Shall We Play? (Part One)

A few weeks ago, I delivered one of the two keynote addresses at the USC Teaching with Technologies conference. This year's theme was "The Connected Mind." I chose to spend my time talking about the value of play, a theme which has surfaced several times in my recent talks, so I wanted to share the core ideas from this presentation with you here. SHALL WE PLAY?

In many ways, I am speaking to you today under false pretenses. This talk is not primarily about teaching with technology. After spending two decades of my life at MIT, I have almost reflexively become that guy who challenges claims about technological determinism and who stresses the importance of the culture which informs the design and deployment of tools.

These themes are explored more fully in the white paper which I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on Learning in a Participatory Culture. New media tools and platforms have affordances which support new kinds of learning, but those forms of learning are also very strongly informed by participatory practices, many of which have a history far older than the web. Today, in focusing on play, I am going to be drawing heavily on ideas that emerged prior to the introduction of digital games, but which continue to be relevant in rethinking our pedagogical practices. If we embrace the values of play, we may find ourselves toying with new technologies and insofar as these participatory practices are closely associated with some of the new platforms of the Web 2.0 era, we may also find that in working with these tools, we are drawn towards a reappraisal of the value of play in our teaching.

This is also not a talk about games-based learning. Through the work I did almost a decade ago at MIT with Kurt Squire, Philip Tan, Eric Klopfer, Alex Chisholm and others on the Games to Teach Project, I have been an early and frequent advocate of games-based learning. I both share James Paul Gee's belief that good game design is also good pedagogical design and have worked to model what games for education might look like. But in talking always about games, we may under-estimate the value of more open-ended forms of play and of play as a general disposition in the educational environment. These are the themes I want to explore more fully today.

This is also not a talk about gamification, a term which is being used far too often today, as if it could adequately sum up the larger movement towards games for change. To me, gamification as a concept grossly simplifies what research on games-based learning has shown us over the past decade or so. When the Games to Teach team worked with content experts, we sought ways to embed information from the curriculum, knowledge from the text book, into activities in the games. We asked each expert what knowing this allowed people to do and then we sought to capture those activities through the game design and mechanics so that they provided deep motivation for the learner to master these concepts.

At the heart of this model was intrinsic motivation. The power of games is in part that they provide such clarity in defining the roles and goals, that they helped us to know what to do and how to do it, and as such, they motivate deeper forms of learning. Gamification, at its worst, rejects a theory of intrinsic motivation in favor of one based on extrinsic motivation. That is to say, it attempts to motivate "proper" or "desired" behavoirs through attaching points to otherwise mundane and uninteresting activities. For example, Foursquare represents a gamification of consumer loyalty programs.

One might argue that this version of gamification does not in any significant way break with current educational practices which may be why it has been easier for schools to embrace than the more challenging kinds of learning games which were proposed in the past. Our students learn NOW in schools not because they value what they are learning but because they have been taught to value grades. And where their grades are not strong, they plead for extra credit points, which represents another way of adding points as rewards or incentives to behaviors valued by their teachers. I do believe we can learn much from games but I sure hope that what we take away from them goes deeper than most current models of gamification.

But, for the moment, I want to push games aside and talk about play. The distinction I am making here comes from an essay by the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. Here's what Bettelheim tells us:

'Generally speaking, play refers to the young child's activities characterized by freedom from all but personally imposed rules (which are changed at will), by free-wheeling fantasy involvement, and by the absence of any goals outside the activities itself...'

Bettelheim thus links play to freedom, experimentation, personal investment, and process, all values to which I will return later in this talk.

"Games, however, are usually competitive and are characterised by agreed-upon, often externally imposed, rules, by a requirement to use the implements of the activity in the manner for which they were intended and not as fancy suggests, and frequently by a goal or purpose outside the activity, such as winning the game."

We might think about the game, Candyland, as an ideal transitional device -- a game which teaches young players the basic mechanics of board games, one which often plays a key role in socializing us into the world of games. For Betteiheim, learning to play games represents an important step in the socialization process -- learning to accept outside and sometimes arbitrary constraints on one's behavior for the purposes of social reciprocity and delayed gratification.

"Children recognize early on that play is an opportunity for pure enjoyment, whereas games may involve considerable stress."

So, while learning to play games is a step forward, it also is accompanied by some kinds of losses -- in terms of personal expression and immediate pleasure. People cheat at games, for example, as a way of coping with the anxiety of competition in ways that they do not generally find it necessary to cheat at play. Indeed, it is not clear what cheating at play would look like given the lack of social constraint on individual expression it entails.

By that same token, institutions find it much easier to incorporate games, which preserves the notion of rule-driven activity, rather than play, which is often understood as a kind of anarchic freedom from any and all constraints. So, schools often treat most forms of play as minimally a distraction, more often a disruption, of school practices, hence the concept of "class clown" which runs through educational literature. In other cultures, the clown is an educator who invites us to re-examine existing hierarchies and structures, taking the world apart and putting it back together again, where-as the clown in our schooling is seen as an unwelcome rival for the classes attention, a challenge to discipline and a disturbance of learning.

In part, this is because our puritan culture maintains a world view in which play is the opposite of work. We have decided that schooling should be about work rather than play, and as such, we are driving down the creative impulses of our students. No wonder that many are seeing a crisis of creativity in contemporary America!

Interestingly, though, when we work with teachers in professional development programs focused on learning and teaching the new media literacies, they consistently gravitate to play out of the 12 social skills and cultural competencies we've identified through our work. Here's how our white paper defines play as a literacy: "the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem solving." Today, we are pushing beyond play as a skill to think about play as a disposition -- a way of seeing oneself and the world through new creative lens which depend on suspending real world consequences and encouraging a process of innovation and creativity.

Educators are sometimes drawn to play for the wrong reasons -- because they seek to entertain their students. I sometimes hear various lay theories of "stealth learning," the idea that we can smuggle in learning disguised as play into schools and students will have so much fun that they will overcome their resistance to the schooling process. In many ways, I see this as like that moment in Tom Sawyer where Twain's protagonist sells others in his cohort into helping him white wash the fence by convincing him that doing so is great fun. This is perhaps the same kind of trap that we fall into when we talk about gamification -- a confusion between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Play is not disguised learning; play IS learning.

Jean Piaget captures this sense of the value of play when he tells us that "play is the work of childhood." He rejects any simple opposition between play and work, suggesting that play is the most important work children perform, because it is through play they acquire basic knowledge and skills fundamental to their culture. A kitten plays at stalking. In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. And in an information society, people play with information and interfaces.

We can rehearse and acquire core skills and knowledge through play because play lowers the stakes of failure. One of the activities we've developed through Project NML for thinking about play is called "Fail and Fail Often," and it uses the casual game, Bloons, to get people to reflect on the strategies of experimentation and calibration they apply in solving problems in games. This is a totally addictive game in part because it is so simple and the way you move forward through the game is to try different strategies, most of which will not work. Through this process, we learn basic things about the physics of the game and how different materials respond to us. We can compare this with the role failure plays in schools: children are afraid to fail and teachers are afraid to tell their students that they are failing. As a result, students do not take risks which might push their performance forward and they do not get the feedback they might need to better calibrate their efforts.

Lately, as I've talked about the value of play for learning, I have started to identify a series of properties which help us to better understand the core principles of play. I call them the Six P's of Play (though this remains a work in progress and may end up with fewer or more Ps before all is said and done).

1. Permission. Before we can play, as adults, as students, we have to give ourselves permission to do so. This is of course different for many children who play often and only stop playing when they are prohibited from doing so. The concept of permission is closely linked to what game theorists call the "magic circle," that is, a mental bracket which we put around our activities which changes their affect, their meaning, and most of all, their consequences. Within that magic circle, we lower the consequences of risks; we agree to engage with each other with good humor; we try hard but do not take the outcome as seriously as we would if we performing the same activities outside of a play context. I love the example of the little girl who is sweeping the floor -- we would understand her activity differently if she were doing chores or playing house, even though the actions would be the same. In a school culture, where there is a long history of prohibiting play, we must work very hard to give signals when play is an acceptable mode of engaging with the activities and we have to build up trust with our students that we are not going to retrospectively count their play against them.

2. Process -- Play values process as much or more than product. Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salens make the point that the most efficient and effective way to play golf is to walk right up to the hole and plop the ball into it. But we would not see that as a very fun way of playing golf. Instead, we create as many obstacles as possible -- we use strange implements, we move far away from the hole, we create sand and water obstacles, we slope the landscape to give us less effective control over the outcome. In an education system now focused so heavily on how students perform on standardized testing, performance based on product completely displaces performance assessed based on process, yet play's value is focusing our attention on the experience itself, in the moment, in the process. It asks us to be aware of how we do things as much as on what we do. This is why play can be helpful in supporting the acquisition of basic skills which can be rehearsed and valued on their own without regard to the finished product.

3. Passion --The Gates Foundation has found that an increasing number of young people are dropping out of school not because they are incapable of performing what's expected of them but because they are bored. Work in the Digital Media and Learning Field tells us that we need to recognize the rewards of passion-based learning, of students pursuing those topics which they care about most deeply and using these interests to motivate and sustain other kinds of learning. Mary Louise Pratt has a great story she tells about her son's baseball card collection and how talking with him about it pushed him to learn more about history (as a backdrop to the key games in baseball history), geography (as a context for where the teams come from), architecture (as a way of discussing different stadiums), and math (as a way of playing around with batting averages.) This brings us back to Bettelheim's notion of play as open-ended, free-flowing, self-determined, and thus as something which is experienced as a site of freedom and passion.

4. Productivity -- Play is highly generative, despite or perhaps even because of its focus on process rather than product. I am very fond of the photographs which Martha Cooper took in the 1960s and 1970s of children's street play in New York City. These images show the imaginative ways that children transform their geographic environments through their play, claiming space even in relatively inhospitable environments where they are free to explore and interact; these images also show them taking up everyday materials around them as raw materials for their own play, transforming them from their mundane functions through a clever recognition of their underlying properties and affordances. And of course, they do the same thing with their bodies and with their social relations, performing new roles, trying out new structures, redefining old situations. This is the sense in which play can be linked to creativity. While in the spirit of play, old rules and structures are suspended, allowing us to look at the world in new ways, and allowing us to transform and transcend our environments.

5. Participation -- Play occurs in a social context which invites us to enter into the fun. We do sometimes watch others play, to be sure, and this represents what educational theorists call "legitimate peripheral participation." We watch with the anticipation of future participation. We watch to observe how others perform, to learn new skills, to appraise our own performance, or simply because we do not yet feel in the right spirit to play. But watching in this case is also a form of learning and is of a very different kind than watching which occurs when we know we will never be able to participate, when we feel that our participation is not welcome, when we anticipate not being able to do what's expected of us. As we sit in classrooms where no one offers up answers and no one is engaging with the learning process, we could learn a lot by going back to the ways that young people are introduced to a new kind of play and the ways that ideally they are encouraged to participate. (Of course, I don't want to romanticize this. As someone who often was not picked for teams in school, I know that the promise of participation can become cutting if we experience exclusion rather than engagement.)

6. Pleasure -- Pleasure is the byproduct of play. The search for pleasure is often what motivates play. This takes us back to Bettelheim's point about the stress around winning a game versus the relative freedom of participating through play. The game remains an operationalization of play, it represents a stress on the outcome that undercuts play's focus on process. And thus, a game may offer pleasure to some but with no guarantees and often a strong threat of displeasure if we lose the game. Thus, while it is very valuable to bring games into school, it is also important to provide contexts for more free and open-ended forms of play, which can offer pleasure to all who participate, rather than offering rewards to those who win.

(MORE TO COME)

"Critical Pessimism" Revisted: An Open Letter to Adam Fish

A few weeks ago, Adam Fish called me out through his blog, Savage Minds, for what he saw as a harsh and unfair representation of the Media Reform movement in the final paragraphs of my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He did so for the most part by simply reprinting my own words to frame a story he wrote about the recent Media Reform conference. I was a bit surprised to find myself singled out as an enemy of the Media Reform movement. If I am the biggest obstacle to your success, you are much closer to victory than I had previously imagined. :-)

The experience was uncomfortable for me, but in a very constructive way, in that it has forced me to revisit my own words and reflect on how much my thinking has changed since I wrote them. It also hit at the end of the term so I am only now able to share some of these reflections with you.

Much of this change has been provoked through conversations with Eric Klinenberg, who I have gotten to know through several summers together at the Aspen Policy Institute, and through my participation in the Verklin Media Policy and Ethics Conference at the University of Virginia shortly before I left MIT. I have since written in my blog about some of these shifts in my thinking, making the argument that there is such urgency in the need for media reform right now that there is no longer any room for the usual infighting between critical and cultural studies perspectives.

Through these experiences, I have had a chance to get to know some of the young leaders who are pushing the Media Reform movement in significant new directions, including a deeper embrace of the potentials of digital media and networked communication and a willingness to partner with fan activist groups in ways which moves them away from a history of dismissing popular culture and scolding those of us who are engaged by it. When I wrote the passages for Convergence Culture which critiqued some aspects of the media reform movement, I was speaking about a very different generation of leaders and a very different set of rhetorics and practices. Even so, my caricature was inadequate and inaccurate, but perhaps even more so now.

Given these shifts in my thinking, I had very much hoped to attend and participate at the media reform conference this year, but was unable to do so because of a personal commitment. When I read Fish's post, I felt a need to speak out less my absence be misinterpreted. It still remains to be seen to what degree someone who comes with my theoretical and political commitments will be welcomed into the ranks of the media reform movement, all the more so because I am clearly going to be forced to eat my words. But I remain eager to revise even more my picture of the reform movement.

There remain, as there have been, very real differences in emphasis and perspective. Many of those academics featured at the Media Reform conference come from critical studies and political economies backgrounds which have often dismissed the cultural studies traditions that inform my work. These traditions bring different things to the table, to be sure, and look at the world through very different lens, but what the world needs now is an approach to media reform which combines critical studies' focus on structural inequality and cultural studies' focus on agency and empowerment. We need to embrace the potentials of participatory culture even as we critique the exploitative practices of web 2.0. We need to understand the ways that digital media does and does not transform the terrain upon which debates about media policy are occurring.

At the heart of Fish's account of Free Press's gathering was a question which has haunted my own recent work as well: "Is the open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet - by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized - becoming closed, centralized and homogenous as it begins to look and feel more like the elite-controlled cable television system?" And there is in this piece a celebration for "ancient movement of ordinary people taking back power from entrenched elites," which for him is embodied through the work of Free Speech TV. For the record, this "open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet -- by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized" is what I mean by participatory culture and Free Speech TV is participatory culture.

We share common goals in providing the American public with the resources needed to sustain democratic citizenship, with a commitment to insuring diversity of perspectives, with a desire to expand the ranges of voices which can be heard, with a push to put the potential for media production in the hands of those who have historically been excluded and marginalized.

My own way forwards towards these goals has been to promote what I call participatory culture, to expand opportunities for people of all backgrounds to produce and share media with each other. I work to promote media reform through advancing the cause of media literacy and defending opportunities to participate through new media channels. My initial frustration with the media reform movement stemmed in part from my disappointment that some of its leadership have historically dismissed media literacy and new media practices as meaningful contributions to the media reform movement, which is why shifts in the movement rhetoric starting with the "Save Our Internet" campaign and the struggles over Net Neutrality represented a significant improvement from my point of view over earlier media reform formulations.

For many in the media reform movement, their strategy starts with a focus on concentration of media ownership. I certainly care about concentration issues, but see them as part of a much larger context of struggles over the nature of our communication and information capacities. The decline in journalism can only partially be understood as a byproduct of media concentration and has to also be understood as a product of other economic and technological shifts. I would, in any case, be as concerned if media was concentrated in the hands of governments, nonprofits, educational institutions, or the media reform movement itself as I am with the fact that it is corporately controlled. The goal should be to insure a world where media power is spread as widely across the culture as possible.

The defense of participatory culture and the critique of media ownership are two sides of the same coin -- two flanks in a battle to democratize and diversify media in this country. One starts with a focus on agency (participatory culture), the other with a focus on structure (media concentration); one starts with an emphasis on the new world we are trying to build, while the other focuses on the system we are trying to dismantle; one is focused on what we are fighting for and the other what we are fighting against.

These are the differences I was trying to get at in making a distinction between critical utopianism and critical pessimism. "Critical pessimism" is at least as accurate a description of what I see as the limits of the critical studies perspective as phrases like "cultural populism" and "techno-utopianism" have been at describing the limits of a cultural studies perspective. Neither set of terms is totally fair, yet they also have descriptive value in helping us to understand where our approaches, taken to their logical extremes, may lead us.

For me, the term, "critical pessimism," captures the distinction between cynicism and skepticism. My hope is that a viable media reform movement will embrace skepticism, asking hard questions of government policy, corporate actions, and, yes, its own assumptions and beliefs. We are not served, though, when skepticism becomes cynicism, when the rhetoric forecloses any meaningful change, when all corporate action, say, is treated as equally repressive and reprehensible. And we are not served, on the other side, by rhetoric which sees digital media as inevitably democratizing and thus does not feel the need to struggle for social justice and media reform, which sees grassroots media as somehow adequate in taking on the concentrated power of mass media. A naive celebration of contemporary digital culture denies the need for struggle and a cynical perspective on grassroots change denies the value of struggle. These are the blind spots which we need to work together to overcome in our work.

So, critical pessimism is not a bad term to describe certain forms of critical studies and political economy work at its worst, but I was wrong to imply that this is the only thing going on here, to conflate critical studies and the media reform movement, to simplify the media reform movement to a small number of highly visible figures, or to suggest we can dismiss the importance of the media reform efforts as a result of our disagreements in disposition and tactics. I have been struggling in some of my own recent work, much of it still not published, to try to work through a critique of Web 2.0 which combines the concerns for structural inequalities and the exploitation of free labor which comes from the critical studies camp with a defense of participatory culture (perhaps the best basis for such critiques) which reflects work from the cultural studies tradition.

I hope we can find ways to bring these two camps together through political activism as well, and my own current work is focused on understanding how the mechanisms of participatory culture can be deployed to foster greater political participation and civic engagement, work partially inspired by watching how the "Save Our Internet" movement was able to bridge between different sites of participatory culture and use grassroots media as the basis for critiquing corporately-controlled media.

Where my comments in Convergence Culture went too far was in my hyperbolic description of certain kinds of media reform advocates as seeking to "opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses". This was frankly sophomoric and beneath the standards I set for myself. Fish writes, "This is a false exaggeration of a movement that is providing a necessary check on corporate power and mindfully working for greater civic, community, and citizen involvement in media production." I agree.

So, let me now publicly apologize for stooping to this kind of stereotype. It was a really dumb thing to say. I am, I'm afraid, still a work in progress on these issues.

At the time I wrote this passage, I was frustrated by the recurring descriptions of popular culture as "weapons of mass distraction," as "bread and circuses," etc. I see popular culture as a much more complex terrain and respect those who would mobilize it for their own ends -- whether in the form of fan culture or Free Speech TV. I have been delighted to see many images now emerging from the Media Reform movement which are not anti-media or anti-popular culture, but rather raise legitimate concerns about the distribution of media power and in particular the decline in substantive journalism, issues very close to my own heart.

I am sometimes struck that many critical studies writers are far more idealistic than critical utopianists insofar as their embrace of the ideal often does not allow them to recognize partial victories or contradictory advances. My own work talks often of "negotiations" between different forms of cultural power, of gains and losses, of progress made even if bigger battles remain to be fought, and for me, the recognition of the good, even when we can still imagine something better, is a necessarily fuel for media reform. To describe oneself as a "utopianist" is often to be accused of imagining that this is the "best of all possible worlds", but in fact, as Stephen Duncombe has been reminding us in some of his recent writing, the construction of utopias has historically been a vital form of social critique, one which can both focus attention on the ways current conditions fall far short of ideal and allowing us to imagine alternative structures that might better meet human needs.

I have often heard critical studies writers accuse us of "not being at all critical," and I agree that this is a charge worth examining, but I want to challenge critical studies writers to be equally concerned with the charge that they are "not at all celebratory." There is something important at stake in our struggles to defend the Internet and if you can not recognize progress made, how can you realize what's at risk? Again, it comes back to the idea that any reform movement needs to be as concerned with what it is fighting for as what it is fighting against. But either way, we should not be fighting with each other, whether in the form of my original critique or Fish's more recent provocation.

So, let me end by celebrating the strong ongoing tradition of media reform in this country as represented by the recent conference and let me urge all of us to work across artificial divides which may get in the way of us working together towards shared goals.

What can Journalists Learn from The Daily Show: An Interview with Amber Day (Part Two)

What do these news comedy programs add to our understanding of contemporary life which may be missing from mainstream news?

What these programs excel at is deconstructing the scripted quality of the contemporary political conversation. Though we may be aware that politicians and corporate spokespeople are all carefully groomed and staged, and that their PR people are experts at getting the talking points on television, the news media rarely actually point this out, nor do they do the work of moving the conversation beyond the talking points. Satire, then, offers a way of satisfyingly breaking through the existing script. Stewart and Colbert (as well as their counterparts in other countries) have built a reputation on their repeated attempts to demonstrate the ways in which the public political conversation is being manipulated, and to gesture to some of the very real issues that are being obscured.

Is there anything journalists could learn from and emulate from these forms of political humor which would not compromise their self-construction as neutral and objective voices?

Journalists likely shouldn't start copying the fart jokes or sexual innuendo, but they could certainly learn how to hold public figures and pundits more accountable, how to push interviewees beyond the sound-bites, and - oddly- how to do more investigative reporting. When a politician suddenly does an about-face on an issue due to political expediency, Stewart and Colbert seize the opportunity to point it out by juxtaposing particularly revealing clips. Journalists should definitely not aim to ridicule public figures, but they should hold them accountable to their own statements and attempt to ask them hard questions.

How has the shift from broadcast to narrowcast impacted the nature of political humor on television? What do you see as the potential shifts that are occuring with the rise of online content in this site?

Narrowcasting has allowed for the development of much edgier, more critical satire. In the broadcast era, there were very few examples of true satire on television. Programs that did veer toward that territory typically attracted a great deal of controversy and did not last long, as producers were wary of alienating any of the viewing public.

Longer-running programs like Saturday Night Live have had moments of incisive critique (particularly in the beginning), but have stayed far more firmly in the realm of personality-focused political humor discussed above. In the age of narrowcasting, however, there has been an explosion of niche programming (including a great deal of satiric programs) designed to appeal to select audiences without as much worry about potentially offending viewers.

The rise of online content seems to be further fueling the changes brought about by narrowcasting in that it has become easier for content to find receptive fans and for fans to come together around particular material.

Your account of comedy news stresses the careful balance that needs to be achieved between being the clown and being the preacher. Your book ends before Colbert and Stewart staged their march for sanity on Washington. What do you think this event did to the public's perception of them?

That is an interesting question, and I think the answer depends on who you are. The press did not know what to make of the event. For the most part, they interpreted it as silly comedy with no larger message whatsoever. The preacher part of the equation totally went over their heads.

On the flip side, partisans on the political right interpreted it as narrowly political, either assuming that it was somehow meant to be in support of Obama and the Democrats, or that it was aimed solely at poking fun of Glen Beck.

Partisans on the political left were hoping that Stewart and Colbert would step forward as political leaders or activists and were ultimately disappointed.

However, most of the long-time fans I spoke with on the mall that day seemed ecstatic to be there. For fans, the rally was perfectly consistent with both the comedy and the critique they were familiar with from the programs. It highlighted the extreme polarization of political debate in this country and lambasted cable news for playing to the extremes, failing to investigate the facts, and wallowing in sensationalism. This critique was made in playful form throughout the variety acts and then by Stewart in a heartfelt plea at the end. The palpable excitement in the crowd that day was over being able to publicly perform support for that critique.

As far as the performers themselves are concerned, in interviews before and after the event, they were careful to continue maintaining the balance between political truth-teller and clown, and they have continued to do so since then. The subtle change, though, seems to have been the realization that they have earned the space to occasionally indulge in moments of heartfelt expression of their views, regardless of whether it makes for uproarious comedy. Stewart, for instance, dedicated several lengthy segments and then an entire episode to drawing attention toward political foot-dragging on passing the Zadroga act (for compensating sick 9/11 first responders), and crafted a dead-serious episode on his response to the Gabrielle Giffords' shooting.

What do you see as the strengths and limitations of satire as a form of political activism?

The limitation of satire as a form of activism is that it can exacerbate polarization and feed a form of in-group elitism. That being said, what irony and satire are good at is creating a feeling of community, which I would argue is a crucial component of political organizing. Ironic activism works to hail people who already might have similar beliefs or sensibilities and remind them that there are others who share their feelings, fueling the sense of community in opposition.

Many would dismiss that as merely "preaching to the converted," but I argue that the so-called "converted" are often discouraged or apathetic, or are simply not focusing on that particular belief at that moment in time. This sort of activism, then, fulfills the integral function of providing affirmation and reinforcement. Ironic activists challenge their audiences to not only get the joke and fill in the unsaid ironic meaning, but to actively identify with the issues as their own.

Additionally, ironic activism works to push issues that may be peripheral to the wider public debate into the dominant public sphere, ideally helping to incrementally shift or reframe that debate. What the genre is good at is engaging an audience, attracting attention, and rallying support.

Does satire necessarily express an oppositional position or are there ways that satire can be a vehicle of the utopian imagination?

I think it absolutely can do both. Certainly most satire is created in reaction to a situation deemed in need of critique. However, I think it does possess the capability of presenting alternatives or even painting a picture of a utopian future.

That is why I end the book with a discussion of the fake New York Times stunt engineered by The Yes Men (in cooperation with a number of other activist groups) in late 2008. About a week after Obama was elected they printed and distributed thousands of copies of a parody version of the New York Times, but rather than critique the state of the news media or spoof a particular story, the activists created a vision of the world they hoped to see in the not too distant future.

The physical object was a very convincing Times look-alike but the lead headline proclaimed the war in Iraq over, while the rest of the stories covered topics like Congress passing a "maximum wage law" and the creation of a national health care bill. The end result was a wide-ranging utopian vision for what they believed the new Obama era should look like. The overall message was that some of it could be possible if everyone got involved and pushed to make it happen. It was designed precisely to spark the collective utopian imagination.

Amber Day is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the English and Cultural Studies Department at Bryant University. She is the author of the book Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.

Your comments are, as always, most welcome. Unfortunately, the comments feature here has had to be disabled due to persistent spam. In the meantime, if you want me to post your comments, send them to me at hjenkins@usc.edu, and signal your desire to have them posted.

What can Journalists Learn from The Daily Show: An Interview with Amber Day (Part One)

In case anyone was wondering, I'm not dead...yet. I seem to have spent the past few weeks AWOL on this blog, having gotten my rhythm thrown off over a particular intense period of activity on my part. Every day, I've been deluding myself into thinking I'd jump back into the swing of things, and I've been busy planning some really cool stuff for the summer which I will be announcing soon, but I've been silent. Sorry, guys. This week, I want to share with you an interview with Amber Day, the author of a fascinating new book, Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate. Day writes here about Colbert, Stewart, Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, the Yes Men, not to mention a range of international satirists (mostly British and Canadian) who are at the bleeding edge between comedy and documentary. She challenges those who think news-comedy is trivializing or cynical; she makes a compelling case for why these kinds of expression encourage healthy skepticism and earnest participation in the political process, helping to foster media literacy skills which can allow us to critically engage with political rhetoric (the so-called talking points) and the frames which the mainstream media constructs around current events. She certainly speaks to the controversies which surround such texts and as such, it is a helpful guide to contemporary debates about the relations between news, popular culture, and civic engagement, but she also offers cogent challenges to anyone who finds it quick and easy to dismiss the importance of what's happening here. This book is in dialogue with other contemporary writers on the theme of news-comedy including Stephen Duncombe, Meghan Boler, Jonathon Gray, among others, so I figured it would be of interest to many of my readers. Enjoy this interview with the writer, which will give you a taste of what's in the book.

Your book, Satire and Dissent, discusses comedy news casts (such as The Daily Show), satirical documentaries (such as those of Michael Moore), parodic activists (such as the Yes Men), and to a smaller degree, parodies on YouTube. What do you see as the major similarities and differences in these forms of political humor?

The impetus for beginning this research was the feeling that there was a sort of renaissance taking place in political satire and parody, one made up of strikingly earnest, deeply political forms of satire. So it was definitely the similarities that piqued my interest.

All of the different case studies I focus on have developed out of previous genres, but the contemporary incarnations differ from many of the previous forms in that there is a more complicated inter-penetration of the real and the satiric. Rather than relying on impersonations or fictional scenarios and one-liners about political figures, they are trespassing deeper into the realm of traditional political debate. Michael Moore, for instance, accosts real officials, forcing them to play themselves in the satiric script he has set up. Similarly, when Jon Stewart plays clips of a politician directly contradicting himself, it becomes evidence in the real political debate, while the Yes Men attempt to speak on behalf of real corporations as a way of hijacking the public conversation. All tend to be interested in actively intervening in the debate rather than just commenting on it.

The differences between them are primarily traceable to the different media forms, as there is a fairly wide distance between the aims of a television program and those of an activist group. However, it was the fact that there were so many striking similarities that made me want to investigate why these forms were all exploding at this moment.

As you note, many have assumed that the rise of comedy news programs may foster cynicism about political participant. Yet, throughout the book, you want to challenge these assertions. What evidence do we have that the skepticism fostered by political humor may encourage rather than discourage political participation?

I think it very much depends on the type of political humor. Most of the traditional late-night comedians like Leno and Letterman do traffic in a more cynical form of political humor. The jokes are primarily aimed at the personal foibles of particular public figures, sending the overall message that all politicians are corrupt/lazy/stupid, etc. and that there is not much we can do about it except feel superior. That type of political humor arguably does foster a cynical distrust of politics.

However, I think the satirists surveyed in the book are doing something far different. For starters, both the humor and the critique tend to be aimed at policy as opposed to just personalities. While someone like Jon Stewart, for instance, does not necessarily pass up all opportunities to take pot shots at particular people, his primary focus is more often on a particular bill, an ideological fight, or the way in which a substantive issue is being framed by the news media.

This type of humor is not ultimately about how useless it is to care about political issues; rather it is premised on the feeling that there are political issues out there that we should care deeply about. Indeed, Stewart's interview segments often then demonstrate an attempt to find solutions to problems through earnest debate with his guests.

Further, in the case of the documentarians and activists I examine, their work is aimed almost exclusively at getting people engaged, often imploring their audiences to take action, which is the antithesis of cynical withdrawal. Finally, the fan communities coalescing around these forms overwhelmingly demonstrate an avid engagement with the larger political debate.

As you note, many writers have assumed that parody and satire represent conservative forces on society, where-as many have seen the artists you are exploring as essentially progressive. How do you explain the disjuncture in how we evaluate political humor?

I don't think satire is inherently progressive or conservative. Rather, it can be mobilized in many different ways. There has been a tendency, particularly when examining classical literary satire, to assume that it functions conservatively because it has often been used (as discussed above) to criticize personalities rather than larger political systems or to disparage unconventional behavior, all while the satirists remain safely on the sidelines.

However, as I've said, these satirists are clearly not as removed from the political realm (often even using their own bodies as primary components of the stunts). They are also interested in pointing to alternatives and often in entreating viewers to take action.

Further, these forms of satire tend to be mobilized in a fairly populist register, as the satirists position themselves as stand-ins for the everyman citizen frustrated at the dissembling of public figures and the irresponsibility of the press corps.

I would definitely describe these examples of contemporary political satire as progressive. This certainly does not apply to all types of satire across all media in all periods of time, but it does demonstrate that satire has become a particularly attractive mode of intervening in the larger political debate at this moment.

Amber Day is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the English and Cultural Studies Department at Bryant University. She is the author of the book Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.

From the VCR to YouTube: An Interview with Lucas Hilderbrand (Part Two)

In talking with fans, it is clear that many of them began "recording" programs well before the availability of videotape. That is, many fans of the Baby Boom generation used audiotape to capture and replay moments from favorite films (smuggling it into the theater) and television shows (using alligator clips attached to their set). What would we learn about the prehistory of video by extending your count back further in time to account for the capacities of audiotape as a means of preserving and exchanging media content? This example suggests some of the challenges, since I gather such practices are rarely discussed in official records of the period, yet loom large in the popular memory of many fans of my age.

It struck me that the histories of video, as they had been written, had not paid enough attention to audio. Not only was the technology for videotape based upon audio recording technologies, but it also seemed to me that popular uses and adoption of the format were similarly modeled upon audio cassette tapes. In addition, my thinking about the grain of videotape was enormously influenced by the histories on sound recording, sound art, and music--for instance, the way intentional distortion or snippets of tape played backward in a song calls attention to a technologically specific aesthetic. Of course video bootlegging had a prehistory in music bootlegging, and of course home taping started with audio. Such audio taping would have implicitly called attention to its own limitations: both in terms of low fidelity recording and the absence of a corresponding image. Yet, such recordings were deeply personal, and likely to either be listened to repeatedly or kept as part of a personal archive.

Your discussion of Superstar highlights Todd Haynes' origins as an independent videomaker who used "bootleg" practices to create and circulate his work. As I am writing these questions, my Tivo is already set to record Haynes' high profile version of Mildred Pierce for HBO. What might a fuller elaboration of Haynes' career tell us about the ways grassroots and independent media production is helping to shape the commercial mainstream? Has anything remained from the "bootleg aesthetic" as he has made this transition?

Todd Haynes was always a filmmaker rather than video artist, but his work is frequently citational. In other words, most of his work builds from pre-existing sources in cinema and popular music, which in and of itself suggests a sensibility of the video era, when one could have access to an array of old films from different periods, and to fan-based remixing. His appropriation has gone from unauthorized music use with Superstar to complicated fabulations of rock history with licensed and original music in Velvet Goldmine to a simulation of mid-century melodramas with Far From Heaven to a remake with intentions of fidelity in Mildred Pierce. Yet, even Mildred Pierce is filtered through 1970s cinematic representations of the 1930s. I don't subscribe to HBO, so I'll have to wait for the DVDs to be available on Netflix to see Mildred Pierce.

Much of the fascination with video has rested with the ability to form our own collections, archives, libraries of materials, which reflect our own idiosyncratic tastes and interests. As you write, "VHS and other analog formats have allowed users to own texts and to make texts their own: to keep them, study them, rework them, copy them, and share them with their friends." Yet, with the drying up of the DVD market, some are predicting we are moving towards a world where we rent access to media but may not be able to collect and own it. Do you think this is a reasonable prediction and if so, what do you see as the losses to our culture implicit in this move towards a new model of access?

I've already suggested something along these lines, but basically, as we move from a tangible media model based on purchasing an object (a physical cassette or DVD) to a streaming media model based upon licensing or subscription, we may lose access to a particular title at any moment when its contract expires or it goes offline. In the tangible model, what is paid for is the hard copy, not the "content", but that tangibility guarantees access to the recording until that copy becomes unplayable. In streaming scenario, we may find ourselves assuming that a particular video will always be available, only to find it's no longer there. I think we've probably all experienced this kind of unreliability with trying to watch something that has been pulled off of YouTube. But it can also happen on Netflix or Hulu. However, the content industry, as far as I know, has never gone to anyone's house and taken back VHS tapes and DVDs that someone has recorded or bought.

You discuss the kinds of feminist media network which emerged through the practices and ethics of video "sharing." To what degree has this politicized conception of "sharing as caring" continued as we moved deeper into the digital era?

We can find numerous examples of using YouTube or other sites for posting and circulating grassroots, activist, or expose videos. But we also see a couple different conceptions of community video emerge. One is Kickstarter, which has become an important way for raising financing for independent media projects, which depends on social networks of friends pledging small financial contributions and an ethos that personal investments are increasingly necessary to mount radical work in an age of limited public funding. But there also continues to be a less overtly politicized model of fan communities forming around reworked media texts that circulate on YouTube yet that may do so in ways that seek to remain stealth. For instance, I have a friend who has recently become deeply involved in the numerous Glee fan videos posted on YouTube centering on Klaine (the relationship between Kurt and Blaine). The comments reveal intense emotional--and eroticized--responses to these videos that essentially form a community based upon feelings, but they are also clearly aware that the videos are uploaded without network permission. So the comments reflect contradictory impulses: the profuse emotional expressions are always in tension with self-policing tactics to never mention the name of the show in the comments, in the hopes that Fox will not track the videos and issue take-down notices.

In your concluding discussion of YouTube, you make a claim that one of its defining characteristics is that of "instantaneity", noting "Users post television clips almost as soon as they have been broadcast," a practice that can call attention to specific moments captured from the endless flow of the broadcast signal. From the start, video has been tied to "time shifting", so what does YouTube add to our relations to the time of Broadcast experience? And how do these new temporal relations shape what becomes the most valued content at this video-sharing site?

One of the things that YouTube reminds us of is the complicated--and often seemingly arbitrary--rules of access for TV. Some broadcasts are truly fleeting, while other shows seem to never go away and recur in syndication with inexplicable frequency and longevity. But YouTube also expands and blurs our understanding of the boundaries of what counts as television by streaming network clips alongside webcam rants, fan remixes, and cat videos. When I've taught television, I have found it impossible to make any assumptions about what students watch now or what their cultural touchstones would have been growing up. The timeshifting of video, cable, and now YouTube only make this more complicated: new popular texts no longer have the same cultural dominance in their own moment, for better or worse, at the same time that our experiences of older texts seem to be less and less periodized. As YouTube comes to seem more everyday and less novel, we are amassing a history of viral videos, too, and so they may have less cultural penetration or staying power in cultural memory. What we see on YouTube are idiosyncratic viral phenomena and long tails.

Lucas Hilderbrand is faculty in film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to core courses on film and TV, he teaches classes on popular sound media, documentary, sex in cinema, Disney, and queer nightlife. He is a contributor to flowtv.org and is currently researching the cultural history of gay bars in the U.S.

From the VCR to YouTube: An Interview with Lucas Hilderbrand (Part One)

What happened before YouTube? It's a question we've addressed here many times before. Many different histories lead to our current moment of video sharing and DIY media-making -- some subcultural (the history of fandom and a range of other communities of practice which are generating new content), some economic, some technological. Lucas Hilderbrand, author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, holds some critical pieces of the puzzle, writing with historiographical sophistication about the emergence of video as a technology and as set of cultural practices, about the debates it sparked especially around shifts in control over production and distribution, about the communities which formed around the sharing of tapes, and about how all of this looks forward to contemporary digital practices. It is a book which raises vital questions and provides a rich historical context for our current debates.

As someone who lived through the era when the VCR was launched, the book brought back many memories of things I had almost forgotten about the dramatic adjustments which the culture made to this transformative and transgressive technology. Working through the book for an interview, I was struck by the fact that I, like many other instructors, have had very little to say about videotape in my current course on new media and culture, something I will work on the next time I teach it.

Given my enthusiasm for this book, I was delighted to be able to interview Hilderbrand and share with you his own reflections on the ways the history of video can help us to understand some contemporary media developments.

As you note, the debates about videotape form an important precursor to current debates about digital technologies -- especially those concerning the implications of expanding grassroots control over media production and circulation and debates around copying and intellectual property. From the start, video was understood as "out of control," as shifting the balance of power between established media producers and distributors, new entrepreneurs, and consumers. What can we learn from tracing the history of video, which might better inform current discussions around file-sharing, piracy, and YouTube?

For me, the stakes of the project were always largely historical and in response to a threat of cultural amnesia. On the one hand, I was interested in intervening in new media studies, which has historically focused on the newness and nowness of technologies. I was intrigued by work that rethought newness in a historical sense, by returning to the 19th century and examining old media in their own moments of newness. But even this more historical work seemed to erase recent and increasingly obsolete technologies from memory and from the histories of new media. It seemed to me that many of the functions and political struggles surrounding new digital technologies had already pre-existed with tape technologies. I thought that it was important not only to complicate the hype surround new media but also to look back at the lessons we could learn from these prior moments that shaped the present.

In terms of questions of policy and sharing, I was struck that so much of the anxiety about piracy and the litigation around copyright seemed like a replay of the controversies that surrounded audiocassettes and videotape when they were introduced. Both the recorded music and the film industries fought tape because they feared that if audiences could make their own copies, that there would be economic collapse for the content industry. For the film studios, at least, VHS proved to be a huge economic boom. The challenge then, as more recently, was to find a new business model that didn't alienate the audience but also provided reasonable and accessible ways to market content.

But the differences between digital distribution and analog tape sharing are also obviously significant in terms of efficiency and scale and in terms of their financial threat, so we need a technologically specific understanding of both the material practices and policy implications. But there's also a major difference between the ways file sharing and burning a DVD work, so even "the digital" needs to be complicated and differentiated.

You describe video as the beginning of "on demand" culture, but also note that this culture has always been constrained on a practical level by issues of availability. How might we carry forward these tensions between the promises and reality of access to think about recent offerings by Amazon, Netflix, and others, that would make more movies and television shows available on demand?

The innovations are largely changes in convenience: as you have suggested in Convergence Culture, convergence often means the availability of the same content across multiple platforms. Even before streaming video, Netflix was functionally the best video store in the world, insofar as it has more selection than any single brick-and-mortar store could, yet even Netflix's inventory was limited to content that had been released on DVD. There remain treasures and obscurities that have never been made available on DVD. And, of course, every tangible technology wears out eventually, so if Netflix's discs of a film got scratched, broken, or lost and that title had gone out of print, it could not be rented. So there is always the limitation of what is made materially available.

For me, streaming video creates a different set of issues. On the one hand, people seem very enthusiastic about Netflix streaming and Hulu. These offer instant streaming access to an ever-increasing range of films and TV shows, and these have been two of the leaders in establishing a new business model that makes online distribution economically viable for the industry. But that model is based upon licensing and subscription rather than purchase. In other words, what is sold is time and access, but that access could be cut off at any time--if the user stops paying or the service's licensing agreement with the rights-owners lapses. Unless users figure out a way to hack, download, and store the material, we are moving toward a model where there is no longer fixity and the assurance of long-term access that a videotape or a DVD allows. We are also moving away from a collector model. This is potentially alarming for fans and especially for teachers and scholars. It will be very hard to teach film and TV when we no longer have stable access or recordings that can be cued. But in the meantime, most people seem to be embracing the streaming model for its convenience. It's been an economic boom for Netflix, and I frequently hear people complain if they have to wait for a DVD to be mailed rather than have streaming access.

Your book argues that issues of access and copying give rise to an aesthetic that recognizes if not respects the reality of "degeneration" which characterizes all analog video. Yet the digital introduces the potential for a "pristine" copy, an image that does not wear down through use. In my own research, I've watched aesthetic shifts in the fan vidding world between early vids which showed rainbow lines and other technical imperfections which emerged from the process of copying and more recent work that uses digital editing techniques and uses DVDs for the source material. What changes do you think have occurred in "video" aesthetics as a consequence of the shift from analog to digital?

First, I'd like to challenge the concept that digital technologies are perfect. Although in principle reproduction should not involve degeneration, most digital reproduction does involve compression, which is a different kind of loss. Perhaps I didn't think this through as clearly as I could have at the time when I was writing: analog reproduction operates through degeneration, digital reproduction through compression. In addition, so many of our interactions with new technologies involve frustration and troubleshooting, whether it's an unreadable DVD or a problem toggling a laptop to a projector or an email missing an attachment. Some of these problems are about mechanical failure, others about human error.

In terms of resolution, I was struck that, when the electronics and content industries began the push for audiences to adopt HD TVs and DVD formats, we saw more rapid adoption of low-resolution video technologies, from YouTube to cameraphones. These low-res options have become increasingly refined to allow for clearer resolution, but it seemed to me that it was convenience rather than pristine quality that generated a massive response. That said, there are numerous instances on YouTube and elsewhere that viewers will prefer a high-quality copy when it's equally available. But we also see a blurring of the two models of "prosumer": producer-consumers often have access to professional-consumer grade technologies that allow for slick fan productions.

Yet evolutions in video aesthetics, I think, make outmoded image resolutions not just dated but increasingly visible. When I started thinking through analog video aesthetics, there wasn't much analytical work to build from, but there are now many popular examples that suggest recognition of what old video technologies look like. The technology has become a style. A friend told me that his iPhone has a filter on its camera to make the image look like VHS. I've seen similar effects that make still images look like Polaroids. So now we have a fetishization of the retro.

Lucas Hilderbrand is faculty in film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to core courses on film and TV, he teaches classes on popular sound media, documentary, sex in cinema, Disney, and queer nightlife. He is a contributor to flowtv.org

and is currently researching the cultural history of gay bars in the U.S.

Responses to My Rant about House, Castle, and White Collar

My blog post last week ranting about how television deals with committed relationship clearly hit a responsive chord with lots of readers and has generated more response than anything I've posted here in a long, long time. Not only have we had active comments posted on the blog, I've also been receiving messages via e-mail, Tweets, Facebook updates, and in person comments. Today, I wanted to share some of the e-mail responses I've received so far, hoping to generate even more reflection out there on these issues. Please, if you want to add anything and have trouble with the Spam Filter on the blog proper, send me e-mails at hjenkins@usc.edu, and do signal that you intend the comments for publication here. So far, the series most often cited as having a great husband-wife relationship is Friday Night Lights, which I have not seen, but may give a chance based on this level of intense fan excitement.

Mr, Jenkins,

Hello! My name is Nicole Bessette, and I will be attending USC's School of Cinematic Arts as a Critical Studies major in the Fall. While on Twitter today, a friend sent me the link to your most recent article regarding the difficulty television has in representing committed relationships, and much as you confessed to inhaling Castle recently, I seemed to have done the same with your article. Your point of view and the way you so eloquently expressed it really struck a chord in me, so I wanted to take this time to wholeheartedly thank you for sharing it with me and so many others.

I, myself, have been a Castle enthusiast since the show first premiered two years ago, and I always tell people that the best thing about it and the reason why I personally believe it to be the best show on television is because of the writing. Mr. Andrew Marlowe, also a USC alumnus, has truly mastered every ounce of the show--from its characters to its relationships--and what I admire about him most is that he has given us a show that actually feels real. Unlike House, you can fully invest in these characters and the relationships that they have with each other, and at the end of each new episode, you turn off your television feeling as though you're a part of something bigger. For this and many other reasons, I could not agree with you more in believing that Castle is just the show to break the mold of the "unrealistic" TV relationships.

In fact, I have become so taken with Castle that I have begun writing about it for a website called BuddyTV.com. As their exclusive Castle Fan Columnist, I volunteer my time every Monday to write recaps of the latest episodes, and although it is often a very time-consuming process, I couldn't enjoy it more because I am being given such a great opportunity to promote a show that I love. In fact, through the power of the social media phenomenon that is Twitter, I was even fortunate enough to have three of the stars of the show (Molly Quinn, Tamala Jones, and Jon Huertas) read one of my articles. I guess all in all, however, what I am really trying to say, Mr. Jenkins, is that I am so very grateful to you for taking the time to highlight some of Castle's best features and in turn support what I believe to be the best show ever on television. What's more, I very much look forward to meeting you on campus sometime in the near future. Again, my sincerest thanks for taking the time to read this, and I wish you all the best!

--

Nicole Bessette

Hi

The whole conversation about what constitutes a good relationship or a bad one and how some show runners are awesome at portraying every kind of relationship, while others are only good at some, is something I love discussing, so here goes:-

For me a show that always did well with relationships was Friday Night Lights. The central couple of Tami and Eric Taylor were possibly the most realistic portrayal of a married couple I've seen on tv. They had been married for years and knew each other inside out. They did that silent communication thing (FNL were actually really good at letting silences work for them in general), they supported each other when their daughter, Julie, tired to play one against the other. They had silly arguments, they had more serious arguments but never was their love for each other in questions.

The writers didn't feel the need to have anything sensational happen within their marriage - no OMG secrets, no affairs, nothing like that. And they were one of the most compelling couples on TV because they were written WELL. Kind of like all the reasons you cited for liking Elizabeth and Peter on White Collar, who I also love.

I think that's the thing the writers and Nathan Fillion need to remember - if it's well written it will engage the viewer and they'll still want to see what happens next. The problem is it's the badly written relationships that stick in people's minds, creating the idea that as soon as two people finally get it together they become boring. It's the writing and the fact that writers don't necessarily know what they are going to do after the initial get together that creates a problem. For example: Sarah and Chuck's relationship evolved and moved on once they got together, but it's never been boring.

In fact, talking about Chuck, it reminds me of something that really annoys me - when shows will do anything ANYTHING to keep their main couple apart - to the point where it becomes a joke, it no longer comes about organically from the story, but it's just the writers wondering what they can do now to keep them apart and it becomes boring and annoying.

A show that did really badly with relationships was Stargate Altantis. The one that really sticks in my head is the Rodney McKay/Katie Brown fiasco. The two characters went from awkwardly liking each other to McKay proposing. It was ridiculous. McKay never spent any time with Katie and they seemed to find looking at each other, casually touching each other or giving each other chaste kisses really embarrassing. It was baffling that the writers thought that the viewers would buy into the idea that Katie and Rodney were in an actual, grown-up relationship. Then there was McKay's relationship with Keller that seemed to come out of nowhere - at least on McKay's part, and again had him spending little to no time (that the viewer saw or heard about) with the woman he professed to love. Those are not writers who should ever try to depict honest to god grown-up relationships.

I would love to tell certain show runners that you can't just throw a relationship at the viewers and expect them to like it. It needs lead-up, we need to see it happening (or at least be able to look back and see it happening). Also, make sure you don't take time away from the aspects of the show that viewers like, just to be able to include the romance, we kind of hate that. Along the same vain, don't forsake friendships and other relationships that have been portrayed for seasons for a romance that the viewers are going to be less invested in. If you bring in a new character, we resent them, if it's a regular character we resent that the others are being screwed. And if you bring two regular characters together - and it wasn't signposted from the beginning - you are going to have to put up with the fans who hate character A and character B being together.

I'd also like to tell show runners of certain kinds of shows that, really, romance isn't for them. Something like NCIS, for example. I watch that for the team interactions. I don't care about their romantic entanglements. The only one I'm okay with is Abby/McGee because that was something that existed from the moment McGee appeared and somehow the writers have managed to make sure that it doesn't take over the show and it's always done subtly and rather cutely. Compare that to Ziva and Tony, where you often feel like you're being hit over the head with a sledgehammer - also, thinking about Ziva and Tony, if you're actors don't have chemistry when possibly moving towards a romantic relationship, drop it. It's painful to watch.

When romance comes into shows that I don't equate with romance, I tend to stop watching them. I stopped watching CS:NY after the 3rd season because the writers focused WAY too much on Danny and Lyndsay and I found it boring.

And one final thing: show runners, you don't need romantic relationships in shows just to attract women. We like shows with little to no romance just fine and you tend to piss us off if you suggest that a show suddenly has romance in it to 'appeal to women'. Stop. Just, stop it. One of the reasons I like Nikita: the women don't spend their time angsting over guys or talking about them all the time.

I hadn't realised that this had got so long, so I think I'm going to stop now *g*

Iona Liddell

Hi Henry-

I recently rewatched My So-Called Life (thx netflix) and was surprised at how Angela Chase's parents were represented strongly as individuals also trying to navigate their own so-called lives. They were thoughtfully represented as individuals committed to each other while also trying to maintain some sort of healthy and separate identity/autonomy within a marriage and family.

-- C Coy

I think my gold standard for how to show a relationship is always gonna be John Crichton and Aeryn Sun, because even if it didn't reach solidly committed stage until pretty late, somehow it felt like that was what it really was the whole time, in a way. And I never felt any sense that they were any less interesting when they were committed, instead they were more.

But yeah, I agree totally with what you said about White Collar, because I adore the relationships and maturity in that show. \o/

--Alyndra N

Hello Professor Jenkins!

Wannabe aca-fan, graduating student in Media Communication and administrator of Bones Italian fandom, here!

I have to say that I'm always very interested in what you write, both academically and personally, but with the article you wrote yesterday you really touched my inner shipper's heart.

Given my experience on the subject, I think I can add another point of view to the discussion.

I think you're absolutely right when you say that television authors usually don't know how to represent a good healthy committed relationship, but it's also true that -often- they don't even have to arrive to depict that "committed" part of the relationships.

If you ask me, the real problem is that the "will they/won't they" dynamic works too well! I speak from personal experience when I say that it's like an addiction! No matter how long the authors keep the pair a non-couple or how bad the story gets, people can't help but coming back for more, hoping every time that THAT is gonna be THE time...

Unfortunately, this postponing the unavoidable is a pull so strong for the public (especially the female one) that let the networks to collect very high ratings, thus to pose two possible scenarios:

1) the authors get scared, become "cowards" and, dreading the "Moonlighting curse", let the pair remain a non-couple;

2) the authors are ready for the big step, but the network make them wait. And wait. And wait. And the pair remains a non-couple.

In any case, the pair finally becomes a couple when it's usually too late and the story is already ruined.

My favorite series, Bones, for example, is now, in its sixth season, dangerously bordering this "deadline".

Bones is a declared character-driven drama disguised as a procedural, starring Emily Deschanel and dear old pal David Boreanaz from the Whedonverse. It's considered like Castle's big brother because it's the one from where Castle authors take their inspiration. If you are enjoying the characters' dynamics in Castle, you definitely can't miss Bones!

I am now able to appreciate Castle as well (I'm loving the 3rd season!) but I couldn't begin to truly appreciate it until I accepted the fact that it wasn't really a "bad copy" of Bones (here at BuddyTV you can find a very funny article on the subject), but a different show that tries to address most of Bones' main themes from a different perspective.

These two shows definitely have a different "touch", maybe Bones is a little bit more deeper and Castle a little bit more frivolous, but in the end they're very similar and if you like one, you can't help but ending up loving the other as well.

For 5 years in Bones everything was great: the scripts were funny and intense at the same time, the characters explored at 360° and the chemistry between the main (non)couple exceptional, but then the authors (and the network), fearing of ruining everything, didn't have the stomach to take them to the next level when the time was right and decided to drag the story keeping them apart for a little longer but in this way they completely damaged their chemistry, depriving the show from its main point of strength.

Now, Castle has one huge advantage on Bones: it's 3 years younger and can learn from its big brother what to do and what not. Will it have the courage to take the big step sooner than Bones? At the moment, nobody can tell.

I, in the meantime, will keep to watch them both because they are, without any shadow of doubt, the two shows that best narrate their characters and if the writers will be so good to mantain the chemistry between the main couples even when they'll officially become couples, the shows will become even better!

Glad to have read your rant and hoping to read another as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Beatrice Belli

PS: My friends say that Chuck is a tv show where the authors knew how to put together the couple without ruining the chemistry but I don't watch it so I can't confirm, sorry.

Just read your fantastic Castle post. You say it's less aca, more fan - but with fan writing that has insight like that, who even needs academics? :p

You end the post with " But, tell me, what would you most like to teach the show runner of your choice about the care and feeding of actual human characters involved in committed relationships?" But do you specifically mean romantic relationships specifically, or any bond between characters? Because as you rightly point out, while the elements of the plot, the contrivances of the genre, may hook us in and keep us curious, it is always the characters and their emotional attachments to each other that led the viewer forge a connection. Even with something Lost, one of the most successful recent shows to have people coming back for "OMG what's next!", it's eduring appeal, I'd argue, was based on character attachment. Conversely, did Heroes become dull because of contrived plots? Or because we know longer much cared for its characters. Of course, none of what I am writing is I think even remotely novel.

I'll echo everyone on Friday Night Lights. The relationship between First Lady and President was quite interesting on The West Wing. I don't think I've ever paused to reflect on The Good Wife, in part because though I enjoy the show immensely, it rarely bears close scrutiny.

And a really fantastic show in all ways, including a wickedly incisive on again off again romance, is the Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows. It's a metatextual dramedy about a Shakespeare Festival in small town Ontario, where the slightly mad artistic director is haunted by the ghost of the previous artistic director, as they direct Hamlet in the first season, MacBeth in the second, and King Lear in the third. After The Wire, almost certainly the best work of Television I've ever encountered.

Two surprisingly interesting relationship dynamics are in very male dominated show. The first is Californication. You'd think the premise of bad boy artist fuck-up who sleeps around would wear thing after four seasons, and yet amazing, it is still compelling. And his absolutely love for Karen is really something. The relationship is completely FUBAR, and yet it's amazing how much they care about each other, and how we care for them. It's as if Hank Moody exerts on us as viewers the same sort of charm he does on women - we know he's an asshole, part of us just wants to get inside him (metaphorically, in the viewers case).

Second, a surprisingly interesting relationship is Ari Gold and his wife on Entourage. Now, it's not particularly realistic - nothing on the show is - and maybe ways, it's less about them as a couple but how it shows a different perspective to Ari. Even so, it's evolved into something very different than much of the show (and indeed, Ari's marriage is a crucial issue at the end of the most recent season).

And in terms of Castle specifically - yes, I think we'll get there. As it's much more than romantic tension, there have been so many missed connections of confessions of love. I agree with the poster's analysis of bones, that they "will they/won't they" will tire eventually. I think they are playing it out nicely, though occasionally it's torture as a fan. Think of the scene where they finally kiss - and yet, "nothing" evolves from that. Of course, any romantic entanglement between the two will have its own comedic pitfalls. I find it highly unlikely they would stay together without breaking up at least once. But so far, much like Californication, they have managed to stretch a charming premise way past it's usual expiry date, so I give them faith. I think for it to be most engaging, the doctor boyfriend needs to be an actual on screen character as much as he is tallked about. Even with limited screen time, Castle's flames have left way more of a mark than Becket's long term boyfriend.

And as well edited as that "closure" video was....Blah! If I want some that sappy, I'll watch Fillion's old soaps.

Michael Carens-Nedelsky

Dear Henry,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful insights into the problem of TV writing today and the lack of committed relationships being depicted. I have to totally agree with you. I am a HUGE Castle fan and have been watching since the very first episode. I have watched the relationship grow over the past three seasons and it does worry me a bit that one of the actors (Nathan Fillion) is leery about the relationship moving forward and the thought that it will get dull or boring and lose fans by doing so. But, I believe it doesn't have to be that way.

Take, for example, the Thin Man movies you were talking about, and that makes me think of the TV show Hart to Hart. Was that show ever great or what? They were married, the show was interesting, their chemistry was remarkably charming, and I know I was never bored watching it. That was one sexy couple and they were in a committed relationship, imagine that? Also, White Collar also has a great married couple, but Elizabeth is a little bit under used in that series and so we don't see her a whole lot. But, again, it's a great example of what a great committed couple looks like.

As far as House goes, I believe that it all boils down to the characterization. I believe that as he is written, he is just a miserable person and doesn't believe he deserves happiness or even that he can truly be happy. So, I think he will always try to sabotage anything good that could possibly ever happen to him. I know he loves Cuddy and she loves him, but that is one relationship that I think may be better off as it is currently. Especially since he has proven that he can't be there for her when she really needs him (her recent cancer scare) and he's so afraid of his feelings that he turns to drugs again to drown them out. I don't think he will ever be emotionally mature to handle being with her (or anyone really.)

Which brings me back to Castle. I had heard that the creator Andrew Marlowe stated that when creating Castle he modeled part of it from old black and white movies. You can certainly see there are characteristics he used, like the great banter from the Tracy/Hepburn movies like Woman of the Year, or even Hepburn/Grant in Bringing Up Baby (not that he used those specifically I am just referencing movies I feel have that great back and forth between the characters). Castle and Beckett have had that great give and take right from the start. The issue I see is that from the very first episode as the show is written, there is that "attraction." Castle is pretty much hitting on Beckett from the start. I feel that Castle in the first season is depicted a bit as a womanizer. (that is just my opinion and how I saw him in Season One.) I think he has mellowed out as the seasons have gone on and has even shown a bit more maturity as the series progresses. I have sensed that Beckett's hesitation in allowing herself to admit to feelings for him may stem from her first impressions of him (if it was the same as mine. Again I am just speculating).

I feel that if a show starts out from the first episode, catering to this immense attraction, it's only inevitable that the fans start getting restless for the couple to become a romantic couple. Castle is now in Season 3 and we have had episodes like Knockdown where the characters kissed, even though it was supposedly as a "cover". And episodes like Countdown when the characters come very close to death and one character comes close to finally admitting that they love the other (at least it looks like what she was about to say.) Then we have the last few episodes where there is barely any interaction between Castle and Beckett of any kind of personal nature. It's very hard for fans who are rooting for this relationship to all of a sudden feel like the brakes are being slammed on just when that train just started to pick up some speed.

I believe for a show to survive the will they or won't they debate, they should take a clue from The XFiles. This was a show that did not introduce their two main characters right from the start as having this immense sexual tension between them. They developed a working relationship, a friendship and years down the road you get a hint of something deeper going on. I didn't even consider them a romantic couple until the first XFiles movie came out and they almost kissed. That was when it finally dawned on me that they could have the potential to be a great couple. I know a lot of XFiles fans would disagree, just like there are Castle fans out there who don't want to see them get together either. I believe that for Castle, it has to happen. They have to have these characters give a relationship a shot. The writing the whole time has been working towards that, I think it's very obvious. And I do believe they can make it work. Take Scarecrow and Mrs. King for example, they gave it a shot and even got married . Okay, so the marriage was a secret but I believe if Kate Jackson had not gotten sick and if the show hadn't ended due to her illness it would have lasted longer and it would have been exciting to see where it would have gone.

So, yes there is hope that a happy, committed relationship between Castle and Beckett is possible. And I hope the writers prove Nathan Fillion wrong and Stana Katic right. And make some of us die hard Castle fans who want to see them together very happy. And I can't believe I am about to say this but here goes... But, if they feel they do think a romantic relationship between Castle and Beckett will dive bomb like Moonlighting, then let the characters move on and form committed relationships with other people. It would break my Castle fan heart, but at the same time I would rather they just stop it now then hesitate for too long and miss the wonderful chance that could have been theirs.

Thanks so much for listening and so glad you love Castle as much as I do!

Sincerely,

Judy Peak

I, myself, have been a Castle enthusiast since the show first premiered two years ago, and I always tell people that the best thing about it and the reason why I personally believe it to be the best show on television is because of the writing. Mr. Andrew Marlowe, also a USC alumnus, has truly mastered every ounce of the show--from its characters to its relationships--and what I admire about him most is that he has given us a show that actually feels real. Unlike House, you can fully invest in these characters and the relationships that they have with each other, and at the end of each new episode, you turn off your television feeling as though you're a part of something bigger. For this and many other reasons, I could not agree with you more in believing that Castle is just the show to break the mold of the "unrealistic" TV relationships.

In fact, I have become so taken with Castle that I have begun writing about it for a website called BuddyTV.com. As their exclusive Castle Fan Columnist, I volunteer my time every Monday to write recaps of the latest episodes, and although it is often a very time-consuming process, I couldn't enjoy it more because I am being given such a great opportunity to promote a show that I love. In fact, through the power of the social media phenomenon that is Twitter, I was even fortunate enough to have three of the stars of the show (Molly Quinn, Tamala Jones, and Jon Huertas) read one of my articles. I guess all in all, however, what I am really trying to say, Mr. Jenkins, is that I am so very grateful to you for taking the time to highlight some of Castle's best features and in turn support what I believe to be the best show ever on television.

--Nicole Bessette

Hi Dr. Jenkins,

I just read your April 6 blog and wanted to share with you this recent post I made on another forum because it relates to your question of what would I ask of the showrunners of Castle (a family favorite in our home).

Interrupting our S/J ship to comment on confirmation. Or shipfirmation. Or...whatever we want to call it. Bear with me, I promise this is not off-topic

I am grading papers this morning while watching (loosely speaking) the last X-Files movie on tv. Now...I was a M/S (Mulder/Scully) diehard shipper. Wrote my fair share of fanfic, read some fabulous fanfic, etc... and like all shippers was clamoring for resolution.

Not that half-a$$ed stuff we got with maybe-babies that were given up, not halfway-hallway kisses (but sexy as all getout in the outtakes of movie 1), no. We wanted 100% "I fell in love with you" dialogue.

And we got it in movie #2.

Now...the next bit should be read with the understanding that not only was I a fan of the show, I worked on the show. My screen name used to be "setmedic," so that should tell you what I did. I worked hard to work on the show, because I loved the show. I tell you this so you can understand my next statement.

Movie #2 was total and utter rubbish. Start to finish.

Fragmented script, go-for-the-gore storyline with no real premise, no characters in which we could put our faith, or commit to, we certainly didn't care about M/S as characters, and they lost all cred (for God's sake, Scully **Googled** stem cell research in looking up treatment options (and seriously...a pathologist doing "cutting-edge" pediatric cancer treatment? Really?)). But, I digress.

But. Earlier in the movie we got a scene in which (strangely reminiscent of the Jack/OTHER scene) in which the camera lifts over Scully's sleeping body to reveal...Mulder. And, just five minutes ago, Scully looked deep into Mulder's eyes and said "This is why I fell in love with you."

Woo. Freaking. Who.

A small, throwaway line that meant...NOTHING.

NOTHING.

No feeling. No chemistry. By this point neither actor was invested in any way in doing the movie other than for financial reasons (yes, I do know this). It wasn't about futhering the story, or the mythology, or an homage to the fans. And it showed in the dry, passionless, "I love you," which may as well been, "That's why I bought cabbage with you."

I do not want our Sam/Jack confirmation to come in the form of a throwaway line in a crappy movie. I would much rather have fanfic and the end-of-the-series-as-we-knew-it Season 8 "Let's not dwell" pier fishing (and we all know it's not about the fishing) scene than a sarcastic, stick-it-to-the-fans tossed-off line.

I, and many of you, have brilliant imaginations and we know the actors love and respect the characters -- nearly as much as do we. I don't believe Brad would put us in the same position Chris Carter did with X-Files, but just in case, I'm laying it out there:

Dear Brad,

Please give us our unequivocal shipfirmation in a lovingly respectful way that enhances and celebrates our characters and does not make them caricatures of themselves or the genre. If that's not possible, please leave it as-is. I'm good with that.

With deepest respect,

Pol

So, Dr. Jenkins, my plea to Andrew Marlowe and Terri Edda would be to use their married relationship as a basis for the dynamic. Or the "couple-age" dynamic of the fabulous writers of the gay family in Modern Family, (and other families in the show) because they have completely nailed those relationships.

In short, Andrew and Terri, take a look around at the fantastic, successful, thriving relationships around you and mine them for the wealth of information they offer. What things do couples struggle over? Money? That's boring. For Castle and Beckett it would be about power. Castle is a typical white male who has money. Lots of money. Lots and lots of money.

What if the Nikki Heat series doesn't do as well as Derek Storm? Is Castle not writing the Beckett he sees? She should be a best-seller.

What if Castle wants to do some real police training? How would that change their dynamic? What if he decides to do the Academy?

Oh, how I'd love to write for them!

Thank you (as always) for the venue and for your fantastic insights.

Best,

Polly

Dear Prof. Jenkins:

Hello! I'm a longtime reader who loved your post on television's allergy to committed relationships, and wanted to add a few thoughts:

- Another shining example from a surprising source: The Vampire Diaries's Stefan and Elena, who have been together 32 episodes and counting. They're high schoolers, but by CW standards, staying together for more than a season = practically married. It's to the writers' credit that the obstacles they've faced as a couple have been much more compelling than the "we're so different and this can never be!!" hand-wringing they went through beforehand, and it highlights a common thread that I think runs throughout the shows that have pulled off successful relationships: respect for stability and loyalty. Elena and Stefan are largely portrayed as a sensible and well-adjusted people, which doesn't preclude disagreements, but eliminates the need to rely on interpersonal conflict to drive the plot. The town's machinations keep them busy enough. I get the sense the writers want them to stay together because there's such a rich story to be mined there, and thus have avoided the willful misunderstandings/distrust/stupidity that have been used to break up other pairings. Stefan and Elena - along with Friday Night Lights's Eric and Tami Taylor, which I'd agree with other posters is the gold standard - run contrary to the conventional wisdom that relationships that hook viewers aren't synonymous with what we want in real life. My corner of fandom would love to life-swap with the Taylors. Give me domesticity any day,

At the same time, I'll acknowledge Beatrice Belli's point that "will they/won't they" works really, really, ridiculously well - so well, in fact, that I'd guess it's one of the elements of a show that's most likely to turn casual viewers into spoiler-seeking, fic-reading, content-producing fans, and writers may be more confident in their abilities to maintain their audience's interest that way - and with good reason, since pulse-pounding depictions of domestic life are so rare and exert a different emotional pull. Not to justify writers' fears, but I think there is something uniquely engaging about UST that's hard to replicate; the tension doesn't go away once characters get together, but it comes packaged in a different form by nature, one where the attraction is no longer so hard-won. I'd be interested in hearing from people whose investment in a TV pairing grew after the protagonists got together after a looooong buildup. Then again, maybe the situation is so dire there wouldn't be any good examples, and that's the problem in the first place!

- I don't watch House, but through fandom osmosis I'd suspect that the writers have taken pains over the years to compound House and Cuddy's respective dysfunctions to keep them apart, which has now backfired in the form of reverting to tired patterns. Your point about showrunners resisting change is well-taken; however, I think what's turned me off of more shows is post-hookup characters becoming unrecognizable. The world's best chemistry can't make up for a lack of caring. I loved Jim and Pam up until season three of The Office, and my losing interest in the show had nothing to do with their getting together. I just didn't like them anymore, separately or together: the once-endearing appreciation society of whispers and pranks they had formed to make through the workday now just seemed petty and mean-spirited, and Pam got flattened into Jim's appendage. That and the plots were about 100x less funny. Same with Chuck and Sarah - I've read praise of how the writers have handled their evolving relationship, but by the time Sarah had been reduced to Chuck's damsel in distress to make it happen, I wanted out. More than anything I wish writers understood that viewers become invested not only in the idea of a relationship, but also in the separate identities two characters bring to the table, their friendships and partnerships with other characters....and the plots that frame all these interactions! I'd rather have writers focus on developing a stable male/female friendship dynamic grounded in respect before plying their audience with romantic tension. Honestly, I'm not sure whether half of the will they/won't they couples on my current shows even like each other. There's one: Leslie and Ben on Parks & Rec. Your description of Castle and Beckett also applies to them: "They clearly are two people who have fun together...and they are people who respect each other's intelligence and creativity." What I love to see in a committed relationship isn't all that different from a great friendship.

- I've never seen a full ep of Castle, but I have a few good friends who love it, and for their sake, television's, and yours, I hope Castle and Beckett achieve that elusive balance: happy but not complacent; steady but not predictable; and not too late in the show's run, when the cases remain fresh and interesting and a worthy canvas for the characters. If I could give the writers any advice, it would be to invest in some good plotting, because the intrigue of a tight mystery does wonders to supplant the tension that fades when the stakes are low. The characters are what keep me watching a show, but too often it seems like showrunners are only willing to take a big step late in the game, when the storylines and dialogue are no longer at their best. I think the long-range format is one of TV's greatest strengths, but I often wonder whether we'd be better off with short-run, UK-style series that allow for more thoughtful planning and a surer sense of direction. But your post makes me hopeful this show will use the format to its advantage, and if Castle manages to combine an ongoing committed relationship with smart cases, I will buy the DVDs so fast I'll leave skid marks.

Thanks for opening up the floor to such a great question! I loved reading the responses, and I hope it's all right mine rambled on for so long. Your work helped convince me to pursue graduate studies in media studies, so it means a lot that you took the time to read this. From one fan to another: thank you!

Best,

Jennifer Shen

A Rant About Television's Difficulty in Representing Committed Relationships

Two things collided over the past week for me as a loyal television viewer and I want to get them off my chest. I give fair warning that this is going to be a bit of a rant. There's almost no aca here and a hell of a lot of fan. The first is that after watching House M.D. with some great pleasure for seven seasons, I am more and more facing the grim reality that it has more or less jumped the shark this season thanks to its frustrating and ill-conceived representation of the on-again, off-again love affair between House and Cuddy.

The second is that I have been more or less inhaling Castle for the past month or so, watching several episodes a night in true "can't eat just one" spirit, having somehow failed to discover it until its third season, and much of what has fueled my passion for this series has been its sophisticated handling of the relationships (all of them in their varied forms and contexts) between the central characters. If you also have not discovered Castle, here's a first season preview which does a good job of spilling out the basic premise.

The contrast between the two series came to a head for me when I read the profile of Castle star Nathan Fillion in the March 25 issue of Entertainment Weekly, a cover story which correctly declared Fillion "Geek God," and which included a side bar asking Castle's two leads whether they think Castle and Beckett should "date or wait." The responses broke down rather predictably along gender lines, with Stana Katic, who plays Beckett, rooting for the two characters to "take it to the next level" and Nathan Fillion worrying that doing so will take much of the passion and tension out of the series. Here's what they each had to say:

Katic: "I might be naively romantic, but I believe that a relationship can be just as spicy when people get together as it was in the chase. The complications that happen when characters like Beckett and Castle get together can make for interesting viewing. They have ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, he has a certain kind of lifestyle and she has a certain kind of lifestyle -- and then on top of that, they actually really care for each other. It would be neat to see how these two people attract each other and drive each other crazy. I'd love to see what happens when Beckett actually touches on a couple of his pet peeves. It would be fun to see her torture him a little bit, you know, in a fun way."

Fillion: "When you get people together, [viewers] stop with the yearning, they stop with the wanting. They go, 'Ah, finally. They're together. All right, what else is on?' I know as an audience member, I enjoy knowing more than the characters I watch on TV know. [With our show it's] looking at these two, saying 'just turn around! She's making the face right now! She's making the face! You'll see it! Ah, you missed it.' The lack of resolution is what keeps people coming back. I think the challenge is how do you serve that so it's not repetitive."

And yes, I know what Fillion's worried about -- he's worried about seeing something like what has happened to House this season. But the problem with House is not that House and Cuddy are in a relationship. The problem is that the writers do not have a clue how to depict a relationship between House and Cuddy in a way which shows any kind of emotional maturity, any kind of psychological depth, and any kind of personal growth.

I often suspect that Hollywood's inability to depict relationships that grow over time has everything to do with the divorce rate in the entertainment capital, very little to do with the constraints of the medium (given how well television depicts the unfolding of interpersonal relationships over time) and even less to do with the desire of fans. (One of the things to pay attention to is how many of the "commitment" episodes for television series are written by a small handful of writers who have consistently ruined every couple they touched.)

From my experience, fandom is all about the relationships between characters, and fans are capable of pulling out insights into those relationships from the most subtle touch, the most nuanced reaction shots, and stitch them together through their stories and videos into stories which show how relationships can grow and unfold over time. Here, for example, a fan re-edits footage from the series to imagine a different kind of relationship between the protagonists.

I've been married for more than thirty years to the same woman (well, actually, neither of us remains the same person from one moment to the next and that's part of what makes marriage such a grand adventure.) My wife remains my best friend, my playmate, my mentor and confident, my sharpest critic and my biggest fan, and living together keeps me constantly on my toes.

This is the kind of relationship which we rarely see on television, again because contemporary writers seem incapable of writing such relationships -- could it be because they are twenty-somethings still recovering from their first major breakup? If I go back to older Hollywood movies, I can see the kinds of relationships I am looking for -- all you have to do is watch any movie which couples Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey or even better, my personal favorite pairing, William Powell and Myrna Loy. Watch how their relationship grows across the full run of The Thin Man series, even, though, gasp, they are together from their very first scenes. There's nothing dull, predictable, passionless, or static about their interactions. It doesn't fall back on House's cynical assumption that people are ultimately incapable of change and thus doomed to disappoint each other.

Part of what gives me confidence that Castle is not going to fall into the traps that House has is that the series itself has shown a close attention to the nuances of character interaction from its first season forward. Certainly, Castle and Beckett have grown closer to each other episode by episode and the writers have been imaginative at finding new ways to deepen their bonds with each other. They clearly are two people who have fun together, which for me is the number one requirement for a meaningful and committed relationship, and they are people who respect each other's intelligence and creativity. The series loves to show them pitching ideas back and forth, often completing each other's intelligence, and they take delight in showing the two very adult characters nevertheless playing with each other, teasing each other with hints of secrets not yet disclosed.

But it isn't just the intense chemistry between the two performers -- and the obvious passion between the two characters which everyone but they seem prepared to acknowledge -- that gives me faith for the future of the relationship. It is also that the series does a great job of depicting other kinds of relationships -- friendships and partnerships such as the one between Ryan and Esposito, mentorships such as the one between Captain Montgomery and Beckett, the father-daughter relationship between Castle and Alexis, the mother-son relationship between Castle and Martha, and even the complexities of relationships which unfold in a single relationships. They recently sprang on us a romance between Esposito and Parish that retrospectively seemed to have been hiding in plain sight all along. There's a powerful sense here that relationships do not just involve the partners but also extend across a larger social network which has a stake in each member's happiness.

And in each of these relationships, at each stage of development, there are hints that the characters involved are more than the sum of their relationships. They are still capable of surprising each other, they have both a history and a future together. This is what keeps me as a fan watching a series long past the point where the genre formulas shaping the stories have become predictable. So, why should the writers or cast worry about their ability to keep the relationship interesting once they move beyond the first blushes of courtship, given that the relationship so far has been so much deeper than teasing the audience about will they or want they?

Given the range and complexity of these relationships, there are surely many different dimensions of the life between Castle and Beckett the writers can pull out, many different things they can learn from and about each other, and many ways that their relationship can be implicated in the mysteries they solve. Of all of the shows currently on television, I think Castle has the best potential to show me the kind of committed couple that I long to see, and I am not alone as the broad range of fan videos and fan stories about these characters suggest.

There's something else which gives me hope that Castle might achieve this kind of representation of dating and married life - the other great couple currently on genre television, Elizabeth and Peter Burke on White Collar, another series currently on my Tivo, although alas, due to USA Network's short seasons, there's a painfully long wait before I'll see any new episodes. White Collar is another fannish show which lives and dies on the basis of character entanglements, entanglements which again go well beyond romance.

Here's a segment from a recent Paley Center event where a woman of the audience asks the program stars and producers about the intense bonds between the series male protagonists, Neal and Peter, and gets some interesting insights in return.

And there's another whole thesis to be written about Neal's other great friendships with his long-time partner, Mozzie, and with his sophisticated landlady, June, played by the great Diane Carroll. And I've been enjoying watching the sexy partnerships between Neal and his sometimes paramours, Alex and Sara. But above all, what I love about White Collar is its depictions of the domestic life between Peter and Elizabeth. Elizabeth (Tiffani Thiessen) doesn't get a lot of screen time: she may only be in a scene or two per episode, and due to the actress's maternity leave, she missed out a good chunk of the first half of the season, but when they are together, there is a playfulness and mutual respect which from where I sit show the signs of a happily married couple.

They know each other well. They call each other out on their nonsense. But there's no question that they would do anything for each other. Elizabeth is smart and she's intelligent, not always the same thing; she's got her own thoughts and her own life; she's not a simple appendage of her husband. And it is precisely because their relationship is complex and unpredictable and constantly evolving that it becomes a catalyst shaping the interactions with the other characters. Witness the Paley Center audience member's acknowledgment that part of what strengthens the friendship between Neal and Peter is that Peter is seeking Neal's advice on how to be a better husband.

Here's a fan video which does a great job in conveying some of what I value about White Collar's depiction of their marriage, again by cobbling together little bits that show a much bigger picture.

So, let me turn the floor over to my readers now. What do you see as the best representations of committed relationships on American television? Which couples demonstrate the capacity for trust and growth which has been sadly lacking on this season's House? What advice would you give to the showrunners at Castle about how they might intensify the relationship between Castle and Beckett without lowering the tension or diminishing audience engagement?

I know the comments function on this blog is more or less broken due to the intense spam protection I've had to put on here. So, if you don't want to fight with the submission process, send me e-mail directly at hjenkins@usc.edu and I will make sure it goes up on this site. But, tell me, what would you most like to teach the show runner of your choice about the care and feeding of actual human characters involved in committed relationships?

Check Out Student Work from Annenberg Innovation Lab Conference

Last Friday, I had the pride and joy of participating in the first conference organized by the Annenberg Innovation Lab. The Lab is a new research initiative launched over the past year, with the goal of becoming an incubator for new media practices and platforms, a space where important conversations can occur between academics and industry leaders which may help shape the future of communications. The mastermind behind the project is Jonathan Taplin, a saavy industry veteran, who has tapped his considerable network to bring some major stakeholders to the table. He's been working with two amazing women -- Erin Reilly, who is also the Research Director for my own Project New Media Literacies, is the Creative Director and Anne Balsamo, a veteran of Xerox Parc, serves as The Director of Learning. I am proud to be working with the lab on several new initiatives which I will be talking about here more in the future, including a new platform to support our work in fostering New Media Literacies and a new eBook project which will expand the resources available to Comic Studies scholars.

They've pulled in many other key researchers from across USC, providing a context which supports the move from theory to applied practice. The real special sauce at the lab is going to be the ability to mix social and cultural insights with technological experimentation and innovation in a space where humanists and social scientists can work hand in hand with engineers and business people.

Between them, Taplin, Reilly, and Balsamo hit the deck running, pulling off the near impossible, in getting the center ready to share some research results only eight months after it was originally conceived.

The conference's highlights include a conversation between Balsamo and the two authors of the important new book, A New Culture of Learning, Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown; a presentation by the musician T. Bone Burnett showing how degraded the current state of sound is within the music industry and announcing a significant new research initiative to help repair the damage of the past decade of failed digital practices; a discussion of the value of play in fostering an innovative environment whether in schools or the workplace; and some great exchanges with key thinkers and doers within the computer and entertainment industries.

But, for me, by far, the highlight was seeing the work being done by USC students as part of what the Lab calls CRUNCH sessions. Altogether, more than 60 students from 8 different schools worked over the past two terms to develop prototypes, including demonstration videos, for new projects which covered a broad range of different models of media, from innovative approaches to eBooks to new game controllers, from civic media to new kinds of visualization tools. The most amazing thing was done by the student teams fueled entirely from their own passions: the Lab provided them with a space, with brainstorming and training sessions, and with technical consultants, but they were neither paid nor offered academic credit for the considerable labor they put into the process. Most of the teams were interdisciplinary, and one of the key values of the Lab was to help match up students from across the University to work together towards common goals.

I was pleased to see how many of the students involved were people I'd been seeing in my classes and it was great to witness what they could create when turned loose on their own projects outside any academic structures. It was especially pleased to see that these projects were informed by a deep understanding of the value of storytelling and entertainment and a grasp of the actual needs of communities of users who have been underserved by the first waves of digital development.

What follows here are the five winners of the CRUNCH competition, each representing a very different model of what media innovation might look like.

NimbleTrek \ Natalia Bogolasky and David Radcliff

WeLobby \ Leonard Hyman

WeLobby from Dave McDougall on Vimeo.

Combiform \ Andy Uehara and Edmond Yee an

New Quill \ Michael Morgan

Interactive Geosurface Map -- Lauren Fenton

And for good measure, here are three more projects which I thought were too cool not to include:

Love in the Time of Genocide \ Thenmozhi Soundararajan

The Mother Road eBook \ Erin Reilly

Reading the News on the Wall \ Jennifer Taylor

Over the Rainbow: John C. Tibbetts Opens Archive of Interviews

Over the past year or so, I've been enjoying an active correspondence with John C. Tibbetts, a long-standing film researcher, who recently put out a three volume collection of highlights from American Classic Screen, a publication which in its day represented an important bridge between the world of film buffs and cineastes, on the one hand, and film scholars on the other. For a period of time, academic film scholars seemed eager to burn some of these bridges, gaining academic respectability at the expense of cutting themselves off from fans and journalists who shared their passions for film. Tibbetts is one of the film scholars who has kept these bridges very much in tact, working through the years as a practicing journalist, as well as teaching at the University of Kansas. He's recently opened a remarkable website which showcases several decades worth of interviews with some of the top creative talents of the era, one which as he explains below is fearless in bridging high and low and cutting across a range of different media. Whatever your interests, there is sure to be material here which will be invaluable to you. "OVER THE RAINBOW": A STATEMENT BY JOHN C. TIBBETTS, UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

I want to thank Henry Jenkins for this opportunity to welcome you to my new website, "Over the Rainbow," administered through the University of Kansas. It contains hundreds of my video and audio interviews spanning 35 years with pop and classical figures in the arts and humanities. The address is: kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/handle/1808/6581. Now in progress, and accessible to scholars, fans, and enthusiasts, "Over the Rainbow" has grown to more than sixty video interviews and soon will include hundreds more video and audio interviews. Eventually, they will be accompanied by brief annotations and illustrations to alert the viewer/reader to their contents.

How did I gain access to these interviews (I prefer to call them "conversations")? Opportunities for contacts were numerous. Before gaining my tenure as an associate professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas in 1998, I worked as a full-time radio and television broadcaster and free-lance journalist for CBS television, the Christian Science Monitor radio network and newspaper, Voice of America, National Public Radio, and several classical music radio stations. At the same time I edited the National Film Society's house magazine, American Classic Screen.

A NOTE ABOUT THE INTERVIEWS

These conversations encompass the worlds of "classical" and "pop" culture, with artists and performers "high" and "low," from the scholar's studio to "drive-by" encounters on the road--at backstage rehearsals, in private homes, movie premieres, music festivals, academic conferences, science fiction/horror cons, etc. As you will see, it could be argued that I have shown little discrimination in these subjects, be they "high" and "low," or somewhere in between. So be it. That's the world we live in; the media borders are porous. As Henry Jenkins has declared, "Today we are trying. . . to build bridges, to open larger conversations, and to join forces with fans and industry alike as we explore the new directions being taken within media culture."

Thus--to cite a few examples of these "bridges,"--you will find here conversations about music with blues man "Screamin'" Jay Hawkins" in a Kansas City bar and with opera star Luciano Pavarotti in the back of a luxury limousine. There are talks about gothic horror with popular novelists Stephen King and Robert (Psycho) Bloch; and with academics Professors Richard (The Age of Wonder) Holmes and Harold Schechter (The Bosom Serpent). Composer Jerry Goldsmith talks about composing for Star Trek, and "classical composer" Virgil Thomson remembers composing for Orson Welles and Robert Flaherty. Jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal and classical violinist Nigel Kennedy demonstrate techniques of improvisation. Comic book artist Bob Kane talks about creating Batman, and award-winning children's book illustrator Chris Van Allsburg remembers writing The Polar Express and Jumanji. Movie soundtrack composer Ry Cooder and Professor Charles Hamm trace American blues traditions to 19th-century African-American roots. Hollywood mainstream directors James Cameron and Tim Burton talk about Aliens and Batman, and international filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci and Peter Weir discuss their work in the Italian and Australian "New Waves."

While on the road, like a modern-day flaneur, I've always kept my microphones and cameras at the ready. I found Ray Bradbury at Disney's WED studios while working on EPCOT's "Spaceship Earth"; Robert Altman at Kansas City's fabled 18th and Vine locations while shooting Kansas City; concert pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy backstage at a Duesseldorf concert hall after a recital; historian Kevin Brownlow in the basement of his London Photoplay offices while finishing his documentary, The Tramp and the Dictator; Chevy Chase at a barbecue on the rim of the Grand Canyon after finishing National Lampoon Vacation; Jeremy Brett backstage in a West End theater before a performance of The Mystery of Sherlock Holmes; Arthur Conan Doyle's daughter, Dame Jean Bromet, in her London flat dispensing tea and cakes while recalling her father's forays into Spiritualism. George Burns in a Las Vegas casino while talking about Oh, God!; and slugger Bo Jackson in the Kansas City Royals dugout before a ballgame.

Inevitably, there are those deliciously unexpected incidents that flavor many of these conversations. Tape recorder in hand, I follow Maurice Sendak backstage while he paints scenery for a performance of the opera version of Where the Wild Things Are. I accompany Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder to the Smithsonian Institute, where they gaze in rapt amazement at the installation of the "Fiftieth Anniversary of Superman" display. Venerable concert pianist Charles Rosen interrupts our talk with a sudden discourse on Hollywood "B" movies. I clamber aboard the Memphis Belle B-17 bomber (now housed at Mud Island, near Memphis) with members of the original crew during on-site conversations about their participation in William Wyler's titular 1943 documentary classic. I watch while Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. illustrates his swashbuckling memories of working with Max Ophuls on The Exile by brandishing a sword he kept in his apartment's umbrella stand. I listened while an ageing Adriana Casellotti (the voice of Disney's Snow White) punctuates her memories of the film with shrill reprises of "Someday My Prince Will Come." While talking about Back to the Beach, Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon suddenly launch into their "Beach Party" theme song. A stark naked Tony Bennett changes costumes during a photo shoot in Los Angeles. Kermit the Frog likewise appears nude (courtesy of Jim Henson's open hand) when he interrupts Henson's remarks about Sesame Street. Instead of closing our conversation about The Color Purple with the traditional handshake, Steven Spielberg extends his hands for a quick game "patty-cake. Look closely, and you'll see Debra Winger punctuating her remarks by munching on a potted plant. Brian Dennehy responds to my invitation to offer career advice to his young co-star, Tyrone Power, Jr., in Cocoon 2 with these immortal words: "Use a little less lip gloss, kid!" Avant-garde composer John Cage finds sudden inspiration for a discourse on "found music" when an ice cream truck tinkles out its melodies below our window. And my tape recorder is rolling while Clarence "Ducky" Nash (the voice of Donald Duck) breaks up a restaurant crowd with one of Donald's squawking tantrums.

The old adage that the bigger they are the nicer they are certainly holds true in my experience. Tops on my list of Good Guys are directors Ron Howard and Richard Donner; actors Michael Caine, Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman, Danny DeVito, Michael Douglas, Sigourney Weaver, Jeff Bridges, and DeForest Kelly ("Bones" on Star Trek); academics Jacques Barzun and Susan Sontag; and ragtime composer Max Morath and opera composer William Bolcom. In particular, I'll never forget my many interviews with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Long ago, during his Conan the Barbarian days, Arnold's consummate professionalism and his love of publicity already marked him as a born politician. The losers. . . well, discretion bids me hold my tongue, but can you spell T-0-M-M-Y L-E-E J-O-N-E-S?

A NOTE ON MY AUTOGRAPHED PORTRAITS

Soon to accompany the interviews on the "Over the Rainbow" web site are hundreds of my sketches and paintings of the interview subjects. This hobby--or whatever it is--began long ago in 1966 when author Ray Bradbury inscribed my portrait of him with greetings from the characters in his stories. Not only did that launch a friendship I cherish to this day (Ray is in his late 80s now), but I was inspired to capture more likenesses and inscriptions. They now number more than 300 images.

My portraits have had their advantages during my interviews. Sometimes they triggered unexpected conversations with the subjects. Gene Hackman showed me some of the sketches he makes between takes on the movie set, and Julie Andrews and Whoopi Goldberg confessed what they really want to do is write children's books. Maybe strangest of all, Broadway superstar Mary Martin told me that she paints portraits too! But not the conventional views of faces; no, she's talking about drawing the backs of their heads. "You see," she explained, "when I was on stage during the run of The Sound of Music, I got to know the Von Trapp kids by the backs of their heads during the "do-re-mi" song. So I gave them each a drawing of the backs of their heads. And since then, I've given all my friends portraits of the backs of their heads. It's become my trademark! I also blush to admit that in swaps for my art work, fantasy illustrator Joseph Mugnaini doodled fantastic designs on my Hollywood hotel stationery, Bob ("Batman") Kane tossed off a drawing of the Dynamic Duo in the bar of the Sheraton-Universal Hotel, and Chuck Jones dashed off a Daffy Duck/ "Scarlet Pumpernickle" drawing in his Hollywood office.

I welcome all of you to visit my web site at the University of Kansas. You may find a few insights and provocations amidst some of the laughs and tom-foolery.

John C. Tibbetts (tibbetts@ku.edu)

John C. Tibbetts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas, where he teaches courses in film history, media studies, and theory and aesthetics. His most recent books are Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography (2005, Yale University Press), Schumann: A Chorus of Voices (2010, Amadeus Press), and the three-volume American Classic Screen (Scarecrow Press, 2010). Forthcoming is Voices of Wonder: Conversations on Classic Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Four)

Despite your title, you spend less time here talking about "gender" than might be expected from other books which talk about women and gaming. What roles does gender play in your analysis? What claims are you making about the different kinds of experiences and identities female players construct around games?

For me, the book is not about gender. It is about women and girls who take gaming beyond gaming to become designers within well-designed passionate affinity spaces that change their lives and the lives of others. It about these women and girls because we believe that what they are doing, how they are doing it (e.g., combing technical modding with modding for emotional intelligence and social interactions), and what they are accomplishing is on the cutting edge of where all of us are going--male or female.

Women and girls are leading the way here as they are in many other areas of society. There has been lots about modding for games like Half-Life and its connections to technical skills--and indeed this is important. But much less has been written about modding the Sims to create challenges and game play that is simultaneously in the game world, in the real world, and in writing things like graphic novels.

Such modding is the force that sustains a passionate affinity space that builds artistic, technical, social, and emotional skills. We wrote the book because these woman and girls rock, not because they are women and girls.

Also I had a sin to expiate. I had left the Sims and women gamers pretty much out of my first book on games. Betty helped me see that The Sims is a real game and a very important one because it is a game that is meant to take people beyond gaming. She helped me see that how women play and design is not "mainstream" (see comments above) but cutting edge, the edge of the future. If it were leprechauns that were the cutting edge of the future I would have written about them.

In the case of The Sims, you have a designer -- Will Wright -- who has been outspoken in his desire to empower his users to construct community and build their own content around his games. How does this goal on the part of the designer impact the kinds of stories you can tell about these women's relations to this particular game?

See answer above. Will Wright is doing in an extreme way what lots of game designers want to do: empower people to think like designers, to organize themselves around the game to become learn new skills that extend beyond the game, and to express their own creativity. Many say the Sims is not a game--and I myself used to believe that. But as Derrida would remind us, what we find marginal is often actually central. Out book argues that games like the Sims--and gaming beyond gaming--will eventually be the new center of gaming or maybe something eventually all together different.

As you get into forms of cultural production such as fan fiction, I start to wonder why is it important for you that this a book about gaming rather than about the much wider array of forms of participatory culture that have emerged in a networked society.

It is important to me because I do not want to compete with you for the participatory culture space. Further, I want to stress production, though I know well you care about production as well. There are some--not you--who in education celebrate participation in a mindless way. They argue that just because people are participating they are learning. But people can participate in ways that allow themselves to be "colonized" by a group or to gain much less than others in the group or even to be used as an example that makes others look good. I think a demand that everyone learns to produce and design--to be a "priest"--can mitigate these dangers, though I am sure that dangers remain.

I know you have expressed in the past great skepticism that our current schooling system can adjust to the potentials of this more participatory culture. Without school involvement, how do we insure a more equitable access to the kinds of formative experiences you describe in the book? On the other hand, how does a school culture so focused on standardized processes and measurements maintain anywhere near the flexibility to respond to personal passions that you've identified in The Sims?

What I have called "situated embodied problem-focused well-designed and well-mentored learning" will either come to exist primarily for elites who will get it 24/7 on demand across many institutions and their homes or it will be given to everyone.

In the first case, the regular ("mainstream") public school system will continue to teach the basics accountably and will exist to produce service workers. In the second case, we will have to reinvent a public sphere and transform our view of society, civic participation, markets, and what constitutes justice, fairness, and a good life. We are headed the first way right now, but there is always hope for the future. Both you and I are trying to push the train to the second future and not the first, though, in the end, in the future the real actors and activists in this "game" will be younger (and often browner) than we are.

The current accountability regime MUST be removed. It is immoral, stupid, and counterproductive. We define accountability around teachers failing to teach children. This is like doing accountability for surgeons by waiting to see how many people they kill and then getting rid of them if they kill too many.

Far better to have accountability back when teachers and surgeons were trained, which means radical changes in Schools of Education and universities. Surely we should not wait to see how many patients they kill or kids they screw. Teachers are punished if a kid's test scores go down, but scores could go down for many reasons, not just what the teacher did in one year. This is like punishing a surgeon when a patient dies in back surgery because his wife poisoned him--and lots of things are poisoning our children, not, by any means, mostly teachers.

What we need accountability for is curriculum and pedagogies, not teachers per se (who should have been well trained and then held to high standards that most of them can and do meet, as in the case of surgeons). Today curricula and pedagogies are often politicized, seen as right wing or left wing. If we could agree on a common measure (say a NAEP test or some other test we can come to agree on), a measure that is given to a sample of students (not given to all), so that it cannot be taught to, then we can simply say which curricula and pedagogies correlate with strong or weak results on the common measure. This is what we do with drugs and surgical procedures.

In the end, though, we MUST change our assessment system or we will never have new learning, since assessment systems, in an accountability regime, drive what is taught and how it is taught. Today's games and other digital media allow for learning to be so well designed that finishing the "game" means you have learned and mastered what it being "taught". No one needs a Halo test after finishing Halo on hard and no one should need an algebra test after finishing an equally well-designed algebra curriculum.

Furthermore, games and digital media can collect, mine, and artfully represent copious moment-by-moment data on a great many variables. So we can, with such data, assess learning across time in terms of growth; we can discover different trajectories towards mastery and use this information to help learners try new styles; and we can compare and contrast learners with thousands of others on hundreds of variables tracked across time (as we already do with Halo for instance).

When the day comes where we can contrast such assessments (based on growth, trajectories, multiple variables represented in ways that inform and develop learners, and comparison among thousands of people sorted into a zillion different types for different purposes) with our now standard "test score"--one number taken on one day--the game will be over. The choice will then be stark. Either we will develop only some or we develop everyone. The bell curve will be gone. No one needs always to be "in the middle" ("mainstream"). Everyone can, in some places and at some times, be at the very top of their game.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Three)

The part of your arguments for affinity spaces which get the most push-back from my students are your claims that "a common passion-fueled endeavor -- not race, class, gender, or disability -- is primary." To many, these seems like a very utopian claim for these spaces, which you have been careful to describe as not "communities" in the way that term is most often used. Yet, surely, inequalities impact participants at all levels, from access to the technology to access to basic skills and experiences, to access to the social networks which support their learning. How can we address these very real inequalities while recognizing that there are indeed ways where class, race, and gender matter differently in the kinds of spaces you are describing?

The statement that passionate affinity spaces are focused on a shared passion (and shared endeavors and goals around that passion) and not race, class, and gender (while allowing people to use such differences strategically as their own choices) is not an empirical claim, it is a stipulation. Something is not a passionate affinity space if it does not meet this condition. So perhaps there are none. But, then, such spaces become a goal and an ideal and we can talk about how close or far away from that goal and ideal we are.

On the other hand, it does little good to follow the standard liberal line that race, class, and gender are always and everywhere one's determining identities. This, for example, locks an African-American child into always being "an African American". A white kid can be a "Pokémon fanatic" or an expert modder, but the African American kid is always "an African-American Pokémon fanatic" or an "African-American modder".

We are never, none of us, one thing all the time. Sure, the world continuously tries to impose rigid identities on all of us all the time. But it is our moral obligation--and one necessary for a healthy life--to resist this and to try to create spaces where identities based on shared passions or commitments can predominate.

In reality, the real identities that count in life most--that define us and make us who we are--are rarely named. They are identities like "a person who would never kill someone because they did not share his or her religion" or "a person who would rather love and be loved than be rich" and a great many more such as these. These sorts of identities constitute our most significant form of human sharing and bonding. And such identities are where the deepest divisions among people occur.

It may be here that I diverge from some others. I have repeatedly seen people who are pissed off because someone said they or their work were not "mainstream". If someone called my work "mainstream" or called me "mainstream" I would be insulted. If I discovered that my work or myself was "mainstream", I would retire or find something else to do. Note, by the way, that NO good academic wants to be mainstream. If something--say, what they teach in high school--is called "mainstream history", you can bet no good young historian wants to do it and you will find next to no one, old or young, in a good history department with such a sign on his or her door.

Chibi-Robo, Ico, Psychonauts, and Shadow of the Colossus are not mainstream games. They are however great games and their designers will be long remembered when many mainstream designers are long forgotten. Remember, too, that 19th century America had only two world-class poets (Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman) and at the time neither was remotely close to mainstream. One never published and the other published his own book himself and reviewed it under various names. The monk Mendel wanted to be a high school biology teacher, but he failed his state teacher's test and was relegated to the monastery's garden. He was unknown in his time, entirely non-mainstream, and yet also the only man in his time who actually knew biology (including Darwin, who knew less than nothing about genetics), though no one knew that until much later.

Throughout the book, you celebrate "grit" as a key virtue of these new forms of cultural participation. How are you defining "grit"? Is this a skill that is valued as much in contemporary schooling?

"Grit"--originally used by Angela Duckworth in a somewhat different way--is passion plus persistence. Human expertise is a practice effect, it requires hours of effort, practice, and persistence past failure. This is unlikely to happen without passion. School has a very hard time producing grit because different people have different passions (and school is about everybody learning the same thing) and passions are something people choose (and school is often not about choice). Furthermore, interest is kindled into passion inside things like passionate affinity spaces and related sorts of social formations and these are hard to come by in schools.

In modern developed countries, only grit will lead to work or lives that are rewarding, given that most jobs will be service jobs. The passion one develops may well be in an out of work space and off market. But there has to be some space where a person has a sense of agency, intelligence, control, and creativity.

Some people have a good deal of grit at school because they believe that putting up with even badly designed schooling will lead to a good college and a successful career. It will lead to a good college, but no longer necessarily to a good career.

The world is full to bursting with educated and talented people, many of whom can compete for the same jobs across the world. Being just good at what others are also good at, in standard ways developed in standard sorts of education, will just put one in competition with millions of well-trained Chinese and Indians and many many others across the globe. In my own view, one needs to have a passion for something and master it in a creative way--it almost does not matter what it is. It could be, for instance, carving art out of avocado pits.

Whatever it is, avocado pits included, you will find via the Internet a critical number of people across the world with whom you can join with for social learning and among whom one can rise to status, respect, and a sense of real contribution and, in some cases, profit (there is not a lot of competition, at least yet, for the top places among avocado artists and, thus, a whole area is waiting to become "hot").

Many of the projects coming out of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative embrace the importance of passion-driven or interest-driven networks. Yet, increasingly, we are being asked to think about young people who do not have or have not yet discovered driving passions of the kinds the book discusses. How do you respond to critics of "geeking out" as an educational ideal? What can we do for kids who "just don't care"?

A person who cannot find a passion is going to be in trouble in our modern world as far as I am concerned. Many people will gain status, respect, control, and creativity off market (since not everyone can gain these things on market for profit in a world where, in developed countries, only 1/5 of people will be well paid). But all people need to gain these things.

All our schools and institutions are set up very poorly to help kids find their passion. We want to teach "what every citizen should know" in things like science and math (and we succeed, all Americans pretty much know the same things about science, mathematics, and geography, which is nothing).

We think we can force people to learn things. We treat collaboration as cheating. We do not give kids the time--and places where the cost of failure is low--to try out a variety of interests and identities in an attempt to discover passion or passions. We do not let kids engage with professional-like tools and activities in areas like urban planning, game design, or journalism.

Rather, we define everything to be learned in terms of content names like "algebra" or "civics" even when this "content" might be best learned as a tool set for other activities like 3-D design. We let rich kids experience what passion and practice can bring one in the world and what the routes to success are, but we do not let poor kids have this knowledge. We treat certifications and degrees as more important that actual talent and achievements.

Now what about people who just "don't care"? Barring serious illness, there are none. Every baby is born as a passion-seeking being. That is why children acquire their native languages and master much of their cultures without formal schooling.

One day, when my son Sam was a mere toddler, I found some plastic figures at the grocery store. I had no idea what they were. I brought a couple home and gave them to Sam. They were Pokémon and they led to interest, passion, and practice that made him a passionate gamer. That passion for gaming led, in ways no one could have predicted, to his current passion for acting and theater, on the one hand, and for Africa, on the other (since Age of Mythology hooked him on mythology and then on cultures beyond his own).

School is defined around outcomes it knows in advance, but does not meet for many children. Real learning kindles passions that make new kinds of people--and people capable of making themselves over again when they need to--but does not know or predict the outcome and does not, by any means, insist on the same outcomes for everyone.

MORE TO COME

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part Two)

Your most recent book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, moves us from a focus on the kinds of learning which occurs inside the game as we play towards the kinds of learning which takes place around the game as people build upon it through the mechanisms of what you would call affinity spaces or what I call Participatory Culture. You describe this as "gaming beyond gaming." What has motivated this shift of emphasis?

Women and Gaming is no longer our most recent book. Language and Learning in the Digital Age has just appeared (another book I did with Betty). My focus of late on passionate affinity spaces was caused by the influences of my son Sam (who claims correctly to have taught me everything I know about games), Betty's wonderful work on her tech-savvy girls clubs, and, of course, you.

The first thing I ever wrote on passionate affinity spaces was motivated by a request that I write a paper about my take on "communities of practice", a notion that has become very popular in a great many areas. In my view, this powerful notion has become attached to so many different things that it is in danger of losing any real meaning. When talking about such notions I think it is necessary to name what you mean very specifically and name it in such a way that it clearly indicates what you value. This is what you have done with "participatory culture" and what I did with passionate affinity spaces.

So why did I choose that term? First I wanted to argue that "interest" gets someone in the door but not out the door to any deep place unless it leads to lots and lots of practice and persistence past failure. To get such practice and persistence past failure an interest has to be kindled into a passion and an affinity space needs to be organized to help people to do this.

I use "space" rather than "community" because the word "community" carries a rather romantic connotation which it should not have. I also use the word "space" because the notion of "membership" is very complex in modern Internet spaces. People are "in" the space even if they are just lurking, but what makes them "members" is a much harder and, in some cases (though not all), a more flexible and fungible notion.

Passionate affinity spaces tend to follow the Pareto Principle (20% of the people produce 80% of the outcomes, 80% produce 20% of the outcomes), while school classrooms tend to follow (enforced) bell curves. I want to stress not just multiple forms and routes to participation, leadership, and mentorship in passionate affinity spaces, but also the opportunity for all people in the space to become producers, designers, and creators, as well as mentors to others.

All passionate affinity spaces are organized first and foremost around a specific passion that is not necessarily shared by everyone (some only have an interest), but is the "attractor" in the space around which norms, values, and behaviors are set. The book Women and Gaming is about different forms passionate affinity spaces can take and some forms we applaud. The form we applaud most is not age-graded (young and old are together); allows newbies and experts to be together; and engages in supportive interactions because people in the space accept a theory of learning that says that expertise is not in a person but in the affinity space and that no matter how good you are there is always something more to learn and someone else from whom to get help and mentoring.

Tell us more about the Tech Savvy Girls Clubs. What were the goals behind this initiative? How did these experiences inform Women and Gaming?

The following is from Elizabeth Hayes:

TSG grew out of my interest in differences among how girls and boys engage with gaming more broadly. Not only do girls and boys tend to play different sorts of games, they also do different things with games. In particular, boys are much more likely to mod games, to create content for games, and otherwise to engage with games and other gamers in ways that support their development of technical skills and identities as content creators. The Sims is one of few games in which girls and women actually predominate as content creators and modders.

I wanted to give girls who otherwise would not participate in such practices greater access, social support and encouragement to participate. We started TSG, though, with a pretty limited understanding of the learning that takes place through fan communities, or affinity spaces. We initially saw fan sites as sources of information (i.e., tutorials, examples of content) rather than as spaces where the girls could develop identities, interact with other players, and be mentored (as well as mentor others).

A crucial turning point in our perspective was conducting interviews with adult women content creators, described in Chapter 5 of the book. These women kept pointing back to the Sims player community as crucial to their interest in content creation and modding, as well as to their mastery of technical skills. Talking to these women made me realize that I had started TSG with a deficit perspective towards women's gaming practices. That is, I'd assumed that we needed to help girls engage in modding practices similar to what boys are doing, rather than starting with an appreciation for what women were already doing.

This change in perspective led us to further investigations of the fan practices already taking place around The Sims, and this research became a very important component of our work. One of my research assistants is just completing her dissertation on The Sims Writers' Hangout, a site where players post and discuss Sims stories, a form of multimodal storytelling that requires composing images in the game and combining them with often lengthy narrative texts. Another student is investigating the learning of specialist language that takes place in Mod The Sims, another fan site devoted to game modding.

This is why discussion of the social spaces around The Sims is so central to Women and Gaming. We wanted to help others see that what women are doing with games is already exciting and important, and also to shift the lens a bit, in order to encourage people to look at male-dominated game spaces in new ways.

A key theme running through the book is the importance of becoming a designer rather than simply being a player of games. What accounts for the growing emphasis on design literacies in the 21st century?

I think that the importance of design, design thinking, and design literacies today follows from the shape of the world. We live amidst complex systems of all sorts, systems which are risky and dangerous and which interact with each other to create yet more risk. Furthermore, such systems are rarely now just "natural" or just "human made".

I live in Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is a dessert. Like desserts from time immemorial, Sedona is cold at night even if it is hot in the day time. This is not so for Phoenix, which is also a dessert. It is hot at night when it is hot in the day time. This is so because of a heat-island effect. The massive amounts of concrete in Phoenix absorb the heat all day and radiate it out all night. So the temperature in Phoenix is a joint venture of "Mother Nature" and humans.

Solutions to problems involving complex systems demand multiple sorts of pooled expertise, including even the wisdom of crowds. Single minded, single focused experts are dangerous, since they undervalue what they do not know and their actions can and do create massive unintended consequences when they intervene in complex systems (as we found out in the 2008 worldwide recession and as Alan Greenspan pretty much admitted in front of Congress).

So people--citizens--need to learn to think of systems as designed or as things that act like they are designed. They need to know how themselves to produce designs as "models" to think with (and model-based thinking is the core of science).

The United States today is politically polarized and comes at all problems as if they are political or ideological, when in fact most of our problems are complex, the solutions to them are going to be compromises with tradeoffs, and we need to continuously question our expertise, values, and goals. We are so polarized today that a core goal of schooling, in my view, ought to be teaching kids to see arguments as designed and as inherently connected to evidence and perspectives and not just ideology, self-interest, and desire.

Of course, the focus on design has also come about because so many digital tools--and other tech tools--developed by and for professionals can be used today by "everyday people" to design, build, and create for themselves. There has always been the danger with any technology--most certainly including books--that people will get divided into two classes: "priests" who are experts and know the deep secrets inside the technology (or make them up) and the "laity" who consume the technology, but do not understand it enough to transform it. The potential of much digital learning today--as well as many passionate affinity spaces--is to allow more and more people to be priests. But this sort of potential has always in human history been opposed and resisted by elites, who ever seek to constrain and tame it.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part One)

James Paul Gee from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

On April 4, I will be respondent for the Pullias Lecture, being hosted by the Rossier School of Education here at the University of Southern California. The primary speaker is James Paul Gee, who is going to address "Games, Learning, and the Looming Crisis of Higher Education." For those in the Los Angeles area, the talk is being held in the Davidson Conference Center at USC, 4-6 PM.

I was delighted to be asked to participate in this exchange, both because I was recently given an honorary appointment in the Rossier School and because I have such affection and respect for Gee. We've known each other for the better part of a decade now. We've appeared together many times, often in informal conversational settings, I like to call "The Jim and Henry Show," where we talk about our shared interests in participatory culture, games and learning, and the new media literacies. Gee has been one of the key thinkers about the kinds of new pedogogical models represented by computer and video games, seeing them as illustrating alternative forms of learning to those represented by our current schooling practices. Gee has been one of the core contributors to the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative, helping to inspire a whole new generation of educational researchers, who are doing serious work not only on games but also modding, machinema, fan fiction, virtual worlds, and a range of other new media platforms and practices.

This semester, I have ended up teaching Gee's recent book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, in my New Media Literacies class. I was delighted when I first saw the book to see Gee expand upon his thinking about "affinity spaces" to think more deeply about what he and his co-author Elizabeth Hayes call "gaming beyond gaming." The term refers to the broad range of productive and social practices which have grown up around games, practices which strongly parallel what I've found in my own research on fan cultures. The book's focus on The Sims signals the importance of this game both as a breakthrough title which expanded female interest in the medium and as a model for all subsequent games which have encouraged players to build and share content with each other. Gee and Hayes are interested in the ways this game has become the jumping off place for lifelong learning processes for a range of women, young and old. It is a delightful mixture of compelling storytelling and thoughtful analysis, one which can easily be assigned to undergraduate students but which is profound enough to capture the imagination of advanced students and researchers.

As I was anticipating our mutual participation in the Pullias Lecture event, it occurred to me that I had never interviewed Gee for my blog, despite all of our other interactions through the years. What follows includes his reflections on the current state of games-based learning research, the state of American education, and the value of participatory culture. Gee was generous with his thoughts and so I am going to be running this meaty exchange over three installments this week.

We've both been involved in thinking about games and learning for the better part of a decade. What do you see as the most significant breakthroughs which have occurred over this time?

The breakthroughs have been slower in coming than I had hoped. Like many new ideas, the idea of games for learning (better, "games as learning") has been often co-opted by entrenched paradigms and interests, rather than truly transforming them. We see now a great many skill-and-drill games, games that do in a more entertaining fashion what we already do in school. We see games being recruited in workplaces--and lots of other instances of "gamification"--simply to make the current structures of exploitation and traditional relationships of power more palatable. We will see the data mining capacities of games and digital media in general recruited for supervision, rather than development. The purpose of games as learning (and other game-like forms of learning) should be to make every learner a proactive, collaborative, reflective, critical, creative and innovative problem solver; a producer with technology and not just a consumer; and a fully engaged participant and not just a spectator in civic life and the public sphere.

In general there are two "great divides" in the games and learning arena. The two divides are based on the learning theories underlying proposals about games for learning. The first divide is this: On the one hand, there are games based on a "break everything into bits and practice each bit in its proper sequence" theory of learning, a theory long popular in instructional technology. Let's call this the "drill and practice theory". On the other hand, there are games based on a "practice the bits inside larger and motivating goal-based activities of which they are integral parts" theory. Let's call this the "problem-and-goals-centered theory". I espouse one version of this theory, but, unfortunately, there are two versions of it. And this is the second divide: On the one hand, there is a "mindless progressive theory" that says just turn learners loose to immerse themselves in rich activities under the steam of their own goals. This version of progressivism (and progressivism in Dewey's hands was not "mindless") has been around a great many years and is popular among "mindless" educational liberals. On the other hand, the other version of the "problem-and-goals-centered theory" claims that deep learning is achieved when learners are focused on well designed, well ordered, and well mentored problem solving with shared goals, that is, goals shared with mentors and a learning community.

Like so many other areas of our lives today, the conservative version (drill and practice) and the liberal version (mindless progressivism) are both wrong. The real solution does not lie in the middle, but outside the space carved up by political debates.

What do you think remain the biggest misunderstandings or disagreements in this space?

Much of what I discussed above is really not about misunderstandings, but about disagreements and different beliefs and value systems, or, in some cases, different political, economic, or cultural vested interests. The biggest misunderstanding in the case of my own work has been people saying that my work espouses games for learning. It does not and never has. It espouses "situated embodied learning", that is learning by participation in well designed and well mentored experiences with clear goals; lots of formative feedback; performance before competence; language and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; and lots of talk and interaction around strategies, critique, planning, and production within a "passionate affinity space" (a type of interest-driven group) built to sustain and extend the game or other curriculum. Games are one good way to do this. There are many others.

The biggest misunderstanding in general is that technologies (like games, television, movies, and books) are good or bad. They are neither. They are good, bad, or indifferent based on how they are used in the contexts in which they are used. By themselves they are inert, though they do have certain affordances. Games for learning work pretty much the same way as books for learning. Kids learn with books or games (or television or computers or movies or pencils) when they are engaged in well designed and good interactions with adults and more advanced peers, interactions that lead to problem solving, meta-critical reflection, and connections to the world and other texts and tools. They learn much less in other circumstances. But we must humbly admit that humans have never yet found a technology more powerful than print. The number of people who have killed others or aided them in the name of a book (the Bible, the Koran, the Turner Diaries, Silent Spring) is vastly larger than those who have killed or helped in the name of a game, movie, or television show. Of course, this may change, but it does little good, in the interim, to pretend books are benign, but games are inherently perilous.

From the start, you were less interested in designing games for teaching than in using principles of game design that are grounded in educational research to reimagine the pedagogical process? To what degree do you think recent projects such as Quest to Learn have embodied those insights?

I see game design and learning design (what a good professional teacher does) as inherently similar activities. The principles of "good games" and of "good learning" are the same, by and large. This is so, of course, because games are just well designed problem-solving spaces with feedback and clear outcomes and that is the most essential thing for real, deep, and consequential learning. These principles include (among others): making clear what identity the learning requires; making clear why anyone would want to do such learning; making clear how the learning will function to lead to problem solving and mastery; making the standards of achievement high and clear, but reachable with persistence; early successes; a low cost of failure that encourages exploration, risk taking, and trying out new styles; lots of practice of basic skills inside larger goal-based and motivating activities; creating and then challenging routine mastery at different levels to move learners upwards; using information and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; performance before competence (doing as a way of learning and being); getting learners to think like designers and to be able themselves to design; encouraging collaboration and affiliation with what is being learned as part of an identity and passion one shares with others; good mentoring by other people, as well as smart tools and technologies.

These principles can be realized in many ways, not one. Chibi-Robo, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Quest to Learn all realize them, though Quest to Learn faces the vast stupidity of our current accountability regime and Chibi-Robo and Yu-Gi-Oh do not.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

A Remediated, Premediated, and Transmediated Conversation with Richard Grusin (Part Three)

I am putting up the final installment of my conversation with Richard Grusin a day early as I am headed out of town for much needed R&R time with my wife. I will not be posting next week, but expect to return shortly thereafter. History and Genealogy

RG: Speaking of history, though, I wonder if you would let me pose another question about the relationship between remediation and transmedia. One of our claims in Remediation (which has gratifyingly been borne out by a good deal of scholarship in the past decade and more), was that although the explosion of new digital media at the end of the 20th century made the double logic of remediation visible, remediation (and its double logic) had a very long history in Western culture, going back at least to the invention of linear perspective. By identifying the working of remediation in contemporary digital media, we have been able to look back on the history of mediation in Western culture to see it in a different light. Do you see a similar historical genealogy for transmedia?

HJ: Yes, depending on how broadly or narrowly we define transmedia. I have made the argument that the church in the middle ages was profoundly transmedia if you lacked the capacity to read. For the priests, the Bible stories were rooted in a text and everything else would have been understood as an illustration of that text. But if you couldn't read that text, you were absorbing bits of the stories from many different sources in the culture around you and the stories could be brought together via stainglass windows, tapestries, or paintings, where characters from multiple stories or symbols for many parables might exist side by side. Michelangelo is in that sense a profoundly intertextual artist.

I would also point to the great world builders of the 20th century -- especially L. Frank Baum, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Walt Disney as also contributing much to the current configurations of transmedia. Baum in terms of mapping Oz through books, stage plays, films, and public lectures, each adding new layers to the original. Tolkien developed a mythology much larger than he could communicate in Lord of the Rings as a specific narrative. And Disney in moving from the screen to location-based entertainment and in constructing a "world" or "family" of characters drawn from multiple stories.

RG:

Your mention here of "world builders," and earlier "fictional worlds" or "universes," is helpful, I think, in clarifying another difference between our approaches. You're interested in how transmedia create fictional worlds. My approach focuses more on logics and practices of mediation in specific historical formations--although your sense that transmedia represents the current media formation of the infotainment industry is itself, I would argue, a historically specific claim.

HJ:

Derek Johnson and Avi Santos have been arguing for greater historical specificity in terms of how today's transmedia models emerge from the larger evolution of franchise entertainment across the 20th century. I also would argue that elements can be tied back to series books and film serials, not to mention to the practices of comic books, all of which link individual units to larger story systems, even if they remain largely within the same medium. A lot depends on whether we are tracing transmedia practices in terms of narrative, visual, or economic structures. I think that recognizing transmedia in contemporary media may similarly open up further historical investigations. I hope it inspires half as much generative scholarship as Remediation has done.

I am very interested in Kim Deitch's graphic novel, Alias the Cat, which depicts a story being created in the 1910s via newspaper serials, comic strips, film serials, and live stunts, all practices possible in the early 20th century, and all practices used in various combinations, although perhaps not in the hypercoordinated way depcited in the comic. For me, this story helps sort through the difference between a set of potential practices, each transmedia in its implications, and an overall logic which may be the current configurations of practices.

Transmedia in that sense is not totally new, yet it is unlikely that it would take its current shapes in the absence of networked communication. And that's why I started this by reflecting on the different ways that transmedia impulses work in the era of the cd-rom, of the web, and of the iPad.

Turning the lens back in your direction, is the history of remediation one in which the same dual logic repeats itself again and again or is it one of historical transition and transformation in which shifts in the media landscape enable or foreclose certain possibilities, certain models of creative practice?

RG:

As I mentioned earlier, remediation can be traced in visual media at least to the origins of linear perspective, particularly the invention of the idea that the canvas or picture plane should be treated as a transparent window through which to view the world. I will leave it to art historians who know much more than I do to determine if it can be traced back even further or into other artistic media.

But I do remember that, while we were writing the book, we used to have fun imagining with our students other arenas in which the twin logics of remediation, transparent immediacy and hypermediacy, had manifested themselves historically. Romantic poets like Wordsworth, for example, appealed to the immediacy of the vernacular and the heart or intuition, while someone like Blake demonstrated a form of hypermediacy especially through his illustrated poems. The scientific debate between scholasticism and empiricism in science might also be glossed in terms of the immediacy of the experiment and the hypermediacy of scholastic traditions. And it is hard not to see the contrast between the Catholic Church and Protestantism as one between hypermediacy and immediacy. These, however, were mainly speculative musings. As someone committed to historical specificity, I remain cautious in trying to think about transhistorical laws of mediation.

Nonetheless, in the historical period within which remediation does operate, I would argue that the double logic of remediation does not repeat itself in the same form but operates, as you say, in terms of "historical transition and transformation in which shifts in the media landscape enable or foreclose certain possibilities, certain models of creative practice." In my new book I situate the double logic of remediation both, as you plausibly suggest earlier, in relation to the invention of new stand-alone multimedia storage devices like the cd-rom, as well as in relation to the 1990s desire for immediacy represented most fully in technical fantasies of virtual reality which grew largely out of the cyberculture and cyberpunk imaginary of the 1980s. In the last two decades of the 20th century, immediacy was defined in terms of the erasure of mediation in an immediate, immersive encounter with the real, while hypermediacy was defined in terms of the kind of multiplication of mediation made possible by cd-roms, the world wide web, and other related media formats.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the emergence of social media has, I argue, shifted the ways in which immediacy and hypermediacy manifest themselves--and thus alter the double logic of remediation. In fact where in the 1990s the immediacy of the real was defined in opposition to the multiplicity of mediation, in the 21st century hypermediation is the mark of the real, as epitomized most dramatically in the Fox series 24, which depicted real-time not in terms of the erasure of mediation but in terms of its multiplication. In our current moment of mobile, socially networked media, immediacy is manifested as mobility, connectivity, and flow, the easy, almost seamless, interaction among our countless personal and collective media sites--FB, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, and countless others. Hypermediacy manifests itself not so much in the formal fragmentation and multiplicity of the visual space of the screen as in the multiplication of mediation among and across our networks, including the ways in which all of our socially mediated interactions are tracked, recorded, and archived by a state and corporate security regime for purposes of data mining, tracking, trendspotting, and preemption of criminal behavior.

Politics

RG: Perhaps because of the changing nature of our times, my approach to premediation, which I argue is the predominant form in which remediation manifests itself in the 21st century, is much more political than our approach to remediation was. While remediation was and remains a concept that can be useful for political means, premediation makes those uses much more explicit. This, then, raises for me another question about your approach to transmedia. Do you see a politics to transmedia, either as practiced in the corporate entertainment industry of as you deploy it in your work? Or is this not an explicit focus of your transmedia work?

HJ: In terms of corporate media, there is certainly a concern that the capacity to expand a story across multiple media platforms and thus blanket the society has a potential to be used for propagandistic purposes in ways which concerns me deeply. That said, as currently developed, the transmedia model comes attached with a very active and skeptical model of spectatorship -- one where collectives of fans work through complex challenges together in ways which encourage criticism and reflection.

Indeed, what we are seeing is the spill over of these forms of fan participation and emerging forms of activism, which are the focus of some new work which I am pursuing in collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation. For example, we are studying the case of the Harry Potter Alliance which has built a large scale network of young activists on the metaphors and narratives provided by J.K. Rowling's media franchise. Here, they are building on an existing transmedia system and on the infrastructure provided by media fandom to motivate political participation around a range of human rights and social justice concerns.

I am also interested in work which Sasha Contanza-Chock has been doing on what he calls "transmedia mobilization" in the Los Angeles immigrant rights movement. There's a tendency to think of transmedia practices as involving high end production values, but here, he is looking at how activists in Los Angeles are deploying a range of low end media to protest current U.S. policies around immigration and to get their message out to their supporters by any means necessary. Transmedia mobilization, in this case, might involve YouTube video, podcasts, mix tapes, graffiti, posters, and street theater, but it still follows principles we can recognize from other research on transmedia practices.

Finally, coming full circle back to corporate media, I am very concerned with the contradictions about participation embedded in current concepts of web 2.0 and user-generated content, issues in public policy which range from concerns about constraints on Fair Use in the domain of intellectual property to issues of "free labor" in the relations between participants in the creative process and the use of surveillance practices to monitor and monetize forms of audience engagement (of the sort you reference above). These issues are central to my new work on Spreadable Media.

A Friendly Ammendment?

RG:

Thanks, Henry. This has been really helpful for me. I hope others will find the discussion useful as well. I'd like to close by returning to where we began this discussion and offer what I hope you will see as a friendly amendment to your concept of transmedia.

In my Premediation book, I argue that the concept of new media, which was useful for both of us in making sense of the exciting and transformative changes that were occurring in the 1980s and 1990s, no longer does much work in the 21st century. In an era where old media like books, newspapers, radio, and television are created, circulated, and consumed through digital media, the distinction between old and new media becomes increasingly problematic. I argue, instead, that we should focus instead on "mediality," which I take to include all the forms of media with which we interact on a regular basis. I relate the concept of mediality to Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality, arguing that media today operate as aspects of governmentality in mobilizing and managing populations, which Foucault describes as networks of people and things. Thus rather than focus on the relations among "new" and "old" forms of media, I argue that we need to pay attention to the things that media do, the way they act and help govern the variety of human and nonhuman publics that proliferate at the present moment. From this perspective the political deployment and implications of transmedia that you have described could be understood as elements of governmentality in the 21st century, as a mode of what I would like to think of as "transmediality."

If we go down this path, then I would suggest (and here is the friendly amendment) that just as mediality allows us to undo or dispose of the distinction between old and new media, transmediality could allow us to undo the distinction with which our discussion began between stand-alone and networked media. In the most trivial sense, we could see that the interaction with a stand-alone DVD, with its extras and director's cuts and commentaries, could be seen as a form of transmediality similar to our interaction with transmedia artifacts on the internet. Of course, I recognize that this might remove (or at least minimize) the element of active hunting and searching that you see as part of the transmedia experience. But more significantly, I think that the distinction between stand-alone and networked media is increasingly coming to become unhelpful in the same way that I described in relation to old vs. new media. Whether we think of the transmediality of CDs loaded in iTunes, or the networked capabilities being built into BluRay players as just two examples, the distinction between stand-alone media and networked media seems increasingly unclear. And when you add to this the fact that the creation, production, and distribution of all digital artifacts are inseparable from all sorts of networked media technologies, I think that it will not be long before the distinction between stand-alone and networked media becomes moot. In making this friendly amendment, I mean not to weaken or minimize the concept of transmediality, but rather the opposite--to suggest that, like remediation did in the 1990s, transmediality in the 21st century names the condition to which all of our media will eventually aspire.

Thanks again, Henry, for suggesting this conversation. Let's do it again some time.

Richard Grusin is Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and four books, including (with Jay David Bolter) Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999) and most recently Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010).

A Remediated, Premediated, and Transmediated Conversation with Richard Grusin (Part Two)

Aesthetics RG:

Serendipitously, I, too, had been thinking of a video that might help delineate the distinction between transmedia and remediation--the Hype Williams video for "Gold Digger," the Kanye West song featuring Jamie Foxx.

For me, the video's remediation of the look and style of pin-up magazine covers as live videos is a clear example of an instance of remediation that I would see as distinct from transmedia. On the other hand the now longstanding practice of refashioning songs as music videos might be able to be seen as an example of both remediation and transmedia. Would you agree with this?

HJ:

I would agree that the "Gold Digger" video is an interesting example of how one could have remediation which does not necessarily become transmedia. It is also, as you note, a music video and thus as an amplification of the recorded song a form of transmedia. I would call it transmedia performance in this case rather than transmedia storytelling. My own early writing emphasized the storytelling functions of transmedia, but storytelling is only one function which is now conducted across media platforms. Performance seems the more pertinent category for thinking about music, though a series like Glee might send out some extensions which are primarily about performance and others that are about narrative.

We could, however, imagine a version of this music video that with very little changes would be pulled towards transmedia narrative (or transmedia play). Right now, the magazine covers function to comment on the situations being described in the song lyrics, but they also seem to construct a kind of world where the song takes place. Let's suppose we built more of a plot into that world -- not simply the story the song offers of failed relationships, violated trusts, and sexual tension. Can we imagine extending those core plot elements into a melodramatic plot and imagine the magazine covers perhaps referring us to other media where we learned more about these people and their relationship? Can we imagine the magazine covers as functioning as clues which led to a kind of alternative reality game, which then led us down a rabbithole where we started seeking out more information elsewhere on the web? This would pull us much more fully into a transmedia logic.

RG:

Yes, I suppose we could and I suppose it would. Your inclination to actively remediate or transmediate existing media forms is much stronger than mine. I see myself more as a cultural critic or media theorist than as a creator of new forms. Still I would be interested in you defining even further how you see transmediation differing from or extending remediation.

HJ:

Well, I think I intended this as a thought experiment at most, but your point is well taken. My work on transmedia has taken me into much closer dialogue with the creative community than I had expected and as that happens, I become much more likely to imagine other possible configurations of media that have not yet emerged in much the same way that Janet Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck sought a kind of predictive or anticipatory aesthetics, mapping what could be done with the affordances of digital media she saw starting to emerge. And do not overlook the fact that Remediation has surely inspired many designers and artists, even if you have not yourself chosen to explore the creative practices implicit in your argument.

RG:

True enough. I like the way you describe your and Janet Murray's work as imagining or anticipating new media futures. It reminds me that, in the context of my most recent work, premediation was already quite active in the 1990s. And yes, it has been very gratifying to see how Remediation was taken up by designers, artists, and other creative people--not to mention by new media scholars like you, especially in relation to transmedia.

Immediacy and Hypermediacy

HJ:

One of the ways I often think about your work in relation to transmedia is the different modes by which transmedia elements are constructed. On the one hand, they often present themselves as documents or documentaries, seeking forms of immediacy. We look through them to see into the world being depicted and the world of, say, District 9 becomes more real to us insofar as such materials adopt forms we associate with nonfiction. The early ARGS often insisted on there being nothing that signaled to players that they were playing a game and thus sought to blur the fake documents being produced back into reality. They were fictions which denied their status as fictions.

On the other hand, more and more, transmedia extensions represent themselves as advertisements for imaginary products, such as True Blood. They show us what the mediascapes of these fictional societies might look like, and so we achieve a kind of access to the fictional world through an heightened awareness of processes of mediation.

We can see how the immediacy and hypermediacy come together by looking at something like MNU Spreads Lies , one of the websites created to help promote District 9. The website proports to be the home page for an Alien Rights organization. Much of the text is in an alien alphabet, though we can convert it to English. My favorite entry is one called "I'm Speechless" which is halfway down the page. Here, we have a mocked up government video on the aliens reproduction system, complete with imitation grain and scratches, clearly intended to achieve a certain degree of immediacy, though the focus on the buggyness of the footage uses properties of mediation to allow us to achieve that level of immediacy. The text around it shows a fake resistant reading of this fake documentary -- the alien rights organization has captured this footage from the government and is offering a shocked and outraged reaction to what they are seeing. Here, we are invited to be aware of the processes of mediation and contestation that have emerged around the video -- for me, this would seem to represent a kind of hypermediation. As you note in the book, at a certain point, as our everyday reality is shaped by our interactions through media, the lines between immediacy and hypermediacy blur. We achieve immediacy by way of hypermediacy.

Interactivity and Participation

RG:

The Tru Blood commercial is fantastic! It is an exemplary example of a kind of faithful or respectful remediation of a Budweiser commercial. But it is even more interesting, as you suggest, as an example of how the urge to transmediate deploys strategies of remediation in constructing new, participatory mediations of imaginary worlds.

But as the District 9 promotions make evident, transmedia isn't always fan-based or participatory, right? It is increasingly a technique of corporate infotainment media, whether in fictionally remediating participatory media like blogs or in distributing elements of specific media narratives or worlds across multiple media formats. What makes the MNU Tells Lies site different (and especially interesting) is that it continues the documentality of the District 9 film into the blogosphere. This is, I think, an advance on the transmediation of the Matrix franchise, which I have discussed in terms of the concept of a "cinema of interactions." The distribution of the narrative of The Matrix across the Enter the Matrix video game and some of The Animatrix contributions (particularly the archival pseudo-documentary about the back story of how the machines took over Earth), while interesting in terms of the continued decline of medium specificity, does not trouble the border between fictionality and reality in the same way that the MNU Tells Lies site does. But in both of these examples, I would agree that your robust concept of transmediality (or my more sketchily developed notion of a cinema of interactions) is more useful and informative than the concept of remediation. That being said, one could certainly (as you do above) approach either of these from the perspective of the double logic of remediation.

HJ:

Both the True Blood and the District 9 materials were generated by the producers (or those working for the brand) rather than the fans. They certainly are responsive to genres and themes which may have originated within fan culture. (We are just beginning to theorize how fan productions might or might not be understood as part of the transmedia system around a given media property). Transmedia is part of a larger shift in the logic of the media industries to place a greater emphasis on engagement, which in turn values fans as the ideal audience for their productions. Part of what first drew me to look at transmedia storytelling was the ways that it seemed to represent a commercial response to key aspects of fan culture: such as the desire to extend the world, to construct backstory, to focus on secondary characters, or even to construct alternative versions of the original characters. But ultimately, these materials claim the status of canon and not fanon, and that has consequences for how they are read.

If they are participatory, it is on the level of reception and circulation rather than on the level of production, though we are seeing some kinds of transmedia production which apply crowd-sourcing or user-generated content models to build out the fictional world further. So, yes, these are part of a new commercial logic. My argument, though, is that they are not simply commercial products; they are also creating new opportunities which gifted storytellers and artists are exploring in ways that deepen our possible engagement with these fictional universes. You could read both the District 9 and True Blood examples as promotional: they are designed to spread word about their affiliated media properties. But they are both expansive (adding to what we learn in their respective works) and expositional (helping to inform our experience once we see their affiliated works) in ways which go beyond what we would expect from a movie trailer. We go into District 9 with different expectations (even a different moral orientation or emotional identification) and have a different experience if we've visited the MNU Spreads Lies site than if we have not. Given this, I don't think we can simply dismiss them as promotional materials.

RG:

Thanks for clarifying. I agree that promotional materials should not be dismissed out of hand. Kracauer wrote that we can learn much about any historical moment by making sense of what he called its "surface phenomena." But where Kracauer explains how these ornamental surface phenomena are of a piece with the structure of monopoly capitalism in the 1920s, you treat transmedia surface phenomena as creative opportunities for artists and designers which deepen the 21st-century consumer experience. Kracauer is making a claim about history, while you are making a claim about how transmedia enhances the creation of fictional universes.

Richard Grusin is Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and four books, including (with Jay David Bolter) Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999) and most recently Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010).

A Remediated, Premediated, and Transmediated Conversation with Richard Grusin (Part One)

This week, I am sharing an extended conversation with Richard Grusin, co-author of Remediation and author of Premediation:Affect and Mediality After 9/11 about the relationship between our work.

If this sparks your interest in learning more about Transmedia Entertainment, check out Transmedia Hollywood II conference coming up at UCLA on April 8. Tickets are still available.

Getting Started

HJ: Richard, you wrote to me a few weeks ago responding to the interview I did with Frank Rose about his new book, The Art of Immersion. That interview tried to clarify the relationship between Rose's concept of "deep media" and my concept of "transmedia entertainment." You raised the interesting question of how these two concepts might relate to the work that you and Jay David Bolter did in Remediation, another book which sought to develop a vocabulary for thinking about the relations between media, and your more recent book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11. Since both books are widely taught, it seemed to me useful for us to try to tease out together the points of contact and divergence between these two models.

At the time you wrote Remediation, many of us were very excited about the kind of multimedia expression which was possible within cd-roms, a short lived technology, which never-the-less became the focus of a good deal of scholarly interest. So, we might start by thinking about the relationship between the multimedia (envisioned within the cd-rom) and the transmedia (now being realized via digital networks). For me, the difference can be summed up as inside the box - outside the box. That is, multimedia sought to organize a series of different kinds of media experiences inside a curated and bounded text. There might be movies and audio files and illustrations and texts, but they were all inside the cd-rom itself.

By contrast, the elements of a transmedia experience are dispersed -- they are spread across multiple media channels -- with the expectation that the consumers will tap into digital and social networks to track down the elements. Part of the pleasure is what I would call "hunting and gathering" and what Rose calls "foraging." Alternate Reality Games make tracking down, exchanging, deciphering, and mapping the dispersed media elements the central play mechanic. And insofar as we are doing this activity within fan communities or as "collective detectives" to use an old term from the ARG world, these mechanisms support social interactions with other readers. Part of what allows this to become a viable form of publicity for media franchises is our tendency to want to brag about our discoveries and share them with others with whom we have common goals and interests.

The rise of the iPad seems to suggest a return to a multimedia model -- witness the promotional video for Sports Illustrated on the iPad which sparked so much excitement in the publishing world at the time the platform was introduced. Here, we again see all of the media elements brought together into a single ordered, curated experience. This design will make these kinds of experiences more accessible to casual readers who want to simply click through an experience, but they may take away from the social mechanics that have grown up around "foraging" or "hunting and gathering."

It occurs to me that the Sports Illustrated video might be a good starting point for us to compare notes. What do you see going on here when you read it through your core concepts?

RG:

Thanks, Henry, for suggesting this. I think it's a great idea, and after reading your initial paragraphs I think there is plenty of room both for clarification and divergence. I will confess that at first I was a bit puzzled by your identification of remediation with the multimedia cd-rom--especially insofar our account of the double logic of remediation at the end of the 20th century takes up so many other media artifacts including muds and moos, the world wide web, and hypermediated space. But in light of your concept of transmedia storytelling I can see why the contrast with an apparently self-contained multimedia artifact like the cd-rom would be important for you.

For me, however, remediation argues precisely against the idea that any medium (multimedia or not) could be self-contained. In defining a medium as that which remediates we set out from the position that all media were hybrid or mixed, that all media refashion other media. The contradictory but coherent logics of transparent immediacy and hypermediacy which operated at the end of the twentieth century still persist (although in different forms) today.

In other words, because remediation invariably involves the relationship between at least two media, all media from our perspective could in some non-trivial sense be seen as transmedia. Transmedia storytelling as I understand it would seem from the perspective of Grusin and Bolter to be one of the forms in which remediation manifests itself in the 21st century, particularly in what have come to be called the "infotainment" industries. In my own post-remediation work I have developed a similar idea, most relevantly in the concept of distributed media that I trace out under the rubric of a "cinema of interactions."

As to describing the Sports Illustrated promotional video through the key concepts of remediation, I suppose I would begin by highlighting the double logic of remediation informing the iPad promo. The use of interactive video in the magazine's new interactive format simultaneously provides a perceptual immediacy and operates as an element of the journal's hypermediacy. But I also see this video as an example of what I have more recently called "premediation," especially as it markets both iPad and Sports Illustrated by premediating digital media formats that do not yet exist but which we can anticipate in the near future. I would be interested in your sense of how transmedia might relate to this reading of the video.

HJ:

I certainly did not mean to restrict your book's argument to a focus on multimedia - it has enormous historical scope and media diversity. I only associate the time of the book's publication with a particular enthusiasm about cd-roms which was sweeping digital studies, and thus I came to understand some of your principles initially in relation to that particular form of remediation.

RG:

Right. I remember in fact when Jay and I presented remediation at a conference you organized at MIT that you were working on a cd-rom film "textbook" with embedded video clips. And when we started our MS in Information Design and Technology at Georgia Tech in the early 1990s, our goal was to train multimedia cd-rom designers. By the time we wrote Remediation, however, our enthusiasm had begun to broaden to networked and distributed forms of mediation, though not yet to your useful concept of transmedia.

From Remediation to Premediation

HJ:

I would agree with you that both multimedia and transmedia represent strategies of remediation, which are particularly vivid in their foregrounding of the relations between media. The Sports Illustrated example, for the most part, stays within the box -- though the segment about playing a game on the ipad while watching the game on television points to ways that even this basic app straddles between platforms rather than operating entirely within them. What interested me here was the way that the video as an act of "premediation," (I like that concept), invites us to re-imagine the medium of the print magazine through expanding its affordances, blurring the line between still and moving images, say, adding sound effects and gestural interfaces that change what it means to read and so forth. Insofar as we read the magazine in relation to the television and live versions of sports, it may well constitute a form of transmedia -- that is, we as consumers bring the pieces together to make sense of a phenomenon which unfolds across platforms. Yet, there's also a sense that the iPad is promising to organize all of those varied media experiences for us in ways that decreases our need to search out new content. This becomes a matter of preprogrammed interactivity rather than open ended participation.

RG:

Yes, I see that this question of participation, what you refer to above as "foraging" or "hunting and gathering," is one that is crucial to you, particularly in regard to your extensive body of work on and continued interest in fan culture. In some sense, of course, this, too, is a product of the media formation of the 1990s, which has in the socially networked 21st century become such a part of our media everyday that it could be seen as no longer unusual. Yet your worry about preprogrammed interactivity supplanting open-ended participation is one that is shared by many. Because I have always had some reservations about the degree to which participatory media could be open-ended or liberatory, I am less troubled by the preprogrammed nature of many of our current forms of interactivity. I have been more concerned, both in Remediation and in my subsequent work, to underscore the preprogrammed or premediated nature of all of our media interactions. So the Sports Illustrated or iPad is less troubling for me.

Richard Grusin is Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and four books, including (with Jay David Bolter) Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999) and most recently Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010).

Akoha-- A Direct Action Game?

For those of you interested in the work I've been discussing over the past week or so on civics and participatory culture, let me strongly recommend checking out the blog which is being run by the graduate students associated with our CivicPaths research group. Recent discussions there have included considerations of zombies as potential political metaphors, reflections on the nature of "engaged scholarship," thoughts on what we can learn from the Tea Party movement, and information about playful forms of civic education around economic literacy. Each of these pieces reflects the work of a particular PhD candidate, mostly from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, though some come from the School of Cinematic Arts or elsewhere at USC. The students post about once a week and are doing a good job of reflecting the kinds of conversations we are having with guest speakers, interview subjects, and amongst ourselves as we try to make sense of the intersection of youth, new media, and political participation.

Today, I am re-posting one of the recent blog entries -- some thoughts about how serious gaming might foster greater civic participation by Benjamin Stokes. Stokes has been deeply committed to the concept of games for change for over a decade, first as part of the leadership of the organization with the same name, then as a foundation officer at MacArthur working with Connie Yowell on the Digital Media and Learning Initiative, and now as a PhD candidate at USC. I have been lucky to have chances to work with him in each of these contexts. He's deeply earnest and serious-minded about how the world of play might influence our civic and social lives. He models what I admire most about my new USC cohort -- the ability to merge theoretical rigor with practices designed to have an impact in the world beyond the academy.

Akoha - a Direct Action Game?

by Benjamin Stokes

How can we make everyday civic participation more compelling? There is a new kind of game on the horizon, one that experiments with real-world action. I call these "direct action games," because they restructure acts like volunteering, activist training, and charitable giving. One prototype is Akoha, which started as a card game, then reinvented itself online, and last year launched a mobile app -- largely off the radar of traditional civics organizations.

At first glance, Akoha looks like a media hub for some do-it-yourself Boy Scouts. Their website reveals thousands of participants, many reporting success with real-world "missions," from going vegetarian for a day, to debating the "I Have a Dream" speech. The actual missions often take place offline, but are only rewarded if documented with photos and stories posted online or via iPhone.

I think Akoha deserves real attention as a working example -- despite some prominent flaws. We desperately need concrete projects if we want to actually rethink civic life. The use of games to help "fix reality" has been a hot topic these past few weeks, thanks to the great traction of Jane McGonigal's new book. Yet the missions of Akoha are more straightforward than most of Jane's "alternate reality games," which tend to have futuristic narratives, puppet masters behind the scenes, and a preference for crowd-sourcing. Thus I propose we look to Akoha and its more raw building blocks to think about direct action games.

Participants in Akoha are mostly adults, but the ages vary widely. The experience is deeply social, as friends create missions for each other, and share their stories. More formal recognition for participation comes as players earn badge-like awards -- such as "multi-talented" for those who complete one mission in every possible category.

Most of Akoha does not look or sound civic. Only one of the mission categories explicitly addresses "social causes." The other nine concern self-actualization in various forms, from "health and well-being" to family time, engaging with popular culture, and the discovery of travel. Is this breadth an upside or downside? That depends on your civic goals, which might include:

1. Fostering citizen journalism, as participants report on civic themes in their communities

2. Informal civic learning, as participants reflect on their civic experiences in new ways through stories and pictures

3. Building social capital, as participants create new ties across traditional social groups

These civic goals may be structurally possible with Akoha, but they are rhetorically hidden. Even as Akoha's missions bring people into the real world, they avoid the "we are purely civic" framing that occurs on many activist and volunteering websites. For the Akoha community, it's OK to admit that you are mainly there to have fun, or are trying to improve yourself (and not simply sacrificing for others). Consider this screenshot from the social cause mission "I Am Not an Island":

Participation begins with the usual click of a button, yet the specific language of "Play Now" differs sharply from the tool focus of civic action websites (e.g., "Take Action Now;" or "Sign the Petition"). But what exactly does it mean to 'play' Akoha? Is it a game?

Certainly Akoha is recreational, and like all games, there are rules. In particular, participants must describe what they did to complete a mission, and thus must certify that they have met the terms set forth by the original mission author. Points and profiles track progress across the Akoha system. All players' profiles feature their picture, personal statement, and a quantitative scoreboard -- including their "player level," number of missions completed, and awards. For a sense of what this looks like, here is one particularly high-achieving player, chosen from among the more than 10,000-plus who have registered:

This public profile has evolved much as the community has coalesced. Just a few months prior, the player described himself in much more formal terms, emphasizing his offline profession -- a "freelance Air conditioning and Refrigeration engineer by qualification and profession," his belief in God, and how he found the site via Reader's Digest. Now, in this recent screenshot, the player has removed his backstory, and describes instead how his Akoha playing strategy is driven by his personality. His refined self-presentation aligns with the pragmatics of the Akoha community, which focuses on choosing missions and writing stories -- both depending more on personality than professional accomplishments outside the community.

Akoha is a designed system, and so I recently interviewed Alex Eberts, co-founder of Akoha and an influential force behind its design. He spoke of his desire to find "psychological drivers that are common to the real-world, and to game play." His designs were informed by self-determination theory, which Eberts first came across in a session at the Game Developers Conference. (Academics, pay heed - these are not the usual dissemination channels for civic theory.)

Self-determination theory describes how human motivation is driven by basic human needs, including competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Altruism is not on the list of needs, just as it is not central to Akoha's rhetoric. Pushing beyond traditional altruism in civic life is a theme that cuts across many of the projects we are tracking in Henry Jenkins' Civic Paths research group -- from the pop pleasure of Harry Potter, to the joy of diamonds as a precursor to political talk. Repositioning altruism is a battle, with fault lines between traditional civic organizations that have failed to engage youth, and new civic organizations that have failed to connect to politics. (See, for example, Bennett's content analysis (pdf) of youth civic websites.)

Connecting games with the real-world necessitates a basic immediacy. This immediacy also distinguishes Akoha from most civic games, which focus on education for future civic life or future civic action. Here, the action and education are both in the present tense, which increases authenticity and the satisfaction of impact. The iPhone app for Akoha, released this past summer, underscores their immediacy -- here is a set of screen shots they provide:

Using the mobile interface, Akoha missions can be documented on a bus in real-time, or browsed from a neighborhood park. Their mobile tech is fairly basic, consisting mainly of reskinning their existing website, with little use of GPS or other mobile sensor data. As a result, Akoha's mobile interface is only minimally aware of the user's location.

Place matters, especially in civics. (The neighborhood of our birth strongly predetermines a host of life opportunities, from income to education and governance.) This is an area for Akoha to grow. By improving their mobile support for place, its implications for civic activity would be more immediate and profound. In particular, Akoha might offer support for filtering missions for one's own neighborhood, or connecting with players who are geographically nearby for joint missions, or simply allowing missions to release new clues when players arrive at specific locations.

Games are still discussed as individual indulgences. Yet increasingly, games are recognized as social forces. This is especially true for Akoha, where the social construction of value emerges over time, as a participant's "friends" share stories about their missions and accomplishments. Different communities are likely to form over time. It is not yet clear whether Akoha is dominated by preexisting networks of offline friends, or by more interest-driven networks of people who gather around a shared passion. (This difference matters - see the ethnography of Ito et al.) Yet if Akoha can introduce strangers based on activity interests, the platform might transcend the left/right regression of civic talk that is so feared online by Sunstein.

Reimagining place is important civic work, just like the reimagining of societal values, tax policy, and even collective heroes. The value of games is to restructure this civic work around different rules - intrinsic motivations of the game, aligned with the desires of everyday people. Sometimes people want an excuse to be more civic. In my interview with Eberts, he confessed that one of the big surprises for his team was how much everyday people wanted Akoha to be even more civic. He hinted that future Akoha versions might well expand toward the civic.

Even as mobile has reshaped the everyday experiences of place and time, so too we may see game-like activities begin to restructure the experience of public participation. Yet Akoha remains an "edge phenomenon" to both the civic and gaming communities. In the first case, nonprofits are still trying to understand games for training, let alone for direct action; in the second, the independent gaming community is struggling to understand games for art, let alone games that improve the real world. Akoha is likely to be seen as a risky investment for funders in either community. Thus the evolving Akoha business model may be as crucial as its innovations in civic participation. For example, Eberts hints that corporate engagement may be an area of growth for such games.

Beyond Akoha, it might be useful to define a framework for direct action games. In a panel I organized last year at the Games for Change Festival, we explored the concept, and its historic manifestations; fellow panelists were game designer Tracy Fullerton and activist/scholar Stephen Duncombe (see embed below for video of the panel).

As we seek to define new templates for civic games, cases like Akoha help us prioritize research questions, including:

1. Can direct action games help us re-imagine civic activity under a different set of rules, solution frames, and feedback loops for engagement? (McGonigal's aforementioned book nicely explores several of these philosophical questions.)

2. If only a portion of the activity is strictly civic, how do we compare to more traditional and pure civic engagement?

3. When is it appropriate to teach citizens how to "game the system" of democracy, to "win" in Akoha, or to rewrite the rules of local politics?

These issues will only become more important in coming months, as civic action goes digital and game culture grows. By examining cases like Akoha, we can develop frameworks for "direct action games" that better structure our civic designs.

The Political Lives of Black Youth: An Interview with Cathy Cohen (Part Two)

You write near the end of the book, "While the Obama Administration and other black officials are attempting to avoid discussions of race, members of the Republican Party and the Far Right have escalated their racial and racist talks and attacks. These contrasting trends have meant that racial discouse is increasingly being shaped by, or at least framed by, the right wing." Clearly, you have in mind something like the Tea Party movement. How would you explain the expanding support that the Tea Party has received? What impact do you think such a movement has on the political lives of the black youth you've studied?

I don't think it is a coincidence that recent polls show that only about 17 percent of black youth support the Tea Party, compared to 34 percent of white youth and 15 percent of Latino youth. Black youth understand that the policies advanced by Tea Party candidates and members will mean a more limited role for the government in the lives of everyday Americans. And while many believe that the reach of the government has extended too far, black youth realize that many of the opportunities secured by the mobilization of Blacks and others from the Civil Rights Movement through the election of President Obama have only been implemented and protected by an activist and expanded federal government.

Thus, a significant part of the Tea Party agenda, that which would repeal recently won health reform or pursue deficit reduction by slashing needed safety net programs or reduce funding for public education, or generally reduce and constrain the work of the government, would detrimentally impact the lives of black youth, especially those who are most vulnerable.

Beyond the specific policies of the Tea Party, I believe that their exaggerated discourse, especially as it targets President Obama and attacks him not on the terms of just his policies but also engages in a racial baiting, will reinforce the idea held among black youth that racism remains a major issue in this country and that black people are treated as second-class citizens in the political community. These young people have watched as the Tea Party held rallies in which President Obama has been demeaned and depicted as other, an unspeakable evil on par with Adolph Hitler. They believe that while some of the objections to President Obama are based on the political agenda he has pursued, other motivations for their challenge to President Obama has everything to do with the fact that he is black.

In response to such actions on the part of some members of the Tea Party, it seems that President Obama and his team has made a decision to try and stay above the fray of racial politics, adopting or letting stand a color-blind approach to race in the United States. My concern as you quote in the question is that the absence of leadership by President Obama on the topic of race and racism has allowed the right wing and some more extreme Tea Party types to step into the gap and promote their decidedly pre-civil rights movement view of the ideal racial order.

In contrast to the continued activity of the right on questions of race and racism, those public officials that might traditionally be mobilized to fight for and articulate a political agenda meant to improve the opportunities and lives of black youth, specifically black and progressive politicians like Barack Obama, are exceedingly reticent to make and defend an explicitly racialized agenda. And so black youth are left to fend for themselves on issues of race and racism, again learning the lesson that politicians are not to be trusted and that even in an environment where expansion of our political community is promised, some will fight the equal rights and inclusion of black youth seemingly forever!

As you've noted, the perspectives of black youth are rarely discussed as part of our understanding of contemporary politics. What do we understand differently about the current political scene if their views are factored into our analysis?

I think it is hard to understand and think effectively about the issues that confront us without thinking about the perspective and lived experience of black youth. As I discussed in a different question, black youth are at the center of many of the most troubling issues confronting the country. Issues ranging from the decline in public education to the rise in incarceration and the dominance of the prison industrial complex all disproportionately impact black youth. So it will be hard to develop effective and inclusive policies, programs and approaches to these issues without seriously considering the perspectives and including the insights of black youth.

However, it is more than just a simple gesture of inclusion when thinking about how black youth help us to understand and imagine differently the political scene. We have to acknowledge that young black people often have a different take on issues than others groups of young people that necessitate different policy choices and political collaborations. For example, if we take the issue of whether we are currently or even approaching a post-racial state, black and white youth think very differently about this issue.

Since the election of Barack Obama, much has been made of the generational divide in the populace. Some have suggested that once the so-called millennials come to dominate the political domain, many of the thorny social issues that have caused great debate and consternation among the American public will be resolved. This line of reasoning implies that young people who embrace and personify a more inclusive society will eventually take over policy-making and thought leadership, moving both areas in a more liberal direction. Commentators point to the significant differences in opinion registered among various generations on topics such as same-sex marriage and abortion as evidence of the more inclusive worldview held by the majority of young people.

The promised harmony around social issues that is presumably evident among younger Americans extends beyond the confines of sexually infused social policy to the prominent and always simmering issue of race. An article published in The New York Times suggests that much of the problem of race and racism found in the Tea Party and the NAACP has to do with the fact that they both are largely comprised of older members who grew up as the targets or beneficiaries of Jim Crow. Columnist Matt Bai writes, "The Tea Party and the N.A.A.C.P. represent disproportionately older memberships. And herein lies a problem with so much of our discussion about race and politics in the Obama era: we tend not to recognize the generational divide that underlies it."

As evidence of this substantial generational divide, Bai cites pre-midterm data from the Pew Research Center indicating that "there is nearly a 20 point spread between Mr. Obama's approval ratings among voters younger than 30 and those older than 65." Perhaps Bai's most important observation is one that he seems to add almost as a throwaway: his comment that "These numbers probably do reflect some profound racial differences among the generations." I show in the book that significant and profound differences in how young whites, blacks, and Latinos think about such topics as racism, citizenship, and gay and lesbian issues still exist today and that these differences are a defining feature of American politics as practiced by the young today, even in the age of Obama.

Far from the generation of millennials signaling the end of race or even the beginning of a post-racial society, I present data in the book that suggest that deep divides still exist among young people, with black youth particularly skeptical about the idea of a post-racial anything. I note in the book that on a survey we administered seven months after the 2008 election, we asked 18-35 year-old respondents if they believed racism was still a major problem. The divide between black and white young people was stark: 68 percent of black youth stated that racism remains a major problem, compared to 33 percent of white respondents and 58 percent of Latino respondents

A similar split was evident when we asked if blacks had achieved racial equality. A near majority of whites (48 percent) thought blacks had achieved equality, compared to 15 percent of blacks and 39 percent of Latinos. As we know the racial landscape is far more expansive than one that accounts for just blacks and whites. When asked if Latinos had achieved racial equality, support for this assertion dropped among whites. In fact, only 29 percent of whites, 16 percent of blacks, and 20 percent of Latinos believed that Latinos had achieved racial equality.

In the many articles written about the generational shift in attitudes on social issues, such as gay marriage or even race, few, if any, take the time to disaggregate the data by race and ethnicity to determine whether there might be divergent trends among the many groups comprising "youth." When researchers disaggregate their data (that is, if they have sampled enough people of color to pursue statistical analysis of different racial and ethnic groups) they often find that there are significant differences in how young people from the various racial and ethnic groups that make up the American populace think about not only same-sex marriage and abortion, but also race. If leaders continue to make policy and academic insist on writing articles with data assuming that the ideas of white youth represent the attitudes of all young people, they are all in for a rude awakening.

As the demographics of the country continue to move from one dominated-in population and power-by whites to one increasingly populated by individuals of color, our analyses must start paying attention to the ideas, attitudes, and actions of young people of color. Making the experiences of black and Latino youth central to our understanding and "work" around race provides a very different perspective in terms of what we must do. In the realm of race, the experience of black youth and, at times, Latino youth is that race still figures prominently in their lives, shaping where they can live, if and where they work, and how state authorities, such as the police, treat them. For these young people, racism still blocks their access to full citizenship, in particular the psychological aspects of believing that one belongs to and is valued in the larger political community. In the book I use the experiences of black youth to underscores the necessity of not just including but highlighting the voices and experiences of black youth if we are to bolster democratic practice in the 21st century.

Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science. . She is also the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education and the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Cohen is principal investigator of two major projects: The Black Youth Project and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.

The Political Lives of Black Youth: An Interview with Cathy Cohen

I have mentioned here several times before my participation in a new research network on youth and participatory politics, which has been funded and organized by the MacArthur Foundation as an extension of their work on Digital Media and Learning. Part of the pleasures of participating in this network has been the chance to engage in "mixed methods" research and in the process, to learn more about research methods that previously seemed very alien to my own. In graduate school, the qualitative and quantitative students walked past each other like ghosts: we shared the same offices, in some cases, but there was not much fraternizing across enemy lines. :-) Here, I've had a chance to learn about and contribute to the design of a large scale national survey as well as having the ethnographic work my team is doing informed by thoughtful questions from the social scientists and political philosophers on the team. I have especially loved getting to know Cathy Cohen, a political scientist who remains surprisingly open to our questioning of what counts as politics in the digital age and who is often leading the way to challenge the established wisdom in her field. Her previous books have included The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and The Breakdown of Black Politics and Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader. She has done extensive research on the political lives of black youth and what they can tell us about the current state of democracy in America, work which led this fall to the publication of a important new book, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics.

The information here is transformative. Cohen tells us for example that more black youth have participated in buycotts, that is directing their consumer purchases towards social change, than in boycotts, that archtypical tactic of the civil rights generation of black leadership. She describes how black youth have been stigmatized not only by white racists but by many black political leaders who often pathologize youth culture as symptomatic of the problems confronting the black community today. Her approach combines statistical and cultural analysis to offer a multilayered portrait of contemporary black youth, their hopes, their fears, their frustrations, their values, and their politics. As she notes, these perspectives are often left out or remain undifferentiated in larger accounts of youth and political participation.

The picture she paints will complicate further claims that the election of Barack Obama represent a "post-racial" era in American politics. As her comments below suggest, current politics are very much shaped by implicit and sometimes explicit assumptions about race at a time when the racial composition of the country is shifting dramatically.

I was lucky to get Cohen to respond to some of my questions about this book, which I strongly recommend to my readers. What follows is simply a glimpse into the rich analysis that runs through Democracy Remixed.

Walk me through your title. What do you mean by "Democracy Remixed"? Why is this an appropriate metaphor for the book's findings?

I decided on the title of Democracy Remixed for a number of reasons. First, it seems to me that one of the interesting consequences of taking seriously the political ideas and actions of some of our most marginal citizens--black youth--is that it pushes, challenges, and changes the nature of how democracy currently functions in the United States. If it doesn't then something is seriously wrong.

For example, if you begin to look at the participation rates of black youth, although there were historically high in 2008, there are still serious challenges to the full participation of black youth in our democracy. The issue of felony disenfranchisement and the general disproportionate impact of incarceration and policing in the lives of black youth are made visible when we focus on the political lives of black youth. Far too many young black people are unable to engage in the most basic of democratic practices--voting--because some states have taken away the franchise of those who have been convicted of a felony, even after they have served the terms of sentence. Thus, if we are serious about facilitating the participation of young black people in something as basic to democracy as voting, then we must examine and "remix" our ideas and laws about felony disenfranchisement.

Similarly, when we include black youth as full and equal members of our political community, it means that we acknowledge their worth and will debate and pursue politics that reflects their priorities and needs. For example, if young black people were active participants in our policy debates, the political agenda might be "remixed" to include specific policies and programs such as quality education for marginalized youth, especially young black people who suffer from dropout rates of nearly 50 percent in some urban cities.

As a country we might find ourselves designating more money to health programs accountable for erasing the disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections, and mental health problems among black youth. It might mean that we would do more to ensure that young people are not killed while playing outside their homes or on their way to or from school; a way of life for black children in Chicago and other major cities.

As equal members of our political community, the future of black youth must be recognized to be the future of the nation. Their suffering is our suffering. And their progress is our progress. Only by remixing our democratic ideals and practices can we truly become an inclusive and full-functioning democratic community.

You begin your book with the story of your nephew Terry. How did his experiences inspire and inform the project? What would you like to see Terry and others of his generation take away from the ideas in your book?

As you note in your question, it was the experiences of my nephew Terry and my other nieces and nephews that inspired this project. Terry, at least for me, represents many of the challenges of black youth today. He has faced and dealt with many of the issues that confront the lives of far too many young black people: violence, a failed educational system, incarceration, becoming a parent too early, and difficulty in finding a job just to name a few. While these are familiar themes that have been outlined in a number of books on black youth, what is different about Terry and hopefully my arguments in this book, is that we both try to provide a more nuanced representation of black youth than is regularly presented in other texts.

I believe that too often we are publish monolithic representations of black youth that either focus exclusively on their failure or their success. Bill Cosby is an example of one celebrity who has garnered a lot of media attention through the simplistic degradation of black people and black youth. I try in the book to detail the complex lives of black youth. As my nieces and nephews as well as thousands of young black people who answered surveys, took part in in-depth interviews and participated in focus groups for this book demonstrate, one has to pay attention to both the agency and structures that are a part of the story of black youth.

When I talk with Terry about the difficulties he has encountered, his is a balanced account, noting structural barriers such as the lack of jobs one can find with a criminal record, but also detailing how he has contributed to his own struggles by, for example, having children without being able to fully care for them, emotionally and materially. While Terry is willing to discuss the impact of being tracked at an early age into special education classes largely because the teachers in his school were unable or unwilling to deal with the learning challenges and energy of young black boys and girls, he also is quick to point out that he did not take advantage of the educational opportunities presented to him. It is the complicated story of being young and black in the United States today that I believe continues to deserve exploration and detail.

I hope the young people who read this book will first and foremost see themselves throughout this book. One of the things that was really amazing about doing the research for this project was the willingness of young black people to take time out of their schedules to talk to me and other researchers associated with the project. Repeatedly, they told us they were willing and eager to talk to us because people rarely asked them their opinions about the issues facing them and their ideas for solutions. So I hope those same young people are able to hear their voices in the ideas and arguments of the book.

Second, I hope the book reminds both young Blacks and the nation as a whole of the centrality of young black people to our democratic futures. Here I'm not only talking about the fact that black youth suffer disproportionately from some of the most important issues facing the country--unemployment, the decline of public education, violence, HIV/AIDS--but also they are a central part of what is promising about the next generation. In 2008 black and Latino youth came to the polls in record numbers to vote for the nation's first black president. Their excitement, determination, and unprecedented turn out is a signal of the promise of an expanding democracy.

Third and finally, I greatly respect young black people for their political intellect, their determination, and their ability to honestly and openly state when they have made bad decisions. Like most of us, these are young people striving every day to do the right thing and be decent human beings. I hope this book affirms their efforts to work hard, to do what is right and their basic humanity.

I was very interested in the mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods shaping this study. What did each contribute to your understanding of the political lives of black youth?

I wanted to use a mixed methodological approach to the book to reach a level of breadth and depth in reporting on the political lives of young black people. Specifically, the research design started with a national representative sample of young people ages15-25 that included oversamples of black and Latino youth. By oversamples I mean including larger number of Blacks and Latinos than might be necessary to make a traditional random sample so that our statistical analysis of young Blacks and Latinos would be more reliable and thus the margin of error would be smaller. In addition to ensuring that the sample would allow us to highlight and analyze the ideas and actions of black youth in comparison to other racial and ethnic groups of young people, we also wanted to develop a survey that would focus on and be rooted in the lives of young black people.

Many of the surveys used to explore the attitudes of young people start with white youth as the normative respondent. What I mean by that is the survey is developed with a young white person in mind. We developed a survey that tried to tap into the lives of young blacks. Toward that end we did things like include questions on rap music and rap music videos since we know that as both a cultural and political form hip hop and specifically rap music is central to the lives of black youth. Much of the statistical data included in the book comes from two original data sets--the Black Youth Project--and another survey we mounted before and after the 2008 presidential election--the Mobilization and Change Project. All of the data from these projects are available to the public and can be downloaded through the websites mentioned above.

Once we had the data from our new survey instrument in hand, we knew that this data would only allow us to say general things about the population of young people from different ethnic and racial groups. It would not provide us with the depth of knowledge needed to write a book that would capture and detail the nuanced political lives of black youth. To gain greater knowledge and go deeper we utilized two methods to gather additional qualitative data. One strategy we used was to carry out interviews with about 40 black youth, most of whom had completed the national survey and lived in the Midwest. We targeted four cities--Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and St. Louis and conducted interviews with black respondents in their city.

We were able to find respondents because at the end of the survey we included a question asking black respondents if they would be willing to be interviewed in the future. Over 90 percent of black youth answered affirmatively to the question, providing three contacts that might be able to find them within a year. Even with this information we were only able to find about 50 percent of the respondents who agreed to a future in-depth interview. After we confirmed the interview, graduate student researchers drove to their town and sat-down with respondents for over an hour, assessing in a more free flowing and detailed manner their thoughts on topics ranging from politics to the role of race in American society. Excerpts from these interviews are included as quotes throughout the book.

Finally, in 2005 and after the 2008 presidential election we held a series of focus groups with young black people in Chicago ages 18-21. We used the early focus groups in 2005 to inform the development of our first national survey and our general work on the Black Youth Project. The focus group held in 2009 was used to get a sense of what young people thought about the election of President Obama and how they thought the policies of the nation's first African-American President would impact their lives. Again, I also use quotes from these focus groups throughout the book, especially in chapter six.

Cathy J. Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science. . She is also the Deputy Provost for Graduate Education and the former Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books: Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press 2010) and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press 1999) and co-editor with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU, 1997). Cohen is principal investigator of two major projects: The Black Youth Project and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Her general field of specialization is American politics, although her research interests include African-American politics, women and politics, lesbian and gay politics, and social movements.