ARG 2.0 (Part One)

The Alternate Reality Game (ARG) remains a topic of great interest to me and to my students at MIT and USC. Through the years, we've discovered that the ARG falls at the intersection between our recurring interests in participatory culture, collective intelligence, new media literacies, transmedia entertainment, and civic engagement. In my Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 graduate seminar last spring, Jeff Watson wrote a provocative essay which reviewed and challenged the current state of ARG theory and design, proposing some of the limits of this still emerging genres, as well as identifying some experiments that stretch the ARG in new directions. I immediately knew that I wanted to share this essay with my readers, who have a range of different investments in this space, in hopes that it might serve as a catalyst for enlarging the conversation around ARGS and might give him useful feedback as he hopes to prepare this essay for publication. Watson comes at this topic as a student in the USC's Cinema School's innovative iMAP program, which is designed to bring together students who are interested in both media design and theory. I am going to be teaching a seminar through the program this fall on Medium Specificity, and will be sharing the syllabus here shortly. Each of the students I have met through this program have impressed me with their creative insights and their willingness to test their ideas through experimental practice. The Cinema School as a whole is exploring how to break down the silos between theory and production and between the different craft specializations within production, because the media maker of the future will need to think and create across media platforms. This is yet another of the many reasons I am excited about being at USC right now.

ARG 2.0

by Jeff Watson

I. Abstract

As marketing instruments, alternate reality games (ARGs) are powerful tools for generating buzz and fostering audience engagement. Their capacity to initiate and maintain playful and creative dialogue between producers and fans signals the immanence of interactive and participatory transmedia entertainment. However, the established structure of the ARG as a time-sensitive and event-driven experience managed by the behind-the-scenes machinations of "puppet masters" (PMs) forecloses a number of important design possibilities. Consequently, ARGs often lack the qualities of accessibility, replayability, and scalability that are so crucial to the adoption and impact of other kinds of socially-articulated interactive systems. In instances where the objective is to create or engage an elite class of "in the know" participants, such a lack may in fact be a strength; but for other use cases, accessibility, replayability, and scalability are critical. This paper outlines the significance of the absence of these characteristics from many "first generation" ARGs, and points toward an emerging "2.0" iteration of the form through reference to recent projects and practices in both industrial and institutional contexts.

II. Terminology

In contrast to more capacious terms such as "pervasive game" or "big game," the term, "alternate reality game," refers to a very specific and well-defined form of interactive transmedia storytelling that "[takes] the substance of everyday life and [weaves] it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world" (IGDA ARG SIG 2006). In an ARG, players discover the game through an encounter with one or more access points embedded in real world contexts. These access points, known in the parlance of ARGs as "rabbit holes," lead players into a dynamic matrix of story components distributed across various kinds of digital and physical media.

By exploring these components, players discover puzzles and challenges that serve both as impetus to connect with other players, and as time- and context-sensitive content bottlenecks. In order to advance the narrative, players typically work together, first assembling into affinity groups via both official (i.e., game-sanctioned) and unofficial (i.e., player-created) social media structures; then tackling puzzles and challenges collectively, leveraging the range of competencies, geographies, and biographies inherent in a large and distributed player base. As puzzles are solved, the game's content producers, or "puppet masters," release successive cycles of story and interactivity, tweaking their approach along the way based on the observed behavior and emerging collective intelligence capabilities of the players.

This process repeats itself until the narrative concludes, typically with the launch of a product or service. At this point, official support for the player community is usually terminated, primary online game assets are deleted or otherwise rendered inactive, and the game ends.

III. Introduction

Early participants and producers of ARGs compared their emergence to watershed moments in pop music (Phillips 2010) and cinema, with some going so far as to suggest that the ARG is effectively the defining narrative mode of our present communications epoch (Stewart 2004). Indeed, especially in the context of the early 2000s, ARGs represented a uniquely transmedial mode of interactive storytelling, and as such were seen as being natural and inevitable outgrowths of the burgeoning network culture. When playing an ARG, fans consume story in a variety of modes, via a range of devices, channels, settings, and practices. This platform-independent nonlinearity and fragmentary or distributed consumption-participation pattern was seen as a logical outcome of millennial shifts in media habits, and was referenced by various futurists as a model for how stories and games could be designed in the coming era of ubiquitous computing and social media (Gibson 2005; Vinge 2006).

Other observers, invested in visions of participatory and collaborative storytelling, noted that, unlike typical consumers of cinema, television and other few-to-many media forms, the players of ARGs are always already necessary and constitutive elements of the work. That is, in an ARG, audience participation is not a byproduct, but rather an essential and formative component of the text. To practitioners and theorists with a stake in participatory culture, the notion of an interactive storytelling form conceived from the ground up as a means of facilitating the collaborative production of media artifacts provided a "perfect illustration of all of the principles . . . shaping the media landscape at the present time" (Jenkins 2006).

Further, ARGs were viewed as fitting into a long tradition of spatially- and temporally-distributed narrative forms, and for some, their emergence indicated the arrival into the mainstream of practices that had hitherto been relegated to fan subcultures and marginal art movements. Like the critical interventions of Situationism, which sought to reconfigure public space as a "new arena for creation" wherein "unforeseen games will become possible through the inventive use of material conditions" (Nieuwenhuys, 1959), the ambiguously-bounded play of ARGs has the ability to produce dramatic shifts in subjectivity that "[sensitize] participants to affordances, real or imagined," "[make] all data seem connected, or at least plausibly connected," and "make surfaces less convincing" (McGonigal 2003, 43-44). Similarly, ARGs promised to do to mainstream storytelling what "distributed narratives"- experimental narratives spread out across "time, space, and the network" (Walker 2004, 1) - had done to avant garde and electronic literature:

Distributed narratives break down the aesthetics of unity we have followed for millennia. They take this disunity a step further than the bricolage of postmodernism, by collapsing the unity of form as well as that of content and concept. Yet perhaps they also point to a new kind of unity: a unity where the time and space of the narrative are in sync with the time and space of the reader. (Walker 2004, 11)

Finally, by bringing together once disparate practices such as game design, performance art, and cinematic narrative, ARGs were seen as being on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary new media thinking. Great things were forecasted, including the use of ARGs in establishing and leveraging collective intelligences in order to solve real-world problems (McGonigal 2003; Jenkins 2004).

IV. ARGs in Practice: 2001-2010

While ARGs have proven that they have the potential to mobilize elite groups of "lead users" who can co-create content and evangelize for a brand or cause (McGonigal 2003; Szulborski 2005; IGDA ARG SIG 2006; Dena 2008a) - and that they can quickly generate alarmingly efficient collective intelligences (McGonigal 2007; see also DARPA 2010) - they have, perhaps understandably, failed to live up to some of the high expectations set at the turn of the century. ARGs have not seen the kinds of growth in popularity that other forms of gaming and storytelling have seen over the past decade (Schell 2010; compare with Dena 2008a); they have not proven to be a particularly effective way of building lasting communities or collaborative practices, especially when compared to more systems-oriented approaches to organizing and maintaining collective action (see Shirky 2008); and they have failed to maintain the same kind of relevance to contemporary media habits and technologies that they arguably held in the early 2000s, ceding this territory to other kinds of pervasive interactivity such as mobile and social media games, casual games, and collaborative production games (see Montola, et al 2009).

The specific reasons for these shortfalls vary from context to context. In the media industry, for example, ARGs have largely been considered marketing tools, and as such have often not been sufficiently integrated into the development and production processes of the properties they promote, leading to disconnects between fans of the source material, ARG player communities, PMs, and producers. As writer Rich Silverman of the Transmedia LA message board (2010) puts it, "[it's] been my experience that an ARG component of a film or TV property comes to the game too late to be really effective . . . we need to start seeing these things baked into the development process of any show or film they're supporting." In educational and institutional contexts, ARGs are similarly marginalized, typically employed as orientation tools (Down 2008) or experimental promotions (Goodlander 2009), but rarely meshed with the core operations or mandates of their hosts.

It is unclear whether the persistent design problems that constrain or preclude the accessibility, replayability, and scalability of ARGs are the cause or the result of this marginalization. Nevertheless, making such a determination is probably less important than identifying what those core design problems are, and suggesting ways in which the form can evolve or adapt in order to correct them. In general, these problems center on three overlapping and relatively unchallenged aspects of traditional ARG design, namely: 1) that, despite the decidedly playful and improvisatory character of the relationship between puppet masters and players, ARGs are ultimately not game systems but rather vehicles for delivering story; 2) that ARGs treat their core audiences as monadic "collective detectives" rather than groups of living, breathing individuals; and, 3) that ARGs are linear, event-driven experiences.

Indeed, many of the problems associated with ARGs can be traced back to their status as temporally-bounded and sequentially-unfolding experiences. As Jim Stewartson of Fourth Wall Studios puts it, "[ARGs have historically been] essentially rock concerts. Very large, real-time, elaborate experiences that were really cool and really fun for the people who were involved with them" (Morris, et al 2009). This event-like design clearly eliminates any potential for replayability, and it exacts almost equally dire consequences on accessibility and scalability. In a typical ARG, players who don't have the time at the right time to dive into the game can find their experience spoiled by those who do. Even players with high levels of interest in the material and a strong desire to participate in the game's challenges can be reduced to lurking on message boards or merely following along with puppet master- or player-created story summaries if they don't have the time required to keep up with the more hard-core players. Consequently, the vast majority of the players of traditional ARGs aren't "players" at all, but are rather more like spectators, albeit very multi-modal ones:

Of the millions of people who 'experience' an ARG only tens of thousands actually play them, the rest read the texts created by players. Now, as I have stated many times before, this is a very interesting model of audience tiering and shows a preference for player-created narratives above producer-created ones (indeed, the desire for a linear narrative above a fragmented one)...but the large numbers often claimed . . . are not indicative of the people who actually play these forms. They are hardcore games that only a (relatively) small amount of players can actually play directly (due to skill, time and access obstacles). I don't see how a form with such accessibility issues is the ultimate form. (Dena 2007)

Dena (2008b), Montola (2009), and others have pointed out that this "pyramid of participation" enables transmedial designs wherein "different play modes contribute to each other and support an experience that is larger than its parts" (Montola, et al 2009, 121). In such an arrangement, spectators co-exist with variously-engaged players, with the hard-core participants effectively acting as "stars" of the game's narrative ; puppet masters and serious players document the actions of the hard core in real- or near-real-time; and the rest of the player base consumes this documentation serially. This kind of structure has been experimented with to varying degrees of success.

However, since this and other kinds of "tiering" (Dena 2008b) demand the production and management of numerous additional layers of game assets, they also represent some of the most expensive and labor-intensive solutions to the accessibility problem.

Another aspect of the accessibility problem emerges from of the manner in which ARG designers traditionally address their players. As Sean Stewart notes in an interview with members of The Cloudmakers (2001), "[the] premise from Day One was that the entire Internet should be considered as a single player; that we could put an ad in a newspaper in Osaka in the morning and have some kid in Iowa using that information by supper time."

That is, while individual players in an ARG are free to privately interact with characters or artifacts from the game, the puzzles and challenges are designed with such complexity that any information gathered from these interactions needs to be shared with and processed by a collective in order to be properly contextualized and rendered sensible in a timely fashion. While this design encourages the formation of collective intelligences, in the context of a time-based, event-driven, closed information system such as an ARG, it also somewhat counter-intuitively results in an increasing diminishment of the degree to which new players can easily access and enter into the activity.

That is, once a functioning "collective detective" (Cloudmakers 2001) has been established, it will tackle the challenges presented by the puppet masters with a self-refining efficiency that will largely discount the need for new members. Knowledge production structures populated by elite players with available time, an appropriate range of competencies, and relevant social capital will gather, process, and analyze data faster and more thoroughly than a non-integrated outsider ever could. Further, as the game progresses, prospective members without adequate reputation within the player community and in-depth knowledge of "the story so far" (see Dena 2008b, 41) will naturally find it increasingly difficult to find a role within the collective.

To illustrate this problem, consider the recent DARPA Network Challenge crowdsourcing experiment (2009). In this experiment, ten red weather balloons were placed in visible locations around the United States, and the public was challenged to find the balloons using any legal means whatsoever. Nine hours after the event commenced, all ten balloons had been found by a team from MIT (http://balloon.mit.edu/). In this instance, the team, which had conscripted around 5,400 balloon spotters via social media and various public entreaties (DARPA 2010), served its purpose and was quickly dissolved; but what if the DARPA Network Challenge had been only the first of many challenges in a long-term game - that is, if it was merely the opening puzzle of a three month long ARG. How would this emerging collective intelligence have evolved? Would it have become more broad-based like Wikipedia, exploring the diverse interests and passions of its user base, or would it have gravitated toward greater efficiencies, tighter working groups, task-oriented committees, and editorial sub-teams?

According to fieldwork conducted by McGonigal (2007), the latter is more likely: rather than becoming more inclusive or expansive, the group might in fact become increasingly specialized along particular "threads of investigation" tied to the core problems with which it was presented. After all, the puzzles in ARGs are ultimately very specific: unlike Wikipedia, which is almost completely open-ended, the knowledge production demanded by an ARG is focused on a particular story world and an associated set of puzzles with clearly-defined solutions - much like the narrow-but-complex balloon-finding task of the DARPA experiment. Further, since the puzzles in ARGs are often cumulative and informed by the solutions to earlier puzzles, those who were on board for the first discoveries - in this case, those who understood the methodology by which the original 5,400 balloon spotters were coordinated and the information they provided was processed - would arguably be more valuable and acceptable assets to the team than newcomers unaware of those practices and procedures. Somewhat ironically, then, this kind of collective intelligence design, when applied to closed information systems such as ARGs, has steeply diminishing returns when it comes to inclusivity and accessibility.

What all of these problems have in common is an origin in the "non-gameness" of ARGs. ARGs, despite their name, are not, in fact, games; rather, they are ergodic (Aarseth 1997) transmedia texts that, structurally speaking, are much more akin to scavenger hunts or group puzzle-solving activities like the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. Rarely in ARG design do we see the generativity, rulesets, and procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007) that characterize games.

This is fine; not everything has to be a game. But for an activity which so often aspires to take place on a massive scale, both in terms of content and participation, to not use game mechanics as a means of generating and managing interactivity is arguably a recipe for disaster. Indeed, much of ARG design is reminiscent of early experiments in electronic literature and interactive filmmaking which sought to create vast narratives via branching story trees: very quickly, artists who took this approach discovered that to do so meant writing or shooting orders of magnitude more material than the reader or viewer would ever see.

An interactive movie-game like Dragon's Lair (1983), for example, needed a total of 27 minutes of animation stored on custom-made laserdiscs to provide an interactive experience that lasted for a maximum of 6 minutes (The Dot Eaters 2007) - and even then, the gameplay consisted of little more than making a handful of left-or-right decisions about which direction the protagonist should move. Compare this outcome to an even older video game, Rogue (1980), a procedurally-generated dungeon-crawler that remains popular to this day. In Rogue, the virtual world is generated on the fly at runtime via an algorithm. Instead of devoting limited computational resources to storing and displaying pre-rendered content (as in Dragon's Lair), Rogue's programmers used a compact ruleset to create their gameworld, producing an expansive and endlessly replayable realm of fantasy adventure and tabletop RPG-style interactivity that would have been technically impossible to produce using pre-made dungeon scenarios given the limited storage resources of early 1980s home computers. Despite being made for free by hobbyist programmers, Rogue's parsimonious use of algorithms rather than branching content trees resulted in much more interactivity and depth than was presented three years later by Dragon's Lair's spectacular but simplistic left-or-right decision making interface. This is the real power of games: to create dynamic interactive experiences through rules rather than archives of pre-made content. As we shall see below, approaching ARG design from this perspective opens a range of new possibilities for producers.

Finally, because ARGs are so expensive and labor-intensive to maintain, media companies and institutions overwhelmingly abandon the communities they create once the putative purpose for their creation has been satisfied (McGonigal 2003; IGDA ARG SIG 2006). While this instrumental view of community may have short-term benefits to brands and creatives, and while many media companies are likely comfortable with the risk of "blowback" from disaffected ARG fans (especially since said fans will have long since served their purpose by the time their complaints come to the fore), in the long term, such a view effectively undermines one of alternate reality gaming's most important potentials for generating value: the creation and maintenance of strong, persistent communities.

Jeff Watson is an interdisciplinary media practitioner with a background in screenwriting, filmmaking, and game design. His doctoral research in Media arts and Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts focuses on investigating how ubiquitous computing and social media can enable new forms of storytelling and civic engagement. For more insights from Jeff Watson, you can check out his website or follow his Twitter flow.

Civic Media: A Syllabus

Over the past few terms, I've been sharing here the syllabi of the new courses I am developing at the University of Southern California, courses which build upon my own research interests and are intended to open up space for students to pursue their own projects. In the fall, I am going to be teaching two classes, both graduate seminars -- Civic Media for the Journalism School and Medium Specificity for the Cinema School. I am sharing my Civic Media syllabus here and will share the Medium Specificity syllabus later this summer. I am sharing these in part in hopes they prove useful to other researchers and teachers and in part because I am hoping to help spread the word to USC students who might be interested in learning more on these topics. The Civic Media class is intended, as the syllabus suggests, as a nexus between Communications and Journalism students, but I also assume it may appeal to students in Political Science, History, Education, perhaps even some in Engineering or Computer Science who want to build tools for supporting civic engagement or activism. If you know of someone at USC who might be interested in this class, please pass the word. SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM

USC ANNENBERG SCHOOL FOR COMMUNICATION & JOURNALISM

JOUR 599 Special Topics: Civic Media

Fall 2010

3 units

Schedule/Syllabus

Section: 21679D

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2-4:40 p.m.

Classroom: TBD

Professor: Henry Jenkins

Email: hjenkins@usc.edu

Office: ASC 101C

Office hours: By appointment.

Please contact Amanda Ford at: amanda.ford@usc.edu

Course Description and Outcomes:

"Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism...When we shift our attention from 'save newspapers' to 'save society,' the imperative changes from 'preserve the current institutions' to 'do whatever works.' And what works today isn't the same as what used to work."-- Clay Shirky

Civic Media: any use of any technology for the purposes of increasing civic engagement and public participation, enabling the exchange of meaningful information, fostering social connectivity, constructing critical perspectives, insuring transparency and accountability, or strengthening citizen agency.

This class on "civic media" is designed to provide a meeting ground between those involved in the cultural study of communications and those invested in the study of journalism as we address a common concern with the current moment of media in transition. We will start our semester by considering a series of recent reports exploring the current state and predicting future directions for journalism, public media, and the information needs of communities. What we hope to develop along the way is a functional understanding of the roles journalism has performed in American society over the past 100 or so years. We see professional journalism as both communicating core data vital for informed citizenship and performing central rituals needed to sustain a democratic culture.

Often, we think about democracy as grounded in a rationalist discourse and shaped by structures of information, but democracy also has strong cultural roots and is shaped by what Raymond Williams would call "a structure of feeling." We may ask in the first instance what citizens need to know in order to make wise decisions and, in the second, what it feels like to be an empowered citizen capable of making a difference and sharing common interests with others. Across the trajectory of the course, we will explore a range of other institutions and practices that have similarly contributed to the public awareness, civic engagement, and social connectivity required for a functioning democracy.

Before we can decide where we are going, though, we need to know where we have been -- we will consider everything from broadsides and ballads to wax museums, "living newspapers," underground comics, photo-shopped collages, circus parades, town pageants, scrapbooks, and toy printing presses, in search of historical models of civic media. Just as newspapers are one form of journalism, journalism is one set of practices that help us to perform these functions.

Our expedition will be historical (looking at how these functions were performed in other times and places), theoretical (focusing on how different writers have conceived of civic engagement, public participation, and social capital), technological (understanding how the affordances and uses of different kinds of media enabled them to achieve one or another of these goals), and applied (seeking future models for how citizens, policy makers, and journalists might collaborate to better meet the informational and cultural needs of our times). We will also consider how new media practices may be altering our conception of democracy, government, citizenship, and community, seeking to better grasp what remains the same and what changes as we interact with each other via virtual worlds and social networks rather than in physical coffee houses and bowling allies.

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

• Define key concepts, such as "public sphere," "counterpublic," "imagined communities," and "citizen journalism," which have run through debates about the civic functions of media
• Discuss how professional journalism fits within a larger realm of public and civic communications
• Identify key positions in current debates about the future of news
• Describe a range of different mechanisms through which civic functions have been performed across history
• Recognize alternative conceptions of the role of citizens and their relationship to civic information
• Analyze major shifts in American and global civic life manifesting through the rise of social networks, virtual worlds, and Web 2.0 practices

Grading and Assignments:

1. Students will contribute questions and comments to the class forum. (20 percent)

2. Students will elect one of the white papers we will have read for Week 2 of the class and write a short five-page response, focusing on the following two questions: What do you see as the strengths and the limits of their approach? What recommendations do you see as realistic and achievable? What obstacles would need to be overcome? (20 percent)

3. Students will develop a five-page report on a civic or activist organization they feel is making innovative use of civic media. (20 percent)

4. Students will develop a final project that applies the broad ideas of the course. This project might be a conventional academic essay, an experiment in new journalistic practice, or the prototype for a new civic media tool. Students should discuss their project with the instructor early in the semester so we can set an appropriate scale for this project. Students will be ready to give a 10-15 minute presentation on their project by the final weeks of the class. (40 percent)

Required Books:

Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown V. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Peter Levine, The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens. Tufts (2007).

Beth Noveck, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better,

Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful, Brookings Institution Press

(2009).

Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siecle Paris, University of California Press (1999).

Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace, The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That

Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse, MIT Press (2007)

Rahaf Harfoush, Yes We Did: How Social Networks Built the Obama Brand, New Riders Press (2009).

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

All other readings will be available through the class blackboard site.

Week 1: Introduction to Civic Media (Tuesday, August 24th)

James W. Carey, "A Cultural Approach to Communication" and "Reconceiving 'Mass'

and 'Media,'" Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Benedict Anderson, "Introduction," "Cultural Roots," and "Census, Map, Museum,"

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006)

Robert Putnam, "Introduction: Thinking about Social Change in America," Bowling

Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Civic Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001)

Handout with quotations from John Milton, John Stuart Mills, Alexis DeTocqville, John

Dewey, Raymond Williams, Benjamin Barber.

Week 2: Does News Have a Future? (Tuesday, August 31st)

Paul Duguid, "Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book" in Geoffrey Nunberg, The Future of the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)

Jessica Clark, "Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics" Center for Social Media

Tony Deifell, "The Big Thaw: Charting A New Course for Journalism" The Media

Consortium

Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities, "Informing

Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age,"

Clay Shirky, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," March 13 2009

Week 3: Where Publics Gather (Tuesday, September 7th)

Nancy Frazier, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually

Existing Democracy," Social Text, 25-26, 1990

Tom Standage, "Coffee," A History of the World in 6 Glasses (New York: Walker, 2006)

Richard Butsch, "The Politics of Audiences in America," The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics and Individuals (New York: Routledge, 2007)

Mary L. Gray, "From Walmart to Websites: Out in Public," Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New York: New York University Press, 2009)

Paul Starr, "The Opening of the Public Sphere, 1600-1860,"The Creation of Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic, 2005)

Handout with key passages from Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

Week 4: Why Media Matters (Tuesday, September 14th)

John Fiske, "Introduction" and "Technostruggles," Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" New Left Review 64, 1970, 13-36.

John Hartley, "The Frequencies of Public Writing: Tomb, Tome, and Time as

Technologies of the Public," in Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn (eds.)

Democracy and New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

Kirsten Drotner, "Media on the Move: Personalized Media and the Transformation of

Publicness," in Sonia Livingstone (ed.) Audiences and Publics: When Cultural

Engagement Matters for the Public (Bristol: Intellect, 2005).

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)

Week 5: Rethinking the Informed Citizen (Tuesday, September 21st)

Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown V. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Steve Classen, "Introduction", "Conclusion," Watching Jim Crow: The Struggle Over Mississippi TV, 1955-1969, Durham: Duke University Press.

Michael Schudson, "Click Here for Democracy: A History and Critique of an

Information-Based Model of Citizenship," in Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn

(eds.) Democracy and New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

Cynthia Gibson, "Citizens at the Center: A New Approach to Civic Engagement" The

Case Foundation

Week 6: The Future of Democracy (Tuesday, September 28th)

Peter Levine, The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens (Boston: Tufts, 2007)

Sonia Livingstone, "On the Relationship Between Audiences and Publics," and Daniel

Dayan, "Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists: Genealogy, Obstetrics, Audiences and Publics," in Sonia Livingstone (ed.) Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere (London: Intellect, 2005)

Meira Levinson, "The Civic Empowerment Gap" Defining the Problem and Locating

Solutions," in Lonnie Sherrod, Constance Flanagan, and Judith Torney-Purta (eds.) Handbook of Research on Civic Engagement in Youth (Boston: John Wiley and Sons 2009)

Henry Jenkins, "A Person's A Person, No Matter How Small: The Democratic

Imagination of Doctor Seuss," in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc (eds.) Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

Week 7: A Digital Revolution? (Tuesday, October 5th)

Anna Everett, "Digital Women: The Case of the Million Woman March Online and On

Television," Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace (New York: State University of New York Press, 2009)

Roger Hurwitz, "Who Needs Politics? Who Needs People?: The Ironies of Democracy in

Cyberspace," in Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn (eds.) Democracy and New

Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

Cass Sunstein, "The Daily We: Is The Internet Really a Blessing for Democracy," and

Responses, The Boston Review, Summer 2001

Richard A. Ryerson, "Committees of Correspondence," The Revolution is Now Begun: the Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765-1776. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978)

Week 8: Collective Action (Tuesday, October 12th)

Beth Noveck, Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better,

Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings Institute Press, 2009)

Yochai Benkler, "The Emergence of a Networked Public Sphere," The Wealth of

Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)

Warren Sack, "What Does a Very Large Scale Conversation Look Like?," Electronic Book Review, March 7 2005.

Jane McGonigel, "This Is Not A Game': Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play,"

Avant-Game,

Week 9: Civic Rituals (Tuesday, October 19th)

Victor Turner, "Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative

Symbology," Rice University Studies 60(3), 53-92

Janet M. Davis, "Instruct the Minds of All Classes," The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Marie Ryan, "The American Parade: Representations of 19th Century Social Order,"

in Lynn Hunt (ed.) The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)

Paul Nadler, "Liberty Censored: Black Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre

Project," African American Review 29 (1995): 615-622

Lynn Hunt, "Pornography and the French Revolution," The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800: Obscenity and The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge: Zone, 1996)

Week 10: Spectacular Reality (Then and Now) (Tuesday, October 26th)

Vanessa R. Schwartz, "Setting the Stage: The Boulevard, the Press and the Framing of

Everyday Life," "Public Visits to the Morgue: Flanerie in the Service of the

State," "The Musee Grevin: Museum and Newspaper in One," Spectacular

Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siecle Paris (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1999)

John Hartley, "Reality and the Plebisite," Television Truths: Forms of Knowledge in

Popular Culture (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007)

Aswin Punathambekar, "Television, Participatory Culture, and Politics: the Case of

Indian Idol," Flow 10(5)

Pamela Wilson, "Jamming Big Brother USA: Webcasting, Audience Intervention and

Narrative Activism," in Ernest Mathis, Janet Jones (eds.) Big Brother International: Formats, Critics and Publics (London: Wallflower, 2004)

Marwan M. Kraidy, "A Battle of Nations: Superstar and the Lebanon-Syria Media War,"

Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Week 11: Democracy in Virtual Worlds (Tuesday, November 2nd)

Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace, The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That

Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009)

Ian Bogost, "Digital Democracy," Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of

Videogames (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007)

Joe Kahne, Ellen Middaugh and Chris Evans, The Civic Potential of Video Games (MacArthur Foundation, 2009)

Week 12: Surviving Disasters (Tuesday, November 9th)

Eric Klinenberg, "In the Public Interest," Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control

America's Media (New York: Holt, 2008)

George Lipsitz, "Learning from New Orleans: The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism

and Competitive Consumer Citizenship," Cultural Anthropology 21(3), August 2006

Elaine Scarry, "Who Defended The Country?," in Daniel J. Sherman and Terry Nardin

(eds.) Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)

Henry Jenkins, "Captain America Shed His Mighty Tears", in Daniel J. Sherman and

Terry Nardin (eds.) Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)

Huma Yusuf, "Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March

2007-February 2008)," Center for Future Civic Media

Week 13: Social Networks and Participatory Culture (Tuesday, November 16th)

Andrew Kohut, "Social Networking and Online Videos Take Off: Internet's Broader

Role in Campaign 2008," Pew Internet and American Life Project

Rahaf Harfoush, Yes We Did: How Social Networks Built the Obama Brand (San Francisco: New Riders Press, 2009)

Ellen Gruber Garvey, "Scissoring and Scrapbooks: 19th Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating" in Lisa Gitelman (ed.) New Media, 1740-1915 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004)

Week 14: Politics, Fantasy and Parody (Tuesday, November 23rd)

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

Henry Jenkins, "Photoshop for Democracy" and "Why Mitt Romney Won't Debate a

Snowman," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New

York: New York University Press, 2006)

Henry Jenkins, "How Dumbledore's Army Is Changing the Real World: An Interview

with Andrew Slack," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July 23 2009,

Week 15: Final Presentations (Tuesday, November 30th)

LAST DAY OF CLASS

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

Science fiction media offers us a chance to envision the future of news. What images have surfaced there most frequently?

Journalists of the future apparently have the same problems as journalists in the past. In a TV Sci-Fi series called Dark Angel, created by Jim Cameron in 2000, a journalist, crippled by the enemy, broadcasts news and revolutionary information by hacking into government television. He is a traditional hero in the future. So are Max Headroom and the TV staff around him. They are working in a corrupt system trying to do the best job they can at informing the public. Almost every journalist in science fiction faces the same problems journalists have faced throughout history. The technology is different. The villains can even be aliens. But the problems are the same and the way the journalist faces the problems hasn't changed in 2,000 years. Often, these sci-fi journalists will risk their lives and may even get killed to make sure the public is informed.

In the 1950s, journalists were used in countless sci-fi films (many real-life journalists performing in the movies just as they performed in real life on radio or TV) to give the films more credibility. In the early 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy played on the postwar fear of communism to stage a witch hunt in Hollywood that destroyed many careers and left a legacy of fear that would last for more than a decade.

It diminished the motion picture industry's enthusiasm for making movies about corrupt

politicians and powerful businessmen. And it created an unquestioning, passive reporter who shows up in one science fiction film after another. These reporters always work with the authorities, and worry less about scoops and informing the public. These reporters are more interested in working with the military and the government to extinguish the man-made or outer space threat, than in the people's right to know. These reporters are good Americans first, journalists second and they never question the government's ultimate authority to do the right thing.

You recently put together a case study of representations of "gay journalists." What did you find?

It turns out that gay journalists are pretty much the same as other journalists except for their sexual preferences, which take up a good deal of screen time. In analyzing more than 125 films and TV programs, we discovered that the gay journalist is often ridiculed and used as a comic figure whose stereotypical gay characteristics are a source of either derision or buffoonery. The majority of serious gay journalists in most of the 20th century are usually bitchy columnists or bitter critics whose devastating one-liners can reduce anyone to tears or anger. They have great power, but usually by the last reel are defeated or even murdered. The same is true with reporters overly concerned about doing their job well and less about the perception around them that they are gay.

By the late 1980s, being gay was often acknowledged in one way or another. Many plots involved the growing AIDS epidemic or the problem of being outed as a gay or the problems of being gay in any society. Interestingly enough, most of the sensitive portrayals of gays in the cinema involve films made outside the United States. With the exception of India, whose stereotypes of gay characters seem to be a staple of Bollywood, films made in France, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Egypt, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada, and the United Kingdom are extremely sensitive and moving portrayals of both male and female gay characters.

As the 20th century came to a close and continuing in the 21st century, gay journalists are accepted as being gay and often their gayness figures prominently in the plot. For some reason, 1997 turned out to be a seminal year previewing the next century's portrayal of gays. Rupert Everett's gay British editor in My Best Friend's Wedding and Tom Selleck's tabloid reporter in In & Out were characters the audiences accepted with affection. But even as film after film featured fully realized gay characters, the ridicule of stereotypical gay characteristics continued in films as recently as He's Just Not That Into You in 2009.

Surprisingly, television programs featuring gay journalists provided far more sensitive portrayals of gay characters. Individual episodes of Night Court, Murphy Brown, Queer as Folk, Dirt, Veronica Mars and The Nanny, and continuing characters in such shows as Ugly Betty, Frasier, Da Ali G and The L Word showed gay journalists who were not afraid or embarrassed to be gay. And the gay journalist in The L Word even gets her own series in 2010.

The gay journalist turns up in all forms of film genres, including horror films, action films, sci-fi and supernatural films, detective films, cartoons and comedies. There's a Ph.D. thesis to be written on the image of the journalist in soft and hard-core adult films and the image of the gay journalist is no exception. All of the stereotypes associated with gays and journalists can be found in soft-core or hard-core pornography featuring gay journalists.

It can also be concluded that lesbians are generally treated more favorably in films and TV than gay men. With the exception of the female who displays male characteristics and is constantly ridiculed and assaulted in films, lesbians with feminine characteristics are among the most favorable images of gay journalists in films and TV.

Some of the more serious films dealing with gays show the influence of parental approval or disapproval on the gay journalist. It is easier for the female to win approval of her lifestyle than the male. Often the male gay journalist is an outcast not only to his family, but also to his fellow workers.

Public relations practitioners display all the characteristics of the image of the public relations practitioners as well as the image of the gay journalist in popular culture. They exhibit all of the stereotypical gay characteristics, they can be ruthless in their pursuit of power, and they often are accepted as being gay and frequently their gayness figures in the plot.

The image of the gay journalist in films and TV is a varied collection of males and females whose sexuality is a primary factor in the plot and character development. They often have close friends of the opposite gender, they exhibit bright minds and devastating one-liners, they seem to be always looking for that significant other and seldom finding him or her, and many seem to have an enormous reservoir of understanding for people who don't get the concept of being gay. More often than not, they appear in comedies. When they appear in dramas, it is usually heavy going involving prejudice, illness and sometimes violence. Gay journalists seem to fare better than other gay characters, possibly because of their sense of humor, their wit and ability to lose themselves in the stories they are working on.

Citizen Kane, the film many consider to be the greatest American movie, deals with a journalist. Is its depiction of the press part of what has made it such an enduring and influential film?

I don't think the fact that Kane was a publisher and surrounded himself with journalists, especially in the early part of the film (which has delightful newspaper sequences), had much to do with making it an enduring and influential film.

The newspaper part came mostly out of Herman Mankiewicz's mind. He was a newspaperman who had written other newspaper films, hated William Randolph Hearst, knew much of the gossip around him because of his friendship with Marian Davies and put practically all of it into the film. It was that part of the film that almost destroyed it.

But Citizen Kane is considered one of the greatest American movies primarily because of its brilliant use of sound, deep focus camera work, and brilliant acting and writing. Nothing like it was ever seen before it appeared on the screen. It was original and daring in its use of audio and video. That is the real secret of its greatness, not its rather coarse story of a publisher who in strategic parts of the film resembled Hearst (the inside joke concerning "Rosebud" will live in infamy).

Is the newspaper film a genre or should we be focusing on the diverse roles journalists play across a range of genres?

Journalists show up in every kind of film ever made. But there is a definite news media film genre. Richard Ness' monumental filmography demonstrates this conclusively. Although the IJPC Database chronicles any journalist in any part of popular culture - even when the journalist shows up for a page or two in a novel, or a scene or two in a movie or TV or radio program - the journalist is a key protagonist enough of the time to warrant its own genre.

The word journalist dates back to 1693 and is defined as someone who makes a living by editing or writing for a public journal or journals. In modern times, the journalist has grown to mean much more than someone simply involved in the production of printed journals. It has become a synonym for reporting in any news media. The IJPC defines journalist as anyone in any century who performs the function of the journalist - to gather and disseminate news and information, to report, to observe, to investigate, to criticize, to inform. The body of film and novels that include this kind of journalist is huge.

Do you see significant differences in the ways journalists are portrayed in films coming from countries which do not have the same tradition of a free press as the United States?

The IJPC Database has more than 2,600 films from other countries that have a journalist in them. Most of the images resemble those of American films. The journalist in any country seems to be depicted in much the same way - either as a hero righting a wrong or the last one standing up for freedom of speech and press, or a villain in cohorts with the government in power.

Many of the problems American journalists face in popular culture are the same as those journalists in foreign films and novels. The concept of a free press and the importance of a free press is a popular theme in most foreign films, even those in which a free press is more of an ideal than a reality. And one Italian film gave us the concept of paparazzi (La Dolce Vita).

About 30 percent of the IJPC Associates are outside the United States. There is great interest in the image of the journalist in American films and TV programs outside of this country. And many of these films and TV programs have had a tremendous influence on the image of the journalist in various non-English speaking films.

In less serious films, the journalist is depicted as an object of humor, and the tabloid press worldwide is the subject of ridicule and sharp satire. Especially in the films labeled Bollywood, many feature a journalist as comic.

Your data base includes many comics. Why do you think the journalist became so centrally linked to the superhero genre?

A reporter is an obvious disguise for a superhero because it puts the superhero right in the thick of the news and gives him or her an opportunity to know what is going on in the city, the country and the world. Also, journalists are always where the news happens so it is also a good cover for a superhero to be where the action is. It is no surprise that the most enduring image of the journalist is the Daily Planet family - Clark Kent (Superman), Lois Lane, Perry White and Jimmy Olsen.

Since they appeared in comic books in 1939-1940, they have not changed at all throughout the last 70 years. They may have been modernized (at one point in the comic books Kent becomes a TV reporter, and in current comic book issues, the Daily Planet is suffering cutbacks and the Internet revolution), but at the heart of it all Kent is still the hard-working reporter who believes in accuracy and fairness, Lois Lane is still the 1940s sob sister more interested in getting the story first than anything else, Perry White is still the gruff editor out of any 1930-1940 film, and Jimmy Olsen, the aspiring cub reporter and later photojournalist is still out to make a name for himself and always following in Kent-Lane's footsteps.

It doesn't matter whether it is the original comic books, the radio show, the early cartoons based on the radio show, the movie serials, the four Superman films, the Lois & Clark TV series, the many TV cartoon versions throughout the years or the brilliant reimagining of the Superman-Clark Kent myth on Smallville, the Daily Planet staff always remains the same - probably the most enduring positive images of the journalist in modern history.

It's no coincidence that the most enduring superheroes - Superman, Spider-man, The Question (TV Reporter Vic Sage), Tabloid Vampire Reporter Becky Burdock, Vulcan (Reporter Johnny Mann), The Megaton Man (Reporter Trent Phloog), The Creeper (Tabloid Columnist-Investigative Reporter Jack Ryder) - are journalists or have journalists around them, superhero partners or rivals - Reporter Lois Lane, Photojournalist Jimmy Olsen, Editor-Reporter Joseph "Robbie" Robertson, Reporter Ben Ulrich, TV Reporter Sweet Polly Purebred, TV Reporter April O'Neil, Magazine Reporter Natsuko Shouno, Reporter Pamela Jointly, Tabloid Reporter Anne-Marie Brogan, Reporter Tully Reed.

The journalist is a good partner, someone who, like a Dr. Watson, is a friend to the superhero and recounts many of the hero's adventures. Also, the audience easily identifies with a journalist, expects that journalist to ask questions and demand answers and is at ease when the journalist narrates the story. For that reason alone, the journalist is often thrown into films and novels simply to be a natural way to give exposition, continuity and reality to a fictional story.

What does the future hold for IJPC? What are your goals for IJPC?

The future, I think, is very bright. Last year, we published the first edition of our peer-reviewed The IJPC Journal giving the field its own academic publication. We hope to have the second volume out by fall, 2010. Now the IJPC Database is updated daily and is available to scholars, students, researches, professionals and anyone else interested in the subject on a daily basis and this should encourage interest in the field.

Our goals are to increase academic scholarship in the field and to publish in areas never before explored. Most of the publication in this field involves movies and some novels. We hope to expand the scholarship to every facet of popular culture.

The IJPC also produces invaluable video compilations filled with images that have never been seen in one place. We have produced seven volumes to date:

• Hollywood Looks at the News: 1925-2007, a one-hour-and-49-minute compilation with 165 movie and TV clips
• Sob Sisters: The Image of the Female Journalist, 1929-2007, a two-hour-and-41 minute video with more than 136 movie and TV clips
• The Image of the Broadcast Journalist in Movies and Television, 1931-2006, a two-hour-and-48-minute compilation with 200 movies and TV clips
• Real-Life Journalists in Movies and Television, 1939-2006, a two-hour-and-13 minute compilation with 79 movie and TV clips
• The Image of the War Correspondent in Movies and Television, 1931 to 2007, a two-disc, 225-minute compilation with 166 movies and TV clips
• The Image of the Gay Journalist in Movies and Television, 1929 to 2009, a three-disc, four-hour and-42 minute compilation with 123 movie and TV clips
• Journalism Ethics Goes to the Movies, a 110-minute compilation.

Anyone wanting a copy simply has to join the IJPC Associates (information at the IJPC Website).

Today, more than two dozen universities offer courses in the subject and many use IJPC materials and video compilations in those classes or in other classes on journalism and the news media. I think the IJPC Database going online will expand the use of the IJPC in classrooms around the world.

We also hope to do two national surveys - one exploring how the images of the journalist in films, television and fiction influence the public, and another exploring how the images of the journalist in film, television and fiction have affected and influenced those who work in the media. Most of what we know about the influence of the images of the journalist on popular culture is anecdotal. We need a scientific survey to give us solid evidence that what we have surmised is true.

I know I became a journalist because of Clark Kent and Hildy Johnson (of The Front Page). Most every journalist I know was influenced by similar images - Lois Lane and Brenda Starr were inspirations for many female journalists throughout the latter part of the 20th century. And whenever I talk to someone who hates the media, they usually reference a movie or TV program that lives up to their worst expectations. There is no question in my mind that the image of the journalist in popular culture has a tremendous influence on the public's perception of its news media. And that's why I have spent so much time documenting the IJPC and try to encourage other academics to write on this extraordinary subject. And there's another reason to explore the IJPC. As one of my colleagues put it, "It's just a lot of fun to do."

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.

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

What do you see as some of the recurring themes in the popular representation of journalism? How much do these myths change over time and how much do they remain constant?

The surprising thing is that the image of the journalist hasn't changed much throughout the centuries. In Antigone, Sophocles summed up the popular opinion more than 400 years before Christ was born: "None love the messenger who brings bad news." About the same time, another popular play told the story of a herald bringing shocking news to the mad hero who is believed to be involved in a murder plot. The hero picks up the herald and dashes his brains upon a stone. No doubt the audience cheered. And so, the image began.

One of the most vicious portrayals of the journalist, for example, is Five Star Final made in 1931. The final shot in the film is the newspaper in the gutter being splattered by mud or something worse.

The basic image of the journalist from the silent days of the movies to the media-drenched days of the early 21st century is that of the flawed hero fighting everyone and anything to get the facts out to the public. The reporter or editor could get away with anything as long as the end result was in the public interest. The journalist could lie, cheat, distort, bribe, betray, or violate any ethical code as long as the journalist exposed corruption, solved a murder, caught a thief or saved an innocent. Most films about journalism end with the reporter or editor winning the battle, if not the war.

At the same time, the most indelible image may be that of the journalist as scoundrel, as evil, as the worst of villains because these journalists use the precious commodity of public confidence in the press for their own selfish ends. If the journalist uses the power of the media for his or her own personal, political, or financial gain, if the end result is not in the public interest, then no matter what the journalist does, no matter how much he or she struggles with his or her conscience or tries to do the right thing, evil has won out.

Betraying the public trust is one of the great sins in a democracy and whether it is a journalist or a politician who does the dirty deed, it is despicable. The corrupt media tycoon's goals and tactics are familiar to everyone, and real-life parallels in modern media abound. That may be the reason so many people are skeptical of the motives of such media billionaires as Rupert Murdoch.

Perhaps the most dominant and damaging image of the journalist in popular culture is that of anonymous reporters chasing after stories. In countless movies, television programs and novels, they travel in packs, usually armed with television cameras and microphones. They cover fast-breaking news by crowding, yelling, shouting, bullying and forcing their way into breaking news events. There were always such packs of aggressive print journalists chasing after heroes in movies, and they made a negative impact through the years, but their zeal was usually taken in good spirits. Nowadays, they appear far more menacing and out of control because their lights, cameras, microphones and tape recorders are jabbed into faces of real people on television news and favorite actors in movies and entertainment television programs.

In the 1930s and 1940s, practically every popular actor eventually portrayed a journalist. By the 1980s, anonymous reporters were chasing popular actors. The audience, as always, identifies with the popular actor. For the most part, audiences now root against reporters who are chasing familiar and friendly faces. It isn't Clark Gable or Barbara Stanwyck chasing after a story. It is now overzealous media newshounds chasing Bruce Willis or Julia Roberts.

This image of a harassing press with no valid reason undermines the public's trust in the news media, conflicting with the movie and television image of the reporter as hero. One result is that the public has turned against reporters, concluding that journalists are obnoxious, interested only in their own egos, not the public interest, and that laws should be passed to stop reporters from harassing innocent people - innocent people often translated in the public mind to be a favorite movie or television star.

These conflicting images of the journalist contribute to the love-hate relationship between the public and its news media that is at the center of the public's confusion about the media today.

The anger and lack of confidence most Americans have in the news media today is partly based on real-life examples they have seen and heard. But much of the image of the journalist as a money-grubbing, selfish, arrogant scoundrel is based on images from movies and television. And it is those images burned in the public memory that have turned the phrases, "the people's right to know" and "First Amendment freedoms" into sick jokes rather than honored phrases. These images directly affect the public's opinion and consequently its support of the freedom of the news media.

What are some of the early texts which helped to define the stories popular cinema tells about journalists and where did they get their ideas about the profession from? How important was the crossover that occurred as trained journalists sought jobs as script writers in Hollywood?

The early cinema stole from everywhere and everyone, from plays, novels, Shakespeare, mythology, the bible, you-name-it. Much of what the popular cinema knew about journalism came from novels and plays written by former journalists about their profession. There were many silent films made about journalism taken from popular 19th-century novels.

Two of the most popular talkies featuring journalists in the early 1930s were The Front Page and Five Star Final, both Broadway plays written by newspapermen. When sound came in, Hollywood raided Broadway to find writers who could write the words their new stars would say. Since newspapermen of the period were glib and hungry, an exodus of newspapermen and women left New York for Hollywood and wrote a good many of the scripts. Because they knew the world of newspaper journalism, many of the scripts featured reporters and editors in starring roles or in secondary roles. These journalists certainly knew what they were writing about and often took real-life anecdotes about editors and reporters and stuffed them into their scripts.

While the kernel of the idea was true, these writers were forced to exaggerate and expand the truth for dramatic effectiveness. For example, they would take 10 years of anecdotes and jam them into one film. Since many of the newspapermen and women were former reporters who hated their editors, they loved getting even with their former editors by revealing every drunken and angry anecdote they could remember.

So while these early newspaper films had a veneer of truth, they were exaggerated to the point where real-life newspaper reviewers condemned their efforts as unrealistic and ridiculous. But what did come through was a kind of affection for these newshawks that only a professional journalist could bring to the craft of screenwriting. That affection - even when the journalist behaved badly, even when the journalist had no ethics at all and would do anything to get a scoop - came through loud and clear and pretty much disappeared in the 1950s when the films about journalists became harder, rougher and less sympathetic. What used to be funny in the 1930s and 1940s - alcoholism among journalists, for example - became serious social problems in the 1950s through the rest of the 20th century. Films about journalists became less fun, and the newspaper world became a more serious place to do business.

You've written a book which specifically examines Capra's Journalists. Why were journalists so central to Capra's work? In what ways does his view of journalists reflect his own contradictory concerns between an embrace of collective action and a fear of mob rule, for example, or between individualism and community?

Capra loved the newspaper world and not only delivered newspapers as a boy but also wanted to be a reporter. He also worked with Robert Riskin, a playwright who while on Broadway spent a lot of time with reporters, especially drunken reporters, who used to spin tales about their lives and hates for hours on end. He soaked in all of this and put much of it into his screenplays for Capra.

The director also never missed a chance to put a journalist into his films - the original story for It Happened One Night didn't have a journalist as its principal character (the Clark Gable role in the short story is a college-educated chemist). It's impossible to imagine that film without a journalist as its major character. He also used reporters as commentators on a society and, while flawed, they usually were guys and gals with good hearts who ended up doing the right thing. Capra and Riskin saved their angry indignation for the publisher.

In Capra's world, the hardworking male or female journalist might do anything for a story, but by the end of the film he or she usually does the right thing even if it means giving up his or her job. By contrast, Capra saved his venom for the owner of the newspaper, the publisher, the media tycoon. They are among the most vicious media villains in all of film history. They are the ones who create the moral chaos in which reporters and editors struggle to survive. Capra was far ahead of his time in seeing that the person who controlled the media was dangerous to any free society. Capra with Riskin's great help was one of the first popular filmmakers to recognize the possibility of great evil on the part of those who own the media. He issued the first popular alarm against the media tycoon who could control the world by controlling information.

In Meet John Doe, for example, a ruthless publisher (whose personal security force resembles the Nazi military) who owns much of the nation's media, plans to use it to create a dictatorship in America. He puts together a cartel of rich businessmen to do just that using the populistic John Doe movement to get elected into office. Only a Capra-contorted conclusion stops the publisher - for now. The ending, one of many filmed, seems to indicate that the media mogul has been stopped for now but will live to fight another day.

The scenes of decent, hard-working Americans turning into a mob when they are told John Doe deceived them is one of the most powerful in American film history showing the fear of mob rule. And while we are watching it, real-life radio commentators pulled off the airwaves and into Capra's film are shown in silhouette, their familiar voices giving the vicious mob scene even more credibility and realism. The scene where John Doe tries to talk to the audience and speaks into a microphone that has been purposely disabled is one of the most terrifying images in the film - the hopelessness of the individual against the ones who control the media and the mob itself.

American journalism has undergone some profound shifts in recent years. How is this reflected in media representations of journalists?

Ironically enough, while the technology changes, the image pretty much stays the same. The reporter is either a hero exposing a crime or catching a crook, revealing some diabolical scheme to wrest power away from the people. Or he/she is a villain going against everything a journalist should be doing - helping people, exposing hypocrisy, fighting for the little guy. Instead, that journalist villain is using the media for his or her own economic or political gain. This is true whether they work for a newspaper, a magazine, a radio station, a television station or, now, the Internet. Bloggers seem to have the same image as their newspaper antecedents. It seems the Internet Journalist Hero is still working in the grand tradition of journalist heroes by exposing a conspiracy or solving a crime. The Internet Journalist Villain uses the new technology to gain economic or political power.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

John Fiske: Now and The Future

Last week, I was honored to be one of the keynote speakers at the Fiske Matters conference which was held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. John Fiske has been and continues to be one of the most important intellectual influences on my work. His strong defense of popular culture as offering a series of resources through which active audiences struggled over meaning was a foundation for my ongoing investigation of participatory culture and new media literacy. His work was controversial at the time he introduced it - in part because he challenged the tendency of left academics towards cultural pessimism which had motivated so much of American cultural theory in the late 20th century. Fiske struggled to get us to look closer at the lives of ordinary people and the ways that they struggled to assert aspects of their own needs and desires through their relationship with mass produced culture. For Fiske, mass culture was culture produced by commercial industries, while popular culture was culture at the moment it became a resource for ordinary people through the process of consumption. Fiske retired more than a decade ago, just as the digital revolution was helping to make the agency of grassroots cultural producers and consumers much more visible than it had been before. To some degree, the shock of the culture war which surrounded Fiske's works had left many of us uncertain how to carry that tradition forward. We had lost his mentorship and intellectual leadership; we didn't know how to face down his critics; and we didn't want the backlash to cripple our own professional development.

But this conference represented a rallying of the troops, a gathering of the tribes. It felt like a homecoming party or a family reunion for a particular strand of cultural studies that had made such a difference for each of us in the room. For a good recap of the event, read this blog post by Bill Kirkpatrick who delivered an eye-opening talk about what Fiske's ideas have and could contribute to debates about media policy.

We were honored that Fiske came out of retirement to share one last lecture with his students - in this case, a talk about how shifts in social consciousness were reflected in the material culture of the 16th and 17th century, which in the end turned out to also be a provocation to think about how our own relationship with self and community were changing in the digital age. This was a talk by a man who had spent the last decade of his life running an antique shop in Vermont and who was clear he was no longer reading cultural theory still managing to share some insights to scholars very much confronting the challenges of understanding his own time. Fiske suggested that antiques were physical reminders that people had thought and live differently in the past and that they had often done so in ways which were meaningful and satisfying to him; it was a suggestion that there were always alternatives to the current configuration of culture and power and thus, if things had changed in the past, they could and would change in the future. We hung on every word, reminded of his lively wit, his provocative personality, his attention to each phrase, and his systematic development of thought.

And as the weekend continued, we learned more about how he had impacted each of us - through his teaching inside and outside the classroom, through his writing, and through his work as an editor and leader in the field. He stitched together through his travels a network of people which scanned across Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and the Americas. And we saw how his students had taken his ideas to Asia and Africa as well. We saw Fiske's own students and contemporaries as well as the next generation - our students can be seen as Fiske's intellectual grandchildren, those who had found his writings through our own teaching and scholarship, all of whom still saw Fiske's ideas as a living presence in our thinking. Fiske made clear that he saw his legacy not in the continued circulation of his ideas, which he had seen as contributions to contemporary debates and conversations about culture and politics, but through the minds and personalities he had influenced. I certainly know that I channel Fiske all the time in both conscious and unconscious ways. It felt liberating to be able to talk with others about the importance of this man and his work.

I was asked by Routledge to write a general introduction to Fiske's scholarship which will accompany the reissue of some of his key books later this year. I also helped to pull together roundtable discussions of his former students around each of the books, feeling that it was far better to represent his works through conversations and colloquiums rather than lectures. I wanted to give just a little taste of this material here - part of my discussion of Fiske's relationship to technology and politics:

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"The technology needed for them [The Right] to establish the total surveillance upon which to base their moral totalism is already available. Fear will increase the likelihood of that technology's use and the probability of right-wing forces being in power to use it. It is, therefore, in their interests to confine as many of us as they can to our cultural and geographic enclaves. Is this what we want?" -- John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change, 1994 (MM, 253)

The above four sentences constitute the final words in John Fiske's final book before his retirement. It is telling that Fiske ends the book on a provocation -- "Is this what we want?" No matter how dark his vision of the society had become, Fiske believed we have a choice, that we have the capacity to change our social conditions , and he called upon academics to deploy their expertise and institutional power in the service of social change.

He asks explicitly: Is this what we want?

He asks implicitly: if not, what are we going to do about it?

The question culminates in a chapter devoted to what Fiske describes as "technostruggles," one of the few places where Fiske wrote extensively about technology as an agent of cultural change. Fiske wrote about arcade games, well before his contemporaries, in Reading the Popular (1989). He discussed the ways people were using channel changers to exert greater control over television in Television Culture (1988). And he described how the widespread deployment of photocopiers were causing anxieties about copyright regulation, even as copying television programs and music was becoming more "socially acceptable" [TC 311]. In each case, his arguments were ultimately less about the technology than about its popular uses. In such passages, Fiske suggested the complex interplay between technological and cultural change, but he never developed a theory of oppositional use of technology until the final chapters of Media Matters.

Fiske's relative disinterest in technology (and often, in media ownership) drew sharp criticism from political economists, who felt that he underestimated the structuring power of entrenched capital. He explains in Understanding Popular Culture that his theoretical perspective is "essentially optimistic, for it finds in the vigor and vitality of the people evidence both of the possibility of social change and of the motivation to drive it." [UPC,21] We've heard so much over the past decade and a half about the democratic potential of new media technologies and practices that it is easy to forget that Fiske saw the Internet as simply another battleground through which ongoing struggles over meaning, pleasure, knowledge, and power would be conducted. But he also did not accept a model which saw certain media technologies as forces for cultural domination:

"Information technology is highly political, but its politics are not directed by its technological features alone. It is, for instance, a technical feature of the surveillance camera that enables it to identify a person's race more clearly than his or her class or religion, but it is a racist society that transforms that information into knowledge." [MM 219]

The affordances of new media could be deployed towards certain ends, but ultimately, how they were used reflected their cultural context.

Fiske saw the promises of a digital revolution but did not declare a premature victory over mass media:

"New technologies cannot in themselves produce social change, though they can and do facilitate it." [MM 115]

"Power is social, not just technological, and it is through institutional and economic control that technology is directed." [MM 137]

"We can make our society one that is rich in diverse knowledges, but only if people strive to produce and circulate them. Technology will always be involved and, if its potential is exploited, its proliferation may make the control over knowledge less, not more, efficient." [MM 238]

"Technology is proliferating, but not equally: its low-tech and high-tech forms still reproduce older hierarchies, and although it may extend the terrain of struggle and introduce new weapons into it, it changes neither the lineup of forces nor the imbalance in the resources they command." [MM 239]

"The multiplication of communication and information technologies extend the terrains of struggle, modifies the forms struggle may take, and makes it even more imperative that people grasp the opportunities for struggle that the multiplying of technologies offers." [MM 240]

Yes, Fiske tells us, media matters, but media change does not overcome other social, cultural, political, and economic factors.....

When I brought John Fiske to MIT shortly after Media Matters was published, I remember the disappointment and frustration some of my students felt that Fiske was "not ready" to embrace the promise of the digital, because at the epicenter of the digital revolution, we were full of hopes that the new media would lower the barriers to entry into cultural production and distribution, allowing many more voices to be heard and putting greater power (political, economic, cultural) in the hands of "the people." I was surrounded by early adopters for whom the transformative capacity of new media was an article of faith. In this context, I often had to work hard to resist technological determinist arguments and to insist, as John had taught us, that cultural and social factors shape technology far more than technology shapes culture....

Confronted with the assertion that the wide availability of new tools would enable greater public participation, Fiske wrote, "In premodern Europe,... everyone had a larynx, but few were able to speak in public and political life." [MM 238] Technological access was not sufficient in the absence of efforts to overcome those social and cultural factors which blocked full participation -- what we now would call "the participation gap."

Fiske typically followed claims about grassroots resistance with an acknowledgment of the powerful forces which were stacked against us. For example, Fiske was interested in the unequal status of high tech and low tech uses of communication technology, contrasting the "videohigh" of the broadcast industry with the "videolow" of citizen camcorder activism, a contrast which paves the way to a consideration of how broadcast and grassroots media competes with each other for attention and credibility. Fiske wrote "technostruggles" in the aftermath of the Rodney King trial. As Fiske notes, the original video showing the Los Angeles police beating suspect Rodney King, captured via a home movie camera by a passerby George Holliday, possessed high credibility because it displayed so little technological sophistication:

"George Holliday owned a camera, but not a computer enhancer; he could produce and replay an electronic image, but could not slow it, reverse it, freeze it, or write upon it, and his videolow appeared so authentic to so many precisely because he could not." [MM 223]

The LAPD's defense attorneys deployed a range of technical and rhetorical tricks to reframe the King video and change how it was understood, at least by the jury, if not by the general public. For Fiske, this struggle over the tape's meaning suggested what was to come -- an ongoing competition between those who have access to low-tech, everyday forms of cultural production and those who had access to high-tech communication systems. If new media technologies were expanding the resources available to those who have previously seemed powerless, they were also expanding the capacities of the powerful.

In Media Matters, Fiske's embrace of participatory media practices was suggested by his enthusiasm for low-bandwidth "pirate" radio stations within the African-American community. At the same time, Fiske was quick to link networked computing with institutions of government surveillance. Fiske warned that the same practices deployed by companies to construct a "consumer profile" could be applied by governments to construct a "political profile": "The magazines we subscribe to, the causes we donate to, the university courses we register for, the books we purchase and the ones we borrow from the library are all recorded, and recorded information is always potentially available." [MM 219] Fiske predicted that conservatives might intensify the power of the government in response to their "fear" as America became a minority-majority country in the coming decades. Fiske anticipated that increased controversy around racial conflict would be embodied through "media events" such as the Rodney King tape and the LA Riots, the battle between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, and the murder trial and acquittal of O.J. Simpson. A decade plus later, we are more apt to ascribe the growth of surveillance culture to the "terror" produced by 9/11 and its aftermath, though Fiske would have pushed us to consider the ways the War on Terror is linked to racial profiling and may mask other kinds of conflicts.

The Future of Teenagers: My Interview in O Globo

Here is the interview I did with Bruno Porto of O Globo, a publication targeting youth, during my time in Rio. The newspaper devoted three full pages to this interview which was prominent on its cover and I heard lots of great responses to it as I traveled around the country. I suspect what will be striking to readers in the United States is how much the questions being asked there by parents, teachers, and others about new media are very much those being asked in our own country. For those who prefer to read this in Portuguese, here's the link. What´s the main difference between the teenagers that lived in 2000 and the ones that live nowadays? Do you see them as completely different beings or the prior generation already had cultural elements that are present in the next one?

First, the continuities across generations are much greater than the differences. Young people today listen to different bands and often acquire music through different platforms than teens a decade ago, yet one's taste in music is still a key indicator of one's personal and social identity for teens. Young people play different games on different game platforms yet young people acquire and display mastery through competitive play. Young people use different social networking platforms and communicate with their friends through text-messaging, yet forging a place for oneself within the social system of their schools remains a central goal of adolescence. We can go down the list and most of the new digital practices which seem alien to older people are serving purposes which, if they are being honest, they recognize from their own teen experiences. That said, there are also significant differences, which I know we will get to as this interview goes forward. What does it mean to have immediate contact with your friends as a support system as you move throughout your day, to know that you will remain connected with your friends no matter where you move in the planet, and that you can form intense, intimate social ties with people who you may never meet face to face? Or to know, but not yet fully grasp, that those pictures you shot at a party when you were 16 could resurface at a job interview when you are 25 or end up being used against you in a political campaign when you are 45 because they have persistence online and can be accessed by many unintended audiences? These are some of the questions that contemporary teens face which are different from those confronting previous generations of teens.

Do you think that the leap between the 2010 generation and the 2020 will be as significant as the leap between the 2000 and 2010 generations? Or have the main, structural changes, already happened?

We are in the midst of a profound and prolonged period of media transition which is inspiring changes on every other level -- economic, social, cultural, political, legal... and I don't see the rate of change slowing anytime soon. Youth are often the earliest adapters and adopters of those emerging technologies and cultural practices as they seek out some place they can call their own, some place where their parents and teachers are not going to be nagging at and snooping on them. Young people, thus, embody the change that media is bringing and they are thus likely to be the advanced guard for most cultural practices. (Interestingly, this is not true for Twitter which has spread from the professional classes outward and downward to reach youth rather than the other way around). As this happens, they are going to create differences in style and taste which signal their differences in identity and affiliation. So, yes, I think that youth ten years from now will be significantly different from youth today -- with my above caveat that it will still be the case that the continuities in experience and interests will far out distance the differences.

Which aspect of the DIY/collaborative philosophy, that transformed the youth (and the world), seems more intriguing and relevant for you now?

For the past three decades, I have studied fan cultures as the springboard for grassroots creativity. Fans are people who are inspired by the stories that circulate through the mass media, who take elements of those stories and deploy them as the raw materials for their own creative expression, and who bond together over their shared investments in these rich cultural materials. I don't call this "do-it-yourself" but rather "do-it-ourselves," because of the deeply collaborative nature of these forms of cultural production. They are collaborative both in the sense that they build on existing stories, including those of mass media, within our culture and because they depend on each other to create the infrastructure which supports their creativity. Fan fiction is collaborative from conception -- as fans talk through story ideas as cafe table conversations, as they give each other feedback through Beta-Reading (peer-review) processes, as they read and comment on each other's shared works, and as they build the very platforms through which they circulate their creations. The fan fiction writer exists alongside the cosplayer who creates costumes and embodies characters, the fan musician who creates, records, and circulates songs, the vidder who re-edits and remixes footage, and so forth. All of them form communities which embrace new participants, which generate new forms of creative expressions, which teach each other the skills needed to participate, and who support each other's creations. This kind of participatory culture has existed for more than a hundred years, but the web has made it accessible to a much broader array of participants. Because it can innovate outside the constraints of the market or the art world, it is endless generative and thus a source of ongoing fascination to me.

The transformations that the web caused are already present in almost all the Western world, but parents and teachers are still trying not only to understand it, but to accept it. Why do you think they´re still in denial?

Some parents are in denial; some are in a state of panic. The first sees no change occurring, the second fears the change that is coming. Few are finding the middle ground between the two which allows young people plenty of space to navigate between neglect and constraint. I just heard the story of a young man, who came from a conservative religious family, who was told by his parents that he could not watch Family Guy or other Fox shows on television. The kid watched it on the internet instead without guilt, since his parents hadn't set up any restrictions on what he did on line. As someone who is the parent of a 29 year old son, I can tell you that most of parenting is reactionary. You are uncertain about the right way forward and so you fall back on what your parents did, even if they were dealing with different times and situations. You end up saying everything you thought you would never say to your kids because the script you have in your head bears the early imprint of your parent's philosophy. And you have to make a very conscious effort to change or reverse those impulses. You may change it some of the time, through sheer act of will, but then you will find yourself reverting back on other fronts. Most parents now do not have a script in their heads for thinking about what young people are doing with their iPhones. The young people are encountering situations which seem on the surface totally different from anything they faced growing up. That's why I always stress the continuities first. They may not know what the value is of having lots of friends on Orkut, but they do know that forming friendships is a vital part of adolescent culture. As the next group of parents grows up, they will have a better mental framework for thinking about these issues but unfortunately, their kids still won't believe they have any clue what they are talking about. :-)

During years journalists, teachers and other specialists considered videogames as a media that causes much more damages than benefits. Do you think that that perception changed?

Yes, somewhat. The good news is that the group of people entering the teaching profession over the past five or so years probably grew up playing Super Mario Brothers and so they have a much more normative understanding of what games can be used for. The bad news is that research shows that of ten different professional classes, teachers are the least likely to still be playing games today. Teachers are consumate creatures of the book and if anything, they are becoming more defensive about these new media as they fear that print culture may be displaced by digital. So, you have some teachers who do get the value of games as recreational and teaching tools, that want to see better games developed which they can deploy through their teaching, that may respect and value the kinds of teamwork and leadership skills being fostered on World of Warcraft, who may understand the simulations of history and government offered by Civilization or Sim City, We are seeing libraries embracing gaming as a community building activity for their patrons. And among educational researchers, games for learning constitute a high growth area of research. On the other hand, you see schools locking out most forms of participatory culture, closing out not only games but also Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia. You are less likely to see teachers who believe that playing Grand Theft Auto is going to turn their students into school shooters, but you are more likely to see teachers who believe video games are simply distractions from real learning, rather than recognizing how at least some games can be vehicles for the learning process. I will be happy when our government officials stop telling kids to turn off their XBoxes and do their homework, and start telling them to turn on their XBoxes and do their homework, but that's going to be a long time coming.

Survivor, The Matrix and American Idol are some of the franchises you used as example in Convergence Culture. Any other relevant examples appeared recently?

Franchises still dominate our media production. If I were writing the book today, I might have chapters focusing on Lost, Heroes, Glee, Avatar, and District 9, each of which represent a somewhat different way of thinking about the media's relationship to its consumers. Indeed, each of these franchises plays a role in my next book, which I hope to be writing later this summer, on spreadable media. So, let's take Lost. On the one hand, Lost represents one of the biggest hits on contemporary commercial television. When the Lost finale airs later this week, it is going to attract a massive audience. It is event television on a global scale. People will gather in large theaters all over the United States to watch it. They were flood Twitter and the other social networking sites with their responses. On the other hand, Lost represents all of the properties we would have associated with niche television a decade ago. It is a complex and demanding program. It draws a hard core, socially active, culturally generative audience. It challenges the collective knowledge and thinking of large scale social networks of people who pool their knowledge, compare notes, and try to figure out the mysteries of the island. And as they do so, they follow Lost through podcasts, websites, wiki projects, alternate reality games, and countless other platforms. Lost is television outside the box -- television in a transmedia environment. Each of the other examples I cite represent the further move of television into a transmedia and participatory world. With Glee, we might pay attention to it as a vehicle for selling music -- in that sense very much like Rock Band and Guitar Hero -- and we might talk about it as inspiring lots of amateur performances -- check out all the amateur performances of the songs from Glee which spring up on YouTube within hours of the airing of a new episode. With Avatar, I am of course interested in 3D but also in the ways that activists around the world have embraced the identity of the Na'Vi and their struggle against the cloud people as a language through which to talk about their own local struggles to protect their environments and their way of life. With District 9, I am interested in the ways that a small scale movie gains the level of public interest this film did through strategies which rely heavily on the most engaged and socially networked segments of their audience. And the list continues.

Ten years ago, in Brazil and many other countries, kids found it hard to feel attracted by their schools. Now, with their connection with technology and the internet, it´s ten times worse. Do you think that most countries are facing this problem properly?

I teach a class at USC on the New Media Literacies. One of the assignments is to have my graduate students interview a teenage student or a teacher they know. My students come from all over the world and since they tend to interview people in their own families, I see projects on people who live in many different countries. Almost without exception, every young person they interviewed had a more intellectually rich life outside of school than inside. The things they cared about, they things that provoked their curiosity and passions, were often things which had no place in the current configurations of schooling. The ways they learned best often involved tools and platforms which were blocked in the classroom. And they felt like what was turning them on intellectually was largely unknown by the adults in their lives. The teachers also expressed frustration about how much new technology they needed to absorb or about how hard it was to change the presumptions of school administrators that such tools were distractions from the core business of learning. This is bad enough as a global problem if we think about schools shutting down the brains of our most networked young people, but we might feel that they still get extra educational opportunities and cultural experiences outside the school hours. But then consider all of those young people who only get access to these technologies at school, for whom the teacher or librarian may be the only adult they know who has any understanding of the technical, social, cultural, and ethical challenges and opportunities they represent. If we shut these practices out of our schools, we will have denied those young people the support they need to meaningfully engage as citizens, workers, learners, and expressive individuals in a world where these technologies are going to be taken for granted. Young people are not better off being told to learn about technology on the street corner the way my generation learned about sex. Our schools need to develop a coherent, informed, creative approach to technology which incorporates the best tools and practices into their pedagogical approaches.

How do you think that the new generation is absorving so much information? Do you think they absorb less - after all, the information is at reach all the time - or less?

First, I think there is a shift away from an emphasis on learning information towards learning how to find information. The emerging generation tends to offload much of what they know into technological devices which they use to enhance their thinking. Take away my laptop and you chop off a chunk of my brain. This is not necessarily a bad thing because the information is changing at such a rapid pace. Yet, it only works if we don't fill our heads with misinformation, if we develop skills at evaluating information and recognizing what kinds of information we need to solve particular kinds of problems. Second, they are learning to depend on each other for information they may lack. This is what we call collective intelligence -- a world where nobody knows everything, everybody knows something, and what an individual knows can be shared with the group as needed. Young people are learning to recognize the expertise of their friends and others in their networks and learning to work together to solve complex problems which they would not be able to tackle on their own. So, there are two ways of processing the massive amount of information which the web makes available to us -- deploy tools which sort and filter the information or tapping into collaborative communities which appraise the information together from many different perspectives. The later, for example, describes how I use Twitter. I subscribe to the feeds of the smartest people I know in many different fields and trust them to insure that I at least get exposed to the key developments in those fields each day. Young people are tapping this in a more informal way, which is why young people often know a lot about current events without ever seeming to read a newspaper or watch the news. A lot falls through the cracks this way, which is why we need to foster these skills more, but it is still a pretty shrewd approach to dealing with what previous generations have described as information overload.

As schools, many companies that hire young people are not prepared for all the changes that are happening. How does that affect young people? They will try to adapt or look for new kinds of jobs?

Our young people have much more to give the world than they are being allowed to contribute. No question about it. When we read reports of fans developing online reference works for Lost, say, there's often a dismissive response that says they had too much time on their hands. I don't want to undercut the value of this grassroots production of knowledge and culture on its own terms, but I also want to ask - whose fault is that? Such activity emerges in a world which undervalues the creativity and knowledge, the skills and intelligence, of every day people -- undervalues it in school, undervalues it in the work place. As a result, young people create alternative spaces where they can learn and share what they learn with each other. It can be enormously frustrating to watch the company where you work make bad decisions because it is ill-informed about alternative possibilities, even as you sit there, knowing about new ways forward, and not being solicited to contribute, or sitting there going through mind-numbing repetitive activities while you know a high tech way which would be more effective and efficient. Just as schools need to change to embrace new ways of learning, companies need to change to embrace new ways of working. The most forward thinking companies have relatively flat organizations which allow new ideas to emerge bottom up from any corner of their staffs. They reconfigure teams so that everyone has a chance to lead and people can contribute based on their skill and expertise. As we think about who might be best at working in such an organization, it may well be someone who grew up playing massively multiplayers games, swaping roles, trying new identities, tackling new challenges. Hell, don't just hire an individual gamer. Hire an entire squad or guild, since this team of people already knows how to work together to achieve its goals, already knows what each member can contribute, and already trusts each person to carry their own weight. It isn't just that companies need to embrace new technologies; they also need to recognize and value new cultural processes which come out of young people's experience of growing up in a networked society.

Last week Rio received his first TEDx (a version of the original TED) and the main attraction was a 13 years old boy that knows how to program apps for iPhone and iPod Touch. Many scientists are trying to understand the brains of people like that boy, that could be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Do you think that makes sense, that they´re treated that way? Or in some years there will be thousands of kids like that one everywhere?

Our focus should not be on prodigies. There have always been child prodigies. There will always be child prodigies. That tells us little about the state of our culture. What we need to pay attention to are the remarkable achievements of perfectly normal girls and boys who are doing things that would have been inconceivable for earlier generations. Their ability to tap into social networks, to deploy new tools and technologies, to process complex information, is astonishing, yet often dismissed by their parents and teachers because it doesn't fit within the grids through which we evaluate their educational performance. It may well be the case that what this young man is doing will become much more widespread in another generation's time, especially as the processes for designing aps are better understood and toolkits more user friendly. In any case, I would want to understand not just how the boy's brain works but also the social support system around the child. What kinds of help has he received from parents, teachers, other adults along his path to this level of accomplishment, since no kid gets to this point alone. In general, we need to understand such developments not as singular cognitive accomplishments but as windows into the kinds of learning ecology which is needed to make it possible for every young person to achieve their full potential.

Down Argentina Way...

If my trip to Brazil ended up focused primarily on convergence culture and transmedia storytelling, the second leg of my trip -- to Buenos Aires -- was much more directed towards my work on new media literacies and issues concerning education. I was invited to Argentina by Ines Dussel, an educator and public intellectual, who is one of the co-authors with Luis Alberto Quevedo of a new white paper exploring the impact of new media on education in Latin America, Educacion y nuevas technologias: los desafios pedagogicos ante el mundo digital. The report was being released at the VI For Latinoamericano de Educacion, hosted by the Fundacion Santilla. It was an event attended by education ministers and educational researchers/policy makers from many of the Latin American countries. I was asked to give a keynote address which shared with the group some of the perspectives on new media literacies, participatory culture, and informal learning we have developed through Project New Media Literacies, including some discussion of the curriculum we have developed around "Reading in a Participatory Culture." A key concern throughout the discussion was the distinction between introducing technology into the classroom and developing the skills which would enable young people of all economic and cultural backgrounds to participate more fully in the emerging media landscape. Ines and her associates have promised me an interview for the blog, which I hope to share with you soon. I ended up using two examples from my family history to illustrate my key points. First, I talked about my father's tool box. My father spent much of his life in and around the construction trade. He was the son of a sheet metal worker. For both of those generations, their tools were vitally important to them, but their knowledge consisted of how to deploy those tools and could not be contained in the tools themselves. If my father sat his tool box on the table and told me to build a house, I wouldn't know what to do. Trust me, we went through this many times when he was alive. I never could think using hand tools. It isn't just that I didn't know how to use the tools well -- how to use a hammer or a saw -- but rather, I lacked the skills needed to use them effectively and I lacked the larger understanding of how a house -- or in my case, a bookcase -- would be put together. I had the tools but I lacked the competencies which would allow me to use them in meaningful ways. I lacked the sense of my own empowerment to take those tools out in the world and construct something with them.

So, we can bring computers into the classroom but unless the tools are accompanied by other kinds of knowledge -- and I don't just mean how to use the keyboard and some basic software -- then they are not going to be able to deploy those tools in meaningful ways. For some of my friends back at MIT, the key knowledge is how to code -- and that's certainly part of what I mean -- but also I think that knowledge involves how to network, how to participate in new structures of culture and knowledge, how to read a Wikipedia page, how to assess the credability of information. And a technically focused curriculum which is not met with the integration of those skills into how we study culture and society will only get us so far in terms of closing the digital divide and the participation gap. That's the heart of the white paper I wrote for MacArthur.

The second story I drew on heavily there had to do with my grandmother, who, among other things, made quilts, growing up in rural Georgia. We might think of quilting as a kind of remix practice. She took bits of cloth left over from other sewing projects, sometimes drawing on the shared reservoirs of the female community, to create new works. In doing so, she was also building on a shared tradition with its own patterns and formulas. And she was producing an artifact which was designed for sharing -- often the quilts were made as gifts to mark social occasions of significance in the life of the community. My grandmother would have known how to engage with a participatory culture.

We can imagine moving from stitching together and remixing textiles to stitching together and remixing media content. Indeed, Francesca Coppa uses the metaphors of "cutting" and "stitching" to talk about the work that goes into producing a fanvid. In the United States, these folk traditions were radically disrupted by the rise of mass production and mass media. Today, quilt making is a specialized skill, more often trained in art schools than passed along from one generation to the next. And the logic of folk production has become disassociated from our understanding of the media.

One of my speculations about digital culture in Latin America is that because it exists alongside a still vibrant folk culture, a new model for thinking about remix may emerge. And this is part of what I am trying to understand through my travels to the region. I don't want to romanticize this possibility since it is also the case that many Latin Americas worry that the web may simply open up another gateway through which North American influences will be felt upon their traditional ways of life, and it is hard talking to people there to dismiss those concerns.

These next two images suggest some of the complex ways that these two ideas -- remix as part of the logic of folk culture and the importation of Northern culture on the south -- interact on a regular basis in Argentina. My brother owes an affinity to the brand community around Coca Cola, living in Atlanta, so I was especially interested to see the many ways that Coke's presence was felt in Buenos Aires. And yet, as cultural theorists might suggest, Coke is localized -- not only by the decisions made in the boardroom but also by the ways it is inserted into a distinctly Argentinian context.

As I traveled around the city, I was struck by the graphic arts of Buenos Aires, the expressive ways that paint -- especially bright primary colors -- was used to transform the urban landscape.

This focus on street art carried over to a strong tradition of murals and graffiti, such as the soccer related image, which also reminds us of how intense the country's connections are to sports fandom.

And this pub sign depicts Carlos Gardel, Tango performer who became a key figure in Argentinian cinema of the early sound era. I was introduced to Gardel's music while visiting Argentina, along with a wide array of appropriations and remixes of Tango music as it gets absorbed into jazz, hip hop, and techno/dance musics.

Gardel remains a key figure in Argentinian popular culture -- if you look closely, you will see his image on the wall behind these contemporary street performers who were in their own ways keeping the Tango tradition alive.

Ines and her husband took me to visit a curio market on Sunday, which is full of cultural debris, some reflecting the local traditions of Argentina, others suggesting the flow of goods and brands from the North. This still life suggests the complex assemblage of objects (and the cultural traditions they embodied) on every table.

The one thing I was taught about Argentina growing up in American public schools of the 1960s was that it was the land of the Gaucho, so I could not resist capturing this image of a Gaucho selling ropes and bolos in the marketplace. I am sure some of this was performance for tourists, but there was still something fascinating about confronting an icon which previously had lived for me only on the pages of battered and largely forgotten textbooks. Besides, I always loved a song Lupe Velez sings in one of the Wheeler and Woolsey comedies that "You can keep Harpo and Chico. I love my Gaucho."

And during this same trip, I was intrigued by these street performers. Like so many living statues, I have seen in the United States, they were frozen in a pose, defying the attempts of visitors to make them move from their static composition. Yet, what amused me here was the attempts to create what seems in still photographs to be a highly dynamic image -- they used a variety of illusions to convey a sense of movement, even as they remained absolutely still.

Pardon me for what has devolved into a series of tourist snapshots which fail to capture the complex thoughts and feelings which this trip stirred within me, but part of what I carried away with me was a real affection and fascination for the kinds of folk and popular culture practices I observed in Buenos Aires.

My Big Brazillian Adventure

Of the foreign language editions of Convergence Culture, probably the best selling one was the version published in Portuguese and distributed primarily in Brazil. Thanks to the support of Mauricio Mota and the Alchemists, a transmedia company which works in Rio and Los Angeles, my book has stimulated enormous interest in that country, with companies such as Globo and Petrobras buying hundreds of copies to give to their employees and clients as Brazil seeks to better understand the digital age at a moment of deep cultural and technological transition.

Why Brazil? Two primary reasons: First, Brazil is at the center of the so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), countries which economists believe are going to be dominant economic (and I suspect, cultural) powers in the 21st century. These are countries on the rise, countries which have embraced new media and are surfing it to gain greater influence over the planet. Much as China has gained greater visibility in recent years through the Olympics and the current Shanghai Expo, Brazil is positioned to gain wider attention by hosting the Olympics and the World Cup in the next few years. It is a country with a strong digital infrastructure and thriving creative industries.

Second, unlike the United States, Brazil has held onto strong folk and participatory traditions, despite the rise of modern mass media. Seymour Papert famously used the Samba Schools as his illustration of how informal and community based learning works and that example has stuck in my head from my early days at MIT:

If you dropped in at a Samba School on a typical Saturday night you would take it for a dance hall. The dominant activity is dancing, with the expected accompaniment of drinking, talking and observing the scene. From time to time the dancing stops and someone sings a lyric or makes a short speech over a very loud P.A. system. You would soon begin to realize that there is more continuity, social cohesion and long term common purpose than amongst transient or even regular dancers in a typical American dance hall. The point is that the Samba School has another purpose then the fun of the particular evening. This purpose is related to the famous Carnival which will dominate Rio at Mardi Gras and at which each Samba School will take on a segment of the more than twenty-four hour long procession of street dancing. This segment will be an elaborately prepared, decorated and choreographed presentation of a story, typically a folk tale rewritten with lyrics, music and dance newly composed during the previous year. So we see the complex functions of the Samba School. While people have come to dance, they are simultaneously participating in the choice, and elaboration of the theme of the next carnival; the lyrics sung between the dances are proposals for inclusion; the dancing is also the audition, at once competitive and supportive, for the leading roles, the rehearsal and the training school for dancers at all levels of ability.

From this point of view a very remarkable aspect of the Samba School is the presence in one place of people engaged in a common activity - dancing - at all levels of competence from beginning children who seem scarcely yet able to talk, to superstars who would not be put to shame by the soloists of dance companies anywhere in the world. The fact of being together would in itself be "educational" for the beginners; but what is more deeply so is the degree of interaction between dancers of different levels of competence. From time to time a dancer will gather a group of others to work together on some technical aspect; the life of the group might be ten minutes or half an hour, its average age five or twenty five, its mode of operation might be highly didactic or more simply a chance to interact with a more advanced dancer. The details are not important: what counts is the weaving of education into the larger, richer cultural-social experience of the Samba School.

My Student Ana Domb Krauskopf recently wrote a fascinating white paper for the Convergence Culture Consortium on Techno Brega, a form of popular music in regional Brazil, which operates under a radically different model of production and distribution which is being studied by many in the Free Culture movement.

If you accept my premise that digital participatory culture is what happens when we apply folk culture logic to the content of mass culture in an era where we have expanded capacities for circulation, then it makes sense that digital culture is going to take a very different shape in Brazil than in the United States. Given this history, my work seems especially resonant with Brazilian readers and I am feeling a strong tug to spend more time in that country.

I spent the last week and a half of May in Brazil, speaking with several key players there in the efforts to make the country a key digital player, including Petrobras, the leading oil company, and Globo, a key media producer and distributor. While I was there, I was interviewed by half a dozen or so of the leading print and television journalists.

The key event during my stay in Rio was a talk to creative workers inside Globo's Project, their primary production facility on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of a truly spectacular cluster of mountains and on the edge of the rain forest. I was consistently impressed in Rio by the ways that the natural world was fully integrated into the life of the city.

I was able to go to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain and look down on the city. Scattered throughout Rio are massive outcroppings of exposed rock -- to call them mountains, though they are mountain sized, does not really capture the oddness of these protrusions. They are much closer to Stone Mountain in my native Atlanta (of course without the carvings of Confederate generals!) than anything else I had ever seen. The city is wrapped in and around these mountains. In some cases, the Favela run up the sides of mountains. The more desirable land is at their foot. They are contained by the beaches and oceans that surround much of the city. And threaded through these pockets of development remain large forests. The effect is close to the technological utopian conception of the city as an integrated environment where nature and technology can co-exist. It is hard to go far in Rio without confronting the natural world and the companies where I spoke were very overt about their commitments to Green policies.

The event at Globo was simply spectacular. The production people had turned a soundstage into what can only be described as a set. Not only had they taken a key motif from the cover of my book and blown it up to the size of a wall, adding in massive television screens on either side, but they had taken other elements from the book's design and decorated the entire hall. It was packed with hundreds of people who wanted to learn more about convergence and transmedia. And the event was being webcast and live-blogged so the words were being transmitted to many who could not be physically present. I presented an opening talk on transmedia which drew upon my recent He-Man essay and my 7 Principles of Transmedia Storytelling paper, both of which have already been shared on my blog, and ended with some thoughts about future challenges confronting transmedia producers which I hope to share with my readers soon.

Afterwords, I was joined on stage by Mark Warshaw, who had developed transmedia for Heroes and Smallville and now is a key partner in The Alchemists, and Florish Klink, a recently minted graduate of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program who is becoming the group's Chief Participation Officer (their expert on fan relations). And we were hit with all kinds of thoughtful questions from the audience, questions which showed just how carefully they had listened and absorbed the insights from my work and how much they were thinking through the future of media in their country. In some ways, they are a step behind developments in North America -- for example, the DVR has not yet come to Rio -- but they are learning the lessons of the early adapter countries and will be ready as they reinvent their media system for the 21st century.

Afterwards, we went on a tour of the production facilities. In many ways, they resemble the classic film studios of the Golden Era of Hollywood, except that they are managed by digital dasebases. So, there are large backlots and vast sound stages. We were shown, for example, a scale reconstruction of a Sao Paolo shopping mall which was used as the setting for a youth-oriented telanovela.

And we were driven through a lovingly recreated neighborhood from the south of Italy which is the setting of another of their popular series. I am posing here with Mauricio Mota and Flourish Klink from The Alchemists.

We toured a vast warehouse holding props which were in storage from previous productions and could be called up from the database when needed for new series and another warehouse where costumes were stored, organized by the decade where the stories were set. Alongside the storehouses, there was a factory of workers sewing new costumes to be used, often in just a few hours, on one or another of the projects they were filming and there were construction crews that could build and breakdown sets on a daily basis.

We walked through the soundstages and saw Passione, a telanovela, being shot. We met briefly the young and very attractive stars Mariana Ximenes and Reynaldo Gianechinni, who have been called the Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt of Brazil. And we were able to watch them shoot a scene from an upcoming episode, standing in the booth with the director as they swapped between five cameras which were filming the scene. It was one of fifteen scenes for the series that were scheduled to be shot that day amongst ten or so settings in the studio devoted to Passione's production. The scenes were shot out of sequence 4 or 5 episodes at a time to allow them to complete their needs of a setting, break it down, and make way for the next setting, all in the course of a 1-2 day period of time. The folks with us who worked in Hollywood were astonished at both the attention to detail in the production design but also the efficiency of the operation over all.

(Next Time: Down Argentina Way)

Call for Papers: Transformative Works and Fan Activism

My team at USC is partnering with the fine folks at Transformative Works and Culture to put together a special issue dealing with our current research focus -- how we can forge a bridge between participatory culture and civic engagement. Here are the particulars. I am hoping some of you out there are either doing work on this topic or have graduate students who are and might be looking for a common space to publish your work. I am going to be speaking more around these topics at the Fiske Matters Conference and the Games Learning and Society conference this coming week, both in Madison, Wisconsin. Looking forward to seeing some of you there. If you read the blog, be sure to introduce yourself to me. I like meeting people who read -- especially at academic conferences. :-) Transformative Works and Fan Activism

March 2012

Edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, University of Southern California

How might research on fandom and participatory culture inform our understanding of citizenship and activism? Cultural theorists have long speculated about how our fantasy lives and cultural engagements might inspire broader forms of public participation. In his book Understanding Popular Culture, for example, John Fiske describes one potential route which might lead a young woman from fannish interest in Madonna towards the resources, skills, and identities she needs to contribute to social change. Fan studies have long located localized resistances within the cultural productions and practices associated with fandom, looking at how fan fiction, say, might lead to new understandings of gender, sexuality, and race. Yet there has been less work that examines how these imaginative practices, at times facilitated by digital media, might lead to an enhanced sense of agency or a new vision of social change, or how the skills developed through fandom might be mobilized for getting people out to vote, protesting public policies, or encouraging contributions and volunteerism around emergency situations.

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins describes how popular culture, and more broadly participatory culture, can function as a civic playground, where lower stakes allow for a greater diversity of opinions than tolerated in political arenas. Jenkins argues, "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." Building on these observations, we begin with the premise that participatory culture, like popular culture, encourages active participation, lively discussion, and even mobilization around particular topics and issues, leading to civic engagement. Clearly, a fan group online is apt to be far more diverse in its perspectives than a group defined around, say, a political candidate or a social issue. This is not to suggest that fan communities do not form firm consensus perspectives that block some other ideas from being heard, but they form them around different axes, such as desired sets of romantic partnerships between characters, which may or may not reflect ideological schisms. Our understanding of these synergies between participatory culture and civic participation creates many possible intersections with grassroots activism.

We seek contributions premised on a dynamic understanding of citizenship that will help us understand how participatory culture interactions encourage people to create, discuss, and organize as a way of engaging with specific civic issues and events, and whether (or how) these interactions may lead to new forms of social organizing and action. Researchers have long noted that people who participate in after-school programs or who contribute to the arts are more likely to become involved in other civic activities; we are just starting to understand whether or not interest-driven activities, such as fandom, which typically occur outside of formal educational settings, may have a similar impact on individual trajectories toward public participation. A growing number of groups, such as the Harry Potter Alliance, and specific campaigns, such as Racebending, are seeking to mobilize fans as potential political agents. In the process, these groups may support the development of long-term civic identities as well as the applied skills of fan activism, such as letter-writing campaigns to keep programs on the air. Both are likely to be useful for future civic and movement mobilization.

This special issue emerges from work being done by the Participatory Culture and Civic Engagement Project at the University of Southern California (Henry Jenkins, Principal Investigator).

We seek articles and other work that explores the continuities between online participatory culture and civic engagement, including, but not limited to:

• Case studies of U.S.-based and international fan communities who have moved toward civic engagement (including efforts to protect or promote the fandom, charity efforts, and direct forms of political activism).
• Examples of how practices from fandom and participatory culture are informing more traditional activist organizations and political debates.
• Examinations of how fan discussions flow into more overtly political conversations, with constructive or destructive consequences.
• Interdisciplinary explorations of ways in which participatory cultures may encourage some forms of civic engagement, as well as the possible limitations of such engagement.
• Considerations of how work in fan studies might contribute to ongoing discussions in cultural studies about the relationship between audiences and publics, consumers, and citizens.
• Theoretical discussion relevant to the trajectories that exist between participatory culture and civic engagement.
• Reflections on how a focus on "cultural citizenship" might challenge more traditional definitions of civic engagement.
• Analyses of digital media participatory practices in the context of civic engagement.
• Methodological discussions of how we might study the shifting relationship between participatory culture and public engagement.
• Investigations of how participatory modes of civic engagement intersect with questions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class.
• Mappings of the dynamics of the local and mediated in communities that form around participatory culture in the context of new media technologies.
• Discussions of 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.

Writing from fans, independent researchers, community leaders, and practitioners is actively encouraged. We are especially interested in case studies that deal with these fan practices outside of the United States.

Submission guidelines

TWC accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms that embrace the technical possibilities of the Web and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. Contributors are encouraged to include embedded links, images, and videos in their articles or to propose submissions in alternative formats that might comprise interviews, collaborations, or video/multimedia works. We are also seeking reviews of relevant books, events, courses, platforms, or projects.

Theory: Often interdisciplinary essays with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame that offer expansive interventions in the field. Peer review. Length: 5,000-8,000 words plus a 100-250-word abstract.

Praxis: Analyses of particular cases that may apply a specific theory or framework to an artifact; explicate fan practice or formations; or perform a detailed reading of a text. Peer review. Length: 4,000-7,000 words plus a 100-250-word abstract.

Symposium: Short pieces that provide insight into current developments and debates. Editorial review. Length: 1,500-2,500 words.

Submissions are accepted online only. Please visit TWC's Web site for complete submission guidelines, or e-mail the TWC Editor (editor AT transformativeworks.org).

Contact

You are encouraged to contact the guest editors with advance inquiries or proposals:

Henry Jenkins, hjenkins AT usc.edu

Sangita Shresthova, sangita.shresthova AT usc.edu

Due dates

Contributions for blind peer review (Theory and Praxis essays) are due by April 1, 2011. Contributions that undergo editorial review (Symposium, Interview, Review) are due by May 1, 2011.

The Hollywood Geek Elite Debates the Future of Television

Editor's note: It looks like we were sent two copies of the same segment. We are tracking down the missing piece of this and will get it up as soon as possible.

Earlier this spring, Denise Mann from the University of California-Los Angeles and I organized a panel of showrunners and other transmedia experts to speak at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference which was being hosted in our city. The industry participants were Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof from Lost, Tim Kring from Heroes, Javier Grillo-Marxuach from The Middleman and Day One, Kim Moses from Ghost Whisperer, and Mark Warshaw (The Alchemists) who developed online content for Smallville, Heroes, and Melrose Place.

We wanted to bring the smartest people we knew from the entertainment world face to face with leading film, television, and media researchers for a conversation about the future of entertainment. In some ways, this was a mini version of what we do with the Futures of Entertainment conference on the East Coast and the new Transmedia Hollywood conference on the West Coast.

Today, I am able to share with you the web-version of that program. Part of what is fascinating about this exchange is how much these producers of cult television shows are thinking and rethinking their relations with their audiences, trying to understand how to court and hold active and engaged consumers in an era of competing media options and multiple delivery platforms. The value of fan participation runs through this conversation.

SCMS presents: Transmedia Storytelling in the Digital Age from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

SCMS presents: Transmedia Storytelling in the Digital Age Part 2 from UCLA Film & TV on Vimeo.

Below, I've included some transcribed highlights from the event. But so much is conveyed by the emotional tone and stylistic self-presentation of the various participations, which include the two head guys from Lost who had flown in just the day before from shooting the final episode in Hawaii. We didn't get any real spoilers but we did get to understand their thinking and sense the glow they had after finishing this key phase of their work.

Ironically, their shows have all ended. Heroes and Ghost Whisperer were canceled in the latest wave of network decisions and Day One never reached the air. Without knowing it, we captured a moment of transition in American television.

In a recent Variety article, you were quoted as saying that all of Lost's loose ends will not be wrapped up or answered in the series finale. Other sources are reporting that ABC is interested in keeping the Lost franchise alive after the finale. Are those two bits of news related? That is, does leaving loose ends have to do with sustaining a franchise beyond the series' completion?

CARLTON: Most of these things are very narrative driven for us and it's a hard thing to try to articulate specifically when we want the audience to understand that every small little niggling question will be impossible to answer watching the show. Our goals as storyteller were to tackle the big questions and try to bring the story to a satisfactory resolution. But if you're wondering who's the guy is, etc, you're not gonna get that answer in the series. The story we were telling in Lost, we planned to end on May 23rd, we have no plan to do any kind of sequel or spin off, anything. We set out to tell the story of the most significant thing that happened. Telling the story was our ability to negotiate with ABC in the 3rd season of the show. Now we're bringing the story that we plan to tell to a conclusion. Now that said, we've also acknowledged that we're not the owners of Lost. It is owned by the Walt Disney company and it is an incredibly valuable franchise. Worth billions as opposed to millions of dollars. And we completely understand that the Disney company will choose to continue to make money under the Lost franchise at some future point...

There's no way when you tell a story that you can tie up all the loose ends, there are many creative minds who'll come stories to ABC and propose to take Lost, using franchise label in the future, and that's great. The story we wanted to tell was that tv series and that ends in May.

The previous transmedia series you worked on--Smallville and Heroes--both had strong ties to the comic book realm--one directly from comic books, and the other owing a lot to the comic book tradition. Melrose Place is on the other side of the spectrum. Has the difference in genre affected where the online stories come from? Or do you find that teen soap lends itself as much to a transmedia story as the sci-fi fantasy genre?

MARK: It's definitely different. You have people who want to get immediately after online and play games. But that's part of why I jumped out of the Melrose Place thing, and we're doing other things kind of that side of the spectrum. If you look at the spectrum, all, at the core, it's about extending a narrative and dipping into the fandom. On a soap opera, there's tons of different worlds and relationships to dive deeper into. That's a really rich photogram for telling transmedia stories. So it was really fun to dive in there, instead of feeding people with the ways to get your light saver. This is fun to go into the most stylish person on Melrose Place's cast and go into her closet, and learn about stuff she had in her closet. Or the diaries, you can just dive deeper. These are just fertile places to make buckets to tell stories. It was a very fun challenge and I think that anything with a story has a good place to go in the transmedia world.

CBS is primarily known for an older demographic which, stereotypically, is not known for frequenting the web. Yet Ghost Whisperer has thrived beautifully both on the network and online. What did you do to make the series and its online components accessible and appealing to an audience that is normally not attracted to this type of content?

KIM: I think that first of all CBS demographics has changed in the last 5 years that we've been on the air. At first when we started with Friday night and Ghost Whisper, we made the announcement for CBS, my partner and I knew we had a math problem, which was 82% of all the shows that had been launched on a Friday night since the X Files which was 10 years prior had not gone to its second year. And before that we had run a show Profiler which was on a Saturday night, so we knew what the challenges were. And we had been working for about 4 years before Ghost Whisperer got ordered, and we were working at the intersection of the Internet had some amazing discoveries when we were doing Profiler, that we were able to continue on and then fold onto our experience with Ghost Whisperer. So what we did was that we created this thing called the "Total Engagement Experience", which is a model that Professor Jenkins and I have talked a while about....CBS had never done this before. We also felt that moving into the 21st century, that our obligation is just developing, pitching and selling tv shows and delivering the film was not the end of our obligation as executive producers and showrunners. Our commitment to any network and studios that we've worked for is...to deliver the audience as well. And I believe that going into the future of tv and feature films, everybody is gonna need to get on board with that, and figure out how to deliver an experience, as opposed to just something that you watch, because we are in the experience era. So when we had layered that out for CBS, and our approach, unlike the CBS at the time, was to go out and find our audience, and court them, and create a playground for them so that they could experience the Ghost Whisperer world rather than just watch. And then, bring them back to the tv show in a very gentle way, that became very successful. Because what we built was a very, very loyal audience, not just a substantial audience on a Friday night, but a loyal audience, which has... this whole thing has served as a model for us to moving forward in the business. And be in the 21st century. It's an important time to do it.

Many academics are describing a push in popular television towards more "complex narratives" (longer story arcs, greater seriality, larger ensemble casts, and so forth) and you represent some of the series which are most often held up as illustrating this turn. What factors do you see leading towards these developments? What obstacles have made it harder to shift television in this direction?


JAVIER: I think that part of the reason why shows are becoming more complicated and novelistic and all that is also the fragmentation of media. It's crucial in that. All of a sudden you have a venue like AMC which can put on a show like Mad Men. And you know, Mad Men is beloved, it's critically loaded, it's a fantastic show, but it only needs to hold onto an audience of about 2 to 3M people in order to make it or not, and then sell a bunch of DVDs and all that. So when you've got networks that are able to hold shows at lower margins, I think there's more room for experimentation. It's a fragment of the audience that watches Law & Order, but they're loyal and they'll watch the show, and that model keeps repeating itself. You'll get Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad... which are deeply serialized. And I think that the network follows suit on that. The network looks at those shows and says: "why don't we have a show like that" and they try to put those shows on the air as well. And then, you got a show like Lost that succeeds for having that kind of longitudinal storytelling and I think that there're a kind of chicken and the egg thing going on, but at the same time, the climate for that wouldn't exist if you didn't have a vastly fragmented media where more experimental shows are able to survive for longer periods of time.

TIM: The whole idea of the serialized show, I mean it hasn't caught on, in a way, Lost and Heroes and things like that seem to be paving the way for these... it's not really caught on cause there's this season so many procedurals are back in favor. And the whole model, one of the dirty little secrets of serialized tv is there's usually a attrition right. You've got a lot of people who come at the beginning and as it goes on, it gets harder and harder to watch, and harder and harder to stay fans of. The upside though is that you get a tremendous ability to have and hit big, you also have the ability to sell DVDs. It used to be that the rerun and the syndication would pay for most of the back ends, for 95% of the show, and this is now being sort of changed, almost exactly percentage wise to foreign sale and DVD sales. And that's where shows like Lost and Heroes do really well. Now that we're in a year round programming, we're reruns are no longer part of the normal network programming. These shows that run at 16 episodes become actually a viable way to program a season.

DAMON: I think that the key thing that a serialized show had going forward is... there's a "what's gonna happen next factor", that doesn't exist on Law & Order, CIS, or this idea that basically you watch Heroes on a Monday night or Lost on a Tuesday night, and it ends, and that's a serialized: what's gonna happen next? What do I do right now on Tuesday night, the show's over? I wanna go somewhere and I wanna find out water coolers that used to exist in my office and now that water cooler is your computer. You go to it, and you can find whatever community you want to, and you not only disassemble the episode that you just saw, what does it mean and the grand skim of the overall story that they're telling, and the overall world that I'm in, but now I'm gonna try to project, and in the case of Lost it's "let's figure out, let's come up with theories." In the case of Heroes, it's a little bit more of a cliff hanger scenario: what's gonna happen next? That idea was such taboo. Tim and I were working on a show called Crossing Jordan and from 2001 to 2004, and I come up with Carlton and both procedural shows / but the word serialized was such a dirty word, because re runs were disaster. And Alias was successful, so we asked ourselves what does Alias has that we don't have, and the answer is: a fandom, and a serialized storyline. You get activated. This idea that a serialized storyline invites the audience in. It basically says: "what do you think?" it's something that non serialized shows do not do. Law & Order doesn't care what you think. They don't! but the fact that Lost and Heroes seem to care, go and basically solicit the opinion of fans saying "what do you think", that can only happen I think on a show with a sort of serialized spine to it.

TIM: The serialized genre sort of lends itself to this social currency is your knowledge of the show. So that becomes what you trade on. If you're able to know one more thing than the guy next to you, you're slightly cooler than the guy next to you. So if you give the audience a chance to dive in deeply, there are always these people who will dive as deeply as you invite them in.

JAVIER: When I was a network executive in the mid 90s, one of the heads of research for NBC came and talk to us, and one of the things that he used to say is that "why is Stay By The Bell so successful?" when it is so hooky and so corny? And he said look: the audience is fragmented, into two very big pots: either there's 20% of your audience is A audience. This is the taste making audience, the audience that goes online, the audience that buys new clothing, the audience that does all of these stuffs. And there's your B audience, that is your audience who's content to go and watch a self contained show, have a laugh and then leave. And the funny thing was that some networks wanted to have A audience cause it would get that magazine cover, some people wanted the A audience, and NBC was going for the B audience at that time. And I think that there's a sweet spot which is sort of where Man Men is right now, with challenging serialized show, but they can have that audience and that's all they need. They don't have the pressure, which Lost had for its first 3 years. They're trying to get to that more mainstream audience without trying to alienate the one audience and I think that the success of Lost and Heroes is in a way, countered to that social wisdom.

The media industry talks often about the value of "audience engagement." And your series are often cited as having produced particularly engaged audiences. Can you describe the relationship you've created with your consumers and what value you place in their active participation around the franchise?

CARLTON: We very consciously try not to write the show outwardly but write the show inwardly. I mean we started basically this Lost just sitting around in my office every morning, we'd have breakfast and just talked about story [...] We stuck with that same methodology all the way through. We were working in the office until 11pm yesterday for the finale of the series, and we've kind of kept that same protocol. Now the advent of the Internet has provoked profound differences of what you can do as a storyteller. I mean for us, we were actually kind of building Lost and at the beginning, one of the things that we found ourselves doing was that breaking a lot of fundamental rules of television, which was: we had a large cast, a sprawling complex narrative, and we infused that narrative a lot of intentional ambiguity. I think we were influenced in a certain way by European filmmaking; this idea that we'd give a chance to make up their mind about certain narrative aspects of the show and it get the audience talking about the show really evoked a sense of discussion and the Internet became a place where people gathered. I remember actually when Javier and I went to this fan event at the Hollywood renaissance hotel the first year, and there were these people who'd flown from all over the world, who were kind of happy to see us, but they were more happy to see each other. They had created an online community. Lost was the catalyst for that community, but the community transcended the show very quickly and there were people who got married, there were relationships that were formed, it was a way of sort of finding a shared interest, but that shared interest ultimately was transcended by the relationships between all these people, and there was all the people from the Fuselage who were basically all meeting each other for the first time. That was really an interesting experience to see that, and I think that over time, we have used the Internet as a way to gage what the responses to the show. Usually we're so far ahead, it doesn't influence the storytelling. Now of course we're done pretty much with the writing of the show, so any surprising responses now, the ship has sort of sailed... The other sort of example we cite al the time is Nicky and Paula. The fans were clambering and saying: what about those other people, there's always those other people on the beach. We see them, they never talk, who are they? So we were actually influenced by the audience to make a narrative decision that actually backfired. So we actually said, "well okay, " [ laughs ]. We started to write those two characters and it felt wrong, but people wanted it, and then, we realized it was kind of a disaster. And then we decided to burry them alive. And the audience was in that same cycle, but they were behind us. We came to that realization week by week, and then the audience was sort of reacting because they were seeing episodes, it was like looking at life from a distance star, when the event had already occurred. But it was something we did because of the fans and then they hated these characters and then they were happy when we killed them, and they thought it was their doing.

TIM: It's an amazing process when you're in this loop with the fandom. As the writer's room, you often emulate, or you basically mirror the fan base. When you start to feel you've gone too far with the story line or not gone far enough, and the characters are working for you, sure enough, it sort of mirrors the same reaction that the fans have except we're still three or more months ahead when... so, you often want to say to people "wait, and see: we're getting exactly to the place where you are" and this whole idea of how to communicate with the fans... it's very interesting. When Damon and I did Crossing Jordan, there was this "one way street" that you had. You pushed the narrative out in the world and two or three months later people saw it, and if people liked it they sort of voted with their Nielsen box.

CARLTON:You got a Nielsen number, that was the entirety of your feedback.

TIM: Yeah, that was it. So the feedback loop was really a one way street. Then the Internet created this two way street where you immediately had an obligation to the fans who were connected to the show. And all of the transmedia components of the show become that part of the show that allows them to have a more immediate feedback.

JAVIER: yeah but the thing is that no matter how mediated you are, and how much of a two way street of communication you have, you're inviolate right as a storyteller, is the right to hold on to your ability to give the audience what it needs rather than what it wants and to be the judge of that, right or wrong! And I think that especially in the early days of the internet, it became very porous, because there was an oversize reaction to Internet reaction to shows. And then you realize: wait a minute, this is still an audience of 10,000 people who read Television Without Pity, and maybe 20 who post on the board. So I think that we're kind of cycling back to a place where storytellers were less likely to be swayed cause we have a better understanding of what that audience is and what our rights as storytellers need to be.

DAMON: There's this incredible Catch 22 that exists, exactly on the point that everybody is talking. And I'm sure you experienced it too, which is: the question that Carlton and I get asked by far, above any other mythological question on the show is: are you making it up as you go along? People ask us that question, they want the answer to be "absolutely not". We have a big binder, we open it up, we go "hop", we're completely functioning by our plans. However, then they also say to us: "do you guys ever go on the boards and listen to what the fans have to say?" and they want the answer to that question to be "yes, absolutely". Now these two things are in direct opposition to each other. Because, unless the fans are saying exactly what's in the binder, which of course, they wouldn't be, so they want us to be making it up as we go along, they just don't want us to admit to it. And they want us to listen to their feedback, ... we're all in the gladiator arena: they're there, and they're giving us the thumb up or down. They want the gladiator to look to them to decide who lives and who dies. And when we kill characters which are popular, they get angry at us, and when we kill characters which are unpopular, they cheer us. And that's the game.

KIM: Last year season 4, we killed Millie's husband and there was a huge push back from the audience. The thing that's valuable for us on the Internet is we're all subjected to testing. Even if you're in your 4th or 5th year, they're still testing the show, and the network and studios are giving you numbers and responses. The testing group is not that big. On the Internet, it's a very, very democratic voice. And that's really exciting. It can be dangerous at time, but I mean (we got death threats, ...) but it's also exhilarating where you're taking your show. And so, I would say, had we done this 10 years ago, when the Internet wasn't what it is today, I don't know what would have happened to our show. But because we did it, we knew that there was gonna be push back, but we also had a plan for it. We were able to go on the Internet and court the audience, and explain to them that there was more coming and that he was going to be a ghost... and it was a great experience. And CBS called us at one point and said "what are you guys doing over there, you're affecting all of our websites, it's because your fans have taking everything over". As you guys know, that happens. And that was very exciting for us. But it is very valuable. Even if you don't act on what you're getting, it's valuable to take the pulse yourself rather than have it filtered through different kinds of agendas.

The television industry is struggling with the reality that consumers are pursuing the content they want through means other than broadcast television - both legally through iTunes, Hulu, and other such sites, and illegally through Bittorrents. How does this reality impact the way you approach your series? One recent study, for example, found that many television series, including several represented on this panel, were watched by more people illegally than legally.

CARLTON: The Internet has kind of changed the world of distribution internationally. So now Lost has moved closed to a day and day model that's basically what's happened to the theatrical film business, to avoid piracy and to capitalize on sorts of marketing campaigns that aren't just now national but international.... TV used to be sort of a gentlemany business where you'd open the show here, and then a foreign buyer would come over and they'd look and they'd watch, and they'd see how it'd do. And then months, sometimes years later, the show would actually run there. Now, because of how the world has shrunk because of the Internet things have gone much more day and day. So we've actually changed.... So this year... each episode of the show has to be done 5 days earlier in order for it to be sent all around the world....One of things that's come up in China too is that there was a race amongst pirates in China to dub the latest issue of Lost. And they were telling me that within 48 hours of the broadcast on NBC, there would be fully dubbed versions of that episode of Lost on Chinese websites. And I was like: these guys are doing it for free! You guys are professional dubbers, why is it taking you 3 months to dub a show? And it was hard to argue with that. So they've actually really shrunk the window of time, and we're on a couple of days later on the English speaking territories, and really the window in terms of dub territory is going down. The studios are doing this for two reasons: one is primarily policy, but secondly, the ability to sort of capitalize on global marketing initiatives which reconnected these ARGs. All the ARGs that we've done have been done in constant with international broadcast partners. Around the world it contributed money and resources to these Internet things. And actually the Internet component of Lost has significantly impacted the actual way in which the show itself ended up being distributed.

TIM: The interesting thing is that the networks, are in a sense, they shoot themselves in the foot a little bit by driving these audience towards these alternate platforms. Heroes, we show commercials where we promote coming to the website, to NBC.com, coming there to be able to watch the show online with extra content and commentary etc. so we're actually incentivizing the audience to go to these different platforms and the fact that you can watch the show on your DVR where you want it and when you want it, without commercials, or watch online with commentary or content, we are incentivizing this audience to go and find another places. Heroes was the number 1 downloaded show last year, Lost right there with it. And the general attitude of the networks towards this massive audience that's out there has been to stand on the sideline and heckle these people when, in fact, these are people who actively sought these shows out. They went some place and actively pirated the show. These are fans that should be embraced, and, somehow, figured out how to monetize. An interesting thing would be product placement as a way to sort of create favor with the network. The interesting thing about that is that when we do a Nissan product placement in the show, those 55 million people who download our show illegally are all getting a Nissan commercial. So in some way that may be the solution there.

JAVIER: Activity creates fertility--especially when you're dealing with a niche show like The Middleman. If people are downloading it illegally in China...my God, please do! Because, ultimately, what I find is that, the more people talk about the show, the more other people will end up buying the DVD. Eventually, anybody who looks at a pirated copy will tell somebody to buy the T-shirt or the DVD or the keychain, and the money will come back to us. I mean that's something...I'd rather have the show I work on be seen, and, frankly, given the way that the studios have dealt with the royalty compensation for writers on alternative platforms...I'm so sorry about your pirating problem, really!

What Can Teachers Learn from DIY Cultures: An Interview with Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (Part Three)

What do you say to an educator or parent who feels that making music remix videos, say, has nothing to do with literacy? In what senses are you describing such forms of expression as literacy practices?

The common sense view of literacy is that it refers to reading and writing alphabetic print and that to be literate is simply a matter of knowing how to encode and decode printed text; that is, to recognise the letters and convert them into words and sequences of words as a reader or a writer. According to this view, literacy is the same thing for everyone. It is the same tool, or the same skill using that tool. Some people might be faster at it and others slower; some may spell better than others, and some may be better at applying text comprehension strategies than others; but at the end of the day, the common sense view is that literacy one single thing, and it is the same for everyone.

This view is flawed, however, and on a number of levels. It's a bit like saying that computing is the same for everyone, just that some are more fluent with it or more skilled. But in the hands of different people who have different purposes and different understandings of what can be done with computers, and so on, computing takes on many different forms. There are many different practices of computing, such that you could give two people what look like the same tool, but what you see going on subsequently might be so very different that you can't really even begin to see them as doing "the same thing" or using the same tool. The example may be even better made by reference to "telephoning." To say that a person calling the dentist on their landline to make an appointment is doing the same thing, using the same tool, employing the same skill - telephoning - as a person in 2010 who uses their mobile phone to video an eyewitness account of what goes on to become a major news event, then uses the phone to upload the video to a social news discussion site along with an explanatory written commentary, and to check back regularly to see what comments have been left by others as well as to track how news of the event itself is playing out across the internet and broadcast media, is to miss the point. What looks like "the same kind of machine" is taken up in very different ways by different people, and has very different meanings for different people. It is to all intents and purposes a "very different thing" in the hands of different people; not the same thing at all.

So it is with literacy, and that is why we think it is best to talk about literacies in the plural rather than literacy in the singular. The singular form focuses our attention on the wrong thing - on thinking that the all-important thing is managing alphabetic text. This is important, but it's only a part of it.

There are two key points to make here. The first is to recognize what is most important about literacy as a social phenomenon, which is that it enables people to do what cannot be done by orality alone. Literacy enables human beings to communicate and share meanings in ways that go beyond the use of voice within face-to-face settings (which is orality). Literacy checks in when the conditions of everyday life are such that people need more than the use of voice alone to get the meaning-making work done that needs to get done for life to go on. The bottom line for literacy is that it enables meaning-making to occur or "travel" across space and time, mediated by systems of signs in the form of encoded texts of one kind or another. Encoded texts "freeze" or "capture" thought and language in ways that free them from their immediate context of production so that they are "transportable." Unencoded texts like speech and hand signs "expire" at the point of production other than to the extent that they can live on - fallibly - in the memories of whoever was there at the time. Encoded texts give (semi) permanence and transcendence to thought and language in the sense that they can "travel" without requiring particular people to transport them. Literacies can involve any kind of codification that "captures" language and thought in this sense. Literacy includes letteracy (the alphabet bits), but goes far beyond that. Speech recorded on tape or digitally is frozen and counts as encoded language and thought. The same applies to still and moving images. It is not that memory and speech alone cannot sustain considerable meaning making across distance and contexts. It is just that this is exponentially enabled and facilitated by literacy as encodification, which permits all kinds of procedures and institutions and practices that would be impossible, or impossibly cumbersome, without encoded thought and language.

During the centuries of mass print, following the invention of the printing press, the dominance of print as the paradigm of encoded texts has made it "natural" to associate literacy with alphabetic text. But this is really just an historical contingency. Many centuries prior to that humans used pictorial inscriptions of one kind or another (as well as other markings) to encode language and thought independently of voice. As new ways of encoding come and go, encoding system paradigms change. And right now we are at a point where the dominance - previously, almost the monopoly - of the print paradigm is being challenged by the ease of digital encoding that can combine multiple modes and mixes of multiple modes. Where it is more effective to use alternative sign systems from alphabetic text to mediate meaning-making within mainstream everyday interactions, the alternatives will be used. And people's ideas about literacy will change accordingly.

The second key point is that literacies vary with contexts. What we mean by context has to do with who the people are within a particular setting, what they are aiming to do, how they are trying to do it, what they are trying to do it with, and who they are or are trying to be within that context. So, if we think about something as obvious as reading a particular text, it is clear that different people, coming from different cultural spaces and possessing different cultural knowledge may read the same text in very different ways and make different meanings from it. For example, during the 1980s, many liberation theology priests who worked with Latin American peasants in ways they hoped would encourage them to mobilise to demand a better share of social wealth interpreted key biblical passages very differently to how conservative urban priests who identified with the existing social order interpreted them. Moreover, both groups worked with biblical texts in different ways and in different settings; liberationists would pore over the texts with peasants within settings where evidence of poverty was immediate, and would encourage the group to think about the meaning in relation to a change agenda. By contrast, other priests would read at large anonymous assemblies, making the interpretation amidst ornate decorative milieux that often dripped gold and spoke to divine rather than popular power. Same text, different people, different purposes, different procedures, different knowledge informing the meaning making and, indeed, a different technology. A bible being read by one person set apart from the listeners is utterly different from a bible being pored over, passed from person to person, and being used to stimulate thought intended to guide political action. Within Latin American settings both of these "ways" of "reading bibles" have been common - along with many other variations we can think of.

Now the point is that these kinds of differences in "ways with encoded texts" can be multiplied many times over. In a famous example, Shirley Brice Heath showed how different social groups within a region of the United States "did bedtime reading" in very different ways. Experts on the philosophy of Kant read and discuss Kant's works in very different ways from first year philosophy students, and (can) make very different meanings from them. That is why philosophers try to induct philosophy students into sophisticated reading practices, of which following letters and words across a page is only a tiny (albeit very important) part. The expert philosophers are trying to recruit the students to a new social practice, and this involves having to teach them how to read and write philosophically (which involves a lot more than just eyes and texts). Jim Gee uses the word Discourse (with a capital "D") to signify the idea that there are all different kinds of combinations of types of people and kinds of purposes and goals, and ways of setting about them, and ways of using language within them, and ways of dressing (liberationists in outdoor garb and metropolitan priests in ornate robes) and so on. We can say that different Discourses tend to involve different literacies, and will often involve different (forms of) technologies or tools, and different ways of using them, and so on. And participants in these different Discourses will make different meanings from what look like the same resources, and they will use what look like the same resources (think: computer, phone, bible) in very different ways.

So if we put all of these ideas together (along with others there is not space to mention here) it suddenly becomes very obvious why we would think of making remix music videos as having everything to do with literacy, rather than having nothing to do with literacy. It is one of a very large number of literacies that exist (not to mention new ones that are emerging all the time). That is, when we think of literacies in terms of "so many socially recognized ways in which people who are participating in particular Discourses generate, communicate and negotiate meanings through the medium of encoded texts," it's perfectly natural to think of people who are producing and sharing and interacting with remix music videos as engaging in (a) literacy. They are decoding and encoding sophisticated multimedia texts, with a view to communicating and sharing and negotiating meanings with others of their ilk (other members of their Discourse). They set about this in ways that others recognize as appropriate to doing this literacy well. They are freezing thought and "language" so that it can travel and be experienced and negotiated within practices of giving and taking meaning.

When we look at things from this perspective it is the people who cannot see remix music video in terms of literacy that have the problem; not those for whom it is self-evidently a legitimate, pleasurable, widely-practised, and potentially incredibly powerful literacy.

In my Afterword, I raise the question about the value of learning these skills as an isolated set of practices rather than as part of a more diverse affinity space. In other words, is there a difference between learning to make a remix video and learning to be an Otaku (who happens to display his or her skills and knowledge through contributing remix videos to a larger fan culture)?

Yes, there certainly is a difference, although learning to make something like a remix video can - and often does - lead to becoming a fan of something one previously was not a fan of, and to becoming more the kind of fan who happens to display their skills and knowledge through contributing artifacts to a larger fan culture and through other characteristically Otaku practices. Indeed, this is precisely the route that Matt, the co-author of our chapter on AMV remix in the book, took. We came across Matt's anime music video remixes via YouTube, where his "Konoha Memory Book" video at the time had over half a million views (take-down notices unfortunately mean the video is no longer on YouTube). Half a million views is a significant marker of popularity online, and so we interviewed him about his anime music video production process, and his involvement in remixing AMVs. He was 17 years old at the time, and he explained that he'd started creating AMVs two years earlier. It turns out that prior to that, he hadn't been a fan of anime or manga or anything like that at all. What happened was that a mate showed him "Narutrix" (an AMV faux movie trailer parodying the Matrix movies) which got Matt interested in watching the Naruto anime series in particular, and then anime in general. It didn't take him long to start tinkering around with creating his own AMVs, even before he became what could be described a full participant in anime culture. He's subsequently gone on to become such an avid anime fan that not only does he create AMVs which he posts to AMV.org and YouTube, submit AMVs to convention contests (and for which he regularly wins awards), draw his own original manga figures and comics which he posts online at DeviantArt.org, maintain a blog about his anime interests, contribute to anime dicussion boards, write generous reviews of and comments' on others' AMVs, but he spends his weekends cosplaying a rich range of anime characters, and organizes cosplay chess games for different anime conventions as well. He's now--thanks to his initial interest in AMVs as an expressive form in their own right--most definitely an Otaku!

Other ideas arise here, however, which are relevant to questions about the relationships between identity and practices and to ideas and ideals of learning. For example, it may not be that a person learns DIY media practices as an isolated set of skills but, rather, as skills and knowledges and values and mastery of systems and the like as part of becoming a kind of person that just happens not to be a fan. Hence, a person who identifies as the kind of person who practises the ideal of being as self-sufficient as possible might learn a particular skill and knowledge set under this kind of motivation (e.g., knowing how to sew clothes; knowing how to preserve or can home-grown fruit; knowing how to make solar-powered things). Moreover, we often find a paradox associated with self-sufficiency: people who identify with being self-sufficient often are closely linked with like minded people and inter-relate with them, sharing points of view, solidarity, and resources and so on. But they do this under a much more diffuse kind of identity than members of specific affinity groups. When people who are into "self-sufficiency" interact with one another their specific interests and things they create may have little or no overlap whatsoever, other than as expressions of participating in a general ideal of being as self-sufficient as possible.

Alternatively, the kind of audience we have for this book is of people who might want to get some experience of DIY creativity and production as part of how they see themselves becoming a more effective teacher or, perhaps, a more in touch parent. Here again, the skills and knowledge being learned would not be "isolated". They might be a long way, at least initially, from Otaku culture or other avid fan cultures, but, equally, they may not at all be isolated but connected to something that is very important to them. In fact, isolation would actually be very difficult to sustain in the context of learning some digital DIY media. The very process tends to put people very quickly into the realm of affinity spaces and, as Matt's case indicates, from there anything can happen - including the development of full-fledged fan affinities and approximations to Otaku ways of doing and being.

At the same time, there are some important differences and distinctions at stake. One is the difference between a more instrumental orientation to practice and a more intrinsic orientation. There is all the difference in the world between dropping in on a Linux forum to get some help with a problem, leaving feedback, making the information available to others and maybe making a Paypal contribution to an open source software fund, on one hand, and being a full-on contributor who helps code open source software and build the open source movement, on the other. In the first case the relationship is instrumental: minimal participation as a means to an end. In the second, it is intrinsic; one is a devotee of open source ideals and practices and, in effect, becomes a steward of those ideals and practices. Lawrence Eng's classic statement about fanship and stewardship is a supreme expression of the intrinsic orientation that defines many Otaku identities. Explaining why he proactively sought out other fans of Sasami from the Tenchi Muyo anime and developed the Sasami Appreciation Society as an affinity space, Eng said "it's our devotion to Sasami ... we're dedicated to bringing her the fanship that she deserves" (as cited by Mimi Ito). This is activity as an end in itself rather than to some further end. It is done for its own sake, as an expression of devotion, rather than as a means to producing an artifact, getting a reputation, or reaping other personal benefits. These may occur, of course, but they are not the point and purpose of the engagement within an intrinsic orientation. Of course, one can learn an incredible amount along the way, but even this is not the motivation to participate.

There is much that is important and valuable about this kind of orientation and way of being. In many ways it constitutes an ideal of active citizenship - of being committed to building something because one believes in it, and of putting that first, and of dedicating one's activity to contributing to its fullest realisation. At its best, this is what communities of academic practice become, and if we need any reminders of how valuable this ideal can be we need only think of negative examples that are always available of academics who are largely or mainly there for "career prospects", and of the ugliness that can so quickly surface in the form of academic jealousies, back-biting practices, resentment, clique formation and turf battles and so on. Apart from the quality of learning that can occur within bona fide affinity practices, the fact is that there is much of human beauty to be found there: selflessness, promotion of the greater good, humility, stewardship, generosity, reciprocity and so on. Anyone who doesn't think we need as much as we can get of such values has not looked outside in a while.

This said, however, it is worth making a couple of cautionary observations about the "structure" of participation and learning within affinity spaces. While we have identified the qualities of stewardship, humility, commitment to a greater (assumed) good, and the priority of intrinsic worth to fan practices, it may be helpful to remind ourselves that humans can be(come) fans of anything, and for these qualities to remain intact and yet, potentially, have regrettable consequences. While becoming a fan of many popular culture practices and icons, as with becoming a fan of environmental science, or mathematics, or democracy might typically be expected to have more or less benign and positive outcomes, the same might not apply to becoming a fan of the Third Reich or Pol Pot or any number of contemporary examples that could be named, where people do in fact become fans (although "bad" fans are often called, fanatics), and do pursue intrinsic goods (as they see them), practice stewardship, collaborate, share, put other people and ideals before themselves and so on. To be a fan has no limits so far as objects of affinity are concerned, and while we may limit the word "Otaku" to some specific range of fanships it may be more difficult to so limit the general concept and its deep grammar. Hence, the "good" of displaying skills and knowledge through contributing to a larger (fan) culture will always be to some extent contingent.

A related point here concerns the structure of learning within practice affinities or, as they are often called, communities of practice. The New Work Order (1996) argues that communities of practice seed values without these values needing some apparent central controlling agency to insist upon them or maintain them: "Immersion into a community of practice [an affinity] can allow individuals or units to internalize values and goals - often without a great deal of negotiation or conscious reflection and without the exercise of very much top-down authority" (p. 65). Participants collaborate, participate, share, reciprocate, "scaffold" and support, for all they are worth, and the net effect of this is building the practice and the community. But it does not necessarily transcend what Kevin Harris (1979), many years ago, referred to as "supportive rhetoric". It can, and usually does, support critical scrutiny that is internal to the practice/community, but at the same time this critique insulates participants against possibilities of external critique. The more a person invests in an affinity the less space there is for countenancing alternatives. The learning is, to be sure, often "deep," and deeply social. But "learning works best - it is most enculturating, but (alas) also most indoctrinating - when it is done inside the social practices of a Discourse" such as a fan affinity practice (New Work Order p. 15). It is not for nothing that many "fast capitalist" enterprises have encouraged the development of fandoms around their products, seeding the core values and leaving it to fan collaboration, participation and celebration to build the community (and the profits).

For us, the important thing is trying to keep the baby with the bathwater, in the sense of encouraging multiple fandoms - memberships of multiple affinities - and multiple orders of affinities, such that we strive for Otaku-like membership of practices that embrace intrinsic ends linked to distribution of material social goods as well as to pleasures. Becoming fans of understanding how social practices work for better and for worse so far as contributing materially to promoting long-term human good is concerned seems to us to be of the utmost importance.

Michele Knobel is Professor of Education at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her research examines new literacy practices across a broad range of contexts. She is joint editor, with Colin Lankshear, of DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. They have also jointly edited A New Literacies Sampler and Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.

Colin Lankshear is an Adjunct Professor of Education at McGill University in Montreal, and James Cook University, in Cairns, Australia. His research interest is in sociocultural studies of literacy practices and new technologies. He is joint author, with Michele Knobel, of The Handbook for Teacher Research and New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning.

What Can Teachers Learn from DIY Cultures: An Interview with Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (Part Two)

A central goal of the book is to help teachers to understand how DIY practices might inform their engagement with their students. This DIY media production has historically been something young people do on their own, outside of school, so what do you see as the value of bringing it into the classroom?

The first point to make here is that becoming a bit familiar with DIY media practices can help inform teachers' teaching and learning interactions with students without the practices necessarily having to come into the classrooms. There are two aspects we would like to touch on here before looking at what the value might be of bringing such activity into classrooms.

Many years ago--in the mid-1990s--we were doing research in a Grade 7 classroom in which there were migrant students who were having to learn English while trying to navigate the content of the curriculum. The teacher remarked how difficult it was having English language learners mainstreamed into "regular" classrooms where there was no accompanying specialist support. She referred to one student, Tony, who had produced during the class' regularly scheduled independent writing time what appeared to be a 20-page manuscript. He'd been working on it for about a month before showing it to his teacher for feedback. His teacher dropped the tome onto the desk with an exasperated sigh and declared that she "didn't know what to do with it" because none of it made any sense, and she simply didn't have time to help him fix his sentences. The length of Tony's narrative and his dedication to writing it piqued our interest, so we took a copy home. The teacher was right in that the text had a fair number of grammatical and spelling glitches, but we'd actually seen worse in the writing of some of his English-only peers. What seemed to be the biggest problem for the teacher, then, was the narrative itself. At first glance, it was very dialogue driven and set in some medieval-like set of kingdoms, with events and characters suddenly appearing and then disappearing, wars suddenly erupting and being just as quickly resolved, and so on. What we soon realized as we began to read Tony's story was that he'd actually produced a really rich and complex narrative that drew on a wide range of popular culture storylines. These included characters, settings and events from video games such as Doom, Mortal Kombat, Dungeon Keeper II, and The Ultimate Evil, and a range of novels from the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series (e.g., The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Caverns of the Snow Witch). He'd produced, in other words, a really engaging and epic fanfic. It included all the things teachers want in students' creative writing: a strong plot line, interesting narrative structure, dialogue, characters with depth, descriptive language, and the like. But none of it "made sense" to or was valued by his teacher because she was unfamiliar with the practice of fan fiction writing, and most likely unfamiliar with the original popular culture resources on which he'd drawn to craft his story. If she'd been able to recognize the text for what it was, her construction of Tony as a student and as an English-language user would've been entirely revised.

The second point has to do with what we think of as cultures of learning. When students enter formal education they enter a new and very strange "model" of learning, compared to what they have experienced in their pre-institutional learning lives. For a start, they move from a learning world in which what they come to know and master is acquired in concrete contexts - is grounded in authentic relationships, purposes and situations - to a learning world in which what they are supposed to come to know and master is to be got from largely abstract and decontextualised "learning opportunities". There is a discrepancy for all young people - this is a dimension of the distinctions James Paul Gee makes between people's primary and secondary discourses, and between acquisition and learning - but the discrepancies are much greater for learners coming from some social groupings than it is for those who come from other social groupings (so, for example, students who are familiar with question-response-evaluation patterns of interaction between an adult and child--where the adult already knows the child knows the answer before posing the question--will find this same pattern at school very familiar and understandable). Often, the discrepancies are so great that young people just can't get onto the school learning wavelength at all: they just don't get it; which means that they can't "get" the curriculum as well as those students for whom the gap is less extreme. One of the things educational researchers who draw on sociocultural lines of theory often say is that the more teachers can understand and make connections to learners' pre-school ways of getting to know things, and the things they get to know about, the better the chances are that teachers can help get learners "onto the school learning wavelength".

What we are now finding is that learners who have already been at school for some time are getting a double dose of discrepancy. This is coming from their experiences of learning within what you and others, Henry, call participatory culture: involving "affinity spaces", low barriers to joining in, peer-to-peer interactions of sharing expertise, and where participants do not think in terms of failure (among many other features). So, they spend large amounts of time outside of formal education learning very effectively, with much passion, with a sense of personal purpose, where there is usually effective guidance close to hand, and so on. Then they turn up to class the next day and are thrown into something completely different. Even those who can handle "classroom ways" increasingly experience considerable disaffection.

In our work within teacher education we constantly are amazed by the extent to which the teachers and teacher education students we encounter have little or no familiarity with the kinds of learning cultures young people with DIY or DIO media learning experiences encounter on a regular (daily, hourly) basis. As we'll go on to mention a little later, we are speaking here of young people who are learning how to do media work through peer-based interactions with others, whether these are fan-based practices or more like hobbies and interests that are not necessarily built upon specific fanships. The thing is that young people nowadays have built up a "modus operandi" for learning that is different both from what they get before school and with what they typically get in school. It is, for very many aficionados of DIY/DIO media practices, a way of learning that they find very effective and pleasurable. Moreover, it is a way of learning that can easily be drawn upon to augment the limited forms of peer-teaching/learning buddies arrangements used in classrooms. The thing is to be aware of this way of learning and to get familiar with it and, hopefully, comfortable with it, as a teacher involved in learning and doing outside the classroom. The more familiar and comfortable it becomes, the easier it will be to find productive and seamless ways to integrate it into classroom routines in ways that are effective, and not just some kind of add on. To be able to make this kind of connection means getting to know the modus operandi in the first instance.

In many ways, for us, this is what the book is mostly about, rather than bringing the actual DIY/DIO media practices themselves into classrooms. It is about taking the time to experience the kinds of learning interactions and "ways" that have become second nature to so many young (and older) people, because by such means we can begin to generate all sorts of creative means for counteracting the "double dose of discrepancy" so that we can actually augment curriculum learning.

Having said all that, like you, we do also see a lot of potential value to be had from integrating DIY/DIO media practices into formal educational activity. To talk about this we have to take a bit of a detour into some work we have done with various colleagues over the past 15 years or so. This involves questions to do with what formal education is about and what it is (or should be) for: some kind of philosophy of education.

At a time when so much of formal education seems to be dominated by standardised testing of standardised curriculum content there seems to be little space for seriously raising and addressing questions about what kind and quality of learning formal education should be concerned with - especially when jobs get scarce and qualifications seem to count more than ever. But these questions are crucial and we get lazy about them at our peril and, especially, at the peril of those who have to endure 10 and more years of compulsory schooling. Working with Jim Gee and Glynda Hull in the mid '90s on the theme of the new work order, we got a new angle on the importance of education being connected to the larger enterprise of living well within the contexts of our times and worlds. We focused on the idea that education is not about children learning in schools but, rather, that education should respond to the needs of human beings who are living lives that can best be seen as trajectories. Every person is born into some milieu in which they will live and, by means of a more or less diverse range of social practices, within a range of social institutions. Education should be about enabling people to do that, and yet we all know that much of what we learn in school simply does not connect well to our lives beyond and after school. Instead, students get inducted into "school versions" of knowledge and social practices. Instead of learning to think and interpret like, say, an historian does, learners get to memorise dates and names and to write essays that weld these dates and names into standardised kinds of five-paragraph essays, and rarely get anywhere near to the kind of "raw data" that historians deal with. We learn history as bits and pieces of content, and as "essay writing". We don't get an introduction to "being, or becoming, an historian", or to "thinking historically". The same holds for pretty much every subject slot on the curriculum or timetable in most schools.

By contrast, as argued in The New Work Order, if we want formal educational learning to be "efficacious" we should be trying to ensure as educators that what someone - whether a child or an adult - does right now in their learning is connected in meaningful and motivating ways with "mature" or "insider" versions of the larger social practices in the world beyond school to which the current learning is supposedly related. In other words, if you're going to learn something in science right now, it should be conceptualised and approached in such a way that the present learning task is a step - to be followed by further steps rather than random bits and pieces of content or ideas - on the way to becoming the kind of person who addresses the world scientifically. Otherwise, what's the point? Today, decades after learning the periodic table, we both can recite by rote the first 10 elements in that table, but haven't got a clue what to do with them. They are inert baggage; wasted synapses. Their only potential use - which is statistically close to impossible - would be if we were on a game show staring at a million dollars and were asked what the 8th element in the period table is (but it would be game over for us if they asked us about the 11th or 12th element!).

Now, from this perspective, one of the major virtues of DIY/DIO media practices is that they exemplify the possibilities for efficacious learning. Participants in these practices are wanting to emulate good practitioners. They are wanting to become like the cultural producers they look up to. When they post a work in progress to get some feedback, or go online to get some "just in time" assistance, or closely examine someone else's work to see how they did what they did, they are taking an active step on a trajectory. When someone takes the time to feed back to others, or to give assistance or to make a suggestion, or to make a resource available, they are making a move in the enactment of being an insider to their social practice. They are learning how to do it, or are refining their learning, or are becoming more of an accomplished participant within a media cultural domain. They are learning to become more of a particular kind of identifiable person in the process of living a good, interesting human life. If education should be about anything, it should surely be about that. Educators, then, can learn much of value for effective pedagogy by experiencing ways of learning with which their students are often much more familiar than they are.

This is not to say, however, that if we integrate DIY media practices into classroom work it should just be for the sake of learning how to make a music video, say, or creating a space for young people to "do fan stuff". Clearly, there is already abundant space outside of school for that to go on. Rather, we think there are larger and deeper educational goals that can be realized by leveraging DIY media interests and proficiencies within school settings. One way of approaching this is via the concept of Knowledge Producing Schools, which we encountered in the course of working with Leonie Rowan and Chris Bigum prior to leaving Australia in the late 1990s.

This is the idea that schools can harness the relationship potential of digital technologies to move away from being based mainly on consuming knowledge and information within subject-based learning, and move in part to becoming involved in producing knowledge that is useful for their communities, and that will be used, valued, and acted on as appropriate by the community because it is good quality knowledge. Under this model learners have to learn how to produce expert-like knowledge, since if it is not good quality and expert-like it will not be valued by the wider community and the relationship will break down. The knowledge production must be efficacious and, therefore, the learning involved in that knowledge production will likewise be efficacious. Typical examples include students learning mathematical operations by tracking and then analysing vehicle speeds through a school zone using professional equipment in the company of transport officials and recommending changes to the speed limits to enhance students' safety, producing a public service video on bullying and how to best respond to bullies, and producing a research-based documentary on the history of a beef sales yard to help the city council promote the town's annual Beef Expo (the latter had actually gone out for public tender, and the students won the bid over other applicants).

The scope for media work within such an approach is enormous, and could project students' informal media production and expertise into the knowledge mastery role of schools in such ways as presenting knowledge via podcasting, videos, games-based movie making, image archiving and curating, audio archiving, and so on. Depending on the kind of knowledge being produced, DIY media proficiencies can enter the process at different points: such as for archiving data, interpreting and representing findings within the process of producing the knowledge, and/or in the process of disseminating or reporting knowledge outcomes.

Of course, ideas like building at least some curriculum work around ideals of efficacious learning and knowledge production will remain pie in the sky if teachers and teacher educators and caregivers and community leaders and other constituents don't put up some effective resistance to the dominance of standardised curriculum and testing. We believe, however, that it will be easier for educators to find spaces for productive take up of media production and sharing within bona fide knowledge work if they become "culturally fluent" with some DIY/DIO media activity.

Michele Knobel is Professor of Education at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her research examines new literacy practices across a broad range of contexts. She is joint editor, with Colin Lankshear, of DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. They have also jointly edited A New Literacies Sampler and Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.

Colin Lankshear is an Adjunct Professor of Education at McGill University in Montreal, and James Cook University, in Cairns, Australia. His research interest is in sociocultural studies of literacy practices and new technologies. He is joint author, with Michele Knobel, of The Handbook for Teacher Research and New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning.

What Can Teachers Learn from DIY Cultures: An Interview with Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (Part One)

Last time, I shared a chunk from my afterword for DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. There's plenty more where that came from, including a report on some of the core insights from our "Reading in a Participatory Culture" initiative. Over the next few installments, I am sharing an extensive and substantive interview with Colin Landkshear and Michele Knobel, the two editors of that book, which digs deep into the implications of DIY culture for contemporary education. Lankshear and Knobel are legends in the space of new media literacies, having authored or edited a series of first rate books, which explore how education is and should be responding to shifts in public access to the means of cultural production. I draw heavily on their collections and on their personal writings when I teach my New Media Literacies class at USC. One reason I feel such kinship with this dynamic duo is that they often ground their considerations of the nature of literacy and the purpose of learning through reference to field work they have done on Anime fans and their video production practices.

Like their other books, DIY Media brings together young and established writers looking at a range of digital media practices; this book is especially targeted at educators who want to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty mucking about with media. In some ways, this is a "How to" book explaining how to make podcasts or edit vids; in some ways it is a "why to" book explaining why these alternative media practices will change our understanding of what it means to be literate. The essays move from pragmatic advice to theoretical ruminations without ever missing a beat and will be incredibly useful to educators struggling to find their footing in these unfamiliar spaces.

In this opening installment, Lankshear and Knobel will explain some of the core premises which shaped the project. As you will see, we do not always agree, but we arrive at what I see as complimentary positions. One reason why I reproduced a chunk from my essay yesterday was to allow you to better understand the points of debate which emerge in the passages that follow.

What is the DIY Media book about?

It's an edited collection, and is an eclectic sampling of do-it-yourself media practices under current conditions of digital technologies and people's ideas about how these technologies can be used within everyday life, and how experience with engaging in such practices might help contribute to enhancing formal education. The authors address music remix, podcasting, photoshopping and photosharing, machinima movie making, stop-motion and flash animation, and anime music video practices. Each chapter begins by talking a little about cultural aspects of the practice it's addressing, and then provides a brief "tutorial" on how to get started technically and socially in that practice, before discussing some educational connections and implications.

The book is "eclectic" partly in the sense that it covers quite a spread of media practices. But it's also eclectic in terms of how "DIY media" is understood. In your Afterword for the book, Henry, you suggest a distinction between DIY/Do-It-Yourself and DIO/Do-It-Ourselves (or DIT/Do-It-Together) to reflect varying degrees of engagement in participatory culture, as you and colleagues so usefully have conceived it. So, at one pole, the concept of DIY media might involve an individual using the generous affordances of the internet (as well as drawing on face-to-face and offline resources) to learn how to create a music video or a stop-motion animation artifact, and to then get on with creating it. This might involve quite minimal participation in affinity spaces - let's say, acknowledging support given by others and reciprocating by making one's own knowledge available to others and, perhaps, posting the animation online. At the other pole, a full-blown DIO/DIT media practice as a full expression of participatory culture involves aficionados of a particular interest working together and in deeply collaborative ways to build a rich and deep affinity space - a kind of cultural community - in which the act of creating a particular artifact is not the end in itself but much more a part (and maybe a relatively insignificant part) of contributing to building the affinity. In this sense of DIO media practices, as we see them, a person's commitment to the space can take a number of active forms. They may participate directly in collaborative artifact production and promotion (such as can be found within the machinima community, for example). Just as importantly, a person can devote much of their energies to regularly visiting a site central to the shared affinity or interest, say, Animemusicvideos.org, and viewing recently uploaded videos, and commenting on them; following up favourite videos on YouTube and commenting there, too; following particular anime music video remixers' work across the internet; voting in viewers' choice awards hosted by AMV.org or other online entities; recommending favourite AMVs to friends; physically attending anime music video screenings at comic conventions; watching a wide range of anime in order to better appreciate anime music video remixers' work, and so on. They actually may be relatively little engaged in creating - albeit with input and support of others - their "own" media artifacts, but still be very much participating within this shared, collaborative affinity space.

The contributing authors in DIY Media cover most of this spectrum themselves as DIY media creators, and as editors we think that having a wide spectrum is important, since the main audience for this book is intended to be formal educators (teachers, teacher educators, teacher education students) and, hopefully, some parents/caregivers. For some serious fans it may be too goal-directed and "instrumental," although we hope that fans will read and interact with it because that interchange is essential for getting a sense of how to bridge the gap between the worlds of formal and less formal learning. Indeed, that role is already really nicely begun by your Afterword to the collection

Our own perspective on DIY generally, and DIY media specifically, in terms of our work as educators may be worth spelling out a little here: starting with the "D." All DIY work involves doing: some degree of producing and not merely consuming. There is still plenty of room for consumption, but when we focus on the "D" we are focusing on being producers. We believe this emphasis has particular importance for formal education, precisely because it is so powerfully and deeply immersed in consuming. In his wonderful and important attack on the disempowering effect of disabling professions, Ivan Illich referred to school as the "reproductive organ of the consumer society," and argued that once our imaginations have been "all schooled up" to accept "full time attendance at an obligatory curriculum" as the learning paradigm, people are ready prey for all the other manipulative institutions that dominate our social system and force us to use their services because they are the only ones sanctioned or authorized to "deliver" them. School learning becomes, in effect, consumption of subject knowledge organised into various pre-determined sequences, and with little or no opportunity to learn how to produce that knowledge in the ways that experts do. Instead, the production within schooled learning is pretty much limited to recycling consumed information within standardized essay writing formats or school projects. There is little opportunity for Doing in the sense involved in doing for oneself at any point on the DIY-DIO spectrum, which is based on creating use values for oneself and for others, in accordance with personal goals, interests and purposes.

The operating conditions of schooling increasingly are becoming as consumer-dominated for teachers as they are for learners. Competency benchmarks, standardized assessment protocols and tests, textbooks and resources, curriculum frameworks and reporting mechanisms are presented to teachers, along with batteries of "professional development opportunities" to consume information about how to enact the requirements imposed from above. Many teacher education students quickly catch onto this and are soon asking to be shown how to do this or that step-by-painful-step. In addition, many teachers are not at home with new technologies and are often reluctant to use them, or become anxious when confronted with getting up to speed - which is often "delivered" as a one-off professional development session that accompanies the arrival of some new technology in the school (Smartboards are a classic case of this kind of thing).

So, for us, the "D" in DIY, as we thought about it for the book, is about trying to challenge at least some of this massive emphasis on consumption/being a consumer within the teaching and learning roles found in formal education through the process of encouraging readers to get started in some digital media practices. In the process, readers who are new to these practices can introduce themselves to some of the opportunities for learning and engaging within the kinds of affinity spaces that have evolved around DIY-DIO media practices and that exemplify participatory culture.

As your book notes, the current moment of digital culture reflects a much older tradition of DIY media production. Can you share with us your sense of that history and what specifically digital media has brought to the kinds of DIY media communities being discussed.

Our take on the DIY tradition is quite literal and pragmatic. We note that as a term in popular use, "DIY" really only dates to the 1950s although, of course, the idea of communities of enthusiasts and others with a will to bypass what is produced for them and to produce their own versions for constituencies they identify with is, as you note in your Afterword, very much older. In some of our earliest published work, for instance, we looked at the determined efforts of working class people in early 19th century Britain to establish a press that would help further their pursuit of better economic and social conditions, through organizing en masse to win voting rights, the right to organize their labour in syndicates or unions, and to generate their own material for reading pleasure and edification. Such doing-it-for-themselves media, however, was scarcely an intrinsic pursuit. It was much closer to a matter of necessity, although it was certainly a major exercise in building affinities and affinity spaces.

In this book we are talking about DIY media in terms of digital entertainment and expressive media--animation, live action video, music video, music, spoken voice tracks, other artistic works--produced by everyday people to meet their own goals and personal satisfactions. Often, these goals and satisfactions are associated with fanship in some larger phenomenon and close affiliation with some social group. At the same time it often emerges out of opportunities to tinker with and explore the means for producing a media artifact of one kind or another. DIY media in this sense is very much characterised by people being able to produce their "own" media--whether it be radio-like podcasts, "original" remixed music, animated video shorts, music videos, etc.--by making use of software, hardware and "insider" skills, techniques and knowledge that were previously the domain of highly-trained experts who had access to specialised and typically very expensive media production know-how, resources and spaces.

Our view of DIY runs multiple strands together. One is the idea of a DIY ethic in the sense of being able to do things oneself that are otherwise the preserve of experts or professionals - a kind of self reliance that lends a measure of independence. Another is the idea that, when it needs to be, this "self reliant production" is nonetheless of good quality and standing. Sometimes a "folksy" look and feel is fine and apropos. But at other times a professional feel and finish is sought, and the proficient DIY creator can achieve that (e.g., furniture construction, intricate quilts). A third strand is the idea that for some DIYers a key purpose is to resist corporate, commercial, and consumerist values per se. We note the way in which the punk subculture that emerged in the '70s not only encouraged personal styles of self-presentation, self- expression, and identity work within self publishing, music creation, clothing oneself and making oneself up; it also - through fanzine, and later general zine publication - impacted the ways fans interacted with musicians, and touched bases with other DIY/DIO traditions by providing gateways to access for novices via zines that offered tutorials on a wide range of creative pursuits.

By comparison with your own position on DIO media, Henry, our view takes a shorter historical sweep, and tends to emphasize the use of tools/technologies, techniques and know how, and generating artifacts. We talk quite a bit about getting up to speed on production aspects and quality aspects, via interactions with others who share the same interest. But we do not emphasize the Otaku-like dimensions of the practices to any extent. We recognize them, but do not emphasize or prioritize them here.

What this means is that our sense of what digital technologies have brought to the kinds of media practices and communities being discussed in DIY Media is less "communitarian" and more "functional", "quality-oriented", and "informational" than a full on "participatory culture" approach involves. For example, we talk about the way these new technologies make it possible in principle for everyday people to produce artifacts that have the kind of sophistication that could previously only be obtained via very high cost infrastructure. We talk about the way networked technologies open up rich opportunities for on-demand or just-in-time learning: the idea that "google is your friend" when you need to know something. This includes cultural knowledge about "cool" and "quality" as well as technical knowhow. We talk about DIY media creators often having a good sense of relevant professional standards, although they will not always prioritize these. Sometimes, basic explorations of a new tool or technique are satisfying and sufficient. At other times, posting a video recording online of a friend riding a bike off a pier and into deep water has much more to do with maintaining social relationships within a friendship network than producing an acclaimed artifact. But we highlight the satisfactions and use values that can be gained from tapping the affordances of contemporary tools and (especially online) learning resources to produce professional-like artifacts and resources. Sophisticated tools are augmented by online how-to guides, dedicated open discussion forums where experts and novices alike can participate, help boards and blogs, user-created media content review and comment spaces, and ready access to what are regarded as exemplary models of the media artifact being created. Such resources make many elements of "professional standards" explicit and accessible to the everyday person (e.g., amateur anime music video makers committed to professional standards know that good quality AMVs don't include clips that are subtitled or have different image resolutions from one another, that they avoid clichéd transitions between clips, and so on).

TO BE CONTINUED

Michele Knobel is Professor of Education at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her research examines new literacy practices across a broad range of contexts. She is joint editor, with Colin Lankshear, of DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. They have also jointly edited A New Literacies Sampler and Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.

Colin Lankshear is an Adjunct Professor of Education at McGill University in Montreal, and James Cook University, in Cairns, Australia. His research interest is in sociocultural studies of literacy practices and new technologies. He is joint author, with Michele Knobel, of The Handbook for Teacher Research and New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning.

Why Participatory Culture Is Not Web 2.0: Some Basic Distinctions

The following is excerpted from the Afterword I wrote for the recently published book, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel's DIY Media: Creating, Sharing and Learning with New Technologies. Next time, I will begin an extended interview with the book's editors about their views about DIY Media, Informal Learning, New Media Literacies, and Otaku Culture. Do It Yourself rarely means Do It Alone. For example, much of what youth learn through game playing emerges from "meta-gaming," the conversations about the game play. Trading advice often forces participants to spell out their core assumptions as more experienced players pass along what they've learned to newcomers. This "meta-gaming" has many of the dimensions of peer-to-peer teaching or "Social Learning." As John Seeley Brown and Richard P. Adler (2008) explain, "social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions."To call this "learning by doing" is too simple, since we will not learn as much if we separate what we are doing -- making a podcast, modding a game, mastering a level -- from the social context in which we are doing it.

I have always felt uncomfortable with the phrase, "Do It Yourself," to label the practices described in this book. "Do It Yourself" is too easy to assimilate back into some vague and comfortable notion of "personal expression" or "individual voice" that Americans can assimilate into long-standing beliefs in "rugged individualism" and "self-reliance." Yet, what may be radical about the DIY ethos is that learning relies on these mutual support networks, creativity is understood as a trait of communities, and expression occurs through collaboration. Given these circumstances, phrases like "Do It Ourselves" or "Do It Together" better capture collective enterprises within networked publics. This is why I am drawn towards concepts such as "participatory culture," (Jenkins et a, 2009l) "Affinity Spaces," (Gee, 2007) "Genres of Participation," (Ito et al, 2009) "networked publics," (Varnelis, 2008) "Collective Intelligence," (Levy, 1999) or "Communities of Practice," (Lave and Wenger, 1991).

While each reflects somewhat different pedalogical models, each captures the sense of a shared space or collective enterprise which shapes the experience of individual participants/learners. Each offers us a model of peer-to-peer education: we learn from each other in the process of working together to achieve shared goals. Many of these models emphasize the diverse roles played by various participants in this process. It is not that all participants know the same things (as has been the expectation in school); success rests on multiple forms of expertise the group can deploy "just in time" responding to shifting circumstances and emerging problems. It is not that all participants do the same things; rather, these practices depend on the ad hoc coordination of diverse skills and actions towards shared interests.

We need to understand the specific practices discussed here as informed by norms and values that emerge from their community of participants. We see different things if we focus on the practices or on the communities that deploy them, and in my remarks here, I hope to shift the lens onto the communities. Focusing on practices first, the editors write in this book's introduction, "Podcasting, for example, involves using particular kinds of tools, techniques and technologies to achieve the goals and purposes that podcasters aim to achieve, and to use them in the ways that people known as podcasters recognize as appropriate to their endeavor in terms of their goals and values." While saying something important about the nature of these practices, this description assumes that the operative identity here is that of the podcaster and that podcasters enjoy a shared identity as parts of a community of practice regardless of the content and functions of their podcasts. And this may be true for some, especially at the moment they are first learning how to podcast or are passing those skills and practices along to others, but for many, podcasting is a means to an end.

OTAKU, FANS, HIP HOPPERS AND GAMERS

On the ground, these practices get embedded in a range of different interest-driven networks and what motivates these activities may be less a desire to make a podcast than an urge to create a shared space where, for example, fans can discuss their mutual interests in Severius Snape or where church members can hold prayer circles or where comic book buffs can interview writers and artists or... The Digital Youth Project (Ito et al) drew a useful distinction between "messing around," tinkering with new tools and techniques to see what they can do, and "geeking out," going deep into a particular interest that may in turn lead you to engage with a range of social networks and production practices. There is some risk that as educators organize class projects around the production of podcasts, they risk divorcing these practices from the larger cultural contexts in which they operate.

We might think about different interest-driven networks as mobilizing somewhat different clusters of interlocking and mutually reinforcing practices. Consider, for example, Mimi Ito's (2005) description of the literacy skills within Otaku culture, the fan community around anime and manga:

"Anime otaku are media connoisseurs, activist prosumers who seek out esoteric content from a far away land and organize their social lives around viewing, interpreting, and remixing these media works. Otaku translate and subtitle all major anime works, they create web sites with hundreds and thousands of members, stay in touch 24/7 on hundreds of IRC channels, and create fan fiction, fan art, and anime music videos that rework the original works into sometimes brilliantly creative and often subversive alternative frames of reference.... To support their media obsessions otaku acquire challenging language skills and media production crafts of scripting, editing, animating, drawing, and writing. And they mobilize socially to create their own communities of interest and working groups to engage in collaborative media production and distribution. Otaku use visual media as their source material for crafting their own identities, and as the coin of the realm for their social networks. Engaging with and reinterpreting professionally produced media is one stepping stone towards critical media analysis and alternative media production."

Certainly, within Otaku culture, one can gain an identity as a fan-subber, a vidder, a fan fiction author, a community organizer, or an illustrator, but these practice-based identities do not supersede one's larger identity as an Otaku.

What Ito observes about Otaku culture is consistent with what researchers have observed in a range of other subcultures. Consider this description from my field work on female-centered science fiction fandom in the early 1990s (Jenkins, 1992):

"Four Quantum Leap fans gather every few weeks in a Madison, Wisconsin apartment to write. The women spread out across the living room, each with their own typewriter or laptop, each working diligently on their own stories about Al and Sam. Two sit at the dining room table, a third sprawls on the floor, a fourth balances her computer on the coffee table. The clatter of the keyboards and the sounds of a filktape are interrupted periodically by conversation. Linda wants to insure that nothing in the program contradicts her speculations about Sam's past. Mary has introduced a southern character and consults Georgia-born Signe for advice about her background. Kate reviews her notes on Riptide, having spent the week rewatching favorite scenes so she can create a 'crossover' story which speculates that Sam may have known Murray during his years at MIT. Mary scrutinizes her collection of 'telepics' (photographs shot from the television image), trying to find the right words to capture the suggestion of a smile that flits across his face....Kate passes around a letter she has received commenting on her recently published fanzine....Each of the group members offers supportive comments on a scene Linda has just finished, all independently expressing glee over a particularly telling line. As the day wears on, writing gives way to conversation, dinner, and the viewing of fan videos (including the one that Mary made a few weeks before)....For the fan observer, there would be nothing particularly remarkable about this encounter. I have spent similar afternoons with other groups of fans, collating and binding zines, telling stories, and debating the backgrounds of favorite characters....For the 'mundane' observer, what is perhaps most striking about this scene is the ease and fluidity with which these fans move from watching a television program to engaging in alternative forms of cultural production: the women are all writing their own stories; Kate edits and publishes her own zines she prints on a photocopy machine she keeps in a spare bedroom and the group helps to assemble them for distribution. Linda and Kate are also fan artists who exhibit and sell their work at conventions; Mary is venturing into fan video making and gives other fans tips on how to shoot better telepics. Almost as striking is how writing becomes a social activity for these fans, functioning simultaneously as a form of personal expression and as a source of collective identity (part of what it means to be a fan). Each of them has something potentially interesting to contribute; the group encourages them to develop their talents fully, taking pride in their accomplishments, be they long-time fan writers and editors like Kate or relative novices like Signe."

At the time, I was interested in what this scene told us about how fans read television and how they deployed its contents as raw materials for their own expressive activities. Rereading the passage today, I am struck by how fully the description captures the strengths of a DIY culture as a site for informal learning. Sometimes the women are working on individual, self-defined projects and sometimes they are working together on mutual projects but always they are drawing moral support from their membership in an interest-driven network. Each plays multiple roles: sometimes the author, sometimes the reader; sometimes the teacher, sometimes the student; sometimes the editor, sometimes the researcher, sometimes the illustrator. They move fluidly from role to role as needed, interupting their own creative activity to lend skills and knowledge to someone else. Their creative interests straddle multiple media practices: they write stories, they take telepics, they edit videos, they publish zines, each of which constitutes a complex cultural practice combining technical skills and cultural expertise. Leadership, as Gee tells us, is "porous": the space is Signe's apartment; Kate is editing the zine to which they are each contributing; and Mary has the expertise in fan video production which she shares with her circle in hopes of getting more of them vidding. And we see here a conception of culture as a series of "processes" rather than a set of "products." Fan work is always open to revision, expansion, and elaboration, rather than locked down and closed off from other's contributions. As a more recent account of fan cultural practices (Busse and Helleckson, 2006) explains:

"Work in progress is a term used in the fan fiction world to describe a piece of fiction still in the process of being written but not yet completed....The appeal of works in progress lies in part in the ways... it invites responses, permits shared authorship, and enjoins a sense of community.....In most cases, the resulting story is part collaboration and part response to not only the source text, but also the cultural context within and outside the fannish community in which it is produced...When the story is finally complete and published, likely online but perhaps in print, the work in progress among the creators shifts to the work in progress among the readers."

Similarly, Kevin Driscoll (2009) has discussed how Hip Hop's diverse practices around music, dance, the graphic arts, video production, and entrepreneurship associated with Hip Hop encourage participants to master a range of cultural and technological skills. He describes, for example, the different participatory practices that got mobilized around the circulation of a single song:

"

As the figurehead of 2007's "Crank Dat" phenomenon, Atlanta teenager Soulja Boy exploited social-networking and media-sharing websites to encourage a widespread dance craze that afforded him a level of visibility typically only available to artists working within the pop industry. "Crank Dat" ... began as a single commodity but grew into a multi-faceted cultural phenomenon.... Within just a few months of the first "Crank Dat" music video, fans had posted countless custom revisions of "Crank Dat" to media-sharing sites like YouTube, SoundClick, imeem, and MySpace. In each case, the participants altered the original video in a different manner. They changed the dance steps, altered the lyrics, created new instrumental beats, wore costumes, and performed in groups. Some created remix videos that borrowed footage from popular TV programs and movies...."Crank Dat" welcomed diverse modes of participation but every production required considerable technical expertise. Even a cursory exploration of the various "Crank Dat" iterations available on YouTube provides evidence of many different media production tools and techniques. The most basic homemade dance videos required operation of a video camera, post-production preparation of compressed digital video, and a successful upload to YouTube. For some of the participants in "Crank Dat", the dance craze provided an impetus for their first media projects. This lively media culture is representative of a spirit of innovation that traverses hip-hop history."

As a former classroom teacher who worked with inner city and minority youth, Driscoll directs attention towards the technical proficency of these Hip Hop fans, to challenge assumptions that often position African-American males on the wrong side of the digital divide, assuming that they have limited capacity and interest for entering STEM subjects. Rather, he argues that educators need to better understand the ways that their cultural attachments to Hip Hop often motivate them to embrace new technologies and adopt new cultural practices, many of which could provide gateways into technical expertise.

Or consider what James Paul Gee (2007) tells us about the "affinity spaces" around on-line gaming:

" A portal like AoM [Age of Mythologies] Heaven, and the AoM space as a whole, allows people to achieve status, if they want it (and they may not), in many different ways. Different people can be good at different things or gain repute in a number of different ways. Of course, playing the game well can gain one status, but so can organizing forum parties, putting out guides, working to stop hackers from cheating in the multi-player game, posting to any of a number of different forums, or a great many other things."

Indeed, for Gee, the idea of multiple forms of participation and status are part of what makes these affinity spaces such rich environments for informal learning. Unlike schools, where everyone is expected to do (and be good at) the same things, these participatory cultures allow each person to set their own goals, learn at their own pace, come and go as they please, and yet they are also motivated by the responses of others, often spending more time engaged with the activities because of a sense of responsibility to their guild or fandom. They enable a ballance between self-expression and collaborative learning which may be the sweet spot for DIY learning.

These examples represent four very different communities, each with their own governing assumptions about what it means to participate and about what kinds of cultural practices and identities are meaningful. Yet, all of them embody the pedagogical principles I have identified within participatory culture:

"A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another." (Jenkins et al, 2006)

CHALLENGING THE "LEARNING 2.0" FORMULATION

There has been a growing tendency to describe the application of these participatory culture principles to the classroom as "education 2.0" and as we do so, to take the highly visible corporate "web 2.0" portals not simply as our ideal model, but also as the source for these new participatory practices. Look at the way Brown and Adler's (2008) influential formulation of "Learning 2.0" ascribes agency to corporate platforms and technologies rather than to communities of participants:

"The latest evolution of the Internet, the so-called Web 2.0, has blurred the line between producers and consumers of content and has shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people. New kinds of online resources-- such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and virtual communities-- have allowed people with common interests to meet, share ideas, and collaborate in innovative ways. Indeed, the Web 2.0 is creating a new kind of participatory medium that is ideal for supporting multple modes of learning."

The DIY ethos, which emerged as a critique of consumer culture and a celebration of making things ourselves, is being transformed into a new form of consumer culture, a product or service that is sold to us by media companies rather than something that emerged from grassroots practices.

For this reason, I want to hold onto a distinction between participatory cultures, which may or may not engaged with commercial portals, and Web 2.0, which refers specifically to a set of commercial practices that seek to capture and harness the creative energies and collective intelligences of their users. "Web 2.0" is not a theory of pedagogy; it's a business model. Unlike projects like Wikipedia that have emerged from nonprofit organizations, the Open Courseware movement from educational institutions, and the Free Software movement from voluntary and unpaid affiliations, the Web 2.0 companies follow a commercial imperative, however much they may also wish to facilitate the needs and interests of their consumer base. The more time we spend interacting with Facebook, YouTube, or Live Journal, the clearer it becomes that there are real gaps between the interests of management and consumers. Academic theorists (Terranova,2004; Green and Jenkins, 2009) have offered cogent critiques of what they describe as the "free labor" provided by those who chose to contribute their time and effort to creating content which can be shared through such sites, while consumers and fans have offered their own blistering responses to shifts in the terms of service which devalue their contributions or claim ownership over the content they produced. Many Web 2.0 sites provide far less scaffolding and mentorship than offered by more grassroots forms of participatory culture. Despite a rhetoric of collaboration and community, they often still conceive of their users as autonomous individuals whose primary relationship is to the company that provides them services and not to each other. There is a real danger in mapping the Web 2.0 business model onto educational practices, thus seeing students as "consumers" rather than "participants" within the educational process.

He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia

The other day I flew back to Cambridge at the request of Scot Osterweill, the research director for The Education Arcade, in order to participate in the Sandbox Summit, a fascinating gathering of game designers, toy makers, television producers, children's book authors, and educators drawn together through their shared interests in "how media is changing our play and how play is changing our media." I had been asked to give a keynote address which would share some of my thoughts about transmedia entertainment in a way that might be relevant to people who were shaping children's culture. As I was pulling my thoughts together for the talk, I stumbled onto an article in I09, one of my favorite blogs about geek culture, which listed the "ten most unfortunate Masters of the Universe Toys." I shared the blog post with my son, now 29, who had grown up as part of the "He-Man" generation and we both took great pleasure in realizing that he had at one time had almost all of their examples in his collection and that we both remembered all of these toys. There was, for example, Moss-Man, an action figure covered in green fuzz; Stinkor, an action figure that smelled and looked like a skunk; and Mosquitor, an action figure which contained a red blood-like fluid.

And I began to ponder why these toys had been such a memorable part of his childhood and what it meant that the generation of young men and women who were, in many cases, controlling the production of transmedia entertainment had come of age playing with this particular media franchise. In some ways, contemporary transmedia is being produced by kids who grew up playing with He-Man to be consumed by kids who grew up playing Pokemon.

Peggy Charren, who formed Action for Children's Television and lobbied the Federal Communication Commission to regulate childrens programming, would have had an explanation. At the time, she argued that Heman and similar programs were simply "half hour commercials" which had no redeeming value, because they "blur the distinction between program content and commercial speech. Children are attracted to the concepts of the shows and don't fully understand the selling intent behind them... [This has become] a gold mine to station managers and toy manufacturers, but a commercial nightmare to most parents." She and her allies argued that the stories and characters, she feared, were being sacrificed in order to turn the cartoons into advertisements for tie-in toys and as a consequence, these toys were going to stifle youngsters' imaginations. Charren's critique of these toys has taken deep roots among the professional classes, as was reflected by the many different ways these concerns got evoked by speakers at the Sandbox Summit. I do not mean to make light of these concerns, though I have also always found myself resistant to the language used to critique these toys, which often assumes that the play around these fictional narratives necessarily reproduces the terms of the original stories without creating a space for the child's own imaginative contributions.

There is no denying that Mattel had a clear commercial interest in producing the program and extending our experience of watching the show into a line of associated toys. And the same can be said of contemporary transmedia entertainment content which is often funded by the branding and promotional budget for the media property. Minimally, transmedia extensions are selling the "mother ship." Often, they are creating alternative sources of income - they are products in their own right just as the He-Man dolls are.

Yet, I don't think we can reduce the experience which young people had playing to He-Man to simply the selling and buying of commercial commodities, however distasteful such toys seem to many academic parents. After all, all of us have bought many commodities in our lifetime, most of which we forgot as soon as we had consumed them, yet these particular toys have become part of the shared memories of my son's generation in part because they were tokens of stories and entertainment experiences which were deeply meaningful to them. More than that, though, these toys became resources for their own imaginations, tokens which they used to claim a space for themselves within the stories.

Whether they fully recognized it or not, when media producers sold these toys to our children, they also told them things about the nature of the story - the story you saw on the screen was not complete and self contained; these characters had a life beyond the stories we've been sold and told, and what happens next is literally and figuratively in the hands of the consumer. These toys were in effect an authoring system which encouraged young people to make up their own stories about these characters much as the folk in other time periods might make up stories about Robin Hood or Pecos Bill.

Children have long played with the core narratives of their culture, as might be suggested by the fact that Tom Sawyer played Robin Hood, Anne of Green Gables King Arthur, and Meg of Little Women Pilgrim's Progress, each central stories of their own time. In the 20th century, mass media displaced many traditional stories, but it does not follow from this that children's play with narrative was none the less meaningful to them as a way of trying on adult roles and asserting their own ability to build on and revise core stories that matter to them.

As a father during that period, I have vivid memory of the intense pain of stepping barefoot on some molded piece of plastic when I was called into my son's bedroom at night to comfort him about a bad dream. I'd pick up the plastic shield, sword, or pick ax, and grumble, "grrrmble snarl Teela" and my son, a stickler for details, would correct me, "No, Dad, that belongs to Sorceress." These details mattered. I often reflected at such moments (or at least I did when the pain of my punctured flesh subsided!) on the ways that this attachment to distinctive shields, say, mirrored the detailed descriptions of the shields and weapons of the different Greek heroes found in Homer, suggesting that heraldry in some forms remains an active element in stories across history.

The accessories were extensions of the characters, reflections of their personalities, artifacts of their stories, and signs of their capacities for action. Each character was connected to every other character through complex sets of antagonisms and alliances and each character bore their own mythology which could become the point of entry for a new as yet unrealized story. He-Man was teaching his generation to think not just about individual stories but about the process of world-building and part of the pleasure of collecting these toys was to demonstrate their mastery over the lore of these worlds.

In some cases, the characters would be deeply embedded in the aired episodes and in other cases, they would exist only in the background or only in one episode and often these were the characters most vividly remembered because they became the child's own possession, their backstory fleshed out from their own imagination, their personality constructed from their own playful performances. Each of the characters had different personalities (and thus demanded different voices) and over time, you would learn their verbal ticks, the quirks of their personality, and the sound of their voice, even though no two children would necessarily perform these characters in the same way. We might think of these characters as in effect avatars, an extension of the child into a virtual or imagined world, and see these constant shifts between personalities as a predecessor of what we would describe as identity play in adolescence.

Of course, the performance doesn't end there. The child themselves might become He-Man or some of the other characters through Halloween dress-ups and the web is full of yellowing family photographs of children of my son's generation physically embodying the heroes of their programs. Their mothers (or in my son's case, their grandmothers) might be coaxed into decorating birthday cakes with images copied from He-Man coloring books. And those lacking coloring books (or possessing artistic temperaments) would draw their own pictures of these characters which gave another tangible form to their fantasy lives. My son wrote countless stories which he dictated to his mother and I about He-Man and in the process, he moved from playing with physical objects to playing with words and with the basic building blocks of narratives.

In many ways, Masters of the Universe was already a transmedia story, at least as much as the technology of the day would allow. He-Man not only appeared in the Filmnation-produced cartoons but his story was extended into the mini comic books which came with each action figures, on the collector cards and sticker books and coloring books and kids books, each of which gave us a chance to learn a little something more about Eternia, Castle Grayskull, and the other places where these stories took place.

And of course, He-Man was only one of the many media franchises which were producing action figures. My son collected figures from Pee-Wee's Playhouse and the World Wrestling Federation, not to mention a smathering of Transformers, Thundercats, Silverhawks, and many other toy lines. Once they were removed from their packages, these toys could be mixed and matched to create new kinds of stories, which might involve meet-ups and cross-overs unlikely to occur in commercial media (though there was at least one DC comic where Superman and He-Man combined forces) but almost inevitable once kids got their hands on the toys.

Sometimes an action figure would stand in for another character not yet acquired much as an actor plays a fictional role and in other cases the pleasure was in experimenting with the boundaries between texts and genres, with the mixing of characters forcing them to rethink the scripts. The cross-over points to the generative dimensions of this action figure play - the ways that kids would move from re-performing favorite stories or ritualizing conventional elements from the series to breaking with conventions and creating their own narratives.

I never understood the parents who feared such toys would stifle my son's imagination because what I observed was very much the opposite - a child learning to appropriate and remix the materials of his culture. The fact that these stories were shared through mass media with other kids and that they were some vividly embodied in the action figures meant that it was easy for children to have intersubjective fantasies, to share their play stories with each other, and to pool knowledge about the particulars of this fictional realm.

So, is it any surprise that as this generation has grown older, they have continued to use these stories, characters, even the toys themselves as resources for their own creative expression? The web is full of amazing fan art in which artists lovingly recreate the assemblage of action figures and accessories they enjoyed as a child, much as earlier generations of artists sketched or wrote stories about the stuffed toys of their childhood imagination. (Think Winnie the Pooh or Raggedy Ann and Andy for earlier kinds of toy focused stories.)

There is a whole genre on YouTube of action figure movies, movies which may lovingly recreate the specific images the filmmakers remembered from the source material but may also playfully evoking the mixing and matching of characters that were part of toyroom play.

This same aesthetic of action-figure cinema gave rise to Adult Swim's successful Robot Chicken series, which also mixes and matches characters or recasts them to achieve desired effects. Here's one of their spoofs of the He-Man characters.

And I am particular fan of the web-based Skeltor Show, which remixes and remasters footage from the original He-Man cartoons for irreverent comedy.

All of this suggests that these toys left a lasting imprint on the imaginations of the generation that grew up playing with them.

When I speak to the 20 and 30 somethings who are leading the charge for transmedia storytelling, many of them have stories of childhood spent immersed in Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, playing with action figures or other franchise related toys, and my own suspicion has always been that such experiences shaped how they thought about stories.

From the beginning, they understood stories less in terms of plots than in terms of clusters of characters and in terms of world building. From the beginning they thought of stories as extending from the screen across platforms and into the physical realm. From the beginning they thought of stories as resources out of which they could create their own fantasies, as something which shifted into the hands of the audience once they had been produced and in turn as something which was expanded and remixed on the grassroots level.

In that sense, the action figure is very much the harbinger of the transmedia movement.