DIY Video 2010: Political Remix (Part Three)

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This is the second in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is my interview with Jonathan McIntosh, who describes himself as "a pop culture hacker, video remix artist and fair use advocate." McIntosh was the curator for the Political Remix track of this series.

Your selections here suggest a strong over-lap between fan vidding and political remix. Can you tell us something of the relationship which has emerged between the two DIY video communities?

The overlap in my curated examples is definitely intentional on my part, though I'm not sure how much of a self-conscious relationship there is between the two genres. I can say little about the impact of political remix on vidding but I can detail the impact of vidding on political remix work.

Many of my favorite political remix videos are created by people from a wide range of DIY communities who felt inspired or compelled to make one (or several) remixes addressing a political/social issue. I think many of these people creating remixes with a critical edge would not necessarily describe themselves or their remixes as being part of the political genre.

There are of course, a relatively small group of remixers who primarily do political work, and I am one of them. Unfortunately, within this self-identified group I still find some resistance to include vidding as a legitimate part of the political/critical remix tradition.

From my point of view it seems clear that vidding is not only an integral part of remix history but vidding practice can also can teach political remixers an enormous amount on a wide range of practices and techniques. Through my engagement with vids and vidders I have gained invaluable insights about the fannish use of narratives and pop culture characters in remix videos. When I look at vidding I see as a core element the idea that it is possible to simultaneously enjoy and love a television show while also being critical of aspects of the show's writing, characters, story arc, embedded messages etc.

Most people engage with mass media stories in a subtle and complex way - we both love it and are critical of it. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit this now but I didn't really understand this tension very well before I learned about vidding. I think that part of the resistance to vidding I encounter from other political remixers might be related to this point. They may be uncomfortable with the fannish and or sympathetic relationship that vidders have to their source because self-conscious political remixers often have a relationship of ridicule or animosity to their source.

Political remix video can be a blunt tool that uses ridicule as a way to expose hypocrisy, illuminate tropes, and talk back to power - but it is a little harder to use the form in more subtle ways (especially if you still want to get the lolz).

Learning about vidding really gave me permission to embrace my fannish-side as a political remixer instead of hiding or being ashamed of it. It would have been impossible for me to conceive of making either "Buffy vs Edward" or "Right Wing Radio Duck" without the positive influence of vidding on me and on my work. In both I rely on my fannish (and therefore sympathetic) view of one pop culture icon (The Slayer and Donald Duck) which I use to critique another popular culture character or story (Glenn Beck and Twilight/Edward Cullen).

I would also say that political remix video does not really have a self-conscious or intentional community, at least not in the same way that communities have coalesced around vidding, AMVs or machinima. The love of source material(s) seems to be part of the glue that holds vidding, AMV and machinima communities together. Political remix video as a genre on the other hand does not have a fandom at its core - but rather rallies around a deep shared suspicion of powerful institutions, structures and the media itself. This base of criticism is what, I think, poses challenges to building a larger sustained online community organized specifically around political remix video.

Political remix makes about the strongest case possible for fair use as a fundamental right of citizenship. Yet, it is clear that our current legal environment does not always support that position. Can you tell us more about how political remix intersects with current debates about intellectual property?

We are living in a culture that increasingly speaks in an audio-visual-video language. Videos which remix, transform, quote and build-on pieces of our shared popular culture are not only valuable to the larger social discourse but are actually an essential part of full participation in society. I absolutely agree that remix is a basic right of communication - it's the right to communicate using the language of the new media landscape(s). This right extends to all genres of DIY video that appropriate fragments of mass media pop culture including vids, AMVs, machinima, lip-syncs etc.

As you point out, political remix video in particular should be one of the most protected transformative genres because of the unambiguous political commentary and critique. However, despite what should be fairly obvious fair use and free-speech arguments, these works still tend to be very vulnerable to takedowns filed by irritated copyright holders.

The widespread use of automated content ID bots for removing videos from media sharing sites like YouTube has been catastrophic for remix video makers. This practice has brought about huge increases in the number of fair use works being zapped into the void by baseless copyright claims. When a creator's remix or entire channel is deleted, not only are all their videos lost, so are all their comment, subscribers and playlists.

These video removals leave gaping holes in the Internet - and I mean that quite literally. Video embeds on blogs, forums and social networks are suddenly missing. Tweets and links to remixes are all abruptly dead or lead to YouTube's notorious pink line of death. In the past month alone five fair use political remix videos I had planned on posting to my blog politicalremixvideo.com have been removed from YouTube for "infringement". To make matters worse many DIY video creators I speak with are either not aware of their fair use rights or are afraid to rock the boat by challenging the takedowns. As a result, valuable online conversations and visual discussions are being shut down.

All of this, for me, highlights a larger problem surrounding our creative new media culture which is that it is all taking place in private corporate spaces. There are effectively zero public spaces on the Internet. The online public square has been completely privatized from the beginning. This strikes me as especially problematic because the development of the Internet was primarily done with public funds. And then it was just unquestionably handed over to corporate interests.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to corporate power and the pursuit of profits being valued far more than the public good, media literacy or a free and open culture. I see no reason why we can't begin to create a new and truly public commons with a little good old fashioned imagination and innovation.

(As an aside, I haven't heard anyone articulate an argument for turning YouTube over to the public commons for the public good but I would be interested to hear a call for that.)

Glenn Beck attacked your recent Donald Duck video, assuming that it was heavily funded and produced by a professional media operation. Was provoking such a response the ultimate badge of honor for a DIY mediamaker?

It was really fascinating to hear Glenn Beck concoct a conspiracy theory live on the air involving me, the stimulus package, the NEA, the "communist union organizers" and Donald Duck. But honestly it was even more exciting to see another remixer on YouTube take what Glenn Beck said and combine that with a Mickey Mouse cartoon. That remixed response - which built on my video to further the conversation - was ultimately much more a badge of honor for me. That along with the thousands of supportive, insightful, hilarious and sometimes scary comments left by people all over the Internet in response to my video was far more satisfying.

What does this controversy say about the blurring lines between DIY and professional media production? There have been, after all, some "astroturf" videos, such as Al Gore's Penguin Army which also sought to imitate the look and feel of DIY political video.

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I recently showcased on my blog a range of mainstream political ads which deploy pop culture references, parody, and the remixing of news clips to make their case, most often against their political opponents. What do such videos suggest about the influence which Political Remix might be having on the rhetoric and imagination of American politics?

There is no question that powerful corporate and political interests are actively attempting to co-opt the DIY video and remix aesthetic. (I also see this co-optation extending to the re-use of actual viral videos for corporate advertising campaigns like the recent Honda Odyssey ad built around David After Dentist and Kitten Afraid of Remote Control Mouse.)

Powerful institutions understand that they have a serious crisis of legitimacy on their hands resulting from widespread public cynicism about advertising. So as genuine DIY videos become enormously popular online, marketers are desperately trying to capture and bottle that sense of authenticity for their own brands.

This type of co-option has been happening for decades. Marketers have long been coming in and stealing from various DIY subcultures. But, though advertisers may be able to copy the mechanics of DIY video to mimic the look and feel of low/no budget viral videos, it's obvious to almost everyone (especially DIY video makers) that these poser videos are made for a very different purpose and with very different messages.

The Jerry Brown for Governor ad you posted which mixed footage of Arnold Schwarzenegger with Meg Whitman may be political, and remix, and video but there is no escaping the fact that it was produced by an establishment politician with a campaign budget of millions. The ad was also shown ad-nauseam on television here in California - to the point where even people that may have agreed with the critique became incredibly annoyed by the video.

What the marketers don't understand is that there is much more to political remix video than the aesthetics, style and production techniques. In my view the most interesting videos in the genre don't just remix the source material, they also remix the larger dominant messages, power relations and social norms embedded inside that media.

In some of my work, I've argued that appropriation -- the meaningful remixing of borrowed materials as a form of critical commentary -- constitutes one of the core New Media Literacies skills. What kinds of knowledge and insight do you think emerges when young people create political remixes?

I often facilitate workshops with youth using remix video with the aim of empowering young people to both understand and creatively talk back to the massive media propaganda machine targeting them. Earlier this year I taught a workshop on gender and remix with young women at Reel Grrls in Seattle.

We looked at several dozen highly gendered toy commercials recorded off the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. In our first discussion, the young women quickly identified some of what the ads were telling us about what is normal, valued and expected in terms of gender roles.

I then asked the participants to form small groups and remix the commercials by simply switching the audio and video of some of the ads directed at boys with those of the ads directed at girls.

We all had a lot of fun as we literally de-constructed and re-constructed the ads and marveled at the hilarious and insightful juxtapositions that resulted from the process. Through remix, the representations of young women in the ads were made into the heroes of epic barbie battles while the representations of young men were made to express nurturing and caring feelings for the world around them.

Before the workshop ended we screened their transformed ads and the young women pointed out further insights discovered during their editing. We discussed how, without exception, the "boys ads" focused on action, making, doing, building, competition and often engaging in battle. While the "girls ads" (even the ones for pink tech-toys) tended to focus on care-giving, child rearing, domestic tasks, physical appearance, shopping and finding a boyfriend. As they left for the day all the participants expressed interest in making more remixes in the future.

Sahar & Diana's video remix from ReelGrrls Workshops on Vimeo.

I think this workshop and others like it are are a fantastic way to empower young people to look behind the curtain the see the mass media wizard and to better understand the manipulation that is being directed at them. In the process participants also learn critical media literacy skills, new media technology, video editing and fair use rights.

After engaging in remix culture, people young and old, find it nearly impossible to experience media in a passive or uncritical way. As members of that remix culture even if we never make a remix video ourselves, we can't help but make imaginary mash-ups in our heads when watching television or movies.

Most of the best known political remixes are progressive. Are there right wing groups who are also creating political remixes? If so, is there any relationships between these two DIY communities?

This question starts to get at what is classified as political remix video, which can be a somewhat complicated answer. There are a wide range of big 'P' and small 'p' topics, beyond the narrow election arena, that are often the subject of DIY videos. I define political remix video to include a broad range of government, social, cultural, corporate, economic, privacy, gender, race, sexuality and media related issues that don't necessarily all fit neatly in the current left/right dichotomy.

When considering if a transformative work fits into the political remix video genre I use the follow criteria:

1) Does it remix or transform the source material(s) used?

2) Does it remix, subvert or comment on some of the messages embedded in the source?

3) Does it subvert larger dominate social or political power structures and messages?

Before categorizing a work as part of the political remix tradition - I also like to consider if the work is DIY or created by a powerful institution or if it is hate speech, targeting marginalized groups or just totally batshit insane (I'm kidding about this last point, sorta).

While some remixers might be intentionally creating progressive messages, many others may not be self-consciously setting out to do that. They may simply want to comment on an issue or topic they are particularly passionate about and feel is missing, under-represented or marginalized by existing mainstream media conversations.

For me, political remix video has at its core a basic power analysis and a suspicion of powerful institutions. The goal is often to challenge oppressive norms, stereotypes and dominant media messages. Remixes dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, don't simply follow red/blue lines but rather critique government policy, empire and military power from all sides of the political spectrum.

When it comes specifically to "right-wing" remix videos, many look and feel a lot like amateur commercials in support of existing power structures. The DIY aesthetic might feel subversive but the messages are often indistinguishable from public relations industry campaigns. Sometimes these works take a more extreme tone or position than even commercial media advertising would deem appropriate. An example would be GrouchyMedia who makes pro-war and pro-military mash-ups mostly in the form of music videos. He uses lyrically violent tracks to accompany violent imagery - like the videos "Die Terrorist Die" or "Taliban Bodies" - both of which celebrate killing, revenge and military power.

Similar mash-ups that ride the edge of online hate speech are works that promote or celebrate racism, sexism, homophobia and violence. Many of these pull clips, themes and messages from movies like Zack Snyder's 300 in very uncritical ways to ridicule different peoples and cultures around the world. I don't consider these videos part of the critical tradition because they are replicating or amplifying established systems of power and oppression.

It would feel rather absurd, for example, for someone to make a remix about how there just aren't enough heterosexual characters or white men on TV. There might be people who are delusional enough to believe that but I don't think such a mash-up would be taken seriously as a critique.

Examples of remix works that reinforce established sexist and patriarchal norms are everywhere online. The LazyTown mash-ups made popular by 4chan and Something Awful are some of the most disturbing in terms of gender. Typically, these works appropriate images or video clips featuring young actress Julianna Mauriello, who at age 12 starred in the hit Nickelodeon children's television show LazyTown. The most popular of the videos combines Mauriello singing the song "Cooking by the Book" with a misogynist, hyper sexual music video by Lil' John. It re-edits and manipulates her dancing to make her move in intensely sexualized ways in time to the beat and lyrics.

Though not all the media appropriating Mauriello's image is sexually objectifying, it is not uncommon for her images to be photoshopped onto hardcore pornography. Not only is this practice horrifying - it also amounts to the virtual sexual harassment of a child via remix.

There is nothing subversive in sexualizing a young actress on a television show for young children. We have a word for people or institutions that use there physical, social, economic or institutional power to demean and target those with less power - and that word is "bully".

The DIY remix video medium is a tool for communication, which can be used for either oppressive or liberatory purposes. At its best political remix video has the potential to transform our relationship with the new media landscape(s) and help us re-imagine our shared sociopolitical systems.

Jonathan McIntosh is a pop culture hacker, video remix artist and fair use advocate. He blogs at PoliticalRemixVideo.com and is a member of the Open Video Alliance. He also facilitates workshops with youth that utilize remix video and a crucial media literacy tool. His latest remix "Right Wing Radio Duck" along with the rest of his work, can be found on his website RebelliousPixels.com.

DIY Video 2010: Political Remix (Part Two)

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This is the second in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following selections were curated and commented upon by Jonathan McIntosh, who describes himself as "a pop culture hacker, video remix artist and fair use advocate."

Music Videos

Music Videos - Vidding, AMVs and many political remix videos use music and lyrics to complicate or even subvert conventional understanding of a particular series of images. Music and lyrics can significantly change the tone or emotional register of otherwise familiar images, and lyrics in particular can provide a complicated counter-narrative to common-place visuals.

Star Trek: Too Many Dicks

Sloane's first vid is a hilarious visual critique of the 2009 Star Trek movie re-boot. Sloane takes the popular ironically sexist song, "Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor" by Flight of the Concords and edits together clips of the largely male Star Trek cast to critique the male dominated storyline. Sloane says of her vid "I was disappointed that J.J. Abrams had dramatically rewritten so many elements of Star Trek canon - and had largely ignored women. I was surprised how many people didn't seem to think that was a problem, or even that the issue existed." This video also serves as a strong argument for the use of cam recordings for visual criticism and critique. Cam or bootleg recording of current theatrical releases make it possible for fans and critics to make their critiques in a timely fashion while films are still fresh in the collective consciousness of the public. If vidders and political remixers have to wait for a DVD release to make their visual arguments then the window for sparking public debate and discussion might have largely passed.

Video Games: Too Many Dicks

Inspired by Sloane's Star Trek Dance Floor vid Anita Sarkeesian of FeministFrequency.com appropriates the same "ironically sexist" song to critique the male domination, hyper masculinity and glorification of violence in popular video games, using source material from 39 different game titles. Once paired with the misogynist lyrics, the games' imagery of guns, swords and chainsaws become hilarious phallic metaphors for patriarchal power inside virtual worlds. Anita also uses the lyrics to highlight two games as alternatives (both with women of color protagonists) that help counter the genre's male dominance: Portal, a first person action puzzle game which utilizes mostly non-violent problem solving strategies, and Mirror's Edge, a less-violent adventure game involving the navigation of a dystopian city maze.

Club Iraq

A warning before viewing: this remix contains clips of military personal using explicit language, mimicking sexual acts and otherwise being racist bullies. The video will most likely leave you feeling at least slightly ill.

"Club Iraq" is a very disturbing and powerful remix from the Wreck and Salvage video art crew. It combines 50 Cent's famous song "In Da Club" with audio of Bush's invasion speech mixed with scores of home videos uploaded to YouTube by US soldiers stationed in Iraq. The juxtaposition of the song with the amateur footage of US soldiers acting like immature boys and saying horrific things about the Iraqi population makes for a sickening, depressing yet poignant remix video. Wreck and Salvage provide us with a behind the scenes view of US military operations never seen in corporate media. These troubling and deeply unflattering home videos (and the thousands like them posted online) were a PR disaster for the Pentagon and are likely part of the reason the Military banned myspace and YouTube from military bases in 2007.

Supercuts

A supercut is an obsessive video montage created by meticulously collecting every phrase, action or cliche from a television show or movie and then editing those clips together into one single video. This can be a powerful way to reveal or highlight something otherwise missed during casual viewing.

The Price is Creepy

In this remix, Rich Juzwiak illuminates the sexist behavior of the famous TV game show host Bob Barker form the The Price is Right. Rich collected and placed back-to back a series of short clips of Barker making patronizing and downright creepy comments to female contestants. Rich's use of 1970's era episodes of the popular game show demonstrates the potential power of the supercut remix genre perfectly with this remix.

A Whole Day Of Tony Hayward's Obfuscating In Four Minute

In the wake of the gulf oil disaster people all over the Internet worked to creatively counter the public relations machine unleashed on us by the company formally known at British Petroleum. There were hilarious logo re-designs, the very entertaining BPGlobalPR spoof Twitter feed and a swarm of videos remixing BP commercials. Here Ben Craw uses a supercut to reduce many long hours of C-Span hearings down to 4 minutes. We see BP CEO Tony Hayward refusing to answer question after question and giving intentionally ambiguous responses over and over again to the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

Synchronized Presidential Debating

Ever wonder why watching the 2008 presidential election debates gave you a funny feeling of déjà vu each time? This re-cut debate video from 236.com (now part of the Huffington Post) might provide some insight. Rather than placing each clip back to back, this supercut uses carefully synched CNN footage from all three presidential debates to highlight the repeated use of well rehearsed talking points by both candidates.

Identity Correction

Identity correction is a term popularized by political pranksters the Yes Men for their many impersonations of corporate officials - when applied to remix video the term refers to re-editing of corporate or government public relations efforts to make them more truthful.

The Red Stripe

YouTuber freeyourpixels offers a short yet eloquent critique of the US Marines "Red Stripe" online advertising campaign. The remix uses still images, commercial clips, new text and precise match-action editing techniques to perfectly mimic the style and tone of the original ad while highlighting the often brutal imperialist history of the US Marine Corps.

World Economic Forum Spoof Videos

The Yes Men spoofed the 2010 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland with an official looking but erroneous website. As part of the project they created a series of re-dubbed video interviews with global economic, government and corporate leaders. In each video, leaders appears to speak in strikingly honest terms about real global economic problems and solutions. The re-dubs succeed in presenting us with a brief look into a possible alternative world. The remix of Patricia Woertz, CEO of the Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM), apparently did not sit well with the agro-business giant because they quickly filed a takedown notice through YouTube. Luckily for us the video is still live on vimeo and elsewhere.

ADM CEO Patricia Woertz (1:10)

Davos Annual Meeting 2010 - ADM CEO Patricia Woertz from World Economic Forum on Vimeo.

Klaus Schwab (1:03)

Davos Annual Meeting 2010 - Klaus Schwab from World Economic Forum on Vimeo.

Queen Elizabeth II of England (0:52)

Davos Annual Meeting 2010 - Queen Elizabeth II of England from World Economic Forum on Vimeo.

Transformative Storytelling

Transformative storytelling combines existing narratives to create new stories often keeping the popular character's original personalities intact while placing them in new contexts and situations. These are particularly popular when they build on the sympathetic use of fictional characters or narrative and utilize them to critique another source.

The Dark Bailout

Matthew Belinkie remixes one of the most famous scenes from The Dark Knight to present the Joker's take on the big bank bailouts. The gangsters in the blockbuster Batman film are re-cast as taxpayers watching President Bush's September 2008 speech urging Americans to support the $700 billion TARP bailout of Wall Street. Through the Joker, Matthew expresses the widespread public anger at the massive transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street.

Jake Gyllenhaal Challenges the Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

An ambitious remix project by artist Diran Lyons who creates a new narrative critical of President Obama's foreign policy. Diran pulls footage from two films starring actor Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko & Jarhead) and combines it with news footage of the US President. As Barack Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize, Gyllenhaal's character becomes disillusioned with Obama's seemingly hypocritical pro-war rhetoric, escalation of the war in Afghanistan and the failure to pull all troops from Iraq.

Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed

Lastly I have included one of my own remix videos. It's a remixed narrative in which Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer at Sunnydale High. It's an example of transformative storytelling serving as a visual critique of Edward's character and generally creepy behavior. Created by re-editing and re-combining clips from the Twilight movie and scenes from 36 different television episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Seen through Buffy's eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed.

Jonathan McIntosh is a pop culture hacker, video remix artist and fair use advocate. He blogs at PoliticalRemixVideo.com and is a member of the Open Video Alliance. He also facilitates workshops with youth that utilize remix video and a crucial media literacy tool. His latest remix "Right Wing Radio Duck" along with the rest of his work, can be found on his website RebelliousPixels.com.

DIY Video 2010: Political Remix (Part One)

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This is the second in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following curator's statement was written by Jonathan McIntosh, who describes himself as "a pop culture hacker, video remix artist and fair use advocate." Political Remix Video can empower people to assert their creative voice, tell alternative stories and critically engage with mass media systems. It is a form of critical DIY media production which challenges power structures, deconstructs cultural norms and subverts dominant social narratives by transforming fragments of mainstream media and popular culture.

The practice of remixing and re-framing moving images for political purposes has been around since the invention of film. The tradition dates back to the 1920's when Russian re-editors (many of them women) would repurpose American Hollywood films to create different political narratives and class messages. During World War Two, the Allies propaganda machine re-edited footage from Nazi rallies for newsreels to poke fun at the German Army making it seem less threatening. These early re-mixes were painstakingly done by hand, splicing strips of film and setting them to a new audio track.

The 1980s and 1990s brought video tapes and home VCRs allowing artists, activists and fan-vidders to make remixes via tape-to-tape editing. The media tools and technology of the 21st century have made the power of critical remix available to anyone with access to the web, a computer and some extra time.

Increasingly we are becoming a global culture that communicates in an audio-visual language. All political remix videos are made without the permission of the copyright holder and rely on the fair use doctrine. However despite the fact that they should be protected under fair use many critical remixes are especially vulnerable to DMCA takedowns and automatied content ID matching systems.

Today a small number of large corporations own, control and produce most of our popular culture. The remix video process provides creators a powerful way of talking back to this mass media machine. It is a way to communicate using that audio-visual language in poetic, humorous, poignant and entertaining ways.

I curated the political remix portion of the DIY 24/7 Video show at USC in the Spring of 2008. I was asked to put together a new show for 2010 highlighting some of the best remixes of the last two years. Here I have collected videos representing several distinct remix styles, covering a wide variety of social, cultural and political topics. I have focused in particular on re-cut trailers, identity correction, transformative storytelling, supercuts, and music videos. These works comment on, subvert, critique, ridicule, celebrate, illuminate and build on aspects of mass media by utilizing pieces of mass media. The topics of these videos vary widely; some focus on big "P" political issues like war, elections and government policy while others highlight small "P" political issues like race, gender and sexuality.

Re-cut trailers

Re-cut trailers are probably the most popular form of video remix online today. Some dramatically shift the genre and tone of popular movies while others remix straight characters to create new queer relationships and queer narratives from heteronormative Hollywood films.

Pretty Women as a Horror Film

Becca Marcus re-imagines the popular romantic comedy Pretty Woman as a terrifying thriller. The 1990 movie stars Richard Gere as a wealthy businessman endearingly obsessed with a women who prostitutes herself on the streets of New York City played by Julia Roberts. Becca re-cuts the films trailer adding a new soundtrack and transforming Richard Gere's character from "wealthy saviour" to a more appropriate violent controlling predator. Interestingly, the original film was written as a dark drama dealing with the difficult lives of sex workers but prior to production, Walt Disney Motion Pictures rewrote the film making it into a lighthearted Cinderella-story with the tagline "Who knew it was so much fun to be a hooker?"

Gay Marriage Storm Chasers

Mary C. Matthews of VideoPancakes remixes the now infamous anti-gay marriage "gathering storm" ad created by the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). She couples it with footage from the Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers, she creates a promo for a new fictitious reality show called "Gay Marriage Chasers". Matthews' seamless combination produces a hilarious critique of the absurd fear mongering embedded in religious anti-gay PR efforts.

Harry Potter and the Brokeback Mountain

By now there are thousands of Brokeback Mountain parody videos online, some edging on ridicule and homophobia and others successfully subverting heteronormative Hollywood narratives to create new queer relationships. This Harry/Ron slash remix, by 19 year old vidder MissSheenie, re-casts the stars of the heteronormative Harry Potter films as young, queer wizards struggling with magic and their feeling for each other. Slash fiction using film trailers as a foundation allows makers to easily queer nearly any on screen straight relationship and is an especially important tool for LGBT fans who have so few characters to identify with in mass media.

Jonathan McIntosh is a pop culture hacker, video remix artist and fair use advocate. He blogs at PoliticalRemixVideo.com and is a member of the Open Video Alliance. He also facilitates workshops with youth that utilize remix video and a crucial media literacy tool. His latest remix "Right Wing Radio Duck" along with the rest of his work, can be found on his website RebelliousPixels.com.

From a Cyberspace of Their Own to Television 2.0: An Interview with Rhianon Bury (Part Two)

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You closed A Cyberspace of Their Own with a call for more research which dealt with issues of race and class as they relate to fan practices. While some such work has been done, this still remains largely unexplored territory. Why do you think it has been so hard to deal with race in fandom as compared to issues of gender and sexuality?

I think it's because fandom is predominately white as are the scholars that study it. This is not to say that people of colour are not fans! But I suspect that they are a minority in many of the participatory cultures that are being studied. Moreover, many do not mark themselves out in terms of their racial identity and therefore are assumed to be white by the other participants.

In contrast, there is a solid body of literature dealing with race and ethnicity in media and film as well as in cyberspace and digital culture. In general, critical discussions of race are started by scholars of colour who have investments in a politics of social transformation much the way that critical discussions of gender were started by feminists (most of whom are women). I chose to work with female X-Files fans, in part, to underscore both their experiences of marginalization in public cyberspace and their strategies of resistance. The subtitle of my book is an intentional reference to Virginia Woolf's famous essay, "A Room of One's Own."

Your book discussed the function of humor in the female-centered fandoms around The X-Files and Due South. There is still relatively little writing on fan humor as compared to the more romantic, erotic, and melodramatic aspects of fan production. Why? What has Fan Studies missed by not focusing more on fan humor?

I haven't a clue why so little is written about humor. Having a background in sociolinguistics, I have a particular interest in language practices and in how things get said, not just in what gets said. Humor plays such an important role in the community making process, cutting across fan interactions and practices, including romantic and erotic talk. As I argued in Cyberspaces, humor is bound up with class, gender and by extension race and ethnicity and nationality. I looked specifically at the repartee, the plays on words and witty exchanges by white, middle-class educated "elite" fans. I'd be very interested to learn about the role of humor in other contexts.

Your discussion of Due South explored the ways that fans did or did not connect with its "Canadian" origins. We are seeing ever more international content develop American fan followings, increasingly based on its accessibility on the internet. Does this process of acquiring the content change how fans think about its national origins?

When I look back, I'm struck by how ahead of their time the American Due South fans were. Many of the MRKS members I worked with in 2000 had never seen the series when its first two seasons were originally broadcast on CBS (Due South was a Canadian-US coproduction at that time.) They either picked it up in syndication or heard about it from fans in other fandoms. There were no opportunities to even rent or buy commercial DVDs.

Due South with its American fan base was part of what Chris Barker calls reverse flow. In his 1999 book, Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities, he challenged the notion that the one-way flow of American programming to the rest of the world would lead to the homogenization of culture and the erasure of local and national identities. The more likely outcomes, he argued, were fragmentation and hybridization. You're certainly correct to suggest that online accessibility is providing more opportunities for Americans to become fans of series from other countries.

Whether this changes their sense of national identity (and there are differing notions of what constitutes being American) remains to be seen. I think that will depend on the type of content being viewed, the viewer's other identifications (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender) and the context of viewing. My sense is that the majority of non-US programming with large American fan followings is British--Dr Who and now Sherlock come to mind. The Anglo-American flow is hardly new although the ability to download episodes almost immediately after they are broadcast in the UK instead of waiting months for the series to be broadcast in North America does offer the opportunity for American fans to hang out in fan spaces dominated by British fans. Considering that most Americans and Canadians outside of Quebec are monolingual, their opportunities to consume a range of international media content and participate in discussions are rather limited.

In your more recent work on Six Feet Under, you have questioned some of the founding assumptions of fan studies. In particular, you have challenged a tendency to equate fan resistance with progressive politics. What do you find in your work on HBO discussion boards which led you towards a different understanding of fan politics?

I was a huge fan of Six Feet Under but only occasionally perused the HBO boards until I watched the fourth season episode, "That's my Dog." As some folks may recall, this episode focused almost exclusively on the psychological and physical violence inflicted on David Fisher by a young man whom David had stopped to help after his car broke down. I had strong but very mixed emotions: on one hand, I was horrified by what had happened to a character I was emotionally attached to; on the other, I felt manipulated by the writers.

So off I went to the HBO boards, where I discovered a number of posts containing vitriolic homophobic comments, blaming David for his victimization (a fantasy scene indicated his initial sexual attraction to the young man). I was shocked that such comments were made by fans of a show with a central gay character.

My later analysis of the posts for the episodes of Season 4 revealed a remarkable pattern of interaction around every storyline in which David expressed explicit gay desire (e.g., giving a blowjob to a plumber in the funeral home; having sex with Sarge, a man he and Keith had picked up and played with after a paintball tournament). First the man-on-man sex scenes were flagged as "excessive," with negative references made to Queer as Folk. These were followed by complaints that David's expression of desire was out of character or morally questionable, and finally by complaints that there was too much "gayness" on television in general.

Of course not all fans responded this way but even the well-meaning comments made in defense of David's actions served to erase his identity as a gay man. I described these fans as textual gamekeepers. Unlike the slash fiction writers who poach by queering the characters that have been written by the producers as straight, these fans "straightened out" the gay storylines. I bet there's a whole lot more textual gamekeeping going on in fandom that has yet to be uncovered.

While your earlier research seemed to focus on relations within the fan community and on interpretive and evaluative responses of fans to the series texts, this new research seems to focus much more on the technologies we deploy in accessing content. Will these strands ultimately come together? What relation exists between whether fans consume content on Hulu and the kinds of social and meaning-making practices that evolve around that content?

It's true that in my previous work I did not pay attention to modes of viewing or the accessing of content. Until recently, fan scholars just assumed that fans as committed viewers watched the original broadcast or a home recording shortly thereafter if they had to miss it. Even the technologies that enabled the creation of fan cyberspaces I studied were in the background. These new modes of consumption, production and interaction are unlikely to change the ways in which fans make meaning out of texts or the community-making process.

However, they certainly have the potential to change what it means to be a fan, how one becomes a fan, what one does as a fan and the kinds of relationships one has with other fans. These are the types of questions that I hope to begin to answer with the survey and interview data.

Let me close by saying that Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way I disseminate research on fandom. The norm in academia is to analyze our data behind closed doors and not report on it until we have a finished "product" in the form of a conference paper, a journal article, a book chapter, etc. With the use of blogging and microblogging technologies, I plan to informally report on findings as I work my way through the data in the coming months. I hope this will provide opportunities for dialogue with fans and fan scholars, and in turn provide feedback to inform my analysis.

Rhiannon Bury is an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her research interests include communication technologies, identity and community, and media fan culture. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own, was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently collecting data for her Television 2.0 project. To take the survey, visit here. Check out her blog.

From a Cyberspace of Their Own to Television 2.0: An Interview with Rhianon Bury (Part One)

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Several months ago, I was contacted by Rhianon Bury, an early contributor to the scholarly research on female online fan communities through her book, A Cyberspace of Their Own, asking me to help her publicize a survey she was conducting on how fans engaged with new delivery platforms for television content. Bury agreed to do an interview for my blog which deals with this new initiative and what it means in terms of her own methodological approaches (an expansion from primarily ethnographic to a more hybrid approach), as well as shifts in the field of fan studies and new media since 2005 when her book first appeared. Like many of us, Bury is finding it hard to separate out the study of media audiences, creative industries, and new media practices, at a time when some aspects of fan culture have become more central to the operations of convergence culture, while, as many recent scholars note, others remain marginalized and in some cases, continue to be fully hidden from outside attention.

You have recently launched an online survey designed to better understand the shift in the media consumption patterns of fans in response to the changing affordances of the new media environment. What kinds of shifts are you hoping to explore?

I am interested in learning more about shifts in both modes of viewing and fan practices afforded by time shifting, streaming, downloading and Web 2.0 technologies. Industry data has provided a starting point for my "Television 2.0" project. According to Nielsen, 38 percent of US households now have DVR/PVRs, up from 33 percent in 2009 and 24.4 percent in 2008 (TVbytheNumbers). In addition to its traditional Live data stream, Nielsen produces two additional streams: Live+SD (same day) and Live+7 (seven days). Although the latter are not significant in setting advertising rates, their effects are starting to be felt in network decision making. Writing in the New York Times, Bill Carter suggests that NBC's The Event was spared early cancellation on the strength of its Live+7 numbers. NBC subsequently ordered a full season, although it remains to be seen whether all will be broadcast given that the live/live+sd numbers continue to fall (Toni Fitzgerald).

A number of recent surveys by marketing research companies attempt to quantify the popularity of viewing of time shifted and online content. Say Media, for example, found that 56 million Americans are "off the grid viewers," 13 percent of whom can be classified as "opt outs" who have no longer watch live TV at all (GigaOM). This matches Strategy Analytics findings that 13 percent of Americans are planning to cancel their cable subscription in the next year. The large majority of "cord cutters" are under 40 and are college educated.

This type of industry data, however, cannot capture the complexity of viewer and fan engagement with multiple screens and platforms. I want to know how much television programming people are watching in front of the television screen, the computer screen and/or on a mobile device. I also want to learn more about what kinds of programming people watch (and rewatch) on which platform(s) and under what circumstances. Television programming is not a homogenous category and viewing is not a homogenous activity.

In terms of media fandom, anecdotally we know social media looms large. Web analytics software can quantify views, hits and clicks of primary and ancillary content on network sites, Hulu, and YouTube. The resulting data, however, tells us very little about the heterogeneity of fandom in terms of the range of practices that fans engage in (or not) and their varying levels of investments and involvement in participatory cultures.

Until now, you have been seen primarily as a qualitative researcher. What has motivated you to adopt a more quantitative approach to this project?

First of all, I am trying to fill what I see as a large gap in the study of fan and participatory cultures. It is of great concern to me that eighteen years after the publication of your very important work, Textual Poachers, no large-scale quantitative academic studies have been conducted. Without valid and reliable data, we cannot make generalizable claims about fan practices. We know fans watch television programming on a variety of platforms, go to cons, participate in online discussion forums, are members of online fan communities, read and write fiction, make vids, live tweet episodes, etc., but we have no idea how widespread these practices actually are among the fan population to use research terminology. Getting a snapshot of this population is not only interesting but critical to establishing a legitimate field of study, at least in the social sciences.

Moreover, unlike my previous research, my starting point is not a particular fandom but rather the individual viewer/fan. There is a tendency among fan scholars to study the fandoms of which they are a part. Methodologically, there's nothing wrong with this choice as long as one is sufficiently reflexive. Such an approach also foregrounds research questions on community and community making. I'm sure we all know people who really enjoy particular television shows but who don't actually do much more than watch the show, talk about it face-to-face, add it to their list of "likes" on Facebook and/or go to the broadcasting network website on occasion.

The Television 2.0 project is actually a mixed methods study. I will be doing not only a quantitative analysis of the data collected in the survey but a qualitative one as well. The second phase will consist of follow up interviews with interested survey respondents, starting (I hope) in early 2011. I still consider myself primarily a qualitative researcher because my interest in measurement is not an end in itself.

You published Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online in 2005 and it reflects research done much earlier than that. What do you see as the biggest changes in online fandom over that time?

It's hard to believe that almost fifteen years have passed since I started working with members of the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades (DDEBs). In the preface to Cyberspaces, I recounted first discovering their websites using a lynx browser on Mozilla using a monochrome monitor. I can't even visualize that interface today!

Beyond the obvious technological changes, one of the biggest shifts has been in the gender composition of fan-based cyberspaces. Research on internet access and use shows that gender parity was reached around 2000 in North America. Would the DDEBs be set up as private female-only listservs today? I doubt it, not because listserv technology is obsolete (at least for this purpose), but because the Usenet group (alt.tv.x-files) where the founding members originally met likely would have had far more participation from women, thereby "diluting" the sexist attitudes of more vocal male members of that forum. In other words, the practices engaged in by the majority of members would have created different community standards or norms.

More significantly, online X-Files fandom would not have been concentrated in one space. A range of alternatives would have been available: discussion forums on Fox and Television Without Pity; LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, particularly for fan fiction writers and vidders; Second Life and Facebook. Fans who had felt personal affinities with others on the various forums they visited would have become personal Facebook friends. Earlier this year, I reconnected with some of my research participants from the DDEBs on Facebook, which has been fun. And just this week, I read the status update from one of the members of the original DDEB indicating that she has created a private Facebook group for the community.

A second major shift that I would like to mention is related to the production of television's secondary texts or paratexts. There was been a lot of "industry creep" into the areas that were once exclusively the domain of fans. Most networks host discussion boards and produce a range of ancillary content for their series websites, including quizzes, polls, games, as well as facebook pages and twitter feeds. The reasons for this move are obvious: fans are also consumers and media content producers want to foster fan loyalties to their brand. Combine easily accessible sites with the power of Google and YouTube, the latter which allows for far wider distribution of fan vids than in the past, and the result is a multiplicity of entry points into fandom.

Rhiannon Bury is an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her research interests include communication technologies, identity and community, and media fan culture. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own, was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently collecting data for her Television 2.0 project. To take the survey, visit here. Check out her blog.

When Politics Meets Pop Culture: The Mid-Term Election Report

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I am writing this well before any election returns have come in. At the moment, I do not know for sure how well any of these candidates fared in the American mid-term elections last night (and given the likely results, I might prefer to remain in blissful ignorance for a bit.) Actually, if you are reading this it is probably because I stayed up way too late last night watching the returns. Over the past few weeks, I've been picking up a range of political ads which are, in one way or another, inspired by contemporary popular culture. As many of you know, I'm doing research right now on the concept of "fan activism" and the related concept of the "consumer-citizen," both ways of getting at the blurring of the lines between politics and entertainment. This has been a key theme running through the campaign season here -- especially as journalists and academics alike have come to grips with the Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert rally for sanity in Washington last weekend. I thought these spots, drawn from races around the country and a range of organizations, might spark some productive conversations on the day after the election.

Here's one produced by the John Manchin (Democrat) campaign for the U.S. Senate in West Virginia.

Don't blame Manchin. The title of George Lucas's science fiction classic has been linked to missile defense systems since the Reagan era. In this case, the candidate just knows how to build on that imagery to transform the campaign in a space opera.

This spot, produced by GOP Proud, uses knowledge of reality television (in this case, Real Housewives of New Jersey) to construct a critique of three leading Democratic figures.

Here, the Pat Quinn (Dem.) for Governor campaign in Illinois borrows a few notes from Glee to try to catch voters up to what they've missed so far in that election cycle. Of course, Quinn took office after the previous governor Rod Blagojevich resigned (under scandal) and went on Celebrity Apprentice.

Here, Young Republicans take aim at the president who has become famous for campaigning on Facebook, representing youth voters as recovering from a bad online romance with an abusive boyfriend. This seems the logical followup to the celebrity-themed spots which the McCain campaign ran during the 2008 election campaign, though they are created by someone who knows what Facebook is and who is also no doubt aware that The Social Network has been generating buzz at the box office.

This last spot, produced by Jerry Brown, has been credited with helping turn around the Governor's race in California. I've included it not because it features our Terminator governor (we've gotten used to that) but because in many ways, its juxtaposition of Meg Whitman and Arnold Schwartzenegger resembles one of the segments on The Daily Show which digs into the news archive to contextualize contemporary news footage.

So here are some questions to consider about these videos:

  • Which genres or forms of popular culture did they each evoke?
  • What kinds of fan knowledge or consumer interests do they tap?
  • What tone or attitude do they adopt towards the popular culture forms in question?
  • What kinds of rhetorical work are the pop culture references doing here?
  • Do the spots situate the candidate and the viewer as equally in the know about popular culture?
  • Do any of them seem pandering or patronizing in their use of pop culture images? If so, why?
  • How might we relate such spots to the "culture wars" which have long defined national politics? Is there a difference in running against popular culture as "cultural pollution" and mobilizing popular culture towards other political ends?
  • Are there differences in liberal and conservative strategies for deploying pop culture references?

I'd love to have readers send in other examples from this campaign season where candidates drew upon pop culture references to help frame their political messages.

theaskanison, one of my Twitter followers, has added this Twilight Zone themed spot to the mix:

DIY Video 2010: Activist Media (Part Three)

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This is the first of an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is an interview with curator Sasha Constanza-Chock designed to more fully map the contexts from which these Activist videos emerged. Some critics have argued that the corporatized sites of web 2.0 will not allow sufficient room for progressive and radical voices to be heard. Some of the videomakers here, such as Witness, have established their own platforms for sharing their work, while others have deployed YouTube, Vimeo, and some of the other commercial platforms. How have these filmmakers worked through their relationship with commercial portals given their often anti-corporate messages?

I think it really depends. Videomakers who work from within social movements tend to see the rise of commercial videosharing sites (and social network sites) primarily as a major opportunity, but one that presents important challenges. Everyone is glad that DIY movement videos are now able to reach vast audiences that were previously inaccessible. At the same time, commercial portals present problems of 1. censorship, 2. surveillance, 3. exploitation, and 4. closed technology design.

In terms of censorship and free speech, activist videomakers often share stories of having their videos censored (taken down) by YouTube and other commercial sites, most frequently because of copyright issues with music they've used in the videos, and sometimes (especially in human rights documentation) because of graphic depiction of violence or dead bodies. This is especially the case for antiwar videos that try to show the real costs of war and military occupation. There are also many cases where video activists have had their accounts suspended. One of the best resources that documents takedowns is YouTomb. Although YouTomb is focused primarily on the copyfight, the project also documents political takedowns, but it's not emphasized. It would be wonderful to highlight political takedowns more systematically.

As for surveillance and privacy, the entire business model of commercial video portals is based on gathering as much information as possible about users in order to serve ads and sell data profiles, and many activist videomakers have problems with that. Many are also concerned about the relationship between commercial video platforms and state intelligence or police forces. We're used to hearing about this as a problem for activists living 'in repressive regimes' but it's an issue everywhere. Just last year, Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) famously said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities." In activist networks, there have long been many anecdotes, and some documented examples, of corporate platforms sharing detailed information with police and other state agents, which then leads to repression, arrests, or worse. Just recently, we have learned even more based on EFF's FOIA for documents about the Department of Homeland Security's SNS surveillance practices.

A third issue, especially for anticorporate activists and critics of global labor and environmental abuses by multinational firms that are hidden behind the glossy surface of brand culture, is that by posting videos to commercial platforms you are providing free labor for the cultural economy (Terranova, and see this excellent presentation by Trebor Scholz).

The fourth problem I hear video activists talk about is the closed nature of commercial video platforms, both in terms of their governance structure (these companies are essentially like dictatorships, where the users don't have voting rights on policies or features, although occasionally they might get polled, they can petition for change, and they can 'flee into exile' in the hinterlands of smaller noncommercial video sites) and in terms of technology design. Although commercial video sites generally run on top of free software, they hide it all in layers of proprietary code and nonfree flash interfaces, and usually don't contribute back to free and open source video software and standards.

Most activist videomakers just live with these problems - it's the tradeoff for reaching more people. But increasingly I think people (not just activists) are also setting up their own, community controlled, noncommercial, free and open source alternatives. For evidence of this just look at the growth of the Open Video Alliance, or the spread of projects like Miro Community or Plumi. Recently, I've been working with Transmission, a network of video makers, programmers and web producers developing online video distribution as a tool for social justice and media democracy, to launch a new free and open source platform to aggregate video from all the activist video organizations that participate in the network. There's a preview up.

For a little bit more of my thoughts on this question check out this post.

You reference here the extended history of DIY activism through film and video production, which we might trace back to, for example, the ways black organizations responded to The Birth of a Nation, if not earlier. To what degree are the new DIY Videomakers conscious of that history? How does it inform the work they are doing?

Honestly, I think that DIY Video has become so much a part of activism and social movement practices that there's no good answer to this question. Some activist videomakers have closely studied the history of radical filmmaking, and go to great lengths to cite and reference that history in their own work. Others have no idea that this history exists and are mostly applying the tools and techniques of present day remix culture to something they're passionate about. Some activist videomakers learn how to shoot and edit by making skate videos, others shot their first video at a street protest and then got hooked, some grew up within communities of radical media makers who took part in key social movement struggles of the previous generation.

I think one aspect of DIY video activism that often gets overlooked is how institutions that were built by a previous generation helped set the stage, build infrastructure, and gain access to channels for broader distribution, and all of this helps encourage the new generation of DIY video activists. For example, check out Dee Dee Halleck's work "Hand Held Visions," on the fight for cable access TV in the US. Cable Access was the victim of a massive smear campaign backed by the corporate networks, but it was actually a space where literally thousands of people learned how to shoot and edit video, and took media democracy into their own hands. Many people active in that movement went on to help cofound local community film centers, activist film festivals, distribution networks like Women Make Movies and even satellite channels like Free Speech TV , and more recently took part in the formation of local Independent Media Centers.

It's also interesting that, as the first generation of digital video activists starts to reach middle age, some are trying to figure out how to create sustainable institutions - be they nonprofits, businesses, worker run co-ops, whatever - so that they can continue to make media without 'selling out' to big media firms. And they are sometimes looking to the previous generation, who in some cases moved from ad hoc collectives to established media arts institutions, to help them think about how to do this.

"Collective Action" was a central theme in the entire DIY 2010 series. In your case, most of these videos come from collectives and political organizations, even as YouTube is often understood as "self branding" and promoted with the slogan, "Broadcast Yourself." How have these collectives taken advantage of the networked nature of online communications in their production process?

More and more, social movement communicators are recognizing the need to shift from top-down, single channel strategies and to engage in what Lina Srivastava calls (echoing your formulation of transmedia storytelling) _transmedia activism_. One important aspect of this is shifting from the role of 'spokesperson for the movement' to 'aggregator, curator, and amplifier' of movement voices. Many of the videos I included were created in networked production processes that explicitly asked movement participants to create media (still images, short videos) and contribute them to a shared pool of resources that serves both as a mobilization archive and as raw material to be remixed into a collaborative work that was then recirculated, illustrating the broad base of support and participation that the movement or movement event enjoyed.

What I'm finding in my own research is that this is part of a broader shift towards _transmedia mobilization_, the critical emerging form for networked social movements to circulate their ideas across platforms:

"Transmedia mobilization involves consciousness building, beyond individual campaign messaging; it requires co-creation and collaboration by different actors across social movement formations; it provides roles and actions for movement participants to take on in their daily life; it is open to participation by the social base of the movement, and it is the key strategic media form for an era of networked social movements. While the goal of corporate actors in transmedia storytelling is to generate profits, the goal of movement actors in transmedia mobilization is to strengthen movement identity, win political and economic victories, and transform consciousness."

More on that here or, in presentation form, here.

In many cases, these videos are simply one resource in much more elaborate campaigns which unfold across a range of different sites and platforms. Can you say a bit more about how online video fits within larger communication strategies for some of the groups you describe?

I already talked about transmedia activism / transmedia mobilization, but I think there's another layer of communication strategy that's important to DIY video activists that we haven't touched on yet, and that's the layer of media and communication policy. Some (but not enough!) movement media activists also end up engaging with these battles - net neutrality, data privacy, media ownership, spectrum access, race and gender inequality in media ownership and employment, etc. Once they've experienced the power of media making, in a very hands-on way, they look around the media landscape and say 'it's not enough to just have our own marginalized spaces or to be visible in the social media space, we need much broader reach!' And unfortunately broader, cross platform reach for is very difficult to achieve for activists making media with values of social, environmental, economic, gender, and racial justice in an environment composed of multibillion dollar, transnational communications conglomerates that are throwing their full weight behind lobbying for media and communications policy that will keep the field tilted towards their own business models - even if those business models rely on advertising that perpetuates values, products, and practices that are literally destroying planet Earth. So that's why more and more DIY media activists are also getting involved in the struggle for media justice, through networks like the Media and Democracy Coalition, organizations like Free Press, and spaces like the Center for Media Justice. Anyone who cares about the potential for DIY video as tool and practice of cultural expression, civic engagement, and social movement mobilization should get connected to these folks. The future of DIY Video - and the future of humanity - might really depend on it :)

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a researcher and mediamaker who works on the critical political economy of communication and on the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights. He holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he is currently a postdoctoral research associate. He's also a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation, a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a member of the community board of VozMob.net.

DIY Video 2010: Activist Media (Part Two)

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This is the first of an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following selection was curated and described by Sasha Constanza-Chock.
What follows is the full selection of videos that I sent to the DIY Video 2010 organizers, structured by the 10 social movement categories that I mentioned above. Short clips of many of them were remixed into the screening program, where they were placed in interesting juxtaposition with other kinds of DIY video by style, technique, and narrative and visual strategy. Here, you can watch the complete set of Activist Media videos, as well as some that didn't make it into the theatrical screening. Enjoy, and I hope that they inspire you to action!

DIY Video Activism Program

Meta: Video Activism

The opening selection is a compilation of key clips from the first two years of the human rights video Hub at witness.org. Witness is a widely respected video advocacy organization, based in New York City, that uses video as a tool to defend human rights. They've trained hundreds of video activists, and produced a number of good resource kits around the complex issues raised by video advocacy - representation, privacy, repression, agency, etc. They've also grappled with the tradeoffs between relying on YouTube and video hosted on corporate platforms vs. creating their own space online. I thought it appropriate to start with a retrospective they put together of recent human rights videos that have had an impact.

2 Years of the Hub - A Look Back (1:03), By Witness

2008 Election

The 2008 election was full of DIY video all over the spectrum, but I chose to highlight two works that emphasize the role of DIY video outside the formal political process, and that were connected to activity in the streets and at the polls.

Terrorizing Dissent (Trailer) (2:07), By the Glass Bead Collective

I was invited by a video journalism organization called iWitness Video (not to be confused with Witness, above) to help document protests against both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions during the 2008 campaign cycle. At the RNC in the twin cities, iWitness video was repeatedly raided by federal agents who, among other ludicrous claims, at one point insisted that they didn't need warrants because the DIY media outfit was holding 'hostages.' The raids proved to be totally baseless, but were effective in part at disrupting our video trainings and production schedule. There's at least a 40 year history of mass protest at the national conventions, and every year there seem to be more riot police, with more 'less lethal' weaponry, beating up more nonviolent protestors who oppose both parties of War and Empire. At the same time, every year there's also more and more DIY documentation of police abuse. This is great for legal teams, who in recent years have had a lot of success winning class action lawsuits in city after city over rampant first amendment violations (peacefully assemble!). Activists I was working with managed to pull together nearly a terabyte of video footage for the legal team in the Twin Cities. Over time, people have also found innovative new ways to remix protest footage in ways that can capture attention.

I contributed footage, editing, and coordination work to the feature length documentary Terrorizing Dissent. This trailer for the film (edited by the Glass Bead Collective) uses the giant American flag projected behind McCain's head as a bluescreen to show the police brutality taking place on the streets just outside the convention center.

Video the Vote 2008: Why Would Anyone Want to Stop You from Voting? (3:41), By Video the Vote

After the theft of the 2000 election, and widespread irregularities again in 2004, In 2006, Ian Inaba of Guerrilla News Network, John Ennis of Shoot First, Inc., and James Rucker of ColorOfChange.org launched a nationwide network of citizen videographers to try and document voting problems on election day. They ended up getting buy-in from major foundations, public media, and corporate partners, and thousands of people across the country volunteered to participate and help ensure that young people, low income people, and people of color wouldn't be systematically denied the right to vote again. It was all coordinated via web, email, and conference calls. It was inspiring to participate in and will hopefully keep growing during future elections.

Iran

It was obvious that this program would have to include the anonymous video of Neda Aghan-Soltan's death during the mass uprising against the theft of the Iranian election. This DIY video was seen worldwide, won the Polk award in a new 'videography' category, and did more than any other single media text to complicate Western publics' monolithic antipathy to Iran by compelling audiences to differentiate between Iranian leadership and the Iranian people. But I didn't want to just include the clip - I wanted to show it situated within a text that draws from a remix aesthetic familiar from daily cultural practices (slideshows mixed with music and short video clips), but applied to mass mobilization.

Neda Soltan [warning: graphic content] (2:22), By AliJahanii:

Iraq & Afghanistan

The massive, worldwide antiwar movement that generated the largest coordinated protest in human history on February 15th, 2003 (a date decided on via the World Social Forum process - see http://www.wsftv.net/) was unable to avert the US invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of dead soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths later, increasing numbers of US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are getting organized to end the wars - and they're using DIY video as part of their tactical arsenal. These short videos (by IVAW) highlight creative protest tactics and direct moral appeals by veterans against the war. The third clip is from Brave New Films, an activist documentary shop that is a little too big to be called DIY but not big enough to really be 'industry' either. I included it anyway since they often incorporate DIY footage into their projects.

Iraq War Veterans Raid Gas Station (1:09), By IVAW

Iraq Veterans Against the War: End the War Now (0:30), By IVAW

Veterans to Obama: Do Not Escalate in Afghanistan (1:53), By Brave New Films - Rethink Afghanistan

LGBTQ movement

The LGBTQ movement has made great strides over the last decade, but California's Proposition 8 dealt a cruel blow to proponents of full equality. Protests and creative actions against "PropH8" exploded into the streets, and it was all documented by protest participants, DIY videomakers, small online journalism startups, and LGBTQ movement organizations. For more background check out "Tactical Media and Prop H8".

National Equality March Madness (1:34), By NatlEQMarch:

Immigration

The successful struggle to defeat the Sensenbrenner Bill in 2006 brought immigrant communities to the streets in the largest wave of mass marches in U.S. history. Hopes of legalization for over 11 million undocumented immigrants, fanned by Obama's election, which had heavy backing from Latino voters, have by now been largely derailed. The Obama administration has pursued detention and deportation even more aggressively than the Bush administration, with 370,000 deportations in 2008 and 390,000 in 2009. This DIY video from Detention Watch Network documents a nationwide grassroots effort to lobby Congress for a more just and humane immigration policy. If you're interested in the use of social media by the immigrant rights movement check out "The Immigrant Rights Movement on the Net". If you're _really_ interested, check out my diss, "Se Ve, Se Siente: Transmedia Mobilization in the Los Angeles Immigrant Rights Movement".

Making Our Voices Heard in DC (3:12), By Will Coley for Detention Watch Network:

Police Brutality

When BART officer Johannes Mehserle shot and killed Oscar Grant on the Fruitvale train platform on January 1st, 2009, it was recorded by multiple videographers who documented the event on camera phones and a handheld video camera. Soon, the footage was circulating on YouTube, seen millions of times and reposted across the web, then picked up by broadcast TV news. DIY video is one of the most powerful tools in the ongoing struggle against police brutality, and in response police departments across the country are attempting to enforce laws against filming police. To follow this battle more closely check out and for a gallery of creative memorials to Oscar Grant.

Oscar Grant Shooting (1:59), By ? (multiple reposts)

Economy & Gentrification

Many of the best DIY activist videos have always been music videos. Music videos are woefully underrepresented in this program, I'm not sure how it turned out that way. But this one, produced by an amazing crew of Detroit artists, makes up for it all. It begins with beats and rhymes that highlight issues of neoliberal globalization, deindustrialization, battles against gentrification, community led development, movement building, and more, all without feeling preachy and while keeping your head nodding to lyrics by the D's very own Invincible. Then it morphs into a minidocumentary about Detroit organizers who are taking back their city for the next generation, featuring civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs . It won the Housing Rights award from Media that Matters.

Locusts (6:29) Directed By Iqaa The Olivetone, Produced By Invincible for Emergence Media, Joe Namy, and Rola Nashef

Haiti

It was incredibly difficult to find DIY video produced by Haitians about what was going in Haiti in the wake of the earthquake. A youth film school called Cine Institute started putting out regular short video stories in the days and weeks after the quake. This compilation provides a taste of their work. It's not exactly social movement media but I felt it was important to include some DIY video from Haiti.

After the Earthquake: A Compilation of Cine Institute Coverage (3:45), By Cine Institute:

After the Earthquake: A Compilation of Ciné Institute Coverage from Ciné Institute on Vimeo.

Climate justice

To close the program, I chose two DIY video selections from the climate justice movement, both related to the Copenhagen COP15 climate summit that, unfortunately, failed to deliver a fair and binding agreement. The first is by the 350 movement , and weaves together stills and short clips from people all around the world who participated in a global day of action to demand a carbon target of 350 parts per million. The final clip is an interesting short by the Copenhagen Bike Bloc that provides a visual history of civil disobedience and serves as a a call to tactical innovation. I wanted to end with this because it's a direct commentary on the way that social movements constantly create new tactics - including new forms of tactical media - in order to push forward towards a more just and sustainable world.

The Day the World Came Together: October 29th, 2009 (2:10)

By The 350 Movement

Put the Fun Between Your Legs: Become the Bike Bloc (1:38), By the Copenhagen Bike Bloc

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a researcher and mediamaker who works on the critical political economy of communication and on the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights. He holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he is currently a postdoctoral research associate. He's also a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation, a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a member of the community board of VozMob.net.

DIY Video 2010: Activist Media (Part One)

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This is the first of an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following curator's statement was developed by Sasha Constanza-Chock.

Activist Media: curated by Sasha Costanza-Chock

I was invited by Steve Anderson and Mimi Ito to curate a program of 'Activist Video' for DIY Video 2010. I was happy to get involved since this is an area that I both study (as a postdoc at the ASC&J and a Fellow at the Berkman Center [http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/scostanzachock]) and have been an active participant in for about 10 years now.

I first got connected to DIY activist video through Indymedia, a worldwide network of grassroots journalists working from within the global justice movement that was inspired by the Zapatistas in southern México. Indymedia videographers used cheap video cameras to document the spectacular wave of popular mobilizations that rocked global financial meetings from 1999 forward, edited those videos on personal computers, and used Free/Libre Open Source Software platforms to circulate them transnationally via the net (this was back before the rise of blogs, social network sites, and especially YouTube as the hegemonic web video space).

In 1999, some friends of mine from Big Noise Films were cutting together footage shot by over 100 street videographers at the protests that shut down the WTO in Seattle, and asked me to help work on the soundtrack for a collaborative, DIY documentary called This Is What Democracy Looks Like The film captured the energy of the moment and was seen very widely, subtitled and distributed around the world for thousands of screenings in homes, community centers, and activist spaces. I was inspired and hooked, and over the next few years spent a lot of time helping to organize new Independent Media Centers, getting video cameras and computers into the hands of grassroots activists in the global justice movement, and shooting, editing, and coordinating collaborative DIY video documentaries (for example, check out The Miami Model [http://www.archive.org/details/miamimodel].) I was also part of the editorial collective for video.indymedia.org].

The Indymedia network is really an interesting phenomenon, and one that's often overlooked by academics studying political media, despite the large number of people involved, the technological innovations it produced, and the huge amount of traffic it (still!) actually gets. It has also been a generative space for many people who went on to become innovators in social movement technology spaces as well as web 2.0 firms more broadly. But the still-quite-recent history of innovative DIY video activism on the web, let alone the much longer history of DIY video (and film!) in general, is too often ignored these days when we talk about activist media. For those interested in a little more history and theory of media activism, check out this short article on "New Media Activism: Looking beyond the last 5 minutes", or for a book-length text see John Downing's excellent "Radical Media: Rebellious communication and social movements."

Besides the disappearance of history from narratives about media and social movements, it seems to me that conversations about 'activist media' in general, but especially 'online activism,' all too often begin by asking the wrong question, usually some version of 'does x media technology produce social change?' Just to take a recent example, see Malcom Gladwell's article "Why the revolution will not be tweeted". My response:

> "We can avoid both cyberutopianism and don't-tweet-on-me reactions with a quite simple strategy: look at how 'real' social movements communicate, rather than start with communication tools and then argue about whether they are revolutionary. Start from the social movement, then ask 'how is this movement using ICTs, from old to new, to achieve its goals?' The revolution will be tweeted - but tweets do not the revolution make." (You can read the rest here

This is similar in a lot of ways to the position put forward by Kevin Driscoll, who argues that we should focus on how networked social movements actually use new tools I agree: start from the movements, then look at the media practices. This is the strategy that I used for my work on transmedia mobilization in the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, and it's the curatorial strategy I employed when I assembled the 'Activist Media' program for DIY Video 2010.

To put it simply, I started by thinking about mobilizations that took place since the last DIY festival in 2008, and about social movement organizations and networks that had significant impact during that time, then went looking for DIY videos made by participants in these movements. Deciding which movements to include (and exclude) was of course difficult, but also energizing, since despite the persistent pessimism of pundits about the 'decline of civic engagement,' once you actually go looking, there is just an overwhelming amount of diverse movement activity going on everywhere :)

I ended up narrowing it down to 10 categories, most of which felt to me like they just *had* to be included: the 2008 US presidential election cycle; the Green uprising in Iran; the movement against the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the protests against Prop 8 and for GLBTQ rights; the immigrant rights movement; the murder of Oscar Grant and the movement against police brutality; the environmental movement and the Copenhagen climate conference, and struggles against gentrification. I also decided to include a video from Haiti, since DIY and local perspectives on the crisis there were so sorely lacking in both mass media and online coverage, and to look for a 'meta' video about the last few years of video activism.

I then let networks of community organizers and video makers, like the Transmission Network, know that I was pulling together this program, and received lots of video links via email and Internet Relay Chat. Most of the videos that made it into the program came from culling through all this material, although there were a few videos that I knew I wanted to include from the beginning. Some of the videomakers I know personally, and it was simple to let them know that their work would be included in the program. Others I contacted to ask for permission, and everyone who got back to me responded positively. Two, I was not able to reach, but in all cases the context of the videos and their wide circulation across the web made it fairly clear that the makers would want them to be seen as widely as possible.

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a researcher and mediamaker who works on the critical political economy of communication and on the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights. He holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he is currently a postdoctoral research associate. He's also a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation, a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and a member of the community board of VozMob.net.

Risks and Safety on the Internet: The Perspectives of European Youth

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Sonia Livingstone is no stranger to this blog. She was one of the two keynote speakers at last year's Digital Media and Learning Conference on "Diversifying Participation." And around the time the conference was announced, I featured an interview with her here about her most recent book, Children and the Internet: Great Expectations and Challenging Realities. She's a tough-minded academic, one who challenges the easy answers offered by digital critics and supporters alike, insisting we "get it right" if we are going to "do right" by young people. She certainly values the benefits of the kinds of participatory culture and informal learning which has become a key focus of the American DML community, but she also cautions us not to move too quickly over risks and inequalities that still surround young people's lives online.

Digital Media and Learning Conference 2010 Closing Keynote and Closing Remarks from UCHRI Video on Vimeo.

In her talk at the DML conference, she argued that many young people lack the skills and resources to learn online outside of the classroom environment, facing frustrations and distractions which make it difficult for them to achieve the full benefits we've seen in other instances of youth engagement with participatory culture.

This past week, Livingstone contacted me to help share the results of a large-scale survey she and a team of researchers (Leslie Haddon, Anke Görzig and Kjartan Ólafsson) conducted with 23,420 young people drawn from 23 European countries and intended to get data on a number of "online risks," including "pornography, bullying, receiving sexual messages, contact with people not known face to face, offline meetings with online contacts, potentially harmful user-generated content and personal data misuse."

This data could not be more urgently needed given the ways that the American and international media has been focusing on issues of cyberbullying and teen suicide in the wake of a series of devastating cases of gay, lesbian, and bi youth taking their own lives over recent weeks. What follows is taken from the Key Findings section of their report:

12% of European 9-16 year olds say that they have been bothered or upset by something on the internet. This includes 9% of 9-10 year olds. However, most children do not report being bothered or upset by going online.

Looking across the range of risks included in the survey (as detailed below), a minority of European 9-16 year olds - 39% overall - have encountered one or more of these risks. Most risks are encountered by less than a quarter of children - as reported under specific findings below.

The most common risks reported by children online are communicating with new people not met face-to- face and seeing potentially harmful user-generated content. It is much rarer for children to meet a new online contact offline or be bullied online.

Significantly, risk does not often result in harm, as reported by children. Being bullied online by receiving nasty or hurtful messages is the least common risk but is most likely to upset children.

Since most children do not report encountering any of the risks asked about, with even fewer having been bothered or upset by their online experiences, future safety policy should target resources and guidance where they are particularly needed - especially for younger children who go online.

Sexual risks - seeing sexual images and receiving sexual messages online - are more encountered but they are experienced as harmful by few of the children who are exposed to them.....

The more children in a country use the internet daily, the more those children have encountered one or more risks. However, more use also brings more opportunities and, no doubt, more benefits.... In other words, internet use brings both risks and opportunities, and the line between them is not easy to draw.

Among those children who have experienced one of these risks, parents often don't realise this: 41% of parents whose child has seen sexual images online say that their child has not seen this; 56% of parents whose child has received nasty or hurtful

messages online say that their child has not; 52% of parents whose child has received sexual messages say that their child has not; 61% of parents whose child has met offline with an online contact say that their child has not. Although the incidence of these

risks affects a minority of children in each case, the level of parental underestimation is more substantial.

Later, the report provides some specific information about the prevalence of cyberbullying:

Nearly one in five (19%) 9-16 year olds across Europe say that someone has acted in a hurtful or nasty way towards them in the past 12 months. Bullying is rarely a frequent experience - 5% say someone acts towards them in a hurtful or nasty way more than once a week, for 4% it is once or twice a month, and for 10% it is less often,

suggesting one or a few instances have occurred in the past year....

The most common form of bullying is in person face to face: 13% say that someone has acted in a hurtful or nasty way towards them in person face to face compared with 5% who say that this happened on the internet and 3% who say that this happened by

mobile phone calls or messages.

Although overall, younger children are as likely to have been bullied as teenagers, they are less likely to be bullied by mobile phone or online. In other words, it seems that for teenagers, being bullied in one way (e.g. face to face) is more likely to be accompanied

by bullying online and/or by mobile....

Although overall, the vast majority of children have not been bullied on the internet, those who have are more likely to have been bullied on a social networking site or by instant messaging. Bullying by email, in gaming sites or chatrooms is less common, probably because these are less used applications across the whole population....

Among children who say "yes, I have been sent nasty or hurtful messages on the internet", one third (30%) of their parents also say that their child has been bullied online. But in over half of these cases (56%), parents say that their child has not been bullied, and in a further 14% of cases, the parent doesn't know....

Parents appear more aware that their child has been bullied if the child is a girl, or in the middle age groups (11-14) than if they are either older or younger.

Parents appear over-confident that the youngest group has not been bullied, when the child says they have, though parents also most often say they 'don't know' about the 9-10 year olds.

Where-ever one stands on the value of youth's online experiences, such numbers are at once sobering and empowering. The team's nuanced research helps us to put into perspective a range of competing claims about the risks of going online. For some of us, these numbers are higher than we'd like to believe, while for others, they are lower than some of the news coverage might have suggested. It is especially helpful where they give us contrasts between the risks online and those kids confront in their physical surroundings, as we've shared above in regard to bullying. We should be concerned that so many young people are confronting these problems without their parents being aware. I've written here before that young people may not need or deserve adults snooping over their shoulders as they interact with their friends but they need adults who are watching their backs, who understand the risks and benefits of what they are doing online, and can help them talk through the challenges they confront there.

For more information on the Livingstone et al report, check here.

Digital Media and Learning: New Video Series

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Last spring, I expressed my dismay over what I saw as the failure of PBS's Digital Nation documentary to adequately express the work being done as part of MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, a project which has brought together some of the smartest contemporary thinkers about formal and informal learning in the digital age. I was not the only one disappointed in the documentary and so I was delighted to be working with folks from the Pearson Foundation who were producing an alternative account, which is scheduled to be aired on PBS stations around the country next spring. Their project will be called Digital Media, New Learners of the 21st Century. In advance of the broadcast, they have started to release a series of video profiles of leading thinkers about media and learning via a temporary Vimeo site. They have said that there are more profiles coming and that they are in the process of building a spiffier website to showcase the material. But I wanted to take advantage of my inside knowledge to give you a sneak peak at the forthcoming project.

Here is the profile they constructed about my work. It was shot in and around my new digs at the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Henry Jenkins from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

One of the things I really admire about this series of videos is their attempt to situate each "thinker" in their real world context -- to show where we live and/or work and to suggest some of the factors in our surroundings which shape our thoughts. This next one focused on John Seeley Brown does a beautiful job of showing the natural environment that surrounds his home in Hawaii and how he draws insight from the surfing culture there that shapes how he thinks about the learning process. (I am not sure what to make of the focus on athletics in their depiction of me -- trust me, I'm no jock, though I do enjoy an office which backs up to the field where the USC Marching Band practices.) The profile of James Paul Gee, which you can find at their site, also situates the educator taking a walk in a beautiful natural setting, again refusing to construct images which pit the digital (or the life of the mind) against the natural.

John Seely Brown from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

This profile of Katie Salen offers us some intriguing glimpses into the Quest to Learn School, an innovative charter school in New York City which uses game design principles to encourage young people to develop systems thinking. You might contrast the respectful way that the school is depicted here with the disorientating representation the project received in the Digital Nation documentary. Here, we have a sense of what young people are doing, why they find it engaging, and how it relates to traditional curricular standards.

Katie Salen from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

Check out their Vimeo site to see the other profiles of James Paul Gee, Mimi Ito, Nicole Pinkard, and Diana Rhoten. Each makes important and inspiring contributions to our understanding of digital media and learning.

Henry Jenkins The Movie or How Does Fandom Happen?

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Around the same time as Teenage Paparazzo first appeared on HBO, I was participating in a Social Media week event billed as a "Fanthropology" workshop here in Los Angeles, hosted by Cimarron Digital, and intended to share insights with area media makers about how they might productively reframe their relations with their fans. I was asked to deliver some opening remarks as a "fan expert" and then join a panel of entertainment bloggers as they talked about their relations with the media industry. My fellow speakers were:

  • Alex Billington, FirstShowing.net movie blog, Owner and Executive Editor
  • Brett Erlich of Current TV, host of The Rotten Tomatoes Show and the Webby Award winning Viral Video Film School segment on infoMania.
  • Babette Pepaj, CEO of BakeSpace.com, the Webby-award nominated largest food-themed social network, which has created social campaigns for Desperate Housewives, Julie & Julia, Grey's Anatomy, It's Complicated, Ugly Betty, etc.
  • Scott Perry, New Music Tipsheet music blog founder
  • Eloise Hess, 15on15, 15-yr-old Creator, Producer, Host. 15on15 is a live music, video web series and music blog which has interviewed bands including Dead Man's Bones, Local Natives and Titus Andronicus @15on15
  • Jovana Grbic is the Creator, Editor and Creative Director of ScriptPhD.com, a blog and creative consulting company focused on science and entertainment

and the event was moderated by Digital LA founder Kevin Winston and Cimarron's Kristen Olson.

How Does Fandom Happen? from Cimarron Digital on Vimeo.

Stitched through the discussion was a power point presentation created by the Cimarron Digital team which explored the stages through which the media industry fed and responded to fan interest surrounding the emergence of a media property.

Much to my amusement, the slides were organized around Henry Jenkins the Movie. A highlight for me was a photoshopped image that shows what the more or less appropriately aged and built Bruce Willis would look like wearing suspenders, glasses, a grey beard, and my alternately bald and shaggy pate -- that is, in the branded, trademarked, and copyrighted persona of Professor Jenkins which I sometimes play in the media.

Here's part of a synopsis created for the rather unlikely Henry Jenkins vehicle:

In the Summer of 2011, America's attention is held in thrall by the 24/7 news machine, focusing on the deterioration of the Space Station and last-minute rescue attempts to remove the scientists and experiments aboard it before it potentially crashes to earth. For Henry Jenkins, however, business goes on as usual in preparing to attend the San Diego Comic Con... until a mysterious woman leaves a mildew-ed, yellowing packet of papers in his office containing an ancient prophecy predicting the space station's crash, and suggesting that only George Takei can stop it. He brushes it off until reaching Comic Con and discovering the situation is dire: not only are several major cities threatened by the crash, but the suggestion of sabotage has the makings of an international incident. As San Diego is one of the cities under threat, organizers have curtailed activities in cooperation with local authorities.

Though he dismisses his own concerns as foolish, the product of an idle mind, Henry is compelled to find George Takei and show him the papers. Despite being a respected professor, he can't even get close; Takei's people won't let Henry see him, and the papers are scattered. He can only recover a few, but as he does, he realizes that the George Takei depicted isn't the George Takei of today, but of 1967, during Star Trek's second season. Confused and frustrated, and figuring someone has played a practical joke on him, he makes his way out of the exhibition hall, colliding with a young woman in steampunk gear, Sally. The papers go flying again, but this time he leaves them. Sally picks them up and returns them to him anyway, and noticing their content, offers to help him with his "time travel problem."

Of course, he's still going to need Takei - otherwise he won't be able to find his past self. So Henry waits for an opportune moment during the Con and grabs Takei, stuffing him into an elaborate costume to avoid detection. When Takei wakes up, they're in the basement of a San Diego hotel with Sally and her steampunk friends. One of whom is suspiciously military-looking. He hands them a couple of devices that don't look anything like steampunk technology, and, before Takei can object, zaps them back to 1967. No explanations, instructions, or anything. Just zap!

Takei is furious. He immediately attempts to kill Henry in an epic fight, before calming down and remembering he's a pacifist. Henry shows him the few papers he has left, and by his reaction, it becomes clear that they mean something different to George than to Henry. He immediately recognizes the nickname of a man he met in 1967 called "The Dreamer." He doesn't know what he has to do with it, but he agrees to take Henry to where he was when he met The Dreamer... The Monterey Pop Festival in San Francisco. But neither one of them has a car...

I don't know about you but I'd certainly buy multiple tickets to that movie and almost certainly grab it when it came out on DVD! Your stakes might be a bit lower than mine, but still, you can surely see why this movie would generate buzz. We might call it William Shatner In Love With Himself or as the Hollywood team preferred, The Redemption of Sulu.

As it happens, I do not know George Takei, but I did have a chance to moderate a panel featuring the Star Trek actor at MIT where he was taping narration for a game in which he played one of my faculty colleagues, Shigeru Miyagawa, so sometimes reality is almost as strange as fiction. At the time, our biggest concern was heading off likely audience questions that might attempt to out the still closeted Star Trek performer, though today, he's a poster child for gay marriage in California.

For the presentation, the Hollywood types had mocked up everything from Tweets and Facebook updates to blog posts, suggesting how the fan community would respond to news about the production -- from its initial announcement through to subsequent announcements and promotions. The goal was to prod the panelists into reflecting on the ways that they, as entertainment bloggers, interfaced with the publicity machine surrounding a major studio release. They did a very effective job at simulating the courtship dance between producers and fans, including unauthorized leaks (and strategies for dealing with them) and fan objections to race-bending casting decisions as well as more carefully controlled PR releases. Below are a sample of the materials generated for this event.

As the presentation's narration explains:

A film is in social media as soon as it's announced - because today, that announcement always occurs through an online news source. An aggressive social media strategy means you leverage every drop of content, using it when it will be most effective. As soon as you announce a film, there will be people - we call them "bleeding edges" - that will be looking for information. Setting up channels for information early establishes the studio as an accessible and important news source.

Their presentation worked through how the studio gradually reveals information about the production, how it responds to fan speculation and gossip, how it fuels and expands audience interest, and how it incorporates grassroots intermediaries into the information flow. It is a strategy designed to build buzz and cultivate but not regulate the growing fan base around this property. I've included some samples from their slides below.

How does fandom happen

All in all, I felt they did a plausible job of modeling fan response, including how the fan base emerges from existing fan communities, how interest gets expressed initially through speculation and later through various kinds of cultural production, how fans develop a sense of ownership over the property and sometimes doubt the legitimacy of the people producing it, and how this buzz may or may not translate into box office success.

After all, Scott Pilgram went through this entire cycle only to disappoint its producers, though I have argued this has as much to do with inflated budgets leading to inflated expectations. After all, if Scott Pilgram was a small budget indie film (on the same level as the comic on which it was based), it would have been fantastic to see it ranked fifth in that week's box office, where-as seeing a highly touted major studio release there was a devastating disappointment.

After all of this excitement, I will now go back to my normal life as a mild-mannered, absent-minded, and over-worked USC professor who wants to make the world safe for participatory culture. But you never know when I may get pulled back into duty as a time-traveling adventurer or when I may find myself being played on screen by Bruce Willis. When duty calls, I hope to have the smart folks at Cimarron Digital build the PR campaign for my big screen adventures.

How YouTube Became OurTube

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In 2008, the University of Southern California hosted 24/7: A DIY Video Summit, which was organized by Steve Anderson, Mimi Ito, and the fine folks at the Center for Multimedia Literacies. Here's some of what I wrote about the conference at the time:

The conference featured screenings focused on 8 different traditions of production-- Political Remix, Activist Media, Independent Arts Video, Youth Media, Machinima, Fan Vids, Videoblogging, Anime Music Video. The inclusiveness of the conference is suggested by the range of categories here -- with avant garde and activist videos shown side by side with youth media, machinima, anime music videos, and fanvids. The curators were not outsiders, selecting works based on arbitrary criteria, but insiders, who sought to reflect the ways these communities understood and evaluated their own work. Paul Marino, who directed Hardly Workin', and who has helped organize the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, put together a crackerjack program which took us from the very earliest use of games as animation engines through the most contemporary and cutting edge work, spanning across a range of different gaming platforms, and mixing videos which are about the games world with those which have a more activist or experimental thrust. Laura Shapiro, an experienced video-maker, brought together a range of fan music videos, again representing a diverse cross-section of fandoms, while Francesca Coppa offered informed critical commentary which identified the schools represented and their aesthetic and thematic goals for their works. Tim Park, an experienced AMV producer, put together a program of anime videos drawn from more than half a dozen different countries.Even in those categories I thought I knew well, I was familiar with only a fragment of the works shown, and even where I thought I knew a work well, I understood it differently when read in the context the curators provided. In some cases, these materials were being shown outside their subcultural community for perhaps the first time. Having written about fanvids since the 1980s, I was delighted to see them gain a public exhibition in this context and for media students to get a sense of the aesthetic complexity and emotional density that is possible working within this form.

Ito and Anderson recently returned to these same curators to see if they could offer us an updated view of their corners of DIY video culture. The IML team edited together a remarkable compilation representing of the key trends in contemporary online video for a screening last month at Los Angeles's Hammer Museum.

24/7 DIY 2010: Collective Action from IML @ USC on Vimeo.

I was asked to give some remarks after the screening and I thought I would write out some of my core ideas below. I have also asked the various curators to share their selections (with commentary) through my blog over the next few months. So, keep an eye open for what should be a fascinating series of snapshots of the best of contemporary DIY video.

How YouTube Became OurTube

I always stumble over pronouns when thinking about YouTube. After all, in the English language, "You" is both singular and plural. Most accounts of YouTube assume that it is a space for personal expression, yet if this is the case, why used networked technologies. It is not simply a site for self-branding or "broadcasting". Rather it is a site for collective expression, with many of the videos posted there coming from specific subcultural communities, each of which has a longer history than YouTube itself, each of which has evolved its own traditions of cultural production and circulation. So, for my purposes, let's consider the "You" in "Do-it-Yourself" as plural, multiple, collective, rather than singular, personal, individual.

This sense of YouTube as composed of many different production communities is vividly illustrated by the opening segment of this video, which shows how "I'm On a Boat," traveled from a Feb. 2009 sketch on Saturday Night Live, across many of the different subcultural communities represented in this program -- as it gets applied to anime and Star Trek, as it gets performed by A Capella groups and by the U.S. Navy, as it gets rewritten into "I'm on a Blimp" or "I'm on a Broom" to better fit the interests of specific fan communities. What we see here are the consequences of these various DIY media production communities coming together to a shared site where they can see what each is doing and where they can quickly apply what they learn to their own work. We can see this process as one which both impacts these various subgroups and starts to create a shared culture which runs across all of those populations who have chosen to use YouTube as a site for distributing their work.

All of this is a vivid illustration of what I've described elsewhere as "participatory culture." In a participatory culture, there are relatively low barriers for engagement and participation, there is strong support for sharing your creations with others, there is a system of informal mentorship where experienced participants help train newbies, and there is a sense that others care about what you say and create. Each of the subcultures represented here have some if not all of the properties of a participatory culture, and when YouTube provides a home for these communities, it acquires some of those properties as well, though it is less clear whether anyone has a primary identification with YouTube and it is very clear that in some ways YouTube itself (especially in its comments sections) can be hostile to the diversity that a participatory culture needs to thrive.

All of this is to say that Web 2.0 is not participatory culture. The Web 2.0 companies seek to court, capture, and commercialize aspects of participatory culture but they do not create it and they do not own it and often, their commercial interests are imperfectly alligned with the noncommercial interests which motivate DIY cultural production. What I am calling participatory culture has a long history -- we can trace its roots back to the folk cultural logic which has shaped human expression throughout much of its history; throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, participatory culture has run through many struggles of everyday people to capture the means of cultural production and to communicate their own stories to the world, a history which runs across many different technological platforms and many different cultural communities.

As I suggested in my essay, "What Happened Before YouTube?," our society was ready for YouTube when it appeared, which is why it was flooded so quickly with all forms of amateur and noncommercial media production, many of which had been looking for a site for circulation and exhibition. While the mad rush to get their work on YouTube is impressive by any criteria, it was a byproduct of long-standing interests within these various groups in producing and sharing media with each other. Some of the practices represented in this program build on those traditions, while others reflect the new potentials which have emerged as a consequence of the hybrid media ecology which has formed at the cultural crossroads which YouTube represents.

Confronting the quick spread of themes and sounds represented by the "I'm On a Boat" phenomenon, many fall back on empty phrases, such as "viral" or "meme" to explain what is going on. In our forthcoming Spreadable Media book, Sam Ford, Joshua Green, and I dissect these concepts, suggesting that they each mystify rather than clarify the process of cultural production and circulation by treating culture as if it were "self-replicating" rather than acknowledging the human agency involved. In particular, the "I'm on a Boat" videos break down the notion of "fidelity" which runs through writing on Memes and Viruses: we do not simply pass these songs on from mind to mind, rather each new group makes its own contributions, leaves its own mark on what the others have produced. These videos are not simply spreading rapidly, like a contagion, but they are evolving rapidly, through a high speed and high tech version of the folk process.

Some of what gets produced for YouTube may start as self-branding, but the work that matters to people matters because it invites their participation, because it encourages them to join the action, even if only through spreading the word. We see this process at work in the segment featured here showing Matthew Harding's "Where the Hell is Matt?" videos, which began as one man's tour of the world, dancing to the sound of his own drummer, but ends with larger and larger groups of people dancing along with Matt. Other featured videos turn our attention towards collective action -- encouraging people to share images of their communities working towards shared interests or agendas. This tendency is spectacularly represented here by the 350 Movement and The GayClic Collab Against Homophobia, both represented in the "All Together Now" portion of the video. In other cases, the videos function as a call and response system, encouraging people to jam together, even though they remain geographically dispersed, as can be seen in "The Mother of All Cords." This desire to express collaborative or collective expression may be what fuels the proliferation of windows, a set of formal practices which gets singled out later in the program.

The program also offers us some examples of how the community passes along knowledge to newer members, shown here in "AMV Technique Beat," an Anime Music Video about the conventions shaping the Anime Music Video genre. And elsewhere, we get the sense of the video platform as a site for important community conversations, as the curators brought together a selection of the different responses to the Derrion Albert beating. As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green have noted in their book about YouTube, even seemingly unprocessed clips, segments taken from commercial films and television series, may serve as resources for the community's conversations, with the comment sections on the site and elsewhere being as important to the process as the video itself. YouTube has become a platform where we go to talk about, through, and around videos, and the site's willingness to make it possible for us to embed these videos on social networking sites and blogs is another key factor in enabling it to support these kinds of dialogues between and within diverse populations.

As I reflect on this process of transforming media content into resources for conversation and communication, I am reminded of the work of my mentor, John Fiske:

"If the cultural commodities or texts do not contain resources out of which the people can make their own meanings of their social relations and identities, they will be rejected and will fail in the marketplace. They will not be made popular."

Fiske insisted that mass culture texts only became popular culture when the public took them up as "resources" through which they could express their own perspectives.

Fiske's theories in the 1980s helped prepare me and many media scholars of my generation for contemporary remix culture. The "Deconstructing Our Icons" and "Putting Words in Our Mouths" sections here show this remix process at work. Each of the subcultures that are reflected in the current program draws some of its raw materials from popular culture, but several of them -- the Fan Vidders, the Anime Music Vids, Machinema, and the Political Remix vids -- in particular are built around different strategies for appropriating and remixing video content. In some cases, the original content is abstracted beyond the point of recognizability, while in others, the point is for us to recognize it both in terms of its original context and the new context into which it has been inserted. There are several striking examples here from the last presidential campaign, including "Terrorizing Dissent" where McCain's convention speech is juxtaposed against the police's assault on protesters outside, "Dance Off" where McCain, Obama, and Palin dance for their awe-struck publics, and "Synchronized Presidential Debating" which makes visible the candidate's reliance on preset soundbytes rather than spontaneous engagement with their rivals. The selections from the Fan Vidding world also show us how the form is being increasingly used to make critical comments on the culture around them, as illustrated by the "Art Bitch" video based on Battlestar: Galactica and the "Piece of Me" video commenting on Brittany Spears and celebrity culture.

A striking shift from the 2008 to the 2010 videos has been the increasingly globalized nature of this grassroots media production. We see this in playful ways as media makers from the developing world join the "lip dub" movement or contribute to pass-along video compilations, but we also saw it in the ways that protesters in Iran were able to capture and transmit powerful footage of the action in the streets in the aftermath of their failed elections. The images of Neda gave a face to the movement and will remain key icons of the 21st century. If some have described, with a certain degree of mythologization, what happened in Iran as a "Twitter Riot," we need to also recognize that it was also a YouTube and Flickr riot. In each case, though, we need to recognize that these media were directed towards us in the west rather than being resources used in Tehran to mobilize the revolution that never quite came. The Iranians tapped new technologies and their strong diasporic network to get word out of their often closed country and to court public opinion around the world. This too is part of the story of DIY media in recent years.

Through this process of media sharing, we have collectively distilled attention around key images and moments which now form key elements of our cultural archive -- some of these elements come from mass media (such as Kanye West's disruptions and eruptions), some from the grassroots media (such as "Charley Bit Me," "Keyboard Cat," or "Double Rainbow,"). In either case, these images have become culturally central because they have provided many different groups with expressive resources. They have gained resonance as they have been deployed and redeployed through countless other videos and thus they have become part of the shared culture of the various networks which pass through YouTube.

In this context, each new formal innovation (capacities to autotune sounds, to layer on windows, or to use Little Big Planet to design characters and levels) travels rapidly from one producing community to another. Early on, the tool may become a source of fascination in its own right, while later, it simply becomes one more device which can be used to create a fan vid or score a political point. In such a context, it becomes challenging to maintain any sharp dividing line between different kinds of subcultural practices. What seemed relatively distinct in 2008 seems less so in 2010.

For me, one of the most compelling segments of this video involved the "lip dub," a practice of grassroots performance where communities of people get together and produce elabroate, single-take music numbers. As I watched these, I was delighted by the sense of collective joy as places of work -- stores, offices, and schools primarily -- get transformed into performance spaces, taken over as sites of play. Behind each such video there is a story of collaborative production, often creative expression which straddles other kinds of hierarchies - as bosses and workers, teachers and students, doctors and patients, work together to create something which allows each of them to feel a moment of stardom. Compared to many traditional societies our culture has surprisingly few such moments of collective joy, few chances to transcend fixed relationships and imagine new ways of singing and dancing together.

Here's a complete list of the videos featured in the program:

Get on the #@&$! Boat

"I'm on a Boat" A Capella | Acquire A Capella of UC Santa Cruz | 2009

I'm on a Boat - Star Trek | kiki_miserychic | 2009

I'm on A Boat (Wind Waker Version) | Matthew Gallant | 2009

Pokemon I'm on a Boat Music Video | DJPhiUp | 2009

I'm on a Blimp (ft. Teddy) | LittleKuriboh | 2009

In a Snuggie | Mikey and Big Bob | 2009

I'm on a Boat Navy Edition | Eychner | 2009

One Piece Tribute: "I'm on a Boat" | fishytoothy | 2009

I'm on a Broom (I'm on a Boat parody) | heynadine | 2009

All Together Now

Day 18 NaVloPoMo | Ermander |2009

Day 10 NaVloPoMo | miglsd | 2009

navlopomo#08 | Miguel Serradas Duarte | 2009

shadow out of time | AliaK | 2009

It's Time | Videolution | 2009

Why Would Anyone Want to Stop You from Voting? | Ian Inaba | 2008

The Day the World Came Together - The 350 Movement: October 24, 2009 | 350org | 2009

Where the Hell Is Matt? | Matthew Harding | 2008

THE BIG FAT GAY COLLAB! | steviebeebishop | 2009

The GayClic Collab Against Homophobia (from France) - Fuck You by Lily Allen | GayClicTube | 2009

SOUR '日々の音色 (Hibi no neiro)' | Masashi Kawamura + Hal Kirkland + Magico Nakamura + Masayoshi Nakamura | 2009

Deconstructing Our Icons

Ian Fleming's Property of a Lady | qwaga | 2009

Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed | Jonathan McIntosh | 2009

Piece of Me | obsessive24 | 2008

Art Bitch | hollywoodgrrl | 2009

Creepy Mario 64 | LightningWolf3 | 2008

Terrorizing Dissent RNC08 - Trailer | terrorizingdissent.org | 2008

See it, Shoot it, Share it

Neda Agha Soltan, killed 20.06.2009, Presidential Election Protest, Tehran, IRAN | AliJahanii | 2009

DERRION ALBERT- BEATIN TO DEATH SEP, 27 2009 | laurenmonique19 | 2009

RE:Chicago student Derrion Albert KILLED in a FIGHT | lovelyti2002 | 2009

DERRION ALBERTS BEAT TO DEATH AT 16YRS OLD (Fenger Highschool) | dncmoneyblogtv1 | 2009

RE: Raw Video of Derrion Albert 16 teen year old beaten to death in chicago sep 27 2009 | nate4keys, 2009

Teach it Yourself

The Story of Stuff | Annie Leonard | 2009

RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism | theRSAorg | 2010

Charts Music | Johannes Kreidler | 2009

Marines - The Red Stripe | Patrick St. John | 2009

The Cycle of Insanity: The Real Story of Water | The Surfrider Foundation | 2010

Little Big Mods

Little big planet COSTUMES SACKBOY | xxxNUCKxxx | 2008

Little Big Planet: Takeshi's Castle | IGNentertainment | 2008

Little Big Planet: Love and Marriage (Engagement Proposal) | Jed05 | 2008

Frost* - Toys - Little Big Planet Music Video | Pete Waite | 2008

Little Big Revenge | Michael Van Ostade and Kaat Schellen | 2009

LittleBigPlanet - This is Sparta (300 parody) | DarkAslox | 2009

Little Big Planet - Watchmen Trailer | Machinima.com | 2009

Little Daft Punk | DanteND | 2009

MTBig Planet | DanteND | 2009

Put Some Words in My Mouth

AMV Technique Beat | Douggie | 2007

Davos Annual Meeting 2010 - Queen Elizabeth II of England | World Economic Forum | 2010

HTC Evo VS iPhone 4 | Brian Maupin | 2010

White Wedding: Literal Video Version | DustoMcNeato | 2009

Davos Annual Meeting 2010 - ADM CEO Patricia Woertz | World Economic Forum | 2010

Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal Video Version | David A. Scott | 2009

Obama and McCain - Dance Off! | David Morgasen | 2008

Gimme More Windows

Kutiman-Thru-you - 01 - Mother of All Funk Chords | Kutiman | 2009

Mario Kart Love Song (Original) | Sam Hart | 2008

Mario Kart Love Song Matlock Project ( cover ) | matrockrecords | 2009

Alice - Pogo Remix | Pogo | 2009

Alice - Pogo Remix - YooouuuTuuube Remix | David Kraftsow (YooouuuTuuube) | 2009

Only Bob | Infinity Squared | 2009

Synchronized Presidential Debating | 236.com | 2008

A Soundtrack for our Life

A Day at the Office | sfeder331 | 2009

The first LIP-DUB in the Arab World and Africa | Anas Benkirane | 2010

Hey Ya: A music video | Shorecrest Video Department | 2009

Shorewood Lip Dub | Shorewood High School | 2009

Hôpital Sacré-Coeur Lip Dub | HSCM2009 | 2009

Lip Dub TOYS R US NANTES Martin Solveig | Toys R Us Nantes | 2009

University LipDub - Brazil - FACCAMP | Campo LImpo Paulista College | 2009

Weird Science- Office Lip Dub! | rancidbry | 2010

lipdub MINI STORE rennes | Mini Store Rennes | 2009

Lip Dub - "Miley Cyrus" by KIIS FM Staff | KIIS-FM Staff | 2008

Tune it Yourself

Dude You Have No Quran AUTOTUNE REMIX | Bart Baker | 2010

This Year in Auto-Tune 2009 - That Really Happened?! | DJ Steve Porter | 2009

Auto-Tune Cute Kids and Kanye | The Gregory Brothers | 2009

Auto-Tune the News #2: pirates. drugs. gay marriage | The Gregory Brothers | 2009

Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10 | Yosemitebear | 2010

Double Rainbow Song | The Gregory Brothers and Yosemitebear | 2010

Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Symphony of Science) | John Boswell | 2009

Wedding Dance Videos

JK Wedding Entrance Dance | TheKheinz | 2009

JK Divorce Entrance Dance | NYVideoProduction | 2009

Spanish Wedding Dancers | Gonzalo Garcia Martinez | 2009

wedding entrance dance spain- entrada boda bailando Miguel y Loida Forever | rbkme | 2009

DK Wedding Reception Entrance Dance | MrPandit33 | 2009

VIJAY & NISHA BEST EVER ASIAN RECEPTION | cookiesclients | 2009

Moran & Irit's wedding Entrance Dance surprise | irimori | 2009

MK Wedding Entrance Dance by Chippendales | chippendales | 2010

JK Wedding Entrance Dance Webkinz Style | PuppyDawg1022 | 2009

JK Wedding Entrance Dance Baby | http://lifeinarabia.org | 2009

Credits

Event Coordinators: Steve Anderson, Mimi Ito, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro and Holly Willis

Program Editor: Ana Shepherd Video Coordinator: Miranda Peter-Lazaro Legal Advisor: Jason Schultz

24/7 2010 Curators: Matteo Bittanti, Francesca Coppa, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Ryanne Hodson, Jonathan McIntosh, Tim Park and Mike Wesch

Special thanks to Jonathan Wells, Meg Grey-Wells and the staff of The Hammer Museum

Sponsored by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California

Towards a New Civic Ecology: Addressing the Grand Challenges

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Last week, I was asked to deliver one of the keynotes for the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges conference which was hosted on the USC campus. I had not been aware of the Grand Challenges program previously, but it seems to bring together engineering students and faculty to work together to confront some of the major problems of the 21st century, seeking to inspire them to direct their research towards the public good and social betterment. I was asked to open a panel on Communications by telling them what they needed to know about how to share their insights and ideas with key stakeholders in the current media landscape.

What follows is my attempt to capture some of the key insights that I shared during my presentation.

Towards a New Civic Ecology

If you are going to confront and overcome the Grand Challenges, you are going to need to learn how to navigate through an increasing complex communications infrastructure. Communicating your core insights is the responsibility of all of us in this room -- the engineers and educators, the journalists and communicators. As you do so, you are going to need to be able to deploy a range of different media platforms and practices. And like the rest of us, you are going to need to do what you can to build and support a robust, diverse communications system which can allow you to educate and motivate all of the many people you are going to have to work with to overcome the obstacles and achieve the solutions you are here to discuss.

Seen through that lens, the contemporary communications system is at once struggling with the threat that many major news outlets which have been the backbone of civic information over the past century are crumbling in the face of competition from new media. We may not be able to count on the traditional newspaper, news magazine or network newscast to do the work we could take for granted in the past. We are already seeing science, health, and technology reporters as especially vulnerable to lay-offs as the news media struggle to maintain economic viability and cultural relevance. At the same time, we are seeing expanded communications opportunities in the hands of everyday people -- including in the hands of academics and other experts who traditionally had little means of direct communication with the various publics impacted by their work. The problem at the present time is that existing channels of professional journalism are crumbling faster than we are developing alternative solutions which will support the kinds of information and communication needed for a democratic society.

Often, this moment of transition has been framed in terms of the concept of citizen journalism. As someone who blogs, I have many problems with this concept and not simply the one which Morley Safer raised when he said "I would trust citizen journalism as much as I would trust citizen surgery." This comment was a sharp defense of the professional skills which our students acquire through journalism schools and apply in the course of their working lives in the news media. As I've noted here before, citizen journalism is a transitional concept at best. Like the phrase, horseless carriage, it defines what is emerging in terms of legacy practices. Today, if I asked you to list ten things about your car, it is unlikely most of you would identify the fact that it is not pulled by horses, yet there was a time when the salience of this description was strong enough that it framed our understanding of what an auto was. Now, we seem to be determined to describe what citizens are doing in a language which pits them in competition with rather than in collaboration with professional journalism. In doing so, we set up several false oppositions.

First, last time I looked, most journalists were also citizens and there is a big danger in them abstracting themselves from their status as citizens when they write about the news. Second, there is often an implication that those who are not journalists are amateurs. But, when I write this blog, I am not writing as an amateur journalist. I am writing as a professional in my own right, someone who has expertise which I seek to share with a larger public, and someone whose expertise is only passed along in fragments by the traditional news media. And finally, I see what citizens as building as more expansive than journalism. We are collectively creating a communications system to support our civic engagement. For the purposes of this argument, I am going to be calling this infrastructure the civic ecology.

Thinking about a civic ecology helps us to recognize that while journalists do important work in gathering and vetting the information we need to make appropriate decisions as citizens, they are only part of a larger system through which key ideas get exchanged and discussed. We understand this if we think about the classic coffee houses which Habermaas saw as part of the ideal public sphere. The proprietors, we are told, stocked them with a range of publications -- broadsides, pamplets, newspapers, journals, and magazines -- which are intended to provide resources for debate and discussion among the paper who are gathered there on any given evening. We might think about the ways that the newspapers in colonial America were supplemented by a wide array of different kinds of political speech -- from petitions, resolutions, and proclamations to various kinds of correspondence (both personal and collective), from speeches, parades, sermons, and songs to street corner gossip.

By this same token, the present moment is characterized by both commercial and noncommercial forms of communication. As the comic strip, Zits, explains, "If it wasn't for blogs, podcasts, and twitter, I'd never know whar was going on." And of course part of the joke is that these new forms of communication are part of how his entire generation follows and makes sense of civic discourse, though often, what they are doing is monitoring and directing attention towards information which originated through professional news channels.

The 2010 State of the News report found that Americans were getting an increasing amount of news and information in the course of their day but they were doing so by "grazing" across the civic ecology -- consuming bits and pieces of information across their day from many different news channels rather than sitting down to read the morning newspaper or watch the evening news from start to finish. They flip on the television to CNN while getting dressed, they catch a few minutes in the radio in the car or listening to their ipod on the subway, they flip across a news app on their iPhone while waiting for class, they pick up a discarded newspaper at lunch and flip through it, they follow a link sent via twitter and brouse around a site on the web, and so it goes across the day and across the week. Their civic education doesn't rest on a single profession, publication, or platform, but is rather constructed across platforms. The news system is porous -- enough so that ideas flow from community to community -- until we do not always know where they originated.

A recent report from the Knight Foundation on the information needs of local communities identifies three core challenges which impact the future of news which you need to factor into the solutions you propose to the Grand challenges:

  • Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information to all americans and their communities;
  • Strengthen the capacity of individuals to engage with information; and
  • Promote individual engagement with information and the public life of the community.

    • Let's consider each of these challenges in turn as we think about the strategies you need to adopt to reach the folks who will be most effected by your discoveries and innovations.

    Challenge One: Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information

    The good news is that this new civic ecology maximizes the potential of scholars -- scientists, engineers, researchers of all kinds -- to communicate directly with the publics they seek to inform without going through professional intermediaries. The bad news is that most of you are so bad about communicating your ideas in languages that laypeople can understand and most of you see doing so as below your pay grade.

    It is going to be up to the generation currently in graduate school to turn this around -- seeing science writing as something more than scrawling formulas on the blackboard. This means learning how to use the wide array of tools and platforms the digital media makes available to you. This means figuring out how to translate what you know into content which is going to engage the interests of non-specialist readers, and that means figuring out the conversations they are already having and providing the resources they need to conduct those changes better. You need to build a trusted relationship with those readers; they need to recognize the value of the information you provide and learn to respect the expertise you offer.

    When should you start? There's no time like the presence. I regularly encourage my own graduate students to start a blog around their research topics. Doing so expands their research networks. Many of them get jobs based on the reputations they build through these practices. Many of them discover that they have something new and important to add to ongoing conversations. If this is going to be a regular part of your professional practices in the future, graduate school is the best time to practice these skills. Form partnerships with other graduate students either at your own institutions or elsewhere, and see if you can set a regular schedule for sharing what you know with the world.

    But keep in mind that blogs are only one possible mechanism for contributing your expertise to larger conversations. At the talk, I shared a visualization of the science entries on Wikipedia. I did so for two reasons: 1) to encourage scientists, engineers, and educators to contribute what they know to the larger project of collaborative knowledge production that Wikipedia represents and 2) to reflect on the ways that new tools for producing and sharing visualizations, such as those offered by the Many Eyes project, expands the resources through which STEM experts can share what they know with others.

    As you reflect on these new opportunities, you also need to recognize that the new communication environment does not respect national borders. I was struck recently talking to some veteran journalists that they kept insisting that Americans did not value "foreign news" and I responded that part of the problem is that professional journalists still think of it as "foreign," when Americans now come from all of these countries and are often seeking information from their mother countries, when American youth are actively seeking out entertainment content from many corners of the world through digital sharing platforms, and where America's political and economic interests are global and not geographically local. The point is not to construct some "foreign" place -- those people over there -- and try to engage us with it but rather to insert global insights into all of the conversations we are having as a society. And as you do so, also to recognize that American news escapes our borders and because a resource which gets deployed, sometimes embraced, sometimes attacked, in all of these other conversations.

    For many of the problems you want to confront, you are going to have to break through national silos and speak to a global population which needs to understand the changes you are proposing. As you do so, you need to embrace whatever works, whatever constitutes the most appropriate technologies for reaching those varied populations. And that means mixing high tech and low tech communication strategies. What begins as digital content in the developed world may be translated into images which can be printed out and pasted on walls in the developing world. What begins as a podcast in the global north may become a cassette tape which is passed hand to hand in the global south.

    Again, thinking of this as a civic ecology helps us to understand how different channels reach different niches and how communication may occur between different sectors or nations by translating content from one medium to another and passing information from one person to another. This process is central to my forthcoming book on Spreadable Media. There, we distinguish between distribution, which is a top-down process under the control of mass media, and circulation, which is a hybrid process which involves movement between commercial and noncommercial participants.

    Challenge Two: Strengthen the capacity to engage with information

    The Knight commission correctly notes that educational reform should go hand in hand with our efforts to restructure the civic ecology. As I've shown in my work for the MacArthur foundation, young people need to acquire a range of skills and competencies if they are going to meaningfully engage in the new participatory culture. As they scan the media ecology for bits and pieces of information, they need more discernment than ever before and that comes only if they are able to count on their schools to help them overcome the connected concerns of the digital divide, the participation gap, and the civic engagement gap.

    The Digital Divide has to do with access to networked communication technologies -- with many still relying on schools and public libraries to provide them with access. The Participation Gap has to do with access to skills and competencies (as well as the experiences through which they are acquired). And the Civic Engagement Gap has to do with access to a sense of empowerment and entitlement which allows one to feel like your voice matters when you tap into the new communication networks to share your thoughts.

    Unfortunately, we've wired the classrooms in this country and then disabled the computers; we've blocked young people from participating in the new forms of participatory culture; and we've taught them that they are not ready to speak in public by sequestering them to walled gardens rather than allowing them to try their voices through public forums. To overcome these challenges, scientists and engineers may need to work against their own vested interests in the short run. Despite constant cries against scientific illiteracy, our public funding for education has strip-minded the funding for all other subject matters in order to support STEM education decade after decade with devastating effects. Certainly, we need to be more effective at training kids to think in scientific and engineering terms, but that does not mean we should crush humanities, arts, and social science education in order to do so. The problems you identify are as much social problems as they are technical problems and if you want your solutions to work, you have to have an educated and empowered citizenry who are able to act upon the information you provide them.

    As we do so, we need to recognize that in the new civic ecology, we are going to confront conflicting regimes of truth, which is why so many Americans believe that evolution and global warming are myths or that Obama is a secret Muslim, an alien, or even someone who comes from Star Trek's mirror mirror universe. We need to understand those other regimes of truth if we are going to find ways to communicate across them. Again, this may be a social or cultural problem but it can not be left to us humanist and social scientists if you are going to achieve your goals.

    Challenge 3: Promote engagement with information

    It is no longer enough simply to inform. You must inspire and motivate, you must engage and enthrall the public, if you want to cut through the clutter of the new media landscape. I've often talked about the ways entertainment franchises are both creating cultural attractors which draw like-minded people together and cultural activators which gives them something to do.

    Jessica Clark and Pat Aufderheide have written about Public Media 2.0, suggesting that we should no longer think about public service media (as if the knowledge simply flowed from above) but rather public facilitating and public mobilizing media that creates a context for meaningful conversations and helps point towards actions which the public might take to address its concerns. It is no longer enough to produce science documentaries which point to distance stars without giving the public something it can do to support your efforts and absorb your insights into motivated action.

    I've been inspired lately by the efforts of Brave New Films, the producers of progressive documentaries, to motivate grassroots activism. Initially, the films were distributed via dvds which could be mailed to supporters who would host house parties where they would be discussed and where local activists might point towards concrete steps that could be taken. Now, they are distributing them as online videos which can be embeded into blogs and social networking sites and thus place the burden of their circulation into the hands of their supporters. This strikes me as a strategy which could be embraced by scientists and engineers who want to build a base of support behind their projects.

    Historically, one of the best tools for capturing the imagination and rallying the support of scientifically literate segements of the population was through science fiction. Science fiction was designed as an intervention into the public debates around science and technology -- pushing us to the limits of known science, speculating about the implications of new technological discoveries, and creating a community ready to discuss what they read. The science fiction fan world became major supporters of NASA and remained supporters of manned space flight well after the rest of the public turned their eyes elsewhere. Indeed, several key science fiction blogs still publish NASA photographs of deep space exploration as "space porn" -- that is, images of heavenly bodies that will remain untouched by human hands. As you move forward with your grand challenges, see if you can find ways to engage with science fiction writers and deploy them as key allies helping to shape the public imagination so we as a society are ready for the great discoveries and innovations you generate through your research.

    So there you have it, the three core challenges of communication. Each of these requires bold action just as much as will be needed to solve the energy crisis or to confront global hunger or climate change. This is why it becomes so important for you to forge cross-disciplinary partnerships throughout your graduate career. You need to walk across campus and engage in conversation with people who are pursuing other majors, who are trying to make a difference through other sectors.

Wanted: Post-Doc to Help Research Youth and Civic Engagement

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I sent word via Twitter and Facebook a few days ago that we are now searching for a Post Doc who can work with out Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics research group. This is a project that is being funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a larger network of affiliated researchers seeking to understand young people's civic engagement. You can learn more about our research here and our group blog is here. USC's Annenberg School for Communication is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join its Media, Activism, Participatory Politics (MAPP) Case Studies Project.

The Postdoctoral Research Associate will assume significant responsibility in conducting case study based research for the Project. This research will investigate the continuities between participatory culture and civic engagement. As such, qualified candidates should be aware of current research trends in fan studies, civics, globalization and/or media studies and should be ready to apply that knowledge to the case study research.

The Postdoctoral Research Associate will have earned an advanced degree and/or conducted previous qualitative research in one or more of the above listed areas. Successful candidates must be able to work independently and apply knowledge of domestic and international participatory cultures and civic action to the development of innovative models of civic learning and identity. Fluency in one foreign language, especially Spanish, is strongly preferred. The Postdoctoral Research Associate will report to the Project's Research Director.

The University of Southern California (USC), founded in 1880, is located in the heart of downtown L.A. and is the largest private employer in the City of Los Angeles. As an employee of USC, you will be a part of a world-class research university and a member of the "Trojan Family," which is comprised of the faculty, students and staff that make the university what it is.

Job Accountabilities:

  • Serves as a research trainee for the purpose of enhancing and developing research competencies. Participates in planning, designing and conducting highly technical and complex research projects under the direction of a supervisor. May or may not work independently.
  • Identifies, researches, compiles and evaluates data sources, background information and/or technology related to area of specialization.
  • Analyzes and evaluates research data utilizing computers and provides interpretations requiring significant knowledge of a specialized area of research. Searches literature, utilizing all available resources including electronic, regarding new methodology and designs experiments accordingly.
  • Contributes to the development of research documentation for publication and/or prepares technical reports, papers and/or records.
  • Performs other related duties as assigned or requested. The University reserves the right to add or change duties at any time.
  • The University of Southern California values diversity and is committed to equal opportunity in employment.

Start date is as soon as possible.

Position is open until filled.

more information about posted position and application details

Harry Shum Jr: Dancing With and Without Glee

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In Media Res is a project of Media Commons. Every day, a media scholar posts a clip and some commentary which is intended to spark conversations. These clips are ideal for incorporating into teaching, but can also be considered resources for the ongoing virtual community of media scholars around the world who use the site to wake up their brains each morning. The format is one which exploits the properties of the web environment well in order to expand our teaching to larger communities. This week, In Media Res is running a series of posts themed around "Transmedia: New Platforms," and I was asked to provide one of the post. My materials are found below, but you will want to check out other great posts from Janet Murray and Chuck Tryon so far, with Christina Dunbar-Hester and Jeff Watson rounding off the week. Transmedia Narrative is simply the most high-profile of a series of different transmedia logics shaping convergence culture. Today, I want to focus on another transmedia logic -- performance. I've chosen as a case in point Harry Shum Jr., perhaps best known as the "other Asian" (more recently named Mike) on Glee. Several critics have noted Shum's status as an eternal extra and what this says about racial politics surrounding television's treatment of Asian-Americans. Even one Facebook fan page for the character calls him simply "the Other Asian."

By contrast, Shum plays a central role in The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (LXD), now finishing up its first season as a direct to Hulu video series, designed to showcase spectacular urban dance performances. Shum was allowed to essentially solo episode 8, "Elliott's Shoes" in a performance which echoes back to Jim Carry's rubbery movements in The Mask. Check it out, since Hulu doesn't allow us to embed clips.

Shum is never given a chance to dance like that on Glee! There, the camera placements and choreography subdue his performance to make his co-stars shine. Yet, after seeing him in LXD, his efforts become much more visible when I watch Glee. His Showreal, shared here, suggests how often Shum has appeared in shadow (as in his appearances for iPod) or in the edges of frames (as in countless music videos), while LXD finally allows him to take center stage.

Prior to the series launch, the LXD dancers were featured on the Oscar telecast (which was produced by Adam Shankman)

and on So You Think You Can Dance, which features Shankman as a judge.

Shankman in turn was the executive producer for Step Up 3D, which also featured Shum and was directed by Jon Cho, who is the executive producer of LXD. Step Up, which was released near the end of LXD's first season, also features Twitch and Little C', two other veterans from Dance, while Little C appears in a cameo role in LXD. And the LXD dancers opened for Glee's summer road show (where Shum was given his own spotlight moment).

Will his character get more screen presence on Glee this season? As the magic black ball hints, "Signs Point to Yes."

What seperates these transmedia performances from more conventional strategies of star development may be the intense coordination across these various properties which are clearly designed to move attention from one media platform and one text to the other. I would love to hear of other examples of how transmedia performance is operating today.

Raising the Digital Generation: What Parents Need to Know About Digital Media and Learning

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A few weeks ago, I was asked to represent the School of Communications by giving a talk for Trojans Parent Weekend at USC. (For those who do not follow American universities and their team mascots, the Trojans is the name for the USC sports team and thus, the name that is attached to anyone affiliated with the university.) Below, you can find the webcast version of my remarks, which sought to congratulate parents on their obvious success in raising a child smart enough to become part of our student body and to challenge some of their preconceptions about the forms of informal learning their offspring may have encountered in the course of their interactions with new media platforms and practices.

I felt that this talk might be of interest to my readers, many of whom are educators and/or parents, and who have displayed in the past great interest in my posts on new media and learning. Parents receive so little advice about how to confront the real challenges of navigating the digital environment which is unfamiliar to them and often to their children. Most often, they are told just say no. The more you restrict media use, the better parent you are. And for God's sake, keep the computer out of the kid's bedroom. But none of that feels adequate for a world where there is real learning taking place on line, where learning to navigate the new media environment is going to be key for your offspring's future success. Our schools are already blocking access to many of these core technologies and often refusing to advise youth about how to use them ethically, safely, and creatively. If parents start shutting off computers in the home, they really do close down potentials for their children's growth and development. And if they start snooping through their young person's internet accounts, they run the risk of damaging trust that is going to be vital for their long term relationship. My core advice to parents: Kids need someone to watch their back and not snoop over their shoulders. They need adults who are as engaged in their online lives as they are with their off-line lives -- not less and not more.

Some of what you hear here will be familiar, reflecting other talks and essays I've published on the work of Project New Media Literacies. Some will be newer, having to do with my ongoing projects in the area of youth, new media, and civic engagement.

I mentioned there in passing that we are in the process of creating the Participatory Culture and Learning Lab in the Annenberg School. Participatory Culture has long been the over-arching theme of my work, whether applied to think about creative industries and consumer/fan culture, new media literacies and education, or civic engagement. Over the past year, I have been transitioning out of many of the research roles I played through the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and consolidating my research efforts here at USC. I have been lucky to draw several key members of my research staff on the East coast to join me here in sunny California -- including Erin Reilly who has long been the research director of the New Media Literacies team (and now is building affiliations with the Annenberg Innovation Lab) -- and I have reunited with Sangita Shreshtova, a CMS alum, who is now Research Director for the work we are doing on civic engagement with the MacArthur and Spencer Foundations. PCL (which people are already calling Pickle) represents an umbrella organization which will sustain these efforts while opening up a space for new research initiatives down the line.

How I Became Part of Adrian Grenier's Entourage ... For a Night

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Several years ago, I was interviewed for the HBO documentary, Teenage Paparazzo, playing this month. The following is my story of that strange evening and my reflections on what it taught me about the nature of celebrity culture. Let's be clear: I have been an enthusiastic viewer (if not a hardcore fan) of the HBO comedy series, Entourage, since it launched, so you can imagine my excitement and disbelief when I received an email from someone associated with lead performer Adrian Grenier asking if I'd be willing to on camera with the star for an HBO documentary. Even with short notice, I was able to rearrange my schedule to meet Grenier at Boston's Fenway Park. (This was back when I was still based at MIT, mind you.) Grenier originally planned to conduct a conversation with Noam Chomsky and me in the "Green Monster," the elite seats, during a Red Sox vs. Yankee's home game. Talk about one of the strangest trios you are likely to ever encounter. Despite twenty years at MIT, I only met Chomsky twice and both were intensely unpleasant experiences for everyone involved. Chomsky turns out to have been characteristically less accommodating (with the result that while his name appears on the credits of the completed film, he ended up on the cutting room floor.)

As I was walking from the Subway station to Fenway, I wondered how I was going to find Grenier and his production crew. I shouldn't have worried. As I arrived, there was a massive sea of fans engulfing a small cluster of people. Elbowing my way through a rough and tumble Boston mob, I soon found Genier at the throng's center. It turned out to be more difficult to separate myself out from all the others shouting for his attention than it was to find the charismatic actor at an already crowded location.

And that's how it ran for the rest of the night. Everywhere we went, the crowds pushed and shoved to get close to us -- well, him, really, but a boy can fantasize. He posed for pictures, signed autographs, hugged people, and remained surprisingly good-natured about the constant intrusions and interruptions. Of course, if he wanted privacy he would not be shooting at such a public location.

Filming a documentary during a Red Sox game worked about as well as you might expect. Every time I started to say something interesting, one of the teams would score a point, the crowd would go wild and it would drown out what I was saying. By the time they got to the part they included in the documentary, my voice was hoarse from trying to be heard over the cheering fans.

Even if there was not a baseball game going on, it would be hard to maintain my usual focus sitting just a few feet away from Vinnie Chase, I mean, Adrian Grenier, and sinking into the gravitational pull of his intense blue eyes. There's an aura about meeting someone you've seen on the screen face to face -- I don't care who you are. It's a heady, intoxicating experience, one which can scramble your sense of the borders between fantasy and reality, between fiction and everyday life. And it didn't help things that Grenier is in person so much like the character he plays on the screen -- puppy-dog likable, somewhat impulsive, deeply earnest, yet not necessarily inhabiting the same reality as the rest of us. It's not hard to picture Vinnie being so touched by meeting a teenage paparazzo that he decides to make a movie about him or that he later feels a need to try to make an impression on the young man and change his life or that he wants to become friends with him outside the shooting of a movie which is necessarily going to change their relationships with each other, or for that matter, that he would try to interview an MIT professor in Fenway Park during a game.

As I watched Grenier interact with his old time buddies and his camera crew, it became clear just how autobiographical Entourage is. I watched him exchange text-messages with a certain female pop star who plays a key role in the documentary and who was put out by someone from Granier's camp who may have said some not nice things about her. Off and on, for the rest of the night, he was grilling people, even phoning his mom, to see who may have made the unattributed comments that hurt his relations with said pop star. At another point, I watched a standoff between Grenier and a certain horror writer who also was in the Green Monster that night to see which was going to leave their box seats to interact with the other. Once the interview was completed, the star decided he wanted to go get Sushi and removed his team from the park, even though the Sox were still battling it out with the Yankees in a highly competitive game. Whatever else was going on, we were not there to watch the ballgame.

In fact, it turns out that we were there to be interrupted. I was there to interpret those interruptions, to bear witness to what it was like to live in a fishbowl. I was there to explain Grenier's life to him. Whereas normally my job in conducting an interview is to abstract from the person asking the questions and help them disappear from the viewer, the opposite was true here. I ended up addressing my comments directly to Adrian, telling him about why his celebrity status matters to his fans.

It doesn't matter to anyone, except maybe me, that while my son has been a season-pass holder for the Red Sox Nation (and has always wanted to sit in the Green Monster), I have little to no interest in baseball. This is not a place where I would be found if it wasn't for the film shoot. For that reason, I was perplexed when I got texts and emails from friends who claimed to have seen me on the sportscast sitting in the stands with Grenier. I mean, given my well-known lack of interests in the game, how likely was that? Of course, when I saw the shot in question in the documentary, I had a better understanding of how a shaggy bearded academic in suspenders, waving his hands around like a crazy man, might be recognizably me even in a blurry and long-distanced shot on ESPN. So, you have to decide which was less likely -- that I would be having an intense (and seemingly one-sided) conversation with the Entourage star at a ballgame or that someone who looked, dressed, and moved like me would be doing so.

My segment in Teenage Paparazzo shows a particularly insistent fan interrupting the interview, demanding a cell phone photograph of himself with Grenier, and praising him for the performance which Mark Ruffalo gave in The Devil Wears Prada. It is admittedly a very funny sequence -- one which The New York Times and many other reviewers have singled out. In fact, such disruptions occurred all night long. Fans seemed not in the slightest deterred by the presence of a camera and production crew. They had no hesitation about stepping into the shot, though I would note that the crew could have been more effective at blocking off the traffic if they had wanted. The fans feel like they already know Grenier or at least his on-screen counterpart and they feel entitled to a moment of attention given the amount of attention they've given him over the years. This is, as the film tells us, an attention-based economy.

The part of the interview which made it into the film centered around the social and cultural functions gossip about celebrities performs in our culture. I argued that the focus of gossip shifted as we moved from a face-to-face culture where we talked about people we know directly -- the town drunk, the village idiot, the school slut -- to a networked and broadcast culture where we gossiped about people we knew through media -- the drunken, crazed, and slutty celebrity. Indeed, the more we communicate with each other through networked computers, the more we need to discuss people who are known over a broader geographic scale. We use celebrities as "resources" which allow us to talk about our concerns, interest, and values. Here, I am drawing on John Fiske's discussion of the O.J. Simpson case in Media Matters where he outlined the range of different ways the case got framed in conversations about class, race, gender, and justice across diverse communities. And I was also building on feminist writers -- from Patricia Specks to Mary Ellen Brown -- who have stressed that the value of gossip rests not on what it said about the object of the exchange but what kinds of communications it facilitated between the gossiping parties. We use gossip as a way of talking through our values by applying them to specific situations which are abstracted from our immediate circumstances. The film picked up on these themes and showed a range of young fans who used celebrities as an excuse for social interactions, for sharing values, and for talking about their own lives.

What got cut from the analysis though was another key point I made -- celebrities need to learn how to mobilize this attention towards their own ends, not just to advance their screen careers but also to help shape the values of the society. I have always been disappointed by the ending of The Truman Show where having discovered that the attention of the world is focused upon him, Truman seeks to escape its gaze rather than direct it towards things that matter to him. (Of course, Truman is such a product of television culture that there may not be much that really matters to him beyond television itself, and the same may be true of some of the celebrities in question.) Around the world, some celebrities have stood for something (or stood up for something) bigger than themselves -- whether it was Bob Hope visiting the troops in Vietnam in the midst of an unpopular war or the Dixie Chicks questioning Bush's policies during their concerts, whether it is Bollywood stars running for political office or American celebrities promoting disaster relief. One can argue that Grenier is doing something like this in making a documentary about the pressing issue of celebrities who are made uncomfortable by being stalked by teenage photographers. Yet, the person who comes through in the film (and despite meeting him in person and even sharing Sushi with the guy, I don't know him much better than I did after the two hour broadcast) is deeply ambivalent about the attention he is receiving: there's a side of him who understands it as part of his obligation to his audience, a side that enjoys it as his rewards for his hard work, and a side that wants to deflect the cameras and hold onto as much privacy as he can. I understand all of those sides, even if the film risks portraying him as a tad self-indulgent in focusing more on his needs as a celebrity than on the larger social context within which celebrity culture operates.

Shooting the film gave me a chance to see close up what it is like to be a celebrity -- it was frankly overwhelming. I don't see how anyone can withstand the intense attention they receive, even though, experiencing it for a night, was pretty damn fun.

Perhaps a revolution is not what we need

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A few weeks ago, Malcolm Gladwell, he of the Tipping Point, set off a fire storm in the blogosphere and twitterverse in response to a pointed critique of the political value of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Gladwell's comments drew a sharp comparison between the kinds of activism which fueled the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the kinds of activism which emerge through the new digital platforms. From where I sit, Gladwell is comparing apples to oranges or in this case, movements and platforms. The Civil Rights Movement certainly tapped into networks of all kinds -- from the congregations of churches to the sisterhood of sororities, and deployed a broad range of communications technologies available at the time. Twitter is however simply one of many communications platforms through which we forge politics in the 21st century. There's a tendency to look at it and try to read its features as totally embodying a new kind of public, but that is profoundly misleading. We do not live on a platform; we live across platforms. We choose the right tools for the right jobs. We need to look at the full range of tools a movement deploys at any given moment -- including some old fashion ones like door to door canvasing, public oratory, and street corner petitions, to understand the work which goes into campaigns for social change. In any case, I think critiques like Gladwell's does important work -- it stirs the pot; it forces us to articulate what we really mean; the debates which follow clears away old stereotypes and cliches. That's why I am as interested in what people are saying in response to Gladwell as I am interest in Gladwell's original comments. So, for example, my former student, Ramesh Srinivasan, now a faculty member at UCLA and someone who spends lots of time getting new media technologies and practices into the hands of marginalized and disenfranchised groups around the world, has written an excellent post over at his blog. Here's a little of what he had to say:

It's hard for me to think about revolutions without remembering the incredible Battle of Algiers film, which apparently the CIA studied when the government was deciding to take the curious step of invading Afghanistan. The success of the resistance network in Algiers was its horizontal structure. There was no point of centrality that could be attacked to then take down the overall network. Classic studies of effective movements of this sort have been conducted by the Rand Corporation, for example, in their research on Information Wars and Networks. Examples as these show that even if Gladwell is correct in that networks largely lack organization, they certainly are difficult to stifle, as we see throughout history around examples of guerilla, distributed wars.

What is notable in the Algerian example is that this effective movement was not hierarchical, but a coordinated network! And that these networks are actually extremely well organized. Organization and decentralization thus need not be mutually exclusive, though of course in some cases they may be (as did indeed seem to be the case in the iran example as well). Thus, perhaps Gladwell is making the mistake of comparing apples and oranges by contrasting most uses of social media (which are passive, require little commitment and are indeed weak ties) with the committment and organization needed within successful revolutions.

Instead, I would suggest that some elements of social media *can be utilized* to generate and cement ties and coordination between those committed to the revolutionary cause. Moreover, by spreading awareness via weak ties, other social roles can be defined and filled, perhaps by some individuals less strongly committed the cause but important in terms of their positions within the network (hit the 'donate here' button!). This is exactly what my colleague Adam Fish and I uncovered in our analysis of oppositional political bloggers in Kyrgyzstan (Internet Authorship in Kyrgyzstan: Social and Political Implications). We found that while it was not the medium itself that 'tweeted revolution', it did serve a purpose of refining a message and philosophy, and most importantly connecting a small but influential group of activists. It was the strong, not weak ties, associated with social media, that made the difference.

There's more great insights on his blog.

Speaking of blogs, we recently launched a blog to support the ongoing research my team at Annnenberg School of Communications and Journalism have been doing around youth, activism, and participatory politics. Here, too, we've been closely dissecting Gladwell's arguments. Kevin Driscoll, an alum of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program and now an Annenberg PHD Candidate, offers his perspectives below, including links to a wide array of other reactions and critiques of the original New Yorker piece.

Perhaps a revolution is not what we need

by Kevin Driscoll

Malcolm Gladwell joins a rising chorus of skeptics in his latest piece for the New Yorker, Small change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted. Responding to what he calls an "outsized enthusiasm" for social media technologies as activist tools, he argues that the weak ties enabled by services like Twitter cannot inspire the kind of commitment and bravery required of "high-risk activism" like the civil rights movement.

It's a compelling argument and, to his credit, Gladwell works hard to name the sources of this "enthusiasm". Among his slacktivist hall of shame: oversold "Twitter Revolutions" in Moldova and Iran, massive awareness campaigns on Facebook, and the Legend of the Stolen Cellphone (as told by Clay Shirky).

Despite careful attention to some very real weaknesses of network activism, Gladwell's argument suffers from a lack of detail in two important areas: technology and history.

What is "Twitter"?

Three different Twitter clients

Twitter is the representative social media technology throughout most of Gladwell's article. But as an admitted non-user, Gladwell overlooks features and user scenarios that would add a critical complexity to his argument. Like email or the telephone, Twitter is a non-prescriptive communication platform. Each user experiences "Twitter" differently depending on the time of day and frequency she checks her feed, the other people she follows, and the interface(s) she uses to access the network. Because of this flexibility, norms emerge, mutate, collide, and fade away among Twitter users with a fluidity that may not be easily apprehendable to a non-user like Gladwell.

Twitter may feel like a new phenomenon but listen closely and you will find echoes of older technological paradigms at its borders. A Twitter feed is expressed using the same protocols that syndicate blog content and its famous 140-character limit ensures compatibility with a text messaging standard from 1985. These design decisions afford Twitter data a powerful mobility. You can subscribe to a Twitter feed with an blog reader and send a tweet from any old mobile phone. Technically speaking, there is little "new" about it.

Although Andrew Sullivan and others initially reported that the 2009 protests in Iran were coordinated by Twitter, it turns out that most of the Twitter activity was taking place in Europe and the U.S.. This narrative meets the needs of Gladwell's argument - Twitter use did not contribute to direct action on the streets of Tehran - but misses an opportunity to investigate an odd parallel: thousands of people with internet access spent days fixated on a geographically-remote street protest.

Who was that fixated population? Amin Vafa suggests that young diasporic Iranians like himself ("lucky enough to move to the US back in the late 1980s") may have played a critical role in the flurry of English-language activity on Twitter. He recalls obsessively seeking information to retweet, "I knew at the time it wasn’t much, but it was something." Messages sent among family and friends within and without Iran provided countless small bridges between the primarily SMS-based communication paradigm in Iran and the tweet-based ecology of the US/EU.

Such connections among far-flung members of Iranian families represent strong ties of a type similar to those that Gladwell admires in the civil-rights movement. And Vafa's experience suggests that the specific technological affordances of Twitter enabled people to exercise those ties on a transnational scale. This is not to recommend either Twitter or SMS as effective tools for organizing an uprising (when things get hectic, cell phone service is the first to go) but instead to highlight the critical importance of including technical detail in any discussion of social media activism.

What is "the civil-rights movement"?

Leaves blowing away

Gladwell presents the civil-rights movement as a touchstone for "traditional" activism. In vivid narrative passages, he recounts moments of breathtaking heroism among black activists in the face of hate, discrimination, and brutality. This bravery, he argues, was inspired by strong local ties and enabled by support from hierarchically-structured organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. The movement, as he finds it, was "disciplined", "precise", and "strategic"; systematically mobilizing thousands of participants in the execution of long-term plans toward well-defined goals. "If you're taking on a powerful and organized establishment," he concludes, "you have to be a hierarchy."

Absent from this discussion, however, is consideration for the role of history in our present-day understanding of the civil-rights movement. During a visit to our research group last week, Steven Classen reminded us that our cultural memory of the civil-rights era is built on an incomplete record. Civil-rights activism was, in Gladwell's terms, "high-risk" activism and carried the threat of injury or death. For this reason, activist communication was covert and empheral; the kind that does not leave traces to be collected and preserved in an archive.

Before the civil-rights movement can provide data to support an analysis of hierarchical activist organizations, consideration must be made for the thousands of "silent heroes" whose whose risks and labor were not recorded in any official history. Classen's interviews and archival research revealed an enlarged history of the civil-rights movement in which the highly-visible actions of centralized organizations were accompanied by small acts of resistance among seemingly autonomous groups in rural communities throughout Mississippi. How should researchers account for these gaps and discrepancies? In spite of the sheer quantity of data produced by today's social media use, there will always be aspects of social movements that are lost, forgotten, obscured, and excluded.

The same risk of injury that once obscured many human stories from the dominant history of the civil-rights movement is fundamental to Gladwell's categorization of different types of activism. On one hand, he is right to distinguish "high-risk" activism like the civil-rights movement from comparatively safe acts like joining a Facebook Cause but when he writes that, "activism that challenges the status quo [...] is not for the faint of heart", he seems to imply that violence is a necessary condition for effecting social change. In response, Linda Raftree recalls the nerve-wracking experience of carrying a politically-themed t-shirt through the streets of El Salvador in the early 1990s. The very same act that seems innocuous to a U.S. citizen can be extremely risky within a different political regime. As social media networks and their users increasingly cross national boundaries, the line between "high" and "low" risks will blur. Depending on one's geographic, cultural, and religious position, participation in social media activism may involve considerable risks: social ostracization, joblessness, displacement, or spiritual alienation.

What works?

Screenshot from an It Gets Better video

The most hierarchical organizations in the civil-rights movement focused on (and succeeded in changing) the most hierarchical problems they faced: discriminatory laws and policies. But racism is not a highly-structured problem. In fact, racism is a dispersed, slippery evil that circulates, mutates, and evolves as it moves through groups of people across time and space. The hierarchical civil-rights movement defeated Jim Crow, an instantiation of racism, but could not eradicate racism itself.

Perhaps network problems like racism require non-hierarchical, network solutions. Stetson Kennedy's "Frown Power" campaign of the 1940s and 1950s was an effort to address racism in a network fashion. To combat everyday racism, Kennedy encouraged anti-racist whites to respond to racist remarks simply by frowning. Dan Savage's It Gets Better project is a similar present-day example. Angered and saddened by the persistence of homophobic bullying among high school students, Savage asks queer adults to speak directly to victimized teens using web video. Both campaigns are activism for the "faint of heart". They effect a slow, quiet change rather than large-scale revolution.

And maybe a focus on outcomes is what this conversation needs. Creating a hard distinction between "traditional" activism and "social media" activism is a dead end. Whether the medium is Twitter, pirate radio, a drum, or lanterns hung in a Boston church tower, "real world" activism depends on the tactical selection of social media technologies. Rather than fret about "slacktivism" or dismiss popular new tools because of their hype, we should be looking critically at history for examples of network campaigns like Frown Power that take advantage of their culture and technological circumstances to effect new kinds of social change.

Sites of Convergence: An Interview for Brazillian Academics (Part Three)

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Conducted by Vinicius Navarro for Contracampo, a journal from Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil).

You have talked about the way media convergence upsets existing hierarchies between producers and consumers of popular culture. Historically, these hierarchies find parallels in the divide between countries that export culture and those that import it, or countries that export knowledge and those that import it. Can we apply some of your insights to the way culture and knowledge circulate across borders? How does the promise of participation manifest itself at a global level?

I am not someone who is going to argue that the world is flat. The economic dominance of Western countries, especially the United States, over the global imaginary continues to be a strong force, one that is difficult to resist. Yet we are also seeing increased fluidity as culture produced in other parts of the world is circulating more freely across national borders.

That circulation is being shaped, first and foremost, through processes of immigration, in which people use the web to maintain contact to mother countries they have left behind, and immigrants introduce new forms of cultural expression wherever they go. Yet this only partially explains the current moment of cultural circulation. I would also argue that young people around the world are increasingly cosmopolitan in their engagement with popular culture. They are seeking out greater diversity than they can find in their own often parochial local communities. We see this in young people in Iran who grew up trying to smuggle Michael Jackson posters, tapes, and videos past government censors and are now reaching out to a global public through Twitter. We see it in American young people who are seeking out compelling content from Asia (Manga now outsells American comics four to one in the U.S. market; Anime is now one of Japan's leading exports to the world; and there are signs that Korean and Chinese dramas are starting to have a similar impact as people are seeking them out online), from Latin America (a huge rise in interest in telenovelas), and so forth. As they do so, they are connecting with the fans of those media in their country of origin and this has the potential to expand global consciousness.

The public's interest in this international media content often far outstrips the ability or willingness of dominant media to provide it, but the grassroots channels are picking up some of the slack. So, it takes less than 24 hours for an episode of Prison Break to air in America and be translated via amateur subtitlers into a range of Asian languages, and then appear on torrents across the Pacific Rim. And it takes no more time for an animated series to appear on Japanese television and find its way into the home of American teens.

We recently saw a video of the winner of Ukraine's Got Talent get posted on YouTube and get seen more than 2 million times. As people discover interesting content, they pass it along to their friends and family. Most Americans had never seen Ukrainian television before, I dare to say, yet they were willing to give it a chance because it was freely available and widely circulating.

Now, that raises the larger challenge - are we concerned with cultural access (with the flow of ideas and expressions across national borders) or economic viability (the ability of other media producing countries to reap a profit from access to once closed American markets)? Both are likely changing right now, but there's no question that there's much greater fluidity on the level of culture than on the level of commerce. Artists everywhere in the world are losing control over the circulation of their content and, as they do so, they may also be losing the economic base that supports their production. Yet one can argue that, in many cases, this content is circulating into markets that would have been closed to them anyway. And they are more likely to find paying customers once the public has been exposed to and educated about their genres of cultural production.

Last year, you and David Bordwell engaged in a discussion on transmedia storytelling, which was posted on your blog. Narratives that start on a movie screen, for instance, can continue in a videogame and then make their way back to the film medium. The idea of transmedia storytelling, however, makes it hard for us to apply formal criteria to the analysis of a particular cultural experience, which is why Bordwell seems to favor more traditional forms of narrative. What are some of the aesthetic criteria that you use to analyze an experience that involves different media platforms?

I teach a course on transmedia entertainment at USC and the experience of closely examining texts and listening to media producers share their creative processes and their conception of the transmedia audiences has really sharpened my focus on these issues. I now believe that it is possible to map out some cornerstones of the aesthetics of transmedia. The first would be a shift from a focus on individual characters and their stories towards ever more complex forms of world building.

The second would be the expansion of traditional forms of seriality that disperse story information across multiple chunks of entertainment content. Traditional serial unfolded across a single medium, providing a means for orientating and engaging viewers, even as they provided gaps that motivated us to continue to engage with their unfolding story. The new serials will unfold across multiple media platforms, allowing us to connect multiple chunks, with a less linear flow of information, and creating a space where we can share what we've found with others who are equally invested in this shared entertainment experience.

Third, there is a focus on layered or multiple forms of subjectivity where, much as in a soap opera, we engage with the story through the perspective of multiple characters, who often reflect different values or social situations.

Think about what transmedia extensions do. They provide us with more information and a chance to more fully explore the fictional world; they allow us to engage with backstory or play out the long-term impact of story events; or they refocalize the story around the perspective of secondary or peripheral characters and thus return to the "mother ship" with a new frame of reference.

Right now, we are still simply mapping the territory, identifying formal devices and modes of storytelling that work in a transmedia environment, occasionally stumbling onto examples that pack real emotional power or cognitive complexity. Yet there are people out there monitoring the experiments, refining their craft - some of them are the artists who will push transmedia to the next level and some of them are the consumers who will be able to keep pace with those artists and help them to achieve their full potential.

When I read your discussion with David Bordwell, I thought about the repercussions of media convergence to traditional academic disciplines. In a sense, Bordwell's response to the notion of transmedia narrative suggests a concern with the status and autonomy of a particular discipline - film studies. It reveals a desire to look at cinema qua cinema. How do you see the role of traditional academic disciplines in the world of media convergence? What fate might they have apart from responding to the "demands" of new media?

Well, that description is more than a little unfair to David Bordwell, who really does seem engaged with the intellectual issues raised by transmedia stories and, if anything, was arguing that the Hollywood industry was too conservative in using the practices in relatively trivial ways having more to do with marketing than storytelling. He certainly would object to the push to turn all films into "mother ships" for transmedia franchise. So would I.

I think we need to study very closely to know when it is going to be aesthetically rewarding and when it is going to be a dead-end. I don't think we were that far apart in that exchange, and I really enjoyed the chance of sparring with someone at the top of his game. Behind that exchange was an enormous degree of mutual respect. Otherwise, why bother.

That said, your larger question about the impact on the disciplines is a very real one. I don't know that the particular configurations of knowledge that emerged in the late industrial age - our current set of disciplines - can or will necessarily last that long into the information age. We are already seeing a significant reconfiguration of fields of knowledge, we are seeing students coming to universities with intellectual pursuits that simply cannot be contained within individual disciplines, which require them to move across majors in the course of their educations, much as they will move across professions in the course of their working lives.

Our university curriculum tries desperately to "discipline" these learners, forcing them into categories, but I'd argue that it does so to the detriment of both the individuals involved and the society at large. We need to be exploring the interconnectedness of our fields of knowledge if we are going to exploit the full potentials of the new media landscape or combat the challenges of life in the 21st century. We need to free our minds, to absorb as many different methods of inquiry and bodies of knowledge as possible, so we can reconfigure knowledge as we learn to collaborate across professional and disciplinary borders. In short, we need to embrace a converged educational system so that we can navigate through a converged information environment.

Vinicius Navarro is assistant professor of film studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the co-author (with Louise Spence) of Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (Rutgers University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a book on performance, documentary, and new media.