The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture: An Interview with Joe Saltzman (Part One)

If USC's Nonny de La Pena is exploring new tools and platforms that will shape the future of journalism, another of my new Annenberg colleagues, Joe Saltzman, is using new media tools to make it easier for us to research journalism's history. Specifically, Saltzman has launched a data base which indexes a vast array of films, television series, comic books, and other media texts which include popular representations of journalists. Saltzman has long been at the center of a growing academic research field focused on the study of the image of the journalist in popular culture. As Saltzman explains in the interview here, much of our understanding of who journalists are comes from such popular representations. It is there we can see both heroic representations of the power of the press to bring down seemingly insurmountable institutions and more critical representations of how this power gets abused for commercial gains or cynical motives. These media encapsulate our dreams and our fears about the Fourth Estate.

I've become good friends with Saltzman since coming to USC -- we have great conversations which range from why the Greek historians might have better been understood as prototypical journalists to the pleasures of watching old movies. He brings a veteran journalist's salty skepticism to a lifetime of serious study of the history of his profession.

This interview will orient you to the new database and how you can use it in your research, but it will also span across some key representations of the press in popular culture, allowing Saltzman to share his unique perspective on some of my favorite movies and movie-makers.

Tell us about your new database. What kinds of information does it contain and what research purposes was it intended to address?

The mission of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture, a project of the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, is to investigate and analyze the conflicting images of journalists in film, television, radio, fiction, commercials, cartoons, comic books, music, art, video games and other aspects of popular culture. Through research and publication, we are able to examine their impact on the public's perception of newsgatherers.

When I started researching the image of the journalist in popular culture almost 20 years ago, no one was much interested in the subject. Seven years ago when I started the IJPC, it wasn't considered an academic discipline and few universities offered courses in the subject. Today, the IJPC Web site (ijpc.org) and the IJPC Database are considered the definitive worldwide sources for this subject and are used on a daily basis by scholars, students and professionals who want to do more research in this area. By having the IJPC Database now online, it means anyone can access it and this means there are no limits to how far the field can grow.

Before the IJPC Database went online only 250 IJPC Associates had access to it. Now anyone can use the database. That means all 75,000 entries on journalists, public relations practitioners and media are now available to everyone, anywhere in the world, to use for research, scholarship, study or just for fun.

The IJPC Database includes:

  • Print journalists (from large urban newspapers to small country weeklies and the Internet, including editors, reporters, photojournalists, correspondents, columnists, publishers, newsboys, bloggers)
  • Broadcast journalists (from networks to local stations including reporters, anchors, correspondents, producers, writers, technical personnel, news directors, station owners, network executives and management).
  • Public relations practitioners (from press agents to publicists)
  • News media (anonymous reporters who show up in countless films and television movies ranging from press conferences to packs of reporters shouting questions or chasing after the main character to individual reporters asking questions).

The IJPC Database can be referenced by year, title, type, occupation, country and author as well as key words in the comments section. It's been said that there are thousands of scholarly papers to be written out of the database. As one professor put it, "I don't see how anyone can write anything in this field without referring to the database. There is nothing like it and it is an indispensable reference."

The entries include:

  • Television (27,000 items)
  • Films (19,500 movies, movies made for TV and miniseries)
  • Fiction (12,300 novels, 1,550 short stories, 500 plays and 200 poems)
  • Cartoons, Comic Books & Comic Strips (5,900 items)
  • Non-Fiction (Documentaries-News-Sports) (3,150 items)
  • Radio (2,900 items)
  • Humor (710 items)
  • Commercials (350 items)
  • Games (140 items)
  • Early References (120 items)
  • Music (Songs-Compositions) (95 items)
  • Internet-Websites (90 items)
  • Art (40 items)

We also redesigned the ijpc.org website making it easier for users to read the thousands of articles and materials we offer on the site. The "Resources" section includes an invaluable collection of hard-to-find articles and books on this subject. The IJPC Student Research Papers include IJPC subjects never before researched. The sections on "The Image of the Gay Journalist in Popular Culture," and "Sob Sisters: The Image of the Female Journalist in Popular Culture" are unique areas of study. The seven video compilations, available only to IJPC Associates, are used in classrooms all over the world. (You can join the IJPC Associates by going to the ijpc.org website and filling out the online form.)

The concept of the IJPC Database was to collect every image imaginable of the journalist in popular culture so scholars, researchers, students, professional journalists and anyone interested in the subject could take this information and use it as the basis for articles, books, blogs and other multimedia publications.

You can have great fun searching the database. I enjoy looking up real-life local reporters (in the Comments section) and seeing all the movies they made as themselves or as generic types (i.e. Newscaster #1). Other things to do with the database queries:

  • If you want to see the full database, simply click Submit and all 75,000 items come up. You can then order the database by year, title, author, or occupation (in the Comments section).
  • Looking up a favorite actor to see how many times they played a journalist (Clark Gable played more leads as a journalist than any other actor, and an actor named Lester Dorr played more reporters in movies than anyone else I can find).
  • Try typing in "Deadline" in the Title category and see how many entries show up.
  • Type in your favorite author (last name followed by a comma and then first name) and see how many journalists were included in their body of work (Anthony Trollope is a good one to check).
  • Type in "Advice Columnist" in the Comments category.
  • Type in a specific country such as Spain in the Reference/Country category.
  • Highlight a Type such as Cartoons or Comic Books or Commercials to see everything in that category.
  • Check out every episode of Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, Smallville, Ugly Betty or How I Met Your Mother, just write in any of those titles in the Title category and all will pop up within seconds.
  • Type in a certain type of journalist - a columnist or investigative reporter or war correspondent - in that occupation in Comments category and see what pops up.

You can literally spend all day looking up things and still not even touch the surface of what's included in the IJPC Database.

The categories that cause me the most difficulty are soap operas and romance novels because journalists are poorly chronicled in soap operas and it seems as if a romance novel is published every three seconds and then disappears in months. I'm looking for experts in both areas to help me out. I'm also looking for correspondents from every country to send me lists of films, novels, comic books and so on featuring journalists, especially someone in India to send me a complete list of journalists and the news media in Bollywood films.

Can you share some of the process of pulling together this data base?

Like many things, the IJPC started in tragedy. When my youngest son David developed Hodgkin's disease as a senior at Yale in 1998 and died a year-and-a-half later. 11 days before his 23rd birthday, I needed a research project to get my mind off the tragedy. I started spending hours in the library studying the subject. Five years later, I came out of my depression realizing that I had more than 10,000 pages in my computer on the subject covering the image of the journalist from the 21st century to ancient times. And so the IJPC was born.

There were a few early writings on the subject, but they focused mostly on films featuring journalists and some novels. The many books by Howard Good, a professor of journalism at SUNY and Richard Ness, Associate Professor of Journalism at Western Illinois University's seminal filmography on the subject (From Headline Hunter to Superman) along with a book by Alex Barris called Stop the Presses! The Newspaperman in American Films in 1976 were the pioneers in the field although often we were writing on the subject simultaneously without any of us knowing about the other. Both Good and Ness are now involved in the IJPC, as is another early writer on the subject, Matthew Ehrlich, Professor of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Journalism in the Movies.)

I obviously went through their books as well as thousands of others on film genres, surveys of novels, short stories, plays and poems in various centuries and any other reference book that simply listed films or novels and characters. But without the Internet, the work would be much harder. I am constantly using the Internet to discover new databases on comic books, cartoons, romance novels, soap operas, commercials, music and every other aspect of popular culture.

I also go through various established Internet databases - the Internet Movie and TV Database, tv.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, TV Guide, etc. And every day I do various Google searches (I have a search vocabulary of 57 words that can turn up references to journalists appearing in various aspects of popular culture) looking for entries not in the database. I spend about five hours a day searching for new entries for the database, adding about 5,000 entries per year.

In addition I record more than 80 hours a week on four DVRs chronicling journalists on television, in commercials and in movies made for television.

You'd be surprised at how many journalists are featured in TV programs and are never mentioned in the summary of the show itself. Besides the obvious programs such as Ugly Betty, How I Met Your Mother, The Daily Show, there is, for example, the Law & Order franchise that often features journalists. There are also many TV shows and movies that show anonymous journalists chasing after the major characters and I want to document all of those. I add all of these programs to the database on a daily basis.

I also make DVD copies for IJPC Associates and we now have more than 12,000 DVDs and tapes, more than 5,000 hours of audiotapes and MP3 files, more than 8,500 novels, short stories, plays and poems (the largest collection of novels and short stories featuring journalists ever assembled), scripts, research materials, articles, art works and other artifacts

You've been the leader of a new field of research centering on the academic study of popular representations of journalists. What do you see as the value of this approach for the students of journalism? What do you think it contributes to the study of cinema more generally?

The IJPC goes far beyond cinema in evaluating the image of the journalist in popular culture. One of the things that amazed me was that most of the writing about the IJPC involved film and the 20th century. But the images of the journalist were really being solidified in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of the images in early cinema, for example, come from 19th century novels on journalism.

The first question I'm asked when I tell people that I'm director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) is who cares about the image of the journalist and why do you waste your time studying it?. And the simple answer is this: Because the images of the journalist you see in films, watch on television and read in novels influence the public's opinion about the news media and the effectiveness of that media. And the ramifications of how the public perceives and judges the media can have a profound effect on the success or failure of our American democracy.

Think about that. When your favorite aunt asks you why would anyone go into journalism, a profession filled with arrogant, impolite reporters who invade people's privacy, make up stories and sensationalize the news, where is she getting her information? She probably doesn't know any journalists, has never visited a newsroom, and has no idea how reporters work. Yet she has very specific ideas about who journalists are and how they behave. And she learned this by watching journalists in the movies and on television and reading about them in novels.

Surveys continue to show that most Americans want a free press that is always there to protect them from authority, from Big Business and Big Government, and give them a free flow of diverse information. But those same surveys also show that most Americans harbor a deep suspicion about the media, worrying about their perceived power, their meanness and negativism, their attacks on institutions and people, their intrusiveness and callousness, their arrogance and bias. And many of the reasons for this dichotomy can be found by studying the image of the journalist in all aspects of popular culture.

By looking at the image of the journalist in popular culture, we can better understand why the public feels the way it does about journalism and the people who practice it.

Joe Saltzman, the director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) and the author of Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film, is an award-winning journalist and professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.

He received his B.A. in journalism from the University of Southern California and his M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. After working for several years as a newspaper reporter and editor, Saltzman joined CBS television in Los Angeles in 1964 and for the next ten years produced documentaries, news magazine shows, and daily news shows, winning more than fifty awards, including the Columbia University-duPont broadcast journalism award (the broadcasting equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), four Emmys, four Golden Mikes, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, a Silver Gavel, and one of the first NAACP Image Awards.

Designing the Futures of Journalism: An Interview with USC's Nonny de la Pena (Part Two)

You are especially interested in issues of bodily presence and affective immediacy that arise in response to immersive environments, qualities which make our experiences in such worlds expecially intense and memorable. Yet there's a long tradition of science fiction writing which worries about the use of such devices for propaganda and social control, suggesting that we may find it hard to separate virtual and real experiences. What do you see as the benefits or dangers of this level of immersive experience when applied to political debates and social policies?

If only I could use this technology to brainwash my kids into cleaning up their room! Joking aside, propaganda can be an extremely effective and manipulative tool and print, radio, television have all been used throughout history for this purpose. I do hope, however, that this technology will be adopted by reputable news organizations and well-trained journalists who can help establish best practices for telling news stories. This will also enable them to have the skills to undercover when mistruths are being fed to the public.

That said, the intensity of immersive environments lends itself to creating exciting news stories. In much the way cameras in Vietnam helped shape what we saw and felt about the war, virtual worlds can potentially create powerful connections to stories. Imagine if we had built a virtual Iraq at the start of the war - audiences would have been able to experience events like marketplace bombings in much more visceral way in that they could "visit" the scene. Of course issues about the legitimacy of recreation now arise - should the audience "feel" the force of the blast?

Clearly there are practical challenges surrounding immersive journalism, given the time and money required to create such robust simulations. Does this mean that "immersive journalism" is most apt to be used for certain kinds of stories -- those which have prolonged significance for the culture?

We are at a very nascent stage in immersive journalism and we may find that certain stories work better than others. My own work tends to focus on human rights and empathy and so I tend to build pieces around those issues. For example, I am currently gathering the necessary physical world audio for a piece that will focus on hunger in California. However, the future remains wide open. In explaining my work, Ernest Wilson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism described one possibility: Imagine when you get your home and garden section in the morning and you could just walk around the gardens. I like the beauty of that vision.

How do you respond to critics who suggest that such simulations must necessarily be partial, giving a simplified version of the way the real world works, given the limits of the program's ability to deal with the complexity of human experience?

Nothing will ever replace the experience of being face to face with another human or actually being in a physical location where an event unfolds. Moreover, before the advent of virtual reality, distortion of factual scenarios in text accounts, photographs or video has a long history. It is true that the rise of digital tools has made faking it much easier and even trusted news sources have been caught using technology for questionable alterations. For example, in 2006 a Reuters' photo editor digitally manipulated photographs from the Israeli-Lebanon conflict and released them as real. In fact, we often accept photos that are "image corrected" or "image enhanced."

What really seems to bother critics about virtual worlds is the cartoon-like animation. But as these spaces become increasingly photorealistic, with more details drawn from data obtained in the physical world through various techniques such as 3D reconstruction, image-based rendering, and motion capture, immersive journalism can become a much more accurate representation of physical world stories. Of course, immersive journalism will then be subject to the same potential manipulation as video and photographs, but it will be certainly not any less 'real' than video.

By allowing for more immersive experiences, if generated according to the principles advocated here and using ethical, best journalistic practices, immersive journalism has the potential to constitute a much more faithful duplication of real events. Being in the middle of a scene can be much realistic and powerful than watching it from the audience or sitting, completely removed from the action, in your living room.

With Stroome, you are turning your attention to what remix culture might have to contribute to journalism. What can you tell us about this project?

Remix is an old culture in newsweekly journalism. For example, as a correspondent for Newsweek, I would join other Newsweek correspondents around the world in contributing material for a single story. We would all send in our individual reports to headquarters in New York where a "writer" would edit our material into the piece that would appear in the magazine. Stroome is based on the same principles. Multiple people can contribute to one story by uploading their video onto Stroome and it can be remixed right in the browser into a finished piece that can be quickly shared across the web. Stroome pushes the newsweekly idea even further, creating a social networking site that celebrates what's possible on the web today. Multiple people can remix any story and that means any contributor can choose to have a voice on how the story should be told. Stroome also tries to be sensitive on how people feel about their content - users can designate that their content only be shared by a small group or kept private until they feel ready to push their work across the web. Finally, Stroome users can quickly search for video they can use to make their remix complete. For example, when reporting on a story, one minor element might be missing such as a sunset shot. Stroome provides a clip pool to access those missing elements.

While Stroome has recently launched, you are already seeing global impact. Can you share with us some of the early reports you've gotten on how journalists around the planet are using this tool?

We launched the site first at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and bloggers across the web quickly picked up on the launch. Suddenly, we had users joining from Uruguay to Tunisia, Brazil to Ireland. Just last week the Tiziano Project, which provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment and training necessary to report local stories and improve their lives, announced they'll use Stroome to create a series of video vignettes bridging war and geography. The first piece--a look at the lives of those living in the streets of Mogadishu and Los Angeles' skid row--will go into production next week.

Neon Tommy and USC Annenberg have started to use Stroome on a regular basis. Do you have any reports yet on the impact it has had on how they are covering stories?

We are still at the initial stages of the launch, but already these USC student reporters have begun to use the site by working from different locations and uploading and editing from wherever they are - home or newsroom. For example, if you go to Madeline Scinto's piece, you can see she reported both from home and in the Neon Tommy newsroom and had fun doing it. Annenberg TV News (ATVN) had one reporter filming at the airport during the volcano-induced chaos and another pulling AP photos while back at USC and posting them to the piece so they could achieve a quick turnaround. These were test cases, but they proved how readily news could be produced on Stroome.

What do you see as the primary implications of Stroome for citizen journalists?

Not only does Stroome makes it much for journalists of all stripes to quickly get their stories across the web, but it also provides a place where collaborations can spawn more robust pieces. For example, during a protest rally, Stroome can be the "meeting point" on the web, where anyone shooting video at the rally can post their material. Now everyone can use different clips from the rally to remix the story as they see fit and push it out across the web. In fact, the same stories can take different shapes, with diversified viewpoints sharing the same space. We also hope to make it possible to stream video straight to the site from cellphones - which means no one can ever confiscate a camera and censor footage before its reached the public. I

Ultimately, we hope Stroome can contribute to a more robust democracy by creating new avenues for information access and delivery. Also, I hope it can help break down the fears that often accompany lack of understanding about those who might be different than you are. Now people from across the planet can tell stories, side by side. Perhaps that sounds idealistic - but Stroome provides the tools to make that possible.

Nonny de la Peña is a Senior Research Fellow exploring Immersive Journalism, a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. Her recent projects include, "Gone Gitmo," a virtual Guantanamo Bay Prison in Second Life, which was prototyped with funding from the MacArthur Foundation and employs first person experience and spatial narrative. Another project, "IPSRESS", is a collaboration with the Event Lab in London and Barcelona which investigates the use of head mounted display technology to evoke feelings of presence in reportage. A former correspondent for Newsweek Magazine, de la Peña has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Time Magazine, Hispanic and others. She has also directed and produced a number of feature documentary films that have been screened on national television and at theaters, festivals, and special events in more than 50 cities around the globe.

Designing the Future of Journalism: An Interview with USC's Nonny de la Pena (Part One)

My Journalism colleagues at USC's Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism are on the cutting edge of national and international conversations about the Future of Journalism. Our school is a site of experimentation and deliberation, sketching and testing new models, which see the emerging media environment not simply as a challenge to traditional forms of news but also as an opportunity to expand resources available to reporters. The School has the right mix of vision and pragmatism -- trying to imagine new possibilities, trying to test them against current realities. Or as Annenberg's dean Ernest Wilson likes to put it, the school is a place where "cool stuff happens." (Well, sometimes he puts it in a bit more colorful language.)

This past week, one of my Annenberg colleagues, Nonny De La Pena, received a Knight News Challenge grant to support the work she is doing around Stroome, a web platform which provides tools and communities to support the collaborative production and remixing of news content.

I had known De La Pena for some yearss and was delighted to find her here when I moved to the west coast. She's constantly probing, trying to imagine new affordances for presenting information to publics in compelling ways, and she's got the hacker instinct to prototype and test her ideas as soon into the process as possible. She has long sought to promote and map the space of immersive journalism. Don't know what that is? You will soon.

The following interview was conducted about a month ago, when Stroome had first launched, and it lays out some of her key research initiatives -- from Gone Gitmo, which uses Second Life to explore human rights issues, to Stroome, which provides citizen journalists new tools for collaboration.

What do you mean by "immersive journalism"? What are some examples of work which falls under this description?

Immersive journalism is a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. These stories can be set in online virtual worlds such as Second Life or produced using a head-tracked head-mounted display system that puts the individual into a virtual body or with a body-tracking Cave. Capitalizing on the sense of presence that comes with well-made virtual reality scenarios, these platforms provide an immersive experience that can offer unprecedented access to the sights and sounds, and possibly feelings and emotions that accompany the news.

Participants move through the story as a digital representation of themselves or as one of the subjects about which the story is being told. Visual and audio primary source material from the physical world reinforce the concept that participants are experiencing a nonfiction story, with the video, sounds or photographs acting on the narrative. For example, video that triggers at key points in the virtual landscape remind a participant that the computer generated environment is grounded in the physical world. Scripted events that create a first person interaction with the reportage can also help create a feeling of "being there." Also, participants can query or interact with the elements around them to learn more about the details or context of the news story.

In collaboration with digital media artist Peggy Weil, we have built several prototypes. Gone Gitmo, a virtual Guantanamo Bay prison built in Second Life, allows participants to explore a place that is inaccessible to the average American citizen and press. (In fact, the Pentagon just kicked out four reporters who have been covering the prison for years.) Gone Gitmo includes an experience on what it might be like to be detained, hooded and then imprisoned in Camp X-Ray. It also examines the ramifications of losing habeas corpus rights. Another prototype using Second Life, Cap & Trade, is a news report on the carbon market that sends people on a journey to follow the money in order to try to better understand the complexities and human consequences of trading carbon credits.

A third prototype is based on the interrogation logs of Detainee 063, Mohammed Al Qahtani, who had been declared tortured by the Bush. Built at the Event Lab in Barcelona with Mel Slater and his team, we used head mounted display (HMD) technology to put participants into the virtual body of a detainee who is held in what is referred to as a "stress position." When the participants look around, they see a virtual mirror and the figure in that mirror, a digital avatar who looks like a detainee, moves in unison with the participant. Participants also wear a breathing strap that programs their avatars to breathe at the same time, further enhancing the sense of virtual body ownership. Throughout, the sounds of the Al Qahtani interrogation plays as if it is coming from the next room. While research data was not collected on this particular prototype, every participant anecdotally reported that their body was hunched over in a stress position when in fact they were sitting upright.

What relationship exists if any between "immersive journalism" and "news gaming"?

News games embrace gaming protocols. The player undertakes a task or pursues a goal, voluntarily constrained by agreed upon rules, and must take action to advance position. Progress is often measured by indicators such as levels or points. In contrast, a participant in immersive journalism isn't playing a game but is put into an experience where she is participating and affected by events but may or may not have agency to change a situation. Immersive journalism also parallels a news narrative playing out in the physical world much like a piece in a newspaper or segment on television and while one might experience the story from different starting points, the story itself should not shift. Of course, that makes immersive journalism less available for irony or political commentary that news games like Gonzalo Frasco's September 12 achieve so successfully. In that game, you try to shoot terrorists on a crowded street, which means bystanders are always at risk. Moreover, whenever you launch a missle, the game spawns multiple replacements until the screen is overrun with terrorists.

How do we overcome the association which often exists between virtual worlds and play/fantasy? Given these associations, will people seek out virtual experiences which are potentially unpleasant or emotionally disturbing? Will they enter into these experiences with the "wrong" mental attitude?

It is exactly because of these issues that we recognized we would have to deal sensitively with questionable interrogation practices in Gone Gitmo -- we do not torture your avatar. We knew that there were many ways torture could become trivialized. However, as these environments become as ubiquitous as the 2D internet is today, I believe these spaces will become a natural environment for experiencing both fiction and non-fiction. Already children are growing up using avatars in populated virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Pixie Hollow. Our web, which uses Google or other 2D spaces as a point of entry, is quite lonely for them -- nobody is there.

Nonny de la Peña is a Senior Research Fellow exploring Immersive Journalism, a novel way to utilize gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. Her recent projects include, "Gone Gitmo," a virtual Guantanamo Bay Prison in Second Life, which was prototyped with funding from the MacArthur Foundation and employs first person experience and spatial narrative. Another project, "IPSRESS", is a collaboration with the Event Lab in London and Barcelona which investigates the use of head mounted display technology to evoke feelings of presence in reportage. A former correspondent for Newsweek Magazine, de la Peña has written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Time Magazine, Hispanic and others. She has also directed and produced a number of feature documentary films that have been screened on national television and at theaters, festivals, and special events in more than 50 cities around the globe.

Transmedia Education: the 7 Principles Revisited

Last week, I participated in one of the ongoing series of webinars for teachers which is being conducted by our Project New Media Literacies team. The series emerges from an Early Adopters Network we are developing with educators in New Hampshire to drill down on the skills we identified in our white paper for the MacArthur Foundation and to think through how teachers in all school subjects and at all levels can draw on them to change how they support the learning of their students. Vanessa Vartabedian is the coordinator who has been running this series. Each month, they focus on a different skill. This month's focus was on Transmedia Navigation. The webinars are open to any and all participants and are drawing educators from all over the world. The webinars are also available after the fact via podcast. The Transmedia Navigation discussion involved not only some remarks by me but also a conversation with Clement Chau from Tufts University and Mark Warshaw from the Alchemists who has developed transmedia content for Smallville, Heroes, and Melrose Place, among other properties. "Our Ning site is where our community of educators are exchanging ideas and trying out resources. You simply need to sign-up and fill out a short profile to access the schedule of upcoming webinars, as well as links to the archived recordings for previous webinars."

The focus of transmedia navigation offered me a chance to think a bit more deeply about what it might mean for us to produce transmedia education and I thought I would share some of those insights with you.

Let's start with some first principles:

Transmedia needs to be understood as a shift in how culture gets produced and consumed, a different way of organizing the dispersal of media content across media platforms. We might understand this in terms of a distinction I make between multimedia and transmedia. Multimedia refers to the integration of multiple modes of expression within a single application. So, for example, an educational cd-rom a decade or so ago might combine text, photographs, sound files, and video files which are accessed through the same interface. Transmedia refers to the dispersal of those same elements across multiple media platforms. So, for example, the use of the web to extend or annotate television content is transmedia, while the iPad is fostering a return to interest in multimedia.

Multimedia and Transmedia assume very different roles for spectators/consumers/readers. In a multimedia application, all the readers needs to do is click a mouse and the content comes to them. In a transmedia presentation, students need to actively seek out content through a hunting and gathering process which leads them across multiple media platforms. Students have to decide whether what they find belongs to the same story and world as other elements. They have to weigh the reliability of information that emerges in different contexts. No two people will find the same content and so they end up needing to compare notes and pool knowledge with others. That's why our skill is transmedia navigation - the capacity to seek out, evaluate, and integrate information conveyed across multiple media.

The push for transmedia is bound up with the economic logic of media consolidation. Yet, there is a push to transform this economic imperative into an aesthetic opportunity. If entertainment experiences are going to play out across multiple platforms, why not use this principle to expand and enrich the experience which consumers have of stories? Why not see transmedia as an expanded platform through which storytellers can deploy their craft? As we think about transmedia in the classroom, there are several key justifications/motivations for integrating it into our learning and teaching practices.

First, as modes of human expression expand and diversify, then the language arts curriculum has to broaden to train students for these new forms of reading and writing. If many stories are going to become transmedia, then we need to talk with our students about what it means to read a transmedia story and as importantly what it means to conceive and write a transmedia story. This is closely related to what Gunther Kress talks about in terms of multimodality and multiliteracy. Kress argues that we need to teach students the affordances of different media through which we can communicate information and help them to foster the rhetorical skills they need to effectively convey what they want to say across those different platforms.

I've had good luck at getting students to think in these terms through assignments which ask them to propose ways of translating an established story into a new medium - for example, translating a novel or film into a computer game. This practice requires them to develop critical skills at identifying the distinctive features of specific stories and worlds and it requires them to think about the affordances and expectations surrounding other media. Check out my earlier blog post on this practice.

As educators, we need to model the effective use of different media platforms in the classroom, a practice which would support what Howard Gardner has told us about multi-intelligences. In this case, I am referring to the idea that different students learn better through different modes of communications and thus the lesson is most effective when conveyed through more than one mode of expression. We can reinforce through visuals or activities what we communicate through spoken words or written texts. Doing so effectively pushes us to think about how multiple platforms of communication might re-enforce what we do through our classrooms.

Some will object that this skill takes a mode of commercial production as a model for what takes place in the classroom. Didn't I note here just a few weeks ago the dangers of talking about "learning 2.0" because it confuses a business plan for a pedagogical approach. I think we need to be careful in this regard and if it were only Pokemon or Lost that operated according to transmedia principles, I might be much slower to advocate integrating these same principles into our teaching.

But here's the thing: Obi-Wan Kenobi is a transmedia character, so is Barrack Obama. In both cases, readers put together information about who this character is and what he stands for by assembling data that comes at us from a range of media platforms. In such a world, each student in our class will have had exposure to different bits of information because they will have consumed different media texts. As a result, one child's mental model of Obama may include the idea that he was not born in the United States, that he is a Moslem, that he is a socialist, or what have you, and we need some way of communicating across those mental models, we need a way of understanding where they came from, and we need to help students expand the range of media sources through which they search out and assess information about what's happening in the world around them. To some degree, teachers emphasis similar skills when they tell students to seek out multiple sources when they write a paper, yet often, they mean only multiple print sources and not sources from across an array of different media. All of this suggests to me that we need to make the process of transmedia navigation much more central to the ways we teach research methods through schools.

Vanessa asked me to share with the group the Seven Principles of Transmedia Entertianment which I presented through this blog last fall and suggest how they might relate to learning. I wanted to express some cautions about this exercise. Transmedia Storytelling is one of a range of transmedia logics, which might also include transmedia branding, transmedia performance, and transmedia learning. There is sure to be some overlap between these different transmedia logics, but also differences. I don't doubt that some principles carry over but we need to keep in mind that there may also be some core principles for transmedia teaching/learning which will not be explored if we simply try to adopt what we know about transmedia entertainment for this space. I hope that this blog can start a conversation which helps us to identify other principles which are specific to the learning domain.

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Here goes.

Spreadability vs. Drillability Daniel Thomas Hickey wrote a series of posts (Part One, Part Two) which explore how the circulation of educational media might be described and improved by our model of spreadability. They are worth checking out.

But for the moment, let's think of this in a somewhat broader way. Spreadability refers to a process of dispersal - to scanning across the media landscape in search of meaningful bits of data. Drillability refers to the ability to dig deeper into something which interests us. A good educational practice, then, encompasses both, allowing students to search out information related to their interests across the broadest possible terrain, while also allowing students to drill deep into something which matters to them. This requires us as educators to think more about motivation - what motivates students to drill deeper - as well as class room management - how can we facilitate their capacity to dig into something that matters to them.

Continuity vs. Multiplicity The media industry often talks about continuity in terms of canons - that is, information which has been authorized, accepted as part of the definitive version of a particular story. Education has often dealt in the range of canon - not only the canon of western literature which deems some books as more worth reading than others but also the structures of disciplines and standards which determine what is worth knowing and how we should know it.

Multiplicity, by contrast, encourages us to think about multiple version - possible alternatives to the established canon. So, for example, Kurt Squire in his work on adapting Civilization III for the classroom talks about the value of asking students to think through "what if" scenarios about history - what if the Native Americans or Africans had resisted colonization, for example - that can be played out in the simulation game and which can help us to understand the contingencies of history. Asking what if questions both force us to think about the impact of historical events as well as the different factors which weighed in to make some possibilities more likely than others. As Squire notes, playing Civilization III encourages students to master the logic of history rather than simply what happened. The same thing happens when we explore how the same story has been told in different national contexts. It helps us to see the different values and norms of these cultures as we look at the way the story has been reworked for local audiences.

p>Immersion vs. Extraction In terms of immersion, we might think about the potential educational value of virtual worlds. I don't mean simply having classes in Second Life which look like virtual versions of the classes we would have in First Life except with far less human expressivity. I mean the idea of moving through a virtual environment which replicates key aspects of a historical or geographical environment. I am thinking about Sasha Barab's Quest Atlantis< or Chris Dede's River City as examples of fully elaborated virtual learning environment which rely on notions of immersion. I am also thinking about activities where students build their own virtual worlds - deciding what details need to be included, mapping their relationship to each other, guiding visitors through their worlds and explaining the significance of what they contain.

Extractability captures another principle which has long been part of education - the idea of meaningful props and artifacts in the classroom. In a sense, every time we have show and tell, everytime a student brings an element from their home culture into the classroom, every time a teacher brings back a mask or a tool from their visit to another country and displays it as part of their geography lesson.

World Building World Building comes out of thinking of the space of a story as a fictional geography. I've mentioned here before that L. Frank Baum described himself as the Royal Geographer of Oz. In this case, we do not simply mean physical geography though this is part of it. Books with a strong focus on worlds often include maps - whether it is the large scale map of Middle Earth in J.R.R. Tolkien or the much more local map of the rigigng of the ship found in many of Patrick O'Brian's books. Part of the pleasure of reading those books is mastering that fictional geography. But world building also depends on cultural geography - our sense of the peoples, their norms and rituals, their dress and speech, their everyday experiences, which is also often the pleasure of reading a fantasy or science fiction narrative. But it is also part of the pleasure of reading historical fiction and a teacher can use the activity of mapping and interpreting a fictional world as a way of opening up a historical period to their students. This moves us away from a history of generals and presidents towards social history as the key way through which schools help us to understand the past. And many traditional school activities encourage students to cook and eat meals, to make and wear costumes, to engage in various rituals, associated with other historical periods. If we develop ways of mapping these worlds as integrated systems, we can push beyond these local insights towards a fuller, richer understanding of past societies.

Seriality The media industry often discusses seriality in terms of the "mythology," which offers one way of understanding how we might connect this principle to traditional school content. At its heart, seriality has to do with the meaningful chunking and dispersal of story-related information. It is about breaking things down into chapters which are satisfying on their own terms but which motivate us to keep coming back for more. What constitutes the equivalent of the cliffhanger in the classroom? What represents the story arc which stitches a range of television episodes together? Or by contrast, what has to be present for a story or lesson to have a satisfying and meaningful shape even if it is part of a larger flow?

Subjectivity At heart, subjectivity refers to looking at the same events from multiple points of view. When we were going through my late mother's papers, we found a school assignment from the 1930s when she wrote the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the perspective of the wolf. When I mentioned this at the webinar, others mentioned Wicked which tells the Wizard of Oz from the vantage point of the Wicked Witch of the West. Matt Madden's book 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Excercises in Style is a great way to bring these issues into the art or language arts classroom: he tells the same simple story 99 times, each time tweaking different storytelling variables, including those around tense and perspective. In the history classroom, there's a value of flipping perspectives - how were the same events understood by the Greeks and the Persians, the RedCoats and the Yankees, the North and the South, and so forth, as a way of breaking out of historical biases and understanding what lay at the heart of these conflicts.

Performance In speaking about entertainment, I discuss performance in terms of a structure of cultural attractors and activators. The attractors draw the audience, the activators give them something to do. In the case of the classroom, there are a range of institutional factors which insure that you have a group of students sitting in front of you. But you still face the issue of motivation. When we were doing work on thinking about games to teach, we often had to ask the content experts to tell us what the information they saw as valuable allowed students to do. To turn the curriculum into a game, we had to move from information on the page to activities which put that information to use.

This is at the heart of any process-driven approach to learning. What are you asking your students to do with what you teach them? How are they able to adapt it in a timely and meaningful fashion from knowledge to skill? And tied to this is the idea of adaptation and improvisation, since in the entertainment world, different fans show their different understandings and interest in the entertainment content through very different kinds of performances. So, how do we create a space where every student can perform the content of the class in ways which are meaningful to them? In short, how might teachers learn to think about cultural activators in designing their lessons?

When Dora the Explorer Met INS: Playing with Popular Icons

As part of my lecture at the Fiske Matters conference, I shared many images of contemporary activist groups which drew upon images and icons from popular culture as "resources" which help them to capture the imagination and motivate the engagement of broader publics. As Fiske wrote,

"These popular forces transform the cultural commodity into a cultural resource, pluralize the meanings and pleasures it offers, evade or resist its disciplinary efforts, fracture its homogenity or coherence, raid or poach upon its terrain."

Fiske saw such struggles over the meaning of cultural texts and commodities as part of the larger process of political transformation. If the power of the status qou was often exercised through the construction of political fictions and the regulation of our access to particular narratives, meanings, and identities, then the ability of grassroots communities to highjack such images and processes towards their own ends was part of the struggle for social change. The mechanisms of the culture industry work to spread them across different subcultures and across national borders. That recognition makes them effective for expressing alternative conceptions in ways which carry an affective force and are immediately accessible to diverse publics.

For example, we've seen Dora the Explorer get mobilized in multiple ways on both sides of the debate about the Arizona immigration bill. Dora is one of the best known Latina characters in contemporary American popular culture so it is no surprise that people would use this sympathetic figure to represent what might happen under the new law. In these images, she is abused for no other reason than her color - and here, the innocence of her original context speaks to the sense of outrage many feel about the potential consequences of a law which allows police to stop any person thought to be an illegal alien and demanding her papers, a practice which is apt to rely heavily on racial profiling.

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These are another powerful set of images which have emerged around the debate about immigration. Dulce Pinzon has taken photographs which depict superheroes doing jobs which are often assigned to illegal immigrants in our society to suggest the hard work, the strength, the endurance, the speed and agility, that immigrants have to possess in order to do work that often nobody else wants to do. These images work in part because so many of the superheroes are themselves visitors from other worlds, outsiders who have had to adopt secret identities in order to function within contemporary American society. The superhero story is often an immigrant story in the United States. There's also a connection to be drawn between these images and the ways that masked wrestlers in the Lucha Libre tradition function as champions of the oppressed in Mexico. Here, also, the supernatural or spectacular aspects of popular culture get deployed as vehicles for making sense of structures of inequality and for inspiring struggles for social justice.

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One of the examples which I explored in depth in the lecture was the phenomenon of Avatar activism. Here's a remarkable video of Palestinian protestors who both enact the plight of the Na'vi and remix footage from James Cameron's film as a way of getting into the global media flow. I wrote a much longer piece on this example for Le Monde diplomatique which will appear later this summer and I will share an English translation at that time. For the moment, I want to suggest two key points: first, the ways that this protest fits within a longer tradition of conducting protests through adopting the identity of racial others (the Moors and Amazons in Early Modern Europe, the Native Americans at the Boston Tea Party, etc.) and second, the ways that re-enacting Avatar created content which could spread more immediately across national and cultural borders, offering a set of metaphors which might make sense to people who knew and cared little about the specifics of the occupied territories.

Finally, we might see some examples of how popular culture can become a semiotic resource for political struggle when we look at some of the images which have been created around the BP Oil Spill off our Gulf Coast. These images combine dark humor with witty appropriations from Mario Brothers, from superhero comics, and a range of other sources, to help us think about the environmental devastation caused by the environmental disaster. There have been concerted efforts to make it harder to circulate images of the actual damage of the leaks on wildlife, so these highjacked and transformed images stand in for the images we are not seeing. This rhetorical process is effective because these popular culture figures have personal, cultural, even mythological significance for so many of us.

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Fiske's work had described a world where struggles over cultural meanings could pave the way for political struggles. These illustrations are among countless examples of how politics, on the right and the left, is now being conducted in and through the language of popular culture. We can connect this to earlier examples I've already discussed on this blog, such as the Obama/Joker trope which has been taken up by the Tea Party movement, the Harry Potter Alliance's effort to use J.K. Rowling's characters to model human rights activism, and the ways that concern over the construction of race in the film version of The Last Avatar has lead to new political consciousness. I still believe that Fiske's work offers us the best language to describe what's going on at such moments.