How I Spent My Summer Vacation : Italy and Switzerland

  Damanhur

I suspect this "eco-society" in the mountains of Northern Italy will be unknown to most of my readers, but it created a certain amount of "alarm" and "concern" for some of the Italians involved in planning other stages of the trip. Domahur is an alternative society, founded on environmental and spiritual principles, in the 1975. Unlike many of the other "utopian" communities of that era, it still survives, even thrives, despite a reputation for secrecy and some public misperceptions which link it to "demon worship," a charge which carries weight in a culture that is so deeply rooted in Catholicism. I was invited to visit Damanhur by Betsy Pool, a veteran of the American media industries, who came to this community several years ago with her husband and her daughter.  Pool has been asked by the community to help tell their story to the world, and she has increasingly been drawn into current discussions around games-based learning and transmedia storytelling, reaching out to a number of key thinkers in this space, and inviting them to visit Northern Italy and explore possible collaborations.

The first thing we felt when we arrived in Damanhur was an enormous sense of community: much about this society is co-operative. Many, though not all, of the residents live in group arrangements and give a certain amount of time and work each week to the betterment of their community. As you walk through the community, you can see and feel  how deeply these people care about each other's well-being, how connected they are to each other's lives, and how much they believe in what they are doing.  Everywhere you look, you see signs of the community's commitment to a kind of participatory culture, one where each person is encouraged to be creative and share what they create with the people they care about. We saw paintings, sculpture, architecture, fashion, food, gardening, and farming, all treated as artistic endeavors. We certainly saw signs of people who were still learning how to create and trying their hands at crafts which were unfamiliar to them, but at the same time, we were impressed by the overall high quality of accomplishment the Damahurians had achieved in their respective crafts. At the same time, there was a commitment to protecting the environment, which has led the group to experiment with advanced techniques that allow them to create a more sustainable lifestyle.

This commitment to creativity is perhaps most fully expressed through the religious life of this community. We were taken on a tour of the Temples of Humankind. The Temples are a remarkable accomplishment -- more than 8,500 cubic meters on five different levels, linked by hundreds of meters of corridors, all carved out of the inside of a mountain.  On first entering this space, you are overwhelmed by its scale, by the incredible attention to detail, by the craftsmanship, and by the colors and textures which constitute this built environment.

As the guides showed us this space, I was impressed by  how deeply they have thought through the core elements of their belief system.

In many ways, this is perhaps the fullest realization I've seen yet of what Joseph Campbell once called Creative Mythology. You get some taste of what it's like to visit the Temple when you watch this video we found on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNWQFNGtHdw

One room in the Temple, the Labryrinth, is devoted to what they see as the many faces of God, with stain glass windows paying their respects to Hades, Aphrodite, Amaterasu, Anahita, Arvisura, Anubis, Astarte, Athena, Balder, Baster, Brahma, Bran, Brigit, Buddha, Christ, Cybel, Enlil, Ganesh, Gaia, Judaism, Horus, Huhuetecotl, Islam, Manitou, Marduk, Mithra, Osiris, Pele, Persephone, Poseidon, Pan, Ra, Sin, Tengri, Thoth, and Unkulu Unkulu, that is, Gods from many corners of the Earth and from many different historic civilizations.

At the same time, there are attempts to incorporate the lived experiences and shared memories of the local people into this larger representation of their belief system, so that the residents create their own self-representations, through a range of media, and place them inside the shared spiritual space. The personal and collective stories  of the community, especially the faces of its founding members, are woven into the stain glass windows and murals, suggesting the links between their lives and core values or beliefs of the Damanhuran people.

On a personal level, I was delighted to find the dandelion as an important artistic motif running through the Temple's design: the dandelion also functions as a core metaphor in Spreadable Media, and it was around this same time we were working with NYU to develop a cover design which features the Dandilion as a model for dispersion and circulation.

The Damahurans embrace what they call "estoricism," a particular understanding of the spiritual world, which I find difficult to explain, even though they were generous in seeking to explain its core beliefs to us and answering our many questions. They feel strong connections, for example, with the people of Atlantis, and many of the motifs in their art take inspiration from those bonds. We attended, for example, a shared ritual where members of the community gather each month to consult the Oracles, amongst dancing and drum-beating. I am tempted to say that I am too much a rationalist to share their beliefs, though I value the creative processes through which they seek to share their insights with the world. Yet, they would not see these beliefs as "anti-rationalist," often using terms like "science" to describe their "research" into the metaphysical realm, and they claim to have developed "technologies" which allow them to communicate with other times and with the plant world.

These beliefs, some of which are ancient in origin, co-exist easily with a pretty open attitude towards contemporary technologies. It is not a closed community: people come and go freely, and there were plenty of examples of outside media throughout the living spaces of the homes which I visited.  Young people often leave the community to explore the outside world and many return, choosing to live here. Despite some reputation for secrecy, Damanhur is not an enclave, but rather the community's homes, public buildings, and farms intermingle with other local residents who do not share their beliefs. Betsy and her fellow community members are quite knowledgeable about current developments in digital media theory and they are committed to using state of the art techniques to share their narratives with the world. Indeed, any effort to create Damahuran transmedia experiences will build on the foundation of other public outreach projects, which have included picture books and graphic novels seeking to explain their understanding of the universe.

Many of the core texts that have defined transmedia  -- from The Matrix and Star Wars to Lost -- have had mythological themes, have drawn their core plot structures from Joseph Campbell, and many of them have tapped into strands of "esoteric" philosophy, so perhaps the world is ready for a transmedia franchise which presents the Damanhurian mythology  and which helps us to embrace some of the core values -- creativity, religious tolerance, diversity, community, and concern for the natural world -- which are part of a way of living here.

It was an amazing experience to spend my birthday in Damanhur, learning more about this remarkable culture, and getting to know some of the community members. Betsy and her family were nice enough to prepare a birthday dinner for me, including a traditional Italian cake, which consisted more or less entirely of icing.

Turin 

The following day, Peppino Ortoleva, a distinguished Italian media scholar, took us on a walking tour of Turin and shared a delightful lunch with us talking about the state of research on popular culture in Italy. For me, the highlight of this tour was a visit to Il Museo Nazionale del Cinema, the national museum of cinema, whose displays about early and silent cinema Ortoleva has helped to curate . Among the collection's more spectacular holdings is the statue of Moloch, created for the 1914 Giovanni Pastrone epic, Cabiria, which was considered to have been a primary influence on D.W. Griffith's Intolerance and which established Italy as a major creative force in the silent film era.

In Los Angeles, they have recently built a shopping mall which lovingly recreates the giant elephants from Intolerance, but here, in Turin, they have preserved the original statue which was so central to the film's iconography.

The museum does not simply present artifacts from world film history, with a strong focus on the accomplishments of Italian cinema, but it also seeks to interpret the experience of film genres and film going into a series of evocative environments -- ranging from a Western saloon to a mad scientist's laboratory.

The museum becomes a totally immersive environment that provokes strong emotional responses in visitors, very different from the contemplative distance we associate with more traditional museums. One certainly comes away with a deeper appreciation of film history, but the lesson is delivered with such showmanship that this has instantly become one of my favorite museums.

Afterwards, I shared a public lecture at the Circolo die Lettori about new media literacies and the value of play in educational practice, which seemed to be heavily attended by area teachers. My respondents included Peppino Juan Carlos De Martin (computer science professor at Politecnico engineering school and a commentator on web/computer subjects in national newspaper La Stampa, based in Torino), and Aldo Grasso (TV critic of II courier, Italy’s main newspaper, who teaches media at Catholic University in Milan).

And then we raced to catch a train which took us to Milan. Here, Cynthia caught an image of me, true to form, working on the train.

And from that same train trip, here's another entry in my series focused on the Slapstick imagery found on European warning signs.

Gotta hurt!

Milan 

In Milan, I gave three public lectures in two days:

First, I spoke to the Italian Scientific Society on Media Education’s national conference. What made this talk especially memorable was that they had brought in a class of local high school students who seemed especially engaged by my discussion of new media and education. At one point, I asked the audience who knew about Invisible Children's Kony 2012 video: all of the students shot their hands instantly, while a surprisingly few of the adults in the audience raised theirs. The young people seemed very proud to be more connected to what was happening in the world than their teachers had been, and I had a wonderful time talking with the students afterwords. They had even brought a video production team to interview me for their school newscast, suggesting that the school was finding good ways to integrate their media literacy skills into the classroom activities.

Second, I spoke to graduate students and industry professionals at Bocconi University, an event organized by the U.S. Embassy in Milan, and hosted by Paola Dubini.

Third, I was one of the invited speakers at Media City: New Spaces, New Aesthetics, an international seminar promoted by Triennale di Milano and curated by Francesco Casetti. The event sought to balance excitement about the ways that new media has enhanced our experiences of living in urban environments ("media makes cities easier to inhabit, more beautiful to see, more intense to share, and more complex to understand") with some skepticism about the ways that smart cites "respond to new needs when they provide a system of surveillance or when they inspect our bodies or when they grant control from distance." Most of the other speakers I heard took this more critical perspective, discussing new forms of "boredom" which emerged as people were subjected to public media which over-rode their ability to enjoy private contemplation or interpersonal conversation as they traveled through public spaces, such as train stations or described in pretty negative terms what happens when the public sought to reclaim spaces of shared celebration in areas controlled and dominated by commercial interests.

My own talk, "From 'Bowling Alone' to 'The New Urban Mechanics': Redesigning the Civic Ecology," took a somewhat more optimistic perspective, describing a range of different models of civic participation and engagement reflected in recent experiments in civic media developed through the Annenberg Innovation Lab, MIT's Center for Civic Media, and the City of Boston's Office for New Urban Mechanics. I organized the projects in terms of data aggregation, information exchange, civic engagement, and collective deliberation.  My abstract sums up the key idea: "As we move to think about the future of the city as the locus of a new civic ecology, there has been a tendency to concentrate on notions of information access and transmission to the exclusion of attention to the affective and ritual dimensions of connectivity and mobility.....He examines the ways information technologies may not only support the public sphere but may also offer us a way to reclaim the roles played by the coffee house, the bowling alley, the town pagent, or the carnival, all previous rituals and locations as much or more invested in creating strong social ties as they were to ensuring rational and informed discourse."  The following videos showcase some of the projects I identified across my rather rapid tour of current experiments in civic media.

Projects from The Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw1DabyLJAs&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QSYp0dUxx8&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0dpDw7SJFU&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUT-cVpevGE&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL5utjMK8Us&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn29ZCarhd8&feature=player_embedded

Projects from the MIT Center for Civic Media

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh_uhaGnqW4&feature=player_embedded

Here's another project developed by Audubon Dougherty, a former Comparative Media Studies student.

Afterwards, Cynthia and I had dinner with Will Straw (McGill University), who has been doing some work on the construction of popular memory online, which has informed some of my recent writings. So, we had a great conversation about zines, obscure forms of print culture, and collecting, all topics I hope to be spending more time thinking about as I get deeper into my new Comics project.

While I was spending my days giving talks, meeting with academics, and giving interviews, Cynthia had a chance to explore Milan. For example, her sightseeing took her to The Duomo, the great 14th century Cathedral, which has been described as the "heart" of this great renaissance city.

Here, you see a detail from the 1562 statue of St. Bartholomew Martyr, which is noted for its depiction of a man who was completely flayed alive, and carries his skin around draped over his shoulder . This sculpture's fascination with muscular and bone structure suggests the role the biological sciences was starting to play in the creative imagination of this period.

Here, we see a monument at the Palazzo Marino erected in the 19th century to honor Leonardo Da Vinci, who did many of his greatest artworks in Milan. The Palazzo is near the Scala, Milan's historic opera house, another key stop on Cynthia's tour.

That evening, Cynthia took me back out to walk at dusk along the outskirts of the Sforza Castle. The Castle/Fort was constructed in the 15th and 16th century during a period when Milan was under Spanish domination. By this point in the trip, Cynthia and I were both deep into reading George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, and thus, we were really fascinating with the heraldic trappings here.

As you can see, this particular castle embraced the image of the snake as central to its identity (again, allowing us to make certain fannish connections with the House of Slytherin in the Harry Potter novels).

It can be hard to make the snake an heroic or even a menacing figure, given all of the negative connotations that often surround reptiles in western culture, but somehow, the castle did a pretty good job of pulling it off.

And Cynthia fell for some stray cats who made their home amidst the ruins and rubble of the castle.

It had to happen. We had been joking the whole trip that we were keeping a "Rock Star" schedule. People had suggested that we print up t-shirts to sell at my talks listing the full route of the tour. I had been comparing notes with my friend, MC Lars, who was doing an honest-to-goodness rock (well, nerd core) tour of Europe over this same period. And every stop along the way, we kept noticing that Bruce Springstein had either just given or was just about to give a concert. Well, we ended up in the same city, Milan, at the same time, but Bruce didn't call me.

VENICE

Venice is exotic, beautiful, romantic, historical, and above all, wet.

We arrived by train from Milan and immediately had to take a water taxi to get to our hotel. I had passed through Venice on the way to the Pordonone Film Festival almost two decades ago and had been scheming to get back ever since; this was Cynthia's first trip, and I think we both became immediate fans of the city, its history, its culture, and its waterways.

For me, a key pilgrimage for this trip was to see the Bridge of Sighs. Historically, the bridge connected the Palace of the Doge's Palace with the prison, so convicted prisoners would cross the bridge and catch their last glimpse of the world outside before being shoved into a dark, dank hole for many years to come. Lord Byron gave the bridge its name and along with it, bestowed a kind of romantic aura around this space. The bridge figures prominently for example in George Roy Hill's A Little Romance, a personal favorite of mine, where two young lovers runaway from their parents in Paris and make their way to Venice where they want above all to cement their romance by kissing underneath the Bridge of Sighs at twilight. So, here, you see me standing in front of the Bridge of Sighs.

And this photograph  is taken on the Bridge looking out at the canals below, more or less what the prisoners might have glimpsed as they crossed.

Leave the myth of the Bridge of Sighs aside, the Dodge's Palace represents one of the most epic spaces I have ever visited. It does seem to be full of people who have fallen out of their clothing at the most inappropriate or awkward moments. We had fun imagining the flirtation which might be taking place between the male and female statues who have stood and looked each other across the courtyard for many centuries now.

Inside the palace, outside the men's room,  we also saw what was perhaps my favorite example of slapstick signage on the entire trip. Sorry for an image which may be NSFW but it is also hanging in a very public space at the Castle.

There's no attempt here to use euphemisms to explain the functions of this room, which should be clear to anyone in any language. But, I can't help but think that the rush this guy is experiencing is a bit life-threatening in its intensity, which is why it seems to me that this sign belongs alongside the other warning signs I've been featuring here.

While sitting in a cafe near St. Mark's Basilica, we observed a grand procession of priests and worshippers, full of pomp and circumstance.

For Cynthia, who has trained as a glassblower, a key pilgrimage was to the Island of Morino, which for many centuries, has been home of the some of the greatest glass-makers in the world.  While glass-blowers from all over come to Morino in hopes of learning more about their crafts, the island's secrets are fiercely protected.  It was not hard to find examples here of fine craftsmanship, though it was also not hard to find lots and lots of cheap knockoffs, aimed at the growing herds of tourists who are finding their way to the Island.

I was intrigued to see these figurines of Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan from The Kid (1921). I knew, of course, that Chaplin had left a strong cultural influence on Europe, but I was consistently surprised at how often we encountered Chaplin iconography as we moved across the continent. And more often than not, it was this film, more than Modern Times or City Lights, which was being evoked, suggesting something about the European understanding of the Little Tramp.

Venice was a great city to people-watch, and here are two wonderful images which Cynthia captured of children at play.

I've shared several times through this blog some of the great candy shops we encountered in Europe. What can I say!  I have a major sweet tooth. One shop in Venice had turned the sculpting and paint of marzipan into an art form and we had to buy one of the little fish you see in this image to take home and enjoy in our hotel room.

And of course, Venice is strongly associated in the public imagination with carnival, especially with the elaborately decorated masks which people wear to the festivities.

If these images seem a bit random, it is in part because we took Venice easy. We wandered around the streets, looking in windows, watching boats on the canals, sampling local food, drinking wine, and sleeping late. After the intense speaking schedule of the previous few weeks, it was great to have some time to re-energize.

LUCERNE

From Venice, we flew to Zurich, Switzerland, and then, took a train to Lucerne, where I would be speaking at a conference focusing on Social Media and Participatory Storytelling. The event, which included artists, intellectuals, and industry people, was organized, in part, by Kurt Reinhard, whose documentary series on the Future of Storytelling was spotlighted on my blog a few years ago.  The conference has set up a Vimeo channel which showcases the proceedings. My talk featured here was the only one presented in English. Lucerne is in the German-speaking region of Switzerland.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNzVnDJbPGQ

Interestingly, as we got ready to travel to the talk, I spotted some Kony 2012 graffiti spray painted at the base of a distinctly Swiss fountain, an interesting signpost given how often that campaign surfaced in my talks across Europe.

The  conference was held in the basement of the building which housed the Bourbaki Panorama. Created in the 19th century, the panorama is a 360 degree painting which depicts an incident during the Franco- Prussian War of 1870-71, where the defeated French General Charles Denis Bourbaki sought refuge in Switzerland and was greeted warmly by the ever-neutral but ever welcoming Swiss people. This incident gave rise to the modern Red Cross. Visitors stand in the center of the painting, which extends via sculpture into the physical space. Such panoramas were a widespread phenomenon in the 19th century all over the world. I grew up visiting the Cyclorama in Atlanta which is from about this same period and depicts the Battle of Atlanta. But, these works have gradually disappeared or been destroyed, so I was happy to get a chance to visit this one. Historically, these paintings might be incorporated into elaborate performance pieces, where plays with light and sound might intensify the drama.

Given a few hours before we needed to head back to the train, we spent some time exploring the waterfront. Those are the Swiss Alps you see in the background.

There was a large bank of swans, more than I had ever seen at one place in my life, who swam the waters and wallowed on the shore. Behind them here, you see the Chapel Bridge, a wooden structure whose origins date back to the 14th century. The Chapel Bridge spans the Reuss, a body of water which eventually contributes to the Rhine in Germany.

This stone lion honors the Swiss mercenaries who served the French royal family and who were massacred during the French revolution.

 Coming Soon: Germany, Czech Republic, and Hungary

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Spain

Madrid, Spain My time in Madrid was one of the most intense legs of the trip: I delivered five talks in three days and most of the time in between was spent doing interviews with the local media. As a consequence, I had very limited time to see this great city and my exposure to its culture mostly consisted of quick meals in between talks.

While in Madrid, we stayed in a really luxurious grand hotel, the aptly named Westin Palace, just a few blocks away from the Prado Art Museum, thanks to the generosity of Telefonica, which was sponsoring my big public talk here.

After checking in, we wandered over to the Prado to soak up a little culture. Personally, what drew me here was the chance to see Hieroymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, a work which has fascinated me since I first wrote a paper about it in high school: I still can't figure out how to place Bosch in the context of his times. Where did this guy come from? Almost as astonishing to us were some of the religious paintings -- such as one where milk shoots out of the breast of the Virgin Mary and across the room into the mouth of a praying saint. (We found that there was a consistent fascination with this particular bodily fluid in religious art across Europe.)

Not surprisingly, Spanish artists, such as El Greco, Goya, and Velazquez, were especially well represented in the collection, and it was breathtaking to experience the size and intense colors of some of these works. Perhaps my favorite discovery on this visit was Velazquez's Christ in the House of Mary and Martha.

First, I was intrigued by the way the picture manages to combine three genres -- the still life, the domestic portrait, and the religious painting -- within a single image. Second, I was fascinated by the ways that the picture juxtaposes and contrasts two very different spaces of action -- the foreground in the kitchen, the background in the dining room -- and links them thematically to the core Biblical story of the two sisters, Martha busily preparing the meal, while her sister, Mary, sat at Jesus's feet and listened to his word. I have been spending lots of time thinking, especially about still life paintings, but also other works which include a strong attention to material culture, in relation to my new Comics and Stuff project. I ended up grabbing a picture off the internet and incorporating this work intoa talk I gave in Madrid about this project.

The following morning, Pilar Lacasa picked me up at the hotel and drove me out to the University of Alcala to present "The Samba School Revisited: Play, Performance, and Participation in Education. Lacasa has been a frequent visitor to the Comparative Media Studies program through the years, where she sat in on classes, participated in conferences, and contributed to our research. I've featured her own work on games-based learning and new media literacies through the blog before. It was meaningful for me to finally get a chance to visit her at her host institution and interact with her students. The talk was adapted from this blog post, which I wrote about the ways my own thinking about participatory culture was influenced by Seymour Papert's classic essay about the Samba School as a site of informal learning. The talk started with my own observations about how one of Rio's Samba Schools encouraged multiple forms of participation in the creative process.

Here, you see Pilar sitting next to me on the podium during the talk:

and me interacting with some of her students in the coutryard afterwords.

That evening, I paid my respects to another friend, Nacho Gallego Perez, who asked me to present my Future of Content talk at the Campus of Leganes, organized by Research Group about Television, Cinema, and Culture at Universidad Carlos III. Perez, who does work on grassroots use of digital radio and podcasting in Spain, had given a guest lecture in my New Media and Culture class at USC and participated in a workshop my Civic Paths group organized for MacArthur's Digital Media and Culture conference.  Nacho and Luis Albornoz took me out afterwards to enjoy Tapas.

After a morning of interviews organized by Telefonica, I went out to give a talk about "Comics..and Stuff" at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, hosted by Jose M. Alvarez-Monzoncillo, who is a leading thinker about the cultural industries. I featured Alvarez-Monzoncillo's book, Watching The Internet: The Future of TV? on my blog shortly before I left for the trip.  You can see me here trying to reach up high enough to point out some details on a Richard Outcault comic page.

No sooner did I arrive back at my hotel, then another host, the international media literacy advocate Roberto Aparici, arrived to pick me up. I met Roberto years ago at MIT, when Textual Poachers was first coming out and he was in residence working on an early interactive media project.  Roberto and I sat down in a studio at a local educational television station to record a most enjoyable conversation which explored our shared interests in new media literacies and participatory politics.

And then, I talked about Play and Pedagogy as the final speaker at the Seminario internacional Redes sociales, educacion mediatica y apprendizaje digital, an event which brought together practicing teachers and educational researchers.

My talk was preceded by a presentation on the affordances of social media by Gunther Kress (University of London). Kress's work on "Multimodal Literacy" offers some valuable conceptual tools for thinking about transmedia learning, and so I was honored to have a chance to chat with him, however briefly. Here's a video interview with Kress I found on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt5wPIhhDDU

And, then, after a full day of talks, I arrived back at the Telefonica Foundation's headquarters in time to join a group tour of the old sector of Madrid and a wonderful dinner with my fellow speakers.

Telefonica's Transmedia Living Lab had pulled together some of the top thinkers about transmedia in Europe for a three day event, which tackled its implications for storytelling, learning,  and social change. My other commitments kept me from attending most of the events, but I very much enjoyed getting to chat with my fellow speakers over dinner.

I was especially taken with Lina Strivastava, a transmedia consultant who has been developing a tool kit for transmedia activism, inspired by her experiences developing a campaign around the Born in Brothals documentary, and Bill Boyd, a educational consultant and teacher working in Scotland, who has been doing some serious thinking and writing about new media literacies through his blog. Boyd has shared some interesting thoughts about the Madrid conference. You can find video and slides from the conference here.

My talk, "'Occupying' the Transmedia Landscape: Spreadable Media, Fan Activism, and Participatory Learning”  used the Occupy Wall Street movement as a point of entry into thinking about how activists are embracing grassroots practices which combine remix, transmedia, and spreadability, to get their messages out to the widest possible audience. The talk was partially inspired by this blog post on the discursive and visual tactics of Occupy.

 Barcelona

My main professional reason for coming to Barcelona was to participate in a dissertation defense for Manuel Garin, a gifted PhD student in Humanities and Audiovisual Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. I first became aware of Garin's work on The Visual Gag, when he shared with me this remarkable video that juxtaposes a sequence from Buster Keaton's silent film, Seven Chances, and footage from the Super Mario Brothers games, to help construct an argument about the ways that classic stunts and gag structures have traveled across time and across media.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEyfaM9pQBE

Garin presented some of his preliminary ideas about games and silent cinema through  this blog post and he had spent some time in California doing research through the USC Cinema School for his project. Garin has an encyclopedic knowledge of the history and aesthetics of gags, not the mention to read across a range of European languages, and thus, to make connections between different theoretical traditions which have sought to understand the place of the gag in media history. Across the dissertation, he explores thousands of gags from films, television, comic strips, games,and popular theater, moving fluidly across national traditions and criss-crossing divides between popular culture and avant grade practice.

The process of the dissertation defense was very different from my experiences in American universities. For one thing, the defense is public -- in this case, very public, since it was attended not only by Garin's family and friends, but also by the attendees of a conference his university was hosting that day on the cinematic gesture, and thus, we conducted everything in front of a packed auditorium. For another thing, it is a highly performative. The candidate gives extensive remarks presenting the core ideas from his project -- in this case, complete with power point and video clips. Then, each committee member speaks about the project for 10-15 minutes and finally the candidate gets to offer a formal rebuttal/response to what has been said. There is no chance for back and forth exchange between the parties involved, as I might have expected back in the States. In this case, each person who presented spoke a different language -- Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and English. I was told in advance that there would be no translation, since it was less important that the committee members understand each other than that what they had to say was understood by the candidate, but we were able to take advantage of the translation services organized by the conference.

Afterwards, I was approached by Robert Figueras and Gemma Dunjo, who are responsible for Panzer Chocolate, which is being billed as the first major transmedia project in Spain. I had been told about it multiple times by this point in the trip. This horror story is told across a feature film, a video game, a motion comic, an alternate reality game, mobile interactivity and "an Internet surprise.'  Here is a trailer they have produced which gives some sense of their approach.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Ed4pz8sXc

My other formal business in Barcelona involved a meeting with Felipe G. Gil, a digital artist, theorist, and activist, based in Seville, who has been promoting the concept of "CopyLove." Inspired by feminist theory and modeled on the idealized concept of maternal love, this approach seeks to imagine what copyright regimes would look like if they were shaped by ideas of reciprocity, caring, nurturing, and sharing, rather than property, mastery, control, and profit.    I had shared on my blog some of Gil's reflections on transmedia and digital literacy, which drew on the remix practices of his young cousin, a few years ago.  Here's a Ted video where Gil explains some of his concepts in Spanish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8msyNpPQRM

Afterwards, we were free to explore the city. Perhaps it was simply that my schedule had been so intense for the past week, perhaps it had to do with the considerable charms of Barcelona, but I felt giddy and liberated, and fell pretty madly in love with this city.  I suspect I am far from unique in saying that my fascination with Barcelona is to a large degree shaped by my engagement with Antoni Gaudi's amazing buildings. Gaudi is perhaps the best known exemplar of what has become known as Catalan Modernism, creating a series of remarkable residences, apartment buildings, churches, and public parks, especially in Barcelona, in the first part of the 20th century. Gaudi took certain tendencies in the Art Nouveau movement and pushed them in other worldly directions. The sensuousness of his structures have to be seen and experienced to be fully understood, but they are such a wonderful play with shape, color, light, and texture, that I found utterly seductive. Here, Cynthia's photographs only give you a taste.

 Gaudi's work is strongly informed by his close study of structure in nature -- Above, for example, you see some of the windows from Casa Batllo, a residence, which are clearly inspired by bones, where-as below, you see some details from the same building's roof, which are organic in their shapes, if not in their colors.

At the same time, there is a strong geometric pull in Gaudi's work, which elaborated on gothic traditions of architecture in order to explore arches in ways that open up radically different kinds of spaces within his buildings.

Every room in a Gaudi building is a surprise -- most of them, breathtaking. Here, you get a sense of how consciously he plays with light, exploring the relationship between interior and exterior spaces, to create a series of thresholds which we pass through as we move from room to room. Here, also, one gets a sense of the subtle and expressive use of color throughout his designs.

We spent more time with Gaudi's residences -- Casa Batllo and La Pedrera -- rather than his public buildings. But here, you see Sagrada Familia, his massive cathedral, which has been under construction for the better part of the past century. Given the centrality of the Cathedral to any visit to Europe, it was fascinating to see how Gaudi brought his idiosyncratic touches to this genre.

We also made our way out to Park Guell, a public space and gardens, which is enriched by Gaudi's sculptural and architectural elements. This park is a very active element in the public and everyday life of Barcelona, so while the residences now have the feel of museums, and are cut off from their original use, here, you can see contemporary Catalans interact in casual and everyday ways with his designed environments.

OK, by now, I have demonstrated why I chose to enter media studies and not architecture. My relationship to this work is largely emotional and intuitive, rather than intellectual, and I lack the basic vocabulary to describe what I saw when I visited these buildings. I should note that from time to time in these photographs, you will see me wearing a white baseball cap. I actually purchased it at one of the Gaudi gift shops. I was looking for something to protect my bald head from the sun and couldn't decide on what to advertise on my pate. The hat features simply the letter, J, as rendered in a font which Gaudi designed.

We were consistently amused by the vividness with which European street signs conveyed the many risks that surround us in the modern world. Sign after sign depicted what could happen to us if we make a single misstep in navigating a world of danger. I came to see them as a kind of conceptual humor, or perhaps the pictorial equivalent of slapstick comedy. I am going to share some in future posts. This sign, spotted in Barcelona, might be suggesting "slippery when wet," or more imaginatively, "please do not jump rope on these stairs," or perhaps, "beware of snakes." In any case, you should try to avoid this poor sucker's fate.

We spent the better part of two days playing tourists in Barcelona, taking advantage of the red hop-on, hop-off buses to sample many different sectors in the city. And as the day started to turn into night, we visited the Aquarium and then walked along the water front.

And, as the night continued, we took a lively midnight walk up La Rambla, where we stopped to watch street gambling, a range of live performances, and simply the back and forth bartering between visitors and merchants. As someone who is a  bit of a night owl by temperament, it was exciting to be some place where there is so much public life still being conducted in the wee hours of the morning. We were exhausted from an intense day of sight-seeing and pretty much limping back to our hotel, but you had a sense that many of these people were just getting started.

NEXT UP: ITALY AND SWITZERLAND

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Paris

 

I am embarrassed to admit that I made my first visit to Paris in my mid-50s, after being told my entire life that Paris is the most romantic city in the world and after having my fascination with the French capital roused all over again by two great films produced last year – Martin Scorsese’s Hugo and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. It would be hard to say that Paris surprised me, when you consider how many very particular images of the city have been etched in our imagination. I had many friends send along their recommendations for things to do while in Paris, many of which sounded very interesting and worthwhile, but ultimately, they were all things you should/could do on one’s second trip to Paris. The itinary for my first trip to Paris had been set in my head since I was 14 and taking a high school French class. As it was, despite pretty aggressive tourism, we still did not get to everything on our “Must See” list.

In the course of two action-packed days, we managed to visit Notre Dame Cathedral, eat lunch on a barge on the Siene River, walk along the Rive Gauche, stand underneath the Eiffel Tower and the Arch De Triumph, do some shopping along the Champs Elysees, stroll through the Jardin du Luxemboug, eat a croissant (actually, several), pay our respect to Shakespeare and Company, and gawk at the Paris Opera House (Home of Erik, the Phantom of Opera, though I could find no sign of an entrance to the sewers). We did not manage to get inside the Louvre, or visit the Arcades, or catch a performance at the Moulin Rouge or visit the cinema museum or take tours of the Paris sewers or the catacombs, all attractions which more or less insure that we will be coming back for more. We walked our legs off, but in the end, we saw very little that has not been seen by every other American tourist visiting the City of Lights over the past half century or more. It is hard to figure out what it is that I can say here that has not been said before.

This photograph, one of the few featured here which I took (as opposed ot my wife, who is by far the more gifted photographer) captures the festive spirit with which I embraced Paris. I thought it should be run with the caption, “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.” (I don't know, but I feel a certain family resemblance to the central figure here.)

By contrast, this image of a couple outside the Musee D’Orsay captures the way we felt at the end of each day – completely worn down by the onslaught on our senses and physical exhaustion from walking miles through the crowded city.

The Musee D’Orsay was one of the few places we visited in Paris which would not have been on my list in high school.  This art museum was built inside the old train station which was so beautifully reconstructed (digitally) by Scorsese in Hugo,  perhaps my favorite film last year. You can get a sense of the atmosphere of the museum from this photograph, which we shot illicitly, since shortly afterwards, we learned that photography was prohibited in this area. Shucks.

And behind the great clock, such a central feature of the Hugo promotional materials, there is a charming café where we stopped to have an Éclair and drink some orange juice.

We arrived late enough in the day that we had very limited time to study the artworks, though we did have time to pay our respect to the room devoted to the works of Vincent Van Gogh, a stop -- I hesitate to confess -- motivated as much by the role  this room played in a episode of Doctor Who asby my serious appreciation of the great modernist painter. (What can I say, I am a fan boy to my core!)

In previous posts, I've shared with you snapshots of the junk food culture of Europe. I offer here, without comment, an image of a delightful little candy shop we encountered in Paris. Whatever else you want to say about the French, they bring Style to everything they do.

A highpoint of our time in France was a visit to Versailles, organized by Melanie Bourdaa (Bordeaux 3 University) ,who has been a major promoter of transmedia narrative in her country. Here, you see Melanie and I sitting together on the Palace grounds.

Again, I suspect Cynthia’s photographs can speak much more powerfully than I can about the epic scale and beauty of this grand palace and its extraordinary grounds. I had visited this palace many times before in my imagination, but I was still overwhelmed by experiencing it in reality.

Note the fireplace: one of my many visits to this place in my fantasies was sparked by another Doctor Who episode, "The Girl in the Fireplace."

Here, and everywhere else I went in Paris, I found myself confronting the degree to which elements drawn from stories – history, mythology, literature, scripture – were dispersed across every available surface.  In many of the rooms in Versailles, one can stand and look up into paintings intended to evoke the heavens .

Many Paris buildings have architectural details (such as the gargoyles outside Notre Dame

or the lamp posts outside the Opera House) which are intended to evoke figures from myths and legends.

And Notre Dame manages to proclaim the Christ story from the sculpted doorways outside

to the stain glass windows inside.

I was especially intrigued by the ways Jesus’s life unfolds through a sequence of panels, which almost seem to predict comics.

I am convinced that someone smarter and more literate than me could develop a whole essay on immersion and dispersion in contemporary transmedia based on lessons learned from a more systematic study of the ways story elements are evoked around every corner in Paris.

For a more contemporary example of the ways the French embed their love of stories into the landscape, consider the love locks which have appeared, since the early 2000s, along bridges and fences in the city. Cynthia and I were unfamiliar with this relatively new practice, but a little time online suggests that it was inspired by the enormous popularity of the best selling novel, I Want You by Italian author Federico Moccia,  which was later adapted into the film, Ho voglia de te.  But even without a source text to refer back to, these locks each tell their own stories of the romances that they were designed to commemorate. The French government has struggled with how to respond to this truly grassroots phenomenon, which they see as obscuring their national monuments, but which resurfaces again as quickly as they are removed.

We made our way to the Pompidou Center several hours before my big public event and spent some time exploring this (in)famous building. Again, the debate about this space has become so entrenched that we all know the script by heart. Yes, it looks like “it is still under construction” and yes, it looks like “The Future.” Next question.

Before the main event, I spent some time being interviewed for a forthcoming documentary being made for French television called Call Me Kate, which uses Castle as a case study of a contemporary fan culture. The producer Emanuelle Wielezynski-Debats had brought along a range of French fan fiction writers, several of whom had participated in efforts to translate some of the key posts from this blog into French as resources for their community.  There has been an explosion in recent years of documentaries about specific fan communities, which seek to avoid the anti-fan clichés that characterized much of the media coverage of the past. Emanuelle was using this production to “come out” as a Castle fan and saw the film as an opportunity to help inform the French public about fan cultural production.

My lecture, “Engagement, Participation, Play: The Value and Meaning of Transmedia Audiences,” was promoted by Sorbonne Nouvelle-Universite Paris 3 and supported by Orange’s Transmedia Lab. The program was introduced by Melanie Bourdaa and Eric Maigret (Sorbonne Nouvelle). This was perhaps the most heavily publicized talk in my lecture tour and there was a massive number of people more or less filling up the auditorium. I came out and delivered a few sentences of clunky high school French, before reverting to English.

Here you will find a video of the entire program, including a panel discussion afterwards where I was joined by Orange’s Morgan Bouchet, who had spoken at this year’s Transmedia Hollywood event. Orange has made a major investment in transmedia, including joining as a sponsor of the Annenberg Innovation Lab, where I am the chief advisor.

Bourdaa and her graduate student,  Aurore Gallarino, wrote a very thoughtful summary of the event, which is worth reading.  They write:

“In Jenkins’ view, five logics are contributing to the emergence of transmedia and the phenomenon of increased fan participation (‘fandom’):

-       The logic ofentertainment, as evidenced by the presence in the US TV schedules of TV series and reality shows;
-

-       The logic ofsocial connection, highlighted by votes and discussions on social networking sites;

-       -    The logic ofexperts [Mastery], symbolised by the collective intelligence (Levy, 1994true) brought to bear by fans for the purposes of creation, production and discussion. Henry Jenkins cites the examples of the creation of Twin Peaks fan sites and the Lost Wiki (Lostpedia), which both collate articles written by fans to offer greater insight into both series;
-

-       The logic of immersion, which encourages participation. For example, on Oscars night fans could use a number of interactive tools to immerse themselves in the ceremony and form a community;
-

-        The logic of identification, which enables fans to establish an identity depending on what they watch.”

Just to be clear, these are not my categories. I was building on a framework my graduate student, Ivan Askwith, deployed as the frame for his Comparative Media Studies thesis a few years ago as part of a case study of the models of engagement around Lost. I have been experimenting with this model lately to think about the very different models of engagement shaping online extensions of American television series. You can read Askwith’s thesis here.

And here’s an interview I did with the French blogger Miss TrollMedia where I shared some reflections about what transmedia might mean in the context of French culture.

“Of course, the rich contents of French culture lend themselves to transmedia, although the desire to defend and close off those contents from outside influences also create challenges, since transmedia is at its roots participatory and generative. I would argue that some of the contents of French culture are already deeply transmedia. We could talk about the church culture which produced Notre Dame as one which was seeking every available channel from which to proclaim God’s Word and which embraced artists who remixed core icons and stories of their culture to create new works.

We could look at writers such as Hugo or Balzac as master world builders, who incorporated many existing stories into their works. So, Hugo sets his Hunchback inside the world of Notre Dame, thus extending the story it tells in new directions, where-as another author sets Phantom of the Opera in the basement and sewers of the Paris Opera House.

So, French culture has a long history of transmedia extensions and explorations, and there’s time for a new generation to enter into this process. But, in a networked culture, transmedia is not simply a conservative force, not simply about transmission, so having gone there, French culture can not work with a logic which treats the original author as a god or which seeks to police the borders of who wants to participate. You can transmit French culture to the world, but then, paradoxically, it will become world culture.”

My final event in Paris was a dinner with a circle of French academics, artists, and intellectuals who get together periodically to discuss game design and game study. I was invited to the dinner by Alexis Blanchet, whose data on the relationship between films and games I had featured on this blog several years ago. We were joined by Etienne Armand Amato, Sebastien Genvo, Vincent Berry, David Peyron, Nicolas Rosette, Olivier Mauco, and Marion Coville.

The group represented a broad mix of disciplines and perspectives, ranging from the aesthetics of interactive design to the place of computer games in the history of toys and play, from the political use of multiplayer games to the sociology of geek culture. Game studies has struggled to find an academic home in the French universities, but this multidisciplinary group of young scholars is bringing rigor and passion to the topic, teaching classes, writing both academic and journalistic games criticism and organizing and curating exhibitions for French cultural institutions.

As the sun sets slowly over Paris, we say goodbye to this romantic country, its gracious people, and its beautiful cityscape.

Coming Soon: Madrid and Barcelona.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Part Three): England and Ireland

England has always felt like a mother country to me -- not simply because (depending on who you ask) Jenkins is either an Irish or Welsh name, but also because Birmingham is the intellectual birthplace of the Cultural Studies tradition from which my work on participatory culture can claim its intellectual roots. So, while most of the other legs of the trip took me to places I had never been before, the British leg was a chance to reacquaint myself with old friends and especially to meet the next generation of British scholars who are working on fan studies or transmedia topics.

London

Our visit to London fell just about a month before the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and a few months before the city would host the Summer Olympics. As this photograph of a British street scene suggests, she was already spruced up and flying her colors.

On May 15th, I delivered a talk about our forthcoming Spreadable Media book  in the Regent’s Street Cinema, which has been hailed as the Birthplace of the British Cinema, since it was the location of the first public exhibition of motion pictures in London.

The talk was hosted by David Gauntlett, whose work on grassroots creativity I showcased on this blog not long ago. Gauntlett's  critiques of media effects arguments had helped to inform my writings around the Columbine Shootings more than a decade earlier. We had corresponded off and on through the years but this was the first time we met in person.  While the official video from the event has not yet been posted, someone in the audience captured and has posted the second part of the talk, including the question and answer session with the audience, and it will give you a good taste of how well Jenkins and Gauntlett played opposite each other. Here's a blogger's take on the event.

Immediately after the talk, I went backstage where I was interviewed by an Irish radio reporter, and you can again got some taste of the presentation from the version he shared through his podcast.

Nottingham

Cynthia and I then traveled by train to Robin Hood country -- Nottingham, for a conference, Contemporary Screen Narratives: Storytelling’s Digital and Industrial Contexts, which was organized by Anthony Smith.  Jason Mittell and I were the two keynote speakers for the event. Jason gave a really provocative presentation, drawing on his current book project dealing with complex television narratives. In this case, he used Breaking Bad to elaborate a theory of television characters. Jason has been posting chapters from the book via Media Commons for feedback, and so you will find the text of his remarks here, and given the interest in my readership in all things transmedia, here’s a link to his chapter on transmedia entertainment, which discusses Lost and again, Breaking Bad. My own remarks centered around “Engagement, Participation, Play: The Value and Meaning of Transmedia Audiences,” and was a dry run of sorts for the presentation I gave at the Pompidou Center in Paris a week or so later. (Watch for video of the Paris version).

For me, the highlight of this event was getting to sample the rich strands of work on fandom, cult media, games, and transmedia entertainment being done by the emerging generation of British and European academics, many of whom were students of my many old friends here:

• Bethann Jones (Cardiff University), a contributor to our issue of Transformative Works and Culture, shared her perspectives on the fanmix as an emergingcreative practice: the fanmix is a compilation of songs (something like a mix tape) which is intended to explore the psychological journey of a particular character (or character relationship), sometimes inspired by a work of fan fiction, sometimes informed by the fan’s reading of an episode or the series as a whole.
• Matthew Freeman (University of Nottingham) provided an important historical corrective to a day heavily focused on contemporary transmedia experiments, exploring the kinds of commercial intertexts and paratexts constructed around Superman in the late 1930s and 1940s. For comic buffs, some of the examples used was familiar ground, but what made the talk exceptional was the ways  he examined the specific industrial contexts of each of the production companies involved in developing Superman for comics, radio, live-action serials, and animation, and the contractual relations  the publishers deployed to insure some degree of integrity and consistency across them.
• Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur (University of Nottingham) traced the history of meta-media and transmedia explorations by the Jim Henson Corporation and the Muppets franchise, suggesting the ways that our awareness of the characters and their personalities inform our response to their performances across multiple media platforms.
• Feride Cicekoglu, Digdem Sezen, and Tonguc Ibrahim Sezen (Istanbul University/Istanbul Bigli University) reflected on the ways transmedia could be deployed to generate civic awareness and political participation, including both examples from the highly topical Valley of the Wolves series for Turkish television and recent efforts to use alternate reality games for social change, such as the British Red Cross’s Traces of Hope and Play the New .

Sunderland

Our next stop was Sunderland, an industrial city in North East England. Sutherland  is the home of British comic book artist and author, Bryan Talbott, whose graphic novel, Alice in Sunderland, will be the focus of a chapter in my planned Comics...and Stuff book project.

Reading Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland is an overwhelming experience -- not simply because of its epic scale whether judged by its 300 plus page length or by its historical scope, which traces the history of a town in Northwest England from the Age of Reptiles and the era of St. Bede through to the present moment.  Talbot shows how Sunderland has functioned as a crossroads for many of the cultural currents that have shaped British history. But, even on the level of the single page, Sunderland is overwhelming because of the way that Talbot has built it up primarily through techniques borrowed from photocomics and especially through the use of collage.

Each page may feature dozens of images Talbot has collected from archives -- old photographs, documents, woodcuts, carved marble, stained-glass windows, film stills, cartoons, and printed books, all jockeying for our attention, each conveying separate bits of information relevant to the historical narrative he is developing, but each gaining far greater meaning when situated within the book’s gestalt.   At the center of this narrative, as its title might suggest, is the story of Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, who lived for a time in Sunderland and met Alice Liddell, his young muse, for whom his fairy story was dedicated. On the surface, the book can be read as an obsessive argument for the priority of Sunderland over Cambridge as the site from which to understand the origins of Carroll’s Wonderland. In the process of making such claims, Talbot goes further, linking Alice and Carroll to a much broader array of stories (from ancient mythology to music hall comedy) which have sprung from the same geographic and cultural roots.

Sunderland, thus, is a project in radical intertextuality, forging links between dispersed narratives drawn from both history and fiction, mapping them onto a highly localized geography. For all of its historical expansiveness, the core structure of the book is a tour, walking up and down the streets of Sunderland, pointing out various monuments and landmarks, and linking them into the emerging narrative of British history. And on yet another meta-level, Talbot is trying to link his own medium, comics, to a much broader history of artistic practices which combined words and pictures to construct narratives, including a consideration of Carroll’s relations with his illustrator John Tenniel, the Bayeux Tapestry, William Blake, and William Hogarth, as well as patches of many different comics genres.

Given the book’s focus on the local history and geography of Sunderland, I was eager to visit some of the depicted sites myself, and to try to get a better understanding of the context within which Talbot works. I was lucky to have established contact via email with Billy Proctor, a scholar of comics and popular narrative who is based in Sunderland, and through him, I made contact with Bryan and his wife, Mary, who invited us to pay them a visit. There, we shared thoughts about our shared fascination with vaudeville and music hall, and I got the chance to see some of the work in progress towards the next book in his Grandville series (which combines steampunk with the funny animal tradition).

While I was there, I found myself being interviewed for a documentary being produced about Talbot and his work (as well as by a local newspaper reporter eager to find out what would bring an “American visitor” to their city). The documentary producer Russell Wall has since shared with me this short film promoting Dotter of Her Father’s Eye. Dotter was Bryan’s first creative collaboration with his wife, Mary Talbot, a noted feminist scholar, who uses the graphic novel form to explore two father-daughter stories: the first is an autobiographical account of her troubled relationship with her father, a noted Joyce scholar, and the second is the account of Joyce’s relationship with his daughter, Lucia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXUKksNjR78&feature=youtu.be

And this video documents Talbot’s involvements to get young people more invested in the expressive potentials of comics as a medium.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5t1Chy1sz4&feature=youtu.be

After our visit with the Talbots, Proctor and his colleague, John-Paul Green, took me on a brief, brisk walking tour of Sunderland on what had turned out to be a rainy, misty afternoon.

Here, you see a picture of Proctor and myself standing next to a Walrus sculpture which figures prominently in Alice: a stuffed walrus was brought back to England by Captain Joseph Wiggins (an associate of Carroll’s Uncle) and may have been the inspiration for the Walrus and the Carpenter.

Here are a few other stops along our walk, each of which plays a central role in the graphic novel:

The giant chess pieces in a children’s playground in Mowbray Park, which celebrates Carroll’s ties to the city

The Empire Music Hall, where such legendary British performers as Vesta Tilley, Guy Formby, and Sidney James once played.

The Statue of Jack Crawford, a British sailor, known as the “Hero of Camperdown,” who “nailed his colors to the mast” of the H.M.S. Venerable when it shattered during a battle with the Dutch.

Proctor, and his colleague Justin Battin, rode with us by train back to London, and we spent most of the trip totally geeking out about contemporary comics, science fiction, and fantasy franchises.

 London (Round 2)

We were all going to attend the Symposium on Popular Media Cultures: Writing in the Margins and Reading Between the Lines, which was being hosted by the Center for Cultural and Creative Research at the University of Portsmouth and by Forbidden Planet, London’s best known comic book shop.  The event was held in the Odeon Cinema near Covent Gardens.

Organized by Lincoln Geraghty, the conference brought together a who’s who of the top British academics working on cult media and fan cultures, including:

• Joanne Garde-Hanson and Kristyn Gorton speaking about the online reactions to Madonna as an aging female pop star
• Cornel Sandvoss examining  the ways that reality television series, such as The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea, played into the local imagination,
• Mark Jancovich tracing the initial critical response to the Val Lewton horror films,
• Stacey Abbott analyzing  the title sequences for such series as American Horror Story and True Blood,
• Will Brooker exploring the construction of authorship around the Dark Knight trilogy,
• Matt Hills sharing  insights about spoilers and “ontological security” within Doctor Who fandom,
• Roberta Pearson mapping a new project she is developing about the popular resurgence of interest in Sherlock Holmes.

My talk, “Beyond Poaching: From Resistant Audiences to Fan Activism,” sought to locate my current work on fan activism as a form of participatory politics in relation to much older debates about whether fan culture can serve as a springboard for “real political change”.  Amusingly, during my talk, Will Brooker asked me a question proposed via Tweet from Alexis Lothian, one of my graduate students back at USC, a symptom of the number of friends and associates who were following some of these adventures online.

Here’s a picture of some of the participants, hanging out in a local pub, following the event.

 Dublin

The following morning, Cynthia and I flew to Dublin, where I had been asked to speak at the Institute of International and European Affairs, a notable think tank which brings together business leaders, journalists, and policy leaders to discuss some of the challenges confronting the modern world.  Here, I offered some critical perspectives on the ways “content” is being reshaped in the contemporary media environment. As I noted, the word, “content,” has classically been defined as “that which is contained,” as in the contents of a bottle or the table of contents of a book. But, a key characteristic of our current moment is that content (as defined by the “content industries”) is not contained, but rather content flows very fluidly across media platforms, across national borders, often shaped by unauthorized acts of circulation which intensify its meanings and may or may not increase its value.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAffkJpYnPI&feature=player_embedded

Don’t miss the question and answer session which followed my talk, including some forceful challenges from business leaders and lawyers who felt threatened by the manipulations and appropriations of intellectual property I had depicted and by those eager to understand what Irish media makers might have to gain by embracing spreadable media.

Earlier that day, I had wandered over to a comic book shop, near my hotel, which had a display of Irish comics in the window. When I brought an armful of titles to the cash register, I discovered that the owner of the shop, Robert Curley, wrote and published most of the books I was buying through his Atomic Diner imprint. I thoroughly enjoyed my purchases, which included Jennifer Wilde, a supernatural mystery set in Paris in the 1920s and involving the ghost of Oscar Wilde; Rossin Dubh, which is set in the world of Irish theater in the 1890s and involves the return of an ancient demonic force,  Black Scorpion, a superhero saga set during the first world war; and the League of Volunteers, which created a team of superheros to reflect Ireland’s national identity.  The writing is lively, the characters are well developed, the attempts to tap into local history, politics, and mythology are distinctive, and the artwork is compelling.  Check out their website. http://www.atomicdiner.com/

Everywhere we looked in Dublin, we saw political posters, speaking to the ongoing debates around the European economic crisis and the austerity moves the government was seeking to impose.   Needless to say, almost every conversation we had in Europe turned sooner or later to the current political moment. The fact that we were traveling to Greece near the end of our tour often raised graveyard humor, speculating about what currency the Greeks would be using by the time we reached there and whether it would still be part of the European Union. It became clear that much of Europe was unified behind at least one core idea – their anger towards German banks and institutions which they saw as seeking to impose their will on the other countries. This image offers a sample of the political signage debating these issues.

And this one reduces the debate to its most basic terms.

Cynthia and I spent many hours wandering around the streets of Dublin, and found ourselves utterly charmed by the city, its architecture, and its local culture.

Along the way, we visited the Trinity College Library to see the Book of Cells, a beautifully illuminated version of the Gospels produced by Celtic monks around 800 A.D., and regarded as one of the real treasures of the country’s cultural heritage.

Coming Soon: Paris!

How Did Howard Rheingold Get So "Net Smart"?: An Interview (Part Three)

You talk in the book about what you call “network knowledge.” Can you define this concept? What kinds of things do you think the ordinary internet user should know about the ways networks work and why?

Networks of the technical and social kind -- and especially their combination -- have become particularly important today because of our growing reliance on networked devices and online social networks. At the same time, knowledge of how technical and social networks work is emerging from empirical research. Network science is illuminating the way the structure of networks influences what can be done within and with them. Social network analysis -- which predates the Internet -- shows how people use networks (sparsely knit, loosely bound) as well as communities (densely knit, tightly bound) in their daily lives, offline and online. Research into social capital has revealed the importance of networks of trust in informal collective action. Some of the most important political conflicts over the future of the Internet, such as the net neutrality debate, are tied up with issues about the architecture of the Internet.

Knowing how to cultivate and make use of personal learning networks has become a life skill in school and the workplace. And Manuel Castells has argued, with impressive evidence, that the linkage of global communication networks with human social networks is transforming world civilization into a "network society." None of this knowledge is particularly complicated, at least at the level of grasping the fundamentals. But the practical lore is embedded in a number of different disciplines that the average web user is unlikely to have studied.

So when I say network knowledge I refer to the knowledge of how a small world network works, the role of trust and reciprocity in social capital, the importance of centrality and structural holes, bridging and bonding capital, the architecture of participation that grows from the Internet's end-to-end principle, the differences (and advantages and disadvantages) between communities and networks, the importance of portfolios of loose and strong ties. Each of these terms has a technical meaning within network science, sociology, political science, but each also has practical application: If you know how to do it, you can use networks to find people who know what they are talking about  and you can engage those people and learn from them. You and others can get things done together online more effectively.

I'll just give one example here. Of course I've detailed this lore in Net Smart. The architecture of the Internet -- the way in which information travels and is controlled -- was deliberately designed to be decentralized by the authors of the TCP/IP protocols. Instead of a centralized switchboard like the telephone system, the packets that carry information on the Internet contain their own addressing and other metadata and are cooperatively routed around the Internet in a decentralized manner. The control doesn't lie in a centralized switchboard, but in the way the packets encapsulate the agreements about how the system works and the cooperation of all the nodes in the system enables information to find its own way around.

One important philosophical foundation of this architecture (and certainly there were many technical reasons behind the design of the protocols) was that the creators of the protocols knew that they could not foresee  how people would use the system and -- most importantly -- would innovate within the system's rules -- in the future. If control of how information moved around the Internet was centralized, future innovators might be forced to ask permission or argue for a reconfiguration of the control mechanism. If anybody at any node can invent a new way to use the system -- a World-Wide Web, for example, based on protocols that conform to TCP/IP and build on it -- there is no need to ask for permission or reconfigure the control mechanism.

As we've seen, this philosophical basis for a technical architecture led to unprecedented innovation. The freedom to innovate is one of the most important things at stake in the net neutrality debate. Will future innovators, perhaps in their dorm rooms, perhaps barefoot geniuses with smartphones, be able to invent new ways of knowing, new industries, in the future? Or will they have to work for one of the big content or communication companies?

"Architecture of participation" is a term Tim O'Reilly used to describe the way Internet services can be configured so that individual acts of self-interest add up to public goods that are useful to everybody. I love social bookmarking, for example, not just as a personal knowledge management tool, but as a way of both sharing and discovering resources and expertise. When I select a site to bookmark, select a snippet, add tags, I am doing something that I need to do for my own interest. But when Diigo, delicious or the newer curation sites make it possible for me to make my decisions public at no additional financial or time cost to me, then my decisions aggregate with the decisions of others.

Napster's secret to success was a form of architecture of participation in which people provisioned a resource (music) in the act of consuming it. Set aside for this discussion the ethical and legal issues around stealing music and just look at the architecture. When Napster users downloaded music, it wasn't from a central server, but from another Napster user online at the same time who had the music the downloader sought. By default, the folder where Napster stored downloaded music on users' computers was open to other Napster users who were searching for music at the time. Cory Doctorow called this "sheep that shit grass." The web itself is an architecture of participation. This is a real and not too difficult to understand implication of specific affordances built into online networks.

Many have talked about a pyramid of participation in which many consume information online but few actively produce it. These models are clearly hierarchical with production valued more than consumption. Yet, concepts like curation, which is central to your discussion, or circulation, which will be central to my forthcoming Spreadable Media book, focus on mid-level activities  which are more widespread in our culture and which nevertheless have been central to defining digital culture from the beginnings. You describe tagging as a “fundamental building block” of networked communities.  Can you share more about your understanding of curation as an important form of participation?

I don't have the figures at my fingertips, but my guess is that there are orders of magnitudes more participators in web culture than there were in print culture, in terms both of raw numbers and as a percentage of the population. There were far more readers than writers when the printing presses was the mode of production and the transport of physical books was the distribution channel.

I think there is an answer to the problem of the rising tide of noise online -- spam, porn, misinformation, disinformation -- and that lies in enabling people to find the good stuff and to make their choices public in a way that adds up. Certainly that, crudely put, is where Google's search algorithm came from -- when millions of people began putting links on their website, their choices added up to the input for PageRank.

The wisdom of the crowd is not infallible and it's important to always start there -- triangulation by finding three independent sources or looking at the material in question three different ways ought to be applied to collective decisions along with all the other information found online. Crap detection is about the kind of critical thinking and verification tools and techniques that can help people avoid wrong information.

Curation, however, is about the social production of decisions about which information is worth paying attention to. As I detail in Net Smart, we're seeing the evolution of hybrid social and algorithmic systems for transforming large numbers of individual decisions into valuable metadata. But at the fundamental level, curation depends on individuals making mindful and informed decisions in a publicly detectable way.

Certainly just clicking on a link, "liking" or "plussing" an item online, adding a tag to a photograph is a lightweight element that can be aggregated in valuable ways (ask Facebook). But the kind of curation that is already mining the mountains of Internet ore for useful and trustworthy nuggets of knowledge, and the kind that will come in the future, has a strong literacy element.

Curators don't just add good-looking resources to lists, or add their vote through a link or like, they summarize and contextualize in their own words, explicitly explain why the resource is worthy of attention, choose relevant excerpts, tag thoughtfully, group resources and clearly describe the grouping criteria. Think of these little information details as the metadata for a collective intelligence.

There's one formula for collective intelligence: introduce a large number of people making refined decisions to a platform that makes it easy for them to share those decisions, add intrinsic value to the curation platform that serves the curators' self-interest, mix in  ways for individual curators to group and communicate. If it sounds easy, the hidden difficulty lies in recruiting a sufficiently large population of participants.

I see three linked occurrences that provide some hope for raising the quality of information people are able to access: Curation platform companies such as Diigo, Delicious, Pinterest, Digg, Scoop.it, Pearltrees and many others are engaged in a commercial competition that is driving development of higher quality, easier to use, more rewarding services. More people are using curated resources through social media sharing via Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus .And more and more people are learning to make their curation decisions more effectively. That's why I interviewed Robert Scoble and Robin Good via video and made the videos available online as well as extracting quotes from my book. I can see curation as the basis of an entire course, and of course it has a long tradition in the information sciences that have evolved from library science.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1IeOzIoRDs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMn-cJHzF8A

You enter into the debates around “Playbor.” When and how does the “architecture of participation” become exploitative? How conscious do you think users are about the trade-offs they make in deploying certain commercial sites as tools and resources for participatory culture?

I have learned a great deal from Fred Turner, Trebor Scholz, and Mirko Schaeffer about the way some profit from the actions of many, so I believe an important part of social media literacy, comprising components of crap-detection, participation literacy, and collaborative skills, is the habit of asking oneself who is profiting from one's actions online -- and what they are giving back in return.

I know that when I upload a video to YouTube or a photo to Flickr and take the time to tag them that I am contributing a small amount of monetary value to Google and to Yahoo, which of course adds up to a very large amount of money when that small amount of value is contributed by millions of people.  When I take into account of leasing my own server to share my videos and photographs, the network effects of sharing with YouTube's or Flickr's large population, the software I would need and the time it would require to host my own media, then, to me, the value proposition that Google and Yahoo offer is a fair one.

Yes, I also know that tracking cookies and other mechanisms invisible to me are used to compile my use of these services and other online activities into valuable commercial metadata and for more nefarious dataveillance purposes. So, knowing this, are participative resources like YouTube, Flickr and many others an evil plot? You can argue this politically, but again I believe the better answer lies in education: in medicine the legal doctrine of informed consent compels my doctor to explain what might happen to me when I give consent to operate upon me. I'm giving Google and Yahoo my informed consent. But I'm informed.

Shouldn't everybody be? I certainly don't argue with and wholeheartedly support efforts to create free, inexpensive, open-source services. And I do think it's always important to be wary of the actions of monopolies. But mostly, I'm for informing people about possible exploitation of their labor.

I think trade-off is a good way to think about it. So much of the "entertaining ourselves to death" mass media journalism has trained us to see complex issues in starkly simple and manichean terms. Maybe the way Playbor works is that a big capitalist corporation makes profits by providing a service that has to compete with other services seeking to exploit our attention, decisions, and media (again, beware monopolies). And maybe it also provides a platform upon which participatory cultures can be built.

In the business world, some cooperative corporations such as Mondragon in Spain enable the workers to also be shareholders; Mondragon owns banks and other industries. Might some future entrepreneurs create playbor hybrids that are cooperatively owned? Critiques are important and it is especially important now to think critically around our use of media, but in addition to critiques, attempts at better ways of doing things are also important.

One thing I took away from Mirko Schaeffer's Bastard Culture was his argument that I (and Henry Jenkins) promulgate a "narrative of participation" that promise empowerment to those who learn to participate online, and that this narrative is being manipulated and exploited by corporate culture producers. Well, in the spirit of crap detection, I agree that it's always good to ask "who profits from this?" and "who is funding this?" I decided to contribute to the profits of book publishers every time I bought a book, and in turn I gained knowledge and entertainment. Of course, book publishers weren't able to use technology to wring further profits out of observing how I read their books and how I share them.

Again, it comes around to being mindful. I want to be mindful in my agreements to be exploited and I want to be mindful in the way I frame my narrative of participation. Participation is empowering. But that doesn't mean I think it's utopian.

James Paul Gee has used the term, “affinity space,” to describe what he sees as highly generative online spaces where learning and knowledge production takes place within groups of people who share common interests. He argues for this term because he feels that many of these spaces do not share the social cohessiveness or emotional connections we might associate with communities. As the person who coined the term “virtual community,” I need to ask you how important is it that online networks have attributes traditionally ascribed to communities in order to function effectively?

Barry Wellman calls this "the community question." In 1955, George Hillery compiled 94 different definitions of community in sociology papers, and one of the most important roots of contemporary sociology goes back to Tönnies decrying the shift from gemeinschaft to geselschaft, often translated as the shift from community to society that occurred in the 19th century with industrialization, urbanization, the rise of capitalism.

As Wellman notes, there's a long history of a kind of pastoralist nostalgia: community is seen as something wholesome that people used to have, but which has been eroded, debased, replaced by modernity, mass media, social media. Most definitions include some people who communicate in some way over some period time and have something in common.

Wellman introduced me to finer distinctions. What most people have in mind when they talk about community are people who are geographically linked, densely knit (many or most people in one's group tend to know one another), and tightly bound (relatively few from outside the boundaries of the group). Networks, however, are not bound by geography (which was true before the Internet -- think of diaspora communities of emigrants, or national/global businesses), are sparsely knit (most people don't know each other -- does your teacher know your spouse, your mechanic, your doctor?), and loosely bound (people from different groups/networks are not uncommon).

I also like how Wellman et. al. describe what people get out of communities -- information, social capital (favors for and from others), support (emotional, financial), and a sense of belonging. I think it's fair to say that unless there is some other compelling factor that forces people to provide one or more of these benefits (e.g., your boss says you have to communicate and share information with your colleagues), you are more likely to get them from networks of people who communicate regularly and have come to trust one another to some degree. This kind of trust comes from familiarity, from small exchanges of informational favors, from shared experiences, jokes, the kind of trivial but humanizing knowledge people gain about each other through "small talk."

From these characteristics, I think community and networks ought to be considered as part of a continuum of social relationships. Some relationships have greater depth, longevity, degree of commitment than others, and so do some networks. A community of practice, for example, might not widely share the kind of trust that would allow you to leave your children with someone for the night, or the kind of trust you'd need to take a long automobile trip with each other. But you might recognize a member of a network as someone who has proved to be helpful to others, who doesn't act like a jerk, and someone you've communicated with about matters of mutual interest -- whether it's technical lore among engineers or various tricks of the trade among online gamers.

A COP can function effectively without a great deal of affective component to communication, but it's hard to think of a group that calls itself a community in which people don't exhibit or signal emotion. This loops back to gemeinschaft-gesellschaft. When most people in the world lived in agrarian communities or small villages, then the people you work with, the people who provide professional services, your friends, and your neighbors were largely part of the same group. Now it's easy to switch from your support group for people caring for aging parents, which is probably pretty community-like, to an online community of practice for educators who use social media, which might be convivial without being familiar. I think the community question is a good way for people to reflect on their relationships and obligations and the media they use to maintain them, but ultimately I also think we have not yet developed a rich enough vocabulary to describe the different varieties of sociality that different media afford -- from skyscrapers and elevators to email and multiplayer games.

Humans keep changing the way we communicate -- writing, the alphabet, print, telephone, broadcast media. And with new media practices come new social practices or new twists on older social practices. We attach familiar names to the new -- horseless carriages and wireless telegraphs came to be known as automobiles and radios, and now we have Internet radio, shortwave radio, FM radio, satellite radio. Affinity spaces and hacker spaces, co-working spaces are emerging in the physical and the online world. So I do agree with Gee that it doesn't make sense to call every affinity group a community, as well as agreeing with Wellman that people can receive the general benefits most people attribute to communities from online communications.

Howard's Story:

I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension in 1981, then plugged my computer into my telephone in 1983 and got sucked into the net. In earlier years, my interest in the powers of the human mind led to Higher Creativity (1984), written with Willis Harman, Talking Tech (1982) and The Cognitive Connection (1986) with Howard Levine, Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes (1988), Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990), with Stephen LaBerge, and They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases.(1988).

I ventured further into the territory where minds meet technology through the subject of computers as mind-amplifiers and wrote Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Amplifiers (1984) [New edition from MIT Press, April 2000]. Next, Virtual Reality (1991) chronicled my odyssey in the world of artificial experience, from simulated battlefields in Hawaii to robotics laboratories in Tokyo, garage inventors in Great Britain, and simulation engineers in the south of France.

In 1985, I became involved in the WELL, a "computer conferencing" system. I started writing about life in my virtual community and ended up with a book about the cultural and political implications of a new communications medium, The Virtual Community(1993 [New edition,MIT Press, 2000]). I am credited with inventing the term "virtual community." I had the privilege of serving as the editor of The Whole Earth review and editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (1994). Here's my introduction to the Catalog, my riff on Taming Technology and a selection of my own articles and reviews from both publications.In 1994, I was one of the principal architects and the first Executive Editor of HotWired. I quit after launch, because I wanted something more like a jam session than a magazine. In 1996, I founded and, with the help of a crew of 15, launched Electric Minds. Electric Minds was named one of the ten best web sites of 1996 by Time magazineand was acquired by Durand Communications in 1997. Since the late 1990s, I've cat-herded a consultancy for virtual community building.

My 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. In 2005, I taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action that I have undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of our ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action. The TED talk I delivered about "Way New Collaboration" has been viewed more than 265,000 times. I have taught Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Digital Journalism at Stanford and continue to teach VirtualCommunity/Social Media at Stanford University, was a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. In 2008, I was a winner in MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition and used my award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. I have aYouTube channel that covers a range of subjects. Most recently, I've been concentrating on learning and teaching 21st Century literacies. I've blogged about this subject for SFGate, have been interviewed, and have presented talks on the subject. I was invited to deliver the 2012 Regents' Lecture at University of California, Berkeley. I also teach online courses through Rheingold U.

You can see my painted shoes, if you'd like.

Howard Rheingold / hlr@well.com

How Did Howard Rheingold Get So "Net Smart"?: An Interview (Part Two)

There has been a tendency to adopt totalizing views about emerging technologies, so that Twitter either "destroys our attention span" or it "paves the way for revolutions around the world." Yet, as you note early on, “Twitter is a recent example of a social media which can either be a waste of time or a multiplier of effort for the person who uses it, depending on how knowledgible the person is in the three related literacies of attentional discipline, collaborative know-how and net saavy.” This approach reframes the question away from technological determinism and onto issues of use and knowledge, which reflect an awareness of human agency (both collective and individual) in terms of what we do with media. Why do you think it has been so hard to get to this point, where new media is understood not in utopian or dystopian terms, but in terms of choices we are making about the role these tools play in our lives?

I'm certainly not the first to point out that totalizing belief systems, whether they are religious or political, make it easier emotionally for people to deal with a complex world. Knowing that there are certain answers makes a large part of the world's population feel right about living in the world. It's not just easier in some way to believe a radical oversimplification about a new technology, it's far easier to persuade people to believe things that don't have much or any evidence.

I think you can tell by this point that I see socio-technological issues as confluences and hybrids of many technical, psychological, social developments. Time and again, the way a new communication technology changes society is influenced by the way people use it, and the circumstances of their use. Chinese and Korean inventors created moveable type before Gutenberg, but there were so many differences in social circumstances. China had greater centralized political power at a time when Europe was divided among dozens of warring states. Elizabeth Eisenstein pointed out how Protestant theology of individual Bible-reading intersected with the technology of the printing press and the emerging entrepreneurial capitalism of the printing trade -- all circumstances that were unique to a time and a place and to strong beliefs.

SMS was invented by network engineers and transformed into a global medium by teenage girls who discovered they could communicate without their parents hearing. ARPAnet was for sharing computer resources across distance, but ARPAnet engineers started using it for social communication. Why should the mobile, social Web be any different?

So I argue that human agency is likely to be important in determining the way digital media and networks will end up for historical reasons. However, I also came to see that believing in technology determinism -- "Is the Web driving us mad" was a Newsweek cover story in the summer of 2012 -- can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a Darwinist, I believe I come from a long line of ancestors who must have thought "there has to be a way out of this apparently possible predicament." Thinking about solving serious threats to one's existence or humanity isn't guaranteed to solve those problems, but thinking the problems are insoluble because they are determined by external forces is almost certainly going to lead to failure and perhaps extinction.

I am not arguing that all the effects of widespread use of social media are salubrious. People will be no less cruel, venal, and ignorant online than they are offline. Screens are definitely attention-magnets and (one of the reasons I wrote Net Smart) it's easy to fall into click-trance and waste hours online that would have been better spent elsewhere.

The issue is mindfulness, as I see it, and the good news is that a little self-awareness of the way we are deploying our attention via large screens and small is a lot more helpful than no self-awareness. The evidence, as I marshal it in my book, is that paying attention to our attention in light of our intention can change our mental habits. (Note that I'm avoiding the obsolete cliche about "rewiring the brain," and I've called for a moratorium on the phrase "squirts of dopamine" in describing the way social media affects our nervous systems.)

Another reason for the persistent popularity of lurid techno-determinism in the media is that responsibility in a non-determinist world extends to you and me. If we do have the power to influence the way emerging media will reshape our lives, then it's up to us to do something about it. So simple, black-and-white views of social media are not just emotionally easier to adopt, they don't require believers to consider their own responsibility in determining the future.

I used Twitter, as you quoted, as a real example of the difference that know-how makes. The most common criticism of Twitter, that it looks like a torrent of trivia and noise, could be applied to the Internet. Knowing how to discover who knows something worth knowing or who communicates in an entertaining way is essential to a Twitter user who wants to devote their attention to something worthwhile. Knowing how to attract the attention of other Twitter users, how connect with Twitter communities, make Twitter lists, makes all the difference between noisy trivia and worthwhile flows of information and entertainment, even channels for sociality. Twitter is a medium in which the users have invented powerful social conventions such as retweets and hashtags. What's interesting is what people do with that medium, such as cultivating Personal Learning Networks.

Some will be surprised to see you write about “Twitter Literacy” given many perceive Twitter to be a subliterate or semiliterate form of communication. How are you defining this term? Where do our ideas about what constitutes effective or thoughtful use of Twitter come from?

I guess this is where it shows that I am not really a licensed academic, but that rare and odd species, an independent scholar. I really didn't start out to do it this way. I was a freelance writer and I tried to write accurately and to be careful to source my material and attribute when necessary.

Then some of my freelance writing was taken up by scholars in what has grown into cyberculture studies and I found myself taken to task for utopian enthusiasms, deterministic language, unsupported generalizations. So I learned to think more critically, to examine whether my choice of words robs humans of agency (some things are determined by forces outside individual control and some things are not and we make unconscious decisions about this issue when we attribute determining agency to technology), to recognize unsupported generalizations (and to look for empirical research that could support or change my hypotheses), All of which is to say that I understand that there are schools of literacy studies that define literacy differently.

And I am aware that the word "literate" is most often associated with the ability to read and write. When I talk about social media literacies I mean (to repeat myself) both the skill of encoding and decoding (from reading and writing to capturing, editing, and uploading video) and the social environment in which that skill is embedded, the community of literates, whether they are typing about books in online forums, making videos for each other, collectively growing a conversation thread around a blog post, refactoring wiki pages together. Each skill involves the knowledge of how to use the skill effectively to get things done with others.

So, with literacy out of the way ;-)  I can recall what motivated me to write Twitter Literacy. It was one of the elements that led up to writing Net Smart, but in the moment it was written as a blog post, it was one of those "for heavens' sake, don't the critics know the first thing about how to use the medium they are criticizing" blog posts that one writes very quickly. I got tired of people saying "I don't care what celebrities had for lunch and I certainly don't care about what somebody I never heard of had for lunch." (I argue elsewhere, in my discussion of social capital in Net Smart, that apparently trivial small talk can lubricate networks of trust among people online, making it more likely that they will cooperate with one another.)

I discovered that if I was selective about who I "followed" on Twitter -- who I chose to pay attention to -- I could learn things, even have a laugh, occasionally make a new friend. That meant actively examining the people that I do follow and evaluating whether, after attending to them for some time, I still believe they offer knowledge and/or entertainment in return for my attention. I had to try people, then decide to stop following people whose output didn't pay off for me. I learned to look at who the people I learned to respect were following. I learned to harvest people to follow by examining Twitter lists of knowledgeable people. Then I learned to feed the network of people who follow me by sharing something not entirely trivial that reveals something about who I am and what I do, share links and knowledge I've gained that others who share my interests might benefit from, answer questions posed by those I follow and reply to those of my followers who address me.

Again, none of this is rocket science. It's not difficult to understand, although it does take some discipline and effort. It certainly pays off for me in terms of knowledge capital, social capital, friendship, and fun. I've had almost entirely fascinating meals with former strangers in London and Bogota, Amsterdam and Baltimore, who responded to my tweet-up offering.

In Net Smart I deconstruct twitter literacy to show how it employs elements of attention literacy (who to pay attention to), participation literacy (how to reward the attention others pay me), network literacy (how to spread my own words through networks), and crap detection (knowing when not to retweet a rumor about breaking news).  Ideas about effective use of Twitter come from the same place a great deal of lore about how to use new media come from -- from the enthusiastic users. Twitter the company did not create retweets or hashtags -- those were both invented by early Twitter users, later to be incorporated by Twitter into its platform. Tweetchats and personal learning networks emerged from communities of users.

As I said in the article and the book, Twitter is not a community, but it offers tools with which people can build communities.

The recent report from MacArthur’s Youth and Participatory Politics survey found that 85 percent of young people would welcome more help in learning how to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information online. You describe this in terms of “crap detection.” Why has our current educational system done such a bad job in teaching issues of credibility and discrimination in networked environments?

I don't want to be too cynical about this, but there's a very fundamental underlying conflict involved in teaching crap detection online, especially in regard to the broader habit of mind in which crap detection is embedded -- critical thinking. Teaching your children, students, customers, citizens to think for themselves and to question authority can be a pain in the ass.

It's not as easy as authoritative answers. But authority, as 500 years of literates knew it in the Gutenberg era, was based on the text. Gatekeepers -- degree-granting institutions, editors, fact-checkers, publishers, teachers, librarians were responsible for vetting published material and granting the imprimatur of authority. For better (I think, mostly) and for worse, search engines and the democratization of publishing have rendered that system obsolete.

My daughter and search engines came of age around the same time. She was in middle school, Google had not been invented yet, and she and her classmates were not just using library books to research compositions -- they were submitting queries to Altavista and Infoseek. So I sat down with her in front of the computer and explained that unlike a book, which was vetted by the authority-granting system I just described, anything she finds through online search has to be vetted by her. She has to look for an author and search on the author's name. She has to think like a detective and look for clues of authenticity or bogosity in the text.

Librarians and educators certainly are interested in teaching critical thinking. But not only is it not easy to do, the fear (and sometimes regulatory or statutory limitations on the use) of the Internet in schools prevents educators from using the most essential tool for teaching online information literacies. Having mentioned "information literacy," I would add that many forward-looking librarians today talk about a suite of literacies that include search and verification, but also include knowing when and how to use information, how to create, publish, network, and use information to solve problems. It can be argued that these have been essential learning skills for a long time, but the ubiquity of smartphones, tablets, laptops, PCs and the explosive growth of networked information resources have dramatically changed the infosphere from the 500 years when printed information was more controllable and reliable.

I went to Reed, where the liberal arts tradition of learning how to think for yourself and how to access the millennia-long discourses of other thinkers, how to learn and how to learn how to learn new things, were central values. And I spent four years as editor of Whole Earth Review and the last editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, enterprises based on the old American values (Emerson! Self-Reliance) of individual responsibility and freedom of thought and action. Don't wait for some distant institution to do it. Learn how to do it yourself, and learn the tools you need to do what you want to do ("Access to tools" was the subtitle of the Whole Earth Catalogs).

So I regard critical thinking and self-reliance as healthy values as well as important life tools. However, I have to recognize that many people still believe that obedience to authority is paramount. As I said, I think this conflict is a fundamental one -- like the question of whether people are essentially sinful and need to restrained from exercising their baser instincts, or whether people are essentially good and need to be educated in positive values.

There has been, as you note, ongoing controversy over the issue of multitasking. What did your review of the neuroscience literature teach you about this debate? You end up suggesting that the key is learning to manage our attention. What specific steps do you recommend to help people deal with issues of attention control more effectively?

Cliff Nass, whose work is most often cited as proof that "multi-tasking doesn't work," has an office down the hall from my own, and I discussed the issue with him and his co-author when their study first came out. First, within the limits of their methodology, Nass and Ophir found that when people attend to multiple media their performance on the cognitive tasks associated with each media channel degrades rather than improves. This is true for a large percentage of subjects.

First I think it's important to understand the methodology. The kind of research that Nass and Ophir necessarily have to do is a simplification of the way people attend to media. In a laboratory, it's about remembering strings of letters backwards or recognizing the color of a numeral flashed on a screen. What we don't know a great deal about is what happens when all those streams of media are coordinated and focused on a single subject. When I'm working on a book, I have my database of research up on one screen, the text in front of me, a Twitter conversation about the subject of my writing going on in another window. I might take a few minutes to watch a video from the research database. Can people learn to multitask effectively if all the tasks are centered on the same inquiry?

There is not yet a lot of evidence about what the small percentage of successful media multitaskers are able to do -- is it innate or learned?

But most importantly, I think it's necessary to see focused attention, diffuse, scanning attention, multitasking, distraction as elements of a toolbox of attentional tools that we mostly don't know how to use all that well online. I know that in my own work, losing efficiency in my overall production is sometimes offset by orders of magnitude by the collective intelligence effects of attending to a network while I'm writing. And sometimes it isn't about productivity at all -- it's about seeing connections, systems, big pictures.

The key is what (I've learned) is called "metacognition." Wikipedia has a pretty good page about it. Metacognition is not only about being aware to some degree of where you are directing your attention and why; it's also about knowing when you need to screen out distractions and focus your attention narrowly and when you are better off diffusing your attention or switching between a small set of tasks -- it's about knowing what circumstances call for each mind-tool and how to best apply the mind-tool in those circumstances. It's more complicated to explain than to do.

In trying to find ways to contextualize my own metacognition -- to give me a reason for choosing one form of attention over another on a day to day, hour to hour basis -- I started writing down two or three objectives for my day's work in a very few words and large letters on an index card, which I replace daily at the periphery of my vision, right under my main computer display screen. Every once in a while, my gaze falls upon the paper and I have the opportunity to ask myself whether what I am doing online right now is in line with what I set out to do today -- and whether that matters, and why.

At first, thinking about where and why my attention is directed was cumbersome, but it swiftly became semi-automatic. I won't trot out the neuroscience -- there are plenty of references in my book -- but there's little controversy over the contention that people can train and retrain their brains through directed attentional practice. As Maryann Wolf so eloquently explained in Proust and the Squid, brain retraining through directed attentional practice is what we do when we learn to read.

Howard's Story

I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension in 1981, then plugged my computer into my telephone in 1983 and got sucked into the net. In earlier years, my interest in the powers of the human mind led to Higher Creativity (1984), written with Willis Harman, Talking Tech (1982) and The Cognitive Connection (1986) with Howard Levine, Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes (1988), Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990), with Stephen LaBerge, and They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases.(1988).

I ventured further into the territory where minds meet technology through the subject of computers as mind-amplifiers and wrote Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Amplifiers (1984) [New edition from MIT Press, April 2000]. Next, Virtual Reality (1991) chronicled my odyssey in the world of artificial experience, from simulated battlefields in Hawaii to robotics laboratories in Tokyo, garage inventors in Great Britain, and simulation engineers in the south of France.

In 1985, I became involved in the WELL, a "computer conferencing" system. I started writing about life in my virtual community and ended up with a book about the cultural and political implications of a new communications medium, The Virtual Community(1993 [New edition,MIT Press, 2000]). I am credited with inventing the term "virtual community." I had the privilege of serving as the editor of The Whole Earth review and editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (1994). Here's my introduction to the Catalog, my riff on Taming Technology and a selection of my own articles and reviews from both publications.In 1994, I was one of the principal architects and the first Executive Editor of HotWired. I quit after launch, because I wanted something more like a jam session than a magazine. In 1996, I founded and, with the help of a crew of 15, launched Electric Minds. Electric Minds was named one of the ten best web sites of 1996 by Time magazineand was acquired by Durand Communications in 1997. Since the late 1990s, I've cat-herded a consultancy for virtual community building.

My 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. In 2005, I taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action that I have undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of our ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action. The TED talk I delivered about "Way New Collaboration" has been viewed more than 265,000 times. I have taught Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Digital Journalism at Stanford and continue to teachVirtualCommunity/Social Media at Stanford University, was a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. In 2008, I was a winner in MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition and used my award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. I have aYouTube channel that covers a range of subjects. Most recently, I've been concentrating on learning and teaching 21st Century literacies. I've blogged about this subject for SFGate, have been interviewed, and have presented talks on the subject. I was invited to deliver the 2012 Regents' Lecture at University of California, Berkeley. I also teach online courses through Rheingold U.

You can see my painted shoes, if you'd like.

Howard Rheingold / hlr@well.com

How Did Howard Rheingold Get So "Net Smart": An Interview (Part One)

Howard Rheingold has been one of the smartest, most forward thinking, most provocative writers about digital culture for the past several decades. He's someone who always makes me think. Even a short hall way chat with Howard at a conference can lead to transformative insights about how we live within a networked culture. I have been lucky to know him for more than two decades now, and I treasure every interaction I've ever had with the guy. Howard embodies the transition which Fred Turner has documented between the counterculture of the 1960s and the cyberculture of today: he has a quirky personality which reminds me of Frank Zappa or Leon Redbone, and, as this interview suggests, he still carries with him some of the core values he first articulated working for the Whole Earth Catalog. So, it would be easy to see him as a voice from the past, but that would be a serious mistake, since he is still totally on top of the most recent developments in the field.

His most recent book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, is a major contribution to the growing body of literature around New Media Literacies. If you have not bought a copy yet, go online now and buy one. If you have not read your copy yet, stop right now and read it. Don't worry, this blog interview will still be here when you get back.

Net Smart makes a strong case for what Rheingold sees as a set of core skills and competencies which we all need to acquire if we are going to make effective use of the communities and resources we encounter in our everyday lives online. He has talked to the experts, reviewed the literature, and thought through the implications of each skill, and he lays them out with his usual clarity and directness. Some in the past have accused Howard (not to mention myself) of being an uncritical utopianist. Here, you get a stronger sense of where the dust has settled for him as we have now lived for an extended period in relation to online platforms and practices. He certainly recognizes the risks and failures associated with the Web 2.0 era, but he also refuses to let them get in the way of what he sees as the more productive and meaningful ways of engaging with digital culture. He is a firm believer in the critical literacy skill he calls "crap detection." Howard doesn't take crap from anyone and he doesn't serve up very much, if any, in this book.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Howard for the book, so I asked him if he would return the favor and share some of his thoughts with my readers.  Howard threw himself into this task with what he might call "mindfulness," digging deep in response to every question, drawing insights not only from the current book but across a life time of thinking about virtual communities, augmented intelligence, and network culture.

Your progression from work on virtual communities to smart mobs to digital literacies says something about the evolution of digital culture over the past few decades. What has led you right now to focus so much on giving everyday people the skills they need to more meaningfully participate in the new media landscape?

I'm going to give a longer answer, so I'll summarize the conclusion at the beginning: What people know about how to use media matters. The underlying technologies are important because of the way they amplify human cognitive and social capabilities, so know-how becomes crucial when a new tool like writing or the printing press or the internet enables people to think and communicate in new ways. The hyper-evolution of digital media over the past half century first depended on hardware, then software, then network infrastructure, then web services, and now the driving force shifts to the part of the system in people's heads and between people. The digital divide now has to include the divide between those who know how to get and to verify information they need just in time and just in place, those who can cultivate and call on social networks, those who can persuade or educate from those who do not know how to apply the power a networked PC or smartphone makes available. The knowledge is not secret, but it hasn't really been compiled and distributed. That's why I wrote the book.

As you note, I've been writing about technologies and media that amplify human thought and communication for a long time. My first article on virtual communities was published in 1987. And my Reed undergraduate thesis in 1968 was about the intersection of electronic tools and human consciousness. So I've been thinking about the broader issues about human-technology interaction for most of my life. In terms of online social media, I was an enthusiastic participant since the BBS days of the early 1980s. Then I started writing about where online communication media came from and where it might be going.

When I published Tools for Thought in 1985, looking at the future of personal computing and human cognition, I was confronted by the questions "Is this new medium healthy or harmful? Is having a personal computer going to make people more or less humane? Are the digital tools that were emerging at the time any good for us as individuals, for our relationships, for our societies, for literate civilization?" These questions came from critics and academics, and it was one that I had been asking myself for some time.

The same questions came up with The Virtual Community in 1993 and Smart Mobs in 2002. I asked myself "what is the most possible outcome, positive or negative, of introducing networked personal computers to millions of people?" In pursuit of that question, I started looking into ways computer-mediated communication by entire populations might affect democracy. That inquiry led me to the literature about the history of the public sphere -- that's how I learn, mostly, by stumbling across things, then inquiring about them.

The health of the public sphere seemed to me in 1992 to represent the most important potential issue that could be raised by the widespread use of digital media. To oversimplify, I understood the public sphere to be a way of saying that democracy and governance of the people, by the people, and for the people is not just about voting for leaders. Unless enough people are literate enough -- and free enough to express themselves -- to understand and debate the issues that affect them, they aren't going to be able to govern themselves. Informed discourse requires informed people, and that requires both educated citizens and a free flow of information.  In The Virtual Community I emphasized the quote by James Madison that is carved into marble at the Library of Congress: "A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

In Smart Mobs I was forced to learn a little about sociology to try to make sense of the ways large groups of people were beginning to behave collectively, now that billions of people have the web in their pockets. And in my research for these books, I grew fascinated with the archaeology of literacy --Elizabeth Eisenstein's work on the impact of the printing press in Europe, the drama of Denise Schmandt-Besserat's worldwide investigation of clay artifacts that led to her definitive history of the origin of writing, Marshall McLuhan's insistence that printing presses change the way people see and deal with the world.

Working backward from McLuhan to Innis, Ong, and McLuhan's colleague Robert K. Logan, I began seeing the broad picture of how new cultural mind tools enabled and initiated changes in the thinking of individuals and the functioning of societies. Working forward from the 1960s visions of JCR Licklider and Douglas Engelbart, it seemed to me that "augmenting human intellect," as Engelbart framed it, was a historic repurposing of devices originally designed for ballistics calculations. Engelbart was well aware of the role of human learning and literacies in the future system he proposed, which he described as comprising "humans, using language, artifacts, methodology, and training."

So now we have more than two billion people with Internet access, more than five billion mobile telephones. The mind-amplifying devices that Engelbart envisioned are in people's pockets. The networks that link people and devices are global and heading toward ubiquitous. What does that mean? We've seen serious critics like Sherry Turkle and Nicholas Carr eloquently illuminating the darker sides and hidden costs of our fascination with social media. And we've seen an enormous amount of moral panic, based on very little or no empirical basis, about fears that using the web is making individuals and cultures shallow.

The answer to any question is available anywhere within a second or too -- but it's up to the inquirer to evaluate the validity of the answer. Virtual communities, smart mobs, collective intelligence, social production, enable millions of people to do things together in the physical world that they were never before able to do. Tech-savvy teenagers invent billion dollar industries and new ways of seeking information and socializing. Others organize revolutions. Know-how is at the core of all these new phenomena, whether they are used for good or ill. So digital literacies of attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network smarts constitute a critical uncertainty. The answer to "is this stuff any good for us" is, I strongly believe: "It depends on what people know, and how many of them know it." Just as the decades after Gutenberg's invention saw the expansion of the literate population from thousands to millions, we're seeing the diffusion of new literacies that are already changing the world more profoundly than print did in its first decades. 

When I use the term literacy, I mean both the learnable skill of coding and decoding in a new medium, but the social aspect as well -- the interaction with the community of literates. Digital literacies are networked. In that regard, I see these skills as pointing inward to the individual and outward to the society. The individual who masters these skills will have a greater chance of personal, professional, political, social success. And the more individuals who master these skills, the more useful and trustworthy the digital commons becomes. Your work on participatory culture was particularly important to my thinking in this regard -- it only makes sense that the person who thinks of herself as a creator of digital culture, even in a small way like tagging or commenting, has a stronger sense of agency as a citizen,  and a person who thinks of himself only as a consumer of culture created by others lacks some of that sense of agency.

What relationship exists between this book and the emerging field of digital media and learning?

In regard to how Net Smart relates to digital media and learning, I want to start by emphasizing the distinctions between learning digital literacies and using digital media in teaching and learning and between the novelty of social media versus the kinds of pedagogy it enables. 

First, digital literacies. I had to oversimplify to get it all in the book, but there are important digital literacies that I didn't include, such as webmaking and coding. In order to spread around the lore I assembled in Net Smart, I've made available to anyone who wants to use it my syllabus based on the book, including many additional web-based resources. I don't think educational institutions are moving anywhere near as fast as technology. And the moral panics have instilled fear of using the internet in schools. How many K-12 students learn how to search and evaluate information found online? I'd love to see it happen, see more teachers like the ones I interview for dmlcentral, so I'm not dismissing the uptake of digital literacies into the traditional curriculum. I do see the dissemination of this knowledge happening more rapidly online.

I do teach the literacies in Net Smart to the students in my virtual community/social media class at Stanford, but it's in the context of a broader inquiry. The literacies are necessary to ask the larger questions about community, collective action, identity, the public sphere, etc. Students are introduced to forums as group voice, blogs as (networked) individual voice, mindmaps as lateral and visual thinking, social bookmarking as collective intelligence, wikis as collaborative platforms. Then they need to use their skills in these media to propose, organize, document, and present collaborative projects in groups of four. In the process, we consciously and deliberately approached our subject matter as a learning community in which classroom discussions expand online, students blog reflectively about what their learning shows them about the media they use, student co-teaching teams take turns co-teaching a classroom session with the professor.

The underlying methodology (Engelbart!) is enabled by the technology, but the methodology is what is important -- giving students a means to continue discursive inquiry beyond the classroom, to tap into worldwide networks of knowledge and expertise, to talk among themselves instead of speaking when called upon by the professor. Making it easier for students to learn together and to take advantage of the infosphere beyond their classroom and their library is what makes for a pedagogy of co-learning. Much of what I do and what Cathy Davidson does in pursuit of co-learner can and should be done with index cards, whiteboards, and colored sticky notes. 

I'm also excited by what Mimi Ito calls "connected learning." I was enthusiastic about  kind of online socializing that I came across that excited me in the 1980s because it was fun. For me, connected learning meant asking big questions about what this kind of fun meant, conversing about those questions with others online and face to face, and pursuing the literature that led me to the sociology of Marc Smith and Barry Wellman, the anthropology of Mimi Ito, the media theory of Henry Jenkins and Robert K. Logan. My enthusiasm plus my networks plus scholarly inquiry connected for me when I wrote Net Smart.

Putting into practice the knowledge I try to convey in Net Smart will make it easier for people to become involved in co-learning online. Pursuing the idea of co-learning far enough brought me to consider putting all the responsibility and power in the hands of the learner. Motivated co-learners in communities of gamers or fan communities teach each other sophisticated material all the time. What does a group of people need to know in order to use online media to co-learn about a particular topic? How would we find and qualify resources? Would we organize them as a syllabus or as a hackerspace? What learning activities, forms of assessment, synchronous and asynchronous media should they use? To that end, I organized the Peeragogy Project, a network of volunteers who are assembling a handbook for co-learners.

Howard's Story:

I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension in 1981, then plugged my computer into my telephone in 1983 and got sucked into the net. In earlier years, my interest in the powers of the human mind led to Higher Creativity (1984), written with Willis Harman, Talking Tech (1982) and The Cognitive Connection (1986) with Howard Levine, Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes (1988), Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990), with Stephen LaBerge, and They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases.(1988).

I ventured further into the territory where minds meet technology through the subject of computers as mind-amplifiers and wrote Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Amplifiers (1984) [New edition from MIT Press, April 2000]. Next, Virtual Reality (1991) chronicled my odyssey in the world of artificial experience, from simulated battlefields in Hawaii to robotics laboratories in Tokyo, garage inventors in Great Britain, and simulation engineers in the south of France.

In 1985, I became involved in the WELL, a "computer conferencing" system. I started writing about life in my virtual community and ended up with a book about the cultural and political implications of a new communications medium, The Virtual Community(1993 [New edition,MIT Press, 2000]). I am credited with inventing the term "virtual community." I had the privilege of serving as the editor of The Whole Earth review and editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (1994). Here's my introduction to the Catalog, my riff on Taming Technology and a selection of my own articles and reviews from both publications.In 1994, I was one of the principal architects and the first Executive Editor of HotWired. I quit after launch, because I wanted something more like a jam session than a magazine. In 1996, I founded and, with the help of a crew of 15, launched Electric Minds. Electric Minds was named one of the ten best web sites of 1996 by Time magazineand was acquired by Durand Communications in 1997. Since the late 1990s, I've cat-herded a consultancy for virtual community building.

My 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. In 2005, I taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action that I have undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of our ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action. The TED talk I delivered about "Way New Collaboration" has been viewed more than 265,000 times. I have taught Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Digital Journalism at Stanford and continue to teachVirtualCommunity/Social Media at Stanford University, was a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. In 2008, I was a winner in MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition and used my award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. I have aYouTube channel that covers a range of subjects. Most recently, I've been concentrating on learning and teaching 21st Century literacies. I've blogged about this subject for SFGate, have been interviewed, and have presented talks on the subject. I was invited to deliver the 2012 Regents' Lecture at University of California, Berkeley. I also teach online courses through Rheingold U.

You can see my painted shoes, if you'd like.

Howard Rheingold / hlr@well.com

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Part Two): Portugal

This is the second in a series of digital "scrapbooks" through which I capture and share my impressions of my extensive lecture tour across Europe. Last time, I dealt with Germany. Today, Portugal.   Of all of the stops of my tour, Portugal was perhaps the biggest surprise. Given how little the average American (myself among them) knows about Portugal, it could not help but be a surprise.  I had not expected to be so taken with the culture, the people, and the beauty of Lisbon and its surrounding area. Going into this leg of the trip, I could have told you four basic things about Portugal:

The first would have been what I had learned about Lisbon in the opening narration from Casablanca, which has long been a film favorite. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU_raVGf87g

The movie's plot centers around the struggle to access papers which would allow refuges from Nazi Germany and Vichy France to get entry into Portugal. So, while the film is set in Morocco, it spends a surprising amount of time telling us about what Lisbon means in the context of the Second World War. When I learned I would be speaking in Lisbon, I had an impulse to see if I could retrace the character's route, and thus dip far enough south to visit Casablanca, but when I spent some time looking at my time table and the basic geography, this did not look like a good idea.  I had to tell my wife that we would always have Paris, but we would not yet have Casablanca.

The second thing I knew about Portugal I learned in my high school history classes -- the role this country had played during the age of discovery as one of the key powers which have opened up the world to European exploration and trade. Specifically, I had been a big fan of Henry the Navigator, the Prince of Portugal most associated with this period of exploration and colonization, largely because of the name association, but also because I liked the cultural myth of the king who was also a geek.

We were able to visit a monument in Lisbon to Henry and the age of exploration. Trust me, when cities start erecting monuments to Henrys, they get my attention. But this was a particularly stunning piece of sculpture -- which manages to evoke the plow of a ship pointing out towards the "new world" and at the same time, personify the rugged seamen who went on those first voyages. On the trip, though, I learned from a book called The First Frontier that Basque fishermen had been traveling to the coasts of Canada and the United States for centuries before their government officially "discovered" this part of the world, which complicates this story considerably. What I also learned was the huge impact that this period had on the architectural style of the city -- where the local architecture incorporated iconography associated with ships (such as ropes) into their design

Or, natural images (both animals and plants associated with the New World.) Cynthia captured this architectural detail of a frog from one of their cathedrals

This image resonated with us because Cynthia had spent a lot of time at a park a few blocks from our hotel which had a pond which was overflowing with frogs. This is one of many great bits of nature photography she brought back from the trip.

We also got a sense of Portugal as a once powerful empire through our visit to a museum which housed the gilded carriages which had been used by the Royal family through the centuries.

If I had dug deeper into my historical memory, I might have recalled that this region's culture was also very strongly influenced by its history of interactions with the Moors, with the result that there is a strong Islamic flavor to much of the local architecture, especially in the use of brightly colored tiles with strong geometric patterns, such as the ones you see in this photograph.

The third thing I could have told you was that Portugal was closely associated with Brazil, sharing a common language with its former colony in South America. Almost every person in Lisbon I asked suggested that these links were more historical than contemporary, but my own observations suggested otherwise. A high percentage of the tourists I met in Lisbon came from Brazil. The grocery store I visited had a whole section devoted to Foods from Brazil. This would not be true of American grocery stores, for example, but then, we would almost be unlikely to have sections devoted to salted fish and meat, or for that matter, smoked pork products. We saw multiple posters for concerts of Brazilian music. And one of the first stops on our guided tour of the city was a monument to the first person to fly solo from Lisbon to Brazil. So, my sense was that there remain very strong cultural links between the two countries, even if these links were not always conscious or acknowledged.

Fourth, as a fan of world music, I knew about Fado. which historians believe emerged in Lisbon in the early 19th century. Wikipedia provides this useful definition:

In popular belief, fado is a form of music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor, and infused with a characteristic sentiment of resignation, fatefulness and melancholia (loosely captured by the word "saudade", or longing). However, although the origins are difficult to trace, today fado is by many regarded as a simply a form of song which can be about anything, but must follow a certain structure. The music is usually linked to the Portuguese word saudade which symbolizes the feeling of loss (a permanent, irreparable loss and its consequent life lasting damage).

You can get a sense of what Fado sounds like (and almost as importantly, looks like) from these two clips which I found on Youtube.

As the clips suggest, the style of music is associated with certain gestures and postures, with a style of performance, with a structure of feeling (suadade), with a set of traditional themes (including, once again, the sea) and with a specific set of musical structures, all of which are distinct to this region. As the clips may also illustrate, each of these is heavily gendered so there are very different modes for men and women in performing these songs. Cynthia and I were lucky enough to have been taken to Clube De Fado, one of the nightclubs in Lisbon which, as the name suggests, is strongly associated with Fado. We were able to see for ourselves the intensity of this musical tradition and the command it still exerts on the heart and soul of the city.

As much as I enjoyed the music and the company on this particular evening, I also will savor for a long time to come the food, which was one of the best meals I had on my entire trip. I ordered something which roughly translates "the treasures of the Black Pork." This was my introduction to the pleasures of eating Pork-based products in Europe. I was nervous from the name that the "treasures" might be various entrails, which might not match my Americanized aesthetic. In fact, they were simply really savory cuts of fried pork. Consistently in Europe, we were struck by how meat-centric the cuisines were and especially how much more central pork, particularly  hams of many varieties, are to their everyday diets. This image which Cynthia captured at a street fair shows the pride they take in their meats.

For dessert, I had, for the first but scarcely the only time on the trip, the pasteis de nata, small custard pies, which quickly became a personal favorite, and which I sampled at several different bakeries as we were walking around Lisbon.

One day, as we were wandering through the Center City of Lisbon, we stumbled onto a street festival which was clearly celebrating the diverse folk traditions of various regions around the country. As a result, we encountered one visually striking set of folk costume after another. Here are just a few examples.

I wish I could place more cultural context around these costumes (and the dances or public performances associated with them), since they really captured my imagination, but we were not working with a guide at that point and any explanation provided would have come in a language I do not understand. If there's any reader out there who can provide us with a fuller explanation, I would really appreciate you sharing it with me and my readers.

Another highlight of our time in Portugal was a day trip we took to Sintra, located in the mountains outside Lisbon. Apart from the natural beauties of this region, it represented such a striking playground of the imagination.

For example, we visited the Palacio da Pena, built for Portugal's royal family in the 19th century with an eclectic mix of styles, including Neo-Gothic, Neo-Manueline, Neo-Islamic, Neo-Renaissance, and the key word in each case is Neo. The architects took what they found most exotic and eye-catching from a range of styles to construct a castle that might otherwise have existed only in our feverish imaginations. Everything is brightly colored, epic in proportion, and full of fantastical details, which left one feeling like you were visiting Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars or some equally fanciful location from the space opera of your choice.

By contrast, we also visited the nearby the Quinta da Regaleria, a gothic mansion created for Antonio Augusto Carvalho Monteiro (1848-1920) in conjunction with the talent of the scenographer-architect Luigi Manini (1848-1936). Monteiro was among other things rumored to be an alchemist and a Freemason. There is a haunting, morbid atmosphere about the place, which reminds me very much of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland or the setting of one of the great Roger Corman films with Vincent Price.

Some of the floors were designed to produce vertigo. The library, for example, was lined with mirrors on the floor, so it looked like it was floating in space and as there were book shelves running below as well as above. As someone who suffers from mild forms of fear of heights, I actually found myself panicking when I had to walk across the floor. But, there's also something playful about the ways the house uses pseudo-Medieval elements throughout, such as the stone boar and other wild game hanging on the wall in this shot.

All told, the place is consistently unsettling and "spooky, complete with garden mazes and underground grottos -- what's not to love!

Of course, so far, I've made it sound as if Lisbon was all sight-seeing. I gave three talks in Lisbon. First, I did a presentation on Spreadable Media as one of the two keynotes (along with Andras Balint Kovacs from Budapest) at the conference of the Associacao Investigadores Da Imagen em Movimento (The Association for Investigators of the Moving Image), which is the key professional organization for film and media scholars in Portugal. The day before, my host, Tiago Baptiste, a film historian and archivist who has done work on silent and early sound films in Portugal, took us to see the Cinemateca Portuguesa, the national film archive, which is housed in a beautiful old mansion, and which currently had a great display of the origins of home movie projectors.

The event was being held the same day as filmmakers and stars were marching in protest in Lisbon over the ways that state support for the national cinema was being gutted as part of the austerity moves Portugal was being forced to make in response to the European economic crisis. While my talk ended with some hope for the ways that crowd-funding and surfing models were offering new resources for independent media makers to work outside traditional gatekeepers, I was forced to acknowledge that the filmmakers most at risk today may be those who had thrived under the state-funding models which produced films as national prestige projects for exhibition in international film festivals. Such films are perhaps too idiosyncratic in their vision to be adequately previewed on Kickstarter or to have the solid base of fan support that has surrounded projects like The Cosmonaut or Iron Skies. As we argue in the book, these crowd funding models do hold open opportunities for producers who have courted solid and committed followers -- not simply fans but also racial, ethnic, or sexual minorities or political movements who have reason to want to see certain kinds of films made which are unlikely to emerge from the Hollywood system. However, they may not support the most personalized forms of expression that drove the various New Wave film movements around the world in the 1960s.

Following the talk, I had a lively interview with an independent filmmaker, Edgar Pera, who sought my comments about the similarities and differences between cinephilia and fandom for his latest production. As you can see from this trailer for The Baron, his films draw strong inspiration from horror films and other B-movies, and so we had a very enjoyable conversation about monster movies fans

.

My second talk in Lisbon, dealing with the Harry Potter Alliance as a model for fan activism (and based on my essay in Transformative Works and Cultures), was presented to faculty and students at t ISCTE - Lisbon University Institute. My host, Gustavo Cardoso, is a sometimes collaborator with my USC colleague Manuel Castells.  As Cardoso was walking us across the campus, we heard cries of surprise and someone raced up to me, urgently asking if I was, indeed, Henry Jenkins. It turned out that this was Kris Hammer, a reader of this blog currently studying in Estonia, who was visiting the campus for totally unrelated reasons. He was surprised to discover that I was about to deliver a lecture. He tagged along with us and engaged actively in the question and answer period.

My third talk was a half day "master class" on news and politics in the digital age, supported by the U.S. Embassy, and given to Cenjor, a school which trains future journalists. I was able to share with the group some of the research being done by Civic Paths and the Youth and Participatory Politics Network, not to mention the thinking which is shaping the Journalism program at USC's Annenberg School. The reporters jumped into the talk quickly and basically, drained me dry, sucking up any insights I could give them about the interplay between professional and citizen journalists, new business models for the future of news, digital and news literacy, and the ways that Spreadable Media might speak to how news circulates through the culture. Something of the tone of these exchanges is captured in this short news report produced by some of the school's students around my visit.

Meanwhile back at the ranch: My son sent us frame grabs from this Carl Jr's commercial which was then playing in the Los Angeles market. The commercial features Spider-Man interacting with people waiting outside the Orphan Theater (which is across the street from where I live) before swinging past the Eastern Columbia (which is my building.) So, after years of fantasizing that he really was my "friendly neighborhood Spider-man," the guy drops by my street, no doubt looking to hook up for some late night adventure, and I am half way across the world! Life is not fair! So, Spidey, if you are reading this, please drop back by the Eastern building. I'd really love to hang out with you.

Of course, it makes total sense that this version of Spider-Man would have a thing for Downtown Los Angeles, since the new film was directed by Mark Webb, who directed (100)Days of Summer, a film which captures the culture of Downtown Los Angeles about as well as anything I've seen.

Coming Soon: My adventures in England and Ireland.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Part One): Germany

This is the first of a series of blog posts which will share images, videos, and impressions from my extensive lecture tour this summer across Europe. I think of these posts as the equivalent of a scrapbook. For me, they are a way of consolidating my impressions on what were truly transformative experiences and encounters. I am hoping for the reader they will function as one part travel guide and one part overview of some key figures and developments in Europe around the topics which I regularly cover here.

The Journey Begins

Over the course of ten weeks, I ended up giving more than 30 talks and visited 12 European countries at a moment of tension and transition within the European Union. As someone commented on my Facebook page near the end of the trip, "Now everyone in Europe has had the chance to hear Henry Jenkins speak at least twice."

In almost every case, it was the first time my wife and I had visited those places and so we engaged with each with curiosity and excitement. I had never really been able to spend significant amounts of time in Europe before, having not had the resources to be a foreign exchange student in high school, to do the Junior semester abroad programs as an undergraduate, or to hitchhike across Europe after graduation, all the stereotypical ways Americans get to know Europe.

As Convergence Culture began to be translated into many European languages, I felt a very strong desire to visit Europe in a more substantial and systematic way, to engage in conversation with the people who were reading the book, and to learn more about how its themes were playing out in a European context. But, the trip kept getting put off as I struggled with my decision to leave MIT and then dealt with the transition to USC, and so this summer was the first time I could make this dream into a reality.

The timing could not have been better, since I could also now use the trip to talk about a range of forthcoming projects, each of which build on the foundations of ideas introduced in Convergence Culture, including a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on fan activism (which I co-edited with Sangita Shreshtova and the members of my Civic Paths team), Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture (Co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, and due out in January), the 20th anniversary edition of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (coming out from Routledge this fall), and Reading in a Participatory Culture (co-edited and co-written with a group of former students and researchers associated with the New Media Literacies Project, due out from Teacher's College Press by the end of 2012.) For me, these projects represent the finalization of many ideas and projects started at MIT and now reaching completion.

Finally, this summer represented a moment of transition as I start really working on book projects which represent the conceptual breakthroughs I have made since starting work at USC, and thus, the summer was a way of clearing my head, refocusing my thinking, as I prepare for some new ventures.

This trip would not have been imaginable without the hard work of Amanda Ford, my ever-resourceful assistant, who coordinated with my hosts at each of these cities to resolve the many, many details involved in pulling off a trip on this scale, certainly the most extensive, exhaustive, and exhausting trip I've ever tackled. I also could not have done it without the partnership of my wife, Cynthia, who acted as the "official photographer" on the trip (almost all of the images I will be running in this series are hers) and also helped to puncture my ego whenever needed to prevent too much swelling of the head.

Marburg

Our trip began in Germany and I recall those first few days through a deep haze -- one part end of term exhaustion, one part jet lag. But one of the more surreal aspects of our first leg was waking up from my sleep in the middle of the afternoon on the first day to the sounds of hail hitting the balcony outside my room and looking down into the streets below, more or less covered with ice. Keep in mind that this was the first week of May and that no one in Marburg could recall having seen a hail storm this late in the year before.

 This is not the best of pictures, but it gives you some sense of what we saw  from the hotel window. I think back on the hail storm as ironic in several senses. First, as any American will tell you, Europe suffers from a severe shortage of ice otherwise. Even when you beg waiters for ice, they return with one or two small slivers, not convinced that it is really healthy to have ice in your drinks. So, the travel gods delivered most of the ice we'd see the whole trip in one dump. And second, by the time the trip was ending, the weather in Europe was sweltering and we were on the verge of melting into the asphalt, so the move from a hail storm in Marburg to 100 degree days in Athens or Rome, says something about just how long we were on the road.

Marburg is a classic medieval German city -- narrow, winding streets, buildings with lots of "gingerbread" decorations -- and it feels as if it were a location in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. This is no accident since the Brothers Grimm spent a portion of their lives here and that many of their visits into the country side to collect local folk tales which form the basis of their narratives were in the region around this town.

As a consequence, my second really surreal encounter in Marburg was seeing this statute of our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man hanging outside a very old world looking comic shop.

 My host for this leg of the journey was Malte Hagener, who has recently published (with Thomas Elssasser) Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses , which offers an approach to classic problems in cinema studies through a framework that is highly appropriate to those of us working in Comparative Media Studies. I plan to use some of its chapters in my course on Medium Specificity this fall.

First, there was a lively informal conversation with a room full of bright undergraduates (many of whom were doing projects dealing with transmedia entertainment or fan studies or game studies). They had been asked to read my recently published essay on the Harry Potter Alliance and fan activism, which gave me a chance to talk more generally about our work on new media, youth, and political participation, and exchange perspectives on everything from the Arab Spring movement to the ways Occupy Wall Street had impacted current debates around the European economic crisis. Later that night, at the University of Marburg, I delivered the first of the trip's formal lecture dealing with the ideas from Spreadable Media.

After,  Hagener and his colleagues took my wife and I on a walk through the old sector of the city and to dinner. We had arrived at the height of Germany's "cult of the white asparagus," which meant that for a few weeks each year a good chunk of the menu was dedicated to this distinctive vegetable, which was served in various soups or stews, cooked into various pastas, served as the main dish with many different kinds of sauce, or served with ham and other local meats. I had never had white asparagus before but by the time this leg was done, we would have enjoyed it for a number of meals. It is larger than the green asparagus we mostly have in the States, but it was surprisingly not at all tough or fibrous, more or less melting in your mouth, and also very sweat tasting.

Gottingen

From Marburg, we traveled by train to Gottingen, where I was greeted by Jason Mittell, who has been spending his sabbatical year in residence at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, where he has joined a group of researchers working on contemporary and historical forms of serial entertainment. I have known Jason since he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and we've worked together many times, especially through the Futures of Entertainment Consortium, and he runs one of the very best academic blogs in media studies, Just TV. Below you can see a photograph of the two of us walking through the streets of his temporary home town.

 Jason, for example, took us for our first of many visits to cathedrals in Europe -- in this case, the St. Jacobikirche (St. Jacoby), which is unexpectedly decorated with candy cane red and white stripes inside. St. Jacoby is called the "dancing cathedral" because the architects used a variety of optical effects in its design which created a strange "buzz" or warping effect on the eye.

Here, you see the window of Cron und Lanz, a truly phenomenal bakery and candy shop. There had been a German Bakery in Atlanta near where I grew up, which carries enormous sentimental importance in my childhood memories. I especially associate it with these great gingerbread man cookies which we would get every year at Christmas. I still seek them out if I have reason to be in Atlanta this time of year, and my friend Laurie Baird, until recently with Turner Broadcasting, will bring me a box if we have a chance to meet. I was having fantasies of tasting authentic German gingerbread, but even though it is available year round in Atlanta, it seems to be a seasonal treat here, so no such luck.

 But, Jason introduced us to another seasonal delicacy -- chocolate Maikäfer or May Bugs, which are associated with the celebration of May Day in this part of Germany. It's hard to see them in the window of the bakery, but there was another whole window displaying various sized chocolate bugs. This is a close up of one such creature who I bought at the shop and later consumed in my hotel room (with the apples used just to give you a sense of scale).

 Here we see the two of us, alongside many of Jason's students and colleagues, who were all part of the the Research Unit for "Popular Seriality -- Aesthetics and Practice", shortly after an intense afternoon bull session.

 The discussion was organized around a chapter we shared from Spreadable Media , which dealt primarily with the ways the television industry understands the concept of "engagement", its struggles to adequately measure and capitalize on the value of audience participation in its franchises, and the ways these trends have shaped the push towards transmedia storytelling. But, our discussion was far reaching, covering many different points of intersection between our research projects. This was the first time I had encountered a very German academic practice. Rather than clapping after the end of a presentation, here and elsewhere in Germany, the audience rapped their knuckles on the table top.

Below you see some members of the very engaged audience at my evening public lecture, based on my new book project, Comics...And Stuff, which deals with the ways contemporary graphic novels are helping us think about our relations to material culture and the practices of collecting in an era of eBay and other forms of networked consumption.

 This project combines formal and thematic considerations of the works of nine contemporary comics artists from the Anglo-American world. This was the first time I had done a public presentation of these ideas, which are still very much taking shape in my head, so the talk had an exploratory and improvizational tone (i.e. I was partially making it up as I went along). Gottingen turned out to be the ideal audience for such an early presentation of these ideas, since there were people in the audience from my diverse fields, many of whom were doing work on popular representation, art history, popular memory, material culture, networked consumption, and above all, a surprising number doing work on comics and graphic storytelling.  Among them were Daniel Stein and Alexandre Starre.) The audience was generous and generative in sharing their reactions to my ideas and helping me think out loud about this project which will dominate much of my writing time for the coming year.

Frankfurt

From there, we traveled to Frankfurt by train. Below is the Frankfurt train station, the site of an especially memorable moment of transcultural misunderstanding. As I was walking through the train station, I spotted a sign advertising Berliners. I have always been bemused by the story of John F. Kennedy's trip to Berlin where he sought to express solidarity with the German people by claiming he was also a Berliner, but ended up, via a mistranslation, announcing to the world that he was a jelly doughnut. So, I had to have a Berliner, and my wife wanted them too, so I went to the counter, only to find that the sales woman did not speak any English and I spoke no German. So, I pointed at the doughnuts and held up two fingers. She spoke very fast in German and held up three fingers. But, I only wanted two doughnuts, so insisted on two, and this went back and forth for some time, before some other customer took mercy on me, suggesting that the woman was trying to tell me that the doughnuts were three for the price of two, and so, in the end, I walked away with three.

 I mean this as no insult to the people of Frankfurt, but this city was intended primarily as a bolt hole where I could lock myself away for a few days and finish off grading for my semester at USC. I had left on the last day of classes and by this point in the trip, the papers for my graduate seminar on Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 were coming in electronically, and I needed to take some time out to grade them in a city where I had no local contacts, no scheduled talks, and thus would not be disturbed. You can see me here grading in the hotel room.

 But, ultimately, I could not visit Frankfurt without doing some exploring. Cynthia and I took a break from grading to do a walk through rain soaked city streets and to visit the Deutsche Filminstitut, which has a museum focused on the history and art of motion pictures and is highly recommended. We especially enjoyed spending time on a floor focused around 19th century forms of media. In the past, these materials would be framed as "the prehistory of cinema," but increasingly, there are the source of fascination in their own right. I am a very modest collector of such artifacts of this earlier moment of media in transition. I especially admired the juxtaposition created here between magic lantern shows (which deployed a broad array of special effects and optical manipulations) and the work of Georges Melies, which turns out to have a remarkably similar aesthetic, though these connections have rarely been explored by film scholars. The museum also has a large collection of materials associated with Charlie Chaplin, including toys, advertisements, and other collectibles, showing the transnational fan culture which grew up around his work.

Giessen

Grading completed, we then took a train to Giessen, a small, somewhat sleepy little German village, where I ran a master class for graduate students doing work on various topics in media and popular culture through International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC). The talk had been organized by Joern Ahrens, who I knew from his time as a visiting scholar at Comparative Media Studies, but he was unfortunately called out of town before I arrived. Nevertheless, I found my time with the students cordial and engaging, as might be suggested by these two photographs from the session.  While I was interacting with the students, Cynthia got to explore a quaint old country cemetery which was just on the edge of the campus. This is one of the many beautiful images she captured there.

Stuttgart

From there, we traveled to Stuttgart, where I participated in FMX, a trade-show/festival focused around animation, games, special effects, and other forms of digital entertainment. I was featured on a special track of programming focused on transmedia which was co-hosted by the fine folks at 5-D, which runs transmedia and world building themed events here in Los Angeles.

Today's program included Scott Walker, one of the key organizers of the Los Angeles area Transmedia Meetup, who has done some innovative thinking about audience engagement strategies through his company, Brain Candy; Femke Wolting, who is part of the acclaimed team at Submarine Channel, which has done many transmedia projects in both fictional and documentary storytelling; and Nuno Bernardo from beActive, a transmedia from Portugal producer who recently published The Producer's Guide to Transmedia .

I delivered a talk on the Future of the Content Industries, which would be a core talk I delivered multiple times across Europe. But, for me, the high point was getting to participate in an open-ended conversation about world building and story telling with Alex McDowell, the noted British-born production designer who most recently has been shaping the look and feel of the upcoming Superman movie, and Shekhar Kapur, the Indian born producer associated with The Bandit Queen and the Elizabeth movies, among other projects. We brought very different perspectives to the topic in terms of our professional stakes and our cultural backgrounds. This conversation, and subsequent talks with Kapur at the conference dinner, ranked as one of the  intellectual high points of my time in Europe. The exchange was marked by constant shifts in tone from the philosophical or even "spiritual" to the intellectual to the personal to the professional, each of us circling around some of the most challenging issues surrounding the nature of entertainment in a transmedia and transnational era. I am sharing the video with you here thanks to special efforts by the 5D and FMX staffs, so thanks guys.

5D: The future of Storytelling in Transmedia at FMX 2012 from Dave Blass on Vimeo.

For more about transmedia at FMX, check out Scott Walker's very perceptive blog post, which shares his impressions not only of the day of programming I participated in but also other highlights from the week long festival. See also here an interview I did about transmedia for a German blog as part of the publicity build up for my appearances in his country.

While I was at the convention, I also shot an interview with Klaus Uhrig, a producer for Bayerischer Rundfunk. Uhrig is preparing a documentary for national television dealing with issues of collecting, ownership, and publishing, as phenomenon undergoing profound transition as we move into the era of cloud computing. More and more, we are not going to own the media we consume -- whether television programs, movies, or books -- but rather we will access them (in effect, rent them) from their publishers. As someone deeply invested in collector culture and very excited to own so many of my favorite media texts in DVD, I am a bit concerned about the uncertainities of access such an era is apt to produce. After all, Borders has never gone into my home and removed books I've bought from my bookshelf, but Amazon has been called out several times now for removing or disabling digital books from people's iPads and Kindles. And, where media availability is concerned, what iTunes and Hulu giveth, they can also withdrawal on their whim, something which is going to have serious consequences for media educators who want to predictably show certain core works semester after semester to their students. So, I am not normally cranky about the future, as anyone reading this blog knows, but to me, there are disturbing implications for our current moment of corporate "curation" and cloud based publishing, which we urgently need to be discussing. You see here a photograph of the producers interviewing me for the program.

Next Time: Portugal

Participatory Culture: What Questions Do YOU Have?

danah boyd,  Mimi Ito, and I have embarked on an interesting project for Polity. Through a series of dialogues, we’re hoping to produce a book that interrogates our different thoughts regarding participatory culture. The goal is to unpack our differences and agreements and identify some of the challenges that we see going forward. We began our dialogue a few weeks ago and had a serious brain jam where we interrogated our own assumptions, values, and stakes in doing the research that we each do and thinking about the project of participatory culture more generally. For the next three weeks, we’re going to individually reflect before coming back to begin another wave of deep dialoguing in the hopes that the output might be something that others (?you?) might be interested in reading.

And here’s where we’re hoping that some of our fans and critics might be willing to provoke us to think more deeply.

• What questions do you have regarding participatory culture that you would hope that we would address?
• What criticisms of our work would you like to offer for us to reflect on?
• What do you think that we fail to address in our work that you wish we would consider?

For those who are less familiar with this concept, my white paper for the MacArthur Foundation described a “participatory culture”  as one:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

This often gets understood through the lens of “Web2.0″ or “user-generated content,” but this is broadly about the ways in which a networked society rich with media enables new forms of interaction and engagement. Some of the topics that we are considering covering include “new media literacies,” “participation gap” and the digital divide, the privatization of culture, and networked political engagement. And, needless to say, a lot of our discussion will center on young people’s activities and the kinds of learning and social practices that take place. So what do *you* want us to talk about?

danah kicked off a discussion around the project last week on her blog, so you can go there to see what others are already thinking, or I am very happy to receive your comments and suggestions here, especially as my tech support people just moved this blog to a new platform and we are eager to see how well the new response functions are working.

Mobile Games: Activism, Art and Learning

A new report, The Civic Tripod for Mobile and Games: Activism, Art and Learning, was published a few weeks ago through the International Journal of Media and Learning. It was written by three PhD candidates, Susana Ruiz, Benjamin Stokes, and Jeff Watson, whom I've worked with closely since I came to USC three years ago.  Susana and Jeff are both game designers who are completing their work through the USC Cinema School's iMAP program, while Ben is doing his PhD in Communications through USC's Annenberg School. Watson completed his PhD this past summer. Here is the way they describe what their report tries to accomplish:

The "big picture" for mobile and locative games has been hard to see, and hard to articulate. One cause is that the examples are rarely woven together across disciplines. Second, theory has too often been absent or heavy-handed. Something in-between is needed. This is especially true for more deeply social designs, which are too often reduced to case studies especially in fields like education, the arts, and civic innovation. We argue that this fragmentation of isolated examples is undermining our ability to think big, design holistically, and evaluate broadly.

For this report, we ambitiously seek to curate a set of conceptually important mobile projects, and to connect them with a light weave of theory from three distinct traditions of practice. Specifically, this report outlines the emerging field of mobile and pervasive games along the dimensions of (1) civic learning, (2) performance/art, and (3) social change. Focusing on real projects from the field, we aim to reveal key opportunities and constraints on the mobile frontier for civic games.

We argue that this three-legged "tripod" is increasingly necessary to articulate how mobile game projects are succeeding (and failing). In the past, designs have been analyzed separately by the siloed domains of art, learning, and social action. Each silo remains a useful lens, but combining the lenses is increasingly necessary for mobile media.

Mobile media is different because it ties into the physical space of our neighborhoods, with longstanding relationships and neighborhood dramas. On the streets in front of our homes, most of us already know if there are potholes, and whether socio-economic segregation is getting worse or better. But we may need the vision of art to imagine alternate futures. Art on our streets resists abstraction, and raises immediate questions of civics, prompting us to ask, "what can we do about this?" And taking action points back to learning, since the neighborhood solution is so often to empower ourselves, which necessitates learning who we are, determining what assets and power we have, and learning the skills of collective action to push for change.

Clearly the tripod legs are not just connected -- they overlap. In fact, we argue that games are pushing for further blur between art, activism and learning. Games are a form of media that do less to structure facts, and more to structure and shape the player's experience and identity. Learning is inherent in games, since their engagement depends on providing challenges that are just barely possible. (To use the language of Vygotsky, we might say that games are only fun when they scaffold the experience to keep the player within their zone of proximal development.) When games are tied to physical space, their action ties to learning about our own neighborhoods -- how to move through them, and to change them. The art of such games is often the physical world itself, with better sounds and graphics than any screen! And the digital side of games draws in the civic, if only because it is so easy to link to more information on how to take action, or how to learn more. In other words, the experiential nature of games pulls mobile experiences on civics into being a mix of art and learning.

The report is a wonderful example of multidisciplinary scholarship with each student embodying one of the legs of their "tripod" and developing their ideas in conversation with the others. They have used a nonlinear format to allow readers to trace multiple paths through the diverse case study examples and interviews with media producers (including Mary Flanagan, Katie London, Colleen Macklin, and many others) they have assembled.

Yet, they also are creating multiple points of synthesis where their insights come together and produce  understandings that none of them individually would be able to reach. Outside this innovative framework and presentation, some of these games might be understood through a lens of avant garde art practice, others through the lens of education or activism, but we would be unlikely to see the connections between them. I strongly recommend this report to anyone who wants to better understand the potentials of mobile games for facilitating new forms of civic learning and expressive practice.

A Pedagogical Response to the Aurora Shootings: 10 Critical Questions about Fictional Representations of Violence

The horrifying and tragic news of the shooting in Aurora, Colorado this weekend requires some degree of reflection on our parts. As someone who found himself very much involved in the national debates surrounding the Columbine Shootings in the late 1990s, there is a terrible sense of deja vu: we all know all too well the twists and turns the national debate will take and the dangers of what happens when "moral panic" spins hopelessly out of control.

I was deeply moved this weekend by a video blog produced by a young woman -- Lauren Bird -- from the Harry Potter Alliance who has so many thoughtful things to say about the social value of popular entertainment, the shared ritual of the midnight movie, and the dangers of pathologizing our desire to participate in the culture. (But, of course, the national AMC chain has already announced that they are banning the wearing of any costumes into their theaters, as if the problem with the shooter in this case was that he was a "crazy fan" who showed up in costume.)

Today, I wanted to share some pedagogical materials which I developed through the New Media Literacies Project in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, where, once again, anxieties about popular culture substituted for serious reflections on the many root causes of violence in American culture.

To be extra clear, I do not think media is where this debate should be focused. The conversation needs to be centered around the root causes of violence and the need to develop a much stronger infrastructure around mental health issues in this country. But, media violence issues are often used as a distraction from serious conversations about public policies in the aftermath of such incidents. If we are going to be discussing "media violence," we need to do so with sufficient nuance to have a meaningful discussion, and ideally, we need to do so in a way which moves us from thinking about simplistic models of "media effects" towards a focus on the meanings of representations of violence as understood in the context of the work as a whole. See my essay on "The War Between Effects and Meanings" in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, for an explanation of this distinction.

First, I wanted to share a passage from a statement about violence I wrote for teachers, which expresses something I was unable to meaningfully communicate via Twitter in an online exchange yesterday:

Why is violence so persistent in our popular culture? Because violence has been persistent across storytelling media of all kinds. A thorough account of violence in media would include: fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, oral epics such as Homer's Iliad, the staged violence of Shakespeare's plays, paintings of the Rape of the Sabine Women, and stained glass window representations of saints being pumped full of arrows, or, for that matter, talk show conversations about the causes of school shootings. Violence is fundamental to these various media because aggression and conflict are core aspects of human experience. We need our art to provide some moral order, to help us sort through our feelings, to provoke us to move beyond easy answers and to ask hard questions.

Our current framing of media violence assumes that it most often attracts us, that it inspires imitation, whereas throughout much of human history, representations of violence were seen as morally instructive, as making it less likely that we are going to transgress against various social prohibitions. When we read the lives of saints, for example, we are invited to identify with the one suffering the violence and not the one committing it. Violence was thought to provoke empathy, which was good for the soul. Violence was thought to make moral lessons more memorable.

Moral reformers rarely take aim at mundane and banal representations of violence, though formulaic violence is pervasive in our culture. Almost always, they go after works that are acclaimed elsewhere as art--the works of Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino, say--precisely because these works manage to get under their skin. For some of us, this provocation gets us thinking more deeply about the moral consequences of violence, whereas others condemn the works themselves, unable to process the idea that such a work might provoke us to reflect about the violence that it represents. The study of literature offers a remarkable opportunity to engage young people in conversations about such issues, expanding the range of stories about violence which they encounter, introducing them to works that encourage reflection about the human consequences of revenge and aggression, and broadening the range of meanings they attach to such representations.

In order to encourage such reflections in the classroom, I developed a set of basic questions we should ask about any representation of violence. There are persistent references throughout this to Moby-Dick because it was part of a teacher's strategy guide for Moby-Dick. Our book on this larger project, Reading in a Participatory Culture , is coming out from Teacher's College Press later this year. I was struck re-reading this today that I had already written here about the role of violence in the Batman saga, though this came out prior to the Dark Knight films by Christopher Nolan.

TEN CRITICAL QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT FICTIONAL REPRESENTATIONS OF VIOLENCE

1. What basic conflicts are being enacted through the violence?

Literary critics have long identified the core conflicts that shape much of the world's literature: Human vs. Human, Human vs. Nature, Human vs. Self, and sometimes Human vs. Machine. Such conflicts spark drama. Moby-Dick can be understood as including all three conflicts: the conflict between Ahab and Starbuck embodies deeper divisions within the ship's crew over the captain's decision to place his own personal goals above their collective well being or above the business of whaling; the conflict between Ahab and Moby Dick may be understood as a human being throwing himself full force against the natural world; Ahab struggles with his own better nature and Starbuck searches his soul trying to figure out how to respond to his conflicting duties. Any of these conflicts can erupt in violence--directly against other people, against the natural world, or against ourselves.

You might ask your students to identify which of these forms of conflict are most visible in contemporary video games, on television, or in the cinema and why some forms of conflict appear more often in these media than others. For example, video game designers have historically found it difficult to depict characters' internalized conflict (human vs. self), in part because contest or combat are central building blocks of most games.

2. Do the characters make conscious choices to engage in acts of violence? How do they try, through language or action, to explain and justify those choices?

In the real world, an act of violence may erupt in a split second: one moment, people we care about are alive; the next, they are dead. The violence may be random: there is no real reason why these victims were singled out over others; they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet, works of fiction often focus our attention on moments when characters make decisions, often based on aspects of their personalities which they little recognize or control, and those choices may have repercussions that echo across the work as a whole.

So, the act that took Ahab's leg may have been totally random, and we see several examples throughout the novel where a split-second decision may cause a character to be wounded or killed. We might compare Ahab's amputation with the events that lead to Pip being thrown from the boat, left adrift, and ultimately driven insane, or to the unnamed man who falls from the ship's mast and drowns. By contrast, the novel invites us to consider the choices Ahab makes at each step and how the other characters respond to those choices. Melville shows us many points where the ship could turn back and avoid its fate. He spells out what the characters are thinking and why they make the decisions they do.

The events could take a different shape, though the shape of a plot can give depicted events a sense of inevitability. Some forms of tragedy, for example, rely on the notion that characters are unable to escape their fates, no matter what choices they make, or that the final acts of violence and destruction flow logically from some "tragic flaw." In trying to make sense of a fictional representation of violence, you want to encourage your student to seek out moments where the characters make choices that ultimately lead towards acts of aggression or destruction. Often, authors provide those characters with rationalizations for their choices, offering some clues through their words, thoughts, or actions about why they do what they do.

At such moments, the work also often offers us alternatives to violence, other choices the characters could have made, though such choices may remain implicit rather than being explicitly stated. Different works and different genres may see these alternatives to violence as more or less plausible, attractive, or rational. So, if you are being chased by a mad man waving a chain saw in a horror film, engaging him in a conversation may not be a rational, plausible, or attractive alternative. Genre fiction constructs contexts where the protagonist has no choice but to resort to violence, though what separates heroes from villains may be their relative comfort in deploying violence to serve their own interests. In many American movies, the hero is reluctant to turn towards violence, seeing it as a last resort. By contrast, the villain may deploy violence in situations where she has other alternatives, suggesting cruelty or indifference.

In dealing with violence in video games, then, you may want to ask what options are available to the player for dealing with a certain situation. In some games, there may be no options other than violence, and the game itself may spend very little time offering the character a rationalization for such actions. It is fight or flight, kill or be killed. Many games are simply digital versions of the classic shooting galleries: the game space is designed as an arena where players can shoot it out with other players or with computer-controlled characters. In other games, there may be options that allow the protagonist to avoid violence, but they may not be emotionally satisfying; they may put the player at a significant disadvantage; they may be hard to execute. So, helping students to interpret the options available to characters in a literary fiction may help them to reflect more

consciously on the more limited choices available to them as gamers.

3. What are the consequences of the violence depicted in the work?

Many popular stories don't pay sufficient attention to the consequences of violence. Rambo may slaughter hundreds and yet, much as in a video game, the bodies simply disappear. We get no sense of the human costs involved in combat on such a scale. Many medieval epics consisted primarily of hack and slash battle sequences; yet, periodically, the action would stop, and the bard would enumerate the names of the dead on both sides, acknowledging that these warriors paid a price even if their actions help to establish the nation state or restore order to the kingdom. Gonzala Frasca has argued that video games inherently trivialize violence because they operate in a world where the player can simply reboot and start over if their character dies.

In contrast, westerns follow a basic formula: the protagonist (most often male) would resort to violence to battle other aggressive forces that threaten his community; his heroic actions would restore justice and order, but the hero could not live within the order he had helped to create and would be forced to ride off into the sunset at the end of the story. Susan Sontag has written about "the Imagination of Disaster," suggesting that films about apocalyptic events often create a rough moral order in which characters are rewarded or punished based on the values they display under extreme circumstances.

Moby-Dick can be said to have its own mechanisms for punishing violence: Ahab's search for vengeance at all costs means that he and his crew must pay the ultimate price.

4. What power relationships, real or symbolic, does the violence suggest?

In many cases, storytellers deploy violence as a means of embodying power. We should not be surprised by this tendency given the way sociologists have characterized rape as the deployment of male power against women or lynching as the enactment of white power against blacks. Historically, wars have been seen as a way of resolving conflicts between nations through the exercise of power, while trial by combat was a means of deploying power to resolve individual conflicts and disagreements.

Media representations of violence can give viewers a seductive sense of empowerment as they watch characters who are hopelessly out-numbered triumph or they watch segments of the population who seem disempowered in the real world deploy violence to right past wrongs. Some have argued that young people play violent video games, in part, as a means of compensating for a sense of disempowerment they may feel at school.

Conversely, stories may encourage our sense of outrage when we see powerful groups or individuals abusing their power, whether in the form of bullies degrading their victims or nations suppressing their citizens. This abuse of power by powerful forces may prepare us for some counter-balancing exercise of power, setting up the basic moral oppositions upon which a story depends.

As you teach students to think critically about representations of violence, a key challenge will be to identify the different forms of power at play within the narrative and to map the relations between them. Which characters are in the most powerful positions and what are their sources of power? Which characters are abusing their power? What sources of power are ascribed to characters who might initially seem powerless, and to what degree is violence depicted as a means of empowerment?

5. How graphic is the depiction of violence?

One of the limits of the study on violence in American cartoons released by the American Academy of Pediatrics is that it counts "violent acts" without considering differing degrees of stylization. In fact, children at a pretty young age--certainly by the time they reach elementary school--are capable of making at least crude distinctions between more or less realistic representations of violence. They can be fooled by media which offers ambiguous cues, but they generally read media that seems realistic very differently from media that seems cartoonish or larger than life. For that reason, they are often more emotionally disturbed by documentaries that depict predators and prey, war, or crime, than they are by the hyperbolic representations we most often are talking about when we

refer to media violence.

While most of us have very limited vocabularies for discussing these different degrees of explicitness, such implicit distinctions shape the ways we respond to representations of violence within fictions. We each know what we can tolerate and tend to avoid modes of representation we find too intense or disturbing. Most ratings systems distinguish between cartoonish and realistic forms of violence. We need to guard against the assumption, however, that the more graphic forms of violence are necessarily "sick" or inappropriate. More stylized forms can make it much easier to ignore the gravity of real world violence through a process of sanitization. In some cases, more graphic depictions of violence

shatter that complacency and can force us to confront the human costs of violence.

Literary critics have long made a distinction between showing and telling. We might extend this distinction to think about media representations of violence. An artist may ask us to directly confront the act of violence, or she may ask us to deal with its repercussions, having a character describe an event which occurred before the opening of the narrative or which took place off stage. Some very famous examples of media violence--such as the torture sequences in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction --pull the camera away at the moments of peak intensity, counting on the viewer's imagination to fill in what happens, often based on cues from the soundtrack, or in the case of Pulp Fiction , the splattering of blood from off-camera. Again, we need to get students to focus on the creative choices made by the storytellers and artists in their construction of these episodes, choices especially about what to show and what not to show.

6. What function does the violence serve in the narrative?

Critics often complain about "gratuitous violence." The phrase has been used so often that we can lose touch with what it means. According to the dictionary, "gratuitous" means "being without apparent reason, cause, or justification." So, before we can decide if an element in a fictional work is gratuitous, we have to look more closely at why it is present (its motivation) and what purposes it serves (its function).

Keep in mind that we are not talking here about why the character performs the violent act but rather why the artist includes it in the work. An artwork might depict senseless killings, as occur at certain moments in No Country for Old Men where the killer is slaughtering people seemingly at random. This doesn't necessarily mean that the violence is "gratuitous" since in this case, the violence sets the action of the story into motion, and the work is very interested in how other characters react to the threat posed by this senseless violence. There is artistic motivation for including the violence, even if the directors, the Coen Brothers, are uninterested in the killer's psychological motives.

An element in a work of fiction may be motivated on several different levels: it may be motivated realistically, in the sense that a story about contemporary urban street gangs might be expected to depict violence as part of their real world experience; it might be motivated generically, in the sense that people going to see a horror movie expect to see a certain amount of gore and bloody mayhem; it may be motivated thematically, in the sense that an act of violence may force characters to take the measure of their own values and ethical commitments; it may be motivated symbolically, in the sense that a character dreams about performing violence and those dreams offer us a window into his or her thinking process. In each case, the violence has a different motivation, even though the actions depicted may be relatively similar.

By the same token, we might ask what functions an act of violence plays in the work. One way to answer that question is to imagine how the work would be different if this element were not included. Would the story have the same shape? Would the characters behave in the same way? Would the work have the same emotional impact? Some acts of violence motivate the actions of the story; some bring about a resolution in the core conflict; still others mark particular steps in the trajectory of the plot; and in some rare cases, the violent acts may indeed be gratuitous, in that their exclusion would change little or nothing in our experience of the work

But keep in mind that the violence which disturbs us the most on first viewing is not necessarily gratuitous and is often violence which has ramifications throughout the rest of the story. Describing a scene as "gratuitous" is easy, especially when it shortcuts the process of engaging more critically with the structure and messages of the work in question. For example, the film Basketball Diaries became the focus of controversy following the Columbine shootings primarily because of a single scene in which the protagonist wears a long black coat and imagines shooting up a school. Those discussing the sequence failed to explain that it was a dream sequence, not an action performed by the film's protagonist, and that it is part of a larger story which explores how a young man overcame his rage, his addictions, and his antisocial impulses to become a poet. Without the representation of his aggression, the power of the story of redemption would be weakened, whereas the scene removed from context seemed to endorse the antisocial values the work itself rejects.

7. What perspective(s) does the work offer us towards the character engaging in violence?

Media theorists have spent a great deal of time trying to determine what we mean when we say we identify with a character in a fictional work. At the most basic level, it means we recognize the character; we distinguish the fictional figure from others depicted in the same work. From there, we may mean that the work devotes a great deal of time and space to depicting the actions of this particular character. Typically, the more time we spend with a character, the more likely we are to see the world from her point of view. Yet, this is not always the case. We may be asked to observe and judge characters, especially if their actions and the values they embody fall outside of the stated perspective of the work. We may grow close to a character only to be pushed away again when the character takes an action we find reprehensible and unjustifiable.

There is a distinction to be drawn here between the structuring of narrative point of view and the structuring of moral judgments on the character. Part of what helps us to negotiate between the two is the degree to which we are given access to the thoughts and feelings of the character (and in the case of an audio-visual work, the degree to which we see the world from his or her optical point of view).

Consider, for example, the use of first person camera in a work like Jaws where scenes are sometimes shot from the perspective of the shark as it swims through the water approaching its human prey. At such moments, we feel fear and dread for the human victims, not sympathy for the sharks. Filmmakers quickly learned to manipulate this first person camera, sometimes duplicating the same camera movement, tricking us into thinking the monster is approaching, and then, demonstrating this to be a false alarm.

So, it is possible to follow characters but not get inside their head, and it is possible to have access to characters' thoughts and still not share their moral perspective.

And indeed, all of these relationships may shift in the course of reading a book as we may feel the character's actions are justified up until a certain point and then cross an implicit line where they become monstrous. Homer shares Ulysses's point of view throughout much of the Odyssey, but we still are inclined to pull back from him at a certain point as he brings bloody vengeance upon Penelope's suitors in the final moments of the epic.

Wyn Kelley identifies a similar pattern in Moby-Dick where we are invited to experience what whaling would be like from the point of view of the whale, and in the process, we are encouraged to reflect on the bloody brutality of slaughtering an innocent animal, stripping the meat off its bones, and boiling its flesh to create oil. Here, a break in the following pattern gives us an opportunity to reassess how we feel about the characters with whom we have up until that point been closely aligned. We might think about a common device in television melodrama where we've seen a scene of conflict between two characters who believe they are alone and then at the end, the camera pulls back to show the reaction of a previously undisclosed third-party figure who has been watching or overhearing the action. Such moments invite us to reassess what we've just seen from another vantage point.

In video games, the category of "first person shooters" has been especially controversial with critics concerned about the implications of players taking on the optical point of view of a character performing acts of violence; often, critics argue, the player doesn't just watch a violent act but is actively encouraged to participate. Gamers will sometimes refer to their characters in the third person ("he") and sometimes in the first person ("I"), pronoun slippages that suggest some confusions brought about by the intense identification players sometimes feel towards their avatars.

Yet, even here, we need to be careful to distinguish between following pattern, optical point of view, and moral attitude. In games, we typically remain attached to a single character whom we control, and thus we have a very strong following pattern. In first person shooters, we see the action through the optical point of view of that character, though we may feel no less connected to the characters we control in a third person game (where we see the full body of the character from an external perspective). The Second Person video game confounds our normal expectations about optical point of view, inviting us to see the action from an unfamiliar perspective, and thus it may shake up our typical ways of making sense of the action.

Those who have spent time watching players play and interviewing them about their game experiences find that in fact, identification works in complex ways, since the player is almost always thinking tactically about the choices that will allow her to beat the game. Winning often involves stepping outside a simple emotional or moral connection with an individual character. Players are encouraged to think of the game as a system, not unlike taking a more omniscient perspective in reading a work of fiction, even as other aspects of the game's formal structure may encourage them to feel a close alignment with a

particular character whose actions are shaped by their own decisions.

Game designer Will Wright (The Sims, Sim City) has argued that games may have a unique ability to make players experience guilt for the choices their characters have made in the course of the action. When we watch a film or read a novel, we always reserve the ability to pull back from a character we may otherwise admire and express anger over choices he or she has made or to direct that anger towards the author who is reflecting a world view we find repugnant. Yet, in a game, because players are making choices, however limited the options provided by the designer, they feel some degree of culpability. And a game designer has the ability to force them to reflect back on those choices and thus to have an experience of guilt.

8. What roles (aggressor, victim, other) does the protagonist play in the depiction of violence?

Many of the media texts which have been most controversial are works which bring the viewer into the head of the aggressor--from the gangster films of the 1930s through contemporary films like Natural Born Killers and American Psycho, television series like Dexter and The Sopranos, and games like Grand Theft Auto. All of these works are accused of glamorizing crime.

As we've already discussed, we need to distinguish between following pattern, optical and psychological point of view, and moral alignment. Many of these works bring us closer to such figures precisely so that we can feel a greater sense of horror over their anti-social behavior. Consider, for example, Sweeney Todd, which depicts a murderous barber and his partner, a baker, who turns the bodies of his victims into meat pies she sells to her customers. We read the story from their perspective and we are even encouraged to laugh at their painful and heartless puns about the potential value of different people as sources for human meat. Yet, our strong identification with these characters allows us to feel greater horror and sorrow over the final consequences of their actions.

At the other end of spectrum, literary scholar James Cain describes how a whole genre of literary works arose in the Middle Ages around representations of saints as victims:

"The persecutions of early Christians gave rise to an extraordinary collection of tales commemorating the supernatural endurance of victims who willingly suffered heinous atrocities and ultimately gave their lives bearing witness to their faith. From accounts of the stoning of the first martyr, St. Stephen, to the broiling of St. Lawrence on an open grill, the strapping of St. Catherine to a mechanical wheel of torture, the gouging-out of St. Lucy's eyeballs, the slitting-open of St. Cecilia's throat, the slicing-off of St. Agatha's breasts, the feeding of St. Perpetua and St. Felicitas to the lions, the piercing of St. Sebastian with a barrage of arrows--the graphic brutality undoubtedly exceeds even the most violent images in media today.... The strong emotional responses these images conjured up in their observers were deliberately designed to produce lasting impressions in people's memories and imaginations, to enable further reflection."

Far from being corrupting, representations of violence are seen as a source of moral instruction, in part because of our enormous sense of empathy for the saints' ability to endure suffering.

Most American popular culture negotiates between the two extremes. In the case of superheroes, for example, their origin stories often include moments of victimization and loss, as when young Bruce Wayne watches his mother and father get killed before deciding to devote his life to battling crime as the Batman, or when Peter Parker learns that "with great power comes great responsibility" the hard way when his lack of responsibility results in the death of his beloved uncle. In the world of the superheroes, the villains are also often victims of acts of violence, as when the Joker's face (and psyche) are scarred by being pushed into a vat of acid. The superhero genre tends to suggest that we have a choice how we respond to trauma and loss. For some, we emerge stronger and more ethically committed, while for others, we are devastated and bitter, turning towards anti-social actions and self-destruction.

A work like David Cronenberg's A History of Violence is particularly complex, since we learn more and more about the character's past as we move more deeply into the narrative and since the protagonist moves from bystander to victim and then reverses things, taking his battle to the gangsters, and along the way, becomes increasingly sadistic in his use of violence. Cronenberg wants to have the viewer rethinking and reassessing the meaning of violence in almost every scene of the film.

The filmmaker Jean Renoir famously said "every character has his reason." His point was that if we shift point of view, we can read the aggressor as victim or vice versa. Few people see themselves as cruel; most find ways to justify and rationalize acts of even the rawest aggression. And a literary work may invite us to see the same action from several different perspectives, shifting our identifications and empathy in the process. So, for example, the moment when we see the hunt from the whale's point of view reverses the lens, seeing Flask and his crew as the aggressors and the whale as the victim, a perspective we don't get in the rest of the novel.

Even when the artist doesn't fill in these other perspectives, critics and spectators can step back from a scene, put themselves in the heads of the various characters, and imagine what the world might look like from their point of view. Consider the novel and stage play, Wicked, which rereads The Wizard of Oz from the vantage point of the Wicked Witch and portrays Dorothy as a mean spirited trespasser who has murdered the witch's sister.

9. What moral frame (pro-social, antisocial, ambiguous) does the work place around the depicted violence?

Some fictions focus on violence as the performance of duty. The police, for example, are authorized to use certain sanctioned forms of violence in the pursuit of criminals and in the name of maintaining law and order. Some of these--for example, the television series The Shield--find great drama in exploring cops who "cross the line," seeing brutality or unnecessary use of force as a symptom of a police force no longer accountable to its public.

Similarly, much fiction centers on themes of war, with works either endorsing or criticizing military actions as forms of violence in the service of the state and of the public. There is a long tradition of national epics, going back to classical times, which depict the struggles to establish or defend the nation with violence often linked to patriotic themes and values. In the American tradition, this function was once performed by the western, which depicts the process by which "savagery" gave way to "civilization," though more recent westerns have sometimes explored the slaughter of the Indians from a more critical perspective as a form of racial cleansing.

So, even within genres that depict the use of force in pro-social or patriotic terms, there are opportunities for raising questions about the nature and value of violence as a tool for bringing about order and stability.

On the other hand, many stories depict violence as anti-social, focusing on criminals, gangsters, or terrorists, who operate outside the law and in opposition to the state or the community. The cultural critic Robert Warshow discusses the very different representations of "men with guns" found in the western, the gangster film, and the war movie, suggesting that all three genres have strong moral codes which explain when it is justifiable to use force and depicting what happens to characters who transgress those norms. The westerner can not live in the community he has helped to create through his use of force; the gangster (see Scarface for example) frequently is destroyed by the violence he has abused to meet his personal desires and ambitions; and the hero returns home at the end of the war, albeit often psychologically transformed by the violence he has experienced.

Just as fictions that seem to depict the pro-social use of violence may contain critiques of the abuse of power by the police or the horrors of war, fictions which depict the anti-social use of violence may include strong critiques of the gangster lifestyle. Robin Woods has famously summed up the basic formula of the horror films as "normality is threatened by monstrosity." In such a formula, there are three important terms to consider--what constitutes normality, what constitutes the monstrous, and what relationship is being posited between the two. Some horror films are highly moralistic, seeking to destroy anything which falls outside of narrow norms; others use the monster as the means of criticizing and questioning the limits of normality.

In many works, there is a core ambiguity about the nature of the violence being depicted. We may be asked to identify with several characters who have different moral codes and thus who see their actions in different terms. Our judgments may shift in the course of the narrative. The characters may understand their actions as pro-social even as the author invites us to read them as antisocial. Or the work may be saying that there's no simple distinction to be drawn between different forms of violence: it's all equally destructive. We might even imagine a truly nihilistic work in which all violence is justified. It isn't that we want students to fit works into simple either/or categories here. Rather, asking this question can force them towards a more complex understanding of the moral judgments the work is making--as opposed to simply those being made by the characters--about the value of the violence to society.

10. What tone does the work take towards the represented violence?

We've already seen the importance of distinguishing between the forms of violence being depicted in a work and the position the work takes on those actions. We've seen that identification with a protagonist is fragile and shifting across a work, so that we may sometimes feel a strong emotional bond with a character for much of the story and yet still feel estranged from her when the author reveals some darker side of her personality.

A work may depict the pro-social use of violence and either endorse or criticize the Establishment being depicted. A work may depict anti-social forms of violence in ways which are conservative in their perspective on those groups who use force outside legal contexts. Or a work may depict forms of violence that are hard to classify in those terms and thus invite readers to struggle with that ambiguity.

Similarly, we need to consider the range of different emotional responses a work may evoke through its use of violent images. Some fictions about violence, such as the action sequences in an Indiana Jones movie, may thrill us with exciting, larger than life heroics. Some, such as Saving Private Ryan or Glory, may appeal to our sense of national pride towards the brave men who gave their lives defending their country. Some, such as the scene in Old Yeller where the boy is forced to shoot his dog, may generate enormous empathy as we feel sorry for the characters who are forced to deploy or suffer violence against their will. Some, such as depictions of human suffering around the world, may seek to shock us into greater social consciousness and civic action. Some, such as slapstick comedy, may encourage us to laugh at highly stylized depictions of physical aggression. And still others, such as Saw or Nightmare on Elm Street, may provoke a sense of horror or disgust as we put ourselves through a series of intense emotional shocks in the name of entertainment.

We can not understand what representations of violence mean, then, without paying attention to issues of tone, and part of teaching close reading skills is helping students identify the subtle markings in a text which indicate the tone the author is taking towards the depicted events. Popular texts tend to create broadly recognizable and easily legible signs of tone, though many of the works of filmmakers like Tarantino or Scorsese generate controversy because they adopt a much more complex and multivalent tone than we expect from other texts in the same genre. We might compare Tarantino or Scorsese to certain writers--William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor come to mind--who also seek complicated or contradictory emotional reactions to grotesque and violent elements in their narratives.

Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action

Over the past few blog posts, I have been sharing updates on some of the work being done by my Civic Paths research group at USC -- first, the special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on fan activism, and second, Arely Zimmerman's white paper exploring the ways undocumented youth and their supporters mobilized through and around new media in support of the DREAM act. But, as I have noted, this work fits within a larger initiative launched by the MacArthur Foundation -- a research hub on Youth and Participatory Politics, headed by Political Science Professor Joe Kahne from Mills College, and involving a multidisciplinary mix of researchers who are combining a range of different approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, to better understand how young people are using new media as a resource for political participation. A few weeks ago, Kahn and another Political Scientist, University of Chicago's Cathy Cohen, released an important report representing the first phases of this research -- Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action. Here's a rich and provocative interview with its primary authors, thanks to MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning team.

The white paper does two things which are really important for people seeking to better understand the interplay of new media and citizen participation -- first, it offers a new conceptual framing for thinking about what our research network is calling "participatory politics" and second, it shares the findings of the team's first large scale survey which seeks to capture the current state of youth, new media, and civic participation, recorded just after the Midterm Elections and prior to the current presidential campaign season.

Here's a key passage of the report which seeks to explain our core concept and what we think it will add to the existing understandings of the political lives of American youth:

The Youth and Participatory Politics study defines participatory politics as interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern. Importantly, these acts are not guided by deference to elites or formal institutions. Examples of participatory political acts include starting a new political group online, writing and disseminating a blog post about a political issue, forwarding a funny political video to one's social network, or participating in a poetry slam.

Participatory political acts can:

␣ reach large audiences and mobilize net- works, often online, on behalf of a cause;

␣ help shape agendas through dialogue with, and provide feedback to, political leaders (on- and offline); and

␣ enable participants to exert greater agency through the circulation or forwarding of political information (e.g., links) as well as through the production of original content, such as a blog or letter to the editor.

Four factors make participatory politics especially important to those thinking about the future of American politics.

1. Participatory politics allow individuals to operate with greater independence in the political realm, circumventing traditional gatekeepers of information and influence, such as newspaper editors, political parties, and interest groups.

2. Participatory politics often facilitate a renegotiation of political power and control with the traditional political entities that are now searching for ways to engage participants. Witness how newspapers and cable television stations now try to facilitate a controlled engagement with their audience through the use of social media.

3. Participatory politics as practiced online provide for greater creativity and voice, as participants produce original content using video, images, and text.

4. Participatory politics afford individuals the capability to reach a sizable audience and mobilize others through their social networks in an easy and inexpensive

manner.

This definition emerges from three years of intense discussions amongst the participating researchers, as well as consultations with leading scholars and activists, all of whom are thinking deeply about media change and its political consequences. It think it is safe to say that this reconceptualization would not have emerged anywhere except in the radically multidisciplinary space which Kahne and the MacArthur Foundation have helped to establish. We bring ideas from our own disciplines into conversation with those from profoundly different frames of reference, and in the process, we have begun to map a space which is inadequately covered by any given field.

In the case of media and cultural studies, the report comes as we are seeing sharper distinctions being drawn between different forms of cultural and political participation, where-as on the Political Science side, it emerges from ongoing discussions about the shifting nature of politics as a human activity, especially the shift of focus towards nongovernmental forms of political action.

The report shifts the focus from "Twitter Revolutions," which place the emphasis on new forms of networked technologies, and onto specific sets of political and cultural practices, which deploy those tools in relation to older media technologies, to help redefine the dynamics of political debate and mobilization.

A second key point to make has to do with the relationship between participatory politics and more established and institutionalized forms of politics, a question to which Kahne and Cohen addressed in the interview that accompanies the report's release:

Participatory politics can allow for greater creativity and voice, but voice may not necessarily lead to influence. What sort of shift must occur in order for these practices to become influential?

Kahne: We have thought about this a lot, and it's something we as a field need to learn more about. There is no doubt that practices that amplify the voice of young people are a significant thing, especially given the marginal status that so many young people have in relation to mainstream institutions. Those institutions are places where young people generally don't have significant voice. Participatory politics can give them that voice. At the same time, it's key to realize that if youth are circulating ideas among their networks without understanding how to move from voice to influence, they may well not achieve the goals they value. In our work with youth organizations, digital platforms, and youth themselves, we have to find ways to help youth connect to institutions act strategically to have influence and to put pressure on the places - whether corporate or governmental - to prompt the change youth want to see occur.

Cohen: Participatory politics is never meant to displace a focus on institutional politics. We might think of it as a supplemental domain where young people can take part in a dialogue about the issues that matter, think about strategies of mobilization, and do some of that mobilizing collectively online. That said, we have to always recognize that there is important power that exists largely offline. The Occupy movement is a classic example of both participatory politics and offline institutional politics coming together to not only amplify voice but also provide influence and power -- even temporarily -- for a group of primarily young people around class and equality issues.

This new framework for thinking about "Participatory Politics" helps us to make sense of some of the significant findings of the national survey. I can hit on only a few key insights here (read the report for more):

Large proportions of young people across racial and ethnic groups have access to the Internet and use online social media regularly to stay connected to their family and friends and pursue interests and hobbies.

Contrary to the traditional notion of a technological digital divide, the YPP study finds young people across racial and ethnic groups are connected online. Overwhelmingly, white (96 percent), black (94 percent), Latino (96 percent) and Asian-American (98 percent) youth report having access to a computer that connects to the Internet. A majority or near majority of white (51 percent), black (57 percent), Latino (49 percent), and Asian American (52 percent) youth report sending messages, sharing status updates and links, or chatting online daily.

Youth are very involved in friendship-driven and interest-driven activities online.

78 percent send messages, share status updates, or chat online on a weekly basis.

58 percent share links or forward information through social networks at least once a week....

I was delighted to see this last question, dealing with the practices around what I call Spreadable Media, included in the survey, since events like Kony 2012 have established that acts of circulation can be an important part of how young people are participating in political debates.

Over-all, 64 percent engage in at least one interest-driven activity in a given week, and 32 percent engage in three or more interest driven activities a week.

Participatory Politics are an important dimension of politics.

41 percent of young people have engaged in at least one act of participatory politics, while 44 percent participate in other acts of politics.

Specifically, 43 percent of white, 41 percent of black, 38 percent of Latino and 36 percent of Asian-American youth participated in at least one act of participatory politics during the prior 12 months.

Participatory politics are an addition to an individual's engagement rather than an alternative to other political activities:

Youth who engaged in at least one act of participatory politics were almost twice as likely

to report voting in 2010 as those who did not.

A large proportion--37 percent of all young people--engages in both participatory

and institutional politics.

Among young people who engage in participatory policies, 90 percent of them either vote or engage in institutional politics.

Participatory politics are equitably distributed across different racial and ethnic groups:

The difference in voting in 2008 between the group with the highest rate of turnout according to the U.S. Census Bureau--black youth (52%)-- and the group with the lowest rate of turnout-- Latino youth (27%)--is 25 percentage points.

These findings challenge many key stereotypes which shape dominant discourses around youth, new media, and political participation, suggesting that:

• participatory politics and culture are not simply activities involving white suburban middle class youth but they are widespread across all ethnic groups, and indeed, the group most likely to engage with the broadest range of such practices are African-Americans
• new media politics does not come at the expense of more traditional forms of political participation but rather is more likely to amplify patterns of voter-participation
• participatory culture and politics seems to be an important equalizer of opportunities for engagement in the political process.

One other conclusion seems important for readers who are invested in media literacy: According to the survey, 84 percent of youth indicate that, given their reliance on online sources for news and information, "would benefit from learning more about how to tell if news and information you find online is trustworthy." So, contrary to the stereotype that young people are indifferent to the credibility of the information they access online, many of them are seeking support from adult educators to help them acquire skills at more meaningfully parsing what should be trusted.

Educators and policy makers alike will benefit from looking more deeply at the rich data and insights found in this report. I am sure to be drawing more on this report through upcoming blog posts around these topics.

For those who want to learn more about the report, I've embedded here the video of a recent chat session featuring Kahne, Cohen, and others, talking about the report with Howard Rheingold through the MacArthur Foundation's Connected Learning Seminar series.

Joe Kahne is the John and Martha Davidson Professor of Education at Mills College. His research focuses on ways school practices and new media influence youth civic and political development.

Cathy Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is the founder of the Black Youth Project and author of The Boundaries of Blackness and Democracy Remixed. Her research focuses on political engagement by marginal communities.

Documenting DREAMS: New Media, Undocumented Youth and the Immigrant Rights Movement

Civic Paths is a team of graduate students, faculty, post-docs, and staff researchers within the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, who are seeking to better understand the role of new media tools and practices in shaping the political socialization and mobilization of American youth. The faculty leads on the research team are myself and my Journalism colleague, Kierstin Thorson while Sangita Shreshtova is the Research Director. The team is linked to a larger research hub on Youth and Participatory Politics, headed by Mills College Political Science Professor Joe Kahne and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Our team's contribution consists of developing a series of ethnographic case studies of innovative networks which have proven effective at encouraging youth to become political activists. Next time, I will be sharing some quantitative research recently released by Kahne, Cathy Cohen, and other members of the YPP network.

Civic Paths recently released the first of the white papers which over the next two years will start to emerge from our research: this one written by our Post-Doc Arely M. Zimmerman and dealing with the groups of undocumented youth who have been trying to rally behind the DREAM Act. The report was released the same week that President Barack Obama announced a major shift in the country's immigration policy that reflected in many ways the success of these DREAM activists in reframing the public's perception of the experience of being undocumented and in calling out the fact that the Obama administration had deported more people in its first three years in office than George W. Bush had in his two terms as president.

Zimmerman's white paper takes us behind the scenes, identifying the tactics which had led to this political victory and sharing the stories shared with her by the participants in her study.

Zimmerman's research was the focus of an earlier blog post, describing a program we hosted at USC where young immigrant rights activists talked about their use of new media to mobilize supporters.

You can find the full report on the DREAM Activists online at the Youth and Participatory Politics homepage. But, to give you a taste of the report, I wanted to share two excerpts here today. The first comes from the introduction to Zimmerman's report:

On October 12, 2011, five undocumented youth wearing graduation caps staged a sit-in at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices in downtown Los Angeles to urge the Obama administration to stop deporting undocumented youths. The sit-in launched the national E.N.D. (Education Not Deportation) Our Pain campaign, comprised of a network of immigrant youth organizations and allies demanding an immediate moratorium on deporting youth eligible for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. This proposed legislation would grant conditional legal status to those brought to the United States under age 16 if they attend college or join the military.

The action took place on a busy Wednesday morning when most Angelenos were at work and most students were in school. Fearing a low turnout, Dream Team Los Angeles, a local youth-led community group, and their allies used social media to send links of a live broadcast of the action from a free video-streaming site. While 300 people attended, over 4,000 users watched online as the youth entered ICE headquarters and demanded a hearing with officials. The attendees and online audience looked on as handcuffs were placed on the youth. Immediately after the arrests, users were able to make donations and petition for the arrestees' release through another website.

The E.N.D. campaign's direct action is an example of a strategy to amplify youth voices in the immigrant rights movement by combining traditional community organizing

with new media strategies. One of the arrestees and leader of one of the DREAM advocacy groups in Los Angeles acknowledges that a mixed media strategy is key for reaching diverse participants:

You have to be able to use Facebook and Twitter, but you have to be intentional about it, and strategic. At the same time, you have to also utilize traditional media outlets because our 'tios' and 'tias' are not using social networking. They are still watching Univision and the nightly news. So you have to engage in both.

DREAM Activism is an exemplar case of youth capitalizing on new media affordances to recruit, mobilize, and sustain broad-based youth political participation. While initial organizing in 2001 focused on states with high immigrant populations such as California, Illinois, and New York, undocumented youth and student organizations are now active at the national level with chapters in 25 states. The California Dream Network, a network of undocumented youth organizations, boasts chapters on over 30 college campuses. Student and youth organizers credit both their rapid growth and public outreach to the power of new media. Prerna Lal, co-founder of DreamActivist.org, a media-centered youth organization, states in an online video, "New media has indeed taken a small group of undocumented students to new heights and fueled a movement that was stagnant."

Immigrant youth's participation in the DREAM movement provides an opportunity to examine the intersection of new media and grassroots youth-led social movements in the context of a politically disenfranchised and legally vulnerable community. Drawing from field research, event observations, media content analysis, and 25 semi-structured interviews with DREAM activists residing in California, Illinois, Georgia, and Texas, this report examines the role of new media in mobilizing undocumented youth's participation in the movement.

Only three of the youth I interviewed were U.S. citizens. While Mexico was the primary country of origin, some of the youth came from Colombia, Nigeria, El Salvador, Poland, and Chile. All but three of the youth were enrolled in an institution of higher learning or had completed their bachelor's degree at the time of the interviewee. The semi-structured interviews allowed me to reconstruct the history of Dream Activism and account for existing organizational networks through youth's narration of events, stories of participation, and the re-telling of their experiences as members of Dream activist organizations. On an individual level, the interview protocol was directed at capturing youth's stories of involvement, the contextual factors and supports that sustained their civic participation, and their use of new media platforms and practices. Additionally, I probed how their participation in the Dream movement had shaped their experiences of inequality and identity, feelings of membership and belonging, and conceptions of citizenship.

As the effects of new media on political participation continue to be sharply

debated, this case study suggests that youth's online and political participation are

mutually reinforcing. Despite the barriers they face because of their legal and socio-

economic status, undocumented youth activists in this study are highly engaged online as bloggers, documentarians, artists, or social media activists. The positive correlation

between levels of civic engagement and online participation is due to several factors.

Online communities have served as spaces to develop associational bonds, forge social

networks, and amass forms of social capital that are particularly useful given the legal

and political vulnerability of face to face activism. Online communities have also

increased youth's sense of political efficacy by offering spaces for collective identification and shared memory. The sophisticated use of new media by undocumented youth has enabled youth to negotiate, resist, and respond to their political and socio- economic marginalization. Through new media, undocumented youth have uplifted the voices, experiences, and stories of an often-ignored segment of the immigrant population in the United States. Simultaneously, these activists have brought attention to the youth voice within the social justice community more broadly....

The second selection from the white paper comes from the conclusion and focuses more directly on the personal trajectories of the DREAM activists that Zimmerman interviewed for the project. She deals honestly with the challenges these undocumented youth confront, both in preserving personal dignity in their everyday interactions and in finding ways to access the digital media which is so vital to their efforts. This passage gives us a snap shot of how people are living with and working around the digital divide and the participation gap and the ways these inequalities of access are tied to larger social, political, and economic inequalities. Their stories help us to understand how current immigration policies are squandering the potential of a generation of young Americans who seek to make a contribution with their lives but who are often blocked from doing so as a consequence of the political stalemate which surrounds efforts to change the process for acquiring citizenship:

During the research on this MAPP case study, I met many individuals who defied the presumption of civically and politically disengaged youth. Like Jose, who used Facebook to confront the social isolation he felt by posting photos of his drawings online, these youth have used new media tools to overcome rather than succumb to barriers to their political participation. Sammy, an aspiring filmmaker, did not have the means to buy a camera with HD capabilities, but produced a short documentary on the plights of undocumented students. El Random Hero was an avid blogger and yet did not have a computer at home. He accessed the internet through public libraries. The stories of these youth provide a glimpse into the positive impact that new media can have on the ability of youth to become civically and politically engaged.

Through this research, I also met disaffected undocumented youth who were less engaged both in their schools, communities, and empowering forms of digital social networks. Though these youth had access to new media, they had not used this access to empower themselves and engage politically. Anna, a high school student, felt that

Facebook was a detriment at times even, pulling her into a web of high school "drama" causing her to deactivate her account. Anna was graduating high school that summer and hadn't any idea of what she would do next. Would she be destined to work in a low- skilled job for minimum wage?

These varied DREAMer youth experiences show the range of outcomes that are possible. For those individuals that experienced positive outcomes in their civic, political and digital lives, it seems to be a result of access to new media combined with a range of other contextual supports. One important contextual support is institutional, namely the college campus. Most of the youth in this study who were politically engaged are also college graduates or on the way to obtaining a degree. Of course, there are exceptions. El Random Hero, for instance, has not been able to afford to attend community college. But for the most part, DREAMers seem to become more involved once they're enrolled in an educational institution. Students like Agustin, who had been exposed early on to Chicano or Ethnic studies, had a framework to understand their struggles in relation to historical patterns, increasing their sense of belonging and group pride. Several youth in this study started their activism by joining a college campus group. Others found each other online. Some later become active in community-based organizations or national coalitions, but they generally began when a peer or a mentor introduced them to a student support group for undocumented students. This happened both online and face-to-face.

While much research needs to be done in this regard, this study suggests that new

media do provide extended opportunities for political advocacy and social engagement

for undocumented youth. DREAMers find each other online. They strengthen their sense

of community through collective storytelling. They mobilize for action using social media. They use their online media savvy in combination with more traditional social movement tactics. The youth use new media to make the DREAM movement personal, networked and visible. What remains a question is whether the degree of empowerment and the sustainability of youth's political participation in this movement relates directly to institutional supports and contextual capital. If so, how can we strengthen these to create powerful avenues for broader youth participation in politics and the public sphere?

While community groups like Dream Team Coalition of Los Angeles or the United We Dream national network are youth-driven, these groups have also successfully drawn on resources and support from more traditional allies in the advocacy and nonprofit sectors. These contextual supports may enhance DREAMer youth's new media affordances towards more sustained political action. For example, in the Los Angeles area, community-based organizations such as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) and UCLA's Labor Center have been at the forefront of undocumented youth organizing. These centers provide both formal and informal supports such as mentorship, scholarship, organizing and leadership development, along with access to the broader social justice community. In 2011, the Labor Center sponsored an event called "Dream Summer", which provided 60 undocumented youth with paid internships and a trip to Washington DC. Such programs help sustain youth's political activism and involvement by providing a means of both emotional and financial support and motivation.

In California, especially in cities like Los Angeles, the immigrant rights community has well-established organizations with a long trajectory of facing an uphill battle to organize and sustain their political involvement. While new media and online social networks are a way to counter social and political isolation, DREAMer youth may benefit by seeking out the support of institutions that can help sustain their activism. Kendra and Jenny, for instance, found it hard to plug into the social justice community in their hometowns in Texas and Illinois, respectively. Because immigrant rights are often framed as a Latino issue, most organizations cater to Spanish speaking, newly arrived immigrants. Kendra and Jenny were not Latin American and were not Spanish speakers. The lack of ethnic ties made it more difficult for them to participate in local organizing activities, so they turned to the Internet. Kendra was more successful than Jenny at connecting to a social network of undocumented students, but she also was pulled further into the immigrant rights struggle when she visited Washington, D.C. for a collective action. Joining others in a solidarity march on Capitol Hill was a catalyst in her political activism.

Clearly, there is still more research that needs to be done in understanding why some undocumented youth become politically and socially empowered, while others, to put it in their words, remain "in the shadows." Further analysis of this research will begin to answer these questions as well. Still, it is already clear that new media placed in the hands of DREAMer youth, inspired by a collective vision and supported by the community, has created a powerful movement for social change.

Civic Paths is very proud of the timely and ground-breaking work which Zimmerman has done on this case study, and we hope you will take the time to check out her full report.

Future Civic Paths white papers will deal with the network of fan activists around the Harry Potter Alliance, the Nerdfighters, and Imagine Better; the activities and institutions supporting the Students for Liberty movement; and the politicization of Moslem-American youth in the wake of 9/11.

Up, Up and Away!: The Power and Potential of Fan Activism

As I continue to catch up on events which occurred while I was out of the country, I want to direct my readers to the special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on "fan activism" which I co-edited with Sangita Shreshtova and the members of our Civic Paths research team. The initial call for papers appeared on this blog several years ago and thanks to your help, we were able to pull together an exceptional range of articles, representing many different forms of fan activism from around the world. The issue is now online and has already started to generate a fair amount of attention, but I wanted to make sure my regular blog readers had a chance to see what we produced. As you will see, many of my talks across Europe drew on this material, and our team is continuing to do work around this topic with the goal of producing a book length study of new forms of cultural activism in the not-too-distant future. Below, I share the introduction to the special issue I wrote with Shreshtova. It should give you some sense of the range of materials we have assembled here. You are strongly encouraged to go to the online journal itself to read any or all of the essays described here.

Up, Up and Away! The Power and Potential of Fan Activism

by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shreshtova

[Fandom] is built on psychological mechanisms that are relevant to political involvement: these are concerned with the realm of fantasy and imagination on the one hand, and with emotional processes on the other...The remaining question then becomes whether and how politics can borrow from the elements of popular culture that produce these intense audience investments, so that citizenship becomes entertaining.

--Liesbeth van Zoonen, Entertaining the Citizen

Scratch an activist and you're apt to find a fan. It's no mystery why: fandom provides a space to explore fabricated worlds that operate according to different norms, laws, and structures than those we experience in our "real" lives. Fandom also necessitates relationships with others: fellow fans with whom to share interests, develop networks and institutions, and create a common culture. This ability to imagine alternatives and build community, not coincidentally, is a basic prerequisite for political activism.

--Steven Duncombe, "Imagining No-Place"

In 2011, American political leaders and activists were surprisingly concerned with an 80-plus-year-old popular culture icon: Superman. When presidential candidate Rick Perry was asked by a 9-year-old child during a campaign stop which superhero he would want to be, the tough-talking Texan chose the man from Krypton, because "Superman came to save the United States!" (Well 2011). At almost that same moment, conservative commentators were up in arms because in an alternative universe DC comics story, Superman denounced his American citizenship to embrace a more global perspective: "I'm tired of having my actions construed as instruments of US policy. 'Truth, Justice, and the American way!'--It's not enough any more." Right-wing rage was expressed by one FoxNews.com reader: "This is absolutely sickening. We are now down to destroying all American Icons. How are we going to survive as a Nation?" (Appelo 2011). Such responses suggest a widespread recognition that popular mythologies may provide the frames through which the public makes sense of its national identity.

Meanwhile, immigrant rights activists were questioning when Superman ever became an American citizen or whether he even possessed a green card, given that he entered the country without permission and, we must presume, without documentation, a refugee from a society in turmoil who has sought to hide his origins and identity from outside scrutiny ever since.

Hari Kondabolu, a South Asian comedian, recorded a video entitled "Superman as Immigrant Rights Activist," distributed through Colorlines , asking why no one ever tried to deport Superman for "stealing jobs" and suggesting that other immigrants might wear glasses, like Clark Kent does, to mask their identities. Photographer Dulce Pinzon produced a powerful set of images depicting a range of (mostly Marvel) superheroes performing the jobs often done by undocumented workers. As Thomas Andrae (1987; see also Engle 1987) has noted, at the time of his origins in the late Depression era, Superman adopted an explicitly political stance ("the champion of the oppressed") rather than the more vaguely civic orientation of subsequent decades. As Matt Yockey demonstrates in regard to Wonder Woman in this issue, superheroes have long functioned as mythological figures or rhetorical devices for debates around identity politics. Even DC Comics has described Superman as "the ultimate immigrant" (Perry 2011).

Arely Zimmerman (forthcoming), a postdoc with the Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project (part of USC's Civic Paths Project), interviewed 25 undocumented youth activists involved in the campaign to pass the Dream Act. She was struck by how often superheroes cropped up in her exchanges. One respondent described the experience of discovering other undocumented youth online as like "finding other X-Men." Another compared their campaign, which involved youth from many different backgrounds, to the Justice League. A third suggested that posting a video on YouTube in which he proclaimed himself "proud" and "undocumented" had parallels to the parallels to the experience of Spider-Man, who had removed his mask on national television during Marvel's Civil Wars story line. A graphic created for an online recruitment campaign used the image of Wolverine to suggest what kind of hero youth volunteers might aspire to become.

On the one hand, we might read these various deployments of the superheroes as illustrating the trends Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) describes: groups promoting social change are tapping the affective and imaginative properties of popular culture to inspire a more intense connection with their supporters. In this issue, Jonathan Gray shows similar appropriations of images from Star Wars and a range of other popular media franchises during labor rights protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Gray argues that such images (which have also been widely associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement) proliferate because popular culture, especially blockbuster franchises, constitutes a common reference point (shared between fans and more casual consumers) within an otherwise diverse and fragmented coalition of protestors and observers. Gray stresses the morale and community-building work performed through the remixing of popular culture for those gathered in an icy Wisconsin winter to express their support for collective bargaining. Zimmerman (forthcoming) also suggests that the Dream activists' use of pop culture references might be understood as part of a larger strategy to signal their assimilation into American culture. Given how much contemporary speech of all kinds is full of snarky pop culture references, it is not surprising that such references are also reshaping our political rhetoric, especially as campaigns seek to speak to young people who have famously felt excluded from traditional campaigns and have often been turned off by inside-the-beltway language. Buffy the Vampire Slayer goes to Washington!

Yet as the epigraph from Duncombe (this issue) suggests, such popular culture references also reflect the lived experiences of activists who also are fans, whether understood in the casual sense of someone who feels a strong emotional connection to a particular narrative or in the more active sense of someone who has participated in a fan community or engaged in transformative practices. Civil rights leaders in the 1960s deployed biblical allusions because part of what they shared were meaningful experiences within black church congregations. Zimmerman's Dream activists referenced superheroes because reading and discussing comics was part of their everyday lives as young people, because these references helped them think through their struggles, because they offer such vivid embodiments of heroic conflicts and deep commitments. Unlike Perry, who had only a faint recollection of Superman's mythology and acknowledged that he was no longer actively reading comics, these allusions to superhero comics were apt rather than opportunistic, grounded in a deep appreciation of who these characters are and how their stories have evolved over time. That is, they show the kinds of mastery we associate with fans. Here, we see what Duncombe describes as the fan within the activist.

However, we can push the idea of fan activism one step farther: by now, the capacity of fan communities to quickly mobilize in reaction to a casting decision or a threat of cancellation has been well established, going back to the now-legendary letter-writing campaign in the 1960s that kept Star Trek on the air. Fan groups have also had a long history of lending their support to the favorite causes of popular performers and producers, or more generally working in support of charity. Some slash fans, for example, have been motivated to march in gay rights parades, raise money for AIDS research and awareness, or, more recently, work in support of marriage equality. Fans have rallied to challenge attempts to regulate the Internet, restrict their deployment of intellectual property, or censor their content. For example, in this issue, Alex Leavitt and Andrea Horbinski trace the responses of Japanese otaku, involved in the creation of dôjinshi (underground comics), to metropolitan Tokyo ordinance Bill 156, which they perceived as an attempt to curtain their artistic freedom.

More recent efforts (such as Racebending, the Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, the Nerdfighters) deploy these same strategies and tactics to support campaigns for social justice and human rights, inspiring their supporters to move from engagement within participatory culture to involvement in political life. Fan activism of the kinds we've known about for years models many effective approaches for using social media to create awareness and mobilize supporters--tactics now being adopted by even traditional charities and activist organizations as they adapt to a networked society.

All of this suggests the urgent need for scholars to explore more fully the many different potential relationships between fandom and political life, since fan studies as a research paradigm has something vital to contribute to larger considerations of the relationship between participatory culture and civic engagement. Fan studies has long depicted fandom as a site of ideological and cultural resistance to the heteronormative and patriarchal values often shaping mass media. Such work is and remains highly valuable as we seek to understand the place of fandom in contemporary culture, but our focus here pushes beyond abstract notions of cultural resistance to focus on specific ways that fan culture has affected debates around law and public policy. Many fans have resisted efforts to bring politics into fandom, seeing their fan activities as a release from the pressures of everyday life, or preferring the term charity rather than the more overtly political term activism to describe their pro-social efforts.

Our goal is not to instrumentalize fandom, not to turn what many of us do for fun into something more serious; fandom remains valuable on its own terms as a set of cultural practices, social relationships, and affective investments, but insofar as a growing number of fans are exploring how they might translate their capacities for analysis, networking, mobilization, and communication into campaigns for social change, we support expanding the field of fan studies to deal with this new mode of civic engagement.

Political participation and fan activism

This issue's two editors are part of the Civic Paths Project research group, housed in the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California. This group has partnered with the Spencer and MacArthur foundations to try to document new forms of political participation that are affecting the lives of young people. Our work is part of a larger research network that is trying to develop a model for understanding what is being called participatory politics. Through our internal discussions, we had begun to identify the concept of fan activism as central to addressing larger questions about what might motivate young people, who are often described as apathetic, to join civic and political organizations. We had located a core body of scholarship, such as the work of van Zoonen (2005), which examined how the playful, affective, and fantasy aspects of fandom were starting to inform political discourse, or the work of Earl and Kimport (2009), which discussed fan online campaigns as part of a larger exploration of what networked politics might look like, or the work of Daniel Dayan (2005), which debated the similarities and differences between audiences and publics. We had already identified some powerful examples of how fan-based groups had helped support civic learning and had developed resources and practices that could quickly mobilize supporters behind emergencies, charities, or human rights campaigns.

We knew that there must be many more examples out there. Still, after we released the call for papers, we were blown away by the range of submissions we received from all over the world, describing other examples of fan activism in practice, debating why calls for fan participation sometimes yield spectacular results and other times fall flat, contesting the borders of fan activism, speculating about its contributions to the public sphere, and making important distinctions between top-down celebrity-run models and bottom-up participatory ones. As you will see, this issue is overflowing with cutting-edge work that takes fans seriously as political agents and that draws on a range of different theories of citizenship and democracy to explain what happens when fans act as citizens. Examples here encompass a wide variety of fandoms--Harry Potter, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Colbert Report, comic books, pop music, and Bollywood.

Essays in this issue

The Civic Paths team is well represented here, with a cluster of three essays offering multiple and complimentary frames for discussing fan activism, and two other contributors (Ritesh Mehta and Alex Leavitt) are active group members. Taking a deep dive into the existing literature around cultural and political participation, Melissa M. Brough and Sangita Shresthova provide an overview of core debates surrounding fan activism, including the diverse forms that participation may take, the tension between resistance and participation as competing models, the value of affect and content worlds, and the criteria by which we might measure such campaigns' success and sustainability. They argue that the study of fan activists may make a significant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates about citizenship and political engagement.

Henry Jenkins maps the history of fan-based activism, providing a context for understanding the Harry Potter Alliance, perhaps the most highly visible of the new generation of fan activist groups. Jenkins defines fan activism as "forms of civic engagement and political participation that emerge from within fan culture itself, often in response to the shared interests of fans, often conducted through the infrastructure of existing fan practices and relationships, and often framed through metaphors drawn from popular and participatory culture" (¶1.8). By exploring the concept of "cultural acupuncture," a phrase coined by HPA's founder, Andrew Slack, Jenkins explores how fannish borrowings from J. K. Rowling's fictions inspire and inform the group's diverse interventions (from an initial focus on human rights and genocide in Darfur to more recent campaigns pushing Warner Bros. to tie their chocolate contracts to fair trade principles).

Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Christine Weitbrecht, and Chris Tokuhama share some of the results of Civic Path's extensive fieldwork, interviewing young participants from the Harry Potter Alliance and Invisible Children, the latter a San Diego-based human rights organization that deploys various forms of participatory culture to motivate high school and college students to become more aware of how Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has kidnapped and conscripted child soldiers. Tracing the trajectories by which these young people become more deeply involved in these efforts, the authors suggest the importance of shared media experiences, rich content worlds, and a desire to help in changing how young people see themselves as political agents. From an initial focus on fan activism, the Civic Paths project has expanded the scope of its research to consider the participatory culture practices associated with Dream Act activism, the efforts of college-aged libertarians, the work of the Nerd Fighters and Imagine Better, and the political and cultural activities of Muslim American youth, each offering models for understanding the cultural and political factors affecting the lives of contemporary American young people.

Ashley Hinck extends this special issue's consideration of the Harry Potter Alliance, drawing on core concepts from the literature of social movements and the public sphere. Focusing primarily on their campaign around Darfur, she argues that the HPA taps into the world of Hogwarts to construct what Hinck calls a "public engagement keystone," defined here as a "touchpoint, worldview, or philosophy that makes other people, actions, and institutions intelligible" (¶4.6). The fact that Harry Potter is so widely read, known, and loved not only by hard-core fans but by many who are not part of fandom makes it a useful resource for bridging the two, helping to revitalize public discourse around human rights concerns in Africa. Lili Wilkinson also explores the value of content worlds from popular culture in facilitating new kinds of political interactions, in this case through an application of Foucault's notion of heterotopia to understanding the links between John Green's young adult novel Paper Towns and his involvement in the Nerdfighters, an informal network of young people who use social media and video blogging to "reduce world suck." Though coming from different theoretical backgrounds, Kligler-Vilenchik et al., Hinck, and Wilkinson all converge around the importance of reimaging the world through shared fantasies.

Another central strand running through the discussion has to do with the differences between efforts of celebrities (authors such as John Green, pop stars such as Hong Kong's Ho Denise Wan See, cult television actors such as Gillian Anderson, filmmakers such as Kevin Smith, television show runners such as Joss Whedon, and comedians such as Stephen Colbert) to mobilize their fans around their pet causes and more grassroots efforts by fans to draw resources from popular culture to help fuel their own efforts at social change. A group like Nerdfighters straddles the line between the two--they are partially a response to the ongoing cultural productions of the brothers John and Hank Green (as Wilkinson suggests) but also a much more open-ended, participatory space, where anyone who wants to claim the nerdfighter identity can produce media and rally support behind his or her own ideas about what might constitute a better society. Lucy Bennett offers a critical review of the literature surrounding celebrity-based activism, exploring how such causes often take off because of the sense of intimacy the stars create with their following. Bethan Jones challenges a tradition of research that has tended to pathologize the parasocial relations between media fans and celebrities by describing the ways that X-Files cast member Gillian Anderson was able to inspire her fans to raise money for various charities. Tanya R. Cochran examines the efforts of Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Angel, Dollhouse) to use his blog to increase awareness about sexual violence against women. Cochran sees Whedon's promotion of feminism as consistent with the focus on strong female characters across his television series, reinforcing the themes that draw fans to his properties in the first place.

The idea that the personality of celebrities, as much as the themes of popular fictions, may shape what issues fan activists embrace (and in this case, which issues generate little or no response) is further explored in Tom Phillips's exploration of the failed attempt by Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma) at stimulating fans to write letters to Southwest Airlines when the filmmaker was removed from his flight because he was viewed as "too fat to fly." Although the incident sparked online conversations around "corporate practice, body image, and consumer rights" (¶0.1), Smith's fans were not able to cohere around a strategy for exerting pressure on the airline. Cheuk Yi Lin explores why a sexually ambiguous pop star in Hong Kong has offered fans new language and images to represent their own erotic identities, but her queer fans have not coalesced into institutional politics around the rights of sexual minorities. Any urge toward more overtly political responses are dampened both by the cultural traditions of Hong Kong and by the institutional structures surrounding the fandom.

Although the first wave of research has stressed the potentials for fan activism, such practices are still relatively rare, with most forms of fandom stopping at the level of creative expression and not translating into collective action. For this reason, studies such as those by Phillips and Lin, which help us to understand the constraints on fan activism, may prove as useful in the long term as those studies which document successful models for translating fan investments into social change. Further challenging a utopian view of fan activism, Sun Jung explores antifandom around the K-Pop star Tablo, showing how some fan discourse may incorporate intense nationalism and even racism, even as other groups actively and productively challenge these discourses.

Contributing to van Zoonen's notion of the entertained citizen, several articles engage the direct connection between the political sphere (as traditionally defined) and participatory cultures. Andreas Jungherr investigates the German federal elections in 2009, arguing that citizen use of new media platforms and practices challenges the candidates' top-down communication practices. Contrasting design and deployment of such strategies across the German political spectrum, Jungherr finds that the participatory possibilities of emerging political practices vary depending on ideology. Jungherr concludes that the more liberal German Social Democrats (SPD) were more successful in designing an online environment that supported grassroots participation than the German conservative party (CDU). In the United States, The Colbert Report, a satirical late-night television program featuring Stephen Colbert, a character who is a parody of conservative media personalities, further blurs the lines between politics and entertainment. Marcus Schulzke shows how the program encouraged audiences to remix content and otherwise manipulate the words and images of political figures in ways that foster critical media literacies. By now, the idea that young Americans are as apt to learn about the political system through such news-comedy programs as from traditional journalism has become commonplace, while the program producers have sought to link creative expression and political participation to what it means to be a fan of their shows.

The simultaneously transnational and local dimensions of fan activism are another strand that runs through this issue. With examples of fan activism that include South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, Australia, and India, the essays in this issue expand the transnational dimensions of fan activism. These examples highlight some of the similarities between various instances and discussions of fan activism (including the role of communities and content worlds, catalyzing moments, and challenges to sustained mobilization), but we are also acutely sensitive to the local dimensions and specifications of these mobilizations. In sharp contrast to the United States, where we are constantly working to establish participatory culture links to the political sphere, Aswin Punathambekar aptly observes that the connection between participatory culture and politics is "not news to anyone in India." Punathambekar goes even further, observing that the struggle in India is to, in fact, demonstrate the "ordinariness of participatory culture." Complementing this observation, and using a public protest inspired by the a Bollywood film to demonstrate his argument, Ritesh Mehta proposes "flash activism" as a crucial element of India's civil society.

Kony 2012

The power and challenges of activism through fanlike engagement with content worlds came into sharp focus with Invisible Children's Kony 2012 campaign, an effort to increase public awareness of the human rights violations and genocide conducted by a Ugandan warlord. At the time of writing, the 30-minute Kony 2012 film released at 12 PM on March 5, 2012, has topped 76 million views on YouTube to become one of the most viewed and fastest-spreading videos in YouTube history. In The Daily Show's coverage of Kony 2012 on March 12, 2012, host Jon Stewart sets up the popularity of the film by saying, "This guy Kony is probably dropping some sick beats." The show cuts to an excerpt from Kony 2012 in which Jason Russell's voice describes the war crimes committed by the LRA set to images of what we gather are victims of those atrocities. We now cut back to a shocked Jon Stewart who goes on to exclaim, "So a thirty-minute video on child soldiers has gone viral--how popular can this thing be? I am sure it's not teenage girl sings song about day of the week hot." The show cuts to mainstream news media coverage of Kony 2012 focused on its extraordinary reach.

Given this almost overwhelming visibility, the film--and with it Invisible Children as an organization--was the subject of sharp debate. In the following days, IC's financials, their activities in Uganda, and their support of military action to "bring Joseph Kony to justice" were examined, debated, and critiqued ad nauseam in news media, through discussion forums, and on IC's own public Facebook page. The importance of these issues notwithstanding, these debates have by and large failed to recognize why the IC has been so incredibly spreadable (to borrow Henry Jenkins's term). Yes, the film is very well edited, and yes, its message, "make Kony famous," is compelling. But as Henry Jenkins (2012) points out, the success of the Kony 2012 YouTube campaign owes much to the fanlike support IC has built around its films over its past eight years of existence. In asking their supporters to reach out to a range of celebrities and policy makers who have a high level of visibility through social media, the organization also tapped into the desire of fans to see their favorites take a stand on issues that matter to them. With Kony 2012, IC activated this supporter base, which then willingly, strategically, and enthusiastically tweeted, posted, and then reposted the film to set its phenomenal spread in motion. They supported it with such fervor that they surpassed IC's goal of getting 500,000 views by the end of 2012 within a few hours.

IC and its supporters were caught off guard by the barrage of criticism levied at Kony 2012. Some, such as Ethan Zuckerman (2012), have suggested that the rapid spread of the video was a consequence of its simplification of complex political issues, wondering how online networks might be deployed to further complicate and nuance the frames that it proposes. As Civic Paths researcher Lana Swartz (2012) suggests, IC focused more on having their media be spreadable (widely circulated) rather than drillable (open to deeper investigation). For example, before Kony 2012, few IC supporters were encouraged to actively seek out more information about the Lord's Revolutionary Army, the militia that Kony heads. Instead, they were generally content with carefully replicating the accurate but somewhat simplistic narrative they received through IC's media. Fans of many media franchises have sought to drill deeper into their content worlds, trying to encapsulate everything that was known about what happened on the island in Lost or expanding the story line through fan fiction writing projects. In this way, fandom's search for hidden depths in seemingly simple texts offers an alternative model for how a group like IC might achieve the more nuanced framing Zuckerman sought and might give their rank-and-file members greater skills at parsing competing truth claims made about what is happening on the ground in Uganda.

In our call for submissions, we set out to understand how the imaginative practices supported by fandom, at times facilitated by digital media, may inform civic and political mobilization and how we may rethink our understanding of engagement in the civic and political spheres through the lens of fandom. The articles included in this issue not only exceed these objectives, but they also point to the extreme timeliness of this endeavor. From undocumented superheroes to humanitarian assistance in the name of Harry Potter, fandom clearly has a lot to teach us about activism in the age of social media and participatory culture.

5. Acknowledgments

Based at the University of Southern California, the Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project (MAPP) is part of Civic Paths Project. The project gratefully acknowledges support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) and the Spencer Foundation.

We thank the authors in this issue, whose original work makes TWC possible; the peer reviewers, who freely provide their time and expertise; the editorial team members, whose engagement with and solicitation of material is so valuable; and the production team members, who transform rough manuscripts into publishable documents.

The following people worked on TWC No. 10 in an editorial capacity: Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova (guest editors); Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (editors); Anne Kustritz, Patricia Nelson, and Suzanne Scott (Symposium); and Louisa Stein (Review).

The following people worked on TWC No. 10 in a production capacity: Rrain Prior (production editor); Beth Friedman, Shoshanna Green, and Mara Greengrass (copyeditors); Wendy Carr, Kristen Murphy, and sunusn (layout); and Kallista Angeloff, Amanda Georgeanne Michaels, Carmen Montopoli, and Vickie West (proofreaders).

TWC thanks the journal project's Organization for Transformative Works board liaison, Francesca Coppa. OTW provides financial support and server space to TWC but is not involved in any way in the content of the journal, which is editorially independent.

TWC thanks all its board members, whose names appear on TWC's masthead, as well as the additional peer reviewers who provided service for TWC No. 10: Katherine Chen, Bertha Chin, Matthew Costello, Ashley Hinck, Ian Hunter, Alex Jenkins, Jeffrey Jones, Rachael Joo, Deborah Kaplan, Flourish Klink, Michael Koulikov, Bingchun Meng, Christopher Moreman, Nele Noppe, Amy Shuman, Fred Turner, Emily Wills, and Ethan Zuckerman.

Note

1. These quotes are excerpted from interviews carried out by Arely Zimmerman for the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics Project between December 2010 and July 2011. Institutional review board approval was secured for this research.

Works cited

Andrae, Thomas. 1987. "From Menace to Messiah: The History and Historicity of Superman," in American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives, edited by Donald Lazare. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Appelo, Tom. 2011. "Superman Renounces US Citizenship, as Warners, DC Comics Bids for Global Audiences." Hollywood Reporter, April 28.

Dayan, Daniel. 2005. "Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists: Genealogy, Obstetrics, Audiences and Publics." In Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere, edited by Sonia Livingstone, 43-76. London: Intellect.

Earl, Jennifer, and Katrina Kimport. 2009. "Movement Societies and Digital Protest: Fan Activism and Other Nonpolitical Protest Online." Sociological Theory 27:220-43. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9558.2009.01346.x.

Engle, Gary. 1987. "What Makes Superman So Darned American?" In Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend, edited by Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle. Cleveland, OH: Octavia.

Jenkins, Henry. 2012. "Contextualizing #Kony2012: Invisible Children, Spreadable Media, and Transmedia Activism." Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 12. http://henryjenkins.org/2012/03/contextualizing_kony2012_invis.html.

Perry, Alexander. 2011. "The Immigrant Superman." Arte Y Vida Chicago, September 1.

Swartz, Lana. 2012. "Invisible Children: Transmedia, Storytelling, Mobilization." Working Paper, March 11.

van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2005. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield.

Well, Dan. 2011. "Candidates' Favorite Super Hero: Superman Chosen by Four," Newsmax, December 29.

Zimmerman, Arely. Forthcoming. DREAM Case Project Report. Media Activism and Participatory Politics Project, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Zuckerman, Ethan. 2012. "Unpacking Kony 2012." My Heart's in Accra, March 8.

Videos from Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations

Sometimes it's easy, sometime's its hard. We've had ongoing success in building a community around the Future of Entertainment Consortium's west coast event, Transmedia Hollywood, which is jointly produced each year through a collaboration between University of Southern California and University of California-Los Angeles (or as they would put it, University of California-Los Angeles and University of Southern California). But, this year's conference seemed to be under some kind of black cloud. We never have had so much difficulty lining up speakers, so much last minute shuffling of presenters. On top of that, the event will be known as the year without Henry, since I ended up in the hospital on the eve of the event, ended up missing most of the day as I fought my way through the bureaucracy to get released. And, then, we faced epic delays getting the videos out to the world.

Well, the videos are finally here and, despite the struggles, we are still very proud of what we were able to produce -- the speakers are, as always, lively and thought provoking, a rich mix of academics and folks from many different sectors of the entertainment industry, and the content remains timely, capturing some of the key transitions shaping the entertainment industry today and bringing an ever stronger transnational focus to the mix, as we are connecting more and more with folks creating transmedia content around the world.

With the growth of transmedia and creative industries/production studies focused classes at universities around the world, we hope these videos will prove to be important resources for use in the classroom or to assist researchers who would not otherwise have access to insider perspectives within the media industries.

Above all, enjoy! And if you find something interesting, help us spread the word.

Transmedia Hollywood 3: Rethinking Creative Relations

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 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 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.

Once the dominant player 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.

Moderator: Denise Mann, UCLA

Panelists:

Nick Childs, Executive Creative Director, Fleishman Hillard

Jennifer Holt, co-Director, Media Industries Project, UCSB

Lee Hunter, Global Head of Marketing, YouTube

Jordan Levin, CEO, Generate

In countries with strong state support for media production, alternative forms of transmedia are taking shape. How has transmedia fit within the effort of nation-states to promote and expand their creative economies?

Moderator: Laurie Baird, Strategic Consultant - Media and Entertainment at Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology.

Panelists:

Jesse Albert, Producer & Consultant in Film, Television, Digital Media, Live Events & Branded Content

Morgan Bouchet, Vice-President, Transmedia and Social Media, Content Division, Orange

Christy Dena, Director, Universe Creation 101

Sara DIamond, President, Ontario College of Art and Design University

Mauricio Mota, Chief Storytelling Officer, Co-founder of The Alchemists

A new generation of media makers are taking art out of the rarefied world of crumbling art-house theaters, museums, and galleries and putting it back in the hands of the masses, creating immersive, interactive, and collaborative works of transmedia entertainment, made for and by the people who enjoy it most.

Moderator: Denise Mann, UCLA.

Panelists:

Tara Tiger Brown, Freelance Interactive Producer/Product Manager

Mike Farah, President of Production, Funny Or DIe

Ted Hope, Producer/Partner/Founder, Double Hope Films

Sheila C. Murphy, Associate Professor, University of Michigan

By many accounts, the comics industry is failing. Yet, comics have never played a more central role in the entertainment industry, seeding more and more film and television franchises. What advantages does audience-tested content bring to other media? What do the producers owe to those die-hard fans as they translate comic book mythology to screen? And why have so many TV series expanded their narrative through graphic novels in recent years?

Moderator: Geoffrey Long, Lead Narrative Producer for the Narrative Design Team at Microsoft Studios.

Panelists:

Katherine Keller, Culture Vultures Editrix at Sequential Tart

Joe LeFavi, Quixotic Transmedia

Mike Richardson, President, Dark Horse Comics

Mark Verheiden, Writer (Falling Skies, Heroes)

Mary Vogt, Costume Designer (Rise Of The Silver Surfer, Men In Black)

For those of you who live on the East Coast, here's the latest news from Sam Ford, who is hard at work planning the next Futures of Entertainment conference:

We have just announced that FoE6 will be Friday, Nov. 9, and Saturday, Nov. 10, in the Wong Auditorium at MIT. Panels will tackle subjects such as the the ethics and politics of curation, corporate listening and empathy, "the shiny new object syndrome," new distribution models in a digital age, and rethinking copyright. We will also look specifically at innovations in storytelling and sports, in video games, in public media, and in civic media.

Information on the tentative schedule, as well as registration, is available here.

Performing Our "Collective Dreams": The Many Worlds of San Diego Comic-Con

So, after ten weeks of speaking and traveling across Europe, my wife and I have finally return to Los Angeles, more than a little road weary and jet-lagged, but eager to share some of the new contacts and insights I've gained through my travel. I hope to share some of my travel experiences before much longer, but in the meantime, I am trying to catch up with a range of other things which have happened since I have been away. Today, I wanted to share with you an article which I wrote about the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con for Boom: A Journal of California, which has finally come out in print -- just in time for Comic-Con 2012. I am not in San Diego this week -- it would have been too much to tackle after my long trip -- but half the people I know are there, so I figured I would prioritize sharing this article with my regular readers. If you would like to read a PDF of the article as it appears in the magazine, including a range of eye-catching photographs, you can find it here:

Boom0202 04

View more documents from amandafo

And you can find the issue itself on the newstand, where-ever quality publications like Boom may be sold in your community.

"Super-Powered Fans": The Many Worlds of San Diego Comic-Con

by Henry Jenkins, written for Boom: A Journal of California

In an "Only at..." moment, the New German Cinema auteur Werner Herzog made a surprise appearance at the 2011 Comic-Con International event. Popping up during a panel focused on the Discovery Channel's Dinosaur Revolution series, Herzog pontificated in a Bavarian accent about how the four-day geekfest represented an epic acting out of the public's "collective dreams." We all applauded with delight as Herzog, known for his art films and documentaries, bubbled with boyish enthusiasm about fandom's ritual practices and shared beliefs as breathlessly as he might have talked about going up the Amazon River to film Fitzcaraldo, or in search of prehistoric art for his more recent Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

A few years ago, another documentary filmmaker, Morgan Spurlock, found himself in conversation with comic book legend Stan Lee at one of Comic-Con's cocktail parties. The pair got excited about possibilities for documenting the festivities. Spurlock's agent connected him to another client in attendance, Firefly mastermind Joss Whedon. Soon, famed blogger Harry Knowles (Ain't It Cool News), also in San Diego for the conference, had joined the dialogue. The team shot a film (Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope) at the 2010 convention, and it started playing on the film festival circuit in the fall of 2011. Further, a photo book based on the documentary was selling on the Comic-Con exhibit floor in 2011 with the tagline, "See anyone you know?" For more and more of us, the answer is hell yes! (For the record, mine is one of hundreds of snapshots on the book's cover.)

If you have a single geeky bone in your body (and who doesn't these days?), you have probably heard about Comic-Con, which is held each year at the San Diego Convention Center. Entertainment Weekly does an annual Comic-Con cover story. The Los Angeles Times does a special insert. And trade publications like The Hollywood Reporter also provide extensive coverage. However, for the most part, these reporters rarely get outside Hall H (where most of the film-related programming is held) or Ballroom 20 (where the high-profile television events take place). Mainstream journalists are focused on what the big studios and A-list celebrities are doing. If they do get beyond that, they typically focus on the spectacular costumes. Both are part of what makes this gathering so interesting, but there's much more to the Comic-Con story.

Comic-Con has a history, culture, economy and politics all its own, one we can only understand if we go beyond the celebrities, spoilers, and costumes and explore some of

the many different functions the con performs for the diverse groups that gather there. Comic-Con International is press junket, trade show, collector's mart, public forum, academic conference, and arts festival, all in one.

I have been active in this world for almost three decades. Students who take my classes about comics, games, transmedia entertainment, and science fiction have sometimes called me a professor of "Comic-Con Studies." But, compared to those who have been attending the Con for four decades, I'm still a relative newcomer; the 2011 festival was only my fourth time at the event.

I came to Comic-Con, first and foremost, as a fan--wanting, like everyone else, to see the artists who create the pop culture fantasies I love. By my second year, I was there as an academic, speaking as part of the event's track of scholarly programming and as part of a larger movement to legitimatize "comic studies" as an emerging field. By the third year, I was asked to participate in industry panels, reflecting the degree to which my research on fan cultures and transmedia entertainment has attracted interest from Hollywood. And last year I was there as an embedded journalist or native guide (pick your favorite metaphor), intending to help Boom's readers understand what Comic-Con was all about.

Comic-Con is the center of the trends I describe in my book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. It's the meeting point between a transmedia commercial culture and a grassroots participatory culture, the place where an uncertain Hollywood goes when it wants to better understand its always unstable relations with its audiences. Comic-Con is a gathering of the tribes, a crossroads for many different communities drawn together by their shared love of popular mythology. What follows are a series of snapshots of the many different Comic-Cons, all functioning inside the San Diego Convention Center every year, simultaneously. Each of these vignettes from Comic-Con 2011 tells us something about how we produce and engage with entertainment media in a networked culture.

Comic-Con as Invasion

Organizers estimated that almost 140,000 people attended the 2011 event. To put this into some perspective, that's just a little under the population of Pasadena (147k) or, perhaps more to the point, of Hollywood (146k). Read through a different lens, Comic-Con attendance figures equal roughly half the number of people the federal government estimates have full or part-time employment in the motion picture industry. And Comic-Con's population is roughly one tenth of the population of San Diego itself.

For those five days, fans own the San Diego Convention Center, whose futuristic architecture--all pristine white and glistening metal--mirrors some cheesy 1970s-era science fiction flick (say, Logan's Run). More than that, the fans own downtown San Diego. Imagine this San Diego scene I saw unfold last year: The landscape is dotted with giant inflatable Smurfs, a full-scale reconstruction of South Park, and a building wrapped in Batman promotional material. The 7-Eleven in front of me has posters depicting Steampunk versions of Slurpee machines, courtesy of Cowboys and Aliens. Over there, sitting at a table outside the Spaghetti Factory, are Batman and Wolverine, united by a shared taste for black leather--never mind that they come from fundamentally different universes ("You're from DC; I'm from Marvel"). An armada of Pedi-cabs are passing by, ferrying fans anywhere they want to go. One of the cabs you see pass is a replica of the throne from Game of Thrones (a project from HBO which soon took on mythic status at the event, as I repeatedly heard people say, "Did you see...?" and "Did you hear about...?").

As I walk ahead, every congestion point in the foot traffic, such as the crossing of the trolley tracks, has been transformed into a gathering place for marketers trying to pass out swag and fliers. As we approach the convention center, we are accosted by Ninja Turtles and Captain Americas, by sexy booth babes in fur bikinis, and--perhaps most effectively--by a bevy of retro Pan Am stewardesses giving away vintage-style powder blue flight bags and walking in unison, having mastered the wave and the twirl with stylized femininity.

Comic-Con as Homecoming Party

Science fiction and comics fans have been holding gatherings at least since the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939 (an ambitious name for a group which at the time probably didn't draw many from outside the Brooklyn area). Some cons are focused around a single media property--historically Star Trek or Star Wars, these days more often Harry Potter. Others are focused on a genre, such as comic books or anime or role-playing games. Many people at Comic-Con attend these other, more specialized, more local gatherings throughout the year, but they all come home to San Diego. Thus, Comic-Con has become the Mega-con, the Con to end all Cons, the gathering place for fans of all varieties (and yes, now, from all over the planet).

Comic-Con started as a small regional comics convention in 1970 with 170 attendees. The organizers sought to broaden their base by including other related interests, including the Society for Creative Anachronisms, The Mythopoetic Society, and, later, gamers and anime fans. By 1980, the convention attracted 5,000 attendees. This was the heyday of comics collecting, when vintage comics discovered in old attics were being avidly sought by wealthy adult collectors. The comics "bubble" eventually popped: vintage comics were valuable because so many mothers had thrown them away, creating artificial scarcity. But by then, genre entertainment had moved from B movies and midnight movies to major Hollywood summer blockbuster status, and the Con kept undergoing growth spurts--15,000 in 1990; 48,000 in 2000; and 130,000 in 2010.The Con so swamped the available hotel rooms in 2011 that my wife and I ended up renting a dorm room at a local college miles away, spending the five days of our stay sleeping in cramped bunk beds.

Today, one of my big ambivalences about Comic-Con is how much it now emphasizes fans as consumers rather than fans as cultural producers. There's a small alleyway tucked in the back corners where fan clubs have booths to attract new members. There are panels where fan podcasts are being recorded, where fan fiction is being discussed, and where costumers trade tips with each other. For the most part, however, Comic-Con International puts the professionals in the center and the subcultural activities the conference was based on at the fringes.

Comic-Con as Publicity Event

Today's television has moved from an appointment-based medium where viewers watch programs at scheduled times to an engagement-based medium where people seek out content through many different media (from Hulu and iTunes to boxed sets of Dvds) on their own time and as their interests dictate. Today's Comic-Con is shaped by the idea of the fan not as a collector, but as an influencer. Most Comic-Con attendees are "early adopters" of communication technologies; they have blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc., and know how to use them. These fans have become the leading edge of the studio's promotional campaigns. Industry research shows that Twitter hashtags represent one of the best predictors of box office success, both because the kinds of folks who see movies on the opening weekend are more often likely to be the type to tweet about their activities, and because these grassroots intermediaries help to inform and shape the ticket-buying habits of more casual audience members.

San Diego seems to be the right place--just close enough to Los Angeles to draw A-list celebrities, just far enough that it makes for a great road trip for those feeling claustrophobic in the media capital. And it's the right time, in the midst of the summer movie madness and less than a month before the launch of the fall television season, to draw maximum attention from the media industry. This is the one time of the year when many Hollywood types directly interface with their audiences, and probably the only place where they are doing so on the fans' terms. Their mission is to "break through the clutter."

Ironically, of course, Comic-Con is perhaps the most media saturated environment you can imagine! Hollywood studios and television networks have to pull out all stops if they want to play, from clips of previously unreleased footage or surprise appearances by crowd-pleasing celebrities to displays of costumes, props, and sets on the floor of Exhibit Hall. In 2010, Marvel introduced the entire cast of the forthcoming Avengers film. In 2011, Andrew Garfield, the new Spider-Man, created a stir--making his grand entrance wearing a "Spidey" Halloween costume, pretending to be a fan asking a question from the floor mic.

My family, like many fans, prepare for Comic-Con as if it were a military operation. By the time we get there, we've mapped and charted our priorities. We know what we most want to see. And we have strategies for the best way to get into the highly attended event. You usually have to awaken and get in line hours early or, more risky, find a point in the schedule which is not a big draw to grab a seat and hold it through a parade of lower-profile panels. The organizers don't "flush" the theater between events, so you can defend your squatting rights. In Ballroom 20, at least, you can get a bathroom pass and come back in without waiting in line.

These practices have their downsides and upsides. Some events draw apathetic and distracted audiences while the true blue fans are locked outside. But attendees get exposed to media properties they might not otherwise encounter. This gives producers who are still struggling to find their audience a unique opportunity to win over new viewers. We lined up outside Ballroom 20, with the primary goal of seeing the Game of Thrones panel, and sat through Burn Notice, Covert Affairs, and Psyche sessions. And it's a good thing we did; more than 7,000 people were turned away from the Game of Thrones panel, presenting at Comic-Con for the first time this year.

A few years ago, the conference organizers were discouraging fans from tweeting about what they heard. Today, exclusivity and secrecy have given way to publicity. Now, Comic-Con's organizers are announcing hashtags (words or phrases preceded by # that allow Twitter users to find others talking about the same topics) in front of every panel. Many speakers are recruiting Twitter followers. And some networks are collaborating with Foursquare, all sure signs the "fan as influencer" paradigm is shaping their branding strategies. We were warned again and again not to tape the clips shown, but, this year, most of them got released in good quality formats to the leading science fiction blogs within days, if not hours, after the event.

Comic-Con as Jury

The myth, at least partially true, was that Comic-Con was key to the early success of such cult television series as Heroes, Lost, True Blood, and The Walking Dead, and that it also crushed the hopes of misguided movie efforts, such as Catwoman and Ang Lee's Hulk, both dead on arrival after negative Comic-Con response. However, Hollywood's fascination with the Comic-Con "bounce" has been deflated by the mediocre box office of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Tron, and Sucker Punch, huge buzz-makers at 2010 Comic-Con that failed to deliver months later. In response, some major studios (Warner Bros, Marvel, Disney, Dream Works and The Weinstein Company) opted not to present at the 2011 convention. By then, the prevailing wisdom was that Comic-Con fans will turn out opening weekend for the superhero blockbusters with or without big promotion at the event. On the other hand, genre television programs such as Grimm, Once Upon a Time, Alcatraz, Terra Nova, and Person of Interest require highly engaged viewers to draw in their friends and families week after week. And, in film, the real beneficiaries of Comic-Con have been lower budget, slightly off-beat, and smart genre films, such as District Nine, Monsters, Moon, Paul, or Attack The Block, few of which have been "hits" but most of which might not make it into the multiplex without Comic-Con mojo. In any case, the news that Hollywood was stepping back from Comic-Con turned out to be overstated; 2011 speakers included Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Kevin Smith, Guillermo Del Toro, Jon Favreau, Peter Jackson, and, yes, Werner Herzog.

Normally, I am exhausted by the time late afternoon comes at Comic-Con. The sensory bombardment (the buzz and crackle of massive television monitors, the smell of over-priced hotdogs and nachos, the constant shock of random encounters with people dressed like their favorite cartoon characters) is simply too intense to prolong. Having gotten up at the crack of dawn to wait in line for some high-profile event, by late afternoon parents are getting into red-faced fights with their children, couples seem to be in danger of breaking up, and people are slumped over on the buses, some snoring, others weeping, from the exhaustion.

We stayed late on Friday, hoping to get into a packed hall to watch the pilot of a television series, Locke and Key--a pilot which most fans knew in all likelihood would never reach the air. Fox commissioned this series based on the best-selling horror comics from Steven King's son, Joe Hill, who was recognized that weekend by the Eisner Awards as the best comics writer of the year. Fox decided not to add Locke and Key to their slate. The producers shared the pilot here in hopes of rallying fan support behind either airing it on another network or developing it straight-to-DVD. The pilot was remarkably faithful to the original graphic novel and respected the intelligence of comic book fans. (No wonder Fox didn't pick it up!) But the producer's efforts to rally fan support suggests just how much weight they believe this jury might play in shaping the fate of cult media properties.

By contrast, Grimm, a fairy-tale themed series that made it onto NBC's fall line-up, had trouble finding the love, despite a pedigree that includes top writers from Angel. The Comic-Con crowd snorted over one obvious plot device (a woman who keeps passing out every time she's about to deliver a key piece of information) and rustled their feet over abrupt shifts in tone and style. As my wife put it, Grimm "doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up." Some fans were already skeptical going into this event because Grimm and Once Upon a Time, both on the fall schedule, seemed so clearly derivative of a long-run Vertigo comics series, Fables. All of them explored the fantasy of storyland characters entering our contemporary reality.

Fans applauded politely when the lights rose, but everyone there knew this screening was, well, grim. (Grimm was picked up for a full season, but its ratings have been lackluster compared to the success of its rival, Once Upon a Time.) Contrary to what some producers might have told themselves, the Comic-Con crowd isn't fickle: it knows exactly what it wants from genre entertainment, and the producers had better deliver it or face our collective scorn.

Comic-Con as Consciousness-Raising Session

The popular vampire series Twilight's stars and producers opened the film program in 2011. Twilight's involvement in Comic-Con has been controversial, with picketers marching outside the theater in years past with signs proclaiming that "real vampires don't sparkle" and "Twi-hards, go home." Throughout the first half of the 20th century, science fiction and comics fandom were dominated by technologically inclined men. However, by the early 1960s, feminist writers like Ursula K. Le Guin or Joanna Russ were drawing more women to fan gatherings, and there have been high-profile conflicts around gender in fandom ever since. Go to some cons, and the attendees are overwhelmingly male. Others are overwhelmingly female. Comic-Con (in recent years at least) has felt a dramatic increase in female attendance that has brought with it some growing pains. The same year that a small number of male fans picketed the Twilight panel, for instance, people were passing out fliers about sexual harassment, suggesting uncertainty about how the fanboys and fangirls were going to interact.

In fact, there were huge numbers of female fans in line outside Ballroom 20--not teenyboppers wanting to hamster-pile Robert Pattison, not girlfriends of male fans, and not exhibitionists trying to see how much skin they could show (all stereotypes of female fans fostered by the news media). These were dedicated fans in their own right, pursuing their own desires and interests. And, by all reports, male fans this year were more worked up over DC's decision to re-launch and renumber all of their titles than about the presence or absence of Twilight fangirls. Comic-Con is featuring more and more women in its programming (including female producers and showrunners who are starting to impact genre entertainment), and they are often peppered by questions about how to survive in an industry still largely dominated by men.

Some have argued that Hollywood's discovery of Comic-Con has inspired the "rise of the fanboy" as a powerful influence on production decisions. The gendered language is purposeful since, apart from the Twilight conflicts, producers and journalists don't seem to have noticed that there are women gathering in San Diego now, too. How long before their tastes and interests become part of the equation, as the media industry seeks to court their most passionate and influential fans?

And something similar is starting to happen around race and ethnicity. Most fan gatherings are heavily Caucasian, while the few minorities in attendance gather by themselves on panels focused on why fandom is "so damn white." But, perhaps as a result of the Southern California location, Comic-Con is by far the most racially and ethnically diverse fan gathering in the country. If San Diego is where Hollywood sends its people to learn what the audience thinks, they encounter a multi-racial mix, often with strong views about the ways minorities get marginalized or stereotyped in popular media. In some ways, genre franchises, such as Lost, Heroes, The Matrix, and Star Trek have done a much better job including people of color than other genres. But they still lag behind an American population that is increasingly becoming a minority majority.

At a panel I attended on diversity and fandom, there was lots of discussion about the Racebending campaign launched by fans of The Last Airbender. These fans protested Hollywood's efforts to take an animated series known for its multicultural representations and make it into a live-action film with white actors cast in most major roles. The fans pushed back, using their online communication skills and partnering with traditional activist groups such as Media Action Network for Asian Americans, to educate their community about the history of "white-casting." They weren't successful at changing the casting decisions, but much of The Last Airbender coverage mentioned their protest, and there are many signs that Hollywood is now running gun-shy, backing off other recent casting decisions (Runaways, Akira) when fans and industry critics, including George Takai, call them out. Fans now represent an important force pushing the industry toward a fuller representation of what America looks like--fans as influencers in a different sense.

Comic-Con as Costume Party

If you've seen a photograph of Comic-Con, odds are that it showed some fan in a costume. Keep in mind that most of us don't dress up (or strip down) for the con. However, for those who do, seeing and being seen at Comic-Con is a big part of the fun.

Why do so many people wear costumes at Comic-Con? For the same reason people dress up in costumes at Carnival in Rio, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert. For that matter, why did you dress up for the office Halloween party last year? Because wearing red, blue, or green spandex frees us from what fans like to call our "mundane" roles and creates a festive environment. Herzog nailed it. Comic-Con is a field of dreams and wearing costumes transforms those "dreams" from something personal and private to something shared and public. Showing a pudgy midriff or pasty white skin amidst fur and feathers allows nerds (typically defined by their brains and not their bodies) to feel sexy. Donning cape and cowl allows children and adults to play together, strangers to find others with the same values, and fans to become micro-celebrities posing for pictures with other guests.

Watching all of these costumed characters creates a kind of intertextual vertigo; the more fanlore you know, the more you take pleasure in seeing incongruous juxtapositions. One of my favorite sightings of the weekend was a bevy of women dressed as Disney princesses ordering Bloody Marys at a mock-up of Fangtasia, the vampire bar from HBO's True Blood. And there were periodic meet-ups where characters from the same universes came together--twenty or so Princess Leia slave girls, an assembly of the Avengers which included someone dressed as Marvel mastermind Stan Lee, and a parade of characters from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Out on the streets, I even witnessed a chance encounter between a woman wearing a skin-tight bright blue latex Mystique costume (X-Men) chatting with an equally blue Na'vi from James Cameron's Avatar, suggesting their common identities as, pardon the pun, people of color.

In Japan, they call it cosplay, andevery weekend there are meet-ups of genre-themed cosplayers in Tokyo's YoYoGi Park. But the scope, scale, and diversity of what you can see here supersedes anything that's ever gone down at Harajuku Station.

Comic-Con as Networking Event

A high percentage of Hollywood insiders have emerged from the ranks of fandom. Kevin Smith, Guillermo Del Toro, Joss Whedon, and J. J. Abrams come back year after year because fans accept them as "one of us." Historically, most major science fiction writers published their first works in amateur fanzines. More and more stars and creators of cult films and television series have similar histories and would come to Comic-Con even if they weren't paid. Darren Criss, Glee's hot-stuff Blaine, was making YouTube videos performing Harry Potter songs only a year or two before joining the show.

Because they are all in San Diego for the weekend, industry insiders use the event to do what they do best--pass around business cards, buy each other lunch, and otherwise network. For the industry insiders and wannabes, the challenge is how to "dress for success" in this festive environment, how to hold onto professional standards while looking like you belong and are not simply a Comic-Con poseur, there just to cut deals. Of course, the other challenge is figuring out how to schedule business meetings so they don't conflict with the Doctor Who panel you really want to attend.

There's no question that Comic-Con represents a different kind of trade show environment for corporate networking. If you go to E3, say, you mostly end up talking to other game designers; at ShoWest, movie people; at the National Association of Broadcasters, television folks. But Comic-Con draws from all of the entertainment sectors. Thus, Comic-Con has become the common ground where transmedia deals get cut, yet another reason why it has gained greater importance in an era of media convergence.

Comic-Con as Marketplace

Sooner or later, everyone ends up in the Exhibit Hall, typically multiple times over the weekend. Sometimes it feels like all or most of the 140,000 attendees end up there at the same time. As one fan put it, Comic-Con is the closest thing to Christmas morning you are going to experience as an adult. Again, most media coverage highlights items which fit a mainstream conception of geek culture--ice trays which depict Han Solo in carbonite or sleeping bags which look like the inside of a Tauntaun (both of which, I admit, are pretty cool). But, if you noticed hipsters walking the streets of San Francisco or Los Angles in the fall dressed like contemporary versions of Peter Pan's Lost Boys in big furry hoods, it might be because they got such media attention at San Diego that summer. And Exhibit Hall is where all of the different communities can find "the stuff dreams are made of"--the otaku (fans of Japanese-made media); the connoisseurs of high-priced original comic book and animation art; the collectors of vintage toys and high-end action figures; the dealers in autographs; the furries (whose kink is dressing up like anthropomorphic animals). Many of these interests are so particular and so dispersed that it's hard to find what you're looking for in any given city. Perhaps you can track stuff down on eBay or Etsy, but many hope that it is all at Comic-Con.

For example, my tastes increasingly run toward retrofuturism, a fascination with older imaginings of the future. Steampunk represents one form of retrofuturism and is to Victorian science fiction what Goth is to Victorian fantasy and horror. Steampunk builds outward from the imaginings of Jules Verne and his contemporaries, constructing a technological realm which never existed, built with brass, stained glass, and mahogany. The Exhibit Hall offered everything from handcrafted lab equipment and goggles to high-end steampunk weapons (created by WETA, the New Zealand special effects house responsible for the Lord of the Rings movies.)

In a related vein, I dig mid-century modern images inspired by the "World of Tomorrow" offering at the 1939 World's Fair. I was especially drawn to booths which dealt with "paper"--old posters, comic strip pages, and other printed matter from the early part of the 20th century. More generally, I collect older forms of media--magic lanterns, stereoscopes, and the like. Somewhere in between lies a new project which has captured my imagination--the production and distribution of new low-fi music on old Victrola wax cylinders. Science fiction fans are increasingly drawn to the past, rather than the future, in their ongoing search for alternatives to the present, and you can find such merchandise on display in the Exhibit Hall.

Comic-Con as Life Support

Ironically, the least attended panels at Comic-Con are often those dealing with comics. Many people here love the content of comics, but many of them are not reading the comics themselves. At Comic-Con, both comics industry veterans and emerging talents often discuss their work in half-full rooms. And the massive waves of shoppers pushing their way through the Exhibit Hall often parted like the Red Sea when it came to the tables in Artists' Alley, which was really treated as Artists Ghetto. In 2011, many artists moved offsite, figuring they would see the same interested attendees and have more fun hanging out at a local tavern.

As a result of such apathy, the floppy monthly comic books my generation grew up reading may now be an endangered species. The major comics publishers have been absorbed by larger entertainment conglomerates--as Marvel is now a part of Disney and DC a part of Warner Bros.--which prop up the comics publishing ventures as a research and development wing to help the company incubate new media franchises. Cowboys and Aliens, the story goes, was published as a comic almost entirely because they wanted to see if it could build an audience before being turned into a feature film.

Yet many of the people who care about the survival of comics were gathered in San Diego, and there was lots of talk of "Comics without Borders." A few years ago, this phrase might have referred to the efforts of underground and alternative publishers to escape the constraints of the old Comics Code. Last year it referred to what happens after the bankruptcy of one of the two leading brick and mortar booksellers. Comics used to be available on spin racks in grocery and drug stores. In recent years, however, interested readers have had to seek them out, often stepping down into dark and dank basements where someone who looks and sounds like Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons comments on all of your purchase decisions. The publication of graphic novels and their distribution through chain bookstores brought comics out of hiding again, resulting especially in a dramatic increase of female readers. Now, so-called mainstream publishers (DC and Marvel) sell far fewer titles through comic book shops than the alternative publishers (such as DC's Vertigo offprint) sell through bookstores. And, curiously, Japanese manga outsell American comics by something like four to one in the U.S. market.

Everyone wanted to know what would happen to all of those casual and crossover readers now that Borders was closing operations. Some calmly suggested that they would simply cross the street to Barnes and Noble., Newly empowered, the Barnes and Noble chain is cutting more aggressive dealers with comics publishers. Meanwhile, DC and Marvel rolled out new strategies for increasing the availability of their titles for download on iPads and other digital platforms, a move which would increase their accessibility to fans but might further endanger the specialty stores for whom the big superhero titles constitute their bread and butter.

Meanwhile, there were gatherings of teachers and librarians who have been part of a larger movement to use comics to encourage young readers. The biggest growth in comics sales over the past few years has come from young adult or all ages titles, largely driven by sales to school and local libraries. Over the past few decades, the average age of the comics reader, much as with other print-based publications, was rising, threatening their industry's long-term viability. However, the success of comics in the library offers new hope for the next generation. So, if some seemed ready to hold a wake for comics, there were others who, mimicking Monty Python, protested that they were "not dead yet."

Comic-Con as Classroom

I had breakfast toward the end of the convention with a group of graduate students who were getting credit for attending and researching Comic-Con. This particular extension course has been run since 2007 by Matthew J. Smith from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, and attracts a diverse collection of students, all pursuing their own projects, using the con as their laboratory or field site. Kane Anderson, a stocky Performance Studies student with flaming red hair from U.C. Santa Barbara, , has spent the past two cons dressed in a range of skin-tight and brightly colored superhero costumes (Captain Marvel and Black Adam, mostly), trying to better understand what motivates the convention's cosplay. Melissa Miller, a Gothy gender studies and public communications student from Georgia State University, was back for a second year camping out with the "Twi-Moms," the mature Twilight fans, to better understand fandom's gender politics.

Throughout the event, I spotted different researchers interviewing people, taking field notes, and, in many cases, "going native" as they abandoned their research to chase after autographs. One of them was on a mighty quest to get Chris Evans to sign his Captain America shield; another was excited to get comic book uber-auteur Grant Morrison to fill out a questionnaire. One academic's artifact is another's swag. In fact, many of the young scholars were collecting gifts to carry back home to appease their restless thesis advisors.

Actually, some of their advisors were across the convention center attending events hosted by the Comic Arts Association, a professional organization for scholars researching and teaching about comics and graphic stories. Even as the comics industry is sputtering, there has been a spurt in college-level comic studies courses, much as previous generations had taken subjects in film appreciation. Inside this space, the big debates focused on whether comics studies should become its own discipline or whether comics-focused research should be integrated across everything from anthropology to

art history, from psychology to media studies. This track of academic programming attracted not only faculty and students but creators eager to think about their industry from a different perspective and fans hoping to learn more about the medium's history and aesthetics.

Comic-Con as Ritual

For the past few years, the formal programming at Comic-Con has ended with a sing-along screening of the musical episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Once More, With Feeling." However diverse they may be on other levels, a high percentage of Comic-Con attendees are fans of the works of Joss Whedon--Buffy, Angel, Firefly/Serenity, Dollhouse, Doctor Horrible's Singalong Blog, and the forthcoming Avengers movie. And Whedon, as well as others from his casts and crews, was highly visible throughout the convention. Consider all of the Buffy alum, in particular, who were prominently involved in the event: Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) was there promoting her new CBS series, Ringers; Anthony Head (Giles) was speaking on the Merlin panel and trying to lend his support to Grimm; Nathan Fillion (Caleb), now the star of Castle, was there talking one-on-one with his fans; Felicia Day (Vi) was showcasing the fifth season of her web-series, The Guild; and Seth Green (Oz) dropped by to talk up Robot Chicken. David Boreanaz (Angel) was supposed to be here, but the Bones panel got canceled. And Nicholas Brendon (Xander) came out in front of the sing-along screening and tried to remember the words to the song Anya and Xander sing in the episode. Think of this group as the Buffy diaspora.

In this context, "Once More, With Feeling" has attained near-mythic status--not only because of its genre-bending musical numbers but because it represents the last moment when the "Scooby Gang" was more or less together before the series "jumped the shark," according to many of its fans (myself among them). When Dawn, Buffy's kid sister, introduced the plot elements which would lead to the community's disintegration in the episode, she was booed. Everyone knew what was coming, but we all wanted to forestall it a few minutes more.

Many fan favorites center around themes of friendship, whether bonds between partners or a more expansive community fighting to save the universe. Fans use such stories to reflect on their own social connections, the bonds that bring them together as friends and as part of a subcultural community. For many of us, fandom is one of those places where "it gets better," where we find others who share our values and don't make fun of our passions.

We can share some of these same experiences now, year round, in cyberspace. But Comic-Con is the place where communities come together face-to-face, and thus anchor their relationships for the coming year. As Buffy ended, with friends going their separate ways, and as people filed out of the doors of the San Diego Convention Center, I felt a lump in my throat. But I knew that most of us would be back next year, "once more, with feeling."

Comic-Con is a microcosm of the dramatic changes transforming the U.S. entertainment industry.

As media options proliferate, attention is fragmenting and audience loyalty is declining. The entertainment industry depends on its fans like never before. As social media allows fans to connect with each other and actively spread the word about their favorites, fans are exerting an unprecedented impact on decisions regarding which films to finance and which series to put on the air. As more and more stories are being told across media platforms, Comic-Con is the crossroads among entertainment sectors. As comics publishing is struggling to survive, here is where its future will be determined. And, as Comic-Con's own population diversifies to include more women and minorities, this gathering becomes a vehicle through which they lobby for greater diversity within mainstream media.

That all of this takes place in such a giddy atmosphere, full of carnivalesque costumes and grand spectacle, only lubricates the social relations among these groups, making it easier to shed old roles and embrace new relationships. For those five days, the center of the U.S. entertainment industry is not Hollywood, but a few hundred miles south in San Diego.

Au Revoir: Heading to Europe

I will be coming soon to a European city near you (that is, assuming you live near a European city). As of today, my wife, Cynthia, and I am departing on a 2 1/2 month, 20 city, 11 country, lecture tour of Western Europe. I will be speaking to academics, journalists, policy makers, industry insiders, secondary educators, and the general public at various legs of the trip, sharing my ideas about spreadable media, civic media, fan activism, transmedia, new media literacies, fan studies, and comics studies, depending on the audience, both looking backward to some of my recent research projects (including the several books which will be published over the next six months or so) and forward to my new project (especially the work I want to do on comics, media history, and material culture.) Along the way, we will see many of the great cities and monuments of both the modern and classical world, most of them for the very first time. For those who want to follow along, here's the schedule of the stops on my tour: ay 1: Travel to Germany

May 2: Marburg, Germany

May 3: Göttingen, Germany

May 4-6: Frankfurt, Germany

May 7: Gießen, Germany

May 8: Stuttgart, Germany

May 9-13: Lisbon, Portugal

May 14-16 London, England

May 17:Nottingham, England

May 18: Sunderland, England

May 19: London, England

May 20-21: Dublin, Ireland

May 22-26: Paris, France

May 27-30: Madrid, Spain

May 31-June 2: Barcelona, Spain

June 3-7: Milan, Italy

June 8-10: Venice, Italy

June 11-12: Zurich, Switzerland

June 13:-16 Delmenhorst, Germany

June 17-19: Prague, Czech Republic

June 20-21: Budapest, Hungry

June 22-30:Bologna, Italy

July 1-11--vacationing in Rome, Italy; Athens, Greece; and Kea Islands,Greece

July 11: Travel Back to U.S.

People are asking what will be my home base. Home bases are for wimps. We are living out of our suit cases, moving city to city, and not looking back. Thanks to the enormous help of the ever remarkable Amanda Ford in pulling together this trip for me and for all of my many hosts along the way who have been so welcoming to this American visitor.

While I am in Europe, my blog is going to go dark. They are going to be doing some work on the back-end and I did not want the responsibility of maintaining it while facing the inconsistencies of maintaining digital access while visiting so many different cities in so many different countries. So, you will have to get along without me for a bit, but know that there will be many good things coming when I get back -- including some recounting of the various sites I saw and hopefully interviews with some of the people I met.

On my way out the door, I thought I would leave you with a few goodies to remind you of me while I was away.

First, this is a video blog created by Lauren Bird from the Harry Potter Alliance in which she offers a very nuanced summary of my ideas about the relationship between folk, mass, digital, and participatory culture. I've become a big fan of Lauren's videos over the past few months, so I was most flattered that she decided to share this account of my work.

A few months ago, I was asked to perform in a USC Student Thesis Film (directed by Nicholas Musurca) which dealt with the career of an imaginary Korean filmmaker. I was delighted when they asked me to play the part of film scholar and critic, David Bordwell. As it happens, I know David very well: he was my dissertation advisor and we've remained good friends ever since. Besides, there's some degree of physical resemblance between us. They've launched a preview for the film through Kickstarter which includes a snippet from my cameo performance, and I thought I would share with those of you who will appreciate the inside jokes here.

Finally, I wanted to share with you an animated short that was made to explain my ideas about media convergence. I have to say that I responded to this video with some degree of bemusement or sadness. It seems my avatar has been putting on too many pounds since my move to USC and now he has to carry around all of that weight with him.

This is how my avatar looked when I was at MIT, partying up with the young folks at Global Kids, and looking pretty lean and spry. I joked at the time that Second Life takes 20 pounds and several decades off you.

And here is how my Avatar looks now, hanging out in bars, eating stuff that is not good for him. This is a real wake-up call and when I get back from Europe, I am going to put that porker on a diet!

Announcing Rio's Henry Jenkins Transmedia Lab

I have written from time to time here about my travels to Brazil and my wonderful engagement with the people who are shaping the creative industries down there. It is a country which has embraced my ideas with a passion that I have seen few other places, and in return, I have fallen in love with their culture, their people, their landscape, and their media. I was deeply honored recently with the Rio Content Market launched the Henry Jenkins Transmedia Lab (*Blush*) and I wanted to share some information about this initiative here with my readers. The Rio Content Market is an international event dedicated to multi-platform content production and open to the television and digital media industry. On its first edition, Rio Content Market hosted the gathering of 170 executives from both national and international markets to share experiences, with the attendance of more than 1.000 members of the television and digital media industry. The second edition of Rio Content Market had keynotes and panels from leading professionals of the field. There were debates, pitching sessions, and rounds of negotiations, and this year, they announced the launch of the Transmedia Lab.

A partnership between the Brazilian Independent Producers Association and The Alchemists. The Transmedia Lab selected 12 transmedia projects (among 170) from

Brazil and Latin America in 3 main categories: (i) web, (ii) TV and (iii) Apps & Games. These projects were analyzed by tutors who will work with the authors to improve them. Later, the selected projects will be pitched and their authors can meet interested players face to face. The winning project - Contacts by Segunda Feira Films, won a

trip to participate on Transmedia Hollywood and will be co-produced by the Alchemists for international markets. The Henry Jenkins Transmedia Lab will be a talent and IP developing platform that will occur between US and Brazil.

We were able to showcase Contacts at this year's Transmedia Hollywood event and introduce its producers to our audience. (I was unfortunately unable to attend the event due to some medical issues). So, now is my first chance to publicly share my enthusiasm and respect for what Segunda Feira Films has been able to produce -- a project which makes imaginative use of social media not as an added on feature but as a central focus of its story, which deals with the possibility that we might receive communications from the dead. At the heart of Contacts is a rich genre-mixing story, which is bold in its experimentation with alternative modes of audience engagement. I hope you will agree.

Mauricio Mota, the key force behind the launch of the Lab and the person who has done the most to introduce me and my work to Brazil, wrote an important statement about the state of transmedia in his country as part of the launch of the lab. I am happy to share it with you here.

LETTER TO THE CONSULTANTS AND PRODUCERS OF THE SELLECTED PROJECTS

by Maurício Mota, Chief Storytelling Officer of The Alchemists

Transmedia Storytelling Co

"First the story, then the platforms"

"First the plot, then the iPhone, my son".

"First a good intrigue and characters, then the character's Facebook page".

Transmea Culpa

In 2007 I had my first contact with the term "transmedia storytelling" in its origin. For more than a week at MIT, I accessed the academic, theoretic and analytic aspects as

well as the commercial, capitalist and Hollywood ones. And when I left I had been transformed by two people: Henry Jenkins and Mark Warshaw. The first, the pope of convergence, a great fan of pop culture and the first academicwho built a healthy bridge between those who think and those who make culture; the second, a pioneer of transmedia storytelling in broadcast television: for eight years he revolutionized Superman in Smallville and made as much noise with the first season of Heroes as Lost made.

We became partners that year. Nice, huh? More or less. It's a bit more complicated.

Here begins this Transmea Culpa, which could have no better place to happen than in Rio-ContentMarket, in Brazil, during the opening of the first Transmedia Lab of Latin America. From the moment when I brought the term transmedia to Brazil, I had the aid of

Meio & Mensagem Group, which understood that this new manner of storytelling would bring innovation to the whole market: storytellers, advertisers, vehicles, agencies and

so on.

They all loved it and started using the term: scripts, projects and PowerPoint slides. Viral videos became transmedia, games became transmedia, cell phone apps became

transmedia, making bogus character blogs became transmedia. There you have it; everyone began to own the latest word. And we were all wrong.

Because excited as we were with the English term and the American cases, everyone was so astonished that they forgot that transmedia storytelling means a TRANSMEDIA NARRATIVE. And in doing so we simply focused on the MEDIA, forgetting the importance of stories and content. Or at least we put all that in the background.

Then we had to repeat endlessly to clients and partners: "first the story, then the platforms". "First the plot, then the iPhone,my son". "First a good intrigue and characters, then the character's Facebook page". Then, besides giving too much audience to Twitter and Facebook (current crazes) this frenzy brought along an unnecessary strife: the

strife between generations or types.

On one side producers, distributors, directors and experienced content creators of consolidated media. On the other side, the generation that considers itself Avant-garde, off the curve, those who understand completely the new media because they spend more time in the social media and own an iPhone. And the only loser is the story.

Because the consolidated bring to the table a repertoire and an experience that you can only amass in time. And the young add freshness and the will to transgress of those who have nothing to lose. If they're mixed, these characteristics are an unbeatable alchemy in the content area.

And this dispute between who is right and who is wrong makes everyone talk too much and do too little. It hinders the process of innovation that we need so much for the next decades - because we will grow immensely, we will set the stage for world events, we

will need content for education and entertainment as never before. If I could put on paper some words that would bring an essential definition to transmedia narrative

in these three years of hits and misses in stories in Brazil and in the USA I would write:

• Balance between platforms
• Quality of production
• Short Mass media togenerate a quick knowledge of the story
• Niche mediawith more time to deepen the story
• TV or internet, radio or book, it doesn't matter: the story needs to have a
• central platform (a mother ship)
• Produce specific content for each media, do not copy and paste
• The story needs to always focus on two types of "people": the general public and the fan, the person who will want more layers to your plot.
• And last but not least, so that you will not need to make a Mea Culpa regarding your story, that could have been more successful and have generated more riches,

  invest a lot in Research and Development, make it right, make mistakes, run risks.

And what is the best environment to take risks and mix experiences, successes and

the scars of the consolidated with the transgressive energy of the new storytellers? A lab. In the city which will help to redraw the way culture and content are made in the world: Rio de Janeiro.

Welcome to the 1st Transmedia Lab of RioContentMarket.

Otaku Culture in a Connected World: An Interview with Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji (Part Three)

Mimi, your own contributions to the book explore what motivates peer-to-peer production in the Fansubbing and Anime Music Video communities. How might this research contribute to a larger understanding of the motivations shaping noncommercial cultural production?

Mimi:

I think both cases help fill out the story about fannish motivations for production, and also add an important transnational dimension to the discussions of noncommercial production and P2P circulation. In the case of AMVs, in a lot of ways the community and the motivations for participation parallel other forms of fan remix and appropriation, whether that is the live action vidding, fan fiction, or fan art. What is unique about AMVs though is the fact that the practice centers on transnational cultural remix, that localizes foreign visual content to popular local music. So it definitely involves reframing, retelling, or digging deeper into a particular series, but it's also about making it speak to local cultural referents. For example, many editors talk about their work in terms of evangelizing for a particular series that might not be well known outside of Japan.

Or when an artist remixes a ninja series like Naruto to the audio of a Matrix trailer, he is making specific transnational connections around Asian martial arts and US cyberpunk culture.

For fansubbers, the role of cross-cultural brokering is even more explicit. Unlike most forms of fan production, fansubbing is less about creativity and self expression and more about fidelity and very disciplined and often rote forms of work. I was first attracted to the community since I am bilingual myself and know just how hard it is to do translation work between English and Japanese. I was fascinated with why it was that fansubbers put in so much labor -- translating, subtiling, timing, distributing -- all on a voluntary basis. And many groups work in a tightly coordinated way on very intense timelines so that they can keep up with a series that is running weekly. It's really backbreaking work. I found, again, that there were a lot of similarities in motivations with other forms of peer production, like what we've seen with communities around open source software or wikipedia. People engaged in the community for learning opportunities, through a sense of broader mission, to build reputation, and be part of a community. But again, like with AMVs, the transnational component adds an important twist to this equation. Fansubbers are filling a unique void in transnational connection by providing a high value function of translation and localization. Thus their sense of mission, of making the media they love available to people who wouldn't have it, is very high. And it also helps that they can reach vast appreciative audiences because they are work faster than the commercial localization industry, and often sub series and in languages that the commercial industry won't localize.

Your title stresses the role of networked communications in these fan communities. Would the current Otaku culture have been possible in a pre-internet era? Why or why not?

Daisuke:

Otaku culture has used snail mail to send around fan zines before the Internet, so even without today's online networks, otaku culture has developed. By around 2000, however, in Japan it has become commonplace for otaku to upload their cosplay photos and fan comics, and to use online sites as archives.

Izumi:

As Daisuke suggests, the origins of otaku culture predated the Internet so there was definitely a pre-Internet otaku culture. It's more that the Internet speeded up the pulse of otaku culture that had been developing slowly over the years, becoming the trigger for a sudden flowering. Internet media radically changed how otaku could stockpile and circulate information. In the mid nineties, the knowledge and information that individual otaku were gathering became a shared stockpile in informationl spaces. Further, by sharing this information with the world, otaku culture became accessible. Since the 2000s, however, I feel like social media have made the flows too fluid and active, and there's not enough attention to information stocks. Otaku culture has become too lightweight. Put simply, I fear that social media and otaku are not well matched. At the end of the day, the value of otaku is in their individual stockpiling of information.

Mimi:

I think what Izumi is pointing to is that we are in an interesting transitional period where the Internet and otaku culture have become much more mainstream, accessible, and out in the open because of the scaling up of these networks and the advent of social media. In the early years of the Internet, it was much more geek and otaku centered, and felt like a match made in heaven, but I think today there's a different feel to the online scene in part because the commercial industries have also taken to online culture in proactive ways now.For example, I think the golden years of fan digisubbing are coming to an end now that your'e seeing commercial localization industries working with a more fansub-like online model. So the distinction between mainstream commercial media and fan networked media is much blurrier. I've really learned from your work in this respect Henry. We're definitely seeing the interplay happening in otaku culture too.

What do you see as the biggest disconnects between Japanese and American versions of Otaku culture?

Izumi:

I think the uniqueness of Japanese versions of otaku culture lie in the postwar origins and the stigma of a defeated nation. In my chapter on train otaku I describe the transition from military otaku to train otaku after Japan's defeat. In the manga world, whether it is Osamu Tezuka, Fujio Fujiko, or Leiji Matsumoto, the memories of wartime defeat are deeply etched. Coming late to modernization, Japan felt it needed to catch up to advanced countries like the US and England, and embraced romantic ideals in relation so science and the military. At the same time, young men could only direct these romantic ideals to fictional worlds, thus giving birth to otaku. I don' think you see this same backdrop to US otaku culture.

My understanding is that US otaku culture celebrate a somewhat more universal set of values. I sense this in Star Trek fans' embrace of multiculturalism or in the early MIT hackers giving birth to a global computer culture.

Daisuke:

I think the biggest difference is that American otakue are much more open that Japanese otaku.

Mimi:

When Daisuke and I move between conventions between Japan the US its always a bit of a shock to see US kids out in the costumes on the street and in local restaurants. You'd never see that in Japan except maybe in Akihabara. It's not considered appropriate to be in costume outside of the convention centers, where mainstream folk might see you. Even though otaku culture has become much more acceptable, there's still a lot of work that the community does to make sure that they stay under the radar. In the US, anime fans take pride in consuming a kind of cult media, but Japanese fans are reframing a local mainstream media form in ways that the mainstream doesn't always think is appropriate. They are seen as deviant and sometimes perverse consumers rather than cult consumers, and that continues to influence how the fandom operates.

Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist of technology use, focusing on children and youth's changing relationships to media and communications. She has been conducting ongoing research on Kids' technoculture in Japan and the United States, and she is coeditor of Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life, coauthor of Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Youth Living and Learning with New Media, and author of Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software. She is professor in residence and MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning at the University of California, Irvine.

Diasuke Okabe is a cognitive psychologist specializing in situated learning theory. His focus is interactional studies of learning and education in relation to new media technologies. He also conducts research on Japanese anime and manga fan culture. He is co-editor of Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life and a lecturer at Tokyo City University.

Izumi Tsuji is a sociologist specializing in the sociology of culture. He has conducted extensive research on Japanese fan culture, including a study of fans of young idol musicians and train otaku. He is coauthor of Sore Zore no Fan Kenkyuu-I Am A Fan, a book on Japanese fan culture. He works as an associate professor at Cho University in Japan.