Last fall, I was asked by a USC dorm which was planning a field trip to Los Angeles' NuArt Cinema to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show if I might share some reflections with them to stimulate thought and discussion about the experience. As someone who had been a Rocky Horror fan in the 1970s, I approached this task with some bemusement, but I also saw it as a chance to think a bit more deeply about the "cult film experience" as it has evolved over time. Here's what I shared with those students:
From Wikipedia:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the 1975 film adaptation of the British rock musical stageplay, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, written by Richard O'Brien. The film is a parody of B-movie, science fiction and horror films of the late 1940s through early 1970s. Director Jim Sharman collaborated on the screenplay with O'Brien, who wrote both the book and lyrics for the stage. The film introduces Tim Curry and features Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick along with cast members from the original Kings Road production presented at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1973.
Still in limited release 36 years after its premiere, it has the longest-running theatrical release in film history. It gained notoriety as a midnight movie in 1977 when audiences began participating with the film in theatres. Rocky Horror is the first film from a major Hollywood studio to be in the midnight movie market. The motion picture has a large international cult following and is one of the most well known and financially successful midnight movies of all time. In 2005, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you have the Rocky Horror Picture Show experience almost 40 years after it all began.
What Constitutes a Cult Movie?: Film scholar Timothy Corrigan writes, "Cult movies are always after a fashion foreign films: the images are especially exotic; the viewer uniquely touristic; and with that relationship viewers get to go places, see things, and manipulate customs in a way that no indigeneous member of that culture or mainstream filmgoer normally could." So, what is it about Rocky Horror Picture Show which has engendered this kind of response? If this is a touristic experience, then where does it invite us to travel, what world does it open for us?
Manufactured or Discovered: A key debate among people who have studied cult movies is whether cult movies can be designed and manufactured to inspire this kind of devoted response or whether they must be found and cultivated by their audience. People have made both arguments about Rocky Horror. The original stage production already passed out sheets instructing the audience on how to dance the Time Warp, and thus clearly invited our participation. But, it is the audience participation which has sustained interest in this property over time, even as other contemporary "Midnight Movies" have long ago faded into the background. So, what properties of the film and of the audience participation inspire such passion?
From Cult Movies to Cult Television -- Some have argued that Rocky Horror represents the last gasp of a public film culture -- that is, the values of movie-going as a shared culture experience. Which contemporary films become events in anywhere close to the same way that the Rocky Horror Picture Show is? Most contemporary cult movies have emerged as such because people watched them on television or DVD. Today, television shows are more apt to become cult objects than movies, and the experience is more likely to be an online experience.
Rocky Horror as Ritual -- When the "Midnight Movies" emerged, they were often discussed anthropologically in terms of the collective performance of rituals. So, there are certain gestures, lines, and actions which are performed and reperformed, taking on special meaning and significance to those who repeat them week after week. What role might popular rituals perform in an increasingly secular society? Are there other examples you know of popular rituals of this kind?
Rocky Horror as Spectacle: When it began, the argument was that Rocky Horror was like traditional carnival -- a space where there was no division between performers and audiences. Over time, though, has it become more like a spectacle, where certain people -- now semi-professional -- perform their parts every week for the amusement of others who come once or twice to watch. Do you feel fully a part of the Rocky Horror experience?
Transgression and Tradition: This movie/experience celebrates transgression. For the first generation who went to the film, it was all about the shock appeal -- the sense that our parents would not go to see a movie featuring a singing transvestite. But, now that this event has been going on for almost four decades, the odds are that many of you have parents who saw this film as an undergraduate. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, today, is almost a historical re-enactment, one deeply immersed in a sense of tradition. And what counted as transgressive in the 1970s may seem much more familiar in the 21st century. So, does the film still maintain its transgressiveness under these circumstances and if so, how?
Room for Improvization?: Many of the practices now associated with Rocky Horror emerged through practices of improvization, as different audience members added their own contributions to the mix. Yet, these practices are increasingly codified. What space remains for spontaneous audience response?
Local and Global: Rocky Horror is a global media phenomenon, yet it is also one which gets performed locally -- tied to specific theaters and specific communities in specific cities. What aspects of the NuArt performance of Rocky Horror seem specific to Los Angeles? What signs if any do you see of the global dimensions of this tradition?
Are You A Virgin?: A classic ritual at many Rocky Horror screenings is to identify those in the audience who are seeing the film for the first time. In the 1970s, it was possible to come to the movie knowing very little about what to expect. But, as RockyHorror references have spread across the culture (for example, Glee did a special Rocky Horror themed episode last year), does anyone really enter the theater without some preconceptions about what they are going to experience? And if not, then what are the consequence of this pre-knowledge?
When I left MIT three years ago, after having spent the whole of my professional career at one institution, I left with a sense that what I had produced so far represented who Henry was at MIT. I had been impacted by everything about that school -- starting with the fact that I arrived there just in time to watch most of the progress of the "digital revolution" move outward from leading technical research institutions and hit the general population, and continuing through everything that had been involved in creating and sustaining the Comparative Media Studies Program for more than a decade. Add to this my experiences as a housemaster for Senior Haus for sixteen years, and you have a picture of someone who was deeply shaped by where they were and how they worked. As I reflect back, I keep discovering ways that I absorbed ideas from colleagues, even people I never really got to know, but whose ideas permeated the environment of the Institute.
I have now been at USC for the better part of three years, long enough for us to start to discover who I am in this new institutional environment. And the Annenberg School provided me with a great chance a week or so ago to reflect on the nature of the changes. The School has initiated what it is calling the "One School, One Book" program, where each year, they will showcase a book by a member of the faculty which they try to get the students, faculty, and staff to read and discuss. This first year, they chose my book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. I was deeply honored and even more so, when they asked that I bring together some of the students I have worked with most closely in the school to share their insights into how the book had impacted their own research.
My joke these days has been that I have reached an age where I know longer want to be disciplined and I am not yet ready to be institutionalized, but it is only partially true in both cases.
If our institutions help to define what we know and what we think and what kinds of work we can do, a lot of that influence is through the students we have a chance to work with, and I have been profoundly lucky to have a chance to work with some extraordinary students in Annenberg, the Cinema School, and beyond. This occasion came at an interesting moment, having sent in the finished manuscript for my next book, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Society, which I co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. Due out in January 2013, this book represents in some ways the culmination of all of the work we did through the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. In my remarks here, I describe it as my transition book, one which is still strongly influenced by contacts and conversations at MIT, but still heavily influenced by my encounters and experiences at my new academic home.
After some opening remarks by our Dean Ernest Wilson and by myself about the experience of writing these two books, we turn the floor over to Francesca Marie Smith, Laurel Felt, Kevin Driscoll, and Meryl Alper, who describe how they relate to different aspects of the work I have begun in Los Angeles on fan studies, new media literacies, civic engagement, and transmedia play, respectively.
By the time this was over, I was bursting with pride over how articulate and thoughtful these students were. I had to share this experience with the loyal readers of this blog, so that you have a stronger sense of what my day to day experiences are like here in Southern California.
Do keep in mind that I also have several other intellectual families here through my work in the Cinema School and the School of Education.
2011 C3 Research Memos and White Paper Series
edited by Prof. Henry Jenkins, Prof. William Uricchio and Daniel Pereira
How to Ride a Lion:
A Call for a Higher Transmedia Criticism
by
Geoffrey Long
Futures of Entertainment Fellow
Alumni Researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3)
(Author's Note: Since this paper was originally authored in 2010, I've been delighted to discover an increasing amount of transmedia critics. Whose analysis of transmedia projects do you most enjoy? Please let us know in the comments! -GL)
PART 3 of 3
4. Conclusions and Next Steps
By now, the value proposition for transmedia criticism should be clear, even if the challenges involved in developing it are daunting. Even if one believes (as I do) that the rewards do justify the labor involved, the question remains of where such criticism will be found. Who will these transmedia critics be, and where will they publish their work?
It's easier to imagine a home for transmedia criticism than one for transmedia reviews. Academically speaking, an easy place to begin would be a Journal of Transmedia Studies, but so far that has yet to come into existence. As more conferences and academic programs begin to appear with transmedia as their focus, more critical thinking about transmedia projects will continue to be produced as a result, and will likely be released either as conference proceedings or on blogs dedicated to particular courses or research projects (not unlike the C3 blog in its heyday)[18]. Programs to keep an eye on for such resources include the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, the IMAP program at USC, the Center for Future Storytelling at the MIT Media Lab, and the nascent Center for Serious Play at the University of Washington.
To date, many discussions of transmedia projects at levels that begin to approach true transmedia criticism can be found around the burgeoning alternate reality game sub-industry, such as ARGNet, the mailing list for the IGDA ARG SIG (or the International Game Developers' Association Alternate Reality Game Special Interest Group, for the uninitiated) or the blogs of ARG authors like Andrea Phillips, whose April 6, 2010 post analyzing the Why So Serious ARG campaign for The Dark Knight explained what that campaign did exceptionally well and, in so doing, showed why the first Twilight book is so poorly designed for transmedia extension. Phillips:
One: Experiences like Why So Serious have come under criticism because they arguably don't create audiences where none were before. At the end of the day, the people who were really involved in Why So Serious were all people who were going to see the movie anyway, right? It's uncomfortable to admit it in public like this, but... yeah, it's probably true.
Two: The most successful transmedia experiences are the ones where there is space for the player to live in the world. Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings; these are all worlds that are very much bigger than the action on the main stage. And that's what we do in the ARG space; we provide walk-on roles that let people live in our worlds, while not requiring them to step onto the main stage themselves.
That's why the first Twilight book is poorly suited to transmedia; there isn't much of a world there outside of the couple in love. But the subsequent books increase the scope of the world more and more, incorporating group dynamics and government structures that add up to a world bigger than just Bella and Edward and their true, sparkly love.
So why was Why So Serious such a big deal? It's because it took a world that did not have space for an audience to live inside it - Gotham - and created canon spaces where players could dwell, for the first time. They became voters and accomplices. It turned a property that was previously not very well suited to a transmedia experience and created one that suddenly is. It's not just Batman and his allies and enemies anymore.
And while the people participating in that world are probably the ones who loved the property before, all of that energy and excitement brings more people in. The person with the Joker mask was already going to see the movie, but maybe their roommate wasn't going to, or their cousin, or the person they enthuse about the film to at work or at the coffee shop or on the bus.
I know I started reading Harry Potter because of all of the fan energy around it; that's also why I read Twilight. Giving your audience the freedom and an outlet for their passion for your work leads to them converting peripheral audience members into fans, and people who were never a part of the core audience into peripheral audience members. Participation is the engine that drives fandom, and fandom drives success.
So there you have it, one of the most important keys to making a great transmedia world: Scope. Make it roomy enough for your audience to play in your world. They'll love you for it, and their love brings rewards.[19]
I read that post and heaved a sigh of contented relief, as if I'd just been given a tubful of water after marching across the Sahara. It's not long, but it's insightful, and is an excellent example of how some sample transmedia criticism might work: pick a transmedia project to criticize, break it apart to determine what worked and what didn't, bubble up the learnable observations, and draw connections from that observation to other examples to give it context (and your argument more weight). To my mind, this was a brilliant example of nascent transmedia criticism, and I constantly go back to Phillips' site in hopes of finding more.
Another up-and-coming source for transmedia criticism is Christy Dena's cheekily-named You Suck at Transmedia (www.yousuckattransmedia.com), which includes comments from Comparative Media Studies and C3 alumnus Ilya Vedrashko and friend of C3 Jeff Watson. Although the site is relatively sparse (24 posts over six months), many of the articles to be found there are really interesting. Here's an excerpt from Dena's opening post:
You Suck at Transmedia!!
Yes, this is something many of us have been wanting to say for a while...to others (mostly) and to ourselves (sometimes).
But don't worry, this site isn't about trashing specific people or projects. I'm a practitioner too, and so I know how even though we learn quickly, we cringe at old mistakes. But importantly, I also know how bad design is often the result of processes and people you don't have control over. You know it sucks but nobody listened, or believed you, or worse still...you didn't tell them. This site is part of that conversation. Encouraging us all to feel confident about what we know (and find out) sucks.
... How do you/we/us stop sucking at transmedia? Well, this site is a step in that direction. This site welcomes contributions that really do aim to progress the state of the art. Here we can discuss the consequences of transmedia design, production and execution decisions.
In short, this site will cover transmedia decisions that never, sometimes, and always work.[20]
As of this writing, Dena's posts have titles like "YSA Directing Meaning Across Media," "YSA Being an Artist", "YSA Being Human," and "YSA Sucking".[21] As of this writing, most of Dena's posts haven't been critical evaluations of particular transmedia experiences so much as reflections on the trials and tribulations of life as a transmedia experience designer, including videos of Quentin Tarantino talking about being an artist and a critique of the National Theatre's recent mishandling of a Twitter snafu, but the site has a great deal of promise.
A third newly-released resource for transmedia criticism is The Pixel Report, from Power to the Pixel's Liz Rosenthal and Tishna Molla. TPR declares itself to be "devoted to showcasing new forms of storytelling, film-making and cross-media business development that is in tune with an audience-centered digital era. It is an essential tool for content creators, a vital resource for policy-makers & funding bodies and a unique guide for anyone interested in the future of film and the media."[22] Unfortunately, the site seems to be a thinly-veiled set of hooks to draw people to the Power to the Pixel conference or order the proceeds from the conference. Although the site ostensibly includes case studies of such projects as beActive Entertainment's Final Punishment, Tommy Palotta's Collapsus, and the National Film Board of Canada's Waterlife, the site's pages for these case studies amount to little more than an overview of each project, video clips of people discussing these projects from the previous conference, and a big button encouraging people to order the case studies. This feels less like transmedia criticism and more like advertising for Power to the Pixel and their consulting services.
Finding a home for transmedia reviews are much more challenging. Let us for a moment ignore the (very real) possibility that the entire print magazine world is going belly-up. So far most articles on transmedia have been either mile-high "What is Transmedia?" articles in publications like Wired or slightly deeper and more directed pieces in publications dedicated solely to one medium, such as those found in Filmmaker Magazine. Although book reviews, film reviews, music reviews, video game reviews and even technology reviews are commonplace in mainstream publications, is it realistic to expect the New York Times to employ a transmedia critic alongside their film and book critics? How likely is a New York Review of Transmedia, or an On the Transmedia show on NPR?
It's possible that the very structure of transmedia experiences, where ideally each extension in each medium is of sufficient quality and modularity to serve as an ambassador for the rest of the franchise to the 'native' fans of that medium, also extends to critics. If Escape from Butcher Bay is good enough to garner a high score on Metacritic, perhaps it's good enough to be reviewed by video game critics who will serve as multipliers (to steal a term from Grant McCracken) and advocates for the rest of the franchise to their audience. However, this still leaves us wanting for critics who will advocate for transmedia experiences that do transmedia well, evaluating and recommending the "greater than the sum of its parts" super-experience of the franchise as a whole. It's possible that such reviews will be relegated to the review sections for the medium in which each franchise has its mothership - so reviews of the transmedia franchise surrounding The Matrix will be found in the film section, reviews of the transmedia franchise for Assassin's Creed will be in the video game section, and so on - but as transmedia experiences continue to evolve into massive things that touch on every part of our lives, will the notion of "mothership" continue to exist? Only time will tell - but it seems likely that, if such a scenario comes to pass, by that time our reviews systems will have evolved to accommodate such vast experiences as well.
Finally, returning to the notion that newspapers, magazines and other print-centric media structures might be dead anyway, it's possible that the very notion of curated collections of reviews will dissipate as well. We already have big blogs dedicated to particular audience demographics, like Engadget or io9 or Blastr, that, like special-interest basic cable channels, cover everything that might be of interest to that particular demographic.[23] This suggests that students interested in becoming transmedia critics might first attempt to become staff writers for such blogs - and supplement their writings there with a constant stream of insights posted to their own blogs (a tactic similar to that of both Phillips and Dena).
As transmedia continues to trend towards mainstream acceptance and continues to gather mass as a key area of development in the entertainment industry, all of these options are likely to flourish. It's only a matter of time before a Journal of Transmedia Studies appears to support the research coming out of these new academic programs, only a matter of time before sites like io9 have to figure out how to review projects from transmedia shops like Fourth Wall Studios, Quixotic Transmedia, Campfire, or Blacklight Transmedia, and only a matter of time before more rich resources begin to appear online that cater specifically to producers and fans of transmedia experiences.
Our next steps now are for more of us to start engaging in close analyses of transmedia experiences, to start breaking them down and figuring out why they work or why they fail. More of this exploration must be done in order to help us understand how to really leverage the unique affordances of transmedia experience design as its own particular art, both individually and as a whole. Tearing into these new transmedia experiences to figure out what makes them tick, sharing those insights with one another and then using those lessons to create more astonishingly fantastic transmedia experiences, teaching each other how to ride these lions, is how we will push the medium forward. Writing more transmedia reviews to spread the word about those experiences to a broader audience is how we will ensure that we will all keep riding lions for a long time to come.
Geoffrey Long is a media analyst, scholar, and author exploring transmedia experiences and emerging entertainment platforms at Microsoft. Geoffrey received his Master's degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he served as a media analyst for the Convergence Culture Consortium and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Through his work with the Convergence Culture Consortium, Geoffrey authored "How to Ride a Lion: A Call for a Higher Transmedia Criticism" and "Moving Stories: Aesthetics and Production in Mobile Media". His personal site is at geoffreylong.com, he can be reached at glong@geoffreylong.com, and he can be found on Twitter as @geoffreylong.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Corrigan, Timothy. A Short Guide to Writing About Film, 7th Ed. Longman, 2010.
Dena, Christy. "Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments." PhD Dissertation. University of Sydney, 2009.
Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism. New York: Verso Press, 2000 ed.
Heer, Jeet and Kent Worcester. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium. University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
edited by Prof. Henry Jenkins, Prof. William Uricchio and Daniel Pereira
How to Ride a Lion:
A Call for a Higher Transmedia Criticism
by
Geoffrey Long
Futures of Entertainment Fellow
Alumni Researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3)
Author's Note: Since this paper was originally authored in 2010, I've been delighted to discover an increasing amount of transmedia critics. Whose analysis of transmedia projects do you most enjoy? Please let us know in the comments! -GL)
PART 2 of 3
3. What Role Might Transmedia Criticism and Reviews Play?
If, as suggested in the last section, what is needed is an ecosystem that includes both transmedia criticism and transmedia reviews, then we need to explore both halves. First, what value can transmedia criticism and transmedia critics provide to the industry? Second, what value can transmedia reviews and reviewers provide to the public?
3.1. Educating the Industry: Transmedia Criticism and Critics
As David Bloom suggested in his 2010 Transmedia /Hollywood recap, transmedia criticism could provide some answers to the very real concerns of the entertainment industry - not just "What is transmedia?" or "Why should I invest in a transmedia project?", but "What does real, measurable success for a transmedia project look like?" Transmedia criticism may not have all the answers - as noted, we desperately need better systems for transmedia 'ratings' and other metrics - but it may provide a jumping-off point for some qualitative analyses while we're waiting for the quantitative ones to catch up.
Most beneficial, perhaps, is the role that such criticism can play in the shaping of a language of transmedia experiences, through the discovery of a set of standard best practices. By understanding these best practices - by speaking the language - creators and their sponsors can improve their chances of creating successful transmedia experiences. Once such an 'open' language is developed, individual implementations of, and strategic differentiations from, those best practices can result in highly profitable products and even new competitive advantages.
In their seminal text The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson describe the importance of standardization in the very early years of the cinema. Rather than reinventing the wheel with every film, Hollywood began to adopt standard techniques, formats, and practices that could be reused effectively in each production - which in turn led to a set of norms against which excellence could be judged:
Industrial standardization included uniformity in nomenclature and dimensions, simplification in types, sizes and grades, and safety provisions and rules of practice. Such standardization facilitated mass production. Standardization also included specifications, methods of testing quality, and ratings under specific conditions. The latter set of elements in standardization have another connotation: a criterion, norm, degree or level of excellence. Both the movement toward uniformity and attainment of excellence coexisted in the trend. The standardization process must be thought of not as an inevitable progression towards dull, mediocre products (although many may be that for reasons of aesthetic differences or economy in materials and workmanship), but instead, particularly in competitive cases, as an attempt to achieve a precision-tooled, quality object. Once established, the standard becomes a goal to be attained.[9]
Such desirable characteristics included "narrative dominance and clarity, verisimilitude, continuity, stars and spectacle". Those of us in the transmedia space should be feeling a slight tingling of recognition at this point. Such a key set of standard, recurring elements in transmedia is already beginning to emerge, as outlined in Henry Jenkins' keynote talk at C3's Futures of Entertainment 4 conference, "Revenge of the Origami Unicorn." Jenkins outlined seven principles of transmedia storytelling: spreadability vs. drillability, continuity vs. multiplicity, immersion vs. extractability, worldbuilding, seriality, subjectivity, and performance.[10] Jenkins' observed principles emerged from his close analysis of multiple transmedia experiences, including The Matrix, the Studio Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, Tori Amos' Comic Book Tattoo project, the success of Susan Boyle, American Idol and so on. Such close readings provide the raw fodder for his high-level observations, which are then shared with the public and the industry alike through books, articles, lectures or blog posts. The same kind of standards-from-observation practices from theorists and critics like Jenkins was at play during the early days of cinema. Again, Bordwell et.al.:
Mechanisms for standardization included ones somewhat connected to the industry - trade publications and critics and 'how-to' books - and ones external to the industry - college courses, newspaper reviewing, theoretical writing, and museum exhibitions. Undoubtedly there are others, but these will suggest how standards were available to influence the company's and worker's conception of how the motion picture ought to look and sound. While these mechanisms presented themselves as educational and informative, they were also prescriptive. A how-to-write-a-movie-script book advised not only how it was done but how it ought to be done to insure a sale. In the case of reviewers or theorists, the references to established standards in other arts (theater, literature, painting, design, music, still photography) perpetuated ideological/signifying practices - although, of course, in mediated form.[11]
Bordwell points out that trade papers in the entertainment field (such as the New York Dramatic Mirror, Show World, the New York Clipper, Moving Picture World, Motion Picture News, The Nickelodeon and, of course, Variety) served as an important channel for these theorists and critics to influence their audiences. One such important influential was Epes Winthrop Sargent, a columnist for Moving Picture World:
Sargent began as a critic for music, theater and vaudeville in the 1890s and had been a scenario editor and press agent for Lubin before he arrived at the Moving Picture World in 1911. At that point he began a series of columns, the "Technique of the photoplay," which included formats of scenarios and film production information primarily aimed at the freelance writer and the manufacturers' scenario departments. Those columns appeared in book form in 1912 and in an extensively revised edition in 1913. Although other handbooks of film practice preceded his, Sargent's work became a classic in a field that from that point on rapidly expanded.[12]
Bordwell goes on to quote an article of Sargent's from December of 1909 as a sample of such prescriptive writing, generated from Sargent's observation of emerging best practices in the form and, amusingly, what sounds an awful lot like comparative media studies:
The stories must have situations plainly visible, a clearly drafted story, and, with it, an opportunity for artistic interpretation. Dramatically, a motion picture story must be more intense in its situations than the spoken drama. It is often dragged into inconsistency but this is pardonable if the story is sufficiently strong to warrant it. The point of situation cannot be too strongly emphasized.
...We are told by our masters in short story writing and in drama writing that we must have one theme and one theme only. Too many characters will spoil the spell that grips us when we have but two or three people to watch. We are told to avoid rambling into green hedges off the roadside and to grip the attention of the audience from the very start. The complications should start immediately and the developments come with the proper regard for sequence.
...The period of action in a motion picture play is not restricted although it is best to follow the arrangement as depicted in the vaudeville drama. A single episode or incident which might occur within the length of time it takes to run the film is better than dragging the tale through twenty or thirty years. Too many notes and subtitles interrupt the story and detract from the interest.
...A motion picture play should be consistent and the nearer to real life we get the more is the picture appreciated. Complications which are too easily cleared up make the story unsatisfying, smacking of unreality, thus destroying the illusion that, as the producer faithfully endeavors to portray, the scene is not one of acting, but that we have an inside view of the comedy or tragedy of a real life. Let your stories, though they be strong in plot, be convincing, the situations not merely possible but probable. The producer will then have no trouble in making his actors appear to be real.[13]
If Jenkins chose to do so, he could write a trade column or a book specifically on how to apply his seven principles to transmedia storytelling, replicating the role of Sargent to this newly-emerging field. Close reading and analysis reveals learnable lessons, as any artist will attest; all authors, filmmakers, video game designers and other creative professionals spend years soaking up as much high-quality work in their medium as possible and tearing it apart to see what makes it tick.
Theorists and critics do the same, but they then write up their analyses and share it with others. In doing so, they begin to create a shared language with which to discuss these emerging best practices, which then becomes a linguistic shorthand for particular approaches and tactics, which then in turn becomes a shared lens for understanding how these things work. This is where terms like first person point of view, suspension of disbelief, unreliable narrator and so on come from - and, once those observations and tactics are internalized, they become accepted as tools by a wider creative audience. Once these concepts become tools, they become more commonly used in the creation of future experiences, thus reinforcing the acceptance of the concepts. Criticism becomes influential through dispersion, acceptance and implementation.
Jenkins' ideas are already becoming widely accepted in the industry and his terms are becoming the terminology for this emerging space. The problem is we need much more of this type of work, and we need it quickly. Increase the number of really insightful, clearly-spoken and practically-minded theorist-critics and we accelerate the rate at which we come to understand what transmedia is really capable of. Again, to paraphrase Kochalka, "Transmedia criticism is a means we have of making sense of this new medium, focusing to make it clearer."
The value in adopting the best practices that emerge through such transmedia criticism in order to increase a transmedia experience's chances for success is apparent. However, there's another key reason why an ecosystem of transmedia criticism would be incredibly useful to practitioners: the creation of strategic differentiation. In other words, to see where to zig when everyone else has chosen to zag. As Bordwell writes:
The emphasis on uniformity does not mean that a standard will not change in small ways. New technology, new products and new models are continually put forth as alternative standards for the field. One analyst of standardization wrote: 'An innovation is successful only when it has become a new standard.' That process is dynamic, with multiple practices creating the change. In fact, for the film industry, changing its product was an economic necessity. In the entertainment field, innovations in standards are also prized qualities. The economic reason is that the promotion of the difference between products is a competitive method and encourages repeated consumption. The phrase differentiation of the product is used to describe the practice in which the firm stresses how its goods or services differ from other ones.[14]
Much the same thing can be said for observing best practices in transmedia storytelling. By observing emerging norms for the medium particularly adventuresome, innovative storytellers can choose to do things differently in hopes of achieving strategic differentiation. Revisit Jenkins' list of principles and imagine how they might be flipped on their heads in a narrative experience, resulting in a new and engaging type of transmedia story. As more transmedia criticism emerges, more crazy "what-if" ideas will be sparked, and even more experimental experiences will appear on the market. Those that work spectacularly well - think 3-D in James Cameron's Avatar - will become more broadly adopted, pushing the cycle of significant differentiation into another iteration, and the medium will continue to grow as a result.
Between a shared language for transmedia experience design, a collection of best practices that will increase a transmedia experience's chances of success, and a seedbed for accelerated strategic differentiation, the value of transmedia criticism to practitioners seems clear. However, transmedia experiences without audiences remain difficult to justify. This is where transmedia reviews come into play.
3.2. Educating the Public: Transmedia Reviews and Reviewers
...The way I experience and think about comics has a lot to do with the fact that I really enjoy them. I like figuring out how that pleasure works and describing it to other people so that they can enjoy them too, or at least enjoy them more fully than they would otherwise. And what I like (and want to pass along) about a particular comic can be the pleasure of pure spectacle, or of ingenious design, or of kinetic flow, or of characters' psychological depth, or of a story that's funny or engaging, or any number of other things. (Wolk 21-22)
Massive entertainment franchises - think long-running soap operas or comic books - frequently get a bad rap for being huge, intimidating monsters. Try picking up a random issue of X-Men or turning on a random episode of As The World Turns and figure out what's going on. It's important not to ignore the word 'complex' in 'complex narratives' or 'complex entertainment', and even more important to remember that transmedia entertainment serves as an exponential multiplier to that complexity. Yes, a transmedia franchise that spans comics, television, films and games can have each of its components serve as a gateway into the entire franchise for "native" fans of those particular media, but an Everest like Star Wars or Halo is a massive undertaking looming on a newcomer's horizon. Such franchises aren't just increasingly complex; they're also increasingly time-consuming and increasingly expensive. You think it's difficult deciding which movie is worth your twenty bucks and two hours on Friday night?
As of this writing, buying the canonical Buffyverse on Amazon will set you back over $400, and take weeks to consume. One can only imagine what it would cost in both time and money to experience every film, book, comic, video game, TV show and piece of ancillary merchandise that makes up Star Wars.
This is where a transmedia critic can play sherpa: a really good (there's that word again) transmedia critic can give an interested fan-in-the-making maps to these daunting territories, even suggesting which paths they should take depending on their personal interests. Are they fans of Luke Skywalker? Watch the original movies, read these books, play those games. Fans of space battles? Watch these TV episodes, read these different books, play these other games. A single transmedia critic can't create personalized recommendations for everybody, but that's why we need an entire thriving community of transmedia critics sharing their opinions and providing maps like these.
The people who currently play these roles are the die-hard fans on fan websites, the people who live and breathe these franchises. Unfortunately, they're frequently not the best ambassadors to the series. We need the John Clutes, the Pauline Kaels, the Gene Siskels and Roger Eberts, the people who can analyze and report back on multiple franchises to convince hesitant audiences that these heights really are navigable, that the best experiences really are worth the labor, and that, alas, some of the peaks are actually best avoided. Having multiple transmedia critics, and having those critics establish themselves as experts with distinct tastes across franchises instead of fanboys for particular franchises, will help make such massive, complex entertainments less intimidating - and thus more enticing to mass audiences. And if we're serious about moving transmedia entertainment more and more towards the mainstream, this has got to happen.
Unfortunately, the viability of transmedia reviews - and, for that matter, transmedia criticism - suffers from the same Everest-level challenge. In a June 1, 2010 post to her blog called "A Criticism on the Lack of Criticism", transmedia designer Brooke Thompson puts her finger on one of the biggest problems facing transmedia criticism - scale:
There are a number of challenges to writing critiques on projects, not the least of which is their complexity and length. It's difficult to be critical once you've invested so much time and energy into a project - whether you've designed it or experienced it. Being critical seems harsh and, well, it might make you wonder if you've wasted a bunch of your time and who wants to think that? This is one reason why we may never have a Roger Ebert or Ben Croshaw - the commitment required to fully experience a transmedia project, especially one as complex as an ARG, is far greater than the commitment required for films and video games (or books or music or or or). To make transmedia critique a commitment on that level is difficult and, well, would require far more time than would be profitable. Which makes it a pursuit of passion or, perhaps, an academic exercise. Yet both of these color the criticism, that's not necessarily bad, but in collaborative transmedia that ignores the "other side of the curtain."
In the Comics Journal article "A Call for Higher Criticism" I cited earlier, Paul Levitz suggests that comics critics consider each issue in the context of the larger body of work, that "the time and effort we now devote to carving up a story should be devoted to carving up the universe in which the story exists" (44). This resonates with transmedia reviews, because, as Thompson points out, current reviews of transmedia franchises are usually limited to individual components - so a review of the latest Star Wars video game, instead of a review of Star Wars as an entire franchise.
Thompson hits the nail on the head when she writes, "the commitment required to fully experience a transmedia project... makes it a pursuit of passion or, perhaps, an academic exercise." Being able to review Star Wars, Star Trek, Halo, or any of these other transmedia super-franchises at the franchise level requires thousands of hours to consume it, let alone analyze it and write intelligently about one's findings. In a way, each of these super-franchises is in effect a lifestyle brand - and therein lies both a primary trouble with transmedia reviews, and why they're so important. Imagine you're trying to decide whether to engage with the Star Wars franchise for the first time. The sheer size of the franchise at this point is epic and must loom large in the eye of the potential audience member - again, an Everest on the horizon. This is why Marvel keeps launching new X-Men titles, reboots and alternate versions, attempting to give people an "accessible" version of the X-Men franchise. As Sam Ford writes frequently on the challenges facing new audiences to soap operas, longevity and drillability can be simultaneously a franchise's greatest strength and greatest liability.
Further, there's a chicken-and-egg issue at hand with massive franchises and geekiness: are geeky people attracted to excessively drillable subjects, or does excessive drilling make one geeky? It's just as easy to become a sports geek as it is to become a comic book geek. The catch is that sometimes those people who are the most familiar with the topic, the ones who have done the most drilling, are also those who are the least valuable as the topic's advocates.
From the outside looking in, there must clearly something interesting about Star Wars, soap operas, the Chicago Cubs, quantum physics, the Civil War, and so on, because so many people are so passionately interested in these topics. An outsider may want to engage with the complex topic enough to enjoy it without becoming "that guy", at least until their interest reaches a sufficient level that they crest the tipping point and mastery of the topic becomes acutely desirable. In a way, transmedia reviews, or transmedia criticism for the masses,[15] should be the equivalent of a 101-level course - sufficient to introduce a lay audience to the highlights of a topic, loaded with directions on where to go next for further drilling, and so on. The trouble is that we need, as Thompson points out, a Roger Ebert of transmedia reviews providing a reliable viewpoint to bear on a new franchise every week, which is the equivalent of a rockstar professor teaching an entire Philosophy 101 course one week, a Political Science 101 course the next week, and a History 101 course the week after that.
As Jenkins has pondered for years, there's a strange line to consider between fandom and scholarship - one needs a certain amount of fandom to motivate the epic amount of drilling required to become an expert in a subject, yet one must also remain sufficiently detached to retain an objective perspective. An Ebert who gave a huge thumbs-up to everything he reviewed wouldn't be a very good critic, he'd just be a guy who never shut up about all the things of which he was a fan. A truly valuable transmedia reviewer/critic must be able to engage with multiple massive transmedia franchises and have enough dedication to consume, analyze and report on each of them on a regular basis, even those he or she doesn't like.
Of all the responses to Paul Levitz' call for higher criticism published by The Comics Journal, my favorite is one by Richard Howell and Carol Kalish. Their response contains a brilliant concise definition of what comics criticism should be, which can easily be applied to transmedia criticism as well:
We feel, however, that comic books share their major objectives with other mass media, [and] can and should be judged by similar standards. To wit: Capability - a familiarity with, and craftsmanship-like utilization of, the medium's techniques, be they visual or verbal elements; Communication - a conscious and responsible manipulation of these technical elements in such a way as to transmit at least the bare storytelling elements (plot, characterization, and theme) to a responsive reader; and Commitment - the perception required to invest the product with a moral focus which can both enlighten and entertain and the dedication needed to broaden the craft repertoire of the medium.
Comic book critics must be prepared to both refine these standards to make them more appropriate measures of comic book products and to apply these rigorous, objective standards with perception and understanding to the industry. Only then can comics criticism assume its rightful position as both guide and guardian of the continual evolution of the comics medium.
This quote points to yet another complication: the issue of what is actually being criticized. If one believes that what is to be criticized is that which makes the franchise transmedia - the unique affordances and characteristics of transmedia as a medium, its aesthetics and mechanics - then a familiarity with just transmedia is clearly sufficient. However, a more idealistic but vastly more daunting approach is to truly and knowledgably criticize each component of the franchise as an example of its own medium. This is the same challenge staring down any transmedia artist, and illustrates the same gut-wrenching truth: something as complex as a piece of transmedia storytelling or transmedia criticism is only as strong as its weakest link.
Any time you have a combination of disciplines brought together into an art form, every element has to succeed for the work as a whole to function properly. A comic book that has beautiful art but is shoddily written will be tossed aside; a TV show that is brilliantly written but horribly acted will get zapped away. Clearly some particularly excellent elements can make up for some weaker ones - the cinematography in The Last Samurai helps make up for Tom Cruise being, well, Tom Cruise - but overall it's how the entire thing hangs together that determines the overall valuation of the whole.
Under this logic, an ideal transmedia critic must be able to criticize the six films of Star Wars as a film critic, The Clone Wars as a TV critic, the Timothy Zahn Heir to the Empire novels as a book critic, the Force Unleashed games as a game critic, Dark Horse's Star Wars: Legacy comics as a comic critic, and so on. This may seem harsh, but it's important to remember that just as each component of a transmedia franchise serves as an entry point into the franchise as a whole, it must also serve as an ambassador to the "native" audiences of each medium.
Think of it as the Transitive Quality of Crap: if a Star Wars comic is a crappy comic, comic readers for whom that comic is their first point of contact with the franchise will likely assume that a similar low quality permeates the entire franchise, and thus assume that the games are crappy, the TV shows are crappy, the film is crappy, and the franchise overall is just one big steaming pile.[16]
I have seen some astonishingly lousy transmedia extensions that were clearly approved by people unfamiliar with that extension's medium - countless tie-in games, comics and novels spring to mind - and/or by people who assume that the value of the franchise's license is sufficient to overcome a lousy experience. This isn't the case, and this is why video games based on film licenses are widely derided in the games industry: a video game based on a film is assumed to have blown most of its budget obtaining the license, was rushed to market to make a "day and date" simultaneous release with the film (and had its production started much, much later than that of the film, despite the fact that video games can sometimes take even longer than films to produce), was creatively crippled by strict oversight by the licensor, and so on.
So here's the problem: a transmedia author needs to be well-versed in each medium being deployed in their franchise, so they know when something is sub-par and can fix that weakest link. A transmedia critic needs to be able to evaluate each component of the franchise so if there is a weakest link, they can point it out as something to be avoided - but still point out that the rest of the franchise shouldn't be missed. For example, one of the best exceptions to the "lousy film tie-in" rule is The Chronicles of Riddick. Both Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick are Vin Diesel sci-fi movies with abysmal scores on Metacritic, but the tie-in game Escape from Butcher Bay has fantastic scores on Metacritic.
A transmedia critic looking at the franchise as a whole must be well-versed enough to be able to say what the films did poorly, what the game did well, what the connections are between the films and the game and how well those connections are crafted, and whether or not an audience must sit through the films in order to enjoy the game. There's enough of a Venn diagram overlap between gamers and sci-fi nerds for game critics to be able to report that the game is better than the movies because they probably saw the movies, but it'd be almost unthinkable for film critics to say, "The films are awful, but the game is excellent - skip the films and play the game." And yet that's precisely what an ideal transmedia critic would be expected to do.
Being well-versed in just one medium does not qualify you to criticize another, for the same reason that gamers find Roger Ebert writing criticisms of video games dubious. A transmedia critic must have a rich, nuanced understanding of multiple media in order to speak authoritatively to audiences across media - to be respected by film buffs when reporting on film components, by comic fans when reporting on comic books, by the literati when reporting on films and by foodies when reporting on food. In a way, the ideal transmedia critic is a return to the Renaissance Man style of critic that drove the first waves of literary criticism in 18th-century England. The question is whether or not such breadth is even remotely feasible on the 21st-century Internet.
(Next: Conclusions and Next Steps)
Geoffrey Long is a media analyst, scholar, and author exploring transmedia experiences and emerging entertainment platforms at Microsoft. Geoffrey received his Master's degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he served as a media analyst for the Convergence Culture Consortium and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Through his work with the Convergence Culture Consortium, Geoffrey authored "How to Ride a Lion: A Call for a Higher Transmedia Criticism" and "Moving Stories: Aesthetics and Production in Mobile Media". His personal site is at geoffreylong.com, he can be reached at glong@geoffreylong.com, and he can be found on Twitter as @geoffreylong.
[15] I'm resisting 'transmedia advocacy' because I believe that term should be reserved for advocacy done across media; see Lina Srivastava's excellent work on transmedia activism for more on this.
As people here on the west coast are getting ready for the April 6 Transmedia Hollywood conference to be held at the USC Cinema School (hint, hint - tickets still available), my old colleagues on the East Coast -- the fine folks in the Futures of Entertainment Consortium (formerly the Convergence Culture Consortium) which I helped to establish back at MIT -- released a significant new white paper which calls for more critical engagement with what does and does not work in the current generation of transmedia entertainment.
Geoffrey Long, an alumni of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, was part of a remarkable cohort of students who helped me work through some of the core ideas in Convergence Culture and who have continued to engage with issues of transmedia in their professional lives. Long, from the start, has asked some of the most thoughtful questions about the aesthetics and poetics of transmedia as a mode of storytelling, and some of that core thinking comes together here in an especially powerful way. I hope to see many of you at the Transmedia Hollywood conference in just a few weeks but in the meantime, Long's white paper gives us all something to chew on. Talk amongst yourselves.
2011 C3 Research Memos and White Paper Series
edited by Prof. Henry Jenkins, Prof. William Uricchio and Daniel Pereira
How to Ride a Lion:
A Call for a Higher Transmedia Criticism
by
Geoffrey Long
Futures of Entertainment Fellow
Alumni Researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3)
(Author's Note: Since this paper was originally authored in 2010, I've been delighted to discover an increasing amount of transmedia critics. Whose analysis of transmedia projects do you most enjoy? Please let us know in the comments! -GL)
PART 1 of 3
Executive Summary
As we move past the "Transmedia 101" stage of definitions and early experiments, the next stage of development for transmedia experiences may require transmedia criticism.
Such a move is not without its challenges. Transmedia criticism is inherently difficult (Should transmedia criticism only focus on transmedia's unique characteristics? Should it evaluate how well each individual component performs as an example of its medium? Must a transmedia critic be 'fluent' in every medium in a franchise?), and unleashing a horde of vicious critics on a medium still in its infancy could be horrifically damaging. There's also the question of where such criticism might ideally begin, as it is likely to evolve in three distinct directions - first in an industry-educating role like that of E.W. Sargent in the early days of cinema, second in an "educate the public sphere" role like that of early literary criticism in 18th-century England, and third in the lonelier role of isolated education to which literary criticism eventually found itself exiled.
Despite these issues, a robust system of transmedia criticism will be well worth the difficulty. As the future of entertainment becomes increasingly dominated by transmedia experiences, the entertainment industry will require both more informed practitioners (who will need both insights into leading transmedia experiences and a shared language of transmedia akin to the language of cinema) and a broader audience for transmedia as a medium (who will need ways to find new transmedia experiences and recommendations of which are worth their time). All of these breakthroughs can be attained through a robust transmedia criticism.
Yet 'good' is also an intensely powerful word. In 2006 I wrote a white paper for the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) in which I half-jokingly declared that Rule One for creating anything is "Don't Suck." The awkward truth at the heart of that joke is that in order for a work to succeed it must first be good. This brings us back to the subjective, fleeting, hyperlocalized nature of 'good', and round and round we go.
And yet, as maddening as the pursuit of 'good' can inherently be, this is where both transmedia production and transmedia studies must go next. The majority of the papers written and talks given about transmedia to date have focused on defining the terminology or recounting early experiments: "this is what we think transmedia is, and this is how we're tinkering with it". A lot of this is Transmedia 101, or, when we're lucky, Transmedia 201. What we need now is Transmedia 701, 801 and 901, to tell us how to create good transmedia experiences, how to succeed at transmedia as a medium in and of itself.
Measuring transmedia success objectively will require some form of transmedia metrics, to tell us which transmedia experiences are gathering audiences, retaining audience attention, converting new audiences in one medium into fans that pursue the experience into additional media, and so on. Alas, we're not there yet. For now, we must satisfy ourselves with subjective forms of success, observing tactics adopted by various transmedia experiences and evaluating how well they appear to function in the service of the whole. We can also attempt to evaluate how well a particular transmedia experience succeeds as a transmedia experience by setting a number of tightly-defined criteria for evaluation, and then determining how closely the subject under examination adheres to those criteria - but attempting to do so for any medium, much less one as early in its infancy as transmedia, may be a fool's errand. The edges of any medium (and, arguably, any definition) will always remain what Samuel R. Delaney calls a 'fuzzy set', and so a fixed definition of 'transmedia' will always be as elusive as a fixed definition of 'film' or 'comics'.[1]
This isn't to say that pushing and pulling at the boundaries of a definition isn't a worthwhile pursuit - such experimentation is what leads to the expansion of any enterprise, and often leads to the creation of wholly new types of things. Some folks will happily bicker for years over whether a truly transmedia experience has to have community involvement, whether all Alternative Reality Games (ARGs) are transmedia experiences, if it's really transmedia if it's just a jump from a digital version of a comic to a print version of a comic, ad infinitum and ad nauseum.[2]
Yet there are now a sufficient number of us playing in this particular sandbox that we can move on to more advanced debates. We can stop pointing to examples of what transmedia storytelling is or is not, and start creating some in-depth, insightful criticism of what we consider to be good or bad examples of what we call transmedia, why we consider them to be so, and what they did that appears to have worked. In his Cute Manifesto, comics artist and theorist James Kochalka states:
Art is not a way of conveying information, it's a way of understanding information. That is, creating a work of art is a means we have of making sense of the world, focusing to make it clearer, not a way of communicating some understanding of the world that we already hold. (Kochalka 2005)
This is similar to the role that transmedia criticism can play in our understanding of this emerging medium. Kochalka's comment could easily be remixed into the following:
Transmedia criticism is not a way of conveying knowledge about transmedia, it's a way of understanding transmedia. That is, transmedia criticism is a means we have of making sense of this new medium, focusing to make it clearer, not a way of communicating some understanding of transmedia that we already hold.
Simply put, we don't yet know enough about transmedia to communicate firm, definitive truths about it that we already hold. However, this demonstrates the value of engaging in such analysis now, while general understanding of - and the creative practices in - transmedia is still relatively malleable. We should engage in earnest transmedia criticism now to gain a clearer focus, a better understanding, and ideally both a broader audience for transmedia and deeper, richer, more engaging, more profitable, and generally better transmedia experiences overall.
This explorative tactic is my chosen approach for this extended essay. The pages that follow include a few examples of what transmedia criticism already exists and draw on a history of criticism and examinations of criticism in other media (particularly comics and film) to lend them some context. By the end, this essay will have sketched out who's calling for such transmedia criticism, what role transmedia criticism might play and why it's important, where such criticism might be found, who might do it, and where might be a good place to start.
Some of us - especially those of us familiar with the work of the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3)[3] - are starting already, groping around in this dark direction. While I wouldn't call the recently-published doctoral theses of either Derek Johnson[4] or Christy Dena[5] transmedia criticism per se, both documents make me long to read what criticism Johnson and Dena would write given the chance. Therein lies the problem - some of this work exists, but we need more of it - a lot more - and we need it quickly and broadly disseminated. This essay is designed as a resource for those of us already thinking about transmedia criticism, to help us step up and write that criticism and get it out there where it can start to do some real good.
At the end of the day, all of this Transmedia 101-level "This is what transmedia is, and this is how we're experimenting with it" panels and papers feel a bit like "There's this thing called a lion, and this is how we poked it with a stick." The challenge is to go further: not just "this is how to tame a lion" further, not just "this is how to ride a lion" further, but "this is how to ride a lion well". We have proven the existence of lions. There are plenty of people out there who are not only starting to ride lions, but are getting really good at riding lions. It's time we point out who's riding their lions through fire - and to tell the world why that's so amazing.
2. Who's Calling for Transmedia Criticism?
I once had a conversation with a high-ranking executive who was a transmedia skeptic. I was describing how important this notion of transmedia was becoming to the future of experiences, until he cut me off. "If it's so important," he said, "why aren't I hearing people calling for it?"
The first response that sprang to mind was Henry Ford's famous quote about how if he had only listened to what people were asking for, he would have built a faster horse. My second dismissed candidate was that people are calling for it - but then I realized that these people calling for transmedia experiences are themselves already converts, and are in fact calling for more advanced transmedia experiences. The response I chose? Those familiar with transmedia experiences are calling for more, and those who aren't just haven't been properly introduced to good transmedia experiences yet.
Not unsurprisingly, the same thing can be said of transmedia criticism. In a recap of the March 2010 Transmedia Hollywood event, journalist David Bloom wrote:
Fans are eating up all the cryptic, dystopian alternate-reality game experiences and spinoff comic books and book-length novelizations, participants said. But just as importantly, what once were just marketing-driven afterthoughts now often are aesthetic achievements that stand on their own. The only questions (and they're big ones) are deciding what counts as a success, based on what criteria, and judged by whom.
...One audience member tartly observed that, "Anything that is concerned with ROI (return on investment) isn't art." Yes, he clearly hadn't talked to a studio executive in a long time (despite saying he was in the middle of post-production on a science-fiction film). But his point went to a core question of the day, one panelists didn't really answer: how do you evaluate a transmedia project's success? Is it artistic/aesthetic? If so, is it judged on its own merits, or just on how it connects and fleshes out the connected "mothership" project, typically a film or book? Should it be judged on financial terms, like a stand-alone book or movie or videogame? If it is financial, is that based only on what the project cost? Or do you have to figure out how to measure what it did for the mothership? How do you value a transmedia project that keeps fans engaged in a major franchise during the lulls between new mothership arrivals? What Hollywood suit is equipped to pencil this one out? And, in the wake of widespread layoffs by print publications of their film, music, TV and theater critics, who's qualified to make any judgments on aesthetic or financial grounds (ahem, Variety, we're looking at you, again)? If, as with some recent projects, it's an elaborate creation that ties together multiple web sites, phone numbers, video material, documents, puzzles and more, who's going to work through all that, and decide how it rates?[6]
Transmedia designer Brooke Thompson voiced similar concerns in a June 1, 2010 blog post called "A Criticism on the Lack of Criticism":
It strikes me that one of the biggest problems hindering the growth of transmedia (and all the various things that fall under it, such as ARGs) is the absolute lack of critical looks at projects. That's not to say that criticism doesn't exist - it does, but it's scattered in conversations and hidden in forum posts or mailing lists. And it is, usually, not about a project as a whole and, instead, focuses on a single issue or is a broad look at the field.
Thompson is referring to the nascent form of transmedia criticism on the message boards of sites like Unfiction or ARGNet (both of which specialize in alternate reality games) and in the blog posts of individuals like Andrea Phillips (another transmedia artist) and Christy Dena (a prominent transmedia scholar). More on their attempts to address this need appear in sections V and VI of this paper, but the main point is that calls for criticism are being issued by fans, practitioners and scholars.
Such calls for criticism have been issued in other media before. In fact, the subtitle of this extended essay pays homage to an article called "A Call for Higher Criticism" published in October of 1979 in The Comics Journal #50. In it, the author pleads:
First, let me make it clear that I'm not trying to promote a standard for "fan" criticism or "professional" efforts. I write this in the hope that I might make discoveries when I read criticism of comics art, and not merely read opinions of an issue, a story, or a creator. What criticism of our medium needs is a frame of reference, and a sustained level of introspection.
The author was a young comics writer and DC editorial staff member named Paul Levitz, who happened to go on to serve as the President of DC Comics from 2002 until 2009. Levitz was calling for a comics criticism that transcended mere reviews of individual stories and included more insightful examinations into the context in which those stories existed. As Levitz concluded:
Many professional comics writers and artists, for whatever reasons, think no further about their work than the job they're currently finishing. Many others, of course, give deep and intense thought to the medium they use. Many critics of comics criticize issues or stories as the be-all and end-all. Few take the time to consider the bigger picture, and to make criticisms that can give both readers and professionals lasting insight into what they do. It's this lasting insight that is a critic's opportunity to make changes in a field - changes great enough to last beyond his lifetime.
...Look back over the numberless thousands of comics you've read when next you criticize a single one. Consider the context, not as an excuse, but as explanation - or at least as the raw data of which an explanation can be made. Communicate your likes and dislikes not on the level of "loved panel seven of page eight," but on a level of theory that may revolutionize the thinking of someone who reads your criticism. That's your golden opportunity to use your critic's throne to change the future, because all you have to do is communicate one ever-so-special thought to the right person at the right time, and you might help genius reach fulfillment. And wouldn't that be a nice change?
A number of established critics stepped up to answer that question, and The Comics Journal published their responses to Levitz' article in the very next issue. The tone of these replies was predictably mixed. Pierce Askegren, for example, noted that "Levitz should bear in mind the comparative youth of comics, comics fandom and comics fans; maturity comes to institutions more slowly than it does to individuals." It's Bill Sherman's response, though, that bears the most relevance to our current purposes:
We should make a distinction here between reviewing and criticizing. Reviews ask - and, one hopes, answers - the simple question: "Is this piece of art worth my time?" In a review the writer acts as an educated consumer, giving a context for his opinion (which may involve history as well as some critical comments) and then telling readers his answer to that question. Most reviewing is by nature ephemeral, though if a writer is consistent and works long enough without taking the easy way out (overusing the cursory cop-outs Levitz mentions, for example), he will produce criticism of a general sort. An example of this happening might be James Agee's series of movie reviews in the '40s: collected, they provide an excellent critical overview of the period.
Criticism speaks to a larger audience: both consumers and those artists willing to look and think about what they and their cohorts are or have been doing. It's analytical, tries to figure out how a piece of art works in relation to other pieces of art, and to a degree it ignores the question of "Is this worth my time?" "Of course it is," criticism says, although that answer may not imply the work being criticized is any good in the critic's eyes, only important. Criticism is lengthier and usually takes a degree of distancing... It takes time for critical vision to develop, which is why so many highly touted favorites have been known to lose their sheen after several years' perspective. For all its analytical value criticism frequently lacks a journalistic sense of what's happening now.
Where does this leave us? With the need for both good criticism and good reviewing, with the need for reviewers with enough critical/historical insight to produce writing that - while short of Levitz's ideal - carries thought behind it, with the need for creators who aren't afraid to have their work looked at from a consumer's point of view and who aren't lackadaisical about the critical process. Levitz's call is just, but there's need for good thoughtful writing on all levels of analysis.
Sherman is absolutely right. The type of criticism Levitz calls for - the deep, insightful examination of how a piece of work is built and the context in which it was made - is intensely useful to practitioners, but it might be overkill for general audiences curious to know whether something is worth their time - and this question takes on even more importance when dealing with transmedia franchises that represent massive time investments in order to consume the whole thing.[7]
This suggests that instead of merely 'transmedia criticism', what we need is actually both a type of 'transmedia criticism' and a form of 'transmedia reviews'. A richer, deeper understanding of transmedia among academics and professionals may require an equally rich, deep form of transmedia criticism, which develops its own language of transmedia akin to the language of cinema (more on that later), wrestles with the lasting import of any particular example of transmedia (in other words, debates the existence of and admission into some form of transmedia canon) and enjoys all the delightful tensions between industry and academia inherent therein.
At the same time, broadening the audience for transmedia experiences may require transmedia reviews, which concern themselves more directly with communicating to the general public (and the generally curious) which transmedia experiences are worth their time and money - and, ideally, which components of those franchises will be the most interesting to a given sub-section of the audience, which component would be the best place to start, and so on. There's clearly a place for both such criticism and such reviews, but it is the combination of the two which will most likely result in both better transmedia and a broader audience for it.[8]
The task at hand, then, is to sketch out not just a form of transmedia criticism, but an ecosystem of transmedia criticism, one that's broad enough to include both criticism targeted at educating the industry and reviews broadening the public. Such a combination might finally provide the ideal answer to the question posed by the executive at the beginning of this section: to hear more people calling for transmedia, first you have to produce something worth wanting, and then show them why they want it.
(Next: What Role Might Transmedia Reviews Play?)
Geoffrey Long is a media analyst, scholar, and author exploring transmedia experiences and emerging entertainment platforms at Microsoft. Geoffrey received his Master's degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he served as a media analyst for the Convergence Culture Consortium and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Through his work with the Convergence Culture Consortium, Geoffrey authored "How to Ride a Lion: A Call for a Higher Transmedia Criticism" and "Moving Stories: Aesthetics and Production in Mobile Media". His personal site is at geoffreylong.com, he can be reached at glong@geoffreylong.com, and he can be found on Twitter as @geoffreylong.
WORKS CITED:
[1] For an example of what a nightmare this is, see the ongoing debate over Scott McCloud's famous definition of 'comics'.
[2] We should let them do so. For many of them, tenure depends on it.
[8] Over a quarter-century later, a new generation of comics scholar-critics have emerged to answer Levitz' call. One such critic is Douglas Wolk, who has written comics criticism for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon and Rolling Stone. In his 2007 book Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, Wolk writes, "...It's my responsibility as a critic to be harsh and demanding and to subject unambitious or botched work to public scorn, because I want more good comics: more cartoonists who challenge themselves to do better, and more readers who insist on the same" (Wolk 22). One hopes it won't take nearly as long to generate the ecosystem of transmedia criticism I'm lobbying for here.
You trace the surprisingly long history of Barnes and Noble as a book store which has transformed itself many times across the 20th century. Â Given this nimbleness, why have we seen so many brick and mortar bookstores close over the past decade or so? Is this simply the next stage in their evolution or does it represent a more fundamental shift in the place of bookstores in our lives?
This is a wonderful and challenging question, Henry, because bookstores mean so many different things to different people. The best way for me to answer it is to think about what Amazon.com has done to the idea of a bookstore. The company has succeeded for many reasons, chief among them a commitment to low prices. But it's also succeeded, at least with books, because it's taught consumers that many of the things people liked best about physical bookstores could be reproduced online, often algorithmically. I wish I had a dollar for the number of memoirs I've read about readers and their relationship to particular (often independent) booksellers. They often wax nostalgic for how their favorite bookseller just seemed to know which books would most interest them. Well, along comes Amazon, which can perform more or less the same service but without direct human intervention. That may be a drawback for some, but many people avoid buying books about sensitive issues -- say, sex, mental illness, or divorce -- for precisely that reason. What Amazon has done so successfully is to create a bookselling environment that mimics most of the strengths of traditional bookstores while at the same time throwing their many drawbacks -- most of which people just accepted as the status quo -- into sharp relief. Oh...and Amazon is always open.
I don't have any grand prognostications about the future place of bookstores, beyond wanting to sound a note of caution about Amazon. It wasn't all that long ago that Amazon deleted pirated copies of George Orwell's 1984 from its customers' Kindles. Can you imagine another (physical) bookseller breaking into your house in the middle of the night to reclaim a pirated copy of a book you'd just legally purchased? Amazon says it will never do something like this again, but because every Kindle is "tethered" to the company, it will always possess the capacity to do so. Similarly, that Amazon accidentally de-listed gay and lesbian themed books from its product catalog a few years ago, re-indexing them as pornography, tells you something about the delicacy of its computer systems. What are the implications of delegating the curatorial work of culture to databases and computer algorithms? That's a question I'm pursuing in my current book project, on the topic of "algorithmic culture," and have posted about at length over on my Late Age of Print blog.
When you ask about "a fundamental shift in the place of bookstores in our lives," these are the types of questions that arise for me. And they're not exactly the kinds of questions we've had to ask about bookstores in the past.
You see the introduction of the ISBN code as a key moment in transforming our contemporary relations with books. What led to this innovation and what impact did it have?
I had the good fortune of receiving a very positive review of The Late Age of Print when it first came out, in UK's Guardian newspaper. The reviewer admiringly called me a "distribution nerd" because of my enthusiastic discussion of the ISBN. I haven't lost any of that exuberance, as you and your readers are about to discover!
The ISBN is a simple, elegant, and effective code, one that tells you just how wired the book industry is. In fact, it's one of the things that tells you that book publishing was among the first wired industries, period, despite the fact that people tend to think about it as behind-the-times.
Basically, in the 1960s, a British bookselling chain confronted a practical problem: how to inventory all of its books and coordinate stock among its numerous stores? The company's management team studied the issue and later convinced a trade organization to agree to a book coding standard -- what was called the "Standard Book Number," or SBN, later to be known as the ISBN when it was adopted internationally. Originally it was 10 digits long; in recent years it's grown to 13 digits. With this you can electronically communicate a book's language or country of origin, as well as its publisher, title, edition, and binding. That's an astonishing amount of information to convey in such a tiny amount of space.
I see the development of the ISBN as a technological counterpart to advertising, public relations, and other types of "ideological" work that the culture industries routinely engage in. So much of the story of popular culture in the United States in the 20th century focuses on how "captains of consciousness" -- people like Bernays and others -- helped to square capitalist production and consumption through their work. And yet, their work would have amounted to little had there not also been an adequate infrastructure in place for book publishing and other industries to coordinate the distribution of their products. It's much sexier to talk about "swaying the masses" than it is to discuss product coding, and yet the latter is no less significant to the story of popular culture than is the former.
You discuss the debates around the contribution of Oprah's Book Club to contemporary print culture, but now, Oprah is off the air. To what degree was the impact of this institution linked to the nature of broadcasting? Could Oprah's book club have functioned the same way in a digital environment? If not, what kinds of digital practice might be encouraging people to read more rather than less (as seems to be the fear of many cybercritics)?
I really appreciate how you've inflected this question now that "Oprah has left the building," as it were. One of the reasons for the success of Oprah's Book Club was Winfrey's repute and notoriety, but celebrity alone can't explain why a TV personality became such a major force in the book world. One of the claims I make in The Late Age of Print is that Winfrey and her producers cleverly tapped elements of the televisual medium to make the Book Club successful. So, for example, they were sensitive to the seasonal dimensions of television viewing; recommendations for long books tended to coincide with the end of the regular television season in May, thereby giving readers plenty of time to read the selection before the new season of Oprah began in September. Similarly, Oprah Book Club shows were carefully segmented in such a way that even those who hadn't read the latest selection wouldn't feel left out. It was an extremely adept, decade and a half-long example of how to marry books and television, happily.
What the Oprah example suggests, moreover, is that printed books and printed book reading can be encouraged in digital environments given the right type of strategy and, more importantly, the right sensitivities to the affordances of digital media. That's already emerged, in fact, around Goodreads, which is a site combining social networking and online conversation about books. Amazon, too, is experimenting with a social network, its version architected around the Kindle. Readers can opt to share passages they've highlighted in their Kindle books with people who have decided to follow their feeds. You can opt to Tweet those passages, too, complete with ready-made hashtags meant to encourage response.
The intention seems to be to virtualize and deterritorialize the traditional reading group. The question critics are now starting to ask is, can you have a meaningful conversation about a book in settings mediated by hardware, software, and code as opposed to, say, paper and one's living room? These digital systems are still in their infancy, so in my view it's too early to tell. Having said that, I don't see why, perforce, you cannot have a deep and intelligent discussion about books online, even in installments of 140 characters or less.
Given the centrality of Harry Potter as a case study in the book, I wondered what you thought the Pottermore announcement suggests about the ways that, as you write, "printed books and electronic media can complement each other"?
The Pottermore site, J. K. Rowling's new digital hub for selling Harry Potter e-books, encouraging fan involvement, and promoting Harry Potter more generally is probably the biggest thing to happen with the boy wizard since I published The Late Age of Print. And, sure enough, it does certainly suggest the complementarity of atoms and bits, paper and pixels.
Having said that, Pottermore also seems to me to point to something even more interesting: Rowling's desire to maintain what you might call "end-to-end" control of the Harry Potter franchise. She's been deeply involved in the production of the film adaptations, even going as far as to have Steven Spielberg removed early on in the process because he wanted to Americanize the stories (for example, by transforming Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry into "Hogwarts High"). She's also active in policing Harry Potter copyrights, trademarks, and related indicia, something the Harry Potter Lexicon copyright infringement case from a few years ago made clear. Moreover, until Pottermore, Rowling refused to make e-editions of the Harry Potter series available, fearing for the ease with which digital copies not in her immediate control might end up being pirated. (A footnote: I find it naive to think that anyone can control a digital copy of anything, even if it's digitally rights managed. When I worked at a hardware store in high school, my boss was fond of saying, "locks are for honest people.")
What Pottermore tells me, then, is that Rowling aspires to become book publishing's equivalent to Apple Computer -- something she's quite well positioned to do. And, as with Apple, that type of end-to-end control will undoubtedly have its plusses and minuses, its benefits and frustrations; you get a great product, but it's significantly on another's terms.
Your Harry Potter case study is very much about "piracy," the creation and circulation of unauthorized versions of the book in the developing world, yet many of my readers are also interested in fan fiction as the unauthorized expansion of the Harry Potter universe by its fans. How does this kind of publishing fit within the book's discussion of print culture practices?
Piracy is an issue with a tremendous amount of gray area, one that too often gets presented as if it were simply black and white. Whenever we want to talk about piracy, I believe we need to imagine it as existing along a continuum that includes, at minimum:
1) officially authorized derivative works (e.g., the various novels in the Star Wars series sanctioned by George Lucas);
2) officially tolerated derivative works (e.g., unauthorized vanilla fan fiction that adheres closely to existing narrative universes);
3) possibly tolerated derivative works (e.g., unauthorized fan fiction that pushes the boundaries of or even departs from the standard narrative universe, as in the re-narrating of Harry Potter and Ron's Weasley's relationship as homosexual); and
4) allegedly infringing derivative works (e.g., unauthorized materials that are usually intended to be sold commercially, as in The Harry Potter Lexicon, the Russian Tanya Grotter books, etc.).
What this means, ostensibly, is that almost anyone whose creative work piggybacks on that of another is a pirate, at least to greater and lesser degrees. I realize that's a controversial claim, but at some level it gets at the nature of the creative process, which is all about marshaling and remixing existing cultural resources. That's also in part why, for instance, J. K. Rowling herself has been accused multiple times of plagiarism and copyright infringement, the Willy the Wizard suit being the most recent example. However fresh and captivating her stories undoubtedly are, they nonetheless draw on some of the deepest resources of Western culture, including the narrative of the hero's quest, the genre of the British boarding school novel, and much, much more. (The fact that Rowling has deep, deep pockets is also a major factor here -- let's be clear.)
One of the things that most intrigues me in talking to the students of my "Cultures of Books and Reading" course, where we read my Harry Potter chapter from The Late Age of Print, is the tension that exists between categories (2) and (4), above. I'm always fascinated to hear my students debate where they think the line should be drawn in terms of what constitutes illicit (piratical) appropriation. Most are generally okay with officially authorized derivative works. Some, however, become very upset at works that end up in category (4), even as they admit to being readers and sometimes producers of fan fiction, typically of category (2) and on rarer occasion, number (3). I'm not sure how to reconcile this tension other than to point out that many have framed the piracy issue as a clash between "powerful" and "grassroots" media producers. But there is also significant tension that exists among the grassroots -- which is to say nothing of all of the suits and countersuits that routinely occur among the big media producers.
The bottom line for me, then, is to begin thinking more deliberately about the ways in which law and legal concerns increasingly mediate people's experiences of culture -- this alongside the work you've done in terms of identifying the frameworks that fans and even more pedestrian consumers use to judge the legitimacy of particular cultural goods.
Ted Striphas is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Culture, Indiana University and book review editor of the journal Cultural Studies. He research and teaching interests include media history, the digital humanities, and the future of scholarly communication. He blogs about books and digital culture at The Late Age of Print. You can also find him on Twitter: @striphas.
Ted Striphas's The Late Age of Print will change how you think about books. Most of the ways we've been taught literature seek to make the print medium itself disappear. We are left thinking about the text as pure expression removed from the material conditions by which it is produced, distributed, and consumed. There is, to be sure, a strong history of work on the history of print and of books, but it still remains highly likely that you can get through most high school and college Literature classes and never really engage with books on that level. Yet, the prospect of delivering these texts through some other medium -- digital, perhaps -- may make many of us passionate defenders of the book as a vehicle for communicating knowledge, as a medium which shapes our experience of reading. So, that's where Striphas starts, with the recurring anxiety that books and book culture may be endangered, but he does not stop there, taking us deep into the history of book stores, book publishing, even the routing process by which books reach consumers. And the result is utterly fascinating.
I had a chance to meet Ted Striphas, who is a professor at Indiana University, when I gave a lecture at Bloomington this past fall, and there we hatched a plan to bring an interview about his book about books to this blog. Throughout this conversation, Striphas gives us a sense of print -- not as a medium at risk, but certainly as a medium in transition.
You titled your book "the Late Age of Print" and your book begins by looking critically at some of the claims being made right now that print culture is in crisis or in active decline. What do you think such writers get right? What do they get wrong?
First, Henry, let me thank you for kindly inviting me for an interview on your blog. What a delight to dialogue with you.
One of the principal claims we hear reiterated about books is how electronic media are, for lack of a better word, their competitors. First it was radio, then it was television, and now it's the internet, video games, and other digital technologies: they're slowly siphoning off the audience for books because of their flash, interactivity, and verve -- or at least that's the story. The upshot is that electronic media are causing books and book reading a slow and agonizing death. This is basically the conclusion that the National Endowment for the Arts reached in its widely cited report from 2004, "Reading at Risk," although similar claims had been made countless times before then in a host of venues.
What the alarmists get right is an appreciation for how books exist within a densely packed media sphere, where more and more media seem to vie for our attention each day. Unfortunately, they tend to glance over just how complex this relationality actually is. Pick up a paperback book and turn it over. What do you see? Endorsements, a summary, maybe a few words telling the bookseller where the volume ought to be shelved. Now look closer, to the part of the book you're not supposed to focus on: the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and Universal Product Code (UPC). These machine codes tell us that the distribution, selling, and ultimately consumption of books all rely significantly on digital technologies. In other words, the very technologies that are supposedly killing off books also facilitate their consumption. That's a fact that most traditional bibliophiles have yet to work through.
Was print culture ever stable in the sense that these writers seem to imply?
Never. In fact, the claims you've asked me about follow in a long line of fears about new technologies edging out the old, either in terms of the technologies themselves or the capacities they're purported to encourage in human beings. Plato bemoaned the technology of writing for making us stupid, because he saw it as an enfeebling prosthetic for our memories. Rousseau said almost exactly the same thing 2500 years later. During the first century of print, scribes bemoaned printed books for being devoid of the mark of the human hand, suggesting that they were existentially inferior to manuscripts as a result. Ditto Martin Heidegger, who made a similar claim in reference to the typewriter in his lectures on Parmenides.
One of my favorite examples, though, comes from a Massachusetts librarian named J. M. Hubbard, who, in 1884, had this to say about popular novels: "This...is our danger in this day of public libraries and cheap literature, that the mental strength of our youth will be weakened through...too much reading of a multitude of books." In other words, it wasn't all that long ago that the very media form we now hold up as sacred -- printed books, or at least a particular genre of them -- was the one being accused of diminishing young people's moral and intellectual wellbeing.
The book historian Elizabeth Eisenstein probably said it best in an essay of hers appearing in The American Scholar called "The End of the Book?": "Premature obituaries on...the end of the book are themselves testimony to long-enduring habits of mind. In the very act of heralding the dawn of a new age with the advent of new media, contemporary analysts continue to bear witness, however inadvertently, to the ineluctable persistence of the past." In other words, the feeling of crisis you've pointed to may well be the only constant in the history of books.
A key theme for you is the "everydayness of books," the ways that they have become incorporated into familiar routines and patterns of our lives. Why is this stress on the "ordinary" so important to your analysis?
One of the questions I ask in The Late Age of Print is: how did books become a prevalent-to-the-point-of-being-banal part of people's lives? This strikes me as a crucial starting point, because it compels us to think about the myriad ways in which books have been incorporated into people's daily routines beyond, say, the reading of them in literature classes. So much of what we know -- or think we know -- about books is premised on a model of literary education from the 20th century, where people are expected to pore over words and interpret them for meaning, symbolism, artistry, and so forth. That's all well and good, but what else do people do with books? I have a bunch of books right now propping up a damaged bookcase. What does that tell you about the uses of books? In the 1970s, Barnes & Noble operated a bargain-basement store called the "Sale Annex," where customers could purchase books by the pound. Were they actually reading them? Maybe. More than likely, though, they were buying them in bulk to fill up what would otherwise be empty bookshelf space.
The point of thinking about the "ordinariness" or "everydayness" of books is to expand our understandings of what books, as cultural artifacts, are or actually do. They're literary objects, to be sure, but they're also space-fillers, positional goods, tools (ever killed a bug with a book?), and more. Unless you start from the everydayness of books, you're apt to write a one-dimensional history of a technologically and culturally complex object.
On a more intellectual-historical note, the concern for "ordinariness" derives from my interest in the work of the cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams. His essay from 1958, "Culture is Ordinary," is one of the key theoretical touchstones of The Late Age of Print and indeed of my larger body of scholarly work.
At San Diego Comic-Con last year, there was a panel on "Comics Without Borders." In years past, this title might have refered to the transgressiveness of underground comics, but this year, it refered to the anxiety caused by the closing of a major book store chain and what that means for the comics industry's hopes for more mainstream (non-speciality shop) distribution. This is one of the biggest changes since you wrote the book. How has the collapse of Borders impacted American book culture?
It's difficult to be sure, since it's only about a year since Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, following a year or two of shuttering unprofitable stores. Having said that, there's at least one immediate effect that's clear: more than 500 retail book superstores disappeared from the American landscape within the space of about two years. That's more than 12 million square feet of bookstore space, to put it in another perspective. What that also means, following the closure of many independent bookstores in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is that there are now just two major players on the bookselling scene: Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com (although we shouldn't forget the so-called "non-book outlets" where printed books are also sold, e.g., pharmacies, discount department stores, etc.). This winnowing is alarming, if for no other reason than it suggests something of a return to the era of mass culture, at least where books are concerned. Together, Barnes & Noble and Amazon possess unparalleled leverage in terms of book distribution and selling, which means they can place extraordinary pressure on publishers to do their bidding.
The collapse of Borders was also something of a wake-up call in terms of getting the book business to begin thinking seriously about the long term viability of its mainstay, printed books. The latter are cumbersome, consuming lots of space and natural resources -- all very costly on a number of levels. And in this, publishers, distributors, and others were reminded of the collapse of two comparable institutions: Tower Records, once an icon of super-sized music selling and now a mere memory, a casualty of (among other things) the explosive rise of digital music in the early 2000s; and Blockbuster Video, whose stores once dotted almost every suburban landscape. Many in the book industry now seem convinced that "efficiency" and "competitiveness" can only mean "digital," a message Amazon in particular is only too happy to reinforce.
I'm not sure this is the absolutely correct conclusion, however, and I think Barnes & Noble may be right in terms of hedging its bets. The company has decided to pursue an aggressive digital strategy while maintaining a more traditional paper artifact/physical bookstore approach. Borders' woes, though related to the rise of digital books, had much more to do with years of mismanagement, including a string of ineffective CEOs who knew next to nothing about books and how to sell them. Again, it's not entirely clear whether digital and paper media are sworn enemies, and whether, then, the new must drive out the old.
Your book mentions several times the crisis in publishing experienced in the early 1930s. What can we learn about today's anxieties around print by looking at this earlier transitional moment? How did the book industry respond to that crisis?
The crisis in books of the 1930s was precipitated largely by the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression. With millions out of work and with less disposable income, the book business suffered, as did most major industries of the time. The downturn forced the book industry to get really creative in its approach to promoting books and reading. For instance, a group of New York publishers began working with the public relations guru Edward L. Bernays, who concocted a clever scheme designed to stigmatize people who loaned their books out to friends -- a practice that must have become all the more commonplace given the economic conditions of the time. Bernays organized a contest in which the readers of several major New York City papers were asked create a neologism -- a put-down, really -- to describe people who, in passing on their books, were depriving authors and publishers of sorely needed sales and thus furthering the Depression. The winning entry was "book sneak," and though it never really made it into the American English lexicon, it's nonetheless a fitting reminder of the indirect -- you might even say backhanded -- ways one might promote book buying.
Bookselling isn't experiencing a complete slump today, although the current economic downturn has affected it negatively, to be sure. And as I mentioned before, many publishers now seem to think that a digital strategy will be the turnkey solution to all their problems. To me this demonstrates unimaginative thinking, as the Bernays example shows. Why not encourage home builders to install bookshelves in new homes, as Bernays also did? Why not try to figure out how to connect books better with readers, as Oprah Winfrey did? Apropos, one of the most interesting things Winfrey did through her Book Club was to avoid reinforcing the longstanding distinction between fiction and non-fiction, which seemed irrelevant to many of her viewers. Still, book publishers persist in categorizing and marketing books in this way, because, in their view, these categories are sacrosanct. All that to say, book publishers and book sellers need to question everything they think they know about the book business, beyond the very obvious distinctions to be made between atoms and bits.
You cite a cartoon from The Chronicle of Higher Education which said "the problem with e-books is that they are e-books." Why do so many intellectuals seem to have a problem with the idea of e-books? What do current sales patterns around the Kindle and the Nook suggest about the future impact of digital technology on books?
I have to confess to being one of those intellectuals who has a problem reading e-books. I'm not a fan, although having forced myself recently to read the Kindle editions of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration; Moneyball: The Art of Winning and Unfair Game; and the Walter Isaacson biography, Steve Jobs, I'm becoming more comfortable than I once was.
For me, the resistance to e-books (and I don't think, as a humanities scholar, I'm alone in this) has everything to do with the intensive way in which I interact with paper books. I underline and takes notes on key passages as I go. You can do that on a Kindle, but you cannot then do what I also do: create an alternative index based on my idiosyncratic trajectory through the book; separate my "brainstorms" from my bootstrap index and marginal notes; and start an additional list of notes in some other location of the text for purposes of, say, leading a class discussion.
The more e-books I read, the more I begin to realize that: (1) Kindles, Nooks, and other e-reading devices are engineered around a conception of what the book industry calls the "general reader"; and (2) academic readers -- especially those of us in the humanities -- are atypical in terms of the ways we read and relate to texts. What that also tells me is that we're still very much in a "one-size-fits-all" phase for e-books. Their growth has been explosive in recent years (assuming we believe Amazon's many unverified claims), but, truth be told, at this point e-book sales have nowhere else to go but up. Eventually the adoption of e-readers will reach some type of limit, which is going to leave companies like Amazon, Barnes & Noble (assuming it survives), Apple, and others scrambling to find new, more specialized markets (Apple may already be doing this through its recent iTextbooks initiative). Maybe then e-readers will become even more full-featured and better able to accommodate the needs of weird readers like me.
Ted Striphas is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Culture, Indiana University and book review editor of the journal Cultural Studies. He research and teaching interests include media history, the digital humanities, and the future of scholarly communication. He blogs about books and digital culture at The Late Age of Print. You can also find him on Twitter: @striphas.
a non-profit organization that mobilizes the Harry Potter fan community
toward civic action, using metaphors from the popular narratives. In
comparing the two organizations, we found that while the Harry Potter
Alliance built on an existing fan community and harnessed a pre-existing
content world (a powerful narrative that strongly resonates with
members) toward its civic goals, Invisible Children began with a
goal--ending the use of child soldiers in the civil war in Uganda--and
built a content world around it.
Invisible
Children has been creating documentary films since 2004, when they
released their first, and for many viewers most powerful, film, Invisible Children: The Rough Cut:
For an analysis of IC's transmedia storytelling practices see the Invisible Children Working Paper written by fellow Civic Paths member Lana Swartz.
The Rough Cut documents IC founders Jason, Bobby and Lauren's trip to Uganda, where they first learned about the war with the LRA and the existence of child soldiers. In members' narratives, this movie is attributed with an almost magical effect in transforming their worldview:
"They
showed me the film and I remember being so floored like, 'I cannot
believe that this is going on' and 'why have I never heard about this.' I
remember something in me shifted that night." (Ruth, IC intern)
The
main strength of the movie to most IC members is the feeling of
identification with the protagonists--the three filmmakers and future IC
founders, young people not much older than themselves, who go out to
Uganda, encounter a social issue and launch a movement:
"The
movie is just very raw, and it's, even though they were older than me
they were kids, and you see these kids just go, they see something, they
run into a problem and they're like, OK, now we have to fix this
problem." (Beth, IC intern)
In this respect, the Kony 2012 movie represents a significant shift in point of view and style. If Rough Cut presented
the founders as naïve but good-intentioned film students accidentally
stumbling onto a war, Kony 2012 shows Jason as a leader of a viable
movement and, predominantly, as a father. When he teaches his 5 year old
son about Joseph Kony being "the bad guy", it's not clear with whom
young viewers most identify - with the 30 something old dad, or with the
innocent but earnest 5 year-old.
While
Kony 2012 was released online, previous IC movies were mostly
distributed through "screenings": 1.5-2 hour long events, taking place
in high schools, colleges and churches. In screenings, IC roadies, who
are volunteer staff members, show the movie, and accompany it with an
introduction and Q&A sessions. Some screenings also include young
Ugandan, recipients of IC scholarships in Uganda, who come to the U.S.
for a short period of time to tell their own story in screenings. After
screenings, audiences were encouraged to donate to Invisible Children,
buy its merchandise, as well as become more involved with its local
clubs.
This
distribution model, of course, reached a negligible audience when
compared with Kony 2012. At the same time, the live interaction with the
roadies enabled Invisible Children to create a different experience
than that possible when watching Kony 2012 online. By supplementing the
movies with live interaction with the roadies, Invisible Children could
supplement the information given in the movies (e.g., explain the
current state of affairs in Uganda), answer audience's questions (e.g.,
how are donations used) as well as create contacts between roadies and
IC supporters, which were later maintained online. This model, while
reaching much smaller audiences, enabled IC to create a more nuanced and
informed message, and thus counter some (though not all) of the
criticisms it is now encountering.
Accusations of Slacktivism, or, can watching a 30 minute movie make you a social activist?
image source: http://jeffzelaya.com/
Part
of the critique around the Kony 2012 campaign is that it promotes
Slacktivism: a genre of social action that is easy (done with a click of
the mouse), comfortable, and thus meaningless. One of the memes that's
been circulating around Kony 2012 presents this critique. This critique
already ignores some of the more active forms of participation that are
planned as part of the Kony 2012 campaign, such as the "cover the night"
events planned for April 20th 2012, in which participants are called to
cover their local cities with posters of Joseph Kony. Countless notices
have already sprung up for such local events on Facebook (though,
arguably, the goal of getting the world to know who Joseph Kony is, has
pretty much been achieved).
Beyond
that, however, talking to members of Invisible Children shows how
previous IC movies indeed played important roles in helping young people
become socially active, though not always in clear, immediate ways.
Beth's story is one example of this. When we interviewed her, Beth was
an IC intern, in charge of updating their website with news on the war
in Uganda. Beth claimed that she used to be an apathetic, selfish kid
(though her family had always been involved in aid in Africa). She
happened to watch The Rough Cut
at a church, where it was shown by a youth pastor. Beth described
watching the movie as a formative moment, an embarking on a journey of
engagement in activism: "I guess it affects everybody differently. For
me there was no way I could do anything else. I couldn't go get a white
collar job [...] I don't even remember what other selfish tracks I was
on." The movie opened her eyes to the world of non-profits, and she
began researching them online. She became engaged with the student
organization STAND, and is now their local president. Through her work
with STAND she reconnected with IC. In the interview, she claimed that
she now sees no other alternative for herself but being involved in
activism: "That life to me just seems like the kind of life everyone
should live, a life where you're not doing something only for yourself,
whatever you're doing is putting something back into the world".
Beth's
story exemplifies an element we heard in many IC members' re-tellings: a
narrative of self-transformation. In this narrative structure, IC
members often describe their 'former selves', before joining IC, in
contrast to who they are today. Beth describes her former self as
apathetic and selfish, in many ways echoing prevalent stereotypes about
disengaged youth. In her narrative, watching the Rough Cut represented
a life-changing turning point. Her commitment to social engagement,
then, seemed to be created at that moment of realization, "understanding
that there's more to life than the mall" (Beth). These
narratives of members are extremely powerful, though they may not be
the full picture of what's going on. Digging down deeper reveals that
many IC members (though not all) had been previously socialized to
altruistic values and practices. For example, while Beth understates the
significance of her parents' involvement in aid in Africa to her own
activist desire, research shows that parental modeling is a key variable
predicting youth civic engagement. Yet the movie served as an important
catalyst to civic action, one that allowed Beth to feel that she
shifted from selfish child to civic actor. Moreover, we found that
seeing IC movies was part of a larger process through which young people
could become socially involved. Even
when young people want to create social change, finding ways to get
meaningfully involved, particularly in world affairs, is described by
many members as a challenge. Many "traditional" non-profits, like the
Peace Corps, offer limited possibilities for youth (under 18), and often
require extensive voluntary commitments. Other organizations may offer
young people ways to become involved, but are perceived as old-fashioned
and out-dated, "charities run by middle-aged women"
(Edie, IC intern). A key strength of IC, and one that Kony 2012
exhibits as well, is the way it offers young people actionable steps,
concrete channels to express a pre-existing activist desire:
"I
had been trying to find ways that I could get into volunteering or
working to become part of a more global community. I saw the screening
and they were in the process of trying to get the bill passed and they
were encouraging us to talk to senators to hold a meeting, a cool way
that you guys can make a big change, and so I got really involved from
there." (Tina, IC roadie)
While signing an online pledge or purchasing a $30 action kit (which are now completely sold out) may be seen as meaningless steps, for young people they can be perceived as significant first steps in taking civic action, giving them a sense of agency and empowerment that often sparks further action, as Beth's story shows. "White man's burden?" Nuancing the message One
of the accusations against Kony 2012 has accompanied Invisible Children
from its start: the accusation of presenting "poor Ugandan children"
who "need to be rescued" by white Americans. Invisible Children as an
organization has grappled with this accusation and over the years made
many attempts to nuance their message. One of the leadership's key
statements is that their relationship with the Ugandans is one of
friendship and mutual learning, not only one-directional aid. This
message is in fact one that was very peripheral to Kony 2012, but it is
strongly echoed in the narratives of members we talked to. IC members
repeatedly expressed shared affiliations with the people of Uganda whom
they have never met.
"Even
though I haven't met anyone from Uganda, I feel like they're kind of my
extended friends now. I care about them not just a far off, 'Oh, I want
everybody to be okay' but I really feel somewhat connected." (Dave, IC
intern)
Janelle, an IC intern, is one of few IC members who have visited Uganda. She similarly speaks of a mutual relationship:
"It was such an eye opening experience. You put faces to the people
you're helping, it's not just helping others but building friendships
and exchanging. It was definitely what [the Ugandans] were giving, they
were giving to us as well, learning from their culture." (Janelle, IC
intern)
It
is still early to tell which relationships toward Ugandans Kony 2012
may invoke in its viewers. In trying to create a movie that people will
be compelled to share, Invisible Children may have sidetracked their
previous commitment to a nuanced representation of their relationship
with the Ugandans. Yet when young people participate in conversations
online about whether or not Kony 2012 is a representation of White Man's
Burden, they may be creating such nuanced understanding themselves in
active ways that may be particularly effective. In this manner, the
movie may again be seen as one aspect of a wider experience through
which young people gain awareness of a problem they previously did not
know about, become more informed about it, but are also mobilized in
concrete and empowering ways.
The message young people are getting (again)
Beyond the specific discussion around Kony 2012, we have, as scholars, a wider agenda. Part
of the criticism that Invisible Children is receiving is a normative
and ideological one: it is about what social action needs to look like,
who may participate in it, and what it should entail. Bluntly read, what
some of critics are arguing is that social advocacy, particularly
around world affairs, should be left to experts: to politicians, to
"serious" NGOs, to erudites. Young people--and this includes both the
film's 30 something-old creators, and its mostly 20 and under
viewers--are told that this isn't a world for them. It is too
complicated, too hard, too serious. These are the same messages young
people are getting about politics: If you don't know exactly what you're
talking about, you'd better not talk at all.
A
lot of the criticism of Invisible Children and Kony 2012 can be read as
a protecting of boundaries and barriers. Who is and who is not allowed
to speak; what is the right way to speak; and what should that sound
like. There are many ways to take social action, and there are many
other organizations out there that probably do many things better than
Invisible Children. They have more nuanced messages, they offer more
detailed information, they spend more of their budget on direct aid
programs. IC is accused of spending too much money on filmmaking and
"marketing". Yet this statistic is seen in a different light if we
consider fostering youth engagement as a central role of what Invisible
Children does, as the Fourth Estate youth leadership event implies. When
was the last time so many young people were so engaged around any
social issue, let alone a war in Africa?
IC belongs to a new genre of civic organization, one that plays with and challengesaccepted
definitions of social action and what it should look and feel like.
Over the past days, many critics have again and again articulated what
IC is doing wrong. But in speaking to young people, it is obviously
doing something right.
Many
critiques of Invisible Children and of Kony 2012 may point to real
improvement areas for the organization, and IC will have to meaningfully
grapple with these critiques over time. But in addition to pointing out
important problems, non-profit organizations, politicians and scholars
should also ask, how is Invisible Children able to resonate so stronglywith
young people? How does it mobilize and get them involved? We suggest
that the answer to these questions can be found not only in their
film-making but also among IC's young viewers, supporters and members,
who want to speak up - but they need to be spoken to and invited to
participate first. Invisible Children is asking them to participate. Are
On behalf of the Civic Paths Project Research Group, I have been selectively collecting online essay and article responses - both critical and positive - to Invisible Children's KONY 2012 campaign, as well as Invisible Children's reactions to them. I have focused on blog responses from experts and activists in relevant fields with particular attention given to Ugandan and other African voices. I've attempted to capture a broad range of representative responses to IC's campaign amongst these groups. A selection of the links have been categorized using the Storify website here. You can also cut and paste this link: http://storify.com/zhanliusc/kony2012-campaign-responses-march-5-10-2012
which provided official responses that argued against key critiques
levelled at their campaign - for instance, regarding IC's NGO
credibility and transparency and IC's position in relation to human
rights based criticisms of the Ugandan government. IC also attempted to
deflect attacks on what some critics have seen as IC's "white savior"
rhetoric by highlighting "that
over 95% of IC's leadership and staff on the ground are Ugandans on the
forefront of program design and implementation." They also addressed
the related controversy regarding the photo of the
founders posing with guns from 2008, with co-founder Jason Russell
stating "that photo was a bad idea. We were young and we got caught up
in the moment."
Overall,
IC appears to have been both caught off-guard as well as feeling
exhilarated and energized by the spread of the campaign so far. In a video posted on March 8th, Jason Russell thanked IC's supporters for the incredible success of the campaign's spread.
called the movement a revolution that will change the world and told
his audience: "I need you to know something. I am here representing you - your voice. This is a collective. It's a We. And this story transcends borders. It is not about politics. It is not about
the economy. This is about human beings - human beings waking up to the
potential and the power that they have. That's what KONY 2012 is about
and it's just the beginning - because we are starting something which
cannot be stopped." IC has also announced that it is translating the
Kony 2012 video into as many languages as possible.
Since
IC published its response to critics, the attention towards Kony 2012
has only increased, with tallies at time of writing (end of day, March
11th) showing around 91 million views in total for the original YouTube
and Vimeo versions (these figures do not count other versions that may
be in circulation, including non-English language editions that may
already have been released). Commentary critiquing and praising IC's
Kony 2012 campaign continues to evolve and expand.
A little under a week ago, the San Diego-based human rights group, Invisible Children, posted its Kony 2012 video through YouTube and encouraged its base of supporters to help spread the word. By midafternoon Sunday, the Youtube video had been watched more than 71 million times and the hashtag #Kony2012 has been a trending topic on Twitter throughout much of this time.
Invisible Children's goal was to make Joseph Kony a household name, not to celebrate his accomplishments, but rather to call him out so that pressure mounts world wide to hold this Ugandan guerilla leader, head of the Lord's Resistance Army, responsible for his acts of child abduction and genocide. According to estimates in a 2006 report produced for UNICEF Uganda by Jeannie Annan, Christopher Blattman and Roger Horton, the LRA since its beginnings has abducted and forced at least 66,000 youths (aged 14-30 years old; the traditional Acholi definition of youth) to fight and/or carry out other roles for them for various lengths of time (many never to return); with the UN estimating 22,000 to 25,000 children being abducted during this period. The LRA has also contributed to the internal displacement of nearly two million people, as well as untold thousands of deaths in its region since its rebellion began in 1986.
Invisible Children has been surprisingly successful in this social media-based campaign to call attention to issues in Africa which have long been neglected by mainstream media and which remained little known to most American citizens. The Kony 2012 campaign has drawn extensive coverage from traditional journalists and sparked heated debates across the blogosphere, with many experts on African politics weighing in to complicate or challenge the film's narrative of what is occurring on the ground in Uganda and its recommendations about what appropriate responses to Kony might look like. Alongside these discussions of African policy and politics, the video has also sparked heated debates about the nature and value of online activism.
For a basic narrative describing the release of the video and its immediate reception, see this blog post by Rhea Richot and Zhan Lee,
For a data base of materials, including both the original video and a range of different responses and critiques, see this archive which Zhan Li has assembled on Storify.
The Civic Paths Project
Much of this coverage has dealt with the video as a piece of content which suddenly went "viral" -- but in fact, the Civic Paths research group at the University of Southern California has had Invisible Children on its radar for almost three years. Our primary focus has been on the strategies behind the organization's success at recruiting, training, and mobilizing young activists in the United States. This research has been funded, in part, by the Spencer Foundation as part of their larger initiative to identify new forms of civic learning and is linked to our group's participation in the Youth and Participatory Politics research team, which has been recruited and funded by the MacArthur Foundation, though neither foundation is responsible for this series of blog posts.
As part of this research, we conducted in depth interviews with more than 30 young people who have become involved in IC's efforts, spent time at the organization's headquarters, audited their media output and strategies, and otherwise, sought to better understand why this group has been so successful at what it does.
The Kony 2012 video did not "go viral"; rather, its circulation depended on the hundreds of thousands of young people who already felt connected to the organization and to this cause through their participation in school based clubs and grassroots campaigns over almost a decade. These young people were among the first to receive the video, pass it along through their social networks to their friends and classmates, and thus, start a process which ultimately got the attention of millions around the world. Many of them have already given time, money, and other resources to this cause. Awareness of Kony 2012 remains highest among teens and young adults, suggesting how central these same groups were to circulating the video from the start.
Given the sudden visibility of the organization's most recent efforts, we felt as a research group that it was important to share some of the core insights from this research through this and the Civic Paths blog. We have little to contribute to the debates about what would be the best policy response to the problems which Invisible Children is calling to the public's attention, but we do feel, as communications scholars, that our work might shed some light into how the current effort fits within IC's larger history of using social media and participatory culture tactics to empower young people to see themselves as active political agents who can make a difference in the world.
Invisible Children: Storytelling-Based Activism
CIvic Paths was started as a project to better understand the links between participatory culture and civic engagement, specifically looking for examples of successful campaigns, organizations, or networks which had helped young people become more involved in campaigns for social justice and political change. During our initial phase, many team members shared groups that they were already researching. Melissa A. Brough brought Invisible Children to our team's attention; she had just completed a study of the visual culture and rhetoric shaping some of the group's earliest efforts, which has since become a chapter in the recently published book, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in NeoLiberal Times, which was edited by Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, for New York University Press. Here are some excerpts from her article:
Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, and Lauren Poole founded Invisible Children in 2004 as recent University of Southern California graduates, after completing their documentary film Invisible Children: Rough Cut. Only four years later, IC had ninety staff running development programs in Uganda and thirty US staff who, significantly, were almost exclusively under the age of thirty. In 2005 they raised more than $300,000; by 2008 the revenue growth reached over $10 million. At the time of this writing 2,098 U.S. school clubs were registered to support IC projects in eleven Ugandan schools. And as is increasingly popular in the commercial sector, IC utilizes user-generated content from its supporters to help collectively envision and market its mission, through Web 2.0 sites like Myspace, YouTube and Facebook....
Creative storytellling through visual media is at the core of the organization's dual mission to be 'both an innovative media-based organization' (i.e. a production company) and a humanitarian/development nongovernmental organization. Approximately 50 percent of its programming budget is therefore spent on media and event production, largely in the US with the stated goal of bringing 'awareness to the situation and promoting international support of the peace process taking place.' IC refers to these production activities as the 'Movement' component of the organization (as opposed to its direct aid and development work), which uses stories and images to connect to and mobilize US youth to support its project in Uganda. This in turn produces content for more stories, creating a circular process of humanitarian media production....
In IC's media, emphasis is placed on the American donor/activist as much as, if not more than, IC's beneficiaries. Invisible Children's videos unapologetically embrace the opportunity for personal growth offered by entrepreneurial participation in the humanitarian adventure. IC sends the winners of high school fundraising competitions, organized through an online social networking site, to Uganda to visit the schools and camps of internally displaced communities that their funds support....
Brough's essay goes on to discuss and critique the group's use of discourses of humanitarian aid as a means of mutual self-empowerment, its use of participatory spectacle, and its deployment of networked communication tactics, with a focus on the first few waves of media which the group produced. She concludes:
Invisible Children's media are bold, beautiful, and captivating the minds of tens of thousands of American youth. They are creating a space for idealism that works within the context of postmodernism and neoliberalism, which is precisely its promise and its peril. Radically reconfiguring humanitarianism will likely require the innovative vision of youth, from both the global North and South.
Brough's work can help to address several aspects of the current controversy, starting with the concern raised by some about what a high percentage of the IC's revenues get spent in North America rather than on the ground in Africa. Such critiques neglect the central role which movement building and civic learning play in IC's model for social change. At times, this focus on increasing young America's social awareness and political voice has come to be as important to their efforts as their specific goals of bring about change in Africa. We can debate the merits of this choice, but it needs to be understood as part of the larger picture of what the group has been doing.
Youth As Political Agents
Brough's essay also suggests that the steps which the group takes to give youth a sense of their own voice and power as political agents, what she describes in terms of "discourses of personal growth," may be problematic when read in relation to the historical relationship between the Global North and South, furthering discourses of dependency which disempower people in developing African nations, even as they give greater agency to those who already possess a high degree of privlidge. This critique has resurfaced often in more recent responses to Kony 2012.
Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, another member of the Civic Paths research team, has developed a blog post which shares what we learned through our interviews with Invisible Children's young activists, specifically focusing on the impact which their participation in these campaigns have had on their own developing civic and political consciousness. This blog post is based on an essay she wrote with Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, and Chris Tokuhama for the Special "Fan Activism" issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, which will appear in June 2012.
Kligler-Vilenchik argues that the focus of the campaign on youth participation is one of the themes which has largely been lost in critical responses by African experts to the video campaign, as has the idea that the video was intended as part of a larger transmedia strategy to create multiple points of contact with its core messages and themes. You can read her reflections here.
Transmedia Mobilization
Lana Swartz, another member of the Civic Paths research team, has conducted an extensive overview of the media strategies deployed by Invisible children, resulting in a working paper written last year which describes the group's efforts in relation to my frameworks for thinking about transmedia storytelling. She argues:
The "Movement," as Invisible Children calls its US-facing work, includes visually-arresting films, spectacular event-oriented campaigns, provocative graphic t-shirts and other apparel, music mixes, print media, blogs and more. To be a member of Invisible Children means to be a viewer, participant, wearer, reader, listener, commenter of and in the various activities, many mediated, that make up the Movement. It is a massive, open-ended, evolving documentary "story" unfurling across an expanding number of media forms.
Swartz and other members of the Civic Paths team briefed key leaders of the Invisible Children staff on these findings last summer; they were receptive to these insights and have made some efforts to improve their practice as a consequence, though, in some ways, her findings predict some of the current controversies surrounding the Kony 2012 video. While many are encountering Invisible Children for the first time thanks to the widespread circulation of this new video, the video itself may best be understood as part of this much wider array of new media tactics and practices.
It is important to understand the transmedia nature of Invisible Children. Swartz writes:
Jenkins (2007) defines transmedia storytelling as a process in which "integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience," and, "ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story." It involves an emphasis on "world building" rather than plot or character-driven narratives, multiple points of entry for differently engaged audiences, co-creation and collaboration across various professional and fan sites of production, and collective intelligence, as audiences become "hunters and gatherers," collecting and sharing information across media. Transmedia storytelling is not just about new media, although it often makes thorough use of it. In fact, in order to best understand the concept, it helps to have an expansive notion of the word "media" as any channel through which new meaning or information is added to the larger story-- be it a piece of clothing, an action figure, or a live in-person performance.
By just looking at one piece-- the Kony 2012 documentary, for example-- it is quite easy to miss the full complexity of group. However, it may be difficult for a newcomer to access the "rest of the story" as most of their web presence has been drafted into the Kony 2012 push and some of their earlier work seems to have been removed from the web.
Spreadability and Drillability
The rest of the paper uses elements of transmedia storytelling to understand the Invisible children in more detail. An important element is the section on Spreadability and Drillability:
Spreadability, the focus of Jenkins et al's (forthcoming, 2013) book, refers to the extent to which media can be engaged with and shared in a way that increases its economic value and social worth. They contrast spreadability to distribution, a model in which "movement of media content is heavily--or totally--controlled by the commercial interests that produce and sell it." Spreadability, instead, is "an emerging hybrid model of circulation, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways." Mittell (2009) offers "drillability" as a corrective but complementary characteristic. He writes, "Spreadable media encourages horizontal ripples, accumulating eyeballs without necessarily encouraging more long-term engagement. Drillable media typically engage far fewer people, but occupy more of their time and energies in a vertical descent into a text's complexities." By putting the two terms in conversation with each other, Jenkins (2009) suggests that transmedia storytelling will likely have both properties working dynamically to engage audiences.
In transmedia storytelling mobilization, both spreadability and drillability can refer to the way the movement structures access to information about the cause and the organization itself. The extent to which the group "raises awareness" is largely dependent on how spreadable their message is. Drillability, on the other hand, describes the learning opportunities that exist beyond initial contact with the message. Both features are necessary for newcomers to become advocates of the cause.
Invisible Children makes information about itself and its work in central Africa very easy to share while at the same time allowing groups and individuals to personalize its meaning, amplifying spreadability. One way it does this is through fairly open content distribution. Although screenings where roadies show Invisible Children films to school and church audiences play a big role in the Movement, DVDs of the 9 major films are available for purchase and have, at various times, also been available for free, streaming online or on YouTube. Each purchase of the Rough Cut comes with two DVDs, one to keep and one to share. Invisible Children does not explicitly use Creative Commons licensing, but it does practice and encourage the free exchange of its materials, stating on the FAQs section of its website:
We at IC make every effort to spread the word about the plight of those in northern Uganda, and we realize that having access to Invisible Children: Rough Cut is vital to helping this movement grow. As we pass the torch to you, we ask you use the documentary and Invisible Children logo responsibly--only to raise awareness and benefit Invisible Children, Inc.
and:
We want everyone to have FREE access to Invisible Children: Rough Cut. Be creative and make your screening unique. The only thing we insist is that you don't charge for admission.
Similarly, Invisible Children takes pains to enable its staff, volunteers, roadies, and other representatives to give accurate information about central Africa and its work there. One intern was careful to correct herself when she said, "war torn," replacing it with, "impacted by war." Roadies in particular cite being equipped with information that would allow to them to speak confidently in any crowd as a particularly valuable part of their training. This information is often dispersed in short, quotable chunks, making it easier to spread in a way that seems particularly effective for the college and high school aged audiences who may have little, if any, prior exposure to the history of central Africa.
Providing drillable wells of knowledge does not seem to be as much of a priority for Invisible Children. Its blog does feature, at least monthly, a "Peace and Conflict Update" on current events in central Africa, but the official description of the history of the war in northern Uganda, a main tab on its website, is less than 1,200 words long, and this information tends to be repeated rather than augmented across media.
In some circumstances, inadequate drillability can undermine Invisible Children's otherwise powerful transmedia story. This is true, for example, when a critic, claiming to be Ugandan, makes comments in multiple Invisible Children blog posts suggesting that Jolly Okot, now the director of Invisible Children's direct aid programs and featured heavily in many of the films, has compromising political ties to the Ugandan government and the LRA. A curious Invisible Children supporter, wanting to drill deeper into these claims, is thwarted from enacting questions across media because the link to the profiles of the Uganda-based staff is broken and has been "Coming Soon" for many months. Because Invisible Children is more focused on enabling spreadability than drillability, it relinquishes opportunities to more thoroughly and credibly describe the good work it is no doubt doing.
This lack of intentional drillability is further exacerbated by cultural and technological asymmetries between the way the Ugandan and American representatives of Invisible Children share data about themselves in unofficial ways across the Internet. For example, even for the most savvy transmedia navigators, finding any information online one way or the other about Jolly Okot's actual political history is very difficult. However, simply by clicking through a series of links or performing a quick search, any interested party can find a personal blog in which a high-ranking member of the American Invisible Children staff makes a joke that, especially in a low-context medium, might be seen as racially insensitive. The lack of drillable information about the leaders in Uganda and the excess of it about those in America equally undermine the credibility of the organization.
This tension between spreadable and drillable communication practices may well be at the heart of the current debate around Invisible Children. Few can debate the group's success at spreading its content and in the process, sparking many more conversations about what's happening in Uganda than would have occured otherwise. Yet, many have argued that the lack of depth in the group's presentation of the issues can come across as naive and misguided.
Provocation and Process
In a very thoughtful blog post, Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow member of the MacArthur Youth and Participatory Politics research hub, shares his own critiques of what Invisible Children has and has not achieved in its current campaign, opening up questions which should be addressed by those of us who see spreadability as a productive model for thinking about new forms of political activism:
The campaign Invisible Children is running is so compelling because it offers an extremely simple narrative: Kony is a uniquely bad actor, a horrific human being, whose capture will end suffering for the people of Northern Uganda. If each of us does our part, influences powerful people, the world's most powerful military force will take action and Kony will be captured....
The problem, of course, is that this narrative is too simple. The theory of change it advocates is unlikely to work, and it's unclear if the goal of eliminating Kony should still be a top priority in stabilizing and rebuilding northern Uganda. By offering support to Museveni, the campaign may end up strengthening a leader with a terrible track record.
A more complex narrative of northern Uganda would look at the odd, codependent relationship between Museveni and Kony, Uganda's systematic failure to protect the Acholi people of northern Uganda. It would look at the numerous community efforts, often led by women, to mediate conflicts and increase stability. It would focus on the efforts to rebuild the economy of northern Uganda, and would recognize the economic consequences of portraying northern Uganda as a war zone. It would feature projects like Women of Kireka, working to build economic independence for women displaced from their homes in Northern Uganda.
Such a narrative would be lots harder to share, much harder to get to "go viral".
I'm starting to wonder if this is a fundamental limit to attention-based advocacy. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?
One way out of this bind is to see the Kony 2012 video not as a stand-alone text, but rather as one element of a much more diverse set of communication practices, as, going back to Swartz, one extension of a larger transmedia mobilization. A while ago, I suggested that Occupy might be better understood as a "provocation," an attempt to shift the discursive frame and spark new conversations, than as a movement, which is pursuing a single cause. At first glance, Invisible Children might seem to be doing the opposite -- too narrowly defining its cause so that it can be easily grasped by -- and potentially achieved through the efforts of -- its young supporters.
Yet, in practice, the effect has been the same. People are talking about Kony, including many who had remained silent and unaware before. The blunt force of the video has created a space where more nuanced readings of the situation are being produced, circulated, read, and debated. Some of the other bloggers might see themselves as correcting the "damages" the group has caused through its simplification, but blog posts such as Zuckerman's can also be seen as continuing the discursive process which the release of the video set into motion.
Zuckerman offers a similar perspective in his blog post's conclusion:
As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good? Or is the wave of pushback against this campaign from Invisible Children evidence that we're learning to read and write complex narratives online, and that a college student with doubts about a campaign's value and validity can find an audience? Will Invisible Children's campaign continue unchanged, or will it engage with critics and design a more complex and nuanced response?
We might think about this process through a lens of "monitorial citizenship" -- groups like Invisible Children help to identify and focus public attention onto urgent problems, initiating a process where-by a range of grassroots groups and experts work together to create richer and more nuanced frames for understanding the problem and identifying solutions.
But this raises the question of whether despite our capacity for networked circulation, we have developed collectively the skills we would need for this kind of deliberative process. We do not know how much these other critiques are able to ride the coat tails of the rapidly circulating video, to what degree young people are inspired by the debate to think more critically about the frames they deploy in thinking about injustices in Africa or America's place in the world.
Ideally, part of Invisible Children's commitment to civic learning would include the fostering of critical media literacy, including the capacity to test and appraise the group's own claims and its own media practices. Ideally, Invisible Children itself would be ready to respond to the controversy with much more information which can support the efforts of their movement to promote human rights in Africa. In practice, they seem to have placed a much higher investment in spreading the basic message than in giving the young citizens they have mobilized a chance to drill deeper and learn more about these issues.
As Invisible Children's critics seek to correct what they see as the simplifications and misrepresentations of the video, we can also hope they will do so in ways which respect the commitment of Invisible Children's young activists, in ways which support their efforts to find their footing as political agents and make a difference in the world. There is a risk that a more complex and nuanced narrative may also be a disempowering one, one which, as so often happens, convince citizens -- young and old -- that they have nothing to contribute and that these matters are best left in the hands of experts.
Contributors:
Neta Kligler-Vilenchik is a Doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. She works with Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito on the Media, Activism, Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, as part of the Youth & Participatory Politics (YPP) Network, where she is investigating connections and continuities between youth's involvement in participatory cultures and new media and their civic engagement. The case studies she works on focus more specifically on organizations and groups that build on networks and communities of fandom, online and off-line, with the aim of encouraging and sustaining young people's involvement in civic life. Neta is currently working on her Doctoral thesis, which revolves around alternative citizenship models and their potential for youth civic engagement. She holds an M.A. in Communication from the University of Haifa, Israel.
Zhan Li holds a B.A. in Social & Political Sciences and a M.Phil. in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (Trinity) as well as a S.M. in Comparative Media Studies from MIT. For his Ph.D. in Organizational Communication, he is specializing in researching the future of scenario planning, a widely used strategic foresight method. Previous thesis topics have included the World Bank's promotion of Knowledge Management and Economics in the 1990s, and the U.S. Army video game America's Army during the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Most recently working as a global media investment banking analyst for HSBC in New York City (with a special focus on India and China), Zhan has also been employed as a researcher at Sony (Los Angeles), the Microsoft Games-To-Teach lab at MIT (Cambridge, MA), the London Business School's Future Media Program and UBS Warburg (London). At Annenberg, Zhan manages the Annenberg Scenario Lab, which focuses on online media innovation in scenario planning techniques for a variety of organizations. His dissertation will focus on the development of online techniques for participatory scenario planning and futures that are informed by organizational communication and new media theory.
Melissa Brough is a Doctoral Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, and a 2010-2011 Fulbright grantee to Colombia. She works in the fields of communication for social change, participatory media, visual and new media cultures, and social movements. She has collaborated with youth and community media projects including Mobile Voices , FilmAid International , Listen Up! and the Chiapas Media Project . She received her B.A. in Development Studies and Modern Culture & Media from Brown University.
Most of Lana Swartz's work is on money (and other regimes of value) as techno-social practice. At Annenberg, she has worked on the CivicPaths research collaborative and the new Media, Economics, and Entrepreneurship working group. In 2009, she completed a masters in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her thesis was on "fake" luxury fashion. There, she also worked on a teachers' strategy guide and an unconference on cultural geography and new media literacies. As part of TeachForAmerica, she taught high school English in Houston, TX.
Rhea Vichot graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Comparative Media Studies in 2004. She attended New York University and attained a Masters in Cinema Studies as well as a Graduate Certificate in Culture and Media in 2006. In 2009, Rhea received a Masters in Digital Media from Georgia Institute of Technology. At Annenberg, Rhea has conducted continuing research on Anonymous, along with other online countercultures and their relationships to learning, cultural practices, and political and civic engagement. Her current research interests include global popular culture, online and fan communities, and media criticism. In particular, she is interested in subaltern groups that have been historically linked with either 'hacker' culture or 'deviant' subcultures. In addition, she is interested in critical analysis of media, specifically games, both as a medium of commercial art as well as an object for cultural production by designers and players.
In the book, you discuss, in relation to Montessori Schools, the concept of "normalization," to explain why some learning environments support students in their natural desires to learn. Yet, implicit in that critique is the recognition that some of this desire to learn has been trained out of the current generation of students through standardized testing and other familiar schooling practices. Given this, what steps would we need to take to create a mind-set among students which would allow them to fully benefit from the kinds of playful, participatory and passion-based modes of learning you describe in the book?
Absolutely. In writing the book, I became captured by how profound this idea is that learning should involve a cycle in which people 1) develop an interest or curiosity, 2) engage in activity to satiate that curiosity (usually developing skills in doing so) and then 3) wrap up and reflect upon that work. For Dr. Montessori, that was the core "game play cycle" of learning, and it works for me. To really embrace this, we'd have to acknowledge that any time you're learning something "for school" or "for a test" it's arguable whether or not you're learning.
As an example, James Wertsch did some excellent studies around the fall of the Soviet Union in which he asked if History had to be believed to be understood. Wertsch was interested in to what extent Estonians "bought" the history of the Soviet Union that they had been taught along side their own family histories. It turns out that Estonians didn't fully resist Soviet sponsored history but didn't entirely buy it either.
And that's a good metaphor for what happens in school. Studies of students' experience in history, chemistry or physics reveals that they can parrot back what they're supposed to know pretty well (more or less), but only when we're truly engaged does it make a change upon us as people. Restated, learners (perhaps adaptively) don't always make themselves available to being changed by formal schooling.
Playful, participatory learning to me does a lot of things. Play, as Eric Zimmerman describes, often times involves an invitation to come and try on a new mode of being. It suggests a mutually agreed upon suspension of disbelief. Participatory culture involves a commitment that if you invest in this activity, you can and should have opportunities to shape its outcomes, including the rules by which it operates.
To make this vision a reality, I think we need to acknowledge that learning requires something like Mimi Ito's cycle of hanging out, messing around and geeking out. We need spaces in which there is low stakes involvement in new ways of being, and then clear trajectories toward becoming fully functioning participants. I don't think it's feasible to reorganize schools tomorrow by this logic by any stretch. However, we can use the edges of the system (summer school, extended school days) to introduce spaces for hanging out and then (ideally) use more formal, organized periods for geeking out.
All of this involves the assumption that learners are autonomous, sense making agents who organically seek out learning experiences, though.
When people talk about bringing games into the classroom, they often act as if there were only one kind of game. Yet, throughout the book, you are attentive to the issue of genre, both in terms of the affordances of different kinds of games for teaching different kinds of content, and in terms of different kinds of gamers having preference for different kinds of game play experiences. How central do you think issue of genre should be to discussions of games-based learning?
One of the first questions I remember asking you, Henry, when I got to MIT was about genres. Educators are not trained to think about genres. Social scientists tend to think about stable lists of features inherent to fixed categories. Genres, in contrast, are historically contextualized and serve as one mechanisms to organize communication across cycles of production and consumption. Without them, we have only horrible art film that no one understands or cares about unless they are paid to do so. Genres also embody crystallized patterns of story, character, interaction and so on that are known to work which provide designers springboards to work from. Hopefully I didn't bastardize your position too much.
Educators designing games need to understand and use genre in very specific ways. Educators struggle with the fact that our audiences have differential experiences with game genres. As an example, I can't assume that every student in a class has played First Person Shooters and intuitively understand the genre's controls or tropes (such as move through spaces to clear it of enemies). If you've never done it, it's fun to sit down with someone new to a genre and watch them puzzle through the most basic of ideas (why can I interact with one object but not another?). Genre knowledge is a bizarre and interesting thing, and it makes you re-realize one more reason people enjoy parody.
As the lead of a design shop, we use genre all the time in very strategic ways. For example, we're currently working on a game about stem cells that we hope will some day teach most every adult the basic concepts of what stem cells are (and are not) and how they might contribute to a science of regenerative medicine. Our designers, Mike Beall and Ted Lauterbach had this brilliant insight that you could build a game around stem cells through "virtual life mechanisms" represented through a Bejeweled type interface (see figure 1).
Building on Bejeweled bought us a lot of things for free. If you see this interface, already you know that you're going to be manipulating symbols that might interact with one another toward building an overarching pattern. This is a form of computer interaction that 10,000,000s of people know about. We can use it to communicate ideas, much as documentarians use the mystery genre to tell stories in history or science.
Other times, we want to be in the business of inventing new genres. Trails Forward is a game that tries to take the rhythm and timing of fantasy sports, as well as sense of playing with reality, and create a new genre of "real life data prognostication" (or something like that). Basically, we're experimenting with the idea that the world is full of data that makes an excellent game board. There should be game experiences we can build by giving people compelling choices on top of these data systems, and then as researchers we should be able to study what they do.
We'll see how it works, but both examples capture the idea that you always design in terms of genre, but sometimes you're trying to reach a goal (reach a lot of users, sell a lot of games) which requires using well understood genre conventions, and other times, you're trying to innovate which means building on genres but also being open to new ideas.
In terms of building teams, I think it's crucial to have people who share a common love for certain genres but who secondarily are well versed across them. Games borrow across genres so rapidly and productively that you can't afford to have a group locked into one.
Your phrase, "replaying history," is interesting because it implies both reimagining the past through "what if" scenarios and it also implies replaying the game, changing variables, and seeing how they impact the outcome. Both seem to have been part of the practice when you brought Civilization 3 into a world history classroom. Both imply an understanding of history as a process, a logic, a system, rather than as a body of content. How does this relate to current understandings of how history should be taught?
Current thoughts on History tend to focus on moving away from names and dates and toward understanding history as cycles of interacting systems. Definitely history as a process (and, geography as well) are key to how people think about it in those domains. My own thinking with Civ is colored by the idea that world history is a unique challenge in that the world across 6000 years not bounded by nation states requires letting go of organizing categories, which isn't easy to do.
One key difference may be that history as a field is very wedded to the concept of narrative. History through games involves narratives but not in the same ways. Some of the most interesting work in history seeks to use tools like AR engines to get kids playing and building historical games.
One common concern about bringing games into the classroom is that they are still heavily gendered outside of school with boys more likely to be heavy gamers. What insights has your research brought us into the different experiences of girls and boys working with games-based learning?
So far, our research has shown that consistent with broader research in education, games themselves aren't as important (as a medium) as the content of the games. Meaning, building a game that involves non-obviously stereotyped genders in which players use science to make a difference in the world tends to increase girls self efficacy. For example, we built a game in which players are doctors analyzing CT scans to help patients. In our studies, girls began with lower self efficacy than boys but after playing the game, passed them along several measures. These results match results others in science education in which teaching science in the service of helping others tends to promotes girls' development. (Oddly, we also found that girls did better with Supercharged).
So far, counterintuitively we're seeing that games tend to work better for girls, compared to boys.
One thing I'm reminded of as we do these studies is that school, as a game, really stinks for girls (especially in middle school). The classes we observed with Supercharged involved girls mostly trying not to stand out during class discussions for fear of being branded a nerd. Games disrupted this to the point where they were able to participate along new lines in which they were much less at risk for being socially ostracized.
As I look at games and education for girls, I'm much less struck by how this medium will systematically exclude girls and much more by how gender in our schools advantages and disadvantages boys and girls in different ways at different periods in time. I'm especially concerned with the plight of low income boys (including whites) who construct identities entirely oppositional to schooling and how games could be a route to re-engage them. Poor boys (including whites) aren't especially beloved in this society, and reports abound at how they are gumming up principal offices and sucking up teacher time through behavioral issues.
Games offer an opportunity to speak to each of these populations and potentially tailor learning experiences to each. We're a long way from getting there, but disruptive technologies like the iPhone, iPad and disruptive forces like iTunes suggest that the predominant order of schooling could change sooner rather than later.
Kurt Squire is an Associate Professor of Digital Media in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Interim Director of the Education Research Integration Area at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. He is the author of over 75 workson digital media and education and most recently Video Games & Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age.
In the design world, "fail and fail often" has become a mantra. What were some of the most instructive failures you experienced working on the first phases of the Games to Teach project and how did they inform later developments in games-based learning?
Oh, there are so many. I have to start with Supercharged, though, which I still get requests for to this day (and the longer it sits, the better it becomes in my memory). We de-emphasized art production and style prioritizing the real-time simulation, for reasons including too few artists at MIT, the fact that scientists didn't really care if it looked good but did care if it was an accurate simulation, and funders' interest in having a fully 3D game. We could -- and probably should -- have prototyped much more in 2D and put the story and fiction through more cycles of refinement.
The biggest failure, though, is that we weren't up front enough about these limitations and failures. The nature of academics (in this area, at this time) required foregrounding successes (which we had). I wish, though, we had been more candid about our failures and implored our colleagues not to make the same mistakes we did.
This is one area I gain inspiration from the game developer's community. It's not uncommon to see a game developer throw down at GDC and challenge designers to stop making the same mistakes. In fact, they create a space for it through sessions such as the game designer's rants. I can easily imagine Harvey Smith or Eric Zimmerman threatening to disown any colleagues who repeated their mistakes. We don't have any space for that.
A few things we did right: Offering a suite of games instead of "one game to rule them all". Mapping out genres and affordances. Using academics as a chance to explore concepts like Augmented Reality. Experimenting with commercial game engines and tools like Neverwinter Nights to understand their potential for education. In retrospect, I wish we would have been even more daring. The work on Environmental Detectives has blossomed to the point where there's now a Spanish class at the University of New Mexico that uses iPods to get kids in their community learning Spanish, and there's a direct line between a conversation between Eric Klopfer, Walter Holland, and Philip Tan at MIT and a classroom full of kids who realize that they can learn Spanish by becoming actively engaged in Spanish speaking neighborhoods, and that's pretty cool.
Throughout the book, you address the constant push for "evidence" that games-based learning works and for measures to assess participatory culture's value in the classroom. What is the current state of our knowledge about the success of such practices? What criteria should we use to evaluate the kinds of projects and programs you are describing?
The current state of the evidence is that we've privileged certain questions (i.e. "Is this working to meet educators' learning goals) over basic questions such as "Is this a good game, when judged by the standards of participatory culture?" We haven't had, that I'm aware of, an educational game that has inspired fan fiction, for example. We need to stop evaluating games primarily by evidence for learning gains along relatively constrained measures and develop more robust measures to understand whether games are inspiring interest in target domains, connecting learners to new social networks, or leading them to produce things.
These critiques aren't wholly new, but I think as educational researchers, we may have copped out on answering these questions. It's easy to blame No Child Left Behind or even Race to the Top, but the real challenge and opportunity is to design a game that might, say, connect youth to more wide reaching social networks and then to empirically demonstrate how a game succeeds in doing so. (Fortunately, the geographically-based nature of school districting and "sequestering" model of educational assessment ensures that schools will look relatively weak as comparisons).
I want to see mechanisms for measuring if playing an educational game inspires youth to create a work of fiction, a film, or build a game. We need to develop longitudinal research programs that analyze youth development over time and begin to model how youth who participate in such a game playing (and production) network differ from those in more traditional environments. This means getting beyond statistical models borrowed from agriculture (which involve simple causality), and looking more broadly toward areas like data mining or machine learning. These kinds of analyses happen now in marketing through sites like Facebook; let's hope it finds its way to education.
Early in the book, you cite Will Wright as saying that anyone who wants to design an educational game should "start with systems." What do you see as the value of games for teaching systems-thinking and why is this approach so central for redesigning American education?
Most games can be productively understood as simulations -- representations that seek to depict systems evolving over time. It's one thing that games (especially Will's) do that other media do less well. Even relatively linear fighting games include fighting "systems" that must be mastered to excel. You might argue that even adventure games -- the most linear of games -- require players to take a step back and to understand the game as a system in order to succeed.
The importance of systems understanding is something near and dear to me personally. My own undergraduate education was in Interdisciplinary Studies, and my course work involved studying natural and social phenomena as systems rather than as discreet disciplines. The world itself does not naturally occur by disciplines, which is something I think we often forget the longer we live with categories such as biology, chemistry and so on. Research on the cutting edge of each of these disciplines crosses over into others as we try to understand phenomena.
The global challenges we face today -- from global warming to poverty to the Middle East -- won't be solved by single solutions. The painfully simple, yet still instructive September 12th game arguing that a war that kills innocent civilians only breeds new terrorists is a good example of something games do more easily than other representational systems.
We have to guard against fetishizing systems thinking, I think, just as we need to guard against computational, design, logical, procedural, metacognitive, or critical thinking, all of which at one point or another were offered as "the new Latin" (or the new Algebra, or more recently Logo). There is no panacea, but there certainly are models of thinking that are of increased importance in today's work. So far, none of these ideas has itself cured the world's problems. We might also go too far in dismissing how Latin / Algebra / Logo may not have solved all of society's ills, but they can be robust ways of thinking (or toolsets) that people employ. I've met many people who trace their love of language to an inspiring Latin teacher or their love of programming to Logo. But I digress.
As you note, many teachers express concern that games are not "perfect simulations," that there are built in biases in the ways they represent the world. How valid is this concern?
I don't see this as a valid concern, any more than the concern that a book would have authorial bias or that a filmmaker would employ a frame. We need more, not less critical understanding of how particular media shape the kinds of messages they tend to produce (to paraphrase McLuhan). I'd rather see a teacher use a horribly biased game and use it as a springboard for conversation than to treat a text as the ultimate authority.
You advocate passion-based learning, such as that which surrounds games, yet, as you note, many educators insist that learning is a discipline and that students should value learning for learning's sake. How can we resolve this disagreement about the role of pleasure and personal interest in schooling?
My wife, Constance Steinkuehler likes to distinguish between "learning for learning's sake" and "learning the things that I want you to learn for learning's sake". Meaning that when pushed, even the most liberal educator who wants to inspire a love of learning may not be entirely comfortable with a student who loves learning about monster trucks or bow hunting. Indeed, it's hard to separate the ideal of learning for the intrinsic value of learning from the content itself.
For example, the scientists I've met working at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, for example, tend to describe their work in terms of a passion for understanding the universe, or even unraveling the mystery of how stem cells form IPS cells and then somehow know how to self-organize into tissue and organs. They don't, however, spend a lot of time talking about learning for learning's sake although many (not all) come across as genuinely inquisitive.
So, we have evidence that most people will throw themselves into passion-based learning, whether it's a passion for bow hunting or a passion for writing fan fiction around The Gilmore Girls, which schools usually don't recognize. We have a set of values that are recognized in formal schooling, although it often doesn't match up well with what people in the world care about.
I like the idea of promoting genuine inquisitiveness as a value (or passion) that schools should produce. I can't think of any better way to kill inquisitiveness than No Child Left Behind, which depending on the day, I might chalk up to being an unfortunate consequence of that legislation or a designed attempt to stifle independent thought.
Either way, we need to acknowledge that most people organically develop passions for things. These passions may not be the same that parents, teachers, or society might want them to have. Liberals like me tend to offload this concern toward a general "love of learning" without really considering that there are certain things we "want" them to love or develop passions for. I think we'd be much better off if we did, and asked, "What kind of a curriculum would truly inspire a love for history, biological systems, or an inquisitiveness toward the world?".
To borrow a page from James Paul Gee (and yourself Henry), we do (in America at least, I think) have an uneasy relationship with pleasure, particularly with kids. Perhaps it's our Puritanical roots, but Americans seem peculiarly suspicious of pleasure, which in most cases I've studied, is wrapped up in learning (as is perhaps pain). Pleasure is often something to be denied (especially so for women, who are socialized to care for others before themselves). One of my favorite political thinkers, Al Giordano often challenges his (very liberal) readers to fully embrace pleasure, and you can almost see them wince at this challenge to simply do things that make them happy. Fortunately, Henry, this isn't a quality I associate with you.
Kurt Squire is an Associate Professor of Digital Media in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Interim Director of the Education Research Integration Area at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. He is the author of over 75 workson digital media and education and most recently Video Games & Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age.
In his new book, Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age, which is one part memoir, one part research report, Kurt Squire -- now one of the country's top researchers on games, learning, and society -- tells the story of how we met. Squire, then a young graduate student from Indiana University, working on games-based learning, "crashed" a salon I was hosting at the Game Designer's Conference, and struck up conversations with Will Wright, Brenda Laurel, Randy Heinrichs, and Warren Spector. Over the course of one heady evening, he demonstrated to all of us that he was someone who was on the cutting edge of thinking about the challenges and opportunities of bringing games into the classroom.
We met at the right moment, because back at MIT, we were launching Games to Teach, a Microsoft-funded initiative to explore what kinds of games for what kinds of subjects might have an impact on American education. Half way through the night, I went up to Alex Chisholm, the red-haired wonder who was my primary advisor in those days, to ask "Who is that guy?" and by the end of the night, Alex came to me to suggest we seriously hire him to be the research director for our serious games initiative. To this day, I think we all hold up that night as an illustration of the importance of seizing every opportunity that presents itself and being ready when there's an opening in the conversation to share what you know.
In this book, Squire recounts his own remarkable history at the intersection of games and learning, going back to when being an expert player of Pirates! bailed him out of a tough spot in a history class, through the work he did at MIT as the driving force behind Games to Teach, through his projects at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he helped to establish the Games, Learning, and Society conference, now the keystone event in the movement to explore the many different models for how what we learn through games might be brought into formal education.
The Games to Teach Project started with the idea of developing conceptual prototypes for a wide range of different kinds of games which might be pedagogically valuable, exploring different disciplines, different game genres, different contexts where gaming could be deployed. We wanted to jump start the conversation. At the time, the models for learning games seem impoverished, and we thought if we could create vivid "thought experiments" that might inspired people to start building actual learning games. As it happened, when we were done mocking up screen shots and developing design documents for these imaginary games, they were so vivid that people found the documentation on line and tried to order the games for their classes. Moreover, the game designs were so forward thinking that we still get such requests, although fewer of them, down to the present day.
The thinking became so vivid for all of us that Microsoft was soon pushing us to build actual games -- not part of the original grants as written - and giddy with excitement, we tried to build some stuff despite not really having at the time the full technical capacity to create what we envisioned. As a result, we built two (barely) playable games -- Supercharged!, which was focused on electromagnetism, and Revolution, which was focused on Colonial Williamsburg.
The efforts at MIT evolved into the Education Arcade, which has now succeeded in completing games like Labrynth which is very much out in the world, under the direction of Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweill. And Alex Chisholm is one of the leaders of the Learning Games Network, a non-profit organization that aims to support innovation in the design and use of games for learning. Another book about a subsequent Education Arcade venture, iQue, will be appearing later this year.
Squire's book, Video Games and Learning, is incredibly engaging and enlightening -- both in terms of its account of how games-based learning took shape as a paradigm in American education (the guy has a knack for being at the right spot at the right time and pushing things forward) and about why and how games might inform a shift in how we think about the learning process. If you've been wondering what all the fuss about games is about, the book is for you, but I have to say, as someone who has been invested in this space for more than a decade, there was much that I also learned by reading through this book (even about our own projects!)
In the following interview, which I plan to run over three installments, Squire explores what we have learned across the past decade plus of research, what the current state of the field is, and where the next phases of development may lie. As always, Squire is bold, original, provocative, but also deeply grounded in both gaming culture and educational research.
Throughout the book, you draw on your own experiences as a gamer, designer, and teacher to help construct your arguments. In what ways has your approach been informed by being part of the first generation to grow up playing Super Mario Brothers? Will the views of teachers and parents towards games shift as more and more of them also played games in their youth (if not now)?
Thanks again for inviting me to do the interview, Henry. That intermingling of gamer/ designer/ teacher was indeed deliberate, somewhat stolen from you.
It remains to be seen how the Nintendo generation ultimately will react, but my suspicion is that the overall constraints of schooling select out people interested in promoting participatory learning from the teaching profession, with the exception of select mavericks. The evidence so far (consistent with other research on teacher practices) suggests that many teachers initially teach the ways that they themselves were taught. The surveys we've done reveal that it's a unique breed who enters the teaching profession straight out of school. If you like computers, mobile devices, or social networking, it's often times the last place you go. Those who enter and stick with the profession often times align with the values of schooling as it exists.
There are these windows of time for those who make it past that 3-5 year window where we find teachers who are incredibly creative and do wonderful things with games that surpass anything I'd ever do. We worked with Tina Kurz and teachers in Oconomowoc Wisconsin who, for example, took our stock "game curriculum" and built an entire course around kids building games for mobile devices based on their local community. Jeremiah McCall has a wonderful book, Gaming the Past that is the clearest discussion of how to teach with games that I've seen. A team of teachers and principals here in Madison recently took a games course and redesigned their school to be all about place-based inquiry -- not turning it into a school about games -- but rather remaking their school to be both responsive to local needs and the broader reality of participatory digital culture.
One interesting historical footnote (I think) is that many of us exploring games and learning actually were raised with Atari, and then after the crash in the 1980s, moved to the Commodore, Apple, or other computers, when there were no more games available. Computer gaming post Atari (which Steven Kent covered nicely in The First Quarter, featured an organic oscillation between game play and game creation as we bought books teaching us to program games in BASIC and then modified them to do more interesting things. Alex Games and I wrote about this in "History of Computer Games in Education" and tried to capture how during that brief window, games for learning existed and thrived, but more importantly, digital gaming had this real sense of tinkering associated with it. I think a lot of people who have used games for learning actually came from that era, and it provides a good template for both thinking about consumption and production as well as authentic participation.
The logic of the book follows the shift in the field of games-based learning from designing games for use in school (or bringing existing games into the classroom, as you have done with the Civilization series) to developing games-based literacies which encourage kids to think of themselves as designers. What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of each approach? Can you explain some of the factors which led to this shift in emphasis?
One advantage to teaching with games that already exist is that creating a fun, engaging game is no easy task, and when you work with an existing game, you (should) have something that is capable of developing and sustaining interest. Many good teachers actually use this as their starting spot: Give me a good engaging game that is about the content and I'll create the contexts to help kids go beyond the game.
The down side is that few games are connected well to particular theories of learning or pedagogical goals in a domain, so it's actually a lot of work for teachers. Something Jeremiah McCall does, which I like, is to treat games as interpretations that students are challenged to critique. This move immediately positions students as critical consumers of information and opens the door to design, which is just brilliant. Many of us hope, though, that some day a suite of games will capture the intrinsically interesting aspects of academically valued domains and / or require thinking in those domains to play them well right out of the box, which requires a mature field of educational games.
One of the interesting historical tensions, I think, is that in the learning sciences, there's an inclination to design learning interventions based on theory as a way to test that theory (see Ann Brown's excellent work on design research), but relatively little explicit value for elegant design. No one design necessarily flows logically from theory, and good designs often have connections to multiple theories. I think James Paul Gee's work does a nice job of demonstrating how good commercial games can be understood through a variety of lenses (to pick up on Jesse Schell's metaphor of lenses). Most games even use Skinnerian reinforcement schedules in the service of more intrinsically driven learning, which suggests how what works in the wild may actually be captured by quite a few theories of learning.
Through our work on the Games to Teach project, we were among the first to map what games-based learning could look like. What do you see as the biggest changes in the space of games and education over the past decade plus since we did our initial prototypes? Why do you think we still have so few functional models of what games that teach look like, despite the enormous interest which has been focused around this topic at both games and learning science conferences?
Now we have multiple groups that take for granted that we should design educational games in direct conversation with entertainment games. Many educational games employ entertainment games tools, build on entertainment game design processes, and seek to map game mechanics on to ways of thinking. Although none of them have been a runaway hit, we can point to games like Resilient Planet, Labyrinth, Game Star Mechanic, Kodu, iCivics, Dimenxian Algebra, Surge, andCosmos Chaos (to name a few) are all legitimate learning games and operating in this space. We're way beyond Reader Rabbit.
We also understand games as media much better now. In 2002, Salen & Zimmerman's Rules of Play was just coming out, as was Gee's influential book. More recently, papers like the Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics framework or books like Jesse Schell's Game Lenses and Traci Fullerton's Game Design Workshop have advanced how with analyze and build games. We now have designers in the field who read these works as high school students and undergrads.
The big challenge though is that we still underestimate design and aesthetics. Too few educational designers do what The Education Arcade did and brought someone like Scot Osterweil into a design team so that you have talented game designers, educators, and pedagogical experts working side by side. Many funders would considering it "wasting money" to invest in such talent. On a basic level, University HR, which has to approve such hires, often times will reject such a hire because it doesn't fit their models of academic staff. Further, the funding mechanisms for games research systematically devalues design expertise, treating design as an afterthought, existing only to serve the research.
We also don't invest in groups enough over time, instead treating projects as one offs. We need groups (and communities) to work collaboratively over time to build on ideas, test them, iterate and improve upon them and then release them to the public. As an example, there is a constellation of ideas around role playing to learn science where you can trace a real intellectual lineage connecting Chris Dede's River City, Sasha Barab's Quest Atlantis, Eric Klopfer's role playing games, Filament Games'Resilient Planet, and then our game Citizen Science, which is a collaboration with Filament. (Note that those project each involve dozens of people and are far from solo efforts). There's a model of civic engagement through multiplayer role playing games just waiting to be scooped up by industry, once the market is there.
Educators / Academics also don't understand the importance of what many in the industry call polish. What constitutes "good enough" for most educators wouldn't cut mustard in the competitive marketplace of entertainment games. Grant funding and the academic research enterprise systematically pushes against creating anything with polish (grants notoriously promise too much and are given too little, and then are asked to skimp on design and not cut corners on research).
I think that educators also systematically undervalue art and aesthetics. Educators (especially academics) most often thrive in text-driven cultures and rarely equipped to understand -- let alone build -- visual and interactive media. The approach I'm pursuing now is to really invest heavily in Art Production and Aesthetics, taking these ideas very seriously and seeing if we can't brand our lab for creating games that don't skimp on either of these areas. Whether it pays off remains to be seen.
Kurt Squire is an Associate Professor of Digital Media in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Interim Director of the Education Research Integration Area at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. He is the author of over 75 workson digital media and education and most recently Video Games & Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age.
Learning today happens everywhere
But it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements gained outside of school. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy to issue, earn and display badges across the web. The result: recognizing 21st century skills, unlocking career and educational opportunities, and helping learners everywhere level up in their life and work.
Get recognition for new skills and achievements

The web and other new learning spaces provide exciting ways to gain skills and experience -- from online courses, learning networks and mentorship to peer learning, volunteering and after-school programs. Badges provide a way for learners to get recognition for these skills, and display them to potential employers, schools, colleagues and their community.
Through a simple framework that's open to all

Using Mozilla's Open Badges infrastructure, any organization or community can issue badges backed by their own seal of approval. Learners can then collect badges from different sources and display them across the web -- on their resume, web site, social networking profiles, job sites or just about anywhere. Unlocking new career and learning opportunities. 
By displaying skills and achievements that traditional degrees and transcripts often leave out, badges can lead to jobs, community recognition, and new learning opportunities. -- from Mozilla Open Badges Wiki
Let me make a few things clear from the start: First, I was an Eagle Scout. Technically, I am an Eagle Scout since what you learn in scouting is something you carry with you for the rest of your life. I not only made Eagle but I had multiple additional palms, which means that I earned a hell (pardon my un-Scout-like language) of a lot of merit badges through the years.
I certainly valued the learning which went into each of those badges, but I also took pride and joy in that full sash of merit badges, in and of themselves, and I was motivated to see how high a rank I could earn before I aged out of the organization.
Scouting does several things right where badges were concerned: there are some badges which every Scout is expected to earn if they want to move up rank but there are also a vast array of different badges which a scout chooses from as they map their own route through scouting. The badges I remember most vividly were those having to do with journalism, communications, drama, and photography, all aspects of the person whom I would become when I grew up. The skills which the badges represented were in most cases skills which we actively deployed in our life in Scouts, so they were not simply things which I learned to earn a badge. Well, there were a few of those -- in my troop, Basket Weaving was the joke badge we all earned at summer camp because the requirements were simple and pretty lame and it was funny to have the badge on your sash. We can say that Scouting thus combines intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to create a system within which the badges are meaningful to those who opt to participate.
That said, even as a lad, I knew that Scouting and its badges were not for everyone. Many of my friends, especially during the late Vietnam War era, did not like the idea of wearing a uniform of any kind, they did not really understand the appeal of badges, they did not want adults telling them what to do. (Today, I might add my own increased questioning of the values of the organization, which has today embraced overt homophobia in its dealing with queer scouts and scoutmasters.)
For the most part, the current drive for badges in education is being pushed by people like me -- people who were proud to wear merit badges, get good grades, or otherwise, display their achievements. The problem is that badges are being designed for people who may or may not share those values and assumptions.
Second, I believe fully and totally in the value of informal learning, seeing much that youth learn outside of school as more essential to who they are and who they become than the more narrowly restricted curriculum imposed by the national standards. I was always someone who learned more outside the classroom than inside, even if I played the game of school well enough to progress to a high place in the system. Scouting was part of that and so I was glad it had such a flexible framework. But, many of the things I did outside school -- like watch and develop a knowledge of 1930s monster movies, which, ultimately, led me to get graduate degrees in cinema studies -- were not something anyone every gave me a badge for. I see the importance of recognizing, respecting, supporting, and deploying the expertise developed through informal learning and fear that when schools seek to close it out of their formal practices, they also shut what is learned in school for what kids do with the rest of their waking hours.
I fully support the ideas about "connected learning" which were announced by the MacArthur Foundation at the recent Digital Media and Learning Conference. Something very important occurs when we develop a more integrated learning ecology and when kids know how to map what they learn outside of school into categories that they can meaningfully deploy inside the system. That's part of the power of Scouting -- to convert the activities into badges into ranks which can be read and appreciated as accomplishments by adult authorities, including those who decide whether we get jobs or can move through the system of higher education.
That said, I remain deeply skeptical of the massive push going on right now to promote the use of badges across a broad array of different informal learning contexts. I am writing this as I wait in the airport on my return from the DML conference, and what I heard there was a push for badges as if they were a one-size-fits-all-solution to a range of ills in the current educational system (at least from the podium) and then a lot of people on the fringes of the party asking each other whether we really believe that badges are uniformly the way to go. Many of us fear that MacArthur, Mozilla and other foundations have jumped too quickly on the badges bandwagon. I was happy to support badges as one interesting model for thinking about how to insure greater respect for the value of informal learning; I am less prepared to accept the premise that badges might someday be the universal currency by which young people get credit for (or in some models get motivated to participate in) a range of informal learning activities.
As someone who helped to build up the current field of Digital Media and Learning, I am concerned that, if badges start to feel too much like a "party line," many are going to feel excluded from the field. This has the potential to be the first major divide in a field which many of us see as our intellectual and spiritual home. We remain silent because we do not want to disrupt the party and because we respect the leadership of the DML initiative so much, but there is much that is at risk in that silence.
So, let me spell out some of the reasons why I want to see us go slower and think through the advantages and disadvantages of badges:
1. Many young people have deep ambivalences about the kinds of "credit" adults choose to give (or withhold) around their activities. There are plenty of smart kids who don't say things in class, may not do as well as they can on assignments, and certainly would not join an organization like scouting because these kinds of achievements are not "cool" within their peer cultures. Many of these kids are learning now outside of school through participating in activities that are intellectually demanding and socially rewarding without bearing the imprint of adult approval. Some of these activities even have an air about them of transgression or subversion which make them safe for their participation. So, what happens when the scoutmasters move into these spaces and start giving out merit badges, gold stars, cookies, whatever they do, to single out those kids they think are doing what the system wants them to do. Do we not run the risk of chasing away the kids who need these kinds of informal learning the most? Admittedly, there is a value in helping these youth find ways to value what they are doing as intellectual pursuits and there is a value in seeking to validate these experiences and help them learn how to mobilize that knowledge as they learn to work through the formal structures that exert power over their lives. Much of that value may come in helping them articulate for themselves what they are getting out of these kinds of experiences. But, making the badges too central to the process may alienate them before they have a chance to exert ownership over the knowledge they are acquiring. (This problem only grows when we seek to move the system of badges from its original American context into a global phenomenon, since badges will mean very different things across a range of different cultural contexts.)
2. Badges run the risk of becoming "gamification" by another name -- that is, a system which does not trust the power of intrinsic motivation and feels the need to add a layer of extrinsic motivation. Again, scouting, I would argue, succeeds in doing both. James Gee argues that games-based communities do also. But, some forms of gamification rely so heavily on points schemes that there is far less effort to make the activities meaningful in and of themselves, and it can be easy to replace learning with "playing the game." American education is already gamified: for too many students, even good students, it is already about collecting badges and they calculate carefully what they need to do to make the 'A'. I worry that badges can become just another points system and as a consequence, undercuts the motivational structures which have historically led young people to engage in these kind of practices. Otherwise, do we run the risk of turning game modding or fan subbing into the contemporary equivalent of my Basketweaving merit badge -- something kids do because it is an easy way to get recognition or because they think it is a joke. And, as they do so, what happens to those kids who value these activities on their own terms.
3. What's working about the kinds of informal learning which takes place in participatory culture is that it is emergent and ad hoc: activities spring up, last as long as they interest participants, disappear again; young people feel empowered to create their own activities and set their own goals within these organizations; young people can feel like the experts in a subject matter which has not yet been fully integrated into the systems of formal learning. Not every child participates in such activities, and our goal should be to expand the range of options available and to provide stronger motivations and scaffording for their participation. But, informal learning works because it is informal. Yet, any coherent system of badges requires systems and structure; there have to be requirements which help to standardize forms of participation and which rank some kinds of contributions as more valuable or at least more central to the group than others. In that sense, too quick a move towards badges runs the risk of destroying the complex but fragile ecosystem within which participatory learning thrives. Our philosophy should be above all do no harm. There is a high potential of harm in a badging system which is badly applied.
4. Another thing that's working about these informal learning communities is that they are relatively nonhierarchical. They are often spaces where youth and adults interact without fixed relations of power and authority -- the adults are not parents and not teachers, they are people who share interests with the younger participants, and the mentorship that emerges is organic to the activities in which they are engaged. In some cases, the adults even learn from youth who have developed greater expertise or have more experience. This fluidity of relations across generations is threatened by a system where some people (you can call them Den Mothers or Scout Masters, Teachers or Principals, you can even call them Fearless Leader and Grand Poohbah) are giving badges to others (who are now seen as their subordinates). These roles will not necessarily break down along conventional adult-child lines, but there's a high likelihood of those roles reasserting themselves into the process, especially if the granting of badges becomes more bureaucratic or requires communications with more formal institutions and organizations.
5. Badges may work well in some circumstances or for some participants. They should certainly be explored as one way of validating and supporting informal learning. But, the rush to badges means that we have not spent as much time in the past few years as we should be trying to understand what other mechanisms for promoting participatory learning might be. It means that we are overlooking or over-riding systems of support which already exist in many of these sites of informal learning. So, even if we think badges are a potentially good idea in some contexts (and, again, my first response to this badges talk was generally supportive), we may not think it is the best or only possible solution in every situation.
6, No system of badges is going to be adopted uniformly. Mozilla's description of where learning takes place encompasses mostly forms of learning which schools and employers are likely to already recognize as valuable -- "from online courses, learning networks and mentorship to peer learning, volunteering and after-school programs." Yet, much of the early work in DML focused on informal learning sites which many adults did not yet fully appreciate -- from gaming communities to fandom. If we move to see badges as a common currency of achievement in informal learning, then what happens to those activities which chose, on principle, not to give badges or which lack the formal infrastructure to even decide who should be issuing badges. Do these activities, in fact, become even more marginalized, because they are now neither part of the formal system of schooling or part of the informal system of badging. This is another way that badges potentially disrupts what's working about participatory culture.
I guess what I am saying is:
Experiment with badges but really experiment -- that is, try to figure out if these mechanisms really do what you hope they will do and be particularly attentive to the ways that they have unintentional consequences and damage the very activities you are seeking to recognize.
Also seed other kinds of research and experimentation which looks more closely at other mechanisms for promoting and appraising participation, including those which may already be in place within such communities of practice.
Be aware that the process of badging is going to make things more comfortable to those who are comfortable with getting recognition from adults and may make things less comfortable for those who have not yet fully bought into the values of the current educational system.
And above all, if you are embracing badges, make sure you are doing so because you agree with the core premises, because it's the right thing to do for your group, and not because someone is offering a bucket of money to those who are willing to "give it a try."
This weekend, I am attending the Third Digital Media and Learning Conference, hosted by the MacArthur Foundation, as part of their efforts to help build a field which takes what we have learned about young people's informal learning, often through the more playful aspects of participatory culture, and apply it to the redesign and reinvention of those institutions which most directly touch young people's lives -- schools, libraries, museums, and public institutions.
Today, the MacArthur Foundation is releasing an important statement about the underlying principles they are calling "connected learning," a statement which helps to sum up the extensive research which has been done by the DML network in recent years. Their goal is to foster a wide reaching conversation not simply among educators but involving all of those adults who play a role in shaping the lives of young people -- and let's face it, that's pretty much all of us. The document is a collective statement from some of the smartest people thinking about contemporary education:
Kris Gutierrez, professor of literacy and learning sciences who is an expert in learning and new media literacies and designing transformative learning environments, University of Colorado, Boulder
Mimi Ito, Research Network Chair, a cultural anthropologist with deep expertise in the implications of how youth are engaging with technology and digital media who led benchmark three-year study of digital youth, University of California, Irvine
Sonia Livingstone, a leading expert on children, youth, and the internet, including issues of risk and safety, and author of a massive study of 25,000 European children and their parents on internet usage, London School of Economics and Political Science
Bill Penuel, expert in learning with digital media in both formal and informal settings, literacy, and using digital tools for digital storytelling, University of Colorado, Boulder
Jean Rhodes, clinical psychologist with expertise in mentoring, adolescent development, and the role of intergenerational relationships in digital media and learning, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Katie Salen, a game designer who has founded two 6th-12th grade public schools that employ game principles for learning, Depaul University
Juliet Schor, economist and sociologist who has published broadly on work, family and sustainability, Boston College
S. Craig Watkins, expert on young people's social and digital media behaviors and is piloting new programs for in-school and out-of-school learning, University of Texas, Austin
I promised them that I would share this important statement with the readers of my blog, and I hope that you will in turn help pass this along to the many communities you represent.
Although the name, "connected learning" could sound like another attempt to describe the impact of new media on our lives, it goes far beyond a focus simply on the technologies which connect us together, and instead, is focused on the cultural practices and social communities through which this connection occurs, and more generally, on the consequences of these new kinds of connectivities and collectivities on the learning process.
I share with the authors a deep appreciation for the idea of a learning ecology, within which learning occurs everywhere, and with their goal to remove some of the obstacles which block the flow of information, knowledge, skills, and wisdom between different sectors. I especially value the focus here on participation -- in the learning process, in the governance of society -- since the struggle to achieve a more participatory culture remains one of the central battles of our times. Like other previous work from the DML realm, the focus is on valuing the kinds of learning that children and youth value, the kind that is deeply motivating and tied in meaningful ways to their construction of their identity, recognizing that the goal of education in the 21st century should be in allowing young people to discover and refine their own expertise as they follow their passions and inform their interests. It is not simply about providing rich databases of information, though such resources help, but rather about providing rich and diverse contexts which support many different kinds of learning and many different kinds of learners.
As they suggest in the statement, the concept of "connected learning" remains a "work in progress," and the best way to make progress is for thoughtful people, across a range of fields, to read, debate, and respond to their provocation and for those of us who find something here to value, to try to put its core principles into play through our work.
REIMAGINING THE EXPERIENCE OF EDUCATION IN THE INFORMATION AGE
We are living in a historical moment of transformation and realignment in the creation and sharing of knowledge, in social, political and economic life, and in global connectedness. There is wide agreement that we need new models of education suited to this historic moment, and not simply new models of schooling, but entirely new visions of learning better suited to the increasing complexity, connectivity, and velocity of our new knowledge society. Fortunately, we are also able to harness the same technologies and social processes that have powered these transformations in order to provide the next generation with learning experiences that open doors to academic achievement, economic opportunity, and civic engagement.
Specifically, we now have the capability to reimagine where, when, and how learning takes place; to empower and motivate youth to pursue knowledge and develop expertise at a pace, to a degree, and on a path that takes advantage of their unique interests and potential; and to build on innovations across a growing spectrum of learning institutions able to support a range of learning experiences for youth that were unimaginable even 15 years ago.
We propose a new approach to learning -- connected learning -- that is anchored in research, robust theories of learning, and the best of traditional standards, but also designed to mine the learning potential of the new social- and digital media domain and the heart of which is aimed at the following questions:
What would it mean to think of education as a responsibility of a distributed network of people and institutions, including schools, libraries, museums and online communities?
What would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding youths' active participation in public life that includes civic engagement, and intellectual, social, recreational, and career-relevant pursuits?
How can we take advantage of the new kinds of intergenerational configurations that have formed in which youth and adults come together to work, mobilize, share, learn, and achieve together?
What would it mean to enlist in this effort a diverse set of stakeholders that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?
Connected learning is a work in progress, building on existing models, ongoing experimentation, and dialog with diverse stakeholders. It draws from social, ubiquitous, blended and personalized learning, delivered by new media, to help us remodel our educational system in tune with today's economic and political realities. Connected learning is not, however, distinguished by a particular technology or platform, but is inspired by an initial set of three educational values, three learning principles, and three design principles.
At the core of connected learning are three values:
Equity -- when educational opportunity is available and accessible to all young people, it elevates the world we all live in.
Full Participation -- learning environments, communities, and civic life thrive when all members actively engage and contribute.
Social connection -- learning is meaningful when it is part of valued social relationships and shared practice, culture, and identity.
In order to realize these values, connected learning seeks to harness and integrate the learning that young people pursue in the spheres of interest, peer relations, and academics based on the following three learning principles:
Interest-powered - Interests power the drive to acquire knowledge and expertise. Research shows that learners who are interested in what they are learning, achieve higher order learning outcomes. Connected learning does not just rely on the innate interests of the individual learner, but views interests and passions as something to be actively developed in the context of personalized learning pathways that allow for specialized and diverse identities and interests.
Peer-supported - Learning in the context of peer interaction is engaging and participatory. Research shows that among friends and peers, young people fluidly contribute, share, and give feedback to one another, producing powerful learning. Connected learning research demonstrates that peer learning need not be peer-isolated. In the context of interest-driven activity, adult participation is welcomed by young people. Although expertise and roles in peer learning can differ based on age and experience, everyone gives feedback to one another and can contribute and share their knowledge and views.
Academically oriented - Educational institutions are centered on the principle that intellectual growth thrives when learning is directed towards academic achievement and excellence. Connected learning recognizes the importance of academic success for intellectual growth and as an avenue towards economic and political opportunity. Peer culture and interest-driven activity needs to be connected to academic subjects, institutions, and credentials for diverse young people to realize these opportunities. Connected learning mines and translates popular peer culture and community-based knowledge for academic relevance.
Connected learning builds on what we've long known about the value and effectiveness of interest-driven, peer-supported, and academically relevant learning; but in addition, connected learning calls on today's interactive and networked media in an effort to make these forms of learning more effective, better integrated, and broadly accessible. The following design principles involve integrating the spheres of interests, peers, and academics, and broadening access through the power of today's technology.
Shared purpose -- Connected learning environments are populated with adults and peers who share interests and are contributing to a common purpose. Today's social media and web-based communities provide exceptional opportunities for learners, parents, caring adults, teachers, and peers in diverse and specialized areas of interest to engage in shared projects and inquiry. Cross-generational learning and connection thrives when centered on common interests and goals.
Production-centered -- Connected learning environments are designed around production, providing tools and opportunities for learners to produce, circulate, curate, and comment on media. Learning that comes from actively creating, making, producing, experimenting, remixing, decoding, and designing, fosters skills and dispositions for lifelong learning and productive contributions to today's rapidly changing work and political conditions.
Openly networked -- Connected learning environments are designed around networks that link together institutions and groups across various sectors, including popular culture, educational institutions, home, and interest communities. Learning resources, tools, and materials are abundant, accessible and visible across these settings and available through open, networked platforms and public-interest policies that protect our collective rights to circulate and access knowledge and culture. Learning is most resilient when it is linked and reinforced across settings of home, school, peer culture and community.
The urgent need to reimagine education grows clearer by the day. Research has shown that too many students are disengaged and alienated from school, and see little or no purpose to their education. Business leaders say there is a widening gap between the skills of the workforce and the needs of businesses seeking competitive advantage. Additionally, technology and the networked era threatens to stretch the already-wide equity gap in education unless there is decisive intervention and a strong public agenda
The principles of connected learning weren't born in the digital age, but they are extraordinarily well-suited to it. Connected learning seeks to tie together the respected historical body of research on how youth best learn with the opportunities made available through today's networked and digital media. Connected learning is real-world. It's social. It's hands-on. It's active. It's networked. It's personal. It's effective. Through a new vision of learning, it holds out the possibility for productive and broad-based educational change.
A few weeks ago, Glenn Kubish, an Alberta-based reader of this blog, wrote to me to share a remarkable story about the power of grassroots media and participatory culture. Like a typical U.S. yokel, I had no idea what had happened up in Canada, but was blown away by the story he told and asked him to share it with the other readers of this blog. Kubish is currently working on a thesis which explores more fully the implications of these events, and would be happy to receive insights or suggestions from you fine folks. With this in mind, I've included his contact information in the bio which follows this piece. For now, sit back, grab some cookies and milk, and read what happened.
C Is For Convergence!
by Glenn Kurbish
It's fairly widely known that Canadians are passionate about health care and the state of hospitals, so what happened to the man who used to run Alberta Health Services (AHS) shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise.
What was surprising was the role played by the Cookie Monster.
Welcome to my astonishing introduction to convergence culture.
You may not have heard of CTV Edmonton (the local television station in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where I used to work as news director) or Stephen Duckett (who used to work as president and CEO of Alberta Health Services, the government agency that oversees all aspects of health delivery in this province), but you have heard of the Cookie Monster, and I guess that is part of the point. But first, the facts.
On the morning of November 19, 2010, we did what we in the broadcast news craft always did to start the day. We met around around a table and behind a door to discuss story ideas and decide the shape of the evening news. Emergency room wait times was again a big issue that day, as hospital leaders from around the province were themselves meeting around a table and behind a few sets of doors at a downtown hotel. Their goal was to establish new standards for care and admissions.
The center of attention was Stephen Duckett. As he left the meeting, he was met by our reporter, who asked if she could ask him a question.
Actually, my words won't do justice to the 2:14 encounter. Some 337,000+ others took a look at it on YouTube.
Summary: Duckett wouldn't answer conventional media questions because he was:
a) eating a cookie,
b) still eating a cookie,
c) interested in eating his cookie,
d) of the opinion that the media should not question him, but, rather, go to a news conference at which an underling would speak about the day's discussions,
e) crossing the street, and
f) eating his cookie.
Dubbed the Cookie Affair and Cookiegate, that piece of video made it to the highest office in the province. The Alberta premier told the legislature, "I think everyone in Alberta watched and saw the offensive comments. I'll just leave it at that." Of course, he didn't leave it at that; he fired Duckett later that day.
And, as it turned out, Albertans did more than just watch and see the video. They posted thousands of comments in that new public square, the YouTube rectangle. Some found fault with the media:
Damn! Let the man eat his cookie! #$#$ media! Would you even had to bother him if he was sitting in the toilet?!? (SpiderQED)
Others defended the reporters' tack:
what a F**ing jerk. He is just so rude, so inconsiderate...They were asking him questions about the state of Alberta's healthcare, something he is responsible for. (maymonk)
And, predictably, others responded by playing some version of the Sesame Street card:
(It is fascinating how one 61-lettered, upper-cased, misspelled word gets the message across, complete with a moving image, with audio, of The Cookie Monster!)
And while many responded from their various perspectives, some recreated the video, using the video of the Duckett-media encounter as their own raw material in remixes that drew tens of thousands of views. Take a look (and tell me if you don't smile at the editing touch at :50!)
Here's another creative, autotune remix effort
And here's one that combines contributions from mass media current and past (Sesame Street's Cookie Monster, NBC's The Apprentice, CBS's Hee Haw) to make a grassroots media case against Duckett.
All of this news and reaction dominated front pages, tops of newscasts, radio call-in shows, chat forums, political blogs, Twitter and Facebook pages. TV Tropes picked it up. I'm Eating My Cookie badges popped up.
For his part, Duckett, a day after the video was posted on YouTube, responded, conventionally, with a letter to the media, which ended:
Most regrettably, I did not convey what I deeply feel, which is the greatest respect for the difficult challenges our health care providers face every day, and their innumerable achievements, and what those challenges and achievements mean for our patients and their families. When I got back to my desk I finalized and uploaded a blog which conveys my feelings in my words.
The blog was seen by AHS staff, but what struck me at the time was what strikes me now as I hit the keyboard letters, and that's how weak written words can be -- especially up against the Cookie Monster! Admittedly, that's not a new insight. Here, Lawrence Lessig in Remix makes the same point: "My favorite among the remixes I've seen are all cases in which the mix delivers a message more powerfully [emphasis added] than any original alone could, and certainly more than words alone could."
But it was a new insight for me as a news director and for the newsroom I managed, even though the superior power of the image and the sound over the word was the price of admission into the TV news industry. This was different. It's not that our station's question-asking and video-recording sparked subsequent debate, because that was routine. It was that the media we produced in this case became the primary material for others, and not so much to produce their opinions as much as to express their opinions by producing their own media.
This, for me, was new territory where, in the words of Henry Jenkins, "old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways."
It is surely the case that Duckett, an erudite and by many accounts friendly and caring citizen, was caught unaware not some much by the pitch of his opponents' attacks -- he was, after all, no stranger to public and political criticism -- but by the strange key in which it was composed, allowing notes from , well, muppets. Of course, this is my speculation, but it seems reasonable on the evidence that Duckett simply did not see the convergence culture moment he became trapped in and, ultimately, a victim of.
The evidence is admittedly indirect, but his retreat into the written word, and his wife's subsequent written defence of her husband's actions suggest, at the very least, a discomfort with the mashup tools arrayed against them.
"Alberta," wrote Duckett's wife in a letter the following month published in the capital city's broadsheet newspaper, "will not find a more passionate defender of publicly funded health care.
"In retrospect...was it too flippant? Probably."
This is all very reasonable. And it would have been very reasonable for the most vociferous of Duckett's critics to debate the statistics around emergency room admissions and treatment versus the targets for the same. Just like it was very reasonable for Duckett, who was bestowed by the University of Bath with a Doctor of Business Administration degree in Higher Education Management, to remind reporters that a news briefing on those very questions would take place within the half hour. (I should note that our news station also covered that news conference).
But all this talk of reasonableness only makes Stephen Duncombe's voice louder and his argument more insistent. In his 2007 book, Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics In An Age Of Fantasy, Duncombe chastises progressive leaders for hitching their star to the rationalism wagon.
Appeals to truth and reality, and faith in rational thought and action, are based in a fantasy of hte past, or, rather, past fantasy. Today's world is linked by media systems and awash in advertising images...We live in a "society of the spectacle," as the French theorist-provocateuer Guy Debord declared back in 1967.
Keep in mind the mediasphere that grew around the Duckett Cookie episode as Duncombe briefly surveys the work of cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who found in the mysterious human capacity for metaphor a radical admission that hard information, rationality, reasonableness are not enough. These categories and metaphors, he argues, allow us to "translate hard information and direct experience into a conceptual form familiar and comfortable for us." He continues:
[P]rogressives need to think less about presenting facts and more about how to frame these facts in such a way that they make sense and hold meaning for everyday people.
Quite apart from whether you are in the progressive chorus, this is a solid stage on which to build a case for what really happened in the Duckett Cookie episode. Those who used the tools of spectacle, including raw material culled from pre-existing media and a laptop edit suite, have heard Duncombe's admonition. Says Duncombe in a chilling remark: "Those who put their trust in Enlightenment principles and empircism today are doomed to political insignificance."
As I continue to study this episode, and ask you for any thoughts or directions on finding and picking the theoretical fruit it contains, it is worth sharing a few provisional conclusions:
It was not the bloggers nor the twitizens nor any other member of the new media who played the pivotal role of being in place to ask Duckett the questions and record his answers. The conventional media may indeed face a threatening business model, but we are not yet in the new world where public figures are directly asked questions by those other than the conventional media who have the resources (time, money) to do so.
The Duckett Cookie episode is unthinkable without the contributions of mass media (Sesame Street) and the gamble, not much of one, that viewers of mashed up videos would immediately understand the Cookie Monster text.
Laughter and ridicule remain potent politcal weapons. I am not the first to point out that once a public figure is ridiculed, he or she cannot be taken seriously.
None of this would have happened if one unconventional decision was made in our conventional newsroom, and that was to post the raw video to YouTube in the first place. Why did we do this? For many reasons, including the feeling that the usual packaging of a television news story (heavily edited, 1:45 in length, reaction clips) did not serve our viewers in forming opinions about the issue.
In convergence culture, the Cookie Monster matters.
Glenn Kubish is working towards a Master of Arts in Communications and Technology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where his final research project will analyze what happened in the 2:14 of video and in its sharing across social media. He can be reached at glenn.kubish@gmail.com
USC Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism
Present:
Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations
April 6, 2012, USC
Conference Overview:
As transmedia models become more central to the ways that the entertainment industry operates, the result has been some dramatic shifts within production culture, shifts in the ways labor gets organized, in how productions get financed and distributed, in the relations between media industries, and in the locations from which creative decisions are being made. This year's Transmedia Hollywood examines the ways that transmedia approaches are forcing the media industry to reconsider old production logics and practices, paving the way for new kinds of creative output. Our hope is to capture these transitions by bringing together established players from mainstream media industries and independent producers trying new routes to the market. We also hope to bring a global perspective to the conversation, looking closely at the ways transmedia operates in a range of different kinds of creative economies and how these different imperatives result in different understandings of what transmedia can contribute to the storytelling process--for traditional Hollywood, the global media industries, and for all the independent media-makers who are taking up the challenge to reinvent traditional media-making for a "connected" audience of collaborators.
Many of Hollywood's entrenched business and creative practices remain deeply mired in the past, weighed down by rigid hierarchies, interlocking bureaucracies, and institutionalized gatekeepers (e.g. the corporate executives, agents, managers, and lawyers). In this volatile moment of crisis and opportunity, as Hollywood shifts from an analog to a digital industry, one which embraces collaboration, collectivity, and compelling uses of social media, a number of powerful independent voices have emerged. These include high-profile transmedia production companies such as Jeff Gomez's Starlight Runner Entertainment as well as less well-funded and well-staffed solo artists who are coming together virtually from various locations across the globe. What these top-down and bottom-up developments have in common is a desire to buck tradition and to help invent the future of entertainment. One of the issues we hope to address today is the social, cultural, and industrial impact of these new forms of international collaboration and mixtures of old and new work cultures.
Another topic that will be addressed is the future of independent film. Will creative commons replace copyright? Will crowdsourcing replace the antiquated foreign sales model? Will the guilds be able to protect the rights of digital laborers who work for peanuts? What about audiences who work for free? Given that most people today spend the bulk of their leisure time online, why aren't independent artists going online and connecting with their community before committing their hard-earned dollars on a speculative project designed for the smallest group of people imaginable--those that frequent art-house theaters?
Fearing obsolescence in the near future, many of Hollywood's traditional studios and networks are looking increasingly to outsiders--often from Silicon Valley or Madison Avenue--to teach these old dogs some new tricks. Many current studio and network executives are overseeing in-house agencies, whose names--Sony Interactive Imageworks, NBC Digital, and Disney Interactive Media Group--are meant to describe their cutting-edge activities and differentiate themselves from Hollywood's old guard. Creating media in the digital age is "nice work if you can get it," according to labor scholar Andrew Ross in a recent book of the same name. Frequently situated in park-like "campuses," many of these new, experimental companies and divisions are hiring large numbers of next generation workers, offering them attractive amenities ranging from coffee bars to well-prepared organic food to basketball courts. However, even though these perks help to humanize the workplace, several labor scholars (e.g. Andrew Ross, Mark Deuze, Rosalind Gill) see them as glittering distractions, obscuring a looming problem on the horizon--a new workforce of "temps, freelancers, adjuncts, and migrants."
While the analog model still dominates in Hollywood, the digital hand-writing is on the wall; therefore, the labor guilds, lawyers, and agent/managers must intervene to find ways to restore the eroding power/leverage of creators. In addition, shouldn't the guilds be mindful of the new generation of digital laborers working inside these in-house agencies? What about the creative talent that emerges from Madison Avenue ad agencies like Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, makers of the Asylum 626 first-person horror experience for Doritos; or Grey's Advertising, makers of the "Behind the Still" collective campaign for Canon? Google has not only put the networks' 30-second ad to shame using Adword, but its Creative Labs has taken marketing to new aesthetic heights with its breathtaking Johnny Cash [collective] Project. Furthermore, Google's evocative Parisian Love campaign reminds us just how intimately intertwined our real and virtual lives have become.
Shouldn't Hollywood take note that many of its most powerful writers, directors, and producers are starting to embrace transmedia in direct and meaningful ways by inviting artists from the worlds of comic books, gaming, and web design to collaborate? These collaborations enhance the storytelling and aesthetic worlds tenfold, enriching "worlds" as diverse as The Dark Knight, The Avengers, and cable's The Walking Dead. Hopefully, this conference will leave all of us with a broader understanding of what it means to be a media maker today--by revealing new and expansive ways for artists to collaborate with Hollywood media managers, audiences, advertisers, members of the tech culture, and with one another.
This panel seeks to capture the unruly, still unfolding, wild wild west moment of cultural-industrial conversion taking place in both virtual and real-world workplaces as Hollywood looks for top-down solutions to engaging with consumers where they live--online. Once the dominant players in the content industry, Hollywood today is having to look as far away as Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue for collaborators in the 2.0 space. Many in Hollywood are trying to bridge the gap between the old and new ways of doing business, describing their operations as "Silicon Valley startups within a big media company." Disney is buying out the founders of social experiments like Club Penguin, Togetherville, and Playdom in order to reinvent their family business for the connected generation. In each instance, Hollywood's old guard is having to rely on a new generation of entrepreneurs from the tech and geek communities to teach them how to navigate the 21st century.
Break: 11:15-11:30
Panel Two (11:30-1:30): "Creative Economies: Commercial vs. State-Based Models"
Henry Jenkins, moderator
In the United States, transmedia production has been often coupled with issues of promotion and branding, because of the ways that production is funded in a Hollywood studio or network television models. But, around the world, in countries where there is strong state support for media production, alternative forms of transmedia are taking shape, which are governed by different imperatives (cultural, educational, artistic). How has transmedia fit within the effort of nation-states to promote and expand their creative economies? What can commercial media producers learn from these alternative models and approaches? How might these developments further expand our understanding of what transmedia is and what it can contribute to the language of storytelling? What are the advantages and disadvantages of creating transmedia content under these different kinds of creative economies?
Lunch (1:30-2:30)
Panel Three (2:30-4:30): "Working on the Margins--Who Pays for Transformative Works of Art?" Denise Mann, moderator
The independent film industry isn't working any longer--so says powerful indie producer Ted Hope, who now advocates for using transmedia entertainment models that allow media-makers to engage directly with fans, and in the process, rethink old production, marketing, and distribution patterns that no longer make sense in the 21st century. A new generation of media-makers, actors, writers, directors, and producers are taking concrete steps to reinvent bottom-up entertainment for the contemporary, connected, tech-savvy audience. For some independent-minded creators, the best way to connect with today's self-aware audience is by creating a self-mocking, self-reflexive web series like The Guild or Dr. Horrible. For others, the best way to engage with the audience is by creating collective works of art via star-driven companies like hitRECord or Funny or Die. The impulse behind each of these works of collective intelligence is to take art out of the rarified world of crumbling art-house theaters, museums, and galleries and put it back into the hands of the masses-- creating an immersive, interactive, and collective works of transmedia entertainment, made by and for the people who enjoy it most.
Break (4:30-4:45)
Panel 4 (4:45-6:45): "Creative Intersections: How Comics Fit into the Transmedia Ecology"
Henry Jenkins, moderator
By many accounts, the comics industry in the United States struggles to survive, with mainstream titles facing declining readerships, despite some growth in the sales of independent graphic novels through bookstores. Yet, the comics industry has never played a more central role in the entertainment industry as a whole, with comics seeding more and more film and television franchises, and with comics performing important functions within larger transmedia projects. So, how can we understand the paradoxical status of the comics industry? In what ways are these other media outlets helping to subsize the production of printed comics? What kinds of advantages does content audience-tested through comics bring to other media industries? Why have so many television series sought to extend their narratives through graphic novels in recent years? As comics are brought to the screen, what do the producers owe to the fans of the original material as opposed to new viewers who may have little to no awareness of the series' origins in comics? What lessons might transmedia producers learn from the larger history of extended universes and intertexuality within comics?
Moderators:
Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins is the Provost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, and Education at the University of Southern California. He is the author or editor of 15 books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) and with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Media and Value in a Networked Culture (Fall, 2012).
Denise Mann
Denise Mann is Associate Professor and Head of the Producers Program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Her most recent book is Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover (Minnesota, 2008). Previously, Mann co-edited Private Screenings: Television & the Female Consumer (Minnesota, 1992) and has published articles on television and consumer culture in a range of journals. Mann served as an associate editor on Camera Obscura, a journal of feminism and film theory, for six years.
Speakers include:
Ivan Askwith
Ivan Askwith is Senior Director of Digital Media at Lucasfilm, where he oversees strategic and creative direction for the wide range of online, mobile, social and cross-platform initiatives that make up the digital presence of Star Wars, Lucasfilm, and the company's other properties. Previously, he was the Director of Strategy at Big Spaceship.
Morgan Bouchet
Morgan Bouchet is Transmedia and Social Media Vice President of the Content Division of Orange and is Director of the Orange Transmedia Lab . Orange is a brand of France Telecom, the main telecommunications company in France (and one of the world's largest). Bouchet joined France Telecom in 2000, developing content experiences and Vod products before moving to transmedia and social media. Prior to France Telecom, Bouchet was manager of the New Media division of FKGB, a French entertainment marketing company.
Angela Chen Caplan
Angela Cheng Caplan is the President and CEO of Cheng Caplan Company, Inc., a boutique literary/talent management and production company based in Los Angeles, California, representing Academy Award nominated filmmakers, best-selling book authors, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and world famous comic book creators such as Brian Wood
Katerina Cizek
Director Katerina Cizek is an Emmy-winning documentary-maker working across many media platforms. Cizek directs the National Film Board of Canada's Highrise series on residential skyscrapers. For five years, she was the National Film Board of Canada's Filmmaker-in-Residence at an inner-city hospital, in a many-media project that won a 2008 Webby Award, a Banff Award, and a Canadian New Media Award.
Sara Diamond
Sara Diamond is the President of the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) University, Canada's "university of the imagination." Prior to her presidency at OCAD University, Dr. Diamond was the Artistic Director of Media and Visual Art and Director of Research at the Banff Centre, where in 1995 she created the Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) and led it for 10 years. Dr. Diamond holds a PhD in computer science and degrees in new media theory and practice, social history, and communications from the United Kingdom and Canada.
Christy Dena
Dr. Christy Dena is the director of Universe Creation 101, an organization that creates and consults cross-media narrative development. As a transmedia analyst, she collaborated with colleagues Tim Kring, Nokia and The company P on Conspiracy for Good, a Digital Emmy-nominated alternate reality experience (2011 Digital Emmy-nominated alternate reality experience. Another recent project includes curating and co-organizing Transmedia Victoria, an industry conference and workshop for the Australia Council of the Arts. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, a postgraduate diploma in Creative Writing from University of Melbourne, and a B.A. in Visual and Performing Arts from Monash University.
Nick De Martino
Nick De Martino is a media and technology consultant and was Senior Vice President of Media and Technology at the American Film Institute for 20 years before retiring in 2010. Under his direction, AFI and Apple Computer developed the first training lab for Hollywood filmmakers, the beginning of many collaborations with high-powered technology companies (that also included Adobe, Intel, and IBM, among others). The Los Angeles Business Journal named De Martino a leader in technology twice, and in 2006, the Hollywood Reporter and the Producer's Guild of America's New Media Council ranked De Martino #3 in the "Digital 50" which recognizes digital innovaters.
Jennifer Holt
Jennifer Holt is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. She specializes in the areas of media industry studies, film and television history, and media policy. Her current research looks at regulation and policy in the era of digitization and convergence. She is the co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Blackwell, 2009) and author of Empires of Entertainment (Rutgers UP, 2011), which examines deregulation and media conglomeration from 1980-1996. She is also the Co-Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center's Media Industries Project.
Ted Hope
Ted Hope has produced Academy-Award nominated independent films such as 21 Grams (2003), The Savages (2007), and In The Bedroom (2001). Three of his entries to the Sundance Film Festival have won the Grand Jury Prize: American Splendor (2003), The Brothers McMullen (1995), and What Happened Was.. (1994). In the early 1990s, he co-founded Good Machine, an independent film production and distribution company that went to become Focus Features. Currently, Hope works from his New York-based indie production house, This Is That, which he co-founded in 2002. He is the recipient of the 2009 Vision Award from the LA Filmmakers' Alliance as well as the Woodstock Film Festival's Honorary Trailblazer Award.
Gareth Kay
Gareth Kay is Chief Strategy Officer of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, an ad agency based in San Francisco. He joined GS&P as the Director of Digital Strategy in 2009. Prior to joining GS&P, Kay was Head of Planning at Modernista!, where he oversaw the strategic direction of all accounts including Cadillac, HUMMER, Napster and (RED). Gareth began his career in the UK and worked at TBWA, dfgw and Lowe. Gareth serves on the boards of Boulder Digital Works and the VCU Brandcenter, and sits on the Google Creative Leadership Council.
Katherine Keller
Katherine Keller is a "Founding Tart" and the current Culture Vultures
Editrix at Sequential Tart. She is married to Ralph Mathieu, owner of
the Eisner nominated Alternate Reality Comics. (Yes, she married her
neighborhood comic shop owner.) In her day job she works at the Lied
Library, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is passionate about
comics, pop culture, fandom, and open access publishing.
Joe LeFavi
Joe LeFavi, is a transmedia producer and brand strategist who launched consultancy Quixotic Transmedia in 2010. His company provided the transmedia strategy for Immortals (2011), Relativity Media's highest grossing film. He has also collaborated with I am Rogue, Lionsgate and Crest Animation. In addition, his company has published motion comics for Platinum's Cowboys & Aliens, numerous titles for Archaia such as Immortals and Johnny Recon, and over 100+ titles for The Jim Henson Company, which includes their line of Archaia graphic novels.
Jordan Levin
Jordan Levin is founding partner and CEO of Generate, a management and cross-platform production company in Los Angeles. Levin is best known for co-founding the WB, where he where he helped develop a distinctive brand of young-skewing shows (Dawson's Creek, Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and served as the youngest-ever network CEO.
Sheila C. Murphy
Shelia C. Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures at the University of Michigan. Murphy is also the author of How Television Invented New Media (Rutgers UP, 2011). She received her B.A. in Art History from the University of Rochester and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine. From teletubbies to cybernetics, television to "convergence," net.art and hacking, her interest lies in visual discourse of and cultural rhetoric about how, why, when and where we use computers and incorporate them into our everyday life.
Jose Padhila
Jose Padhila is a Brazilian filmmaker and producer. His credits include Bus 174, Elite Squad, and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, a trilogy that explores corruption and brutality in Brazil. Elite Squad won the Golden Berlin Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2008, one of Padhila's many filmmaking awards. Upcoming films include Robocop, Words with Gods and Rio, eu te amo.
Mike Richardson
Mike Richardson is the current president of Dark Horse Comics, a comics publishing company he founded in 1986, as well as the president of Dark Horse Entertainment, which has developed and produced numerous projects for film and television based on Dark Horse or other licensed properties. Dark Horse publishes many licensed comics, including comics based on Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Aliens, Predator, Mass Effect, and Conan; the company also publishes creator owned comics such as Frank Miller's Sin City and 300, Mike Mignola's Hellboy, Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, Paul Chadwick's Concrete, and Michael Chabon's The Escapist.
Mark Verheiden
Mark Verheiden is a writer for comics, movies, and television. He is a co-executive producer for the television series Falling Skies for DreamWorks Television and the TNT Network. Verheiden was also a writer and consulting producer for Heroes and a a writer and co-executive producer on the television series Battlestar Galactica. Verheiden's introduction into writing comics came in June 1987, when he penned The American, which was published by Dark Horse Comics. Verheiden has written many series for Dark Horse based on both the Aliens and Predator series of films.
Mary Vogt
Mary Vogt is a costume designer who has been Emmy-nominated for her work on Pushing Daisies (2008). She was the costume designer for the Men in Black movies, Batman Returns (1992), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and the 2010 Tamil (South Asian) science fiction blockbuster, Endhiran (Robot).
The USC School of Cinematic Arts is located at 900 W. 34th St., Los Angeles, CA 90007. Parking passes are available for Parking Structure D (PSD) for $8.00 at Entrance Gate #4, located off Jefferson Blvd. at Royal Street (east of Hoover Street). The School of Cinematic Arts is down 34th Street (heading away from Figueroa) from the Parking Structure. To view a map of the Parking Structures and Entrance Gates, visit http://web-app.usc.edu/maps/
Conference Pass (includes admission to all panels and reception)
As more and more colleges and universities are teaching courses in transmedia enertainment, crossmedia design, and convergence culture, Transmedia Hollywood wants to invite people interested in exchanging resources or trading experiences to gather for a special "birds of a feather" meeting at the Annenberg Innovation Lab on the eve of the conference -- April 5 -- at 7 pm. If you want to come, drop me a note at hjenkins@usc.edu
You suggest a broad range of design fields as important for addressing the core properties of digital media. I know you've thought a lot about the process of educating designers. Do you imagine expanding the curriculum so that all designers know at least something of these various fields or do you imagine building multidisciplinarity into the design process through collaboration across various expertise?
I do think that designers should know about all the contributory fields - such as visual design, human computer interaction, industrial design, computer science, media studies. These fields overlap one another and each one is already drawing on multiple other disciplines, so even those with a more narrow training have had some exposure to other disciplines. For me, the key thing is that we should understand design as a collective process of inventing a common medium - that all of these practices should be seen as contributing to a common design palette of conventions that are available for use by any application. For example, we can't think of information design as separate from game design, because game mechanics can be very useful in explaining complex systems, and information visualization can be very useful in offering an overview of a complex multiplayer world. The more we think of every artifact we make as occupying this larger potential design space, the more strategies we have at our disposal for making expressive, coherent digital artifacts.
But we need a way to unify these different approaches, which is why I suggest that we think of the digital medium as having four characteristic affordances (the procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial) so that we can understand the role of each of these contributory disciplines in helping us to maximize these affordances.
Of course curriculum decisions are always influenced by local configurations - by what departments are more open to change or to collaboration within any particular university. Digital Media is being taught in many departments, and degree programs are proliferating so rapidly that we seem to have a new faculty ad to post to our PhD students every day. My hope is that Inventing the Medium will make it possible for more people to teach digital media design from a wider range of disciplines. I'm hoping that humanities and arts faculty will be able to introduce the technical issues using the book, and that computer science and engineering departments will be able to use it to integrate media-oriented design questions into their teaching. And I've made an extensive Glossary in order to encourage professionals from varying disciplinary backgrounds to share a design vocabulary.
You write that "media expand the scope of our shared attention." Yet, the issue of attention remains a central one for critics of digital media. What relationship do you see between this idea of "shared attention" and the competing claims by Steven Johnson that "Everything Bad is Good For Us" and Nicholas Carr that "Google is Making Us Stupid"?
I think that Steven Johnson is right - more complex storytelling (as in the change in serial drama that he charts in that book) makes us smarter. And I see the digital medium as supporting more complex cognitive forms, not only story-telling forms, but also representations of the world as replayable simulated systems, so that we can look at how the same situation can be configured in multiple different ways, or how multiple causes can contribute to a single event. I thank that Nicholas Carr and other dystopian chroniclers of the digital era are correct in identifying the distracting effect of information overload, but they mistake the immediate situation for something that is intrinsic to digital culture. Right now, we have a growth in the quantity and variety of information that we can encode and deliver - a big growth spurt in inscription and transmission - but a lag in the conventions of representation that make information coherent. Google is making us much smarter in exactly the way that external media representation has always made us smarter: the new encyclopedic affordances of the digital medium lets us offload information that we no longer need to carry in memory, and to share information with one another that we no longer need specialists or personal contact to access. Google makes all this encyclopedic information retrieval on demand. Of course it is not as refined as we need it to be, but it has already made it orders of magnitude easier to find an address, identify an author, check on professional affiliations, etc. So it is absurd to say that internet resources reduce our ability to focus.
Now, it may be the case that people are less patient with self-indulgent prose, that people are less willing to submit to the long-winded authorial voice, to enter the trance of reading a longer work. But in some cases that may mean that we can convey the same information in more concise terms. For example, I needed to express the argument for Inventing the Medium in book form, but now that I have laid it out, I would love to make an ebook that segmented the same information in smaller chunks and allowed for multiple navigational paths.
Your book makes a strong case for medium specificity, critiquing the over-reliance on "inherited structures" from "legacy media." Yet, others have made the argument for media impurity, seeing real value in the cross-polination of different traditions and practices. And in your earlier work, you often saw such borrowings as necessary to help people make the transition into a new medium. So, how might designers think about when elements borrowed from other media are enabling or retarding the growth of digital culture?
Borrowing is a necessary feature of design. But designers should be aware of the provenance, the origins, of design features and think about the function they serve separately from the medium in which they live. For example the front page of a newspaper and the headlines on the page are very useful conventions for conveying a common understanding of what is news in a short time. But the sound bite and display behind the news anchor, the scrolling headlines at the bottom of the screen, the magazine cover, are similar conventions, and they all relate to the core cultural task of taking in diverse summary information in an efficient manner. If we are making a news site for the web, or for a mobile device, or for some future platform that operates from a chip in the corner of special glasses, we would have to think about the purpose served by the aggregation of headlines on the front page, and consider what we want to merely borrow the legacy conventions (or the web conventions when they become digital legacy) and what we will need to reinvent.
I don't believe that the digital medium is wholly new and separate from cultural history--quite the contrary. But I do see the need for designers to borrow, invent, and refine the appropriate conventions of the new medium in a way that is mindful of how earlier customs reflect earlier limitations (such as column size and page size and the fixity of paper) that we need not reproduce.
You focus here primarily on the work of designers. But, as you know, the digital has brought about a more participatory culture where lots of everyday people are designing and producing media. How do their "untrained" and "unprofessional" design decisions contribute to the process of inventing the medium?
That is a great question and of course one answer is that I rely on you, Henry, to tell me about that!
But I don't think designers can abdicate responsibility. It is our job to invent the conventions that scaffold popular invention. For example, the status line and hash tag are incredibly powerful organizing conventions, which then make possible the inventive uses (such as professional convention commentary, fan commentary, political organizing, even ironic pseudo-hashtags) that we value on a viral success like Twitter. People need a coherent structure in order to share focused attention and pool their creativity.
Janet H. Murray is an internationally recognized designer and media theorist, and Ivan Allen College Dean's Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech where she also directs the Experimental Television Laboratory. She holds a PhD in English from Harvard University and was a pioneer of digital humanities applications at MIT in the 1980s and 1990s, moving to Georgia Tech in 1999, and serving as Director of Graduate Studies in Digital Media from 2000-2010 during which time she led the redesign of the MS curriculum and the founding of one of the first PhDs in the field. She is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997; MIT Press 1998), which has been translated into 5 languages, and is widely used as a roadmap to emerging broadband art, information, and entertainment environments, and Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (MIT Press, 2011). At Georgia Tech, her interactive design projects include a digital edition of the Warner Brothers classic, Casablanca, funded by NEH and in collaboration with the American Film Institute; the Interactive Toolkit for Engineering LearningProject, funded by NSF; and a series of prototypes for the convergence of television and computation, created in collaboration with PBS, ABC , MTV, Turner, Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, and other networks and media companies. Murray is an emerita Trustee of the AFI and a current board member of the George Foster Peabody Award. In December 2010 Murray was named one of the "Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future" by Prospect Magazine.
You describe the digital as still an "immature medium." What would constitute a mature medium and what steps would still need to take place before the digital can reach this state?
Well, movies are a mature medium - we don't think about the devices by which the story is told - the placement of the camera or the acting style: all of that has become conventionalized and made transparent to the viewer and at the same time it affords the practice of virtuosity, of invention of the new within a stable expressive range of conventions.
And some parts of digital expression are more mature than others - web page design is pretty stable for example. But it is easy to think of changes in the inscription or transmission layer that will make current web design obsolete. For example, if 3D screens become the norm we might enter a period of exploring and refining some of the established film techniques - we can see that happening in Scorsese's Hugo for example, but all within the recognizable conventions of a Hollywood movie. But if 3D screens become the norm for interactive environments, then we will have to develop a whole new set of conventions for navigation along the Z axis, and we will see a rearrangement of archives into 3 dimensions (think of the tables of iTunes songs) and this will inevitably make us more eager to use gestural interfaces to reach in and grab things or send them hurtling back and forth. The disruption in inscription of a 3D screen would not just lead to 3D shooter games but to new genres and formats that would organize information and experience in ways that we cannot predict until we start messing with it. So this openness to disruption is a symptom of an immature medium.
What is the case for seeing the computer as a medium as opposed to a delivery mechanism for a wide array of different kinds of media formats and practices?
That is what I asked myself to prove in Chapter 3 of Hamlet on the Holodeck. It is a medium because it has its own affordances, particularly the procedural and participatory affordances that we recognize as "interactivity." But that does not mean that we can't think about videogames as a medium within the larger digital medium, just as newspapers are a medium within the larger print medium.
As McLuhan pointed out, the content of any new medium is an older medium, and Bolter and Grusin are right to call attention to "remediation" as a cultural phenomenon that is always going on: we are always transposing conventions from one medium to another.
But when we treat the computer as merely a wire for sending down packages of video or print in imitation of legacy formats then we are missing out on new expressive opportunities and often reinscribing the limitations of older physical structures.
For someone trying to make money in the short term from legacy properties then creating a DVD of a movie or streaming a TV show or an electronically delivering a PDF of a "book" seems like a win. But designers should think beyond this: they should ask what we are communicating with these legacy formats - what stories we are telling, what concepts we are explaining -- and then consider whether we can serve the same purposes in more powerful ways by drawing on the affordances of computation. For example, maybe it is time to replace all the physics text books with manipulable system models. Or to go back to a project you and I worked on at MIT some years ago, wouldn't it be better to teach film studies in a digital environment where you could access any film at multiple levels of granularity, comparing multiple examples of the wipe or dissolve? If we think about the digital medium as just a way of reinscribing the print-era text-book or other legacy media formats we will deprive ourselves of new strategies for expressing, sharing, and understanding human experience.
Though you write near the end about the importance of creating "more expressive machines," Hamlet on the Holodeck's concern with expression often takes a back seat here to issues of functionality and transparency. Does this suggest that you think the kinds of debates you used to have with Sven Birkerts and others have been resolved? Are you personally less interested today in the issue of whether the digital can be art or literature?
No, I am still interested in art which is one of the primary ways of exploring the expressive qualities of a new medium - of stretching the clay, so to speak -- and there are many expressive examples in the text, such as Camille Utterback's work, which I admire tremendously as well as a section in the last chapter on playfulness as a design strategy.
But the book does engage the nitty gritty conceptual work of shaping something in digital form: how to abstract experience into coherent procedures and structured documents, how to think about loops and metadata as the raw materials for expressive practice. To my mind, you must understand the specific materiality of the medium - the plasticity of code and data structures - in order to exercise creative power as a designer. That doesn't mean that everyone has to write their own code on every project, but you have to understand how to shape the bits in order to have a wide enough understanding of the design space. If you don't understand how code makes meaning then you can't imagine a wide enough range of possibilities to be a strong designer.
As for Sven Birkerts -- I was happy to see him announce that the journal he was editing was moving to the web just a few years after our debate. He was one of the first to express a kind of nostalgia for print, which I can sympathize with - I'm very fond of books and have just written a very fat one. What I still don't sympathize with is the notion that there is a hierarchy of media, so that anything in print is somehow better than anything on TV or in the digital medium. But Sven was very poetic in evoking the joy of print, which people will likely continue to do as we become more aware of media forms because of the changing landscape.
You rather quickly dismiss the concept of "transmedia" or "crossplatform" storytelling from your focus here. Yet, I know you have been working with the American Film Institute on various projects to think about the computer as a "second screen" in relation to film or television. What insights might you be able to share from this work with my readers who are interested in transmedia issues?
My etv group has been an important focus of my own research since I came to Georgia Tech. It assumes a convergence platform that combines everything we love about TV with all the affordances of the digital medium. This is what I predicted in HoH in 1997, and described in chapter 9. The home TV is converging with the computer, the game platform, and the telephone which is now a video telephone. The tablet has become a useful second screen and is very well positioned to replace the remote control. Our prototypes address these possibilities. For example, we assume that TV series are stored in an archive that is navigable across episodes and across series. Then we ask, what kinds of connections will viewers want to make? So we do prototypes that connect two American history documentaries that explore the Cuban Missile Crisis from Castro's perspective and from Kennedy's. Or we show how a long-form story arc, like Graham Yost's masterfully controlled Justified season, can be made clearer to viewers by scene-specific synchronized visualizations that do not distract them from the unfolding story.
I like your categories of transmedia very much and I know the term has been very energizing within the entertainment industry. I particularly like your calling attention to the need for a consistent storyworld across media instantiations. I have picked a friendly quarrel with the term "transmedia" on my blog and I am taking up the same issue in a keynote at Euro iTV next August, calling for a process of "transcending transmedia. " Instead of interactive environments as separate media from television, I want to encourage people to think about more complex storyworlds that integrate the affordances of the digital medium, such as documentaries that are indexed for multiple paths, or dramatic series that come with the ability to follow a single thread across multiple episodes or seasons, or fantasy dramas that support investigation and sharing of clues to mysterious forces without a sense of leaving one medium and entering another one. I'm more interested in the integration because I think that more complex storytelling is a human resource. It holds the power to make us smarter and more empathetic.
In the interest of continuing this "friendly quarrel," let me add a few thoughts about Janet's arguments about "transmedia" as a purely "additive" concept. She is in some senses rehashing arguments she made two decades ago against the concept of "multimedia," which she argued was like "photoplay" a transitional term which described our limited understanding of how media could be integrated together and that as better design principles emerged, we would see a richer deployment of the affordances of the digital, which included new understandings of the properties of once distinct media. I agreed with her then about multimedia, and still do despite the resurgence of the concept as a result of the iPad's appeals to more integrated media experiences (perhaps, a second stage in the integration process). I am less certain that transmedia is a transitory term in this same sense. Here, I see the gaps between media as a feature and not a bug. For me, transmedia is about creating meaningful layers, where much of the pleasure and agency is in making connections across texts and deploying them as resources in an ongoing social conversation. The gaps between different extensions encourage a more active engagement, accounting for the recurring interest in transmedia across the entertainment industry as Hollywood seeks models for what engagement-based content looks like. I do believe we will see more and more integration of the functions of transmedia as more and more content comes to us through digital platforms, but I also think something vital will be lost if all of the content becomes instantly available to us in a more integrated fashion. This is the moment where transmedia changes back into multimedia (which for me is media across multiple modalities but within the same platform). The result will be to make the layered texts associated with transmedia more popularly accessible, but potentially at the expense of the hunting and gathering (not to mention the social exchange and collective interpretation of content) which has made the transmedia model so effective at mobilizing buzz and participation around media properties. Janet anticipated some aspects of transmedia with her discussion in Hamlet on the Holodeck of the notion of "hyperserial." The key concept here is "serial." Transmedia is a kind of seriality. Serial fictions have a distinct aesthetic and economic function, which would not be achieved by simply integrating all of the elements into a mega-text, and I think the kinds of seriality represented by transmedia will have value even when it becomes technically possible to more fully integrate the extensions. My five cents worth.
