"Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part Three)

As you describe the many kinds of anxieties, uncertainties, disappointments, and frustrations which surround technology in everyday life, it sounds like many people are unhappy with current configurations and most have harsh judgments of the uses of new media by others in their friends and family, yet few people are breaking out of the patterns you describe. Why not?

I think that we are at a point of inflection. Our lives are enmeshed with our new technologies of connection and ever more so. We now have more experience of what this means for us as individuals, for our relationships with our families, with our parents, with our children, with our friends, with our neighbors. We are coming to a greater understanding of what this means for us as politically, both in our own country and globally.

It has taken time for people to understand where life with this new kind of technology has brought them. Things came to them one gadget at a time. A phone, a navigation system, a way to listen to music, a new way to read books, books "on tape" became something else . . . . and now we catch up to the idea that positioning and navigation translate into surveillance and that using social media as though it were a neutral "utility" ignores important issues about privacy and ownership of personal data.

I don't think that we grownups who "gave" this new communications regime to our children thought it through on several of its critical dimensions. What is intimacy without privacy? What is democracy without privacy? These are not easy questions. But they are starting to be questions that people are thinking about. They begin to have concrete meaning as people come to a new kind of life and have enough experience to take its measure.

On the simplest level, when I talk to parents who realize that it makes them anxious to walk to the corner candystore with their child without taking their cell phone, who cannot go to the playground with their child without bringing their e-mail enabled device, who text in the car while driving with their children in the back seat, it seems clear to me that we are not at a point of stable equilibrium. These people are not happy.

So my qualified optimism about change comes from my sense that the people to whom I have been talking are not happy and are genuinely searching for new ways of living with new technology. I hear more and more about "Internet Sabbaths" during which families disconnect for a day or a weekend. Some families modify the Sabbath and declare two hours a day as off-the-grid family time.

There is no option in which we give up on our new devices. They are our partners in the human adventure. What we have to do is find a way to live with them that is healthier. A digital diet that is better for our health and the health of our families. It took a long time for Americans to learn that a diet high in sugar and processed foods was not healthy. It is going to take a long time for people to develop strategies, individually and collectively, to live with our new technologies in the most healthy way. But the stakes are high and we can get this right.

Your book describes a world where technological demands often supersede human needs, yet you are insistent that you are not anti-technology. So, what do you see as the gains which new media have brought into the culture?

In the domain of communications technology, one of the things that excites me the most is when technologies of the virtual enhance our experiences of and in the physical real. So, ironically, one of the earliest uses of the Internet as a social media, how MeetUps were used in the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, remains an inspiration to me. People "met" online for a political purpose and then "met up" in the physical world. They did not fool themselves into thinking that political action consisted of just giving money online or visiting a website and leaving a "thumbs up" sign on it.

MeetUp continues in this tradition as do many other online groups that organize in the virtual and connect in the physical. We have seen this play out on the most dramatic scale in political life where despots may be challenged by groups brought together by social networking in all of its many forms.

I am often asked this question: "You are so critical of social networking. But what about Egypt" My criticism of social networking boils down to the necessity for us not to redefine the social as what the social network can do. The social encompasses a great deal more. This is not to put the social network down, it is simply to put it in its place. So there is no conflict between the magnificence of what the social network can do for the overthrow of tyrants and how it can get in the way of the development of teenagers who need to engage with each other face to face.

On a personal note, I recently attended a reunion of my fifth grade class. This was the fifth grade class from PS 216 Brooklyn. This fifth grade class would have never had a chance of meeting had it not been for Facebook. One person from the class had been connected with several others and then searched Facebook for a few more names she remembered. Those people remembered a few more names. Within six months, our fifth grade class was on the roof terrace of the Peninsula Hotel in New York. It was a small miracle. It was a gift, a profound gift. Yet in the annals of the social network, my story is banal.

You suggest that we are using new media to deal with the anxiety of separation. Is this separation anxiety itself a product of our reliance on technology or is it a reflection of, say, the increases of divorce and mobility in American culture over the past several generations? Are there ways in which the use of social media is a rational response to those social and cultural disruptions, allowing for old friends to remain in contact despite geographic distances or for separated parents to remain active parts of their children's lives?

I think it is easy to make distinctions in this domain. A parent who uses social media to keep up with a child living away from home or a child who uses social media to keep up with a parent in a different city - one recognizes and respects these cases when one sees them. My concern is with very different kinds of cases. Parents who cannot tolerate their eight year old child not having a cell phone. Children who have developed a style of relating that I characterize as "I text therefore I am" or "I share therefore I am."

To put it too simply, things have moved from a style of relating where one thinks: "I have a feeling, I want to make a call" to "I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text." In other words, the act of sharing a nascent feeling becomes part of the constitution of the feeling.

The problem is that when we use other people in this way, as needed elements on the path toward our having our feelings, we can move toward a misuse of others. We are not relating to them as others but as what psychologists call "part objects." We are using them as spare parts to support our fragile selves.

This takes the notion of an "other directed" self to a higher power. Our technology supports a culture of narcissism digital-style. It is a kind of self that does not tolerate being alone. And yet, psychology teaches us that if you do not teach your children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. We are forgetting this lesson in our culture of hyper-connection. These kinds of anxieties of connection are different from the "rational responses" to staying in touch to far-flung family and friends.

In your discussion of Chatroulette, you talk about "nexting," while elsewhere, you describe "stalking". First can you explain the two concepts and then tell us what you see as the relations between them? Is the indifference to others implied by Nexting the flip side of the kinds of obsessive interest in other people's business online represented by stalking?

What both nexting and stalking have in common is the objectification of people who we meet on screens. We do not consider them in their humanity. They have a profound similarity. And this, too, is one of the major themes of Alone Together: we are at a moment of temptation. It is to treat machines as if they were people and to treat people as if they were machines.

In what ways has the persistence of information online forced you to revise earlier arguments about the potential to protean plays with identity? It seems these days, on the internet, everyone knows you are dog and many know what dog food you eat.

Henry, this is beautifully put. My earlier enthusiasm for identity play on the Internet, for what Amy Bruckman called the Internet experience as "identity workshop" relied heavily on the work of psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Erikson wrote about the developmental need for a moratorium or "time out" during adolescence, a kind of play space in which one had a chance to experiment with identity. In the mid-1990s, I wrote about the Internet as a space where anonymity was possible and where one could experiment with aspects of self in a safe environment.

Today, adolescents grow up with a sense of wearing their online selves on their backs "like a turtle" for the rest of their lives. The internet is forever. And anonymity on the Internet seems a dream of another century, another technology. People still use game and virtual world avatars and social network personae for identity play. But the expectation of a parallel, distinct, and anonymous virtual life is no longer a clear starting expectation.

It cannot be. Many of these experiences begin by registering with a credit card.

You are skeptical of the value of the term, addiction, to describe some of the kinds of behavoir you criticise in the book. What do you see as the limits of addiction as a way of understanding what's going on here?

No matter how much the metaphor of addiction may seem to fit our circumstance, we can ill afford the luxury of using it. It does not serve us well. To end addiction, you have to discard the substance. And we know that we are not going to "get rid" of the Internet. We are not going to "get rid" of social networking. We will not go "cold turkey" or forbid cell phones to our children. Addiction--with its one solution that we know we won't use--makes us feel hopeless, passive.

We will find new paths, but a first step will surely be to not consider ourselves passive victims of a bad substance, but to acknowledge that in our use of networked technology, we have incurred some costs that we don't want to pay. We are not in trouble because of invention but because we think it will solve everything. As we consider all this, we will not find a "solution" or a simple answer. But we cannot assume that the life technology makes easy is how we want to live. There is time to make the corrections.

You describe your book as an attempt to start a conversation. What has been your sense so far of the conversation which it has generated? What have people misunderstood about your book?

I wrote Alone Together to mark a time of opportunity. So for example, the essence of my critique of the metaphor of Internet "addiction" is that it closes down conversation, because it suggests a solution that no one is going to take. Addictive substances need to be discarded. We are not going to discard connectivity technology.

We need to form a more empowering partnership with it, one that shows (for example) greater respect for our needs for privacy, solitude, times of non-interruption. In some areas the need for empowerment has reached a state of great urgency, for example, in the area of privacy. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, has declared privacy to be "no longer a social norm."

In Alone Together, I question such assumptions. Privacy may not be convenient for social networking technology, but it seems to me essential to intimacy and democracy. This is one of the conversations I wanted to contribute to. Others include conversations about child development, connectivity, autonomy, and narcissism. I think one of the most important sentences of my book is "If we don't teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely." I want people to talk about this when they give their eight year olds smart phones.

And yet much of the reaction to Alone Together criticizes me as though I have told the world to "unplug." As though I have accused technology of causing a new epidemic of mental illness. And as though I have said that technology is making us less human. I have been portrayed as an anti-technology crusader. Reviewers analyze why someone like me, someone who was once on the cover of Wired magazine, could now, not "like" technology. Commentators talk as though technology and I were dating and I, capriciously, have decided to cheat on him.

This rhetoric points to a serious problem. Technology is not there for us to like or not like. Our job is to shape it to our human purposes. When you say a technology has problems that need to be addressed, people are quick to interpret you as saying that it offers nothing. In Alone Together I write of "necessary conversations" that lie ahead. I wrote the book in the hope of sparking some of them. I'm glad that people are talking. But sometimes it can be hard to know if you are in a conversation if people are shouting.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). Professor Turkle's most recent book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books in January 2011.

"Does This Technology Serve Human Purposes?": A "Necessary Conversation" with Sherry Turkle (Part Two)

In many ways, both of us have been profoundly shaped by our time amongst MIT Students. And you wrote very explicitly about MIT hacker culture in The Second Self. What do you see as the strengths and limitations of MIT as a testing ground for your ideas?

I don't see MIT as a testing ground for my ideas. I would say rather that MIT is the place where my ideas are most challenged because there is a tendency at MIT to want to see human purposes and technological affordances as being one. Technology has purposes; technology is made by people. Technology and people are at one in their purpose.

From my point of view, every technology offers an opportunity for people do ask: "Does this technology serve human purposes?" and this is a wonderful thing because it enables us to ask again what these purposes are. We are well positioned to create technology whose purposes are not in our best interests. And then, it is time to make the corrections.

So, from this point of view, I find that my favorite sentence in my books is "Just because we grew up with the Internet, we think that the Internet is all grown up." From my point of view, this is a distortion of perspective, one that is very common at MIT. From my point of view, we are in early days and it is time to make the corrections.

Perhaps the greatest ongoing difference of opinion I have had with close colleagues at MIT has been about the meaning and prospect of sociable robots. I take a very strong position in Alone Together that nanny-bots and elder-care bots who pretend affection are seductive. And that my research shows that we are vulnerable to them. We are alone with them, yet we feel a faux-intimacy with them.

Indeed, the arc of the book is that with robots, we are alone and feel a new intimacy. In our new mobile connectivity, we are together with each other, and yet experience new solitudes.

I worked on my studies of sociable robots with colleagues at MIT who are some of the most brilliant and creative developers of sociable robotics. We had deeply-felt, serious conversations about the purposes and possibilities of these machines. Some think that their ultimate significance will be profoundly humanistic. I'm listening, but I am not convinced. Conversations with robots about love, sex, children, the arc of a life - in other words, about human meaning - to me, this has no meaning. These are things that the robot has not experienced. These are not appropriate topics for conversations with robots. So, being at MIT has kept me more aware than I would ever have been about the broad differences of opinion in what the purposes of machines can be.

I took you to task, ever so mildly, in my blog a while back about some of your comments about MIT students and multitasking in the Digital Nations documentary. You can see what I said here. I wanted to offer you a chance to respond to my arguments.

I most often run into our disagreement about multi-tasking in the context of parents who say, "Well, is it so bad if I text while my kid is in the kitchen with me; my mom used to do the dishes while I hung around?" Or, "My dad used the read the newspaper when we watched sports on TV; what's the difference between that and my doing my email while I watch sports with my son on Sunday?"

Having interviewed the children who feel abandoned by their parents, who feel almost desperate for parental attention, has led me to do a lot of thinking about the kinds of attention that digital devices require. We don't give them the kind of attention we gave to doodling or to a newspaper or for that matter, to cooking or watching TV. We are drawn in in quite a different way. This is made apparent when I interview teenagers who say things like "When I was little I used to watch Sunday football with my dad and we would talk. Now, he is on his BlackBerry and he is in the 'Zone.' I can't interrupt him." Or, stories, many stories of daughters who come into the kitchen to hang out with their mothers and find them texting and cannot make eye contact with them and who are shushed away. I observe parents and children in the playground with children desperately trying to get their parents attention; parents are absorbed in their devices and cannot "multi-task" attention for their kids.

So, I think that the narratives we use to think about our students multi-tasking in class needs to be informed by the nature of what it is to absorb oneself in digital media. Beyond this, I am persuaded by the research that suggests that when we multi-task, our performance degrades for each task we multi-task, even as we receive a neurochemical reward for our multi-tasking. So, through no fault of our own, our biology has us feeling better and better even as we do worse and worse.

I do think that smitten by what computers enable us to do, we have allowed multi-tasking to seem like a twenty-first century alchemy. I think that classrooms, will soon be in the position of being the places where uni-tasking is taught, places where students learn to concentrate and where, additionally, they learn to cultivate the capacity for solitude.

I think that the two learning skills that are in the most jeopardy in our hyper-connected world are the ability to concentrate on one thing and the capacity for the kind of solitude that replenishes and restores.

I am going to be running a summer-long conversation on this blog about the value of the autobiographical voice in cultural criticism. You have now edited a series of books where people share autobiographical reflections on what you call evocative objects. Can you explain what you mean by evocative objects and what you think is the contributions of these kinds of reflections?

Evocative objects are objects that cause us to reflect on ourselves or on other things. Put otherwise, they give us materials that help us to do this in new and richer ways. Objects can be evocative for many different reasons. Some of these reasons have been widely studied. So, for example, objects that are "betwixt and between" standard categories are classically evocative because they cause us to reflect on the categories themselves. This is why computational objects, standing between mind and not-mind, between the world of the animate and not animate, have been so evocative as objects-to-think-with.

Other evocative objects partake of elements of what Winnicott called "transitional objects." These are objects that blur the boundaries between self and not-self, object that we experience as being in a special, blurred, sometimes fused relation to self. Here, too computational objects have had a special role to play. From the very beginning, people experienced a kind of "mind meld" when using software, saying things such as "When I use Microsoft Word I see my ideas form someplace between my mind and the screen." Now, in talking about always-on-them digital devices, there is an ever greater sense of the device being part of the body.

Evocative objects provide a special window onto life experience, one that is grounded and cannot avoid issues of depth psychology. Science studies, sociology, anthropology have each in their own way welcomed the study of objects but have been hostile to depth psychology. When one pays careful attention to evocative objects, one "hears" psychodynamic issues, one "hears" family history, one "hears" a close attention to personal narrative and the texture of a life in all of its peculiarity and deeply woven interconnections with others. In science studies, studying objects and life narrative has the additional virtue of making the point, which seems to need making for every new generation of students, that technologies are not "just" tools, that our relationships with objects are profoundly interconnected to how we make meaning out of lives and think through who we are as people.

You describe both children and the elderly being drawn to robots as companions. In your discussion of social networking sites, you seem to accept the distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants, implying that generational differences matter in response to those technologies. Do these same differences matter in talking about human relations with robots?

There are of course important differences in how people who grew up with a given technology appropriate it in contrast to those who adopted it in adulthood. But what most fascinates me these days are common vulnerabilities of grownups and younger people, both in the area of communications technology and in the area of sociable robotics. I did many interviews with people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who are willing to entertain the idea of a robot that might love them, care for them. But certainly, the sensibility of the "robotic moment," the idea that we are ready for robots that might care for us is most apparent among the young.

Their science fiction and imaginative toy and game worlds suggest to them that robots may soon be in a position to teach people how to love; they have a way of thinking about the nature of aliveness that considers objects with a new pragmatism. That is, previous generations talked about computational objects as "sort of alive" or "kind of alive." This new generation talks of computational objects as "alive enough" to do certain jobs. Robots are thus considered "alive enough" for the job of care and companionship, at the limit, alive for affection.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). Professor Turkle's most recent book is Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published by Basic Books in January 2011.

Imagine Better: "Open at the Close"

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Akoha-- A Direct Action Game?

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

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

Akoha - a Direct Action Game?

by Benjamin Stokes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media-Making Madness: #Arab Revolutions from the Perspective of Egyptian-American VJ Um Amel (Part One)

Like many of the rest of you, I've followed with intense interest the developments over the past few weeks in North Africa and the Arab world, grabbing at anything which might help me better understand the perspectives of those involved in the various revolutions, protests, and uprisings, and in particular, to make sense of the back and forth debates about the role which new media may have played in what has been occurring. Talking to friends who know the region well, it is clear that more turmoil and transformation is on the horizon, and we will be sorting out what happened and why for many years to come. In this process, I've reconnected with Laila Shereen Sakr, akn as VJ Um Amel, an Egyptian-American artist, activist, and critic, currently a graduate student in the iMAP program at University of Southern California, and a student in my Medium Specificity class last term. Sakr has long been interested in developing tools which would allow her to better map the use of social media in the Arab world and has remained very interested in debates about the role of Twitter in social change movements impacting her region. Over the past few weeks, she's been working hard trying to map what's happening in Cairo and trying to share what she's learned through her video productions.

Late last week, I asked if she would write up a report on this work to share with the readers of this blog, and she turned this around in record time. I hope you will find the work she is doing as interesting as I do.

At her request, I am running both part one and part two of this post today given the timely nature of the content. You can either read them together or bookmark part two and return later. I will accordingly not be running a post mid-week but will be back with a new post come Friday.

Media-Making Madness: #Arab Revolutions from the Perspective of Egyptian-American VJ Um Amel

by Laila Shereen Sakr

I have not yet been able to digest the magnitude of what has happened in Tunisia, Egypt, and is happening now Iran, Syria, Yemen, and other Arab countries. As an Egyptian-American VJ and media artist whose work concerns the Arab world, the revolutions of 2011 have deeply impacted me professionally, artistically, and personally. There is something extremely poignant for Egyptians living outside of Egypt at this exact moment in history. Most of us who emigrated from Egypt often did so for the same reasons that incited millions to rise and cause revolutions. Perhaps there is lingering guilt that stays with the emigrant for not having stuck it out--on top of repercussions of Diaspora accumulated over decades. Still, there is no doubt that all Arabs living in and outside of the region have been extremely inspired and mobilized by the collective power of the people in the region. I keep hearing, repeatedly: the time is now.

The last couple weeks indeed have been a whirlwind. The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 happened in 18 days, while the world participated in this epic media making madness.

Since January 2011, I have entered into communication with tens of thousands of people through a weird concoction of videos online, Twitter, Facebook, satellite TV, online journals, and data visualizations. I think it is significant to consider the relations among media, and I am in agreement with you, Professor Jenkins: The reality is that we have truly passed beyond the point of media convergence. Contemporary cultures--influenced by global trends and transnationalism--have become a fully designed and mediated phenomenon. From the built spaces we inhabit, to the paths of circulation we travel through--a set of expressive practices, professional skills, and making protocols--plays a critical role in the production of global culture. During the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, I believe that all media makers became like co-designers of the transformative, speedy, historic event(s) in the region--from the 800,000 posts on #Jan25 in Twitter, to the role of Facebook, YouTube, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, to White House and Egyptian State Television broadcasting. Just as large numbers of Egyptian were flooding the streets of Egyptian cities throughout the country, pedabytes of data were mediated through various networks.

And so when it all began in last month, my first reaction was to start to archive and aggregate this exponentially growing corpus of data into our prototype. I started by adding #Tunisia then #Jan25 to the existing R-Shief's Twitter Analytics. Despite what some scholars and journalists might have said before, Twitter (and other social networking sites) had undoubtedly been causal in recent events in the Middle East. Since August 2010, R-Shief has been data mining (pulling from Twitter and storing onto our own server every 15 minutes) tweets by selected hashtags. (A hashtag is Twitter nomenclature for 'subject heading'). After storing the tweets by hashtag, we chose to use language field by which to sort the data because language is able to offer culturally specific indicators of the Middle East beyond its current geopolitical place in the world.

Effectively, R-Shief continues to make accessible all tweets following hashtags: #Wikileaks, #Tunisia, #Jan25, #KhaledSaid, #Abdulemam, #Gaza, and #Flotilla going as far back as September 2010. This simple, craigslist-like interface is meant to encourage users to filter searches through these hashtags by language and/or range of dates--while providing interesting word clouds and parsing out top contributors and hyperlinks within tweets.

VIDEO URL

Over the following days, I crafted a VJ remix in support of my fellow Egyptians, "#Jan25, Oum Kalthoum, Sadat, Latuff, #Video Remix," which I published on both Vimeo and YouTube on Monday, Jan 31, 2011, one week into the protest in Egypt. The entire country of Egypt was taken offline, which had repercussions beyond Twitter--ATM's were down, banks were closed; the Egyptian economy came to a "sudden stop." And so along with that there came a sudden urgency to spread the word. Secondly, I wanted to illustrate the irony of the recursive nature of history itself, incredible in the face of human integrity. It was ironic to me that the very same army which was responsible for the coup d'etat of 1952 that led to the expulsion of King Farouk was now being usurped by the people in the name of peace, solidarity, and unity. Whereas the previous generation was led by individual icons like Gamal Abdel Nassar, Anwar Sadat, Oum Kalthoum, images used to represent today's iconic power reflected the scale of the protests, the eagle multiplied into a flock of birds, The images that took the breath of the world revealed numbers and numbers of people--the beauty was in its plurality and diversity. Published only a week into the revolution for the Egyptian people, this video remixed significant milestones of that week with historical references, YouTube videos that rocked the world, a visualization of live Twitter posts of #Jan25, original music, and illustrations by revolutionary cartoonist, Carlos Latuff. The animations I made in After Effects and the recording of the Twitter visualization built in Quartz composer were added into Final Cut Pro for final editing. If I had enough time, I would have added translated too.

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Using spatially designed information visualizations along with other representations, these remixes by VJ Um Amel demonstrate live media mixing as a research methodology whereby one can capture temporally specific conjunctures such that others can witness them.

This next remix was a total inspiration--immersed in all the media coming from Tahrir square I began noticing patterns emerging. One thing that struck me was how instrumental were the Arab women and youth in this movement. Even though all generations, professions, classes, faiths came out to protest in unity, there were several key voices that swept through social media, new media, and even satellite media like hot fire--and they were that of women, young women. There were several photo albums specifically of Egyptian women protesting that got reposted around social media sites. And when I saw the video of the young girl leading the chants and waving the Egyptian flag, I realized I had to do another remix that captured the contributions women and youth were making to the revolution. The final motivation to do this piece came when DJ Lucxke pinged me on Facebook with a link to the dubstep and bass song he had just composed. Using this style of music allowed me to bring out the techno-feminist cyborg in VJ Um Amel.

"Women & Youth of the Arab Revolutions (Suheir Hammad, Carlos Latuff, Dubstep Remix)" is done entirely differently than the previous one (published on YouTube on Feb 8, 2011). This video is a recording of a live VJ session where I edited the clips in real time--the cube effects, the rotoscoping, the layers and transitions, were all performed using real-time video processing software, VDMX and patches. This is a very different process than post-production editing in Final Cut Pro. Though the video is raw, I find that there is a certain poetics that real-time mixing was able to bring out.

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Through my research developing R-Shief Twitter Analytics, I have accumulated over 800,000 tweets on the hashtag #Jan25 alone since Jan 25, 2011. And that includes the several days at the height of the conflict in Egypt, when 85 million inhabitants in Egypt were cut from the Internet--still the world tweeted. How did that happen? How were millions of tweets generated over protests in Egypt while the entire nation was offline? I wrote about my experience managing this Twitter aggregation in a recently published article in critical code journal, ThoughtMesh: "social media operates based on principles of uncertainty, where there are no groups, only formations of groups, and where non-linear time and space still create narratives and meaning vis-à-vis the database, and where objects (such as Twitter) have agency in a social network." (ThoughtMesh.net, Feb 5, 2011).

This info vid below is a good example of what how computers can run semantic analytics on a set of strings (words), an interactive experience that demonstrates how a database narrative might express meaning through recombinant and indexical instantiations.

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The purpose of these data visualizations is to capture that special something that makes Twitter (and other social media sites) so feared that a government would shut down the Internet to an entire nation during civil uprising and protest. This next information visualization below, also published Feb 12, 2011, was designed to have a more poetic (and less narrative) meaning to express. This is a running hashtag of all the tweets on #Egypt that were posted to Twitter the day Hosni Mubarak resigned as president of Egypt. Whereas the previous semantic content info vid is more like content analysis or data visualization, the hashmap presented here offers a sentiment analysis and is intended to be evocative.

I programmed it in Processing, which runs as a Java applet. Crunching the data was not as straightforward as you might think. I have only begun to consider the design challenges to producing data visualization. Ideally, my process is to problematize the project's approach in order to get beyond the obvious and expected, i.e.: "Muslims" AND "Christians" combination. In future research, I will be conducting link analysis, term frequency analysis, creating a network map based on themes and links, and if possible identifying primary grouping. My aim is to make people say, "ah, that's what's going on with Twitter. That's how it participated in the #ArabRevolts."

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What we need most at this point is illumination on the kinds of research questions we need to be asking plus a good perspective how others are going about content analysis. I am confident we can master the tools and generate data. I think the big challenge is designing it in a way that renders meaning. The revolution that started in Tunisia is having its Tsunami effect felt all the way over on the West coast of the United States. Next week I have been invited to attend a roundtable workshop on "Blogs & Bullets: Social Media and the Struggle for Political Change," hosted at Stanford University with US Institute for Peace and The Institute for Public Diplomacy & Global Communication at The George Washington University. Other participants will be from the Oxford Internet Institute and Meedan online translation along with Larry Diamond, Marc Lynch, Clay Shirky, and others. I am looking forward to this.

I see the ecology in the field of database narrative making and visualizing as rich, undiscovered territory to explore. We need to consider various methodological approaches to social media analysis for both the expert and the student. In the months to come, I plan to provide suggested approaches of social media analysis for teachers. Also, I will be documenting the techniques used in the research practice as we uncover--all of this is work in progress.

In parallel, my itch to create innovative VJ mixes continues. They are like my version of blog posts, a type of serialized commentary. Last week, I wanted to do a live remixing of tweets and people's YouTube videos and project it into Tahrir via Al Jazeera's bandwidth. I still want to do it, however, Tahrir no longer makes sense. So am connecting with friends and family there to find an appropriate time and place. One way this might go down is as a show comprised of performances of other Arab-American/ Egyptian-American artists like L.A.-based comedian, Ahmed Ahmed, Omar Effendum, Wesam Nassar, Rita Qatami, Leyya Tawil and others. Imagine projecting back to the people in Egypt the tweets from around the world--parsed out by language, Italian, French, Arabic, Japanese, etc...

Common among the creative fields--the arts, science, technology and design--is a commitment to the production of new knowledge based on original research. This presentation hopes to have extended notions of how innovative methods might be applied in a Media studies or Middle East studies context. Through this VJed publication, my aim has been to demonstrate the notion of design/ art practice as transformative research. Most recently in Arab countries, social media and its surprising political usages have created interplay between the application of structure and resistance that have been transformative. In conclusion, I argue that social media in the Arab world be unique--both in terms of how the society is operating, tightly woven; and in terms of media's history in the Arab world, born in print form as an apparatus of the state since the Ottoman Empire. Where U.S. media, in principle, acts to ensure the power of the government remains under checks and balances, in the Arab world it functions quite differently. And so when, in Egypt, media became actively dependent on the social fabric, rather than institutional sources of information and analysis, that opened up an uncertain bag of worms for an entire region.

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Laila Shereen Sakr (a.k.a. VJ Um Amel) is a media artist whose practices include ambient visual projection, live cinema performance, game design, database design, and innovative research. In her live VJ performances, she explores the implications of juxtaposing the identity of "mother" and a techno-feminist construct of "cyborg" within local and transnational expressions of "Arab." Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts where she was awarded an Annenberg Fellowship.

DIY Video 2010: Political Remix (Part Three)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIY Video 2010: Political Remix (Part Two)

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

Music Videos

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

Star Trek: Too Many Dicks

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

Video Games: Too Many Dicks

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

Club Iraq

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

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

Supercuts

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

The Price is Creepy

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

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

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

Synchronized Presidential Debating

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

Identity Correction

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

The Red Stripe

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

World Economic Forum Spoof Videos

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

ADM CEO Patricia Woertz (1:10)

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

Klaus Schwab (1:03)

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

Queen Elizabeth II of England (0:52)

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

Transformative Storytelling

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

The Dark Bailout

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

Jake Gyllenhaal Challenges the Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

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

Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed

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

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

DIY Video 2010: Political Remix (Part One)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-cut trailers

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

Pretty Women as a Horror Film

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

Gay Marriage Storm Chasers

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

Harry Potter and the Brokeback Mountain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here are some questions to consider about these videos:

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

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

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

DIY Video 2010: Activist Media (Part Three)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIY Video 2010: Activist Media (Part Two)

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

DIY Video Activism Program

Meta: Video Activism

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

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

2008 Election

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran

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

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

Iraq & Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

LGBTQ movement

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

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

Immigration

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

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

Police Brutality

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

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

Economy & Gentrification

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

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

Haiti

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

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

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

Climate justice

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

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

By The 350 Movement

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

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

DIY Video 2010: Activist Media (Part One)

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

Activist Media: curated by Sasha Costanza-Chock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards a New Civic Ecology: Addressing the Grand Challenges

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

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

Towards a New Civic Ecology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenge One: Maximize the availability of relevant and credible information

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenge Two: Strengthen the capacity to engage with information

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

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

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

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

Challenge 3: Promote engagement with information

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Job Accountabilities:

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

Start date is as soon as possible.

Position is open until filled.

more information about posted position and application details

Perhaps a revolution is not what we need

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

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

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

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

There's more great insights on his blog.

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

Perhaps a revolution is not what we need

by Kevin Driscoll

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

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

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

What is "Twitter"?

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

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

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

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

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

What is "the civil-rights movement"?

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

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

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

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

What works?

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

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

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