August 19, 2011

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Alex Juhasz, Jay Bushman, and Derek Johnson (Part Two)

August 19, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

On August 9th, strewn across three time zones, Jay Bushman, Alex Juhasz, and Derek Kompare picked up where their previous segment ended, and pondered the implications of the concept of fandom via Skype chat. Derek Kompare (10:04 am):

My point at the end of our last conversation was to come in on this idea that there's more (much more) to the equation than "producers" and "fans." You and Jay were explicating some of these complex roles.

Alex Juhasz (10:07 am):

Where do you see yourself and your work along this spectrum?

Derek Kompare (10:09 am):

I came into this career via fandom (literally, as a fan of SF media, alternative music, etc.), but I see myself now as studying the broader formations of culture. That is, what larger structures and forces produce the entire concept of "media," "media consumption," and (yes) "fandom."

Alex Juhasz (10:10 am):

As a fan whose moved on, up, out, deeper, over (which word or is there another?) how did you find the tone and content of our earlier conversation, given that neither Jay nor I identify as either fan or acafan?

Derek Kompare (10:14 am):

I wouldn't say I've moved so much in any direction (I'm wary of discourses of transcendence; we're all already "dirty"!), but just have a more ambivalent relationship to it all. I still love being a fan, and the idea of fandom, but I'm more critical of the PRACTICES of fandom (and the relationships they entail). You and Jay hit on this massive blind spot in a lot of acafan discourse: what about people and forms that DON'T immediately identify with these terms? What does acafan do for them? I'd argue, not much! And thus we need a more useful concept.

Alex Juhasz (10:18 am):

I think that Jay and I agreed that: a situated, engaged practice (as makers or scholars) within a community of which one is a member or player that is facilitated by technology and is interested in a subjective, affective analysis of these activities links us both to acafandom even though the objects and feelings we both engage with might differ from those stereotypically connected to this sub-field.

Also, we both used the word "play" a lot, as Henry noted in his comments to us on our first exchange. "Play" helped me to name the life-affirming, community-producing, self-empowerment that can come from collective, situated, cultural production (including analysis). Of course this is also "serious"--when I am engaging with others in these lived and felt practice against, say, an illicit war or a deadly virus; or when my methods include the use of "theory" or perhaps the production of avant-garde and thus "hi-brow" texts.

Derek Kompare (10:29 am):

Is "life-affirming, community-producing, self-empowerment" always "play"? Is emotional affect always reducible to "fandom"? While I can certainly see the appeal and rationality of this conception on several planes (politically, emotionally, even physically), I worry that it risks cleaving away things that are NOT "play" and affect that is NOT "fandom."

To put on the curmudgeonly pol econ hat (which I hate wearing, but it's still in my closet): these terms also merge quite nicely with 21st century capitalism, in which consumption and pleasure are symbiotic. As much as I hate to go there, these discourses (including the ever-controversial "gamification") give me pause.

What about "citizenship"? What about "love"? What about following a particular religious faith? These things could be described as "fandom," but to me that's selling them way short, and reducing their possibilities to mere market transactions.

Alex Juhasz (10:39 am):

Given that I am not a fan, I heartily agree. I suppose I was trying to generous (to you, and other acafans in this dialogue). I study and make alternative culture in some (probably already regulated and predictable) defiance to corporate capitalism. Hence, I want to make from scratch, and using different vocabularies and systems, the culture I want to see given that I can't leave the one I am in and the languages and products it uses are often familiar and therefore useful. And when I do this with others against a war or about AIDS, mourning, and death, I do start from anger, or love, or a highly-educated analysis but in the activity itself we all live outside corporate capitalism's will to mollify us with its stuff. That's why I'm curious about how you make sense of your own fandom of corporate things.

Derek Kompare (10:47 am):

The genius of corporate culture is that its output can be so, so attractive and compelling. I don't just mean "seductive" in a conspiratorial way: I mean genuinely intriguing. The people who make the culture that comes out under corporate labels (e.g., DC Comics writers, JJ Abrams, Lady Gaga, the Dallas Mavericks) are artists in the broad sense of the word: talented people creating engaging material. I see that creative work, per se (i.e., the actual creative labor, regardless of content), as no different than any other cultural work, including oppositional work such as what Alex is involved with. So my fandom starts from the recognition of this talent.

However, since it is corporate culture, it gets complicated very quickly, and can never be totally separate from that. Of course what we all do (including the scholarly life) can never be completely separate from corporate culture anyway...

Alex Juhasz (10:50 am):

Understood. But without the means behind whatever talent we do or do not have, alternative producers and fans make objects which somehow pale, therefore putting the focus on process rather than product.

And of course, alternative production is entirely situated within capitalism, we simply try to find crevices where we can name different rules of engagement and different values (as is true for academia as well).

[Jay jumped in when he could due to his schedule]

Jay Bushman (10:53 am):

At the risk of a tangent, I liked the mention of religion above. My parents like to say that my religion growing up was "Jedi," so immersed was I in Star Wars fandom. On a functional level, it's not that ridiculous -- I'd guess that more people of my age group in the US had their morals and ethics shaped by the idea of the Force than the idea of the Holy Ghost. We joke sometimes that the Bible was the original piece of transmedia.

Alex Juhasz (10:54 am):

I just used the word "values." No tangent.

Derek Kompare (10:56 am):

The Jedi example is a great one of the complexity of corporate culture. Many people might find it blasphemous to link the Bible and Star Wars, but the affect is clearly there. Again, "fandom" risks bracketing it all off into a kind of happy/fun, harmless space, when there's always more to it (not only in terms of, say, corporate capitalism, but also, in this example, spiritual investment).

Alex Juhasz (10:59 am):

How does Henry's suggestion of the word "serious" help here?

Jay Bushman (11:00 am):

The corporate culture question is also at the root of the whole transmedia terminology debate. Lurking behind all the questions about marketing vs. storytelling vs. franchising is the split between large corporate entities and small indie producers. The example of The Matrix that Henry is fond of using to describe transmedia is far away from anything transmedia that I've been involved with.

I've always found "serious" an odd and unsatisfying term -- as if something cannot be fun and engaging and also be important at the same time.

Alex Juhasz (11:03 am):

Because you make smaller, indie things, yes? Do they also need to make money?

Jay Bushman (11:04 am):

Up until 6 months ago, I was a completely indie producer, and my projects were intentionally designed to not have a revenue generating requirement. I'm swimming in different waters now, and it has been an educational process.

Derek Kompare (11:05 am):

Agreed on "serious." We're limited by language here, which puts "serious" and "fun" on a binary, rather than on a scale, or (better) a wide plane.

Jay Bushman (11:05 am):

Re: Serious -- I view Moby-Dick as a comedy. But hey, what do I know?

Alex Juhasz (11:06 am):

I've never made anything that needs to make money because I am a Professor and am supported in this way, or I get grants or donations or I make things for super cheap. But there's no outside capitalism: just quickly evaporating places within it (like Academia).

Derek Kompare (11:09 am):

The things we make are still commodities, though, at least in part. They may not make money directly, but they are broadly "marketable" (i.e., as lines in a vita or resume, works to build up our name recognition, etc.). Kind of a tangent, but even art and academia are part of the whole system, as it's always been.

Jay Bushman (11:09 am):

I worked corporate jobs for years to support myself, while making my projects on the side. But there's a limit to the scope and scale that can be produced that way.

Alex Juhasz (11:10 am):

And aca's get paid by the University while fans do the same work (play?) and do not.

Derek Kompare (11:11 am):

Those "limits" are certainly fascinating, though. Every medium has those places, which often result in really interesting stuff (as well as a lot of crap!). As SF writer Paul Cornell said, there's no shame in producing work that only a handful of people understand or appreciate.

Great point about support systems, Alex. Again, another very valid reason to have reservations about "acafan."

Alex Juhasz (11:12 am):

Virality goes against most of what I believe in, and yet its pull is a religion of its own.

I want to start a new religion of anti-virality, non-spreadability, and local joy, but who am I kidding!

Derek Kompare (11:13 am):

"Non-spreadability"! I love it!

Alex Juhasz (11:14 am):

It was fun and serious too. Nice meeting you both.

Jay Bushman (11:14 am):

Nice to meet you too, Alex!

Derek Kompare (11:14 am):

Great to meet both of you as well!

Jay Bushman is a transmedia story designer. Writing under the name "The Loose-Fish Project," he's produced a series of Twitter-based interactive story events around subjects including Star Wars, H.P. Lovecraft and famous ghosts. Jay is also the author of The Good Captain, a Twitter-based adaptation of Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno," and Spoon River Metblog, a modernization of "Spoon River Anthology" in the form of a group blog. His essay "Cloudmaker Days: A Memoir of the A.I. Game" appeared in Well Played 2.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning from ETC Press. Jay is currently a writer/designer at Fourth Wall Studios and the co-coordinator of Transmedia Los Angeles.

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke University Press, 1995), Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (Minnesota, 2005), and Media Praxis: A Radical Web-Site Integrating Theory, Practice and Politics, She has published extensively on documentary film and video. Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy. She recently completed the feature documentaries SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008), Video Remains (2005), and Dear Gabe (2003) as well as Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (1998) and the shorts, RELEASED: 5 Short Videos about Women and Film (2000) and Naming Prairie (2001), a Sundance Film Festival, 2002, official selection. She is the producer of the feature films, The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1997) and The Owls (Dunye, 2010). Her current work is on and about YouTube: www.aljean.wordpress.com. Her born-digital on-line "video-book" about YouTube, Learning from YouTube, is available from MIT Press (Winter 2011).

An annual attendee of both the SCMS conference and the San Diego Comic-Con, Derek Kompare is an Associate Professor in the Division of Film and Media Arts at Southern Methodist University. His research and writing is primarily focused on how media forms develop, and can be found in the books Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (2005) and CSI (2010), several anthology and journal articles, and online at Antenna, Flow, In Media Res and (occasionally) his own blog.

August 17, 2011

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Alex Juhasz, Jay Bushman, and Derek Kompare (Part One)

August 17, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Friday August 5, 2011 Alex Juhasz 9:50 AM (via MS Word):

For about an hour and a half on Monday August 1, Jay Bushman and I had a typed conversation over Skype while Derek Kompare drove thousands of miles and was off line. Through previous email exchanges, we had learned that we had almost nothing in common with each other, and had little interest in acafandom. It is from there that we began the "conversation" that follows. As we typed, I also read from a novel, played Internet scrabble, worked on my YouTube art show, PerpiTube: Repurposing Social Media Spaces, and monitored my children who were playing Minecraft and Sims.

Monday August 1, 2011

Alex Juhasz 4:27 PM (via Sykpe):

Jay. Hi. My thought is we try to have an asycnch conversation about the issues for Henry's blog, and then use it as our submission. Given people's vacation schedule, this may be a bit complicated, but it's worth a go, just to shake up their format a bit, if nothing else.

Jay Bushman 4:27 PM:

Works for me. Perhaps a good place for us to start would be off of this provocation:

"How might the debates about the acafan concept relate to other debates in connected fields of popular culture studies, such as discussions about the emergence of the 'new games journalism' as a means of capturing the subjective experience of players?"

I work in what you could describe as the professional transmedia community, and the ongoing debate over the definition of "transmedia" is absolutely related to self-identity and a need to justify the right sort of hybridization--a strange attraction to purity for such a multi-disciplinary field!

The phrase "subjective experience of the players" caught my eye. I've been arguing that the output of the various competing factions vying for control of the term transmedia, when viewed from the perspective of audience/player experience, actually have very little in common.

Alex Juhasz 4:40 PM:

Although I don't play or study games, my kids do (12, 12, and 13. Don't ask! blended pomo family...) and I have lots to say about my own subjective if vicarious experience of everything from Sims, to Minecraft, to Mario: a strange attraction/repulsion. I also don't study or play with mainstream culture. So fandom (and acafandom) are way outside my sitelines, except again for the vicarious experiences of my children, and various life partners (all of whom watch a lot of TV). That said, self-identity and subjective experience have both been really important to my work as a feminist scholar of alternative culture (that is what I do like to watch, and play, and make, in the forms of films, documentaries, and lately YouTube videos and websites).

Jay Bushman 4:43 PM:

I live in Los Angeles, where "academic" usually means something different than what it does in the rest of the world. I'm called "academic" because I want to produce new media versions of classic texts like Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice and Moby-Dick.

Alex Juhasz 4:52 PM:

Do you have any fancy degrees? I'm an academic, I think, in large part because I have a Ph.D. That said, my method is often "artistic," in that I choose to make things as my critical, studied process and project. Also, given my interest in things "alternative," my work is thought to be in some sort of opposition to the "classic texts" you are committed to. Although, of course, like most highly educated people, I have a soft spot in my heart for many of the greats, which also puts me at odds with a lot of what I think acafandom is supposed to be about: finding highs in mainstream culture's lows.

Jay Bushman 4:55 PM:

"a lot of what I think acafandom is supposed to be about: finding highs in mainstream culture's lows." - I like that description. It reminds me of one of my favorite plays, Wallace Shawn's "The Designated Mourner." A major theme of the play examines real and perceived differences between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" culture.

I have an MFA in Film and Video production. I'm now working as a writer and designer at Fourth Wall Studios, where the boundaries between narrative design and game design are blurry. I wrote an essay about my experience playing the first Alternate Reality Game for the ETC, which is why, I think, I was invited to participate

Alex Juhasz 4:57 PM:

And speaking of games: I LOVE the board and card kind. I also am addicted to Facebook Scrabble. But none of the immersive kind at all. That for me is a book.

I feel like fault lines of the conversation are already hi/low, immersive/narrative, fan/artist or perhaps fan/maker? Does that sound right? How are experience and narrative related in your work? BTW I write a lot about the processes of making activist/art work within communities (as important as the text).

Jay Bushman 5:08 PM:

My work tends to be split along two very different lines. One would be the digital narrative with the emphasis taken almost completely off of interactivity. Things like twitter novels, serial blog fiction, stories where the different delivery mechanisms are used to convey different characteristics of the story. Matching medium to material. For example, I wrote a sci-fi adaptation of the Melville short story "Benito Cereno" that was written for and distributed via Twitter. "Benito Cereno" is all about the faulty perceptions of its unreliable narrator, and twitter was a great medium to use to force the reader to adopt the narrator's descriptions of events.

The other fork is hugely interactive, with very little narrative--basically collaborative realtime story events using Twitter (and other social media to a lesser extent). For instance, every year during the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX, I run a Star Wars-based story event. And on Halloween, I usually run some sort of spooky/horror themed experience - I've done ghosts and Lovecraft so far, and am in the planning stages for next October.

The idea is to devise a simple ruleset with a light narrative throughline, and get participants to create their own stories within that world. I ripped off a description that I heard Douglas Rushkoff use to describe this - Throughline and Magic Circle - where the throughline represents tradition narrative structure, surrounded my a magic circle of interactivity and participation.

Alex Juhasz 5:18 PM:

So interactive/narrative is another split.

As an activist/artists/academic of alternative culture I think of the living, doing and making of things as immersive and interactive. I use narrative to structure and re-present representations of the activities and actions that are important to me in the living and doing of them. However, my new work is about the living and doing of online experience, which, I think of as already representation, and which I do not use narrative to structure. Hmm.

Jay Bushman 5:40 PM:

Well, one of the neat things about online/interactive storytelling is that you can throw out a handful of almost random data points, and the audience will tie them together into a narrative for you. Although sometimes, that doesn't work out the way you'd want.

Alex Juhasz 5:47 PM:

Audience/user, another faultline? Can you give an example that worked, and one that failed?

Jay Bushman 5:51 PM:

There's a somewhat well-known story from the A.I. ARG (aka The Beast.) Where the same piece of stock photography was accidentally used to depict two different characters - a successful executive, and robot geisha. The players immediately found the mistake, but decided to turn the error into a conspiracy theory about how the executive was secretly a robot in disguise. The game designers took this player-created theory and ran with it, incorporating it into the story. That one is both a failure and a success: failure of execution in the regular game leading to a remarkable, opportunistic success.

Alex Juhasz 6:06 PM:

Interesting. The work I make has neither players, nor fans. Teaching has students. Documentaries have viewers. Websites have users. And collaboratives have doers. When we make, we play, for sure. Mistakes usually happen because we lack budgets, then jump great hoops for coherence (i.e. $20K collaborative lesbian feature, The Owls, 2010, that had no coverage and half the story left unshot after grueling five day shoot, and yet still a narrative feature got made, and even got micro-distribution: First Run Features.) We played to make it work with our tiny budget and for our tiny microcommunity of makers, and slightly larger group of "fans" or maybe "friends."

Gotta make dinner for the kids. Any way that we might share this with Derek, let him voice in, make something of it, finish it off, and be done (and yes, this had been play: thanks!)

Friday, August 5, 3:40 PM

Derek Kompare (via MS Word)

I apologize for missing this intriguing discussion; as Alex said, I was driving with family across the US southwest. Rather than retcon myself into the above, I'll briefly respond to what I consider the most significant point.

As the member of this triad who most identifies with the usual conception of "acafan," it was refreshing to see how the term looks from its outside. As Alex and Jay suggest, we all have hybrid identities that affect our work and our play. But the modes and mediums we use in either are also parts of those identities. A "game" thus means different things to Jay, Alex, Alex's kids, Jay's "players," etc.

There are many ways of "doing" culture. Moreover, there are many ways of explaining how culture is done. My main issue with the term "acafan" is that, while it has certainly loosened the boundaries between those ways, it has itself established new expectations and restrictions. As Alex and Jay's work respectively shows, cultural engagement is not always about "academics and/or fans," and it's time we started to acknowledge that more.

August 17, 2011

Back to School Special: Syllabus for Science Fiction AS Media Theory

August 17, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

As I've done in previous terms, I am sharing here the syllabus for my graduate seminar this fall. The focus is on science fiction AS media theory: i.e. we are looking primarily at science fiction texts (mostly literary) as ways of thinking through the implications of media change and we are looking at media theories for the implicit utopian or dystopian claims they make and for the ways they have drawn on metaphors from science fiction. I have taught science fiction as literature before -- at MIT -- but this represents a new approach for me in terms of how I engage with SF texts in the classroom. Science Fiction as Media Theory

This class explores the ways that science fiction--sometimes known as speculative fiction--has historically functioned as a form of vernacular theory about media technologies, practices, and institutions. As recent writings about "design fictions" illustrate, these speculations have in turn inspired the developers and of new technologies as well as those who create content for such platforms, helping to frame our expectations about the nature of media change. And, increasingly, media theorists--raised in a culture where science fiction has been a pervasive influence--are drawing on its metaphors as they speculate about virtual worlds, cyborg feminism, post-humanism, and afro-futurism, among a range of other topics.

This seminar will explore the multiple intersections between science fiction and media theory, reading literary and filmic fictions as theoretical speculations and classic and contemporary theory as forms of science fiction. The scope of the course ranges from technological Utopian writers from the early 20th century to contemporary imaginings of digital futures and steampunk pasts. Not simply a course on science fiction as a genre, this seminar will invite us to explore what kinds of cultural work science fiction performs and how it has contributed to larger debates about communication and culture.

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

describe the historic relationship between speculative fiction and media theory
explain key movements in science fiction, such as technological utopianism, cyberpunk, steampunk, and discuss their relationship to larger theories of media change.
trace the roots of contemporary media theories of cyborg feminism, afrofuturism, and trans/post-humanism, back through science fiction films and literature
develop their own critical account of how ideas about media and technology have been shaped by the discourses associated with science fiction.

Required Books:

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants

Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers

Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End

Nalo Hopkinson and Upphinder Mehan (eds.), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy

Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

All other readings can be found on the class Blackboard site.

Assignments:

1. Blackboard Posts: Each week, students will post a reaction to the readings via the class blackboard site. The reaction might be a comment, a question, a provocation, and often will be a complex mixture of all of the above. It can be informal and need not be more than a few paragraphs, but it should show the student's thinking process in response to the topics and materials being encountered that week. This is the primary mechanism by which I will be monitoring your mastery of the core concepts of the class. You need not respond to every reading each week, but there should be signs there of close reading and critical engagement. (30 percent)

2. Media Analysis Paper: Applying the concepts of science fiction as a "design platform" that we will encounter in the first class session, students will choose a film, television series, or game which they feel offers a particularly vivid embodiment of a science fiction concept and provide an analysis which considers the thinking behind this representation of future media or technology, the ways this concept gets deployed through the story and the values which become associated with it, and how this concept may be deployed as a springboard for creative thinking about the development of future media tools, platforms, or processes. Along the way, students might consider the differences between embodying these concepts in an audio-visual media as opposed to the ways they might be dealt with in a literary text. The result should be a short but impactful essay (roughly 5-7 pages). (20 percent)

3. Theory Analysis Paper: A key theme in our discussions has been the idea that science fiction functions much like theory to speculate about the implications of current social, economic, political, cultural, or technological practices and to envision potential outcomes of current trends. In this paper, students will reverse their lens and examine theory as a form of speculative fiction. Students will select a work of media theory and discuss what they see as its vision for the future (whether implicit or explicit). What does it have to say about the nature of media change? Does it see people as moving towards a utopian or dystopian future? What, if any, explicit use does it make of metaphors drawn from science fiction as it constructs its vision for the future? What kinds of response does it seek from its readers to the problems or potentials that it has identified? Students shall produce a short, impactful essay (5-7 pages) which demonstrates close reading of the theoretical text and an ability to push analysis beyond what's explicitly on the page. (20 Percent)

4. Final Paper: Students, in consultation with the professor, will develop a distinctive project which emerges from the intersection between their research interests and the course content. The result can either be a creative project or a paper, though either should show the ability to construct an argument and mobilize evidence in support of their core claims and should show a grasp of the basic conceptual framework of the course. Students will be asked to give a short class presentation, sharing their project and its implications with their classmates, as part of the process of developing and refining their ideas. (30 Percent)

Wednesday, August 24th

Week 1: Science Fiction as Design Fiction

Readings:

* Brian David Johnson, Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction (Morgan and Claypool, 2011)

* Philip K. Dick, "The Minority Report," Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (New York: Random House, 2002), pp. 227-264.

The students will watch Minority Report prior to the first class session.

Guest Speaker: John Underkoffler, technical advisor to Minority Report; Brian David Johnson, author of Science Fiction Prototyping

Rec. for Further Reading:

Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell, "'Resistance is Futile:' Reading Science Fiction Alongside Ubiquitous Computing," forthcoming.
Bruce Sterling, "Design Fiction," Interactions, May-June 2009.
Mark Pesce, "Magic Mirror: Science Fiction as a Software Development Platform," Media in Transition conference, 1999.
David Stork, "The Best-Informed Dream: HAL and the Vision of 2001," Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

Wednesday, August 31st

Week Two: Technological Utopianism

Howard P. Segal, "The Vocabulary of Technological Utopianism" and "American Visions of Technological Utopia," Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 10-44.
Sina Nafai, "Underworld: An Interview with Rosalind Williams," Cabinet, Summer 2008, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/30/najafi.php.
Edward Bellamy, Excerpt from Looking Backward, Chapter 1-12, pp. 3-72.
Katharine Burdekin, excerpt from Proud Man.

Wednesday, September 7th

Week Three The Origins of Science Fiction

Andrew Ross, "Getting Out of the Gernsbeck Continuum," Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 100-135
John W. Campbell, "Twilight;" (40-63) Lester del Rey, "Helen O'Loy;" (62-73) and Theodore Sturgeon, "Microscopic God," (115-142) in Robert Silverberg (ed.), Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1, (New York, NY: Orb Books, 2005).
Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (pp. 35-48); Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (pp. 49-64); Nobert Wiener, "Men, Machines, and the World About" (pp. 65-72), in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (ed.),The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Recommended for Further Reading:

John Huntington, "The Myth of Genius: The Fantasy of Apolitical Power" (pp. 44-59) and "An Economy of Reason: The Motives of the Technocratic Hero" (pp. 69-79) in Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Short Story (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

Wednesday, September 14th

Week Four: Postwar Dystopias

Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, "Mass Communications, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action," (pp. 18-30) and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry Reconsidered" (pp.31-37) in Paul Marris and Sue Thornham (ed.), Media Studies: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language." http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
George Orwell, 1984, Chapter One. http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/0.html
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, pp. 1-44, 117-131
Ray Bradbury, Fairenheit 451.

Wednesday, September 21st

Week Five The Space Merchants and American Advertising

Vance Packard, excerpt from The Hidden Persuaders (New York: Ig, 2007), pp. 31-64.
Jules Henry, "Advertising as a Philosophical System," Culture Against Man (New York: Vintage, 1965), pp. 45-99.
Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (New York: St. Martins, 1958)
Frederik Pohl, "Tunnel Under the World" (pp.1-34) and "Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus" (pp.62-85), The Best of Frederik Pohl (New York: Sidgewick and Johnson, 1977)
Henry Kuttner, "The Twonky," The Best of Henry Kutner (New York: Ballantine, 1975), pp.167-189.

Wednesday, September 28th (Henry out of town)

Week Six Cordwainer Smith and Psychological Warfare

Paul M.A. Linebarger, excerpt from Psychological Warfare (xxx), pp. 43-92.
Cordwainer Smith, "Scanners Live in Vain" (pp.65-95); "The Dead Lady of Clown Town"(pp. 223-286); "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" (pp.401-417) "A Planet Named Shayol," (pp. 419-448); "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," (pp.xx) The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (Boston: Boston Science Fiction Association, 1993)

Wednesday, October 5th

Week Seven Altered States

Alvin Toffler, "Diversity" from Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 283-322.
Betty Friedan, "The Problem That Has No Name"(pp.57-78) and "The Crisis in Women's Identity" (pp.123-136) The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001).
James Tiptree Jr., "The Women Men Don't See," (pp.255-279) and John Varley, "Lollipop and Tar Baby," (pp. 357-374) in Brian Atteby and Ursula K. Le Guin (eds.) The Norton Book of Science Fiction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pp. 255-279.
Octavia Butler, "Blood Child," Blood Child and Other Stories (Seven Stories Press, 2005), pp.3-30.
Pamela Zoline, "Heat Death of the Universe" in Pamela Sargent (ed.) The New Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 100-119.
Kate Wilhelm, "Baby, You Were Great," in Pamela Sargent (ed.) Women of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 139-158.

Wednesday, October 12th

Week Eight Cyberpunk

Bruce Sterling, "Preface;" James Patrick Kelly, "Solstice;" (pp. 66-104) Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner, "Mozart in Mirrorshades;" (pp. 223-239) and John Shirley, "Freezone;" (pp. 139- 177) in Bruce Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Ace Books, 1988).
William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic," Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1986), pp.1-22.
Samuel R. Delaney, "Some Real Mothers: An Interview with Samuel R. Delaney," in Silent Interviews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), pp. 164-185.
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., "Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism," in Larry McCaffrey (ed.) Storming the Reality Studio: A Case Book of Cyberpunk and Post-Modern Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 182-193.

Wednesday, October 19th

Week Nine Cyborg Feminism

Anne Balsamo, "Signal to Noise: On the Meaning of Cyberpunk Subculture," in Frank Biocca and Mark R. Levy (eds.), Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 347-368.
All of Balsamo's online articles can be found here
Anne Balsamo, "Feminism for the Incurably Informed," Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 133-156.
Veronica Hollinger, "Something Like a Fiction: Speculative Intersections of Sexuality and Technology" in Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon (eds.), Queer Universes: Sexualities and Science Fiction, (Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 140-160.
C.L. Moore, "No Woman Born," Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 261-300.
Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers (Orion, 2000).

Recommended Reading:

Donna Harroway, "Cyborgs at Large," in Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (eds.) Technoculture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 1-20.

Guest Speaker: Anne Balsamo, USC

Wednesday, October 26th

Week Ten The Space Merchants Revisited

Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang, "The Consumer as Explorer" (pp. 68-80) and "The Consumer as Rebel" (pp. 137-151), in The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and Its Fragmentation (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996).
Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (New York: Tor, 2003).
George Saunders, "Civil War Land In Bad Decline," Civil War Land In Bad Decline (Riverhead, 1997), pp. 3-24.
Samuel R. Delany, "Aye, And Gomorrah," Aye, and Gomorrah: Stories, pp.91-101.

Wednesday, November 2nd

Week Eleven Posthumanism and Transhumanism

Jussi Parikka, "Insects in the Age of Technology," in Jussi Parikka (ed.), Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. ix-xxxv.
N. Katherine Hayles, "Towards Embodied Virtuality," in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 1-24.
Ray Kurzweil, "The Six Epochs,"(pp.7-34) and "Eich bin ein Singularitarian," (pp. 369-390) The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, (London, England: Penguin, 2006), pp. 7-34.
Vernor Vinge, Rainbow's End (New York: Tor, 2007)

Wednesday, November 9th

Week Twelve Afrofuturism and the Global Imagination

"What is Afro-Futurism?: An Interview with artist/educator D. Denenge Akpem," Post-Black, March 2010, http://postblackthebook.blogspot.com/2010/03/afro-futurism-interview-with.html.
Catherine Rameriz, "Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin," Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33(1), Spring 2008, pp. 185-194. http://americanstudies.ucsc.edu/csramirez/Afrofuturism.pdf
Andrea Hairston, "Girots of the Galaxy;" Larissa Lai, "Rachel;" Vandana Singh, "Delhi;" Tamai Kobayashi, "Panopte's Eye;" Karin Lowachee, "The Forgotten Ones;" Greg Van Eekhout, "Native Aliens;" Celu Amberstone, "Refugees;" devorah major, "Trade Winds;" and Carole McDonnel, "Lingua Franca," from Nalo Hopkinson and Upphinder Mehan (eds.), So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004).

Wednesday, November 16th

Week Thirteen Steampunk and Retrofuturism

Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (New York: St. Martin's, 2010)
Rebecca Onion, "Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice," Neo-Victorian Studies 1(1), Autumn, 2008, pp. 138-163.
Henry Jenkins, "'The Tomorrow That Never Was': Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter," in Jorn Ahrens and Arno Meteling (eds.), Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence,(New York, NY: Continuum, 2010), pp. 63-83.

Wednesday, November 30th

Week Fourteen Student Presentations

August 15, 2011

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Roberta Pearson and Alexis Lothian (Part Two)

August 15, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Roberta Pearson: You and I differ so radically with regard to what constitutes our acafandom that it's difficult for me to respond to the substance of your post (not having had experience of the kind of fandom in which you're involved). I'm going to use what you say to continue to meditate on what we might mean by acafan and whether it's a useful label. It's interesting that you, like many others, have the urge to self-confession. You say that the overlap of fandom and academia in your life has everything to do with personal ethics, particularly through the feminist science fiction convention where you serve as an advocate of transformative fan works. You also say that you're not at the moment a fan of a particular text but rather as I suggested in my original post a fan of fandom. I'm glad that you're 'self-confessing' this way and also glad that other people here have given into the urge, since it may be these self-confessions that help us to refine the acafan label.

In terms of the matrix of acafandom that I began to develop above, you'd be a non-tenured, transformational fan of fandom, and now I would add with a strong stake in this identity. I'd be a tenured, affirmational fan of particular texts without a particularly strong stake in this identity, except for my continuing connections with Sherlockian friends and my decade long attempt to write my book about Star Trek as television. I think the identity issue might be a key differentiator not only amongst fans but amongst acafans as well. Being an empiricist at heart (although not a raw positivist) I'm tempted to put together a little questionaire for everyone participating in this site to see if we can come up with an acafandom matrix. .

Alexis Lothian: I feel strange about the "fan of fandom" label, although it clearly applies to me. The awkwardness comes from the flexibility of the term 'fan' I discussed in my provocation, I think. I'm a transformational fan of fandom too; I certainly wouldn't want to affirm everything that is included under that term, although I would want to call attention to the hierarchy of values operating in what I would and would not be willing to affirm.

Perhaps the origin of those terms "transformational" and "affirmational" fandom (at least as I understand it) can help make sense of where I stand. They are terms that come from fandom, coined initially by obsession_inc and then taken up by Skud+ response to the feminist convention WisCon, which is the one I've been talking about my involvement in. When I talk about acafandom, I'm talking at least partly about acknowledging and doing justice to my own thinking's debt to fannish theorists and artists outside the academia machine who have given me terms and ideas that help me theorize just as much as the dense analyses and critical explorations of literary and cultural studies do.

I appreciate that you called attention to the "tenured / non tenured" strand in our aca/fannish matrix. Both as someone on the bottom end of that particular greasy pole, a graduate student on the cusp of finishing her PhD and entering the job market, and as someone who is invested in unpacking hierarchies of status and privilege, I think a lot about the materialities underpinning what we can and can't say about our fandom, our academia.

On the question of tastemaking that you brought up, for me, it goes without saying that Star Trek has as much place in scholarship as Shakespeare, and I see the Shakespeare scholar's celebration of genius as fannish in just about the same way as the Star Trek geek's idealization of 'Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination.' As a scholar, delving into texts for their own sake is less what interests me than the work texts can do in the context of readers and cultures (though I love close textual analysis for what it can uncover and engage in it both in fannish and in academic situations). I would like to think that both Star Trek and Shakespeare fandom can show us important things about what Shakespeare and Trek can be, can create in and for their viewers.

I often work with texts that few members of academic communities are familiar with, whether because they are little-read historical works (let me just pause in this space to recommend Katharine Burdekin's 1937 feminist dystopia Swastika Night) or because they circulate outside of mainstream literary communities.

I do embrace the capacity to be a tastemaker that academia gives me to some extent in that it allows me to share these amazing works with other people: I've been able to put together several vidshows for student audiences to explain the way transformative fan communities have developed a set of literacies and artistic practices for digital video remix. I'm alert to the issues Kristina Busse has often raised, in terms of the ways scholars may be creating a canon that isn't representative of fan creators' work as a whole and may indeed go against the way fans want to be represented. But I aim to be quite clear that when I show fanworks, my aim is generally not to show what fandom is (I am grateful to scholars like Tisha Turk for doing the work of explicating fan videos' rhetorical functioning so that I can focus on my own interests without needing to do that to the same extent) but rather to show what fans' transformative artistic practices can do.

Roberta Pearson: I know the original definitions of affirmational versus transformational fandom as developed by obsession (if we can call her this for short) although don't know how the concepts have been developed by Skud so need to go look at that. While I find the distinctions useful, I reject the value judgements inherent in them. As I said in my essay for Kristina and Louisa that I mentioned above, I think that celebrating the latter and intimating that the former are too closely linked with producers returns us to the early days of fan studies when we celebrated semiotic geurrillas and ignored other aspects of fandom. But if the distinction is between fans who engage in interpretation and evaluation of a loved textual object and those who transform that object in some way, without one being seen as superior to the other, than I'm happy to use it not only for fans but for acafans.

I really find this whole fan of fandom thing fascinating since it's something I've just 'discovered' while writing that essay I keep referring to. I had thought that fans always had to be anchored to particular texts and that indeed 'texts' produced fans (who might then of course go on to produce other texts). This is getting us a bit far from the acafan debate, although perhaps not if we return to my point that we need to theorise fandom before theorising acafandom.

Re your statement about fannish theorists and artists who help you theorise as much as any academic, this seems quite close to people studying contemporary art -- as least as I understand it! I have a colleague who works on contemporary Chinese art. He says that many of the artists have imbibed some critical theory from the academy and are now reworking it in their art works. And he's very interested in the junction between critical theory and critical practice. So this kind of work might be very close to what you and other acafans are doing when working with fan artists. Again, this suggests that we might broaden the term acafan to many humanist disciplines.

RE academic power and privilege, of course even those at the top of the greasy pole can't entirely escape our fannish affiliations. Many colleagues in various depts have teased me about Star Trek -- associating me, of course, with the most stereotyped fans of all, the Trekkies. But as long as I'm publishing on the topic they're happy because of the national system of research evaluation that we have in the UK. I imagine that a fannish identity might be harder for an ambitious young acafan to disclose in publications or more particularly at job interviews. But that might be more of a problem in the States. Here in the UK, I don't think it's such a big deal, but then again I think the US academy is generally more obsessed with identity issues than the UK one.

Alexis Lothian: Skud doesn't alter obsession_inc's concepts of affirmational and transformational fandom so much as lay them out in a matrix of examples--it might fit nicely with your interest in the empirical! I think that a value judgment does sometimes seem very present in how those terms are used by those who engage in transformational fandom, but a line in Skud's post suggests that the intention is much as you have been using them: she writes that ""affirmational" and "transformational" are things you can be both of, either at different times or simultaneously, without disappearing in a puff of illogic." I think that, if we made your questionnaire (an idea I rather love), we would find that many people appeared simultaneously in several different places on the matrix.

I completely agree that the way I am talking about fans and fanworks is the way many scholars engage with practising artists. In fact, in October of this year I am taking part in a panel at the Los Angeles Queer Studies conference with three other young queer scholars, in which we will all be presenting work on queer digital artistic self-fashioning and talking about projects with regard to which we are both scholars and creators. The work that I will be talking about just happens to be fan production.

As for the UK/US difference in academic structures, I have experience of both and think you're probably correct regarding identity, but I suspect the differences within each country are at least as wide as the transatlantic gap. And I'll have to get back to you regarding the fate of the ambitious young acafan in a couple of years...

Alexis Lothian is completing her dissertation in the English department at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on queer time, speculative fiction, and fan communities' transformative modes of digital analysis and critique. She is a founding member of the editorial team for Transformative Works and Cultures and has presented and published on science fiction literature and film and on fan video, including contributions to dossiers in Cinema Journal and Camera Obscura (forthcoming). Her website is http://queergeektheory.org.

Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies and Head of the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. She has written about Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, Batman and other cultural icons. She has written some Sherlockian scholarship and even produced a Trek fanfic or two for private circulation, but considers herself primarily an 'affirmational' fan whose academic interests are more in the industry than in fandom.

August 14, 2011

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Roberta Pearson and Alexis Lothian (Part One)

August 14, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Roberta Pearson: I'm looking forward to Alexis' 'provocation' since our preliminary exchanges indicate that we're ideal partners, coming at the issue of aca-fannishness from very different perspectives. In fact, it's the perspective and position of the various posters that I want to address first.

The very title of Henry's blog together with this debate have so far led most participants to confessions concerning the kinds of acafans they are or are not and why. As Anne Kustritz pointed out, though, there's a danger here. "The aca-fan concept will be defined by perhaps the most simplistically "confessional" works unless we create a theoretical frame for understanding...." And as Henry said, "my bet is that each participant has reasons to feel somewhat inside and somewhat outside the "core" of the community being represented." So far we've had discussions of myriad fandoms, including skating and Radiohead, with many people positioning themselves somewhat outside the core of the fan communities with which they affiliate. We've also had people positioning themselves outside a presumed core of acafans, which implicitly (and not so implicitly in some cases) means an active involvement in a fan community or at least a stake in transformational as opposed to affirmational fandom. I'd like to suggest that we can't begin to theorise the concept of acafan unless we first return to our theorisations of fan.

Harrington says, "I am also, I suspect, a different kind of fan that most participants in this blog series. I'm definitely an "as-is" (not transformative) fan and for the most part my fandom is experienced privately not publicly." Campbell says that when reading some fan studies, he has the "distinct impression that if I don't don a Star Trek uniform, attend Sci-Fi conventions, invest a significant amount of my time memorizing minutia surrounding each episode and reading fan fiction, then I cannot claim to be a Star Trek fan. Apparently, enjoying the series, collecting some Star Trek memorabilia, and discussing the series with friends who also enjoy the show is not enough to be a "fan.""

And now time for a bit of personal confession and positioning. I certainly consider myself a fan, particularly with my core fandoms of Trek and Sherlock Holmes. Re the former, I've written a couple of fanfics, just to see how it was done, but the first and only time I went to a con, the sight of people dressed in Starfleet uniforms struck me as either risible or horrifying. Re the latter, I've written Sherlockian scholarship, was for a period in my life actively involved in the Sherlockian community and still count some members of that community among my dearest and oldest friends. But with Harrington I'm much more an affirmational than a transformative fan and experience most of my fandom in private; thus by some accounts I'm probably not a fan despite my self-declaration as such. Here we have two possible dimensions of fandom: affirmational versus transformational and private versus public (or perhaps text versus community).

In a recent essay that I wrote for Kristina Busse's and Louisa Stein's collection on the BBC Sherlock, I suggested another dimension, distinguishing between those who are fans of a specific text/cultural icon and those who are fans of fandom itself, the shared protocols of fandom on sites such as LiveJournal permitting fans to move easily from one fandom to another. The relationship of these various kinds of fans to texts, to the industries that produce them and to fan communities are distinctly different and worthy of exploration. And until we do this we cannot begin to distinguish among the different kinds of aca-fans.

And of course once we've charted the fan bit of the term, we must also chart the aca bit, defining the individual's relationship to the academy. We can then differentiate for example, between a non-tenure track transformational fan of fandom and a tenured affirmational fan of particular texts or cultural icons (the category into which I would put myself), along with the factors of power and privilege that come with these distinctions.

Continuing with self-positioning, I have to confess (and among this crowd it feels very much like a confession, although one I've made before and in print) that I'm a fan of lots of high culture, ranging from Shakespeare to Bach. I would argue that many in the humanities who engage in "serious scholarship" around these cultural icons are also fans. As Henry says here, "as writers like Jolie Jensen noted, this mixture of passion and knowledge was what qualified one to speak about classical music, serious literature, or high art, but because of the legacy of critical studies, being passionate about popular culture was seen as being duped by the culture Industries." Here's the classic Bourdieu-ian binary: passionate engagement with popular culture and distanced appreciation of high culture.

Yet as I have argued elsewhere, those who love Bach or Shakespeare are just as passionate as those who love skating or Radio Head, and this extends to those who engage in "serious scholarship." Above I've suggested refining the concept of the aca-fan; here I suggest broadening it to include those within the humanities who research particular texts or icons. Anyone who has been in the company of Shakespeareans for example, recognizes the easy familiarity and in-group conversation of the fan, as people reference various plays and characters. Why should those of us who (also) study popular culture and engage in much the same activities, feel inferior to acafans of high culture?

These high culture acafans have always felt fully confident in their judgments as authorized tastemakers, fully confident that is until the culture wars that enshrined relativism and challenged academic authority. As someone who began her academic career amidst this furore and fully imbibed the concept of cultural relativism, I've never felt confident in imposing my own tastes upon my students nor in unproblematically declaring that something I like is 'good'.

My initial training as a social scientist, which involved the notions of objectivity that others have referenced here, probably also made it harder for me to engage either in aesthetic analysis or aesthetic judgments. From my preliminary exchanges with Francesca Coppa, originally scheduled to be my partner in this debate, I have the impression that the younger generation of academics feels much less reticent about this and happy to grab the tastemaking power that comes with an academic position. And even I am now happier to declare something "good," or at least to interrogate the factors that might make something "good," as my co-author and I are doing in a chapter of our book about Star Trek and Television. But does being an acafan always mean that one loves the object that one studies?

And yet another confession - as well as being a fan of texts I'm a fan of the industries that produce them. This industry fandom was practically forced upon me as a fan of Star Trek during its first airing, as news of low ratings and imminent cancellation continually circulated. In order to understand this, my adolescent self had to acquire some grasp of network operations, even if only through the not so reliable medium of TV Guide. Now that production studies has emerged as the dominant paradigm within television studies, I return to worries about objectivity and what it means to study the beloved object and to have access to those who produce it. Can we/should we maintain a critical distance?

I said above that when I first saw someone in Starfleet uniform at a con, I hovered between horror and laughter. The next time I saw someone in Starfleet uniform, was on the Paramount studio lot during the filming of Star Trek Nemesis. When Brent Spiner and Marina Sirtis appeared fully decked out in their characters' costumes, scholarly objectivity disappeared in a haze of excitement: I was for a moment completely fan without a trace of aca, indeed, living the fan's perfect daydream. But loving something doesn't mean always being affirmational: affirmational fans are perfectly capable of insightful criticism.

And fans of course are themselves often insightful industry analysts, for the same reasons that I was forced to be as an adolescent; they want to know what brings their beloved object into being and how long it might survive. I think it's important that fans, academics and aca-fans all have some knowledge of the industries that produce the texts that generate the majority of fandoms. Therefore, I disagree with Kristina when she says, "As a fan I don't want to engage directly with actors/writers/directors, and as an academic, I don't care about that side either. I know it's an important area, and I'm very happy that we have good and smart people explaining and representing fandom, but to me fandom is mostly about what we as fans do." However, I do think that acafans who do production studies do need to engage in constant self-reflexivity about their relationships to industry and to producers.

Alexis Lothian:

I couldn't agree more with Roberta that we need to theorize what it is we mean when we talk about being a "fan" as well as an "acafan." Without that, we find ourselves talking at cross purposes--though, of course, it's the very overdetermination of both those terms that keeps them alive and interesting. That said, it is difficult to engage in this conversation without giving in to a certain urge to self-disclosure. Especially because the way I experience the overlap of academia and fandom in my own life has everything to do with personal ethics, with the contexts and standpoints that shape my participation in knowledge production.

For me, fandom is less an identity than a location, a set of networks and connections within which I'm situated. My participation in fan culture mostly means being accountable to a community that I became part of through my love for science fiction and my interest in transformative works and fan video, but it's been sustained--and friendships formed--more through discussions of feminism, race, queer sex, and capitalism than through exploration of a source text. In fact, I find it difficult to name anything that I am intensively a fan *of* at the moment. Other than to say that I'm a fan of critical fanworks that engage transformatively with the hegemonic politics of the culture industry, which is possibly partly a way of seeking excuses for the extent of the pleasures I take in the aforementioned hegemonic products.

Being a fan is difficult, as Jack Halberstam says in this debate. The things you love betray you and other people just don't understand. In fact, my own movement away from more object-oriented fandom can probably be traced to the intensity of my disappointment with the end of Battlestar: Galactica, around which I participated in an exciting whirl of collaborative fanwork-making, drawing out queer and antihumanist and other critical interpretations through transformative works. The show's last half-season (and here I do speak as frustrated fan!) made a mockery of everything that excited my collaborators and I, and even though the fanworks the group created maintained the queer worldmaking we'd been doing around the show in ways I think are fascinating and important, I've been less inclined to give myself over to a fannish passion since.

Instead I have been working to celebrate and expand critical forms of fandom through the feminist science fiction convention WisCon, where I've been part of a group bringing transformational fanworks into the heart of a convention traditionally focused on literary science fiction with a feminist focus (the kind that tends, alas, not to sell very well or to get mainstream marketing). The convention is not an academic conference, but it shares very many concerns with my academic home of queer studies: thinking critically about politics and pleasure, discovering and creating and building on ways of living, thinking, loving that are outside the mainstream. It owes at least as much to activism (often online activism but certainly not restricted to that) as to the fandom it's ostensibly organized around. As with anything one is a fan of, I have plenty of frustrations relating to WisCon, but it wouldn't be inaccurate to say I'm a fan of this particular fan community. It's also true that I could occupy the position I do with respect to the WisCon community without necessarily calling myself a fan--to think of myself as a fan marks me as more personally invested, names the position the feminist sf world plays not just in my professional but also in my personal life.

In going to WisCon as a fan, even a fan who has been afforded professional opportunities through it, I tend not to go as an academic. I don't study fans or fannishness as such, though I have written about fanworks and will continue to do so. It's more that my participation in fandom has shaped the way I engage with scholarship. My academic work is about what speculative fiction and other forms of artistic speculation can do to create alternative ways of being, different ways of living and thinking futures and worlds. Being part of feminist sf and transformative works fandom lets me see how other people are also thinking about these things. I don't want only to study fans or to use fans' ideas to make sense of texts, although those are certainly dynamics that I engage in. I tend to prefer to think about fandom, as about as a set of communities where people are engaging in cultural production, intellectual exchange and concrete worldmaking that participates in the same project as the one I'm working on. Fandom has become central to my intellectual life because of the specific things that happen in the fannish world I live in: the art that gets made, the people who connect, the ways in which normative relationships between pleasures, politics, capital, genders, and sexes get played with and reimagined.

I say "intellectual life" rather than "academic life" with some care. I take seriously Matt Hills's injunction in the classic Fan Cultures that academics should bear in mind our tendency to valorise the modes of fannish participation that look most like the particular class based institutional worlds that we inhabit, and certainly convention-based US sf fan culture looks sometimes disturbingly similar to the academic conference and publication circuit. But the differences between fandom and academia are profound, and I get very uncomfortable when they are eroded from either side.

Fandom's structures come about through play, sometimes through desires to make the world a better or more equitable or more entertaining place. Academia's an industry, and academics working on objects they love or with communities they are a part of don't get to opt out of the more problematic parts of knowledge production--such as measuring their output for the assessment of research's quality and impact. If I use my connections to fandom for that purpose, I think it's vital for me to offer something to fandom itself as well. I could call that research ethics, but as a scholar of literature and cultural production without a substantial background in the social sciences or in critical anthropological literature, I'm happier calling it acafannish manners.

I hope these meditations make it clear why I tend to embrace the term acafan, and how I've been able to leverage that term to account for the ethical considerations that are important to me. Other terms might fit as well; Halberstam talks in In a Queer Time and Place about the subcultural archivist who is also a participant, and that also describes how I see my work.

There are plenty of places where my scholarship and my fandom do not overlap, and I think I need that space in order to maintain both rigor in my academic work and pleasure in my fandom. But in the spaces between, acafandom is a helpful shorthand for my affective, ethical, critical, and personal negotiations. Working within queer studies and having lots of connections to critical ethnic studies scholarship, I've seen plenty of examples of the way this kind of insider/outsider position plays out for scholars who study communities of which they are members--particularly communities that are excluded and oppressed. Fandom is not an oppressed community, although there are plenty of people and groups within it who are structurally oppressed in various ways. But it is often marginal, overlaps with other marginal groups and practices (especially when it comes to sex and sexuality, I have found) and it can still be unfairly exploited.

I've recently had the opportunity to experience the acafannish situation from the opposite side, as it were. A friend of mine, who I know through fannish circles and who is a postgraduate student, recently wrote a paper about vidding. She wanted to interview a vidder and asked me, and I've now had the opportunity to read my own opinions about fannish meaning-making as stated by a research informant rather than from the pedestal of scholarly publication. Her piece is excellent and I learned a lot from the way she was analyzing my responses; I suppose this must be an experience with which any academic who is also an artist or cultural producer will be familiar. Yet it was still a strange and vulnerable feeling, one that may well affect the way my academic and fannish projects intersect in future.

August 11, 2011

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Karen Tongson, Jayna Brown, and Geraldine Bloustein (Part Two)

August 11, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Karen Tongson: What strikes me when I view our opening remarks collectively, is that each of us has such a different orientation to the concept of "cultural studies." I think I work from a Williamsian genealogy (still very much influenced by literary studies), whereas Jayna invokes the Frankfurt School, and Gerry speaks from the vantage point of Anthropology. These positions clearly have an impact on how we each respond to the notion of "fandom" itself: whether we embrace, disavow, or express some ambivalence to being a fan, let alone an "acafan."

The capaciousness of the term "fan" (at least for those of us not squarely situated within "fan studies") reminds me of how the term "queer" used to circulate in the early-to-mid-90s: as irritant and stimulant, as identification and practice, as discipline and unruliness. We, as a trio, are are quite loose with our associations to the terms "fan" and "acafan." My rather casual embrace of the term "acafan," I think, has as much to do with seeing it as an adjacent and complementary practice to the other fields in which my work is more readily situated. It's descriptive of another dimension to my work in queer cultural studies. Do you two feel the same way about the "adjacency" or additive power in the terms "fandom" and "acafandom?"

I was especially struck by the moment in Jayna's piece when she declared her identification as "a fan," not in relation to a broader set of cultural objects, but of her nephew's attachment to Gaga and other pop iconoclasts. Jayna forges a fandom once removed, and practiced through mediation. Instead of thinking this as a disavowal of, or distancing from what "true fandom" and commitment might mean, I am drawn to the possibilities it opens for creating a prismatic approach to affective, intellectual attachments.

I also see something of this in Gerry's relationship to her research "subjects," who are her collaborators, as much as they are figures of inquiry and "knowledge acquisition."

Each of us also seem to find and wind our way into this adjacency or proximity with fandom through music, in particular. In what ways does music, as the object, and as form, bear some impact (or not) on the practice of "acafandom?"

Jayna Brown:

Karen has asked us in her response to consider the ways we may think of acafandom or fandom as additive or adjacent to the fields we work in. Acafandom, if I am using it in the correct way, would seem adjacent in the sense that the skills I learn and develop in my intellectual life are my way of embracing the music and film and literature that I feel passionate about. These skills open up the 'texts,' to reveal the shape and texture of my passions. But these skills also help shape what I find interest in, what I am drawn to, or become the object of affection themselves. What strikes me about all three of our opening remarks is just this: the dialogic relationship between our topics and our intellectual training.

Karen also asks a very important question, regarding the ways music impacts the practice of acafandom. Perhaps one of the ways it does so is to require that we become part of, or engage with a mixture of communities. Karen's remembrances bring me back to my undergraduate years in England, reading the Brontës and Kristeva during the day and dancing to house music and northern soul in the club all night (yes, I am feeling nostalgic today!).

Music could also challenge what we think of as 'aca' in the first place, broaden our sense of what that means. If 'aca' implies study of and incorporation of influences, so might fandom, as with the 'homework' I see my nephew doing into music and cultural movements of the past. The way, as Karen says, Scritti Politti introduced her to Kant is the same way Lady Gaga has introduced my nephew to Dada, Andy Warhol and German Cabaret. This is the same way The Clash's Sandinista album (my favorite!) got me to find out what dictatorship was and about US cold war policies in Central and South America.

I share with Gerry an appreciation of the ways music blurs the lines between creator and audience; at least the types of music I am drawn to are participatory, collective. Music also impacts the practice of acafandom in that it makes us search for a way to think about the non linguistic, what happens, as Paul Gilroy puts it, at lower frequencies, in different registers.

Gerry Bloustein:

I think Karen's initial questions about the additive or adjacent nature of acafandom to our own areas pf interest and research are pertinent. On reflection, like Jayna, I realise that my engagement and in fact my immersion with particular areas of popular culture and especially with music does continue to both shape and develop my intellectual pursuits and networks as well as underpin my attraction and love of the activities. So work and play interweave and mesh (how lucky are we acafans!).

Interestingly, one of the young musicians and entreperneurs (one my collaborators with whom I have been working closely for about 10 years!) articulated this dialogic relationship, which Jayne described. He now runs a grassroots and thriving retail hip hop business, including an event management business which supports his own music making and his experiential community and networks. He told me sternly one day in response to a question I asked him about how he saw the blending of his art and commerce, 'Everyone wants to make money from things they love doing, so why shouldn't I?'

If you think about the ways in which we as academic fans also make our living through activities we love and from the worlds in which we are embedded, it is a similar story.

And as far as music is concerned yes I think it does underpin so much of what we love and enjoy whatever the subject of our desires and attractions. I was/ am very much an acafan of Joss Whedon's work (love the writing, the humour, the characterisations) and so loved the clever use of music throughout all of his creations. It is an area that I still am anxious to explore - the role of affect (I think I said this earlier) which is so powerful and can often articulate the unspoken / unspeakable and even the ineffable through music. Any other takers?

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press), is forthcoming in August 2011. She is co-series editor for Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins (NYU Press), and is also co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) with Gustavus Stadler.

Jayna Brown is Associate Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Riverside. Her book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern was published by Duke University Press in 2008 and has won awards. Her current projects focus on utopias and race in speculative fiction and global pop music and black women and postpunk music in Britain.

Geraldine Bloustien is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Hawke Research Centre, Division of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of South Australia (UniSA). She has published extensively and internationally in the areas of cultural identities, youth cultures and on the complexity of effectively using participatory visual ethnography. Her book publications include Girl Making: A Cross Cultural Ethnography of Growing Up Female (Berghahn 2003), Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity (Ashgate 2008) and Youth, Music and Creative Cultures: Playing for life (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2011).. Her recent research explores the intersections of community media, music, health and Web 2.0 technologies.

August 10, 2011

Aca-fandom and Beyond: Karen Tongson, Jayna Brown, and Geraldine Bloustien (Part One)

August 10, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Earworms, Touchstones, Inversions Karen Tongson

I've got a reason, girl, and it's Immanuel Kant's--and I like it

-Scritti Politti, "Boom! There She Was"

I'm convinced the only reason I ever cracked open a copy of Kant's Critique of Judgment--the "Great Books" edition--is that Green Gartside, the helium-voiced frontman of the 80s British pop band, Scritti Politti, suggestively whispered this remark through my Walkman when I was 13 years old. I hadn't even realized then that several years prior, Scritti Politti also recorded a single called "Jacques Derrida," in which the andro-voiced Green declares: "I'm in love with Zhack Derr-eee-dah/Read a page and I know what I need to/Take apart my baby's heart..."

I open with Scritti Politti not simply to provide some texture to the pop music fandom that manifests in my work, but also because, in many respects, Scritti Politti's irreverent and cheeky approach to intellectual life offered a nascent template for what evolved into my own improvisational practice of acafandom from middle school onwards. Rather than learning to take apart "my baby's heart," I was offered the tools to understand my own through books, music and media-in-the-making.

Though I'd like to think my intellectual curiosity was ignited by more than the dreamy, synth-laden British pop that scooted across the pond all the way into Riverside, California's chain record stores (vast and enticing to a kid recently immigrated from the Philippines), so much of what I've devoted my life to reading, analyzing, writing about, and indeed loving, has been informed by snippets of New Romantic, post-punk songs that name-check everyone from Voltaire to Keats and Yeats. It seems no accident, then, that I began graduate school as a Romanticist, before transitioning into Victorian studies, and finally (though I'd like to hope intellectual incarnations are never "final") into contemporary queer cultural studies. The latter became a means to make sense of the circuits of affect and encounter that made my intellectual and textual promiscuity possible. The concept of textual promiscuity (which I wrote about in my dissertation on Victorian non-fiction prose), would seem to run counter to certain notions of fandom that, some may argue, overlap with institutional desires for specialization: the sense of "loyalty and devotion" to an object or set of objects and subjects that constitute expertise in a particular genre, era or area.

And yet, I'd like my contribution to our broader conversation about acafandom to rethink the value of errant desires: wayward passions eliciting accusations on a lifetime of schoolyards, from junior high to the university, that one is a "wannabe." An even baser version of a dilettante. (Case in point: though I was known for being a "Duranie" in the seventh grade, a musically tribalized "metal boy" called me a "wannabe," because I expressed a fondness for Ozzie Osborne's "Bark at the Moon" video).

The figure who ultimately inspired me to consider "textual promiscuity" more seriously was, strangely enough, the eminent Victorian (and arguably, Britain's first "cultural studies" scholar), Matthew Arnold. In "The Study of Poetry," Arnold suggests we store lines of poetry in our memory and use them as "touchstones" to assess the potential "greatness" of other works. The type of critical evaluation encouraged by the touchstone is one of comparative efficiency. Arnold's touchstones are what we might now call earworms: catchy expressions and memorable snippets of text that "lodge" themselves in the mind (to use Arnold's phrasing). These unforgettable lines not only have a good hook, but they've been preordained for excellence depending on who has produced them.

According to Arnold, touchstones come from the "great masters" (casually assembled by Arnold himself) and are thus, worthy of comparative application. Strikingly, a resemblance between the touchstone and the object under scrutiny is not a prerequisite for excellence. In fact, dissimilarity and incongruity are among the benefits of juxtaposition afforded by this handy evaluative tool that the critic carries with her in her intellectual kit. Arnold's touchstones are actually quite random and subjective--his own special set of "fanboy faves." A passing survey of Arnold's touchstones in "The Study of Poetry" takes us through sources as predictable as Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, but he also extols lesser-known figures like Brunetto Latini and Christian of Troyes.

The genealogy ascribed to Arnold's method for measuring poetic works by comparing them to "expressions of the great masters" is often construed as an elitist one for obvious reasons. Arnold himself sought to dignify English poetry by employing touchstones from classical and continental poetry as standards. And yet the very notion of "lines stuck in the head" has always, for me, carried the potential of something more reparative (to invoke Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on a practice of reading that contains within it a spirit of intellectual and affective compromise).

Quite obviously, my tendency to use random song lyrics and other earworms from a migrant musical past as the foundation for my own critical labors, especially in my first book, Relocations, bears some resemblance to the touchstone in "The Study of Poetry," albeit in the crassest sense. Or maybe we should just accept the fact that touchstones have always been conceptually crass; have always had to do with the vicissitudes of affective attachment, and the cultural contexts that make these attachments congeal in ways both problematic and un. It's a simple point, I realize, that has been repeated (perhaps some may say ad nauseum) within the frameworks of cultural studies, queer studies, feminist studies, critical ethnic studies and other intellectual orientations that have openly parried with the personal. Nevertheless, I think it bears repeating, so that we may reconsider the materials that might comprise the "fannish" archive: one more expansive and historically rangy than we allow ourselves to imagine.

When I taught my first course on fan studies as an English graduate student, I focused not only on the contemporary materials more readily associated with "fan cultures," but also asked my students to reconsider Ruskin's writings on Turner, Nietzsche's writings on Wagner, and Thomas Carlyle's "Heroes" lectures as fannish texts. Though some may argue such comparisons produce anachronisms (despite the fact that the etymology for "fan" affords such reconsiderations), I believed it was crucial then, and remains crucial now, that we take a longer view on critical enthusiasms.

Though trained within a discipline that Arnoldian concepts like the touchstone and "critical disinterestedness" made possible, I'd like to imagine my own work, and the work performed by others who identify with the practices of aca-fandom, as a mutation of this and other disciplinary lineages. The traffic needn't always be scaled vertically between high and low, but rather imagined sideways (to invoke Katherine Bond Stockton's work), askew, and even inverted: the kinds of inversion that lead to Kant via Scritti Politti, or to The Smiths via a precocious passion for Keats, Yeats and Wilde.

Monster Paws Up! Loving the Stuff You Love

Jayna Brown

I've never thought of myself as a fan. In fact, I always thought of fandom as the inability to think creatively for the self, as being centrally about consumption. Despite my focus on popular culture in my work, when I thought of fans my thinking became strangely Frankfurt School. Surely, that kind of blind fervor was about the commodification of affective response, the symptom of a modernity that created dependency on the cultural industry for permission to have any emotion or passions. Making pleasure dependent on purchase was canalizing creativity.

Yet the worlds that interest me and make me passionate in my own work are those very worlds at the nexus of commodification and 'organic' collective creativity, and what is fascinating to me is how impossible and unnecessary it is to draw the line between the two in the ephemeral, tricky world of popular music and dance. My training in cultural studies taught me to ask certain questions of expressive forms. What is politically at stake? How is it reflective of the specific historical conjuncture in which it was produced? These questions, for me, are a way of 'loving' the stuff I love--1930's musicals, chorus girls, Detroit Techno, Chicago House, Missy Elliott and beyond.

But the center of all this activity for me has been the disco, the club, where the concept of audience and producer blur, where participation is what makes the moment happen and anonymity is charismatic. It is about the space that the collective creates together and fills with an ecstatic state of possibility. Where the body is claimed outside of the wage relation, outside of the demands of work, for another kind of labor. "You better work!" was a phrase from the floor in my time.

Participating in this forum is a fantastic way for me to examine my own investments, and the shifting ground of what shakes me up. It may sound cliché, but I am now inspired by the movements of the next generation now rising up to claim the dance floor. Now, I am heavily invested in watching my fourteen-year-old nephew grow up. From infancy he has been a true performer, with an acute sense of fashion and pose. Over the years I have seen him create some of the wildest costumes: complete with heels, headgear and wigs, choreographing entire shows. He is one of a new generation giving meaning to the term 'gender non conformity' which makes the term drag queen, or cross dresser, entirely insufficient. He quite consciously blurs the lines, is fluid in his presentation, aware of the performativity of all gender assignment. Ahead of his years, he also insists on a fluidity of sexual preference.

What I also admire in him is his precocious use of influences, as he consciously draws on movements and artists. At three it was Hello Kitty and Powerpuff Girls; at eight it was Japanese anime and Tim Burton; now, at almost fifteen, drawing on David Bowie, the Runaways and Andy Warhol, he is destined for great things. And he can do cartwheels in seven-inch heels!

I am a fan.

And he, in turn, has turned into a great, even professional fan of Lady Gaga. "There is a difference between monsters and little monsters," he tells me. "Monsters are like me, we've been fans for a long time." I was at first dismayed to hear this, thinking it surely meant he was sublimating his own creative impulse into worship and mimicry. When I asked him, "isn't being a fan just about copying your idols?" "No!" he replied, and then patiently explained it to me. "It is a culture, a movement," he said.

I think she is the first artist to come up with a name for her fans. I think that gave them an identity. But they are not copying her. They are expressing themselves. Her message is that we always have the power to rebirth ourselves. She feeds off our ideas and we feed off hers. We call her mother monster. I admire her because she writes all her own music, co-produces and sings live. I do dance to her songs, and use her choreography, but one of the reasons I copy her is that I am just starting out and most people start out copying others in cover bands and stuff. She is just a stepping-stone in my development. I know there will be others. But no other artist has made me cry, or feel so good about myself.

So now I can see my nephew, monster paws up in eight-inch heeled orange boots, harnessing his own cultural moment and letting it feed him as he develops. If Gaga sets the precedent for an openness to avant garde as well as hyper pop art and the places they intersect, I actually can't think of a better influence on a young gender non conforming performance artist like my nephew.

As cultural critics we often spend time raising awareness and alarm over the ways in which art and popular culture have participated in producing regimes of oppression. So what I take acafan studies to mean for me is the chance to develop a language to talk about the kinds of cultural formations where we catch a glimpse of a life of pleasure and ease, where we find and feel, as the utopian critic Ernst Bloch would have it, traces of anticipatory illumination. These traces he argues, can be found in the most commercial, "vestigial and contaminated" of sources--lipstick, fashion, advertisements all can harness dreamscapes, even, to quote Tom Moylan, "recoverable traces of radical longing." I still balk a bit at this idea, when faced with talentless fetish symbols produced in Hollywood, until I remember it is what people do with such products that matters. Here, there are worlds of possibility.

Geraldine (Gerry) Bloustien:

I don't feel the term acafan really resonated with me as something particularly different from what I have always done and considered as a researcher. My sense of an intersectional identity which incorporates both my European / Jewish migrant cultural background (arriving as a female adult in Australia) together with my education and training as an educator and then as an Anthropologist has made me always very aware and sensitive to occupying / embodying several worlds and cultures all at the same time.

Being aware of this complex layering of identities - as lived, performed, constructed, and embodied - does indeed shape what I see and what I study. I always thought that one's cultural background and experiences are the key to what people felt inclined, or even urged to investigate.

This was certainly true in my case. Moving from a culture (in the UK) where I felt physically, psychologically and emotionally 'at home' to a world where suddenly I was identified and addressed as coming from somewhere else, brought about a severe case of culture shock. I quickly learnt to perform and be both simultaneously within and without two cultures and became fascinated by the ways in which all cultures express and respond to this sense of belonging and longing and I found this resonated with my experience as a fan - in particular genres of music and particularly TV programs that I became obsessed with (yes I can be an obsessive fan!).

For example, I have always loved the very physical way people engage with music. That was my first experience of acafandom, some 20 or more years ago, I think, seeing my own response to music in others and wanting to explore this further. I also wanted to tease out the ways in which the lines between consumer, user and creator were blurred in so much of what I saw, recognised, identified with in my engagement with popular culture - including the way I also enjoyed, immersed myself and wanted to share and discuss my enjoyment in, and knowledge of, my particular 'scenes' of popular culture.

I think I have always been more interested in the idea of fandom, though - people rather than the various texts and that is because I am (again as an Anthropologist) motivated primarily by the phenomenon and multiplicity of lived experiences.

As an academic (an acafan?) it also led me to look for a type of methodology that encouraged and facilitated participation and reciprocity; I wasn't looking for critical distance! I wanted to find a way of discussing my findings through a multi-vocal, dialogic, emotive narrative and was very impressed and influenced by Michael Taussig (1993) and Marcus and Fischer (1996) in approach and style. This also meant that I wanted to ensure that the non-academics of my study were collaborators, co-researchers and not just respondents.

Of course, increasingly this means we (non academics and academics) are sharing a language, a way of talking about our common interests and shared passions. I think that researching and writing about an area in which one is passionately engaged means one cannot stand outside and look in. You are already inside the culture, the experiential community, a participant observer, and an embedded member of the culture or the scene that one is studying. Everyday life, leisure, work friendship groups blur all the time (Wow! Especially with social networking sites like Facebook, now that I come to think about it. Then issues of privacy and boundaries do become an issue).

Does such an approach and such a field of scholarship get in the way of the critical distance expected of serious scholarship? Hmm! I don't believe so because firstly, I don't believe it is possible to be completely critically distant. Secondly, I believe that what one is actually studying is the meeting of cultures. The area of research is never static and it is not immune from our involvement as both fans and researchers within it.

I am, however, constantly struggling to explain and justify my approach, methodologies and even my particular interests in a field of study to colleagues from other disciplines (sometimes while in the middle of collaborative research! Assumptions sometimes become unravelled in the field). I faced this in my recent project and book (Youth, Music and Creative cultures: Playing for Life 2011) and spent sometime discussing this and writing about it there.

So being an acafan for me goes beyond how I see myself now as engaged in areas of scholarship and leisure communities. I suspect the provocations outlined in this task actually underpin most areas of scholarship for most people but they are issues that are often not acknowledged or made overt. This leads me to start thinking again about the second provocation - the question of Acafan as a concept. I think the acafan concept owes much to earlier debates about the nature of "subjective criticism" and also subjective writing; it has been influenced by 'the poetic turn' in Anthropology too. It has given the scholar 'permission' and legitimacy to be engaged with areas that she loves, especially in areas of popular culture, many of which still seem to be deemed 'low brow', trivial and inconsequential.

That leads me to one other aspect before I stop for breath. The particular fields in which I am engaged as a fan do not seem to be considered equal. I have no difficulty being recognised within my own or other institutions, or obtain funding etc. for my research into popular music or film. But my work on (and love of) Buffy or other popular TV programs or my work in 3D virtual worlds, is a totally another matter. So for example, despite there being over 50 different disciplines world wide that have used ideas in the Buffyverse, my research and writing in this field is trivialised and I find in this work I often am expected to defend my own fascination with, involvement in, and the rigour of, the scholarship in this field through established (maybe even inappropriate?) hierarchies of literature.

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on race, sexuality, popular culture and the suburbs, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press), is forthcoming in August 2011. She is co-series editor for Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins (NYU Press), and is also co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Music Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) with Gustavus Stadler.

August 09, 2011

Imagine Better: "Open at the Close"

August 09, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

As many readers will know, my Civicpaths team at USC is studying the Harry Potter Alliance as a key example of what we call "fan activism," seeking to better understand how the group helps young people who are culturally engaged become more politically aware and active. A few weeks ago, Neta Kligler Vilenchik, a PhD student working on this project, attended Leakycon where the HPA's Andrew Slack announced a new outgrowth of his efforts. Below is her report from the field. Imagine Better: "Open at the Close"

by Neta Kligler Vilenchik

I open at the close.jpg

Fan art by ShadowKunoiciAsh

In Deathly Hallows, the last book of the Harry Potter series, the phrase "I open at the close" is inscribed onto a golden snitch, a key part of Dumbledore's inheritance to Harry. Not knowing throughout the book how to open this mysterious object, Harry [spoiler alert!] finally realizes that it will open only when he is about to face his own death.

Given this quite sinister plot connection, it is perhaps surprising that "open at the close" came to be the unofficial theme of LeakyCon 2011, this year's Harry Potter fan convention. At LeakyCon, the phrase held several meanings. "Open at the close" was the name of the event in which conference attendees could, for the second time, enter the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal's Island of Adventure for a special night-time celebration, when the park would open -- only for the fans - as it closes for all other guests (see Henry's accounts from last year's "Night of a Thousand Wizards").

But "open at the close" was also used in a wider sense. As both mainstream media and popular conversations wondered what will happen to the Harry Potter phenomena as the last of the movies was released, for the fans gathered in the conference halls this question carried deep personal meaning. As fans were breathlessly preparing towards their special fan screening of Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (6 hours before the official midnight release!), many talked about 'the end of an era'. "I can't believe there will be no more midnight screenings", fans said to each other, mirroring - perhaps more palely--many of the sensations that have been voiced before, as the last of the books had come out.

If those fans from a few years back consoled themselves that they still had the movies to look forward to, the fandom now has latched onto Pottermore, J.K. Rowling's new online project, as the new lifeline. As Henry has discussed a few weeks ago, Pottermore is not free of potential controversy, and yet at LeakyCon, it was embraced by fans as a source supplying more valuable canonic information around Harry Potter, and was hailed as the pathway for a new generation of fans to enter the series. The sequenced order in which the digital versions of the Harry Potter books will come out was already exciting fans as an opportunity to have more countdowns on fan websites, and fans were eagerly awaiting the possibility of being the first to join the new site.

The phrase "open at the close" thus served, at least metaphorically, for the fans to assure each other that this is not really the end of an era. Instead, it is the beginning of a new phase for Harry Potter fandom, one that will rely more heavily on fan production and fan creativity to keep the fire burning, and, in addition, one that excitedly looks forward towards Pottermore.

Yet "open at the close" was also used at LeakyCon in another context: as part of the press conference launching the new organization "Imagine Better", which was described as "the future of the Harry Potter Alliance". Regular readers of this blog will probably be familiar with the Harry Potter Alliance, a key case study for our USC-based research team Civic Paths, which explores continuities between participatory culture and young people's engagement within civic life. The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) has played an important role in shaping our understanding of how such processes may function. Creating metaphors between the Harry Potter narratives and real-life issues, as well as tapping into the structures of Harry Potter fandom, the HPA has succeeded in reaching over 100,000 young people, encouraging them to channel their love of the text and their connection to other fans around them towards civic-minded action in the real world. More on our work about the HPA can be read here and here.

The HPA was also what had led me to LeakyCon--my first experience at a fan conference. For almost two years now, I have been following the HPA as part of our Civic Paths research, interviewing members about their experiences with the organization and attending their public events. LeakyCon, as a mecca for Harry Potter fans, garnered an impressive presence of HPA members as well--the organization boasted 37 volunteer members in brand new staff T-shirts, and an impressive repertoire of HPA programming, including hands-on sessions like "how to open an HPA chapter" and "all about the crisis climate horcrux".

When examining the HPA as a civic organization, however, getting to know the Harry Potter fan community is a key component. The assertion that the organization's success thrives on the energies of the fandom, which had been expressed in many interviews before, could not be clearer than at LeakyCon.

HPA Members.jpg

There are good reasons to try to understand the "magic formula" behind the HPA. In addition to the organization's tangible achievements (raising $123,000 for Haiti in two weeks, donating 87,000 books to local and international communities, collecting 15,000 signatures on a petition for fair trade chocolate, achieving first place at the Chase Community Giving Competition to receive a $250,000 grant), it has received national media coverage as well as academic interest. The idea behind the launch of the new organization "Imagine Better" is to take the approach that has proven successful for the HPA - connecting fans around story worlds they love to create real world change - and to apply that to collaborations with other fandoms.

This is a segment from the press release at LeakyCon, at which Andrew Slack, founder of the HPA, officially launches Imagine Better:[embed video: ]

Strategically timed, the HPA chose the release date of Deathly Hallows 2 to launch Imagine Better. An activist in heart, as well as a man of symbols, Andrew Slack reminded audiences that July 14 is the date of Bastille Day, while the Imagine Better website was--also symbolically--launched on the 4th of July. From a more pragmatic point of view, the launch date secured some interest from mainstream and niche media outlets, who were looking for Harry Potter-related stories to cover around the movie release.

The idea behind Imagine Better, however, has been looming in the head of Andrew Slack for several years now. In fact, as Slack revealed at LeakyCon, this had been his original idea when he envisioned linking narratives with activism: "taking a bottom-up approach to love to stories and the art, and connecting it to the world". In contrast to the strong links that the HPA has made so far to a specific canon, as well as their embeddedness within a specific fan community, Imagine Better seeks to tap into the shared ground of all kinds of fans, aggregating their respective energies towards shared social action.

Leading towards this new organization were almost 2 years of research conducted by young HPA members. The volunteer "fandom team" received the task of searching and cataloguing other fandoms online, as well as identifying potential contact points within these fandoms. This legwork has enabled Imagine Better to list over 20 fan communities in its list of collaborators, including fan communities around popular books, shows and movies, as well as you-tube celebrities and young adult authors.

This list, however, is still open-ended. At Leakycon, conference attendees had the chance to imagine Imagine Better together with its founders. In a break-out session devoted to the new organization, 35 LeakyCon attendees brainstormed possible fandoms they would want to collaborate with. In addition to the usual suspects, this brainstorming brought up surprising directions such as Sparklife, a community of regular users of Sparknotes. The group then focused on three fan communities: Glee, Hunger Games, and Doctor Who, and made a list of real-world issues that could be raised in conjunction with these texts. They then broke out into small groups, discussing potential campaigns the HPA could hold in conjunction with these other fan communities. The group discussing possible collaborations with 'Gleeks' (fans of Glee) thought of campaigns ranging from issues of LGBTQ rights and bullying to fighting ableism (discrimination towards persons with physical disability).

Collaboration with other fan communities is a natural step for many HPA members. In our conversations with members we often hear long lists of texts they are passionate about, starting with Harry Potter, but moving on to a variety of genres and media (recurrent favorites are Doctor Who, the Hunger Games, Star Trek and more. The relationship with Twilight is a bit more contested). Many HPA members also identify as 'nerdfighters' - followers of the vlogbrothers John and Hank Green.

In Textual Poachers, Henry builds on De Certeau's notion of readers as nomads to describe fans as being similarly nomadic: "always in movement, 'not here or there', not constrained by permanent property ownership but rather constantly advancing upon another text, appropriating new materials". Imagine Better seems to build on this idea of fan as nomads, whose passion may be directed towards any greatly told story, rather than towards a particular narrative. Moreover, it builds on the shared characteristics, and potentially shared identity, that fans (of different texts) may have with each other.

Slack expresses this when he announces at the press conference that Imagine Better is going "to start with the most popular piece of fiction in human history and to go beyond that because, who here loves stories beyond Harry Potter? We all do. And we're going to continue to love Harry Potter and continue to love other stories and continue to love being engaged as heroes in the story of our world. This is our launch, as we open at the close." Here, "open at the close" takes on added meaning. It may refer to the end of the canon, but it is also preparation towards a possible decline, or at least decrease, of Harry Potter fandom.

Yet at LeakyCon - the gathering of hardcore Harry Potter fans, let's not forget - this statement receives a slightly reserved reaction. As fans are spending the whole convention assuring each other that the fandom is alive and kicking, not everyone seems ready to quickly shed off the 'HP' part of the HPA, and stick only with the 'Alliance'. While Imagine Better is aiming to speak to the shared identity of "fans", or to the fan as nomad, many in the room may align themselves more as "fans of [Harry Potter]" (see John Edward Campbell's recent discussion of this notion).

For them, their mode of engagement may be seen not as a fixed identity, but rather a relationship towards a particular text. Part of this may stem from the fact that to many, Harry Potter is a first experience within fandom, that hasn't necessarily (or perhaps, not yet) crossed into a more generalized fan identity.

It seems that the HPA is aware of this potential tension, as the launch of Imagine Better happens parallel to continuing action of the HPA, and not as a new organization replacing it, as was previously suggested to us in our conversations with staff members. An important part in this decision may have been fan perceptions climbing bottom-up: With most of its staff being volunteer members and with its vast variety of participatory forums, the HPA as an organization has extremely close contact with its member base. The general consensus within Harry Potter fandom that it is alive and kicking, thank you very much (strongly aided by the announcement of Pottermore), may have been a contributing factor to launch Imagine Better as an additional venture, rather than a replacement of the HPA.

As Slack reminded us at LeakyCon, few people - within the fandom and outside of it - had believed that the HPA would succeed as a civic organization. But it has. Imagine Better now takes on the next leap. Its attempt to apply a similar formula to other fan communities offers us a fascinating test case on the intersections between fandom and civic engagement. We are excitedly following it as it "opens at the close".

Neta Kligler Vilenchik is a third year doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.Neta graduated Summa Cum Laude from Tel Aviv University, studying communication and political science, and received her MA in communication, summa Cum Laude, from the University of Haifa in 2009. Neta's research revolves around young people's involvement in civic action through participatory culture practices, an interest she has been pursuing as part of the Civic Paths research team under the guidance of Prof. Henry Jenkins.

She is also part of an effort to develop a measure examining people's active construction of communication ecologies in pursuit of different goals, within the Metamorphosis team under the guidance of Prof. Sandra Ball-Rokeach. Finally, Neta is fascinated by the relations between individual and collective memories as they relate to the media, as well as in memory's role in shaping national identity. Her work takes an innovative approach to the study of collective memory, combining quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the role of media memory in shaping collective memories.

August 07, 2011

Studying Creativity in the Age of Web 2.0: An interview with David Gauntlett (Part Three)

August 07, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

In talking about Star Wars Uncut, you touch on an issue very important to my own work - can we build creativity onto borrowed materials? Does it matter if those raw materials are physical objects (recycling of trash or driftwood, say, as the basis of new artworks or fabric scraps as the basis for quilting) or media content (as in many forms of fan productivity)? How would you situate fan culture within the larger logic of DIY Media?

Ah, this is interesting - this is where I think my priorities might be a bit different to yours, Henry, perhaps. Of course there's lots of lovely, amazing stuff out there made by fans. I talk about Star Wars Uncut in the book as one of the things that led me to reflect that the kind of tangible joyfulness involved in the process of creativity, which you can get a sense of in its outputs, is more important than the empirical originality of the outputs. Star Wars Uncut is a project by fans to remake Star Wars in 15-second chunks. There's a huge amount of inventiveness on display in the many different kinds of animation and recreation which fans have used to produce this amazing patchwork, and it's the funny little homemade details that make it especially touching.

Star Wars Uncut "The Escape" from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

But the thing that I don't like about the emphasis on 'fans' as the new generation of creators is that they are inevitably positioned as, to some extent, subservient to the producers of the big, mainstream (or at least industrial or professional) media thing or things that they are fans of.

So on the one hand, the fans do very clever, very creative things within their fan practice. But at the same time, they are not the 'ultimate' creators, but instead take their inspiration from the successful professional media producers who are, in this sense, the 'ultimate' creators. So it seems a bit of an odd emphasis to me. There's so much wholly original stuff out there in the DIY/online creative world, and I think the focus on 'fans' may tend to feed the egos of professional media producers who feel they are the rightful creators of original content - the kind of authentic creative work that ordinary mortals could not make and which such mortals could, at best, only be 'fans' of. Do you know what I mean? As advocates of a new, alternative participatory culture, I don't think we should always pick examples that are derivatives of, or in some way dependent upon, the offerings of the traditional established media.

Henry Jenkins: We may have to agree to disagree on some of this. Yes, fans are not the only form of participatory culture out there and part of what I love about this book is that you really engage with a broader array of DIY practices. For me, participatory culture would refer to any form of cultural practice which is open to a broad range of participants who have access to the means of cultural production and circulation. My own work has focused primarily on fans because this is a form of cultural production I have been tracing -- and engaging with -- for more than thirty years, but in my forthcoming book, Spreadable Media, we deal with a much wider array of participatory culture communities. Sites like YouTube and Flickr and Etsey have certainly increased the visibility of these other sites of grassroots production. Fans interest me because they inhabit the intersection between the old media culture and the new and thus they illustrate the contradictions of a moment of media in transition. But I am not saying that they are more creative than any of a range of other communities who are similarly transitioning from the pre-digital to the digital.

That said, I do not see fans as "subservient" to commercial media, any more than I see any artist as "subservient" to the raw materials out of which they construct their art. So, let's imagine a range of different DIY makers. One of them works within a genre and builds on its established icons and their encrusted media. One reconstructs historical artifacts and thus builds on the crafts of the past. One works within a tradition and thus starts from a set of practices inherited from other crafters. One remixes existing media content and thus builds upon the meanings and associations contained there. One takes discarded coke bottles as physical material out of which they construct something new. For me, there is nothing fundamentally different about these processes. All are working with the resources they draw from the culture around them to create something new and distinctly theirs.

I am purposefully avoiding assigning high or low cultural status to these practices because any of the above could end up in a gallery space or a crafts fair or fan convention in the current context and any could be posted online. Cultural hierarchies work both to make fan production "less valuable" than, say, the work of a postmodern artist dealing with the same materials or "less authentic" than a traditional craftsman doing, say, "primitive" art about Biblical characters.

As critics, we may be interested in these objects from many different vantage points. A media scholar might be interested in what the fan work says about the program to which it responds, but I might also be interested in the relations between the fans and leave the commercial producer out of the equation altogether. I might, for example, studying how different DIY communities pass along craft and knowledge from more experienced to newbie participants, and in that study, the sources of the raw materials are going to be less important to my analysis than the sources of the knowledge being exchanged between participants. But in terms of whether the participants are being "creative" or not, these differences in source materials are not that important to me.

David Gauntlett: Yes, you're right of course - everything builds on some things that have come before, whether it is ways of using materials, or styles and genres of creative work, or the elements and practices of storytelling. I certainly did not mean to suggest that fans who make stuff within an already-existing narrative are 'less creative' than other makers. It was just that it means that the grand narratives, or the powers to create original story universes, remain in the hands of traditional media. But no matter. As you say, creative fans are just as interesting as creative anybody, and working at the 'intersection' between old and new media can be especially revealing.

I was struck by the passage you quote from Ivan Illich: "A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenges known." It struck me that you could swap out "educational system" with "communication system" and come up with a pretty good definition of what I and others call participatory culture. By these criteria, how would we evaluate the current state of web culture?

I agree, it's a good aspirational definition of participatory culture, or for the Web in general. We are not there yet, but the potential is still there. Some commentators write as though the Web has already been entirely taken over by the big commercial companies, such as Google, or that Web 2.0 has been entirely absorbed by them as a profit machine. I would really hate for that to happen. But to act like it has already happened is, in a way, giving up, I think; and reveals a lack of awareness of what's really going on.

Yes - you offer some sharp criticisms in the book of some contemporary critical studies work which has seen Web 2.0 largely if not exclusively as a form of exploitation. How would you situate your work in regards to current debates about "free labor" in the digital economy?

Well basically I argue that those people who are only interested in saying that Web 2.0 is about the exploitation of free labour are making a category error, and using an exclusively economic lens where that actually isn't the best way of understanding what's happening. Someone who makes an original music video, say, to share with their friends, and with anyone else who wants to take a look, and who chooses to do so by putting it on YouTube, a convenient and free platform, is hardly being 'exploited' in the way we would normally use the term in a Marxist analysis of labour. Obviously those services do seek to make profit from the advertising revenue, and from the value of the user data that they capture, on the back of stuff provided for free by users. But users themselves see it as a decent bargain - the site hosts your material for free, and enables you to engage with a community around it, and in return it gets to keep that associated revenue. In most cases, the value associated with any particular video or other piece of content will be very small, and it is only when it is multiplied by millions of other bits of content that it becomes a viable business.

These arguments create confusion about what Web 2.0 is about. A really great, archetypal example of Web 2.0 in action would be if there were an encyclopedia which was entirely written by users around the world, writing about the things that interest and engage them, and collaboratively editing it to make it get better and better. And it would be owned and run by a non-profit foundation. What an outrageous and unlikely idea! But that already happens, of course, and it's called Wikipedia.

Another archetypal example of Web 2.0 in action would be if an international consortium of organisations - such as, say, a collaboration between the Library of Congress, and the British Library, and perhaps the BBC, and some of the great European museums or cultural institutions - would set up and support, but not interfere with, a non-commercial platform for creativity, along the lines of YouTube, where people could share their creative works, comment and rate the work of others, and form supportive groups and communities of practice. That one hasn't happened yet, but there's no reason why it couldn't.

Web 2.0, or participatory culture, is not inherently commercial, and it might be healthier and more reliable in a non-commercial environment. One of the best things about non-commercial Web 2.0 services is that they make those comments about 'exploitation of labour' immediately redundant. The critics of the commercial services are not entirely wrong, but they are missing the most important thing that's going on.

You have discussed, in your work, theories of education. What kinds of educational practices and values do you think will best prepare people to participate in the world you are advocating?

Well, unsurprisingly, I favour educational processes which are about students exploring for themselves, asking questions, being curious, tinkering, and learning through making things. One inevitably thinks of that point made by Ken Robinson, in his very popular TED talk online, that we are meant to be preparing young people for the future but not one of us knows what that future will look like. What we do know is that people need to have powerful 'learning muscles', as Guy Claxton has put it, which means that they need to be creative, and questioning, and they need to be resilient - which means that when things go wrong then they are not crushed by this event, but instead know that things going wrong is a normal part of life and something which you can learn from. As educators we should model learning - in other words, show that we ourselves are learning all the time and are engaged in any number of 'learning projects' at once.

One thing I have been learning recently myself is how to make a Kindle book. Amazon enables authors to self-publish Kindle books, but the process is not quite as easy as you might expect, if you want to do it properly. For instance, to make a logical table of contents file I had to learn some XML for the first time. I became proficient in HTML fifteen years ago when you had to make Web sites by hand using Notepad, the standard function-free text editor in Windows. But I've shied away from trying to master XML - until this new challenge came along. I like new platforms for self-expression in general, and this is one I wanted to crack. Kindle books aren't restricted to people who own Kindle devices these days - there are free Kindle readers for iPhone and Android phones, iPad, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and probably soon for your toaster.

This looks like a complete aside, but actually is relevant because I have pieces on both the content of what I think media and communications studies should be about, and also on how we should try to orchestrate learning about it (you see I avoided saying 'teaching' there), in my new Kindle book which I am publishing in August 2011. It's called Media Studies 2.0, and Other Battles around the Future of Media Research, and pulls together some previously published but uncollected writings, and some new stuff.

Thank you very much indeed, Henry, for inviting me onto your blog to be interviewed. It's an honour to be here and I have really enjoyed it.

Links:

• Making is Connecting: The social meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, site for the new book (May 2011) with extracts and videos

• Media Studies 2.0, and Other Battles around the Future of Media Research, new short Kindle book (August 2011):

Amazon USA: I ($7.90)

Amazon UK: (£4.80)

David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK. His teaching and research concerns people's use of media in their everyday lives, with a particular focus on creative uses of digital media. He is the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007) and Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0 (2011). He has made several popular YouTube videos, and produces the website about media and identities, Theory.org.uk. He has conducted collaborative research with a number of the world's leading creative organisations, including the BBC, Lego, and Tate.

August 05, 2011

Studying Creativity in the Age of Web 2.0: An interview with David Gauntlett (Part Two)

August 05, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

One of the real revelations in the book for many readers will be in how directly the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris speak to contemporary issues in the Web 2.0 era. What do you see as the key value of re-examining their work now? What do you see as the most important continuities and discontinuities between their conception of craft and contemporary DIY culture?

I'm glad you liked that part. Thank you. I just thought it was very striking that these English Victorian critics, whose philosophy inspired the Arts and Crafts movement, who were writing 120-160 years ago, seemed to really chime with the spirit of Web 2.0, or at least the best part of it. By which I mean: fostering and encouraging everyday creativity, and giving people tools which enable them to share, communicate, and connect. And seeing the importance of things being made by everyday, non-professional people - and the power of making, in itself - rather than us all being mere consumers of stuff made by other people. That's what Ruskin and Morris's most exciting writings are all about.

And, of course, I like making these connections between things that at first look very different. What, for instance, could medieval cathedrals have to teach us about the ecology of YouTube? Well: John Ruskin was passionate about the gargoyles that you find on medieval cathedrals. They are often quite quirky and ugly, and rather roughly-done - not at all like 'fine art' - but that's precisely why Ruskin cherishes them: because you can see in them the lively spirit of a creative human being. And you can sense the presence of the person who spent time making it.

Then if you carry that way of seeing over to YouTube: there again you have quite a lot of quirky things, often roughly-done, and not like the kind of professional stuff you would see on TV; but that is what makes them so special, and exciting, because what you see there is people making things, and sharing them with others, just because they want to. They've got something they want to communicate. You can often sense that personal presence, and enthusiasm. So Ruskin's passion for one kind of craft really helped me to build an argument about the importance of another.

Then if you look at what William Morris did with Ruskin's ideas - Morris was more concerned with societies and communities than Ruskin, and he added a vision of communities connected through the things that they make: people filling their lives with the fruits of their own creative labour. It was especially important to him that people should be creators, not (only) consumers.

Morris felt you had to make things to understand them fully, which is part of the Make magazine positive-hacker ethos that is enjoying a revival today. Morris was a maker himself, and mastered a dazzling number of craft and construction techniques. So he was both a writer and a maker, but these were not two separate tracks in his life; rather, his writings and the things he made can be seen as two sides of the same project: 'visionary accounts of an ideal world'.

In ways that seem very relevant today, Morris argued that the route to pleasure and fulfilment was through the collection and dissemination of knowledge; communication between people; and creating and sharing expressive material. That's like a manifesto for Web 2.0 right there. So I think the continuities between these old arguments and our present situation are strong; and the discontinuities are the things that put us in a stronger position today, because today we have much wider access to tools to make and share things, which were denied to non-elite people in the past. Not everyone, of course, has access or the necessary skills, and the tools are often owned by big powerful companies, as we will discuss below; it's not perfect.

But I hope these ideas from Ruskin and Morris are therefore shown not to be just some kind of nostalgia, which just shines a little light upon our present situation; rather, they offer very relevant manifestos for what we should be doing today.

You write at several places about the "messiness" of everyday creativity as in part a virtue and not a flaw - the point which begins with Ruskin's gargoyles. Yet, our classic notions of crafts include the "value of a job well done." How might we reconcile these two claims about craft?

Well I'm less concerned about the approach to craft which is about doing the same thing repeatedly until you can achieve a very high level of 'polish'. But I think a lot of makers are very concerned to make something to the best of their ability. And I think the 'value of a job well done' can refer to how well something connects with others, or how effectively it communicates a message or an idea. The 'value of a job well done' can be about the self-esteem that comes from having made something which has touched someone else. So you could have something quite 'messy' which is still very successful in this other sense.

Some of your examples come from very traditional kinds of craft production, such as weaving, stitching, etc. How has the introduction of new media changed the practices of such communities? What has remained the same?

Craft people have taken to the Web with great enthusiasm. The essence of what they do often remains unchanged, but today they talk more, share more, and find it much easier to find other people who share their passions. So they get more feedback, encouragement, and inspiration. Often in the past, individuals had to be quite resilient to stick with their craft or maker interests, because their families and friends tended not to understand or be very sympathetic to their strange 'hobby'. Being able to find others who share their interests, online, has been an extraordinary source of support and encouragement for many of these people.

August 03, 2011

Studying Creativity in the Age of Web 2.0: An Interview with David Gauntlett

August 03, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

The expansion of participatory culture and its relationship to the emergence of Web 2.0 is a theme which has run through my recent work, but it is also a key concern for researchers thinking about everyday creativity in all of its historical and contemporary forms. Over his past several books, British scholars David Gauntlett has been asking researchers to think more deeply about the nature of "creativity" and its place in our everyday lives. Gauntlett's exploration is central to his most recent book, Making is Connecting:The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and Knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, which I read recently with a sense of encountering a kindred spirit with whom one can have productive disagreements (as surface later in this exchange) and from whom one can draw core insights. Part of the richness of this book is its expansion well beyond the sphere of things digital to place grassroots creativity and DIY tinkering in a larger historical and philosophical context, one which will be valuable in helping to further clarify the core point that Web 2.0 is simply one model for thinking about what happens when more people have the capacity to produce and circulate media and other cultural materials.

Gauntlett's accessible and engaging writing is a gift, all the more so given the urgency of his message. All of the above come through loud and clear in this interview, which I will run over the next few installments of my blog.

Let's start with something very basic - the title of your book, Making Is Connecting. What do you mean by making? By connecting? What do you see as the relationship between the two in an era of networked computing?

Well, I'm using these words in their recognised senses - I don't believe in making up new words, or jargon, for things that can be expressed simply. So, by 'making' I simply mean people making things. This can be with new technologies, or ancient ones, and can be on the internet, or offline. So it refers to James knitting a scarf, Amira writing a poem, Kelly producing a blog, Marvin taking photographs, Michelle making a YouTube video, Jermaine doing a drawing, Natasha coding a videogame, or hundreds of other examples like that.

And 'connecting' means social connections - people starting conversations, sharing reviews, providing information, or making friends. But also it refers, for me, to a connectedness with the world which we live in. So I say 'making is connecting' because you put together ideas and materials to make something new; because creativity often includes a social dimension, connecting you with other people; and because I think that through making things, you feel more of a participant in the world, and you feel more a part of it, more embedded - because you are contributing, not just consuming, so you're more actively engaged with the world, and so, more connected.

I think this is almost always the case, regardless of what technology is being used, and was the case for centuries before we had a global wired network. But in an era of networked computing, which you mentioned, I think that these benefits are amplified, and many new opportunities and connections are enabled. Creativity didn't begin with the internet - far from it. But in an obvious and well-known way, the internet enables people to connect with others who share their interests, regardless of where they live in the world - whereas previously, geography, and the practical difficulties of finding people, made it far more difficult to have conversations with others who shared niche interests.

Having easy access to people who share their passions means that individuals can be inspired by each other's work and ideas - which can lead to a positive spiral of people doing better and better things and inspiring more and more activity by others. This could happen before the internet, in clubs and societies, but it would tend to be slower, and the inspiring inputs would most likely be fewer, and less diverse.

Across your past couple of books, you have been working through a definition of "creativity." What is your current understanding of this concept and why does understanding creativity seem so urgent at the present moment?

Well I never wanted to get bogged down in arguments over a 'definition' of creativity. But in Making is Connecting I do put forward a new definition, basically to provoke a conversation around how we think about creativity, and to shake up the consensus which seemed to have formed which casually accepts and cites the definition put forward by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about 15 years ago. That definition emphasises that creativity is some kind of novel contribution or innovation which makes a visible difference within a domain of expertise, or in the wider culture. So it's a definition of creativity which requires us to focus on the outputs of a creative process; and then it actually goes further, and says that those outputs don't really count for anything unless they are recognised and embraced by a significant or influential audience.

Now, Csikszentmihalyi developed this definition for a particular purpose, for use in his sociological study of the circumstances which enable creative acts to be recognised and to flourish. So it's fine for his own purposes, and he clearly didn't mean any harm. But now, because Csikszentmihalyi is a well-respected expert in more than one area, widely cited in academic papers and featuring strongly in Google searches in this area, his definition pops up in all kinds of other contexts where someone wants a definition of creativity to put into their talk, article, or presentation.

So the unintended consequence is that creativity is increasingly likely to be understood, these days, as the generation of innovative products which become popular, or at least widely recognised. Now, that is one kind of creativity, but as a definition it seems much too narrow.

One problem is that it runs counter to our common-sense understanding of 'creativity', because it is far too demanding. I'm sure you can think of quite a few friends or colleagues whom you would say were 'very creative' - and you would really mean it - and yet they have not invented a new process which has revolutionised the field of architecture, and have not written a novel which sold over a million copies, nor done anything else which goes over the very high bar set by Csikszentmihalyi. But you still really believe that these are creative individuals. So that's one difficulty.

Another problem is that this now-standard definition is focused on outputs. Indeed, you can only assess creativity in this way by looking at the outputs of a creative process. I wanted to shift the conversation about creativity so it was more about the process, not the outcomes. But I also thought it was weird that this Csikszentmihalyi perspective on creativity meant that you literally could not say if something was creative or not without consulting an external system of experts or publications. Someone might show you an amazing work of art, or an invention, or a new way to do something, and you might exclaim 'oh that's very creative!', but in strict Csikszentmihalyi terms that would be inaccurate, unless this thing had already become influential or successful.

I talk about all these issues at some length in the book. But I arrive at a definition which emphasises the process of creativity, rather than outcomes, and prioritises feelings rather than levels of external success. It's a bit long. It says:

Everyday creativity refers to a process which brings together at least one active human mind, and the material or digital world, in the activity of making something. The activity has not been done in this way by this person (or these people) before. The process may arouse various emotions, such as excitement and frustration, but most especially a feeling of joy. When witnessing and appreciating the output, people may sense the presence of the maker, and recognise those feelings.

I also did a shorter one, trying to make it a single sentence:

Everyday creativity refers to a process which brings together at least one active human mind, and the material or digital world, in the activity of making something which is novel in that context, and is a process which evokes a feeling of joy.

This shorter definition is OK, although for the sake of brevity it misses out some bits that I thought were quite important. But in both cases you can see I have emphasised emotion - even the word 'joy', which comes through strongly in interviews with makers. They are not filled with joy all the time of course - creative work is often experienced as hard and challenging - but you get moments of pride and accomplishment which make it all worthwhile.

Understanding creativity is perhaps no more or less important today than at any other time. But we do see, I think, an explosion of visible, accessible, shareable creativity online, which it is interesting and important to study and understand, and which is so diverse, and done by people just because they want to, that I wanted us to have a working definition of creativity which embraced the key dimensions of this work - rather than sniffily dismissing it because it had not yet won awards, gone global, or made an auditable impact.

In particular, I was very taken by your claim that "creativity is something that is felt, rather than something that needs external expert verification." Can you spell out a little more the internal and external dimensions of everyday creativity? On what basis, from what perspective, can it be appraised?

Well as you can tell, I'm not so bothered about an understanding of creativity which can be counted or quantified. So it's a bit like 'happiness'. On the one hand, as economists and social scientists have found quite recently, happiness is perfectly measurable - you can do large-scale surveys which ask people to say how happy they are with their lives, on a scale of one to five, for instance, and then you can compare with other data and variables, and build up a picture of the self-reported levels of happiness in different groups or areas, and the factors which are correlated with them. Those statistics are really interesting - and indeed I use some of them in Making is Connecting to show the importance of personal relationships and creative projects. But of course, this data doesn't tell you anything about what happiness feels like.

I think creativity is in the same boat. The most important thing about it is what it does for the person doing the creating - the sense of self-esteem, the sense of doing something in the world, being an active participant, feeling alive in the world - these are all feelings which are reported by people who make things in the physical world and, with striking similarity, by people who make things online. But the things they make are also important - those are the things which, at first, connect us with others, which say something about ourselves, and which perhaps contain ideas or inspiration which will make a significant difference to our own or other people's future experiences of the world. So the internal and external dimensions of creativity are both important, but I would say that the most important thing is just doing it.

You suggest early on that the key question you want to answer is "Why is everyday creativity important?" I'll bite, why is everyday creativity important?

I think there is a tendency to think of everyday people's acts of creativity as 'nice', on an individual level, but insignificant, in social or political terms. So it may be personally pleasing, or emotionally rewarding, for someone to make a toy for their child, or to maintain a blog about their everyday experiences, or to make some amusing YouTube videos, or to record and share a song - these all sound like 'nice' things, and nobody would really want to stop them from happening - but they are not considered to be much more than that.

And as you know yourself, Henry, there are people who work on the more obvious, formal 'political' issues in media and communications studies - government broadcasting policies, or the business practices of multinational corporations, or the impact of political advertising on public opinion - and they would not recognise an interest in everyday creativity as part of serious or proper critical study.

But I think these acts of everyday creativity are extremely important. You can cast them as just 'a nice thing' for individuals, and normally they are a nice thing for individuals, but they are much more than that. Every time someone decides to make something themselves, rather than buying or consuming something already made by someone else, they are making a distinct choice, to be an active participant in the world rather than an observer or a shopper in the world. And through the process of making, they get to enjoy, as I've said, that sense of purpose and connection, and satisfaction.

Taken one by one these are all small things, seemingly insignificant moments; but when more and more people make more and more choices like this, and then also when they go online to amplify and inspire further activities, it builds up to something really big, and powerful.

July 31, 2011

Transmedia 202: Further Reflections

July 31, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

The above video was shot by Scott Walker during one of my presentations at San Diego Comic-Con, during which I spoke about some of the controversy which has surrounded the definition of transmedia over the past six months or so. I've largely stayed out of these conversations, though you can find a very good summary of the debates here.

I've been focusing on other projects and also I've been more interested in the shapes these discussions take than seeking to intervene in them directly, but over the summer, in a range of venues, I've been pushing and proding at my own definitions to see if I can capture some of my own shifting understandings of transmedia, especially as I am preparing to teach a revamped transmedia entertainment class at USC. Today, I am going to try to put some of this still evolving thinking into writing in hopes that it helps others sort through these issues.

Much of this is covered in the above video so if you process things better in audio-visual than in print, you have your options. I've heard some gossip that Jenkins was going to issue a "new definition" of "transmedia": this is no where near as dramatic an overhaul as that, just some clarifications and reflections about definitions. This definition still covers, more or less, what I mean by transmedia storytelling:

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.

So, consider what follows Transmedia 202, to compliment my earlier Transmedia 101 post.

Given the sheer range of people who have embraced (latched onto?) transmedia, we should not be surprised that:

different groups of people are defining a still emerging concept differently for different purposes for different audiences in different contexts
some of those who talk about transmedia are less immersed in the previous writings and thinkings as we might wish and thus can bring a certain degree of fog
some groups are strongly motivated to expand or blur the scope of the category for self promotional and self advancement purposes.

So, let's start at the top with convergence, which in Convergence Culture, I describe as a paradigm for thinking about the current moment of media change, one which is defined through the layering, diversification, and interconnectivity of media. Convergence contrasts with the Digital Revolution model which assumed old media would be displaced by new media. Aspects of this convergence model are shaping decisions of media producers, advertisers, technologists, consumers, and policy-makers, and thus convergence has many different aspects and consequences.

Transmedia, used by itself, simply means "across media." Transmedia, at this level, is one way of talking about convergence as a set of cultural practices. Keep in mind that Marsha Kinder in Playing with Power wrote about "transmedia intertextuality", while I was one of the first to popularize the term, transmedia storytelling. Transmedia storytelling describes one logic for thinking about the flow of content across media. We might also think about transmedia branding, transmedia performance, transmedia ritual, transmedia play, transmedia activism, and transmedia spectacle, as other logics. The same text might fit within multiple logics. So, for example, we could imagine Glee as a transmedia narrative in which we follow the characters and situations across media, but more often, Glee's transmedia strategies emphasize transmedia performance, with the songs moving through YouTube, iTunes, live performances, etc., which we read against each other to make sense of the larger Glee phenomenon.

So, there are some people who think that transmedia is simply a form of branding: I would rather argue that branding is one thing you can do with transmedia, but when I speak about transmedia storytelling, that is not the central focus of my interest. I am focusing on emergent forms of storytelling which tap into the flow of content across media and the networking of fan response.

Some people have argued that transmedia is simply another name for franchising. Franchising is a corporate structure for media production which has a long history and throughout much of that history, there has been an attempt to move icons and brands across media channels, but not necessarily an attempt to extend the story in ways which expanded its scope and meaning. Most previous media franchises were based on reproduction and redundancy, but transmedia represents a structure based on the further development of the storyworld through each new medium. For a good guide to the history and practices of franchising, watch for the forthcoming book by Derek Johnson, who has been doing extensive thinking on this topic.

Much of franchising has been based on licensing arrangements which make it hard for media producers to add or change anything beyond what is already in the primary text or the mother ship. True transmedia storytelling is apt to emerge through structures which encourage co-creation and collaboration, but as Johnson notes, the more a media producer moves in this direction, the greater the challenges of coordination and consistency become.

I have sometimes talked about a distinction between adaptation and extension as fundamental to understanding these shifts. Basically, an adaptation takes the same story from one medium and retells it in another. An extension seeks to add something to the existing story as it moves from one medium to another. Christy Dena has challenged making such a cut-and-dried distinction. Adaptations may be highly literal or deeply transformative. Any adaptation represents an interpretation of the work in question and not simply a reproduction, so all adaptions to some degree add to the range of meanings attached to a story. And as Dena notes, the shifts between media mean that we have new experiences and learn new things. To translate Harry Potter from a book to a movie series means thinking through much more deeply what Hogwarts looks like and thus the art director/production designer has significantly expanded and extended the story in the process. It might be better to think of adaptation and extension as part of a continuum in which both poles are only theoretical possibilities and most of the action takes place somewhere in the middle.

What the adaptation-extension distinction was intended to address was additive comprehension, a term borrowed from game designer Neil Young, to refer to the degree that each new text adds to our understanding of the story as a whole. So, the Falling Skies graphic novel is a prequel which tells us about the disappearance of the middle brother and thus helps to provide insights into the motives of the characters on the Turner television series. In this case, additive comprehension takes the form of back story, but the same graphic novel also helps us to better understand the organization of the resistance movement, which we can see as part of a world-building process. Most transmedia content serves one or more of the following functions:

Offers backstory
Maps the World
Offers us other character's perspectives on the action
Deepens audience engagement.

I have been troubled by writers who want to reduce transmedia to the idea of multiple media platforms without digging more deeply into the logical relations between those media extensions. So, if you are a guild, it matters deeply that you have a definition which determines how many media are deployed, but for me, as a scholar, that is not the key issue that concerns me. As we think about defining transmedia, then, we need to come back to the relations between media and not simply count the number of the media platforms. So, again, let's imagine a continuum of possibilities.

We might start with the notion of seriality. Seriality would imply the unfolding of a story over time, typically through a process of chunking (creating meaningful bits of the story) and dispersal (breaking the story into interconnected installments). Central to this process is the creation of a story hook or cliffhanger which motivates the consumer to come back for more of the same story. Historically, seriality occurs within the same text.

So, we've seen American television evolve over time between highly episodic structures (more or less self-contained) to much more heavily serialized structures. Most shows, though, combine elements of the episodic (a procedural plot which can be wrapped up in a single episode) and the serial (an evolving character relationship, an unfolding mythology, a larger plot within which the individual episodes work as chapters.) The shift towards seriality on American television plays a large role in preparing audiences for transmedia storytelling. Most transmedia stories are highly serial in structure, but not all serials are transmedia. So, Bones, say, is a partially serialized drama which, for the most part, remains within a single medium.

But we can think of examples where there is a movement across texts or across textual structures within the same medium. I describe this in terms of "radical intertextuality." So, for example, the DC and Marvel universes create dozens of titles which are seen as inter-related. Characters move between them. Plots unfold across them. Periodically, they may have events which straddle multiple book titles, and part of the pleasure of something like Marvel Civil Wars is that we see the same event from the point of view of multiple characters, who may have conflicting perspectives on what is happening. Similarly, Battlestar Galactica unfolds across multiple television series, mini-series, and stand-alone movies. If Battlestar remained in a single medium, television, then it would be another example of radical intertextuality. But, because Battlestar extends this process to include webisodes and comics, which are understood as part of the same continuity, then we call it a transmedia story.

So, let's call this next level Multimodality -- a term coined by Gunther Kress to talk about how educational design taps the affordances of different instructional media, but applied by Christy Dena to talk about transmedia narrative. The key point here is that different media involve different kinds of representation -- so what Green Lantern looks like differs from a comic book, a live action movie, a game, or an animated television series. Each medium has different kinds of affordances -- the game facilitates different ways of interacting with the content than a book or a feature film. A story that plays out across different media adopts different modalities. A franchise can be multimodal without being transmedia -- most of those which repeat the same basic story elements in every media fall into this category. For me, a work needs to combine radical intertextuality and multimodality for the purposes of additive comprehension to be a transmedia story. That's why shortening transmedia to "a story across multiple media" distorts the discussion.

So far, nothing here implies that particular media need to be involved for something to become transmedia. One can construct a high end transmedia system (a major blockbuster movie or network television show and its extensions) and one can construct a low end transmedia system (a low budget and/or independent film, a comic book or web series as the spring board for something which might include live performance or oral storytelling...) Some have tried to argue that games are a key component of transmedia, but I do not want to prioritize digital media extensions over other kinds of media practices.

For this reason, it is possible to find historical antecedents for transmedia which predate the rise of networked computing and interactive entertainment. I am not preoccupied with the "newness" of transmedia. The current push for transmedia has emerged from shifts in production practices (shaped by media concentration, in some cases) or reception practices (the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media), but it has also come from the emergence of new aesthetic understandings of how popular texts work (shaped in part by the rise of geeks and fans to positions of power within the entertainment industries).

The options available to a transmedia producer today are different from those available some decades ago, but we can still point to historical antecedents which were experimenting with notions of world building and mythology-modeled story structures in ways that include both radical intertextuality and multimodality. In that way, you can say that L. Frank Baum (in his focus on world building across media), Walt Disney (in his focus on transmedia branding) and J.R.R. Tolkien (with his experiments in radical intertextuality) each prefigure transmedia practices.

Similarly, I've argued that Obama is as much a transmedia character as Obi Wan is. I do not mean by this simply that our everyday lives are conducted across multiple media platforms, though this is true. I also mean that we tend to connect those dispersed pieces of information together to form a story, that the story we construct depends on which media extensions we draw upon (Fox News vs. The Huffingston Post), and that there are architects who seek to coordinate and construct the range of meanings which get attached to that story. In that sense, the Obama story, as constructed by his campaign, includes both radical intertextuality and multimodality.

When I wrote Convergence Culture, I focused the transmedia discussion around The Matrix, while including a side bar which discussed The Beast as an Alternate Reality Game. I understood that ARGs had something to do with transmedia, but my use of the sidebar structure allowed me to dodge the tougher question of whether ARGs are transmedia, and that's where some of the most heated debates in recent years has occurred.

The Hollywood based model of transmedia assumes a story told or a world explored across not simply multiple media but multiple texts, which can be sold to audiences separately and which represent multiple touch points with the brand. (Note, for my definition, it really doesn't matter if the texts form a single narrative or multiple stories set in the same world, since in practice, most transmedia includes multiple plot lines which can be dispersed in different ways across the installments.) The ARG model, however, assumes that multiple media can contribute to a single entertainment experience. So, we are more likely to talk about The Beast, I Love Bees, or The Lost Experience as completed texts in their own right (as well as in all three cases as part of larger entertainment franchises). Different groups have different stakes in drawing lines distinguishing or integrating these two models. It is important to understand what they are each trying to accomplish, but I am less invested in defining in or out one model or the other. I just think this is a space which deserves closer conceptual work than it has received so far. Both could meet my emphasis on radical intertextuality and multimodality and both can deliver on the promises of additive comprehension.

Another debate worth monitoring here has to do with issues of audience participation in the development of a transmedia property. These debates break down into two sets of issues. The first has to do with the differences I draw in Convergence Culture between interactivity and participation. For me, interactivity has to do with the properties of the technology and participation has to do with the properties of the culture. Obviously, in practice, both may come into play in the same text. So, for example, a computer game stresses interactivity and thus preprogramed entertainment experiences. Fan culture is high on participation, where fans take the resources offered by a text and push it in a range of directions which are neither preprogrammed nor authorized by the producers.

When people claim that interactivity is a core element of a transmedia experience, I want to make sure we are using the term in the same way. We can imagine a range of different relations which fans might have to a transmedia property. On one end would be the hunting and gathering practices of finding the dispersed pieces of information and figuring out how they all fit together to form a meaningful whole. On the other end, we might have playing through a level of a game, working past obstacles, killing bosses, and gathering objects. But we might also think about various forms of fan performance -- from fan fiction to cosplay -- which are more participatory and open ended and less dependent on the design choices of the transmedia producers.

A second set of issues has to do with continuity vs. multiplicity. Most discussions of transmedia place a high emphasis on continuity -- assuming that transmedia requires a high level of coordination and creative control and that all of the pieces have to cohere into a consistent narrative or world. This is a practice which is hard enough to achieve across the multiple divisions of the same production team and it becomes hard for fans to contribute directly to the development of a narrative which places high emphasis on continuity. Indeed, many projects which claim to tap "user-generated content" do so in ways which protect the "integrity" of the continuity at the expense of enabling multiple perspectives and more open-ended participation. They make the author or some designated agent an arbiter of what counts within the canon. On the other hand, there are forms of commercially produced transmedia which really celebrate the multiplicity which emerges from seeing the same characters and stories told in radically different ways. This focus on multiplicity leaves open a space for us to see fan-produced media as part of a larger transmedia process, even if we then want to try to sort through how different elements get marked as official canon or fan alternatives.

Sorry this has gotten so complicated, but I think part of the problem is that many people are looking for simple formulas and a one-size-fits-all definition, trying to delimit what transmedia is. But, we are still in a period of experimentation and innovation. New models are emerging through production practices and critical debates, and we need to be open to a broad array of variations of what transmedia means in relation to different projects. I wrote in Convergence Culture that convergence practices, for the foreseeable future, will amount to "kludges," jerry-rigged attempts to connect different media together, as we all figure out what's going on and what works well.

There is no transmedia formula. Transmedia refers to a set of choices made about the best approach to tell a particular story to a particular audience in a particular context depending on the particular resources available to particular producers. The more we expand the definition, the richer the range of options available to us can be. It doesn't mean we expand transmedia to the point that anything and everything counts, but it means we need a definition sophisticated enough to deal with a range of very different examples. What I want to exclude from this definition is "business as usual" projects which are not exploring the expanded potential of transmedia, but are simply slapping a transmedia label on the same old franchising practices we've seen for decades.

As a way to promote more conversation, please send me your questions, critiques, and other responses to hjenkins@usc.edu, and I will try to respond in a future post.

July 29, 2011

Aca-fandom and Beyond: John Edward Campbell, Lee Harrington, and Catherine Tossenberger (Part Two)

July 29, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

John: I can't help thinking my provocation is an odd fit in this larger discussion. Although I once belonged to a gay Sci-Fi fan group (the Gaylaxians), have attended Sci-Fi conventions, and love speculative literature, films, and television shows, I've never been comfortable with identifying myself simply as a "fan." I have always used the term in relation to a particular cultural text or practice. I also find I don't identify with many people who do declare themselves "fans" in the general sense. Furthermore, I'm not comfortable with the fixed sense of identity the term "fan" suggests to me. On a personal level, claiming to be a "fan" feels like committing to a particular model of identity that denies both my individuality and the diverse and changing nature of my tastes and pleasures. Today I enjoy watching True Blood, but I may not in ten years. When I was in my 20s I belonged to a Sci-Fi fan group and attended Sci-Fi conventions, but I don't anymore. Those activities fulfilled a particular need at a particular moment in my life, but they hardly define who I am now. Thus for me, "fandom" is something fluid that one may move in and out of over the course of one's life.

In some respects, my experiences of "fandom" converge with those of Lee Harrington. My expressions of fan behavior have also largely occurred in private. I would include in this private experience of fandom, intimate gatherings of friends to share the enjoyment of a particular media text, such as weekly get-togethers over a friend's house to watch True Blood or Project Runway or Heroes. (What can I say; we all had a crush on the telepathic cop played by Greg Grunberg. Greg, if you're reading this, call me.)

As with Harrington, I have not had to grapple with my own fan practices when studying various media fan communities. This is not to suggest that I fail to acknowledge how key axes of my identity shape both how I approach a particular subject and even what subjects I find worthy of study. However, that struggle has been in terms of gender, race, class background, and sexuality, and all those other social categories I was essentially assigned to at birth and I did not simply choose for myself. I have only ever known the world through the eyes of a white man who has felt different as far back as I can recall. Thus, in being reflexivity, I qualify my observations as coming from this very particular vantage point and that things may look very different indeed from another vantage point.

Unlike my gender, race, and sexuality, my tastes and those cultural artifacts from which I derive pleasure have changed over the course of my life. I was not (nor was anyone else) born into a particular vantage point on fandom. In fact, I currently occupy a very different vantage point on media fandom then I did in my 20s. Given fluid nature of tastes, it would be useful to explore how race, gender, sexuality, and class background all shape one's desire to identify as a fan or "acafan." Unfortunately, some of the fan scholarship I've read does not extend self-reflexivity beyond a claim to fan status. It is important to keep in mind that a claim to a shared fan identity, does not erase power inequalities between the researcher and the subject, nor does it negate the influence of race, gender, sexuality, and class not only on our analyses, but also on what cultural activities we deem worthy of analysis in the first place.

To clarify, by lack of fluidity surrounding social constructs such as sexuality, I am not suggesting our erotic desires and sexual impulses are fixed or that our sexual identity doesn't change over the course of our lives. Rather, I'm referring to the way society seeks to lock our sexual identities into rigid and often binary categories: gay/straight, homosexual/heterosexual, deviant/normal. Basically, once you step over a certain line in our society, you're no longer straight you're "Other" and it's wroth noting how invested our society is in policing that line. Obviously, sexual appetites and erotic desires do not fit comfortably within the gay/straight or any other binary model of sexuality. Even opening a space for such other categories of sexual identity as bisexual, pansexual, queer, or questioning, still does not adequately reflect the vastness and variability of the erotic universe.

Even though I do not identify myself as an "acafan," it is not to say that I have not drawn from my passions in my work. For instance, while in graduate school I wrote an article on The X-Files. I was an avid fan of the series (well, OK, the first four seasons of the series) and discussed it extensively with those friends who also followed the show. I drew upon this cultural capital in writing my analysis of the text and what I saw as its complex ideological function. Indeed, researching and writing the article was a pleasurable practice in itself. In this sense, my understanding of a fan is much in line with Nancy Baym's and Sam Ford's - a fan is someone with an extensive amount of knowledge about and deep appreciation for a particular type of text (whether that be soap operas, Sci-Fi shows, sporting events, modern art, Broadway musicals, etc.). Here we can understand a fan as type of connoisseur; an individual with refined taste and specialized knowledge in some particular area. Arguably, it is this refined taste and specialized knowledge that underlies much of the enjoyment a fan experiences in consuming a particular text, what Barthes would identify as plaisir as opposed to jouissance.

I do have to agree with Catherine Tosenberger regarding the importance of "thinking through" our positionality in relation to the communities we study and representations we construct. This is certainly an issue that has been wrestled with extensively in LGBT studies and queer theory. Gay scholars have a professional responsibility not to present a sanitized or idealized image of the communities or individuals they study. For this reason, I am careful to note in my work on gay male communities how hierarchies of race, gender, and even beauty are (re)constructed in online environments. My goal as a critical scholar is to neither celebrate nor condemn the communities I study, but rather to understand them. My primary concern is constructing a representation that shows my subjects in all their complexities as individuals - individuals who are as flawed and noble as the rest of humanity.

It goes without saying that I have the added responsibility of considering the very real social, political, and economic ramifications of the representations I provide in my scholarship. Here the stakes are high indeed. Many of the individuals I interact with in the course of my research must conceal their sexual identity for fear of losing their employment, their families, and perhaps even their lives. Some of the individuals I have interviewed over the years have been victims of violent hate crimes and still carry the psychological scars from those attacks. And the majority of the individuals I've encountered in my research live in locations where there are no legal defenses against blatant forms of discrimination.

I would also ask that those who do identify as "acafans" be a bit more reflexive about comparisons of fans to sexual minorities. Would a LGBT individual be as ready use the language of "coming out" to describe identifying oneself as a fan? There is a way that sexual minorities growing up in this society must constantly police their behavior, their tastes, their gestures, even their subtlest glances to conceal their difference from mainstream society. If they fail to sufficiently conceal their difference, the consequences can be severe. As I write this, a trial is underway in the Los Angeles district of Chatsworth. The trail involves a 14-year-old boy, Brandon McInerney, who has already confessed to shooting one of his peers, Larry Fobes King, twice in the back of the head execution style in front of his teacher and a classroom full of students. The motivation for the shooting was the victim's openness about his (homo)sexuality and his non-normative gender expression, which included wearing dresses and make-up to school. This story as well as those of Matthew Shepard and far too many others, remind me of how terrified I was in high school that someone would even suspect I was different. I didn't yet have a name for this difference, but I knew nonetheless that it was something horrible which had to be hidden away from everyone. While I was very open about my love for all things Star Wars since seeing the first film, I was utterly silent about my love for men even to myself. Being a fan of Star Wars was cool. Being different was dangerous.

Catherine: Throughout this whole discussion, I've found it interesting how comfort levels with the term "acafan" seem to be correlated to different experiences of fannishness: the impression I have, listening to John and Lee and reading the previous postings, is that those fans who have the easiest time with the term are those whose fannish experience has been primarily transformational, rather than affirmational. If you're a humanities/cultural studies scholar, especially, then the basic premise of transformational fandom -- the source text is a springboard for your own creative and analytical work to share with others -- dovetails with academia in many ways, as Joli Jensen pointed out ages ago; moreover, many transformational fan practices (like fanfiction) have obvious analogues with "respectable" mainstream practices (like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, etc.), as John mentioned. If those types of fannishness, and those types of texts, are the ones that you as a fan and academic are working with, then the category of the "acafan" goes down easier.

But those fans whose experiences have primarily tended to follow affirmational patterns , or what Lee called "as-is" fans, I think understandably have been having more trouble with the idea. This is why I think we need to have these discussions, because the unmarked term "fan" covers so much ground.

I love those terms, affirmational/transformational, because they're not setting up a hierarchy of "true fans" or whatever, but just describing general patterns of participation, ways of "doing" fandom; granted, they're still talking about fans who are interacting in some kind of social way with other fans, as opposed to a wholly private experience, but I think it's a good way of conceptualizing participatory fannishness.

And building on that, I think that it's also important to talk about how these different forms of fannishness (and therefore conceptions of acafannishness) interact with existing systems of privilege and power. The original discussion of affirmational vs. transformational arose in fandom because of these observed culture clashes. Affirmational fannishness (and I'd include mainstream sports fandom here) generally fits more comfortably within existing cultural hierarchies, since it tends to reiterate the primacy of the official creator/institution; affirmational fannish spaces are also often (not always, but often) majority male. Transformational fannish spaces, as Kristina and others have pointed out, are more likely to be majority-female, and overtly queer or queer-friendly. Transformational fans were also likely to be treated as an even more pathological form of the pathologized fan: those fan boys fighting about the engines on the Enterprise might be hopeless geeks, but at least they're not perverts writing gay porn about Kirk and Spock!, etc. The initial constructions of the acafan were responding to those larger issues just as much as to the construction of fans specifically, which is why there was so much focus upon female fans doing the most arguably "subversive" stuff (like writing erotic and homoerotic stories). I think for the term aca-fandom to continue to be useful, we need to really think through that history, and our own positions within that history.

John, some of my thinking overlaps with yours (and not just on the hotness of Greg Grunberg!), but I think it's really important to point out that particularly in transformational fandom, sexuality, and fan production as a means of exploring and articulating sexuality, is a big deal -- this is especially true for younger fans, whose expressions of sexuality are so heavily policed in institutional settings. While not every fan, transformational or otherwise, is focused upon sexuality or eroticism by any means, sexuality and sexual enjoyment is a major part of the discourse in all the fandoms I've been involved in, and a lot of discussion centers around the topic -- especially in slash fandom, where, according to recent research by Anne Kustritz and others, the majority of slashers identify as somewhere on the queer spectrum, myself included.

Kristina, Robin Anne Reid, and Alexis Lothian wrote a fabulous article called "Yearning Void and Infinite Potential: Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space," on just these issues of sexuality and fannishness, and the potential for fluidity of sexual desire and categorization of that desire. These are conversations that are important to have, and are being had both within fandom and within academia. A lot of this is centered around slash fandom though, so if you're not plugged into that corner, or transformational fandom in general, it might fly under your radar. There are a lot of things that can be said about fandom and queerness in spaces beyond specific consideration of slash, of course, and I'd love to see that conversation spread.

It's funny; I know I'm coming across as a bit "Rah Rah Acafandom!," but I'm actually having something of a crisis -- not so much about the concept itself, but all those issues of identification and "overinvestment" and such that go hand-in-hand with it. I'm working on an article on the tv show Glee right now; I've always joked that I overidentified (I was in show choir! In Ohio! It was just like the show, really!), but then Santana, who has been struggling with identifying her sexuality and coming out, happened. I basically was Santana in high school (though instead of a Brittany, I had a Quinn, which is a recipe for horror), complete with attitude problem and her methods of (not) dealing with her desires and their implications; I sometimes feel like, watching the show, that the writers somehow got hold of my teenage diary.

In a lot of figurations of fannishness and acafannishness, this should be my way into producing reams of material on Santana, but it hasn't been the case. I have a hard time reading Santana fanfic, much less writing it, because I find myself going "That's not right, that's not how it was!", projecting my own experiences on to her. And of course, Santana isn't entirely me, not then and not now -- I'm bisexual and white, among other important differences. But I struggle a lot with thinking and writing about her, because it's too close, and too exposing; even talking about it here, I'm squirming a little (I've confessed to being a mean girl, omg). Fandom is so often treated as if it's about uncritical adoration, but I find that I can only be a productive fan if I can maintain some distance, enough to be able to consider aesthetic issues and the like -- if I can't adopt a stance of critical engagement with a character, I have nowhere to move, no conflicting feelings to mine.

That, for me, gets at the heart of "what it means to be an "acafan" -- it's not some kind of binary between rational disengagement on one hand and slobbering emotion on the other, but about the ways we make different parts of the spectrum work productively in a variety of spaces.

Lee: Very interesting observation, Catherine, I hadn't noticed a correlation between comfort level with the term "acafan" and types of fannishness (transformational vs. affirmational)....and I'm still mulling through how this might intersect with the "doing" vs. "being" distinction that John explores. When Denise Bielby and I wrote Soap Fans we were explicitly arguing FOR fandom-as-identity ("being"), as it seemed to be absent or downplayed in the emergent fan studies of the early 1990s.

I appreciate John's discomfort with the generalized term "fan" (rather than fan of something) and what it potentially implies, though I guess I think of most identities, fan included, as fluid rather than fixed. I'm not overlooking the power of ascription (a nice old-fashioned sociological term) but rather highlighting the extent to which our multiple identities are visibilized and invisibilized in different interactional and social contexts...though not always a result of our own agentic choices, of course. In my undergraduate sociology courses I spend a lot of time exploring implications of the distinction John emphasizes - a person who engages in certain activities vs. a certain type of person - though admittedly I've never questioned fandom in quite the same way.

For me personally, fandom is both an identity (that we can claim or not, or have imposed on us or not, or express or not) and an activity (manifested in any number of ways including some not visible to others). I have no problem sharing my fan identity - the naming of it - with students and colleagues and even strangers, etc., but they're sure as hell not going to "see" it very often. Or, rather, they might see (some of) the activity but the emotional basis of fandom for me, the sheer pleasure of fandom, is mine and mine alone.

I laughed when I read Catherine's description of her squirminess and admire her both for having a teenage diary and for apparently keeping the damn thing (I prefer my 16-year old self to be as repressed as possible). And perhaps this is ultimately why I don't consider myself an acafan - as I mentioned earlier I've never written from within my own fandom (see Catherine, above) and the claiming/naming of it has been minimally useful to me both personally or professionally.

I've been thinking of what Jack Halberstam wrote in an earlier post, that it's hard to be a fan. For me it's not hard, it's just nobody's business but my own - the emotional content of it, I mean. The "fan" Lee Harrington that exists publicly is about as real as the "teacher" Lee Harrington. There's some authenticity to it but it's also mighty partial and mighty varnished.

C. Lee Harrington is Professor of Sociology and Affiliate of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Miami University. She has published on fans and fandom since the early 1990s and is currently exploring aging audiences/fans. Her fan interests as of today include Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, General Hospital, all things cheese-related (since gifted a cheese-of-the-month-club, it's fantastic!), Las Vegas, and - inexplicably to those who know her - Kate and William.

John Edward Campbell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications, and Mass Media in the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University. He teaches media theory, cultural studies, and popular culture. His current book project - Selling Belonging: When Online Communities Become Big Business - examines the cultural and political implications of the commercialization of online communities. His first book - Getting It On Online: Cyberspace and Gay Male Sexuality - represents an ethnographic exploration of the cultural practices of online gay communities.

Catherine Tosenberger is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, where she is attached to the Centre for Young People's Texts and Cultures. She teaches children's and YA literature, folklore, and cultural studies, and has been involved in the Harry Potter, Supernatural, and Glee fandoms. Her publications include articles on the Grimms' tales, Harry Potter slash, and Supernatural fanfiction.

July 28, 2011

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: John Edward Campbell, Lee Harrington, and Catherine Tossenberger (Part One)

July 28, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Lee Harrington: Very interesting discussion thus far......I think my own experience and perspective most closely aligns with that of Nancy Baym's. I do not find myself struggling to reconcile any competing expectations or ethical codes in, as Nancy puts it, being a fan studying fandom within academia. I appreciated Henry's backstory of where the term "acafan" came from. Even though I began writing about fans in the same time period he refers to, I came out of a very different disciplinary background (sociology) and training (sociology of emotions). Even though some of the early sociological pathologizing of media fans is exactly the body of scholarship that an acafan positioning responded to (bad grammar, sorry, it's summer), the type of tension or dissonance inherent in the term does not reflect my own experience. I am also, I suspect, a different kind of fan that most participants in this blog series. I'm definitely an "as-is" (not transformative) fan and for the most part my fandom is experienced privately not publicly -- a distinction Denise Bielby and I first emphasized in Soap Fans (1995, thanks for the shoutout, Sam) and which I think remains overlooked in fan studies, admittedly due to the methodological challenges private fandom presents. My first fan event was a General Hospital fan club luncheon in the late 1980s which Denise and I went to in LA....that was a huge impetus for our soap book because I was STUNNED by the public display of emotion in the room, the naked joy fans expressed at mingling with the actors on GH. Not me and "my" fandom at all, then or now.

So the near-20 years of research I've done on fans and fan texts (mostly the former) has been fascinating because I'm talking with people whose emotional experiences are comparable to mine in many ways but who share it in ways I rarely do. That doesn't mean I approach more expressive fans as "other" in my research - at least I hope I don't. For me, the emotional experience is the shared common core of fandom rather than its expression.

So if acafan is an identity, I don't claim it and haven't felt the need or pressure to do so. If it's an activity I don't think I engage in it the way it's discussed in this blog series, though I need to think through that assertion some more. I've never written from within my own fandom (my own fan pleasures), nor have I seen the need to either personally or professionally. The research ethics I adhere to stem from my disciplinary training and my qualitative research approach, not my fandom (not that it's an automatic either/or, I'm just naming the source).

If acafan is a community I'm kind of a half-assed member, though that's true of my membership in mainstream sociology as well (and forget about the sociology of emotions and its community, I feel terrible for my dissertation advisor who invested four years of his life in me and I promptly took a 45-degree turn and never looked back). If anything, I agree with Sam's suggestion that acafandom now signals potential spaces of collaboration. That works for me.

I'm unsure of the usefulness of the term at this point in fan studies. I can see how it might be politically risky for some scholars to claim (e.g. untenured in a tenurable position, and/or in traditional social science disciplines, and/or by those trying to present/publish in traditional disciplinary outlets) while useful as an identity marker or authorial positioning in other contexts. If it (still?) has a hip-factor to it, I'm not sure. It can also (and has, I think) be used to justify some really sloppy naval-gazing, as Henry pointed out, and in that regard is akin to autoethnography at its ick-iest. I recognize and value the methodological rigor/ethics that the term implies for some scholars.....but it has also been used to justify some pretty crappy work.

John Edward Campbell: Although I appreciate that the term "acafan" was, in part, a strategic reaction to an older, and often elitist, approach to the study of media audiences (an approach that had largely fallen from favor by the time I entered graduate school), it remains a descriptor I hesitate embracing. My reservations surrounding the term are informed by my experiences as a gay man who has studied sexual minority communities. Given that in an earlier statement Henry Jenkins noted the influence queer theory had on his thinking about the relationship of media scholars to media fans, the work of Michel Foucault is useful in articulating my concerns surrounding some of the current conceptions of "fandom" in academia.

In his discussion of the construction of the "homosexual," Foucault is careful to distinguish behavior from identity. Only recently in Western history did engaging in a particular type of behavior (sexual interactions with members of the same sex) become the basis of an entire identity (the homosexual as a separate species of person). For Foucault, the social construction of the homosexual is an example of the generative aspect of power (or what he refers to as "biopower"). Indeed, the construction of various classifications of human beings based on their (sexual) behavior, granted significant social, political, and economic capital to the fields of psychology, psychoanalysis, and medicine, as well as to those individuals who proclaimed themselves "experts" in studying such types of people.

Many scholars working under the rubric of LGBT studies and queer theory have interrogated this essentialist understanding of (homo)sexuality. Although these scholars approached the issue from diverse disciplines - Judith Butler from philosophy, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick from literature, Kath Weston from anthropology, and Larry Gross from communication to name but a few - they found related ontological and epistemological problems in claims of there being a fixed (essential) identity based on sexual behavior.

In critical gay scholarship, the researcher acknowledges the constructed nature of (homo)sexuality even as she or he sets out to study the practices of those that society has categorized as sexual minorities. Thus, the self-reflexive gay scholar rejects the claim of "insider" status. Indeed, such a claim necessitates the question: Inside what exactly? A heterogeneous, fragmented, amalgamation of disparate groups whose only true commonality is an exclusion from mainstream society?

Such scholarship is quick to point out that the "LGBT community" is more an imagined community (in Benedict Anderson's sense of the term) than a tangible reality. There are social collectives of individuals who may share sexual sensibilities, but there is no singular "gay community" to which all sexual minorities belong by virtue of their sexuality. (Obviously, speaking of "the LGBT community" is politically useful in both fighting for fundamental civil rights and for gay scholars who must justify their research for the sake of tenure and promotion.)

Thus, it would be deeply problematic if I claimed in my work to either studying "the gay community" or "my community." The former assertion would reify something that exists only in the abstract and deny the diverse and often contradictory experiences of those individuals identified as belonging to a sexual minority. The latter assertion would reduce my subjects and I to our sexual identity alone, ignoring both the porous nature of gay social collectives and the complicated ways sexuality intersects with other axes of identity (e.g. gender, race, class, ethnicity, religion, nationality, etc.). It would also position me as some form of champion or spokesperson for a particular community.

Although such a gesture is understandable if I were an activist, it's cavalier at best for a social scientist. Indeed, I have read the work of other gay-identified scholars who have referred to sexual minorities as "their people" (or in one case, "their tribe") and my immediate response was: Who the hell does this person think they are? Besides our sexuality, we have absolutely nothing in common and I doubt we'd even be friends. It is for this reason that any scholar must be painfully careful when they claim to speak for a particular community.

So what has this to do with fans? When a researcher transitions from talking about "fans of" to simply "fans," a shift occurs that parallels Foucault's discussion of the homosexual. This seemingly minor discursive change transforms "fan" from signifying a type of behavior in relation to a particular cultural artifact to signifying a type of person. For instance, I am a fan of a great many media texts - Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson is God!), Harry Potter (I went to see the final movie twice in its opening weekend), True Blood (or as I call it, televised crack!), 30 Rock, Fringe, Dexter, and Disney theme parks (OK, I know the last one is not a media text) - but I am not a fan.

In the former use of the term (fan of) any individual may potentially experience a powerful emotional connection to some cultural text or practice. Given that one of the ways we construct identity in our society is through which cultural artifacts and practices provide us pleasure, we could argue every individual has a fan status much the same way every individual has a sexual status. (Keep in mind that in early academic studies of human sexuality, it was suggested that only non-heterosexuals had a sexuality much like early discussions of gender suggested only women were gendered.) Social hierarchy becomes apparent not in the pleasure an individual experiences, but rather in what cultural artifacts and practices are deemed worthy of such pleasure.

Of course, an essentialist view of "fans" as a type of person has significant professional advantages for the researcher. Such a view allows the researcher to speak about "fans" and the "fan community" in uncomplicated terms, as if these human beings have a fixed and singular identity as well as a distinct set of practices not shared by the rest of humanity. (When scholars speak of "transformative" fans, I can't help wondering if that includes everyone who takes existing media content and reworks it into an original creation. If so, that would include all of the students in our program who, for various course assignments, create mashups, machinima, and various other original creations using existing media content.) An essentialist understanding of "fans" also allows the researcher to claim "insider" status, granting the scholar special knowledge about this species of human being. Most notably, an essentialist view allows the researcher to position the "fan" as a type of minority, granting the scholar a certain moral authority to speak on behalf of an oppressed group of people.

This underlies my reservations about the title "acafan." Not only does it largely rest on an essentialist understanding of "fan," it also allows some scholars to position themselves as arbiters of who does and does not constitute a "true" fan. When I read some fan studies, I have the distinct impression that if I don't don a Star Trek uniform, attend Sci-Fi conventions, invest a significant amount of my time memorizing minutia surrounding each episode and reading fan fiction, then I cannot claim to be a Star Trek fan. Apparently, enjoying the series, collecting some Star Trek memorabilia, and discussing the series with friends who also enjoy the show is not enough to be a "fan."

I find this as problematic as suggesting that if a man doesn't march in gay pride parades, watch Project Runway, listen to Cher and Madonna, have a rainbow sticker on his car, and quote lines from Will & Grace ("Oh look, better people."), then they are not a "true" gay man.

(I would not be entirely surprised if someone reading my words would think to himself or herself: He's not a fan. He doesn't understand. He's an outsider. Of course, I would then have to ask, outside what exactly? Where precisely is the demarcation between fan and non-fan? And who gets to set the demarcation point?)

Yes, I don't identify myself as an "acafan." Rather, I find it more useful (and more in line with post-structuralist theory and queer theory) to deconstruct the notion that others do not have a fan-like relationship to some cultural artifact or practice. In other words, just as a queer theorist is quick to point out that straight people also have a sexuality, and that this sexuality is as constructed as the sexuality of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals, I find it useful to point out that critics of media fans themselves experience pleasurable relationships to cultural texts. For instance, could we not argue that scholars who both study and enjoy the works of Joyce are "acafans"? Are they not studying something they feel passionate about? Do they not go to social gatherings attended by others who share their passions? Do they not invest considerable time and energy writing and discussing and critiquing cultural texts in which they are deeply emotionally invested? Are they not fans?

Catherine Tosenberger: In a lot of ways, my identity as an acafan -- and I do find the label the most accurate description of my own understanding of my position as academic and fan -- is pretty typical, if by "typical" you mean I'm a media fan who engages in transformational practices and has hooked up my understanding of those practices to my academic work.

Where it gets a little funky, for me, is that I never had the same kind of problems reconciling academic/fannish pursuits that many have reported, and never felt the same need to... justify myself? Not really. Part of that, of course, is the fact that I'm of a scholarly generation that benefited from Henry's and other's initial articulation of the concept of the acafan, so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. But also, my academic work is in the fields of children's/YA literature and folklore, fields which are directly concerned with audience and community; fandom studies, and my own acafannish identity, meshed very easily with the existing conversations going on in those fields.

As Karen Hellekson mentioned, there's often this perception that literary critics primarily do some kind of New Critical "text is all" scholarship -- we sit around talking about similes and metaphors and sometimes phallic symbols, and we only ever talk about audiences in terms of representation in texts. This isn't entirely the case, but it is true that some disciplines are more audience-focused than others, and that those disciplines that are very audience-focused have tended to occupy a kind of marginal position within literary studies. Folklore, of course, straddles the boundary between humanities and social sciences, depending upon what you're studying, how you're studying it, and where you're studying -- folklore programs have historically often been attached either to literature or anthropology departments, which of course affects how the field is approached.

With children's/YA literature, the issues of audience become even more intense: it's the only literary genre that is defined in terms of its audience, rather than by the form or content of the text itself. But as Jacqueline Rose famously pointed out, children's literature is produced by and for adults, and it has to satisfy adult desires and fantasies about what children are, and what they're supposed to want, before it ever gets into the hands of a kid. So adults reading and studying children's lit are in the weird position of being both the outsider audience AND the insider audience: we're not the designated audience, but we are the ones that the text has to satisfy. And those ideas about the "proper" audience is completely overrun with fantasies, often Romantic, often nostalgic, about children and what they know and what they should know, what they want and what they should want.

As audiences, both young people and traditional figurations of the "folk" were (and are) often characterized as naïve, suggestible, irrational, and whether that's presented as a bad thing or a Romantically good thing depends on the time, the place, and the speaker. But scholars in both fields have spent a long time interrogating these conceptions of audiences; to link fandom studies, and the conception of the pathologized fan, up to these conversations was the easiest thing in the world -- fannishness was so consistently characterized as "adolescent" and/or "uneducated" behavior that the language already existed for questioning those ideas. Plenty of scholars in both fields have mentioned fan fiction in passing as a great space for further study; it's especially relevant to children's/YA lit, because, particularly in fandoms like Harry Potter or Glee that have a big audience of young fans, the responses of actual readers/viewers could be seen, which enables a move away from reductive, stereotyped figurations of how some imaginary "typical" young person is supposed to react.

Anne Kustritz talked about the self-reflexive turn in anthropology, which was mirrored in folklore in the 1960s, when Alan Dundes redefined the term "folk group" to mean "any group of people with one linking factor"; this moved folklore theorizing away from privileging outsider statements and theorizing. In children's/YA lit, of course, this is much trickier across the board, since young people as a group don't have access to institutional authority that enables this kind of speech. So, for me, coming into the fields of folklore and children's lit, it wasn't difficult at all for me to think through issues of representation, and my own positionality, because those questions were already being asked.

And I didn't have any trouble "selling" myself as a children's lit academic on those terms, not really. The static I received on the job market was mainly from people who thought children's lit in general was a useless field -- I never had to defend my fannishness, but I, like other genre scholars, had to defend why we should "waste our time" with picture books when there was Samuel Johnson to be read, and so forth. I also got a lot of kneejerk horror from the fact that I was talking about erotic narratives in Harry Potter fandom, but again, mainly from non-children's lit people; children's lit scholars are generally down with James Kincaid's work on youth as an erotic category, and feminist and GLBTQ approaches to YA lit in particular are interested in issues of eroticism.

Erica Rand mentioned that there's still this wide distrust of pleasure when it comes to talking about culture, and that distrust of pleasure is intensified when we're talking about young people: kids should be learning, dammit, and they should only be learning about the "proper" things. Pleasure is something illicit even for adults, and vast amounts of cultural energy are expended policing young people's pleasure -- and policing what kind of pleasure adults can take concerning anything having to do with young people. Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer titled their super-important textbook on young people's texts The Pleasures of Children's Literature, specifically as a way of interrogating that distrust and policing: given that existing conversation, my acafannishness -- my willingness not only to admit to fannish pleasure but to make it part of my work -- was actually a factor in what got me hired at Nodelman and Reimer's school, the University of Winnipeg.

I was massively lucky (and not only because UW had a job opening when I was on the market): I came into two fields where the conversations so relevant to acafannishness had evolved in a parallel way, and people in those fields were willing to listen, and to help me think through my own position.

C. Lee Harrington is Professor of Sociology and Affiliate of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Miami University. She has published on fans and fandom since the early 1990s and is currently exploring aging audiences/fans. Her fan interests as of today include Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, General Hospital, all things cheese-related (since gifted a cheese-of-the-month-club, it's fantastic!), Las Vegas, and - inexplicably to those who know her - Kate and William.

Catherine Tosenberger is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, where she is attached to the Centre for Young People's Texts and Cultures. She teaches children's and YA literature, folklore, and cultural studies, and has been involved in the Harry Potter, Supernatural, and Glee fandoms. Her publications include articles on the Grimms' tales, Harry Potter slash, and Supernatural fanfiction.

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July 27, 2011

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Christine Bacareza Balance, Jack Halberstam, and Sarah Banet-Weiser (Part Two)

July 27, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Jack: Christine, I really enjoyed your piece - the compact way you account for the colonial context within which popular culture is absorbed, reviled and then transformed by those very people whom colonialism has reduced to the status of mimics. I also appreciate your effort to refuse the sharp distinction between fan and critic, poetry and prose, song and soundscape. In relation to your observations on "fandom" and "fanaticism," I would love to hear you say more about excess, about over the top performances that go beyond the reproduction of the same. I also have struggled with that Sedgwickian notion of "reparative" and I wonder how you are using it. I love her take on the paranoid form of reasoning that dominates academic style but I never really believed in the reparative as an alternative...

Sarah: Jack, Christine, I'm also interested in this notion of excess--both in fan activities as well as in constructions of other subjectivities, including gender, race, sexuality. I struggle with how to articulate this in my own work, because accounting for excess (or spaces of ambivalence) is tricky yet vital, as this is where performances of identity, as you say, can go beyond the reproduction of the same. Excess allows us to imagine new spaces of possibility and transformation. . .

Christine: In response to Jack's post and query and, in allegiance with her opening anecdote, I too have endured such distracting and annoying concert-going experiences (too many to name, in fact). The most recent example: this past June, I attended Janelle Monae and Bruno Mars' concert at the Gibson Amphitheatre--the only Los Angeles stop on their national "Hooligans in Wonderland" tour--both as a critic (currently writing a review of their performance) and a fan (of both artists). Armed with the critical analytics--histories of labor and musical performance as re-cited in each artist's performance (Monae and chitlin circuits, Mars and Hawai'i's tourist economies-- that were going to frame my review of the show, I was first slightly peeved by the audience's (mainly teenage girls and boys and their parents) lukewarm reception of Monae and then fully irritated about two songs into Mars' set. In a similar fashion to Jack's Radiohead experience, my seatmate decided to not just sing but, instead, scream the chorus to his hit single, "Billionaire," sans irony or self-reflexivity. Needless to say, I had to switch seats in order not to inflict fan-on-fan, audience member-on-audience member violence. Indeed, the "fantasy and impossibility" embedded in fandom and being an academic is what makes such a scene difficult. But I try (after physically distancing myself), in such situations, to curb the critical desire to position myself as an omniscient or holier-than-thou audience member, for, it is precisely this stance--one generated and performed by collectors and critics in other settings--which forecloses any possibility of dialogue or conversation.

The "reparative" here becomes a call to stand alongside other fans, rather than above them, no matter how difficult it might be. It signals a type of ethical relationship. For me, the genre of performance--with its qualities of immediacy, ephemerality, improvisation, and liveness--is particularly generative in cultivating what Alexandra Vazquez (by way of Barbara Johnson) identifies as moments of "surprise"--on stage, in the classroom, on the written page, and in everyday life. These days, in my own work, I am finding the analytic of surprise--something unexpected that can incite various affective responses (fear, astonishment, wonder, and even violence)--to be more generative than "excess," especially when (again) the subjects, objects, and performances I am most interested are being generated by a historical relationship (U.S. empire in the Philippines) otherwise deemed "invisible" in mainstream U.S. popular culture.

I also appreciate Sarah's comments regarding "the fan as self-brand." Needless to say, none other than this past weekend's Comicon gathering brings to the forefront the ways that, as Sarah notes, the "fan is positioned and validated as a kind of product within a circuit of commodity exchange." With the increasing presence of mainstream popular entertainment industries (such as films, television, video games) at this long-standing fan-centered event, it becomes quite obvious that Hollywood is present to capitalize on its fans--consumer-participants whose a) identities are themselves "products" of particular forms of consumption and b) fandom does the work of publicizing upcoming new releases (mainly, through social networking outlets such as Twitter and Facebook but also by wearing t-shirts featuring their favorite comic book characters or films). At the same time, by dressing up as characters from particular franchises (this year's favorites: Black Swan, Harry Potter, and the tried-and-true standby, Star Wars), teenage and adult Comicon attendees inhabit and bring to life these particular pop cultural products. Fueled by a "desire for visibility," I witnessed firsthand how these "dressed up" attendees actually extend and are part of the "long tail" of mainstream franchises in a manner similar to amusement parks, as parents photographed their children posed next to other attendees dressed like Tinker Bell or Wolverine.

But, again, rather than merely maintaining some type of critical arm's length from the slew of (mainly) teenagers dressed up as characters and huddled together on the convention center floors, I allowed myself to hearken back to my own adolescent yesteryears, to the theatre competitions and showcases that colored my high school weekends. Where and how can we draw the line between dressing up like Lady Macbeth as opposed to Xena the Warrior Princess, Huckelberry Finn instead of Luke Skywalker, Stanley Kowalski rather than an Avatar? I believe that any attempt to draw lines of difference between such examples of "dressing up" recapitulates the age-old divide between "high" and "low" cultures while it prohibits the potential meanings made by both these performers and their audiences.

Jack: Sarah, I think your notion of the fan as brand and as a distribution point for the circulation of popular culture actually dialogues with my worry that the fan becomes a "celebrity subject" in training - in other words, we consume to learn how to produce well and then produce well in order to facilitate more production. At the same time that I am compelled by these critiques of fandom and the sense of fandom as a economic relay point, I still do want to hold on to some kind of resistant notion of fandom, one where the branding changes the meaning of self, consumption, branding, capital in the process of participating in it.

Sarah: Jack--yes! Your idea/worry about "celebrity subject" in training is truly in conversation with my worry about fan as brand (and self-branding in general). But I also hear both you and Christine about holding on to a concept of the fan as a resistant notion, or a resistant subject, or just in terms of the surprise of meaning Christine gestures toward when talking about dressing up and performing as an adolescent (and I appreciate the notion of surprise over excess). For me, the trick is to hold on to both of these notions simultaneously (fandom as economic relay point, and fandom as potentially resistant), without resorting to a commercial v. non-commercial binary. Which is why I think, Jack, that your last statement, about those moments where branding changes the self, consumption, capital in the process of participating within branding, is vital for me in thinking about how meaning circulates in advanced capitalism. how do we utilize the logic of branding for progressive (and I'm not talking about socially responsible corporations here) or resistant ways? Again, I'm not talking about culture jamming or detournement (though both certainly can have their uses in terms of resistance), but making and remaking brands and fans within new parameters of meaning and signification--that is, how branding can surprise you.

Jack: Christine - well, exactly, one wants to stand or sit alongside the annoying fan from an ethical point of view but in actual, material reality, one wants to get as far away as possible!! So, that is exactly why I mistrust the reparative - it is a gesture of the ethical, a way of knowing the right thing to do but it clashes with the instinctive gesture of, in this case, recoil and disconnection. Moments of surprise are similarly wonderful pedagogical opportunities but hard to come by in an age of self-branding, self-marketing and commercial child manipulation! The only cultural productions that have really been continuously surprising to me in recent years have been animated films for children, which I discuss extensively in The Queer Art of Failure, which manage to address the child viewer in non condescending and often non-normative ways...and then of course, the surprise and wonder of the animated landscape gives way to the banality of the tie-in action figure served up with the kid's happy meal a few hours later. How do we extend the momentary surprise so that it has more affective intensity than the desire for the figure, the dress-up or the happy meal? Sarah - can you give us an example of when branding can surprise?

Sarah: Yes, well, that is the question, isn't it? I love your question of how we can extend the momentary surprise so that creative and potentially resistant cultural forms don't end up like happy meals. I don't have the answer, but one interesting example might be the recent branding of Wikileaks (the Wall St. Journal covered this in February of this year), where Julian Assange's organization began selling t-shirts, etc that said things like "Free Assange!" and "the truth is not treason." The profit generated by the t-shirts supposedly went to Assange's legal fund, or to the maintenance of the site, or somewhere (and of course, the "somewhere" is always the question--the company that made the Wikileaks t-shirts also made Spice Girls t-shirts). To brand something like Wikileaks and its subversive potential is simultaneously a bit of a surprise and entirely predictable. And I'm not sure if it has "more affective intensity than the desire for the figure;" there's got to be a Julian Assange action figure out there for sale somewhere. I'm thinking, though, that this kind of move within branding represents a sort of bending or distorting of commodity exchange, that could possibly lead to different sorts of affective openings. . .

Christine Bacareza Balance is Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies (UC Irvine). Her research & teaching interests include: Filipino/Filipino American studies, performance studies, and popular culture. Her writing has been published in Women & Performance: a feminist journal, the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Theatre Journal, and In Media Res (online). One-ninth of the Polynesian power pop band The Jack Lords Orchestra, she is currently writing a book on popular music and performance in Filipino America.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. Her first book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (University of California Press, 1999), explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out. She has also authored a book on consumer citizenship and the children's cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2007), in addition to her co-edited book, Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, co-edited with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2007). Her current book project, Authentic TM: Political Possibility in a Brand Culture (New York University Press, forthcoming) examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion. A co-edited book, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee, is under contract with New York University Press (forthcoming 2011).

Judith "Jack" Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at USC. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam's first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam's last book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity. Halberstam was also the co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano of a photo/essay book, The Drag King Book (1999), and with Ira Livingston of an anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). Halberstam regularly speaks on queer culture, gender studies and popular culture and publishes blogs at bullybloggers.com. Halberstam just finished a book titled The Queer Art of Failure due out 2011 from Duke University Press.

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July 26, 2011

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Christine Bacareza Balance, Jack Halberstam, and Sarah Banet-Weiser

July 26, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Christine Bacareza Balance

fan (n.): a person enthusiastic about a specified sport, pastime, or performer; devotee

fanatic (Latin, "of a temple"): unreasonably enthusiastic, overly zealous; a person whose extreme zeal, piety, etc. goes beyond what is reasonable.

I begin with these two brief definitions of "fan" and "fanatic"--from which the first term is typically derived--because they touch upon some of the topics I am interested in, both in my research and everyday life. As someone whose early scholarly training came by way of U.S. ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, my research today focuses on the labor (productive, consumptive, affective) of making music within Filipino America--a soundscape created by the historical relationship (imperial, postcolonial, neocolonial) between the U.S. and Philippines. It is an intimate yet oft-forgotten relationship and, thus, is charged with the racial/cultural invisibility of Filipinos within a U.S. racial imaginary. In other words, what is Filipino culture in the eyes of the U.S.?

Nothing but a merely mimetic nation, as evidenced by its most notable cover performers--Arnel Pineda, Charice Pempengco, and the hordes of cover bands playing in a global tourist circuit, the spectacular choreography of its prison inmates set to a Michael Jackson beat, and a deadly penchant for singing "My Way" on a karaoke machine.

Here, then, in a U.S. popular imaginary, Filipinos are fanatics--people who go beyond what is "reasonable"--when it comes to their relationship to their former colonizer's popular culture. It is a type of affective charge that simultaneously places them outside of a certain modernity (and therefore, post-modernity, as well) seemingly located in a logic of culture industries--TV, film, popular music--the same industries which render them "invisible" (or, more likely, collapse them within a limited idea of "Asian-ness" as evidenced in the common occurrence of Filipino stars "playing" characters of other Asian races--Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, but never Filipino) within a landscape of U.S. racialization.

Instead, as Apl de Ap of the Black Eyed Peas--one of the most "visible yet invisible" Filipino Americans in U.S. popular music today--notes, these and other Asian Americans remain a "quiet storm" of music producers, songwriters, and simply undercover agents (note one of pop's biggest stars today--Bruno Mars--is often noted for his Puerto Rican ancestry, Hawaiian upbringing but rarely, if ever, his Filipino heritage).

Along with this, however, I also sense a common belief within fan studies (and perhaps the term "aca-fan" specifically) that there can and does remain a divide between fans and performers--as if never the twain shall meet. Though my research has most definitely led me to examples of participatory culture--specifically, through the interactive communication technology (ICT) and everyday performance event of karaoke singing as well as the "viral aesthetics" evidenced in the recent emergence of Asian American performers on YouTube, from my interviews with and personal experiences interacting with musicians, events organizers/producers, club owners and DJs from Manila to the San Francisco Bay, I have witnessed the various forms of fan-dom these musical producers themselves inhabit.

Here, they are not only devoted the U.S. or European popular musics but, most especially, OPM (original Pilipino music)--from the 1950s up until today. In turn, my complicated relationship to this larger soundscape of OPM--as scholar, fan, and colleague--I believe, is not a rare incident. There a number of other popular music studies scholars in the U.S. and beyond who maintain a place in each of these (as well as other) categories of identification.

In the end, I am currently most interested in the styles of writing about musical cultures and sonic phenomena--in other words, the various ways that we, as critics, can attempt to write performatively--understanding our roles in the process of making meaning of culture--and, in the terms set by the late Eve Sedgwick, reparatively. Since many of the artists I choose to write about are generally people I have maintained an close relationship with--as a friend or fan or collaborator, the question of writing in a style legible to them is always there.

But, I believe that we should always be striving to be much more than just "legible" or "transparent" in our critical writing. Instead, we should, as Daphne Brooks once aptly stated, try to make the music sing in our writing. Or, as Josh Kun has shown us, we should imagine music creating places, bringing together worlds through both performance and listening. And, with their keen interest in the relationship between words and sound, Fred Moten and Alexandra Vazquez's work always remind me, it's not only that we try to capture the essence of music but, instead, that we travel inside of music's poetry and allow it to show us other ways of seeing, hearing, and being.

Jack Halberstam

It is hard to be a fan sometimes: a few scenarios come to mind - I am at a Radiohead show circa 2004, miles from the stage and while I am trying to be absorbed by the live performance, I am deeply distracted by a young woman sitting on her boyfriend's shoulders next to me and singing "Everything in its riiiight place" in the same tone that she may have been singing "give me what you want, what you really, really want" just a few years earlier while swinging her blond hair back and forth and whooping "oh yeah" in between little bursts of lyrics. I remember feeling really irritated, thinking to myself, well if she is a Radiohead fan, am I?

Or, a few years before that, probably the same year that Ms. Thing was screaming to the Spice Girls, I was going to drag king shows in NYC, heading out late at night to take in the queer night life scene of downtown New York. But instead of entering into dens of subcultural intimacy, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with gawkers, the beautiful people who were following a buzz and lining up now to take in the freak show before moving on to the next hot subcultural site.

And before that it was going to punk shows and pogo-ing alongside scary skinheads who may not have been attracted to the Clash, the Jam, the Slits, X-Ray Spex for the same reasons that I was.

Fandom is full of jeopardy and heartbreak, it is a jagged experience that confirms you and shatters you and often in the same location. It summons a sense of community but also calls forth snobbish and elitist modes of differentiation (why was I SO put out by the blond girl at the Radiohead concert? What made me SO sure that I and not she was the proper kind of Radiohead fan?). When we study fandom or bring our fannish commitments into our academic work, perhaps we are just trying to smooth out the rough edges of an experience that never quite delivers on what it promises - that precisely cannot deliver on that promise if only because fantasy and impossibility are the fuel upon which fandom thrives, burns and, ultimately, crashes.

I have succumbed to the siren calls of certain forms of fandom--punk, drag, gaga--and I will be called to plenty more in the future but I am now more wary and cautious of fandom than in my younger days. I am interested in thinking about forms of fandom that not only flirt with ecstatic pleasure but that also turn quickly to hostility and even violence when disappointed - think All About Eve, think about the killing of John Lennon or Selena. I would love to talk about fandom in an age of ubiquitous and mundane celebrity - if subjectivity, more and more, runs through the territory of everyday celebrity (everyone is a celebrity in their own mind), then what is fandom? A tutelage mode? A training in celebrity subjectivities? In academia and in the realm of popular culture, I think it is time to think about breaking with fidelity, devotion, discipleship (and other quasi-religious modes of practice) in favor of what I call "low theory" in my new book, what Foucault names as subjugated knowledge and what Fred Moten and Stefano Harny call "fugitive knowing."

Fandom does encompass many of these modes already, but lets be clear that fandom can both reproduce the norm or neutralize all that opposes it. Fandom entails risk, danger, complicity and explosive possibilities; it's hard to be a fan.

Sarah Banet-Weiser

I appreciate how Christine begins her post with two definitions of "fan" and "fanatic;" I am, I must confess, a person who often harbors unfair assumptions about the blurring of the two categories. This partly comes from the fact that I never really consider myself a "real" fan--certainly I'm a fan of popular culture in a broad sense, but I've never gone beyond the typical audience subject position to vote on contestants, to write fan fiction, to comment on a fan site (okay, once I voted on American Idol, but just for Adam Lambert).

So I've felt at times a certain (ir)rational distance when thinking about fans who position themselves in more active ways in relation to cultural texts, and am certainly guilty of occasionally merging the two definitions Christine offered, so that fans were often de facto fanatics in my mind.

Christine powerfully reminds us, though, that the merging between the fan and the fanatic is often complex and multi-layered, and certainly fans and fan activity do not circulate in culture in the same ways, across all boundaries. Fandom, as Christine points out, is often racialized, so that particular fans are seen as fanatics due to their racialization, their "irrational" or "cultural" bodies, such as the Filipino musicians Christine writes about.

Jack also reminds us that what fandom is isn't always clear, and it can be many things at once. Fandom can entail risk and challenge, but it can also--and often does--reproduce the norm.

What I want to do in this post is to draw on this multivalent notion of fandom, and invoke yet another iteration: the fan as self-brand. I would say that all fans and fan activities are situated within a commercial context, though again, this means different things for different fans. That is, while the cultural and commercial economy is surely a framing or shaping context, it is not always a deterministic one. The fact that fans, texts, and fandom take place and are often enabled by a broad milieu of consumption does not mean that fans and their activities do not have cultural, political, and social meaning.

However, the commercial context of much fandom and fan activities also animates other processes by which the "fan" is positioned and validated as a kind of product within a circuit of commodity exchange. The practice of self-branding is an increasingly normative practice in US culture, where "building a brand" seems to more and more be the logical go-to strategy for marketing our personal and professional identities. There often seems to be a relationship between self-branding and actively constructing oneself as a particular fan.

That is, I'm troubled by the ways in which there seems to be an increasing collapse between business brand strategy and personal identity construction in digital spaces--and it seems that in this collapse, it becomes harder (at least for me) to always discern what it means to be a "fan." Digital media, and the ways in which users are interactive within this space, offer flexibility for fans to not only produce their own media, but also facilitate strategies of self-branding.

Part of being a fan means contributing to the distribution and publicity of popular texts, especially if fan production is posted on-line. While this is not necessarily a negative thing, it does have a heightened significance in an economic context where the individual is privileged as a commodity, and where cultural and social life is increasingly organized and experienced through the terms and conditions of business models. This means that cultural values, such as morals and personal standards, can be harnessed and re-shaped within these same business conditions, so that building a brand becomes almost like a moral obligation to oneself.

In particular, I'm interested in the ways digital media and media production authorize the practice of self-branding for girls and young women, often in the name of self-empowerment, on social network sites, such as Youtube and Facebook. The practice of individuals becoming what Nikolas Rose calls "the enterprising self" has implications for women within the 21st century, where "putting oneself out there" and the quest for visibility is an ever more normative practice for young women.

So I suppose my contribution to this discussion is to ask the question: what happens when the fan becomes a kind of product? Or when the discourse of fandom and fan activities is not so much about individual tastes and desires, or belonging to a community, but is rather about fans laboring in the name of both the self-brand and a company brand? As Jack said, it is hard to be a fan.

Christine Bacareza Balance is Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies (UC Irvine). Her research & teaching interests include: Filipino/Filipino American studies, performance studies, and popular culture. Her writing has been published in Women & Performance: a feminist journal, the Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS), Theatre Journal, and In Media Res (online). One-ninth of the Polynesian power pop band The Jack Lords Orchestra, she is currently writing a book on popular music and performance in Filipino America.

Judith "Jack" Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at USC. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam's first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. Her 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. Halberstam's last book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity. Halberstam was also the co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano of a photo/essay book, The Drag King Book (1999), and with Ira Livingston of an anthology, Posthuman Bodies (1995). Halberstam regularly speaks on queer culture, gender studies and popular culture and publishes blogs at bullybloggers.com. Halberstam just finished a book titled The Queer Art of Failure due out 2011 from Duke University Press.

July 25, 2011

Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part Three)

July 25, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

This is the final installment of my interiew with Brian David Johnson. Sorry for the delay in posting. I had some difficulty with email access during Comic-Con.

You talk in the book about "ubiquitous television." Many readers will not know this concept, so can you explain what it means and how it represents a significant shift from our current relationship to content?

Ubiquitous TV is built off the idea of ubiquitous computing. This was a concept pioneered by Mark Weiser while he was at Xerox PARC. Weiser saw computing existing in three stages: Stage one was the old mainframe computer. These were the computer the size of an entire room. The second stage of computing was the personal computer. This is the Mac or PC that we all know and love.

Now we should point out that the shift from stage one to stage two was massive. This shift defines the world of computing as we know it today. There was a time when it was fantasy to think of a computer that could fit in your pocket. But of course we all know that happened. And Weiser made a leap to the next stage of computing.

For Weiser stage three was where computing disappeared and literally could be found everywhere. It would be invisible. It would be ubiquitous. This has been a long standing area of study in the academic and corporate research worlds. In my book I took this approach and showed how it was actually beginning to happen in the world of entertainment. I also expanded it to how consumers and people would experience TV in their lives.

The idea of ubiquitous TV means that people would live with TV throughout their day and across all the digital devices or "screens" in their lives. What I always found lovely about the idea of ubiquitous TV was that it shifted the focus of the definition and experience away from the devices and to the lives of consumers. No longer would you go to your TV just to get TV. You wouldn't go to your PC to access the Internet and phones wouldn't just be for phone calls. The idea of ubiquitous TV really is the foundation of my idea of Screen Future.

For consumers it's not about the TV or the PC or the smart phone or any other devices. When our social scientists talk to consumers they hear that for real people it's just about the screens and the entertainment and social communication that these screens give us. That is truly a ubiquitous experience. It's not about one device to rule them all but about whatever device we have handy at the time. In this world of ubiquitous TV it is less about the device and more about how that device does, what we want it to do and how it gives us the experience we want.

When I think about ubiquitous TV now for me it is a real life actualization of Weiser's theoretical ideas. The world of ubiquitous TV is happening and gives us a real world glimpse and application of what we can expect to see In the future.

One could argue that there is a core tension between the idea of media as "personalized" and the idea of media as "socialized," something we consume through networks (whether old school broadcast or new school digital/social). This is not a new tension, but it seems hard for advocates for new models of television to keep both aspects in their heads at the same time. How do these two pulls impact the design of the next generation of television-related technologies?

You couldn't be more right. It has been hard for people to keep both of these concepts in their heads at the same time. But for me I approach it differently. For me I think about what consumers and people are telling us. Because ultimately it's about what they want and people have no problem managing these two ideas at the same time. The reason why it's easy for them is because they want it both ways.

As we start to think about how to design for both the personalized state as well as the socialized state, I think we need to remember that for consumers both of these states are still TV. In the business of entertainment and even in the business of thinking and writing about entertainment, we like to create categories and systems for understanding what's happening in the modern media landscape. This certainly is important as we need to have these discussions but even as we discuss and debate we have to remember that for consumers they don't think this way. They are not thinking about the business or cultural implications of media. People are simply enjoying it as a part of their lives.

I realize this might sound a little over simplified but I've noticed over the past few years that many people I've been talking to forget this simple difference.

So as we start to think about designing for consumers we must remember that there is no line between personalized or socialized. It's about access and communication. I've written a few times that the goal of my kind of futurism is to ultimately become mundane.

People often quote Arthur C. Clarke's third law. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But I'd like to humbly add Johnson's Addendum to Clarke. It would say that yes - Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - But come next Tuesday evening that magic will be mundane.

For us to design in this landscape we need to understand how people move through their days interacting with people and entertainment. If we remember that people want it both ways. They want to interact and socialize sometimes AND they want to just sit back and be passive sometimes PLUS they want to switch between these modalities freely then I think we are starting to approach a proper design sense.

BUT this is just a start! What I'm most interested in is not their either or approach that we are taking. We always seem to be talking about New TV and Old TV. That's fine. As I said above we have to remember that people want both and that's a good thing. But what I'm really interested in is the landscape I'm between these two experiences. The uncharted territory around these TV experiences. I'm worried we are still encumbered by our past prejudices and experiences. This is why I typically tell my students that they are the future of TV-- not me. I may be working out how people will be interacting with TV and computational platforms and screens and even you Henry will be writing about what's happening and COULD happen but they are the ones who will actually build these experiences. They are the ones who need to be unencumbered by the past. We always need to appreciate what consumers what and respect the TV entertainment experiences but there are so many places to innovate and invent.

Much early writing on digital media implied that the era of mass media would be displaced by an era of niche media, yet there remains an ongoing engagement with our shared experience of broadcast media which has allowed television to weather the storm. What factors have allowed television to withstand competition from the net and the web?

I love the old ideas of where TV was going to go. People always said that it would all be personal; that mainstream broadcast media would shrivel and die. No longer would large corporation dictate to the people what they should watch. It would be a wild and wooly collection of intensely personal niche channels that would change and adapt to the needs and desires of people.

Well yeah that's cool but it didn't happen exactly like that. It turns out people love mainstream broadcast TV. People all over the world love watching American Idol or Pop Idol or Indian Idol... And there's nothing wrong with this. Consumers love personalization and they also love watching Idol live. This is not hard for them to understand.

Look we have to be clear here. Our research shows that the majority of people all over the world still watch the majority of their TV on an actual TV in real time, in broadcast from traditional broadcast, cable or satellite. TV...traditional TV is still very important to people. But that doesn't mean it can't change. Obviously what has happened over the last few years with the delivery of entertainment via the internet to multiple connected computational screens clearly illustrates that people's imaginations can get captured with new entertainment experiences. But that's TV. It can be both things and it's an experience that is strong enough and robust enough to be up to the task.

Part of the frustration of print publishing about emerging media practices is that the book is always out of date before it reaches the reader. What recent developments do you wish you had been able to discuss in the book?

Ah yes! At the end of Screen Future I wrote that I figured that by the time people read the book there would be a whole host of issues and technologies that were outdated.

But in Screen Future I really wanted to spend more time writing and talking to people in the gaming industry. I have always been a gamer. Pong and I were born in the same year. I grew up with a joystick in my hands. My generation is a generation of gamers and the affect that this has had on how we think about entertainment is massive.

I got to do a little writing in this in one of my columns. I spoke with a round table of gamers and game developers at the PAX convention in Seattle and that was really informative. Ultimately I think we need to rethink how we define gaming and that this could have a massive affect not only on the gaming industry but perhaps the entire media landscape.

I've joked that I could write an entire book on social TV. I feel in the book I barely scratched the surface. I really think the social activity is the future of TV and entertainment. Now really this is a bit of a copout because social experience has always been in the bedrock of TV but I do think there is so much more we can do.

What happens when TV and entertainment becomes the platform not only for being social for our friends and family? What happens when TV becomes the platform by which we are social with our government and with our culture and with education?

I'm thinking I should really explore this with you Henry. It's an amazing area and one that I think we need to keep our eye on. The future is going to be really amazing here.

July 19, 2011

Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part Two)

July 19, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

What aspects of television can not change and have television remain the same medium?

That's a tough one because TV, like any good system or organism, has survived for so long because it adapts. This is one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by the history of TV. TV as a collection of technical innovations, business models, story structures, cultural indicators and motivators is in a constant state of change. I could give you the long list most of us take for granted: Black and white to color. Sponsored shows to the 30 sec spot. The big three broadcasters to cable and satellite. TiVo! The complex web of broadcasters and affiliates. The birth and refining and reimaging of the half hour sit com. The sit com or more pointedly the American sit com is really strange and deeply interesting...but I'm gushing

When I think about what would not change so that TV remains TV. I could defer to USC's own Jeffrey Cole from The Center for the Digital Future. He says TV is easy. TV is video. For most people they know TV when they see it and it's simply video.

Now some might think of this a being a little too broad but I like it because it puts the burden of the recognition of TV on the people who are consuming it. Which fits really. I also love it because it defines TV as an audio visual medium. Which keeps it broad and allows us to include not just broadcast TV or even Internet delivered TV but any video or games or even applications that is intermingled with video.

You argue that a fundamental change occurred when the computer changed television into data. How so? How is this shift experienced by the everyday television consumer?

I should start off by saying that this fundamental shift to TV from digital to data has not happened yet on a broad scale. It's certainly coming. Some folks I've talked to peg 2015 as a possible date from this but I'm thinking now for mass consumption it might be a bit longer. At the moment the average consumer isn't experiencing the world that I described...yet.

But behind the scenes it's certainly happening and happening right now. At Intel I've seen some really smart work in this area three years ago. I write about it in my book that we have been doing work in the fields of video analytics and computer vision. In a way you can think of it as computers warning TV. How do computers watch TV? What computers what TV what do they see and how do they see it?

In one of our labs in China we did some interesting work with computers watching soccer or football depending upon where you are from. The team created a system that would track the different players, identify them and even track the ball movement. The whole system would go crazy when one of the teams made a goal. It was great.

What was generated from this was a massive amount of data. Essentially TV, the football match, was turned from something that was a digital transmission to data. The tracking of the different objects in the frame and also the links that identified the players created a running data feed. This turned TV from digital to data and once you do that then we can do some really interesting things with. All this data allowed us to search the videos in ways we'd never been able to do before. We could also then pull that data apart and put it back together in some interesting ways. That shift from digital to data was key.

Now the real question is what do we do with that data? That's the question that I'm not sure we know what to do with yet. It's similar to the data mining and massive data set questions that are being discussed now. Practical examples might be the Net Flix prize (which I write about in the book). One way to look at this future of TV and entertainment is those who have the best algorithm to search this data wins. Fascinating!

But we aren't there yet. Although there is some really interesting work going on in universities and companies all over world we haven't got this technology to the point where we could take it to scale and roll the capability to the general public. But this isn't really I think what you are asking.

We aren't there yet. But we will be soon. It's not a failure of technology at the moment but a failure if imagination. What I mean by this is that I really believe we don't know what's possible when TV and entertainment become truly data based. What do we do with that data? How do we organize it? How do we search it? Who owns it? Who owns that data about us using that data?

These are the issues that are just coming up as the algorithms and technology get to the point that they become a viable business option. Once this goes to scale and consumers really begin to see it like you asked I think it's going to be really interesting.

Some are arguing that television is moving from an appointment-based medium to an engagement-based one. What roles will new technologies play in supporting and sustaining our engagement with television?

Oh this is an easy one. You are throwing me a softball here Henry. Technology, the very technology we have been discussing has brought about the transformation of entertainment from a broadcast model or an appointment based TV experience to a more personated and engaged TV experience. Technology did this. No question. In the early days of the DVR is way ReplayTV and Tivo. Heck even to a very limited extent the VCR.

(Side note: The original goal of the VCR was really trying the bring engagement TV into the lives of consumers. The original slogan for the Sony Betamax was: "You don't have to miss Kojack because you're watching Colombo." But as we all know the VCR is a tale of unintended consequences. Although the VCR was originally designed to allow you to personalize your TV experience it really didn't do this. Very few people were recording live TV. Where the VCR shined was allowing consumer to bring home movies and turn their living rooms into a movie theater. In fact what was actually time shifting wasn't TV but the cinema. And it literally changed the underlying financial model of movies and Hollywood forever.

But this wasn't TV. It took the digitization of the TV signal to turn appointment TV to engagement TV. Little upstart companies like Tivo and ReplayTV slowly but surely changed how we acted and interacted with TV.

Of course it wasn't just being able to record TV that brought this change. It was also being able to manage the TV shows you liked (aka the season pass in TiVo) and also find new shows and even get recommendations. Although admittedly the initial accuracy of these recommendations was so questionable that it led to a sitcom spoof.

But even this was a perfect indicator that the world of TV had changed. Never before would the big broadcasters assume you were homosexual and change their broadcasting to meet you new preconceived likes and dislikes. That sitcom was a perfect mainstream digital marker that the world of TV had changed forever.

Enter the Internet. Hokey smokes. Think about all the various ways the Internet and it's accompanying apps and services have literally changed the face of the world. The delay in applying this to the world of TV and entertainment hasn't been technological. As we talked about earlier, the pressure from the technological changes have forced changes in other areas of business, unions, contract and distribution.

Now as I finish up here let me say that appointment TV is not going anywhere. Regardless of how technology transforms TV to an intensely personal experience, appointment TV will not go away. We will always have World Cup and the Olympics and American Idol.

The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"--using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.

July 18, 2011

Imagining Television's Futures: An Interview with Intel's Brian David Johnson (Part One)

July 18, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Shortly after I arrived at USC, Brian David Johnson from Intel came to the office to interview me for a book he was developing on the future of screens and entertainment. I was giddy from having taught the first session of my Transmedia Entertainment class, and we had a great exchange about the relations between consumers and technology and how it might impact our future relations to television and other entertainment media.

The interview was included in Johnson's book, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices We Love, which was released last year. Johnson's book combines interviews with key thinkers about media's future from both academia and industry with his own reflections on recent technological developments being developed at labs and what their long term implications may be.

After years of teaching at MIT, I am often skeptical of work on media which starts from a technologist's perspective since they rarely factor in the social and cultural dimensions of media. Johnson is a notable exception -- a deep thinker who groks the interface between technology and culture, who may work for industry but also understands the consumer perspective on why we love television and what we want to get out of watching our favorite series. So, I recommend his book to anyone who wants to expand their thinking and learn about the visions of screen futures which are driving technological development at Intel and a range of other companies.

Johnson was nice enough to sign on to let me reverse the microphone, so to speak, and do an interview for this blog. Over the next few installments, Johnson will share some of his current thinking. Here, he talks about television in relation to such trends as ubiquitous computing and social media, and shares some of the factors which drove him to produce this book.

Here's Johnson's official bio which should give you a clearer sense of where he is coming from:

The future is Brian David Johnson's business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2020. His work is called "future casting"--using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to provide Intel with a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Along with reinventing TV, Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and using science fiction as a design tool. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment Computing and the Devices we Love, Fake Plastic Love, and Nebulous Mechanisms: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter.

You begin the book with Isaac Asimov's warning that predicting the future is a "hopeless, thankless task." Given this, what do you hope to accomplish with this book?

I love that quote! I have tremendous respect for Asimov not only as a science fiction writer and a thinker but also as a person who brought science and conversations about science into the mainstream. When I was writing Screen Future I actually had two books always within reach. The first was Richard Feynman's The Character of Physical Law - his collection of lectures and the second was a collection of Asimov essays The Planet that Wasn't. Asimov was such a good writer, easy to understand and quite funny - that people had no problem reading about the intricacies of planetary motion or the theoretical planet of Vulcan. Both Feynman and Asimov were passionate communicators and conversationalists. Feynman was known as the great explainer, while Asimov was the great popularize of science.

Getting people to have conversations about science is certainly important. But I think getting people to have conversations about the future is even more critical. The future is not a fixed point in time that we are all hurdling towards. The future is not set. The future is made every day by the actions of people. The of the most significant ways that we can all affect the future is to have conversations about it. We need to ask ourselves: What kind of future do we want to live in? What kind of future do we NOT want to live in? Having these conversations, when they are based on sound science can have a real affect on where we are going. Science fiction can do this - I believe science fiction gives us the language so that we can have this conversation about the future. But nonfiction can do the same thing. Both Feynman and Asimov knew this. The ultimate goal of Screen Future and the future casting work I do is to have conversations about the future.

Ultimately what I want to accomplish with the book is twofold:

First we are in an incredibly interesting time when it comes to technology and storytelling. For quite a while now we're been talking about telling stories, meaningful stories across multiple mediums, platforms and technologies. I don't have to tell you this Henry - you've done some of the best writing in this area. But I think something changed in 2010 and I really recognized it when I was walking around the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 2011. Wondering the floor of that massive show, looking at all these different connected devices and screens it became really obvious to me that we had passed a kind of technological tipping point. What I mean by that is that for years most of the reasons why we've not really been able to take this screen future mainstream or distributed widely was because of technological limitations - the processors were to slow, there wasn't descent broadband connections, heck there really wasn't a robust Internet - things like that. But ultimately that's all changed.

We've really reached that tipping point where we have the processing power, battery life, storage, connectivity and human interfaces (small form factors, touch screens, etc) to be able to delivery people the entertainment and communication experience they want. And businesses have the ability to bring out not just one device - it's not just Apple or Sony or Samsung - it's a entire robust and sometimes zany collection of device manufactures that are bringing all kind of wonderful devices and screens and form factors to market. It's not a technological problem anymore getting across these experiences.

I think where we are now is smack in the middle of a new set of challenges which are very different in nature but just as important. Right now I think we are seeing the gathering of a business tipping point and an experience tipping point. Now forgive me for overusing the tipping point metaphor here but I think it applies. Right now we're watching some really interesting developments around the business of entertainment and computing. People a really beginning to explore what it means for their businesses to deliver these experiences. It has repercussions all over the world, in union negotiations, government regulations, mergers, long term strategic plans...anything that is touched by entertainment and computing industries. And what' most exciting is that we a right in the middle of it - it's happening right now.

I wanted to explore this in Screen Future. There's a lot of culture, history, technology and economics in the book to give us some background on this - but when the book gets really good is when we start having discussions about where things might go, how businesses might change and what are the underlying factors to this change. Since the book has been out and I've been on the book tour I've had some really interesting and well informed discussions and sometimes arguments about the business of storytelling and the business of delivery those stories to people using technology.

The second goal for writing Screen Future is a little more broad. As you know I travel around the world talking to people about the future and I'm always struck with how passionate, interested and engaged people are when they talk about their visions for the future. I wanted the book to be a place to gather together a wide range of research and opinions and offer up a vision for where we might be going. My process of future casting really isn't about prediction at all. Asimov was right THAT is a thankless task. Future casting is a little more pragmatic - I use things like social and computer science, global trends and conversations with experts and visionaries to construct a grounded vision for where we are headed. Then we use this vision to talk about what's good and bad about that vision - like I said before. But ultimately we're using this future casting to develop visions that we can build. In the book I wanted to capture the future casting process with all of its disparate inputs and show what a vision for 2015 might look like. Then use it as a way to have conversations with people about the future that they wanted and the future they were worried about

You describe yourself as a "Consumer Experience Architect." What does this entail? What kinds of expertise and insight shape your models of the consumer experience? What factors are shifting the consumer experience of television? Are the changes being driven by shifts in technology, in business practice, or in social and cultural expectations?

I'm going to give the answer that I give to my engineering colleagues. But I have to warn you that they hate this answer. So I kind of like giving it to them. The answer to your question is....yes. The answer is yes. All of the above. The changes in consumers experience with TV are due to all of the factors you mentioned. Let's look at each one and see if we don't uncover some more.

Let's start with "shifts in technology". Because I work in an engineering company this is the easiest to tackle. I've watched the evolution of TV technology first hand for more than twenty years now. In the early 1990s I worked on interactive TV deployments in Europe and Scandinavia. Now to give you an idea of the types of things I worked on I should tell you about one of our most successful projects. It was a huge success and we thought it really showed the way forward for "interactive TV". But thinking about it today in 2011 the sad truth is that it really illustrates the technical limitations of TV before recent improvements.

The project was done for British Airways. They were looking to sell vacation packages to Spain at the time. A big problem for them was lead generation, actually finding the right people who would be interested in the vacation package. Now the vacations they were selling weren't super expensive but they also weren't budget vacations either. They were right in the middle. So what BA wanted to do was use an interactive TV application to find the right people to market to.

To do this they produced a really slick commercial. I think it was about 5 minutes long. At the end of the advertisement the viewer was prompted to press a button on their remote control to request a glossy brochure for more information.

We launched the test in Cardiff Whales and it was a huge success as a pilot. We thought we were geniuses. The back end was pretty complicated. To actually make the thing work you had to send the request via the back channel on the set top box. It then had to interface with the head end, pull the subscribers address and information then send that information to the fulfillment center so that they could mail out the glossy brochure of beautiful beaches and smiling people. For BA it was great because they were gathering prequalified leads for their vacation packages, only sending the costly brochure to people who were interested. For many this type of lead generation is the holy grail of advertising. You actually get your potential customers to ask you for advertising materials.

Like I said it was a success and we thought we were geniuses ushering in the future of interactivity on TV. How pathetic is that? Press a button and get a brochure...that was the staggering brilliance of interactive design. A button that sends you a piece of paper mail!

Now I'm not trying to trivialize how difficult it was to pull off this project. It was actually kind of hard but I think it really illustrates the technical and infrastructure limitations of TV systems in the past.

Flash forward 20 years and look how far we have come technically. We all know the Internet really changed everything from a media and storytelling standpoint. But behind the scenes and inside the TV a lot of little and large changes have really turned the TV itself into a computational device. Two decades ago the TV technically look pretty close to the old RCA sets that used to bring I Love Lucy into American living rooms. Today TVs look more like computers and smart phones.

I guess that's really the big shift and one of the main points of my book. Today technically speaking TVs and PCs and smart phones and any connected device is just that; a screen that can connect to the Internet and give people the entertainment and communications they want. It's just a screen not a specific device. When you look at it this way the conversation is less about the TV or PC or whatever and more about the form factor, the size of the screen and they way it fits into your life; the way all the different screens you own fit into your life

That's a huge shift! I'm a TV guy and recasting the TV and entertainment experience like this is worlds away from where we were 20 years ago. Much of this shift has been started and brought about by the technological advances to both TVs and PCs; which really I just think about as computational devices across the board.

This isn't a completely linear story by any means but for the moment let's pretend it is. So, after all they technological advances, the introduction and popularization of the Internet, the reduction in the cost of computational power to consumers and the expansion of meaningful broadband networks then it really got interesting. Well let me restate that...what got interesting is what people did with all of these changes. (Here's a tiny aside: I wrote all of my notes for our conversation on my smart phone as I flew from London or LA or Mumbai - even how we compose and were has evolved!)

Few people have chronicled and explored these cultural shifts more fully than you Henry - so I'm not going to bore you with my poor summary of your work of which I am a huge fan. But let's just say people got involved in their entrainment. They got involved in making it, finding it, talking about it and did it on their schedule and to better fit their preferences not the preferences of the companies and corporation that were producing, distributing and advertising with this content

Now the entertainment industry isn't stupid. We often forget that these large companies are made up of many passionate intelligent people who mainly want to make the best stories possible on whatever medium they choose.

So around 2007 the media and technology industry really began to change and intermingle. A lot of writers cite the 2007 consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas as the turning point where all industries realized the fact that the future of TV and the future of entertainment was digital or a mix of traditional delivery mingled with the Internet. This was massive realization for these large global companies.

This really brought about and is continuing to bring about the business practice changes you asked about. And it's really these changes that we are witnessing and will continue to watch for the next few years. This is something I really came upon while working on my book. From a technological stand point we are there. When it comes to having technical capabilities to deliver the entertainment experience the majority of people want we have the engineering done. We might even be a little ahead. This of course will change but for today most of the technical hurdles have been solved.

We are now witnessing the business changes as they adapt to these technological advancements as they mix with expanded consumer expectations and habits. I find this fascinating! All you need to do is pick up The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Variety and even Entertainment Weekly and underneath many of the articles you will see the influences of these changes.

And the changes will come. They have to come. People want them. Now I'm not saying TV is going away or even that big budget entertainment is going away. That's not going to happen either. The main reason for that is that people love it. People don't want it to go away. They will still pay for it. But their habits and expectation for where they get it, how they get it and how they can participate with it are changing. The entertainment industry will adapt to this just as it has done the past. As I see it this is an exciting time full with a lot of juicy stories and incredible opportunity.

July 13, 2011

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Four, Part Two (Drew Davidson, Corvus Elrod, and Nick Fortugno)

July 13, 2011/ Henry Jenkins

Drew: I enjoyed reading both your responses to the provocation questions, and it seems like we have agreement for the most part around a lot of the issues involved with acafandom.

Corvus: I think I'd like to explore Nick's definition of fan though to start our conversation. I'm not sure it applies as much today as it once did. I think fandom has evolved considerably and the "fanatic" connotations are being lost.

Nick: How so? I might be pointing to an extreme case in my initial thoughts, but I still see people defending Attack of the Clones.

Drew: And Comic-Con always reminds me that the relationship of fan and fanatic.

Corvus: Maybe it's that I live in Portland, or that I self-select to not interact with the most maladjusted members of the many communities I participate in, but I think fandom has evolved a lot in the last 20 years.

Drew:

I think this brings up an interesting point in terms of pop culture. I have a general impression that Portland as a city/community has a vibe of being laid back and that fans are almost like friends. Whereas NYC is where you would find your elite connoisseurs.

Nick:

Well, what is a fan if not a person passionate about a piece of content? And being from NYC, I'm comfortable with the notion of being elitist. I wear that hand-designed, custom-made badge proudly. I don't think the important part of the fanaticism is thinking your love is superior to other loves. I think it's that you are rooting for your love. Which is an inherently not critical position.

Corvus:

Fair enough. It seems like everyone in Portland is very into their own thing, but very open to everyone else's thing being different. I guess then it's important to make a distinction between fan culture and enthusiast culture?

Drew:

I like this notion, particularly in the context of sports. You're a fan, you root for your team regardless. Although you can be (highly) critical of how your team performs.

Nick:

Right, so is that an acafan position? The guy who thinks that Knicks are making a huge mistake by doing such and such rather than such and such.

Corvus:

I think a potentially severe problem of fandom is myopia, and lacking a broader perspective. Do you think that this is what the "aca" portion of acafan is meant to offset?

Drew:

I think so, although Nick brings up a great point about how acafan could possibly be a "nicer" way to be elitist.

Corvus:

Sure, but isn't it also about objectively exploring your own subjective enjoyment? For instance, I learn a lot from my enjoyment of objectively bad media.

Nick:

Are you a fan of that bad media though?

Corvus:

Some of it I am! Star Trek is, on many levels, objectively terrible, but I consider myself a fan.

Drew:

This gets to the heart of it for me, I think acafan includes a more self-reflex look at what you're doing. Like Nick notes (in referencing Derrida) it could collapse into a mess of relativity where everything is cool (which isn't cool). And then you have the other end of the spectrum which is elitists who dictate canon

Corvus:

Right. I didn't mention him by name, but I hope it was clear that I was talking about Ebert in my opening statement in regards to the elevation of subjective taste as objective assessment. I think he really helped establish this as a school of criticism, while the other movie critics at the time he began his career weren't so blatant about it.

Nick:

He's by no means alone in doing that. But to return to sports for a second, I think that sports is the border case that's telling. If I'm a serious fan of baseball, and I love the Mets, I can objectively say that the Mets suck this year, for reasons objective to sports, and still love the Mets. So, is the educated sports fan the ideal acafan?

Drew:

I like this tact, and even thinking beyond sports (in how to be critical (and still feel the love) this is where aesthetics (in a classic sense) come into play for me. It's how I work through my impressions and ideas to articulate my "judgment" of an experience. For example, take a movie like, The 5th element. Referencing Arnold Isenberg, to make an aesthetic judgment, you make a verdict, give a reason and cite a norm. So, to make a verdict (aesthetically) is to look at the movie in terms of the expression of its form and function. And the reason would be a detailed articulation of the experience how that related to the verdict. And finally, citing a norm would be placing it in the spectrum of movies in general or in specific (e.g. it's a scifi action flick). Thinking this through helps me then make the claim that I appreciated The 5th Element (even though it had a rather rote plot) because of it's art direction, set design and sense of fashion. (or something like that).

Nick:

That makes sense as a methodology, but it sounds a lot (no offense) like elitist fandom.

Drew:

Well what's problematic (for me at least) is how negative the concept of "elite" has become. You "earn" an expertise by being well read (or well played even).

Nick:

Oh, I agree 100% about that. I'm not ashamed at all about being snobby about good work. Why should I like crap?

Corvus:

Well when you combine these two loaded pejorative terms (elitist fanatic) do they cancel each other out?

Nick:

No, they resonate into something even more powerful.

Corvus:

I'm going to immediately change my self-descriptor on all my social networks. But seriously, those are both the problematic ends of a spectrum of consumption, right? So to embrace both ends is to stretch yourself to cover the entire spectrum, and that has to be a good thing. For example, "I only eat the best" and "I only eat this one thing."

Drew:

From sports to food, talk about some great territory for this discussion. "Let me tell you about the best place to get a burger in the world," can start a heated deep conversation.

Nick:

I think where we've been evolving is to say this - Academic thinking has some claim to an objective standard. Or at least an intersubjective standard that's formed from rigorous exposure to a history of a medium. And fandom is support for a particular entrant in the medium. And to your earlier point Corvus, that is different from the enthusiast, who just likes the medium. If the above definitions apply, there is nothing mutually exclusive between fandom and academic approaches to work. And you can certainly be fanatic about that. Only eat whole-grains or non-pasteurized cheese. Only read Martin when you read fantasy. Only play RTS by Blizzard.

Corvus:

Right, and now I want to Venn diagram this!

Drew:

http://store.dieselsweeties.com/products/elitism

Drew:

Running with the idea of foodies. Again, it becomes a way to discuss something you have a passion for (so much so that you get it a lot (say dark chocolate) and to better understand and express your appreciation, you do get "elitist" in that you learn and develop a specific language (for instance, to describe why this chocolate's "snap" is better than that one's., and it lingers on the palate so pleasingly).

Nick:

That's where I end up too. Insofar as academia in part a refinement of taste from exposure and a particular heuristic, then it's elitist by direct result.

Corvus:

Whereas a fan would only eat one specific dark chocolate because "it's the best" while offering no justification necessarily.

Drew:

In some ways for me, acafan is a way to try and better express your appreciation in more general terms so that people outside of your field of expertise can understand what you're saying.

Nick:

We can also fall right into radical relativism here (Look, I hate radical relativism. I'm just trying to be thorough). Why does an academic approach merit more respect than a fan's? I think that's where we have a desire to have academic mean objective.

Drew:

Well on a cultural level, there's a general sense that "academic" as a term connotes consideration, rigor, thoughtful. And "fan" connotes passion, " all in", excitement.

Nick:

Do we accept those definitions?

Corvus:

If someone can recognize their own subjective experience and objectively discuss it, it gives greater weight (in my opinion) to their opinions, because I have to do less filtration myself.

Drew:

Interestingly, I think this ties into why Henry invited us to join this conversation. He thought the Well Played books were "acafan" and that video game criticism seemed to inherently be acafan (since the play experience is so individualized).

Nick:

Transient art is hard to critique. You can't have a truly Apollonian relationship to it if you're making it exist and a part of it.

Corvus:

I tend to agree there. Not only is the emotive experience radically different from one play to the next, but the structural experience can be as well. And because it's easier to grasp that notion, it's easier to accept the reality of the differing emotional and intellectual experiences as well.

Nick:

Sure. That's the whole point of having agency.

Drew:

And that's why I like to try and describe and define my "agency" in relation to the play experience (how much I played the game, did I reference GameFAQS, etc.)

Nick:

I agree about that aspect of agency, Drew Davidson. Very Baudrillard. So, Well Played is about applying rigor to evaluating gameplay. That's the "aca" side. Is that fair?

Drew:

Seems so to me. And the fan side comes from that ephemeral play experience that we each have. Also, that the essays, while critical, are appreciative.

Nick:

Ok. I like that. You still cite flaws in the work, even while being appreciative.

Drew:

Plus appreciative in the sense that games are worth considering. 5-10 years ago that wasn't the case, but now it feels more like a norm (so i think we don't have to say it as much (or as loud)

Nick:

Yeah, true. I guess we still have to say that.

Corvus:

Now we add it to the conversation for clarification, rather than leading with it as our point. That's progress

Drew:

In fact, when I started thinking about "well played" as an idea, I went with the assumption that it was.

Drew:

To wrap up, it's been thought-provoking to write and read our response to the provocations. And I really appreciate working together to articulate our ideas around the concept of acafandom. And while we needed the text for this post, I think it would have been an even better as a conversation (I've been doing some video interviews on another project, and it makes me think that could be a great way to capture the back and forth discussion around this topic, but I think we had some good ideas here.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

BIOS

Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories across texts, comics, games and other media. He is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center - Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University and the Editor of ETC Press.

Corvus Elrod is a Semionaut and Narrative Designer. He is the co-founder of Zakelro! Story Studio and creator of The HoneyComb Engine, an upcoming open and extensible tabletop RPG framework. He has been designing participatory experiences for the better part of two decades, beginning with his exploration of improvisational theater. As he incorporated more and more game mechanics into his performances, he turned his attention to how video game mechanics communicate meaning and began formalizing a semiotic theory of game design. He has contracted for a broad spectrum of clients, from major game studios and publishers to installation artists, and has worked on several small game projects in collaboration with independent developers and artists.

Nick Fortugno is a game designer and entrepreneur of digital and real-world games based in New York City, and a founder of Playmatics, a NYC game development company. Playmatics has created a variety of games including the CableFAX award winning Breaking Bad: The Interrogation and the New York Public Library's centennial game Find the Future with Jane McGonigal. For the past ten years, Fortugno has been a designer, writer and project manager on dozens of commercial and serious games, and served as lead designer on the downloadable blockbuster Diner Dash and the award-winning serious game Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Nick is also a co-founder of the Come Out and Play street games festival hosted in New York City and Amsterdam since 2006, and co-creator of the Big Urban Game for Minneapolis/St. Paul in 2003. Nick teaches game design and interactive narrative design at Parsons The New School of Design, and has participated in the construction of the school's game design curriculum. Nick's most recent writing about games can be found in the anthology Well-Played 1.0: Video Game, Value, and Meaning, published by ETC-Press.

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