television at war with the new digital tools and participatory culture. Explain. How might we resolve this conflict?

Local public media stations are afraid for their existence. If everything is digital and handled via the Internet, and broadcast becomes a thing of the past, the question does arise of why they even exist. What is their purpose?

The answer to this lies in re-envisioning the role of the local station in its community. A lot of the public media community is starting to image the local station as a community hub, doing serious local journalism, creating forums and town-hall-style meetings, and providing resources for solving local problems. Also, as I mentioned above, taking a greater role in teaching youth to be media literate. The network of local stations is an infrastructure aimed at serving the public good already in place; we shouldn't waste it. But we do need to re-imagine it.

A decade ago, the push to respond to the digital divide led to the wiring of classrooms often without adequate pedagogical goals or professional development. We wired the classroom-now what? How do we avoid the replication of this same problem where the expansion of technical infrastructure outstrips the educational vision needed to use these tools towards meaningful pedagogy?

This is another great question and I feel woefully unqualified to answer it. It's so easy to say what ought to happen, and another thing entirely to actually make something happen.

I think you put your finger on it before when you asked about teachers' wanting to keep the Internet, social networking, etc. out of the classroom. Or Jim Gee talks very eloquently about classrooms very methodically making kids leave everything they're interested in at the door, thus essentially ensuring the kids will be uninterested in the classroom, and, most obviously, failing to take advantage of a kid's natural interests to facilitate learning. Or I love the example I've heard you give of your Moby-Dick project getting stymied because the word "dick" had been blocked by school administrators from Internet searches.

I totally agree with you that having fancy technology is of no use whatsoever if there's no vision of how to use it.

Part of what NPL advocates is also providing content for teachers to use in the classroom and a major push for teacher training when it comes to digital tools. But I know that's kind of a cop-out answer, because how do you actually implement these things? How do you inspire vast change in a system notoriously mired in bureaucracy and seriously allergic to change? This is one of those questions of the ages.

It's probably worth remembering that we are in a period of transition. In another ten years or so, the people signing on to become teachers will have grown up with digital technology and may feel more comfortable using it. In the meantime, I think an assault from all sides is necessary - pressing the Obama administration, which seems pretty savvy and progressive regarding digital technology, to get involved; working with parents to understand what's at stake in terms of their kids' education; educating teachers, etc

.

Educational games figure prominently in this report. This is not surprising given your previous work on games. Why might games be a particularly rich test case for the kind of expanded public media system you are describing?

Yes, I am very passionate about using games to teach and foster civic engagement. One example: right now simulations exist at all levels of the government for all kinds of things, from weather predictions, to budget issues, to military scenarios. Simulations can be incredibly powerful tools for learning how things work - why not take these simulations, which already exist and which we, as tax payers, financed, and turn them into games made available to the public to play with?

It would be cheap, could reach vast amounts of people quicly and easily, and could educate people about important things like how tax cuts or break will effect the economy, what the potential outcomes of military decisions might be, etc. In other words these could be powerful tools for fostering transparancy, which is key to a real democracy. We now have more data than we know what to do with.

Making games so that people can play with the data is one way to help people make sense of everything that is out there. Government data should be available to the public so that we can make informed decisions about what our government ought to be doing. Taking something that already exists- government-created simulations - and making them available as games to people seems a really obvious way to foster democracy.

I also think public media needs to begin funding games in the same way it funds educational television. The inspiration for the act of Congress that funded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and created PBS and NPR in the first place was this idea that here was this new media - TV - and that we ought to be using it for more than just entertainment purposes. Well, that was 1967. It's more than 30 years later and there's a new new media on the block and that's the videogame. Why leave such a powerful tool in the hands of corporate entertainment companies? As a society we want it in our arsenal of tools to educate the next generation of Americans to be active and engaged participants in our democracy.

Heather Chaplin is a professor of journalism at The New School and author of the book, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. She recently participated in a Ford Foundation grant looking at issues of the public interest in the next generation of the Internet. She also works with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on issues of digital literacy and journalism. She has been interviewed for and cited in publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Businessweek, and The Believer and has appeared on shows such as Talk of the Nation, and CBS Sunday Morning. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Details, and Salon. She is a regular contributor on game culture for All Things Considered.

Public Media, Public Education, and the Public Good: An Interview with Heather Chaplin (Part One)

Heather Chaplin is one of the good guys -- she wrote one of the best books about the place of video games in contemporary culture; she's doing journalism which challenges some of the preconceptions about youth and new technology that run through most mainstream coverage; and she's been doing consulting work with some leading foundations -- MacArthur, Ford, among them -- as they think through what needs to be done to reallign public institutions with the risks and opportunities of the digital age. Heather interviewed me recently for the Digital Media and Learning project website, talking about participatory culture and public engagement. She was nice enough to allow me to turn the microphone (or in this case, the keyboard) the other way to talk with her about her recently published white paper, National Public Lightpath: Documentation and Recommendations, which seeks to map some future directions for how the internet might serve the public good.

Here's part of the summary of the white paper:

It's hard to remember life before the Internet. In the span of two decades it has entirely reshaped the way we do business, gather information, shop, play, and socialize. It's all moved so quickly, it's been hard to even stop and think. But do for a minute. Stop. Think. In all our rush to buy books and shoes online, and to find our lost high school friends on Facebook, we have failed to consider one thing. What part of the Internet is going to be devoted to the public interest?"

In part one of this interview, Heather offers some frank and provocative comments about how the internet might better serve the public good and critiques the "libertarian" perspective on how the web should grow. In the second part, which will run later this week, she shares some thoughts about digital literacy and public education.

Your white paper opens with the provocative question, "what part of the Internet is going to be devoted to the public interest?" How would you answer that question?

It's actually a really hard question to answer, based on what your notion of "in the public interest" is. I mean, NPR and PBS have presences on the Internet. And I suppose you could argue that there are probably millions of sites out there that serve the general public good. So, if I were to play devil's advocate against myself, I suppose I would argue that the very nature of the Internet - the anyone-can-publish idea - is in itself a public good.

But here's the thing, I'm not really the libertarian type. I don't believe that things will necessarily just sort themselves out if left alone. When I talk about creating a piece of the Internet in the public interest, I'm really talking about both public ownership of the infrastructure and content created specifically to educate, enlighten and enrich in the interests of genuine literacy and civic engagement.

I think ownership of the infrastructure is important here. There is no inherent financial incentive to create something like NPL so there is no reason on earth for Verizon or AT&T to get involved. As it is they want to create a pay structure where people pay more for faster connections, which would in effect wipe out any chance for the "little guy" to compete with corporate players. People forget in this country that corporations despite their sunny logos and appealing products, are not our friends. They have a PROFIT MOTIVE. This means, as the phrase would imply, they're motivated by profit not the public good. In fact, they're legally set up so that they're breaking the law if they stop to consider the public good over profits.

I have a real bee in my bonnet about the way the Internet infrastructure belongs to these companies when it was created by tax payer dollars. It's the same with the pharmaceutical companies - they make billions off drugs, the research for which was done by public universities funded by public citizens like you and me.

But now I digress.

What was the original question? Ah yes, well, in reality, I FEAR no part of the Internet will be devoted to the public interest in any sort of "official" capacity. I HOPE, however, that we are able to build an infrastructure that would, at first, connect public media to the schools, for educational purposes, and then build out from there to people's houses, libraries, museums etc.

Your paper proposes what you are calling the National Public Lightpath. What specifically are you advocating?

NPL proposes creating a publicly-owned piece of the Internet that links together important institutions devoted to the public good, such as public media, the public schools systems, and, eventually, museums and libraries. Ideally, it would eventually spread so that people could plug into NPL at home as well, to , say, complete a homework assignment given at school.

What many people don't understand is how the Internet works - that there are different modes of connecting households and institutions. Some Internet connections, for example, are still run over copper wires, even though copper wires don't permit for very fast transmission. The reason? In the early 1990s, a couple of the big providers bought a lot of copper wire, and don't want to lose out on their investment. NPL advocates using high speed fiber optic cable, which in essence means the "pipes" to your house or school or whatever, would be fatter and thus capable of transmitting a greater amount of data at faster speeds. This is something Japan, Korea and many European countries already have. Many scientific universities are also connected on a network they own communaly called National LamdaRail, a non-profit set up specifically for that purpose. (NPL would build off of the National LamdaRail infastructure, as it already circles the country.) Fatter pipes gives you the ability to transmit vast amounts of data in real time. Imagine your kid in school learning biology by playing with 3-D molecular models being piped into the classroom from a university on the other side of the world - or engaging in peer-to-peer learning by sharing, in real time, virtual worlds they'd built with kids in other country. The possibilities are endless.

Your talk about "empowering an agency to oversee these efforts and become the steward of the internet in the public interest" speaks of a centralized model of public media which is precisely what the internet has in many ways sought to overthrow. Have we gone too far towards decentralization and if so, what areas do require governmental intervention to promote the public interest?

This is a great question. As I mentioned, I don't really go with the whole libertarian thing. I don't have a problem with a society deciding, you know what, education is really important and we're going to create a way to make sure that kids all over the country, no matter where they're from or what color they are get a top notch one. I do think the culture of the Internet is so gung-ho on this idea of "freedom" that they sometimes forget what that word even means. I would argue that the kid who isn't given the skills she needs to be a functioning and engaged part of her society because she wasn't given the critical thinking skills for independent thinking is not really free. That's more important to me that making sure that no agency anywhere ever gets to decide about anything. I'm sick to death of the post-deconstructionist idea that nothing has any inherent meaning, that everything is subjective, etc. It's led to a lot of very smart people adopting a hands off attitude that I think is very dangerous to our future.

You note that most of the key tools which now support public discourse are owned by companies that are "designed to serve shareholders -- not the public." In what ways are these systems being deployed in ways which hurt rather than facilitate the public good?

Well this goes back to my earlier rant. I just always think it's worth pointing out what an organization's goal is. The goal of a for-profit corporation is to earn profits. That is its legal responsibility. So, if making money happens to coincide with the public good, than fantastic, everybody wins. But what happens when it doesn't? Say, keeping drug prices so high that most people in the world can't afford to buy them? Or letting cars go out on the road known to be dangerous because a recall is more expensive then settling law suits?

In the case of the Internet, one needs look no farther than the issue of Net Neutrality. The providers want to be able to charge more for faster speeds. Sounds OK. But all you need to do is think about it for one minute and realize that that's the end of the wonderful, brilliant democracy of the Internet right there and then. Why are they doing this? It's certainly not for the public good; it's to make money. Which, again, is their mandate.

I don't have a problem particularly with a company making money - we live in a capitalist society - I just don't think we should kid ourselves about the implications. We've gone so far towards being market-worshipers, and we've come to view anyone who wants to see the government get involved in any way as being anti-"freedom," that I think we've gotten ourselves into a bit of a mess. With this mind set, we've handed over a vast amount of power to extremely large entities who dont' even nominally have our best interests at heart. This is a problem.

Heather Chaplin is a professor of journalism at The New School and author of the book, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. She recently participated in a Ford Foundation grant looking at issues of the public interest in the next generation of the Internet. She also works with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on issues of digital literacy and journalism. She has been interviewed for and cited in publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Businessweek, and The Believer and has appeared on shows such as Talk of the Nation, and CBS Sunday Morning. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Details, and Salon. She is a regular contributor on game culture for All Things Considered.

How Fictional Story Worlds Influence Real World Politics

Last time, I shared with you the first of a series of occassional field reports and thought pieces from a team I have been putting together at MIT and USC to reflect on what we perceive as a potential continuum from engagement with participatory culture (especially fan communities and practices) and public participation in civic and political activities. As we described last time, this work is currently at a conceptual level as we gather examples of groups which are using elements from popular culture to provide a bridge into real world social and political concerns. Eventually we hope to do more indepth case studies working with organizations and their members to identify best practices that may be increasing young people's civic engagement and from there, develop materials which may foster even greater public participation. This reserarch has been funded in part by the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT (funded by the Knight Foundation) and reflects my involvement in a new John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation initiative focused on youth, new media, and public participation. This time, Flourish Klink, a Master's Candidate in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, shares some of our current thinking about "fictional story worlds" which offer resources that these groups are deploying to think through and intervene in complex real world problems.

The idea may seem radical at first -- breaking with the largely rationalist drive of most contemporary activism. We have had less trouble accepting the premise that works of realist literature -- Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jungle, The Grapes of Wrath -- can become the focal point for movements for social change than we have buying the idea that fantastical realms may do so, even though there is a long history. As someone who has spent much of my life in fandom, I have long seen examples of science fiction inspiring fans to rally support around NASA and manned space flight, say, or more recently, slash fans being moved to actively engage with issues of concern to the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transsexual community or to join fights against censorship and for free expression.

But what has intrigued me the most in recent years is the way fan communities, especially around fantasy texts, are inspiring activism around human rights issues. The green politics often implicit in Anime has sparked growing awareness of environmental issues while J.K. Rowling's background in Amnesty International helps to explain why the Harry Potter books are leading young people to be concerned with repressive governments and human dignity.

The temptation is to evaluate such movements through a focus on the author's implicit or explicit political commitments, yet we may also explore how fans have used these popular platforms as raw materials for their own public engagement, seeking inspiration there for ways they might work through complex real world issues. It is this focus on fandom as a site for exploring and engaging with social concerns that is the central focus of this second installment in the series.

If you know of any groups who are doing interesting work which fuses participatory culture and public participation, please contact me at hjenkins@usc.edu. We are trying to identify as many examples as we can at this stage in our research.

How Fictional Story Worlds Influence Real World Politics

by Flourish Klink

Once upon a time, a hare saw a tortoise ambling along, and began to mock him. The hare challenged the tortoise to a race, and the tortoise accepted. When they began, the hare immediately shot ahead. After running for some time, the hare was very far ahead of the tortoise, so he decided to sit down and have a rest before continuing the race. Sitting under a shady tree, the hare soon fell asleep. The tortoise, plodding on, overtook him, and by the time the hare woke up, the tortoise had already passed the finish line. The moral of this story is that slow and steady wins the race.

As they read stories like this one, out of Aesop's fables, children are primed to seek meanings and morals in the stories they read. What we are taught as children follows us throughout our lives. As teens and adults, we continue to look for meanings in the stories we read. "That was such an inspiring book," we say, or "that movie was so depressing. It really made me feel like there's nothing I can do to fix this messed-up world."

Sometimes, we are inspired to emulate aspects of our favorite stories. For example, when reading The Lord of the Rings, a fan might be inspired by Frodo's willingness to embark upon a long, perilous and dangerous journey, even before he really knows what it will entail, and even though every part of him wants to take the easier route:

"

A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo's side in Rivendell filled his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. 'I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."

Frodo's self-sacrifice and bravery might inspire us to take a chance - to try something new, perhaps. One can imagine that a person might read about Frodo's choice and decide that they, too, can take a journey to a dangerous place for the good of mankind - and sign up for the Peace Corps. Or, on a smaller scale, someone might just decide to start serving the homeless and mentally ill, overcoming her cultural revulsion against and fear of people less fortunate than herself.

This kind of inspiration really relies on you "buying into" the story's world. It doesn't matter whether Frodo is saying heroic things if you find Lord of the Rings boring and Tolkien's style dry as dust. In some sense, if you really care about a story, the characters in it become figures that live in your mind, role models, if you will.

Now think of a different situation. Imagine that, instead of our fictional do-gooder being inspired by Frodo's speech, she is inspired by a persuasive person. Perhaps she goes to a lecture about the issue of homelessness in her town, and at this lecture she meets a woman who runs a soup kitchen and who convinces her to overcome her nervousness at volunteering there. How is this situation different from the first? How is it the same? Is the first situation even realistic? Is the second situation? These are some of the sub-questions we're struggling with in our civic engagement research.

It is well known that people who are involved in the high arts are more likely to volunteer in their communities. However, the reasons for this correlation are not clear. Are people actually inspired to volunteer by high arts? Is it only high arts that can inspire people to become more civically engaged, or can popular culture do it, too? Or is there a more complex situation underpinning the NEA study and these questions?

As Anna ably chronicled in the last post in this series, there are plenty of civically engaged organizations which, to a greater or lesser degree, have formed around particular pop culture texts. There's a wide variety of ways that these organizations activate popular culture. Some of them grew organically out of a fan culture; others were concerned with a particular issue and then decided to use a story to make that issue more compelling. Some started off as very tightly focused on one issue - for instance, Racebending began life as a protest against white actors being cast in Asian roles in the movie The Last Airbender - and eventually branched out into more concerns. Others have always cast their net a bit wider. Still others began as tightly focused and continue to be tightly focused, such as Verb Noire, an e-publishing company dedicated to publishing fiction about groups that have been historically underrepresented in sci-fi and fantasy. What all these organizations have in common, however, is that they mobilize stories to encourage people to become more civically engaged - and in many cases, they were inspired and mobilized by stories.

There's a lot more complexity in the way that these organizations deal with the stories they refer to than might initially meet the eye. In Textual Poachers, Henry refers to fandom as a mix of "fascination and frustration." Never is that more clear than in these organizations. Some of them, like Verb Noire, are dealing directly with aspects of their fandom that they don't like. Other organizations have to negotiate complex and differing understandings of their core story: the Harry Potter Alliance's "What would Dumbledore do?" campaign relies on a perception of Dumbledore as a positive or "good" character, which not all Harry Potter fans share. Some, like Racebending, are dealing with multiple instantiations of a single story and their slight variations, drawing inspiration from some but not all of these versions.

Then, too, relatively simple fictional worlds often provide a starting point for hard thinking about the nuanced real world - hard thinking that goes beyond just "I want to be like Frodo." For example, the Harry Potter Alliance is doing this sort of hard thinking about the issue of witch hunts in Nigeria. In these witch hunts, parents are persuaded to ostracize and abuse their disobedient children, calling them "witches," in the name of performing an exorcism. The pastors who perform the exorcisms frequently charge a great deal of money for the service; if the parents cannot pay, they are told their only option is to completely ostracize or even kill their child. The children who survive often have suffered horrific wounds and incredible emotional trauma, and they are left alone in the world, if they aren't lucky enough to be taken into an orphanage or shelter.

Naturally, witches and wizards are an important part of the Harry Potter books - and the persecution of witches and wizards is an important part of the Harry Potter books. In fact, Harry's aunt and uncle subject him to fairly horrible neglect as a result of his wizarding talents. On the surface, there would seem to be a very direct correlation between the witch-hunts in Nigeria and Harry Potter's childhood in the Harry Potter books, a correlation which the Harry Potter Alliance might rally around.

In reality, however, this correlation was only the start of the conversation. Rather than simply seeing the similarities between Harry's life and the life of a persecuted African child, members of the Harry Potter Alliance also looked for the differences. They discussed, and are still discussing, how the cultural differences between Africa and the developed West might be clouding their understanding of the issue. They discussed the differences between the witch hunts in Nigeria and persecution of Wiccans in the United States (and came to the conclusion that Harry Potter fandom's typical claim - that the books don't lead to witchcraft - is, on some level, complicit with the idea that it is wrong to be Wiccan). And they discussed the ways that cultural flows between churches in the United States and churches in Africa may have contributed to the increased number of witch hunts that are taking place today. In fact, the conversation is still continuing, as they struggle with the question of how to make an intervention without behaving paternalistically towards the African groups involved.

This sort of discussion can take place because the Harry Potter Alliance exists in the context of participatory culture. Rather than receiving information from a central source, group members have access to a social network and to easy email communication with organizers: there's plenty of opportunity for group members to become engaged in debate about the organizations' understanding of the stories they're focused on, and the organizations' actions. This increased communication can sometimes lead to unending debate, it's true: in some more decentralized groups, it can be difficult to come to a decision. When making choices quickly is important, there's nothing like centralized authority. But sometimes, like when the Harry Potter Alliance was thinking about witch hunts in Africa, a longer, slower thought process is appropriate, leading to better decisions. To quote a story with a moral: "slow and steady wins the race!"

On Chuck and Carrot Mobs: Mapping the Connections Between Participatory Culture and Public Participation

One of my proudest moments at the Futures of the Entertainment 4 conference was moderating a session on Transmedia for Social Change, which closed off the first day of the event. This panel brought together a number of people who I have encounter recently through my research on the relations between participatory culture and public participation: Stephen Duncombe - NYU, author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy (The New Press); Andrew Slack - The Harry Potter Alliance; Noessa Higa - Visionaire Media; Lorraine Sammy - Co-creator Racebending; and Jedidiah Jenkins-Director of Public & Media Relations, Invisible Children.

For many attending this event, their discussion of new forms of activism that have emerged around the borders of transmedia entertainment were particularly eye opening While we were able to draw connections across these various projects, none of the panelists had met before and most did not know what the others were doing. It was exciting to see the shift in tone at the conference as we moved from talking about business plans to talking about human rights and social justice. I wanted to share the video of this session with you here.

During my introduction to the panel, I referenced the research we've begun to do trying to better understand how engagement with participatory culture, especially with fandom, may be teaching the skills and creating identities which can be applied to campaigns for social change. This project has launched since my move to California and is being conducted jointly with researchers at USC, MIT, and Tufts. What follows is the first of a series of reports on this still new research initiative, written by members of my team. Anna Van Someren, who wrote this first installment, joined the team having already served as the production manager on Project New Media Literacies, and with a background in media production, media literacy instruction, and social activism. Here, she gives an overview of what we are trying to do.

On Chuck and Carrot Mobs: Mapping the Connections Between Participatory Culture and Public Participation

by Anna Van Someren

I was on my 8th (excruciating) rep, struggling with some kind of bowflex-looking machine when my personal trainer asked what I do for work. As usual, I had the fleeting wish that I could say something short and concrete, something like "preschool teacher" or "novelist". Because really, did this woman care any more than the typical dentist who asks such questions with both hands inside your mouth? Could I finally come up with something a little less opaque than "researcher at MIT"? If I did, could I for once muster the self-discipline it takes not to ramble incomprehensibly?

I tried a new approach, and asked if she had a favorite television show. "Battlestar Galactica!" - her face lit up as she described the Starbuck costume her friend was helping her create for Halloween. "Well, say a Battlestar Galactica fan group became interested in doing some work for social change, work that maybe addresses an issue brought up by the show. The group I'm working with is looking at how people who organize around a story they love, and then decide to take some kind of public action." She seemed genuinely interested, so I continued with more detail during front lunges. I think I may have gotten a bit rambly, but I'll try not to here.

As readers of this blog know, Henry has moved to LA and is now the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California. Although he has relinquished his role as principal investigator at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media (funded by the Knight Foundation), his work on participatory culture and civic engagement has spawned a new research project supported in part by the center. This project is bi-coastal; on the east coast we have myself, research advisor Clement Chau and research assistant Flourish Klink. Representing the west coast out at USC with Henry we have research director Sangita Shresthova (CMS alum '03) along with more than a dozen Annenberg School students whose work relates directly to our research interests.

Our early conversations circled around the skills needed to become involved in public discourse. We discussed emerging forms of engagement, such as the Carrotmob project, which might be considered civic because of its socially beneficial goal of protecting the environment. Carrotmob organizes competitions in which local businesses pledge to make ecological improvements to their practices. The business with the best pledge enjoys an environmentally-motivated flash mob: 'carrotmobbers' receive instructions via blog posts and twitter about where and when to show up and spend.

The 'Finale & a Footlong' Save Chuck campaign is another recent initiative working to leverage consumer power. In April 2009, organizers mobilized fans of the television show Chuck to buy footlong sandwiches at Subway, a main sponsor, on the night of the show's finale. Fans were instructed to leave a note in the Subway suggestion box mentioning the campaign, and Chuck star Zach Levi described it as "a way for non-Nielson fans to show their love of the show by directly supporting one of Chuck's key advertisers".

These two projects have entirely different goals, and some might say Save Chuck is a far cry from civic engagement, but it's interesting to note that the skills and strategies being used are so similar. We began to wonder if participants in campaigns like Save Chuck might stand to gain some of the skills and knowledge needed to become active citizens. With so many young people so engaged with popular culture, this potential is critical to understand. In Convergence Culture, Henry describes how popular culture can function as a civic playground, where lower stakes allow for a greater diversity of opinions than tolerated in political arenas. "One way that popular culture can enable a more engaged citizenry is by allowing people to play with power on a microlevel ...popular culture may be preparing the way for a more meaningful public culture."

Of course, there are differing definitions of what an 'engaged citizenry' looks like. CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Engagement, works with three primary categories: civic activities, electoral activities, and political voice activities. In Civic Life Online, Kate Raynes-Goldie and Luke Walker define civic engagement broadly and simply as "any activity aimed at improving one's community". In his book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam considers civic engagement to be on the decline, and bemoans the social ties we've lost now that we spend more time "isolated" in front of the television. Some share his pessimism, worrying that the millennial generation lacks an interest in the workings of government, but it's important to remember that we're not talking about something static or stabilized. In their paper Young Citizens and Civic Learning: Two Paradigms of Citizenship in the Digital Age Lance Bennett, Alison Rank and Christopher Wells remind us that "citizenship is a dynamic social construction that reflects changing social and political conditions."

So how does the dimension of popular culture fit into our understanding of citizenship? Voting, joining a political party, or doing community service are concrete, measurable activities that have long been defined as civic. What does loving a television show have to do with any of this? It's helpful here to consider two opposing views of democracy described by Stephen Coleman in Civic Life Online. Although he's talking specifically about youth e-citizenship here, he offers a useful model, describing the conflict between democracy viewed as "an established and reasonably just system, with which young people should be encouraged to engage" and as "a political as well as cultural aspiration, most likely to be realized through networks in which young people engage with one another". The second view is expansive; it describes a realm where citizens are empowered not only to participate in the public arena, but to shape it. It's a view that does not contain activity within a strictly political sphere, but embraces cultural citizenship. This aligns well with Peter Levine's definition of civic engagement as not only political activism, deliberation, and problem-solving, but also cultural production, or participation in shaping a culture.

If we want to see how engagement with popular culture can fuel social action, Loraine Sammy and her activities with racebending.com provide a rich case study. Fans of Nickelodeon's Avatar: the Last Airbender animation series were frustrated and disappointed by the casting process for the live-action movie version. Paramount cast the main characters, who are Asian in the original series, with white actors. Avatar fans came together to create the LiveJournal-based Aang Ain't White campaign, which attempted to pressure Paramount with a letter-writing campaign. Loraine, who spoke on the Transmedia for Social Change panel at Futures of Entertainment 4, helped grow Aang Ain't White into the racebending movement, "a coalition and community dedicated to encouraging fair casting practices". She and other participants volunteer their time, talents and skills to advocate on behalf of this cause, which has now reached beyond the Avatar movie and may begin to play a watchdog role in Hollywood.

There are so many aspects we want to explore about the racebending community, and others like it. It's intriguing to think about how fiction and fantasy can captivate us on an emotional level, providing a narrative structure that can motivate us to seek change in the real world. We're also curious about how individuals develop their identities as citizens - is it possible that participants in the Save Chuck campaign were developing a sense of empowerment and efficacy in the world - exercising their civic muscles, as it were? Our primary interest right now lies with the nature of participatory culture communities, like racebending.

We consider a participatory culture to be one where:

1. there are relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. there is strong support for creating and sharing one's creations with others
3. there is some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4. members believe their contributions matter
5. members feel some degree of social connection with one another

How do these characteristics work together to encourage and support civic engagement? To find out, we'll be looking at participatory culture communities engaged in some type of social or public action. We're specifically interested in groups which originally gelled around shared interest in popular culture and then become somehow involved in public discourse. Racebending is an excellent example, and is one of our planned case studies, along with the Harry Potter Alliance, Invisible Children, Browncoats, Anonymous, and possibly the hacktivism inspired by Cory Doctorow's novel Little Brother.

This winter we'll be conducting interviews with members and founders of these groups, asking questions about their operations, their membership, and their activities. By spring we hope to have a stronger grasp on our research question, how do the characteristics of participatory culture environments support the kinds of social learning, deliberation, debate, and advocacy practices that allow entry into a shared public discourse? In order to share our thoughts and findings in advance of our white paper, we'll be posting updates here. This introduction marks the start of our series, so stay tuned for more from our team, and please share your ideas, critiques, and comments.

If you know of other groups or projects who are deploying fan culture/popular culture as a springboard for social change, please let us know. We are trying to cast a wide net right now to identify examples which might help us better understand these emerging forms of activism. We are especially interested in examples from outside the United States.

If you are interested in this discussion of civic engagement and participatory culture, you might also want to check out this video produced by the MacArthur Foundation and showcasing the thinkin of Joe Kahne, who is part of the new research hub MacArthur is creating to think about these issues.

Joe Kahne on Civic Participation Online and Off from Spotlight on Vimeo.

Harry Potter: The Exhibition, or what Location Entertainment Adds to a Transmedia Franchise

While in Cambridge for the Futures of Entertainment conference, my wife and I stopped over at the Boston Museum of Science which is currently playing host to Harry Potter: The Exhibition. We had both attended a fascinating presentation about the design and development of this exhibit during last Summer's Azkatraz convention in San Francisco and so we had high anticipations for the show and were not disappointed. If you live anywhere near Boston, you should definitely try to make it there for the exhibit which runs through Feb. 21. The exhibit is pricy since you have to pay a fee above and beyond the price of admission to the museum itself, but we found it more than worth it.

Since my head was still filled with thoughts from two days of conversations about transmedia entertainment, the exhibit gave me some chances to reflect upon what location based entertainment can contribute to a larger cross-media franchise. Throughout, I will be making reference to some of the principles I introduced in my "The Revenge of the Oragami Unicorn" posts, so if you missed them, you may want to pause now and catch up. We'll wait up for you.

First, we might think of the exhibit as an example of immersion. That is, from the very start, we are encouraged to enter into J.K. Rowling's universe as manifest in the feature film franchise. Before we enter the exhibit, one or two children are asked to step up, put on the sorting hat, and get placed into the proper "house." The museum has lovingly recreated some of the key settings, filled them with costumes and props, and thus offer us a chance to tour the fictional environment. We can, for example, enter into Hagrid's Hut and even sit in his giant chair which dwarfs even the adults in the party, or we can enter the Great Hall as it is decorated for one or another of the festive ocassions depicted in the story. The designers went to some length to minimize the number of glass cases we have to look through, prefering to situate props and costumes in their "natural" settings, such as the Gryfindor Boys Dormatory or a Quiddich Trophy Room.

Some of the professor figures -- such as Lockhart or Umbridge -- get represented through their living quarters. We see the life size self portrait of Lockhart or experience directly the pink monstrosity, complete with mewing cat plates, which is Umbridge's personal quarters. As we enter and exit the exhibit, we must pass the interactive portraits which figure so strongly in the films and our entrance also takes us past the railroad car that the students take from Paddington Station to Hogwarts School.

Often, a sense of being embedded in the world gets created by scale as we find the dementors towering above us when we meet Voldemort and his minions or when we see how much larger than lifesize Hagard's costumes are. There was something magical about the time spent inside the exhibition precisely because it felt as if we had left Boston and entered into the territory of the imagination. Everything was familiar because we knew them so well from the books and films so this sense of immersion was a kind of homecoming.

As may already be suggested from the above, the exhibit focuses primarily around the Harry Potter books and films as a world rather than as a story. We can imagine, for example, a trip which took us through a series of vignettes which lay out the memorable moments from the narrative as a series of spectacular spaces. To a large degree, this sense of transforming events into spaces would characterize many of the earliest exhibits in Fantasyland at the Disney Theme Parks -- the Peter Pan or Snow White rides come to mind as the most obvious examples of this process. And something similar occurs often when films are adopted into video games. After all, games, amusement parks, and museums are organized spatially and our primary experience is a movement through compelling landscapes, but what gets represented in those spaces may have strong or weak narrative hooks.

I will bow here before the ludologists who would argue that such spaces are not narratives -- yet we may see them as evoking familiar narratives, as part of a storytelling system, as alternative ways we experience exposition which alters our relationship to the more overtly narrative manifestations of the franchise.

There are some examples in the Harry Potter exhibition which point to very specific moments in the films -- for example, there's an arrangement of the costumes which the primary characters wore to the Yule Ball which unmistakingly refers to specific events. But most of what is showcased here are recurring elements from the fictional world, scenes which appeared across multiple books or films, even if they are more central to some installments than others. There is a sense of the passing of time contributed by some exhibits which juxtapose the costumes worn by the primary characters over time, allowing us to watch the characters grow up across the series.

The exhibit rewards our sense of fan mastery, both by allowing us to recognize and place for ourselves various costumes and props, thanks to relatively nonintrusive signage. It allows us to examine each artifact closely and often gain new insights into the characters, as we learn by studying Lockhart's exams and realizing that they ask about nothing other than the teacher's own exploits, or scanning the wrappers of the candies or the covers of the textbooks to see details which never really were visible on the screen but help to flesh out the world of the story. This is often what is meant when tourists comment on the attention to detail -- not simply that we get every detail we expect to see there but that looking more closely teaches us things about the world we would not know from consuming the other media manifestations of the franchise. So, we might see this attention to detail as part of the drillability Jason Mittell has described as a property of complex narrative systems.

There was some tension here between the desire to immerse us in a fictional realm and the desire to provide the kinds of annotation and background we anticipate from a museum experience. There are thus video monitors at various points throughout the exhibit, creating a sense of hypermediacy (see Bolter and Grusin's Remediations). These videos offer us just in time glimpses into key scenes from the films which are evoked by the costumes, props, and settings on display. In some ways, seeing the film footage alongside the costume deepened our sense of immersion, while in other senses, it pulled us out of the suspension of disbelief since these monitors had little to do with the world of Hogwarts and everything to do with our experiences as museum goers.

A greater sense of disjunction was created for me by the experience of taking the audio tour where key production people comment on and provide background on the design choices which went into the construction of these costumes and props. After all, the only justification for this exhibit occupying space in a Museum of Science, other than because of its crowd appeal, has to do with showcasing the technical skills and industrial design which went into the production. We might think of the audio tour as something like a director's commentary on the film world -- except that I always find it hard to listen to the director's commentary and remain absorbed in the fiction at the same time. In the case of a DVD, they represent different kinds of experiences, different modes of interpretation.

Yet walking through the immersive exhibit space and listening to the audio tour invited us to think about what we see as real (through suspension of disbelief) and constructed (through our behind the scenes perspective). In some cases, the information provided was illuminating, inviting us to look closely at the costumes as personifying different aspects of the character's personalities, or explaining why lifesize models were created for some of the mythological creatures, like the Horntail dragon. But it always competed with the fantasy I was constructing in my head about getting to visit Hogwarts and its grounds. This is not a challenge that faces amusement park designers, for example, who are able to simply allow us to immerse ourselves in an entertaining fantasy without feeling compelled to offer educational background.

The exhibit clearly functioned as a cultural attractor -- creating a shared space for Harry Potter fans to gather and have common experiences. I found myself engaged in conversations with many of the other patrons in ways I would have been reluctant to do at an art museum, say, or at the science museum in its normal mode. We had a common relationship to this fiction and in one way or another, we were fans.

The exhibit also was a cultural activator, giving us some things to do -- get sorted upon entrance (if you are lucky enough to get picked), rip up a mandrake root and watch it squirm, through a quiddich ball through a hoop, and so forth.

But many of us came into the museum with our own fantasy investments as well. For example, I strongly identify with the Ravenclaw House and its most famous character, Luna Lovegood. I have been "sorted" through a variety of mechanisms through the years and always end up getting placed in Ravenclaw. Over time, I've discovered many of my closest friends in Harry Potter fandom are also self-identified Ravenclaw, which put us in a minority within the fandom, which veers towards Slytherin (and Snape/Malfoy fans) or Griffyndor (with Harry and friends). Indeed, of the two children being sorted on my tour, both had proclaimed fantasies about being Gryffindor, and were so sorted.

Because of this identification, though, I found myself increasingly annoyed that my house was under-represented in the exhibit -- most blatantly in an area which shows the uniforms of three of the four Quiddich team captains, but makes no mention of the Ravenclaw captain. I suppose even in fantasy you can't be an intellectual and a jock at the same time. :-{ We could accept that Luna is a sufficiently secondary character that she would not necessarily be represented but many of the other secondary characters on the same level of obscurity do find at least token acknowledgement here. The "houses" are so central to fan identifications within the Harry Potter world that it strikes me as odd that one house would be so totally neglected -- except for occassional banners -- and it suggests to me the one major misfire in an otherwise respectfully and lovingly created exhibit.

Next time: Transmedia for Social Change

Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: The Remaining Four Principles of Transmedia Storytelling

3. Immersion vs. Extractability These two concepts refer to the perceived relationship between the transmedia fiction and our everyday experiences. At the Studio Ghibli Museum outside of Tokyo, there's a fascinating exhibition on the history of motion pictures. Much of what is there could have been in a western museum on the same topic - various motion toys designed to capture and exploit the persistence of vision. Yet, there are also panorama boxes - little minature worlds which you have to kneel down to look inside, worlds constructed of plastic figurines in front of cellophane backdrops. On the wall, there's a quote from animator Hayao Miyazki, who explains,

"just as people wished to make pictures move, they wished to look inside a different world. They yearned to enter a story or travel to a faraway land. They longed to see the future of the landscapes of the past. The panorama box with no moving parts was made much earlier than the Zoetrope."

Miyazki is making the case, then, that immersion - the ability of consumers to enter into fictional worlds - was the driving force behind the creation of cinema and has fueled the development of many subsequent media. It is certainly not hard to move from the microworlds constructed in the panorama boxes to the microworlds created for contemporary video games. But if we step outside the museum proper and into the gift shop, we see another principle at play. Here, one can buy tiny figures and massive models of key characters, props, and settings from Miyazki's films, or we can buy props and costumes which can become resoures for Cosplay. Ian Condry has made the case that the toy industry in Japan and its need for extractable elements has dramatically shaped the development of anime and manga.

In immersion, then, the consumer enters into the world of the story, while in extractability, the fan takes aspects of the story away with them as resources they deploy in the spaces of their everyday life.

Again, neither principle is new: just as we had panorama boxes in Japan, the movie palaces which sprung up in the United States in the 1920s were instruments of immersion, offering fantastical environments within which to watch movies which were themselves often exploring exotic or faraway worlds, and we might extend immersion to include more contemporary amusement parks, such as the soon to open theme park that seeks to reconstruct the world of Harry Potter or the Dubai based theme park focused around Marvel superheroes to open in 2012 (assuming either Dubai or the world doesn't end before then). On the other end of the spectrum, we can see early examples of extractable content growing up around Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse, Buster Brown, or Charlie Chaplin, to cite a few examples, even around Nanook of the North (which helped to introduce the Eskimo Pie to the American buying public).

4. Worldbuilding.

In Convergence Culture, I quoted an unnamed screenwriter who discussed how Hollywood's priorities had shifted in the course of his career: "When I first started you would pitch a story because without a good story, you didn't really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. and now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media." This focus on world building has a long history in science fiction, where writers such as Cordwainer Smith constructed interconnecting worlds which link together stories scattered across publications.

We can point towards someone like L. Frank Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz books, as someone who had a deep investment in this concept of the author as world builder. For most of us today, The Wizard of Oz is a story - really reduced to a single book from the twenty or so Baum wrote and from there, to only those characters and plot elements that appeared in the MGM musical. Baum would have understood Oz as a world and indeed, he presented himself as the "geographer" of Oz, giving a series of mock travelogue lectures, where he showed slides and short films, which illustrated different places within Oz and hinted at the events which had occurred there. Oz as a place got elaborated not simply through the books but also through comic strip series (recently reprinted), stage musicals, and films, each of which added new places and characters to the overall mix. Some of the Oz books were novelizations and elaborations of stories introduced through these other media. And consistently, the logic of these stories were focused on journeys and travel, so that the Oz franchise was constantly uncovering more parts of the fictional world.

This concept of world building is closely linked to what Janet Murray has called the "encyclopedic" impulse behind contemporary interactive fictions - the desire of audiences to map and master as much as they can know about such universes, often through the production of charts, maps, and concordances. Consider, for example, this map of the character relations which have unfolded in the X-Men universe over the past 40 plus years and compare it to the complex social dynamics ascribed to the great Russian novels, such as Tolstoi's War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Pushing back even earlier, we can see this world building impulse at work in something like the Sistine Chapel Ceiling Murals, which seek to stitch together characters and stories from across many different parts of the Bible into a single coherent representation.

The concept of world building seems closely linked to the earlier principles of immersion and extractability since they both represent ways for consumers to engage more directly with the worlds represented in the narratives, treating them as real spaces which intersect in some way with our own lived realities. Witness the production of travel posters for fictional locations, for example. Many transmedia extensions can be understood as doing something similar to Baum's travel lectures as offering us a guided tour of the fictional setting, literally in the case of a real estate site created around Melrose Place, or simply flesh out our understanding of the institutions and practices.

Increasingly, transmedia producers are creating the media which exists in the fictional world as a way of understanding its own logic, practices, and institutions - so we see, for example, the production of fictional pirate comics within Alan Moore's original Watchmen graphic novels to show us the fantasies of a world where superheroes are a reality, or the newscasts created around the film version of Watchmen, which help us to understand the altered history created by the superhero's intervention into 20th century events.

These extensions may take physical forms, as in the park benches for District 9, which helped us to experience the segregation between humans and aliens. They might include mock advertising campaigns, such as those for Tru-Blood, or political posters, such as those created in support of alien rights in District 9 or vampire rights in True Blood. And they might extend to the production of fictional media franchises and fandoms, such as Jesse Alexander has created for Sargasso Planet in his upcoming Day One miniseries.

5. Seriality

The idea of seriality has an equally long history, which we can trace back to 19th century literary figures, such as Charles Dickens or the Dumas factory, and which took on new significance with the rise of movie serials in the early 20th century. Indeed, Kim Deitch's Alias the Cat graphic novel uses this earlier historical moment to comment on our current push towards transmedia entertainment, with his protagonist gradually drawing connections between events depicted in movie serials, comic strips, live theatrical events, and news stories, suggesting ways that an earlier media system might tell a story across multiple platforms.

We might understand how serials work by falling back on a classic film studies distinction between story and plot. The story refers to our mental construction of what happened which can be formed only after we have absorbed all of the available chunks of information. The plot refers to the sequence through which those bits of information have been made available to us. A serial, then, creates meaningful and compelling story chunks and then disperses the full story across multiple installments. The cliff-hanger represents an archtypical moment of rupture where one text ends and closure where one text bleeds into the next, creating a strong enigma which drives the reader to continue to consume the story even though our satisfaction has been deferred while we await the next installment.

We can think of transmedia storytelling then as a hyperbolic version of the serial, where the chunks of meaningful and engaging story information have been dispersed not simply across multiple segments within the same medium, but rather across multiple media systems. There still is a lot we don't know about what will motivate consumers to seek out those other bits of information about the unfolding story - ie. What would constitute the cliffhanger in a transmedia narrative - and we still know little about how much explicit instruction they need to know these other elements exist or where to look for them. As we work on these problems, there is a great deal we can learn by studying classic serial forms of fiction, such as the serial publication of novels or the unfolding of chapters in movie serials or even in comic book series.

Early writing on transmedia (mine included) may have made too much of the nonlinear nature of the transmedia entertainment experience, suggesting that the parts could be consumed within any order. Increasingly, we are seeing companies deploy very different content and strategies in the build up to the launch of the "mother ship" of the franchise than while the series is on the air or after the main text has completed its cycle. So there's work to be done to understand the sequencing of transmedia components and whether, in fact, it really does work to consume them in any order. We are, however, seeing some very elaborate plays with time lines and seriality occurring as the stories of television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, or Supernatural extend into comics, or consider the ways that each of the Battlestar Galactica films has added some new chunk to the timeline of that particular universe.

6. Subjectivity

Transmedia extensions, then, may focus on unexplored dimensions of the fictional world, as happens when Star Wars games pick up on particular groups - such as the bounty hunters or podracers - and expands upon what was depicted in the films. Transmedia extensions may broaden the timeline of the aired material, as happens when we rely on comics to fill in back story or play out the long term ramifications of the depicted events (see for example the use of animation in the build up to The Dark Knight or The Matrix Reloaded). A third function of transmedia extensions may be to show us the experiences and perspectives of secondary characters. These functions may be combined as they were with the Heroes webcomics, which provided backstories and insights into the large cast of characters as the series was being launched. These kinds of extensions tap into longstanding readers interest in comparing and contrasting multiple subjective experiences of the same fictional events.

We may learn a good deal about this aspect of transmedia by looking at the tradition of epistolary novels. Works like Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, or Dracula, constructed fictional diaries, letters, even transcripts. While they are contained within a single binder, they can be described as transmedia works insofar as they imitate multiple genres, including both manuscript and print forms of prose, and thus invite us to construct the fictional reality from these fragments. Typically, the author constructed himself or herself as having found these documents rather than constructed them, much as ARGs often refuse to acknowledge that they are games or works like The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity pretend to be constructed from found footage.

As we read such works, we are encouraged to be aware of who is writing and who they are writing for, thus using the letters or diaries to help further construct the relationships between characters. Something similar occurs when we look at the mock websites constructed around transmedia fictions - for example, District 9 was accompanied by a website for an alien rights organization which directly challenges some of the claims made by the government characters in the film and in some cases, we are seeing mock government propaganda footage as it is being "read against the grain" by these resistant organizations, thus creating a layered subjectivity. If Ghost Whispererr, the television series, is about a human woman who speaks with ghost, the webisode series, "The Other Side," shares the perspective of ghost who speak to human women. The promoters of 2012 recently sparked controversy when they created a mock educational website that while clearly marked as tied to a fictional film represented "scientific" perspectives on why the world was ending, a site which provoked responses from NASA who were concerned that it might be misleading the public about actual scientific thoughts and theories about the state of the universe.

This focus on multiple subjectivities is giving rise to the use of Twitter as a platform through which fans (Mad Men) or authors (Valmont) can elaborate on the secondary characters and their responses to events represented in the primary text. We even saw this focus on multiple subjectivities extend into reality television this season when Project Runway, which focuses on the designers, added a second series, which focused on the same events as experienced by "The Models of the Runway."

Transmedia texts often rely on secondary characters because it is too costly to bring the primary actors over to work in lower yield media like mobisodes and webisodes. Yet, we have a lot to learn about how to turn this into a strength by exploiting the audience's desire to see through more than one set of eyes. Battlestar Galactica's webisode series, "The Face of the Enemy," showed some of this potential in focusing around Felix Gaeta, a previously marginalized figure on the series, and creating interest as they lead into a season where he was going to play a much more central role; the episodes fleshed out his backstory, explored his motivations, and hinted at some of the future developments, all within a short and largely self-contained storyline.

7. Performance

In Convergence Culture, I introduced two related concepts - cultural attractors (a phrase borrowed from Pierre Levy) and cultural activators. Cultural attractors draw together a community of people who share common interests - even if it is simply the common interest in figuring out who is going to get booted from the island next. Cultural activators give that community something to do. My classic example would be the map flashed in short bursts in the second season of Lost. Hardcore fans were motivated to create their own screengrabs, share them online, construct their own maps, and try to decipher the cryptic text and figure out how it related to the depicted events. Increasingly, producers are being asked to think about what fans are going to do with their series and to design in spaces for their active participation. Sharon Marie Ross discusses these as invitational strategies, suggesting that these can be explicit (as in the appeals to vote on So You Think You Can Dance) or implicit (as in the depiction inside the series of fans in The O.C. or mobile social networks in Gossip Girl.)

But even without those invitations, fans are going to be actively identifying sites of potential performance in and around the transmedia narrative where they can make their own contributions. Indeed, much of the discussion at Futures of Entertainment this year centered around various ways that producers were engaging with these fans, supporting, "harvesting," or shutting down their own creative contributions. In my original talk, I refer to "fan performance" but it was pointed out through these discussions that producers are also "performing" their relationship to both the text and the audience through their presence online or through director's commentary. We typically think of these director commentaries as "nonfiction" or "documentary" breaking down the fiction to show us the behind the scenes production process, yet some authors - Ron Moore in the case of Battlestar Galactica or JMS in the case of Babylon 5 - deploy these platforms to expand our understanding of the fictional worlds, the characters, and depicted events, suggesting that they may also be understood as an expansion of the narrative and not simply an exposition on its conditions of production.

As Louisa Stein noted at the conference, there's still much to be explored as we expand the discourse of transmedia entertainment to engage more fully with issues being raised by those working in the fan studies tradition. I can't fully elaborate on these issues now, but in the talk, I simply pointed to some examples of these fan-made extensions, such as the performance videos on YouTube where fans re-enact or lip sinc musical numbers from Glee which Alex Leavitt discussed on the Convergence Culture Consortium blog recently, or The Hunt for Gollum, a fan constructed extension of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, or Star Wars Uncut, where each fan is allowed to reconstruct a single shot from the George Lucas film, which no unfolds through a giddy array of representational strategies (claymation, lego, drag queens, manipulated or re-enacted footage).

I also suggested that we can understand transmedia activism, such as that illustrated by the HP Alliance, which deploys themes, characters, and situations from the J.K. Rowling narratives to motivate real world social change, as a logical extension both of performance and of the tension between extractability and immersion. All of these represent unauthorized forms of extension which are not directly acknowledged in the primary text. Yet, a central theme running through the conference centered on how these fan productions and performances might feed back into the creation of the commercial transmedia franchise itself, with Purefold being held up as an emerging model which deploys crowdsourcing and Creative Commons liscensing to encourage viewer contributions to thinking through future directions in the series.

So there you have them - seven core principles of transmedia storytelling. Is this an exhaustive list? Probably not. Some of them weren't even fully on my radar at the start of the semester. These represent insights into the various transmedia experiments we've seen so far. Some of these have drawn a good deal of critical attention, while others represent new and unexplored spaces. Most point to ways that transmedia connects to historic cultural practices and thus can draw insights from historical and critical writing on those practices. Most point to ways that the study of transmedia narrative needs to reconnect with the study of commercial industries and fan communities if we are to really understand the dynamic being created by these interventions. And most of them point to new spaces for creative experimentation.

If you are enjoying this discussion of transmedia, stay tuned. More is coming next week including some previews of the work we are doing on transmedia activism. For now, you can check out two more of the sessions from Futures of Entertainment 4 which deal with transmedia issues.

Session 1: Producing Transmedia Experiences: Stories in a Cross-Platform World

Moderator: Jason Mittell - Middlebury College

Panelists: Brian Clark - Partner and CEO, GMD Studios; Michael Monello- Co-Founder & Creative Director, Campfire; Derek Johnson - University of North Texas; Victoria Jaye - Acting Head of Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, BBC; Patricia Handschiegel - Serial Entrepeneur, Founder of Stylediary.net

Case Study: Transmedia Design and Conceptualization - The Making of Purefold

Moderator: Geoffrey Long - Gambit-MIT

Panelists include: David Bausola - Co-founder of Ag8; Tom Himpe - Co-founder of Ag8; Mauricio Mota - Chief Storytelling Officer, co-founder The Alchemists; C3 Consulting Practitioner; Leo Sa - Petrobras

The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling (Well, Two Actually. Five More on Friday)

Across the next two weeks, we will be rolling out the webcast versions of the sessions we hosted during the recent Futures of Entertainment 4 conference held last month at MIT. (see Monday's post for the session on Grant McCracken's Chief Culture Officer). Many of the conference sessions were focused around the concept of transmedia entertainment. The team asked me to deliver some opening remarks at the conference which updated my own thinking about transmedia and introduced some basic vocabulary which might guide the discussion. My remarks were largely off the cuff in response to power point slides, but I am making an effort here to capture the key concepts in writing for the first time. You can watch the recording of the actual presentation here and/or read along with this text.

Many of these ideas were informed by the discussions I've been having all semester long within my Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment class at the University of Southern California.

Revenge of the Oragami Unicorn: Seven Core Concepts of Transmedia Storytelling

[Electronic Arts game designer] Neil Young talks about "additive comprehension." He cites the example of the director's cut of Blade Runner, where adding a small segment showing Deckard discovering an origami unicorn invited viewers to question whether Deckard might be a replicant: "That changes your whole perception of the film, your perception of the ending...The challenge for us, especially with the Lord of the Rings is how do we deliver that one piece of information that makes you look at the films differently?" -- Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collides (2006).

I first introduced my concept of transmedia storytelling in my Technology Review column in 2003 and elaborated upon it through the "Searching for the Oragami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling" chapter in Convergence Culture. For me, the origami unicorn has remained emblematic of the core principles shaping my understanding of transmedia storytelling, a kind of patron saint for what has emerged as increasing passionate and motivated community of artists, storytellers, brands, game designers, and critics/scholars, for whom transmedia has emerged as a driving cause in their creative and intellectual lives. We all have somewhat different definitions of transmedia storytelling and indeed, we don't even agree on the same term - with Frank Rose talking about "Deep Media" and Christy Dena talking about "Cross-media."

As Frank has put it, same elephant, different blind men. We are all groping to grasp a significant shift in the underlying logic of commercial entertainment, one which has both commercial and aesthetic potentials we are still trying to understand, one which has to do with the interplay between different media systems and delivery platforms (and of course different media audiences and modes of engagement.)

Whatever we call it, transmedia entertainment is increasingly prominent in our conversations about how media operates in a digital era - from recent books (such as Jonathon Gray's Show Sold Seperately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts and Chuck Tryon's Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence) to dedicated websites (such as the Narrative Design Exploratorium which has been running a great series of interviews with transmedia designers and storytellers) and websites created by transmedia producers, such as Jeff Gomez, to explain the concept to their clients. We are seeing senior statesmen across multiple disciplines - from David Bordwell in film studies to Don Norman in design research - weigh in on the aesthetics and design of transmedia experiences. All of this influx of new interest invites us to pull back and lay out some core principles that might shape our development or analysis of transmedia narrative and to revise some of our earlier formulations of this topic.

Six years ago, fans and critics were shocked at the idea of transmedia as they first encountered what the Wachowski Brothers were doing around The Matrix. Now, there is almost a transmedia expectation, as occurred when fans of Flash Forward complained recently because the series introduced a Url on the air and then only provided impoverished extensions to those fans who tracked down the link. Have we reached the point where media franchises are going to be judged harshly if they do not sustain our hunger for transmedia content?

Let me start with the following definition of transmedia storytelling as an operating principle: "Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story." Some of what I will say here will complicate this conception of a "unified and coordinated entertainment experience," as we factor in the unauthorized, grassroots expansion of the text by fans or consider the ways that franchises might value diversity over coherence in their exploration of fictional worlds.

We should be clear that narrative represents simply one kind of transmedia logic which is shaping the contemporary entertainment realm. We might identify a range of others - including branding, spectacle, performance, games, perhaps others - which can operate either independently or may be combined within any given entertainment experience. During the conference, Nancy Baym asked us to think about when and how music has gone transmedia. We struggled to come up with examples - everyone of course immediately latched onto the ARG created around the Nine Inch Nails; I proposed the Comic Book Tatoo where artists and writers used Tori Amos songs as their inspiration. The question looks different, though, if we ask about transmedia performance, because most contemporary musical artists perform across multiple media - minimally live and recorded performance, but also video and social network sites and twitter and...

We might also draw a distinction between transmedia storytelling and transmedia branding, though these can also be closely intertwined. So, we can see something like Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader as a extension of the transmedia narrative that has grown up around Star Wars because it provides back story and insights into a central character in that saga. (Thanks to Geoffrey Long for this example) By comparison, a Star Wars breakfast cereal may enhance the franchise's branding but it may have limited contribution to make to our understanding of the narrative or the world of the story. The idea that Storm Troopers might be made of sugar sweet marshmellow bits probably contradicts rather than enhances the continuity and coherence of the fictional world George Lucas was creating.

Where does this leave the Star Wars action figures? Well, they represent resources where players can expand their understanding of the fictional world through their play. Minimally, they enhance transmedia play, but in so far as coherent stories emerge through this play, they may also contribute to the expansion of the transmedia story. And indeed, writers like Will Brooker and Jonathon Gray have made compelling arguments for the specific ways these toys expanded or reshaped the transmedia narrative, adding, for example, to the mystique around Boba Fett.

While we are making distinctions, we need to distinguish between adaptation, which reproduces the original narrative with minimum changes into a new medium and is essentially redundant to the original work, and extension, which expands our understanding of the original by introducing new elements into the fiction. Of course, this is a matter of degree - since any good adaptation contributes new insights into our understanding of the work and makes additions or omissions which reshape the story in significant ways. But, I think we can agree that Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet is an adaptation, while Tom Stoppard's Rosencranz & Guildenstern Are Dead expands Shakespeare's original narrative through its refocalization around secondary characters from the play.

My own early writing about transmedia may have over-emphasized the "newness" of these developments, excited as I was to see how digital media was extending the potential for entertainment companies to deliver content around their franchises. Yet, Derrick Johnson has made strong arguments that the current transmedia moment needs to be understood in relation to a much longer history of different strategies for structuring and deploying media franchises. Indeed, when I head to University of Southern California each morning to teach, I am given a forceful reminder of these earlier stages in the evolution of transmedia entertainment in the form of a giant statue of Felix the Cat which has sat atop a local car dealership since the 1920s and has become a beloved Los Angeles landmark. Felix, as Donald Crafton, has shown us was a transmedia personality, whose exploits moved across the animated screen and comics to become the focus of popular music and merchandising, and he was one of the first personalities to get broadcast on network American television. We might well distinguish Felix as a character who is extracted from any specific narrative context (given each of his cartoons is self-contained and episodic) as opposed to a modern transmedia figure who carries with him or her the timeline and the world depicted on the "mother ship," the primary work which anchors the franchise. As I move through this argument, I will connect transmedia to earlier historical practices, trying to identify similarities and differences along the way.

1. Spreadability vs. Drillability

At last year's Futures of Entertainment conference, we unrolled the concept of "spreadability" which is the central focus of my next book, which is now being written with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. Spreadability refered to the capacity of the public to engage actively in the circulation of media content through social networks and in the process expand its economic value and cultural worth. Writing in response to that argument, Jason Mittell has proposed a counterveiling principle, what he calls "drillability" which has some close connection to Neil Young's concept of "additive comprehension" cited above. Mitell's discussion of drillability is worth quoting at length here:

"Perhaps we need a different metaphor to describe viewer engagement with narrative complexity. We might think of such programs as drillable rather than spreadable. They encourage a mode of forensic fandom that encourages viewers to dig deeper, probing beneath the surface to understand the compleity of a sotry and its telling. Such programs create magnets for engagement, drawing viewers into the storyworlds and urging them to drill down to discover more...The opposition between spreadable and drillable shouldn't be thought of as a hierarchy, but rather as opposing vectors of cultural engagement. Spreadable media encourages horizontal ripples, accumulating eyeballs without necessarily encouraging more long-term engagement. Drillable media typically engage far fewer people, but occupy more of their time and energies in a vertical descent into a text's complexities."

A key phrase here may be "necessarily" since we've seen that helping to spread the message may well be central to enhancing viewer engagement and may encourage further participation - as we've seen in the past few weeks where the release of Susan Boyle's album, more than six months after the participatory circulation of her original video, has broken sales records this year, swamping by something like seven to one the release of an album by American Idol winner Adam Lambert.

Yet, Mittell invites us to think of a world where many of us are constantly scanning for media franchises that interest us and they drilling down deeper once we find a fiction that captures our imagination. Both potentials may be built into the same transmedia franchise, yet they represent, as he suggests, different dimensions of the experience, and there may well be cases where a franchise sustains spreadability without offering any real depth to drill into or offers depth and complexity without offering strong incentives to pass it along through our social networks. More work needs to be done to fully understand the interplay between these two impulses which are shaping current entertainment experiences.

2. Continuity vs. Multiplicity

I mentioned earlier that some of my recent thinking about transmedia starts to challenge the idea of a "unified experience" which is "systematically" developed across multiple texts. It is certainly the case that many transmedia franchises do indeed seek to construct a very strong sense of "continuity" which contributes to our appreciation of the "coherence" and "plausibility" of their fictional worlds and that many hardcore fans see this kind of "continuity" as the real payoff for their investment of time and energy in collecting the scattered bits and assembling them into a meaningful whole. We can see the elaborate continuities developed around the DC and Marvel superheroes as a particular rich example of the kind of "continuity" structures long preferred by the most dedicated fans of transmedia entertainment.

Yet, if we use these comic book publishers as a starting point, we can see them pushing beyond continuity in more recent publishing ventures which rely on what I described in my contributions to Third Person as a logic of "multiplicity." So, for example, we can see Spider-Man as part of the mainstream continuity of the Marvel universe, but he also exists in the parallel continuity offered by the Ultimate Spider-Man franchise, and we can see a range of distinctly separate mini-franchises, such as Spider-Man India (which sets the story in Mumbai) or Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane (which stands alone as a romance comic series for young female readers). And indeed, some of these experiments - Spider-Man India, the DC Elseworlds series - use multiplicity - the possibility of alternative versions of the characters or parallel universe versions of the stories - as an alternative set of rewards for our mastery over the source material.

Multiplicity allows fans to take pleasure in alternative retellings, seeing the characters and events from fresh perspectives, and comics publishers trust their fans to sort out not only how the pieces fit together but also which version of the story any given work fits within. We can compare this with the laborious process the producers had to go through to launch the recent Star Trek film, showing us that it does indeed take place in the same universe as the original and is part of the original continuity, but the continuity has to be altered to make way for the new performers and their versions of the characters.

This pleasure in multiplicity is not restricted to comics, as is suggested by the recent trend to take works in public domain, especially literary classics, and mash them up with more contemporary genres - such as Pride and Predjudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, or Little Women and Werewolves.

The concept of multiplicity paves the way for us to think about fan fiction and other forms of grassroots expression as part of the same transmedia logic - unauthorized extensions of the "mother ship" which may nevertheless enhance fan engagement and expand our understanding of the original. For those franchises where there is a strong desire to police and preserve continuity, fan fiction can be experienced by producers as a threat, something which may disrupt the coherence of their unfolding story, but where we embrace a logic of multiplicity, they simply become one version among many which may offer us interesting insights into who these characters are and what motivates their behavior.

In my class and at the conference, this concept of multiplicity has been experienced as liberating, allowing us to conceive of alternative configurations of transmedia, and lowering some of the anxiety about making sure every detail is "right" when collaborating across media platforms. My key point, though, would be that there needs to be clear signaling of whether you are introducing multiplicity within the franchise, as well as consistency within any given "alternative" version of the central storyline.

TO BE CONTINUED

From Cool Hunters to Chief Culture Officers: An Interview with Grant McCracken

One of the high points of our recent Futures of Entertainment conference was a presentation by Anthropologist/Consultant/Blogger Grant McCracken on his new book, Chief Culture Officier: How to Create a Living Breathing Corporation. McCracken is a lively and engaging speaker and one of the most provocative thinkers I know when it comes to addressing the social, cultural, technological and economic changes shaping the world around us. McCracken has long been part of the brain trust behind the Convergence Culture Consortium and he writes an exceptional blog, This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. I had a chance to read Grant's book in draft form and have been eagerly awaiting its release because of the conversation it is going to spark both within universities and within corporations about the value of cultural insights for modern business and where those insights were likely to come from. When we launched the Comparative Media Studies Program a decade ago, one of our early backers encouraged us to train our students for jobs that didn't have names yet -- jobs which depended on their ability to think across media and to understand the intersection of culture, technology, and industry. Through the years, many of our best students went into industry, often into jobs created around their expertise and talent. Recently, we've called them "thought leaders." I've seen these same kind of students through the professional programs in Annenberg and the Cinema School at USC. I constantly meet prospective students with this kind of vision for their future, but so far, few academic programs have embraced this alternative professional trajectory for their students or have developed curriculum which encourage a more applied perspective.

McCracken proposes a new title, "Chief Culture Officer," and argues that the most powerful companies in th world need to have people in the top ranks of their leadership whose primary job is to attend to the culture around them. While some may disagree, I would contend this expertise is most likely to come from programs in media and cultural studies, anthropology, and other branches of the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. It certainly is not the expertise fostered in most business schools. If we take McCracken's arguments here seriously, they have implications for how we train our students -- not limiting them for an increasingly constipated academic job market but giving them the background and experience they would need to navigate through a range of other sectors being impacted by media change. And it also has implications for how companies think about their consumers, how they anticipate new developments and how they pay respect to more stable, slower changing aspects of their culture.

All of these issues surfaced during the panel discussion which followed Grant's presentation. Respondents included am Sam Ford - Director of Customer Insights, Peppercom, and C3 Research Affiliate; Jane Shattuc - Emerson College; and Leora Kornfeld - Research Associate, Harvard Business School. The moderator was William Uricchio, chair of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program. You can watch the video of the event here.

I was lucky enough to get Grant McCracken to address some of the key issues in the book in an exclusive interview for this blog conducted earlier this fall. Here, he lays out some of the key premises of the book and its implications for how companies and universities think about the future.

What do you mean by a "chief culture officer" and what role would such a person play within the modern corporation?

Corporations have been notoriously bad at reckoning with culture. They manage the "problem of culture" with ad hocery of many kinds. They call on ad agencies, consultants, gurus and cool hunters and, when all else fails, the intern down the hall. But there is no single person and, worse, there is no senior manager. Even as culture grows ever more dynamic, various, demanding, and participatory. So that's my argument: there ought to be someone in the C-Suite who's job it is to reckon with culture and to spot the opportunities and dangers it represents.

Your professional training was in anthropology yet you've spent much of your career as a cultural consultant. What kinds of advice have companies sought from you? What has been the biggest adjustment you've had to make from anthropology as it exists in the university to ethnography as a basis for making business decisions?

Sometimes I am supplying the ethnography, and this means quizzing consumers about how they see the world. This is culture from the bottom up, as it were. Sometimes I am supplying anthropology and this means reporting on the categories, distinctions and rules that make up our culture. This is culture from the top down, so to say.

As to the adjustment, it was a horrible slog for awhile, like riding uneven circus ponies. But eventually my academic self and my consulting self found a way to work together. There are moments of surprising coincidence and the interactive effect can be terrific. And then of course you find a way to respect the demands of Christ by forgetting Caesar (and the other way round.) The good news is that consulting forces a grueling pace of problem solving that builds skills for one's academic work, I think. And vice versa.

You cite "Cool Hunters" as enemies of the Culture Officer. What are the limits of the current "cool hunting" process and how does it lead companies astray?

The trouble with cool hunters is that they are a little like cats. Cats have more rods in the retina than we do and this gives them the ability to see movement better than we do. The price that cats and coolhunters pay for this adaption is that they are not very good at seeing things when these things are still. Which is a too elaborate way of saying cool hunters are maximally responsive to culture in motion and disinclined to take an interest in culture when more static. Actually, we can go further than this. Cool hunters are generally pretty hopeless when it comes to the deeper, slower and more static aspects of culture. They don't even appear to know that they exist. If one had to guess at a metric only something like 30% of our culture is fad and fashion. That means the better of our culture escapes the grasp of the cool hunter and the corporation who relies on him/her.

What is the argument for embedding cultural expertise within the company rather than outsourcing it through some kind of consulting firm?

There are two problems with hiring in culture expertise. Culture is increasingly various and changeable. Corporations are increasingly complex and changeable. To find the fit between them takes an exquisite knowledge of both. Hiring culture knowledge in gives the corporation a collection of partial views as rendered by people who may or may not understand the corporation. No corporation would dream of handling finance, technology, human relations this way. It's something that has to be done in-house to be done well.

What should humanities programs be doing differently in order to fully prepare their students for the position of chief culture officer?

Humanities programs turn out to be the heroes of the piece. It gives people the frame-shifting, assumption-jumping, intellectual nimbleness they need to reckon with the complexities of culture and the corporation. We spend a lot of time these days looking at new developments and asking, "is this something or nothing really?" and if it's something, "Ok, is this X1, X2 or notX at all?" The liberal arts are wonderfully good at cultivating this gift. Certainly, engineering and finance create formidable intellectual abilities. The most fluid, the most elegant mind I trained at the Harvard Business School was a product of the British military. So, clearly, many cognitive styles qualify. But the humanities have a certain advantage. They seem to endow people with the pattern recognition the CCO needs. Of course, the humanities have problems of their own. Postmodernism has turned many minds to mush.

One model for cultural analysis which has gained some traction in the corporate world is Eric Von Hipple's concept of the lead user. Von Hipple encourages companies to use early adapters as test-beds for their products, often looking there for insights which may allow them to innovate and refine their offerings. How does this model align with your claims for the value of ethnographic perspectives in the board room?

Lead users are useful. The trouble is they are so enthusiastic about an innovation they are perfectly happy to make any adjustments necessary to adopt it. And as Geoffrey Moore says, this makes them a bad guide to the larger market of later adopters. These people expect the innovation to conform to them. And this takes another order (and probably another round) of product development, which development must be informed by our knowledge of the cultural meanings and practices in place. Without cultural knowledge, the innovation cannot "jump the chasm" to use Geoffrey Moore's famous phrase. (All of this is Moore's argument.) Ethnography is especially useful as a way of discovering what this culture is.

You write about the "Apollo Theater effect," as you try to explain the shifting relations between cultural producers and consumers. Explain. Why may we be outgrowing the concept of consumption?

I take your lead here, Henry. As you demonstrated so early and so well, more consumers are becoming producers, and this makes us as Apollo theatre audience of us all. Because we make so much culture, we have become more observant and critical, and less passive in our consumption of other's productions. And on these grounds I've suggested that perhaps its time that we start called "consumers" "multipliers." I except your wisdom here: "if it doesn't spread, it's dead."

Some companies are now monitoring Twitter to try to see how consumers are responding to them. What are the strengths and limits of this approach?

This is a good and necessary idea, as a way of spotting emergent concerns around which consumers are organizing themselves. On the other hand, Twitter is very like a key hole. It's hard to see very much and unless we follow up with some more thorough inquiry, we are missing a great deal.

Many executives assume that cultural knowledge is "intuitive," something they absorb by growing up in a culture. Yet, you are arguing that cultural knowledge requires a certain kind of expertise. Why is intuition not enough?

Intuition is indeed the instrument by which we often deliver cultural insights, but it is also a way for the corporation to diminish cultural intelligence by calling them "soft" "vaque," and "impressionistic." As we become more expert, more professional and more disciplined about our study of culture, I hope we will encourage a new comprehension of what culture knowledge is and how it adds value.

Does the cultural knowledge companies need become even more of a challenge as companies start to do business on a global scale?

Indeed, this is a challenge. How do we speak to several cultures and many segments with a single voice. There is a global culture in the works. It will be a long time coming, but it is coming. But as you and others have pointed out, the real opportunity for the world of communications is to move from the monolithic message to the nuanced, multiple one. We can speak to many communities with many voices, and this really takes a virtuoso control of knowlege and communication. The good news is that as we engage more consumers in acts of cocreation, they will help.

You've argued for advertising and branding as activities which are involved in the management and production of meanings. How would branding change in a world where more companies had chief culture officers?

Yes, that's my hope, that the presence of a CCO would make the corporation better at the production and management of meanings. At some point, I think, our destination must be this: a living, breathing corporation, that fully participates in and draws from and gives to the culture around it. We will have to teach the old dog many new tricks to make this possible. Old asymmetries and boundaries and assumptions will have to be broken down. The good news is that many of the old models are just not working and the corporation in its way has always been keenly interested in what works. I'm hoping the book will help a little here.

Grant McCracken holds a PhD from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. He is the author of Big Hair, Culture and Consumption, Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning and Brand Management, Flock and Flow, The Long Interview, Plenitude: Culture by Commotion, Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture, and Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation. He has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum), a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and he is now an adjunct professor at McGill University. He has consulted widely in the corporate world, including the Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, Chrysler, Kraft, Kodak, and Kimberly Clark. He is a member of the IBM Social Networking Advisory Board.

Inside the Computer Clubhouse (Part Three of Three)

Would it be possible to do what the Computer Clubhouses do in the context of more formalized educational structures? Why or why not?

YASMIN: We have many examples of schools that adopt the premise of self-directed work for students who with assistance of teachers and other peers dig deeply into projects rather than to follow textbooks. Schools and classrooms like these think about themselves as communities of learners rather than as a collection of individuals. Examples are the recently opened "Quest to Learn" school in New York City; here in Philadelphia, I know of the Science Leadership Academy.

But to become a school like this requires some fundamental changes in how we organize learning in general, what the roles of students and teachers are, and what the role of technology is - how it's being used for research, exchange and production. The Computer Clubhouse also reconceptualized the role of the coordinator. We conducted many interviews with coordinators, community organizers and network administrators to get a better sense on what a job description for clubhouse coordinator would be like - part social worker, youth support, art teacher, mentor - it's not a traditional role when you're there to support youth in creative endeavors. I think the same would apply to teachers, principals, and administrators who want to adopt the principles of the Computer Clubhouse model in their schools.

You write, "The Computer Clubhouse is not a computer lab." Explain the difference.

YASMIN: Actually Gail Breslow, the director of the Computer Clubhouse Network made this statement in an interview that we conducted with her. The picture that people have of a computer lab is one with rows of computers facing walls and students not interacting with each other as they're running programs. The picture of a Computer Clubhouse is very different: computers in clusters so that youth can talk to the person right next to them and see what they're doing and a green table in the middle with no computers on it that serves as play and meeting space.

ROBBIN: Computer labs provide an invaluable service by making digital technologies available to its clients. These labs, however, are not designed to generate a learning community and to respond to needs and situations outside of the use of computer equipment and computer resources. The Clubhouse provides access to digital technology, but that is just the beginning. In fact, the Clubhouse is primarily a learning community, both for learning to use technology for creative expression and becoming a lifelong learner.

You place a strong emphasis on helping young people to learn how to program. What do you see as the value of programming, as opposed to other kinds of digital skills, such as networking or storytelling?

KYLIE: It's not really an either/or proposition. Certainly, social networking and digital storytelling are important skills in the 21st Century. Learning to computer program is really about learning the language of the computer. Now, I'm an artist and not a programmer by trade, so it's probably surprising that I would see the value in learning to program. By championing programming as a critical skill for today's youth, I'm not advocating for a generation of hackers insomuch as I'm seeing programming as a key step in moving youth from consumers to producers, and learning to program provides transparency into how software and computers operate and give youth some degree of control over their interactions with the computer. Casey Reas and others have called this "software literacy" because at the heart of using the computer as a creative medium is learning how to manipulate it and to create your own software in a sense. You really don't need to look far to see how people are taking up this type of literacy on a widespread scale--The iPhone app phenomenon is one example where everyday people are creating their own apps. This is also catching on in youth communities. It's not as hard to do as it might seem--As the book illuminates, the field has produced several shortcut tools (see for example Scratch or Processing) that allow youth (and adults alike) to use programming concepts in a way that is more user-friendly to novices. As evidenced by burgeoning online communities of tween/teen game designers, animators and digital artists, learning to code creatively is becoming to today's generation what learning to read and write was to those growing up in the 20th Century. Furthermore, media projects (like the Scratch projects described in the book) emphasize graphic, music and video -- media at the core of youths' technology interests and thus provide new opportunities to broaden participation of under-represented groups in the design and invention of new technologies.

ROBBIN: Programming constructs can be viewed as another instance of Papert's "gears." In Papert's case, his play with gears gave him insight into more powerful mathematical ideas of differentials, etc. Programming can give learners insights into more powerful ideas such as convergence, iteration, etc. However, I disagree with the phrasing of your question, as it presupposes storytelling is not as important an activity at the Clubhouse as programming. Storytelling, or more specifically, being able to tell a good story, is important whether you're a researcher telling the story of your data or a Clubhouse member telling the story of your learning. Storytelling embodies many powerful ideas, including non-determinism. Storytelling also engages learners in various modes of critical reflection.

You write that when the Clubhouses started in 1993, 70 percent of your visitors had never used a mouse before. How have the users of the Clubhouses changed over this time and what shifts have you needed to make to keep pace with the nature of your learners?

ROBBIN: Members come into the Clubhouse with a greater familiarity and comfort with computer technologies. There are regional variances, of course. As a result, members can dive right in to using the equipment. At the Clubhouse, it is important that mentors support the members starting "where they are" along the user spectrum. What is unique about the Clubhouse experience is members are challenged to create and be expressive with rather than just use technology. If a member wants to play computer games, she must first create a computer game to play.

What processes have you built into the Computer Clubhouses to insure that participants reflect on their own practices and share what they have learned with others?

ROBBIN: At the Flagship Clubhouse, members use software called, Pearls of Wisdom, to share their meta-learning and creative experiences around their project development. There are also project showcases and presentations that take place at the Clubhouse. Additionally, the Clubhouse-2-College/Clubhouse-2-Career program provides opportunities for members to reflect on how their Clubhouse learning can leads to job and education opportunities beyond the Clubhouse itself.

How have you been able to tap the international network of Clubhouses to help foster greater global consciousness in your participants?

KYLIE: One experience that really stands out in my mind is the Teen Summit in Boston in 2006. I attended this summit along with several of the youth from the Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc. Computer Clubhouse in South Los Angeles. To give you a bit of background, the Computer Clubhouse Network hosts a teen summit every couple of years. Every Clubhouse is able to send a couple of their top members (15 years and older) to the event as well as one or two members of their staff to help with supervision. The youth come from across the globe and speak a variety of languages. Keep in mind that Clubhouses are mostly located in very low-income areas by design, so this is the first time that most of the youth have been outside of their city, let alone on a plane to another country or state. The youth coming from the Los Angeles Clubhouse really blossomed as a result of this experience and met youth from South America and elsewhere. Like with most similar experiences for teens, the intense amount of time spent together day and night forge deep bonds that were made deeper as they engaged in meaningful collaborative work during the workshops. Participating youth signed up for a range of workshops to explore new types of software and project ideas, including video workshops where they learned interview and editing techniques, Adobe Photoshop workshops, robotics labs, social network analyses labs and the list goes on and on. All of the youth participated in multiple workshops and were also able to visit local college campuses, museums, and stay in campus dorms. Some of the groups made videos about their darkest fears or learned new programming skills to put the latest Chris Brown dance video together. When the youth returned to Los Angeles, you could see their horizons had expanded and they worked hard to remain in contact with their new friends. The book highlights many other examples, including how a traveling puppet named Cosmo, which was based on the Flat Stanley books, moved between Clubhouses worldwide, bringing together youth from all over the world to create a collective narrative about the puppet's journeys in each country. Youth's stories were well documented on the intranet and new chapters (as well as Cosmo's arrival) were much anticipated by the youth. Additionally, in countries like Israel, there are Clubhouses in the Israeli and Palestinian areas of the country, which are geographically close to one another. Coordinators use creative projects to bring youth together and foster cross-cultural tolerance in meaningful ways through creating musical compositions or fostering meaningful dialogues among participants.

Yasmin Kafai, professor of learning sciences at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, has led several NSF-funded research projects that have studied and evaluated youth's learning of programming as designers of interactive games, simulations and media arts in school and afterschool programs. She has pioneered research on games and learning since the early 90's and more recently on tween's participation in virtual worlds, which is now supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. She has also been influential in several national policy efforts among them "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the Computer Age" (AAUW, 2000). Currently, she is a member of the steering committee for the National Academies' workshop series on "Computational Thinking for Everyone". Kafai is a recipient of an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation, a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education, and the Rosenfield Prize for Community Partnership in 2007.

Kylie Peppler is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. As a visual and new media artist by training, Peppler engages in research that focuses on the intersection of the arts, media literacy, and new technologies. A Dissertation-Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation as well as a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship has supported her work in these areas. Her research interests center on the media arts practices of urban, rural, and (dis)abled youth in order to better understand and support literacy, learning, and the arts in the 21st Century. Peppler is also currently a co-PI, on two recent grants from the National Science Foundation to study creativity in youth online communities focused on creative production.

Dr. Robbin Chapman is currently the Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and Special Assistant to the Vice-Provost for Faculty Equity. She is responsible for strategic leadership and development of Institute-wide faculty development programs and graduate student recruitment initiatives. She is PI on a Department of Education grant project that is underway in schools in the Birmingham, Alabama public school system.

Inside the Computer Clubhouse (Part Two of Three)

What do you see as the biggest impact the Computer Clubhouse movement has made on our current pedagogies around new media?

ROBBIN: When I think of pedagogies and new media one thought is that new media can serve as a powerful amplifier of human sociality, in this case around learning. Such new media pedagogies should catalyze, facilitate, and propagate individual and collective learning and teaching experiences. The Clubhouse has been a test bed for exploring how learners and mentors can engage learning from each other through digital media. One outcome has been how members and mentors come to view digital media as a material for expressing their ideas about learning and their community.

The MacArthur Foundation will be hosting an upcoming conference on Diversifying Participation. What lessons might we take from the Computer Clubhouses about how to support diversity in access and engagement with digital media?

KYLIE: The Clubhouse definitely serves as a great model for successful scale-up across diverse contexts, including across racial, gender, religious and national boundaries. One of the programs that the Network has adopted to foster diversity within the Clubhouses is "Girls Day". Girls Day sets aside particular times and days where the Clubhouse is an all-girls site, where girls can feel comfortable learning new skills and trying out new projects in a safe space. As a result, the Computer Clubhouse Network has historically appealed equally to both boys and girls, which is uncommon in technology-rich settings.

It also seems to me that Clubhouse's emphasis on creative production allows for both local adaptability and the ability to make something personally meaningful. The tools that are available at the Clubhouse sites have been chosen precisely because they allow youth to design their own projects and give them flexibility in the process. For example, at the LA Clubhouse site, a popular activity was to manipulate digital pictures of expensive cars, inserting a picture of yourself next to "your" ride. A young bi-racial African-American and Latino youth named Dwight extended this practice by creating a culture of "Low Rida" interactive Scratch projects. A Low Rida (or lowrider) is a customized car associated principally with the Mexican American community that first emerged amongst migrant workers during World War II. Lowrider art is now an established art form where youth draw or depict lowriders and is featured in magazines, like Lowrider magazine, along with pictures of customized cars, political reports, and advertisements for parts and accessories. In one of Dwight's first projects, "Low Low," the viewer controls the hydraulics on two cars using arrow and letter keys. Dwight's contribution to the Clubhouse was to expand the genres of work in Scratch and incorporate new genres that are inclusive of his social practices. This resonated with others in the Clubhouse community, eventually drawing in several first-time users of Scratch who may have not otherwise engaged in this type of creative production. Low Ridas represent a conscientious and literate practice that stands in opposition to the pressure to assimilate into the American mainstream culture. In sum, the Clubhouse's emphasis on design and tools for design seems to facilitate the ability to adapt to local contexts more so than, say, games that are by nature more embedded in the culture that produced them.

Early in the book, you describe your goal as to "inspire youth to think about themselves as competent, creative, and critical learners and citizens." Break that down for us.

ROBBIN: Clubhouse member self-identification as critical thinkers is a product of their experiences in deep learning activities such as debugging, critical reflection, etc., and their exchanges with others learners in the Clubhouse. There are many ways to practice these skills, whether utilizing software (Pearls of Wisdom, for example), hardware (robotics, Legos, etc.), and people (working on team projects, exchanging ideas with other leaders, reacting to project feedback from other learners, etc.).

While the Clubhouse supports young people pursuing their own interests and projects, you also see adults as playing a strong role in the process. You describe these adults as "mentors" and not "teachers." How do you characterize the distinction?

KYLIE: While there is considerable overlap, the distinction is important with regard to two factors: the nature of afterschool learning environments and support for the constructionist philosophy of the Clubhouse. On the first point, when we think of the role of a "teacher", we're envisioning the type of direct instruction that is common in schools. While direct instruction has merit, there are numerous characteristics of afterschool learning spaces that don't look like those of your typical classroom--youth moving freely between activities in the Clubhouse, sporadic attendance, and the often irregular times that parents drop in to pick up their kids are a few of these factors. As a result, using a direct instruction model for projects that youth work on for a few days or weeks doesn't really work. The second, and perhaps more important, factor in this distinction between our view of a "teacher" and a "mentor" is the role of a mentor as a muse, someone who supports the kids on self-directed projects, even if the mentor has very little expertise in the area. Being a mentor extends way beyond helping members to debug their projects; it's about social networking and connecting youth with resources outside the Clubhouse; it's about listening, advice giving and supporting; and it's about co-creating with the youth. Some of the times that were most exciting for me at the Clubhouse in South LA were the times when neither of us (the member or me) knew the answer to a given problem. At one point, I was working with a youth that wanted to make a side-scrolling video game using Scratch. I had absolutely no idea how we were going to do this! We each came up with several ideas - none of them really worked, but he seemed to build some confidence in the fact that I didn't know what I was doing either and I was getting a Ph.D. at UCLA at the time. That evening he continued to work after I left. The next day, he was soooo excited to show me the solution that he had come up with - one that neither of us had originally thought of. You could see it in his eyes that he was beaming with pride and shortly thereafter he told me that he wanted to be a professional game designer. These types of experiences made me realize that you really don't need to know how to do everything in order for kids to discover new things. Being open to exploring the materials alongside youth is equally, if not more, valuable.

ROBBIN: I view the exceptional mentoring that takes place at the Clubhouse as a function of four core mentor "strengths;" mentor as model, cultivator, peer and network. While it is rare for a single individual to embody all these strengths, it is the combination and distribution of these attributes that determine the "feel" of a Clubhouse and the breadth and depth of the learning activities that take place. The "mentor as model" represents mentoring behaviors that expose members to how the adult goes about problem solving, learning new things, and how they articulate their meta-learning experiences. Members tend to be particularly drawn to mentors that exhibit this strength. The "mentor as cultivator" speaks to how mentors seed many of the "firsts" members discover during their time at the Clubhouse, including expectations of going to college, involved community citizenship, and connecting Clubhouse lessons to their dreams and aspiration. The "mentor as peer" is the person who encourages members to teach what they know to other Clubhouse members. These mentors tend also to encourage members to problem-solve and provide moral support while the member navigates this process. The members are then encouraged to share their understanding of meta-learning with their peers. Finally, the "mentor as network" refers to the mentor as a key resource, to people and ideas previously unavailable to the member through his or her personal networks. Exposure to a "larger world" than that experienced in their local neighborhood is a critical part of the learning and teaching that occurs at the Clubhouse.

You talk about the Computer Clubhouse as a "community of learners." How important is it that they function as communities rather than provide services to individual learners?

KYLIE: This question is really at the heart of what makes the Computer Clubhouse unique. During one of our interviews for the book, one of the Clubhouse Coordinators put it in terms that really resonated with me. He was someone who had made quite a bit of money in a former career as a computer engineer in the .com era but was increasingly dissatisfied with his former job. As a result, he quit his job and started working at a local Computer Clubhouse, sharing his knowledge about computer programming and engineering with the Clubhouse youth. His daughter, on the other hand, was still attending a wealthy private school. He noted that despite having access to all of the same equipment at home and at school, the crucial ingredient that was missing was the community of learners engaged in shared activity. Even learning about technologies en masse in a computer class in school doesn't provide the same arena for the development of personal interests, nor the amount of time to work in depth on your projects, using these technologies. Without it, he argued youth didn't have the support from adults and peers to creatively engage with the technologies as youth have at the Clubhouse. It's really not about the technologies, the communities and practices that emerge around the technologies are what are most important for meaningful and continued long-term engagement, which ironically is not part of technology programs even in wealthy and more well-off neighborhoods.

ROBBIN: A defining characteristic of a vibrant, productive community is its resiliency and strength. Such communities are themselves the "safety net" that protects its members and ensures their personal and professional development. Service providers may provide various safety net functions; however in most cases this requires the person being serviced to fit within a framework particular to the service provider. Clients must use the programs and services in particular ways that are determined by the service provider. The Clubhouse, as a learning community, provides a safety net without an excess of program constraints. Kids are members of the Clubhouse community. The resources of the Clubhouse belong to them and are their responsibility. They have a say in how their Clubhouse manages itself and how it grows. The Clubhouse is the launch point for new, future opportunities, including higher education and creative, successful careers based on the learning lessons of the Clubhouse. Also, the Clubhouse community is more than a group of learners and is deeply connected. Members and mentors develop lifelong relationships.

Yasmin Kafai, professor of learning sciences at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, has led several NSF-funded research projects that have studied and evaluated youth's learning of programming as designers of interactive games, simulations and media arts in school and afterschool programs. She has pioneered research on games and learning since the early 90's and more recently on tween's participation in virtual worlds, which is now supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. She has also been influential in several national policy efforts among them "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the Computer Age" (AAUW, 2000). Currently, she is a member of the steering committee for the National Academies' workshop series on "Computational Thinking for Everyone". Kafai is a recipient of an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation, a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education, and the Rosenfield Prize for Community Partnership in 2007.

Kylie Peppler is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. As a visual and new media artist by training, Peppler engages in research that focuses on the intersection of the arts, media literacy, and new technologies. A Dissertation-Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation as well as a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship has supported her work in these areas. Her research interests center on the media arts practices of urban, rural, and (dis)abled youth in order to better understand and support literacy, learning, and the arts in the 21st Century. Peppler is also currently a co-PI, on two recent grants from the National Science Foundation to study creativity in youth online communities focused on creative production.

Dr. Robbin Chapman is currently the Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and Special Assistant to the Vice-Provost for Faculty Equity. She is responsible for strategic leadership and development of Institute-wide faculty development programs and graduate student recruitment initiatives. She is PI on a Department of Education grant project that is underway in schools in the Birmingham, Alabama public school system.

Inside the Computer Clubhouse (Part One of Three)

The Computer Clubhouse is a worldwide network of digital literacy programs in after-school settings. The first clubhouse program started in 1993 at the Boston Computer Museum, an outgrowth of the work being done at the MIT Media Lab by Mitchel Resnick and Natalie Rusk. By 2007, there were more than one hundred clubhouses world wide. I I have long admired the extraordinary impact of the Computer Clubhouse movement, having had the privilege to get to know Resnick and others associated with the project during my many years at MIT. Few other programs have had this kind of impact on learning all over this planet, getting countless young people more engaged with the worlds of programming and digital design through an open-ended, constructionist practice, which respects each learner's goals and interests. A new book, The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities, pays tribute to the fifteen year plus history of the movement, sharing some of its key successes, and offering key insights into what has made the Clubhouses so successful. The highly readable book, addressed to educators of all kinds who want to make a difference in addressing the digital divide and the participation gap, was produced for the Teacher's College Press by some key veterans of the movement -- Yasmin B. Kafai, Kylie A. Peppler, and Robbin N. Chapman. I know this book is going to be of great interest to many of you who follow this blog because of your interest in new media literacies. The publisher was nice enough to arrange an interview with the editors for this blog and I will be sharing their perspectives over the next three installments. In this installment, they share something of the goals and history of the clubhouse movement. In future installments, we will dig deeper into its global impact and its governing pedagogical assumptions.

Kalfai's work will already be familiar to regular readers, since she participated in an interview I did a year or so back with the editors of Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming.

How would you describe the vision behind the Computer Clubhouse movement? What factors led to the creation of the first Computer Clubhouse?

YASMIN: It all started out in the Computer Museum. Yes, in the late 80's there was a museum with a walk-through computer in Boston (it has since then moved into the Museum of Science). Coincidentally it was right next to the Children's Museum with the mission to make information technology more accessible to the public. Many of the exhibits in the museum allowed visitors to take a closer look at the inner working of a computer and some even asked them to make things, like robots. Those turned out to be the really popular exhibits with kids; so popular that some kids would come back and sneak past admissions into the museum in order to play with the computers. Remember, computers at home or in school were rare in those days. This led Natalie Rusk, the education director at the computer museum, to talk with Mitchel Resnick and Stina Cooke to propose an after school space to which youth could come independent from the museum with a special focus on creating things with technology.

The idea was to provide access to the tools professionals actually used to make graphics, robots or games. There is a great paper titled "Access is not enough" that recounts this history in more detail as does a chapter in the book. What's important here is though that the focus was not just on giving access to computers but on promoting creative uses -- the very ones kids found so intriguing that they came back voluntarily (!) to the museum. All of this was a really bold proposal in the early 90's - that kids would actually be interested in designing technology, in making things. But we had ample evidence that indeed they were interested in challenging activities.

At the time, I was working in a local elementary school where hundreds of students were designing video games to learn about programming and mathematics and science and writing stories and advertisements. They were spending months on it. We knew that these kinds of creative activities with computers were popular with kids not just in school but also in museums and after school clubs.

ROBBIN: The vision of the Clubhouse can be described as a response to the need for space where equity, opportunity, and learning community membership become resources for young people. I often express this idea as the function, Clubhouse Vision = f{equity(learning, creativity) + opportunity(self-development, new areas for growth) + learning community(participation, citizenship)}

Can you define constructivism? How has this philosophy shaped the work of the computer clubhouses?

ROBBIN: Constructionism is project-based learning that occurs through the building and rebuilding of projects that you share with others. I view constructionism as an organic learning model because it grows in depth and breadth as it is expressed different local learning environments. This ability to adapt keeps the model regionally relevant and robust.

YASMIN: Seymour Papert who coined the term 'Constructionism' clearly distinguished it from 'Constructivism' that emphasizes the construction of knowledge by learners. Papert emphasized that indeed learners construct their own knowledge but they do so best by making things of social significance. In the end, you're constructing knowledge by constructing artifacts - be it a computer program, robot, or games - that represent your thinking. Equally important is the idea of 'social significance' that means that you do so with others and for others. I believe these two aspects, the artifacts and the social context, are what make constructionism a pedagogy of the 21st century. Today, we take it for granted that people socially interact and contribute via technology but twenty years ago this was a bold assertion.

Give us a sense of the scale of the Computer Clubhouse movement. What has allowed this project to achieve this level of scalability and sustainability?

KYLIE: Currently, the Computer Clubhouse Network is an international community of over 100 Computer Clubhouses located across 21 different countries around the world. The whole movement started with the opening of the Flagship Clubhouse in Boston in 1993 and grew with support from the Intel Foundation and several others to reach the point that it's at now. In my opinion, there are three crucial ingredients that led to the success of Computer Clubhouse movement.

First, the model establishes new Clubhouses within existing community organizations. This is helpful not just for management and advertisement in the local community, but also helps with long-term planning and additional funding support for the new Clubhouses. There are some challenges with this model of expansion, however. Primarily, local staff need training and support to adhere to the Clubhouse philosophy, which can be challenging for people coming from more traditional ways of thinking about informal learning spaces as "computer labs". Instead, Clubhouses are more like digital studios, and have a wide array of tools available for youth beyond just computers. Of course, there are other issues of coordinators gaining the technical expertise to run the Clubhouse but, as the coordinators will tell you, you can learn those skills on the job. Helping coordinators to uphold the ideals of the Clubhouse is an active central Network in Boston that provides ongoing support in the form of training for new Clubhouse staff, in-person visits from Network staff, and a cutting-edge intranet that connects all of the Clubhouses and coordinators.

The Clubhouse intranet provides a worldwide social network to share ideas, projects, host social events, and share insights on how to run a successful Clubhouse. Of course, what really sets Clubhouses apart is that these spaces are really youth-organized and run. At local Clubhouses, the youth run for executive offices and oftentimes take on leadership roles in the local community. If youth didn't find the Clubhouses to be engaging, the Network would cease to exist. Youth really drive the Clubhouses and return even after they graduate to help mentor future generations of members - another key sign of their commitment to the long-term success of these programs.

ROBBIN: The core principles of the Clubhouse model, with its grounding in the constructionist learning framework, are important because various mechanisms can be wrapped around the model to facilitate learning. In the case of the Clubhouse, digital technology is one layer. Other layers include local customs, materials, and modes of engagement. The model doesn't exist because of the technology; instead the technology is another material being used by the model. Because of this layering characteristic, the model is very adaptable to local needs and resources.

Yasmin Kafai, professor of learning sciences at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, has led several NSF-funded research projects that have studied and evaluated youth's learning of programming as designers of interactive games, simulations and media arts in school and afterschool programs. She has pioneered research on games and learning since the early 90's and more recently on tween's participation in virtual worlds, which is now supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. She has also been influential in several national policy efforts among them "Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the Computer Age" (AAUW, 2000). Currently, she is a member of the steering committee for the National Academies' workshop series on "Computational Thinking for Everyone". Kafai is a recipient of an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation, a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education, and the Rosenfield Prize for Community Partnership in 2007.

Kylie Peppler is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. As a visual and new media artist by training, Peppler engages in research that focuses on the intersection of the arts, media literacy, and new technologies. A Dissertation-Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation as well as a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship has supported her work in these areas. Her research interests center on the media arts practices of urban, rural, and (dis)abled youth in order to better understand and support literacy, learning, and the arts in the 21st Century. Peppler is also currently a co-PI, on two recent grants from the National Science Foundation to study creativity in youth online communities focused on creative production.

Dr. Robbin Chapman is currently the Manager of Diversity Recruitment for the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and Special Assistant to the Vice-Provost for Faculty Equity. She is responsible for strategic leadership and development of Institute-wide faculty development programs and graduate student recruitment initiatives. She is PI on a Department of Education grant project that is underway in schools in the Birmingham, Alabama public school system.

Writing Between the Cracks: An Interview with Interfiction 2 Contributors

This is the last installment in my series about the release of Interfictions 2. Today, I interview some of the authors who contributed short stories to the collection. Once again, the focus is on the complex and contradictory role of genre in contemporary popular fiction. (By the way, I am taking Friday off to spend time with my family so see you next week.) Do you consider yourself an interstitial artist?

Carlos Hernandez -- Definitely. I think there are two general impulses for the artist: the desire to innovate and the desire to communicate. Communication is vital, of course: art can't happen without it. But since communication requires a certain quorum of similarity between writer and reader -- e.g. a shared language -- it tends to be the more conservative impulse. Innovation, by contrast, is where genius lives. It is the only legitimate reason to make new art. Otherwise, we should all simply go and enjoy old art exclusively. For me, writers who cleave too closely to a genre -- and I would most definitely include "literary fiction" as a genre -- are favoring communication over innovation: to the point where they are neglecting the most important reason for this new art to exist.

Jeffrey Ford -- This has always been one of my problems with the term interstitial. I don't believe that artists are interstitial or not. I only believe that works of art can be interstitial. An artist should, of course, always be willing to go anywhere and do or say anything necessary for the creation of a work of art. Sometimes it's as daring to create something in a "traditional" structure and mode as it is to make something that could be labeled interstitial. Artists are artists -- sometimes their art is interstitial. Besides, it's the interaction of the materials and influences as they come together or play off each other in a work of art, not the artist. When artists operate in the marchland between genres or where media coincide it can be as lame and stale as traditional approaches to creation. I think there is great potential energy in these places, but if one were to strart out with the idea of, "OK, now I'm going to get interstitial." That's not following an idiosyncratic vision -- which for me, is what art's about. You shouldn't know something is going to be interstitial before it reveals itself.

Alaya Johnson -- I think I probably do a lot of work in interstitial spaces. I definitely see Jeff Ford's point, though, about it being tricky to identify the artist as interstitial, as opposed to the art. And to some extent, perhaps one could argue that all art is interstitial in some way. The difference might be that in more conventional work, the interstices are narrower gradations of sub (or sub-sub) genres. For example: a novel about chain-smoking biker elves who fight vampires is pretty unequivocally interstitial, but the genres it straddles are so commonplace and predictable that it wouldn't be particularly innovative. (And now I'm going to negate the forgoing entirely, and say that if you do something with enough intelligence and self-awareness, even the tritest plot line can be made into something innovative.)

What motivated your participation in this project?

Carlos Hernandez -- I had written a strange story that I loved, and I wasn't sure what to do with it. Cue the Interfictions II call for submissions. I nearly swooned for pleasure. The philosophy of the project was not only in line with this particular story's aesthetic, but with pretty much everything I believe about art. The arrival of that call in my life, just when I needed it: it's enough to make you believe in Flying Spaghetti Monsters.

ALAYA JOHNSON -- That's essentially what happened to me, too. I'd written a strange, fractured story I had a hard time finding a home for, and then I saw that Interfictions was doing a second anthology. I jumped with joy-- especially when they bought it!

Brian Slattery: Like Jeff, I'd written my story before I knew that Interfictions 2 was coming out, and I knew I liked it (which is unusual for me regarding my own stuff) but didn't know what to do with it, because I also knew that it was, well, kind of weird. Meanwhile, I'd read the first Interfictions collection and really enjoyed it; reading the stories, I had the sense that these were my people. So I was delighted to learn

that Interfictions 2 was happening, and of course I'm even more delighted to be a part of it.

Jeffrey Ford -- I'd written the story before I'd heard that there was going to be an interfictions 2 anthology. I made some cursory attempts to publish this story, but had no luck. It was too wacky. I liked it, though. I thought it had something going for it, so when I heard about Interfictions I gave it a shot. The fact that the editors of this anthology accepted it gave me great encouragment to believe in the fiction I feel a personal connection to, even if it is perceived as too different by others.

Do you see the interstitial as a way of cutting across genres or escaping them all together?

Carlos Hernandez -- I don't think we ever escape genre. Genre is deeper than what our publishing industry has defined for us. I can meaningfully oppose the "personal essay" to a work of journalism because we all recognize that the different ways each has of producing truth and beauty. But I can cut across those genres, remix them, mash them up: I can write gonzo journalism or creative nonfiction or a hundred different other flavors of nonfiction subgenres. And fiction is, and should be, even slipperier, because fiction always begins with the following premise: "What I am about to tell you is a l

ALAYA JOHNSON -- I'm with Carlos-- I don't think genre is something anyone can escape (even literary artists who pretend they don't work in one). It's very fundamental to how humans perceive the world, I think: categories and taxonomies are how we structure information. It's crucial to our creative process. I see the purpose of defining the cross-genre impulse as "interstitial" as largely one of pollination. Of getting out of the constantly rehashed and well-plowed ideas in our most comfortable categories and exploring how others see things. My story cross-pollinates with a great deal of non-fiction, mostly of the political, polemical variety. I could never have written that story four years ago, before I started reading that sort of work. I became so immersed in it that, eventually, that story became something that I not only could write, but felt utterly compelled to create.I realize that my answer to this question is annoying, but here goes.

Brian Slattery: First off, I don't have nearly enough of a sense of the breadth of

literature these days to make a sweeping generalization about any genre. And second, the question of genre seems more important to critics and marketing folks--who need them for very good reasons--but I'm not a critic or a marketing guy. From where I stand as a dude who writes stuff, the genres aren't really well-defined enough to be cut across or escaped. The borders are so fuzzy that they aren't really borders at all. In the past, I've used the analogy of genres as

neighborhoods in a city with no walls between them. But here's another one: If the genres were countries, they'd be sort of quasi-failed states. The capital cities might be under control, but the farther from the seat of government you get, the less governed (governable?) the territory becomes. And there are wide stretches of land that are disputed, argued over, but never claimed outright; no genre has the power to assert its dominion over the others.

I understand the idea of genre better when it comes to certain types of plot or plot devices, character archetypes, or certain styles of writing, but even in that case, if I'm writing something, I see genre choices more as tools in a toolbox than as a series of constraints that one must work to stay within or break out of. Which is probably why the label "interstitial" applies so well to what I do.

Jeffrey Ford -- Again, for me, the interstitial is not a method but only a product. I guess it can cut across genres. I don't really know enough about genre to know if it can be escaped. I know about it, and many would say I've worked in specific genres for years, but genre has many facets and secrets, and if you were to escape genre, would your work then be in the genre of works that escaped genre?

Have you worked in genre fiction previously? If so, what had been your experience?

Carlos Hernandez -- Yes, I've published several short stories in genre magazines and anthologies. But again, I think the question is tricky, since I think we are never outside of genre. The experience of writing genre fiction and of working with editors to publish my genre fiction have easily been the best writing experiences of my life. Never have I learned more, nor felt more like a writer doing honest work, than I have when working with an editor on a story. Also, let me add that genre editors are, to my mind, the best readers a body could ask for. They tend to be these prose-devouring polymaths who deal equally well in the nuances of art and the practicalities of production. It takes a kind of double-genius to do the job of editor well -- a genius of both left brain and right -- and I've been very lucky to meet and work with some of them.

ALAYA JOHNSON -- If by "in genre fiction" you mean, "outside of the literary genre" then yes, that's largely where I've found myself working. The tropes of fantasy (and, to a lesser extent, Science Fiction) speak to me most powerfully of all the various literary forms. Every once in a while, I contemplate stories that lie firmly in what we call "literary" but they never feel as compelling as the ones that cross more boundaries.

Brian Slattery: Yes. My first short story was published in Glimmer Train, and probably by anyone's generic definition, it was an example of straight-up

literary fiction. At the time, I had given myself the assignment of seeing if I could cram a typical literary fiction novel's story arc into the shortest story I could write. I have no idea if I succeeded,

but I was completely psyched that Glimmer Train's editors saw fit to publish the result, and am still grateful to them today.

When I finished my first book, though, I really had no idea what I had written. It was either a science-fiction novel with literary-fiction stylings, or a literary-fiction novel with lots of science-fictional elements in it, and I was in no position to make the call. So I figured I'd let someone else decide, and submitted it to a few different places. The feedback I got taught me a lot. The

literary-fiction people I talked to seemed to like the quality of the writing (which was nice), but were very confused by the plot, number of characters, and other things that science-fiction readers don't get thrown by. The science-fiction people, meanwhile, seemed to just like the book. So I figured that I'd written a science-fiction novel and didn't think all that much more about it. My second book came out as even more clearly science fiction, which delights me. But in the

future? Who knows?

Can we produce works which appeal to popular readers without falling into genre formulas?

Carlos Hernandez -- This is a deceptively difficult question, because it calls on action from both writers and readers. I feel that, in the United States at least, the media conglomerates and mega-bookstores that have taken over the publishing world have taught the American public to narrowly define genres and, more importantly, to narrowly enjoy works of specific genres. Readers now will often check the spine of a book to make sure it is of a genre they will enjoy -- "if it doesn't say 'mystery' on the spine, I won't like it, because it's not a mystery." I know people speak disparagingly of Oprah's Book Club, but c'mon people! She got millions of folks to read Beloved, which is not only one of the greatest books of the 20th century, but as interstitial a work of art as we could ask for. What's unfortunate is that it takes a decree from Oprah to give popular readers the confidence and motivation to try something outside of their comfort zone. So, solutions? 1) Get publishers and mega-bookstores to stop insisting on narrowly-defined genres (near-impossible); 2) Get Oprah to endorse a lot more interstitial art (not exactly a reliable method); 3) Get writers to keep trying to write innovative work that eschews pretension while at the same time challenges readers -- and hope for the best.

ALAYA JOHNSON -- I agree that the issue of connecting readers to fiction has a great deal more to do with the juggernaut of the industry behind books than the works actual readers might enjoy if they could find them. Why else, for example, would book stores ghettoize literature by black writers in the "African American" or "urban" section of the book store? Not necessarily because white readers won't buy these books, but because segregation is how the industry has constructed itself. I've had the experience of hunting through the Science Fiction section for a single Octavia Butler novel, finding none present, and eventually discovering them shelved next to True to the Game III or whatever in Urban Lit. In the latter example, the segregation is based on race, but it's the same principle that means those readers who enjoy Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale will never find Sherri Tepper's Grass without venturing into a completely different section of the bookstore. The ostensible reason for this segregation is that it makes it easier for readers to find works they like, but as in both examples, it also makes it harder for readers to find works they like. So, to answer your question, I don't think "genre formulas" are the culprit here so much as an industry that makes it financially and practically impossible to look outside your own genre.

What kind of emotional experience do you think your story offers readers?

Carlos Hernandez -- I picked up a term from a collection of medieval words and phrases called: "merry-go-sorry." That phrase encapsulates my entire philosophy in three words: life is merry-go-sorry-go-merry-go-sorry-go-etc. Round and round we go, from moment to moment -- life is bewildering, awful at times but also awe-ful, a relentless dogpile of bathos and pathos. So what do we make of it? What can we say about an existence like that? If my story offers any answers, they are emotional ones, because I take the word "fiction" very seriously. I lie like hell all the way through.

ALAYA JOHNSON -- I'm not sure, really. I suppose I would hope a cathartic one, because issues of grief, guilt, redemption and eventual catharsis seem to run through most of my work. But because I have constructed it in such a way that the reader has to really work to find the story inside, it's entirely possible that readers could find the experience of reading it rather emotionally cold or clinical. It's hard to tell how people will react to things, especially when I as a writer have very deliberately eschewed most of the techniques in the writer's arsenal for heightening pathos (the equivalent, in my mind, of sweeping strings and roiling storm clouds in, say, a Steven Spielberg movie).

What was the biggest challenge in writing interfiction?

Carlos Hernandez -- Writing a relatable story that in its own small way tries to innovate. In short, writing a story that's good.

ALAYA JOHNSON -- One of the purpose of genres, and taxonomies and categories in general, is that it provides an in-group/out-group structure. It, by virtue of exclusion, creates a community and a community creates a shared language. Many science fiction writers, for example, have had the experience of writing a story that is perfectly comprehensible to their in-group of SF readers, and utterly enigmatic to those familiar with other communities and literary languages. So the greatest challenge of truly interstitial writing, I'd argue, is that you both need to have mastered the various languages of the genres you want to straddle while making the foreign tropes comprehensible to all parties. Out of the labor of this communication, though, comes particularly gratifying rewards.

Carlos Hernandez is a writer and English professor living in New York City. He was the co-author of Abecedarium.

Jeffrey Ford's The Physiognomy won The World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for 1997 and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Ford has since finished the other two books of the trilogy, Memoranda (99 NY Times Notable Book of the Year) and The Beyond (2001).

Alaya Dawn Johnson's novels include Racing the Dark and The Burning City, the first two installments of The Spirit Binders trilogy and the forthcoming Moonshine, a vampire saga set in the 1920s.

Brian Slattery's novels include Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America and Spaceman Blues: A Love Song .

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.