A Virtual Bullpen?: How the USC Cinema School Has Embraced ARGs To Shape The Experience of Entering Students (Part One)

A few weeks ago, I was sent a pack of collector's cards -- with my picture on them! -- and asked to show up in the courtyard outside the USC Cinematic Arts facilities so that I could pass them out to students who showed up and said "convergence." I camped out and soon small clusters of students started showing up, enthusiastically saying "convergence" and waiting for me to hand them their tokens. Very quickly, I gave out of cards and for the most part, the students did not mind. In fact, a bunch of those who arrived later hung out and started a conversation, which kept growing until at its peek I had twenty or so undergraduates sitting all around me asking questions about transmedia storytelling, fan culture, new media literacies, spreadable media, and an astonishing array of other topics from my blog. This photograph was shot surreptitiously by Tracy Fullerton, one of my Cinema School colleagues, who was staking out a vantage point not far away.

All of this cloak and dagger stuff was part of an innovative game -- an Alternate Reality Game of sorts -- which is being conducted amongst the entering Cinema School undergraduates this year. If my own experiences are any indication, the game is proving to be enormously successful at getting students involved, excited about entering the Cinema School, more aware of its resources, more connected to its faculty, more engaged with its research, more connected across different divisions. It is also getting them involved in collaborative and production like activities than most entering students who have had to wait for a bit before they would be allowed to take production classes. I've seen lots of discussion over the past few years about the potentials of using ARGS for pedagogical purposes. But, this is the first time I've seen such a large scale experiment in integrating ARG activities across an entire school to orient entering students to a program and to serve a range of instructional goals. The passion the game is motivating in USC students is palpable. And I can tell you that many of the faculty, who have gotten pulled into the game through one play mechanic or another, are feeling a real pride in their school for its willingness to embrace this kind of experimentation and innovation.

I've wanted for some time to share with you some of the insights of the people most involved in this project -- Jeff Watson, Tracey Fullerton, and Simon Wiscombe, who wish to be identified here as the "co-designers/conspirators" behind the Game. In this interview, they tell us more about how the game came about, the design and teaching goals shaping it, the core mechanics, and the impact it has had on the school and especially this remarkable group of entering students. I have a feeling we are going to want to track its impact for the next four years to see what kind of difference it has made in their relations to each other and to the school.

The three of you have been co-conspirators in the development of an alternate reality game which has captured the passions and interests of the incoming students at the USC School of Cinematic Arts this fall. Can you give us some background on the project? What got it started?

Tracy Fullerton: The project actually came out of a committee established by the dean of the School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) in 2009 after a full faculty retreat. The charge for that committee was to envision the future of the SCA, and one of the key initiatives was to establish a "gateway experience" for incoming students that introduced them to the changing media landscape, the history and future of the school, the possibilities that can emerge from the SCA network of current and past students, and the importance of bridging the divisions of the school while they are here, both socially and academically.

The gateway course was envisioned as introducing a new kind of social networking for SCA students, both on and offline, that would become critical to their involvement in courses and with each other. As the class developed, it became clear that a game layer would be a perfect way to achieve all of the goals set out by the committee without falling victim to the general survey or lecture class tradition we wanted to move beyond. So, while the curriculum for the gateway class and the game aren't "officially" linked, they are intertwined in vision and purpose and serve to bring students from all divisions together in multiple ways that will purposefully drive the social dynamics and the cross-media collaboration.

From its inception, the gateway class was envisioned as having a companion social network, which linked to a digital library of information about media history and theory and SCA's past and future. The design of the card game, with its "high touch" in-person mechanics, is just the beginning of implementing that vision. On each card, history and theory are linked to practice with a piece of knowledge on one side and a prompt to creative practice on the other. This bridge between theory and practice, like the ones we hope to forge between divisions here, is a critical statement at the heart of the game.

Jeff Watson: As an iMAP PhD student, finding ways to bring together theory and practice is central to my doctoral research. Over the past couple of years, I had been looking for a dissertation project that would enable me to put into practice my research into transmedia interaction design and alternate reality games. I wanted this project to be something that played out in the real world and had a tangible and measurable impact. I didn't want it to be a demo or a proof of concept. I wanted to play with real stakes, real players, and real outcomes. I wanted the project to be able to fail if it wasn't designed properly. So when Holly Willis, the chair of the Future Committee, came to me with the mandates that Tracy just outlined and asked if I would be able to come up with a pitch for an ARG that could be played by all the incoming students of the SCA, I jumped at the chance. This was a real design challenge that touched on all the corners of my research, from participatory culture to social and mobile media to interventionist art practice.

What were the core learning goals for the design and deployment of this game?

Tracy Fullerton: The core learning goals for the game are all around fostering the kind of complex skills that are sometimes called 21st century skills. Of course, these skills, such as team-building, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and innovation, are not unique to the 21st century and they have been at the heart of the curriculum here at SCA for a very long time. The difference here is activating students right from the start of their SCA experience with the knowledge that these skills are critical building blocks to their success as media makers, and also that the development and improvement of these skills is something they need to take responsibility for themselves from day one.

The game wraps these learning goals into a kind of induction into the SCA culture of networking and support which is something students certainly leave USC with, but we wanted to use the game to start surfacing these ideas for them earlier in their development.

Jeff Watson: When we first met to brainstorm what we wanted students to be able to discover through this game, we filled up a 16 foot whiteboard and still felt like we hadn't scratched the surface. On top of the kinds of building block skills Tracy just mentioned, faculty members from each division of the SCA had very granular lists of the kinds of things that they felt Cinematic Arts students should be aware of as they commence their tenure as undergraduates. Writing professors wanted the game to encourage the exploration of character and story; production faculty wanted to make sure all students acquired basic knowledge about cameras, editing, and safety; critical studies pushed for more opportunities for analysis, historical contextualization, and reflection; animation wanted to make sure their students would have more ways to connect with students from other divisions; and interactive media pushed for a deeper integration of notions of iterative design and systems thinking. At the end of the meeting, I took a picture of the whiteboard with my iPhone. It was a crazy tangled bird's nest of inspiration.

To make sense of it all, we took the mass of ideas generated during that whiteboard session and started looking for connective tissue. We noticed that all the learning goals we had brainstormed fell into one of three broad categories, which we ended up calling Literacy, Craft, and Social. Literacy goals were those that pertained to knowledge of all kinds: from highly local lore about the school and its resources, to basic understandings about the history and theory of media-making. Craft goals were those that had anything to do with the act of making -- from writing prose to shooting video to designing board games. Finally, Social goals were all those that related to the discovery of and connection with peers, alumni, faculty, and the broader community. Since the "content" of each of these categories of learning was agnostic with respect to the various divisions of the SCA, the first challenge of breaking down divisional/disciplinary boundaries had been met. The question became how to make a game that would motivate players to traverse the networks of Literacy, Craft, and Social goals that we had identified for inclusion. This became the starting point for our prototyping.

Can you describe some of the basic mechanics of the game?

Simon Wiscombe: The game is, at its core, a project creation game. When players elect to join, they're given a pack of cards containing green "maker" cards (e.g. "30 second short," "Board Game," etc.), pink "property" cards (e.g. "About love", "In the SCA Courtyard", etc.), and one orange "people" card (which contains the name of one first year undergrad in the USC film school). These cards can be combined together or with other players' cards to make a "Deal," the simplest of which is composed of one maker card and one property card -- although an almost unlimited number of property cards can be attached so long as there are enough connectors. After laying out a Deal, players go out and actually create it (i.e. "A 30 second short about love in the SCA courtyard"). They then submit it to the site, and justify it in the game office -- at which point it's uploaded, they get points for the Deal, and everyone in the game can see it.

Jeff Watson: This whole process is outlined with pictures and video on the game website . Since it's such a highly visual interactive experience, readers who want to get a good sense of how it feels to play should head over there and check out the intro materials.

Simon Wiscombe: Yes, visit the website -- it explains everything and also showcases the amazing work the players have created so far.

What relationship does this game have with other alternate reality games which have been used for entertainment or training purposes in the past?

Jeff Watson: The "meat" of this game is structured creative improvisation. As Simon has described, the core interaction here involves players trading, sharing, and combining collectible playing cards in order to generate creative prompts known as "Deals". Responding to these prompts by submitting completed artifacts results in advancement on the game's various leaderboards, unlocking special game content. This special content constitutes what might be called the "sauce" on the meat of the game.

This "sauce" is the closest we get to "traditional" alternate reality game content. For example, toward the end of the second week of gameplay, we sent clues to several players who were leading in key Deal-making categories. The clues provided the players with a time and a location and nothing else. Bravely enough, the students showed up. Once there, they were greeted by a formally-attired Oud player. Accompanied by the Oudist, the players were transported without explanation to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Once in the museum, the players encountered two alums of the SCA, Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago (designers of critically-acclaimed games such as Flow, Flower, and Journey), who were wandering around in the darkness wearing sequined masquerade masks. Upon discovering them, the players were presented with a special game power which enabled them to score additional points on subsequent Deals, and were then treated to 90 minutes of informal discussion about game design, art, and media making.

In short, our approach uses a rule-based play system (the card game) to drive the bulk of the experience, and employs more traditional ARG techniques around the edges, as rewards and tonal elements. This approach is in many ways a practical implementation of the ideas and critiques I presented last year on your blog in my essay, "ARG 2.0". In most "traditional" ARGs, our "sauce" is the full meal. The player experience in such games unfolds around a kind of scavenger hunt activity wherein game runners moderate and manage player communities as they plow through a sequence of puzzles, curated action prompts, and side-quests.

While this logistically-complex structure is appropriate for certain team-building and talent sourcing applications, we wanted to make something that would have the capacity to perpetuate itself without relying on the constant generation of puzzle and narrative content by game runners. More importantly, we wanted our game to emphasize an active engagement with media-making: while scavenger hunts might help to build social bonds and search/analysis skills, we felt that they are inherently about solving puzzles or responding to prompts created by someone else -- and as such are a kind of consumption-oriented form of play. We wanted to make this game about the players' creativity, not ours.

"What Is Civic Media" Revisited: A Conversation with John Palfrey (Part Two)

JP: One of the tensions that emerged from my interviewing was around this issue (broadly) of what community means. It operated as a tension on various levels. One was a sense among the staff that they weren't quite sure what Knight Foundation had in mind about where to focus: locally near Boston, around the US, abroad. (I'm sure that Ethan Zuckerman's focus in his own work will have an impact on future thinking in this regard.) Another hard question related to the term "communities": what are they, do they really exist in the ways that paradigmatic examples might suggest, and so forth. I think there's good, hard, conceptual work still to be done about what it means to "meet the information needs of a community" and what empowerment looks like in the C4 model. I love the approach taken so far, and I think it can bear fruit in terms of informing theory, too.

HJ: John, your questions about whether communities exist is a key one which I've struggled with from the start. Benedict Anderson tells us that communities are "imagined" in that no member of a community in practice has regular contact with every other member of the community but they act as if there were strong social ties and a shared identity among this somewhat abstracted group of people.

So, when we talk about doing projects in "communities," what are we talking about? Are we describing an actual group of people who interface regularly with each other? Are we dealing with a population, such as prisoners, who are locked out of the dominant social institutions and yet seek some kind of interface with a community beyond the prison walls? Are we seeking tools, such as Hero Reports, which seek to strengthen the imagined ties between people who pass each other on the subway? Are we seeking to decrease social conflicts or to give people tools to more meaningfully engage with those conflicts, as seems to be the goals for some of Chris's projects?

The mandate for the center assumes that we are working within existing communities, yet often we may be helping to constitute the communities the projects serve by giving them resources through which they may better "imagine" and start to more fully realize the potential ties between them. The range of projects the center has developed so far suggest many different understandings of what a community is and how media relate to communities, though we have a way to go before they/we articulate fully the theoretical implications of this work.

JP: This concept of in fact "constituting" communities by giving them resources is completely fascinating. I think this is one of the common beliefs about the web, in particular: where there are humans who are far-flung in geographic terms, share an interest, find one another through the web, and then work together, have we "constituted" these communities in the process?

An interesting case study might be Global Voices, the signature project that Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon founded and which joins an extraordinary network of citizen journalists and activists around the globe. Was there a GV community before GV? Or was it in fact constituted by the creation of tools, the services, and the passion that went into the founding of GV?

I realize that this is not exactly on point, vis-a-vis much of the existing work of the Center, which has defined much of what it's done in geographic terms, but I wonder if there might be insight there. Diaspora communities, connected by digital media in richer ways, might be another case to consider.

HJ: I am struck by the contrast between the Center's view that civic media may enhance a sense of community among participants and the fears being expressed by political leaders and news media in Great Britain that social media may have contributed to the riots which disrupted community life across England last summer. How might we contrast between these two models for thinking about the impact of new media technologies on community life?

There seems to have been a persistent strand of criticism that new media is leading to greater social isolation, that it is inspiring anti-social behavior, that it contributes to the disintegration of traditional civic associations, etc. In what ways can we see what the Center has done as an effort not simply to question those claims on a theoretical level but also to demonstrate on a practical level how new media can be used in the service of strengthening social ties?

JP: This too is a tension worth exploring in my view. I've had the Arab Spring uprisings alongside the riots in the United Kingdom in my head. In terms of our reaction to these two events, why do leaders like the Prime Minister in the UK on the one hand say that we should be studying the Egyptian marches in our schools, while raising the specter of restricting social media use when people take to the streets in his hometown?

OK, so the politics of the situation are obvious; also, there are ways to distinguish the two types of uprising. But the core problem remains the same: it's dangerous for us to make any assumptions about how a given "community" will use digital media tools in any given circumstance. They may have a salutary effect on one day, and a disruptive one on the next -- if your perspective if law-and-order. And from a social fabric perspective, we ought to note the possibilities for multiple outcomes as well, as you note.

HJ: I am struck in your report by some comments which Chris makes about "disruptive technologies" rather than "gradual change." And that points to another creative friction that shaped the early days of the Center. It's not clear that we would have agreed about the model of social change underlying our work.

Chris, certainly, embraces disruptive uses of technology, yet there is also an argument to be made for the use of civic media as a way of sustaining traditional institutions and practices, of maintaining social ties, which are being disrupted by other forces in contemporary life. This is not necessarily conservative in a political sense, but it may be conservative in the sense that it seeks to protect something vital in our communities which is being threatened by changes that are not under the control of community members.

For example, I used to talk about town pageants as an old civic ritual which connected current residents of a town to their past -- and not simply on the level of representing their history. If the same pageant is performed year after year, there is a social sharing across generations that take place - shared memories, even shared identities (as people feel close to others who have played the same character in the performance). We don't have such rituals any more and so it is easy for people to lose sense of their own history or to feel disconnected across generations. I wondered what the contemporary equivalent of a town pageant might look like. And I am not sure whether this line of inquiry has born fruit yet in terms of the projects the Center has developed.

JP: I like the connection around the word "disruption" between these various points. Of course, I was most influenced by what I heard from those in the Center as of the end of 2010 and start of 2011, so Chris's approach was dominant in the discourse and in the shape of the projects that I observed. I don't think that means that the questions you posed have been asked and answered yet; they seem to me still out there for exploration.

HJ: Bringing on Ethan Zuckerman as the new Director of the Center almost certainly means a further expansion of our notion of community -- one which moves the Center much more decisively towards global interventions and pushes it further from a focus on its own backyard. There will be radically different conceptions of community life at play as we deal with national contexts radically different from the U.S.A. and where we will encounter a different set of challenges to community life.

A central concern across such projects should be with who gets to participate, who gets to be a member of a community, given that all communities exclude as well as include, and given that access to and familarity with technologies are a central dividing line in our culture. As I sign off, I want to press the Center to remain attentive to the digital divide and the participation gap and to use technologies as a means of bridging between sectors of communities.

JP: And as I sign off: thanks so much to everyone in the Center's community for letting me and Catherine Bracy go so deep into your work. It was fascinating. Plainly, what you are doing -- regardless of whether it is disruptive or gradual, local or international, place-based or virtual -- is so very important to the future of our culture and societies. And thanks, Henry, for the chance to reflect together on this great set of issues. You always push me in my thinking (your critique of the digital natives frame comes to mind, among many other examples) and I consider myself lucky to be able to learn from what you say and do.

John Palfrey is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, vice dean for library and information resources, and the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He led a reorganization of the Harvard Law School Library in 2009. He is a principal investigator on the Open Net Initiative, a collaboration between Harvard and the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge that studies the Internet filtering of countries such as China, Iran, and Singapore, among many others He is co-author or editor of several books, including Access Denied (MIT Press, 2008), Access Controlled (MIT Press, 2010), and Born Digital (Basic Books, 2008).

"What Is Civic Media" Revisited: A Conversation with Harvard's John Palfrey

Henry Jenkins: On September 20 2007, we officially launched the MIT Center for the Future of Civic Media, a joint venture of the Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies Program.

Our launching event include myself, Chris Csikzentmihalyi, Mitchell Resnick, Beth Noveck, and Ethan Zuckerman. At the time, Chris, Mitch and I were the co-directors of the Center. It was announced several months ago that Ethan Zuckerman would now be taking over the leadership of the lab starting this fall, and a review of the first four years of the Center's research by John Palfrey was made public. I was asked if I would be willing to participate in a conversation about the nature of Civic Media and the work of the Center with Palfrey, which will run on both my blog and the blog for the Center.

As I thought about how to initiate this conversation, I went back to my original blog post about the Center, which asked the core question, "What Is Civic Media?" And this is a question which everyone who has been affiliated with this project continues to ask. My answer at the time was deceptively simple:

Civic media, as I use the term, refers to any use of any medium which fosters or enhances civic engagement. I intend this definition to be as broad and inclusive as possible. Civic media includes but extends well beyond the concept of citizen journalism which is so much in fashion at the moment.

I left the Center when I left MIT, though I've continued to do work on civic media through my new post at the University of Southern California.

Here's how I defined the concept of Civic Media at the head of a syllabus of a class I taught last year on this topic:

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

This much more elaborated definition reflects the conversations which took place through many meetings with the Lab's affiliated faculty, students, and researchers, especially through the exchanges I had with Ellen Hume, who was for a time the Research Director at the Lab, and Colleen Kamen, a CMS graduate student whom we asked to help think through our vision of civic media. It also has emerged through my classroom practice at MIT and now USC and more recently, my involvement in a MacArthur Research Hub focused on better understanding youth, new media, and participatory politics. For a rich snapshot of our early attempts to define "civic media," check out the series of videos at the Center's homepage.

What the two definitions share is the idea that civic media is not simply citizen journalism, a framing which seems to limit the kinds of community practices we are describing and the ways they meet the information needs of communities, to use a phrase the Knight Foundation has been exploring in recent years. Both are technology agnostic -- which is to say any set of practices around any set of technologies can become civic media if it is applied towards certain ends. The more recent definition offers some expanded sense of what those ends are which grows out of a much deeper dive into the literature around the notion of the informed citizen and around participatory politics more broadly.

From the start, I was most interested in understanding how the emergence of new media and participatory practices might be reshaping our understanding of the civic, responding to some of the disruptions of community life which had characterized the second part of the 20th century. It seemed like an important conversation to be having, and it was a key theme which emerged through the early Communication Forum events and conferences hosted by the Center.

John Palfrey: Henry, I think your starting point, pushing on the definitional issue and driving from there, is right on. In my review of the Center's first four years, I worked with a close colleague, Catherine Bracy, to interview as many of the people involved in the Center as we could. Taken as a whole, the overwhelming view of the community was how valuable C4 has been in the lives of individuals involved and also in many of the environments where C4 faculty, staff, fellows, and students have been active.

A secondary finding was a hunger for understanding civic media as a concept. People had plainly been drawn to what you'd set up, even with a nascent definition; I think a lot of participants came to help in the active shaping of what it would become. I like very much your refinement over time. I've found myself, also, puzzling over the definitional issues and enjoying the process of thinking about them.

HJ: There was from the start some, hopefully productive, tension between the Media Lab participants who were strongly invested in the idea that we could design new tools which would be especially conducive to serving civic needs and the bias of the Comparative Media Studies participants who felt that we needed to be more focused on the social and cultural practices by which people integrated those tools into their everyday lives. We used to have heated debates about whether we should build the tools first and then apply them to communities or whether we should start with a deeper understanding of the community's existing practices and needs and then design to serve them better. Such debates are inevitable when working in an interdisciplinary space and could be generative or distracting depending on how well the people involved dealt with them.

JP: Yes! This productive tension jumped out of the review that we did. I think the idea of tempering one approach with another, in a way that made more of whole, is a deeply profound concept. The critical nature of the CMS discipline and the "let's go build it!" nature of the Lab's discipline have a peanut butter-and-chocolate quality to them. I think those debates have been, and can be in the future, extremely textured and important. One question I have is how C4 can tease them out and make them more public than they've been so far, so others of us can share in them somehow.

HJ:From the start, Knight wanted to keep the focus on geographically localized communities rather than more dispersed communities of interest, though we debated among ourselves how easily the two could be separated. For example, as the Center launched we were still dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. George Lipsitz had described the working class communities of New Orleans as being "network rich and resource poor," that is to say, very strong social networks had emerged over decades which supported the sustainability of that community and insured the well-being of its members. But the hurricane had disrupted these networks on the ground, scattering the people across the country, and had done so in a way that made it difficult to imagine these communities ever being put back together again in the ways they had once functioned.

So, for me, the question was always whether we could separate out the local community in southern Louisiana from the more dispersed, diasporic community of folks from New Orleans, still strongly identified with that city, now living across the country, once part of strong social networks which they now tapped into via digital and mobile technologies. Surely, any technology-enhanced practice which strengthened the bonds between these communities would be civic media.

John Palfrey is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, vice dean for library and information resources, and the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He led a reorganization of the Harvard Law School Library in 2009. He is a principal investigator on the Open Net Initiative, a collaboration between Harvard and the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge that studies the Internet filtering of countries such as China, Iran, and Singapore, among many others He is co-author or editor of several books, including Access Denied (MIT Press, 2008), Access Controlled (MIT Press, 2010), and Born Digital (Basic Books, 2008).

Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part One)

I have had a chance to watch Anne Balsamo at work in many different contexts -- as a junior faculty member at Georgia Tech focusing on cyberfeminism and reconceptualizations of the body; as a designer in residence at Xerox Parc where she was developing devices intended to embody alternative conceptions of the future of publication and reading; as someone dispatched by the MacArthur Foundation to encourage us to reflect on the nature of "design literacy"; and most recently, as a colleague at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC where we are working together to launch an expanded ebook project. She is someone who has been able to pursue a shared research agenda in a range of different contexts (both academic and industrial) and in the process, to build upon the work of others around her, to carry with her what she's learned into these new spaces. What I love about Balsamo is her fearlessness in moving beyond her own comfort zone and her ability to inspire creativity and reflection in those she finds around her. I am so blessed to have a chance to work with people like Balsamo and her other colleagues at the Innovation Lab on a regular basis. Her newest book, Designing Cultures: The Technological Imagination at Work, could only have come about as a result of her experiences working in these many different environments. It is one part autobiography, one part portfolio (she shares some of her great projects through an attached disc), and one part theoretical reflection. Above all, it is an intervention by someone deeply rooted into the humanities into the current debates about technological innovation. Her conceptual models and frameworks are sure to spark discussions at digital humanities labs around the world, but my hope is that they do not end there, that they offer engineers and programmers and designers a way to reflect on their own contributions to culture (and their own contexts of innovation).

In this interview that follows, we talk together about some of the key themes of her book, which, as the title playfully suggests, deals both with the design of culture and with the cultural contexts where design takes place.

Designing Culture: the Technological Imagination at Work from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

Early in the book, you make the statement, "the wellspring of technological innovation is the exercise of the technological imagination." Can you break that down for us? What is the "technological imagination" and how does this concept bridge between technology and culture?

Inspired by the concept of the "sociological imagination," first developed by C. Wright Mills in the 1960s, I define the technological imagination as a mindset that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible. This imagination is performative: it improvises within constraints to create something new. It is through the exercise of their technological imaginations that people engage the materiality of the world, creating the conditions for future world-making. Most importantly, this is the capacity to understand that all technologies come from somewhere, that they could always be different from what they are, and that they always have multiple and contradictory impacts.

In the active engagement between human beings and technological elements, culture too is reworked through the development of new narratives, new myths, new rituals, new modes of expression, and new knowledges that make the innovations meaningful. When people participate in the activities of producing "innovation," their technological imaginations are engaged in a complex process of meaning-making whereby both technology and culture are created anew.

Throughout the book, you talk about "innovation," which as you note is a widely deployed concept these days. What do you mean by "innovation" and how does your use of the term differ from some of the notions currently shaping industry and government discourse?

Innovation is a process, not a product. Innovation changes how life will be lived in the future. I think that many people--industry pundits and government spokespeople--believe that innovation is a "thing." I make the distinction between "invention" which implies the creation of new things--new applications, services, devices, processes--and "innovation" which is the process whereby the elements of human life are rearranged such that life in the future is lived differently.

You suggest that a key aim of the book is to get your humanities colleagues more engaged with the process of technological innovation. Why? What will they gain from participating in a process which may seem alien to many of them? What will humanities people bring to the table that is currently missing from our conversations around technology?

I argue that the process of technological innovation is actually NOT at all alien to humanists; it is the process of engaging with technologies to change the shape of the way culture is lived, reproduced, and expressed in the future. This is an abiding interest and contribution of the humanities that is more commonly understood as the process of education through their engagement with a range of technologies of literacy (i.e., the book, historical narrative, aesthetic materials of expression). If one believes, as I do, that innovation is the process whereby culture is rearranged, then it is easy to see the valuable role of humanists in providing the tools and the critical frameworks for understanding not only how culture might change in the future, but also how current cultural arrangements structure conditions of possibility of any effort of innovation.

How a Robot Got its Groove from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

Our colleague, Tara McPherson, has argued that issues of gender and race tend to be pushed aside when people talk about designing new media. How and why do these questions surface throughout your book?

This book, indeed the entire project that goes by the name "Designing Culture" is a direct outgrowth of my earlier work on the biotechnological reproduction of gendered bodies. In my first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke 1996), I examined the cultural implications of what were then (in the 1980s-1990s) emergent bio-technologies. What I learned through that project was how to critique the technocultural arrangements that reproduced gendered identities for the bodies that engaged with new technologies (body building, cosmetic surgery, surrogate motherhood, computer-mediated communication, and virtual reality). By the time I finished, I realized that if I were to take my feminist political commitments seriously, it was not enough for me to critique the ideological work of emergent technologies, I had to go further to examine how the critique might suggest ways of doing things differently in the future.

In some sense, all my work is influenced by Donna Haraway's assertion that "all technologies are reproductive technologies." Whereas the first book examined a broad range of BIOLOGICAL reproductive technologies that were innovative during the last two decades of the 20th century, the new work examined what I believed were going to be the DOMINANT reproductive technologies of the 21st century: digital media technologies. This "turn to reproduction" is but one way in which feminist theory--as a way of thinking gender--informs all my research.

Thus I formulated new research questions that directed my attention to study and participate in the processes whereby new technologies are developed which enabled me to build a framework to understand the techno-social-cultural conditions of technological innovation. Put simply, I continued to study the processes of technologically-assisted cultural reproduction...but with the new project the focus was on the creation of new digital media technologies rather than on biological technologies.

To follow these questions, I turned my attention to the investigation of the practices of technological design and I immersed myself in projects that would allow me to learn how to use new media technologies to create new digital applications. My first project--to create the interactive documentary called "Women of the World Talk Back"-- was the result of my experiments with a range of (what were then) innovative new media digital authoring tools for the purposes of creating feminist activist interactive media. Through collaborations with colleagues and students--who had a much more developed set of technological design skills than I did--my technological imagination was inspired and shaped to think differently about the cultural possibilities of new technologies.

Anne Balsamo holds joint appointments in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Her interest in the relationship between technology and culture informs her work as a scholar, teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, and new media designer. She is the recipient of a recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interactive tangible interface for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In 2008 she received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study the future of museums and libraries in a digital age. Her next project investigates tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a digital age. Her on-going research-design projects focus on the role of public interactives as a stage for technology transfer from sites of innovation (university labs and research centers) to the general public.

Designing Woman: An Interview with Anne Balsamo (Part Two)

You worked at Xerox PARC, which, as you note, has become a mythic locale in the early history of digital technology. What do you think the current myths about Xerox PARC get right and what do they misunderstand?

Among the many lessons I learned during my time working at Xerox PARC is the understanding that the future is created first in the imagination, and then is enacted through the many activities of the research laboratory (among other places). Contrary to the old adage--that the best way to predict the future is to invent it--what I came to appreciate is the important role of narrative in creating an imaginary relationship between the FUTURE and the present. The first act of innovation is an act of story-making--which involves the spinning of a narrative that features technologies, materials, beliefs about "needs" and "opportunities," and is performed by researchers who (as in the case of Xerox PARC) are employed in the business of innovation. I'm not sure how that matches with the cultural work of Xerox PARC today--the scene has changed in the decade since I left. But I suspect that the researchers there are still eagerly engaged in the cultural processes--and performance--of innovation.

You argue that technologists should "pay attention to the technological literacy of the intended users off the technology-under-development." What advice can you offer to technologists about the best way to "pay attention"? What are the "ethical responsibilities" of technologists in regard to those who will be left behind if their tools and platforms are more widely adopted?

My approach to the topic of "paying attention" is grounded in the theory of "strong objectivity" developed by the philosopher of science, Sandra Harding. This argument is best situated within the debates about objectivity, scientism, and relativism of the late 1990s that were spurred by important work in critical feminist science studies. Harding argues that we need NOT to abandon ideals of "scientific objectivity"--as some feminists might have than been accused of advocating--but rather we need to be more RIGOROUSLY objective in understanding that reality is multidimensional; and that science, to be a truly objective explanatory enterprise needs to engage the minds and points of view of people who have been trained (socialized) to see the matter of the world from different perspectives.

Perhaps the key issue here is that what we are to "pay attention to" is multidimensional; thus the ethical responsibility of any technologist is to actively seek to see the world through different eyes, and not to assume that the point of view that one embodies is privileged as the only "point of view." Haraway calls this the "god trick." The ethical response is to understand how one's perspective is always partial, and to seek out other points of view (as it were) when developing or experimenting with the creation of new technologies.

I don't see the issue as one about people who will be "left behind"--because I understand that technologies are not simply objects, but rather a whole technocultural formation. Everyone lives in a current technological cultural moment that is constantly unfolding; an individual's position within that technocultural formation is what we really need to address when we think about "access to technology." No one is actually "left behind" in a cultural formation; they are differently positioned, constrained, enabled, empowered, with different (and often unequal) access to resources such as tools, knowledge, economic goods. I would argue that issues that are framed in terms of "people left behind" do not reflect a complex understanding about the nature of technoculture and cultural reproduction. To frame this question in this way presupposes an answer that puts the emphasis solely on "access to technology." Yet we know that simply providing access--dumping computers into classrooms for example--doesn't work to address the broader issues of inequality in power, economic resources, and intellectual support. Its time to start thinking more complexly about strategies for rearticulating dominant technocultural formations to allow for more liberatory and equal participation.

What is Literacy? from Anne Balsamo on Vimeo.

What does your book's focus on "design" contribute to the larger conversation around New Media Literacies and Digital Learning which has been sparked by the recent interventions of the MacArthur Foundation?

As I elaborated in the book, I make explicit the connections between the processes of design thinking and the skills and sensibilities that you list as key 21st century literacies. I argue that we need to teach designing practices across the curriculum; I support the notion that "design is a new liberal art." The issue of designing (design thinking, critical design skills) emerges as an important topic as we come to appreciate the many ways in which young people use new digital technologies to create and participate in innovative learning experiences. As they are called to be "designers/authors" of their own learning experiences, they will be well served (I assert) by learning also important design methods and critical frameworks for the analysis of their designed efforts.

The central premise of the book is that the work of design is one of the most important sites of cultural reproduction in a digital age. When I turn my attention to the designing/authoring efforts of students, I understand that even when these students think they are making it all up for the first time, they are actually engaged in the process of reproducing cultural understandings that came before them, and setting up the conditions for the reproduction of these understandings in the future. Thus for me to teach design also requires the teaching of ethics and the training of the historical imagination....both of these concepts are less fashionable to speak of these days

DML efforts might cast these concerns as "civic engagement" or as topics for "learning games." While there is nothing wrong with that approach--who could argue against "civic engagement" as an important topic for contemporary new media and digital learning--as I elaborate in the book I believe that there are additional insights to glean from discussions about ethics and about history in the context of understanding the praxis of designing and the reproduction of culture.

Given your discussion throughout about the need to reimagine the book, I am curious about the process which led you to develop Designing Culture as a print based book with digital extensions. What do you see each medium contributing to our experience of the whole?

The book and the digital projects were designed/authored simultaneously; but at any point, one creative project would take precedence over the others. This is because I'm not really good about multitasking at the broadest levels. It is also because the knowledge making process that is invoked during the course of creating digital media applications is different for me than the knowledge making process that emerges through the act of writing/authoring.

I wrote the book, as I explained in the conclusion, for personal, professional, and theoretical reasons. One of the most salient theoretical reasons is that the book is well suited to one of the most critical, but most commonly overlooked stages of designing: the stage when the designer returns to the design effort (and outputs) to critically assess the lessons learned and the cultural impact of the project. This stage of self-reflexive assessment is not easily accommodated in digital media genres of the museum exhibit, videos, interactive applications, and such.

The technological form of the printed book allows for the theoretical elaboration of abstract concepts and of self-reflexive accounts of designing practice. The book I wrote was neither a factual account of a series of moments long past, nor was it a simply a work of speculative design fiction. It was an authored account that was both factual and fictional; that was highly determined by my own biography and set of theoretical commitments, but not able to be reduced to either biography or theory.

If we return to C. Wright Mills notion of the "sociological imagination" we will hear him call for this kind of disposition--the sociological imagination for him was the capacity to make the connections between one's own personal biographies and the broader social and institutional forces and formations that invariably shape those biographies. This is the deep theoretical tradition I was trained in as a cultural theorist: to seek to make connections between my personal investments and biographical moments and the broader technocultural formation that I participate in as a subject/author and that I am "subjected to" through the work of ideology and other shaping forces.

Moreover, the DESIGNING CULTURE project is an example of the technological imagination at work in that the project manifested across a range of media technologies: where each part of the project was realized and expressed in the modality that was best deployed for my particular authorial objectives. Here I borrow Mill's insight to suggest that the technological imagination is the disposition that allows one to make the connections among technological forms and more personal/authorial objectives. Other people might call this paying attention to the "media specificity" of different modalities of cultural expression. Indeed that is what a good story teller always does: chose the best medium for addressing the desired audience that is matched with the story one wants to tell.

You are part of the leadership of the Annenberg Innovation Lab. What opportunities does the Lab offer you to push your concepts to the next level?

My work with the Annenberg Innovation Lab is very exciting for me because it offers an opportunity to collaborate with other people on the project of technological innovation that begins by taking culture seriously. This is the challenge that is laid out in the book: it is time to treat culture as a serious concept in our discussions, learning activities, design projects, and technological inventions.

Jonathan Taplin, Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, invokes the mantra for the lab as such: Every day culture eats strategy for lunch. This assertion resonates strongly with the main thesis of the Designing Culture project and sets the stage for a whole range of interesting experiments in the design of innovative technologies and the exercise of the technological imagination.

Anne Balsamo holds joint appointments in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Interactive Media Division of the School of Cinematic Arts. Her interest in the relationship between technology and culture informs her work as a scholar, teacher, researcher, entrepreneur, and new media designer. She is the recipient of a recent grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an interactive tangible interface for the AIDS Memorial Quilt. In 2008 she received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study the future of museums and libraries in a digital age. Her next project investigates tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a digital age. Her on-going research-design projects focus on the role of public interactives as a stage for technology transfer from sites of innovation (university labs and research centers) to the general public.

Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part Two)

Conversation Jason:

In reading over Alex and Gail's excellent provocations, I find myself reading fairly fannishly - not because I'm an admirer of their work (although I certainly am), but because even though they each present arguments that might seem to contradict my own stated position, I highlight and (to evoke our host) poach the moments and examples that confirm my own ideas. In Alex's post, I see evidence of the usefulness of writing what you believe and feel without a label - he might be framed as an acafan fore-parent, but the work that inspired so many of us didn't need that label to forge a model.

And his post points to another example of a slippery term that has had much more semiotic utility than either acafan or postmodern: queer. As we all know, this was not a term coined for academic convenience or trendiness, but rather a reclamation of an already powerful signifier that has come to define a field in seemingly (for a sideline observer like myself) coherent, pragmatic and politically efficacious ways. The semantic history of queer proves that terms can matter, but suggests that we should also engage with terms that already matter and fight the important fights, rather than coining and squabbling over new ones.

Both Gail and Alex's posts highlight the role of affect in writing about culture, and the importance of owning up to our personal engagements. But while Alex chose to "inject the I" into his work through both political and emotional investments, Gail chooses to speak Vulcan over Klingon, tempering affect while foregrounding her taste and identity. I'm sure that adherents of the term acafan would allow for both styles of fannishness under its rubric, but that points to challenges of the concept: either you must delineate the category in a way that excludes some significant modes of engagement, or you create a large umbrella that loses its explanatory power. I'm left unsure why labelling either of their approaches, or those of the many others who have participated in this series, as "acafan" helps us understand or justify the resulting work.

So I'm left with a question for both of my esteemed co-provocateurs: what would be different for the type of work you do without the term acafan to categorize it?

Gail:

Oh, quite simply, I think of myself as an "acafan" because Henry employed that term. He could have called it "lorax" and I would have said, "Yes, that's what I'm trying to do with my work, with my career. I'm trying to be a lorax!" As Alex is the fore-parent of so much great cultural studies and queer studies work, so Henry is the fore-parent of so much great work in fan studies. (Thus it is so great to have these two strands of genealogy touch points through this conversation, though of course their work has always been relevant to each other's.) I came into fan studies through the Henry route, and so Henry's terminology is mine.

But actually I would like to take up the question of using "queer" as a possible descriptor for "acafan." I know that's not literally what you suggested, Jason, but I have often wondered about drawing a connection between the two terms. On the one hand, "acafan" "queers" both academic and fan, Henry has explicitly referenced the origins of his early fan studies work in the emergent queer studies movement, fans generally use terms like "outed," there is something real at stake for those of us who are academics who "come out" as fans, and one of Henry's landmark contributions was showing that it could be done with respect to popular media, that one could and maybe MUST "out" oneself in academic work as a fan.

On the other hand, earlier in this discussion, John Edward Campbell asked "those who identify as 'acafans' to be a bit more reflexive about comparisons of fans to sexual minorities," emphasizing rightly that the dangers for people who "out" themselves as sexual minorities are far more acute and severe than for people who "out" themselves as fans.

If either of you has any thoughts on the intersections of "queer" and "acafan," as two terms that could be brought to bear on one another or may support or serve one another, or as two terms that are and must remain very distinct and separate, I would be really interested in them.

Alex:

I'll begin with Gail's provocation about how she tries to have her academic work speak critically about fandom and things she is a fan of rather than have her speaking as a fan, and how this particular positioning as an acafan (one I think most acafans take on) runs the risk of reinforcing "the old equivalences" of fan with "irrationality" and "overemotionalism" and academic with "rationality" and critical "distance." I agree with you, Gail, that this positioning may be a matter of "tone," and I will add "degree," rather than a wholesale denial or repression of emotion, but I have always been frustrated by how deploying this position always seems to demand we "control" our expressions of enthusiasm because they are, somehow, antithetical to the intellectual work we do. Is it really be impossible to conceive of a piece of work that veers between Photoplay and "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," and that is taken seriously in the academy?

Jason, you really are being a provocateur when you ask if we would really lose anything in terms of how we go about our business without the term "acafan" (or "postmodern"). I suppose I would say "no" and "yes." No, in the sense that those of us who were/are intent on combining "the personal is the political" type investments in our work would have proceeded (and did proceed) without a concept to work within or under.

But, yes, in the sense that it is handy to have a term like "acafan," or the earlier "scholar-fan," to indicate a "performance" option (as you put it, Gail) for scholarship. Once a term like this is established, it can provide some added weight to the struggle to legitimate certain types of scholarly performance. (I know, even while writing out "legitimate" I was cringing, but a girl's got to eat, so. . .) While, as Jason points out, this term (whether applied to a person or to a product) can mean many things to many people, it does gesture toward a group of people (self-identifying and not) and body of work that has attempted to expand and complicate just what constitutes a "scholar" or a piece of "scholarly" or "academic" work. And I do feel a kinship with these folks and with this project--though I guess don't really need a term to describe all this, I suppose. How's that for equivocating?

As to understanding acafandom, the acafan, and acafan production as "queer" somehow, I don't see why not, for the reasons Gail outlines, primary among them the impulse to critique categories with an eye to deconstructing them. Following this line of thinking, then, the queer goal of acafandom should finally be to trouble the categories of "fan" and "academic" (and academic and fan discourse) so much that we are left with exactly what Jason is calling for--a space that allows "our arguments and ideas to speak for themselves" no matter what their approach, methodology, for form. So, Jason, maybe you can just wait a while for acafandom to do its queer work!

Jason:

I appreciate that both of you equivocate about my question, and even though I'm skeptical of the term, I'm similarly on the fence. Such labels certainly have their uses for community-building, group identification, and signalling a set of sympathies so that others can find like-minded fellow travellers - I imagine that on some social network like Academia.edu, tagging yourself as an acafan could be useful (as would tagging ourselves as Loraxes for that matter!). But as academics in the critical humanities, we need to be careful in how we use our labels, as today's marker of convenience is tomorrow's site of political factioning or terminological warfare: when will we see articles positing that we are now in the era of post-acafandom, to be followed by neo-acafandom?

To pull out another term that emerged from the theoretical stew of postmodernism (but I'd argue need not be labeled as such to be useful), what I think is going on around these acafan conversations is a form of strategic essentialism. There is a tactical utility for scholars, especially in vulnerable untenured positions, to be able to grasp onto a term like acafan and highlight how prominent figures in our field like Henry & Alex embrace it - it helps situate ones work & identity within an area of study that has validity and legitimation. But what happens when a hiring or review committee asks "so what does that mean?" I think it's most useful and honest to be able to embrace labels not just for their pragmatic utility, but because they actually help explain what it is you do and how you do it.

As for the queer question, I get the parallel in terms of issues of visibility and categorical instability, but echoing John Edward Campbell's point that Gail cited, I fear that it might unintentionally belittle the huge power differentials between being a fan and being a sexual minority. The odds that someone would suffer tangible discrimination or violence for being a fan are so much less than for being queer, and the fandoms that would probably carry the greatest stigma are themselves already queered. In other words, nobody's going to care that I "outed" myself as a sysop for a Lost fan wiki, but a scholar who writes BDSM slash fanfic has legitimate reasons to keep that aspect of her fandom closeted - but I'd argue that's less because it's a fan activity than because it's a queer type of fandom. Might a strategic use of the term acafandom would help her by validating such activity within an established community? Perhaps, and if so, that's as good of a justification for the term as I could imagine - although my skepticism about the incoherence of the category remains.

Gail: Jason, you're such a hater! It's awesome - I like the "hater" position and use it very frequently myself (cf. Jonathan Gray's outstanding work on "anti-fans" and "non-fans"). You're a non-fan of the "acafan" term and an anti-fan of the potential for terms like "post-acafan" (!) and I respect that. I actually don't use the term "acafan" to refer to myself in any promotion review-type situation, or to define myself or my work to non-acafen, but I do *think* of myself as an acafan and I like that a term exists as a "tag" that other scholars use so that I can find them and their work and understand something about their methodologies and what their goals are.

"Acafan" works well for me as a kind of search term (though I've never typed that into Google) - if someone is called an "acafan" or refers to themselves using that term, even in passing, it's helpful for me to recognize them as someone whose work may have some relevance and importance to my own work.

But just going back to the lorax example quickly, I am also fine with other tags like "fan studies scholar," "scholar-fan," "fan theorist," "fan cultures scholar," etc. And that circle of terms can widen outward quickly to "cultural studies scholar," "media studies scholar," "digital culture theorist," "Amy Pond who studies online communities," etc. I just find terminology useful for a quick assessment of whether someone's essays or books or blog entries or LiveJournal posts or conference papers are worth time and attention - Are they working on projects that are of interest to me, or not? Are they using approaches and frameworks that I might want to learn about, or not?

But I do think that as the acafan approach gets to be more and more common, with new generations of scholars emerging for whom the question of whether or not they should declare their fandoms is not even a question, that the term may become specific to a time frame. "Some scholars and fans in the late 1990s and early 2000s, sensing commonalities and overlaps in their theoretical and critical work, used the term 'acafan' to define themselves. Today, it is well-known that everyone who studies media of any kind is a fan, a non-fan, or an anti-fan, and that anyone who thinks that passion and emotion are not integral to media criticism and analysis is an idiot." (from the Future Encyclopedia of Media Studies, copyright 2042).

I do hope, though, that if and when "acafan" goes away, that we who were acafen remember that academics and fans can and should talk to one another, that they/we are not that different from one another, that the "meta" done in fandoms and the "studies" done in academia are similar kinds of work. I am especially concerned here about fans' possible marginalization from future academic discussions, since academics have access to (some) institutional legitimacy and research funds that many fans do not.

Thank you both, Alex and Jason, for weighing in on whether "queer" can or mustn't be thought of as pertinent to "acafan." Both of you suggest that much acafan work can do, and is already doing, queer work - and so inspires discomfort and encounters disapprobation because of its queerness, not because of its acafanishness. To me, that means that it is useful to think about "acafan" and "queer" together, and to articulate their relationships, but that in any discussion of the two concepts together, it is crucial not to mistake the social positioning of one for the social positioning of the other.

Alex: Well it looks as if I am bringing up the rear (to coin a phrase). It seems as if where we are leaving "acafan" is understanding it as a concept that might have certain uses for academic fans if not for "civilian" fans (sorry, I was an Army brat) when it is used carefully and strategically--but that it may have a shelf life, so we shouldn't get too attached to it. I think that between and among them, our provocations and responses have compellingly suggested some of the potential benefits of using "acafan" as well as some of its limitations or problematic aspects.

Reading both of your follow-up comments on "acafandom" and/as "queer," I realized that I probably sounded a bit flippant in my last response on this. As a queer and an acafan--yes, I will hold onto that label for a while longer though I don't really need it to do what I do, even though I still think it helps explain what I do to some extent, although Jason is correct in suggesting that sometime you need to define "acafan" for people before talking about your specific acafan work-- I agree that while as concepts they can be interestingly compared to each other, this should not suggest that "open" acafans leave themselves open to anything like what "open" queers do--except, possibly, as Jason suggests, when the acafan/acafan work is itself queer.

I like Gail's encyclopedia entry for "acafan(dom)," especially the final sentiment, which is an interesting reversal of what many undergraduate students think: that analysis and criticism have no place in expressions of (their) fan enthusiasms. That is, they will no longer enjoy (or enjoy less) popular culture texts or personalities once they have certain (academic) critical and analytic tools. Hey, this might be something else the concept and products of acafandom are useful for--showing students that you can simultaneously think critically and emote when you watch a film, listen to a song, contemplate a celebrity, etc. etc. etc. A carefully selected acafan article or two--along with a general discussion of "acafan(dom)"--have done wonders in my undergraduate classes along these lines.

Abigail (Gail) De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a joint appointment in the Berkeley Center for New Media (http://bcnm-dev.berkeley.edu/) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (http://tdps.berkeley.edu/). Her current LJ userpics are: The Beatles, Don & Peggy, Starbuck & Apollo (Kara & Lee), Rogue, Blair Waldorf, Torvill & Dean, Lisbon & Jane, Tony & Pepper, Daniel & Betty, and Mal & Zoe. At this time, she's looking for a good Arya Stark icon.

Alexander Doty is Chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University and a Professor in this department and in the Department of Gender Studies. He has written Making Things Perfectly Queer and Flaming Classics, co-edited Out in Culture, and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas. An old fogey, he is currently not active in any web-based fan communities, but in the past he has been known to put his 2-cents up on broadwayworld.com, and to indulge the consumer side of his fandom by buying risque postcards of 1920s stars George O'Brien and Ramon Novarro on Ebay--and, yes, he will end up writing something on at least one of them in order to justify these purchases to his "aca" side.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College, and a Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen, Germany, for the 2011-12 academic year. As an aca, he's written Genre & Television (2004), Television & American Culture (2009), Complex TV (in process) and the blog Just TV (ongoing). As a fan, he's been active in the Lostpedia community, transforms Wilco songs for the mandolin, and calls his fantasy football team The Heisenberg Helmets.

Acafandom and Beyond: Alex Doty, Abigail De Kosnik, and Jason Mittell (Part One)

Alexander Doty: Reading through the posts, I realized that some of my earlier work is considered part of the pre-history of acafan(dom). It is not really self-reflexively working at the intersection of scholarship and fandom, but it gestures towards this space by making a case for lesbian and gay and queer reception of mainstream film and popular culture as an intense and conflicted "fannish" site for articulating marginalized identities and communities, as well as a site within which to challenge notions of (fixed) identity and (unified) community.

This early work suggests that LGQ film and popular culture enthusiasms were also almost always what might now be called acafan-like as they simultaneously negotiated pleasures while generating critiques from positions that were at once inside and outside the dominant culture that produced these film and media products. As the sometimes "gay," sometimes "queer," sometimes "femme," sometimes "butch" scholar and fan considering all this, I was also articulating an approach to film and popular culture that I hoped to deploy in my own writing.

Inspired by Robin Wood's "Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic," I wanted my academic work to more clearly and consistently reveal my "personal-is-the-political" gay/queer investments in film and popular culture. As I moved in this direction, I discovered that the addition of "gay" or "lesbian" or "queer" or "bisexual" to even legitimated academic approaches to film and popular culture--such as auteurism, genre studies, film history, etc.--resulted in this work often being considered unscholarly and unsubstantiated "wish fulfillment" or "fantasy. In effect, a gay reading of any film or TV show that didn't represent gay men in "obvious," denotative ways was a subcultural fan reading to many in the academy. Things are somewhat different now, though I find that the academy still frequently asks LGBTQ film and media acafans to go the extra mile in order to overcome resistance to what might be perceived of as doubly fannish positions.

I suppose I got so tired of attempting to inject aspects of the autobiographical (-as- political) into my scholarly writing only to have it rejected or patronized, that I returned to my English Department roots and hid behind close textual readings that were theoretically, culturally, and historically informed, but largely devoid of any obvious sense of personal investment or enthusiasm--unless you sensed it in the sometimes breathless and colorful prose stylings, or, read my first book's introduction. A (re)turning point for me involved Henry Jenkins and one of the other co-editors of Hop on Pop, Jane Shattuc, who said my lesbian reading of The Wizard of Oz was all well and good, but where was I in all this? That is, what brought this particular gay fan and queer academic to this particular lesbian understanding of the film?

Forced to fess up, I examined my personal and professional "archives" and discovered that a longtime sense of fluid gender and sexuality, combined with annual (or bi-annual) viewings of The Wizard of Oz since childhood, combined with teaching the film in various contexts, combined with lesbian feminism, combined with queer theory, combined with a particular drag performance I attended involving "Judy Garland" and lesbian fans, led me to see the film as a lesbian coming of age (if not coming out) story.

In short, my whole life had led me to that piece on The Wizard of Oz. Only by drawing together aspects of autobiography, fandom, pedagogy, and academic training could I express (and, for some, justify) my "queer reception" love for the film, while also recognizing its ideological lapses--largely centered on the butch Elmira Gulch/the Wicked Witch of the West, I might add.

So, while I have previously used the term "scholar-fan" to describe the kind work I do--or that I prefer to do--I am now ready to drop the hyphen that separates these two terms, take up "acafan," and deal with the tensions and negotiations that might arise from this hybrid term (though I did notice that Henry's blog does use the hyphenated "aca-fan" in its title--what gives Henry?). Yes, being and acafan and doing acafan work can be somewhat "elitist" as some have pointed out, but it can also be a site for meaningfully mingling the academy and "the streets." I know I never felt that my life was more consistently integrated than when the queer film/media scholarship and teaching I was doing as a post-doc at Cornell were being fed by actions I participated in as a member of ACT-UP and Queer Nation--and vice-versa. When is the next time that my Nancy Sinatra fandom will express itself as part of a City Hall protest done to the tune of "These Boots are Made For Walking," or when most of my students will be integrating their activist art and video-making into term projects that deploy "high theory" and cultural studies approaches to contextualize and analyze their work?

P.S. I apologize for this Me-centered opening statement. My plan was to go over all the posts before our groups' entries and cherry pick ideas with which to engage. But after landing on comments that positioned some folks in my academic cohort as the foremothers and forefathers of the acafan, I got nostalgic--and you got this aca-autobiographical opening statement. I hope you can forgive it as a form of Grandpa Simpson-like ramblings about the (not-always-so-good) old days. I will resist further Memory Lane wanderings in our subsequent conversation.

Abigail De Kosnik:

Firstly, I would like to say that I am an "acafan" of many of the participants in this wonderful debate (is that correct usage of the term?), and my enthusiasm for the work of Alexander Doty is one of the longest-lasting fandoms of my life. Alex's scholarship - the kinds of interventions that he describes in his "provocation" above - were key inspirations for me to seek out training in cultural studies, queer studies, and media studies, none of which were taught in any deep or concerted way when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1990s. Therefore, you can imagine my excitement at being assigned to his group! Along with Jason Mittell, whom I consider a friend and colleague, and whose work I also think of as foundational to my media studies training. What luck!

This is one of my favorite rewards of academia: sometimes the structures and operations and networks that academics create and operate (I am thinking of public performances of academic-ness such as conferences, symposia, and Henry's blog - Henry's blog being more consistently entertaining than the former two formats) put you (me) in direct contact with the objects of your (my) fandom. I mean, I remember the first time that Henry Jenkins saw me and remembered my name. I had introduced myself to Henry a couple of times at conferences to say that I was a graduate student who was a huge fan of his, but the first time Henry greeted me by name, I thought, My God, Henry Jenkins KNOWS WHO I AM.

Today, as an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, I actually *arrange* for fannish encounters with senior scholars on campus under the auspices of academic events. In other words, I totally "acafan" (I'm using that as a verb now) Linda Williams, Judith Butler, and others. I put myself into academic situations where these luminaries are basically forced to read my work and give me feedback. And after I have met another star in my constellation, I have this wonderful moment of "Wow. Judith Butler just gave me notes on my paper."

But you know, I contain my fannishness. I don't gush. Or I limit my gush to two sentences, when speaking to my academic idols, and when speaking to my colleagues about my academic idols. And in my scholarly writing, I also attempt to contain "the squee." In my scholarship, I try not to be too sycophantic to any one theorist, too beholden. My fandoms come across anyway. Everyone knows, after attending one of my seminars or just speaking to me about any of my fields, who "my people" are, whose work I draw upon the most. But I try (not always sure if I succeed, but I do try) to not write with a "fannish" voice, to not let my emotional investments and deeply felt affinities be the starting point of my analyses of cultural phenomena.

I am an acafan with a set of rules, applicable (as far as I am concerned) only to myself. My personal brand of acafandom is one that says, that even announces/proclaims, "I am a fan," but dispassionately. If a student or colleague or audience member at an academic conference wants to know about my fandoms, I will gladly list them, an entire litany. I have many, many fandoms, of every media format and nearly every historical period and many geographical regions. I will talk films if you want to talk films, I will talk astrolabes if you want to talk astrolabes, I will talk Atari or medieval bestiaries or printings of The Communist Manifesto. My fandoms are innumerable, and I am happy to discuss them. But - at an academic event, or in an academic context - I will speak of my fandoms not from the perspective of a fan, but from the perspective of an academic.

That doesn't mean that the "academic I" aims to appear devoid of passion, but she (the "academic I") does aim to appear to be somewhat Spock-like: the rational is what meets you right away, up front; the emotional is there, but buried deep. Spock's emotions inform his decisions but he tries not to get lost in them, and keeps them out of others' sight as much as he is able. The feeling, the affective power, of my fandom, fuels all of my academic work - I could not bear to delve deeply enough into any given topic or text without a kind of fannish devotion to, obsession with, it - but I try to keep the knowledge, the information, the analysis, up front, and leave the feeling out, for the most part.

In other words, I conceive of "acafan" as a term that designates a certain professionalism, a certain demeanor (a "seeming") of critical distance, a certain coolness and calmness in discussing all the many facets and valences of fandom. This does not mean denying, covering, or burying my personal fannish affinities - for those affinities are fact, they exist, and I will gladly state them at every turn - rather, I am speaking here of performance, of attitude, of tone. I think of myself as an "acafan" insofar as I say, everywhere I go, "I am a fan," but in Vulcan rather than Klingon.

Why my emphasis on tone, attitude, performance? Not only because I am housed in Berkeley's (Theater, Dance and) Performance Studies Department, but also because frankly, an even tone is what makes it possible for academics to communicate with one another. Keeping open channels of communication - keeping one's listeners and readers receptive - is so crucial when one is speaking or writing about topics that might be balked at as ridiculous, marginal, or unworthy of academic study. I have taken on this concept of "acafan" for myself completely because of my straddling a number of disciplinary fields, and almost never being a total "insider" to any one academic field. As a media studies person, I am an outsider to performance studies; as a Marxist cultural studies person, I am an outsider to new media studies; and so on. My experience in academia, traveling across many disciplinary borders and constantly visiting academic territories that are more or less foreign territories, has taught me that, if I want to talk about fandom, if I want to talk about texts and topics that are (still) somewhat unsettling to my audiences, that I must at least sound like "one of them" - like "one of us" - which is to say, I must sound/seem/perform like "an academic."

Once again, this does not mean that I am advocating a shift away from the personalization of theoretical, scholarly writing, in which Alex was a pioneer. In fact, Alex's work is a fantastic example of how fannish writing can be deeply serious academic work, and be taken seriously, received as significant and meaningful. I also have an essay coming out soon in an anthology (edited by Bill Aspray and Megan Winget of UT-Austin's School of Information) advocating that, in the digital age, we need more humanities writing that is theoretical and highly personal at the same time - the essay is called "Personal Theory" - because most of our students are learning most of what they know in media (social media/online communication) that emphasizes first-person perspective, that applies the "I" as a lens to almost every subject matter.

I am only sharing my personal incorporation of the subject position of "acafan" in my life, which is to be openly a fan, writing plentifully about fandom, and presenting myself and my work with the most professional affect I can muster. If this reinstates or simply reinforces the old equivalences between fan and irrationality and overemotionalism, and the opposition of fan and academic, and the equivalences between academic and rationality and distance, well then, I suppose I still live in this world, and must do my best to navigate and negotiate it. But if I try not to "seem" a fan when I speak or write in an academic forum, I do aim to argue for fans and fandom - not for their inherent goodness or creativity, but for their interestingness, for their value, for their importance.

Funny, these arguments are of the same bent as the arguments I am currently making for academics in the humanities: they are interesting, they have value, they are important. Fans are not nothing; they are so many things, they are significant. Same with humanities scholars. And as Karen Hellekson said so well earlier in this conversation, academics are nothing if not fans. So ironically, though I really believe that academics and fans are the same, they do not seem the same. Performing "fan" is (still, still) so so different than performing "academic."

But you should see me when I get home. Or when I am on LiveJournal. Or when I am in a mostly- or all-fan space (online or f2f). In those sites, I squee and squee.

Jason Mittell:

I should begin my "provocation" about the concept of acafandom with a caveat that I don't feel particularly provoked or provocative about this topic. I do have a take on the debate, but don't feel like I have much of a stake in it. While I certainly align myself with both of the categories fused in acafan, I don't feel like the term speaks to or about me.

Instead, I find myself looking on this debate as an outsider, asking pragmatic questions about the terminology and semantic politics: Who uses this term beyond the people participating in this discussion? Does this term do something useful that other more established labels do not? And what would be lost without it? And I'm left with the answers "not sure", "not really", and "not much".

The parallel that comes to mind is the term "postmodern," a label with much broader academic currency than acafan but that similarly leaves me feeling ambivalent. While most humanists for the past twenty years have probably spent time immersed in various theories of postmodernity, postmodernism, and postmodern conditions, I'm not sure to what end. That's not to say that great work has not been done under the rubric of postmodernism - it certainly has - but now that it is less liberally applied to every example of contemporary theory or culture, I'm left thinking that the term has probably done more harm than good (except perhaps to the major academic presses in cultural studies, who certainly boosted sales through the strategically applied use of "postmodern" in book titles).

Because there was no academic consensus on what "postmodern" meant (by design, I believe), the label obscured rather than illuminated, marking academic work as "cutting edge" without hinting on what was being cut or doing the cutting. Looking back on seminal scholarship focused on various flavors of postmodernism, I think we could eliminate the fuzzy label and strengthen our understanding of the core arguments and analyses without losing much of intellectual value.

I'd argue the same is true about acafandom. While that term will certainly never have the transdisciplinary currency of postmodernism, I do feel like the time spent debating what it means, what it does, who it includes (and excludes), and why it matters could be better spent doing the scholarly work that each of think matters most. And while that work may very well explore the intersecting identities and practices of academia and fandom, I do not think labeling it acafan research helps situate it in a larger conversation or subfield in a productive way. Instead, I'd contend that avoiding using a term that means such different things to so many of us would allow our arguments and ideas to speak for themselves, rather than being labeled in a way that can be easily dismissed or marginalized (or kneejerk embraced since the author is "part of the club").

So my ultimate provocation, to which I welcome debate: we should not hide our investments in the structures and identities of either academia or fandom, but we shouldn't hang our identities on a such a slippery signifier as "acafan."

Abigail (Gail) De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has a joint appointment in the Berkeley Center for New Media (http://bcnm-dev.berkeley.edu/) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (http://tdps.berkeley.edu/). Her current LJ userpics are: The Beatles, Don & Peggy, Starbuck & Apollo (Kara & Lee), Rogue, Blair Waldorf, Torvill & Dean, Lisbon & Jane, Tony & Pepper, Daniel & Betty, and Mal & Zoe. At this time, she's looking for a good Arya Stark icon.

Alexander Doty is Chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University and a Professor in this department and in the Department of Gender Studies. He has written Making Things Perfectly Queer and Flaming Classics, co-edited Out in Culture, and edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas. An old fogey, he is currently not active in any web-based fan communities, but in the past he has been known to put his 2-cents up on broadwayworld.com, and to indulge the consumer side of his fandom by buying risque postcards of 1920s stars George O'Brien and Ramon Novarro on Ebay--and, yes, he will end up writing something on at least one of them in order to justify these purchases to his "aca" side.

Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College, and a Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at the University of Göttingen, Germany, for the 2011-12 academic year. As an aca, he's written Genre & Television (2004), Television & American Culture (2009), Complex TV (in process) and the blog Just TV (ongoing). As a fan, he's been active in the Lostpedia community, transforms Wilco songs for the mandolin, and calls his fantasy football team The Heisenberg Helmets.

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Rhianon Bury and Matt Yockey (Part Two)

Matt Yockey: Rhiannon, I very much enjoyed reading your thoughtful post, especially since you come to this topic from a very different background than I do. You say that earlier in your academic career you identified as a feminist but also say that you don't consider yourself an acafan because you resist labels. Assuming that you still identify as a feminist, this suggests that in academia we remain very much invested in labels that carry a certain cache, diminishing the potential value of other labels.

Yes, any label will to some degree homogenize but they remain a necessary mode of understanding ourselves and engaging with the world (and certainly "feminism" as a label has had a long history of homogenizing and excluding). And this is not pick on feminism, as I identify as a feminist. I don't see this identification as allowing me a certain privileged position with women, any more than being queer-friendly allows me to fully affectively understand the experience of being queer. But both labels define who I am, both inside and outside of academia. So the label is important to me as a means of overcoming the schisms produced by the public/private divide

Love the Shatner SNL reference. I remember laughing hysterically with my Trekkie friend Mike in college when that first aired. It allowed some easy disavowal but also identification. For me, since then, I've grown increasingly invested in making meaning out of and between the things that move me, which have always been good ideas, whether they come in the form of a smart science fiction film or a really good cultural theory book.

All the various labels indicate the composite nature of my larger understanding of self, which is always in conversation with a larger public sphere. That hybridity of self is very important to acknowledge, I think, because it helps us engage with the complexities and contradictions of other individuals and the public sphere.

Rhiannon Bury:

Good on you Matt for calling me out on my own contradictory use of labels, specifically my troubling of 'acafan' just after my seemingly straightforward embrace of 'feminist'. Of course the latter has been questioned, challenged and critiqued since the early 1990s by anti-racist and postmodern and postcolonial scholars for privileging the issues and experiences of white, western, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied women. And yet while I recognize the importance of an intersectional analysis and the incommensurable differences among women, the identification of feminist' is still meaningful and necessary to me at a time when women's rights are being continuously eroded by neoliberal and globalization agendas.

I found compelling your honest discussion of academic work and affect. (I am a Buffy fan but fear not; I do not hold your dislike of the series against you!) Affect is a dirty word in the academy, with pressure continuing to be exerted on those who study popular texts and fans regardless of whether they label themselves acafans or not. I recall one (former) colleague's facial expression change from puzzlement to relief when I answered his inquiry about whether I wrote fan fiction in the negative. Yet to be a writer in an English Department is a creative pursuit that is highly valued.

If I am totally honest, I distance myself, in part, with the acafan identification because of my desire to be taken seriously not only by my direct colleagues but by the feminist scholarly community where the study of female fan communities seems rather trivial when measured up against the more "pressing" issues of violence against women or other oppressions and resistances.

Matt Yockey:

I agree that in many circles within academia, the kinds of study scholars such as you and I engage is placed at the margins, making for a oftentimes uncomfortable sense of our own value as academics. I too have sometimes felt the need to somehow gloss over what exactly it is that I study. I have taken this up as a challenge to more explicitly engage with the political capacity of fandom in my work (for example,

considering the progressive interventions made by fans via their fan object - a recent piece I did looks at fans' use of Wonder Woman as a vehicle for supporting womens' shelters and for promoting gay rights). Perhaps the old saw, 'the personal is the political' is ultimately what I'm on about here but I think the notion has real value in considering why I am affectively and professionally invested in fandom.

Rhiannon Bury:

It is interesting how we adjust our rationales depending on the discipline. With colleagues in English, it is a matter of demonstrating that we have not lost our "objectivity" and our ability to distinguish "quality" texts from "popular" texts. In feminist, Marxist and/or or queer scholarly communities we justify our work, consciously or not, by emphasizing its political relevance-- in your case the progressiveness of Wonder Woman fans and in one of mine, the heterosexism and homophobia of Six Feet Under fans.

Matt Yockey:

The essential liminality of the acafan label works for me because of this need (and desire) to exercise mobile identity formations. But those moments in which the aca and the fan more directly intersect (as at the recent conference where I presented my work on Wonder Woman) are the most affectively satisfying. I only wish I had those moments when I am engaged with a non-academic fan community. In those situations I often feel that underlying suspicion and hostility that others have commented on here. I suppose that utopia I was speaking of would be characterized strongly by a real dissolution of that wall between academics and non-academics.

Rhiannon Bury:

You draw an interesting connection between your fandom and utopian ideals. I have never thought of fan spaces in this way as a fan and/ or as a scholar. In Cyberspaces of Their Own, I conceptualized female fan spaces as potentially heterotopic. Foucault specifically states that the heterotopia is not a utopia but a space of inversion or reversal of normative spaces.

Matt Yockey:

Foucault's notion of the heterotopia works for me but really as a means of thinking about the processes of utopian desire, as opposed to utopian plans. I think that this desire is instrumental to the affect of a lot of fandom, the process of becoming someone better while acknowledging that such a project can never be completed and is suffused with contradiction. In this way I certainly see the value of considering fan spaces and fan subjectivity as, at their best, working out the meaning of and working toward a notion of the utopian. It is this which gives me a sense of home, in that it is a space that allows me the freedoms to be a fully contradictory, ever-striving person.

Rhiannon Bury:

Interesting. When I think about it, I did feel "at home" with members of the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades who joined the listserv I set up for my first ethnographic case study. As one of the participants noted, it was like "hanging around someone's kitchen shooting the breeze." So this home was a very much a domestic, gendered space.

I would like to go back to the earlier comment you made about the parallels between academic communities and fan communities. I'd go a step further and say that scholarly communities are the ultimate fan communities, with deep emotional investments in their particular objects of study that are hidden under the veneer of objectivity. While I do not study the fan practices that surround every text that I am a fan of, it is unlikely that I would study those surrounding texts in which I have no interest or actively dislike. For instance, I think the study of reality tv is important on an intellectual level in terms of the representations and performances of race, class and gender as well as the pleasures it produces. When I was in a Communications Department, I would never dream of not including a discussion of it in a television or media class. But like you said Matt, my heart is really not in it enough to pursue anything further.

Matt Yockey:

I couldn't agree more regarding scholarly communities as fan communities. I find it difficult to understand the desire to study a text if one does not already have some degree of appreciation for it. I do think we get too hung up in academia being apologetic about actually having an emotional investment in what we study. For me it simply carries over into my affective investment in teaching and when I teach I'm not really being objective at all - I think the media texts that we study in my classes all matter because representation matters and we should care about their consequences.

Rhiannon Bury is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently analyzing survey and interview data collected for her current research project, Television 2.0: Shifting Patterns of Audience Reception and Participatory Culture. Updates coming soon via www.twitter.com/television2pt0.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Toledo. He has published articles in Transformative Works and Cultures, The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, CineAction, and The Velvet Light Trap. His book on the Batman TV series is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Rhianon Bury and Matt Yockey (Part One)

Rhiannon Bury: It has been a bit of a challenge putting together this "provocation" in the final weeks of the Acafan and Beyond debate. I hope I have succeeded in responding to the original set of questions without covering too much of the same ground as earlier posts. Let me start by saying that I really am an accidental fan studies scholar. As late as 1995, when I was doing my PhD in Education with a focus on Cultural Studies, I was still heavily invested in the high/low culture binary. I whole heartedly agreed with William Shatner's "get a life" cri de coeur to fans. I identified strongly as a feminist so my "discovery" of the three David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades (DDEBs) while surfing the web for X-Files information and subsequent engagement with some of the members forced me to interrogate and reevaluate my elitist attitudes. Sixteen years later and an academic career made possible by the kindness and generosity of participatory fans, I do not consider myself an acafan or even a fan-scholar (overlapping but not interchangeable terms).

My reservation is in part a discontent with labels and their effects. As others have already remarked, they serve to homogenize the heterogenous, to constrain and erase difference and to draw boundaries that mark out who is an insider and who is an outsider. To be fair, "acafan" gestures openly to its hybridity and instability as a category but as the discussion over the weeks has made clear, it has historical linkages to a particular set of fan practices that involves the production of secondary texts such as fanfic or vids. Despite fannish interests in a number of primary texts and a number of professional and personal relationships with fanfic writers and vidders, my highest level of non-academic participatory engagement has been reading and posting a few comments on Television Without Pity for Battlestar Galactica (reimagined) and Dexter. As much as I like the idea of making a vid, I just don't have the creative commitment to follow through.

Drawing on queer studies and activist discourses while recognizing the dangers in doing so, I am mulling over another term that might be a better fit for me and perhaps others: fan-ally and, by extension, an acafan-ally. As previous contributions to the debate have indicated, being an acafan may be a fraught, complicated, even contradictory identification but its legibility and legitimacy must ultimately be determined by those who articulate it. I suspect a good number of those who identify as acafans are also on the margins of academia-- as women, as students, and/or as contingent, independent or untenured scholars. "Objective" criticisms and dismissals from those who do not identify as acafans but hold positions of authority can have a silencing effect, even if unintentional.

The other issue I wish to touch on is the issue of self-defined acafans "sitting too close" (Jenkins, 1993). I agree to a point with Nancy Baym's statement that the inability of acafans to distance themselves critically "is a failure of their academic training, not of their being fans." Part of this "failure" may be attributable to graduate degrees in the humanites not the social sciences. I had an MA in CompLit and was fortunate to have had a linguistic anthropologist on my thesis committee in addition to taking a qualitative methods course as part of my doctoral coursework.

Working out of a critical paradigm, I strongly believe that the location of the researcher, not just training, affects knowledge production. Being an insider both enables and disables certain forms of knowledge production. The same is true for the outsider. Researchers who put themselves in the frame of the research are not being subjective; they are being responsible knowledge producers.

Matt Yockey:

Responding to these provocations has proven much more challenging than I originally anticipated, perhaps in large part because it requires the kind of candor and reflexivity I've tried to dodge in my own work on texts of which I am a fan. The problem for me is my own struggle with identifying as a fan, as if this some sort of monolithic construct. For similar reasons I've often resisted the label of academic. The acafan label limits my identity as an academic (I do more than study texts of which I would consider myself a fan) and as a fan (I don't perform academic analyses of many objects of my fandom, such as the Red Sox, Robyn Hitchcock, or The Rockford Files). Curiously, however, the designation acafan has both emphasized my ambivalence regarding such labels and reconciled some of the problems I've had with them.

I don't explicitly identify as an acafan but the term is important to my sense of self; I keep it as a reminder of my own (perceived) liminality. Yet it also allows me access to certain communities when I choose to, or need to, use it for such a purpose. This was brought home to me by a recent trip to Australia. My trip was purely academic in purpose: I researched a comic book archive at the National Library and presented a paper on Wonder Woman fandom at a conference on the female superhero at a university in Melbourne. In the first instance I found a perfect commingling of my academic and fan selves, as I not only found valuable research information but quickly bonded as a fan with some of the staff members who enthusiastically brought out box after box of comic books and volunteered their own fannish interests to me.

I found a similar rapport at times with my fellow attendees of the conference, where the term "acafan" was never spoken but was certainly realized on every panel about Xena, Buffy, the Powerpuff Girls, etc. As with any conference, I found that my level of engagement with the presentations waxed and waned according to whether the paper was intellectually engaging and/or the topic was of general interest to me. For example, when panelists presented papers on Buffy, I listened attentively (and even took notes and asked questions), but my heart wasn't really in it because I actively dislike that show (and by admitting this, I know I've now alienated 75% of the academics reading this).

The trip confirmed for me why I am both an academic and a fan: because in academia and fandom I can engage with a community that confirms my own sense of self and legitimates my own utopian desires. I suppose the academic side of equation simply intellectualizes the affective fan side of it, for I'm compelled to turn to theorists to explain myself. Cornel Sandvoss, in particular, comes to mind when he writes in Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: "Fandom best compares to the emotional significance of the places we have grown to call 'home', to the form of physical, emotional and ideological space that is best described as Heimat" (64).

Sandvoss argues that the fan sense of Heimat as fluid is different from the traditional understanding of home as a stable signifier. I would argue that what attracts me to academia is its potential (much less often realized than in fandom) to confirm a sense of Heimat through an individual, affective response to a text (in the case of the academic, an object of study and/or the theory applied to an analysis of such an object).

I say less often realized because in the "acafan" equation, the academic side is the one that I most frequently find wanting. Academia is as suffused with its own coded jargon, internal hierarchies, and privileged texts as the most pathologized fan community. In fact, I use my fandom to more comfortably take on the role of academic. And I am an acafan because I believe that, at its best, my affiliation with an academic community offers as much potential for utopian transcendence as the fan communities with which I identify.

The (ideally) perpetual intellectual pursuits of academia mirror the ongoing, transformative engagements fans make with texts. Both are motivated (at least for me) by the utopian pursuit of Heimat, an affirmation of my identity through a group affiliation. And Heimat is mobile because I am always searching for the utopian ideal away from home and only by separating myself from home can I then re-imagine home as potentially utopian. It's my own fort/da game with self located within the fluid structures of academia and fandom. The term acafan has allowed me to bridge the gaps produced within this dynamic and be more comfortable in my own skin(s).

Rhiannon Bury is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Athabasca University, Canada's Open University. Her book, Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online was published by Peter Lang in 2005. She is currently analyzing survey and interview data collected for her current research project, Television 2.0: Shifting Patterns of Audience Reception and Participatory Culture. Updates coming soon via www.twitter.com/television2pt0.

Matt Yockey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Toledo. He has published articles in Transformative Works and Cultures, The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, CineAction, and The Velvet Light Trap. His book on the Batman TV series is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press.

How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical Artifact"?: USC's Mark Marino on Critical Code Studies (Part Two)


What do you see as the relationship between critical code studies and platform studies as approaches to understanding digital artifacts?

These approaches are tightly intertwined. On the one hand, you can talk about code independent of platform. That happens in computer science classes all the time. However, if you take the example of a forthcoming book project, you will see how platform plays a key role or rather how the code can point to an understanding of the platform. Over the past year, I have been working on a book under contract with MIT to analyze a single line of code, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. This line of code generates an image that resembles a maze. I should say, rather, that the code generates this image when executed on a Commodore 64 because in addition to using BASIC, which came installed on C64s, it also uses a custom set of ASCII code called PETSCII, which included two characters (2 diagonal lines), to create this image. Our exploration of this code, then, has led us to discuss the platform and its context. So to talk about the code is not to exclude a discussion of the platform, hardware, or larger systems, but rather to use the code as the central axis.

Currently, the various approaches to digital objects are associated with specific critics, projects, and publishing series. As a result, "Software Studies" and "Platform Studies" will be defined by the kinds of things these critics publish, the kinds of readings they perform, and their own theoretical predilections. Comparing these first readings could skew the way the approaches are perceived. Taking the long view, I believe these terms will eventually become abstracted from the readings of those particular critics and will become part of rich assemblages of approaches to digital objects that look at the software, at the platform, at the hardware, and, of course, at the code.


What has been the response of programmers to the kinds of work you are doing?

Many of the people who do CCS readings are programmers, so I would say on the whole it has been very positive. You know, there are a lot of misconceptions about what humanities people do, particularly regarding interpretation. When I first began suggesting this idea to professional programmers some voiced skepticism because they thought I was advocating treating their code like poetry. They doubted such a study would yield very much. Once I explained that I was interested in, for example, why programmers chose one programming paradigm over another, their process of writing the code, or even why they were laughing when I would show them some code written by someone else, what was the joke - they started to get more of a sense of what I was after. Once we reach that understanding, they typically offer their own critical observations, reflections they've formulated but haven't had an opportunity to discuss.


You've written, "The distance between the Haiku and the can of Coca Cola as texts marks the shift between the study of artistry and the broader study of signification." So, what does it mean to study code as a kind of "signification"?

Code is a medium of communication, and like other communication substrates, its meaning is not restricted to what its author intended. The way someone writes a line of code, the language they choose, the programming architecture and paradigm, the code they borrow, the libraries they use - all these factors produce meaning in code. That is when code is taken as a sign system with its own material conditions.

At the 2011 CCS Symposium, UCLA Computer Science professor Todd Millstein explained that computer scientists already see code as an aspect of a program that is meant primarily for human readers. It is not, then, heresy to say that code is written for other people to read. By extension, once it is circulated, its meaning expands and changes depending on who is doing the readings. Jeremy Douglass gave a terrific demonstration of this in the second week of the Critical Code Studies Working Group (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/recoded), when he showed how two opposing sides of the Climate debate used the source code associated with Climategate to support conflicting points of view.

Code is a semiotic medium. It has rhetoric, style, art. It is a sign of a process and is in-process in terms of its own development. It circulates within discourse realms. It also bears marks of its authorship, signs of communal affiliation, remnants of its history, and notes and stubs for future development. Code has a special relation to the computational system in which it circulates. To make a legitimate utterance with code, one must comply with and conform to many restrictions that do not exist in, say, spoken language. Moreover, code is typically part of a chain of command, a layer of information represented in a form more easy for humans to read than machine language and binary (though my electrical engineering wife does tell binary jokes). Yet, as Wendy Chun has observed, source code is not the same as the executed code.

To explore the significance of code, though, as you suggested, is not merely to look at what it says but to delve deeply into what it does and how it does it. While the signs themselves can produce meaning, for example in their relationship to natural language constructs (Print, function, if, then, void) as well as in comments and variable names, by constituting the algorithms of the program, the code also represents the logic of the program. Here too lies significance in a way analogous to but not exactly like other sign systems. Discovering the particularities of how code signifies is one of the chief challenges of CCS.

What kinds of work do you see your center contributing to the growth of Critical Code Studies?

The HaCCS Lab has two chief goals: to develop and promote the methodologies of Critical Code Studies and to foster dialogue between computer science and humanities scholars. This summer we hosted our first conference and have several events planned for the coming academic year geared toward bringing a diverse array of scholars together. Also, in the Spring, we plan to host another online forum, the third in three years. More importantly, the lab will serve as a hub for scholars interested in working on CCS, a source for news on the latest publications, and perhaps even a venue for provocations in the current debates surrounding code. We are currently investigating publication venues and are examining opportunities to create new courses and to offer workshops for those interested in joining our broader research community.

Mark Marino is the Director of the newly launched Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at USC, named for a field he initiated in 2006. He is the Director of Communication for the Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org), as well as a writer and critic of experimental interactive forms, including "a show of hands" (http://hands.literatronica.net) and the LA Flood Project. He blogs at Writer Response Theory and is Editor of Bunk Magazine, an online humor zine. He currently teaches for the Writing Program at USC. He is currently working on two collaborative book projects using CCS methodologies. His portfolio can be found here.

How Can We Understand Code as a "Critical Artifact"?: USC's Mark Marino on Critical Code Studies (Part One)

The Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab opened this summer at the University of Southern California with the specific goal of developing the field and fostering discussion between the Humanities and Computer Science. Current members include USC faculty and students and a host of affiliated scholars from other institutions, including and international advisory board. The HaCCS Lab sponsored its first conference this summer and will be sponsoring other get togethers both on campus and online. Central to its mission is to develop common vocabularies, methodologies, and case-studies of CCS, while promoting publications in the field. Mark Marino, who teaches in the USC Writing Program, is the Director of the new center. He was nice enough to agree to an interview during which he explains what he means by Critical Code Studies, how it relates to other humanistic approaches to studying digital culture, and what he thinks it contributes to our understanding of Code as a cultural practice and as a critical artifact.


What do you mean by critical code studies?

The working definition for Critical Code Studies (CCS) is "the application of humanities style hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer source code."  However, lately, I have found it more useful to explain the field to people as the analysis of technoculture (culture as imbricated with technology) through the entry point of the source code of a particular digital object. The code is not the ends of the analyses, but the beginning.

Critical Code Studies finds code meaningful not as text but "as a text," an artifact of a digital moment, full of hooks for discussing digital culture and programming communities. I should note that Critical Code Studies also looks at code separated from functioning software as in the case of some codework poetry, such as Mez's work or Zach Blas' trasnCoder anti-programming language. To that extent, Critical Code Studies is also interested in the culture of code, the art of code, and code in culture more broadly.

At this nascent stage, I also find it useful to point out the plurality and variability of the methodologies that have been already used to analyze code whether in the Critical Code Studies Working Group, at our two conferences, in the HASTAC Scholars Forum, at MLA, and elsewhere. These preliminary readings demonstrate that Critical Code Studies is not an approach but a wide range of approaches that use code as a starting point for a larger discussion. Scholars seem eager to talk about code and are experimenting with ways to unpack it.

Critical Code Studies answers a call from N. Katherine Hayles and others for media specific analysis by taking up for analysis an aspect of digital objects that is unique to the computational realm. Back in 2005 and 2006 when I first began talking to people about code, there weren't many examples of critics, working then under the title "new media," who discussed code, which struck me as unusual since it's such a rich semiotic realm. There just weren't enough critical readings that demonstrated for how to talk about that component of the work. At the time, I was working on my dissertation and was trying to produce readings of conversation agents, or chatbots. That led me to write that initial essay in electronic book review.

For my work, the "critical" component is also crucial because it evokes "critical theory." I don't want to limit the types of theory or philosophy that can be applied to code, but I do want to push for critiques that challenge, that remain sensitive to the socio-historic contexts of the code, the institutional investments, the ideologies and ontologies of code. Code is already studied in the contexts of computer science, while the humanities have something unique to offer in the form of critical analysis and explication or, if you will, exegesis.


Your published definition of the field stresses the "extra-functional significance" of code. Why separate out meaning from effect? Why not study the relationship between significance and function?

The "extra" in "extra-functional" does not mean "outside of" or "beyond" but rather "growing out from."  Function is certainly an important component of the way code signifies, but it is important to distinguish CCS from the study of code that concentrates primarily on function.  Perhaps more important to this moment of CCS is to discuss the difference between an interpretive approach that seeks implications and meaning rather than a utilitarian approach that is primarily concerned with making code function. Again, while I agree with you that the two aspects are inseparable, the search for meaning goes beyond denotation into the connotations, resonance, implication, evocation, et cetera.

 
How much technical skill and knowledge is required to look at code critically?  Is this a potential space for collaboration between the humanities and the technical fields?

It is the contention of CCS and the newly formed Humanities and Critical Code Studies lab that everyone should have at least some literacy in how code works, whether at a base-level understanding of algorithms, some basic knowledge of programming principals, and/or a basic ability to parse code in whatever language.  That said, the HaCCS lab is working to foster dialogue and collaboration between the Humanities and Computer Science scholars because more engaged critical readings come from the fullest understanding of the culture out of which that code emanates.  Without that dialogue, CCS could become a kind of imperialist project, subject to the same kinds of over-writing, misinterpretation, and misreading that such relationships engender.

In my own readings, I tend to engage in lengthy discussions with programmers, including the authors of the code, so that I can get a more nuanced understanding of how they perceive the code. Again, part of what I'm after are the layers of meaning that code has as it circulates through different discourse communities in different contexts. I look forward to courses in Critical Code Studies co-taught by Humanities and Computer Science faculty to students from across the university looking at code together using the lenses from all their disciplines.

At the same time, CCS tends to attract the programmer-scholar, the hacker-theorist, critics who build things. Being versant in both programming and critical theory helps these critics to apply the theoretical approaches without doing violence or overwriting the ways in which coding conventions are understood within programming circles.

Is the goal to develop an "aesthetics" of "good code"? Is critical code studies a kind of formalism?

No, Critical Code Studies is not primarily focused on "good code," although the discussions of the aesthetics of code or Don Knuth's formulation of  "beautiful code" offer an opening for a conversation that will be familiar to Humanities scholars, namely who defines the aesthetics of beautiful code, why have they chosen this criteria, and what alternatives have been surpassed.  Such discussions often turn to programming anomalies such as the obfuscated code contests. Nonetheless, the discussion of aesthetics makes a fundamental notion of CCS clear: code is not a pure, inevitable formulation.  As Knuth said in his Turing Award lecture, programming is an art. 

As to the second question, Critical Code Studies is not formalist, but instead requires a deeply contextualized reading.  On one of the earliest pages we published on CriticalCodeStudies.com, you will find a list of ways to read code that includes reading code against the factors of its creation, it funding source, its composer's work, its implementation and circulation in cultural as well as material contexts such as the platforms on which it operated, and the other code with which it interacts.    Critical Code Studies focuses on examining the code in its historical moment to better understand the culture out of which it developed. 

Bio:

Mark Marino is the Director of the newly launched Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at USC, named for a field he initiated in 2006. He is the Director of Communication for the Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org), as well as a writer and critic of experimental interactive forms, including "a show of hands" (http://hands.literatronica.net) and the LA Flood Project. He blogs at Writer Response Theory and is Editor of Bunk Magazine, an online humor zine. He currently teaches for the Writing Program at USC. He is currently working on two collaborative book projects using CCS methodologies. His portfolio can be found here.

Announcing Futures of Entertainment 5 Conference

Registration Open for Futures of Entertainment 5 By Sam Ford

We're excited to announce that registration has officially opened for our fifth Futures of Entertainment conference, which will begin on 11/11/11. The conference--which will run Nov. 11-12--will be held at the Kirsch Auditorium on the first floor of the Frank Gehry-designed Ray and Maria Stata Center on the campus of MIT in Cambridge, MA.

Full details on the line-up as it stands is below. Registration is available here. Please keep in mind that seats are limited, so--if you plan to attend--register soon.

The Futures of Entertainment conference brings together professionals from academia and the marketing and media industries to discuss how communication between media producers/brands and audiences are changing, and how the nature of storytelling is shifting in a digital era.

On Friday, we will tackle some of the pressing questions and new innovations on the media horizon: new models of media creation and distribution--and challenges/questions related to participation--in a "spreadable media" landscape; new models aimed at representing fan interests in media production; innovations in crowdsourcing for content creation, funding, and distribution; the impact of location-based technologies and services; and privacy concerns raised by these developments. On Saturday, we will look at particular media industries to how these innovations are evolving: serialized storytelling; children's media; nonfiction storytelling; and music.

The conference will run from 8:30 a.m. until 6:45 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, with a reception scheduled for Friday evening.

On Thursday evening, Nov. 10th, from 5-7, MIT will be hosting an "eve of FoE" Communications Forum event on "Cities and the Future of Entertainment" in the Bartos Theater in MIT's Wiesner Building.

Cities and the Future of Entertainment. Today, new entertainment production cultures are arising around key cities like Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. What do these changes mean for the international flow of media content? And how does the nature of these cities help shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation allow people to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these trends co-exist? And what does it mean for the futures of entertainment?

• Moderator: Maurício Mota (The Alchemists)
• Panelists: Parmesh Shahani (Godrej Industries, India)
• Ernie Wilson (University of Southern California)
• Eduardo Paes (Mayor of Rio de Janeiro)

FRIDAY:

Introduction:

• William Uricchio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Ilya Vedrashko (Hill Holliday)

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society. How are the shifting relations between media producers and their audiences transforming the concept of meaningful participation? And how do alternative systems for the circulation of media texts pave the way for new production modes, alternative genres of content, and new relationships between producers and audiences? Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green--co-authors of the forthcoming book Spreadable Media--share recent experiments from independent filmmakers, video game designers, comic book creators, and artists and discuss the promises and challenges of models for deeper audience participation with the media industries, setting the stage for the issues covered by the conference.

Speakers:

• Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California)
• Sam Ford (Peppercom Strategic Communications)
• Joshua Green (Undercurrent)

Collaboration? Emerging Models for Audiences to Participate in Entertainment Decision-Making. In an era where fans are lobbying advertisers to keep their favorite shows from being cancelled, advertisers are shunning networks to protest on the fans' behalf and content creators are launching web ventures in conversation with their audiences, there appears to be more opportunity than ever for closer collaboration between content creators and their most ardent fans. What models are being attempted as a way forward, and what can we learn from them? And what challenges exist in pursuing that participation for fans and for creators alike?

• Moderator: Sheila Seles (Advertising Research Foundation)
• Panelists: C. Lee Harrington (Miami University)
• Seung Bak (Dramafever)
• Jamin Warren (Kill Screen)

Creating with the Crowd: Crowdsourcing for Funding, Producing and Circulating Media Content. Beyond the buzzword and gimmicks using the concept, crowdsourcing is emerging as a new way in which creators are funding media production, inviting audiences into the creation process and exploring new and innovative means of circulating media content. What are some of the innovative projects forging new paths forward, and what can be learned from them? How are attempts at crowdsourcing creating richer media content and greater ownership for fans? And what are the barriers and risks ahead for making these models more prevalent?

• Moderator: Ana Domb (Almabrands, Chile)
• Panelists: Mirko Schafer (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
• Bruno Natal (Queremos, Brazil)
• Timo Vuorensola (Wreckamovie, Finland)
• Caitlin Boyle (Film Sprout)

Here We Are Now (Entertain Us): Location, Mobile, and How Data Tells Stories. Location-based services and context-aware technologies are altering the way we encounter our environments and producing enormous volumes of data about where we go, what we do, and how we live and interact. How are these changes transforming the ways we engage with our physical world, and with each other? What kind of stories does the data produce, and what do they tell us about our culture and social behaviors? What opportunities and perils does this information have for businesses and individuals? What are the implications for brands, audiences, content producers, and media companies?

• Moderator: Xiaochang Li (New York University)
• Panelists: Germaine Halegoua (University of Kansas)
• (other two panelists still being confirmed)

At What Cost?: The Privacy Issues that Must Be Considered in a Digital World. The vast range of new experiments to facilitated greater audience participation and more personalized media content bring are often accomplished through much deeper uses of audience data and platforms whose business models are built on the collection and use of data. What privacy issues must be considered beneath the enthusiasm for these new innovations? What are the fault lines beneath the surface of digital entertainment and marketing, and what is the appropriate balance between new modes of communication and communication privacy?

• Participants: Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard University)
• Helen Nissenbaum (New York University)

Saturday:

Introduction:

• Grant McCracken (author of Chief Culture Officer; Culturematic)

The Futures of Serialized Storytelling. New means of digital circulation, audience engagement and fan activism have brought with it a variety of experiments with serialized video storytelling. What can we learn from some of the most compelling emerging ways to tell ongoing stories through online video, cross-platform features and applications and real world engagement? What models for content creation are emerging, and what are the stakes for content creators and audiences alike?

• Moderator: Laurie Baird (Georgia Tech)
• Panelists: Matt Locke (Storythings, UK)
• Steve Coulson (Campfire)
• Lynn Liccardo (soap opera critic)
• Denise Mann (University of California-Los Angeles)

The Futures of Children's Media. Children's media has long been an innovator in creating new ways of storytelling. In a digital era, what emerging practices are changing the ways in which stories are being told to children, and what are the challenges unique to children's properties in an online communication environment?

• Moderator: Sarah Banet-Weiser (University of Southern California)
• Panelists: Melissa Anelli (The Leaky Cauldron)
• Michael Levine (Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Sesame Workshop)
• John Bartlett, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The Futures of Nonfiction Storytelling. Digital communication has arguably impacted the lives of journalists more than any other media practitioner. But new platforms and ways of circulating content are providing vast new opportunities for journalists and documentarians. How have--and might--nonfiction storytellers incorporate many of the emerging strategies of transmedia storytelling and audience participation from marketing and entertainment, and what experiments are currently underway that are showing the potential paths forward?

• Moderator: Ellen McGirt (Fast Company)
• Panelists: Molly Bingham (photojournalist; founder of ORB)
• Chris O'Brien (San Jose Mercury News)
• Patricia Zimmermann (Ithaca College)
• Lenny Altschuler (Televisa)

The Futures of Music. The music industry is often cited as the horror story that all other entertainment genres might learn from: how the digital era has laid waste to a traditional business model. But what new models for musicians and for the music industry exist in the wake of this paradigm shift, and what can other media industries learn from emerging models of content creation and circulation?

• Moderator: Nancy Baym (Kansas University)
• Panelists: Mike King (Berklee College of Music)
• João Brasil (Brazilian artist)
• Chuck Fromm (Worship Leader Media)
• Erin McKeown (musical artist and fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Univeristy)
• Brian Whitman (The Echo Nest)

On Skepticism, News Literacy, and Transparency: An Interview with Dan Gillmor (Part Two)

Some have argued that the criteria for evaluating news has shifted from

impartiality to transparency. How would you rank mainstream news and citizen

media in terms of their embrace of transparency as a civic virtue?

An effort to be impartial - or "objective," to use the word most journalists revere - is not a bad thing. The problem is that it's impossible to achieve in the real world. We all come to our jobs with life histories, world views, and sometimes outright biases.

That said, transparency is a definite virtue. It's one of several principles - though not enough by itself - that information providers of all kinds should embrace. Add transparency to thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and independent thinking, and we're getting somewhere.

I would rank traditional media organizations low on the transparency scale. They're still among the most opaque institutions around. But there are glimmers of openness, here and there, that give me some hope that journalists are beginning to understand why they need to do this. Bloggers and others we might put in the "citizen journalism" sphere vary in their openness, too, though I'd say bloggers tend to be somewhat more transparent than professional journalists.

It's about trust in the end. For people who are honorable in the way they work, transparency inspires greater trust.

What role should the news media itself play in fostering basic civic skills,

including those of critical reading and thinking? For example, how should

the news media be responding to persistent rumors about Obama, such as those

promoted by so-called Birthers? Is this a "teachable moment," as one would

say in the Education Schools, and if so, how should teaching taking place

via the news media?

I wish the news media had made this a core mission a long time ago. They didn't, and still haven't. That's a real shame; it would have helped not just their audiences but themselves - because audiences would have gotten a better idea what it takes to do quality journalism and had more respect for it.

If I ran a news organization and learned that a sizeable percentage of people in my community believed something that was false - birtherism, for example - I would make it part of my mission to help them learn the truth. That sounds easier than it would be, because people who believe lies are invested in those beliefs, but teachable moments abound in today's world.

You also advocate in the book that in an era where many of us are playing

more active roles as citizen journalists, that the status of journalism

classes in colleges and universities shifts from training professionals to

training all citizens. Should journalism now be a required subject as part

of a newly configured liberal arts education?

The principles and skills of journalism map extremely well to every other endeavor, when you think about it. They're part of being an engaged citizen in a variety of ways.

So, yes, I would make some kind of 21st Century media literacy - call it journalism or whatever - a part of the core curriculum. At several schools, "news literacy" is becoming a required course, though in the ones I've seen the emphasis (for practical reasons) is on consumption of news. The emphasis should be on critical thinking as consumers , but we are not literate unless we are also creators.

Many argue that the key difference between citizen and professional

journalism is the role of fact checking. Yet, your book describes many

different mechanisms on the grassroots level which are designed to check

facts and otherwise insure the integrity of information, while, for many

reasons, the place of fact checking in professional journalism is declining.

So, how long can we frame this as a meaningful distinction? And if this is

not the best way to think of the differences between amateur and

professional journalism, what would be productive ways of understanding

their relationship?

I don't agree that the key difference between citizen and pro journalism is fact-checking. It can be a difference, but as you note, sloppiness is growing in traditional media and lots of bloggers are doing work that I trust a great deal.

The real issue is that we all have to take more responsibility for what we know, and what we say. Certainly we have to trust some sources more than others, but we have to be skeptical in varying degrees of everything, and the more important something is to us the more we need to look deeper. I don't buy a car based on an advertisement, and if I see a story about some alleged medical breakthrough - especially if I am personally a candidate for that treatment - I'll check further.

I'm trying to blur the distinctions between "pro" and "amateur" in the information world rather than highlight them, by improving the practices of both and encouraging audiences to take more responsibility.

Your book maintains a healthy faith that the current shifts in journalism

are going to not only maintain but expand diversity. As you know, many would

disagree with this claim, suggesting that core news organizations are

eroding amidst waves of consolidation of ownership and that this is going to

result in a much narrower range of information and opinion. What would you

say to those critics and skeptics of the current news ecosystem?

There's no question that traditional journalism is in trouble as a business, and that some parts - vital parts - of what these organizations have done will go missing for a time. Consolidation of the traditional media into an ever-smaller number of corporate hands is also a reality.

At the same time, there's never been more quality information about all kinds of things in some profitable niches, such as politics, technology, fashion, sports and a host of other things. Meanwhile, in a host of unprofitable (as media companies) niches, domain experts are telling us what matters. And new techniques for providing information, using APIs and databases among other tools, are leading to an explosion of social news gathering and dissemination.

We're also starting to see some genuine innovation in business models, That's key to what needs to happen.

Are we where we need to be? Not even close. But I have to stress that we're very early in this transition. If it's a baseball game we're in the bottom of the second inning or top of the third.

What practices might emerge around citizen journalism which would increase

its accuracy and reliability?

The main one would be a recognition on the part of the information provider that it's better to be trusted than distrusted - and that following some basic principles (the ones outlines above) are the road map to be trusted.

I stress principles because they don't change much, if at all. The rest is simply tactics, which do change, but if tactics have principles as a foundation, we'll be fine.

Dan Gillmor is founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The project aims to help students understand the startup culture, and ultimately to help them invent their own jobs.

Dan's latest book, Mediactive, aims to encourage a better media supply in part by creating better demand -- to spur people to become active media users, as consumers and participants. His last book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People was the first to explain the rise of citizen media and why it matters. Dan also writes an online column for the Guardian and blogs regularly at Mediactive.com.

Dan has been a co-founder, investor and advisor in a number of media ventures in the for-profit and non-profit worlds. From 1994 until early 2005 he was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont.

More about Dan at http://dangillmor.com/about

On Skepticism, News Literacy, and Transparency: An Interview with Dan Gillmor (Part One)

"We're in an age of information overload, and too much of what we watch, hear and read is mistaken, deceitful and dangerous. Yet you and I can take control and make media serve us -- all of us -- by being active consumers and participants."

This language appears at the top of the website Dan Gillmor, long time advocate for citizen journalism, has constructed around his most recent project, Mediactive, and beautifully captures his particular contribution to the media literacy movement. Gillmor's approach acknowledges the challenges and opportunities the new media landscape presents us in a way which is at once pragmatic and empowering. He certainly knows the risks to democracy posed by waves of misinformation and disinformation being spread across an array of media channels and the challenges of a context where we do not always know who created the media we are consuming. He also recognizes the value of expanding who has access to the channels of communication and thus the democratization which occurs when a broader range of citizens are producing and sharing media with each other. What he demands is that we each take ownership over the information we consume and share with each other, and taking ownership for him starts with skepticism.

Gillmor's book provides a solid foundation for anyone wanting to work with young people or adults about news literacy, one which is as invested in new forms of civic media and citizen journalism as it is concerned about the future of professional news. In this interview, we get a glimpse into Gillmor's current thinking about what it means to be a discerning citizen in the digital age and what the obligations of journalists are to help foster core civic skills and competencies.

Your new book, Mediactive, seeks to encourage "skepticism" about news and information. What do you see as the core virtues of skepticism and how does it differ from cynicism, which some would argue is wide spread in the

current context?

Skepticism is an essential part of being well-informed. It starts us off in the right place: assuming nothing but learning to trust some sources of information more than others.

Skepticism differs from cynicism in one key way: A cynic has essentially given up any hope that an information provider can do a good enough job to ever earn trust. A skeptic recognizes that there will be flaws, but also believes that trust can be earned.

Throughout the book, you use the concept of a media or news "ecosystem." Can

you explain this concept and suggest ways that the ecosystem we inhabit

today is different from the one which other generations confronted?

Let's look at agriculture as an analogy for a second. American factory farming is an ecosystem, but highly non-diverse - nearly a "monoculture" in many crops where a single variety overwhelmingly dominates the market.

The news ecosystem has been something of a monoculture in recent years, at least in the newspaper business in most U.S. communities that support daily papers, where typically there's a single surviving one. Broadcast is close to that - just a few entities with government-granted airwaves that no one else can use.

We've come to understand the danger of monocultures. They're inherently unstable, because when they fail they do so with catastrophic results. (Remember Wall Street in 2008.)

A diverse ecosystem, by contrast, isn't as threatened by individual failures, because the parts of the ecosystem are less dominant. If the dominant food variety fails, we can end up with a serious food shortage, or worse. If a few big banks can kill the global economy when they fail, similar forces are at work.

In a diverse and vibrant agricultural system or capitalist economy, the failure of a specific crop varietal or business is tragic mostly for the farmers who planted it or that business. It doesn't cause a wider catastrophe.

That's the kind of news/information ecosystem we need, and which is coming. It's why I'm optimistic.

You have historically been a key advocate of citizen journalism, but here,

you are also offering some important cautions, calling for citizens (as

readers and news producers) to take greater responsibility over the

information they are exchanging. Is this a shift in position or a shift in

emphasis?

It's much more a shift of emphasis. I was cautious about quality in my last book, which some folks misconstrued as an uncritical celebration of citizen media. I continue to celebrate the fact that so many more people are creating media, but while the quantity is surging, it would be crazy to declare victory when it comes to quality.

In the book, you advocate what you call "slow news." Can you explain this

concept and why you think the speed of current journalism is partially to

blame for the circulation and perpetuation of myths, rumors, and other

inadequacies?

I've been a fan of the "slow food" movement for some time (even if I don't adhere as well as I should to its ideas). Slow news, a term that was coined in this context by Ethan Zuckerman, is the notion that we should not hurry to assume we know what's actually happening, certainly not when we're getting news at the rapid pace we hear and see it today.

When you combine the amount of information pouring over us with its high velocity, the need to take things a little more slowly - as information providers but especially as info consumers - becomes obvious. And it's not just random blog posts and tweets that can lead us astray.

We need only look to last January's horrific shootings in Tuscon, Arizona, for evidence. NPR and a number of other news outlets (most relying on NPR as a source) reported that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had died in the supermarket parking lot. She had not died, as we learned fairly quickly.

My own approach is to force myself to consider how sensational a report is along with how soon it comes after the alleged event. And the closer it is to the event, the more I put it in a category of "interesting if true" - with emphasis on "if".

I recognize that this goes against human nature to some degree. But if we can persuade ourselves to keep in the back of our minds that sliver of skepticism, we'll be fooled less, at a time when the consequences of being fooled are growing.

Dan Gillmor is founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. The project aims to help students understand the startup culture, and ultimately to help them invent their own jobs.

Dan's latest book, Mediactive, aims to encourage a better media supply in part by creating better demand -- to spur people to become active media users, as consumers and participants. His last book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People was the first to explain the rise of citizen media and why it matters. Dan also writes an online column for the Guardian and blogs regularly at Mediactive.com.

Dan has been a co-founder, investor and advisor in a number of media ventures in the for-profit and non-profit worlds. From 1994 until early 2005 he was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont.

More about Dan at http://dangillmor.com/about

Back to School Special 2: Syllabus for my Transmedia Entertainment Class

One of the challenges of teaching cutting edge subject matter is that you need to totally revamp your syllabus each time you teach a class. The following is the updated syllabus for the class on Transmedia Entertainment I am offering this term through the USC Cinema School. Our long-range hope is that a significant number of the students studying film production at USC will end up with a basic conceptual vocabulary in transmedia storytelling and will thus enter the industry already able to collaborate across media platforms in a meaningful way. Indeed, I would argue that the "movie brats" who have long been poster-children for the Cinema School, the guys whose names are on the buildings -- Spielberg, Lucas, Zemeckis, were never "pure filmmakers" in the classical sense but had always worked across media platforms and indeed, paved the way for contemporary transmedia practice. So, USC is the appropriate place to be developing such a subject. As you will see, the class relies heavily on guest speakers from across the media industry and it also relies on a simulation activity in which our students develop transmedia proposals (including Bibles) and pitch their approach to a panel of industry experts. I am not a designer and so can not teach the design and production aspects of transmedia fully, but I try to tap the full range of creative talent in the class to see how far we can push their thinking, using a model I developed at MIT where I taught an interactive design class from the late and much missed Sande Scordos from Sony Imageworks.

Transmedia Entertainment

CTSC 482

Tuesdays 10:00 am-1:50 pm

We now live in a moment where every story, image, brand, relationship plays itself out across the maximum number of media platforms, shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenager's bedrooms. The concentrated ownership of media conglomerates increases the desirability of properties that can exploit "synergies" between different parts of the medium system and "maximize touch-points" with different niches of consumers. The result has been the push towards franchise-building in general and transmedia entertainment in particular.

A transmedia story represents the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms. A story like Heroes or Lost might spread from television into comics, the web, computer or alternate reality games, toys and other commodities, and so forth, picking up new consumers as it goes and allowing the most dedicated fans to drill deeper. The fans, in turn, may translate their interests in the franchise into concordances and Wikipedia entries, fan fiction, vids, fan films, cosplay, game mods, and a range of other participatory practices that further extend the story world in new directions. Both the commercial and grassroots expansion of narrative universes contribute to a new mode of storytelling, one which is based on an encyclopedic expanse of information which gets put together differently by each individual consumer as well as processed collectively by social networks and online knowledge communities.

Each class session will introduce a concept central to our understanding of transmedia entertainment that we will explore through a combination of lectures, screenings, and conversations with industry insiders who are applying these concepts through their own creative practices. The readings for this class are organized into required readings, which every student should read in order for us to have a shared basis for discussion, and recommended readings, which are intended to be resources for the group project as they dig deeper into the course concepts. My recommendation is that the members of the group divide these readings between them and make sure that the core concepts be in the shared pool of knowledge for each team.

In this course, we will be exploring the phenomenon of transmedia storytelling through:

• Critically examining commercial and grassroots texts that contribute to larger media franchises (mobisodes and webisodes, comics, games).
• Developing a theoretical framework for understanding how storytelling works in this new environment with a particular emphasis upon issues of world building, cultural attractors, and cultural activators.
• Tracing the historical context from which modern transmedia practices emerged, including consideration of the contributions of such key figures as P.T. Barnum, L. Frank Baum, Feuillade, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cordwainer Smith, Walt Disney, George Lucas, DC and Marvel Comics, and Joss Whedon.
• Exploring what transmedia approaches contribute to such key genres as science fiction, fantasy, horror, superhero, suspense, soap opera, teen and reality television.
• Listening to cutting-edge thinkers from the media industry talk about the challenges and opportunities that transmedia entertainment offers, walking through cases of contemporary projects that have deployed cross-platform strategies.
• Putting these ideas into action through working with a team of fellow students to develop and pitch transmedia strategies around an existing media property.

Required Book:

Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and How We Tell Stories (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011)

Recommended Book:

Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (New York: Chamberlain Brothers, 2005)

All additional readings will be provided through the Blackboard site for the class.

Grading and Assignments:

Commercial Extension Paper 20 percent

Grassroots Extension Paper 20 percent

Final Project - Franchise Development Project 40 percent

Class Forums 20 percent

In order to fully understand how transmedia entertainment works, students will be expected to immerse themselves into at least one major media franchise for the duration of the term. You should consume as many different instantiations (official and unofficial) of this franchise as you can and try to get an understanding of what each part contributes to the series as a whole.

COMMERCIAL EXTENSION PAPER: For the first paper, you will be asked to write a 5-7 page essay examining one commercially produced media extension (comic, website, game, mobisode, amusement park attraction, etc.). You should try to address such issues as its relationship to the story world, its strategies for expanding the narrative, its deployment of the distinctive properties of its platform, its targeted audience, and its cultural attractors/activators. The paper will be evaluated on its demonstrated grasp of core concepts from the class, its original research, and its analysis of how the artifact relates to specific trends impacting the entertainment industry. Where possible, link your analysis to the course materials, including readings, lecture notes, and speaker comments. Please email a short paragraph describing your project to Prof. Jenkins and Shawna by September 27th. (Due Oct. 4) (20 Percent)

GRASSROOTS EXTENSION PAPER: For the second paper, you will be asked to write a 5-7 page essay examining a fan-made extension (fan fiction, discussion list, video, etc.) and try to understand where the audience has sought to attach themselves to the franchise, what they add to the story world, how they respond to or route around the invitational strategies of the series, and how they reshape our understanding of the characters, plot or world of the original franchise. The paper will be evaluated on its demonstrated grasp of core concepts from the class, its original research, and its analysis of how the artifact relates to specific trends impacting the entertainment industry. Where possible, link your analysis to the course materials, including readings, lecture notes, and speaker comments. Please email a short paragraph describing your project to Prof. Jenkins and Shawna by October 25th. (Due Nov. 1) (20 Percent)

FINAL PROJECT - FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: Students will be organized into teams, which for the purpose of this exercise will function as transmedia companies. You should select a media property (a film, television series, comic book, novel, etc.) that you feel has the potential to become a successful transmedia franchise. In most cases, you will be looking for a property that has not yet added media extensions, though you could also look at a property that you feel has been mishandled in the past. You should have identified and agreed on a property no later than Sept. 13th. By the end of the term, your team will be "pitching" this property. The pitch should include a briefing book that describes:

1) the core defining properties of the media property

2) a description of the intended audience(s) and what we know of its potential interests

3) a discussion of the specific plans for each media platform you are going to deploy

4) an overall description for how you will seek to integrate the different media platforms to create a coherent world

5) parallel examples of other properties which have deployed the strategies being described

For a potential model for what such a book might look like, see the transmedia bible template from Screen Australia, available here: http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/filmmaking/digital_resources.aspx. Or visit: http://zenfilms.typepad.com/zen_films/2010/06/transmedia-workflow.html. If you use either as a model, include only those segments of their Bible templates which make sense for your particular property and approach.

The pitch itself will be a group presentation, followed by questions from our panel of judges, who will be drawn from across the entertainment industry. The length and format of the presentation will be announced as the term progresses to reflect the number of students actually involved in the process and thus the number of participating teams. The presentation should give us a "taste" of what the property is like as well as to lay out some of the key elements that are identified in the briefing book. Each team will need to determine what are the most salient features to cover in their pitches as well as what information they want to hold in reserve to address the judge's questions. Each member of the team will be expected to develop expertise around a specific media platform as well as to contribute to the over-all strategies for spreading the property across media systems. The group will select its own team leader who will be responsible for contacts with the instructor and will coordinate the presentation. The team leader will be asked to provide feedback on what each team member contributed to the effort, while team members will be asked to provide an evaluation of how the team leader performed. Team Members will check in on Week Ten and Week Fourteen to review their progress on the assignment. The instructor may request short written updates throughout the term to insure that the team is moving in the right direction. (40 percent)

CLASS FORUM/PARTICIPATION: For each class session, students will be asked to contribute a substantive question or comment via the class forum on BlackBoard. Comments should reflect an understanding of the readings for that day as well as an attempt to formulate an issue that we can explore with the visiting speakers. Students will also be evaluated based on regular attendance and class participation. (20 Percent)

TUESDAY, AUGUST 23rd

Transmedia Storytelling 101

Required Readings:

● Henry Jenkins, "Transmedia Storytelling 101," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 22, 2007

● Henry Jenkins, "Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling," Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), pp. 93-130.

● Nick DeMartino, "Why Transmedia Is Catching On Now," Future of Film Blog, Parts 1, 2, 3.

Recommended Readings:

● Geoffrey Long, Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company, Master's thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007

● P. David Marshall, "The New Intertextual Commodity" in Dan Harries (ed.) The New Media Book (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 69-81.

Speaker: Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner Entertainment

Jeff Gomez is the world's leading producer of transmedia entertainment properties. He is an expert at incubating new entertainment franchises, strategic planning and production for cross-platform implementation. As CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, Jeff leverages intellectual properties into global franchises that successfully navigate an array of media channels. Jeff has worked on such blockbuster universes as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, Microsoft's Halo and James Cameron's Avatar. He sits on the board of the Producers Guild of America East, as well as on the PGA New Media Council. A Latino, raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Jeff earned degrees in Film Studies and Communication Arts & Sciences at Queens College, CUNY.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 30th

A Brief History of Transmedia

Required Reading:

● J.P. Telotte, Disney TV (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), pp. 61 - 79.

● Frank Rose, "How to Build a World That Doesn't Fall Apart," Art of Immersion, pp. 289- 320.

Recommended Readings:

● Neil Harris, "The Operational Aesthetic," Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 61-89.

● Carolyn Handler Miller, "Using a Transmedia Approach," Digital Storytelling: A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainment (Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2006), pp. 149-164.

Speaker: Alexander Seropian, Disney Interactive

Alexander Seropian is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Core Games for Disney Interactive Media Group. He is responsible for building interactive franchises with major brands such as Mickey Mouse, Pixar and Marvel. Prior to his position at Disney, Alex founded Wideload Games, an independent game developer that utilized an external development model similar to film production. Wideload Games produced award-winning titles such as Stubbs the Zombie. In 2009, the studio was acquired by Disney Interactive Media Group. Alex began his career in videogames in 1991 as the founder of Bungie Studios. Under his guidance, Bungie created some of the most celebrated game franchises in the industry, including Marathon, Myth, Oni, and Halo. Alex also serves as the Game Designer in Residence for DePaul University's College of Digital Media.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6th

High Concept and the Franchise System

Required Reading:

● Justin Wyatt, "Critical Redefinition: The Concept of High Concept" High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 1-22.

● Jonathan Gray, "Learning to Use the Force: Star Wars Toys and Their Films," Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: NYU Press, 2010), pp. 177-187.

● Christy Dena, "Chapter 2: Art, Commerce, Media and Environments in Transmedia Practice," from Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environment, pp. 26-55.

● Frank Rose, "Deeper," The Art of Immersion, pp.47-76.

Recommended Readings:

● Derek Johnson, "Learning to Share: The Relational Logics of Media Franchising" a White Paper

● Aaron Smith, "The Era of Convergence," from Transmedia Stories in Television 2.0

Student Team Meetings

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13th

The Logic of Engagement

Required Reading:

● Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, "Chapter Four," Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: NYU Press, forthcoming)

● Frank Rose, "The Dyslexic Storyteller" and "Television: The Game," The Art of Immersion, pp. 9-30, 169-198.

● Christy Dena, Selection from "Chapter 4: Narrative, Game and Interactivity in Transmedia Projects" from Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments, pp. 223- 259

Recommended Reading:

● Ivan Askwith, "The Expanded Television Text", "Five Logics of Engagement," "Lost at Televisions' Crossroads," Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium, Master's thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007, pp. 51-150.

● Kim Moses and Ian Sander, selections from Ghost Whisperer: The Spirit Guide (New York: Titan Books, 2008).

Speaker: Kim Moses, Sandermoses Production

A principal in Sander/Moses Productions, she has both developed and served as an executive producer on over 500 hours of prime-time television programming. Kim has co-created (with Ian Sander) the "Total Engagement Experience", a new business and creative model for television, which uses the television show as a component of a broader multi-platform entertainment experience that includes the internet, publishing, music, mobile, DVD's, video games and more, establishing an infinity loop driving ratings and increasing revenue streams. Moses was Executive Producer and Director of the hit CBS drama Ghost Whisperer, and she has co-authored the show's companion book, Ghost Whisperer: Spirit Guide. She has also co-created and written the award winning Ghost Whisperer: The Other Side webseries.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20th

Media Mix and Multimodality

Required Reading:

● Frank Rose, "Fear of Fiction," The Art of Immersion, pp. 31-46.

● Christy Dena, Chapter Two, Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments, pp. 55-95.

Recommended Reading:

● Anne Allison, "Pokemon: Getting Monsters and Communicating Capitalism," Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 192-233.

● Mizuko Ito, "Gender Dynamics of the Japanese Media Mix," Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 97-110.

Speaker: Brian Clarke, GMD Studios

Brian is an award-winning New York City-based experience designer, the a founder and former publisher of independent film news daily indieWIRE.com, and the CEO of the 16-year-old media innovation lab GMD Studios (www.gmdstudios.com). His integrated experience clients have included advertisers (including Audi, SEGA, Microsoft, Ford), broadcasters (IFC, Fox Television, PBS, Showtime), publishers (New York Times, Scholastic) and film studios.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27th

Continuity and Multiplicity

Reading:

● William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, "I'm Not Fooled by That Cheap Disguise," in Roberta E. Pearson (ed.), The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to A Superhero and His Media (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 182-213.

● Sam Ford and Henry Jenkins, "Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics," in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 303-313.

● Christy Dena, "The Who of Transmedia Practice" and "Continuity Documentation," Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments, pp.124-147.

Recommended Reading:

● Alec Austin, "Hybrid Expectations," Expectations Across Entertainment Media, Master's thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007, pp. 97-127

● Jason Bainbridge, "Worlds within Worlds: The Role of Superheroes in the Marvel and DC Universe," in Angela Ndalianis (ed.), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 64-85.

● Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (New York: Chamberlain Brothers, 2005)

Speaker: Dan Didio, DC Comics

Dan DiDio was named Co-Publisher of DC Comics alongside Jim Lee in February 2010. Previously to being named Co-Publisher, DiDio served as Senior Vice President and Executive Editor, overseeing the editorial department for the DC Universe line of comic book titles, and charting the ongoing adventures of Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, The Flash and scores of heroes and villains; he also worked to develop new titles with the industry's premier writers and artists. Before joining DC in January 2002, DiDio was with the computer animation company Mainframe Entertainment where he served as freelance story editor and scriptwriter for the television series Reboot and War Planets. Later he became its Senior Vice President, Creative Affairs, overseeing the development, distribution, marketing, and promotion as well as merchandising and licensing of all Mainframe's television properties. Among the television projects he developed were Weird-Ohs, Beast Machines, Black Bull's Gatecrasher and Jill Thompson's Scary Godmother. He began his television career in 1981 at CBS, where he worked at a variety of positions before moving to Capital Cities/ABC in 1985. At ABC, DiDio served as Public Relations Manager for the three New York-based daytime dramas, then moved to Los Angeles to become Executive Director of Children's Programming. In this post, he was responsible for Saturday morning programs and After School Specials and served as Program Executive on such series as Tales from the Cryptkeeper, Hypernauts, Madeline, Dumb and Dumber, and Reboot.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4th

Immersion and Extractability

Paper One: Commercial Extension Due

Reading:

● Jeff Gomez, "Creating Blockbuster Worlds" (unpublished).

● Henry Jenkins, "He-Man and Masters of Transmedia, " Confessions of an Aca-Fan, May 21, 2010

● Christy Dena, Selection from "Chapter 5 Dramatic Unity, Versimilitude, and the Actual World in Transmedia Practice, " Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments, pp. 277-316

Speaker: Geoffrey Long, Microsoft

Geoffrey Long is a media analyst, scholar, and author exploring transmedia experiences and emerging entertainment platforms as a Transmedia Producer and Program Manager in the Narrative Design Team at Microsoft Studios. He is an alumni researcher with the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT, a co-editor of the Playful Thinking book series from the MIT Press, and an executive board member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation. His personal site can be found at geoffreylong.com.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11th

World Building

Reading:

● Derek Johnson, "Intelligent Design or Godless Universe? The Creative Challenges of World Building and Franchise Development," Franchising Media Worlds: Content Networks and The Collaborative Production of Culture, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009. pp. 170-279.

● Frank Rose, "Open Worlds," The Art of Immersion, pp. 121-144.

Recommended Reading:

● Walter Jon Williams, "In What Universe?" in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 25-32.

● Henry Jenkins, "The Pleasure of Pirates And What It Tells Us About World Building in Branded Entertainment", Confessions of an Aca-Fan, June 13, 2007

● Christy Dena, "Chapter Five Dramatic Unity, Verisimitude, and the Actual World in Transmedia Practice", Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments, pp. 260 -277.

Speaker: Alex McDowell

McDowell trained as a painter in London in the Seventies, and opened a graphic design firm where he built his reputation designing album covers for seminal groups in the London punk scene. Since moving to Los Angeles from London in 1986, he has designed film productions for directors as diverse as Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, David Fincher, Zack Snyder and Steven Spielberg. It was on Minority Report that McDowell built the first fully digital art department, and developed a prototyping process that has evolved into a new narrative design methodology. Currently McDowell is working on a new Warner Brothers franchise project with director Zack Snyder, and he has recently completed design of a dystopian future for In Time, directed by Andrew Niccol. He continues to work as visual development consultant for projects, both live action and virtual. With many awards for his film design, McDowell was named Royal Designer for Industry by the UK's most prestigious design society, the Royal Society of Arts, in 2006. McDowell serves on several Advisory Boards for design and technology groups and institutions. He currently serves on the AMPAS Science and Technology Council. He is adjunct professor at the School of Cinematic Arts, USC and is a Visiting Artist at MIT's Media Lab, where he has worked for several years with Tod Machover's Opera of the Future Lab. McDowell is co-founder and creative director of the immersive design conference 5D | The Future of Immersive Design, a global series of distributed events and a knowledgebase for an expanding community of thought leaders across all narrative media.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18th

Seriality

Reading:

● Jason Mittell, "All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling, and Procedural Logic," in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 429-438.

● Neil Perryman, "Doctor Who and the Convergence of Media: A Case Study in Transmedia Storytelling," Convergence, February 2008, pp. 21-40.

● Frank Rose, "Forking Paths," The Art of Immersion, pp. 103-120.

Recommended Reading:

● Jennifer Haywood, "Mutual Friends: The Development of the Mass Serial" Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1997), pp. 21-51.

Speaker: TBD, Campfire

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25th

Subjectivity

Paper Two: Fan Extension Due

Reading:

● The 9th Wonders, Chapters 1-9

● Henry Jenkins, "'We Had So Many Stories to Tell': The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling," Confessions of an Aca-Fan, Dec. 3, 2007.

Speaker: Mark Warshaw, The Alchemists

Mark is a transmedia storytelling writer/producer/director. Before co-founding The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co., Warshaw developed and produced the transmedia experience for the TV series Heroes. During his tenure, Heroes 360 became a financial and critical success. Forester Research has estimated the value of the initiative at $50,000,000 and it won an Emmy for Excellence in Interactive Programming. Before joining Heroes, Warshaw spent six seasons on the TV series Smallville where he produced all the show's transmedia content and integrated advertiser initiatives. The Smallville websites and projects won various awards, helped build a large fan community, and became a major source of revenue for the property. Warshaw has created and produced on projects with Volkswagen, Ford, Sprint, Toyota, Verizon Wireless, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, TRESemmé, Coca-Cola, Nokia and Nissan. He has written for television and comic books and produced and directed webisode series for Warner Bros, The CW, NBC, Elle Magazine and the NFL. He was born and bred in Los Angeles, California with a stopover at the University of Georgia for a degree in Journalism and Mass Communication.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1st

Drillability and Spreadability

Readings:

● Bob Rehak, "That Which Survives: Star Trek's Design Network in Fandom and Franchise," (unpublished), pp. 2-79.

● Suzanne Scott, "Who's Steering the Mothership?: The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling" (forthcoming).

● Frank Rose, "The Hive Mind and the Mystery Box," The Art of Immersion, pp. 145-168.

Recommended Reading:

● Kristin Thompson, "Not Your Father's Tolkien," The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 53-74.

● C.S. Lewis, "On Stories," Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: Harvest, 2002), pp. 3-21.

● Aaron Smith, Chapter 4-5 in Transmedia Stories in Television 2.0

Speaker: Tim Kring

76 million Heroes fans around the world know the name Tim Kring, and tuned in weekly across broadcast TV, cable, online and mobile to follow plotlines about ordinary people who discovered they possessed extraordinary abilities. As part of the most watched television program in the history of television, Heroes Evolutions set the bar high for multiplatform storytelling when it won the Primetime Emmy® for Interactive Television in 2008. In April, 2010, Kring received the Pioneer Prize at the International Digital Emmy® Awards in Cannes in recognition of his industry-leading creativity in multi-screen storytelling. During the summer of 2010, Kring teamed with Nokia to launch the Conspiracy For Good, a global movement that allows the audience to become part of the story to create positive real world change. The pilot engaged an audience online, through Alternative Reality Gaming elements, Nokia mobile apps, and on the streets of London while incorporating charitable and social benefits with Room to Read and the Pearson Foundation. Through this unique blend of entertainment and philanthropy, Conspiracy For Good delivered funding to build five school libraries in Zambia, more than 10,000 books to stock the library shelves, and created 50 new scholarships for deserving schoolgirls. Kring's Conspiracy For Good is nominated for an International Digital Emmy® Award this April in Cannes. Later this year, Kring begins production on his latest TV pilot Touch for FBC and 20th Century Fox studios, with Kiefer Sutherland attached to star.

Tuesday, November 8th

Performance

Readings:

● Francesca Coppa, "Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding," Transformative Works and Cultures 1, 2008, .

● Frank Rose, "Control," The Art of Immersion, pp. 77-102.

Recommended Readings

● Robert Kozinets, "Inno-Tribes: Star Trek as Wikimedia," in Bernard Cova, Robert Kozinets, and Avi Shankar (eds.), Consumer Tribes (London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007), pp. 194-209.

Student Team Meetings

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15th

Independent Approaches

Reading:

● Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Chapter Seven, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: NYU Press, forthcoming).

Student Team Meetings

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22nd

No Class

Work on Student Presentations

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 29th

Student Presentations

Acafandom and Beyond: Jonathan Gray, Matt Hills, and Alisa Perren (Part Two)

Jonathan Gray: Perhaps I could start with this issue of definition that all of us touched upon. I think it's interesting that, albeit in different ways, both Matt (from wholly within the realm of acafandom) and Alisa (feeling outside of it) note that the term may have calcified around a set group of people with a set group of interests. Matt suggests that's a "misreading," and that there are many types of acafans. But I guess my question is whether we need to rescue the term, or whether the ideas can run free of it.

A considerable problem with the term is best illustrated by some of Alisa's understanding of the calcification. Her concern, for instance, that the industry might co-opt acafans is far-fetched if applied to many of those who self-identify most clearly as aca-fans, given that a good number of this community engage in fan practices that the industry doesn't want to have much to do with, such as writing slash and/or long critiques of the racism or sexism within the text. But some of that community share Alisa's concern that another group of academic fans are too in love with user-generated content and with servicing The Man. And my sense is that in the media studies community at large, "aca-fan" has simply come to mean "an academic who is also a fan" (for sure, I don't mean to wag a finger at Alisa for getting the "wrong" definition of aca-fan, as I think her definition is commonly shared by those who don't call themselves aca-fans), and by this definition, aca-fans are all those with Buffy and Lost journals, yet another Something Popular With Upper Middle Class White Americans and Philosophy book, and squee aplenty, all of which should definitely make us worry about co-option.

This might seem to back up Matt's point that there are many acafandoms. But they're still being conflated by a wider community of media studies scholarship as a whole. Thus, we might need to realize that the term has grown up and is associating with a different crowd than we as its parents would prefer. Some of the behaviors and practice of those regarded as aca-fans, moreover, are directly in contrast to the critical mission of aca-fandom. If it originally had a referent assigned to it by Henry and co., then, it now has a whole bunch of other referents attached to it by those who aren't aca-fans. Hence my belief that the critical mission of aca-fandom could be much better taken up if the term itself is left behind. The term may have become too "polluted."

Let me turn that into a question, though, to Matt and Alisa, especially since they come from very different standpoints here. Has the term become polluted, and if so can or should it be rescued?

Matt Hills:

I find myself agreeing with much in Jonathan and Alisa's opening arguments, although all three of us are approaching acafandom from quite different perspectives. With Jonathan, I too would like to see a greater encouragement of reflexivity in all media studies, not just in something called acafan writing. And with Alisa, I absolutely share the concern that acafandom has led to a restricted set of textual objects becoming unhappily canonised in TV Studies, because those happen to be the shows that many academics enjoy watching and writing about. I think that acafandom does have a responsibility to cover shows that go beyond rather limited taste cultures and demographics, as well as covering a wider range of fan practices and activities (as I suggested in my own opening statement). As I said, I think we should be looking to encourage a wider-ranging, more diverse, and ever more critically reflexive acafandom, in relation to both 'aca' and 'fan' experiences.

Jonathan quite rightly raises one perennial question haunting acafandom - what does the 'fan' part actually refer to? If it means having a certain liking for something, then yes, perhaps all scholars are acafans, whether they are studying television or quantum mechanics. Scientists passionate about their specialism would be acafans, on this account. However, this seems like a curiously attenuated definition. Jonathan's argument seemingly defines acafandom into redundancy - using a massively inclusive definition that doesn't fully engage with the sociological and discursive history of (media) 'fandom'.

I do think that defining fandom only as community-oriented is problematic, but even lone media consumers who self-define as fans are still likely to engage with fandom as an imagined community, or a "constellated community" in Rick Altman's terms. So, for me, fandom retains a degree of social, communal and discursive specificity which means that not all academics would be acafans, as I understand the term.

In fact, if one leans towards at least minimally articulating fandom with community - whether this is inhabited in a participatory sense, or aligned with in an imaginative sense - I think there remains something distinctive about acafandom, since it involves the simultaneous engagement with two (differentiated) interpretive communities focused on the same textual object(s). A critical TV scholar writing about Doctor Who who had no fan affiliation or identity could still "like" and enjoy the TV show they were analysing, but they would have no awareness of the reading protocols, hierarchies, ways of understanding the show's history and characters etc, that fan culture would bring.

Acafandom is thus interpretatively distinctive, I would say, because it brings communally-shaped and communally-patterned systems of meaning-making into dialogue with similar systems of meaning-generation in the academy, as well as moving between and potentially destabilising the value systems at work in these terrains. If one defines acafandom purely as liking something and then studying it, then these hermeneutic and axiological questions fade away somewhat - rather prematurely, I feel.

Unlike Jonathan, then, I think acafandom remains useful for the ways in which it can identify, and draw on, and reflexively engage with, audience communities and their understandings of texts. My current work on Torchwood, for example, poses a number of challenges to academic textual analysis on the basis of fans' readings of narrative and character, as well as challenging fan readings which decode the show for textual coherence/continuity. If acafandom was 'just' about liking Torchwood then it would lack a focus on how we are likely to read the show as a TV Studies community versus how other communities would and have read the series.

Moving on, and responding to Alisa's point about possible complicity between acafandom and the TV industry - yes, I find this to be a worrying possibility and a worryng development. After all, I'm the author of a book called Triumph of a Time Lord! But the book works to critically theorise the show's production, and the ways in which its producers othered fan audiences - even describing them very negatively - while also drawing on specific fan discourses. It is not a celebration of the industry processes involved - it is very much a critical reading which could never have been written as an 'official' BBC book. But there are some arenas where 'acafandom' seems to increasingly lack critical reflexivity, and where the term seems to have become coterminous with the "Something Popular With Upper Middle Class White Americans and Philosophy" sort of book, as Jonathan says. I think all three of us, as writers working in different but not unconnected strands of TV Studies, are united in seeing this as a thorny issue.

'Acafandom' has certainly become multiple, as I've argued, but I'm not sure I'd want to use Jonathan's terminology: I wouldn't equate multiple acafandoms with a sense of the word having been somehow "polluted" or rendered toxic. The question of multiple acafandoms suggests instead, I think, that we need to argue more carefully and more precisely for what we want acafandom to do. And perhaps to work to make these definitions more available, and more visible, to those 'outside' the debate itself, so that wider notions of 'acafandom' may themselves become more nuanced.

As Alisa says - what does acafandom include and exclude? Or more than that: what would we like it to include and exclude? The concept - as I would want to use and defend it - needs to be about critical reflexivity in relation to fan and academic communities. That means being reflexive about the canonisation of limited texts, and the (relative) failure to engage with childhood fandoms and fan cultures, and the question of whether industry and production discourses are being reinforced in some acafan work. But it also means being reflexive about fans' moral economies - and where and how fandom remains inattentive to issues of gendered, classed or age-based forms of cultural power. Reflexivity needs to be embraced as something substantively informing our practices rather than something we write about in passing in forewords and footnotes - reflexive acafandom can be precisely about addressing all the sorts of concerns raised here. And very much not "a cost-effective source of market research for industry", as Alisa writes. In short, I view acafandom - as I have defined it here, asymptotically - not as the problem, or as something murky and/or conceptually exhausted to be let go of, but as an ongoing way of thinking through the problematics of studying media while being positioned within variant interpretive communities.

Reiterating my response to Jonathan's final question: I'd say the term has become dispersed but not necessarily polluted. And so perhaps acafandom needs to be re-defined (to re-emphasise its critical edge), rather than being "rescued" per se? Mind you, I wonder whether I'm writing this, in part, as a fan of acafandom: a fanacafan. At which point, and before logical regression takes hold, I'll hand over to Alisa with a question: if we agree that acafandom does have a responsibility to expand beyond the genre and "quality" texts that it has clustered around, then what (if any) other responsibilities might it also have?

Alisa Perren:

I find it fascinating that, although Matt, Jonathan and I all have similar issues with the current definition - and perception - of acafandom, we deliver very different responses on how to proceed. To put it somewhat crudely, Matt (fanacafan?) thinks we should salvage the term, Jonathan (anti-fanacafan?) wonders if it has outlived its usefulness. Meanwhile, I am more ambivalent. I do not feel comfortable arguing to either "dump it" or "save it," as I do not have the long-standing investment in researching and writing about it that either of you have. The most I can do is speak from the stance of a "casual observer," illustrating how the term might presently be perceived by those who are less aware of its layered history and meanings.

From this position of casual observer, I appreciate reading each of your explanations about how acafandom can mean - or at least, has previously meant - much more than "one who is an academic who is also a fan." And Matt does make a strong case for retaining the word, as long as it is deployed with sufficient clarity and reflexivity.

I guess the issue that remains for me is whether the nuances of the term can be made apparent to those who don't regularly engage with fan studies and conversations about acafandom. Is it a "responsibility" (returning to Matt's final question) of those writing about acafandom to expand their objects of analysis, but also to make this expanded scope more apparent to "outsiders"? Will a change in perception take place if there is more "outreach" on the part of acafans, a greater effort to illustrate that acafans can and do write about far more than Spock, Spike and Skate?

I want to return to one other point made by Jonathan, which connects to Matt's discussion of reflexivity. Jonathan notes that many acafans do not serve the interests of industry, but rather "engage in fan practices that the industry doesn't want to have much to do with." I certainly did not mean to imply that acafandom was monolithic, or that all acafans (want or try to) service industry desires and imperatives. But it seems to me that the industry gives a voice to those serving their interests, and makes the voices of certain acafans resonate more loudly. What's more, given the heightened pressure placed on scholars today to procure external funding, the limited funding of this type available to humanistically oriented scholars, and the receptiveness that industry has shown toward those acafans serving their promotional interests, I can't help but wonder whether these voices will continue to grow louder. To pose an even more cynical question, in an age in which it seems that "no publicity is bad publicity," aren't even those that take more critical stances ultimately serving the industry's larger promotional ends? (Suddenly I have seemed to wander into the land of Adorno and Horkheimer...I will try to step away from the computer now.)

I leave it to Matt and Jonathan (and others!) to chime in here with their own thoughts regarding the responsibilities of acafans - to other acafans, to scholars that don't self-identify as acafans, and maybe even in relationship to the media industries.

Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality, Television Entertainment, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and, with Amanda Lotz, the soon to be released Television Studies. He is also co-editor of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, Battleground: The Media, and Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture.

Matt Hills is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales. He is the author of Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002), The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum, 2005), How To Do Things With Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold, 2005), Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the 21st Century (I.B. Tauris, 2010), and the forthcoming Cultographies: Blade Runner (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2011). Recent book chapters or journal articles include work on the Saw franchise, the TV series Sherlock, and television aesthetics. Matt is currently working on a study of Torchwood.

Alisa Perren is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and author of Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (University of Texas Press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in a range of print and online publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television and Flow. She also is Coordinating Editor of In Media Res, a MediaCommons project focused on experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship.

Aca-Fandom and Beyond: Jonathan Gray, Matt Hills, and Alisa Perren (Part One)

Jonathan Gray: One of my concerns with the term "acafan," and hence a key source of my reluctance to self-identify as one, is that it suggests a special relationship between one's object of study and one's academic practice that obscures the degree to which everyone studying the media has some such relationship.

Simply put, I don't believe anyone who tries to tell me that their choice of what to study and how to study isn't deeply informed by their own personal likes and dislikes. Everyone's critical practice assumes a normative ideal, and while I don't believe that such ideals are "merely" about what they like and dislike, I also don't think that like and dislike can ever truly be separated from our critical faculties, thereby meaning that there's nothing "mere" about like and dislike in the first place.

As such, I think that everyone working with texts is an acafan or proto-acafan of a sort, and an aca-antifan or proto-aca-antifan of a sort. And they very likely move between these positions (if they are even separate positions). Therefore, to claim the role of acafan risks being either redundant (because we all are or might/could be), a denial of one's anti-acafandom, a disavowal of anti-fandom and/or non-fandom that is as unhealthy as a disavowal of fandom would be, and/or an attempt to create a special elite who are better, self-actualized acafans than everyone else.

I want to see media and textual studies scholars be more reflective on the various motivations behind our research in general, and more accountable to our various publics. That reflection needn't always be public (in fact, I'd find it remarkably tedious if it was always public), but it should still be taking place. And towards that end, "acafandom" as title risks halting the process, rather than helping it. If reflexivity and accountability are required and expected of this small group called acafans, rather than an expectation of all scholars who work with texts, and if we accept that acafans can't separate out their fannish identities from their academic ones but imagine that others can, I'm not happy with the work that the tag is doing.

But (and hopefully as illustration of my point about reflection) I realize that my position here comes in part from my own personal relationship to fandom and fan studies. I'm saying this as someone who is more invested in media studies than I am in fandom or in any given fan community per se. See, I thought I was a fan until I encountered fan studies and was told by many therein that fandom required a community and production. If that's the case, I've only ever truly been a fan of Star Wars, yet that was as a kid (I still love it, but I don't have the community that I did in my school playground days), and kids don't seem to count as fans either (an aside: why don't we look more at kid fandoms?). I'd still like to argue that one needn't be in a community to be a fan, but perhaps because I don't see myself as speaking for any set community, I therefore don't feel a strong need to fight that fight, and so I'm trying to catch different fish in my research instead. Meanwhile, if I'm of questionable fannishness, I guess I can't be an acafan either.

Yet I don't feel I'm missing much by not being or counting as an acafan, to be honest. When I read the best definitions and defenses of acafandom, by the likes of Henry, Matt (see below), and Louisa Stein, I recognize a great deal and would like to think that I operate with many of the same assumptions. As an instructor at a leading grad program, moreover, I'd like all of my students to think critically of their own practice and their personal engagement and stakes in that practice in what might be seen as an acafannish way ... yet many don't identify as fans, nor do I think they need to.

If there's a mission behind the term "acafan," in other words, I'd rather dis-articulate it from the seeming requirement that one self-identify as a fan and/or count as a fan in other's eyes (especially when I see the bar set too high for who counts), and let that mission take root elsewhere too. Let's instead articulate requirements of reflectivity, accountability, respect for one's subjects, and so forth to media, textual, and audience studies as a whole, and demand that of all.

Matt Hills:

My take on acafandom is that it's impossible to be 'for' or 'against' it, since either stance assumes an overly monolithic definition of what 'it' is that we're in favour of, or not. The greatest difficulty with the label of acafandom is that it misleads us into thinking there's one referent to be championed, critiqued or defended. Instead, I'd like to open up the question of acafandoms, plural, and hence the range of critical practices, identity positions, or bids for authority that the term might blur together. I'm not convinced that acafandom necessarily captures a singular (hybridised) scholarly community, and so this needs careful thought as well.

The question I recently set for myself, then, was to interrogate my own discomfort with specific narratives of acafandom. I'd identify two influential accounts of acafandom: the 'normalising' and the 'levelling'. The former asserts that popular culture is best studied from a position which combines fan knowledge and affect with academic knowledge and affect - in essence, it's the legitimation of acafandom as a generational shift in the academy. By contrast, the 'levelling' account, which I'd also read as generational, asserts that there's no longer any differential between scholarly and fan identities, so these can freely be moved between, hence the work of 'acafandom' is done, and the term is redundant.

Neither of these narratives gets to the heart of the matter, for me, which is this: what critical distance can scholar-fandom take from both 'academic' and 'fan' identities? In the 'normalising' (first generation) narrative - which was still present in my own Fan Cultures (2002) - acafans are presumed to be better scholars than academics without fan knowledge and engagement. There is a lack of critical distance here from fandom; forms of scholarship are critiqued, but fandom is assumed to provide 'the answer' to rejuvenating academic authority. First-generation acafandom is, in a sense, too close to fandom.

And in the 'levelling' narrative it seems to me that there is a loss of critical distance from academia and fandom; if 'the battle' has been won, then academia no longer requires critique or renovation, and institutional praxis doesn't call for questioning in relation to how culture is studied. Equally, fan praxis can unproblematically form the basis for academic work. Second-generation acafandom seems, therefore, to presume a happy world where institutional limits to knowledge-formation have winked out of existence.

Against these narratives, I want to argue for acafandom which strives for "proper distance" (Silverstone 2007) from all its constituencies. My rendering of "proper distance" implies critical and multi-dimensional reflexivity. I think scholar-fandom remains important to the extent that it is able to engage critically with the contemporary limits of what can be said in academic and fan communities. The notion of moral economy is thus useful - or rather, the interference pattern created by intersecting, multiple moral economies.

Acafandom goes awry if it assumes that it can speak for a fandom. In this case, the fan community that the scholar 'belongs' to is mediated and re-presented in academic literature. Likewise, acafans may speak for sections of a fandom, mediating and re-presenting a specific (gendered, or classed, or aged, or nationally delimited) incarnation of that fandom. Instead of displaying critical distance from the scholar's own fan experience, this experience instead forms the basis for their academic work. The issue here isn't that this is somehow "subjective", but rather that it leads to specific taste cultures, and fan cultures, being rendered canonical in fan studies. Why so many studies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who? (But relatively few on Torchwood, and almost none on The Sarah Jane Adventures, a children's TV show).

By speaking for their own fandoms, rather than exploring fandoms surrounding a wider and disparate range of cultural artefacts, acafans participate in a drastically skewed account of pop culture passions. I include my own work on Doctor Who (2010) within this critique - this work demonstrates a problematic acafandom rather than one which attains 'proper distance'. And by speaking for their own fan practices, rather than exploring a range of fan activities, acafans similarly skew accounts: cosplay remains under-represented in scholarship, and replica prop-making even more so, yet I regularly encounter work on vidding and, yes, fanfic (usually written by acafans who vid and create fanfic. For some reason the prop-makers have been less interested in theorizing their material cultures). So, proper distance asks the question of what it would look like if we hybridised fandom and academia without simply mirroring, or reproducing, our own pre-existent fan tastes, cultures, and practices.

And I think acafandom goes awry when it assumes that it can speak for a settled academic constituency, e.g. critical theory/sociology/psychosocial studies. When Textual Poachers sought to hybridise scholarly and fan identity positions it did so as part of a challenge to powerful academic norms. If acafandom assumes that it is speaking for a set of academic norms then it comfortably inhabits that moral economy, and fails to challenge discursive, institutional limits. My work on Doctor Who does, for example, pose questions to academia, e.g. the role of experiencing an ongoing text versus the role of mastering a (finished) text as a body of knowledge.

But there continue to be discursive limits operating in academic contexts - it feels, to me, as if Cornel Sandvoss's Fans (2005), despite being an outstanding study, speaks for critical sociology and its moral economy when it addresses fandom as self-mirroring. There is an institutional delimitation at work here, I feel, rather than a 'proper distance' being taken from this academic community. (In a sense, my own work in fan studies and Sandvoss's act as two sides of a torn dialectic, since I have tended to fail to operate with 'proper distance' from my own fan cultures and practices).

We also need to stop thinking spatially about acafandom as if it is the intersecting portion in a Venn diagram, and consider acafandom temporally instead. What varied (personal, disciplinary) histories and traces does the term mask? Acafans can exist within academic disciplines, or they can be in motion between disciplines, mobilising fandom to challenge their parent discipline, or even to temporarily (or definitively) move beyond it. Acafandom may look obsolete, or unnecessary, to those raised intellectually in cultural studies and TV studies, whereas it may be revelatory to those wanting to write about videogames, TV, or pop music in, say, philosophy departments. I

t's thus surely important to consider the 'aca' of acafandom in context; is this contextualised acafandom issuing a challenge to disciplinary norms and discourses, definitively breaching them, or engaging in transdisciplinary traffic? The potential acafandom of a book like Doctor Who and Philosophy may read - and performatively act - very differently to that of Triumph of a Time Lord, for instance. Some acafandoms may even offend or aggravate us as acafan readers, where the version of academia being engaged with is alien or othered (e.g. writing about TV as an acafan without doing any reading whatsoever in TV studies).

Acafandom cannot secure one communal identity since it is partly fractured by academic disciplines, as well as by different fandoms. In my experience, acafans within the same academic discipline can find some common ground despite tackling different fan objects, whereas those who share a fandom but not a discipline often still find themselves speaking uneasily across discursive frames. We shouldn't narcissistically mistake acafandom as the property of media/cultural studies alone: it will likely look very different from the standpoint of philosophy, an English Lit department, or even within game studies and fields newer than media studies.

In short, I would argue that acafandom has not yet (often) existed in terms of a simultaneous 'proper distance' from both fandom and academia. This is an ideal, always still to come, rather than finished and outmoded. So-called acafans, myself among them, have usually either spoken for a fan culture (critiquing academia), or they have spoken for an academic community (critiquing fandom). Acafandom demonstrating "proper distance" is an asymptote rather than a fixed category or a tidy concept. Perhaps we should be striving to do acafandom better, rather than giving up on it.

Alisa Perren:

While I appreciate being asked to participate in this conversation about aca-fandom, I come to this conversation feeling a bit like an outsider. This is in part because my own scholarship has focused much more on media production and distribution practices, rather than on fandom. But this feeling of "being an outsider" is not simply based on my different scholarly emphases. Rather, it also stems from that fact that my interests in popular culture seem to differ from many of those who write and speak from the position of aca-fans. This is not to say that I have a problem with the term of aca-fandom per se. But it does lead me to ask what this label includes - and excludes - and what these boundaries might suggest.

Put simply: to what extent has aca-fandom legitimated the study of certain tastes over others? I have no problem with people choosing to study texts or creative figures that they feel passionate about - passion drives much of the best scholarship. The problem, it seems to me, is that expansion of the "aca-fan" identity has led to a heightened emphasis on the same body of texts (in the case of television, this includes genre shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica and Lost).

I like many of these shows. I like to talk about many of these shows. But I don't like the degree to which these shows seem to dominate conversations about fandom (and, increasingly, television/media studies) at the expense of conversations about so many other shows. What does it mean that these particular media products are the objects of so much discussion, while shows like Law & Order and The Good Wife (two personal favorites of mine) are far less likely to be examined at panels devoted to aca-fandom? Does "aca-fandom" have a responsibility to expand its scope beyond the genre or "quality" texts that it has tended to radiate toward?

This last question raises a related issue, one that is particularly pertinent to me as a scholar who studies the media industries: Namely, how might aca-fandom be used to serve industry imperatives - and is this something about which we should be concerned? Those working in media organizations, of course, have little interest in interacting with scholars that question their practices or products. Access has always been difficult to gain, especially for those scholars who present themselves as being critical of the organizations or their practices. Within this context, from the perspective of industry, aca-fans represent the ideal (humanistically-oriented) scholars. They are eager for access, and willing to share their knowledge with executives and production staff. The issue then becomes whether aca-fans simply become a cost-effective source of market research for industry, in much the same way that fans can (and have) also been exploited on occasion.

I pose these questions in part to question what's at stake in the evolving industry-aca-fan relationship. But I am also posing these questions because they are meaningful to me, personally. I take pleasure in researching and talking about the operations of the media industries. I enjoy going to sites like Variety, Movie City News and Deadline and reading the latest news and gossip. Indeed, if I were to self-identify as an "aca-fan," I would most likely be an aca-fan of industry discourse. Is such an identification possible, given how the term has evolved thus far? And if it is, what are the implications or stakes involved in adopting such a label?

Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality, Television Entertainment, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and, with Amanda Lotz, the soon to be released Television Studies. He is also co-editor of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, Battleground: The Media, and Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture.

Matt Hills is Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales. He is the author of Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002), The Pleasures of Horror (Continuum, 2005), How To Do Things With Cultural Theory (Hodder-Arnold, 2005), Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the 21st Century (I.B. Tauris, 2010), and the forthcoming Cultographies: Blade Runner (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2011). Recent book chapters or journal articles include work on the Saw franchise, the TV series Sherlock, and television aesthetics. Matt is currently working on a study of Torchwood.

Alisa Perren is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She is co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and author of Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (University of Texas Press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in a range of print and online publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television and Flow. She also is Coordinating Editor of In Media Res, a MediaCommons project focused on experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of online scholarship.

"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.

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

After more than twenty years of living in the heart of the machine, I have concluded that there are two ways of doing humanities at MIT (perhaps anywhere): the first is entrenched and embattled, defending the traditions, from a broom closet, trying to civilize those who see virtue in the technological and who undervalue the cultural; the second is engaged, confronting the technological and demanding that it serve human needs, asking core questions about the nature of our species, and exploring how the cultural and the psychological reasserts itself through those media which we make, in Marshall McLuhan's terms, into extensions of ourselves. There is at MIT no greater advocate for humanistic engagement than Sherry Turkle, whose work on technologies as "second selves," as "evocative objects," as intimate tools and "relational artifacts", the central theme of her work. It has been my joy and honor to consider Turkle my friend for more than two decades. Our paths crossed too rarely in the years I was in Cambridge, but each time they did, I left the conversation changed by her insights about core questions which shaped both of our work. Here is a video recording of our most recent in-person exchange, a public dialogue about solitude and participation in the digital age, which we conducted at the Scratch conference hosted by our mutual friend, Mitch Resnick, at the MIT Media Lab. It will be clear there that our shifting alignments, sometimes agreeing, but often coming at the world a bit askew to each other, brought out some fresh thinking from both of us.

Sherry Turkle shared with me some years ago the insight that we are both victims of the public's desire for simple answers. No matter what Sherry says, which is often layered and sometimes paradoxical, about the complexity of human's relations with technology, there will be those who see her as too pessimistic and no matter what I say, people are going to see me as too celebratory. In both cases, at the heart of our work is the desire to "complicate" our understanding of technological change through a focus on core human experiences.

I was reminded of her statement when I saw the response to her most recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. Critics and supporters alike tended to read the book as a diatribe against new media and as thus a turning of her back on the work of many at MIT who stress the ways new tools are expanding rather than constraining human potentials. Many wrote to ask me what I thought of the book, often with the expectation that we were fundamentally at odds with each other.

I should have known better, but I found myself entering the book on the defensive, looking for points of disagreement, and there are certainly some of those as the following exchange will suggest. But, as I read, I found myself struggling to answer the challenges she posed, and finding the book anything but simplistic and one-sided. She is demanding that we all enter a new phase of the "conversation," one which accepts that technological changes are fundamental and unlikely to reverse course, but one which demands that we shape technologies to core human needs and goals rather than the other way around.

This is the great theme which runs across the remarkable interview I am sharing with you this week, resurfacing again and again as she presses beyond simple one-sided perspectives and forces us to address our fundamental "vulnerability" to technological shifts. Do not enter into this interview expecting to disagree with Turkle or to simply reaffirm your own comfortable and well rehearsed arguments. Rather, use her comments to reshape your thinking and to redirect your energies to some of the core struggles of our times. What you will find throughout this discussion is a powerful intellect engaging with the shifting borders between the human and the mechanical, between psychology and technology, and between pessimism and skepticism. As always, I learn so much from reading Turkle's work, even where, or perhaps especially where, we disagree. But, again, I would stress, we disagree far less often than many, ourselves among them, might imagine.

I was struck by one of the very first sentences in the book: "Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies." Can you dissect that evocative phrase a bit for me? In what forms does the proposal take and how do we signal whether or not we accept?

From the earliest days that I came to MIT, struck by the intensity of people's emotional engagement with their objects - and most especially with their computational objects - there were many people, and especially many colleagues, who were highly skeptical of my endeavor. And yet, I am inspired by Winston Churchill's words, who said, before McCluhan rephrased: "We make our buildings, and in turn, our buildings make and shape us." We make our technologies, and our technologies make and shape us. The technologies I study, the technologies of communication, are identity technologies. I think of them as intimate machines. They are not only, as the computer has always been, mirrors of our mind; they are now the places where the shape and dimensions of our relationship are sculpted.

I think of the technological devices as having an inner history. That inner history is how they shape our relationships with them and our relationships with each other. Another way to think of this is in terms of technological affordance and human vulnerability. Technologies have certain psychological affordances, they make certain psychological offers. We are vulnerable to many of these. There is an intricate play between what technology offers and what we, vulnerable, often struggle to refuse.

There would have been a time when technology was understood as the opposite of intimate -- as something cold, impersonal, mechanical, and industrial. In a sense your three books have mapped the process by which we have come to embrace technology as intimate. What factors has led to this shift in our relationships to technology?

I think there are two ways of answering your question. The first is to say that technology has never been cold, impersonal, and industrial. We simply chose to understand it that way. Technology has always had a role in shaping the inner life, the intimate life. The telephone - surely a shaping force in the making and shaping of self. The telegram, the letter, the book.

As a teenager living in Paris in the 1960s, I remember the telephone being shunned as too "impersonal" - for significant apologies, a request for a meeting, an assignation - it was explained to me that one sent a pneumatique. All the post offices of Paris were connected with pneumatic tubes. One wrote a letter in a sealed envelope. It was picked up at one's apartment and brought to the post, put in the tube, sent to the post office closest to the destinataire's address and hand delivered. The pneumatique had the touch of the hand on the correspondence. This, too, was intimate technology. There was nothing cold about the letter.

Nor was there anything cold about how industrial technologies such as cars and trains shaped our sensibilities, our sense of self, of our sensuality, our possibilities. If we have succumbed to an ideology of technological neutrality that is something that needs to be studied as an independent phenomenon; it is not to be taken as a given.

But there is another way of approaching this question. And that is to say that I do believe that information technology and the digital revolution has changed something fundamental in our way of seeing the world. There is something new in our current circumstance. The computer is a mind machine, not only because it has its own very primitive psychology but because it causes us to reflect upon our own.

From the very beginning, people saw the computer as a "second self" - an extension and reflection of self. The computer seemed much like the psychologist's inkblot test: the computer as Rorschach, a projection of personal concerns. Indeed, I got the title of my first book on the computer culture from a thirteen year old who said, after an experience with computers: "When you work with a computer, you put a little piece of your mind into the computer's mind and you come to see yourself differently." A second self. So, one might say that in a context where I believe that all technologies shape and make us, the computer takes this vocation to a higher power. Or perhaps, one might say, this vocation is a centerpiece of its identity. I think of it as an intimate machine.

This vocation has been heightened in the age of always-on/always-on-you communications devices, which of course are the focus of my current work. They move from being tools or perhaps prosthetics to giving people the sense of being near-cyborg. The devices seem like a phantom limb, so much are they are part of us.

Your discussion of our shifting relations to Robots remains focused primarily on the actual technological devices and the roles they play in our lived experience. Yet surely our shifting understanding of the robotic has also been shaped in profound ways by the cultural imagination. After all, the very term, Robot, emerges from a work of science fiction -- Karel Capek's R.U.R. (1920) and surely our relations with actual robots have been shaped by science fiction representations from Asimov's I Robot and Robbie the Robot and Gort to C3P0 and R2D2. So, what relationship might we posit between the creative imagination and our shifting relations to the robots in our physical surroundings?

This is a very important question for me. I have been tracking the flowering of a genre - there are of course antecedents - but now we have a flowering - of the robot who teaches people to love, and more than this, and crucially, teaches people how to be human. For me, the prototype here is WALL-E. The people have forgotten their sensuality, their capacity for love, their capacity for interconnectedness. It is a robot designed for industrial cleanup who rediscovers all of this, who falls in love and who, transcendent in this capacity, is in a position to teach it to humanity. In fact he saves humanity not just in the physical sense, but in the spiritual sense as well.

In Alone Together, I talk about our having reached a "robotic moment." This is not because we have robots who are capable of loving us, but because so many of the people I interviewed say that they are prepared to be loved by a robot. There is no question that imaginative literature and film have been part of this shift. We used to look to machines for physical help. Now we feel we are missing things on an emotional and spiritual dimension and we look to the machine world.

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.